Journal articles: 'Kirkland House (Cambridge, Mass.)' – Grafiati (2024)

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Jon Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth: Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945-1990 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015) Reviewed by Jonathan BachMicahel Krüger, Christian Becker, and Stefan Nielsen, German Sports, Doping, and Politics: A History of Performance Enhancement (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) Reviewed by Heather L. DichterSusanne Rinner. The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination: Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013) Reviewed by Kirkland Alexander FulkKristen Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012) Reviewed by Alexander WochnikSean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann, eds., Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Rochester: Camden House, 2012). Reviewed by Wilko Graf von HardenbergFrank Uekötter, The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). Reviewed by Carol Hager

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ABSTRACTIn 1964, the editor of Sydney University Press, Michael Turnbull, approached G. R. Elton to write the book that became The practice of history (1967). Remarkably, a famous University of Cambridge historian was persuaded to embark on what Turnbull correctly sensed would be an influential and profitable text, and this for an obscure and recently established publishing house located at the other end of the earth. Were it not for Turnbull, The practice of history would probably never have been written. But for Turnbull's editorial advice, a somewhat different book would have resulted. This article traces the close and fruitful working relationship between publisher and author, as well as the adversarial relationship between The practice of history and E. H. Carr's What is history? (1961). It also suggests that Turnbull intended The practice of history as part of a wider publishing purpose where big ideas could be expressed, given a mass audience, and thus contribute to debate and social change. Elton would have found such a socially engaged agenda abhorrent, had he known about it.

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Jack Lewis was born and educated in Lancashire. He rose rapidly to become a highly renowned chemist who helped to pioneer the development of modern inorganic chemistry. He was one of the small group of scientists who led the expansion of inorganic chemistry from its renaissance, inspired by Professor Ron Nyholm in the mid 1950s, through the syntheses and study of new transition-metal and organometallic complexes. Their characterization was accomplished through the perceptive application of the newly available physical techniques of spectroscopy (electronic, vibrational and nuclear magnetic resonance), magnetism, mass spectrometry and X-ray diffraction. Jack completed his PhD at the University of Nottingham in 1952, and then held academic appointments in close succession at the University of Sheffield, Imperial College, London, and University College London (UCL) before being appointed Professor of Chemistry at the University of Manchester in early 1962. He returned to UCL as Professor of Chemistry for the period 1967–70 before being appointed the 1970 Professor of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, a position that he held until 1995, when he was granted emeritus status. His dedication to the study and furtherance of inorganic chemistry was profound and his research achievements were made all the more remarkable when one considers his substantial additional high-profile responsibilities. In 1975 Jack became the first Warden of the newly established Robinson College in Cambridge, where he shaped and guided a progressive academic community until his retirement in 2001. Furthermore, his skill as a highly effective debater also took him, in 1989, to the House of Lords, where as a Life Peer he represented science with great enthusiasm and distinction until a few months before his death. He was a most effective chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution from 1985 to 1992.

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-Peter Hulme, Stephen Greenblatt, New World Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xviii + 344 pp.-Nigel Rigby, Alan Riach ,The radical imagination: Lectures and talks by Wilson Harris. Liège: Department of English, University of Liège, xx + 126 pp., Mark Williams (eds)-Jonathan White, Rei Terada, Derek Walcott's poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: North-eastern University Press, 1992. ix + 260 pp.-Ray A. Kea, John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400-1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xxxviii + 309 pp.-B.W. Higman, Barbara L. Solow, Slavery and the rise of the Atlantic system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. viii + 355 pp.-Sidney W. Mintz, Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave acculturation and resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 412 pp.-Karen Fog Olwig, Corinna Raddatz, Afrika in Amerika. Hamburg: Hamburgisches Museum für Völkerkunde, 1992. 264 pp.-Lee Haring, William Bascom, African folktales in the new world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. xxv + 243 pp.-Frank Jan van Dijk, Dale A. Bisnauth, History of religions in the Caribbean. Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1989. 225 pp.-Gloria Wekker, Philomena Essed, Everyday racism: Reports from women of two cultures. Alameda CA: Hunter House, 1990. xiii + 288 pp.''Understanding everyday racism: An interdisciplinary theory. Newbury Park CA: Sage, 1991. x + 322 pp.-Deborah S. Rubin, Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White women, racism, and history. London: Verso, 1992. xviii + 263 pp.-Michael Hanchard, Peter Wade, Blackness and race mixture: The dynamics of racial identity in Colombia. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993. xv + 415 pp.-Rosalie Schwartz, Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Slaves, sugar, & colonial society: Travel accounts of Cuba, 1801-1899. Wilmington DE: SR Books, 1992. xxvi + 259 pp.-Susan Eckstein, Sandor Halebsky ,Cuba in transition: Crisis and transformation. With Carolee Bengelsdorf, Richard L. Harris, Jean Stubbs & Andrew Zimbalist. Boulder CO: Westview, 1992. xi + 244 pp., John M. Kirk (eds)-Michiel Baud, Andrés L. Mateo, Mito y cultura en la era de Trujillo. Santo Domingo: Librería La Trinitario/Instituto del Libro, 1993. 224 pp.-Edgardo Meléndez, Andrés Serbin, Medio ambiente, seguridad y cooperacíon regional en el Caribe. Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1992. 147 pp.-Dean W. Collinwood, Michael Craton ,Islanders in the stream: A history of the Bahamian people. Volume One: From Aboriginal times to the end of slavery. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. xxxiii + 455 pp., Gail Saunders (eds)-Gary Brana-Shute, Alan A. Block, Masters of paradise: Organized crime and the internal revenue service in the Bahamas. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991. vii + 319 pp.-Michaeline Crichlow, Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican people 1880-1902. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1991. xiv + 300 pp.-Faye V Harrison, Lisa Douglass, The power of sentiment: Love, hierarchy, and the Jamaican family elite. Boulder CO: Westview, 1992. xviii + 298 pp.-Frank Jan van Dijk, Bob Marley, Songs of freedom: From 'Judge Not' to 'Redemption Song.' Kingston: Tuff Gong/Bob Marley Foundation / London : Island Records, 1992 (limited edition). 63 pp. + 4 compact discs.-Riva Berleant-Schiller, Veront M. Satchell, From plots to plantations: Land transactions in Jamaica, 1866-1900. Mona: University of the West Indies, 1990. xiii + 197 pp.-Hymie Rubenstein, Christine Barrow, Family, land and development in St. Lucia. Cave Hill, Barbados: Institute for social and economic studies (ISER), University of the West Indies, 1992. xii + 83 pp.-Bonham C. Richardson, Selwyn Ryan, Social and occupational stratification in contemporary Trinidad and Tobago. St. Augustine, Trinidad: ISER, 1991. xiv + 474 pp.-Bill Maurer, Roland Littlewood, Pathology and identity: The work of Mother Earth in Trinidad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xxii + 322 pp.-Robert Fatton, Jr., Brian Weinstein ,Haiti: The failure of politics. New York: Praeger, 1992. ix + 203 pp., Aaron Segal (eds)-Uli Locher, Michel S. Laguerre, The military and society in Haiti. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. x + 223 pp.-Paul E. Brodwin, Leslie G. Desmangles, The faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xiii + 218 pp.-Marian Goslinga, Enid Brown, Bibliographical guide to Caribbean mass communication. John A. Lent (comp.). Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. xi + 301 pp.''Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles: An annotated English-language bibliography. Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. xi + 276 pp.-Jay B. Haviser, F.R. Effert, J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong, curator and archaeologist: A study of his early career (1910-1935). Leiden: Centre of Non-Western studies, University of Leiden, 1992. v + 119 pp.-Hans van Amersfoort, Anil Ramdas, De papegaai, de stier en de klimmende bougainvillea. Essays. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1992.-Ineke van Wetering, Deonarayan, Curse of the Devtas. Paramaribo: J.J. Buitenweg, 1992. v + 103 pp.-Ineke van Wetering, G. Mungra, Hindoestaanse gezinnen in Nederland. Leiden: Centrum voor Onderzoek Maatschappelijke Tegenstellingen, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1990. 313 pp.-J.M.R. Schrils, Alex Reinders, Politieke geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Antillen en Aruba 1950-1993. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1993. 430 pp.-Gert Oostindie, G.J. Cijntje ,Stemmen OK, maar op wie? Delft: Eburon, 1991. 150 pp., A. Nicatia, F. Quirindongo (eds)-Genevieve Escure, Donald Winford, Predication in Caribbean English Creoles. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993, viii + 419 pp.-Jean D'Costa, Lise Winer, Trinidad and Tobago. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993. xi + 369 pp. (plus cassette)

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A different name than English literature, ‘Anglo-Indian Literature’, was given to the body of literature in English that emerged on account of the British interaction with India unlike the case with their interaction with America or Australia or New Zealand. Even the Indians’ contributions (translations as well as creative pieces in English) were classed under the caption ‘Anglo-Indian’ initially but later a different name, ‘Indo-Anglian’, was conceived for the growing variety and volume of writings in English by the Indians. However, unlike the former the latter has not found a favour with the compilers of English dictionaries. With the passage of time the fine line of demarcation drawn on the basis of subject matter and author’s point of view has disappeared and currently even Anglo-Indians’ writings are classed as ‘Indo-Anglian’. Besides contemplating on various connotations of the term ‘Indo-Anglian’ the article discusses the related issues such as: the etymology of the term, fixing the name of its coiner and the date of its first use. In contrast to the opinions of the historians and critics like K R S Iyengar, G P Sarma, M K Naik, Daniela Rogobete, Sachidananda Mohanty, Dilip Chatterjee and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak it has been brought to light that the term ‘Indo-Anglian’ was first used in 1880 by James Payn to refer to the Indians’ writings in English rather pejoratively. However, Iyengar used it in a positive sense though he himself gave it up soon. The reasons for the wide acceptance of the term, sometimes also for the authors of the sub-continent, by the members of academia all over the world, despite its rejection by Sahitya Akademi (the national body of letters in India), have also been contemplated on. References Alphonso-Karkala, John B. (1970). Indo-English Literature in the Nineteenth Century, Mysore: Literary Half-yearly, University of Mysore, University of Mysore Press. Amanuddin, Syed. (2016 [1990]). “Don’t Call Me Indo-Anglian”. C. D. Narasimhaiah (Ed.), An Anthology of Commonwealth Poetry. Bengaluru: Trinity Press. B A (Compiler). (1883). Indo-Anglian Literature. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. PDF. Retrieved from: https://books.google.co.in/books?id=rByZ2RcSBTMC&pg=PA1&source= gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false ---. (1887). “Indo-Anglian Literature”. 2nd Issue. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. PDF. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/60238178 Basham, A L. (1981[1954]). The Wonder That Was India: A Survey of the History and Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent before the Coming of the Muslims. Indian Rpt, Calcutta: Rupa. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/TheWonderThatWasIndiaByALBasham Bhushan, V N. (1945). The Peaco*ck Lute. Bomaby: Padma Publications Ltd. Bhushan, V N. (1945). The Moving Finger. Bomaby: Padma Publications Ltd. Boria, Cavellay. (1807). “Account of the Jains, Collected from a Priest of this Sect; at Mudgeri: Translated by Cavelly Boria, Brahmen; for Major C. Mackenzie”. Asiatick Researches: Or Transactions of the Society; Instituted In Bengal, For Enquiring Into The History And Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia, 9, 244-286. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.104510 Chamber’s Twentieth Century Dictionary [The]. (1971). Bombay et al: Allied Publishers. Print. Chatterjee, Dilip Kumar. (1989). Cousins and Sri Aurobindo: A Study in Literary Influence, Journal of South Asian Literature, 24(1), 114-123. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/ stable/40873985. Chattopadhyay, Dilip Kumar. (1988). A Study of the Works of James Henry Cousins (1873-1956) in the Light of the Theosophical Movement in India and the West. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Burdwan: The University of Burdwan. PDF. Retrieved from: http://ir.inflibnet. ac.in:8080/jspui/bitstream/10603/68500/9/09_chapter%205.pdf. Cobuild English Language Dictionary. (1989 [1987]). rpt. London and Glasgow. Collins Cobuild Advanced Illustrated Dictionary. (2010). rpt. Glasgow: Harper Collins. Print. Concise Oxford English Dictionary [The]. (1961 [1951]). H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler. (Eds.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. 4th ed. Cousins, James H. (1921). Modern English Poetry: Its Characteristics and Tendencies. Madras: Ganesh & Co. n. d., Preface is dated April, 1921. PDF. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/ 2027/uc1.$b683874 ---. (1919) New Ways in English Literature. Madras: Ganesh & Co. 2nd edition. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.31747 ---. (1918). The Renaissance in India. Madras: Madras: Ganesh & Co., n. d., Preface is dated June 1918. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.203914 Das, Sisir Kumar. (1991). History of Indian Literature. Vol. 1. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Encarta World English Dictionary. (1999). London: Bloomsbury. Gandhi, M K. (1938 [1909]). Hind Swaraj Tr. M K Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/hind_swaraj.pdf. Gokak, V K. (n.d.). English in India: Its Present and Future. Bombay et al: Asia Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.460832 Goodwin, Gwendoline (Ed.). (1927). Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, London: John Murray. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.176578 Guptara, Prabhu S. (1986). Review of Indian Literature in English, 1827-1979: A Guide to Information Sources. The Yearbook of English Studies, 16 (1986): 311–13. PDF. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3507834 Iyengar, K R Srinivasa. (1945). Indian Contribution to English Literature [The]. Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/ indiancontributi030041mbp ---. (2013 [1962]). Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Sterling. ---. (1943). Indo-Anglian Literature. Bombay: PEN & International Book House. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/IndoAnglianLiterature Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. (2003). Essex: Pearson. Lyall, Alfred Comyn. (1915). The Anglo-Indian Novelist. Studies in Literature and History. London: John Murray. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet. dli.2015.94619 Macaulay T. B. (1835). Minute on Indian Education dated the 2nd February 1835. HTML. Retrieved from: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/ txt_minute_education_1835.html Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna. (2003). An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. Delhi: Permanent Black. ---. (2003[1992]). The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. New Delhi: Oxford U P. Minocherhomji, Roshan Nadirsha. (1945). Indian Writers of Fiction in English. Bombay: U of Bombay. Modak, Cyril (Editor). (1938). The Indian Gateway to Poetry (Poetry in English), Calcutta: Longmans, Green. PDF. Retrieved from http://en.booksee.org/book/2266726 Mohanty, Sachidananda. (2013). “An ‘Indo-Anglian’ Legacy”. The Hindu. July 20, 2013. Web. Retrieved from: http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/an-indoanglian-legacy/article 4927193.ece Mukherjee, Sujit. (1968). Indo-English Literature: An Essay in Definition, Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English. Eds. M. K. Naik, G. S. Amur and S. K. Desai. Dharwad: Karnatak University. Naik, M K. (1989 [1982]). A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, rpt.New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles [The], (1993). Ed. Lesley Brown, Vol. 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Naik, M K. (1989 [1982]). A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, rpt. Oaten, Edward Farley. (1953 [1916]). Anglo-Indian Literature. In: Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. 14, (pp. 331-342). A C Award and A R Waller, (Eds). Rpt. ---. (1908). A Sketch of Anglo-Indian Literature, London: Kegan Paul. PDF. Retrieved from: https://ia600303.us.archive.org/0/items/sketchofangloind00oateuoft/sketchofangloind00oateuoft.pdf) Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. (1979 [1974]). A. S. Hornby (Ed). : Oxford UP, 3rd ed. Oxford English Dictionary [The]. Vol. 7. (1991[1989]). J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, (Eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed. Pai, Sajith. (2018). Indo-Anglians: The newest and fastest-growing caste in India. Web. Retrieved from: https://scroll.in/magazine/867130/indo-anglians-the-newest-and-fastest-growing-caste-in-india Pandia, Mahendra Navansuklal. (1950). The Indo-Anglian Novels as a Social Document. Bombay: U Press. Payn, James. (1880). An Indo-Anglian Poet, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 246(1791):370-375. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/stream/gentlemansmagaz11unkngoog#page/ n382/mode/2up. ---. (1880). An Indo-Anglian Poet, Littell’s Living Age (1844-1896), 145(1868): 49-52. PDF. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/stream/livingage18projgoog/livingage18projgoog_ djvu.txt. Rai, Saritha. (2012). India’s New ‘English Only’ Generation. Retrieved from: https://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/indias-new-english-only-generation/ Raizada, Harish. (1978). The Lotus and the Rose: Indian Fiction in English (1850-1947). Aligarh: The Arts Faculty. Rajan, P K. (2006). Indian English literature: Changing traditions. Littcrit. 32(1-2), 11-23. Rao, Raja. (2005 [1938]). Kanthapura. New Delhi: Oxford UP. Rogobete, Daniela. (2015). Global versus Glocal Dimensions of the Post-1981 Indian English Novel. Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 12(1). Retrieved from: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/4378/4589. Rushdie, Salman & Elizabeth West. (Eds.) (1997). The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947 – 1997. London: Vintage. Sampson, George. (1959 [1941]). Concise Cambridge History of English Literature [The]. Cambridge: UP. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.18336. Sarma, Gobinda Prasad. (1990). Nationalism in Indo-Anglian Fiction. New Delhi: Sterling. Singh, Kh. Kunjo. (2002). The Fiction of Bhabani Bhattacharya. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (2012). How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Sturgeon, Mary C. (1916). Studies of Contemporary Poets, London: George G Hard & Co., Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.95728. Thomson, W S (Ed). (1876). Anglo-Indian Prize Poems, Native and English Writers, In: Commemoration of the Visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to India. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., Retrieved from https://books.google.co.in/ books?id=QrwOAAAAQAAJ Wadia, A R. (1954). The Future of English. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Wadia, B J. (1945). Foreword to K R Srinivasa Iyengar’s The Indian Contribution to English Literature. Bombay: Karnatak Publishing House. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/ details/indiancontributi030041mbp Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. (1989). New York: Portland House. Yule, H. and A C Burnell. (1903). Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. W. Crooke, Ed. London: J. Murray. 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Since ancient times India has been a multilingual society and languages in India have thrived though at times many races and religions came into conflict. The states in modern India were reorganised on linguistic basis in 1956 yet in contrast to the European notion of one language one nation, majority of the states have more than one official language. The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) conducted by Grierson between 1866 and 1927 identified 179 languages and 544 dialects. The first post-independence Indian census after (1951) listed 845 languages including dialects. The 1991 Census identified 216 mother tongues were identified while in 2001 their number was 234. The three-language formula devised to maintain the multilingual character of the nation and paying due attention to the importance of mother tongue is widely accepted in the country in imparting the education at primary and secondary levels. However, higher education system in India impedes multilingualism. According the Constitution it is imperative on the “Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India … by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages.” However, the books translated into Hindi mainly from English have found favour with neither the students nor the teachers. On the other hand the predominance of English in various competitive examinations has caused social discontent leading to mass protests and cases have been filed in the High Courts and the Supreme Court against linguistic imperialism of English and Hindi. The governments may channelize the languages but in a democratic set up it is ultimately the will of the people that prevails. Some languages are bound to suffer a heavy casualty both in the short and long runs in the process. References Basil, Bernstein. (1971). Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Chambers, J. K. (2009). Sociolinguistic Theory: Linguistic Variation and Its Social Significance. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Constitution of India [The]. (2007). Retrieved from: http://lawmin.nic.in/ coi/coiason29july08.pdf. Cummins, J. (2000). Language, Power and Pedagogy. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Dictionary of Quotations in Communications. (1997). L. McPherson Shilling and L. K. Fuller (eds.), Westport: Greenwood. Fishman, J. A. (1972). The Sociology of Language. An Interdisciplinary Social Science Approach to Language in Society. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Gandhi, M. K. (1917). Hindi: The National Language for India. In: Speeches and Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, (pp.395–99). Retrieved from http://www.mkgandhi.org/ towrds_edu/chap15.htm. Gandhi, M. K. Medium of Instruction. Retrieved from http://www.mkgandhi.org/towrds_edu/chap14.htm. Giglioli, P. P. (1972). Language and Social Context: Selected Readings. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Gumperz, J. J., Dell H. H. (1972). Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Haugen, E. (1966). Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hymns of the Atharva-Veda. Tr. Maurice Bloomfield. In: Sacred Books of the East, 42, 1897. Retrieved from: http://www.archive.org/stream/ SacredBooksEastVariousOrientalScholarsWithIndex.50VolsMaxMuller/42.SacredBooks East.VarOrSch.v42.Muller.Hindu.Bloomfield.HymnsAtharvaVed.ExRitBkCom.Oxf.189 7.#page/n19/mode/2up. Jernudd, B. H. (1982). Language Planning as a Focus for Language Correction. Language Planning Newsletter, 8(4) November, 1–3. Retrieved from http://languagemanagement.ff.cuni.cz/en/system/files/documents/Je rnudd_LP%20as%20 LC.pdf. Kamat, V. The Languages of India. Retrieved from http://www.kamat.com/indica/diversity/languages.htm. King, K., & Mackey, A. (2007). The Bilingual Edge: Why, When, and How to Teach Your Child a Second Language. New York: Collins. Kosonen, K. (2005). Education in Local Languages: Policy and Practice in Southeast Asia. First Languages First: Community-based Literacy Programmes for Minority Language Contexts in Asia. Bangkok: UNESCO Bangkok. Lewis, E. G. (1972). Multilingualism in the Soviet Union: Aspects of Language Policy and Its Implementation. Mouton: The Hague. Linguistic Survey of India. George Abraham Grierson (Comp. and ed.). Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903–1928. PDF. Retrieved from http://dsal.uchicago.edu/books/lsi/. Macaulay, T. B. (1835). Minute dated the 2nd February 1835. Web. Retrieved from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_ed uca tion_1835.html. Mansor, S. (2005). Language Planning in Higher Education. New York: Oxford University Press. Mishra, Dr Jayakanta & others, PIL Case no. CWJC 7505/1998. Patna High Court. Peñalosa, F. (1981). Introduction to the Sociology of Language. New York: Newbury House Publishers. Sapir, E. in “Mutilingualism & National Development: The Nigerian Situation”, R O Farinde, In Nigerian Languages, Literatures, Culture and Reforms, Ndimele, Ozo-mekuri (Ed.), Port Harcourt: M & J Grand Orbit Communications, 2007. Simons, G., Fennig, C. (2017). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Twentieth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Retrieved from http://www.ethnologue.com/country/IN. Stegen, O. Why Teaching the Mother Tongue is Important? Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/2406265/Why_teaching_the_mother_tongue_is_important. “The Tower of Babel”. Genesis 11:1–9. The Bible. Retrieved from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+11:1–9. Trudgill, Peter (2000). Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society. London: Penguin. UNESCO (1953). The Use of the Vernacular Languages in Education. Monographs on Foundations of Education, No. 8. Paris: UNESCO. U P Hindi Sahitya Sammelan vs. the State of UP and others. Supreme Court of India 2014STPL(web)569SC. Retrieved from: http://judis.nic.in/ supremecourt/ imgs1.aspx?filename=41872. Whorf, B. L. (1940). Science and linguistics. Technology Review, 42(6), 229–31, 247–8. Sources http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011-documents/lsi/ling_survey_india.htm http://www.ciil-lisindia.net/ http://www.ethnologue.com/country/IN http://peopleslinguisticsurvey.org/ http://www.rajbhasha.nic.in/en/official-language-rules-1976 http://www.ugc.ac.in/journallist/ http://www.unesco.org/new/en/international-mother-language-day

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Diosdado Macapagal, Philippine President from 1961-1965, whose career was made rich by working in the foreign service, belonged to a tradition of championing a Foreign Policy shaped under America’s tutelage, adhering to democratic ideals, dismissive of Communism, and indifferent to neutralism and non-alignment. While various groups branded this policy as one of mendicancy that jeopardized Philippine Independence itself, President Manuel Roxas, who instituted it in 1946, was given little to no option but to side with America. The Second World War’s apocalyptic results required prompt and massive reconstruction and industrialization, necessitating foreign aid. This study reveals a chapter in the Philippines’ Cold War History, which show instances of balancing the state of dependence on America with neo-realist postures. Macapagal worked for Land Reform to peacefully address Communism within and collaborated with America in the name of national security to counter possible foreign communist infiltration. In an anarchic world forged by Cold War developments, Macapagal secured US financial and military assistance and defended national interest in a neorealist posture to the point of championing views more orthodox and even contrary to that of America. Filipino’s preference for collaboration with America made the neo-colonial situation manageable at that time, to still reap whatever the superpower is willing to give while it promoted its own global agenda. Macapagal worked within this neo-colonial setting by balancing dependency and neorealism. References Abaya, Hernando. Our Vaunted Press: A Critique. Philippine Graphic 35, no. 16 (1968). Buszybnski, Leszek. “Realism, Institutionalism, and Philippine Security.” Asian Survey 42, no. 3 (2002). Carr, Edward. What is History? New York: Pelican Books, 1961. Constantino, Renato. Identity and Consciousness: The Philippine Experience. Quezon City: Malaya Books, 1974. _________________. The Nationalist Alternative. Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1984. David, Randolph. “Philippine Underdevelopment and Dependency Theory.” Philippine Sociological Review 28, no. 1/4 (1980). De Castro, Rene. “Historical Review of the Concept, Issues, and Proposals for an Independent Foreign Policy for the Philippines: 1855-1988, 1989.” https://www.asj.upd.edu.ph/mediabox/archive/ASJ-27-1989/decastro.pdf Accessed May 13, 2022. Fifield, Russel. “Philippine Foreign Policy.” Far Eastern Survey 20, 4 (1951). Forbes, William. The Philippine Islands. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945. Gribble, Richard. Anti-Communism, Patrick Peyton, CSC and the C.I.A. Journal of Churchand State 45, no. 3 (2003). Guinto, Josias. A Study of Philippine Foreign Policy. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Santo Tomas, 1955. Higginson, P. (1980). The Vatican and Communism from ′Divini Redemptoris′ to Pope Paul VI. New Blackfriars. 61 (719) pp. 158-171 From: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43247119 John XXIII. Pacem in Terris, Encyclical Letter. April 11, 1963. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j xxiii_enc_11041963_pacem.html Accessed: 19 March 2022. Lent, J. (1966). “The Press of the Philippines: Its History and Problems.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (1966). Macapagal, Diosdado. A Stone for the Edifice: Memoirs of a President. Quezon City: MAC Publishing House, 1968. __________________. Constitutional Democracy in the World. Manila: Santo Tomas University Press, 1991. __________________. From Nipa Hut to Presidential Palace: Autobiography of President Diosdado Macapagal. Quezon City: Philippine Academy for Continuing Education and Research, 2002. __________________. Imperatives of Economic Development in the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas, 1957.__________________. New Hope for the Common Man: Speeches and Statements of President Diosdado Macapagal. Volume 1. Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1962. __________________. New Hope for the Common Man: Speeches and Statements of President Diosdado Macapagal. Volume 2. Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1963. __________________. 1963 State of the Nation Address. Delivered at the Old Legislative Building in Manila. Retrieved: March 19, 2022 From: https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1963/01/28/diosdado-macapagal-second-state- of-the-nation-address-january-28-1963/Accessed: 19 March 2022. __________________. 1964 State of the Nation Address. Delivered at the Old Legislative Building in Manila. https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1964/01/27/diosdado-macapagal-third-state-of-thenation-address-january-27-1964/Accessed March 19, 2022. __________________. 1965 State of the Nation Address. Delivered at the Old Legislative Building in Manila. https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1965/01/25/diosdado-macapagal-fourth-state-of-the-nation-address-january-25-1965/Accessed March 19, 2022. Magsaysay, Ramon. Roots of Philippine Policy. Foreign Affairs 35, no. 1 (1956). Manglapus, Raul. (1960). The State of Philippine Democracy. Foreign Affairs 38, no. 4. Official Gazette. Official Week in Review (May 27-June 2, 1962). Official Gazette. Official Week in Review (January 17, 1965). Perez, Louis. Dependency. The Journal of American History 77, no. 1 (1990). Pineda-Ofreneo, Rosalinda. A History of Philippine Journalism Since 1945. Mandaluyong: Cacho Hermanos, 1984. Pius IX. Qui Pluribus, Encyclical Letter. Issued November 9, 1846. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-ix/it/documents/enciclica-qui-pluribus-9-novembre-1846.html Accessed: 19 March 2022. Pius XI. Divini Redemptoris, Encyclical Letter. Issued March 19, 1937. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19370319_divini-redemptoris.html Accessed March 19, 2022. Russell, Bertrand. Portraits of Memory and Other Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956. Van der Kroef, Justus. “Communism and Reform in the Philippines.” Pacific Affairs 46, no. 1 (1973). Velasco, Andres. “Dependency Theory.” Foreign Policy, 33 (2002).

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Agriculture production is directly dependent on climate change and weather. Possible changes in temperature, precipitation and CO2 concentration are expected to significantly impact crop growth and ultimately we lose our crop productivity and indirectly affect the sustainable food availability issue. The overall impact of climate change on worldwide food production is considered to be low to moderate with successful adaptation and adequate irrigation. Climate change has a serious impact on the availability of various resources on the earth especially water, which sustains life on this planet. The global food security situation and outlook remains delicately imbalanced amid surplus food production and the prevalence of hunger, due to the complex interplay of social, economic, and ecological factors that mediate food security outcomes at various human and institutional scales. Weather aberration poses complex challenges in terms of increased variability and risk for food producers and the energy and water sectors. Changes in the biosphere, biodiversity and natural resources are adversely affecting human health and quality of life. Throughout the 21st century, India is projected to experience warming above global level. India will also begin to experience more seasonal variation in temperature with more warming in the winters than summers. Longevity of heat waves across India has extended in recent years with warmer night temperatures and hotter days, and this trend is expected to continue. Strategic research priorities are outlined for a range of sectors that underpin global food security, including: agriculture, ecosystem services from agriculture, climate change, international trade, water management solutions, the water-energy-food security nexus, service delivery to smallholders and women farmers, and better governance models and regional priority setting. There is a need to look beyond agriculture and invest in affordable and suitable farm technologies if the problem of food insecurity is to be addressed in a sustainable manner. Introduction Globally, agriculture is one of the most vulnerable sectors to climate change. This vulnerability is relatively higher in India in view of the large population depending on agriculture and poor coping capabilities of small and marginal farmers. Impacts of climate change pose a serious threat to food security. “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (World Food Summit, 1996). This definition gives rise to four dimensions of food security: availability of food, accessibility (economically and physically), utilization (the way it is used and assimilated by the human body) and stability of these three dimensions. According to the United Nations, in 2015, there are still 836 million people in the world living in extreme poverty (less than USD1.25/day) (UN, 2015). And according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), at least 70 percent of the very poor live in rural areas, most of them depending partly (or completely) on agriculture for their livelihoods. It is estimated that 500 million smallholder farms in the developing world are supporting almost 2 billion people, and in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa these small farms produce about 80 percent of the food consumed. Climate change threatens to reverse the progress made so far in the fight against hunger and malnutrition. As highlighted by the assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC), climate change augments and intensifies risks to food security for the most vulnerable countries and populations. Few of the major risks induced by climate change, as identified by IPCC have direct consequences for food security (IPCC, 2007). These are mainly to loss of rural livelihoods and income, loss of marine and coastal ecosystems, livelihoods loss of terrestrial and inland water ecosystems and food insecurity (breakdown of food systems). Rural farmers, whose livelihood depends on the use of natural resources, are likely to bear the brunt of adverse impacts. Most of the crop simulation model runs and experiments under elevated temperature and carbon dioxide indicate that by 2030, a 3-7% decline in the yield of principal cereal crops like rice and wheat is likely in India by adoption of current production technologies. Global warming impacts growth, reproduction and yields of food and horticulture crops, increases crop water requirement, causes more soil erosion, increases thermal stress on animals leading to decreased milk yields and change the distribution and breeding season of fisheries. Fast changing climatic conditions, shrinking land, water and other natural resources with rapid growing population around the globe has put many challenges before us (Mukherjee, 2014). Food is going to be second most challenging issue for mankind in time to come. India will also begin to experience more seasonal variation in temperature with more warming in the winters than summers (Christensen et al., 2007). Climate change is posing a great threat to agriculture and food security in India and it's subcontinent. Water is the most critical agricultural input in India, as 55% of the total cultivated areas do not have irrigation facilities. Currently we are able to secure food supplies under these varying conditions. Under the threat of climate variability, our food grain production system becomes quite comfortable and easily accessible for local people. India's food grain production is estimated to rise 2 per cent in 2020-21 crop years to an all-time high of 303.34 million tonnes on better output of rice, wheat, pulse and coarse cereals amid good monsoon rains last year. In the 2019-20 crop year, the country's food grain output (comprising wheat, rice, pulses and coarse cereals) stood at a record 297.5 million tonnes (MT). Releasing the second advance estimates for 2020-21 crop year, the agriculture ministry said foodgrain production is projected at a record 303.34 MT. As per the data, rice production is pegged at record 120.32 MT as against 118.87 MT in the previous year. Wheat production is estimated to rise to a record 109.24 MT in 2020-21 from 107.86 MT in the previous year, while output of coarse cereals is likely to increase to 49.36 MT from 47.75 MT. Pulses output is seen at 24.42 MT, up from 23.03 MT in 2019-20 crop year. In the non-foodgrain category, the production of oilseeds is estimated at 37.31 MT in 2020-21 as against 33.22 MT in the previous year. Sugarcane production is pegged at 397.66 MT from 370.50 MT in the previous year, while cotton output is expected to be higher at 36.54 million bales (170 kg each) from 36.07. This production figure seem to be sufficient for current population, but we need to improve more and more with vertical farming and advance agronomic and crop improvement tools for future burgeoning population figure under the milieu of climate change issue. Our rural mass and tribal people have very limited resources and they sometime complete depend on forest microhabitat. To order to ensure food and nutritional security for growing population, a new strategy needs to be initiated for growing of crops in changing climatic condition. The country has a large pool of underutilized or underexploited fruit or cereals crops which have enormous potential for contributing to food security, nutrition, health, ecosystem sustainability under the changing climatic conditions, since they require little input, as they have inherent capabilities to withstand biotic and abiotic stress. Apart from the impacts on agronomic conditions of crop productions, climate change also affects the economy, food systems and wellbeing of the consumers (Abbade, 2017). Crop nutritional quality become very challenging, as we noticed that, zinc and iron deficiency is a serious global health problem in humans depending on cereal-diet and is largely prevalent in low-income countries like Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and South-east Asia. We report inefficiency of modern-bred cultivars of rice and wheat to sequester those essential nutrients in grains as the reason for such deficiency and prevalence (Debnath et al., 2021). Keeping in mind the crop yield and nutritional quality become very daunting task to our food security issue and this can overcome with the proper and time bound research in cognizance with the environment. Threat and challenges In recent years, climate change has become a debatable issue worldwide. South Asia will be one of the most adversely affected regions in terms of impacts of climate change on agricultural yield, economic activity and trading policies. Addressing climate change is central for global future food security and poverty alleviation. The approach would need to implement strategies linked with developmental plans to enhance its adaptive capacity in terms of climate resilience and mitigation. Over time, there has been a visible shift in the global climate change initiative towards adaptation. Adaptation can complement mitigation as a cost-effective strategy to reduce climate change risks. The impact of climate change is projected to have different effects across societies and countries. Mitigation and adaptation actions can, if appropriately designed, advance sustainable development and equity both within and across countries and between generations. One approach to balancing the attention on adaptation and mitigation strategies is to compare the costs and benefits of both the strategies. The most imminent change is the increase in the atmospheric temperatures due to increase levels of GHGs (Green House Gases) i.e. carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) etc into the atmosphere. The global mean annual temperatures at the end of the 20th century were almost 0.7 degree centigrade above than those recorded at the end of the 19th century and likely to increase further by 1.8- 6.4ºC by 2100 AD. The quantity of rainfall and its distribution will be affected to a great extent resulting in more flooding. The changes in soil properties such as loss of organic matter, leaching of soil nutrients, salinization and erosion are a likely outcome of climate change in many cases. Water crisis can be a serious problem with the anticipated global warming and climate change. With increasing exploitation of natural resources and environmental pollution, the atmospheric temperature is expected to rise by 3-5 0C in next 75-100 years (www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-1). If it happens most of the rivers originating from the Himalayas may dry up and cause severe shortage of water for irrigation, suppressing agriculture production by 40-50%. There has been considerable concern in recent years about climatic changes caused by human activities and their effects on agriculture. Surface climate is always changing, but at the beginning of industrial revolution these changes have been more noticeable due to interference of human beings activity. Studies of climate change impacts on agriculture initially focused on increasing temperature. Many researchers, including reported that changes in temperature, radiation and precipitation need to be studied in order to evaluate the impact of climate change. Temperature changes can affect crop productivity. Higher temperatures may increase plant carboxilation and stimulate higher photosynthesis, respiration, and transpiration rates. Meanwhile, flowering may also be partially triggered by higher temperatures, while low temperatures may reduce energy use and increased sugar storage. Changes in temperature can also affect air vapor pressure deficits, thus impacting the water use in agricultural landscapes. This coupling affects transpiration and can cause significant shifts in temperature and water loss (Mukherjee, 2017). In chickpea and other pulse crop this increase in temperature due to climate change affects to a greater extent flower numbers, pod production, pollen viability, and pistilfunction are reduced and flower and pod abortion increased under terminal heat stress which ultimately leads to hamper its productivity on large scale. There is probability of 10-40% loss in crop production in India with the expected temperature increase by 2080-2100. Rice yields in northern India during last three decades are showing a decreasing trend (Aggarwal et al., 2000). Further, the IPCC (2007) report also projected that cereal yields in seasonally dry and tropical regions like India are likely to decrease for even small local temperature increases. wheat production will be reduced by 4-5 million tonnes with the rise of every 10C temperature throughout the growing period that coincides in India with 2020-30. However, grain yield of rice declined by 10% for each 1ºC increase in growing season. A 1ºC increase in temperature may reduce rapeseed mustard yield by 3-7%. Thus a productivity of 2050-2562 kg/ha for rapeseed mustard would have to be achieved by 2030 under the changing scenario of climate, decreasing and degrading land and water resources, costly inputs, government priority of food crops and other policy imperatives from the present level of nearly 1200 kg/ha. Diseases and pest infestation In future, plant protection will assume even more significance given the daunting task before us to feed the growing population under the era of shifting climate pattern, as it directly influence pest life cycle in crop calendar (Mukherjee, 2019). Every year, about USD 8.5 billion worth of crops are lost in India because of disease and insects pests and another 2.5 billion worth of food grains in storages. In the scenario of climate change, experts believe that these losses could rise as high as four folds. Global warming and climate change would lead to emergence of more aggressive pests and diseases which can cause epidemics resulting in heavy losses (Mesterhazy et al., 2020). The range of many insects will change or expand and new combinations of diseases and pests may emerge. The well-known interaction between host × pathogen × environment for plant disease epidemic development and weather based disease management strategies have been routinely exploited by plant pathologists. However, the impact of inter annual climatic variation resulting in the abundance of pathogen populations and realistic assessment of climatic change impacts on host-pathogen interactions are still scarce and there are only handful of studies. Further emerging of new disease with climate alteration in grain crop such as wheat blast, become challenging for growers and hamper food chain availability (Mukherjee et al., 2019). Temperature increase associated with climatic changes could result in following changes in plant diseases: Extension of geographical range of pathogens Changes in population growth rates of pathogens Changes in relative abundance and effectiveness of bio control agents Changes in pathogen × host × environment interactions Loss of resistance in cultivars containing temperature-sensitive genes Emergence of new diseases/and pathogen forms Increased risk of invasion by migrant diseases Reduced efficacy of integrated disease management practices These changes will have major implications for food and nutritional security, particularly in the developing countries of the dry-tropics, where the need to increase and sustain food production is most urgent. The current knowledge on the main potential effects of climate change on plant patho systems has been recently summarized by Pautasso et al. (2012). Their overview suggests that maintaining plant health across diversified environments is a key requirement for climate change mitigation as well as the conservation of biodiversity and provisions of ecosystem services under global change. Changing in weed flora pattern under different cropping system become very challenging to the food growers, and threat to our food security issue. It has been estimated that the potential losses due to weeds in different field crops would be around 180 million tonnes valued Rs 1,05,000 crores annually. In addition to the direct effect on crop yield, weeds result in considerable reduction in the efficiency of inputs used and food quality. Increasing atmospheric CO2 and temperature have the potential to directly affect weed physiology and crop-weed interactions vis-à-vis their response to weed control methods. Many of the world’s major weeds are C4 plants and major crops are C3 plants (Mandal and Mukherjee, 2018). The differential effects of CO2 on C3 and C4 plants may have implications on crop-weed interactions. Weed species have a greater genetic diversity than most crops and therefore, under the changing scenario of resources (eg., light, moisture, nutrients, CO2), weeds will have the greater capacity for growth and reproductive response than most crops. Differential response to seed emergence with temperature could also influence species establishment and subsequent weed-crop competition. Increasing temperature might allow some sleeper weeds to become invasive (Mukherjeee, 2020; Science Daily, 2009). Studies suggest that proper weed management techniques if adopted can result in an additional production of 103 million tonnes of food grains, 15 million tonnes of pulses,10 million tonnes of oilseeds, and 52 million tonnes of commercial crops per annum, which in few cases are even equivalent to the existing annual production (Rao and Chauhan, 2015). There is tremendous scope to increase agricultural productivity by adopting improved weed management technologies that have been developed in the country. Conclusion The greatest challenge before us is to enhance the production of required amount of food items viz., cereals, pulses, oilseeds, vegetable, underutilized fruit etc to keep pace with population growth through employing suitable crop cultivars, biotechnological approaches, conserving natural resources and protecting crops from weeds, insects pests and diseases eco-friendly with climate change. Research is a continuous process that has to be pursued vigorously and incessantly in the critical areas viz., evolvement of new genotype, land development and reclamation, soil and moisture conservation, soil health care, seeds and planting material, enhancing fertilizer and water use efficiencies, conservation agriculture, eco-friendly plant protection measures etc. Due to complexity of crop environment interaction under different climate situation, a multidisciplinary approach to the problem is required in which plant breeders, agronomists, crop physiologists and agrometeorologists need to interact for finding long term solutions in sustaining crop production. References: Abbade, E. B. 2017. Availability, access and utilization: Identifying the main fragilities for promoting food security in developing countries. World Journal of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development, 14(4): 322–335. doi:10.1108/WJSTSD-05-2016-0033 Aggrawal, P.K., Bandyopadhyay, S. and Pathak, S. 2020. Analysis of yield trends of the Rice-Wheat system in north-western India. Outlook on Agriculture, 29(4):259-268. Christensen, J.H., Hewitson, B., Busuioc, A., Chen, A. and Gao, X, 2007. Regional Climate Projections. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, United Kingdom. Debnath, S., Mandal, B., Saha, S., Sarkar, D., Batabyal, K., Murmu, S., Patra, B.C., Mukherjee, and Biswas, T. 2021. Are the modern-bred rice and wheat cultivars in India inefficient in zinc and iron sequestration?. Environmental and Experimental Botany,189:1-7. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envexpbot.2021.104535) 2007. Climate Change 2007- Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson, Eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 976pp. Mandal, B and Mukherjee, D. 2018. Influenced of different weed management Practices for Higher Productivity of Jute (Corchorus olitorius) in West Bengal. International Journal of Bioresource Science, 5 (1): 21-26. Mesterhazy, A., Olah, J. and Popp, J. 2020. Losses in the grain supply chain: causes and solutions. Sustainability, 12, 2342; doi:10.3390/su12062342. Mukherjee D. 2019. Effect of various crop establishment methods and weed management practices on growth and yield of rice. Journal of Cereal Research, 11(3): 300-303. http://doi.org/10.25174/2249-4065/2019/95811. Mukherjee, D. 2014. Climate change and its impact on Indian agriculture. In : Plant Disease Management and Microbes (eds. Nehra, S.). Aavishkar Publishers, Jaipur, India. Pp 193-206. Mukherjee, D. 2017. Rising weed problems and their effects on production potential of various crops under changing climate situation of hill. Indian Horticulture Journal, 7(1): 85-89. Mukherjee, D., Mahapatra, S., Singh, D.P., Kumar, S., Kashyap , P.L. and Singh, G.P. 2019. Threat assessment of wheat blast like disease in the West Bengal". 4th International Group Meeting on Wheat production enhancement through climate smart practices. at CSK HPKV, Palampur, HP, India, February, 14-16, 2019. Organized by CSK HPKV, Palampur and Society of Advancement of Wheat and Barley Research (SAWBAR). Journal of Cereal Research, 11 (1): 78. Mukherjee, D. 2020. Herbicide combinations effect on weeds and yield of wheat in North-Eastern plain. Indian Journal of Weed Science, 52 (2): 116–122. Pautasso, M. 2012. Observed impacts of climate change on terrestrial birds in Europe: an overview. Italian Journal of Zoology, 38:56-74. .Doi:10.1080/11250003.2011.627381 Rao, A.N. and Chauhan, B.S. 2015. Weeds and weed management in India -A Review. 25 Asian Pacific Weed Science Society Conference, at Hyderabad, India, Volume: 1 (A.N. Rao and N.T. Yaduraju (eds.). pp 87-118.

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Seven spot ladybird beetle, (Coccinella septempunctata) is a widely distributed natural enemy of soft-bodied insect pests especially aphids worldwide. Both the adult and larvae of this coccinellid beetle are voracious feeders and serve as a commercially available biological control agent around the globe. Different techniques are adopted to enhance the mass rearing and storage of this natural enemy by taking advantage of its natural ability to withstand under extremely low temperatures and entering diapause under unfavorable low temperature conditions. The key objective of this study was to develop a cost effective technique for enhancing the storage life and predatory potential of the larvae of C. septempunctata through cold storage in conjunction with the use of nuclear techniques, gamma radiations. Results showed that the host eating potential of larvae was enhanced as the cold storage duration was increased. Gamma irradiation further enhanced the feeding potential of larvae that were kept under cold storage. Different irradiation doses also affected the development time of C. septempuntata larvae significantly. Without cold storage, the lower radiation doses (10 and 25 GY) prolonged the developmental time as compared to un-irradiated larvae. Furthermore, the higher dose of radiation (50GY) increased the developmental time after removal from cold storage. This study first time paves the way to use radiation in conjunction with cold storage as an effective technique in implementation of different biological control approaches as a part of any IPM programs.Key wordGamma irradiations; cold storage, Coccinella septempunctata larvae; predatory potential; integrated pest management programme.INTRODUCTIONNuclear techniques such as gamma radiations have a vast application in different programmes of biological control including continuous supply of sterilized host and improved rearing techniques (Greany and Carpenter, 2000; Cai et al., 2017). Similarly irradiation can be used for sentinel-host eggs and larvae for monitoring survival and distribution of parasitoids (Jordão-paranhos et al., 2003; Hendrichs et al., 2009; Tunçbilek et al., 2009; Zapater et al., 2009; Van Lenteren, 2012). Also, at the production level, such technique may facilitate the management of host rearing, improve quality and expedite transport of product (Fatima et al., 2009; Hamed et al., 2009; Wang et al., 2009). Gamma irradiations can also be used to stop insect’s development to enhance host suitability for their use in different mass rearing programs (Celmer-Warda, 2004; Hendrichs et al., 2009; Seth et al., 2009). Development and survival of all insects have a direct connection with temperatures which in turn affect the physical, functional and behavioral adaptations (Ramløy, 2000). Many insects living in moderate regions can survive at low temperature by process of diapause. A temperature between 0 to 10oC may cause some insects to become sluggish and they only become active when the temperature is suitable. Such insects show greater adaptations to flexible temperature regimes for better survival. Many studies have reported this concept of cold-hardiness in insects in general (Bale, 2002; Danks, 2006) and specifically in coccinellid beetles over past years (Watanabe, 2002; Koch et al., 2004; Pervez and Omkar, 2006; Labrie et al., 2008; Berkvens et al., 2010). Using this cold hardiness phenomenon, many coccinellids have been studied for the effect of cold storage such as Coccinella undecimpunctata (Abdel‐Salam and Abdel‐Baky, 2000), Coleomegilla maculata (Gagné and Coderre, 2001) and Harmonia axyridis (Watanabe, 2002). This natural phenomenon, therefore, can be a helpful tool in developing low temperature stockpiling for improving mass-rearing procedures (Mousapour et al., 2014). It may provide a significant output in terms of providing natural enemies as and when required during pest infestation peaks (Venkatesan et al., 2000). Use of irradiation in conjunction with cold storage proves to be an effective technique in implementation of different biological control approaches as a part of any IPM programme. A study reported that the pupate of house fly, Musca domestica irradiated at dose of 500 Gy and can stored up to 2 months at 6°C for future use for a parasitoid wasp Spalangia endius rearing (Zapater et al., 2009). Similarly, when irradiated at 20 GY, parasitic wasps Cotesia flavipes were stored safely up to two months without deterioration of their parasitic potential (Fatima et al., 2009). Similarly, bio-control program of sugarcane shoot borer Chilo infescatellus proved successful through the use of irradiation combined with cold storage of its egg and larval parasitoids Trichogramma chilonis and C. flavipes (Fatima et al., 2009). Less mobile life stages such as larvae are of significance in any IPM strategy because they remain on target site for more time period as compared to adults. Therefore, use of predatory larvae is very promising in different biological control approaches because of their immediate attack on pests and more resistance to unfavorable environmental conditions than delicate egg stage. In addition, with their augmentation into fields, larval stage shows their presence for longer time than adult stage and their feeding potential is also satisfactory as that of adults. For the best utilization of these predators in the field and maximum impact of 3rd and 4th larval instars on prey, we should encourage late 2nd second instar larvae of predatory beetles in the fields as these instars have more feeding capacity due to increased size and ability to handle larger preys.In spite of higher significance, there is little information available about the effect of cold storage on the survival of larval instars of different ladybird beetles and its effect on their predatory potential. Very few studies report the use of cold storage for non-diapausing larval stage like for Semiadalia undecimnotata and only one study reported the short-term storage (up to two weeks) of 2nd and 3rd instar coccinellid, C. maculate, without any loss in feeding voracity of larvae after storage (Gagné and Coderre, 2001). The survival of 3rd and 4th larval instars of C. undecimpunctata for 7 days after storage at 5oC was reported in a study but the survival rate declined after 15-60 days of storage (Abdel‐Salam and Abdel‐Baky, 2000). As C. septempunctata is considered one of the voracious predators (Afroz, 2001; Jandial and Malik, 2006; Bilashini and Singh, 2009; Xia et al., 2018) and diapause is a prominent feature of this beetle and it may undergo facultative diapause under suitable laboratory conditions (Suleman, 2015). No information is available to date about the combined effect of cold storage and irradiation on the larval instars of this species.OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was to devise a cost effective technique for the cold storage and its effect on the subsequent predatory potential of the seven spotted ladybird beetle larvae in conjunction with the use of gamma radiations. Hypothesis of the study was that an optimum length of low temperature treatment for storage purpose would not affect the predation capacity of C. septempunctata larvae and their developmental parameters including survival and pupation will remain unaffected. Furthermore, use of gamma irradiation will have some additional effects on survival and feeding capacity of irradiated C. septempunctata larvae. Such techniques can be utilized in different biocontrol programs where short term storage is required. So these larvae can be successfully imparted in different IPM programs against sucking complex of insect pests as a component of biological control strategyMATERIALS AND METHODSPlant materials: Collection and rearing of C. septempunctata: Adult C. septempunctata were collected from the wheat crop (in NIAB vicinity and farm area) in the month of March during late winter and early in spring season 2016-2017. They were kept in plastic jars and were fed with brassica aphids. Under controlled laboratory conditions (25+2oC, 16h: 8h L:D and 65+5% R.H.), eggs of C. septempuctata were obtained and after hatching, larvae were also given brassica aphids as dietary source. Larvae of second instar were selected for this experiment (as the first instar is generally very weak and vulnerable to mortality under low temperatures). As the larvae approached second instar, they were separated for the experimentation. Irradiation of larvae at different doses: Irradiation of larvae was carried out by the irradiation source 137CS at Radiation laboratory, and the larvae were then brought back to the IPM laboratory, Plant Protection Division, Nuclear Institute for Agriculture and Biology (NIAB) Faisalabad. Radiation doses of 10 GY (Grey), 25 GY and 50 GY were used to treat the second instar larvae. There were three replicates for each treatment and five larvae per replicate were used. Control treatment was left un-irradiated.Cold storage of irradiated larvae: In present work, second instar C. septempunctata larvae were studied for storage at low temperature of 8oC. The larvae were kept at 8oC for 0, I and II weeks where week 0 depicts no cold treatment and this set of larvae was left under laboratory conditions for feeding and to complete their development. For larvae that were kept under cold storage for one week at 8°C, the term week I was devised. Similarly, week II denotes the larvae that remained under cold conditions (8°C) for two continuous weeks. Larvae were removed from cold storage in their respective week i.e., after week I and week II and were left under laboratory conditions to complete their development by feeding on aphids. Data collection: For recording the predatory potential of C. septempunctata larvae, 100 aphids were provided per larva per replicate on a daily basis until pupation as this number was more than their feeding capacity to make sure that they were not starved (personal observation). Observations were recorded for survival rate, developmental time and feeding potential. Data analysis: Data were statistically analysed by Statistical Software SPSS (Version 16.0). The data were subjected to normality check through the One-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Non normal data were transformed to normal data which were then used for all parametric variance tests. One-way and two-way analyses of variance were used. For comparison between variables, LSD test at α 0.05 was applied.RESULTSFeeding potential of irradiated larvae after removal from cold storage: Results showed an increase in the feeding potential of C. septempunctata larvae with increased cold storage duration. The feeding potential was significantly higher for the larvae that spent maximum length of time (week II) under cold storage conditions followed by week I and week 0. Gamma irradiations further enhanced the feeding potential of larvae that were kept under cold storage. When larvae were irradiated at 10 GY, the eating capacity of larvae increased significantly with the duration of cold storage. Similarly, larvae that were irradiated at 25 GY, showed increase in feeding potential on aphids as the time period of cold storage increased. The feeding potential of larvae that were irradiated at 50 GY, was again significantly increased with increase of cold storage duration. When different radiation doses were compared to week 0 of storage, there was a significant difference in feeding potential and larvae irradiated at 50 GY consumed the maximum numbers of aphids when no cold storage was done followed by larvae irradiated at 10 and 25 GY. With the other treatment, where larvae were kept under cold storage for one week (week I) the larvae irradiated at 50GY again showed the highest feeding potential. The feeding potential of irradiated larvae was again significantly higher than the un-irradiated larvae that were kept for two weeks (week II) under cold storage (table 1).Two-way ANOVA was performed to check the interaction between the different radiation doses and different lengths of storage durations for feeding potential of C. septempunctata larvae on aphids. The feeding potential of larvae irradiated at different doses and subjected to variable durations of cold storage were significantly different for both the radiation doses and cold storage intervals. Furthermore, the interaction between the radiation doses and storage duration was also significant meaning that the larvae irradiated at different doses with different length of cold storage were having significant variations in feeding levels (table 2).Developmental time of irradiated larvae after removal from cold storage: Significant difference was found in the development time of the larvae of C. septempunctata when irradiated at different doses at week 0 (without cold storage). The larvae irradiated at 10 GY took the maximum time for development and with the increase in irradiation dosage, from 25 to 50 GY, the time of development was shortened. The larvae irradiated at 50 GY had the same development time as the un-irradiated ones. When, the irradiated larvae were subjected to cold storage of one week duration (week I), their development time after removal from storage condition varied significantly. The larvae irradiated at 25 GY took the maximum time for development followed by larvae irradiated at 50 GY and 10 GY. There was an indication that the development time was extended for irradiated larvae as compared to un-irradiated larvae.Results also depicted a significant difference in the time taken by irradiated larvae to complete their development after taken out from cold storage of two weeks duration (week II). As the storage time of irradiated larvae increased, the development time was prolonged. Results showed that the larvae that were irradiated at 25 and 50 GY, took the maximum time to complete their development. With the prolonged duration of cold storage up to two weeks (week II), this difference of development time was less evident at lower doses (10 GY). The larvae irradiated at 10 GY showed a significant difference in their developmental duration after being taken out of cold storage conditions of the week 0, I and II. There was no difference in the developmental duration of larvae that were un-irradiated and subjected to different regimes of storage. Un-irradiated larvae were least affected by the duration of storage. With the increase in the storage time, a decrease in the developmental time was recorded. Larvae that were irradiated at 10 GY, took the maximum period to complete their development when no cold storage was done (week 0) followed by week I and II of cold storage. When the larvae irradiated at 25 GY were compared for their development time, there was again significant difference for week 0, I and II of storage duration. Maximum time was taken by the larvae for their complete development when removed from cold storage after one week (week I). With the increase in storage duration the time taken by larvae to complete their development after removal from cold storage reduced.When the larvae were removed after different lengths of cold storage duration i.e., week 0, week I and week II, there was a significant difference in the developmental time afterwards. Results have shown that the higher dose of radiation, increased the developmental time after removal from cold storage. The larvae irradiated at 50 GY took the longest time to complete their development after removal from cold storage (week I and week II) as compared the larvae that were not kept under cold storage conditions (week 0) (table 3).Interaction between the different radiation doses and different lengths of storage durations for development time of larvae were checked by two-way ANOVA. The development time of larvae irradiated at different doses and subjected to variable durations of cold storage were significantly different for both the doses and cold storage intervals. Furthermore, the interaction between the radiation doses and storage duration was also significant meaning that the larvae irradiated at different doses with different length of cold storage were having significant variations in development times (table 4). DISCUSSIONThe present research work indicates the possibility of keeping the larval instars of C. septempunctata under cold storage conditions of 8oC for a short duration of around 14 days without affecting its further development and feeding potential. Furthermore, irradiation can enhance the feeding potential and increase the development time of larval instars. This in turn could be a useful technique in mass rearing and field release programmes for biological control through larval instars. Usually temperature range of 8-10oC is an optimal selection of low temperature for storage as reported earlier for eggs two spotted ladybird beetle, Adalia bipunctata and the eggs of C. septempunctata (Hamalainen and Markkula, 1977), Trichogramma species (Jalali and Singh, 1992) and fairyfly, Gonatocerus ashmeadi (Hymenoptra; Mymaridae) (Leopold and Chen, 2007). However, a study reported more than 80% survival rate for the coccinellid beetle, Harmonia axyridis for up to 150 days at moderately low temperature of 3-6oC (Ruan et al., 2012). So there is great flexibility in coccinellid adults and larvae for tolerating low temperature conditions. After removal from cold storage, larvae showed better feeding potential with consumption of more aphids when compared to normal larvae that were not placed under low temperature conditions. This indicates that when the adult or immature insect stages are subjected to low temperature environment, they tend to reduce their metabolic activity for keeping them alive on the reserves of their body fats and sustain themselves for a substantial length of time under such cold environment. Hereafter, the larval instars that were in cold storage were behaving as if starved for a certain length of time and showed more hunger. This behavior of improved or higher feeding potential of stored larvae has been reported previously (Chapman, 1998). Hence, the feeding potential of C. septempunctata larvae significantly increased after cold storage. Gagné and Coderre (2001) reported higher predatory efficacy in larvae of C. maculata when stored at the same temperature as in the present study i.e., 8oC. Similarly, Ruan et al. (2012) showed that the multicolored Asian ladybug, H. axyridis, when stored under cold conditions, had more eating capacity towards aphids Aphis craccivora Koch than the individuals that were not stored. Such studies indicate that the higher feeding potential in insects after being subjected to low temperature environmental conditions could be due to the maintenance of their metabolism rate to a certain level while utilizing their energy reserves to the maximum extent (Watanabe, 2002).The individuals coming out from cold storage are therefore capable of consuming more pray as they were in a condition of starvation and they have to regain their energy loss through enhanced consumption. Furthermore, the starvation in C. septempunctata has previously been reported to affect their feeding potential (Suleman et al., 2017). In the present study, the larval development was delayed after returning to normal laboratory conditions. Cold storage affects the life cycle of many insects other than coccinellids. The cold storage of green bug aphid parasitoid, Lysiphlebus testaceipes Cresson (Hymenoptra; Braconidae) mummies increased the life cycle 3-4 times. Nevertheless, in current study the development process of stored larvae resumed quickly after taking them out and larvae completed their development up to adult stage. Similar kinds of results were reported for resumption of larval development after removal from cold storage conditions. Such studies only report satisfactory survival rates and development for a short duration of cold storage but as the length of storage is increased, it could become harmful to certain insects. Gagné and Coderre (2001) reported that cold storage for longer period (three weeks) proved fatal for almost 40% of larvae of C. maculata. Furthermore, in the same study, the feeding potential of C. maculata larvae was also affected beyond two weeks of cold storage due to the loss of mobility after a long storage period. Many studies have reported that longer durations of low temperature conditions can either damage the metabolic pathways of body cells or may increase the levels of toxins within the bodies of insects. Also, low temperature exposure for longer duration may cause specific interruptions in the insect body especially neuro-hormones responsible for insect development, which could be dangerous or even life threatening.Chen et al. (2004) also reported that the biological qualities of parasitized Bemisia tabaci pupae on population quality of Encarsia formosa were affected negatively with increase in cold storage duration. Similarly, the egg hatchability of green lacewing Chrysoperla carnea Stephen was lost completely beyond 18 days of cold storage (Sohail et al., 2019). However, in the present study the cold storage was done for maximum two weeks and it is to be regarded as a short term storage hence the survival rate was satisfactory. Longer periods of cold storage for larvae are not considered safe due to their vulnerable state as compared to adults which are hardier. Also 2nd instar larvae used in the present study for cold storage for being bigger in size and physical stronger than 1st instar. Abdel‐Salam and Abdel‐Baky (2000) reported that in C. undecimpunctata the cold storage of 3rd and 4th larval instars was higher and considered safer than early larval instars. The same study showed sharp decline in survival rate after two weeks and there was no survival beyond 30-60 days of cold storage. The present study showed that short term storage of the larvae of C. septempunctata could be done without any loss of their feeding potential or development so the quality of predator remained unaffected. Similar kind of work for many other insects had been reported previously where cold storage technique proved useful without deteriorating the fitness of stored insects. For example, the flight ability of reared codling moth Cydia pomonella Linnaeus remained unaffected after removal from cold storage (Matveev et al., 2017). Moreover, a sturdy reported that pupae of a parasitoid wasp Trichogramma nerudai (Hymenoptera; Trichogrammatidae) could be safely put in cold storage for above than 50 days (Tezze and Botto, 2004). Similarly, a technique of cold storage of non-diapausing eggs of black fly Simulium ornaturm Meigen was developed at 1oC. Another study reported safe storage of a predatory bug insidious flower bug Orius insidiosus for more than 10 days at 8°C (Bueno et al., 2014).In present study without cold storage, the lower doses of 10 and 25 GY prolonged the developmental time as compared to un-irradiated larvae and higher doses of irradiations in conjunction with cold storage again significantly prolonged the developmental time of larvae when returned to the laboratory conditions. Salem et al. (2014) also reported that Gamma irradiations significantly increased the duration of developmental stages (larvae and pupae) in cutworm, Agrotis ipsilon (Hufnagel). In another study, where endoparasitic wasps Glyptapanteles liparidis were evaluated with irradiated and non-irradiated gypsy moth Lymantria dispar larvae for oviposition, it was found that non-irradiated larvae had a shorter time to reach the adult stage as compared to irradiated larvae (Novotny et al., 2003). Both for higher doses with cold storage and lower doses without cold storage extended the larval duration of C. septempunctata. In another study when the parasitoid wasp Habrobracon hebetor was irradiated at the dose of 10 GY, it resulted in prolonged longevity (Genchev et al., 2008). In the same study, when another parasitoid Ventruria canescens was irradiated at lower doses of 4GY and 3 GY, it resulted in increased emergence from the host larvae, while gamma irradiations at the dose of 1 GY and 2 GY significantly stimulated the rate of parasitism (Genchev et al., 2008). The current study also indicated higher rates of predation in the form of increased feeding potential of larvae as a result of irradiations at lower doses.CONCLUSIONThe outcome of the current study shows that storage of 2nd instar C. septempunctata at low temperature of 8oC for a short duration of about 14 days is completely safe and could have broader application in different biocontrol programs. Such flexibility in storage duration can also assist in different mass rearing techniques and commercial uses. The combination of gamma radiation with low temperature cold storage could be a useful tool in developing different biological pest management programs against sucking insect pests. Incidence of periodic occurrence of both the target insect pests with their predatory ladybird beetles in synchrony is an important aspect that could be further strengthened by cold storage techniques. Therefore, short or long term bulk cold storage of useful commercial biocontrol agents and then reactivating them at appropriate time of pest infestation is a simple but an advantageous method in mass rearing programs. Increased feeding capacity of stored larvae is another edge and hence such larvae may prove more beneficial as compared to unstored larvae. Both cold storage and improved feeding of the C. septempuctata larvae can be utilized for implementation of IPM for many sucking insect pests of various crops, fruits and vegetables. Due to some constraints this study could not be continued beyond two weeks but for future directions, higher doses and longer duration periods could further elaborate the understanding and better application of such useful techniques in future IPM programmes on a wider scale. Also, some other predatory coccinellid beetle species can be tested with similar doses and cold storage treatments to see how effective this technique is on other species as well.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We acknowledge the Sugarcane Research and Development Board for providing a research grant (No. SRDB/P/4/16) to carry out this research work. 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Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004)Review by Geoff EleyEli Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility and Nationalism (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2004)Review by Tobias BrinkmannKolinsky, Eva, and Hildegard Maria Nickel, eds., Reinventing Gender: Women in Eastern Germany since Unification (London, Portland: Frank Cass, 2003)Review by Katrin SiegWilliam Glenn Gray, Germany's Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949-1969 (Chapel Hill/London, 2003)Review by Clay ClemensPeter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge and New York, 2003)Review by Henry KrischPatrick Stevenson, Language and German Disunity: A Sociolinguistic History of East and West in Germany, 1945 – 2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)Review by Heidi ByrnesStuart Taberner and Frank Finlay, eds., Recasting German Identity: Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic (Rochester: Camden House, 2002)Review by Kris Thomas Vander Lugt

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In Feminist theory: from margin to center, bell hooks puts into question the works by reformist feminists who happens to be mostly white, privileged women. She insists that these reformists do not address the plight of other oppressed women who were subjugated not only by their sex alone but by other factors such as race and class. Consequently, she proposes a cultural criticism that investigates the systems of domination in place through a disruption and deconstruction of cultural productions. This paper aims to critically evaluate hooks’ radical feminism and cultural criticism, and show its philosophical heritage through an engagement with the key ideas of critical theory and postmodernism. References Ackerly, Brooke A. Political theory and feminist social criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Adorno, Theodor W., and Anson G. Rabinbach. “Culture industry reconsidered.” New German Critique 6 (1975): 12-19. Ahmed, Sara. Differences that matter: Feminist theory and postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Anderson, Pamela Sue. “Feminism and philosophy.” In Gamble, Sarah, ed. The Routledge companion to feminism and postfeminism. London: Routledge, 2006, 117-124. Berger, Arthur Asa. Cultural criticism: a primer of key concepts. California: Sage Publications, 1995. Brezina, Corona. Sojourner Truth’s “ain't I a woman?” speech: A primary source investigation. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2005. Bronner, Stephen Eric, and Douglas Kellner, eds. Critical theory and society: A reader. New York: Psychology Press, 1989. Brooks, Ann. Postfeminisms: feminism, cultural theory and cultural forms. London: Routledge, 1997. Cavallaro, Dani. Critical and cultural theory. London: The Athlone Press, 2001. Cott, Nancy F. The grounding of modern feminism. Boston, Mass.: Yale University Press, 1987. del Guadalupe Davidson, Maria, and George Yancy, eds. Critical perspectives on bell hooks. London: Routledge, 2009. Devereux, Cecily. “New woman, new world: maternal feminism and the new imperialism in the white settler colonies.” In Women's studies international forum, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 175-184. Pergamon, 1999. Dicker, Rory, and Alison Piepmeier, eds. Catching a wave: Reclaiming feminism for the 21st century. Northeastern University Press, 2016. Foucault, Michel. The history of sexuality: An introduction. Vintage, 1990. Friedan, Betty. The feminine mystique. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2010. Gamble, Sarah, ed. The Routledge companion to feminism and postfeminism. London: Routledge, 2006. Genz, Stéphanie and Benjamin Brabon. Postfeminism: cultural texts and theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Geuss, Raymond. The idea of a critical theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. hooks, bell. Outlaw culture: resisting representations. London: Routledge, 2006. __________. Salvation: Black people and love. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. __________. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, Mass.: South and Press, 1990. __________. Feminist theory: from margin to center. Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1984. __________. Ain't I a woman: Black women and feminism. Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1981. Horkheimer, Max. Between philosophy and social science: selected early writings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Leitch, Vincent B., and William E. Cain, eds. The Norton anthology of theory and criticism. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2010. McLaren, Peter, and Nathalia E. Jaramillo. “Borderlines: bell hooks and the Pedagogy of Revolutionary Change.” In Critical Perspectives on bell hooks, pp. 31-47. Routledge, 2009. Kellner, Douglas. Baudrillard: A critical reader. Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1995. May, Tim, and Jason Powell. Situating social theory. London: McGraw-Hill Education, 2008. Nussbaum, Martha C. “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism.” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (1992): 202-46. Rush, Fred, ed. The Cambridge companion to critical theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. "Forty Years of Women’s Studies." Ms. Magazine online. Spring Issue. http://www. msmagazine. com/womensstudies/FourtyYears.asp (2009). Walters, Suzanna Danuta. Material girls: Making sense of feminist cultural theory. California: University of California Press, 1995. Watkins, S. Craig, and Rana A. Emerson. “Feminist media criticism and feminist media practices.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 571, no. 1 (2000): 151-166. Wolf, Naomi. The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used against women. New York: Random House, 1991.

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Last year, the ABC’s Media Watch (17 Oct. 2005) noted the continuing outrage in the tabloid media over “the dirtiest house in NSW”. The program took issue with Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph, and the descriptor “exclusive” attached to their article on a property in beachside Bondi (9 Oct. 2005). In fact, as Media Watch pointed out, Channel Seven’s current affairs flagship Today Tonight had already made repeat visits to the residence. A Current Affair, Channel Nine’s rival show, as well as Bondi’s local newspaper also offered coverage. However, I am interested not in the number of times the story appeared – though this is certainly a symptom of what I do want to talk about. Instead, I want to consider the affect generated by this reportage. In turn, I want to consider what this reveals about our attitudes to refuse, and how these attitudes work to constitute social order in capitalist discourse. The overwhelming affective register of the language deployed to speak about the house is disgust. Adam Bell in The Sunday Telegraph paints a visceral picture entitled “A stinking mess”. He writes that the Bondi premises are engulfed in a stinking three-metre high pile of decaying rubbish that poses a serious health and safety risk. … Stacked with empty boxes, beer cartons, broken furniture, canned fruit, newspapers and cardboard, the waste dump fills the entire front and backyards of the house and spills onto the street. On hot days, the stench of the rotting garbage is detected blocks away while at night, rats and co*ckroaches are regularly seen running in and out of the mess. … The rubbish is piled so high only the roof of the 1920s Californian bungalow is clearly visible from the front. (9 Oct. 2005) Bell’s follow-up speaks of “the huge pile of filth at the infamous Bondi rubbish house” and of “a team of cleaners dressed in forensic ‘space suits’” (27 Nov. 2005). Other News Limited journalists who subsequently visited the site conjured similar imagery (Goldner; Cummings). Television was not to be outdone: Today Tonight called it “the house from hell”, whilst A Current Affair focused on the “disgraceful pile of rat-infested rubbish [that] just gets higher and higher” (Media Watch). The tonality of the language is a dimension of the prevalent discourse of “aspirationalism” that is central to the popularist politics of Australian Prime Minister John Howard. One key signifier of “aspiration” is property ownership expressed through the rhetoric of the “home.” The affective dimension of the reporting—the disgust—stems from the disjuncture of the exalted (Bondi Beach, high property values) and the abject (refuse). It is a tool used to discursively fix the inappropriate physical and social location of the refuse so as to locate what is culturally valued. Bell’s initial article mentions no less than three times in 600 words that the house is a “million dollar property” and is “located in one of Sydney’s most prestigious and expensive suburbs” (9 Oct. 2005). His second article also mentioned the property’s value (27 Nov. 2005), as did another article by a colleague at The Daily Telegraph (9 Dec. 2005). Today Tonight emphasized that the house was in “an exclusive beachside suburb” and that it was “smack bang in the middle of one of Australia’s most expensive and best known suburbs” (Media Watch). William Ian Miller in Anatomy of Disgust explains how the affective response to an encounter like the one with Bondi’s “rubbish house” can be attributed to feelings about organisation. Miller positions disgust as “a strong sense of aversion to something perceived as dangerous because of its danger to contaminate, infect, or pollute by proximity, contact or ingestion” (2). In other words, disgust is the product of an aversion to something that breaches the lines of containment, and therefore signals a threat to established order. The body – a network of physiological and neurological processes, which constitute multiple systems of order in their own right – cannot cope with such a breakdown and reacts accordingly. David Trotter elaborates: Psychological activity [is] an attempt to impose order on experience: bodily paroxysm is a way of confronting and resolving urgent abstract dilemmas. According to this view, you vomit because you have lost confidence in your ability to make sense of the world: your ability to categorize, order, explain, or tell stories about what has happened to you. Disgust is the product of conceptual trauma. (158-9) The “conceptual trauma” in the case of Bondi’s “rubbish house” is a reaction to a transgression of the order of capitalist social space, which then becomes a discursive conduit for its hegemonic renewal. Indeed, the concern with the malfunction in social order that the misplaced refuse represents confirms what anthropologist Mary Douglas has been telling us for some time: If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. (36) Certainly, the associated health risks to Mary Bobolas, the house’s owner/occupier, and the wider community from her hoarding are not purely ideological. However, it is impossible to divorce the social discourses surrounding refuse from the series of social and technological developments that Dominique Laporte in his History of sh*t calls the “privatisation” of waste (28). The social and technical apparatuses which enable dominant sociogenetic attitudes regarding refuse include the increasing emphasis on private property, the emergence of the family unit as the primary site for the coalescence of socializing forces and inventions such as the toilet (Elias 137-40). Laporte believes that this process in instrumental in creating the individuated, capitalist subject, which, in the context of contemporary Australian capitalist discourse, is the middle-class homeowner. The construction of complex regulatory architecture to manage practices and tastes substantiates American novelist Don DeLillo’s proposal that civilisation did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage came first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn’t discard, to reprocess what we couldn’t use. … Consume or die. That’s the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it. (287-8) Most of the systems to which DeLillo refers are designed to counter the visibility of refuse and channel it to a demarcated, separate space. This is the paradox of refuse: our sense of order depends upon it, yet in affluent society we are anxious about confronting it. Over the years, Bondi Beach has been sanitised both materially and socially. The sewage outfall is a heritage site and the area is no longer working class. Yet, it seems the sh*t is still washing up on the shore: significantly, the refuse Bobolas accumulates is other people’s rubbish collected from “the streets, garbage bins and council clean-ups” (Bell 9 Oct. 2005). It is produced by the very homeowners whose disgust is so palpable. However, the media coverage of the “rubbish house” does not merely remind the rich and famous residents of their own refuse, nor does it function as a critique of conspicuous consumption. The media event of the “rubbish house” illustrates how “matter out of place” and the resulting affect of disgust are exploited discursively by hegemonic culture in order to maintain the ideology of “aspirationalism” and reiterate the wider capitalist project. References Bell, Adam. “A Stinking Mess – Mountain of Garbage in Sydney Yard.” Sunday Telegraph [Sydney] 9 Oct. 2005: 9. Bell, Adam. “End of the Dirt House.” Sunday Telegraph [Sydney] 27 Nov. 2005: 17. Cummings, Larissa. “Bondi Mountain of Rubbish Rises Again.” Daily Telegraph [Sydney] 20 May 2006: 15. DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2002. Elias, Norbert. The Civilising Process: The History of Manners: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978. Goldner, Viva. “Rage over Rubbish – Daughters Defend Garbage Mountain.” Daily Telegraph [Sydney] 9 Dec. 2005: 17. Laporte, Dominique. History of sh*t. Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 2002. Media Watch. ABC TV. 17 Oct. 2005. Transcript. 23 Jul 2006 http://www.abc. net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1483767.htm. net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1483767.htm> Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, Mass & London: Harvard UP, 1997. Trotter, David. Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Seale, Kirsten. "Location, Location: Situating Bondi’s “Rubbish House”." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/07-seale.php>. APA Style Seale, K. (Nov. 2006) "Location, Location: Situating Bondi’s “Rubbish House”," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/07-seale.php>.

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Working drawings are produced, when a house is designed, to envisage an imagined building. They are a tangible representation of an object that has no tangible existence. These working drawings act as a manual for constructing the house; they represent that which is to be built. The house comes into being, therefore, via this set of drawings. This is known as documentation. However, these drawings record the house at an ideal moment in time; they capture the house in stasis. They do not represent the future life of the house, the changes and traces the inhabitants make upon a space, nor do they document the path of the person, the arc of their actions, within the space of the house. Other types of documentation of the house allow these elements to be included. Documentation that is produced after-the-event, that interprets ‘the existing’, is absent from discourses on documentation; the realm of post factum documentation is a less examined form of documentation. This paper investigates post factum documentation of the house, and the alternative ways of making, producing and, therefore, thinking about, the house that it offers. This acknowledges the body in the space of architecture, and the inhabitation of space, and as a dynamic process. This then leads to the potential of the‘model of an action’ representing the motion and temporality inherent within the house. Architecture may then be seen as that which encloses the inhabitant. The word ‘document’ refers to a record or evidence of events. It implies a chronological sequence: the document comes after-the-event, that is, it is post factum. Within architecture, however, the use of the word documentation, predominantly, refers to working drawings that are made to ‘get to’ a building, drawings being the dominant representation within architecture. Robin Evans calls this notion, of architecture being brought into existence through drawing, the principle of reversed directionality (Evans 1997, 1989). Although it may be said that these types of drawings document the idea, or document the imagined reality of the building, their main emphasis, and reading, is in getting to something. In this case, the term documentation is used, not due to the documents’ placement within a process, of coming after the subject-object, but in referring to the drawings’ role. Other architectural drawings do exist that are a record of what is seen, but these are not the dominant drawing practice within architecture. Documentation within architecture regards the act of drawing as that process upon which the object is wholly dependent for its coming into existence. Drawing is defined as the pre-eminent methodology for generation of the building; drawings are considered the necessary initial step towards the creation of the 1:1 scale object. During the designing phase, the drawings are primary, setting out an intention. Drawings, therefore, are regarded as having a prescriptive endpoint rather than being part of an open-ended improvisation. Drawings, in getting to a building, draw out something, the act of drawing searches for and uncovers the latent design, drawing it into existence. They are seen as getting to the core of the design. Drawings display a technique of making and are influenced by their medium. Models, in getting to a building, may be described in the same way. The act of modelling, of making manifest two-dimensional sketches into a three-dimensional object, operates similarly in possessing a certain power in assisting the design process to unfurl. Drawing, as recording, alters the object. This act of drawing is used to resolve, and to edit, by excluding and omitting, as much as by including, within its page. Models similarly made after-the-fact are interpretive and consciously aware of their intentions. In encapsulating the subject-object, the model as documentation is equally drawing out meaning. This type of documentation is not neutral, but rather involves interpretation and reflection through representational editing. Working drawings record the house at an ideal moment in time: at the moment the builders leave the site and the owners unlock the front door. These drawings capture the house in stasis. There is often the notion that until the owners of a new house move in, the house has been empty, unlived in. But the life of the house cannot be fixed to any one starting point; rather it has different phases of life from conception to ruin. With working drawings being the dominant representation of the house, they exclude much; both the life of the house before this act of inhabitation, and the life that occurs after it. The transformations that occur at each phase of construction are never shown in a set of working drawings. When a house is built, it separates itself from the space it resides within: the domain of the house is marked off from the rest of the site. The house has a skin of a periphery, that inherently creates an outside and an inside (Kreiser 88). As construction continues, there is a freedom in the structure which closes down; potential becomes prescriptive as choices are made and embodied in material. The undesignedness of the site, that exists before the house is planned, becomes lost once the surveyors’ pegs are in place (Wakely 92). Next, the skeletal frame of open volumes becomes roofed, and then becomes walled, and walking through the frame becomes walking through doorways. One day an interior is created. The interior and exterior of the house are now two different things, and the house has definite edges (Casey 290). At some point, the house becomes lockable, its security assured through this act of sealing. It is this moment that working drawings capture. Photographs comprise the usual documentation of houses once they are built, and yet they show no lived-in-ness, no palimpsest of occupancy. They do not observe the changes and traces the inhabitants make upon a space, nor do they document the path of the person, the arc of their actions, within the space of the house. American architects and artists Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have written of these traces of the everyday that punctuate floor and wall surfaces: the intersecting rings left by coffee glasses on a tabletop, the dust under a bed that becomes its plan analog when the bed is moved, the swing etched into the floor by a sagging door. (Diller & Scofidio 99) It is these marks, these traces, that are omitted from the conventional documentation of a built house. To examine an alternative way of documenting, and to redress these omissions, a redefinition of the house is needed. A space can be delineated by its form, its edges, or it can be defined by the actions that are performed, and the connections between people that occur, within it. To define the house by what it encapsulates, rather than being seen as an object in space, allows a different type of documentation to be employed. By defining a space as that which accommodates actions, rooms may be delineated by the reach of a person, carved out by the actions of a person, as though they are leaving a trace as they move, a windscreen wiper of living, through the repetition of an act. Reverse directional documentation does not directly show the actions that take place within a house; we must infer these from the rooms’ fittings and fixtures, and the names on the plan. In a similar way, Italo Calvino, in Invisible Cities, defines a city by the relationships between its inhabitants, rather than by its buildings: in Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or grey or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain … Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form. (Calvino 62) By defining architecture by that which it encapsulates, form or materiality may be given to the ‘spiderwebs of intricate relationships’. Modelling the actions that are performed in the space of architecture, therefore, models the architecture. This is referred to as a model of an action. In examining the model of an action, the possibilities of post factum documentation of the house may be seen. The Shinkenchiku competition The Plan-Less House (2006), explored these ideas of representing a house without using the conventional plan to do so. A suggested alternative was to map the use of the house by its inhabitants, similar to the idea of the model of an action. The house could be described by a technique of scanning: those areas that came into contact with the body would be mapped. Therefore, the representation of the house is not connected with spatial division, that is, by marking the location of walls, but rather with its use by its inhabitants. The work of Diller and Scofidio and Allan Wexler and others explores this realm. One inquiry they share is the modelling of the body in the space of architecture: to them, the body is inseparable from the conception of space. By looking at their work, and that of others, three different ways of representing this inhabitation of space are seen. These are: to represent the objects involved in a particular action, or patterns of movement, that occurs in the space, in a way that highlights the action; to document the action itself; or to document the result of the action. These can all be defined as the model of an action. The first way, the examination of the body in a space via an action’s objects, is explored by American artist Allan Wexler, who defines architecture as ‘choreography without a choreographer, structuring its inhabitant’s movements’ (Galfetti 22). In his project ‘Crate House’ (1981), Wexler examines the notion of the body in a space via an action’s objects. He divided the house into its basic activities: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room. Each of these is then defined by their artefacts, contained in their own crate on wheels, which is rolled out when needed. At any point in time, the entire house becomes the activity due to its crate: when a room such as the kitchen is needed, that crate is rolled in through one of the door openings. When the occupant is tired, the entire house becomes a bedroom, and when the occupant is hungry, it becomes a kitchen … I view each crate as if it is a diorama in a natural history museum — the pillow, the spoon, the flashlight, the pot, the nail, the salt. We lose sight of everyday things. These things I isolate, making them sculpture: their use being theatre. (Galfetti 42–6) The work of Andrea Zittel explores similar ideas. ‘A–Z Comfort Unit’ (1994), is made up of five segments, the centrepiece being a couch/bed, which is surrounded by four ancillary units on castors. These offer a library, kitchen, home office and vanity unit. The structure allows the lodger never to need to leave the cocoon-like bed, as all desires are an arm’s reach away. The ritual of eating a meal is examined in Wexler’s ‘Scaffold Furniture’ (1988). This project isolates the components of the dining table without the structure of the table. Instead, the chair, plate, cup, glass, napkin, knife, fork, spoon and lamp are suspended by scaffolding. Their connection, rather than being that of objects sharing a tabletop, is seen to be the (absent) hand that uses them during a meal; the act of eating is highlighted. In these examples, the actions performed within a space are represented by the objects involved in the action. A second way of representing the patterns of movement within a space is to represent the action itself. The Japanese tea ceremony breaks the act of drinking into many parts, separating and dissecting the whole as a way of then reassembling it as though it is one continuous action. Wexler likens this to an Eadweard Muybridge film of a human in motion (Galfetti 31). This one action is then housed in a particular building, so that when devoid of people, the action itself still has a presence. Another way of documenting the inhabitation of architecture, by drawing the actions within the space, is time and motion studies, such as those of Rene W.P. Leanhardt (Diller & Scofidio 40–1). In one series of photographs, lights were attached to a housewife’s wrists, to demonstrate the difference in time and effort required in the preparation of a dinner prepared entirely from scratch in ninety minutes, and a pre-cooked, pre-packaged dinner of the same dish, which took only twelve minutes. These studies are lines of light, recorded as line drawings on a photograph of the kitchen. They record the movement of the person in the room of the action they perform, but they also draw the kitchen in a way conventional documentation does not. A recent example of the documentation of an action was undertaken by Asymptote and the students at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture in their exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2000. A gymnast moving through the interior space of the pavilion was recorded using a process of digitisation and augmentation. Using modelling procedures, the spatial information was then reconstructed to become a full-scale architectural re-enactment of the gymnast’s trajectory through the room (Feireiss 40). This is similar to a recent performance by Australian contemporary dance company Chunky Move, called ‘Glow’. Infra-red video tracking took a picture of the dancer twenty-five times a second. This was used to generate shapes and images based on the movements of a solo dancer, which were projected onto the floor and the dancer herself. In the past, when the company has used DVDs or videos, the dancer has had to match what they were doing to the projection. This shifts the technology to following the dancer (Bibby 3). A third way of representing the inhabitation of architecture is to document the result of an action. Raoul Bunschoten writes of the marks of a knife being the manifestation of the act of cutting, as an analogy: incisions imply the use of a cutting tool. Together, cuts and cutting tool embrace a special condition. The actual movement of the incision is fleeting, the cut or mark stays behind, the knife moves on, creating an apparent discontinuity … The space of the cut is a reminder of the knife, its shape and its movements: the preparation, the swoop through the air, the cutting, withdrawal, the moving away. These movements remain implicitly connected with the cut as its imaginary cause, as a mnemonic programme about a hand holding a knife, incising a surface, severing skin. (Bunschoten 40) As a method of documenting actions, the paintings of Jackson Pollack can be seen as a manifestation of an act. In the late 1940s, Pollack began to drip paint onto a canvas laid flat on the floor; his tools were sticks and old caked brushes. This process clarified his work, allowing him to walk around it and work from all four sides. Robert Hughes describes it as ‘painting “from the hip” … swinging paintstick in flourishes and frisks that required an almost dancelike movement of the body’ (Hughes 154). These paintings made manifest Pollack’s gestures. As his arm swung in space, the dripping paint followed that arc, to be preserved on a flat plane as pictorial space (Hughes 262). Wexler, in another study, recorded the manifestation of an action. He placed a chair in a one-room building. It was attached to lengths of timber that extended outdoors through slots in the walls of the building. As the chair moved inside the building, its projections carved grooves in the ground outside. As the chair moved in a particular pattern, deeper grooves were created: ‘Eventually, the occupant of the chair has no choice in his movement; the architecture moves him.’ (Galfetti 14) The pattern of movement creates a result, which in turn influences the movement. By redefining architecture by what it encapsulates rather than by the enclosure itself, allows architecture to be documented by the post factum model of an action that occurs in that space. This leads to the exploration of architecture, formed by the body within it, since the documentation and representation of architecture starts to affect the reading of architecture. Architecture may then be seen as that which encloses the inhabitant. The documentation of the body and the space it makes concerns the work of the Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz. His exploration is of the body and the space it makes. Makovecz, and a circle of like-minded architects and artists, embarked on a series of experiments analysing the patterns of human motion and subsequently set up a competition based around the search for a minimum existential space. This consisted of mapping human motion in certain spatial conditions and situations. Small light bulbs were attached to points on the limbs and joints and photographed, creating a series of curves and forms. This led to a competition called ‘Minimal Space’ (1971–2), in which architects, artists and designers were invited to consider a minimal space for containing the human body, a new notion of personal containment. Makovecz’s own response took the form of a bell-like capsule composed of a double shell expressing its presence and location in both time and space (Heathcote 120). Vito Acconci, an artist turned architect by virtue of his installation work, explored this notion of enclosure in his work (Feireiss 38). In 1980 Acconci began his series of ‘self-erecting architectures’, vehicles or instruments involving one or more viewers whose operation erected simple buildings (Acconci & Linker 114). In his project ‘Instant House’ (1980), a set of walls lies flat on the floor, forming an open cruciform shape. By sitting in the swing in the centre of this configuration, the visitor activates an apparatus of cables and pulleys causing walls to rise and form a box-like house. It is a work that explores the idea of enclosing, of a space being something that has to be constructed, in the same way for example one builds up meaning (Reed 247–8). This documentation of architecture directly references the inhabitation of architecture. The post factum model of architecture is closely linked to the body in space and the actions it performs. Examining the actions and movement patterns within a space allows the inhabitation process to be seen as a dynamic process. David Owen describes the biological process of ‘ecopoiesis’: the process of a system making a home for itself. He describes the building and its occupants jointly as the new system, in a system of shaping and reshaping themselves until there is a tolerable fit (Brand 164). The definition of architecture as being that which encloses us, interests Edward S. Casey: in standing in my home, I stand here and yet feel surrounded (sheltered, challenged, drawn out, etc.) by the building’s boundaries over there. A person in this situation is not simply in time or simply in space but experiences an event in all its engaging and unpredictable power. In Derrida’s words, ‘this outside engages us in the very thing we are’, and we find ourselves subjected to architecture rather than being the controlling subject that plans or owns, uses or enjoys it; in short architecture ‘comprehends us’. (Casey 314) This shift in relationship between the inhabitant and architecture shifts the documentation and reading of the exhibition of architecture. Casey’s notion of architecture comprehending the inhabitant opens the possibility for an alternate exhibition of architecture, the documentation of that which is beyond the inhabitant’s direction. Conventional documentation shows a quiescence to the house. Rather than attempting to capture the flurry — the palimpsest of occupancy — within the house, it is presented as stilled, inert and dormant. In representing the house this way, a lull is provided, fostering a steadiness of gaze: a pause is created, within which to examine the house. However, the house is then seen as object, rather than that which encapsulates motion and temporality. Defining, and thus documenting, the space of architecture by its actions, extends the perimeter of architecture. No longer is the house bounded by its doors and walls, but rather by the extent of its patterns of movement. Post factum documentation allows this altering of the definition of architecture, as it includes the notion of the model of an action. By appropriating, clarifying and reshaping situations that are relevant to the investigation of post factum documentation, the notion of the inhabitation of the house as a definition of architecture may be examined. This further examines the relationship between architectural representation, the architectural image, and the image of architecture. References Acconci, V., and K. Linker. Vito Acconci. New York: Rizzoli, 1994. Bibby, P. “Dancer in the Dark Is Light Years Ahead.” Sydney Morning Herald 22 March 2007: 3. Brand, S. How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built. London: Phoenix Illustrated, 1997. Bunschoten, R. “Cutting the Horizon: Two Theses on Architecture.” Forum (Nov. 1992): 40–9. Calvino, I. Invisible Cities. London: Picador, 1979. Casey, E.S. The Fate of Place. California: U of California P, 1998. Diller, E., and R. Scofidio. Flesh: Architectural Probes. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. Evans, R. Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. ———. “Architectural Projection.” Eds. E. Blau and E. Kaufman. Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation: Works from the Collection of the Canadian Center for Architecture. Exhibition catalogue. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. 19–35. Feireiss, K., ed. The Art of Architecture Exhibitions. Rotterdam: Netherlands Architecture Institute, 2001. Galfetti, G.G., ed. Allan Wexler. Barcelona: GG Portfolio, 1998. Glanville, R. “An Irregular Dodekahedron and a Lemon Yellow Citroen.” In L. van Schaik, ed., The Practice of Practice: Research in the Medium of Design. Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2003. 258–265. Heathcote, E. Imre Mackovecz: The Wings of the Soul. West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1997. Hughes, R. The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980. Kreiser, C. “On the Loss of (Dark) Inside Space.” Daidalos 36 (June 1990): 88–99. Reed, C. ed. Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996. “Shinkenchiku Competition 2006: The Plan-Less House.” The Japan Architect 64 (Winter 2007): 7–12. Small, D. Paper John. USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. Wakely, M. Dream Home. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Macken, Marian. "And Then We Moved In: Post Factum Documentation of the House." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/04-macken.php>. APA Style Macken, M. (Aug. 2007) "And Then We Moved In: Post Factum Documentation of the House," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/04-macken.php>.

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Becker, Bonny. The Sniffles for Bear. Cambridge, Mass.: Candlewick Press, 2011. Print Any book featuring the shenanigans of curmudgeonly Bear and winsome Mouse is met with enthusiasm in my house. Bear has a terrible cold and he responds to his condition with his usual verbose intolerance. Again, it is utterly creative and unstoppably committed Mouse - every introvert’s secret fantasy friend - to the rescue. While the dialogue is as snappy and satisfying as ever, it is Denton’s illustrations, their clean, clear detail and spot-on visual characterization that put these excellent books over the top. Has there ever been a cold suffered more intensely than Bear’s? The physical language and facial expressions on the cover alone speak to the depths Bear’s lethargy and irritation and Mouse’s unquenchable joie de vivre. Becker’s willingness to use evocative, mildly esoteric words, rather than baffling children, engages them with exotic cadence and apt expressions of the characters’ compelling idiosyncrasies. The mood and temperament of the books is unfailingly cozy and pastoral. (Is it Upper Canada or New England pastoral, though? I can’t decide.) One always worries that the return of appealing characters in new stories will dilute their charms but that has, luckily, not been the case with Becker and Denton’s collaboration; the dynamic between Bear and Mouse continues to be clever and delightful. The exploration of friendships between the sort of oppositional temperaments that Bear and Mouse embody is a familiar theme in children’s literature. While only time will tell, there is potential that Bear and Mouse are developing as enduring a partnership as Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad. One keenly hopes for many more little domestic adventures to come. Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Matilda Roche Matilda spends her days lavishing attention on the University of Alberta’s metadata but children’s illustrated books, literature for young adults and graphic novels also make her heart sing. Her reviews benefit from the critical influence of a four year old daughter and a one year old son – both geniuses. Matilda’s super power is the ability to read comic books aloud.

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IntroductionThe Sydney Opera House is Australia’s, if not the world’s, most recognisable building. It is universally recognised as an architectural icon and as a masterpiece of the built environment, which has captured the imagination of many (Commonwealth of Australia 4). The construction of the Sydney Opera House, between 1959 and 1973, utilised many ground-breaking methods and materials which, together, pushed the boundaries of technical possibilities to the limits of human knowledge at the time (Commonwealth of Australia 36, 45). Typical investigations into the Sydney Opera House focus on its architects, the materials, construction, or the events that occur on its stages. The role of the illumination, in the perception and understanding of Australia’s most famous performing arts centre, is an under-investigated aspect of its construction and its use today (Dwyer Backstage Biography 1; Dwyer “Utzon’s Use” 131).This article examines the illumination of the Sydney Opera House from the perspective of light as a construction material, another element that is used to ‘build’ the structure on Bennelong Point. This article examines the illumination from an historical view as Jørn Utzon’s (1918-2008) concepts for the building, including the lighting design intentions, were not all realised as he did not complete the project. The task of finishing this structure was allocated to the architectural cooperative of Hall, Todd & Littlemore who replaced Utzon in 1966. The Danish-born Utzon was appointed in January 1957 having won an international competition, from a field of over 230 entries, to design a national opera house for Sydney. He quickly began the task of resolving his design, transforming the roughly-sketched concepts presented in his competition entry, into detailed drawings that articulated how the opera house would be realised. The iteration of these concepts can be most succinctly identified in Utzon’s formal design reports to the Opera House Committee which are often referred to based on the colour of their cover design. The first report, the ‘red book’ was issued in 1958 with further developments of the architectural and services designs outlined in the ‘yellow book’ which followed in 1962. The last of the original architects’ publications was the Utzon Design Principles (2002) which was created as part of the reengagement process—between the Government of New South Wales and the Sydney Opera House with the original architect—that commenced in 1999.As with many modern buildings (such as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center, Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church or Adrian D. Smith’ Burj Khalifa), concrete was selected to form the basic structural element of the Sydney Opera House. Working with the, now internationally-renowned, engineering firm Ove Arup and Partners, Utzon designed some of the most significant shapes and finishes that have become synonymous with the site. The concrete elements range from basic blade walls with lustrous finishes to the complex, shape-changing beams that rise from under the monumental stairs and climb to terminate in the southern foyers. Thus, demonstrating the use of concrete as both a structural element and a high quality architectural finish. Another product used throughout the Sydney Opera House is granite. As a hardwearing stone, it is used in a crushed form as part of the precast panels that line the walls and internal flooring and as setts on the forecourt. As with the concrete the use of the same material inside and out blurs the distinction between interior and exterior. The forecourt forms a wide-open plaza before the building rises like a headland as it meets the harbour. The final, and most recognisable element is that of the shell (or roof) tiles. After many years of research Utzon settled on a simple mix of gloss and matt tiles of approximately 120mm square that, carefully arranged, produced a chevron shaped ‘lid’ and results in an effect likened to snow and ice (Commonwealth of Australia 51).These construction elements would all remain invisible if not illuminated by light, natural or artificial. This paper posits that the illumination reinforces the architecture of the structure and extends the architectural and experiential narratives of the Sydney Opera House across time and space. That, light is—like concrete, granite and tiles—a critical component of the Opera House’s build.Building a Narrative with LightIn creating the Sydney Opera House, Utzon set about harnessing natural and artificial illumination that are intrinsic parts of the human condition. Light shapes every facet of our lives from defining working and leisure hours to providing the mechanism for high speed communications and is, therefore, an obvious choice to reinforce the structure of the building and to link the built environment with the natural world that enveloped his creation. Light was to play a major role in the narrative of the Sydney Opera House starting from a patron’s approach to the site.Utzon’s staged approach to a performance at the Sydney Opera House is well documented, from the opening passages of the Descriptive Narrative (Utzon 1-2) to the Lighting Master Plan (Steensen Varming). The role of artificial light in the preparation of the audience extends beyond the simple visibility necessary to navigate the site. Light provides a linking element that guides an audience member along their ‘journey’ through several phases of transformation from the physicality of the city on the forecourt to “another world–a make believe atmosphere, which will exclude all outside impressions and allow the patrons to be absorbed into the theatre mood, which the actors and the producers wish to create” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 2) in the theatres. Utzon conceived of light as part of the storytelling process, expressing the building’s narrative in a way that allows illumination is to be so much more than signposts to points of activity such as cloaking areas, theatre entries and the like. The lighting was intended to delineate various stages on the ‘journey’ noted above, to reinforce the transition from one world to another such that the combination of light and architecture would provide a series of successive stimuli that would build until the crescendo of the performance itself. This supports the transition of the visitor from the world of the everyday into the narrative of the Sydney Opera House and a world of make believe. Yet, in providing a narrative between these two ‘worlds’ the lighting becomes an anchor—or an element held in suspension – a mediator in the tension between the city at the beginning of the ‘journey’ and the ‘other world’ of the performance at the end. There is a balance to be maintained between illuminating the Sydney Opera House so that it remains prominent in its harbour location, easily read as a distinct sculptural structure on the peninsular separate from, but still an essential part of, the city that lies beyond Circular Quay to the south. Utzon alludes to the challenges of crafting the illumination so that it meets these requirements, noting that the illumination of the broardwalks “must be compatible with the lighting on the approach roads” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 68) while maintaining that “the floodlit building will be the first and last impression for [… an audience] to receive” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 1). These lighting requirements are also tempered by the desire that the “night time [...] view will be all lights and reflections, [that] stretch all along the harbour for many miles” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 1) reinforcing the use of light as an anchor that provides both a point of reference and serves as a mediator of the Sydney Opera House’s place within the city.The narrative of the materials and elements that are combined to give the final, physical form its striking sensory presence is also told through light, in particular colour. Or, perhaps more precisely in an illumination sense, the accurate reproduction of colour and by extension accurate presentation of the construction materials used in the creation of the Sydney Opera House. Expression of the ‘truth’ in the materials he used was important for Utzon and the faithful representation of details such as the fine grains in timber and the smooth concrete finishes required careful lighting to enhance these features. When extended to the human occupants of the Sydney Opera House, there is a short, yet very descriptive instruction: the lighting is to give “life to the skin and hair on the human form in much the same way as the light from candles” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). Thus, the narrative of the materials and their quality was as important as the final structure and those who would occupy it. It is the role of light to build upon the story of the materials to contribute to the overall narrative of the Sydney Opera House.Building an Experience through IlluminationUtzon envisaged that light would do much more than provide illumination or tell the narrative of the materials he had selected – light was also to build a unique architectural experience for a patron. The experience of light was to be subtle; the architecture was to retain a position of centre stage, reinforced by, rather than ever replaced by, the illumination. In this way, concealed lighting was proposed which would be “designed in close collaboration with the acoustical engineers as they will become an integral part of overall acoustic design” and “installed in carefully selected places based on knowledge gleaned from experimental work” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). Through concealing the light source, the architecture did not become cluttered or over powered by a dazzling array of fixtures and fittings that detracted from the audience’s experiences. For instance, to illuminate the monumental steps, Utzon proposed that the fittings would be recessed into the handrails, while the bar and lounge areas would be lit from discreet fittings installed within the plywood ceiling panels (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 16) to create an experience of light that was unified across the site. In addition to the aesthetical improvements gained from the removal of the light sources from the field of view, unwanted glare is also reduced reinforcing the ‘whole’ of the architectural experience.During the time that Utzon was conceptualising the illumination of the Sydney Opera House, the Major Hall (what is now known as the Concert Hall) was envisaged as what might be considered as a modern multipurpose venue, one that could accommodate among other activities: symphonic concerts; opera; ballet and dance; choral concerts; pageants and mass meetings (NSW Department of Local Government 24). The Concert Hall was the terminus for the ‘journey’—where the actors and audience find themselves in the same space, the ‘other world’—“a make believe atmosphere, which will exclude all outside impressions and allow the patrons to be absorbed into the theatre mood, which the actors and the producers wish to create” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 2). This other world was to sumptuously explode with rich colours “which uplift you in that festive mood, away from daily life, that you expect when you go to the theatre, a play, an opera or a concert” (Utzon Utzon Design Principles 34). These highly decorated and colourful finishes contrast with the white shells further highlighting the ‘journey’ that has taken place. Utzon proposed to use the illumination to reinforce this distance and provide the link between the natural colours of the raw materials used outside the theatre and highly decorated colours of the performance spaces.The lighting treatment of the theatres extended into the foyers and their public amenities to ensure that the lighting design contributed to the overall enhancement of a patron’s visit and delivered the experience of the ‘journey’ that was envisaged by Utzon (Dwyer “Utzon’s Use” 130-32). This standardised approach was in concert with Utzon’s architectural philosophy where repetitive systems of construction elements were utilised, for instance, in the construction of the shells. Utzon clearly articulated this approach in The Descriptive Narrative, noting that “standard light fittings will be chosen […] to suit each location” (67), however the standardisation would not compromise other considerations of the space such as the acoustical performance, with Utzon noting that the “fittings for auditoria and rehearsal rooms must be of necessity, designed in close collaboration with the acoustical engineers as they will become an integral part of over acoustic design” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). Another parallel between the architectural development of the Sydney Opera House and Utzon’s approach to the lighting concepts was, uncommon at the time, his preference for prototyping and experimentation with lighting effects and various fittings (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). A sharp contrast to the usual practices of the day which relied upon more straightforward procurement processes with generic rather than tailored solutions. Peter Hall, of Hall, Todd & Littlemore, discussed the typical method of lighting design which was prevalent during the construction of the Sydney Opera House, as a method which “amounted to the electrical engineers laying out on a plan sufficient off-the-shelf light fittings to achieve the desired illumination levels […] the resulting effects were dull even if brightly lit” (Hall 180). Thus, Utzon’s careful approach to ensure that light and architecture were in harmony as “nothing is introduced into the scheme, before it has been carefully investigated and has proved to be the right solution to the problem” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 2) was highly innovative for its time.The use of light to provide an experience was not necessarily new, for example RSL Clubs, theme parks and department stores all used light to attract attention to their products and services, however the scale and proposed execution of these concepts was pioneering for Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. Utzon’s concepts provided a highly experiential unified design to provide the patron with a unique architectural experience built through the careful use of light.Building the Scenery with LightArchitecture might be considered set design on a grand scale (for example see Raban, Rasmuseen and Read). Both architects and set designers are concerned with the relationship between the creative designs and the viewers and both set up opportunities for interactions between people (as actors or users) and structure. However, without light, the scene remains literally, in the dark, isolated from its surroundings and unperceetable to an audience.Utzon was acutely aware of the relationship between the Sydney Opera House and the city in which it stands. The positioning of the structure on the site is no accident and the interplay between the ‘sails’ and the sun is perhaps the most recognised lighting feature of the Sydney Opera House. By varying the angle of the shells, the reflections and the effects of the sunlight are constantly varying depending on the viewer’s position and focus. More importantly, these subtle variations in the light enhance the sculptural effect of the direct illumination and help create the effect of “matt snow and shining ice” (Commonwealth of Australia 51): the ‘shimmer of life’ so desired by Utzon as the sunlight strikes the ceramic tiles. This ‘shimmer’ is not the only natural lighting effect. The use of the different angles ensures variation in the light, clouds and resulting shadows to heighten interest and create an ever-changing scene that plays out on the shells as the sun moves across the sky, as Utzon notes, “something new goes on all the time and it is so important–this interplay is so important that together with the sun, the light and the clouds, it makes it a living thing” (Utzon Sydney Opera House 49). This scene is enhanced by the changing quality of the sunlight; the shells appear to be deep amber at first light their shadows long and faint before becoming shorter and stronger as the sun moves towards its midday position with the colour changing slowly to ‘pure’ white before the shadows change sides, the process reverses and they again disappear under the cover of darkness. Although the scene replays daily, the relative location of the sun and changing weather patterns ensure infinite variation in the effect.This changing scene, on a grand scale, with light as the central character is just as important as the theatrical performances taking place indoors on the stages. With a mobile audience, the detailing of the visual scene that is the structure becomes more important. The Sydney Opera House competes for attention with shipping movements in the harbour, the adjacent bridge with the ant-like procession of climbers and the activities of the city to the south. Utzon foresaw this noting that the “position on a peninsular, which is overlooked from all angles makes it important to maintain an all-round elevation. There can be no backsides to the building and nothing can be hidden from the view” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 1). The use of natural light to enhance the sculptural form and reinforce isolation of the structure on the peninsular, centre stage on the harbour is therefore not a coincidence. Utzon has deliberately harnessed the natural light to ensure that the Sydney Opera House is just as vibrant a performer as its surroundings. In this way, Utzon has used light to anchor the Sydney Opera House both in the city it serves and for the performances it houses.It is not just the natural light that is used as such an anchor point. Utzon planned for artificial lighting of the sails and surrounding site to ensure that after dark the ‘shimmer’ of the white tiles would be maintained with an equivalent, if manufactured, effect. For Utzon, the sculptural qualities of structure were important and should be clearly ‘read’ at night, even against a dark harbour on one side and the brighter city on the other. Through the use of artificial lighting, Utzon set the scene on Bennelong Point with the structure clearly centred in the set that is the Sydney skyline. This reinforced the notion that a journey into the Sydney Opera House was something special, a transition from the everyday to the ‘other’ world.ConclusionFor Utzon light was just as essential as concrete and other building materials for the design of the Sydney Opera House. The traditional bright lights of the stage had no place in the architectural illumination, replaced instead by a much more subtle, understated use of light, and indeed its absence. Utzon planned for the lighting to envelope an audience but not to smother them. Unfortunately, he was unable to complete his project and in 1968 J.M. Waldram was eventually appointed to complete the lighting design. Waldram’s lighting solutions—many of which are still in place today—borrowed or significantly drew upon Utzon’s original illumination concepts, thus demonstrating their strength and timeless qualities. In this way light builds on the story of the structure, reinforcing the architecture of the building and extending the narratives of the construction elements used to build the Sydney Opera House.AcknowledgementsThe author acknowledges the assistance of Rachel Franks for her input on an early draft of this article and thanks the blind peer reviewers for their generous feedback and suggestions, of course any remain errors or omissions are my own. ReferencesCommonwealth of Australia. Sydney Opera House Nomination by the Government of Australia for Inscription on the World Heritage List. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2006.Cleaver, Jack. Surface and Textured Finishes for Concrete and Their Impact upon the Environment. Sydney: Steel Reinforcement Institute of Australia, 2005.Dwyer, Simon. A Backstage Biography of the Sydney Opera House. Proceedings of the 7th Annual Conference of the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) 2016: 1-10.———. “Utzon’s Use of Light to Influence the Audience’s Perception of the Sydney Opera House”. Inhabiting the Meta Visual: Contemporary Performance Themes. Eds. Helene Gee Markstein and Arthur Maria Steijn. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary P, 2016.Hall, Peter. Sydney Opera House: The Design Approach to the Building with Recommendations on Its Conservation. Sydney: Sydney Opera House Trust, 1990.NSW Department of Local Government. An International Competition for a National Opera House at Bennelong Point Sydney, New South Wales, Australia: Conditions and Program (“The ‘Brown’ Book”). Sydney: NSW Government Printer, 1957.Raban, Jonathan. Soft City. London: Picador, 2008.Rasmuseen, Steen. Experiencing Architecture. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1964.Read, Gary. “Theater of Public Space: Architectural Experimentation in the Théâtre de l'Espace (Theater of Space), Paris 1937.” Journal of Architectural Education 58.4 (2005): 53-62.Steensen Varming. Lighting Master Plan. Sydney: Sydney Opera House Trust, 2007.Utzon, Jørn. Sydney Opera House: The Descriptive Narrative. Sydney: Sydney Opera House Trust, 1965.———. The Sydney Opera House. Zodiac, 1965. 48-93.———. Untitled. (The ‘Red’ Book). Unpublished, 1958.———. Untitled. (The ‘Yellow’ Book). Unpublished, 1962.———. Utzon Design Principles. Sydney: Sydney Opera House Trust, 2002.

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AbstractSince 1999, the CORESTA Special Analytes Sub Group (SPA SG) has been working on the development of CORESTA Recommended Methods (CRMs) for the analysis of cigarette smoke components. All CRMs have been posted on the CORESTA website and several associated papers published. In this study, 21 laboratories shared data and in-house methodologies for 28 additional smoke components of regulatory interest to prioritise the development of further CRMs. Laboratories provided data, where available, from CORESTA monitor test pieces (CM6 and CM7) and Kentucky Reference Cigarettes (1R5F / 3R4F) covering the period 2010-2012 obtained under both the ISO 3308 and Health Canada Intense regimes. Scant data were available on the CORESTA monitor test pieces and the Kentucky 1R5F reference. The greatest amount of data was obtained on the Kentucky 3R4F and this was used in the analyses described in this paper. SPA SG discussions provided invaluable insight into identifying causes and ways of reducing inter-laboratory variability which will be investigated in joint experiments before embarking on final collaborative studies using draft CRMs to obtain mean yields, repeatability and reproducibility values. Phenolic compounds (phenol, 3 cresol isomers, hydroquinone, catechol and resorcinol) gave consistent results by liquid chromatography (LC) separation and fluorescence detection after extracting collected “tar” on a Cambridge filter pad (CFP). Yields were similar to those obtained by a derivatisation method followed by gas chromatography - mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis. Similar ratios of phenols were also obtained from each method. Of the 28 studied analytes, the between-laboratory variability was lowest for the phenols. Hydrogen cyanide was derivatised using various reagents and the colour development measured after continuous flow analysis (CFA) by ultra-violet absorbance. Although, methodologies gave reasonably consistent results, investigations on the trapping system and on differences in the application of the various colour complexes used for quantification with UV absorbance is required. Ammonia analysis was carried out by ion chromatography (IC) followed by conductivity measurement and gave very similar results between laboratories. Yields were similar to those obtained by a derivatisation method followed by LC/MS-MS methodology. Optimal conditions for the separation of ammonium from interfering ions and minimizing artefactual ammonia formation from other smoke components need to be addressed during standardisation. Aromatic amine methods involved either LC/MS-MS separation and detection or derivatisation by one of two main reagents followed by GC-MS analysis. Yields were at similar but variable levels using these different techniques. It is currently unclear which method will be taken to a CRM. In general, four compounds were measured (1-amino naphthalene; 2-amino naphthalene; 3-amino biphenyl and 4-amino biphenyl) although two others were incorporated in methodologies used by 3 laboratories (o-anisidine and o-toluidine). Semi-volatiles (pyridine, quinoline and styrene) were often integrated with the selected volatiles method by measurement of the combination of CFP extracts and the contents of the impinger trapping system. Less data, obtained mainly by inductively-coupled plasma - mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), were available on metals (cadmium, lead, arsenic, beryllium, cobalt, chromium, nickel, selenium and mercury) in smoke. Trace metals were the most variable of the studied smoke analytes. Optimisation of the digestion step to remove the organic matrix needs to be addressed. As a consequence of this study and subsequent discussions within the Sub Group, it was decided to prioritise the development of CRMs for selected phenols followed by hydrogen cyanide and ammonia.

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IntroductionCoffee, as a stimulant, and the spaces in which it is has been consumed, have long played a vital role in fostering communication, creativity, and sociality. This article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. In developing these themes, this article is structured in two parts. The first looks back to the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a historical context to the contemporary role of the café as a key site of creativity through its facilitation of social interaction, communication and information exchange. The second explores the continuation of the link between cafés, communication and creativity, through an instance from the mid-twentieth century where this process becomes individualised and is tied more intrinsically to the material surroundings of the café itself. From this, we argue that in order to understand the connection between café space and creativity, it is valuable to consider the rich polymorphic material and aesthetic composition of cafés. The Social Life of Coffee: London’s Coffee Houses While the social consumption of coffee has a long history, here we restrict our focus to a discussion of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the seventeenth century that the vogue of these coffee houses reached its zenith when they operated as a vibrant site of mercantile activity, as well as cultural and political exchange (Cowan; Lillywhite; Ellis). Many of these coffee houses were situated close to the places where politicians, merchants, and other significant people congregated and did business, near government buildings such as Parliament, as well as courts, ports and other travel route hubs (Lillywhite 17). A great deal of information was shared within these spaces and, as a result, the coffee house became a key venue for communication, especially the reading and distribution of print and scribal publications (Cowan 85). At this time, “no coffee house worth its name” would be without a ready selection of newspapers for its patrons (Cowan 173). By working to twenty-four hour diurnal cycles and heightening the sense of repetition and regularity, coffee houses also played a crucial role in routinising news as a form of daily consumption alongside other forms of habitual consumption (including that of coffee drinking). In Cowan’s words, “restoration coffee houses soon became known as places ‘dasht with diurnals and books of news’” (172). Among these was the short-lived but nonetheless infamous social gossip publication, The Tatler (1709-10), which was strongly associated with the London coffee houses and, despite its short publication life, offers great insight into the social life and scandals of the time. The coffee house became, in short, “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed” (Cowan 172). The proprietors of coffee houses were quick to exploit this situation by dealing in “news mongering” and developing their own news publications to supplement their incomes (172). They sometimes printed news, commentary and gossip that other publishers were not willing to print. However, as their reputation as news providers grew, so did the pressure on coffee houses to meet the high cost of continually acquiring or producing journals (Cowan 173; Ellis 185-206). In addition to the provision of news, coffee houses were vital sites for other forms of communication. For example, coffee houses were key venues where “one might deposit and receive one’s mail” (Cowan 175), and the Penny Post used coffeehouses as vital pick-up and delivery centres (Lillywhite 17). As Cowan explains, “Many correspondents [including Jonathan Swift] used a coffeehouse as a convenient place to write their letters as well as to send them” (176). This service was apparently provided gratis for regular patrons, but coffee house owners were less happy to provide this for their more infrequent customers (Cowan 176). London’s coffee houses functioned, in short, as notable sites of sociality that bundled together drinking coffee with news provision and postal and other services to attract customers (Cowan; Ellis). Key to the success of the London coffee house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the figure of the virtuoso habitué (Cowan 105)—an urbane individual of the middle or upper classes who was skilled in social intercourse, skills that were honed through participation in the highly ritualised and refined forms of interpersonal communication, such as visiting the stately homes of that time. In contrast to such private visits, the coffee house provided a less formalised and more spontaneous space of sociality, but where established social skills were distinctly advantageous. A striking example of the figure of the virtuoso habitué is the philosopher, architect and scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Hooke, by all accounts, used the opportunities provided by his regular visits to coffee houses “to draw on the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals, from servants and skilled laborers to aristocrats, as well as to share and display novel scientific instruments” (Cowan 105) in order to explore and develop his virtuoso interests. The coffee house also served Hooke as a place to debate philosophy with cliques of “like-minded virtuosi” and thus formed the “premier locale” through which he could “fulfil his own view of himself as a virtuoso, as a man of business, [and] as a man at the centre of intellectual life in the city” (Cowan 105-06). For Hooke, the coffee house was a space for serious work, and he was known to complain when “little philosophical work” was accomplished (105-06). Sociality operates in this example as a form of creative performance, demonstrating individual skill, and is tied to other forms of creative output. Patronage of a coffee house involved hearing and passing on gossip as news, but also entailed skill in philosophical debate and other intellectual pursuits. It should also be noted that the complex role of the coffee house as a locus of communication, sociality, and creativity was repeated elsewhere. During the 1600s in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), for example, coffee houses served as sites of intensive literary activity as well as the locations for discussions of art, sciences and literature, not to mention also of gambling and drug use (Hattox 101). While the popularity of coffee houses had declined in London by the 1800s, café culture was flowering elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the late 1870s in Paris, Edgar Degas and Edward Manet documented the rich café life of the city in their drawings and paintings (Ellis 216). Meanwhile, in Vienna, “the kaffeehaus offered another evocative model of urban and artistic modernity” (Ellis 217; see also Bollerey 44-81). Serving wine and dinners as well as coffee and pastries, the kaffeehaus was, like cafés elsewhere in Europe, a mecca for writers, artists and intellectuals. The Café Royal in London survived into the twentieth century, mainly through the patronage of European expatriates and local intellectuals such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, and Henri Bergson (Ellis 220). This pattern of patronage within specific and more isolated cafés was repeated in famous gatherings of literary identities elsewhere in Europe throughout the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, a picture emerges of how the social functions of the coffee house and its successors, the espresso bar and modern café, have shifted over the course of their histories (Bollerey 44-81). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffee house was an important location for vibrant social interaction and the consumption and distribution of various forms of communication such as gossip, news, and letters. However, in the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café was more commonly a site for more restricted social interaction between discrete groups. Studies of cafés and creativity during this era focus on cafés as “factories of literature, inciters to art, and breeding places for new ideas” (Fitch, The Grand 18). Central in these accounts are bohemian artists, their associated social circles, and their preferred cafés de bohème (for detailed discussion, see Wilson; Fitch, Paris Café; Brooker; Grafe and Bollerey 4-41). As much of this literature on café culture details, by the early twentieth century, cafés emerge as places that enable individuals to carve out a space for sociality and creativity which was not possible elsewhere in the modern metropolis. Writing on the modern metropolis, Simmel suggests that the concentration of people and things in cities “stimulate[s] the nervous system of the individual” to such an extent that it prompts a kind of self-preservation that he terms a “blasé attitude” (415). This is a form of “reserve”, he writes, which “grants to the individual a [certain] kind and an amount of personal freedom” that was hitherto unknown (416). Cafés arguably form a key site in feeding this dynamic insofar as they facilitate self-protectionism—Fitch’s “pool of privacy” (The Grand 22)—and, at the same time, produce a sense of individual freedom in Simmel’s sense of the term. That is to say, from the early-to-mid twentieth century, cafés have become complex settings in terms of the relationships they enable or constrain between living in public, privacy, intimacy, and cultural practice. (See Haine for a detailed discussion of how this plays out in relation to working class engagement with Paris cafés, and Wilson as well as White on other cultural contexts, such as Japan.) Threaded throughout this history is a clear celebration of the individual artist as a kind of virtuoso habitué of the contemporary café. Café Jama Michalika The following historical moment, drawn from a powerful point in the mid-twentieth century, illustrates this last stage in the evolution of the relationship between café space, communication, and creativity. This particular historical moment concerns the renowned Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who is most well-known for his avant-garde piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), his Polymorphia (1961), and St Luke Passion (1963-66), all of which entailed new compositional and notation techniques. Poland, along with other European countries devastated by the Second World War, underwent significant rebuilding after the war, also investing heavily in the arts, musical education, new concert halls, and conservatoria (Monastra). In the immediate post-war period, Poland and Polish culture was under the strong ideological influence exerted by the Soviet Union. However, as Thomas notes, within a year of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were flickering signs of moderation in Polish culture” (83). With respect to musical creativity, a key turning point was the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival of 1956. “The driving force” behind the first festival (which was to become an annual event), was Polish “composers’ overwhelming sense of cultural isolation and their wish to break the provincial nature of Polish music” at that time (Thomas 85). Penderecki was one of a younger generation of composers who participated in, and benefited from, these early festivals, making his first appearance in 1959 with his composition Strophes, and successive appearances with Dimensions of Time and Silence in 1960, and Threnody in 1961 (Thomas 90). Penderecki married in the 1950s and had a child in 1955. This, in combination with the fact that his wife was a pianist and needed to practice daily, restricted Penderecki’s ability to work in their small Krakow apartment. Nor could he find space at the music school which was free from the intrusion of the sound of other instruments. Instead, he frequented the café Jama Michalika off the central square of Krakow, where he worked most days between nine in the morning and noon, when he would leave as a pianist began to play. Penderecki states that because of the small space of the café table, he had to “invent [a] special kind of notation which allowed me to write the piece which was for 52 instruments, like Threnody, on one small piece of paper” (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). In this, Penderecki created a completely new set of notation symbols, which assisted him in graphically representing tone clustering (Robinson 6) while, in his score for Polymorphia, he implemented “novel graphic notation, comparable with medical temperature charts, or oscillograms” (Schwinger 29) to represent in the most compact way possible the dense layering of sounds and vocal elements that is developed in this particular piece. This historical account is valuable because it contributes to discussions on individual creativity that both depends on, and occurs within, the material space of the café. This relationship is explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Polyclinic”, where he develops an extended analogy between the writer and the café and the surgeon and his instruments. As Cohen summarises, “Benjamin constructs the field of writerly operation both in medical terms and as a space dear to Parisian intellectuals, as an operating table that is also the marble-topped table of a café” (179). At this time, the space of the café itself thus becomes a vital site for individual cultural production, putting the artist in touch with the social life of the city, as many accounts of writers and artists in the cafés of Paris, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe attest. “The attraction of the café for the writer”, Fitch argues, “is that seeming tension between the intimate circle of privacy in a comfortable room, on the one hand, and the flow of (perhaps usable) information all around on the other” (The Grand 11). Penderecki talks about searching for a sound while composing in café Jama Michalika and, hearing the noise of a passing tram, subsequently incorporated it into his famous composition, Threnody (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). There is an indirect connection here with the attractions of the seventeenth century coffee houses in London, where news writers drew much of their gossip and news from the talk within the coffee houses. However, the shift is to a more isolated, individualistic habitué. Nonetheless, the aesthetic composition of the café space remains essential to the creative productivity described by Penderecki. A concept that can be used to describe this method of composition is contained within one of Penderecki’s best-known pieces, Polymorphia (1961). The term “polymorphia” refers not to the form of the music itself (which is actually quite conventionally structured) but rather to the multiple blending of sounds. Schwinger defines polymorphia as “many formedness […] which applies not […] to the form of the piece, but to the broadly deployed scale of sound, [the] exchange and simultaneous penetration of sound and noise, the contrast and interflow of soft and hard sounds” (131). This description also reflects the rich material context of the café space as Penderecki describes its role in shaping (both enabling and constraining) his creative output. Creativity, Technology, Materialism The materiality of the café—including the table itself for Penderecki—is crucial in understanding the relationship between the forms of creative output and the material conditions of the spaces that enable them. In Penderecki’s case, to understand the origins of the score and even his innovative forms of musical notation as artefacts of communication, we need to understand the material conditions under which they were created. As a fixture of twentieth and twenty-first century urban environments, the café mediates the private within the public in a way that offers the contemporary virtuoso habitué a rich, polymorphic sensory experience. In a discussion of the indivisibility of sensation and its resistance to language, writer Anna Gibbs describes these rich experiential qualities: sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of “being in the café” (201). Gibbs’s point is that the world of the café is highly synaesthetic and infused with sensual interconnections. The din of the café with its white noise of conversation and overlaying sounds of often carefully chosen music illustrates the extension of taste beyond the flavour of the coffee on the palate. In this way, the café space provides the infrastructure for a type of creative output that, in Gibbs’s case, facilitates her explanation of expression and affect. The individualised virtuoso habitué, as characterised by Penderecki’s work within café Jama Michalika, simply describes one (celebrated) form of the material conditions of communication and creativity. An essential factor in creative cultural output is contained in the ways in which material conditions such as these come to be organised. As Elizabeth Grosz expresses it: Art is the regulation and organisation of its materials—paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials—according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and intensify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (4). Materialist and medium-oriented theories of media and communication have emphasised the impact of physical constraints and enablers on the forms produced. McLuhan, for example, famously argued that the typewriter brought writing, speech, and publication into closer association, one effect of which was the tighter regulation of spelling and grammar, a pressure toward precision and uniformity that saw a jump in the sales of dictionaries (279). In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, McLuhan sees the typewriter as enabling a patterned layout of text that functions as “a musical score for choral speech” (278). In the same way, the café in Penderecki’s recollections both constrains his ability to compose freely (a creative activity that normally requires ample flat surface), but also facilitates the invention of a new language for composition, one able to accommodate the small space of the café table. Recent studies that have sought to materialise language and communication point to its physicality and the embodied forms through which communication occurs. As Packer and Crofts Wiley explain, “infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape” (3). The confined and often crowded space of the café and its individual tables shape the form of productive output in Penderecki’s case. Targeting these material constraints and enablers in her discussion of art, creativity and territoriality, Grosz describes the “architectural force of framing” as liberating “the qualities of objects or events that come to constitute the substance, the matter, of the art-work” (11). More broadly, the design features of the café, the form and layout of the tables and the space made available for individual habitation, the din of the social encounters, and even the stimulating influences on the body of the coffee served there, can be seen to act as enablers of communication and creativity. Conclusion The historical examples examined above indicate a material link between cafés and communication. They also suggest a relationship between materialism and creativity, as well as the roots of the romantic association—or mythos—of cafés as a key source of cultural life as they offer a “shared place of composition” and an “environment for creative work” (Fitch, The Grand 11). We have detailed one example pertaining to European coffee consumption, cafés and creativity. While we believe Penderecki’s case is valuable in terms of what it can tell us about forms of communication and creativity, clearly other cultural and historical contexts may reveal additional insights—as may be found in the cases of Middle Eastern cafés (Hattox) or the North American diner (Hurley), and in contemporary developments such as the café as a source of free WiFi and the commodification associated with global coffee chains. Penderecki’s example, we suggest, also sheds light on a longer history of creativity and cultural production that intersects with contemporary work practices in city spaces as well as conceptualisations of the individual’s place within complex urban spaces. References Benjamin, Walter. “Polyclinic” in “One-Way Street.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1998: 88-9. Bollerey, Franziska. “Setting the Stage for Modernity: The Cosmos of the Coffee House.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 44-81. Brooker, Peter. Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. Houndmills, Hamps.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004. Fitch, Noël Riley. Paris Café: The Sélect Crowd. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2007. -----. The Grand Literary Cafés of Europe. London: New Holland Publishers (UK), 2006. Gibbs, Anna. “After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Siegworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 186-205. Grafe, Christoph, and Franziska Bollerey. “Introduction: Cafés and Bars—Places for Sociability.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 4-41. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Haine, W. Scott. The World of the Paris Café. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1985. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Krzysztof Penderecki. Dir. Andreas Missler-Morell. Spektrum TV production and Telewizja Polska S.A. Oddzial W Krakowie for RM Associates and ZDF in cooperation with ARTE, 2000. Lillywhite, Bryant. London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Abacus, 1974. Monastra, Peggy. “Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia and Fluorescence.” Moldenhauer Archives, [US] Library of Congress. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/moldenhauer/2428143.pdf› Packer, Jeremy, and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley. “Introduction: The Materiality of Communication.” Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. New York, Routledge, 2012. 3-16. Robinson, R. Krzysztof Penderecki: A Guide to His Works. Princeton, NJ: Prestige Publications, 1983. Schwinger, Wolfram. Krzysztof Penderecki: His Life and Work. Encounters, Biography and Musical Commentary. London: Schott, 1979. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: The Free P, 1960. Thomas, Adrian. Polish Music since Szymanowski. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Wilson, Elizabeth. “The Bohemianization of Mass Culture.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2.1 (1999): 11-32.

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Abstract:

In PilsenTwenty-six Station Road,She climbed to the third floorUp stairs which were all that was leftOf the whole house,She opened her doorFull on to the sky,Stood gaping over the edge.For this was the placeThe world ended.Thenshe locked up carefullylest someone stealSiriusor Aldebaranfrom her kitchen,went back downstairsand settled herselfto waitfor the house to rise againand for her husband to rise from the ashesand for her children’s hands and feet to be stuck back in placeIn the morning they found herstill as stone, sparrows pecking her hands.Five Minutes after the Air Raidby Miroslav Holub(Calder 287) Holding Still Detonation. Affect. During the Second World War, London and other European cities were subjected to the terrors of aerial bombardment, rendered through nightmarish anticipations of the bomber (Gollin 7) and the material storm of the real air-raid. The fall of bombs plagued cities and their citizens with the terrible rain of explosives and incendiary weapons. A volatile landscape was formed as the urban environment was ‘unmade’ and urged into violent motion. Flying projectiles of shrapnel, debris and people; avalanches of collapsing factories and houses; the inhale and exhale of compressed air and firestorms; the scream of the explosion. All these composed an incredibly fluid urban traumatic, as atmospheres fell over the cities that was thick with smoke, dust, and ventilated only by terror (see for instance Sebald 10 and Mendieta’s 3 recent commentary). Vast craters were imprinted onto the charred morphologies of London and Berlin as well as Coventry, Hamburg and Dresden. Just as the punctuations of the bombing saw the psychic as well as the material give way, writers portraying Britain as an ‘volcano island’ (Spaight 5) witnessed eruptive projections – the volleys of the material air-war; the emotional signature of charged and bitter reprisals; pain, anguish and vengeance - counter-strikes of affect. In the midst of all of this molten violence and emotion it seems impossible that a simultaneous sense of quiescence could be at all possible. More than mere physical fixity or geographical stasis, a rather different sort of experience could take place. Preceding, during and following the excessive mobilisation of an air raid, ‘stillness’ was often used to describe certain plateuing stretches of time-space which were slowed and even stopped (Anderson 740). Between the eruptions appeared hollows of calm and even boredom. People’s nervous flinching under the reverberation of high-explosive blasts formed part of what Jordan Crandall might call a ‘bodily-inclination’ position. Slackened and taut feelings condensed around people listening out for the oncoming bomber. People found that they prepared for the dreadful wail of the siren, or relaxed in the aftermath of the attack. In these instances, states of tension and apprehension as well as calm and relief formed though stillness. The peculiar experiences of ‘stillness’ articulated in these events open out, I suggest, distinctive ways-of-being which undo our assumptions of perpetually fluid subjectivities and the primacy of the ‘body in motion’ even within the context of unparalleled movement and uncertainty (see Harrison 423 and also Rose and Wylie 477 for theoretical critique). The sorts of “musics of stillness and silence able to be discovered in a world of movement” (Thrift, Still 50), add to our understandings of the material geographies of war and terror (see for instance Graham 63; Gregory and Pred 3), whilst they gesture towards complex material-affective experiences of bodies and spaces. Stillness in this sense, denotes apprehending and anticipating spaces and events in ways that sees the body enveloped within the movement of the environment around it; bobbing along intensities that course their way through it; positioned towards pasts and futures that make themselves felt, and becoming capable of intense forms of experience and thought. These examples illustrate not a shutting down of the body to an inwardly focused position – albeit composed by complex relations and connections – but bodies finely attuned to their exteriors (see Bissell, Animating 277 and Conradson 33). In this paper I draw from a range of oral and written testimony archived at the Imperial War Museum and the Mass Observation wartime regular reports. Edited publications from these collections were also consulted. Detailing the experience of aerial bombing during the Blitz, particularly on London between September 1940 to May 1941, forms part of a wider project concerning the calculative and affective dimensions of the aeroplane’s relationship with the human body, especially through the spaces it has worked to construct (infrastructures such as airports) and destroy. While appearing extraordinary, the examples I use are actually fairly typical of the patternings of experience and the depth and clarity with which they are told. They could be taken to be representative of the population as a whole or coincidentally similar testimonials. Either way, they are couched within a specific cultural historical context of urgency, threat and unparalleled violence.Anticipations The complex material geographies of an air raid reveal the ecological interdependencies of populations and their often urban environments and metabolisms (Coward 419; Davis 3; Graham 63; Gregory The Colonial 19; Hewitt Place 257). Aerial warfare was an address of populations conceived at the register of their bio-rhythmical and metabolic relationship to their milieu (Adey). The Blitz and the subsequent Allied bombing campaign constituted Churchill’s ‘great experiment’ for governments attempting to assess the damage an air raid could inflict upon a population’s nerves and morale (Brittain 77; Gregory In Another 88). An anxious and uncertain landscape constructed before the war, perpetuated by public officials, commentators and members of parliament, saw background affects (Ngai 5) of urgency creating an atmosphere that pressurised and squeezed the population to prepare for the ‘gathering storm’. Attacks upon the atmosphere itself had been readily predicted in the form of threatening gas attacks ready to poison the medium upon which human and animal life depended (Haldane 111; Sloterdijk 41-57). One of the most talked of moments of the Blitz is not necessarily the action but the times of stillness that preceded it. Before and in-between an air raid stillness appears to describe a state rendered somewhere between the lulls and silences of the action and the warnings and the anticipatory feelings of what might happen. In the awaiting bodies, the materialites of silence could be felt as a kind-of-sound and as an atmospheric sense of imminence. At the onset of the first air-raids sound became a signifier of what was on the way (MO 408). Waiting – as both practice and sensation – imparted considerable inertia that went back and forth through time (Jeffrey 956; Massumi, Parables 3). For Geographer Kenneth Hewitt, sound “told of the coming raiders, the nearness of bombs, the plight of loved ones” (When the 16). The enormous social survey of Mass Observation concluded that “fear seems to be linked above all with noise” (original emphasis). As one report found, “It is the siren or the whistle or the explosion or the drone – these are the things that terrify. Fear seems to come to us most of all through our sense of hearing” (MO 378). Yet the power of the siren came not only from its capacity to propagate sound and to alert, but the warning held in its voice of ‘keeping silent’. “Prefacing in a dire prolepsis the post-apocalyptic event before the event”, as Bishop and Phillips (97) put it, the stillness of silence was incredibly virtual in its affects, disclosing - in its lack of life – the lives that would be later taken. Devastation was expected and rehearsed by civilians. Stillness formed a space and body ready to spring into movement – an ‘imminent mobility’ as John Armitage (204) has described it. Perched on the edge of devastation, space-times were felt through a sense of impending doom. Fatalistic yet composed expectations of a bomb heading straight down pervaded the thoughts and feelings of shelter dwellers (MO 253; MO 217). Waves of sound disrupted fragile tempers as they passed through the waiting bodies in the physical language of tensed muscles and gritted teeth (Gaskin 36). Silence helped form bodies inclined-to-attention, particularly sensitive to aural disturbances and vibrations from all around. Walls, floors and objects carried an urban bass-line of warning (Goodman). Stillness was forged through a body readied in advance of the violence these materialities signified. A calm and composed body was not necessarily an immobile body. Civilians who had prepared for the attacks were ready to snap into action - to dutifully wear their gas-mask or escape to shelter. ‘Backgrounds of expectation’ (Thrift, Still 36) were forged through non-too-subtle procedural and sequential movements which opened-out new modes of thinking and feeling. Folding one’s clothes and placing them on the dresser in-readiness; pillows and sheets prepared for a spell in the shelter, these were some of many orderly examples (IWM 14595). In the event of a gas attack air raid precautions instructions advised how to put on a gas mask (ARPD 90-92),i) Hold the breath. ii) Remove headgear and place between the knees. iii) Lift the flap of the haversack [ …] iv) Bring the face-piece towards the face’[…](v) Breathe out and continue to breathe in a normal manner The rational technologies of drill, dressage and operational research enabled poise in the face of an eventual air-raid. Through this ‘logistical-life’ (Reid 17), thought was directed towards simple tasks by minutely described instructions. Stilled LifeThe end of stillness was usually marked by a reactionary ‘flinch’, ‘start’ or ‘jump’. Such reactionary ‘urgent analogs’ (Ngai 94; Tomkins 96) often occurred as a response to sounds and movements that merely broke the tension rather than accurately mimicking an air raid. These atmospheres were brittle and easily disrupted. Cars back-firing and changing gear were often complained about (MO 371), just as bringing people out of the quiescence of sleep was a common effect of air-raids (Kraftl and Horton 509). Disorientation was usually fostered in this process while people found it very difficult to carry out the most simple of tasks. Putting one’s clothes on or even making their way out of the bedroom door became enormously problematic. Sirens awoke a ‘conditioned reflex’ to take cover (MO 364). Long periods of sleep deprivation brought on considerable fatigue and anxiety. ‘Sleep we Must’ wrote journalist Ritchie Calder (252) noticing the invigorating powers of sleep for both urban morale and the bare existence of survival. For other more traumatized members of the population, psychological studies found that the sustained concentration of shelling caused what was named ‘apathy-retreat’ (Harrisson, Living 65). This extreme form of acquiescence saw especially susceptible and vulnerable civilians suffer an overwhelming urge to sleep and to be cared-for ‘as if chronically ill’ (Janis 90). A class and racial politics of quiescent affect was enacted as several members of the population were believed far more liable to ‘give way’ to defeat and dangerous emotions (Brittain 77; Committee of Imperial Defence).In other cases it was only once an air-raid had started that sleep could be found (MO 253). The boredom of waiting could gather in its intensity deforming bodies with “the doom of depression” (Anderson 749). The stopped time-spaces in advance of a raid could be soaked with so much tension that the commencement of sirens, vibrations and explosions would allow a person overwhelming relief (MO 253). Quoting from a boy recalling his experiences in Hannover during 1943, Hewitt illustrates:I lie in bed. I am afraid. I strain my ears to hear something but still all is quiet. I hardly dare breathe, as if something horrible is knocking at the door, at the windows. Is it the beating of my heart? ... Suddenly there seems relief, the sirens howl into the night ... (Heimatbund Niedersachsen 1953: 185). (Cited in Hewitt, When 16)Once a state of still was lost getting it back required some effort (Bissell, Comfortable 1697). Cautious of preventing mass panic and public hysteria by allowing the body to erupt outwards into dangerous vectors of mobility, the British government’s schooling in the theories of panicology (Orr 12) and contagious affect (Le Bon 17; Tarde 278; Thrift, Intensities 57; Trotter 140), made air raid precautions (ARP) officers, police and civil defence teams enforce ‘stay put’ and ‘hold firm’ orders to protect the population (Jones et al, Civilian Morale 463, Public Panic 63-64; Thomas 16). Such orders were meant to shield against precisely the kinds of volatile bodies they were trying to compel with their own bombing strategies. Reactions to the Blitz were moralised and racialised. Becoming stilled required self-conscious work by a public anxious not to be seen to ‘panic’. This took the form of self-disciplination. People exhausted considerable energy to ‘settle’ themselves down. It required ‘holding’ themselves still and ‘together’ in order to accomplish this state, and to avoid going the same way as the buildings falling apart around them, as some people observed (MO 408). In Britain a cup of tea was often made as a spontaneous response in the event of the conclusion of a raid (Brown 686). As well as destroying bombing created spaces too – making space for stillness (Conradson 33). Many people found that they could recall their experiences in vivid detail, allocating a significant proportion of their memories to the recollection of the self and an awareness of their surroundings (IWM 19103). In this mode of stillness, contemplation did not turn-inwards but unfolded out towards the environment. The material processual movement of the shell-blast literally evacuated all sound and materials from its centre to leave a vacuum of negative pressure. Diaries and oral testimonies stretch out these millisecond events into discernable times and spaces of sensation, thought and the experience of experience (Massumi, Parables 2). Extraordinarily, survivors mention serene feelings of quiet within the eye of the blast (see Mortimer 239); they had, literally, ‘no time to be frightened’ (Crighton-Miller 6150). A shell explosion could create such intensities of stillness that a sudden and distinctive lessening of the person and world are expressed, constituting ‘stilling-slowing diminishments’ (Anderson 744). As if the blast-vacuum had sucked all the animation from their agency, recollections convey passivity and, paradoxically, a much more heightened and contemplative sense of the moment (Bourke 121; Thrift, Still 41). More lucid accounts describe a multitude of thoughts and an attention to minute detail. Alternatively, the enormous peaking of a waking blast subdued all later activities to relative obsolescence. The hurricane of sounds and air appear to overload into the flatness of an extended and calmed instantaneous present.Then the whistling stopped, then a terrific thump as it hit the ground, and everything seem to expand, then contract with deliberation and stillness seemed to be all around. (As recollected by Bill and Vi Reagan in Gaskin 17)On the other hand, as Schivelbusch (7) shows us in his exploration of defeat, the cessation of war could be met with an outburst of feeling. In these micro-moments a close encounter with death was often experienced with elation, a feeling of peace and well-being drawn through a much more heightened sense of the now (MO 253). These are not pre-formed or contemplative techniques of attunement as Thrift has tracked, but are the consequence of significant trauma and the primal reaction to extreme danger.TracesSusan Griffin’s haunting A Chorus of Stones documents what she describes as a private life of war (1). For Griffin, and as shown in these brief examples, stillness and being-stilled describe a series of diverse experiences endured during aerial bombing. Yet, as Griffin narrates, these are not-so private lives. A common representation of air war can be found in Henry Moore’s tube shelter sketches which convey sleeping tube-dwellers harboured in the London underground during the Blitz. The bodies are represented as much more than individuals being connected by Moore’s wave-like shapes into the turbulent aggregation of a choppy ocean. What we see in Moore’s portrayal and the examples discussed already are experiences with definite relations to both inner and outer worlds. They refer to more-than individuals who bear intimate relations to their outsides and the atmospheric and material environments enveloping and searing through them. Stillness was an unlikely state composed through these circulations just as it was formed as a means of address. It was required in order to apprehend sounds and possible events through techniques of listening or waiting. Alternatively being stilled could refer to pauses between air-strikes and the corresponding breaks of tension in the aftermath of a raid. Stillness was composed through a series of distributed yet interconnecting bodies, feelings, materials and atmospheres oriented towards the future and the past. The ruins of bombed-out building forms stand as traces even today. Just as Massumi (Sensing 16) describes in the context of architecture, the now static remainder of the explosion “envelops in its stillness a deformational field of which it stands as the trace”. The ruined forms left after the attack stand as a “monument” of the passing of the raid to be what it once was – house, factory, shop, restaurant, library - and to become something else. The experience of those ‘from below’ (Hewitt 2) suffering contemporary forms of air-warfare share many parallels with those of the Blitz. Air power continues to target, apparently more precisely, the affective tones of the body. Accessed by kinetic and non-kinetic forces, the signs of air-war are generated by the shelling of Kosovo, ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq, air-strikes in Afghanistan and by the simulated air-raids of IDF aircraft producing sonic-booms over sleeping Palestinian civilians, now becoming far more real as I write in the final days of 2008. Achieving stillness in the wake of aerial trauma remains, even now, a way to survive the (private) life of air war. AcknowledgementsI’d like to thank the editors and particularly the referees for such a close reading of the article; time did not permit the attention their suggestions demanded. Grateful acknowledgement is also made to the AHRC whose funding allowed me to research and write this paper. ReferencesAdey, Peter. Aerial Geographies: Mobilities, Bodies and Subjects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 (forthcoming). 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London: Continuum 2006.Brown, Felix. “Civilian Psychiatric Air-Raid Casualties.” The Lancet (31 May 1941): 686-691.Calder, Angus. The People's War: Britain, 1939-45. London: Panther, 1971.Calder, Ritchie. “Sleep We Must.” New Statesman and Nation (14 Sep. 1940): 252-253.Committee of Imperial Defence. Minute book. HO 45/17636. The National Archives, 1936.Conradson, David. “The Experiential Economy of Stillness: Places of Retreat in Contemporary Britain.” In Alison Williams, ed. Therapeutic Landscapes: Advances and Applications. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 33-48.Coward, Martin. “Against Anthropocentrism: The Destruction of the Built Environment as a Distinct Form of Political Violence.” Review of International Studies 32 (2006): 419-437. Crandall, Jordan. “Precision + Guided + Seeing.” CTheory (1 Oct. 2006). 8 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=502›.Crighton-Miller, H. “Somatic Factors Conditioning Air-Raid Reactions.” The Lancet (12 July 1941): 31-34.Davis, Mike. Dead Cities, and Other Tales. New York: New P, 2002. Davis, Tracy. Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defence. Durham: Duke U P, 2007Gaskin, Martin. Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.Graham, Stephen. “Lessons in Urbicide.” New Left Review (2003): 63-78.Gregory, Derek. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. London: Routledge, 2004.———. “‘In Another Time-Zone, the Bombs Fall Unsafely…’: Targets, Civilians and Late Modern War.” Arab World Geographer 9 (2007): 88-112.Gregory, Derek, and Allan Pred. Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence. London: Routledge, 2007.Grosscup, Beau. Strategic Terror: The Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment. London: Zed Books, 2006.Griffin, Susan. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. London: Anchor Books, 1993.Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge: MIT P, 2009 (forthcoming).Haldane, Jack. A.R.P. London: Victor Gollancz, 1938.Harrisson, Tom. Living through the Blitz. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979.Harrison, Paul. “Corporeal Remains: Vulnerability, Proximity, and Living On after the End of the World.” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 423-445.Hewitt, Kenneth. “Place Annihilation - Area Bombing and the Fate of Urban Places.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73 (1983): 257-284.———. “When the Great Planes Came and Made Ashes of Our City - Towards an Oral Geography of the Disasters of War.” Antipode 26 (1994): 1-34.IWM 14595. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive. Oral Interview.IWM 19103. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive. Oral Interview.Janis, Irving. Air War and Emotional Stress. Psychological Studies of Bombing and Civilian Defense. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951.Jones, Edgar, Robert Woolven, Bill Durodie, and Simon Wesselly. “Civilian Morale during the Second World War: Responses to Air Raids Re-Examined.” Social History of Medicine 17 (2004): 463-479.———. “Public Panic and Morale: Second World War Civilian Responses Reexamined in the Light of the Current Anti-Terrorist Campaign.” Journal of Risk Research 9 (2006): 57-73.Kraftl, Peter, and John Horton. “Sleepy Geographies and the Spaces of Every-Night Life.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): 509-532.Le Bon, Gustav. The Crowd. London: T. F. Unwin, 1925.Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke U P, 2002.———. “Sensing the Virtual: Building the Insensible.” Architectural Design 68.5/6 (1998): 16-24Mendieta, Edwardo. “The Literature of Urbicide: Friedrich, Nossack, Sebald, and Vonnegut.” Theory and Event 10 (2007):MO 371. “Cars and Sirens.” Mass Observation Report. 27 Aug. 1940.MO 408. “Human Adjustments to Air Raids.” Mass Observation Report. 8 Sep. 1940.MO 253. “Air Raids.” Mass Observation Report. 5 July 1940.MO 217. “Air Raids.” Mass Observation Report. 21 June 1940.MO A14. “Shelters.” Mass Observation Report. [date unknown] 1940.MO 364. “Metropolitan Air Raids.” Mass Observation Report. 23 Aug. 1940.Mortimer, Gavin. The Longest Night. London: Orion, 2005.Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard: Harvard U P, 2005.Orr, Pauline. Panic Diaries. Durham and London: Duke U P, 2006.Reid, Julian. The Biopolitics of the War on Terror. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2006.Rose, Mitch, and John Wylie. “Animating Landscape: Editorial Introduction.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2007): 475-479.Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Culture of Defeat. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.Sebald, W. G. On the Natural History of Destruction. New York: Random House, 2003.Sloterdijk, Peter. "Airquake." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27.1 (2009): 41-57.Thomas, S. Evelyn. The Wardens Manual. London: St Albans Press, 1942.Thrift, Nigel. “Still Life in Nearly Present Time: The Object of Nature.” Body and Society 6 (2000): 34-57.———. “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect.” Geografiska Annaler Series B 86 (2005): 57-78.Tomkins, Sylvan. Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1995.Trotter, Wilfred. Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924.

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Abstract:

When I saw the word ‘bubbles’ my immediate thought went to the painting by John Millais of a child blowing bubbles that subsequently became part of the advertising campaign for Pears soap. Bubbles blown by children, as we all once did, last but a few seconds and lead on naturally to the theme of transience and constant change. Nothing lasts forever, even if human beings make attempts to impose permanence on the world. A child’s disappointment at having a soap bubble burst represents a deep human desire for permanence which is the focus of this article. Before the modern age, human life could be considered to be somewhat like a bubble in that it could be pricked at any time. This was especially the case with babies and young children who could be easily carried off. As Jeremy Taylor put it: but if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a child, of a careless nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents. (9) More generally, human beings understood that there was nothing permanent about their existing circ*mstances and that the possibility of famine, disease and, even war was ever present. Pax Romana, which is eulogised by Edward Gibbon as a felicitous time, did not suffer much in the way of war, famine, or epidemics but it was still a time when many Romans would have suffered from a range of diseases and not always have been well nourished. It was, however, a time of considerable security for most Romans who did not need to fear a band of marauders turning up on their doorstep. Disease and war would follow in the wake of climate change during the next century (Harper). Pax Romana was a bubble of relative tranquillity in human history. For a short period of time, climatic conditions, economic circ*mstances and political stability coalesced to still the winds of time temporarily. But such bubbles were unusual in the European context, which was usually riven by war. Peace reigned, by and large, in the long nineteenth century and in the period following World War II, to which it is possible to attach the name ‘pax moderna’. In China, much longer bubbles have been the norm, but they were succeeded by terrible periods of famine, dislocation, and war. The Ming bubble burst in the seventeenth century amidst a time of cold, famine, and plague (Parker 115-151). In such circ*mstances there was an appreciation of the precariousness of human existence. This had two major effects: A search for permanence in a world of change and uncertainty, a means of creating a bubble that can resist that change. When living in a time of relative stability, dealing with the fear that that stability will only last so long and that bad things may be just around the corner. These two matters form the basis of this article. Human beings create bubbles as they attempt to control change. They then become attached to their bubbles, even to the extent of believing that their bubbles are the real world. This has the effect of bubbles continuing to exist even if they harm human understanding of the world rather than enhancing it. Impermanence is the great reality of human existence; as Heracl*tus (Burnet 136) correctly stated, we cannot place our foot in the same river twice. The extraordinary thing is that human beings possess a plastic nature that allows them to adapt to that impermanence (Melleuish & Rizzo ‘Limits’). The plasticity of human beings, as expressed in their culture, can be seen most clearly in the way that human languages constantly change. This occurs both in terms of word usage and grammatical structure. English was once an inflected language but cases now only really survive in personal pronouns. Words constantly change their meanings, both over time and in different places. Words appear to take on the appearance of permanence; they appear to form bubbles that are encased in lead, even when the reality is that words form multiple fragile bubbles that are constantly being burst and remade. The changing nature of the meaning of words only becomes known to a literate society, in particular a literate society that has a genuine sense of history. In an oral society words are free to change over time and there is little sense of those changes. Writing has the effect of fixing texts into a particular form; at the very least it makes creative reworking of texts much more difficult. Of course, there are counter examples to such a claim, the most famous of which are the Vedas which, it is argued, remained unchanged despite centuries of oral transmission (Doniger104-7). This fixed nature could be achieved because of the strict mode of transmission, ensuring that the hymns did not change when transmitted. As the Vedas are linked to the performance of rituals this exactness was necessary for the rituals to be efficacious (Olivelle xli-xlv). The transmission of words is not the same thing as the transmission of meaning. Nor does it mean that many words that today are used as seemingly universal ideas have always existed. Religion (Nongeri), state (Melleuish, ‘State’), civilisation, and culture (Melleuish, ‘Civilisation’) are all modern creations; ‘identity’ is only about sixty years old (Stokes 2). New words emerge to deal with new circ*mstances. For example, civilisation came into being partially because the old term ‘Christendom’ had become redundant; ‘identity’ replaced an earlier idea of national character. Words, then, are bubbles that human beings cast out onto the world and that appear to create the appearance of permanence. These bubbles encase the real world giving the thing that they name ‘being’, even as that thing is in flux and a condition of becoming. For Parmenides (loc. 1355-1439), the true nature of the world is being. The solidity provided by ‘being’ is a comfort in a world that is constantly changing and in which there is a constant threat of change. Words and ideas do not form stable bubbles, they form a string of bubbles, with individuals constantly blowing out new versions of a word, but they appear as if they were just the one bubble. One can argue, quite correctly, I believe, that this tendency to meld a string of bubbles into a single bubble is central to the human condition and actually helps human beings to come to terms with their existence in the world. ‘Bubble as being’ provides human beings with a considerable capacity to gain a degree of control over their world. Amongst other things, it allows for radical simplification. A.R. Luria (20-47), in his study of the impact of literacy on how human beings think, noted that illiterate Uzbeks classified colour in a complex way but that with the coming of literacy came to accept the quite simple colour classifications of the modern world. Interestingly, Uzbeks have no word for orange; the ‘being’ of colours is a human creation. One would think that this desire for ‘being’, for a world that is composed of ‘constants’, is confined to the world of human culture, but that is not the case. Everyone learns at school that the speed of light is a constant. Rupert Sheldrake (92-3) decided to check the measurement of the speed of light and discovered that the empirical measurements taken of its speed actually varied. Constants give the universe a smooth regularity that it would otherwise lack. However, there are a number of problems that emerge from a too strong attachment to these bubbles of being. One is that the word is mistaken for the thing; the power of the word, the logos, becomes so great that it comes to be assumed that all the objects described by a word must fit into a single model or type. This flies in the face of two realities. One is that every example of a named object is different. Hence, when one does something practically in the world, such as construct a building, one must adjust one’s activities according to local circ*mstances. That the world is heterogeneous explains why human beings need plasticity. They need to adapt their practices as they encounter new and different circ*mstances. If they do not, it may be the case that they will die. The problem with the logos introduced by literacy, the bubble of being, is that it makes human beings less flexible in their dealings with the world. The other reality is human plasticity itself. As word/bubbles are being constantly generated then each bubble will vary in its particular meaning, both at the community and, even, individual, level. Over time words will vary subtly in meaning in different places. There is no agreed common meaning to any word; being is an illusion. Of course, it is possible for governments and other institutions to lay down what the ‘real’ meaning of a word is, much in the same way as the various forms of measurement are defined by certain scientific criteria. This becomes dangerous in the case of abstract nouns. It is the source of ‘heresy’ which is often defined in terms of the meaning of particular words. Multiple, almost infinite, bubbles must be amalgamated into one big bubble. Attempts by logos professionals to impose a single meaning are often resisted by ordinary human beings who generally seem to be quite happy living with a range of bubbles (Tannous; Pegg). One example of mutation of meaning is the word ‘liberal’, which means quite different things in America and Australia. To add to the confusion, there are occasions when liberal is used in Australia in its American sense. This simply illustrates the reality that liberal has no specific ‘being’, some universal idea of which individual liberals are particular manifestations. The problem becomes even worse when one moves between languages and cultures. To give but one example; the ancient Greek word πολις is translated as state but it can be argued that the Greek πολις was a stateless society (Berent). There are good arguments for taking a pragmatic attitude to these matters and assuming that there is a vague general agreement regarding what words such as ‘democracy’ mean, and not to go down the rabbit hole into the wonderland of infinite bubbles. This works so long as individuals understand that bubbles of being are provisional in nature and are capable of being pricked. It is possible, however, for the bubbles to harden and to impose on us what is best described as the ‘tyranny of concepts’, whereby the idea or word obscures the reality. This can occur because some words, especially abstract nouns, have very vague meanings: they can be seen as a sort of cloudy bubble. Again, democracy is good example of a cloudy bubble whose meaning is very difficult to define. A cloudy bubble prevents us from analysing and criticising something too closely. Bubbles exist because human beings desire permanence in a world of change and transience. In this sense, the propensity to create bubbles is as much an aspect of human nature as its capacity for plasticity. They are the product of a desire to ‘tame time’ and to create a feeling of security in a world of flux. As discussed above, a measure of security has not been a common state of affairs for much of human history, which is why the Pax Romana was so idealised. If there is modern ‘bubble’ created by the Enlightenment it is the dream of Kantian perpetual peace, that it is possible to bring a world into being that is marked by permanent peace, in which all the earlier horrors of human existence, from famine to epidemics to war can be tamed and humanity live harmoniously and peacefully forever. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to ‘tame’ history (Melleuish & Rizzo, ‘Philosophy’). This can be done through the idea of progress. History can be placed into a bubble of constant improvement whereby human beings are constantly getting better, not just materially but also intellectually and morally. Progress very easily turns into a utopian fantasy where people no longer suffer and can live forever. The horrors of the first half of the twentieth century did little to dent the power of this bubble. There is still an element of modern culture that dreams of such a world actually coming into being. Human beings may try to convince themselves that the bubble of progress will not burst and that perpetual peace may well be perpetual, but underlying that hope there are deep anxieties born of the knowledge that ‘nothing lasts forever’. Since 1945, the West has lived through a period of peace and relative prosperity, a pax moderna; the European Union is very much a Kantian creation. Underneath the surface, however, contemporary Western culture has a deep fear that the bubble can burst very easily and that the veneer of modern civilisation will be stripped away. This fear manifests itself in a number of ways. One can be seen in the regular articles that appear about the possibility of a comet or asteroid hitting the earth (Drake). Such a collision will eventually occur but it is sixty five million years since the dinosaurs became extinct. Another is the fear of solar storm that could destroy both electricity grids and electronic devices (Britt). Another expression of this fear can be found in forms of artistic expression, including zombie, disaster, and apocalypse movies. These reveal something about the psyche of modernity, and modern democracy, in the same way that Athenian tragedy expressed the hopes and fears of fifth-century Athenian democracy through its elaboration of the great Greek myths. Robert Musil remarks in The Man without Qualities (833) that if humanity dreamed collectively it would dream Moosbrugger, a serial murderer. Certainly, it appears to be the case that when the modern West dreams collectively it dreams of zombies, vampires, and a world in which civilised values have broken down and everyone lives in a Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all against all (Hobbes 86-100). This theme of the bursting of the ‘civilised bubble’ is a significant theme in contemporary culture. In popular culture, two of the best examples of this bursting are the television shows Battlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead. In Galactica, human beings fall prey to the vengeful artificial creatures that they have created and mistreated. In The Walking Dead, as in all post-apocalyptic Zombie creations, the great fear is that human beings will turn into zombies, creatures that have been granted a form of immortality but at the cost of the loss of their souls. The fear of death is primal in all human beings, as is the fear of the loss of one’s humanity after death. This fear is expressed in the first surviving work of human literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh goes unsuccessfully in search of immortal life. In perhaps the bleakest modern portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, we encounter the ultimate Hobbesian universe. This is a world that has undergone an apocalypse of unknown origin. There is only darkness and dust and ash; nothing grows any longer and the few survivors are left to scavenge for the food left behind in tins. Or they can eat each other. It is the ultimate war of all against all. The clipped language, the lack of identity of the inhabitants, leads us into something that is almost no longer human. There is little or no hope. Reading The Road one is drawn back to the ‘House of Darkness’ described in The Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes the afterlife in terms of dust (“The Great Myths”): He bound my arms like the wings of a bird, to lead me captive to the house of darkness, seat of Irkalla:to the house which none who enters ever leaves, on the path that allows no journey back, to the house whose residents are deprived of light, where soil is itself their sustenance and clay their food,where they are clad like birds in coats of feathers, and see no light, but dwell in darkness. The Road is a profoundly depressing work, and the movie is barely watchable. In bursting the bubble of immortality, it plays on human fears and anxieties that stretch back millennia. The really interesting question is why such fears should emerge at a time when people in countries like America are living through a period of peace and prosperity. Much as people dream of a bubble of infinite progress and perpetual peace, they instinctively understand that that particular bubble is very fragile and may very easily be punctured. My final example is the less than well-known movie Zardoz, dating from the 1970s and starring Sean Connery. In it, some human beings have achieved ‘immortality’ but the consequences are less than perfect, and the Sean Connery character has the task, given to him by nature, to restore the balance between life and death, just as Gilgamesh had to understand that the two went together. There are some bubbles that are meant to be burst, some realities that human beings have to face if they are to appreciate their place in the scheme of things. Hence, we face a paradox. Human beings are constantly producing bubbles as they chart their way through a world that is also always changing. This is a consequence of their plastic nature. For good reasons, largely out of a desire for stability and security, they also tend to bring these infinite bubbles together into a much smaller number of bubbles that they view as possessing being and hence permanence. The problem is that these ‘bubbles of being’ are treated as if they really described the world in some sort of universal fashion, rather than treated as useful tools. Human beings can become the victims of their own creations. At the same time, human beings have an instinctive appreciation that the world is not stable and fixed, and this appreciation finds its expression in the products of their imagination. They burst bubbles through the use of their imagination in response to their fears and anxieties. Bubbles are the product of the interaction between the changing nature of both the world and human beings and the desire of those human beings for a degree of stability. Human beings need to appreciate both the reality of change and the strengths and weaknesses of bubbles as they navigate their way through the world. References Berent, M. “Stasis, or the Greek Invention of Politics.” History of Political Thought XIX.3 (1998). Britt, R.R. “150 Years Ago: The Worst Solar Storm Ever.” Space.com, 2 Sep. 2009. <https://www.space.com/7224-150-years-worst-solar-storm.html>. Burnet, J. Early Greek Philosophy. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1892. Doniger, W. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Drake, N. “Why NASA Plans to Slam a Spacecraft into an Asteroid.” National Geographic, 28 Apr. 2020. <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/giant-asteroid-nasa-dart-deflection/>. Gibbons, E. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Vol. 1. New York: Harper, 1836. <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25717/25717-h/25717-h.htm#chap02.1>. “The Great Myths #6: Enkidu in the Underworld.” <https://wordandsilence.com/2017/11/30/6-enkidu-in-the-underworld-mesopotamian/>. Harper, K. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the End of an Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Hobbes, T. Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Kant I. “Perpetual Peace.” In Political Writings, ed. H.S. Reiss. Trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 93-130. Luria, A.R. Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations. Trans. M. Lopez-Morillas and L. Solotaroff. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976. McCarthy, C. The Road. London: Picador, 2006. Melleuish, G.. “The State in World History: Perspectives and Problems.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 48.3 (2002): 322–336. ———. “Civilisation, Culture and Police.” Arts 20 (1998): 7–25. Melleuish, G., and S. Rizzo. “Limits of Naturalism: Plasticity, Finitude and the Imagination.” Cosmos & History 11.1 (2015): 221-238. Melleuish, G., and S.G. Rizzo. “Philosophy of History: Change, Stability and the Tragic Human Condition.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 13.3 (2017): 292-311. Musil, Robert. The Man without Qualities. Vol. 2. Trans. Sophie Wilkins. New York: Vintage International, 1996. Nongeri, B. Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. Olivelle, P. Introduction. Upanisads. Trans. Patrick Olivelle. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Parker, G. Global Crisis: War, Climate & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale, 2013. Parmenides. Fragments: A Text and Translation with an Introduction by David Gallop. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984. Kindle edition. Pegg, M.G. A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Sheldrake, Rupert. The Science Illusion. London: Coronet: 2013. 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According to media conglomerate CNN, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s peace crusade began in 1971. CNN’s on-line news group Showbiz on June 22, 1997 frames John and Yoko’s campaign for peace: “Former Beatle John Lennon was honoured posthumously Friday for his contributions to world peace at a star-studded ceremony in London for the 22nd Silver Clef awards. Lennon’s song “Imagine” has been a leading anthem for the peace movement”. This is a rather limited selection that overlooks a number of earlier (and more radical) possibilities in the Lennon-Ono musical arsenal. A 1969 article in Newsweek entitled “The Peace Anthem” records the phenomenal success of “Give Peace a Chance” in mobilizing the protesting masses against the war in Vietnam. Newsweek relates how “Chance” became the chant for anti-war protestors in Washington on November 15, 1969. On that day, 250,000 marchers demonstrated at the American nation’s capitol for a Moratorium to stop the fighting in Vietnam. Led by folk singer Pete Seeger, the crowd was swept up in the endless repetition of the Lennon dictum, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” When Lennon tuned into the signals from Washington, he dubbed it one of the “biggest moments of my life” (Wiener 97). Dodging the immigration authorities that would not let John and Yoko physically into the United States, John and Yoko’s anti-war signals had been transmitted over the border from the “Bed-in” in Montreal where the song originated, to rally the masses marching on the mall in Washington. The story concluded: “The peace movement had found an anthem” (Newsweek 102). “Give Peace a Chance”—and the Vietnam War against which it raised its voice—have been deleted from CNN’s selective memory. Its brand of political dissent and anti-war activism does not fit the rubric of a 90’s Showbiz column. Yet, this is how the avant-garde performance artist and the hippie rock and roller conceived their peacemaking efforts—as the invasion and intervention of “showbiz” and media hype into the space of mass politics. In their fight for peace, the newly wed John and Yoko staged a series of art and media events in the form of interviews, songs, ads, concerts, demonstrations and happenings. Many of these media-savvy events took place in Canada in 1969. For example, John and Yoko’s The Plastic Ono Band played Varsity Stadium in Toronto in September at the concert known as “Live Peace” which included performances of “Give Peace a Chance” and Yoko’s intense lament “John, John (Let’s Hope for Peace).” With these events, Yoko’s avant-garde strategies of Fluxus and Conceptual art combined forces with John’s energies of rock and roll rebellion to forge a program of media activism and political dissent. Biographer Jon Wiener recalls that John and Yoko’s anti-war campaign represented a new chapter in New Left politics and its relation to mass media. Rather than reject newspapers and TV as “exclusively instruments of corporate domination,” John and Yoko sought “to work within the mass media, to use them, briefly and sporadically, against the system in which they functioned” (89). Umberto Eco pointed to this in his 1967 essay “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” suggesting that “the universe of Technological Communication” (i.e., mass media) be patrolled by “groups of communications guerrillas” who would engage in “future communications guerrilla warfare” to restore a critical dimension involving “the constant correction of perspectives, the checking of codes, and the ever renewed interpretation of mass messages” (143-144). Eco’s formulation provides a possible frame of reference for John and Yoko’s media war and their series of events countering, checking and, to quote Yoko, “criticizing the establishment” and its pro-war propaganda (Giulano 71). The 1969 “Bed-Ins” were media events that used the publicity around John and Yoko’s honeymoon as a lure for the press to report on their anti-war campaign. The first took place in Amsterdam in late March and John and Yoko staged a second honeymoon in Montreal in late May. As non-stop salespeople for their peace product, John and Yoko gave ten hours of press interviews every day invoking the media maxim that repetition induces belief. Blurring art and life, the “Bed-Ins” illustrate the strategies of happenings and Fluxus performance at the heart of Yoko’s aesthetic. At the Amsterdam press conference, Yoko framed their work as an avant-garde performance piece electrified by mass communications media. “Everything we do is a happening. All of our events are directly connected with society. We would like to communicate with the world. This event is called the ““Bed Peace”, and it’s not p-i-e-c-e, it’s p-e-a-c-e. Let’s just stay in bed and grow hair instead of being violent” (Giulano 46). The word plays of “Bed Peace” and “Hair Peace” pasted above their nuptial bed appealed to both Yoko and John’s punster sensibilities, their express aim being to play the world’s clowns for peace and mobilize the subversive power of laughter. The “Bed-Ins” must be situated against the background of the sit-ins on American college campuses at that time of anti-Vietnam war protests. Indeed, John referred to the event as “the bed sit-in” showing that this connection was in his mind. The direct links to the student revolt were further underscored in the telephone exchange between John and Yoko in Montreal and the rioters in People’s Park in Berkeley when Lennon played peace guru, encouraging the demonstrators to avoid violence at all costs (Wiener 92-93). Around the same time, John and Yoko also began their playfully named “Nuts for Peace” campaign by sending acorns to fifty heads of state and asking them to plant them as a symbolic gesture for peace. Another John and Yoko media blitz took over billboards as the sites to wage communications guerrilla warfare. When asked at a press conference to explain the “War is Over Poster Campaign”, the peace PR man stated: “It’s part of our advertising campaign for peace” (Giulano 83). This particular aspect of the media war recalls the international dissemination of the poster “War is Over! If You Want It. Happy Christmas from John and Yoko” in twelve urban centres. Since the mid-sixties, Beatle John had been delivering promotional peace and good will messages on vinyl to his fans at Christmas. In 1969, he and his new partner in art prepared a visual Christmas card using public space to blur the boundaries between art, activism, and advertising. The glaring headline stated the fantasy as if already fulfilled (War is Over!). This was followed by the empowering call to mass action reminding the viewer of what was needed to attain the goal (If You Want It). To kick off the campaign, the international peace politicos gave a “Christmas for Peace” charity concert in London for the United Nations Children’s Fund. When asked about the costs of the poster, Lennon sidestepped the issue, saying he didn’t want to think about it, but joking, “I’ll have to write a song or two to earn me money back” (Giulano 83). The critics attacked this statement as evasive and not willing to own up to how the promoters were direct beneficiaries of the marketing of peace. Rather than focusing on how this campaign would afford free publicity to John and Yoko and promote further demand for their products, Lennon focused on extensive outlays of capital. This recalls another rather hostile exchange at a November 1969 press conference having the look of an all-out media war on the occasion of Lennon returning his M.B.E. Medal of Honour to the Queen. Lennon’s letter read in part: “Your Majesty, I am returning this M.B.E. in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts” (Wiener 106). Numerous critics sought to deflate Lennon’s claim that this was an act of political protest in the fight for peace, characterising it as a mere self-serving publicity stunt for his latest single. John: “Well, we use advertising.” Reporter: “You’re an advertisem*nt.” John: “Will you shut up a minute!” (Giulano 109) In the heat of exchange, Lennon breaks his cool at the reporter who underscores that there is no way to differentiate between the use of advertising to promote peace and to promote John and Yoko. This concurs with Graeme Turner’s argument in Fame Games that “the celebrity’s ultimate power is to sell the commodity that is themselves” (Turner 12). At the point that would convert this speaking subject into a walking advertisem*nt, the hippie peacenik snaps and reveals a violent temper not befitting someone who would follow Gandhi’s way of non-violence. Engaging with the mass media, John and Yoko’s media war packaged and promoted their peace product as art and advertising, as information and entertainment, as a discourse of political dissent and of self-promotion. With a slogan like “War is Over! If You Want It,” these two media warriors supplied youth culture at the end of the 60’s with the peace product and process that was lacking. Their consuming images and anthems anticipated the “collusional critique” of eighties art and its appropriation of media images that function as “both critical manifesto and the very commodity it critiques” (Sussman 15). In this case, John and Yoko’s media war provided a critique of the official war program while capitalizing upon the very commodity against which war had been declared. For if John seriously wanted to “make peace big business for everybody” (Newsweek 102), this could be achieved only in a parasitic relationship with a war economy making John and Yoko both peace prophets and profiteers. But even if one acknowledges the profit motive in the peace campaign—and this assumes that John was not misappropriated as a “peace capitalist” by the establishment press—there was something else fluxing up the media machine and the war program. John and Yoko understood how their star power and international celebrity gave them a privileged and almost unlimited access to a mass media that wanted to soak up their Pop star aura to satisfy its own instrumentalist agenda. The press and the public wanted John and Yoko, and these two media stars fed this desire and then some. They complied with the pop star demand, but spiked it with the dangerous supplements of political dissent and subversive humour. They fed this desire with a feedback loop and interventionist strategy, with an anti-war army surplus provided at no extra charge. The year 1969 concluded with another savvy media event that lent John and Yoko’s media war more political credibility and gave the American establishment something they had not bargained for: a photo-op and peace dialogue with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada. Once again, John and Yoko’s media war had added an extra twist and an extra shout that the war programmers would have preferred not to hear, the message “War is Over (If You Want It!)” and “War is Over” whether they wanted it or not. Imagine that. Works Cited “The Peace Anthem,” Newsweek, December 1, 1969. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality, San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Giulano, Geoffrey and Brenda. The Lost Lennon Interviews, Holbrook, MA: Adams Media Corporation, 1996. Sussman, Elizabeth. On the Passage of a Few People Through a Brief Moment of Time: The Situationist International 1957-1972, Boston: M.I.T. Press and Institute of Contemporary Art, 1989. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner and David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Wiener, Jon. Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (New York: Random House, 1984). Links http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/9706/21/lennon.award Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Kaplan, Louis. "“War is Over! If You Want It”" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/06-warisover.php>. APA Style Kaplan, L., (2003, Feb 26). “War is Over! If You Want It”. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/06-warisover.html

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IntroductionIn 2016, the online cause #Mission22 went viral on social media. Established to raise awareness about high suicide rates among US military veterans, the campaign involves users posting a video of themselves doing 22 push-ups for 22 days, and on some platforms, to donate and recruit others to do the same. Based on a ‘big data’ analysis of Twitter data (over 225,883 unique tweets) during the height of the campaign, this article uses #Mission22 as a site in which to analyse how people depict, self-represent and self-tell as moral subjects using social media campaigns. In addition to spotlighting how such movements are mobilised to portray moral selves in particular ways, the analysis focuses on how a specific online cause like #Mission22 becomes popularly supported from a plethora of possible causes and how this selection and support is shaped by online networks. We speculate that part of the reason why Mission22 went ‘viral’ in the highly competitive attention economies of social media environments was related to visual depictions of affective bodily, fitness and moral practices.Web 2.0 Culture: Self and Mass DepictionWeb 2.0 culture such as social networking sites (eg., Facebook; Instagram), the advent of video sharing technologies (eg., YouTube) and more recently, micro-blogging services like Twitter have created new and transformative spaces to create, depict and display identity. Web 2.0 is primarily defined by user-generated content and interaction, whereby users are positioned as both consumer and producers, or ‘produsers’ of Web content (Bruns and Schmidt). Challenging traditional “broadcast” media models, Web 2.0 gives users a platform to produce their own content and for “the many” to communicate “with the many” (Castells). The growth of mass self communication, supported by broadband and wireless technologies, gives unprecedented power to individuals and groups to depict and represent their identities and relationships to a potential global audience.The rise of user-generated communication technologies dovetails with broader analyses of the changing contours of self and identity in late-modern times. Individuals in the early decades of the 21st century must take charge for how they depict, portray and self-tell as distinctive, unique and individual subjects (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim; Giddens; Bauman). As contemporary lives become less bound to the strictures of tradition, community and religion, the self becomes a project to be worked out and developed. These theorists suggest that via processes of individualisation, detraditionalisation and globalisation, contemporary subjects have become disconnected from the traditional coordinates of community and are thus faced with the imperative of self-construction and reinvention (Elliott and Lemert).More recently, theoretical and empirical work has attempted to interpret and evaluate how networks of mass self-depiction powered by new digital and wireless technologies are reshaping identity practices. For some theorists, like Bauman (Consuming 2) and Turkle, Web 2.0 is a worrying trend. Bauman suggests in the “confessional society” – think reality TV, talk shows, social media – people are compelled to curate and reflect upon their lives in the public realm. These public acts of self-depiction are part of a move to treating the self as a brand to be consumed, “as products capable of drawing attention, and attracting demands and customers” (Bauman and Lyon 33). The consumer quality of new communications sees connections replace relationships as social bonds become short-term and brittle. Turkle makes a similar argument, suggesting that our preoccupation with online curation centres on controlling our identities and depicting “perfect” versions of ourselves. The result is diminished forms of intimacy and connection; we preach authenticity and realness but practice self-curation and self-stylisation.A more positive body of literature has examined how Web technologies work as tools for the formation of self. This literature is based on more close-up and detailed readings of particular platforms and practices rather than relying on sweeping claims about technology and social change. Following Foucault, Bakardjieva & Gaden argue that personal blogs and social networking site (SNS) profiles constitute a contemporary technology of the self, whereby users employ Web 2.0 technologies in everyday life as practices of self care and self-formation. In a similar way, Sauter argues that SNSs, and in particular Facebook, are tools for self-formation through the way in which status updates provide a contemporary form of self-writing. Eschewing the notion of social media activity as narcissistic or self-obsessive, Sauter argues that SNSs are a techno-social practice of self-writing that facilitate individuals to “form relations to self and others by exposing themselves to others and obtaining their feedback” (Sauter 836). Other research has explored young people’s sustained use of social media, particularly Facebook, and how these sites are used to tell and archive “growing up” narratives and key rites of passage (Robards and Lincoln).One area of research that has been overlooked is how people use social media to construct and depict moral identity. Following Sauter’s arguments about the self work that occurs through networked self-writing, we can extend this to include the ethical self work performed and produced through online depictions. One exception is work by Hookway which analyses how people use blogs – an earlier Web 2.0 form – to write and self-examine their moral experiences. This research shows how bloggers use blogging as a form of online self-writing to construct a do-it-yourself form of morality that emphasises the self, emotions, body and ideals of authenticity. Hookway highlights the idea that morality is less about obedience to a code of rules or following external laws to becoming a particular moral person through a set of self-practices. Paralleling broader shifts in identity construction, people are no longer bound to the inherited guidelines of the past, morality becomes a project to be worked out, designed and depicted in relation to Others (Hookway).In Foucault’s terms, morality involves a process of ethical self-stylisation – an “aesthetics of existence” – based on “the ethical work of the self on the self” (Foucault 91). “Care of the self” involves a “set of occupations” or “labours” that connect and link the self to the Other through guidance, counselling and communication (Foucault 50). For Foucault, self-creation and self-care imply “care for others” as individuals perform a mutual concern with achieving an “art of existence”. This is a reciprocated ethics that obligates the individual to care for others in order to help them care for themselves.This stylisation of the ethical self has been drastically reshaped by the new opportunities for self-expression, belonging and communication offered in our digitally networked society. Digital worlds and spaces create new multi-media modes for individuals and groups to depict, perform and communicate particular moral identities and positions. Web 2.0 technologies are seeing the boundaries between the private and public sphere collapse as more people are willing to share the most intimate part of their moral lives with a diverse mix of strangers, friends, family and associates.The confessional quality of online spaces provide a unique opportunity to analyse “lay morality” or everyday moral understandings, constructions and depictions and how this is co-produced in relation to new technological affordances. Following Sayer (951), morality is defined as “how people should treat others and be treated by them, which of course is crucial for their subjective and objective well-being”. Morality is understood as a relational and evaluative practice that involves being responsive to how people are faring and whether they are suffering or flourishing.In this article, we use the #Mission22 campaign – a campaign that went “viral” across multiple social media platforms – as a unique site to analyse and visualise lay moral depictions and constructions. Specifically, we analyse the #Mission22 campaign on Twitter using a big data analysis. Much of the empirical work on online self construction and depiction is either purely theoretical in the vein of Bauman, Turkle and Sauter or based on small qualitative samples such as the work by Lincoln and Robards and Author A. This article is unique not only in investigating the crafting of moral depictions in Web 2.0 forums but also in the scale of the textual and visual representation of mass moral self-depictions it captures and analyses. Big Data Analysis of #Mission22 on TwitterIn order to empirically examine the #Mission22 campaign on Twitter, we used the Twitter API to collect over three months of tweets that contained the campaign hashtag (from 20 Aug. 2016 to 1 Dec. 2016). This resulted in a dataset of 2,908,559 tweets, of which 225,883 were non-duplicated (i.e., some tweets were collected multiple times by the crawler).There were 3,230 user accounts participating during this period, with each user tweeting 70 times on average. As Figure 1 shows, a sizeable percentage of users were quite active at the height of the campaign, although there is clearly a number of users who only tweeted once or twice. More specifically, there were 1,232 users (or 38%) who tweeted at least 100 times, and on the other hand 1080 users (or 33%) who only tweeted two times or less. In addition, a tiny number of ‘power users’ (18 or 0.006%) tweeted more than 400 times during this period. Figure 1: Frequency distribution of #Mission22 tweets for each user in the datasetTo get a sense of what users were talking about during the campaign, we constructed a wordcloud out of the text data extracted from the tweets (see Figure 2). To provide more information and context, usernames (preceded with @) and hashtags (preceded with #) were included along with the words, providing a set of terms. As a result, the wordcloud also shows the user accounts and hashtags that were mentioned most often (note that #Mission22 was excluded from the data as it, by definition of the data collection process, has to occur in every tweet). In order to remove meaningless terms from the dataset we applied several text processing steps. First, all terms were converted to lowercase, such that “Veteran” and “veteran” are treated as the same term. Next, we applied a technique known as term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) to the tweet text data. Tf-idf effectively removes terms that occur so frequently that they provide no interesting information (e.g., the term “mission22”), and also terms that occur extremely infrequently. Finally, we removed English “stop words” from the text data, thereby eliminating common words such as “the” and “and”. Figure 2: Wordcloud of the #Mission22 tweet contentAs Figure 2 shows, the most frequent terms revolve around the campaign message and call-to-action for suicide awareness, including, for example, “day”, “veteran”, “support”, “push-ups”, “band”, “challenge”, “suicide”, “fight”, and “alone”. A number of user accounts are also frequently mentioned, which largely relate to the heavily retweeted users (discussed further below). Furthermore, alongside the central #mission22 hashtag, a number of other popular hashtags were in circulation during the campaign, including “#veteran”, “#americasmission”, “#22kill”, and “#22adayis22toomany”. Table 1 provides the top 50 most frequently occurring terms in decreasing order.Table 1: Top 50 words in the #Mission22 tweet content (decreasing order)1-1011-2021-3031-4041-50day@mrbernardedlong@uc_vetsnothingveteran#veteranbetter@kappasigmauceverysupporteverydaybelieve@ucthetachimissionpush-upschallengetodaytakehelp@sandratxassuicidehaulone#22kill@defensebaronveteransawarenessjustsay@the_usofightaccepted@piedmontlax#veterans@nbcnewsaloneptsdgoodweaknessbandvets22kwrong#nevertrumpcimmunity [sic]#americasmissionshoutoutgodwillA surprising finding of our study is that the vast majority of tweets are simply just retweets of other users. The number of retweets was 223,666, which accounts for about 99% of all tweets in the dataset. Even more surprising was that the vast majority of these retweets are from a single tweet. Indeed, 221,088 (or 98%) of all tweets in the dataset were retweets of the following tweet that was authored on 2 March 2015 by @SandraTXAS (see Figure 3). Clearly we can say that this tweet went ‘viral’ (Jenders et al) in the sense that it became frequently retweeted and gained an increasing amount of attention due to its cumulative popularity and visibility over time. Figure 3: #1 most retweeted #Mission22 tweet – @SandraTXAS (https://twitter.com/SandraTXAS)This highly retweeted or viral #Mission22 tweet provides a point of departure to examine what aspects of the tweet content influence the virality or popularity of #Mission22 tweets during the height of the campaign. To do this, we extracted the next nine most retweeted tweets from our dataset, providing an analysis of the “top 10” retweets (including the @SandraTXAS tweet above). Figure 4: #2 most retweeted - @mrbernarded (https://twitter.com/mrbernarded/status/776221040582295553)This tweet was retweeted 715 times in our dataset. Figure 5: #4 most retweeted - @Mission22 (https://twitter.com/Mission22/status/799872548863414272)This was retweeted 317 times in our dataset. Figure 6: #4 most retweeted - @UCThetaChi (https://twitter.com/UCThetaChi/status/784775641430384640)This was retweeted 180 times in our dataset. Figure 7: #5 most retweeted - @PamKeith2016 (https://twitter.com/PamKeith2016/status/782975576550305792)This was retweeted 121 times in our dataset. Figure 8: #6 most retweeted - @PiedmontLax (https://twitter.com/PiedmontLax/status/770749891698122752)This was retweeted 105 times in our dataset. Figure 9: #7 most retweeted - @PiedmontLax (https://twitter.com/PiedmontLax/status/771181070066692098) This was retweeted 78 times in our dataset. Figure 10: #8 most retweeted - @PatriotBrother (https://twitter.com/PatriotBrother/status/804387050728394752) This was retweeted 59 times in our dataset. Figure 11: #9 most retweeted - @alexgotayjr (https://twitter.com/alexgotayjr/status/787112936644849664) This was retweeted 49 times in our dataset. Figure 12: #10 most retweeted - @csjacobson89 (https://twitter.com/csjacobson89/status/772921614044233729) This was retweeted 45 times in our dataset.DiscussionThis article has provided the first “big data” analysis of the #Mission22 movement that went viral across multiple social media platforms in 2016. We began by arguing that Web 2.0 has ushered in profound changes to how people depict and construct identities that articulate with wider transformations in self and identity in conditions of late-modernity. The “confessional” quality of Web 2.0 means individuals and groups are presented with unprecedented opportunities to “mass self-depict” through new communication and Internet technologies. We suggest that the focus on how Web technologies are implicated in the formation of moral subjectivities is something that has been overlooked in the extant research on identity and Web 2.0 technologies.Filling this gap, we used the #Mission22 movement on Twitter as an empirical site to analyse how contemporary subjects construct and visually depict moral identities in online contexts. A central finding of our analysis of 225883 Twitter posts is that most engagement with #Mission22 was through retweeting. Our data show that retweets were by far the most popular way to interact and engage with the movement. In other words, most people were not producing original or new content in how they participated in the movement but were re-sharing – re-depicting – what others had shared. This finding highlights the importance of paying attention to the architectural affordances of social media platforms, in this case, the affordances of the ‘retweet’ button, and how they shape online identity practices and moral expression. We use moral expression here as a broad term to capture the different ways individuals and groups make moral evaluations based on a responsiveness to how people are faring and whether they are suffering or flourishing (Sayer). This approach provides an emic account of everyday morality and precludes, for example, wider philosophical debates about whether patriotism or nationalistic solidarity can be understood as moral values.The prominence of the retweet in driving the shape and nature of #Mission22 raises questions about the depth of moral engagement being communicated. Is the dominance of the retweet suggestive of a type of “moral slacktivism”? Like its online political equivalent, does the retweet highlight a shallow and cursory involvement with a cause or movement? Did online engagement translate to concrete moral actions such as making a donation to the cause or engaging in some other form of civic activity to draw attention to the movement? These questions are beyond the scope of this article but it is interesting to consider the link between the affordances of the platform, capacity for moral expression and how this translates to face-to-face moral action. Putting aside questions of depth, people are compelled not to ignore these posts, they move from “seeing” to “posting”, to taking action within the affordances of the architectural platform.What then is moving Twitter users to morally engage with this content? How did this movement go viral? What helped bust this movement out of the “long tail distribution” which characterises most movements – that is, few movements “take-off” and become durable within the congested attention economies of social media environments. The Top 10 most retweeted tweets provide powerful answers here. All of them feature highly emotive and affective visual depictions, either high impact photos and statements, or videos of people/groups doing pushups in solidarity together. The images and videos align affective, bodily and fitness practices with nationalistic and patriotic themes to produce a powerful and moving moral co*cktail. The Top 50 words also capture the emotionally evocative use of moral language: words like: alone, fight, challenge, better, believe, good, wrong, god, help, mission, weakness and will.The emotional and embodied visual depictions that characterise the the Top 10 retweets and Top 50 words highlight how moral identity is not just a cerebral practice, but one that is fundamentally emotional and bodily. We do morality not just with our minds and heads but also with our bodies and our hearts. Part of the power of this movement, then, is the way it mobilises interest and involvement with the movement through a physical and embodied practice – doing push-ups. Visually depicting oneself doing push-ups online is a powerful display of morality identity. The “lay morality” being communicated is that not only are you somebody who cares about the flourishing and suffering of Others, you are also a fit, active and engaged citizen. And of course, the subject who actively takes responsibility for their health and well-being is highly valued in neoliberal risk contexts (Lupton).There is also a strong gendered dimensions to the visual depictions used in #Mission22. All of the Top 10 retweets feature images of men, mostly doing push-ups in groups. In the case of the second most popular retweet, it is two men in suits doing push-ups while three sexualised female singers “look-on” admiringly. Further analysis needs to be done to detail the gendered composition of movement participation, but it is interesting to speculate whether men were more likely to participate. The combination of demonstrating care for Other via a strong assertion of physical strength makes this a potentially more masculinised form of moral self-expression.Overall, Mission22 highlights how online self-work and cultivation can have a strong moral dimension. In Foucault’s language, the self-work involved in posting a video or image of yourself doing push-ups can be read as “an intensification of social relations”. It involves an ethics that is about self-creation through visual and textual depictions. Following the more pessimistic line of Bauman or Turkle, posting images of oneself doing push-ups might be seen as evidence of narcissism or a consumerist self-absorption. Rather than narcissism, we want to suggest that Mission22 highlights how a self-based moral practice – based on bodily, emotional and visual depictions – can extend to Others in an act of mutual care and exchange. Again Foucault helps clarify our argument: “the intensification of the concern for the self goes hand in hand with a valorisation of the Other”. What our work does, is show how this operates empirically on a large-scale in the new confessional contexts of Web 2.0 and its cultures of mass self-depiction. ReferencesBakardjieva, Maria, and Georgia Gaden. “Web 2.0 Technologies of the Self.” Philosophy & Technology 25.3 (2012): 399–413.Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.———. Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.———, and David Lyon. Liquid Surveillance. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.Beck, Ulrich, and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Individualisation. London: Sage, 2001.Bruns, Axel, and Jan-Hinrik Schmidt. “Produsage: A Closer Look at Continuing Developments.” New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 17.1 (2011): 3–7.Dutta-Bergman, Mohan J. “Primary Sources of Health Information: Comparisons in the Domain of Health Attitudes, Health Cognitions, and Health Behaviors.” Health Communication 16.3 (2004): 273–288.Elliott, Anthony, and Charles Lemert. The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2006.Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3. New York: Random House, 1986.Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.Hookway, Nicholas. “The Moral Self: Class, Narcissism and the Problem of Do-It-Yourself Moralities.” The Sociological Review, 15 Mar. 2017. <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0038026117699540?journalCode=sora>.Jenders, Maximilian, et al. “Analyzing and Predicting Viral Tweets.” Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW). Rio de Janeiro, 13-17 May 2013.Kata, Anna. “Anti-Vaccine Activists, Web 2.0, and the Postmodern Paradigm: An Overview of Tactics and Tropes Used Online by the Anti-Vaccination Movement.” Vaccine 30.25 (2012): 3778–89.Lincoln, Sian, and Brady Robards. “Editing the Project of the Self: Sustained Facebook Use and Growing Up Online.” Journal of Youth Studies 20.4 (2017): 518–531.Lupton, Deborah. The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body. London: Sage, 1995.Sauter, Theresa. ‘“What's on Your Mind?’ Writing on Facebook as a Tool for Self-Formation.” New Media & Society 16.5 (2014): 823–839.Sayer, Andrew. Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Smith, Gavin J.D., and Pat O’Malley. “Driving Politics: Data-Driven Governance and Resistance.” The British Journal of Criminology 56.1 (2016): 1–24.Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin: New York, 2015.

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Coffee changes people. Moreover, it changes the way they interact with their friends, their fellow citizens and their community. (Ellis 24) On my daily walk around the streets of my neighbourhood, I pass the footpath cafés that have become synonymous with the area. On this particular day, I take a less familiar route and notice a new, small café wedged between a candle shop and an industrial building. At one of the two footpath tables sit a couple with their young child, conveniently (for them) asleep in a stroller. One is reading the Saturday paper, and the other has her nose in a book—coffee, muffins, and newspapers are strewn across the table. I am struck by this tableau of domestic ease and comfort, precisely because it is so domestic and yet the couple and child, with all the accoutrements of a relaxed Saturday morning, are situated outside the spaces of the home. It brings to mind an elegant phrase of Robert Hughes’ about the types of spaces that cities need, where “solitudes may lie together” (cited in Miller 79). I could, of course, also have drawn my attention to other vignettes at the café—for example, people involved in animated or easy conversation—and this would support Hughes’ other dictum, that cities need places where “people can gather and engage in energetic discourse” (79), which is of course another way in which people inhabit and utilise the café. The ascendancy of the café is synonymous with the contemporary city and, as semi-public space, it supports either solitude—through anonymity—or sociability. “Having a coffee” is central to the experience of everyday life in cities, yet it is also an expression of intent that suggests more than simply drinking a café latte or a cappuccino at our favourite neighbourhood café. While coffee aficionados will go the extra distance for a good brew, the coffee transaction is typically more to do with meeting friends, colleagues or connecting with people beyond our personal and professional networks. And under the umbrella of these types of encounters sit a variety of affective, social and civil transactions. In cities characterised by increasing density and cultural difference, and as mobile populations move back and forth across the planet, how we forge and maintain relationships with each other is important for the development of cosmopolitan cultures and social cohesion. It is the contemporary café and its coffee culture that provides the space to support sociability and the negotiation of civil encounters. Sociability, Coffee, and the Café Café culture is emblematic of social and urban change, of the rise of food culture and industries, and “aesthetic” cultures. The proliferation of hospitality and entertainment industries in the form of cafés, bars, restaurants, and other semi-public spaces—such as art galleries—are the consumer-based social spaces in which new forms of sociability and attachment are being nurtured and sustained. It is hardly surprising that people seek out places to meet others—given the transformation in social and kinship relations wrought by social change, globalization and mobile populations—to find their genesis in the city. Despite the decline of familial relations, new social formation produced by conditions such as workforce mobility, flexible work arrangements, the rise of the so-called “creative class” and single person households are flourishing. There are now more single person households in Australia than in any other period, with 1.9 million people living alone in 2006. This figure is predicted to increase to 30.36 per cent of the population by 2026 (ABS). The rapid take-up of apartment living in Australian cities suggests both a desire and necessity for urban living along with its associated amenities, and as a result, more people are living out their lives in the public and semi-public spaces of cities. Maffesoli refers to restructured and emerging social relations as “tribes” which are types of “emotional communities” (after Weber) based upon the affective, life-affirming impulse of “being togetherness” rather than an outmoded, rationalised social structure. For Maffesoli, tribes have strong powers of inclusion and integration and people are connected by shared affinities or lifestyles. Their stamping ground is the city where they gather in its public and semi-public spaces, such as the café, where sociability is expressed through “the exchange of feelings, conversation” (13). In this context, the café facilitates a mode of interaction that is both emotional and rational: while there might be a reason for meeting up, it is frequently driven by a desire for communication that is underpinned by the affective dimension. As a common ritualistic behaviour, “meeting for coffee” facilitates encounters not only with those known to us, but also among relationships that are provisional and contingent. It is among those less familiar that the café is useful as a space for engaging and practicing civil discourse (after Habermas) and where encounters with strangers might be comfortably negotiated. The café’s social codes facilitate the negotiation of less familiar relationships, promoting a sociability that is not as easy to navigate in other spaces of the city. The gesture of “having coffee” is hospitable, and the café’s neutrality as a meeting place is predicated on its function as transitional or liminal space; it is neither domestic, work, nor wholly public space. Its liminality removes inhabitants from the potentially anxious intimacy of the home and offers protection from the unknown of public space. Moreover, the café’s “safety” is further reinforced because it is regulated temporally by its central function as a place of food and beverage consumption: it provides a finite certitude to meetings, with the length of encounter largely being determined by the time it takes to consume a coffee or snack. In this way, the possible complexity or ambiguity associated with meetings with strangers in the more intimate spaces of the home is avoided, and meeting in a café may relieve the onus and anxiety that can be associated with entertaining. Café culture is not a new phenomenon, though its current manifestation differs from its antecedent, the sixteenth-century coffee house. Both the modern café and the coffee house are notable as places of intense sociability where people from all walks of life mingle (Ellis 2004). The diverse clientele of the coffee house is recorded extensively in the diaries of Samuel Pepys and unlike other social institutions of the time, was defined by its inclusivity of men from all walks of life (Ellis 59). Similarly, the espresso bars of the 1950s that appeared in Europe, North America and to a lesser extent Australia became known for their mix of customers from a range of classes, races and cultures, and for the inclusion of women as their patrons (Ellis 233). The wide assortment of people who patronised these espresso bars was noted in Architectural Digest magazine which claimed the new coffee bars as “the greatest social revolution since the launderette in 1954” (Ellis 234). Contemporary café culture continues this egalitarian tradition, with the café assuming importance as a place in which reconfigured social relationships are fostered and maintained. In Australia, the café has replaced the institution of the public house or hotel—the “pub” in Australia—as the traditional meeting place of cultural significance. Not everyone felt at home, or indeed was welcomed in the pub, despite its mythology as a place that was emblematic of “the Australian way of life”. Women, children and “others” who may have felt or may have been legally excluded from the pub are the new beneficiaries of the café’s inclusivity. The social organisation of the pub revolved around the interests of masculine relationships and culture (Fiske et al.) and until the late 1970s, women were excluded by legislation from its public bars. There are many other socio-cultural reasons why women were uncomfortable in the pub, even once legislation was removed. By comparison, the café, despite the bourgeois associations in some of its manifestations, is more democratic space than the pub and this rests to some extent on a greater emphasis placed on disciplined conduct of its patrons. The consumption of alcohol in hotels, combined with a cultural tolerance of excess and with alcohol’s effect of loosening inhibitions, also encourages the loosening of socially acceptable forms of conduct. A wider range of behaviour is tolerated and sanctioned which can present problems for women in particular. The negotiation of gendered relationships in the pub is, therefore, typically of more concern to women than men. In spite of its egalitarianism, and the diversity of patrons welcomed, the café, as a social space, is governed by a set of rules that communicate meaning about who belongs, who doesn’t and how people should behave. The social codes inscribed into café culture contribute to the production and reproduction of different social groups (Bourdieu and Lefebvre) and are reinforced by the café’s choice of aesthetics. Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital accounts for the acquisition of cultural competencies and explains why some people feel comfortable in certain spaces while others feel excluded. Knowledge and skills required in social spaces express both subtle and sometimes not so subtle hierarchies of power and ownership, cutting across gender, ethnic and class divisions. Yet despite this, the relatively low cost of obtaining entry into the café—through the purchase of a drink—gives it greater accessibility than a pub, restaurant, or any other consumer site that is central to sociability and place attachment. In cities characterised by an intensity of change and movement, the café also enables a negotiation of place attachment. A sense of place connectedness, through habitual and regular usage, facilitates social meaning and belonging. People become “regulars” at cafés, patronising one over another, getting to know the staff and perhaps other patrons. The semiotics of the café, its ambience, decor, type of food and drink it sells, all contribute to the kind of fit that helps anchors it in a place. A proliferation of café styles offers scope for individual and collective affinities. While some adopt the latest trends in interior design, others appeal to a differentiated clientele through more varied approaches to design. Critiques of urban café culture, which see it as serving the interests of taste-based bourgeois patterns of consumption, often overlook the diversity of café styles that appeal to, and serve a wide range of, demographic groups. Café styles vary across a design continuum from fashionable minimalist décor, homey, grungy, sophisticated, traditional, corporate (McDonalds and Starbucks) or simply plain with little attention to current décor trends. The growth of café culture is a significant feature of gentrified inner city areas in cities across the world. In Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley in Australia, an inner-city youth entertainment precinct, many cafés have adopted a downmarket or “grunge” aesthetic, appealing to the area’s youth clientele and other marginal groups. Here, décor can suggest a cavalier disregard for bourgeois taste: shabby décor with mismatching tables and chairs and posters and graffiti plastered over windows and walls. Ironically, the community service organisation Mission Australia saw the need to provide for its community in this area; the marginalised, disadvantaged, and disengaged original inhabitants of this gentrified area, and opened a no-frills Café One to cater for them. Civility, Coffee, and the Café One of the distinctive features of cities is that they are places where “we meet with the other” (Barthes 96), and this is in contrast to life in provincial towns and villages where people and families could be known for generations. For the last two decades or so, cities across the world have been undergoing a period of accelerated change, including the rise of Asian mega-cities—and now, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population is urban based. Alongside this development is the movement of people across the world, for work, study, travel or fleeing from conflict and persecution. If Barthes’s statement was apt in the 1980s, it is ever more so now, nearly thirty years later. How strangers live together in cities of unprecedented scale and density raises important questions around social cohesion and the civil life of cities. As well as offering spaces that support a growth in urban sociability, the exponential rise of café culture can be seen as an important factor in the production of urban civilities. Reciprocity is central here, and it is the café’s function as a place of hospitality that adds another dimension to its role in the cultivation of civility and sociability. Café culture requires the acquisition of competencies associated with etiquette and manners that are based upon on notions of hospitality. The protocol required for ordering food and drink and for eating and drinking with others encourages certain types of behaviour such as courtesy, patience, restraint, and tolerance by all participants, including the café staff. The serving of food and drink in a semi-public space in exchange for money is more than a commercial transaction, it also demands the language and behaviour of civility. Conduct such as not talking too loudly, not eavesdropping on others’ conversations, knowing where to look and what to hear, are considered necessary competencies when thrust into close proximity with strangers. More intimately, the techniques of conversation—of listening, responding and sharing information—are practised in the café. It can be instructive to reprise Habermas’s concept of the public sphere (1962) in order to consider how semi-public places such as the café contribute to support the civil life of a city. Habermas’s analysis, grounded in the eighteenth-century city, charted how the coffee house or salon was instrumental to the development of a civilised discourse which contributed to the development of the public sphere across Europe. While a set of political and social structures operating at the time paved the way for the advent of democracy, critical discussion and rational argument was also vital. In other words, democratic values underpin civil discourse and the parallel here is that the space the café provides for civil interaction, particularly in cities marked by cultural and other difference, is unique among public amenities on offer in the city. The “bourgeois public sphere” for Habermas is based on the development of a social mode of interaction which became normative through socio-structural transformation during this period, and the coffee house or salon was a place that enabled a particular form of sociability and communication style. For Habermas, meeting places such as the urban-based coffee house were the heart of sociability, where conversational rules based on reasoned exchange were established; the cultivation of conversation was aimed at the dialogical egalitarian. Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere is essentially and potentially a political one, “conceived […] as the sphere of private people come together as a public” (Johnson 27). It refers to a realm of social life in which something approaching public opinion can be found. I am not claiming that the contemporary café might be the site of political dialogue and civic activism of the type that Habermas suggests. Rather, what is useful here is a recognition that the café facilitates a mode of interaction similar to the one proposed by Habermas—a mode of interaction which has the potential to be distinguished by its “open and inclusive character” (Johnson 22). The expectation of a “patient, willing comprehension of sympathetic fellows” (Johnson 23) refers to the cultivation of the art of conversation based on a reciprocity and is one that requires empathetic listening as well as dialogue. Because the café is a venue where people meet with less familiar others, the practice and techniques of conversation assumes particular significance, borne out in Habermas’s and Ellis’s historical research into café culture. Both scholars attribute the establishment of coffee houses in London to the development of social discourse and urban networking which helped set the ground for conversational rules and exchange and worked towards a democratic culture. In this context, values were challenged and differences revealed but the continued practice of conversation enabled the negotiation of such social diversity. Demonstrations of civility and generosity are straightforward in the café because of its established codes of conduct in an environment focussed upon hospitality. Paying for another’s drink, although not a great expense is a simple gesture of hospitality: “meeting for coffee” has become part of the lingua franca of workplace and business culture and relationships and is weighted with meaning. As cities grow in density, complexity and cultural diversity, citizens are adapting with new techniques of urban living. At a broad level, the café can be seen as supporting the growth in networks of sociability and facilitating the negotiation of civil discourse and behaviour. In the café, to act as a competent citizen, one must demonstrate the ability to be polite, restrained, considerate and civil—that is, to act in accordance with the social situation. This involves an element of self-control and discipline and requires social standards and expectations to become self-monitored and controlled. To be perceived as acting in accordance with the needs of certain social situations, participants bend, limit and regulate their behaviour and affects. In sum, the widespread take up of café culture, based on hospitality and reciprocity, encourages a mode of interaction that has implications for the development of a social and civic ethic. References Australian Bureau of Statistics. "1301.0–Year Book Australia." 2009. 31 Jan. 2012 ‹http://abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/0/916F96F929978825CA25773700169C65?opendocument› Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Ellis, Markum. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004. Fiske, J., B. Hodge, and G. Turner, eds. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1962. -----. The Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. T. McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. Johnson, Pauline. Habermas: Rescuing the Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2006. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Maffesoli, Michel. Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. Trans. D. Smith. London: Sage, 1996. Miller, George. “A City that Works.” Sydney Papers Spring (2001): 77–79.

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Abstract:

Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods. Mark Weiser on ubiquitous computing (21st Century Computer 104) In 2007, a forum entitled HCI 2020: Human Values in a Digital Age sought to address the questions: What will our world be like in 2020? Digital technologies will continue to proliferate, enabling ever more ways of changing how we live. But will such developments improve the quality of life, empower us, and make us feel safer, happier and more connected? Or will living with technology make it more tiresome, frustrating, angst-ridden, and security-driven? What will it mean to be human when everything we do is supported or augmented by technology? (Harper et al. 10) The forum came as a response to, what many call, post-PC technological developments; developments that seek to engulf our lives in digital technologies which in their various forms are meant to support and augment our everyday lives. One of these developments has been the project of ubiquitous computing along with its kin project, tangible computing. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) made its appearance in the late 1980s in the labs of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) as the “third wave” in computing, following those of the mainframe and personal computing (Weiser, Open House 2). Mark Weiser, who coined the term, along with his collaborators at Xerox PARC, envisioned a “new technological paradigm” which would leave behind the traditional one-to-one relationship between human and computer, and spread computation “ubiquitously, but invisibly, throughout the environment” (Weiser, Gold and Brown 693). Since then, the field has grown and now counts several peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and academic and industrial research centres around the world, which have set out to study the new “post-PC computing” under names such as Pervasive Computing, Ambient Intelligence, Tangible Computing, The Internet of Things, etc. Instead of providing a comprehensive account of all the different ubicomp incarnations, this paper seeks to focus on the early projects and writings of some of ubicomp’s most prominent figures and tease out, as a way of critique, the origins of some of its romantic promises. From the outset, ubiquitous computing was heavily informed by a human-centred approach that sought to shift the focus from the personal computer back to its users. On the grounds that the PC has dominated the technological landscape at the expense of its human counterparts, ubiquitous computing promised a different human-machine interaction, with “machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs” (104, my italics) placing the two in opposite and antagonistic terrains. The problem comes about in the form of interaction between people and machines … So when the two have to meet, which side should dominate? In the past, it has been the machine that dominates. In the future, it should be the human. (Norman 140) Within these early ubicomp discourses, the computer came to embody a technological menace, the machine that threatened the liberal humanist value of being free and in control. For example, in 1999 in a book that was characterized as “the bible of ‘post-PC’ thinking” by Business Week, Donald Norman exclaimed: we have let ourselves to be trapped. … I don’t want to be controlled by a technology. I just want to get on with my life, … So down with PC’s; down with computers. All they do is complicate our lives. (72) And we read on the website of MIT’s first ubicomp project Oxygen: For over forty years, computation has centered about machines, not people. We have catered to expensive computers, pampering them in air-conditioned rooms or carrying them around with us. Purporting to serve us, they have actually forced us to serve them. Ubiquitous computing then, in its early incarnations, was presented as the solution; the human-centred, somewhat natural approach, which would shift the emphasis away from the machine and bring control back to its legitimate owner, the liberal autonomous human subject, becoming the facilitator of our apparently threatened humanness. Its promise? An early promise of regressive augmentation, I would say, since it promised to augment our lives, not by changing them, but by returning us to a past, better world that the alienating PC has supposedly displaced, enabling us to “have more time to be more fully human” (Weiser and Brown). And it sought to achieve this through the key characteristic of invisibility, which was based on the paradox that while more and more computers will permeate our lives, they will effectively disappear. Ubicomp’s Early Romantic Promises The question of how we can make computers disappear has been addressed in computer research in various ways. One of the earliest and most prominent of these is the approach, which focuses on the physicality of the world seeking to build tangible interfaces. One of the main advocates of this approach is MIT’s Tangible Media Group, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii. The group has been working on their vision, which they call “Tangible Bits,” for almost two decades now, and in 2009 they were awarded the “Lasting Impact Award” at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) for their metaDesk platform, presented in 1997 (fig.1), which explores the coupling of everyday physical objects with digital information (Ullmer and Ishii). Also, in 2004 in a special paper titled “Bottles: A Transparent Interface as a Tribute to Mark Weiser”, Ishii presented once again an early project he and his group developed in 1999, and for which they were personally commented by Weiser himself. According to Ishii, bottles (fig. 2)—a system which comprises three glass bottles “filled with music” each representing a different musical instrument, placed on a Plexiglas “stage” and controlled by their physical manipulation (moving, opening or closing them)—no less, “illustrates Mark Weiser’s vision of the transparent (or invisible) interface that weaves itself into the fabric of everyday life” (1299). Figure 1: metaDesk platform (MIT Tangible Media Group) Figure 2: musicBottles (MIT Tangible Media Group) Tangible computing was based on the premise that we inhabit two worlds: the physical world and cyberspace, or as Ishii and Ullmer put it, the world of atoms and the world of bits claiming that there is gap between these two worlds that left us “torn between these parallel but disjoint spaces” (1). This agreed with Weiser’s argument that cyberspace, and specifically the computer, has taken centre stage leaving the real world—the real people, the real interactions—in the background and neglected. Tangible computing then sought to address this problem by "bridging the gaps between both cyberspace and the physical environment" (1). As Ishii and Ullmer wrote in 1997: The aim of our research is to show concrete ways to move beyond the current dominant model of GUI [Graphic User Interface] bound to computers with a flat rectangular display, windows, a mouse, and a keyboard. To make computing truly ubiquitous and invisible, we seek to establish a new type of HCI that we call "Tangible User Interfaces" (TUIs). TUIs will augment the real physical world by coupling digital information to everyday physical objects and environments. (2) “Our intention is to take advantage of natural physical affordances to achieve a heightened legibility and seamlessness of interaction between people and information” (2). In his earlier work computer scientist Paul Dourish turned to phenomenology and the concept of embodiment in order to develop an understanding of interaction as embodied. This was prior to his recent work with cultural anthropologist Bell where they examined the motivating mythology of ubiquitous computing along with the messiness of its lived experience (Dourish and Bell). Dourish, in this earlier work observed that one of the common critical features early tangible and ubiquitous computing shared is that “they both attempt to exploit our natural familiarity with the everyday environment and our highly developed spatial and physical skills to specialize and control how computation can be used in concert with naturalistic activities” (Context-Aware Computing 232). They then sought to exploit this familiarity in order to build natural computational interfaces that fit seamlessly within our everyday, real world (Where the Action Is 17). This idea of an existing set of natural tactile skills appears to come hand-in-hand with a nostalgic, romantic view of an innocent, simple, and long gone world that the early projects of tangible and ubiquitous computing sought to revive; a world where the personal computer not only did not fit, an innocent world in fact displaced by the personal computer. In 1997, Ishii and Ullmer wrote about their decision to start their investigations about the “future of HCI” in the museum of the Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments at Harvard University in their efforts to get inspired by “the aesthetics and rich affordances of these historical scientific instruments” concerned that, “alas, much of this richness has been lost to the rapid flood of digital technologies” (1). Elsewhere Ishii explained that the origin of his idea to design a bottle interface began with the concept of a “weather forecast bottle;” an idea he intended to develop as a present for his mother. “Upon opening the weather bottle, she would be greeted by the sound of singing birds if the next day’s weather was forecasted to be clear” (1300). Here, we are introduced to a nice elderly lady who has opened thousands of bottles while cooking for her family in her kitchen. This senior lady; who is made to embody the symbolic alignment between woman, the domestic and nature (see Soper, Rose, Plumwood); “has never clicked a mouse, typed a URL, nor booted a computer in her life” (Ishii 1300). Instead, “my mother simply wanted to know the following day’s weather forecast. Why should this be so complicated?” (1300, my italics). Weiser also mobilised nostalgic sentiments in order to paint a picture of what it would be to live with ubiquitous computing. So, for example, when seeking a metaphor for ubiquitous computing, he proposed “childhood – playful, a building of foundations, constant learning, a bit mysterious and quickly forgotten by adults” (Not a Desktop 8). He viewed the ubicomp home as the ideal retreat to a state of childhood; playfully reaching out to the unknown, while being securely protected and safely “at home” (Open House). These early ideas of a direct experience of the world through our bodily senses along with the romantic view of a past, simple, and better world that the computer threatened and that future technological developments promised, could point towards what Leo Marx has described as America’s “pastoral ideal”, a force that, according to Marx, is ingrained in the American view of life. Balancing between primitivism and civilisation, nature and culture, the pastoral ideal “is an embodiment of what Lovejoy calls ‘semi-primitivism’; it is located in a middle ground somewhere ‘between’, yet in a transcendent relation to, the opposing forces of civilisation and nature” (Marx 23). It appears that the early advocates of tangible and ubiquitous computing sought to strike a similar balance to the American pastoral ideal; a precarious position that managed to reconcile the disfavour and fear of Europe’s “satanic mills” with an admiration for the technological power of the Industrial Revolution, the admiration for technological development with the bucolic ideal of an unspoiled and pure nature. But how was such a balance to be achieved? How could the ideal middle state be achieved balancing the opposing forces of technological development and the dream of the return to a serene pastoral existence? According to Leo Marx, for the European colonisers, the New World was to provide the answer to this exact question (101). The American landscape was to become the terrain where old and new, nature and technology harmonically meet to form a libertarian utopia. Technology was seen as “‘naturally arising’ from the landscape as another natural ‘means of happiness’ decreed by the Creator in his design of the continent. So, far from conceding that there might be anything alien or ‘artificial’ about mechanization, technology was seen as inherent in ‘nature’; both geographic and human” (160). Since then, according to Marx, the idea of the “return” to a new Golden Age has been engrained in the American culture and it appears that it informs ubiquitous computing’s own early visions. The idea of a “naturally arising” technology which would facilitate our return to the once lost garden of security and nostalgia appears to have become a common theme within ubiquitous computing discourses making appearances across time and borders. So, for example, while in 1991 Weiser envisioned that ubiquitous technologies will make “using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods” (21st Century Computer 11), twelve years later Marzano writing about Philip’s vision of Ambient Intelligence promised that “the living space of the future could look more like that of the past than that of today” (9). While the pastoral defined nature in terms of the geographical landscape, early ubiquitous computing appeared to define nature in terms of the objects, tools and technologies that surround us and our interactions with them. While pastoral America defined itself in contradistinction to the European industrial sites and the dirty, smoky and alienating cityscapes, within those early ubiquitous computing discourses the role of the alienating force was assigned to the personal computer. And whereas the personal computer with its “grey box” was early on rejected as the modern embodiment of the European satanic mills, computation was welcomed as a “naturally arising” technological solution which would infuse the objects which, “through the ages, … are most relevant to human life—chairs, tables and beds, for instance, … the objects we can’t do without” (Marzano 9). Or else, it would infuse the—newly constructed—natural landscape fulfilling the promise that when the “world of bits” and the “world of atoms” are finally bridged, the balance will be restored. But how did these two worlds come into existence? How did bits and atoms come to occupy different and separate ontological spheres? Far from being obvious or commonsensical, the idea of the separation between bits and atoms has a history that grounds it to specific times and places, and consequently makes those early ubiquitous and tangible computing discourses part of a bigger story that, as documented (Hayles) and argued (Agre), started some time ago. The view that we inhabit the two worlds of atoms and bits (Ishii and Ullmer) was endorsed by both early ubiquitous and tangible computing, it was based on the idea of the separation of computation from its material instantiation, presenting the former as a free floating entity able to infuse our world. As we saw earlier, tangible computing took the idea of this separation as an unquestionable fact, which then served as the basis for its research goals. As we read in the home page of the Tangible Media Group’s website: Where the sea of bits meets the land of atoms, we are now facing the challenge of reconciling our dual citizenship in the physical and digital worlds. "Tangible Bits" is our vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI): we seek a seamless coupling of bits and atoms by giving physical form to digital information and computation (my italics). The idea that digital information does not have to have a physical form, but is given one in order to achieve a coupling of the two worlds, not only reinforces the view of digital information as an immaterial entity, but also places it in a privileged position against the material world. Under this light, those early ideas of augmentation or of “awakening” the physical world (Ishii and Ullmer 3) appear to be based on the idea of a passive material world that can be brought to life and become worthy and meaningful through computation, making ubiquitous computing part of a bigger and more familiar story. Restaging the dominant Cartesian dualism between the “ensouled” subject and the “soulless” material object, the latter is rendered passive, manipulable, and void of agency and, just like Ishii’s old bottles, it is performed as a mute, docile “empty vessel” ready to carry out any of its creator’s wishes; hold perfumes and beverages, play music, or tell the weather. At the same time, computation was presented as the force that could breathe life to a mundane and passive world; a free floating, somewhat natural, immaterial entity, like oxygen (hence the name of MIT’s first ubicomp project), like the air we breathe that could travel unobstructed through any medium, our everyday objects and our environment. But it is interesting to see that in those early ubicomp discourses computation’s power did not extend too far. While computation appeared to be foregrounded as a powerful, almost magic, entity able to give life and soul to a soulless material world, at the same time it was presented as controlled and muted. The computational power that would fill our lives, according to Weiser’s ubiquitous computing, would be invisible, it wouldn’t “intrude on our consciousness” (Weiser Not a Desktop 7), it would leave no traces and bring no radical changes. If anything, it would enable us to re-establish our humanness and return us to our past, natural state promising not to change us, or our lives, by introducing something new and unfamiliar, but to enable us to “remain serene and in control” (Weiser and Brown). In other words, ubiquitous computing, as this early story goes, would not be alienating, complex, obtrusive, or even noticeable, for that matter, and so, at the end of this paper, we come full circle to ubicomp’s early goals of invisibility with its underpinnings of the precarious pastoral ideal. This short paper focused on some of ubicomp’s early stories and projects and specifically on its promise to return us to a past and implicitly better world that the PC has arguably displaced. By reading these early promises of, what I call, regressive augmentation through Marx’s work on the “pastoral ideal,” this paper sought to tease out, in order to unsettle, the origins of some of ubicomp’s romantic promises. References Agre, P. E. Computation and Human Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Dourish, P. “Seeking a Foundation for Context-Aware Computing.” Human–Computer Interaction 16.2-4 (2001): 229-241. ———. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Dourish, P. and Genevieve Bell. Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011.Grimes, A., and R. Harper. “Celebratory Technology: New Directions for Food Research in HCI.” In CHI’08, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 2008. 467-476. Harper, R., T. Rodden, Y. Rogers, and A. Sellen (eds.). Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020. Microsoft Research, 2008. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/Cambridge/projects/hci2020/downloads/BeingHuman_A3.pdf›. Hayles, K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ishii, H. “Bottles: A Transparent Interface as a Tribute to Mark Weiser.” IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems 87.6 (2004): 1299-1311. Ishii, H., and B. Ullmer. “Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms.” In CHI ’97, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 1997. 234-241. Marx, L. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 35th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Marzano, S. “Cultural Issues in Ambient Intelligence”. In E. Aarts and S. Marzano (eds.), The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2003. Norman, D. The Invisible Computer: Why Good Oroducts Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Plumwood, V. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London, New York: Routledge, 1993. Rose, G. Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. Soper, K. “Naturalised Woman and Feminized Nature.” In L. Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2000. Ullmer, B., and H. Ishii. “The metaDESK: Models and Prototypes for Tangible User Interfaces.” In UIST '97, Proceedings of the 10th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. New York: ACM, 1997. 223-232. Weiser, M. “The Computer for the 21st Century." Scientific American 265.3 (1991): 94-104. ———. “The Open House.” ITP Review 2.0, 1996. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://makingfurnitureinteractive.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/wholehouse.pdf›. ———. “The World Is Not a Desktop." Interactions 1.1 (1994): 7-8. Weiser, M., and J.S. Brown. “The Coming Age of Calm Technology.” 1996. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.johnseelybrown.com/calmtech.pdf›. Weiser, M., R. Gold, and J.S. Brown. “The Origins of Ubiquitous Computing at PARC in the Late 80s.” Pervasive Computing 38 (1999): 693-696.

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Introduction This article is a study in anxiety with regard to social online spaces (SOS) conceived of as dark. There are two possible ways to define ‘dark’ in this context. The first is that communication is dark because it either has limited distribution, is not open to all users (closed groups are a case example) or hidden. The second definition, linked as a result of the first, is the way that communication via these means is interpreted and understood. Dark social spaces disrupt the accepted top-down flow by the ‘gazing elite’ (data aggregators including social media), but anxious users might need to strain to notice what is out there, and this in turn destabilises one’s reception of the scene. In an environment where surveillance technologies are proliferating, this article examines contemporary, dark, interconnected, and interactive communications for the entangled affordances that might be brought to bear. A provocation is that resistance through counterveillance or “sousveillance” is one possibility. An alternative (or addition) is retreating to or building ‘dark’ spaces that are less surveilled and (perhaps counterintuitively) less fearful. This article considers critically the notion of dark social online spaces via four broad socio-technical concerns connected to the big social media services that have helped increase a tendency for fearful anxiety produced by surveillance and the perceived implications for personal privacy. It also shines light on the aspect of darkness where some users are spurred to actively seek alternative, dark social online spaces. Since the 1970s, public-key cryptosystems typically preserved security for websites, emails, and sensitive health, government, and military data, but this is now reduced (Williams). We have seen such systems exploited via cyberattacks and misappropriated data acquired by affiliations such as Facebook-Cambridge Analytica for targeted political advertising during the 2016 US elections. Via the notion of “parasitic strategies”, such events can be described as news/information hacks “whose attack vectors target a system’s weak points with the help of specific strategies” (von Nordheim and Kleinen-von Königslöw, 88). In accord with Wilson and Serisier’s arguments (178), emerging technologies facilitate rapid data sharing, collection, storage, and processing wherein subsequent “outcomes are unpredictable”. This would also include the effect of acquiescence. In regard to our digital devices, for some, being watched overtly—through cameras encased in toys, computers, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) to digital street ads that determine the resonance of human emotions in public places including bus stops, malls, and train stations—is becoming normalised (McStay, Emotional AI). It might appear that consumers immersed within this Internet of Things (IoT) are themselves comfortable interacting with devices that record sound and capture images for easy analysis and distribution across the communications networks. A counter-claim is that mainstream social media corporations have cultivated a sense of digital resignation “produced when people desire to control the information digital entities have about them but feel unable to do so” (Draper and Turow, 1824). Careful consumers’ trust in mainstream media is waning, with readers observing a strong presence of big media players in the industry and are carefully picking their publications and public intellectuals to follow (Mahmood, 6). A number now also avoid the mainstream internet in favour of alternate dark sites. This is done by users with “varying backgrounds, motivations and participation behaviours that may be idiosyncratic (as they are rooted in the respective person’s biography and circ*mstance)” (Quandt, 42). By way of connection with dark internet studies via Biddle et al. (1; see also Lasica), the “darknet” is a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content … not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks. Examples of darknets are peer-to-peer file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and key or password sharing on email and newsgroups. As we note from the quote above, the “dark web” uses existing public and private networks that facilitate communication via the Internet. Gehl (1220; see also Gehl and McKelvey) has detailed that this includes “hidden sites that end in ‘.onion’ or ‘.i2p’ or other Top-Level Domain names only available through modified browsers or special software. Accessing I2P sites requires a special routing program ... . Accessing .onion sites requires Tor [The Onion Router]”. For some, this gives rise to social anxiety, read here as stemming from that which is not known, and an exaggerated sense of danger, which makes fight or flight seem the only options. This is often justified or exacerbated by the changing media and communication landscape and depicted in popular documentaries such as The Social Dilemma or The Great Hack, which affect public opinion on the unknown aspects of internet spaces and the uses of personal data. The question for this article remains whether the fear of the dark is justified. Consider that most often one will choose to make one’s intimate bedroom space dark in order to have a good night’s rest. We might pleasurably escape into a cinema’s darkness for the stories told therein, or walk along a beach at night enjoying unseen breezes. Most do not avoid these experiences, choosing to actively seek them out. Drawing this thread, then, is the case made here that agency can also be found in the dark by resisting socio-political structural harms. 1. Digital Futures and Anxiety of the Dark Fear of the darkI have a constant fear that something's always nearFear of the darkFear of the darkI have a phobia that someone's always there In the lyrics to the song “Fear of the Dark” (1992) by British heavy metal group Iron Maiden is a sense that that which is unknown and unseen causes fear and anxiety. Holding a fear of the dark is not unusual and varies in degree for adults as it does for children (Fellous and Arbib). Such anxiety connected to the dark does not always concern darkness itself. It can also be a concern for the possible or imagined dangers that are concealed by the darkness itself as a result of cognitive-emotional interactions (McDonald, 16). Extending this claim is this article’s non-binary assertion that while for some technology and what it can do is frequently misunderstood and shunned as a result, for others who embrace the possibilities and actively take it on it is learning by attentively partaking. Mistakes, solecism, and frustrations are part of the process. Such conceptual theorising falls along a continuum of thinking. Global interconnectivity of communications networks has certainly led to consequent concerns (Turkle Alone Together). Much focus for anxiety has been on the impact upon social and individual inner lives, levels of media concentration, and power over and commercialisation of the internet. Of specific note is that increasing commercial media influence—such as Facebook and its acquisition of WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Instagram, CRTL-labs (translating movements and neural impulses into digital signals), LiveRail (video advertising technology), Chainspace (Blockchain)—regularly changes the overall dynamics of the online environment (Turow and Kavanaugh). This provocation was born out recently when Facebook disrupted the delivery of news to Australian audiences via its service. Mainstream social online spaces (SOS) are platforms which provide more than the delivery of media alone and have been conceptualised predominantly in a binary light. On the one hand, they can be depicted as tools for the common good of society through notional widespread access and as places for civic participation and discussion, identity expression, education, and community formation (Turkle; Bruns; Cinque and Brown; Jenkins). This end of the continuum of thinking about SOS seems set hard against the view that SOS are operating as businesses with strategies that manipulate consumers to generate revenue through advertising, data, venture capital for advanced research and development, and company profit, on the other hand. In between the two polar ends of this continuum are the range of other possibilities, the shades of grey, that add contemporary nuance to understanding SOS in regard to what they facilitate, what the various implications might be, and for whom. By way of a brief summary, anxiety of the dark is steeped in the practices of privacy-invasive social media giants such as Facebook and its ancillary companies. Second are the advertising technology companies, surveillance contractors, and intelligence agencies that collect and monitor our actions and related data; as well as the increased ease of use and interoperability brought about by Web 2.0 that has seen a disconnection between technological infrastructure and social connection that acts to limit user permissions and online affordances. Third are concerns for the negative effects associated with depressed mental health and wellbeing caused by “psychologically damaging social networks”, through sleep loss, anxiety, poor body image, real world relationships, and the fear of missing out (FOMO; Royal Society for Public Health (UK) and the Young Health Movement). Here the harms are both individual and societal. Fourth is the intended acceleration toward post-quantum IoT (Fernández-Caramés), as quantum computing’s digital components are continually being miniaturised. This is coupled with advances in electrical battery capacity and interconnected telecommunications infrastructures. The result of such is that the ontogenetic capacity of the powerfully advanced network/s affords supralevel surveillance. What this means is that through devices and the services that they provide, individuals’ data is commodified (Neff and Nafus; Nissenbaum and Patterson). Personal data is enmeshed in ‘things’ requiring that the decisions that are both overt, subtle, and/or hidden (dark) are scrutinised for the various ways they shape social norms and create consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society (Gillespie). Data and personal information are retrievable from devices, sharable in SOS, and potentially exposed across networks. For these reasons, some have chosen to go dark by being “off the grid”, judiciously selecting their means of communications and their ‘friends’ carefully. 2. Is There Room for Privacy Any More When Everyone in SOS Is Watching? An interesting turn comes through counterarguments against overarching institutional surveillance that underscore the uses of technologies to watch the watchers. This involves a practice of counter-surveillance whereby technologies are tools of resistance to go ‘dark’ and are used by political activists in protest situations for both communication and avoiding surveillance. This is not new and has long existed in an increasingly dispersed media landscape (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes). For example, counter-surveillance video footage has been accessed and made available via live-streaming channels, with commentary in SOS augmenting networking possibilities for niche interest groups or micropublics (Wilson and Serisier, 178). A further example is the Wordpress site Fitwatch, appealing for an end to what the site claims are issues associated with police surveillance (fitwatch.org.uk and endpolicesurveillance.wordpress.com). Users of these sites are called to post police officers’ identity numbers and photographs in an attempt to identify “cops” that might act to “misuse” UK Anti-terrorism legislation against activists during legitimate protests. Others that might be interested in doing their own “monitoring” are invited to reach out to identified personal email addresses or other private (dark) messaging software and application services such as Telegram (freeware and cross-platform). In their work on surveillance, Mann and Ferenbok (18) propose that there is an increase in “complex constructs between power and the practices of seeing, looking, and watching/sensing in a networked culture mediated by mobile/portable/wearable computing devices and technologies”. By way of critical definition, Mann and Ferenbok (25) clarify that “where the viewer is in a position of power over the subject, this is considered surveillance, but where the viewer is in a lower position of power, this is considered sousveillance”. It is the aspect of sousveillance that is empowering to those using dark SOS. One might consider that not all surveillance is “bad” nor institutionalised. It is neither overtly nor formally regulated—as yet. Like most technologies, many of the surveillant technologies are value-neutral until applied towards specific uses, according to Mann and Ferenbok (18). But this is part of the ‘grey area’ for understanding the impact of dark SOS in regard to which actors or what nations are developing tools for surveillance, where access and control lies, and with what effects into the future. 3. Big Brother Watches, So What Are the Alternatives: Whither the Gazing Elite in Dark SOS? By way of conceptual genealogy, consideration of contemporary perceptions of surveillance in a visually networked society (Cinque, Changing Media Landscapes) might be usefully explored through a revisitation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, applied here as a metaphor for contemporary surveillance. Arguably, this is a foundational theoretical model for integrated methods of social control (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 192-211), realised in the “panopticon” (prison) in 1787 by Jeremy Bentham (Bentham and Božovič, 29-95) during a period of social reformation aimed at the improvement of the individual. Like the power for social control over the incarcerated in a panopticon, police power, in order that it be effectively exercised, “had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible … like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception” (Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 213–4). In grappling with the impact of SOS for the individual and the collective in post-digital times, we can trace out these early ruminations on the complex documentary organisation through state-controlled apparatuses (such as inspectors and paid observers including “secret agents”) via Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 214; Subject and Power, 326-7) for comparison to commercial operators like Facebook. Today, artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition technology (FRT), and closed-circuit television (CCTV) for video surveillance are used for social control of appropriate behaviours. Exemplified by governments and the private sector is the use of combined technologies to maintain social order, from ensuring citizens cross the street only on green lights, to putting rubbish in the correct recycling bin or be publicly shamed, to making cashless payments in stores. The actions see advantages for individual and collective safety, sustainability, and convenience, but also register forms of behaviour and attitudes with predictive capacities. This gives rise to suspicions about a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour over time. Returning to Foucault (Surveiller et Punir, 135), the impact of this finds a dissociation of power from the individual, whereby they become unwittingly impelled into pre-existing social structures, leading to a ‘normalisation’ and acceptance of such systems. If we are talking about the dark, anxiety is key for a Ministry of SOS. Following Foucault again (Subject and Power, 326-7), there is the potential for a crawling, creeping governance that was once distinct but is itself increasingly hidden and growing. A blanket call for some form of ongoing scrutiny of such proliferating powers might be warranted, but with it comes regulation that, while offering certain rights and protections, is not without consequences. For their part, a number of SOS platforms had little to no moderation for explicit content prior to December 2018, and in terms of power, notwithstanding important anxiety connected to arguments that children and the vulnerable need protections from those that would seek to take advantage, this was a crucial aspect of community building and self-expression that resulted in this freedom of expression. In unearthing the extent that individuals are empowered arising from the capacity to post sexual self-images, Tiidenberg ("Bringing Sexy Back") considered that through dark SOS (read here as unregulated) some users could work in opposition to the mainstream consumer culture that provides select and limited representations of bodies and their sexualities. This links directly to Mondin’s exploration of the abundance of queer and feminist p*rnography on dark SOS as a “counterpolitics of visibility” (288). This work resulted in a reasoned claim that the technological structure of dark SOS created a highly political and affective social space that users valued. What also needs to be underscored is that many users also believed that such a space could not be replicated on other mainstream SOS because of the differences in architecture and social norms. Cho (47) worked with this theory to claim that dark SOS are modern-day examples in a history of queer individuals having to rely on “underground economies of expression and relation”. Discussions such as these complicate what dark SOS might now become in the face of ‘adult’ content moderation and emerging tracking technologies to close sites or locate individuals that transgress social norms. Further, broader questions are raised about how content moderation fits in with the public space conceptualisations of SOS more generally. Increasingly, “there is an app for that” where being able to identify the poster of an image or an author of an unknown text is seen as crucial. While there is presently no standard approach, models for combining instance-based and profile-based features such as SVM for determining authorship attribution are in development, with the result that potentially far less content will remain hidden in the future (Bacciu et al.). 4. There’s Nothing New under the Sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9) For some, “[the] high hopes regarding the positive impact of the Internet and digital participation in civic society have faded” (Schwarzenegger, 99). My participant observation over some years in various SOS, however, finds that critical concern has always existed. Views move along the spectrum of thinking from deep scepticisms (Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil) to wondrous techo-utopian promises (Negroponte, Being Digital). Indeed, concerns about the (then) new technologies of wireless broadcasting can be compared with today’s anxiety over the possible effects of the internet and SOS. Inglis (7) recalls, here, too, were fears that humanity was tampering with some dangerous force; might wireless wave be causing thunderstorms, droughts, floods? Sterility or strokes? Such anxieties soon evaporated; but a sense of mystery might stay longer with evangelists for broadcasting than with a laity who soon took wireless for granted and settled down to enjoy the products of a process they need not understand. As the analogy above makes clear, just as audiences came to use ‘the wireless’ and later the internet regularly, it is reasonable to argue that dark SOS will also gain widespread understanding and find greater acceptance. Dark social spaces are simply the recent development of internet connectivity and communication more broadly. The dark SOS afford choice to be connected beyond mainstream offerings, which some users avoid for their perceived manipulation of content and user both. As part of the wider array of dark web services, the resilience of dark social spaces is reinforced by the proliferation of users as opposed to decentralised replication. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be used for anonymity in parallel to TOR access, but they guarantee only anonymity to the client. A VPN cannot guarantee anonymity to the server or the internet service provider (ISP). While users may use pseudonyms rather than actual names as seen on Facebook and other SOS, users continue to take to the virtual spaces they inhabit their off-line, ‘real’ foibles, problems, and idiosyncrasies (Chenault). To varying degrees, however, people also take their best intentions to their interactions in the dark. The hyper-efficient tools now deployed can intensify this, which is the great advantage attracting some users. In balance, however, in regard to online information access and dissemination, critical examination of what is in the public’s interest, and whether content should be regulated or controlled versus allowing a free flow of information where users self-regulate their online behaviour, is fraught. O’Loughlin (604) was one of the first to claim that there will be voluntary loss through negative liberty or freedom from (freedom from unwanted information or influence) and an increase in positive liberty or freedom to (freedom to read or say anything); hence, freedom from surveillance and interference is a kind of negative liberty, consistent with both libertarianism and liberalism. Conclusion The early adopters of initial iterations of SOS were hopeful and liberal (utopian) in their beliefs about universality and ‘free’ spaces of open communication between like-minded others. This was a way of virtual networking using a visual motivation (led by images, text, and sounds) for consequent interaction with others (Cinque, Visual Networking). The structural transformation of the public sphere in a Habermasian sense—and now found in SOS and their darker, hidden or closed social spaces that might ensure a counterbalance to the power of those with influence—towards all having equal access to platforms for presenting their views, and doing so respectfully, is as ever problematised. Broadly, this is no more so, however, than for mainstream SOS or for communicating in the world. References Bacciu, Andrea, Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Eugenio Nerio Nemmi, Valerio Neri, and Julinda Stefa. “Cross-Domain Authorship Attribution Combining Instance Based and Profile-Based Features.” CLEF (Working Notes). Lugano, Switzerland, 9-12 Sep. 2019. Bentham, Jeremy, and Miran Božovič. The Panopticon Writings. London: Verso Trade, 1995. Biddle, Peter, et al. “The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution.” Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management. Vol. 6. Washington DC, 2002. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Chenault, Brittney G. “Developing Personal and Emotional Relationships via Computer-Mediated Communication.” CMC Magazine 5.5 (1998). 1 May 2020 <http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1998/may/chenault.html>. Cho, Alexander. “Queer Reverb: Tumblr, Affect, Time.” Networked Affect. Eds. K. Hillis, S. Paasonen, and M. Petit. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015: 43-58. Cinque, Toija. Changing Media Landscapes: Visual Networking. London: Oxford UP, 2015. ———. “Visual Networking: Australia's Media Landscape.” Global Media Journal: Australian Edition 6.1 (2012): 1-8. 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‘Artists are replicants who have found the secret of their obsolescence.’ (Brian Massumi) The critical reception to British writer Iain Sinclair’s most recent novel Dining on Stones (or, the Middle Ground) frequently focused on the British writer’s predilection for intertextual quotation and allusion, and more specifically, on his proclivity for integrating material from his own backlist. A survey of Dining on Stones reveals the following textual duplication: an entire short story, “View from My Window”, which was published in 2003; excerpts from a 2002 collection of poetry and prose, White Goods; material from his 1999 collaboration with artist Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinsky’s Room; a paragraph lifted from Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A to Z, also from 1999; and scenes from 1971’s The Kodak Mantra Diaries. Moreover, the name of the narrator, Andrew Norton, is copied from an earlier Sinclair work, Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Of the six aforementioned inter-texts, only Rodinsky’s Room has had wide commercial release. The remainder are small press publications, often limited edition, difficult to find and read, which leads to the charge that Sinclair is relying on the inaccessibility of earlier texts to obscure his acts of autoplagiarism in the mass market Dining on Stones. Whatever Sinclair’s motives, his textual methodology locates a point of departure for an interrogation of textual doubling within the context of late era capitalism. At first approximation, Dining on Stones appears to belong to a postmodern literature which treats a text’s confluence, or dissonance of innumerable signifiers and systems of signification as axiomatic and intra-textually draws attention to this circ*mstance. Thematically, the heteroglot narrative of Dining on Stones frequently returns to the duplication of textual material. The book’s primary narrator is haunted by doubles, not least because Andrew Norton periodically functions as a textual doppelganger for Sinclair. Norton’s biography constitutes a cut-up of episodes copied from Sinclair’s personal history and experience as it is presented in his non-fiction and quasi-autobiographical poetry and prose like Lights Out for the Territory and London Orbital. Like his creator, Norton is ontologically troubled by a fetch, or two, who may or may not be the products of his writer’s imagination. He claims that someone is ‘stealing my material. He impersonated me with a flair I couldn’t hope to equal, this thief. Trickster.’ (218) A ‘disturbing’ encounter with ‘Grays’, an uncannily familiar short story by another writer Marina Fountain, reveals a second textual poacher copying Norton’s work. She hadn’t written it without help, obviously. The tone was masculine, sure of itself, its pretensions; grammatically suspect, lexicologically challenged, topographically slapdash. A slash-and-burn stylist. But haunted: by missing fathers – Bram Stoker, S. Freud and Joseph Conrad. Clunky hints… about writing and stalking, literary bloodsucking, gender, disguise. … But it was the Conrad aspect that pricked me. Fountain had somehow got wind of my researched (incomplete, unpublished) essay on Conrad in Hackney. Her exaggerated prose, its shotgun sarcasm, jump-cuts, psychotic syntax, was an offensive parody of a manner of composition I’d left behind. (167) When ‘Grays’ is later reprinted in full in the novel (141-65), it is a renamed double of a previous Sinclair piece, ‘In Train for the Estuary’ (Sinclair, White Goods, 57-75). This doubling is replicated with another Sinclair story ‘View from My Window’ also being attributed to Fountain (313-341). Neither the style, nor the content of Sinclair’s previous works have been discarded: they have been reproduced and incorporated in Dining on Stones’ retrospective of Sinclair’s earlier work. Thus, Norton’s review of Fountain’s writing as ‘a manner of composition I’d left behind’ doubles as Sinclair’s self-conscious recognition of the text as an artefact produced from diverse inter-texts – including his own. In contrast to Sinclair’s dialogic doubling, Fountain’s double is of a monologic disposition. It is mechanical ‘echopraxis,’ a neologism coined in Dining on Stones which is defined as the ‘mindless repetition of another person’s moves and gestures.’ (192) Its mercenary dimension, enacted without regard for the integrity of the inter-text, is underscored with the epithet ‘slash-and-burn stylist.’ The monologic double possesses the text, drains it of its vitality. It entails necrosis, mortification. Fountain’s appropriation of Norton’s story is close to Fredric Jameson’s characterisation of pastiche which, he says, shuts down communication between texts (202). For Jameson, pastiche is the exemplary postmodern literary ‘style’. It is inert, static, a textual aporia. Jameson’s verdict is harsh: pastiche is cannibalism, text devouring text with an appetite that corresponds to the cupidity of consumer culture. Textual cannibalism vanquishes dialogism. It is the negation of the textual Other because cannibalism is only possible when the Other no longer exists. So how does Sinclair distinguish his doubling of his own text from Fountain’s monologic doubling as it is depicted in the novel’s narrative? A clue can be detected in one of the stories stolen by Fountain. ‘In Train for the Estuary’ is a re-writing of Dracula, and takes its cue from Karl Marx’s famous analogy between capitalism and vampirism: ‘capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ (342) Sinclair’s vampire doubles as an academic (or is it the other way round?) who obsessively and compulsively stalks her quarry/object of study, Joseph Conrad. First, she had learnt Polish. Then she tracked down the letters and initiated the slow, painstaking, much-revised process of translation. She travelled. Validated herself. Being alone in an unknown city, visiting libraries, enduring and enjoying bureaucratic obfuscation, sitting in bars, going to the cinema, allowed her to try on a new identity. She initiated correspondence with people she never met. She lied. She stole from Conrad. (Sinclair, White Goods, 58) The woman’s identity is leeched from the work of Conrad. Sinclair describes unethical activity in appropriating text: lying, stealing, sucking the blood from the corpus of Conrad. A compulsive need to maintain the ‘validation’ of this poached identity emerges, manifesting itself as addiction. The addict is an extreme embodiment of the (ir)rationality of consumption: consumed by the need to consume. The woman’s lust for text is commensurate with the twin desires—blood and real estate—of her precursor, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Sinclair’s narrative of addiction doubles as a meta-critique on the compulsive desire to reproduce text and image that characterizes postmodern textualities as well as the apparatuses that produce them. The textual doubling in Dining on Stones, which is published by the multinational Penguin, seems to enact a reterritorialisation of a deterritorialised minor literature. However, Sinclair’s allegorical rewriting of the vampire legend and its subsequent inclusion in the mainstream novel’s narrative, reveal that capitalism’s doubles are simulacra in the Aristotelian sense because they are copies for which there is no original. The ostensible ‘original’ is the product of different material conditions and thus cannot be duplicated by the machinery of capitalism. The capitalist reproduction of text produced within an alternative cultural economy is an uncanny double (with an infinite capacity to be doubled over and over again) whose existence, like that of Sinclair’s academic in White Goods, is parasitical. The capitalist simulacrum necessitates that the original be destroyed, or at the very least, theorised out of existence so that restrictions based on its own premise of individual property rights can be circumvented. Postmodernism’s attendant theory is an over-determined repetition of poststructuralist tenets such as the instability of texts, the polysemous signifier and the impossibility of self as empirical subject. Images and meaning are no longer anchored, and free to be reproduced. Paradoxically, this proliferation of signification has the effect of constricting the originary text, compressing it under the burden of competing meanings, so that it is almost undetectable. Writes Brian Massumi (doubling Jean Baudrillard), ‘postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.’ The postmodern project’s effacement of the centred subject and the self has as its consequence, according to Jameson, a ‘waning of affect’ which is superseded ‘by a peculiar kind of euphoria.’ (200) The euphoria to which Jameson refers is not that of the poststructuralist textasy. Instead, it is postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, a euphoria achieved from the fusion of contradictions. Postmodernism’s doubles are a utopian attempt to synthesize antinomy and unity in a simultaneity that assimilates the fragmentation of modernity and the modern subject, with the cohesion of the commodity and its closed system of cultural logic. As such, the postmodern double is a rejection of modernist engagements with technical reproducibility. Modernism’s literary assemblages are, in Victor Shlovsky’s words, the laying bare of the device, an exposition of the seams through techniques such as collage, bricolage and montage. These linguistic (and at times visual) conjunctures of disparate elements do not attempt to elide material and thematic disjuncture. As Walter Benjamin stresses, this type of textual methodology has the potential, through the disruption of spatial and temporal logic and the creation of anachrony, to rupture the linear representations and formations of order favoured by capitalist political economies (Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’). Postmodernism, which doubles (following Jameson’s formulation) as the cultural logic of late capitalism, reiterates that texts can be undone, and then reassembled, rearticulated anew, rendered useful to a commodity culture over and over again. Consequently, postmodernism’s copies are analogous, at the level of cultural production, to capitalism’s ceaseless appropriation of discourse, practice, and production. This is the alchemical project of capitalism. It strives to transform everything that it has doubled into the gold of the commodity. The inherent dangers of unrestrained reproduction are for Jameson exemplified in the treatment of Van Gogh’s Pair of Shoes (1885): If this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation—which has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production. (194) Jameson’s reading of Van Gogh’s shoes reminds us of the fate of Alberto Korda’s 1960 photograph of revolutionary Che Guevara. Appropriated by the media, inscribed on T-shirts, mugs, even door mats, Che’s portrait is an emblem of the degradation Jameson describes. Like Van Gogh’s painting, Korda’s photograph was once a ‘symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production,’ saturated with the potential and spirit of revolution. Over time, the iconic image has leaked meaning. The signifying chain that anchored it to its original significance is broken each time it is reproduced and decontextualised through the process of commodification, until Che’s image is unrecognisable, a mere ornament. Refuting Benjamin’s concerns in ‘The Work of Art in its Age of Technical Reproducibility’ postmodern theory argues that technologies enabling reproducibility have led to a democratisation of text and textual production, and by extension, have liberated the multitude from a hierarchy of value that privileges the singular. Mass reproduction and the accompanying pressure for texts to be accessible results in altered attitudes regarding the preservation of intellectual property rights and ‘fair use’. In an economy of signs where use-value has become synonymous with exchange-value, then the text which has no exchange value due to it being ‘freely’ available—‘free’ in its double sense, as something exempt from restriction, or cost—can be copied without economic or ethical restraint, without permission. The quotation marks can be scrapped. According to postmodern logic, the double is a transposition with a legitimacy equalling, even rivalling the original. Clearly, Jameson’s lament that postmodernism represents ‘the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction)’ cannot escape an association with elitism because technical reproducibility indubitably enables greater access. However, the utility of technologies of reproduction to the capitalist empire of structures and signs cannot be underestimated. It enables the ceaseless reproduction of ideologemes inscribed with the logic of capitalism; in other words, it enables capitalism to reproduce itself relentlessly. Postmodern cultural production is self-aware; it acknowledges its role as commodity and reproduces the ideology of the commodity form in its material form. In this manner, it functions as an ideologeme. Sinclair’s doubles cannot be understood according to the schema of postmodernism because he subverts postmodernism’s political and aesthetic symbiosis with capitalism. Moreover, the double in Sinclair travels beyond rehearsing a self-conscious hyphology (Barthes, 39). He defies postmodernism’s occultation of the author through his reiteration of the author’s authority over their own work. In contrast to the reductive manner postmodern texts duplicate other texts, Sinclair’s texts propose a typology of the double which advocates a dialogic duplication. Sinclair’s doubling refuses postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, and its synthesis of contradictions in the service of its unified material and aesthetic program: the commodification of literature. Consequently, Dining on Stones’ textual doubling is a critique of the epistemic shift to the monologic double which Jameson claims typifies a large portion of contemporary textual duplication. References Barthes, Roland. “Theory of the Text.” Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. ––– . “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility.” Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” The Jameson Reader. Eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Massumi, Brian. “Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari.” 12 May 2005. http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm>. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Trans. by Ben Fowkes. Vintage Books edition. New York: Random House, 1976. Sinclair, Iain. Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A-Z. ––– . Dining on Stones. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004. ––– . Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta 1997. ––– . London Orbital. London: Granta, 2002. ––– . Rodinsky’s Room. London: Granta, 1998. ––– . View from My Window. Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2003. ––– . White Goods. Uppingham: Goldmark, 2002. Sinclair, Iain, and Dave McKean. Slow Chocolate Autopsy. London: Phoenix, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Seale, Kirsten. "Doubling: Capitalism and Textual Duplication." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/08-seale.php>. APA Style Seale, K. (Jul. 2005) "Doubling: Capitalism and Textual Duplication," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/08-seale.php>.

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Abstract:

Literary critics have mainly read Herman Melville’s short story “I and My Chimney” (1856) as allegory. This article elaborates on the tradition of interpreting Melville’s text allegorically by relating it to Fredric Jameson’s post-structural reinterpretation of allegory. In doing so, it argues that the story is not a simple example of allegory but rather an auto-reflexive engagement with allegory that reflects the cultural and historical ambivalences of the time in which Melville was writing. The suggestion is that Melville deliberately used signifiers (or the lack thereof) of directionality and place to reframe the overt context of his allegory (Civil War divisions of North and South) through teasing reference to the contemporaneous emergence of Manifest Destiny as an East-West historical spatialization. To this extent, from a literary-historical perspective, Melville’s text presents as an enquiry into the relationship between the obvious allegorical elements of a text and the literal or material elements that may either support or, as in this case, problematize traditional allegorical modes. In some ways, Melville’s story faintly anticipates Jameson’s post-structural theory of allegory as produced over a century later. “I and My Chimney” may also be linked to later texts, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which shift the directionality of American Literary History, in a definite way, from a North-South to an East-West axis. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books may also be mentioned here. While, in recent years, some literary critics have produced readings of Melville’s story that depart from the traditional emphasis on its allegorical nature, this article claims to be the first to engage with “I and My Chimney” from within an allegorical perspective also informed by post-structural thinking. To do this, it focuses on the setting or directionality of the story, and on the orientating details of the titular chimney.Written and published shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861-1865), which pitted North against South, Melville’s story is told in the first person by a narrator with overweening affection for the chimney he sees as an image of himself: “I and my chimney, two gray-headed old smokers, reside in the country. We are, I may say, old settlers here; particularly my old chimney, which settles more and more every day” (327). Within the merged identity of narrator and chimney, however, the latter takes precedence, almost completely, over the former: “though I always say, I and my chimney, as Cardinal Wolsey used to say, I and my King, yet this egotistic way of speaking, wherein I take precedence of my chimney, is hardly borne out by the facts; in everything, except the above phrase, my chimney taking precedence of me” (327). Immediately, this sentence underscores a disjunction between words (“the above phrase”) and material circ*mstances (“the facts”) that will become crucial in my later consideration of Melville’s story as post-structural allegory.Detailed architectural and architectonic descriptions manifesting the chimney as “the one great domineering object” of the narrator’s house characterize the opening pages of the story (328). Intermingled with these descriptions, the narrator recounts the various interpersonal and business-related stratagems he has been forced to adopt in order to protect his chimney from the “Northern influences” that would threaten it. Numbered in this company are his mortgagee, the narrator’s own wife and daughters, and Mr. Hiram Scribe—“a rough sort of architect” (341). The key subplot implicated with the narrator’s fears for his chimney concerns its provenance. The narrator’s “late kinsman, Captain Julian Dacres” built the house, along with its stupendous chimney, and upon his death a rumour developed concerning supposed “concealed treasure” in the chimney (346). Once the architect Scribe insinuates, in correspondence to the chimney’s alter ego (the narrator), “that there is architectural cause to conjecture that somewhere concealed in your chimney is a reserved space, hermetically closed, in short, a secret chamber, or rather closet” the narrator’s wife and daughter use Scribe’s suggestion of a possible connection to Dacres’s alleged hidden treasure to reiterate their calls for the chimney’s destruction (345):Although they had never before dreamed of such a revelation as Mr. Scribe’s, yet upon the first suggestion they instinctively saw the extreme likelihood of it. In corroboration, they cited first my kinsman, and second, my chimney; alleging that the profound mystery involving the former, and the equally profound masonry involving the latter, though both acknowledged facts, were alike preposterous on any other supposition than the secret closet. (347)To protect his chimney, the narrator bribes Mr. Scribe, inviting him to produce a “‘little certificate—something, say, like a steam-boat certificate, certifying that you, a competent surveyor, have surveyed my chimney, and found no reason to believe any unsoundness; in short, any—any secret closet in it’” (351). Having enticed Scribe to scribe words against himself, the narrator concludes his tale triumphantly: “I am simply standing guard over my mossy old chimney; for it is resolved between me and my chimney, that I and my chimney will never surrender” (354).Despite its inherent interest, literary critics have largely overlooked “I and My Chimney”. Katja Kanzler observes that “together with much of [Melville’s] other short fiction, and his uncollected magazine pieces in particular, it has never really come out of the shadow of the more epic texts long considered his masterpieces” (583). To the extent that critics have engaged the story, they have mainly read it as traditional allegory (Chatfield; Emery; Sealts; Sowder). Further, the allegorical trend in the reception of Melville’s text clusters within the period from the early 1940s to the early 1980s. More recently, other critics have explored new ways of reading Melville’s story, but none, to my knowledge, have re-investigated its dominant allegorical mode of reception in the light of the post-structural engagements with allegory captured succinctly in Fredric Jameson’s work (Allison; Kanzler; Wilson). This article acknowledges the perspicacity of the mid-twentieth-century tradition of the allegorical interpretation of Melville’s story, while nuancing its insights through greater attention to the spatialized materiality of the text, its “geomorphic” nature, and its broader historical contexts.E. Hale Chatfield argues that “I and My Chimney” evidences one broad allegorical polarity of “Aristocratic Tradition vs. Innovation and Destruction” (164). This umbrella category is parsed by Sealts as an individualized allegory of besieged patriarchal identity and by Sowder as a national-level allegory of anxieties linked to the antebellum North-South relationship. Chatfield’s opposition works equally well for an individual or for communities of individuals. Thus, in this view, even as it structures our reception of Melville’s story, allegory remains unproblematized in itself through its internal interlocking. In turn, “I and My Chimney” provides fertile soil for critics to harvest an allegorical crop. Its very title inveigles the reader towards an allegorical attitude: the upstanding “I” of the title is associated with the architecture of the chimney, itself also upstanding. What is of the chimney is also, allegorically, of the “I”, and the vertical chimney, like the letter “I”, argues, as it were, a north-south axis, being “swung vertical to hit the meridian moon,” as Melville writes on his story’s first page (327). The narrator, or “I”, is as north-south as is his narrated allegory.Herman Melville was a Northern resident with Southern predilections, at least to the extent that he co-opted “Southern-ness” to, in Katja Kanzler’s words, “articulate the anxiety of mid-nineteenth-century cultural elites about what they perceive as a cultural decline” (583). As Chatfield notes, the South stood for “Aristocratic Tradition”; the North, for “Innovation and Destruction” (164). Reflecting the conventional mid-twentieth-century view that “I and My Chimney” is a guileless allegory of North-South relations, William J. Sowder argues that itreveals allegorically an accurate history of Southern slavery from the latter part of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth—that critical period when the South spent most of its time and energy apologizing for the existence of slavery. It discloses the split which Northern liberals so ably effected between liberal and conservative forces in the South, and it lays bare the intransigence of the traditional South on the Negro question. Above everything, the story reveals that the South had little in common with the rest of the Union: the War between the States was inevitable. (129-30)Sowder goes into painstaking detail prosecuting his North-South allegorical reading of Melville’s text, to the extent of finding multiple correspondences between what is allegorizing and what is being allegorized within a single sentence. One example, with Sowder’s allegorical interpolations in square brackets, comes from a passage where Melville is writing about his narrator’s replaced “gable roof” (Melville 331): “‘it was replaced with a modern roof [the cotton gin], more fit for a railway woodhouse [an industrial society] than an old country gentleman’s abode’” (Sowder 137).Sowder’s argument is historically erudite, and utterly convincing overall, except in one crucial detail. That is, for a text supposedly so much about the South, and written so much from its perspective—Sowder labels the narrator a “bitter Old Southerner”—it is remarkable how the story is only very ambiguously set in the South (145). Sowder distances himself from an earlier generation of commentators who “generally assumed that the old man is Melville and that the country is the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshires, where Melville lived from 1850 to 1863,” concluding, “in fact, I find it hard to picture the narrator as a Northerner at all: the country which he describes sounds too much like the Land of Cotton” (130).Quite obviously, the narrator of any literary text does not necessarily represent its author, and in the case of “I and My Chimney”, if the narrator is not inevitably coincident with the author, then it follows that the setting of the story is not necessarily coincident with “the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshires.” That said, the position of critics prior to Sowder that the setting is Massachusetts, and by extension that the narrator is Melville (a Southern sympathizer displaced to the North), hints at an oversight in the traditional allegorical reading of Melville’s text—related to its spatializations—the implications of which Sowder misses.Think about it: “too much like the Land of Cotton” is an exceedingly odd phrase; “too much like” the South, but not conclusively like the South (Sowder 130)! A key characteristic of Melville’s story is the ambiguity of its setting and, by extension, of its directionality. For the text to operate (following Chatfield, Emery, Sealts and Sowder) as a straightforward allegory of the American North-South relationship, the terms “north” and “south” cannot afford to be problematized. Even so, whereas so much in the story reads as related to either the South or the North, as cultural locations, the notions of “south-ness” and “north-ness” themselves are made friable (in this article, the lower case broadly indicates the material domain, the upper case, the cultural). At its most fundamental allegorical level, the story undoes its own allegorical expressions; as I will be arguing, the materiality of its directionality deconstructs what everything else in the text strives (allegorically) to maintain.Remarkably, for a text purporting to allegorize the North as the South’s polar opposite, nowhere does the story definitively indicate where it is set. The absence of place names or other textual features which might place “I and My Chimney” in the South, is over-compensated for by an abundance of geographically distracting signifiers of “place-ness” that negatively emphasize the circ*mstance that the story is not set definitively where it is set suggestively. The narrator muses at one point that “in fact, I’ve often thought that the proper place for my old chimney is ivied old England” (332). Elsewhere, further destabilizing the geographical coordinates of the text, reference is made to “the garden of Versailles” (329). Again, the architect Hiram Scribe’s house is named New Petra. Rich as it is with cultural resonances, at base, Petra denominates a city in Jordan; New Petra, by contrast, is place-less.It would appear that something strange is going on with allegory in this deceptively straightforward allegory, and that this strangeness is linked to equally strange goings on with the geographical and directional relations of north and south, as sites of the historical and cultural American North and South that the story allegorizes so assiduously. As tensions between North and South would shortly lead to the Civil War, Melville writes an allegorical text clearly about these tensions, while simultaneously deconstructing the allegorical index of geographical north to cultural North and of geographical south to cultural South.Fredric Jameson’s work on allegory scaffolds the historically and materially nuanced reading I am proposing of “I and My Chimney”. Jameson writes:Our traditional conception of allegory—based, for instance, on stereotypes of Bunyan—is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences: this is, so to speak, a one-dimensional view of this signifying process, which might only be set in motion and complexified were we willing to entertain the more alarming notion that such equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text. (73)As American history undergoes transformation, Melville foreshadows Jameson’s transformation of allegory through his (Melville’s) own transformations of directionality and place. In a story about North and South, are we in the south or the north? Allegorical “equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text” (Jameson 73). North-north equivalences falter; South-south equivalences falter.As noted above, the chimney of Melville’s story—“swung vertical to hit the meridian moon”—insists upon a north-south axis, much as, in an allegorical mode, the vertical “I” of the narrator structures a polarity of north and south (327). However, a closer reading shows that the chimney is no less complicit in the confusion of north and south than the environs of the house it occupies:In those houses which are strictly double houses—that is, where the hall is in the middle—the fire-places usually are on opposite sides; so that while one member of the household is warming himself at a fire built into a recess of the north wall, say another member, the former’s own brother, perhaps, may be holding his feet to the blaze before a hearth in the south wall—the two thus fairly sitting back to back. Is this well? (328)Here, Melville is directly allegorizing the “sulky” state of the American nation; the brothers are, as it were, North and South (328). However, just as the text’s signifiers of place problematize the notions of north and south (and thus the associated cultural resonances of capitalized North and South), this passage, in queering the axes of the chimneys, further upsets the primary allegory. The same chimney that structures Melville’s text along a north-south or up-down orientation, now defers to an east-west axis, for the back-to-back and (in cultural and allegorical terms) North-South brothers, sit at a 90-degree angle to their house’s chimneys, which thus logically manifest a cross-wise orientation of east-west (in cultural and allegorical terms, East-West). To this extent, there is something of an exquisite crossover and confusion of cultural North and South, as represented by the two brothers, and geographical/architectural/architectonic north and south (now vacillating between an east-west and a north-south orientation). The North-South cultural relationship of the brothers distorts the allegorical force of the narrator’s spine-like chimney (not to mention of the brother’s respective chimneys), thus enflaming Jameson’s allegorical equivalences. The promiscuous literality of the smokestack—Katja Kanzler notes the “astonishing materiality” of the chimney—subverts its main allegorical function; directionality both supports and disrupts allegory (591). Simply put, there is a disjunction between words and material circ*mstances; the “way of speaking… is hardly borne out by the facts” (Melville 327).The not unjustified critical focus on “I and My Chimney” as an allegory of North-South cultural (and shortly wartime) tensions, has not kept up with post-structural developments in allegorical theory as represented in Fredric Jameson’s work. In part, I suggest, this is because critics to date have missed the importance to Melville’s allegory of its extra-textual context. According to William J. Sowder, “Melville showed a lively interest in such contemporary social events as the gold rush, the French Revolution of 1848, and the activities of the English Chartists” (129). The pity is that readings of “I and My Chimney” have limited this “lively interest” to the Civil War. Melville’s attentiveness to “contemporary social events” should also encompass, I suggest, the East-West (east-west) dynamic of mid-nineteenth century American history, as much as the North-South (north-south) dynamic.The redialing of Melville’s allegory along another directional axis is thus accounted for. When “I and My Chimney” was published in 1856, there was, of course, at least one other major historical development in play besides the prospect of the Civil War, and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny ran, not to put it too finely, along an East-West (east-west) axis. Indeed, Manifest Destiny is at least as replete with a directional emphasis as the discourse of Civil War North-South opposition. As quoted in Frederick Merk’s Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, Senator Daniel S. Dickinson states to the Senate, in 1848, “but the tide of emigration and the course of empire have since been westward” (Merk 29). Allied to this tradition, of course, is the well-known contemporaneous saying, “go West, young man, go West” (“Go West, Young Man”).To the extent that Melville’s text appears to anticipate Jameson’s post-structural theory of allegory, it may be linked, I suggest, to Melville’s sense of being at an intersection of American history. The meta-narrative of national history when “I and My Chimney” was produced had a spatial dimension to it: north-south directionality (culturally, North-South) was giving way to east-west directionality (culturally, East-West). Civil War would soon give way to Manifest Destiny; just as Melville’s texts themselves would, much later admittedly, give way to texts of Manifest Destiny in all its forms, including Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. Equivalently, as much as the narrator’s wife represents Northern “progress” she might also be taken to signify Western “ambition”.However, it is not only that “I and My Chimney” is a switching-point text of geo-history (mediating relations, most obviously, between the tendencies of Southern Exceptionalism and of Western National Ambition) but that it operates as a potentially generalizable test case of the limits of allegory by setting up an all-too-simple allegory of North-South/north-south relations which is subsequently subtly problematized along the lines of East-West/east-west directionality. As I have argued, Melville’s “experimental allegory” continually diverts words (that is, the symbols allegory relies upon) through the turbulence of material circ*mstances.North, or north, is simultaneously a cultural and a geographical or directional coordinate of Melville’s text, and the chimney of “I and My Chimney” is both a signifier of the difference between N/north and S/south and also a portal to a 360-degrees all-encompassing engagement of (allegorical) writing with history in all its (spatialized) manifestations.ReferencesAllison, J. “Conservative Architecture: Hawthorne in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” South Central Review 13.1 (1996): 17-25.Chatfield, E.H. “Levels of Meaning in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Imago 19.2 (1962): 163-69.Emery, A.M. “The Political Significance of Melville’s Chimney.” The New England Quarterly 55.2 (1982): 201-28.“Go West, Young Man.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 29 Sep. 2017. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_young_man>.Jameson, F. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88.Kanzler, K. “Architecture, Writing, and Vulnerable Signification in Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Studies 54.4 (2009): 583-601.Kerouac, J. On the Road. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Melville, H. “I and My Chimney.” Great Short Works of Herman Melville. New York: Perennial-HarperCollins, 2004: 327-54.Merk, F. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.Sealts, M.M. “Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Literature 13 (May 1941): 142-54.Sowder, W.J. “Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney:’ A Southern Exposure.” Mississippi Quarterly 16.3 (1963): 128-45.Wilder, L.I. Little House on the Prairie Series.Wilson, S. “Melville and the Architecture of Antebellum Masculinity.” American Literature 76.1 (2004): 59-87.

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Connecting I’ve moved house on the weekend, closer to the centre of an Australian capital city. I had recently signed up for broadband, with a major Australian Internet company (my first contact, cf. Turner). Now I am the proud owner of a larger modem than I have ever owned: a white cable modem. I gaze out into our new street: two thick black cables cosseted in silver wire. I am relieved. My new home is located in one of those streets, double-cabled by Telstra and Optus in the data-rush of the mid-1990s. Otherwise, I’d be moth-balling the cable modem, and the thrill of my data percolating down coaxial cable. And it would be off to the computer supermarket to buy an ASDL modem, then to pick a provider, to squeeze some twenty-first century connectivity out of old copper (the phone network our grandparents and great-grandparents built). If I still lived in the country, or the outskirts of the city, or anywhere else more than four kilometres from the phone exchange, and somewhere that cable pay TV will never reach, it would be a dish for me — satellite. Our digital lives are premised upon infrastructure, the networks through which we shape what we do, fashion the meanings of our customs and practices, and exchange signs with others. Infrastructure is not simply the material or the technical (Lamberton), but it is the dense, fibrous knotting together of social visions, cultural resources, individual desires, and connections. No more can one easily discern between ‘society’ and ‘technology’, ‘carriage’ and ‘content’, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, or ‘infrastructure’ and ‘applications’ (or ‘services’ or ‘content’). To understand telecommunications in action, or the vectors of fibre, we need to consider the long and heterogeneous list of links among different human and non-human actors — the long networks, to take Bruno Latour’s evocative concept, that confect our broadband networks (Latour). The co-ordinates of our infrastructure still build on a century-long history of telecommunications networks, on the nineteenth-century centrality of telegraphy preceding this, and on the histories of the public and private so inscribed. Yet we are in the midst of a long, slow dismantling of the posts-telegraph-telephone (PTT) model of the monopoly carrier for each nation that dominated the twentieth century, with its deep colonial foundations. Instead our New World Information and Communication Order is not the decolonising UNESCO vision of the late 1970s and early 1980s (MacBride, Maitland). Rather it is the neoliberal, free trade, market access model, its symbol the 1984 US judicial decision to require the break-up of AT&T and the UK legislation in the same year that underpinned the Thatcherite twin move to privatize British Telecom and introduce telecommunications competition. Between 1984 and 1999, 110 telecommunications companies were privatized, and the ‘acquisition of privatized PTOs [public telecommunications operators] by European and American operators does follow colonial lines’ (Winseck 396; see also Mody, Bauer & Straubhaar). The competitive market has now been uneasily installed as the paradigm for convergent communications networks, not least with the World Trade Organisation’s 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services and Annex on Telecommunications. As the citizen is recast as consumer and customer (Goggin, ‘Citizens and Beyond’), we rethink our cultural and political axioms as well as the axes that orient our understandings in this area. Information might travel close to the speed of light, and we might fantasise about optical fibre to the home (or pillow), but our terrain, our band where the struggle lies today, is narrower than we wish. Begging for broadband, it seems, is a long way from warchalking for WiFi. Policy Circuits The dreary everyday business of getting connected plugs the individual netizen into a tangled mess of policy circuits, as much as tricky network negotiations. Broadband in mid-2003 in Australia is a curious chimera, welded together from a patchwork of technologies, old and newer communications industries, emerging economies and patterns of use. Broadband conjures up grander visions, however, of communication and cultural cornucopia. Broadband is high-speed, high-bandwidth, ‘always-on’, networked communications. People can send and receive video, engage in multimedia exchanges of all sorts, make the most of online education, realise the vision of home-based work and trading, have access to telemedicine, and entertainment. Broadband really entered the lexicon with the mass takeup of the Internet in the early to mid-1990s, and with the debates about something called the ‘information superhighway’. The rise of the Internet, the deregulation of telecommunications, and the involuted convergence of communications and media technologies saw broadband positioned at the centre of policy debates nearly a decade ago. In 1993-1994, Australia had its Broadband Services Expert Group (BSEG), established by the then Labor government. The BSEG was charged with inquiring into ‘issues relating to the delivery of broadband services to homes, schools and businesses’. Stung by criticisms of elite composition (a narrow membership, with only one woman among its twelve members, and no consumer or citizen group representation), the BSEG was prompted into wider public discussion and consultation (Goggin & Newell). The then Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE), since transmogrified into the Communications Research Unit of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), conducted its large-scale Communications Futures Project (BTCE and Luck). The BSEG Final report posed the question starkly: As a society we have choices to make. If we ignore the opportunities we run the risk of being left behind as other countries introduce new services and make themselves more competitive: we will become consumers of other countries’ content, culture and technologies rather than our own. Or we could adopt new technologies at any cost…This report puts forward a different approach, one based on developing a new, user-oriented strategy for communications. The emphasis will be on communication among people... (BSEG v) The BSEG proposed a ‘National Strategy for New Communications Networks’ based on three aspects: education and community access, industry development, and the role of government (BSEG x). Ironically, while the nation, or at least its policy elites, pondered the weighty question of broadband, Australia’s two largest telcos were doing it. The commercial decision of Telstra/Foxtel and Optus Vision, and their various television partners, was to nail their colours (black) to the mast, or rather telegraph pole, and to lay cable in the major capital cities. In fact, they duplicated the infrastructure in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne, then deciding it would not be profitable to cable up even regional centres, let alone small country towns or settlements. As Terry Flew and Christina Spurgeon observe: This wasteful duplication contrasted with many other parts of the country that would never have access to this infrastructure, or to the social and economic benefits that it was perceived to deliver. (Flew & Spurgeon 72) The implications of this decision for Australia’s telecommunications and television were profound, but there was little, if any, public input into this. Then Minister Michael Lee was very proud of his anti-siphoning list of programs, such as national sporting events, that would remain on free-to-air television rather than screen on pay, but was unwilling, or unable, to develop policy on broadband and pay TV cable infrastructure (on the ironies of Australia’s television history, see Given’s masterly account). During this period also, it may be remembered, Australia’s Internet was being passed into private hands, with the tendering out of AARNET (see Spurgeon for discussion). No such national strategy on broadband really emerged in the intervening years, nor has the market provided integrated, accessible broadband services. In 1997, landmark telecommunications legislation was enacted that provided a comprehensive framework for competition in telecommunications, as well as consolidating and extending consumer protection, universal service, customer service standards, and other reforms (CLC). Carrier and reseller competition had commenced in 1991, and the 1997 legislation gave it further impetus. Effective competition is now well established in long distance telephone markets, and in mobiles. Rivalrous competition exists in the market for local-call services, though viable alternatives to Telstra’s dominance are still few (Fels). Broadband too is an area where there is symbolic rivalry rather than effective competition. This is most visible in advertised ADSL offerings in large cities, yet most of the infrastructure for these services is comprised by Telstra’s copper, fixed-line network. Facilities-based duopoly competition exists principally where Telstra/Foxtel and Optus cable networks have been laid, though there are quite a number of ventures underway by regional telcos, power companies, and, most substantial perhaps, the ACT government’s TransACT broadband network. Policymakers and industry have been greatly concerned about what they see as slow takeup of broadband, compared to other countries, and by barriers to broadband competition and access to ‘bottleneck’ facilities (such as Telstra or Optus’s networks) by potential competitors. The government has alternated between trying to talk up broadband benefits and rates of take up and recognising the real difficulties Australia faces as a large country with a relative small and dispersed population. In March 2003, Minister Alston directed the ACCC to implement new monitoring and reporting arrangements on competition in the broadband industry. A key site for discussion of these matters has been the competition policy institution, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and its various inquiries, reports, and considerations (consult ACCC’s telecommunications homepage at http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm). Another key site has been the Productivity Commission (http://www.pc.gov.au), while a third is the National Office on the Information Economy (NOIE - http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/access/access/broadband1.htm). Others have questioned whether even the most perfectly competitive market in broadband will actually provide access to citizens and consumers. A great deal of work on this issue has been undertaken by DCITA, NOIE, the regulators, and industry bodies, not to mention consumer and public interest groups. Since 1997, there have been a number of governmental inquiries undertaken or in progress concerning the takeup of broadband and networked new media (for example, a House of Representatives Wireless Broadband Inquiry), as well as important inquiries into the still most strategically important of Australia’s companies in this area, Telstra. Much of this effort on an ersatz broadband policy has been piecemeal and fragmented. There are fundamental difficulties with the large size of the Australian continent and its harsh terrain, the small size of the Australian market, the number of providers, and the dominant position effectively still held by Telstra, as well as Singtel Optus (Optus’s previous overseas investors included Cable & Wireless and Bell South), and the larger telecommunications and Internet companies (such as Ozemail). Many consumers living in metropolitan Australia still face real difficulties in realising the slogan ‘bandwidth for all’, but the situation in parts of rural Australia is far worse. Satellite ‘broadband’ solutions are available, through Telstra Countrywide or other providers, but these offer limited two-way interactivity. Data can be received at reasonable speeds (though at far lower data rates than how ‘broadband’ used to be defined), but can only be sent at far slower rates (Goggin, Rural Communities Online). The cultural implications of these digital constraints may well be considerable. Computer gamers, for instance, are frustrated by slow return paths. In this light, the final report of the January 2003 Broadband Advisory Group (BAG) is very timely. The BAG report opens with a broadband rhapsody: Broadband communications technologies can deliver substantial economic and social benefits to Australia…As well as producing productivity gains in traditional and new industries, advanced connectivity can enrich community life, particularly in rural and regional areas. It provides the basis for integration of remote communities into national economic, cultural and social life. (BAG 1, 7) Its prescriptions include: Australia will be a world leader in the availability and effective use of broadband...and to capture the economic and social benefits of broadband connectivity...Broadband should be available to all Australians at fair and reasonable prices…Market arrangements should be pro-competitive and encourage investment...The Government should adopt a National Broadband Strategy (BAG 1) And, like its predecessor nine years earlier, the BAG report does make reference to a national broadband strategy aiming to maximise “choice in work and recreation activities available to all Australians independent of location, background, age or interests” (17). However, the idea of a national broadband strategy is not something the BAG really comes to grips with. The final report is keen on encouraging broadband adoption, but not explicit on how barriers to broadband can be addressed. Perhaps this is not surprising given that the membership of the BAG, dominated by representatives of large corporations and senior bureaucrats was even less representative than its BSEG predecessor. Some months after the BAG report, the Federal government did declare a broadband strategy. It did so, intriguingly enough, under the rubric of its response to the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry report (Estens), the second inquiry responsible for reassuring citizens nervous about the full-privatisation of Telstra (the first inquiry being Besley). The government’s grand $142.8 million National Broadband Strategy focusses on the ‘broadband needs of regional Australians, in partnership with all levels of government’ (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’). Among other things, the government claims that the Strategy will result in “improved outcomes in terms of services and prices for regional broadband access; [and] the development of national broadband infrastructure assets.” (Alston, ‘National Broadband Strategy’) At the same time, the government announced an overall response to the Estens Inquiry, with specific safeguards for Telstra’s role in regional communications — a preliminary to the full Telstra sale (Alston, ‘Future Proofing’). Less publicised was the government’s further initiative in indigenous telecommunications, complementing its Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities (DCITA). Indigenous people, it can be argued, were never really contemplated as citizens with the ken of the universal service policy taken to underpin the twentieth-century government monopoly PTT project. In Australia during the deregulatory and re-regulatory 1990s, there was a great reluctance on the part of Labor and Coalition Federal governments, Telstra and other industry participants, even to research issues of access to and use of telecommunications by indigenous communicators. Telstra, and to a lesser extent Optus (who had purchased AUSSAT as part of their licence arrangements), shrouded the issue of indigenous communications in mystery that policymakers were very reluctant to uncover, let alone systematically address. Then regulator, the Australian Telecommunications Authority (AUSTEL), had raised grave concerns about indigenous telecommunications access in its 1991 Rural Communications inquiry. However, there was no government consideration of, nor research upon, these issues until Alston commissioned a study in 2001 — the basis for the TAPRIC strategy (DCITA). The elision of indigenous telecommunications from mainstream industry and government policy is all the more puzzling, if one considers the extraordinarily varied and significant experiments by indigenous Australians in telecommunications and Internet (not least in the early work of the Tanami community, made famous in media and cultural studies by the writings of anthropologist Eric Michaels). While the government’s mid-2003 moves on a ‘National Broadband Strategy’ attend to some details of the broadband predicament, they fall well short of an integrated framework that grasps the shortcomings of the neoliberal communications model. The funding offered is a token amount. The view from the seat of government is a glance from the rear-view mirror: taking a snapshot of rural communications in the years 2000-2002 and projecting this tableau into a safety-net ‘future proofing’ for the inevitable turning away of a fully-privately-owned Telstra from its previously universal, ‘carrier of last resort’ responsibilities. In this aetiolated, residualist policy gaze, citizens remain constructed as consumers in a very narrow sense in this incremental, quietist version of state securing of market arrangements. What is missing is any more expansive notion of citizens, their varied needs, expectations, uses, and cultural imaginings of ‘always on’ broadband networks. Hybrid Networks “Most people on earth will eventually have access to networks that are all switched, interactive, and broadband”, wrote Frances Cairncross in 1998. ‘Eventually’ is a very appropriate word to describe the parlous state of broadband technology implementation. Broadband is in a slow state of evolution and invention. The story of broadband so far underscores the predicament for Australian access to bandwidth, when we lack any comprehensive, integrated, effective, and fair policy in communications and information technology. We have only begun to experiment with broadband technologies and understand their evolving uses, cultural forms, and the sense in which they rework us as subjects. Our communications networks are not superhighways, to invoke an enduring artefact from an older technology. Nor any longer are they a single ‘public’ switched telecommunications network, like those presided over by the post-telegraph-telephone monopolies of old. Like roads themselves, or the nascent postal system of the sixteenth century, broadband is a patchwork quilt. The ‘fibre’ of our communications networks is hybrid. To be sure, powerful corporations dominate, like the Tassis or Taxis who served as postmasters to the Habsburg emperors (Briggs & Burke 25). Activating broadband today provides a perspective on the path dependency of technology history, and how we can open up new threads of a communications fabric. Our options for transforming our multitudinous networked lives emerge as much from everyday tactics and strategies as they do from grander schemes and unifying policies. We may care to reflect on the waning potential for nation-building technology, in the wake of globalisation. We no longer gather our imagined community around a Community Telephone Plan as it was called in 1960 (Barr, Moyal, and PMG). Yet we do require national and international strategies to get and stay connected (Barr), ideas and funding that concretely address the wider dimensions of access and use. We do need to debate the respective roles of Telstra, the state, community initiatives, and industry competition in fair telecommunications futures. Networks have global reach and require global and national integration. Here vision, co-ordination, and resources are urgently required for our commonweal and moral fibre. To feel the width of the band we desire, we need to plug into and activate the policy circuits. Thanks to Grayson Cooke, Patrick Lichty, Ned Rossiter, John Pace, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. Works Cited Alston, Richard. ‘ “Future Proofing” Regional Communications.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115485,00.php> —. ‘A National Broadband Strategy.’ Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115486,00.php>. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Broadband Services Report March 2003. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 17 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm>. —. Emerging Market Structures in the Communications Sector. Canberra: ACCC, 2003. 15 July 2003 <http://www.accc.gov.au/pubs/publications/utilities/telecommu... ...nications/Emerg_mar_struc.doc>. Barr, Trevor. new media.com: The Changing Face of Australia’s Media and Telecommunications. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Besley, Tim (Telecommunications Service Inquiry). Connecting Australia: Telecommunications Service Inquiry. Canberra: Department of Information, Communications and the Arts, 2000. 17 July 2003 <http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/final_report.php>. Briggs, Asa, and Burke, Peter. A Social History of the Internet: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Broadband Advisory Group. Australia’s Broadband Connectivity: The Broadband Advisory Group’s Report to Government. Melbourne: National Office on the Information Economy, 2003. 15 July 2003 <http://www.noie.gov.au/publications/NOIE/BAG/report/index.htm>. Broadband Services Expert Group. Networking Australia’s Future: Final Report. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service (AGPS), 1994. Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics (BTCE). Communications Futures Final Project. Canberra: AGPS, 1994. Cairncross, Frances. The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives. London: Orion Business Books, 1997. Communications Law Centre (CLC). Australian Telecommunications Regulation: The Communications Law Centre Guide. 2nd edition. Sydney: Communications Law Centre, University of NSW, 2001. Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA). Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities: Report on the Strategic Study for Improving Telecommunications in Remote Indigenous Communities. Canberra: DCITA, 2002. Estens, D. Connecting Regional Australia: The Report of the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry. Canberra: DCITA, 2002. <http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/rti-report.php>, accessed 17 July 2003. Fels, Alan. ‘Competition in Telecommunications’, speech to Australian Telecommunications Users Group 19th Annual Conference. 6 March, 2003, Sydney. <http://www.accc.gov.au/speeches/2003/Fels_ATUG_6March03.doc>, accessed 15 July 2003. Flew, Terry, and Spurgeon, Christina. ‘Television After Broadcasting’. In The Australian TV Book. Ed. Graeme Turner and Stuart Cunningham. Allen & Unwin, Sydney. 69-85. 2000. Given, Jock. Turning Off the Television. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003. Goggin, Gerard. ‘Citizens and Beyond: Universal service in the Twilight of the Nation-State.’ In All Connected?: Universal Service in Telecommunications, ed. Bruce Langtry. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1998. 49-77 —. Rural Communities Online: Networking to link Consumers to Providers. Melbourne: Telstra Consumer Consultative Council, 2003. Goggin, Gerard, and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (HoR). Connecting Australia!: Wireless Broadband. Report of Inquiry into Wireless Broadband Technologies. Canberra: Parliament House, 2002. <http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/cita/Wbt/report.htm>, accessed 17 July 2003. Lamberton, Don. ‘A Telecommunications Infrastructure is Not an Information Infrastructure’. Prometheus: Journal of Issues in Technological Change, Innovation, Information Economics, Communication and Science Policy 14 (1996): 31-38. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Luck, David. ‘Revisiting the Future: Assessing the 1994 BTCE communications futures project.’ Media International Australia 96 (2000): 109-119. MacBride, Sean (Chair of International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems). Many Voices, One World: Towards a New More Just and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order. Paris: Kegan Page, London. UNESCO, 1980. Maitland Commission (Independent Commission on Worldwide Telecommunications Development). The Missing Link. Geneva: International Telecommunications Union, 1985. Michaels, Eric. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Mody, Bella, Bauer, Johannes M., and Straubhaar, Joseph D., eds. Telecommunications Politics: Ownership and Control of the Information Highway in Developing Countries. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995. Moyal, Ann. Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1984. Post-Master General’s Department (PMG). Community Telephone Plan for Australia. Melbourne: PMG, 1960. Productivity Commission (PC). Telecommunications Competition Regulation: Inquiry Report. Report No. 16. Melbourne: Productivity Commission, 2001. <http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/telecommunications/finalreport/>, accessed 17 July 2003. Spurgeon, Christina. ‘National Culture, Communications and the Information Economy.’ Media International Australia 87 (1998): 23-34. Turner, Graeme. ‘First Contact: coming to terms with the cable guy.’ UTS Review 3 (1997): 109-21. Winseck, Dwayne. ‘Wired Cities and Transnational Communications: New Forms of Governance for Telecommunications and the New Media’. In The Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, ed. Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone. London: Sage, 2002. 393-409. World Trade Organisation. General Agreement on Trade in Services: Annex on Telecommunications. Geneva: World Trade Organisation, 1994. 17 July 2003 <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/12-tel_e.htm>. —. Fourth protocol to the General Agreement on Trade in Services. Geneva: World Trade Organisation. 17 July 2003 <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/4prote_e.htm>. Links http://www.accc.gov.au/pubs/publications/utilities/telecommunications/Emerg_mar_struc.doc http://www.accc.gov.au/speeches/2003/Fels_ATUG_6March03.doc http://www.accc.gov.au/telco/fs-telecom.htm http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/cita/Wbt/report.htm http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115485,00.html http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_3-4_115486,00.html http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/access/access/broadband1.htm http://www.noie.gov.au/publications/NOIE/BAG/report/index.htm http://www.pc.gov.au http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/telecommunications/finalreport/ http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/final_report.html http://www.telinquiry.gov.au/rti-report.html http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/12-tel_e.htm http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/4prote_e.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Broadband" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/02-featurebroadband.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (2003, Aug 26). Broadband. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/02-featurebroadband.php>

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Cultural sociologists (Bourdieu; DiMaggio, “Cultural Capital”, “Classification”; Gans; Lamont & Foumier; Halle; Erickson) wrote about high culture and popular culture in an attempt to explain the growing social and economic inequalities, to find consensus on culture hierarchies, and to analyze cultural complexities. Halle states that this categorisation of culture into “high culture” and “popular culture” underlined most of the debate on culture in the last fifty years. Gans contends that both high culture and popular culture are stereotypes, public forms of culture or taste cultures, each sharing “common aesthetic values and standards of tastes” (8). However, this article is not concerned with these categorisations, or macro analysis. Rather, it is a reflection piece that inquires if opera, which is usually considered high culture, has become more equal to popular culture, and why some directors change the time and place of opera plots, whereas others will stay true to the original setting of the story. I do not consider these productions “adaptations,” but “post-modern morphologies,” and I will refer to this later in the paper. In other words, the paper is seeking to explain a social phenomenon and explore the underlying motives by quoting interviews with directors. The word ‘opera’ is defined in Elson’s Music Dictionary as: “a form of musical composition evolved shortly before 1600, by some enthusiastic Florentine amateurs who sought to bring back the Greek plays to the modern stage” (189). Hence, it was an experimentation to revive Greek music and drama believed to be the ideal way to express emotions (Grout 186). It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when stage directors started changing the time and place of the original settings of operas. The practice became more common after World War II, and Peter Brook’s Covent Garden productions of Boris Godunov (1948) and Salome (1949) are considered the prototypes of this practice (Sutcliffe 19-20). Richard Wagner’s grandsons, the brothers Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner are cited in the music literature as using technology and modern innovations in staging and design beginning in the early 1950s. Brief Background into the History of Opera Grout contends that opera began as an attempt to heighten the dramatic expression of language by intensifying the natural accents of speech through melody supported by simple harmony. In the late 1590s, the Italian composer Jacopo Peri wrote what is considered to be the first opera, but most of it has been lost. The first surviving complete opera is Euridice, a version of the Orpheus myth that Peri and Giulio Caccini jointly set to music in 1600. The first composer to understand the possibilities inherent in this new musical form was Claudio Monteverdi, who in 1607 wrote Orfeo. Although it was based on the same story as Euridice, it was expanded to a full five acts. Early opera was meant for small, private audiences, usually at court; hence it began as an elitist genre. After thirty years of being private, in 1637, opera went public with the opening of the first public opera house, Teatro di San Cassiano, in Venice, and the genre quickly became popular. Indeed, Monteverdi wrote his last two operas, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea for the Venetian public, thereby leading the transition from the Italian courts to the ‘public’. Both operas are still performed today. Poppea was the first opera to be based on a historical rather than a mythological or allegorical subject. Sutcliffe argues that opera became popular because it was a new mixture of means: new words, new music, new methods of performance. He states, “operatic fashion through history may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old” (65). By the end of the 17th century, Venice alone had ten opera houses that had produced more than 350 operas. Wealthy families purchased season boxes, but inexpensive tickets made the genre available to persons of lesser means. The genre spread quickly, and various styles of opera developed. In Naples, for example, music rather than the libretto dominated opera. The genre spread to Germany and France, each developing the genre to suit the demands of its audiences. For example, ballet became an essential component of French opera. Eventually, “opera became the profligate art as large casts and lavish settings made it the most expensive public entertainment. It was the only art that without embarrassment called itself ‘grand’” (Boorstin 467). Contemporary Opera Productions Opera continues to be popular. According to a 2002 report released by the National Endowment for the Arts, 6.6 million adults attended at least one live opera performance in 2002, and 37.6 million experienced opera on television, video, radio, audio recording or via the Internet. Some think that it is a dying art form, while others think to the contrary, that it is a living art form because of its complexity and “ability to probe deeper into the human experience than any other art form” (Berger 3). Some directors change the setting of operas with perhaps the most famous contemporary proponent of this approach being Peter Sellars, who made drastic changes to three of Mozart’s most famous operas. Le Nozze di Figaro, originally set in 18th-century Seville, was set by Sellars in a luxury apartment in the Trump Tower in New York City; Sellars set Don Giovanni in contemporary Spanish Harlem rather than 17th century Seville; and for Cosi Fan Tutte, Sellars chose a diner on Cape Cod rather than 18th century Naples. As one of the more than six million Americans who attend live opera each year, I have experienced several updated productions, which made me reflect on the convergence or cross-over between high culture and popular culture. In 2000, I attended a production of Don Giovanni at the Estates Theatre in Prague, the very theatre where Mozart conducted the world premiere in 1787. In this production, Don Giovanni was a fashion designer known as “Don G” and drove a BMW. During the 1999-2000 season, Los Angeles Opera engaged film director Bruce Beresford to direct Verdi’s Rigoletto. Beresford updated the original setting of 16th century Mantua to 20th century Hollywood. The lead tenor, rather than being the Duke of Mantua, was a Hollywood agent known as “Duke Mantua.” In the first act, just before Marullo announces to the Duke’s guests that the jester Rigoletto has taken a mistress, he gets the news via his cell phone. Director Ian Judge set the 2004 production of Le Nozze di Figaro in the 1950s. In one of the opening productions of the 2006-07 LA opera season, Vincent Patterson also chose the 1950s for Massenet’s Manon rather than France in the 1720s. This allowed the title character to appear in the fourth act dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Excerpts from the dress rehearsal can be seen on YouTube. Most recently, I attended a production of Ariane et Barbe-Bleu at the Paris Opera. The original setting of the Maeterlinck play is in Duke Bluebeard’s castle, but the time period is unclear. However, it is doubtful that the 1907 opera based on an 1899 play was meant to be set in what appeared to be a mental institution equipped with surveillance cameras whose screens were visible to the audience. The critical and audience consensus seemed to be that the opera was a musical success but a failure as a production. James Shore summed up the audience reaction: “the production team was vociferously booed and jeered by much of the house, and the enthusiastic applause that had greeted the singers and conductor, immediately went nearly silent when they came on stage”. It seems to me that a new class-related taste has emerged; the opera genre has shot out a subdivision which I shall call “post-modern morphologies,” that may appeal to a larger pool of people. Hence, class, age, gender, and race are becoming more important factors in conceptualising opera productions today than in the past. I do not consider these productions as new adaptations because the libretto and the music are originals. What changes is the fact that both text and sound are taken to a higher dimension by adding iconographic images that stimulate people’s brains. When asked in an interview why he often changes the setting of an opera, Ian Judge commented, “I try to find the best world for the story and characters to operate in, and I think you have to find a balance between the period the author set it in, the period he conceived it in and the nature of theatre and audiences at that time, and the world we live in.” Hence, the world today is complex, interconnected, borderless and timeless because of advanced technologies, and updated opera productions play with symbols that offer multiple meanings that reflect the world we live in. It may be that television and film have influenced opera production. Character tenor Graham Clark recently observed in an interview, “Now the situation has changed enormously. Television and film have made a lot of things totally accessible which they were not before and in an entirely different perception.” Director Ian Judge believes that television and film have affected audience expectations in opera. “I think audiences who are brought up on television, which is bad acting, and movies, which is not that good acting, perhaps require more of opera than stand and deliver, and I have never really been happy with someone who just stands and sings.” Sociologist Wendy Griswold states that culture reflects social reality and the meaning of a particular cultural object (such as opera), originates “in the social structures and social patterns it reflects” (22). Screens of various technologies are embedded in our lives and normalised as extensions of our bodies. In those opera productions in which directors change the time and place of opera plots, use technology, and are less concerned with what the composer or librettist intended (which we can only guess), the iconographic images create multi valances, textuality similar to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of multiplicity of voices. Hence, a plurality of meanings. Plàcido Domingo, the Eli and Edyth Broad General Director of Los Angeles Opera, seeks to take advantage of the company’s proximity to the film industry. This is evidenced by his having engaged Bruce Beresford to direct Rigoletto and William Friedkin to direct Ariadne auf Naxos, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Gianni Schicchi. Perhaps the most daring example of Domingo’s approach was convincing Garry Marshall, creator of the television sitcom Happy Days and who directed the films Pretty Woman and The Princess Diaries, to direct Jacques Offenbach’s The Grand duch*ess of Gerolstein to open the company’s 20th anniversary season. When asked how Domingo convinced him to direct an opera for the first time, Marshall responded, “he was insistent that one, people think that opera is pretty elitist, and he knew without insulting me that I was not one of the elitists; two, he said that you gotta make a funny opera; we need more comedy in the operetta and opera world.” Marshall rewrote most of the dialogue and performed it in English, but left the “songs” untouched and in the original French. He also developed numerous sight gags and added characters including a dog named Morrie and the composer Jacques Offenbach himself. Did it work? Christie Grimstad wrote, “if you want an evening filled with witty music, kaleidoscopic colors and hilariously good singing, seek out The Grand duch*ess. You will not be disappointed.” The FanFaire Website commented on Domingo’s approach of using television and film directors to direct opera: You’ve got to hand it to Plàcido Domingo for having the vision to draw on Hollywood’s vast pool of directorial talent. Certainly something can be gained from the cross-fertilization that could ensue from this sort of interaction between opera and the movies, two forms of entertainment (elitist and perennially struggling for funds vs. popular and, it seems, eternally rich) that in Los Angeles have traditionally lived separate lives on opposite sides of the tracks. A wider audience, for example, never a problem for the movies, can only mean good news for the future of opera. So, did the Marshall Plan work? Purists of course will always want their operas and operettas ‘pure and unadulterated’. But with an audience that seemed to have as much fun as the stellar cast on stage, it sure did. Critic Alan Rich disagrees, calling Marshall “a representative from an alien industry taking on an artistic product, not to create something innovative and interesting, but merely to insult.” Nevertheless, the combination of Hollywood and opera seems to work. The Los Angeles Opera reported that the 2005-2006 season was its best ever: “ticket revenues from the season, which ended in June, exceeded projected figures by nearly US$900,000. Seasonal attendance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stood at more than 86% of the house’s capacity, the largest percentage in the opera’s history.” Domingo continues with the Hollywood connection in the upcoming 2008-2009 season. He has reengaged William Friedkin to direct two of Puccini’s three operas titled collectively as Il Trittico. Friedkin will direct the two tragedies, Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica. Although Friedkin has already directed a production of the third opera in Il Trittico for Los Angeles, the comedy Gianni Schicchi, Domingo convinced Woody Allen to make his operatic directorial debut with this work. This can be viewed as another example of the desire to make opera and popular culture more equal. However, some, like Alan Rich, may see this attempt as merely insulting rather than interesting and innovative. With a top ticket price in Los Angeles of US$238 per seat, opera seems to continue to be elitist. Berger (2005) concurs with this idea and gives his rationale for elitism: there are rich people who support and attend the opera; it is an imported art from Europe that causes some marginalisation; opera is not associated with something being ‘moral,’ a concept engrained in American culture; it is expensive to produce and usually funded by kings, corporations, rich people; and the opera singers are rare –usually one in a million who will have the vocal quality to sing opera arias. Furthermore, Nicholas Kenyon commented in the early 1990s: “there is suspicion that audiences are now paying more and more money for their seats to see more and more money spent on stage” (Kenyon 3). Still, Garry Marshall commented that the budget for The Grand duch*ess was US$2 million, while his budget for Runaway Bride was US$72 million. Kenyon warns, “Such popularity for opera may be illusory. The enjoyment of one striking aria does not guarantee the survival of an art form long regarded as over-elitist, over-recondite, and over-priced” (Kenyon 3). A recent development is the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to simulcast live opera performances from the Met stage to various cinemas around the world. These HD transmissions began with the 2006-2007 season when six performances were broadcast. In the 2007-2008 season, the schedule has expanded to eight live Saturday matinee broadcasts plus eight recorded encores broadcast the following day. According to The Los Angeles Times, “the Met’s experiment of merging film with live performance has created a new art form” (Aslup). Whether or not this is a “new art form,” it certainly makes world-class live opera available to countless persons who cannot travel to New York and pay the price for tickets, when they are available. In the US alone, more than 350 cinemas screen these live HD broadcasts from the Met. Top ticket price for these performances at the Met is US$375, while the lowest price is US$27 for seats with only a partial view. Top price for the HD transmissions in participating cinemas is US$22. This experiment with live simulcasts makes opera more affordable and may increase its popularity; combined with updated stagings, opera can engage a much larger audience and hope for even a mass consumption. Is opera moving closer and closer to popular culture? There still seems to be an aura of elitism and snobbery about opera. However, Plàcido Domingo’s attempt to join opera with Hollywood is meant to break the barriers between high and popular culture. The practice of updating opera settings is not confined to Los Angeles. As mentioned earlier, the idea can be traced to post World War II England, and is quite common in Europe. Examples include Erich Wonder’s approach to Wagner’s Ring, making Valhalla, the mythological home of the gods and typically a mountaintop, into the spaceship Valhalla, as well as my own experience with Don Giovanni in Prague and Ariane et Barbe-Bleu in Paris. Indeed, Sutcliffe maintains, “Great classics in all branches of the arts are repeatedly being repackaged for a consumerist world that is increasingly and neurotically self-obsessed” (61). Although new operas are being written and performed, most contemporary performances are of operas by Verdi, Mozart, and Puccini (www.operabase.com). This means that audiences see the same works repeated many times, but in different interpretations. Perhaps this is why Sutcliffe contends, “since the 1970s it is the actual productions that have had the novelty value grabbed by the headlines. Singing no longer predominates” (Sutcliffe 57). If then, as Sutcliffe argues, “operatic fashion through history may be a desire for novelty, new formulas displacing old” (Sutcliffe 65), then the contemporary practice of changing the original settings is simply the latest “new formula” that is replacing the old ones. If there are no new words or new music, then what remains are new methods of performance, hence the practice of changing time and place. Opera is a complex art form that has evolved over the past 400 years and continues to evolve, but will it survive? The underlining motives for directors changing the time and place of opera performances are at least three: for aesthetic/artistic purposes, financial purposes, and to reach an audience from many cultures, who speak different languages, and who have varied tastes. These three reasons are interrelated. In 1996, Sutcliffe wrote that there has been one constant in all the arguments about opera productions during the preceding two decades: “the producer’s wish to relate the works being staged to contemporary circ*mstances and passions.” Although that sounds like a purely aesthetic reason, making opera relevant to new, multicultural audiences and thereby increasing the bottom line seems very much a part of that aesthetic. It is as true today as it was when Sutcliffe made the observation twelve years ago (60-61). My own speculation is that opera needs to attract various audiences, and it can only do so by appealing to popular culture and engaging new forms of media and technology. Erickson concludes that the number of upper status people who are exclusively faithful to fine arts is declining; high status people consume a variety of culture while the lower status people are limited to what they like. Research in North America, Europe, and Australia, states Erickson, attest to these trends. My answer to the question can stage directors make opera and popular culture “equal” is yes, and they can do it successfully. Perhaps Stanley Sharpless summed it up best: After his Eden triumph, When the Devil played his ace, He wondered what he could do next To irk the human race, So he invented Opera, With many a fiendish grin, To mystify the lowbrows, And take the highbrows in. References The Grand duch*ess. 2005. 3 Feb. 2008 < http://www.ffaire.com/duch*ess/index.htm >.Aslup, Glenn. “Puccini’s La Boheme: A Live HD Broadcast from the Met.” Central City Blog Opera 7 Apr. 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.centralcityopera.org/blog/2008/04/07/puccini%E2%80%99s- la-boheme-a-live-hd-broadcast-from-the-met/ >.Berger, William. Puccini without Excuses. New York: Vintage, 2005.Boorstin, Daniel. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. New York: Random House, 1992.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.Clark, Graham. “Interview with Graham Clark.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 11 Aug. 2006.DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Capital and School Success.” American Sociological Review 47 (1982): 189-201.DiMaggio, Paul. “Classification in Art.”_ American Sociological Review_ 52 (1987): 440-55.Elson, C. Louis. “Opera.” Elson’s Music Dictionary. Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1905.Erickson, H. Bonnie. “The Crisis in Culture and Inequality.” In W. Ivey and S. J. Tepper, eds. Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life. New York: Routledge, 2007.Fanfaire.com. “At Its 20th Anniversary Celebration, the Los Angeles Opera Had a Ball with The Grand duch*ess.” 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.fanfaire.com/duch*ess/index.htm >.Gans, J. Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1977.Grimstad, Christie. Concerto Net.com. 2005. 12 Jan. 2008 < http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=3091 >.Grisworld, Wendy. Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1994.Grout, D. Jay. A History of Western Music. Shorter ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1964.Halle, David. “High and Low Culture.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. London: Blackwell, 2006.Judge, Ian. “Interview with Ian Judge.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 22 Mar. 2006.Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001. 19 Nov. 2006 < http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=opera&searchmode=none >.Kenyon, Nicholas. “Introduction.” In A. Holden, N. Kenyon and S. Walsh, eds. The Viking Opera Guide. New York: Penguin, 1993.Lamont, Michele, and Marcel Fournier. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Lord, M.G. “Shlemiel! Shlemozzle! And Cue the Soprano.” The New York Times 4 Sep. 2005.Los Angeles Opera. “LA Opera General Director Placido Domingo Announces Results of Record-Breaking 20th Anniversary Season.” News release. 2006.Marshall, Garry. “Interview with Garry Marshall.” The KCSN Opera House, 88.5 FM. 31 Aug. 2005.National Endowment for the Arts. 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Research Division Report #45. 5 Feb. 2008 < http://www.nea.gov/pub/NEASurvey2004.pdf >.NCM Fanthom. “The Metropolitan Opera HD Live.” 2 Feb. 2008 < http://fathomevents.com/details.aspx?seriesid=622&gclid= CLa59NGuspECFQU6awodjiOafA >.Opera Today. James Sobre: Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and Capriccio in Paris – Name This Stage Piece If You Can. 5 Feb. 2008 < http://www.operatoday.com/content/2007/09/ariane_et_barbe_1.php >.Rich, Alan. “High Notes, and Low.” LA Weekly 15 Sep. 2005. 6 May 2008 < http://www.laweekly.com/stage/a-lot-of-night-music/high-notes-and-low/8160/ >.Sharpless, Stanley. “A Song against Opera.” In E. O. Parrott, ed. How to Be Tremendously Tuned in to Opera. New York: Penguin, 1990.Shore, James. Opera Today. 2007. 4 Feb. 2008 < http://www.operatoday.com/content/2007/09/ariane_et_barbe_1.php >.Sutcliffe, Tom. Believing in Opera. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1996.YouTube. “Manon Sex and the Opera.” 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiBQhr2Sy0k >.

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For Socrates the act of communication is grounded in the world of original forms, archetypes, or abstract ideas. These ideas exist independently of the human mind and reflect a reality that is truer than the world of everyday experience. The task of the speaker is to draw the listener closer to the truth of these ideas, and this requires an intimate coupling of the form of speech to the character of the listener. In Phaedrus, Socrates explains, ". . . a would-be speaker must know how many types of soul there are. The number is finite, and they account for a variety of individual characters. When these are determined one must enumerate the various types of speech, a finite number also." The types of soul must then be carefully paired with the types of speech. This theoretical knowledge by itself, however, is not sufficient. A speaker must also know when ". . . he has actually before him a specific example of a type which he has heard described, and that this is what he must say and this is how he must say it if he wants to influence his hearer in this particular way" (Plato 91-92). Thus, the aspiring speaker must sharpen his powers of observation. Exactly how a speaker goes about discerning the various types of souls in his audience is not discussed in Phaedrus, but one assumes it is by mastering the art of face reading, or physiognomy. The science of physiognomy was of particular importance to the ancient Greeks. Nearly all the well-known Greek writers had something to say about the subject. Pythagoras is claimed to be the first Greek to formalize it systematically as a science. Hippocrates wrote voluminously on the subject, as did Aristotle. Socrates not only recommended physiognomy to his students (Tytler) but he is also reported to have demonstrated his facility with the science at least twice: once in predicting the promotion of Alcibiades and once upon first meeting Plato, whom he immediately recognized as a man of considerable philosophical talent (Encyclopedia Britannica). Writing is inferior to speech, Socrates tells Phaedrus, precisely because it cannot see and adapt the message to the reader. Like a painting of an object, writing is merely the image of dissociated speech. What is missing in writing-and what writing seems ever intent on reconstructing-is the human face. Pressing Faces Behind the Typeface Although physiognomy was banned by the Church, as it was associated with paganism and devil worship (practitioners of the science were burnt at the stake), it was revived in the Renaissance and became an obsession with the advent of the printing press. The printing press heralds democracy. But as human rights grew, urban centers developed, and new professions and classes emerged, people were no longer able to divine their own destiny or to predict the behavior and destiny of others. It became imperative to find other more reliable means of identifying the good and the bad, the talented and the unremarkable. Two books were considered indispensable: the Bible and Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy (Juengel). Physiognomy was the science that helped people decipher class and profession. It became the spelling book of character, one that people diligently studied so that they could learn to read not only the marks of character in others but also the signs of talent and potential in their own faces and in the faces of their children. Face reading was egalitarian and leveling (Juengel). The heads of state could be read and debunked in the flourishing art of caricature, and people delighted in decoding the physiognomy of the ordinary faces that crowded the pages of the popular press. The populace applauded the artists that succeeded in revealing the whole spectrum of a character-class, intentions, profession-in the masterly strokes of the pen (Wechsler). Unfortunately, so intense was the interest in face reading that many people were forced to cover their faces when out in public (Zebrowitz). Inside the religious, medical, educational, and criminal justice institutions, authorities scanned faces to identify the virtuous and the vile. People were hanged because of the shape of their jaws ("A physiognomic auto-da-fé,") and sometimes convicted of crimes because of an unfortunate physiognomy, even before any crimes were committed (Lichtenberg. 93). Mass Consumption of the Face Open a magazine. What do you see? I counted over 200 faces in the September 15, 2003 issue of Newsweek, 120 faces in the September 29, 2003 issue of Forbes, 124 faces in the September 15, 2003 issue of Time, and 37 faces in the November, 2003 issue of Handgunner (I included the masked faces). Whereas, in the 19th century, face reading was used by the religious, medical, and criminal justice authorities to identify a person's character, in the modern world face reading becomes face righting. Early in the century, people came to be viewed less as individuals than as masses that were dynamically statistical with fluctuations of opinions and tastes that could be sampled and manipulated. It quickly became apparent to the behemoth advertising industry that was erected with the advent of mass media that product designs and packages could be collated with viewer reactions. The audience is scrutinized, labeled, and targeted. What people are fed are fleshless images of themselves. Horkheimer and Adorno have observed that the media have reduced the individual to the stereotype. Stereotypes package people, typically in unflattering boxes. Mediated faces are used to mirror, to prime, and to manipulate the audience (Kress and van Leeuwen). On television and in print, images of canned faces proliferate. Not all stereotypes are unsavory. Nothing recommends itself nor sells like a beautiful face, but even beautiful faces must be retouched, even recomposed from features extracted from databases of perfect facial features. So important is the image of the face that media icons routinely visit the plastic surgeon. Michael Jackson is the most extreme example of what has been derogatorily termed a "scalpel slave." Plastic surgery is not exclusive to celebrities; countless millions of ordinary Americans feel compelled to undergo various cosmetic surgeries. The 20th-century consumption of the face has ended by consuming the face. Facing the Face Interface Text has made a comeback in hypertext. Empowered by the hyperlink, readers have become writers as they assemble texts with the clicks of a mouse (Landow). Electronic texts are pushed as well as pulled. Businesses have learned to track and to query users, building individual profiles that are then used to assemble personalized pages and email messages. Socrates' objection that writing is unable to perceive the reader no longer holds. The virtual text is watching you. And it is watching you with virtual eyes. There is a growing interest in developing face interfaces that are capable of perceiving and talking. The technical requirements are enormous. Face interfaces must learn to make eye contact, follow speaking faces with their eyes, mirror emotion, lip synch, and periodically nod, raise eyebrows, and tilt the head (Massaro). Face interfaces are also learning to write faces, to map rhetorical forms to the character of their interlocutors in ways Socrates could not have imagined. Socrates did not teach his students to consider the rhetorical effects of their faces: the speaker's face was thought to be fixed, a true reflection of the inner soul. Virtual faces are not so constrained. Smart faces are being developed that are capable of rendering their own appearances from within a statistical model of the users' impressions of faces. The goal is for these virtual faces to learn to design, through their interactions with users, facial appearances that are calibrated to elicit very specific impressions and reactions in others (Brahnam). Some people will disapprove of virtual faces. Just as the media use faces to manipulate the viewer and perpetuate facial stereotypes, smart faces run the risk of doing the same. Some may also worry that virtual faces will be attributed more intelligence and social capacity then they actually possess. Do we really want our children growing up talking to virtual faces? Can they satisfy our need for human contact? What does it mean to converse with a virtual face? What kind of conversation is that? For the present at least, virtual faces are more like the orators and bards of old. They merely repeat the speeches of others. Their own speech is nearly incomprehensible, and their grammatical hiccups annoyingly disrupt the suspension of disbelief. On their own, without the human in the loop, no one believes them. Thus, the virtual face appears on the screen, silently nodding and smiling. Not yet a proper student of classical rhetoric, it is much like the virtual guide at artificial-life.com that recently greeted her visitors wearing the following placard: A virtual guide that greeted visitors at artificial-life.com. Access date: October 2003. Works Cited Brahnam, Sheryl. "Agents as Artists: Automating Socially Intelligent Embodiment," Proceedings of the First International Workshop on the Philosophy & Design of Socially Adept Technologies, in conjunction with CHI 2002. Minneapolis, MN, 2002: 15-18. Encyclopedia Britannica. "Physiognomy." LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia, 1911. Available: http://21.1911encyclopedia.org Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Seabury, 1944. Juengel, Scott Jordan. "About Face: Physiognomics, Revolution, and the Radical Act of Looking." Ph.D. dissertation. University of Iowa, 1997. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge, 1996. Landow, P. George. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: John Hopkins U P, 1997. Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy: For the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. Trans. Thomas Holcroft. London: printed by C. Whittingham for H. D. Symonds, 1804. Lichtenberg. Quoted in Frey, Siegfried. "Lavater, Lichtenberg, and the Suggestive Power of the Human Face." The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater. Ed. Ellis Shookman. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993. 64-103. Massaro, D. M. Perceiving Talking Faces: From Speech Perception to a Behavioral Principle. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1997. Plato. Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters. Trans. Walter Hamilton. London: Penguin, 1973. Tytler, Graeme. Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U P, 1982. Wechsler, Judith. A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris. London: U of Chicago P, 1982. Zebrowitz, Leslie A. Reading Faces: Window to the Soul? Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1998. Web Links http://vhost.oddcast.com/vhost_minisite/ http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/facedemo/ http://www.faceinterfaces.com http://www.artificial-life.com Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brahnam, Sheryl. "Type/Face" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/04-brahnam.php>. APA Style Brahnam, S. (2004, Jan 12). Type/Face. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/04-brahnam.php>

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Abstract:

Reality TV has emerged as a visible site for contemporary debates over modern fame. In fact, while issues of ‘taste’ and cultural value have long since shaped conceptions of celebrity (Turner, Bonner, Marshall 178), the issue of fame has played a central role in the negative cultural criticisms of Reality TV. Reality programming is often invoked as short-hand to illustrate the moral ills of contemporary fame – as if it has somehow swept away the certainties of ‘the past’ where discourses of public recognition, visibility and reward are concerned. In exploring Reality TV as a site of contemporary fame, I examine here some of these claims to ‘transformation’, not so much to defend the form’s participation in celebrity culture, as to indicate that there is more going on here than these (increasingly familiar) critiques appear to suggest. We can note, for example, their tendency to simplify the history of fame (which of course then makes it far easier to situate Reality TV as a conclusive break with the past). Equally, these criticisms seem of limited use when it comes to considering what is clearly a broader cultural fascination with fame in Reality TV. Furthermore, such critiques tend to operate at a very general level, often paying little attention to how fame is actually articulated in Reality TV, and the possibilities of differences between formats. The period 2000-1 saw a number of global reality game shows emerge in the UK and elsewhere and in general terms, critics often foregrounded fame as part of a broader negative response to the use of factual programming as primarily entertainment. The pervasive screen examples of ‘would-be presenters’ or ‘wannabe models’ were invoked as antithetical to perceptions of factual programming’s traditionally more ‘worthy’ (and implicitly public service) agenda (Holmes, “All”). But in the context of fame, it is more appropriate to suggest that a number of critical positions on Reality TV have emerged. For example, in what is probably the most prevalent perspective in circulation, contestants have persistently been constructed as exemplifying, and in many ways accelerating, a shift toward a fame culture in which an emphasis on ‘famous for being famous’ has regrettably triumphed over the concepts of ‘talent’ and ‘hard work’ (Holmes, “All”) (even though this perspective is clearly far from new) (see Marshall 9-11). Second, and related to the emphasis on ‘undeserved’ fame above, has been a position which foregrounds the prominence of falsity and manufacture. Here, Reality TV contestants are seen as falling victim to the manipulative powers of a ruthless fame-making machine. Often yoked to an emphasis on the ephemeral nature of their celebrity, here we encounter cautionary tales about the price of public visibility and the lure of immediate wealth, a penalty when, as one programme put it, ‘instant television fame is over in a dream’ (Tonight with Trevor McDonald, ITV1, 13 Feb. 2004). In contrast, the centrality of the ‘ordinary’ person turned celebrity has been read in terms of democratisation, both in relation to access to the televisual airwaves (a position championed by broadcasters and producers, for example) (Bazalgette) and to the dynamics of public/ media visibility itself (see Biressi and Nunn). These positions clearly intersect, their distinctions largely inflected by the perspective of the observer. For example, what is the producer’s claim to ‘democratisation’ is the critic’s class-based distaste for all these ‘awful ordinary’ people on television (see Bazalgette). While each of these positions is limited and simplistic, collectively they do speak to changing cultural conceptions of fame. Joshua’s Gamson’s (Claims, “Assembly”) work in particular has usefully suggested a picture in which certain positions on, or ‘explanations of fame’, have had a historical significance in vying for cultural visibility (although the contours of these narratives must be swiftly drawn here). With the growth of the arts and technologies and the establishment of celebrity as a mass phenomenon (see Gamson, “Assembly” 261), public visibility became increasingly detached from aristocratic standing, with discourses of democracy – as epitomised by the American context – increasingly coming to the fore. With the Hollywood studio system representing celebrity’s later period of industrialisation, and with a controlled production system producing celebrities for a mass audience, the earlier theme of ‘greatness’ became muted into questions of ‘star quality’ and ‘talent’ (Gamson, “Assembly” 264). While the focus may now have been predominantly on the culture of the ‘personality’, Gamson argues that the primary narrative was still one of ‘natural’ rise (“Assembly” 264). However, what is crucial here is that the increasing visibility of the publicity machine itself gradually began to pose a threat to this myth. Shaped by industrial and cultural shifts such as the decline of the Hollywood studio system and the emergence of television, as well as the increasing growth of celebrity journalism, the second half of the 20th century witnessed the increasing prevalence of the ‘manufacture’ discourse, where it henceforth becomes what Gamson describes as a ‘serious contender’ in explaining celebrity (Claims 44). This is not to suggest that the older ideological myths of fame are entirely obscured but rather that, perhaps as never before, the two positions precariously jostle for visibility in the same space. Indeed, Gamson suggests that by the late 20th century, it was possible to discern strategies intended to ‘cope’ with the increasing potential for disjuncture here. In particular, he points toward the twin devices of the ‘exposure’ of the process and the construction of an ironic and mocking perspective on celebrity culture, both of which can be seen to offer the audience a flattering position of power (Claims 276). In many ways, Reality TV would appear to be paradigmatic of these discursive shifts in fame. While I emphasise the specificity of particular formats below, Reality TV in the form of Big Brother, Pop Idol or celebrity-reality shows (such as I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!), have made a particular claim to ‘reveal’ or ‘expose’ the process of fame construction – whether in terms of following ‘ordinary’ hopefuls from the audition stages to their entrance into the media world, or by claiming to offer us an unprecedented ‘access’ to existing celebrities (‘stripping’ away the celebrity façade). (While of course what Richard Dyer termed ‘the negotiation of authenticity’, or the bid to think in terms of ‘really’, has long since structured the textual mediation of celebrity, it can conceivably be seen to have witnessed an accelerated shift in these contexts.) Equally, in terms of the decline of older myths of fame, these shows exhibit a self-conscious acknowledgement of the process of image production and construction, and the use of celebrity for commercial purposes. Lastly, in mediating the threat of the manufacture discourse, they evidently speak quite explicitly to an emphasis on the ‘power’ of the audience given that, through the now familiar use of interactivity (see Holmes, “But”), they construct the audience as operating as the ultimate creator of the celebrity. This already begins to indicate how, responding to and participating in particular discursive shifts in fame, Reality TV negotiates contemporary discourses on celebrity in complex and contradictory ways. Yet this would also need to acknowledge the differences and specificities of particular formats. For example, Big Brother may well be invoked as the ultimate example of the decline of older myths of fame. The programme does not suggest that a special ‘talent’, or ‘hard work’, are necessary for fame. Indeed, time in the house is clearly organised around an excess of leisured time in which, as the primary antidotes to boredom, eating, sleeping and sunbathing are repetitiously played out before the camera’s gaze. Contestants talk self-consciously about being ‘produced’ as celebrities while in the house (in terms of the programme and wider press coverage), with the understanding that each other’s behaviour and self-presentation is clearly directed to this end. The highly opportunistic and potentially calculating conception of fame is thus self-consciously displayed in the programme itself. In comparison, drawing on the older genre of the TV talent show, the Reality pop programmes such as Popstars (2001, UK), Pop Idol (2001-2, 2003, UK), Fame Academy (2002, 2003, UK) and most recently, The X-Factor (2004, UK) are more explicitly configured around the ‘search’ for a star. In this respect, they are specifically concerned with dramatising a power relationship between music industry and audience, a dialogue which is mapped onto the narrative of the star-making process. Certainly, on one level, they are self-consciously a product of the manufacture era of fame, produced for the scrutiny of a media-aware audience entirely conversant with the concept of ‘image’ construction. In tracking the contestants through auditions, training and re-styling, we witness the open production of the famous self – often trying on different ‘images’ week by week – and the ideological constraints (such as those pertaining to body image or physical appearance) under which this process must take place. The judges equally claim to be representative articulations of the ‘reality’ of the business by foregrounding the importance of image ‘packaging’ and the selling of the self. (As the notoriously ‘nasty’ judge Simon Cowell explains in one edition of Pop Idol, ‘Ten year old girls in Hull have to want to be you… They have to buy into the “image”. Do you see?’) (12 Sep. 2003). In short, they often boldly foreground the capitalistic nature of celebrity production. But at the same time, these programmes clearly draw upon, and arguably engage the audience by, much articulating older myths of fame. Given that, in Gamson’s terms, the pervasive nature of the manufacture discourse ultimately represents a threat to the commercial enterprise of celebrity, these shows provide exemplary evidence of the ways in which the two claims-to-fame stories continue to jostle for cultural legitimacy. Celebrating a mythic emphasis on a unique, authentic and gifted self, there is a persistent bid to lay claim to an indefinable sense of ‘specialness’. Indeed, the phrases ‘you’ve got “star quality” or the “X factor” have become an increasingly self-conscious convention in the shows themselves – as suggested by the naming of the most recent UK format, The X-Factor. In their emphasis on ‘ordinariness’, ‘lucky breaks’, ‘specialness’ and ‘hard work’, they are paradigmatic of the meritocratic ideology of the ‘access myth’ (Dyer, Stars). As Fame Academy’s singing coach Carrie Grant gravely tells the contestants: ‘The only place where “success” comes before work is in the dictionary’ (14 Dec. 2002). In this respect, without the irony or humour that has become such a pervasive aspect of contemporary celebrity coverage (see Gamson, Claims, “Assembly”), the programmes clearly also re-peddle traditional explanations of fame for contemporary cultural consumption (Holmes, “Reality”). Dismissals of these programmes in terms of their promotion of ‘manufactured pop’ ignore the fact that ‘authenticity’ is not really configured around the music itself. Pop music (and particularly TV pop) has historically been configured as ‘the most inauthentic music’ (Moore 220), whether in terms of industrial production, form/ sound, or artist expression and identity. But in many ways the programmes openly acknowledge the derivative and packaged nature of ‘pop’. The aspirant pop stars often sing cover versions on the shows (although they are valued and praised for inserting their ‘individual’ style), and in Pop Idol we witness each of the three finalists record the winning song in the studio prior to the result of the (live) television vote. In this respect, evoking Adorno’s famous critique of popular music’s standardised form, their voice is a cog in a wider machine – a component part which can be substituted and exchanged. But Reality TV’s serial form, aesthetic style and pursuit of ‘the real’, asks us to buy into the authenticity of the self, that the participants are – despite the image packaging – somehow the same person that auditioned at the start. There is often equally the suggestion that Reality TV may bring out the ‘real’, ‘special’ self that was partly inside all along: As one contestant in Fame Academy is chastised after a live performance: ‘We’ve had you showing that you can be Westlife or Bryan Adams, but have we had Barry yet? Where, Barry, is the “Barryness” of Barry?’ (19 Sep. 2003). But in broad terms, with factory workers, waitresses or train drivers turning into superstars, contestants are often imagined as being more ‘authentic’ because of their class background, something which has historically been conceived to signify ‘ordinariness’ within narratives of fame. This is again paradigmatic of the older, traditional discourse of the success myth (and its close companion, the American Dream) (Dyer, Stars). In the Reality format, this is also factored though the sense that we have ‘known’ them in the moment of authentic ‘pre-fame’, when, in short, they were ‘just like us’. In the context of his wider argument that stars work to articulate ideas of personhood or selfhood (Dyer, Stars), one of Richard Dyer’s key interventions was to suggest that stars function to work through discourses of individualism (see also Marshall). Working from a broadly Marxist perspective, he explained how the perpetual attempt to negotiate authenticity in the star image worked to promote a particular concept of personhood on which capitalist society depends. Dyer conceptualised this as ‘a separable, coherent quality, located “inside” consciousness and variously termed “the self”, “the soul”, “the subject”…’ (9). Although, in the context of contemporary celebrity culture and the discourses of postmodernism, Dyer’s model of the self has been critiqued and challenged (see Lovell, King), it by no means seems redundant here. We are absolutely encouraged to seek out, recognise, and believe in, the ‘inner’ self in Reality TV, while the highly performative and mediated context of the form makes this quest more paradoxical than ever. In fact, while programmes such as Big Brother and Pop Idol may display significantly different discourses on, or explanations of fame, this ideology of selfhood permeates much of Reality TV. While in Big Brother there is much self-reflexive and dizzying discussion of ‘who is being their real selves? Who is simply playing up for the camera?’, we are asked to judge the contestants (and they are asked to judge each other), precisely by this criteria of ‘authenticity’. We only need note that – from Big Brother, the pop programmes to the celebrity-reality shows – winners are often chosen and applauded because they are seen to have been the most ‘true’ to themselves. Again, despite the self-reflexive and performative context of Reality TV, this suggests highly conservative ideologies of selfhood and individualism. As Dyer reminds us, we have historically valued stars who appear to ‘bear witness to the continuousness of their own selves’, given that ‘sincerity and authenticity are two qualities greatly prized in stars’ (11). While it is not my intention to make assumptions about audience reading strategies here, it is worth noting that existing audience research (Hill, Jones) into Reality TV has emphasised how viewers indeed obtain satisfaction from the search for ‘the real’ in Reality TV, and from actively negotiating the tensions between construction, performance and authenticity. Annette Hill describes how the ‘game’ is ‘to find the “truth” in the spectacle/performance environment’ (337), and as this quote implies, this is far from suggesting that audiences have given up on the idea of ‘the real’ in Reality TV (Hill, Jones). The primary site on which this is played out is the representation of the self – an arena which stardom and celebrity has historically placed centre stage (Dyer, Marshall). As this suggests, then, the two fields have much to discuss. While I have only touched briefly on the detail of the formats here, this discussion emphasises how Reality TV demands closer consideration in the context of claims suggesting its ‘transformation’ of celebrity. Its position with a longer history of fame, the specificities of particular formats, and the ideological parameters in which they function, all question any simple or hom*ogenous interpretation of its impact on celebrity culture. References Adorno, Theodor. “On Popular Music.” 1941. On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. Eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. London: Routledge, 1990. 22-38. Bazalgette, Peter. “Big Brother and Beyond.” Television (Oct. 2001): 20-3. Biressi, Anita, and Heather Nunn “The Especially Remarkable: Celebrity and Social Mobility in Reality TV.” Mediactive 2 (2004): 44-58. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1979 (reprinted 1998). Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: BFI, 1986. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Gamson, Joshua. “The Assembly Line of Greatness: Celebrity in Twentieth-Century America.” Popular Culture: Production and Consumption. Eds. C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 259-82. Hill, Annette “Big Brother: The Real Audience.” Television and New Media 3.3 (2002): 323-41. Holmes, Su. “’All You’ve Got to Worry about Is Having a Cup of Tea and Doing a Bit of Sunbathing…’: Approaching Celebrity in Big Brother.” Understanding Reality TV. Eds. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn. London: Routledge, 2004. 111-35. Holmes, Su. “But This Time You Choose!: Approaching the Interactive Audience of Reality TV.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.2 (2004): 213-31. Holmes, Su. “Reality Goes Pop!: Reality TV, Popular Music and Narratives of Stardom in Pop Idol.” Television and New Media 5.2 (2004): 147-72. Jones, Janet. “Show Your Real Face: A Fan Study of the UK Big Brother Transmissions (2000, 2001, 2002).” New Media and Society 5.3 (2003): 400-21. King, Barry. “Embodying an Elastic Self: The Parametrics of Contemporary Stardom.” Contemporary Hollywood Stardom. Eds. Thomas Austin and Martin Barker. London: Arnold, 2003. 29-44. Lovell, Alan. “I Went in Search of Deborah Kerr, Jodie Foster and Julianne Moore But Got Waylaid…” Contemporary Hollywood Stardom. Eds. Thomas Austin and Martin Barker. London: Arnold, 2003. 259-70. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Holmes, Susan. "'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?': Conceptualising Fame in Reality TV." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/07-holmes.php>. APA Style Holmes, S. (Nov. 2004) "'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?': Conceptualising Fame in Reality TV," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/07-holmes.php>.

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Abstract:

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944). It is worth revisiting the old boy’s grumpiness, because the rhetoric he so niftily skewers continues in our own time. Facebook features “Peace on Facebook” and even claims that it can “decrease world conflict” through inter-cultural communication. Twitter has announced itself as “a triumph of humanity” (“A Cyber-House” 61). Queue George. In between Orwell and latter-day hoody cybertarians, a whole host of excitable public intellectuals announced the impending end of materiality through emergent media forms. Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Daniel Bell, Ithiel de Sola Pool, George Gilder, Alvin Toffler—the list of 1960s futurists goes on and on. And this wasn’t just a matter of punditry: the OECD decreed the coming of the “information society” in 1975 and the European Union (EU) followed suit in 1979, while IBM merrily declared an “information age” in 1977. Bell theorized this technological utopia as post-ideological, because class would cease to matter (Mattelart). Polluting industries seemingly no longer represented the dynamic core of industrial capitalism; instead, market dynamism radiated from a networked, intellectual core of creative and informational activities. The new information and knowledge-based economies would rescue First World hegemony from an “insurgent world” that lurked within as well as beyond itself (Schiller). Orwell’s others and the Cold-War futurists propagated one of the most destructive myths shaping both public debate and scholarly studies of the media, culture, and communication. They convinced generations of analysts, activists, and arrivistes that the promises and problems of the media could be understood via metaphors of the environment, and that the media were weightless and virtual. The famous medium they wished us to see as the message —a substance as vital to our wellbeing as air, water, and soil—turned out to be no such thing. Today’s cybertarians inherit their anti-Marxist, anti-materialist positions, as a casual glance at any new media journal, culture-industry magazine, or bourgeois press outlet discloses. The media are undoubtedly important instruments of social cohesion and fragmentation, political power and dissent, democracy and demagoguery, and other fraught extensions of human consciousness. But talk of media systems as equivalent to physical ecosystems—fashionable among marketers and media scholars alike—is predicated on the notion that they are environmentally benign technologies. This has never been true, from the beginnings of print to today’s cloud-covered computing. Our new book Greening the Media focuses on the environmental impact of the media—the myriad ways that media technology consumes, despoils, and wastes natural resources. We introduce ideas, stories, and facts that have been marginal or absent from popular, academic, and professional histories of media technology. Throughout, ecological issues have been at the core of our work and we immodestly think the same should apply to media communications, and cultural studies more generally. We recognize that those fields have contributed valuable research and teaching that address environmental questions. For instance, there is an abundant literature on representations of the environment in cinema, how to communicate environmental messages successfully, and press coverage of climate change. That’s not enough. You may already know that media technologies contain toxic substances. You may have signed an on-line petition protesting the hazardous and oppressive conditions under which workers assemble cell phones and computers. But you may be startled, as we were, by the scale and pervasiveness of these environmental risks. They are present in and around every site where electronic and electric devices are manufactured, used, and thrown away, poisoning humans, animals, vegetation, soil, air and water. We are using the term “media” as a portmanteau word to cover a multitude of cultural and communications machines and processes—print, film, radio, television, information and communications technologies (ICT), and consumer electronics (CE). This is not only for analytical convenience, but because there is increasing overlap between the sectors. CE connect to ICT and vice versa; televisions resemble computers; books are read on telephones; newspapers are written through clouds; and so on. Cultural forms and gadgets that were once separate are now linked. The currently fashionable notion of convergence doesn’t quite capture the vastness of this integration, which includes any object with a circuit board, scores of accessories that plug into it, and a global nexus of labor and environmental inputs and effects that produce and flow from it. In 2007, a combination of ICT/CE and media production accounted for between 2 and 3 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted around the world (“Gartner Estimates,”; International Telecommunication Union; Malmodin et al.). Between twenty and fifty million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) are generated annually, much of it via discarded cell phones and computers, which affluent populations throw out regularly in order to buy replacements. (Presumably this fits the narcissism of small differences that distinguishes them from their own past.) E-waste is historically produced in the Global North—Australasia, Western Europe, Japan, and the US—and dumped in the Global South—Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southern and Southeast Asia, and China. It takes the form of a thousand different, often deadly, materials for each electrical and electronic gadget. This trend is changing as India and China generate their own media detritus (Robinson; Herat). Enclosed hard drives, backlit screens, cathode ray tubes, wiring, capacitors, and heavy metals pose few risks while these materials remain encased. But once discarded and dismantled, ICT/CE have the potential to expose workers and ecosystems to a morass of toxic components. Theoretically, “outmoded” parts could be reused or swapped for newer parts to refurbish devices. But items that are defined as waste undergo further destruction in order to collect remaining parts and valuable metals, such as gold, silver, copper, and rare-earth elements. This process causes serious health risks to bones, brains, stomachs, lungs, and other vital organs, in addition to birth defects and disrupted biological development in children. Medical catastrophes can result from lead, cadmium, mercury, other heavy metals, poisonous fumes emitted in search of precious metals, and such carcinogenic compounds as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, polyvinyl chloride, and flame retardants (Maxwell and Miller 13). The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency estimates that by 2007 US residents owned approximately three billion electronic devices, with an annual turnover rate of 400 million units, and well over half such purchases made by women. Overall CE ownership varied with age—adults under 45 typically boasted four gadgets; those over 65 made do with one. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) says US$145 billion was expended in the sector in 2006 in the US alone, up 13% on the previous year. The CEA refers joyously to a “consumer love affair with technology continuing at a healthy clip.” In the midst of a recession, 2009 saw $165 billion in sales, and households owned between fifteen and twenty-four gadgets on average. By 2010, US$233 billion was spent on electronic products, three-quarters of the population owned a computer, nearly half of all US adults owned an MP3 player, and 85% had a cell phone. By all measures, the amount of ICT/CE on the planet is staggering. As investigative science journalist, Elizabeth Grossman put it: “no industry pushes products into the global market on the scale that high-tech electronics does” (Maxwell and Miller 2). In 2007, “of the 2.25 million tons of TVs, cell phones and computer products ready for end-of-life management, 18% (414,000 tons) was collected for recycling and 82% (1.84 million tons) was disposed of, primarily in landfill” (Environmental Protection Agency 1). Twenty million computers fell obsolete across the US in 1998, and the rate was 130,000 a day by 2005. It has been estimated that the five hundred million personal computers discarded in the US between 1997 and 2007 contained 6.32 billion pounds of plastics, 1.58 billion pounds of lead, three million pounds of cadmium, 1.9 million pounds of chromium, and 632000 pounds of mercury (Environmental Protection Agency; Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 6). The European Union is expected to generate upwards of twelve million tons annually by 2020 (Commission of the European Communities 17). While refrigerators and dangerous refrigerants account for the bulk of EU e-waste, about 44% of the most toxic e-waste measured in 2005 came from medium-to-small ICT/CE: computer monitors, TVs, printers, ink cartridges, telecommunications equipment, toys, tools, and anything with a circuit board (Commission of the European Communities 31-34). Understanding the enormity of the environmental problems caused by making, using, and disposing of media technologies should arrest our enthusiasm for them. But intellectual correctives to the “love affair” with technology, or technophilia, have come and gone without establishing much of a foothold against the breathtaking flood of gadgets and the propaganda that proclaims their awe-inspiring capabilities.[i] There is a peculiar enchantment with the seeming magic of wireless communication, touch-screen phones and tablets, flat-screen high-definition televisions, 3-D IMAX cinema, mobile computing, and so on—a totemic, quasi-sacred power that the historian of technology David Nye has named the technological sublime (Nye Technological Sublime 297).[ii] We demonstrate in our book why there is no place for the technological sublime in projects to green the media. But first we should explain why such symbolic power does not accrue to more mundane technologies; after all, for the time-strapped cook, a pressure cooker does truly magical things. Three important qualities endow ICT/CE with unique symbolic potency—virtuality, volume, and novelty. The technological sublime of media technology is reinforced by the “virtual nature of much of the industry’s content,” which “tends to obscure their responsibility for a vast proliferation of hardware, all with high levels of built-in obsolescence and decreasing levels of efficiency” (Boyce and Lewis 5). Planned obsolescence entered the lexicon as a new “ethics” for electrical engineering in the 1920s and ’30s, when marketers, eager to “habituate people to buying new products,” called for designs to become quickly obsolete “in efficiency, economy, style, or taste” (Grossman 7-8).[iii] This defines the short lifespan deliberately constructed for computer systems (drives, interfaces, operating systems, batteries, etc.) by making tiny improvements incompatible with existing hardware (Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 33-50; Boyce and Lewis). With planned obsolescence leading to “dizzying new heights” of product replacement (Rogers 202), there is an overstated sense of the novelty and preeminence of “new” media—a “cult of the present” is particularly dazzled by the spread of electronic gadgets through globalization (Mattelart and Constantinou 22). References to the symbolic power of media technology can be found in hymnals across the internet and the halls of academe: technologies change us, the media will solve social problems or create new ones, ICTs transform work, monopoly ownership no longer matters, journalism is dead, social networking enables social revolution, and the media deliver a cleaner, post-industrial, capitalism. Here is a typical example from the twilight zone of the technological sublime (actually, the OECD): A major feature of the knowledge-based economy is the impact that ICTs have had on industrial structure, with a rapid growth of services and a relative decline of manufacturing. Services are typically less energy intensive and less polluting, so among those countries with a high and increasing share of services, we often see a declining energy intensity of production … with the emergence of the Knowledge Economy ending the old linear relationship between output and energy use (i.e. partially de-coupling growth and energy use) (Houghton 1) This statement mixes half-truths and nonsense. In reality, old-time, toxic manufacturing has moved to the Global South, where it is ascendant; pollution levels are rising worldwide; and energy consumption is accelerating in residential and institutional sectors, due almost entirely to ICT/CE usage, despite advances in energy conservation technology (a neat instance of the age-old Jevons Paradox). In our book we show how these are all outcomes of growth in ICT/CE, the foundation of the so-called knowledge-based economy. ICT/CE are misleadingly presented as having little or no material ecological impact. In the realm of everyday life, the sublime experience of electronic machinery conceals the physical work and material resources that go into them, while the technological sublime makes the idea that more-is-better palatable, axiomatic; even sexy. In this sense, the technological sublime relates to what Marx called “the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour” once they are in the hands of the consumer, who lusts after them as if they were “independent beings” (77). There is a direct but unseen relationship between technology’s symbolic power and the scale of its environmental impact, which the economist Juliet Schor refers to as a “materiality paradox” —the greater the frenzy to buy goods for their transcendent or nonmaterial cultural meaning, the greater the use of material resources (40-41). We wrote Greening the Media knowing that a study of the media’s effect on the environment must work especially hard to break the enchantment that inflames popular and elite passions for media technologies. We understand that the mere mention of the political-economic arrangements that make shiny gadgets possible, or the environmental consequences of their appearance and disappearance, is bad medicine. It’s an unwelcome buzz kill—not a cool way to converse about cool stuff. But we didn’t write the book expecting to win many allies among high-tech enthusiasts and ICT/CE industry leaders. We do not dispute the importance of information and communication media in our lives and modern social systems. We are media people by profession and personal choice, and deeply immersed in the study and use of emerging media technologies. But we think it’s time for a balanced assessment with less hype and more practical understanding of the relationship of media technologies to the biosphere they inhabit. Media consumers, designers, producers, activists, researchers, and policy makers must find new and effective ways to move ICT/CE production and consumption toward ecologically sound practices. In the course of this project, we found in casual conversation, lecture halls, classroom discussions, and correspondence, consistent and increasing concern with the environmental impact of media technology, especially the deleterious effects of e-waste toxins on workers, air, water, and soil. We have learned that the grip of the technological sublime is not ironclad. Its instability provides a point of departure for investigating and criticizing the relationship between the media and the environment. The media are, and have been for a long time, intimate environmental participants. Media technologies are yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s news, but rarely in the way they should be. The prevailing myth is that the printing press, telegraph, phonograph, photograph, cinema, telephone, wireless radio, television, and internet changed the world without changing the Earth. In reality, each technology has emerged by despoiling ecosystems and exposing workers to harmful environments, a truth obscured by symbolic power and the power of moguls to set the terms by which such technologies are designed and deployed. Those who benefit from ideas of growth, progress, and convergence, who profit from high-tech innovation, monopoly, and state collusion—the military-industrial-entertainment-academic complex and multinational commandants of labor—have for too long ripped off the Earth and workers. As the current celebration of media technology inevitably winds down, perhaps it will become easier to comprehend that digital wonders come at the expense of employees and ecosystems. This will return us to Max Weber’s insistence that we understand technology in a mundane way as a “mode of processing material goods” (27). Further to understanding that ordinariness, we can turn to the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, who noted three decades ago “the failures of technocratic dreams [:] that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Such fantasies derived from the very banality of these introductions—that every time they took place, one more “technical apparatus” was simply “being made at home with the rest of our world’ (548). Media studies can join in this repetitive banality. Or it can withdraw the welcome mat for media technologies that despoil the Earth and wreck the lives of those who make them. In our view, it’s time to green the media by greening media studies. References “A Cyber-House Divided.” Economist 4 Sep. 2010: 61-62. “Gartner Estimates ICT Industry Accounts for 2 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions.” Gartner press release. 6 April 2007. ‹http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867›. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia. Seattle: Basel Action Network, 25 Feb. 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “Central Park.” Trans. Lloyd Spencer with Mark Harrington. New German Critique 34 (1985): 32-58. Biagioli, Mario. “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 816-33. Boyce, Tammy and Justin Lewis, eds. Climate Change and the Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Commission of the European Communities. “Impact Assessment.” Commission Staff Working Paper accompanying the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) (recast). COM (2008) 810 Final. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 3 Dec. 2008. Environmental Protection Agency. Management of Electronic Waste in the United States. Washington, DC: EPA, 2007 Environmental Protection Agency. Statistics on the Management of Used and End-of-Life Electronics. Washington, DC: EPA, 2008 Grossman, Elizabeth. Tackling High-Tech Trash: The E-Waste Explosion & What We Can Do about It. New York: Demos, 2008. ‹http://www.demos.org/pubs/e-waste_FINAL.pdf› Herat, Sunil. “Review: Sustainable Management of Electronic Waste (e-Waste).” Clean 35.4 (2007): 305-10. Houghton, J. “ICT and the Environment in Developing Countries: Opportunities and Developments.” Paper prepared for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2009. International Telecommunication Union. ICTs for Environment: Guidelines for Developing Countries, with a Focus on Climate Change. Geneva: ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division Policies and Strategies Department ITU Telecommunication Development Sector, 2008. Malmodin, Jens, Åsa Moberg, Dag Lundén, Göran Finnveden, and Nina Lövehagen. “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Operational Electricity Use in the ICT and Entertainment & Media Sectors.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 14.5 (2010): 770-90. Marx, Karl. Capital: Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, 3rd ed. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1987. Mattelart, Armand and Costas M. Constantinou. “Communications/Excommunications: An Interview with Armand Mattelart.” Trans. Amandine Bled, Jacques Guot, and Costas Constantinou. Review of International Studies 34.1 (2008): 21-42. Mattelart, Armand. “Cómo nació el mito de Internet.” Trans. Yanina Guthman. El mito internet. Ed. Victor Hugo de la Fuente. Santiago: Editorial aún creemos en los sueños, 2002. 25-32. Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Nye, David E. Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2007. Orwell, George. “As I Please.” Tribune. 12 May 1944. Richtel, Matt. “Consumers Hold on to Products Longer.” New York Times: B1, 26 Feb. 2011. Robinson, Brett H. “E-Waste: An Assessment of Global Production and Environmental Impacts.” Science of the Total Environment 408.2 (2009): 183-91. Rogers, Heather. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: New Press, 2005. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Vols. I and II. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Malden: Blackwell, 1995. Schiller, Herbert I. Information and the Crisis Economy. Norwood: Ablex Publishing, 1984. Schor, Juliet B. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin, 2010. Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials. Los Angeles: Academy Imprints, 2007. Weber, Max. “Remarks on Technology and Culture.” Trans. Beatrix Zumsteg and Thomas M. Kemple. Ed. Thomas M. Kemple. Theory, Culture [i] The global recession that began in 2007 has been the main reason for some declines in Global North energy consumption, slower turnover in gadget upgrades, and longer periods of consumer maintenance of electronic goods (Richtel). [ii] The emergence of the technological sublime has been attributed to the Western triumphs in the post-Second World War period, when technological power supposedly supplanted the power of nature to inspire fear and astonishment (Nye Technology Matters 28). Historian Mario Biagioli explains how the sublime permeates everyday life through technoscience: "If around 1950 the popular imaginary placed science close to the military and away from the home, today’s technoscience frames our everyday life at all levels, down to our notion of the self" (818). [iii] This compulsory repetition is seemingly undertaken each time as a novelty, governed by what German cultural critic Walter Benjamin called, in his awkward but occasionally illuminating prose, "the ever-always-the-same" of "mass-production" cloaked in "a hitherto unheard-of significance" (48).

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Introduction A snapshot, not unlike countless photographs likely to be found in any number of family albums, shows two figures sitting on a park bench: an elderly and amiable looking man grins beneath the rim of a golf cap; a young boy of twelve smiles wide for the camera — a rather banal scene, captured on film. And yet, this seemingly innocent and unexceptional photograph was the site of a remarkable and wide ranging discourse — encompassing American conservatism, celebrity politics, and the end of the Cold War — as the image circulated around the globe during the weeklong state funeral of Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United States. Taken in 1997 by the young boy’s grandfather, Ukrainian immigrant Yakov Ravin, during a chance encounter with the former president, the snapshot is believed to be the last public photograph of Ronald Reagan. Published on the occasion of the president’s death, the photograph made “instant celebrities” of the boy, now a twenty-year-old college student, Rostik Denenburg and his grand dad. Throughout the week of Reagan’s funeral, the two joined a chorus of dignitaries, politicians, pundits, and “ordinary” Americans praising Ronald Reagan: “The Great Communicator,” the man who defeated Communism, the popular president who restored America’s confidence, strength, and prosperity. Yes, it was mourning in America again. And the whole world was watching. Not since Princess Diana’s sudden (and unexpected) death, have we witnessed an electronic hagiography of such global proportions. Unlike Diana’s funeral, however, Reagan’s farewell played out in distinctly partisan terms. As James Ridgeway (2004) noted, the Reagan state funeral was “not only face-saving for the current administration, but also perhaps a mask for the American military debacle in Iraq. Not to mention a gesture of America’s might in the ‘war on terror.’” With non-stop media coverage, the weeklong ceremonies provided a sorely needed shot in the arm to the Bush re-election campaign. Still, whilst the funeral proceedings and the attendant media coverage were undeniably excessive in their deification of the former president, the historical white wash was not nearly so vulgar as the antiseptic send off Richard Nixon received back in 1994. That is to say, the piety of the Nixon funeral was at once startling and galling to many who reviled the man (Lapham). By contrast, given Ronald Reagan’s disarming public persona, his uniquely cordial relationship with the national press corps, and most notably, his handler’s mastery of media management techniques, the Reagan idolatry was neither surprising nor unexpected. In this brief essay, I want to consider Reagan’s funeral, and his legacy, in relation to what cultural critics, referring to the production of celebrity, have described as “fame games” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall). Specifically, I draw on the concept of “flashpoints” — moments of media excess surrounding a particular personage — in consideration of the Reagan funeral. Throughout, I demonstrate how Reagan’s death and the attendant media coverage epitomize this distinctive feature of contemporary culture. Furthermore, I observe Reagan’s innovative approaches to electoral politics in the age of television. Here, I suggest that Reagan’s appropriation of the strategies and techniques associated with advertising, marketing and public relations were decisive, not merely in terms of his electoral success, but also in securing his lasting fame. I conclude with some thoughts on the implications of Reagan’s legacy on historical memory, contemporary politics, and what neoconservatives, the heirs of the Reagan Revolution, gleefully describe as the New American Century. The Magic Hour On the morning of 12 June 2004, the last day of the state funeral, world leaders eulogized Reagan, the statesmen, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Among the A-List political stars invited to speak were Margaret Thatcher, former president George H. W. Bush and, to borrow Arundhati Roi’s useful phrase, “Bush the Lesser.” Reagan’s one-time Cold War adversary, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as former Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were also on hand, but did not have speaking parts. Former Reagan administration officials, Supreme Court justices, and congressional representatives from both sides of the aisle rounded out a guest list that read like a who’s who of the American political class. All told, Reagan’s weeklong sendoff was a state funeral at its most elaborate. It had it all—the flag draped coffin, the grieving widow, the riderless horse, and the procession of mourners winding their way through the Rotunda of the US Capitol. In this last regard, Reagan joined an elite group of seven presidents, including four who died by assassination — Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy — to be honored by having his remains lie in state in the Rotunda. But just as the deceased president was product of the studio system, so too, the script for the Gipper’s swan song come straight out of Hollywood. Later that day, the Reagan entourage made one last transcontinental flight back to the presidential library in Simi Valley, California for a private funeral service at sunset. In Hollywood parlance, the “magic hour” refers to the quality of light at dusk. It is an ideal, but ephemeral time favored by cinematographers, when the sunlight takes on a golden glow lending grandeur, nostalgia, and oftentimes, a sense of closure to a scene. This was Ronald Reagan’s final moment in the sun: a fitting end for an actor of the silver screen, as well as for the president who mastered televisual politics. In a culture so thoroughly saturated with the image, even the death of a minor celebrity is an occasion to replay film clips, interviews, paparazzi photos and the like. Moreover, these “flashpoints” grow in intensity and frequency as promotional culture, technological innovation, and the proliferation of new media outlets shape contemporary media culture. They are both cause and consequence of these moments of media excess. And, as Turner, Bonner and Marshall observe, “That is their point. It is their disproportionate nature that makes them so important: the scale of their visibility, their overwhelmingly excessive demonstration of the power of the relationship between mass-mediated celebrities and the consumers of popular culture” (3-4). B-Movie actor, corporate spokesman, state governor and, finally, US president, Ronald Reagan left an extraordinary photographic record. Small wonder, then, that Reagan’s death was a “flashpoint” of the highest order: an orgy of images, a media spectacle waiting to happen. After all, Reagan appeared in over 50 films during his career in Hollywood. Publicity stills and clips from Reagan’s film career, including Knute Rockne, All American, the biopic that earned Reagan his nickname “the Gipper”, King’s Row, and Bedtime for Bonzo provided a surreal, yet welcome respite from television’s obsessive (some might say morbidly so) live coverage of Reagan’s remains making their way across country. Likewise, archival footage of Reagan’s political career — most notably, images of the 1981 assassination attempt; his quip “not to make age an issue” during the 1984 presidential debate; and his 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate demanding that Soviet President Gorbachev, “tear down this wall” — provided the raw materials for press coverage that thoroughly dominated the global mediascape. None of which is to suggest, however, that the sheer volume of Reagan’s photographic record is sufficient to account for the endless replay and reinterpretation of Reagan’s life story. If we are to fully comprehend Reagan’s fame, we must acknowledge his seminal engagement with promotional culture, “a professional articulation between the news and entertainment media and the sources of publicity and promotion” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall 5) in advancing an extraordinary political career. Hitting His Mark In a televised address supporting Barry Goldwater’s nomination for the presidency delivered at the 1964 Republican Convention, Ronald Reagan firmly established his conservative credentials and, in so doing, launched one of the most remarkable and influential careers in American politics. Political scientist Gerard J. De Groot makes a compelling case that the strategy Reagan and his handlers developed in the 1966 California gubernatorial campaign would eventually win him the presidency. The centerpiece of this strategy was to depict the former actor as a political outsider. Crafting a persona he described as “citizen politician,” Reagan’s great appeal and enormous success lie in his uncanny ability to project an image founded on traditional American values of hard work, common sense and self-determination. Over the course of his political career, Reagan’s studied optimism and “no-nonsense” approach to public policy would resonate with an electorate weary of career politicians. Charming, persuasive, and seemingly “authentic,” Reagan ran gubernatorial and subsequent presidential campaigns that were distinctive in that they employed sophisticated public relations and marketing techniques heretofore unknown in the realm of electoral politics. The 1966 Reagan gubernatorial campaign took the then unprecedented step of employing an advertising firm, Los Angeles-based Spencer-Roberts, in shaping the candidate’s image. Leveraging their candidate’s ease before the camera, the Reagan team crafted a campaign founded upon a sophisticated grasp of the television industry, TV news routines, and the medium’s growing importance to electoral politics. For instance, in the days before the 1966 Republican primary, the Reagan team produced a five-minute film using images culled from his campaign appearances. Unlike his opponent, whose television spots were long-winded, amateurish and poorly scheduled pieces that interrupted popular programs, like Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Reagan’s short film aired in the early evening, between program segments (De Groot). Thus, while his opponent’s television spot alienated viewers, the Reagan team demonstrated a formidable appreciation not only for televisual style, but also, crucially, a sophisticated understanding of the nuances of television scheduling, audience preferences and viewing habits. Over the course of his political career, Reagan refined his media driven, media directed campaign strategy. An analysis of his 1980 presidential campaign reveals three dimensions of Reagan’s increasingly sophisticated media management strategy (Covington et al.). First, the Reagan campaign carefully controlled their candidate’s accessibility to the press. Reagan’s penchant for potentially damaging off-the-cuff remarks and factual errors led his advisors to limit journalists’ interactions with the candidate. Second, the character of Reagan’s public appearances, including photo opportunities and especially press conferences, grew more formal. Reagan’s interactions with the press corps were highly structured affairs designed to control which reporters were permitted to ask questions and to help the candidate anticipate questions and prepare responses in advance. Finally, the Reagan campaign sought to keep the candidate “on message.” That is to say, press releases, photo opportunities and campaign appearances focused on a single, consistent message. This approach, known as the Issue of the Day (IOD) media management strategy proved indispensable to advancing the administration’s goals and achieving its objectives. Not only was the IOD strategy remarkably effective in influencing press coverage of the Reagan White House, this coverage promoted an overwhelmingly positive image of the president. As the weeklong funeral amply demonstrated, Reagan was, and remains, one of the most popular presidents in modern American history. Reagan’s popular (and populist) appeal is instructive inasmuch as it illuminates the crucial distinction between “celebrity and its premodern antecedent, fame” observed by historian Charles L. Ponce de Leone (13). Whereas fame was traditionally bestowed upon those whose heroism and extraordinary achievements distinguished them from common people, celebrity is a defining feature of modernity, inasmuch as celebrity is “a direct outgrowth of developments that most of us regard as progressive: the spread of the market economy and the rise of democratic, individualistic values” (Ponce de Leone 14). On one hand, then, Reagan’s celebrity reflects his individualism, his resolute faith in the primacy of the market, and his defense of “traditional” (i.e. democratic) American values. On the other hand, by emphasizing his heroic, almost supernatural achievements, most notably his vanquishing of the “Evil Empire,” the Reagan mythology serves to lift him “far above the common rung of humanity” raising him to “the realm of the divine” (Ponce de Leone 14). Indeed, prior to his death, the Reagan faithful successfully lobbied Congress to create secular shrines to the standard bearer of American conservatism. For instance, in 1998, President Clinton signed a bill that officially rechristened one of the US capitol’s airports to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. More recently, conservatives working under the aegis of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project have called for the creation of even more visible totems to the Reagan Revolution, including replacing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s profile on the dime with Reagan’s image and, more dramatically, inscribing Reagan in stone, alongside Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt at Mount Rushmore (Gordon). Therefore, Reagan’s enduring fame rests not only on the considerable symbolic capital associated with his visual record, but also, increasingly, upon material manifestations of American political culture. The High Stakes of Media Politics What are we to make of Reagan’s fame and its implications for America? To begin with, we must acknowledge Reagan’s enduring influence on modern electoral politics. Clearly, Reagan’s “citizen politician” was a media construct — the masterful orchestration of ideological content across the institutional structures of news, public relations and marketing. While some may suggest that Reagan’s success was an anomaly, a historical aberration, a host of politicians, and not a few celebrities — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger among them — emulate Reagan’s style and employ the media management strategies he pioneered. Furthermore, we need to recognize that the Reagan mythology that is so thoroughly bound up in his approach to media/politics does more to obscure, rather than illuminate the historical record. For instance, in her (video taped) remarks at the funeral service, Margaret Thatcher made the extraordinary claim — a central tenet of the Reagan Revolution — that Ronnie won the cold war “without firing a shot.” Such claims went unchallenged, at least in the establishment press, despite Reagan’s well-documented penchant for waging costly and protracted proxy wars in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America. Similarly, the Reagan hagiography failed to acknowledge the decisive role Gorbachev and his policies of “reform” and “openness” — Perestroika and Glasnost — played in the ending of the Cold War. Indeed, Reagan’s media managed populism flies in the face of what radical historian Howard Zinn might describe as a “people’s history” of the 1980s. That is to say, a broad cross-section of America — labor, racial and ethnic minorities, environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists among them — rallied in vehement opposition to Reagan’s foreign and domestic policies. And yet, throughout the weeklong funeral, the divisiveness of the Reagan era went largely unnoted. In the Reagan mythology, then, popular demonstrations against an unprecedented military build up, the administration’s failure to acknowledge, let alone intervene in the AIDS epidemic, and the growing disparity between rich and poor that marked his tenure in office were, to borrow a phrase, relegated to the dustbin of history. In light of the upcoming US presidential election, we ought to weigh how Reagan’s celebrity squares with the historical record; and, equally important, how his legacy both shapes and reflects the realities we confront today. Whether we consider economic and tax policy, social services, electoral politics, international relations or the domestic culture wars, Reagan’s policies and practices continue to determine the state of the union and inform the content and character of American political discourse. Increasingly, American electoral politics turns on the pithy soundbite, the carefully orchestrated pseudo-event, and a campaign team’s unwavering ability to stay on message. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ronald Reagan’s unmistakable influence upon the current (and illegitimate) occupant of the White House. References Covington, Cary R., Kroeger, K., Richardson, G., and J. David Woodward. “Shaping a Candidate’s Image in the Press: Ronald Reagan and the 1980 Presidential Election.” Political Research Quarterly 46.4 (1993): 783-98. De Groot, Gerard J. “‘A Goddamed Electable Person’: The 1966 California Gubernatorial Campaign of Ronald Reagan.” History 82.267 (1997): 429-48. Gordon, Colin. “Replace FDR on the Dime with Reagan?” History News Network 15 December, 2003. http://hnn.us/articles/1853.html>. Lapham, Lewis H. “Morte de Nixon – Death of Richard Nixon – Editorial.” Harper’s Magazine (July 1994). http://www.harpers.org/MorteDeNixon.html>. Ponce de Leon, Charles L. Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Ridgeway, James. “Bush Takes a Ride in Reagan’s Wake.” Village Voice (10 June 2004). http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0423/mondo5.php>. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Zinn, Howard. The Peoples’ History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Howley, Kevin. "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>. APA Style Howley, K. (Nov. 2004) "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>.

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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.

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Abstract:

In one of his final pieces of writing, Timothy Leary—one of the most singularly iconic and influential figures of the 1960s counterculture, known especially for his advocacy of a “molecular revolution” premised upon hallucinogenic self-medication—proposes that [c]ounterculture blooms wherever and whenever a few members of a society choose lifestyles, artistic expressions, and ways of thinking and being that wholeheartedly embrace the ancient axiom that the only true constant is change itself. The mark of counterculture is not a particular social form or structure, but rather the evanescence of forms and structures, the dazzling rapidity and flexibility with which they appear, mutate, and morph into one another and disappear. (ix) But it is not just radical activists and ancient philosophers who celebrate the constancy of change; on the contrary, it is a basic principle of post-industrial capitalism, a system which relies upon the constant extraction of surplus value—this being the very basis of the accumulation of capital—through an ever-accelerating creation of new markets and new desires fostered via a perpetual cycle of technical obsolescence and social destabilisation. Far from being unambiguously aligned with a mode of resistance then (as seemingly inferred by the quote above), the imperative for change would appear to be a basic constituent of that which the latter seeks to undermine. The very concept of “counterculture” as an ideal and a practice has been challenged and contested repeatedly over the past fifty or so years, both inside and outside of the academy. For the most part, the notion of counterculture is understood to have emerged out of the tumultuous cultural shifts of the 1960s, and yet, at the same time, as Theodore Roszak—who first coined the term—notes, the intellectual heritage of such a movement draws upon a “stormy Romantic sensibility, obsessed from first to last with paradox and madness, ecstasy and spiritual striving” (91) that dates back to nineteenth century Idealist philosophy and its critique of a rapidly industrialising civilisation. My purpose in this paper is not to address these numerous conceptualisations of counterculture but instead to analyse specifically the enigmatic definition given by Leary above, whereby he conflates counterculture with the demand for continual change or novelty, arguing that the former appears precisely at the point when “equilibrium and symmetry have given way to a complexity so intense as to appear to the eye as chaos” (ix). Concerned that this definition is internally inconsistent given Leary’s understanding of counterculture as a profoundly anti-capitalist force, I will cursorily illustrate the contradictions that proceed when the notion of counterculture as resistance to capitalist hegemony is combined with the identification of counterculture as an authentic and repeated irruption of the new, albeit one that is inevitably domesticated by and subsumed into the dominant culture against which it is posed, as occurs in Leary’s account. The claim that I make here is that this demand for change as an end in itself is inextricably capitalist in its orientation, and as such, cannot be meaningfully understood as a structural externality to the capitalist processes that it strives to interrupt. Capitalism and Growth The study of counterculture is typically, and probably inevitably premised upon an opposition between a dominant culture and those emergent forces that seek to undermine it. In the words of Roszak, the American counterculture of the 1960s arose in defiance of the “modernizing, up-dating, rationalizing, planning” tendencies of technocracy, “that social form in which an industrial society reaches the peak of its organizational integration” (5). Similarly, for Herbert Marcuse, the philosopher perhaps most closely associated with this counterculture, and whose writings formed the intellectual lynchpin of the student protest movement at that time, “intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified unfreedom,” and as a consequence, we must strive for “a non-repressive civilization, based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man [sic] and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations” (Eros 4-5). In both cases, the dominant culture is associated with a particular form of repression, based upon the false sense of freedom imposed by the exigencies of the market. “Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom,” argues Marcuse, “if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear” (One-Dimensional 10). Most importantly, Marcuse observes that this facile freedom of choice is propped up by processes of continual renewal, transformation, and rationalisation—“advertising, public relations, indoctrination, planned obsolescence”—operating on the basis of a “relentless utilization of advanced techniques and science,” such that “a rising standard of living is the almost unavoidable by-product of the politically manipulated industrial society” (One-Dimensional 52-53). Writing at a time when the Keynesian welfare state was still a foregone conclusion, Marcuse denounces the way in which an increase in the quality of life associated with the rise of consumerism and lifestyle culture “reduces the use-value of freedom”, for “there is no reason to insist on self-determination if the administered life is the comfortable and even the ‘good’ life” (One-Dimensional 53). The late industrial society, in other words, is presented as driven by a repressive desublimation which does not merely replace the objects of a so-called “high culture” with those of an inferior mass culture, but totally liquidates any such distinction, reducing all culture to a mere process of consumption, divorced from any higher goals or purposes. This desublimation is able to maintain growth through the constant production of novelty—providing new objects for the purposes of consumption. This society is not stagnant then; rather, “[i]ts productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction” all represent the demand for a continual production of the new that undergirds its own stability (One-Dimensional 11). This necessary dynamism, and the creative destruction that goes along with it, is a result of the basic laws of competition: the need not only to generate profit, but to maintain this profitability means that new avenues for growth must constantly be laid down. This leads to both a geographical expansion in search of new markets, and a psychological manipulation in order to cultivate needs, desires, and fantasies in consumers that they never knew they had, combined with a dramatic shift in the search for both raw materials and labour power toward the developing economies of Asia. The result, notes David Harvey, is to “exacerbate insecurity and instability, as masses of capital and workers shift from one line of production to another, leaving whole sectors devastated, while the perpetual flux in consumer wants, tastes, and needs becomes a permanent locus of uncertainty and struggle” (106). What we are seeing then, as these processes of production and demands for consumption accelerate, is not so much the maintenance of the comfortable and carefree life that Marcuse sees as destructive to culture; conversely, this acceleration is engendering a sense of disorientation and even groundlessness that leaves us in a state of continual anxiety and disquietude. Although these processes have certainly accelerated in recent years—not least because of the rise of high-speed digital networking and telecommunications—they were prominent throughout the second-half of the twentieth century (in varying degrees), and indicate a general logic of rationalisation and technical efficiency that has been the focus of critique from the proto-countercultural romanticism of the nineteenth century onward. It is Marx who observes that “[t]he driving motive and determining purpose of capitalist production is the self-valorization of capital to the greatest possible extent,” and it is precisely this seemingly unstoppable impetus toward accumulation that finds its most acute manifestation in our age of digital, post-industrial capitalism (449). What needs to be kept in mind is that capitalism is not opposed to those exteriorities that resist its logic; on the contrary, it is through its ability to appropriate them in a double movement whereby it simultaneously claims to act as the condition of their production and claims the right to represent them on its terms (through the universal sign of money) that capitalism is able to maintain its continual growth. Put simply, capitalism as an economic system and an ideological constellation has proved itself time and time again to be remarkably resilient not only to intellectual critique, but also to the concrete production of new forms of living seemingly contrary to its principles, precisely because it is able to incorporate and thus nullify such threats. The production of the new does not harm capitalism; on the contrary, capitalism thrives on such production. The odd contradiction of the mass society, writes Walter Benjamin, coheres in the way that “the novelty of products—as a stimulus to demand—is accorded an unprecedented importance,” whilst at the same time, “‘the eternal return of the same’ is manifest in mass production” (331). This production of novelty is, in other words, restricted by the parameters of the commodity form—the necessity that it be exchangeable under the terms of capital (as money)—such that its potential heterogeneity is restrained by its identity as a commodity. Capitalism is perfectly capable of creating new modes of living, but it does so specifically according to its terms. This poses a difficulty then for the study and advocacy of counterculture in the terms for which Leary advocates above, because the progressivism of the latter—referring to its demand for continual change and innovation (a demand that admittedly runs counter to the nostalgic romanticism that has motivated a great deal of countercultural thought and praxis, and is certainly not a universally accepted definition of counterculture more broadly)—is not necessarily easily distinguishable from the dominant culture against which it is counterposed. Raymond Williams expresses this frustration well when he observes that “it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture […] and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it” (123). In other words, given that capitalism as an economic system and hegemonic cultural formation is so effective in producing the novelty that we crave—creating objects, ideas, and practices often vastly different to those residual traditions that preceded them—there is no obvious metric for determining when we are looking at a genuine alternative to this hegemony, and when we are looking at yet another variegated product of it. Williams makes a distinction here, whereby the emergence (in the strict sense of coming-into-being or genesis) of a new culture is presumed to be qualitatively different to mere novelty. What is not adequately considered is the possibility that this distinction is entirely illusory—that holding out hope for a qualitatively different mode of existence that will mark a distinct break from capitalist hegemony is in fact the chimera by which this hegemony is sustained, and its cycle of production perpetuated. There is an anxiety here that is present within (and one might suggest even constitutive of) present-day debates over counterculture, particularly in regard to the question of resistance, and what form it might take under the conditions of late capitalism. From Williams’s perspective, it can be argued that “all or nearly all initiatives and contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the hegemonic,” such that “the dominant culture, so to say, at once produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture” (114). To argue this though, he goes on to suggest, would: overlook the importance of works and ideas which, while clearly affected by hegemonic limits and pressures, are at least in part significant breaks beyond them, which may again in part be neutralized, reduced, or incorporated, but which in their most active elements nevertheless come through as independent and original. (114)Authentic breaks in specific social conditions are not just a fantasy, he correctly observes, but have occurred many times across history—and not merely in the guise of violent revolutionary activity. What is needed, therefore, is the development of “modes of analysis which instead of reducing works to finished products, and activities to fixed positions, are capable of discerning, in good faith, the finite but significant openness of many actual initiatives and contributions” (114). For Williams, this openness is located chiefly within the semiotic indeterminacy of the artwork, and the resultant potentiality contained within it for individuals to develop resistant readings contrary to any dominant interpretation. These divergent readings become the sites upon which we might imagine new worlds and new ways of living. There is a sense of resignation in his solution though: an appeal to the autonomy of an artwork, and a momentary sublime glimpse of another world, that will inevitably be domesticated by capital. The difficulty that comes with understanding counterculture as an uncompromising demand for the new, over and against the mundane repetitions of commodity culture and lifestyle consumerism, is that it must reckon with the seemingly inevitable appropriation of these new creations by the system against which they are opposed. In such cases, the typical result is a tragic and fundamentally romantic defeatism, in which the creative individual (or community, etc.) must continue to create anew, knowing full well that their output will immediately find itself domesticated and enervated by the forces of capital. This specific conception of counterculture as perpetual change knows that it is doomed to failure, but takes pleasure in the struggle that nonetheless ensues. The Subsumption of Counterculture “Marx and Freud, perhaps, do represent the dawn of our culture,” writes philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “but Nietzsche is something entirely different: the dawn of counterculture” (142). Friedrich Nietzsche seems like an unlikely candidate for the originator of counterculture—his writings certainly bear little overt resemblance to the premises of the various movements that emerged in the 1960s, even though, as Roszak remarks, these movements actually largely issued forth from “the work of Freud and of Nietzsche, the major psychologists of the Faustian soul” (91)—but what he does share with Leary is a belief, expressed most clearly in his posthumous text The Will to Power (1967), in the political and ethical power of becoming, and the need to celebrate and affirm, rather than resist, a world that appears to be in constant, ineluctable flux. Rather than seeking merely to improve the status quo, Nietzsche works toward total and perpetual upheaval—a transvaluation of all values. In Deleuze’s words, he “made thought into a machine of war—a battering ram—into a nomadic force” (149). At a time when resistance to capitalism seems futile; when the possibility of capitalism ending seems more and more distant (which is not to say that it is unlikely to end anytime soon, but merely that its plausible alternatives have been evacuated from the popular imagination), such a claim can seem rather appealing. But how might we distinguish this conception of perpetual revolution of values from the creative destruction of capitalism itself? Why do we presume that there is such a distinction to be made? Why should Leary’s call for rapidity and flexibility—and more broadly, a celebration of change over constancy—be seen as anything other than an acknowledgement and reinforcement of capitalism’s accelerating cycle of obsolescence? The uncomfortable reality we must consider is that the countercultural, as an apparent exteriority waiting to be appropriated, plays an essential role in the accumulation of capital that drives our economic system, and that accordingly, it cannot be plausibly understood as external to the structural conditions that it opposes. This is not to suggest that counterculture does not produce new possibilities, new opportunities, and new ways of living, but simply that its production is always already structured by capitalist relations—the precise anxiety acknowledged by Williams. Once again, this is not a dismissal of counterculture, just the opposite in fact. It is a rejection of the conflation that Leary makes between counterculture and novelty, the combination of which is supposed to provide a potent threat to capitalist hegemony. “The naive supposition of an unambiguous development towards increased production,” argues German philosopher Theodor Adorno, “is itself a piece of that bourgeois outlook which permits development because […] it is hostile to qualitative difference” (156). Capitalism produces many different types of commodities (within which we can include ideas, beliefs, means of communication, as well as physical goods in the traditional sense), but what unites them is their shared identity under the regime of exchange value (money). This exchange value masks their genuine heterogeneity. But what use is it simply reassuring us that if we continue to produce, we may eventually produce something so new, so different that it will evade capture by this logic? Does this not merely reinforce a complicity between the appeal of the countercultural as a force of change and the continuous accumulation of capital? I would contend that to define counterculture as the production of the new underwrites the inexhaustible productivism of the capitalist hegemony that it seeks to challenge. What if, then, this qualitative difference was created not through the production of the new, but the total rejection of this production as the means to resistance? This would not be to engender or encourage a state of total stasis (which is definitely not a preferable or plausible scenario), but rather, to detach the hope for a better world from the idea that we must achieve this by somehow adding to the world that we already have—to recognise, as Adorno would have it, that “the forces of production are not the deepest substratum of man [sic], but represent his historical form adapted to the production of commodities” (156). Leary’s peculiar conception of counterculture that we have been examining throughout this paper refuses to give countenance to any kind of stability or equilibrium, instead proffering an essentially Nietzschean mode of resistance in which incessant creativity becomes the means to the contrivance of a new world—this is part of what Roszak records as the rejection of Marx’s “compulsive hard-headedness” and the embrace of “[m]yth, religion, dreams, visions” which mark the fundamental romanticism of (post-)1960s counterculture, and its heritage in nineteenth century bourgeois sensibilities. For all the benefits that such a conception of counterculture has provided, it would seem misguided to ignore the ways in which Leary’s rhetoric is undermined by the simple fact that it presumes a hierarchy between a dominant culture (capitalism) and its resistant periphery that is already structured by and given through a capitalist mode of thought that presumes its own self-sufficiency (that is, it assumes the adequacy of the logic of exchange to hom*ogenise all products under the commodity form). The postulate that grounds Leary’s understanding of counterculture is a covert identification of man/woman as a restless, alienated being who will never reach a state of stability or actualisation, and must instead continue to produce in the vain hope that this might finally and definitely change things for the better. Instead of embracing the constancy of change, an ideology that ends up justifying the excesses of a capitalist order that knows nothing other than production, perhaps it is possible to begin reconceptualising counterculture in terms that resist precisely this demand for novelty. As Alexander Galloway declares, “[i]t is time now to subtract from this world, not add to it,” for the “political does not arise from the domain of production” (138-139). We do not need more well-intentioned ideas regarding how the world could be a better place or what new possibilities are on offer—we know these things already, we hear about them every day. What we need, and what perhaps counterculture can offer, is to affirm the truth of that which does not need to be produced, which is always already given to us through the immanence of human thought. In the words of François Laruelle, this is an understanding of human individuals as ordinary, “stripped of qualities or attributes by a wholly positive sufficiency,” such that “they lack nothing, are not alienated,” whereby the identity of the individual “is defined by characteristics that are absolutely original, primitive, internal, and without equivalent in the World […] not ideal essences, but finite, inalienable (and consequently irrecusable) lived experiences” (48-49). The job of counterculture then becomes not so much creating that which did not exist prior, but of realising “what we already know to be true” (Galloway 139). References Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London and New York: Verso, 1974. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge and London: The Belknapp Press, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles. “Nomad Thought.” The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation. Ed. David B. Allison. New York City: Dell Publishing, 1977: 142-149. Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2012. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Laruelle, François. From Decision to Heresy: Experiments in Non-Standard Thought. Ed. Robin Mackay. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012. Leary, Timothy. “Foreword.” Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. Ken Goffman and Dan Joy. New York City: Villard Books, 2004: ix-xiv. Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. ---. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. London: Routledge, 1998. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume One. London: Penguin, 1976. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Roszak, Theodore. The Makings of a Counter Culture. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1969. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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The Harry Potter (HP) Fan Fiction (FF) phenomenon offers an opportunity to explore the nature of fame and the work of fans (including the second author, a participant observer) in creating and circulating cultural products within fan communities. Matt Hills comments (xi) that “fandom is not simply a ‘thing’ that can be picked over analytically. It is also always performative; by which I mean that it is an identity which is (dis-)claimed, and which performs cultural work”. This paper explores the cultural work of fandom in relation to FF and fame. The global HP phenomenon – in which FF lists are a small part – has made creator J K Rowling richer than the Queen of England, according to the 2003 ‘Sunday Times Rich List’. The books (five so far) and the films (three) continue to accelerate the growth in Rowling’s fortune, which quadrupled from 2001-3: an incredible success for an author unknown before the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997. Even the on-screen HP lead actor, Daniel Radcliffe, is now Britain’s second wealthiest teenager (after England’s Prince Harry). There are other globally successful books, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Narnia collection, but neither of these series has experienced the momentum of the HP rise to fame. (See Endnote for an indication of the scale of fan involvement with HP FF, compared with Lord of the Rings.) Contemporary ‘Fame’ has been critically defined in relation to the western mass media’s requirement for ‘entertaining’ content, and the production and circulation of celebrity as opposed to ‘hard news’(Turner, Bonner and Marshall). The current perception is that an army of publicists and spin doctors are usually necessary, but not sufficient, to create and nurture global fame. Yet the HP phenomenon started out with no greater publicity investment than that garnered by any other promising first novelist: and given the status of HP as children’s publishing, it was probably less hyped than equivalent adult-audience publications. So are there particular characteristics of HP and his creator that predisposed the series and its author to become famous? And how does the fame status relate to fans’ incorporation of these cultural materials into their lives? Accepting that it is no more possible to predict the future fame of an author or (fictional) character than it is to predict the future financial success of a book, film or album, there is a range of features of the HP phenomenon that, in hindsight, helped accelerate the fame momentum, creating what has become in hindsight an unparalleled global media property. J K Rowling’s personal story – in the hands of her publicity machine – itself constituted a magical myth: the struggling single mother writing away (in longhand) in a Scottish café, snatching odd moments to construct the first book while her infant daughter slept. (Comparatively little attention was paid by the marketers to the author’s professional training and status as a teacher, or to Rowling’s own admission that the first book, and the outline for the series, took five years to write.) Rowling’s name itself, with no self-evident gender attribution, was also indicative of ambiguity and mystery. The back-story to HP, therefore, became one of a quintessentially romantic endeavour – the struggle to write against the odds. Publicity relating to the ‘starving in a garret’ background is not sufficient to explain the HP/Rowling grip on the popular imagination, however. Instead it is arguable that the growth of HP fame and fandom is directly related to the growth of the Internet and to the middle class readers’ Internet access. If the production of celebrity is a major project of the conventional mass media, the HP phenomenon is a harbinger of the hyper-fame that can be generated through the combined efforts of the mass media and online fan communities. The implication of this – evident in new online viral marketing techniques (Kirby), is that publicists need to pique cyber-interest as well as work with the mass media in the construction of celebrity. As the cheer-leaders for online viral marketing make the argument, the technique “provides the missing link between the [bottom-up] word-of-mouth approach and the top-down, advertainment approach”. Which is not to say that the initial HP success was a function of online viral marketing: rather, the marketers learned their trade by analysing the magnifier impact that the online fan communities had upon the exponential growth of the HP phenomenon. This cyber-impact is based both on enhanced connectivity – the bottom-up, word-of-mouth dynamic, and on the individual’s need to assume an identity (albeit fluid) to participate effectively in online community. Critiquing the notion that the computer is an identity machine, Streeter focuses upon (649) “identities that people have brought to computers from the culture at large”. He does not deal in any depth with FF, but suggests (651) that “what the Internet is and will come to be, then, is partly a matter of who we expect to be when we sit down to use it”. What happens when fans sit down to use the Internet, and is there a particular reason why the Internet should be of importance to the rise and rise of HP fame? From the point of view of one of us, HP was born at more or less the same time as she was. Eleven years old in the first book, published in 1997, Potter’s putative birth year might be set in 1986 – in line with many of the original HP readership, and the publisher’s target market. At the point that this cohort was first spellbound by Potter, 1998-9, they were also on the brink of discovering the Internet. In Australia and many western nations, over half of (two-parent) families with school-aged children were online by the end of 2000 (ABS). Potter would notionally have been 14: his fans a little younger but well primed for the ‘teeny-bopper’ years. Arguably, the only thing more famous than HP for that age-group, at that time, was the Internet itself. As knowledge of the Internet grew stories about it constituted both news and entertainment and circulated widely in the mass media: the uncertainty concerning new media, and their impact upon existing social structures, has – over time – precipitated a succession of moral panics … Established commercial media are not noted for their generosity to competitors, and it is unsurprising that many of the moral panics circulating about p*rnography on the Net, Internet stalking, Web addiction, hate sites etc are promulgated in the older media. (Green xxvii) Although the mass media may have successfully scared the impressionable, the Internet was not solely constructed as a site of moral panic. Prior to the general pervasiveness of the Internet in domestic space, P. David Marshall discusses multiple constructions of the computer – seen by parents as an educational tool which could help future-proof their children; but which their children were more like to conceptualise as a games machine, or (this was the greater fear) use for hacking. As the computer was to become a site for the battle ground between education, entertainment and power, so too the Internet was poised to be colonised by teenagers for a variety of purposes their parents would have preferred to prevent: chat, p*rnography, game-playing (among others). Fan communities thrive on the power of the individual fan to project themselves and their fan identity as part of an ongoing conversation. Further, in constructing the reasons behind what has happened in the HP narrative, and in speculating what is to come, fans are presenting themselves as identities with whom others might agree (positive affirmation) or disagree (offering the chance for engagement through exchange). The genuinely insightful fans, who apparently predict the plots before they’re published, may even be credited in their communities with inspiring J K Rowling’s muse. (The FF mythology is that J K Rowling dare not look at the FF sites in case she finds herself influenced.) Nancy Baym, commenting on a soap opera fan Usenet group (Usenet was an early 1990s precursor to discussion groups) notes that: The viewers’ relationship with characters, the viewers’ understanding of socioemotional experience, and soap opera’s narrative structure, in which moments of maximal suspense are always followed by temporal gaps, work together to ensure that fans will use the gaps during and between shows to discuss with one another possible outcomes and possible interpretations of what has been seen. (143) In HP terms the The Philosopher’s Stone constructed a fan knowledge that J K Rowling’s project entailed at least seven books (one for each year at Hogwarts School) and this offered plentiful opportunities to speculate upon the future direction and evolution of the HP characters. With each speculation, each posting, the individual fan can refine and extend their identity as a member of the FF community. The temporal gaps between the books and the films – coupled with the expanding possibilities of Internet communication – mean that fans can feel both creative and connected while circulating the cultural materials derived from their engagement with the HP ‘canon’. Canon is used to describe the HP oeuvre as approved by Rowling, her publishers, and her copyright assignees (for example, Warner Bros). In contrast, ‘fanon’ is the name used by fans to refer the body of work that results from their creative/subversive interactions with the core texts, such as “slash” (hom*o-erotic/romance) fiction. Differentiation between the two terms acknowledges the likelihood that J K Rowling or her assignees might not approve of fanon. The constructed identities of fans who deal solely with canon differ significantly from those who are engaged in fanon. The implicit (romantic) or explicit (full-action descriptions) sexualisation of HP FF is part of a complex identity play on behalf of both the writers and readers of FF. Further, given that the online communities are often nurtured and enriched by offline face to face exchanges with other participants, what an individual is prepared to read or not to read, or write or not write, says as much about that person’s public persona as does another’s overt consumption of p*rnography; or diet of art house films, in contrast to someone else’s enthusiasm for Friends. Hearn, Mandeville and Anthony argue that a “central assertion of postmodern views of consumption is that social identity can be interpreted as a function of consumption” (106), and few would disagree with them: herein lies the power of the brand. Noting that consumer culture centrally focuses upon harnessing ‘the desire to desire’, Streeter’s work (654, on the opening up of Internet connectivity) suggests a continuum from ‘desire provoked’; through anticipation, ‘excitement based on what people imagined would happen’; to a sense of ‘possibility’. All this was made more tantalising in terms of the ‘unpredictability’ of how cyberspace would eventually resolve itself (657). Thus a progression is posited from desire through to the thrill of comparing future possibilities with eventual outcomes. These forces clearly influence the HP FF phenomenon, where a section of HP fans have become impatient with the pace of the ‘official’/canon HP text. J K Rowling’s writing has slowed down to the point that Harry’s initial readership has overtaken him by several years. He’s about to enter his sixth year (of seven) at secondary school – his erstwhile-contemporaries have already left school or are about to graduate to University. HP is yet to have ‘a relationship’: his fans are engaged in some well-informed speculation as to a range of sexual possibilities which would likely take J K Rowling some light years from her marketers’ core readership. So the story is progressing more slowly than many fans would choose and with less spice than many would like (from the evidence of the web, at least). As indicated in the Endnote, the productivity of the fans, as they ‘fill in the gaps’ while waiting for the official narrative to resume, is prodigious. It may be that as the fans outstrip HP in their own social and emotional development they find his reactions in later books increasingly unbelievable, and/or out of character with the HP they felt they knew. Thus they develop an alternative ‘Harry’ in fanon. Some FF authors identify in advance which books they accept as canon, and which they have decided to ignore. For example, popular FF author Midnight Blue gives the setting of her evolving FF The Mirror of Maybe as “after Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and as an alternative to the events detailed in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, [this] is a Slash story involving Harry Potter and Severus Snape”. Some fans, tired of waiting for Rowling to get Harry grown up, ‘are doin’ it for themselves’. Alternatively, it may be that as they get older the first groups of HP fans are unwilling to relinquish their investment in the HP phenomenon, but are equally unwilling to align themselves uncritically with the anodyne story of the canon. Harry Potter, as Warner Bros licensed him, may be OK for pre-teens, but less cool for the older adolescent. The range of identities that can be constructed using the many online HP FF genres, however, permits wide scope for FF members to identify with dissident constructions of the HP narrative and helps to add to the momentum with which his fame increases. Latterly there is evidence that custodians of canon may be making subtle overtures to creators of fanon. Here, the viral marketers have a particular challenge – to embrace the huge market represented by fanon, while not disturbing those whose HP fandom is based upon the purity of canon. Some elements of fanon feel their discourses have been recognised within the evolving approved narrative . This sense within the fan community – that the holders of the canon have complimented them through an intertextual reference – is much prized and builds the momentum of the fame engagement (as has been demonstrated by Watson, with respect to the band ‘phish’). Specifically, Harry/Draco slash fans have delighted in the hint of a blown kiss from Draco Malfoy to Harry (as Draco sends Harry an origami bird/graffiti message in a Defence against the Dark Arts Class in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as an acknowledgement of their cultural contribution to the development of the HP phenomenon. Streeter credits Raymond’s essay ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as offering a model for the incorporation of voluntary labour into the marketplace. Although Streeter’s example concerns the Open Source movement, derived from hacker culture, it has parallels with the prodigious creativity (and productivity) of the HP FF communities. Discussing the decision by Netscape to throw open the source code of its software in 1998, allowing those who use it to modify and improve it, Streeter comments that (659) “the core trope is to portray Linux-style software development like a bazaar, a real-life competitive marketplace”. The bazaar features a world of competing, yet complementary, small traders each displaying their skills and their wares for evaluation in terms of the product on offer. In contrast, “Microsoft-style software production is portrayed as hierarchical and centralised – and thus inefficient – like a cathedral”. Raymond identifies “ego satisfaction and reputation among other [peers]” as a specific socio-emotional benefit for volunteer participants (in Open Source development), going on to note: “Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon [… for example] science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized ‘egoboo’ (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity”. This may also be a prime mover for FF engagement. Where fans have outgrown the anodyne canon they get added value through using the raw materials of the HP stories to construct fanon: establishing and building individual identities and communities through HP consumption practices in parallel with, but different from, those deemed acceptable for younger, more innocent, fans. The fame implicit in HP fandom is not only that of HP, the HP lead actor Daniel Radcliffe and HP’s creator J K Rowling; for some fans the famed ‘state or quality of being widely honoured and acclaimed’ can be realised through their participation in online fan culture – fans become famous and recognised within their own community for the quality of their work and the generosity of their sharing with others. The cultural capital circulated on the FF sites is both canon and fanon, a matter of some anxiety for the corporations that typically buy into and foster these mega-media products. As Jim Ward, Vice-President of Marketing for Lucasfilm comments about Star Wars fans (cited in Murray 11): “We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact someone is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that’s not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.” Slash fans would beg to differ, and for many FF readers and writers, the joy of engagement, and a significant engine for the growth of HP fame, is partly located in the creativity offered for readers and writers to fill in the gaps. Endnote HP FF ranges from posts on general FF sites (such as fanfiction.net >> books, where HP has 147,067 stories [on 4,490 pages of hotlinks] posted, compared with its nearest ‘rival’ Lord of the rings: with 33,189 FF stories). General FF sites exclude adult content, much of which is corralled into 18+ FF sites, such as Restrictedsection.org, set up when core material was expelled from general sites. As an example of one adult site, the Potter Slash Archive is selective (unlike fanfiction.net, for example) which means that only stories liked by the site team are displayed. Authors submitting work are asked to abide by a list of ‘compulsory parameters’, but ‘warnings’ fall under the category of ‘optional parameters’: “Please put a warning if your story contains content that may be offensive to some authors [sic], such as m/m sex, graphic sex or violence, violent sex, character death, major angst, BDSM, non-con (rape) etc”. Adult-content FF readers/writers embrace a range of unexpected genres – such as Twincest (incest within either of the two sets of twin characters in HP) and Weasleycest (incest within the Weasley clan) – in addition to mainstream romance/hom*o-erotica pairings, such as that between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. (NB: within the time frame 16 August – 4 October, Harry Potter FF writers had posted an additional 9,196 stories on the fanfiction.net site alone.) References ABS. 8147.0 Use of the Internet by Householders, Australia. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/ e8ae5488b598839cca25682000131612/ ae8e67619446db22ca2568a9001393f8!OpenDocument, 2001, 2001>. Baym, Nancy. “The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication.” CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. S. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. 138-63. Blue, Midnight. “The Mirror of Maybe.” http://www.greyblue.net/MidnightBlue/Mirror/default.htm>. Coates, Laura. “Muggle Kids Battle for Domain Name Rights. Irish Computer. http://www.irishcomputer.com/domaingame2.html>. Fanfiction.net. “Category: Books” http://www.fanfiction.net/cat/202/>. Green, Lelia. Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hearn, Greg, Tom Mandeville and David Anthony. The Communication Superhighway: Social and Economic Change in the Digital Age. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. Houghton Mifflin. “Potlatch.” Encyclopedia of North American Indians. http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/ na_030900_potlatch.htm>. Kirby, Justin. “Brand Papers: Getting the Bug.” Brand Strategy July-August 2004. http://www.dmc.co.uk/pdf/BrandStrategy07-0804.pdf>. Marshall, P. David. “Technophobia: Video Games, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics.” Media International Australia 85 (Nov. 1997): 70-8. Murray, Simone. “Celebrating the Story the Way It Is: Cultural Studies, Corporate Media and the Contested Utility of Fandom.” Continuum 18.1 (2004): 7-25. Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 2000. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html>. Streeter, Thomas. The Romantic Self and the Politics of Internet Commercialization. Cultural Studies 17.5 (2003): 648-68. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge UP. Watson, Nessim. “Why We Argue about Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.net Fan Community.” Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety. Ed. Steven G. Jones. London: Sage, 1997. 102-32. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia, and Carmen Guinery. "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php>. APA Style Green, L., and C. Guinery. (Nov. 2004) "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php>.

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Social media companies like to claim the world. Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is “building a global community”. Twitter promises to show you “what’s happening in the world right now”. Even Parler claims to be the “global town square”. Indeed, among the fungible aspects of digital culture is the promise of geographic fungibility—the interchangeability of location and national provenance. The taglines of social media platforms tap into the social imagination of the Internet erasing distance—Marshall McLuhan’s global village on a touch screen (see fig. 1). Fig. 1: Platform taglines: YouTube, Twitter, Parler, and Facebook have made globality part of their pitch to users. Yet users’ perceptions of geographic fungibility remain unclear. Scholars have proposed forms of cosmopolitan and global citizenship in which national borders play less of a role in how people engage with political ideas (Delanty; Sassen). Others suggest the potential erasure of location may be disorienting (Calhoun). “Nobody lives globally”, as Hugh Dyer writes (64). In this article, I interrogate popular and academic assumptions about global political spaces, looking at geographic fungibility as a condition experienced by users. The article draws on interviews conducted with Twitter users in the Scandinavian region. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark offer an interesting contrast to online spaces because of their small and highly cohesive political cultures; yet these countries also have high Internet penetration rates and English proficiency levels, making them potentially highly globally connected (Syvertsen et al.). Based on a thematic analysis of these interviews, I find fungibility emerges as a key feature of how users interact with politics at a global level in three ways: invisibility: fungibility as disconnection; efficacy: fungibility as empowerment; and antagonism: non-fungibility as strategy. Finally, in contrast to currently available models, I propose that online practices are not characterised so much by cosmopolitan norms, but by what I describe as fungible citizenship. Geographic Fungibility and Cosmopolitan Hopes Let’s back up and take a real-life example that highlights what it means for geography to be fungible. In March 2017, at a high-stakes meeting of the US House Intelligence Committee, a congressman suddenly noticed that President Donald Trump was not only following the hearing on television, but was live-tweeting incorrect information about it on Twitter. “This tweet has gone out to millions of Americans”, said Congressman Jim Himes, noting Donald Trump’s follower count. “16.1 million to be exact” (C-SPAN). Only, those followers weren’t just Americans; Trump was tweeting to 16.1 million followers worldwide (see Sevin and Uzunoğlu). Moreover, the committee was gathered that day to address an issue related to geographic fungibility: it was the first public hearing on Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 American presidential race—which occurred, among other places, on Twitter. In a way, democratic systems are based on fungibility. One person one vote. Equality before the law. But land mass was not imagined to be commutable, and given the physical restrictions of communication, participation in the public sphere was largely assumed to be restricted by geography (Habermas). But online platforms offer a fundamentally different structure. Nancy Fraser observes that “public spheres today are not coextensive with political membership. Often the interlocutors are neither co-nationals nor fellow citizens” (16). Netflix, YouTube, K-Pop, #BLM: the resources that people draw on to define their worlds come less from nation-specific media (Robertson 179). C-SPAN’s online feed—if one really wanted to—is as easy to click on in Seattle as in Stockholm. Indeed, research on Twitter finds geographically dispersed networks (Leetaru et al.). Many Twitter users tweet in multiple languages, with English being the lingua franca of Twitter (Mocanu et al.). This has helped make geographic location interchangeable, even undetectable without use of advanced methods (Stock). Such conditions might set the stage for what sociologists have envisioned as cosmopolitan or global public spheres (Linklater; Szerszynski and Urry). That is, cross-border networks based more on shared interest than shared nationality (Sassen 277). Theorists observing the growth of online communities in the late 1990s and early 2000s proposed that such activity could lead to a shift in people’s perspectives on the world: namely, by closing the communicative distance with the Other, people would also close the moral distance. Delanty suggested that “discursive spaces of world openness” could counter nationalist tendencies and help mobilise cosmopolitan citizens against the negative effects of globalisation (44). However, much of this discourse dates to the pre-social media Internet. These platforms have proved to be more hierarchical, less interactive, and even less global than early theorists hoped (Burgess and Baym; Dahlgren, “Social Media”; Hindman). Although ordinary citizens certainly break through, entrenched power dynamics and algorithmic structures complicate the process, leading to what Bucher describes as a reverse Panopticon: “the possibility of constantly disappearing, of not being considered important enough” (1171). A 2021 report by the Pew Research Center found most Twitter users receive few if any likes and retweets of their content. In short, it may be that social media are less like Marshall McLuhan’s global village and more like a global version of Marc Augé’s “non-places”: an anonymous and disempowering whereabouts (77–78). Cosmopolitanism itself is also plagued by problems of legitimacy (Calhoun). Fraser argues that global public opinion is meaningless without a constituent global government. “What could efficacy mean in this situation?” she asks (15). Moreover, universalist sentiment and erasure of borders are not exactly the story of the last 15 years. Media scholar Terry Flew notes that given Brexit and the rise of figures like Trump and Bolsonaro, projections of cosmopolitanism were seriously overestimated (19). Yet social media are undeniably political places. So how do we make sense of users’ engagement in the discourse that increasingly takes place here? It is this point I turn to next. Citizenship in the Age of Social Media In recent years, scholars have reconsidered how they understand the way people interact with politics, as access to political discourse has become a regular, even mundane part of our lives. Increasingly they are challenging old models of “informed citizens” and traditional forms of political participation. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik writes: the oft-heard claims that citizenship is in decline, particularly for young people, are usually based on citizenship indicators derived from these legacy models—the informed/dutiful citizen. Yet scholars are increasingly positing … citizenship [is not] declining, but rather changing its form. (1891) In other words, rather than wondering if tweeting is like a citizen speaking in the town square or merely scribbling in the margins of a newspaper, this line of thinking suggests tweeting is a new form of citizen participation entirely (Bucher; Lane et al.). Who speaks in the town square these days anyway? To be clear, “citizenship” here is not meant in the ballot box and passport sense; this isn’t about changing legal definitions. Rather, the citizenship at issue refers to how people perceive and enact their public selves. In particular, new models of citizenship emphasise how people understand their relation to strangers through discursive means (Asen)—through talking, in other words, in its various forms (Dahlgren, “Talkative Public”). This may include anything from Facebook posts to online petitions (Vaughan et al.) to digital organising (Vromen) to even activities that can seem trivial, solitary, or apolitical by traditional measures, such as “liking” a post or retweeting a news story. Although some research finds users do see strategic value in such activities (Picone et al.), Lane et al. argue that small-scale acts are important on their own because they force us to self-reflect on our relationship to politics, under a model they call “expressive citizenship”. Kligler-Vilenchik argues that such approaches to citizenship reflect not only new technology but also a society in which public discourse is less formalised through official institutions (newspapers, city council meetings, clubs): “each individual is required to ‘invent themselves’, to shape and form who they are and what they believe in—including how to enact their citizenship” she writes (1892). However, missing from these new understandings of politics is a spatial dimension. How does the geographic reach of social media sites play into perceptions of citizenship in these spaces? This is important because, regardless of the state of cosmopolitan sentiment, political problems are global: climate change, pandemic, regulation of tech companies, the next US president: many of society’s biggest issues, as Beck notes, “do not respect nation-state or any other borders” (4). Yet it’s not clear whether users’ correlative ability to reach across borders is empowering, or overwhelming. Thus, inspired particularly by Delanty’s “micro” cosmopolitanism and Dahlgren’s conditions for the formation of citizenship (“Talkative Public”), I am guided by the following questions: how do people negotiate geographic fungibility online? And specifically, how do they understand their relationship to a global space and their ability to be heard in it? Methodology Christensen and Jansson have suggested that one of the underutilised ways to understand media cultures is to talk to users directly about the “mediatized everyday” (1474). To that end, I interviewed 26 Twitter users in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The Scandinavian region is a useful region of study because most people use the Web nearly every day and the populations have high English proficiency (Syvertsen et al.). Participants were found in large-scale data scrapes of Twitter, using linguistic and geographic markers in their profiles, a process similar to the mapping of the Australian Twittersphere (Bruns et al.). The interviewees were selected because of their mixed use of Scandinavian languages and English and their participation in international networks. Participants were contacted through direct messages on Twitter or via email. In figure 2, the participants’ timeline data have been graphed into a network map according to who users @mentioned and retweeted, with lines representing tweets and colours representing languages. The participants include activists, corporate consultants, government employees, students, journalists, politicians, a security guard, a doctor, a teacher, and unemployed people. They range from age 24 to 60. Eight are women, reflecting the gender imbalance of Twitter. Six have an immigrant background. Eight are right-leaning politically. Participants also have wide variation in follower counts in order to capture a variety of experiences on the platform (min=281, max=136,000, median=3,600, standard deviation=33,708). All users had public profiles, but under Norwegian rules for research data, they will be identified here by an ID and their country, gender, and follower count (e.g., P01, Sweden, M, 23,000). Focussing on a single platform allowed the interviews to be more specific and makes it easier to compare the participants’ responses, although other social media often came up in the course of the interviews. Twitter was selected because it is often used in a public manner and has become an important channel for political communication (Larsson and Moe). The interviews lasted around an hour each and were conducted on Zoom between May 2020 and March 2021. Fig. 2: Network map of interview participants’ Twitter timelines. Invisibility: The Abyss of the Global Village Each participant was asked during the interview how they think about globality on Twitter. For many, it was part of the original reason for joining the platform. “Twitter had this reputation of being the hangout of a lot of the world’s intellectuals”, said P022 (Norway, M, 136,000). One Swedish woman described a kind of cosmopolitan curation process, where she would follow people on every continent, so that her feed would give her a sense of the world. “And yes, you can get that from international papers”, she told me, “but if I actually consumed as much as I do on Twitter in papers, I would be reading papers and articles all day” (P023, Sweden, F, 384). Yet while globality was part of the appeal, it was also an abstraction. “I mean, the Internet is global, so everything you do is going to end up somewhere else”, said one Swedish user (P013, M, 12,000). Users would echo the taglines that social media allow you to “interact with someone half a world away” (P05, Norway, M, 3,300) but were often hard-pressed to recall specific examples. A strong theme of invisibility—or feeling lost in an abyss—ran throughout the interviews. For many users this manifested in a lack of any visible response to their tweets. Even when replying to another user, the participants didn’t expect much dialogic engagement with them (“No, no, that’s unrealistic”.) For P04 (Norway, F, 2,000), tweeting back a heart emoji to someone with a large following was for her own benefit, much like the intrapersonal expressions described by Lane et al. that are not necessarily intended for other actors. P04 didn’t expect the original poster to even see her emoji. Interestingly, invisibility was more of a frustration among users with several thousand followers than those with only a few hundred. Having more followers seemed to only make Twitter appear more fickle. “Sometimes you get a lot of attention and sometimes it’s completely disregarded” said P05 (Norway, M, 3,300). P024 (Sweden, M, 2,000) had essentially given up: “I think it’s fun that you found me [to interview]”, he said, “Because I have this idea that almost no one sees my tweets anymore”. In a different way, P08 (Norway, F) who had a follower count of 121,000, also felt the abstraction of globality. “It’s almost like I’m just tweeting into a void or into space”, she said, “because it's too many people to grasp or really understand that these are real people”. For P08, Twitter was almost an anonymous non-place because of its vastness, compared with Facebook and Instagram where the known faces of her friends and family made for more finite and specific places—and thus made her more self-conscious about the visibility of her posts. Efficacy: Fungibility as Empowerment Despite the frequent feeling of global invisibility, almost all the users—even those with few followers—believed they had some sort of effect in global political discussions on Twitter. This was surprising, and seemingly contradictory to the first theme. This second theme of empowerment is characterised by feelings of efficacy or perception of impact. One of the most striking examples came from a Danish man with 345 followers. I wondered before the interview if he might have automated his account because he replied to Donald Trump so often (see fig. 3). The participant explained that, no, he was just trying to affect the statistics on Trump’s tweet, to get it ratioed. He explained: it's like when I'm voting, I'm not necessarily thinking [I’m personally] going to affect the situation, you know. … It’s the statistics that shows a position—that people don't like it, and they’re speaking actively against it. (P06, Denmark, M, 345) Other participants described their role similarly—not as making an impact directly, but being “one ant in the anthill” or helping information spread “like rings in the water”. One woman in Sweden said of the US election: I can't go to the streets because I'm in Stockholm. So I take to their streets on Twitter. I'm kind of helping them—using the algorithms, with retweets, and re-enforcing some hashtags. (P018, Sweden, F, 7,400) Note that the participants rationalise their Twitter activities through comparisons to classic forms of political participation—voting and protesting. Yet the acts of citizenship they describe are very much in line with new norms of citizenship (Vaughan et al.) and what Picone et al. call “small acts of engagement”. They are just acts aimed at the American sphere instead of their national sphere. Participants with large followings understood their accounts had a kind of brand, such as commenting on Middle Eastern politics, mocking leftist politicians, or critiquing the media. But these users were also sceptical they were having any direct impact. Rather, they too saw themselves as being “a tiny part of a combined effect from a lot of people” (P014, Norway, M, 39,000). Fig. 3: Participant P06 replies to Trump. Antagonism: Encounters with Non-Fungibility The final theme reflects instances when geography became suddenly apparent—and thrown back in the faces of the users. This was often in relation to the 2020 American election, which many of the participants were following closely. “I probably know more about US politics than Swedish”, said P023 (Sweden, F, 380). Particularly among left-wing users who listed a Scandinavian location in their profile, tweeting about the topic had occasionally led to encounters with Americans claiming foreign interference. “I had some people telling me ‘You don't have anything to do with our politics. You have no say in this’” said P018 (Sweden, F, 7,400). In these instances, the participants likewise deployed geography strategically. Participants said they would claim legitimacy because the election would affect their country too. “I think it’s important for the rest of the world to give them [the US] that feedback. That ‘we’re depending on you’” said P017 (Sweden, M, 280). As a result of these interactions, P06 started to pre-emptively identify himself as Danish in his tweets, which in a way sacrificed his own geographic fungibility, but also reinforced a wider sense of geographic fungibility on Twitter. In one of his replies to Donald Trump, Jr., he wrote, “Denmark here. The world is hoping for real leader!” Conclusion: Fungible Citizenship The view that digital media are global looms large in academic and popular imagination. The aim of the analysis presented here is to help illuminate how these perceptions play into practices of citizenship in digital spaces. One of the contradictions inherent in this research is that geographic or linguistic information was necessary to find the users interviewed. It may be that users who are geographically anonymous—or even lie about their location—would have a different relationship to online globality. With that said, several key themes emerged from the interviews: the abstraction and invisibility of digital spaces, the empowerment of geographic fungibility, and the occasional antagonistic deployment of non-fungibility by other users and the participants. Taken together, these themes point to geographic fungibility as a condition that can both stifle as well as create new arenas for political expression. Even spontaneous and small acts that aren’t expected to ever reach an audience (Lane et al.) nevertheless are done with an awareness of social processes that extend beyond the national sphere. Moreover, algorithms and metrics, while being the source of invisibility (Bucher), were at times a means of empowerment for those at a physical distance. In contrast to the cosmopolitan literature, it is not so much that users didn’t identify with their nation as their “community of membership” (Sassen)—they saw it as giving them an important perspective. Rather, they considered politics in the EU, US, UK, Russia, and elsewhere to be part of their national arena. In this way, the findings support Delanty’s description of “changes within … national identities rather than in the emergence in new identities” (42). Yet the interviews do not point to “the desire to go beyond ethnocentricity and particularity” (42). Some of the most adamant and active global communicators were on the right and radical right. For them, opposition to immigration and strengthening of national identity were major reasons to be on Twitter. Cross-border communication for them was not a form of resistance to nationalism but wholly compatible with it. Instead of the emergence of global or cosmopolitan citizenship then, I propose that what has emerged is a form of fungible citizenship. This is perhaps a more ambivalent, and certainly a less idealistic, view of digital culture. It implies that users are not elevating their affinities or shedding their national ties. Rather, the transnational effects of political decisions are viewed as legitimate grounds for political participation online. This approach to global platforms builds on and nuances current discursive approaches to citizenship, which emphasise expression (Lane et al.) and contribution (Vaughan et al.) rather than formal participation within institutions. Perhaps the Scandinavian users cannot cast a vote in US elections, but they can still engage in the same forms of expression as any American with a Twitter account. That encounters with non-fungibility were so notable to the participants also points to the mundanity of globality on social media. Vaughan et al. write that “citizens are increasingly accustomed to participating in horizontal networks of relationships which facilitate more expressive, smaller forms of action” (17). The findings here suggest that they are also accustomed to participating in geographically agnostic networks, in which their expressions of citizenship are at once small, interchangeable, and potentially global. References Asen, Robert. "A Discourse Theory of Citizenship." Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189–211. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Beck, Ulrich. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Bruns, Axel, et al. "The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the Follower/Followee Network." Social Media + Society 3.4 (2017): 1–15. Bucher, Taina. "Want to Be on the Top? Algorithmic Power and the Threat of Invisibility on Facebook." New Media & Society 14.7 (2012): 1164–80. Burgess, Jean, and Nancy Baym. Twitter: A Biography. New York: New York UP, 2020. C-SPAN. Russian Election Interference, House Select Intelligence Committee. 24 Feb. 2017. Transcript. 21 Mar. 2017 <https://www.c-span.org/video/?425087-1/fbi-director-investigating-links-trump-campaign-russia>. Calhoun, Craig. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. New York: Routledge, 2007. Christensen, Miyase, and André Jansson. "Complicit Surveillance, Interveillance, and the Question of Cosmopolitanism: Toward a Phenomenological Understanding of Mediatization." New Media & Society 17.9 (2015): 1473–91. Dahlgren, Peter. "In Search of the Talkative Public: Media, Deliberative Democracy and Civic Culture." Javnost – The Public 9.3 (2002): 5–25. ———. "Social Media and Political Participation: Discourse and Deflection." Critique, Social Media and the Information Society. Eds. Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval. New York: Routledge, 2014. 191–202. Delanty, Gerard. "The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory." British Journal of Sociology 57.1 (2006): 25–47. Dyer, Hugh C. Coping and Conformity in World Politics. Routledge, 2009. Flew, Terry. "Globalization, Neo-Globalization and Post-Globalization: The Challenge of Populism and the Return of the National." Global Media and Communication 16.1 (2020): 19–39. Fraser, Nancy. "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World." Theory, Culture & Society 24.4 (2007): 7–30. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991 [1962]. Kligler-Vilenchik, Neta. "Alternative Citizenship Models: Contextualizing New Media and the New ‘Good Citizen’." New Media & Society 19.11 (2017): 1887–903. Lane, Daniel S., Kevin Do, and Nancy Molina-Rogers. "What Is Political Expression on Social Media Anyway? A Systematic Review." Journal of Information Technology & Politics (2021): 1–15. Larsson, Anders Olof, and Hallvard Moe. "Twitter in Politics and Elections: Insights from Scandinavia." Twitter and Society. Eds. Katrin Weller et al. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 319–30. Linklater, Andrew. "Cosmopolitan Citizenship." Handbook of Citizenship Studies. Eds. Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner. London: Sage, 2002. 317–32. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Ark, 1987 [1964]. Mocanu, Delia, et al. "The Twitter of Babel: Mapping World Languages through Microblogging Platforms." PLOS ONE 8.4 (2013): e61981. Picone, Ike, et al. "Small Acts of Engagement: Reconnecting Productive Audience Practices with Everyday Agency." New Media & Society 21.9 (2019): 2010–28. Robertson, Alexa. Mediated Cosmopolitanism: The World of Television News. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Sassen, Saskia. "Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship." Handbook of Citizenship Studies. Eds. Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner. London: Sage, 2002. 277–91. Sevin, Efe, and Sarphan Uzunoğlu. "Do Foreigners Count? Internationalization of Presidential Campaigns." American Behavioral Scientist 61.3 (2017): 315–33. Stock, Kristin. "Mining Location from Social Media: A Systematic Review." Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 71 (2018): 209–40. Syvertsen, Trine, et al. The Media Welfare State: Nordic Media in the Digital Era. New Media World. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2014. Szerszynski, Bronislaw, and John Urry. "Cultures of Cosmopolitanism." The Sociological Review 50.4 (2002): 461–81. Vaughan, Michael, et al. "The Role of Novel Citizenship Norms in Signing and Sharing Online Petitions." Political Studies (2022). Vromen, Ariadne. Digital Citizenship and Political Engagement: The Challenge from Online Campaigning and Advocacy Organisations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

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Abstract:

Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circ*mstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless hom*ogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circ*mstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. 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Abstract:

IntroductionIn Nancy Meyers’s 2015 film The Intern a particular kind of masculinity is celebrated through the material accoutrements of Ben Whittaker (Robert De Niro). A retired 70-year-old manager, Ben takes up a position as a “senior” Intern in an online clothing distribution company run by Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway). Jules’s company, All About Fit, is the embodiment of the Gen Y creative workplace operating in an old Brooklyn warehouse. Ben’s presence in this environment is anachronistic and yet also stylishly retro in an industry where “vintage” is a mode of dress but also offers alternative ethical values (Veenstra and Kuipers). The alternative that Ben offers is figured through his sartorial style, which mobilises a specific kind of retro masculinity made available through his senior white male body. This paper investigates how and why retro masculinity is materialised and embodied as both a set of values and a set of objects in The Intern.Three particular objects are emblematic of this retro masculinity and come to stand in for a body of desirable masculine values: the business suit, the briefcase, and the handkerchief. In the midst of an indie e-commerce garment business, Ben’s old-fashioned wardrobe registers a regular middle class managerial masculinity from the past that is codified as solidly reliable and dependable. Sherry Turkle reminds us that “material culture carries emotions and ideas of startling intensity” (6), and these impact our thinking, our emotional life, and our memories. The suit, briefcase, and handkerchief are material reminders of this reliable masculine past. The values they evoke, as presented in this film, seem to offer sensible solutions to the fast pace of twenty-first century life and its reconfigurations of family and work prompted by feminism and technology.The film’s fetishisation of these objects of retro masculinity could be mistaken for nostalgia, in the way that vintage collections elide their political context, and yet it also registers social anxiety around gender and generation amid twenty-first century social change. Turner reminds us of the importance of film as a social practice through which “our culture makes sense of itself” (3), and which participates in the ongoing negotiation of the meanings of gender. While masculinity is often understood to have been in crisis since the advent of second-wave feminism and women’s mass entry into the labour force, theoretical scrutiny now understands masculinity to be socially constructed and changing, rather than elemental and stable; performative rather than innate; fundamentally political, and multiple through the intersection of class, race, sexuality, and age amongst other factors (Connell; Butler). While Connell coined the term “hegemonic masculinity,” to indicate “masculinity which occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations” (76), it is always intersectional and contestable. Ben’s hegemonic position in The Intern might be understood in relation to what Buchbinder identifies as “inadequate” or “incompetent” masculinities, which offer a “foil for another principal character” (232), but this movement between margin and hegemony is always in process and accords with the needs that structure the story, and its attendant social anxieties. This film’s fetishising of Ben’s sartorial style suggests a yearning for a stable and recognisable masculine identity, but in order to reinstall these meanings the film must ignore the political times from which they emerge.The construction of retro masculinity in this case is mapped onto Ben’s body as a “senior.” As Gilleard notes, ageing bodies are usually marked by a narrative of corporeal decline, and yet for men of hegemonic privilege, non-material values like seniority, integrity, wisdom, and longevity coalesce to embody “the accumulation of cultural or symbolic capital in the form of wisdom, maturity or experience” (1). Like masculinity, then, corporeality is understood to be a set of unstable signifiers produced through particular cultural discourses.The Business SuitThe business suit is Ben Whittaker’s habitual work attire, so when he comes out of retirement to be an intern at the e-commerce company he re-adopts this professional garb. The solid outline of a tailored and dark-coloured suit signals a professional body that is separate, autonomous and impervious to the outside world, according to Longhurst (99). It is a body that is “proper,” ready for business, and suit-ed to the professional corporate world, whose values it also embodies (Edwards 42). In contrast, the costuming code of the Google generation of online marketers in the film is defined as “super cas[ual].” This is a workplace where the boss rides her bicycle through the open-space office and in which the other 219 workers define their individuality through informal dress and decoration. In this environment Ben stands out, as Jules comments on his first day:Jules: Don’t feel like you have to dress up.Ben: I’m comfortable in a suit if it’s okay.Jules: No, it’s fine. [grins] Old school.Ben: At least I’ll stand out.Jules: I don’t think you’ll need a suit to do that.The anachronism of a 70-year-old being an intern is materialised through Ben’s dress code. The business suit comes to represent Ben not only as old school, however, but as a “proper” manager.As the embodiment of a successful working woman, entrepreneur Jules Ostin appears to be the antithesis of the business-suit model of a manager. Consciously not playing by the book, her company is both highly successful, meeting its five-year objectives in only nine months, and highly vulnerable to disasters like bedbugs, delivery crises, and even badly wrapped tissue. Shaped in her image, the company is often directly associated with Jules herself, as Ben continually notes, and this comes to include the mix of success, vulnerability, and disaster. In fact, the success of her company is the reason that she is urged to find a “seasoned” CEO to run the company, indicating the ambiguous, simultaneous guise of success and disaster.This relationship between individual corporeality and the corporate workforce is reinforced when it is revealed that Ben worked as a manager for 40 years in the very same warehouse, reinforcing his qualities of longevity, reliability, and dependability. He oversaw the printing of the physical telephone book, another quaint material artefact of the past akin to Ben, which is shown to have literally shaped the building where the floor dips over in the corner due to the heavy printers. The differences between Ben and Jules as successive generations of managers in this building operate as registers of social change inflected with just a little nostalgia. Indeed, the name of Jules’s company, All About Fit, seems to refer more to the beautifully tailored “fit” of Ben’s business suit than to any of the other clothed bodies in the company.Not only is the business suit fitted to business, but it comes to represent a properly managed body as well. This is particularly evident when contrasted with Jules’s management style. Over the course of the film, as she endures a humiliating series of meetings, sends a disastrous email to the wrong recipient, and juggles her strained marriage and her daughter’s school schedule, Jules is continuously shown to teeter on the brink of losing control. Her bodily needs are exaggerated in the movie: she does not sleep and apparently risks “getting fat” according to her mother’s research; then when she does sleep it is in inappropriate places and she snores loudly; she forgets to eat, she cries, gets drunk and vomits, gets nervous, and gets emotional. All of these outpourings are in situations that Ben remedies, in his solid reliable suited self. As Longhurst reminds us,The suit helps to create an illusion of a hard, or at least a firm and “proper,” body that is autonomous, in control, rational and masculine. It gives the impression that bodily boundaries continually remain intact and reduce potential embarrassment caused by any kind of leakage. (99)Ben is thus suited to manage situations in ways that contrast to Jules, whose bodily emissions and emotional dramas reinforce her as feminine, chaotic, and emotionally vulnerable. As Gatens notes of our epistemological inheritance, “women are most often understood to be less able to control the passions of the body and this failure is often located in the a priori disorder or anarchy of the female body itself” (50). Transitioning these philosophical principles to the 21st-century workplace, however, manifests some angst around gender and generation in this film.Despite the film’s apparent advocacy of successful working women, Jules too comes to prefer Ben’s model of corporeal control and masculinity. Ben is someone who makes Jules “feel calm, more centred or something. I could use that, obviously,” she quips. After he leads the almost undifferentiated younger employees Jason, Davis, and Lewis on a physical email rescue, Jules presents her theory of men amidst shots at a bar to celebrate their heist:Jules: So, we were always told that we could be anything, do anything, and I think guys got, maybe not left behind but not quite as nurtured, you know? I mean, like, we were the generation of You go, Girl. We had Oprah. And I wonder sometimes how guys fit in, you know they still seem to be trying to figure it out. They’re still dressing like little boys, they’re still playing video games …Lewis: Well they’ve gotten great.Davis: I love video games.Ben: Oh boy.Jules: How, in one generation, have men gone from guys like Jack Nicholson and Harrison Ford to … [Lewis, Davis, and Jason look down at themselves]Jules: Take Ben, here. A dying breed. Look and learn boys, because if you ask me, this is what cool is.Jules’s excessive drinking in this scene, which is followed by her vomiting into a rubbish bin, appears to reinforce Ben’s stable sobriety, alongside the culture of excess and rapid change associated with Jules through her gender and generation.Jules’s adoption of Ben as the model of masculinity is timely, given that she consistently encounters “sexism in business.” After every meeting with a potential CEO Jules complains of their patronising approach—calling her company a “chick site,” for example. And yet Ben echoes the sartorial style of the 1960s Mad Men era, which is suffused with sexism. The tension between Ben’s modelling of old-fashioned chivalry and those outdated sexist businessmen who never appear on-screen remains linked, however, through the iconography of the suit. In his book Mediated Nostalgia, Lizardi notes a similar tendency in contemporary media for what he calls “presentist versions of the past […] that represent a simpler time” (6) where viewers are constructed as ”uncritical citizens of our own culture” (1). By heroising Ben as a model of white middle-class managerial masculinity that is nostalgically enduring and endearing, this film betrays a yearning for such a “simpler time,” despite the complexities that hover just off-screen.Indeed, most of the other male characters in the film are found wanting in comparison to the retro masculinity of Ben. Jules’s husband Matt appears to be a perfect modern “stay-at-home-dad” who gives up his career for Jules’s business start-up. Yet he is found to be having an affair with one of the school mums. Lewis’s clothes are also condemned by Ben: “Why doesn’t anyone tuck anything in anymore?” he complains. Jason does not know how to speak to his love-interest Becky, expecting that texting and emailing sad emoticons will suffice, and Davis is unable to find a place to live. Luckily Ben can offer advice and tutelage to these men, going so far as to house Davis and give him one of his “vintage” ties to wear. Jules endorses this, saying she loves men in ties.The BriefcaseIf a feature of Ben’s experienced managerial style is longevity and stability, then these values are also attached to his briefcase. The association between Ben and his briefcase is established when the briefcase is personified during preparations for Ben’s first day: “Back in action,” Ben tells it. According to Atkinson, the briefcase is a “signifier of executive status […] entwined with a ‘macho mystique’ of concealed technology” (192). He ties this to the emergence of Cold War spy films like James Bond and traces it to the development of the laptop computer. This mix of mobility, concealment, glamour, and a touch of playboy adventurousness in a mass-produced material product manifested the values of the corporate world in latter 20th-century work culture and rendered the briefcase an important part of executive masculinity. Ben’s briefcase is initially indicative of his anachronistic position in All About Fit. While Davis opens his canvas messenger bag to reveal a smartphone, charger, USB drive, multi-cable connector, and book, Ben mirrors this by taking out his glasses case, set of pens, calculator, fliptop phone, and travel clock. Later in the film he places a print newspaper and leather bound book back into the case. Despite the association with a pre-digital age, the briefcase quickly becomes a product associated with Ben’s retro style. Lewis, at the next computer console, asks about its brand:Ben: It’s a 1973 Executive Ashburn Attaché. They don’t make it anymore.Lewis: I’m a little in love with it.Ben: It’s a classic Lewis. It’s unbeatable.The attaché case is left over from Ben’s past in executive management as VP for sales and advertising. This was a position he held for twenty years, during his past working life, which was spent with the same company for over 40 years. Ben’s long-serving employment record has the same values as his equally long-serving attaché case: it is dependable, reliable, ages well, and outlasts changes in fashion.The kind of nostalgia invested in Ben and his briefcase is reinforced extradiagetically through the musical soundtracks associated with him. Compared to the undifferentiated upbeat tracks at the workplace, Ben’s scenes feature a slower-paced sound from another era, including Ray Charles, Astrud Gilberto, Billie Holiday, and Benny Goodman. These classics are a point of connection with Jules, who declares that she loves Billie Holiday. Yet Jules is otherwise characterised by upbeat, even frantic, timing. She hates slow talkers, is always on the move, and is renowned for being late for meetings and operating on what is known as “Jules Standard Time.” In contrast, like his music, Ben is always on time: setting two alarm clocks each night, driving shorter and more efficient routes, seeing things at just the right time, and even staying at work until the boss leaves. He is reliable, steady, and orderly. He restores order both to the office junk desk and to the desk of Jules’s personal assistant Becky. These characteristics of order and timeliness are offered as an alternative to the chaos of 21st-century global flows of fashion marketing. Like his longevity, time is measured and managed around Ben. Even his name echoes that veritable keeper of time, Big Ben.The HandkerchiefThe handkerchief is another anachronistic object that Ben routinely carries, concealed inside his suit rather than flamboyantly worn on the outside pocket. A neatly ironed square of white hanky, it forms a notable part of Ben’s closet, as Davis notices and enquires about:Davis: Okay what’s the deal with the handkerchief? I don’t get that at all.Ben: It’s essential. That your generation doesn’t know that is criminal. The reason for carrying a handkerchief is to lend it. Ask Jason about this. Women cry Davis. We carry it for them. One of the last vestiges of the chivalrous gent.Indeed, when Jules’s personal assistant Becky bursts into tears because her skills and overtime go unrecognised, Ben is able to offer the hanky to Jason to give her as a kind of white flag, officially signaling a ceasefire between Becky and Jason. This scene is didactic: Ben is teaching Jason how to talk to a woman with the handkerchief as a material prop to prompt the occasion. He also offers advice to Becky to keep more regular hours, and go out and have fun (with Jason, obviously). Despite Becky declaring she “hates girls who cry at work,” this reaction to the pressures of a contemporary work culture that is irregular, chaotic, and never-ending is clearly marking gender, as the handkerchief also marks a gendered transaction of comfort.The handkerchief functions as a material marker of the “chivalrous gent” partly due to the number of times women are seen to cry in this film. In one of Ben’s first encounters with Jules she is crying in a boardroom, when it is suggested that she find a CEO to manage the company. Ben is clearly embarrassed, as is Jules, indicating the inappropriateness of such bodily emissions at work and reinforcing the emotional currency of women in the workplace. Jules again cries while discussing her marriage crisis with Ben, a scene in which Ben comments it is “the one time when he doesn’t have a hanky.” By the end of the film, when Jules and Matt are reconciling, she suggests: “It would be great if you were to carry a handkerchief.” The remaking of modern men into the retro style of Ben is more fully manifested in Davis who is depicted going to work on the last day in the film in a suit and tie. No doubt a handkerchief lurks hidden within.ConclusionThe yearning that emerges for a masculinity of yesteryear means that the intern in this film, Ben Whittaker, becomes an internal moral compass who reminds us of rapid social changes in gender and work, and of their discomfits. That this should be mapped onto an older, white, heterosexual, male body is unsurprising, given the authority traditionally invested in such bodies. Ben’s retro masculinity, however, is a fantasy from a fictional yesteryear, without the social or political forces that render those times problematic; instead, his material culture is fetishised and stripped of political analysis. Ben even becomes the voice of feminism, correcting Jules for taking the blame for Matt’s affair. Buchbinder argues that the more recent manifestations in film and television of “inadequate or incomplete” masculinity can be understood as “enacting a resistance to or even a refusal of the coercive pressure of the gender system” (235, italics in original), and yet The Intern’s yearning for a slow, orderly, mature, and knowing male hero refuses much space for alternative younger models. Despite this apparently unerring adulation of retro masculinity, however, we are reminded of the sexist social culture that suits, briefcases, and handkerchiefs materialise every time Jules encounters one of the seasoned CEOs jostling to replace her. The yearning for a stable masculinity in this film comes at the cost of politicising the past, and imagining alternative models for the future.ReferencesAtkinson, Paul. “Man in a Briefcase: The Social Construction of the Laptop Computer and the Emergence of a Type Form.” Journal of Design History 18.2 (2005): 191-205. Buchbinder, David. “Enter the Schlemiel: The Emergence of Inadequate of Incompetent Masculinities in Recent Film and Television.” Canadian Review of American Studies 38.2 (2008): 227-245.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.Connell, R.W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.Edwards, Tim. Fashion in Focus: Concepts, Practices and Politics. London: Routledge, 2010.Gatens, Moira. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. New York: Routledge, 1996.Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment. London: Anthem, 2014.Lizardi, Ryan. Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media. London: Lexington Books, 2015.Longhurst, Robyn. Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. London: Routledge, 2001.Meyers, Nancy, dir. The Intern. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2015.Turkle, Sherry. “The Things That Matter.” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Ed. Sherry Turkle. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007.Turner, Graeme. Film as Social Practice. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.Veenstra, Aleit, and Giselinde Kuipers. “It Is Not Old-Fashioned, It Is Vintage: Vintage Fashion and the Complexities of 21st Century Consumption Practices.” Sociology Compass 7.5 (2013): 355-365.

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“...children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents...” — Stephen Kline, The Making of Children’s Culture We live in a world saturated by design and through design artefacts, one can glean unique insights into a culture's values and norms. In fact, some academics, such as British media and film theorist Ben Highmore, see the two areas so inextricably intertwined as to suggest a wholesale “re-branding of the cultural sciences as design studies” (14). Too often, however, everyday objects are marginalised or overlooked as objects of scholarly attention. The field of material culture studies seeks to change that by focussing on the quotidian object and its ability to reveal much about the time, place, and culture in which it was designed and used. This article takes on one such object, a mid-century children's toy tea set, whose humble journey from 1968 Sears catalogue to 2014 thrift shop—and subsequently this author’s basem*nt—reveals complex rhetorical messages communicated both visually and verbally. As material culture studies theorist Jules Prown notes, the field’s foundation is laid upon the understanding “that objects made ... by man reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased or used them, and by extension the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged” (1-2). In this case, the objects’ material and aesthetic characteristics can be shown to reflect some of the pervasive stereotypes and gender roles of the mid-century and trace some of the prevailing tastes of the American middle class of that era, or perhaps more accurately the type of design that came to represent good taste and a modern aesthetic for that audience. A wealth of research exists on the function of toys and play in learning about the world and even the role of toy selection in early sex-typing, socialisation, and personal identity of children (Teglasi). This particular research area isn’t the focus of this article; however, one aspect that is directly relevant and will be addressed is the notion of adult role-playing among children and the role of toys in communicating certain adult practices or values to the child—what sociologist David Oswell calls “the dedifferentiation of childhood and adulthood” (200). Neither is the focus of this article the practice nor indeed the ethicality of marketing to children. Relevant to this particular example I suggest, is as a product utilising messaging aimed not at children but at adults, appealing to certain parents’ interest in nurturing within their child a perceived era and class-appropriate sense of taste. This was fuelled in large part by the curatorial pursuits of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, coupled with an interest and investment in raising their children in a design-forward household and a desire for toys that reflected that priority; in essence, parents wishing to raise modern children. Following Prown’s model of material culture analysis, the tea set is examined in three stages, through description, deduction and speculation with each stage building on the previous one. Figure 1: Porcelain Toy Tea Set. Description The tea set consists of twenty-six pieces that allows service for six. Six cups, saucers, and plates; a tall carafe with spout, handle and lid; a smaller vessel with a spout and handle; a small round bowl with a lid; a larger oval bowl with a lid, and a coordinated oval platter. The cups are just under two inches tall and two inches in diameter. The largest piece, the platter is roughly six inches by four inches. The pieces are made of a ceramic material white in colour and glossy in texture and are very lightweight. The rim or edge of each piece is decorated with a motif of three straight lines in two different shades of blue and in different thicknesses, interspersed with a set of three black wiggly lines. Figure 2: Porcelain Toy Tea Set Box. The set is packaged for retail purposes and the original box appears to be fully intact. The packaging of an object carries artefactual evidence just as important as what it contains that falls into the category of a “‘para-artefact’ … paraphernalia that accompanies the product (labels, packaging, instructions etc.), all of which contribute to a product’s discourse” (Folkmann and Jensen 83). The graphics on the box are colourful, featuring similar shades of teal blue as found on the objects, with the addition of orange and a silver sticker featuring the logo of the American retailer Sears. The cover features an illustration of the objects on an orange tabletop. The most prominent text that confirms that the toy is a “Porcelain Toy Tea Set” is in an organic, almost psychedelic style that mimics both popular graphics of this era—especially album art and concert posters—as well as the organic curves of steam that emanate from the illustrated teapot’s spout. Additional messages appear on the box, in particular “Contemporary DESIGN” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. Along the edges of the box lid, a detail of the decorative motif is reproduced somewhat abstracted from what actually appears on the ceramic objects. Figure 3: Sears’s Christmas Wishbook Catalogue, page 574 (1968). Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Sears) is well-known for its over one-hundred-year history of producing printed merchandise catalogues. The catalogue is another important para-artefact to consider in analysing the objects. The tea set first appeared in the 1968 Sears Christmas Wishbook. There is no date or copyright on the box, so only its inclusion in the catalogue allows the set to be accurately dated. It also allows us to understand how the set was originally marketed. Deduction In the deduction phase, we focus on the sensory aesthetic and functional interactive qualities of the various components of the set. In terms of its function, it is critical that we situate the objects in their original use context, play. The light weight of the objects and thinness of the ceramic material lends the objects a delicate, if not fragile, feeling which indicates that this set is not for rough use. Toy historian Lorraine May Punchard differentiates between toy tea sets “meant to be used by little girls, having parties for their friends and practising the social graces of the times” and smaller sets or doll dishes “made for little girls to have parties with their dolls, or for their dolls to have parties among themselves” (7). Similar sets sold by Sears feature images of girls using the sets with both human playmates and dolls. The quantity allowing service for six invites multiple users to join the party. The packaging makes clear that these toy tea sets were intended for imaginary play only, rendering them non-functional through an all-capitals caution declaiming “IMPORTANT: Do not use near heat”. The walls and handles of the cups are so thin one can imagine that they would quickly become dangerous if filled with a hot liquid. Nevertheless, the lid of the oval bowl has a tan stain or watermark which suggests actual use. The box is broken up by pink cardboard partitions dividing it into segments sized for each item in the set. Interestingly even the small squares of unfinished corrugated cardboard used as cushioning between each stacked plate have survived. The evidence of careful re-packing indicates that great care was taken in keeping the objects safe. It may suggest that even though the set was used, the children or perhaps the parents, considered the set as something to care for and conserve for the future. Flaws in the glaze and applique of the design motif can be found on several pieces in the set and offer some insight as to the technique used in producing these items. Errors such as the design being perfectly evenly spaced but crooked in its alignment to the rim, or pieces of the design becoming detached or accidentally folded over and overlapping itself could only be the result of a print transfer technique popularised with decorative china of the Victorian era, a technique which lends itself to mass production and lower cost when compared to hand decoration. Speculation In the speculation stage, we can consider the external evidence and begin a more rigorous investigation of the messaging, iconography, and possible meanings of the material artefact. Aspects of the set allow a number of useful observations about the role of such an object in its own time and context. Sociologists observe the role of toys as embodiments of particular types of parental messages and values (Cross 292) and note how particularly in the twentieth century “children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents” (Kline 96). Throughout history children’s toys often reflected a miniaturised version of the adult world allowing children to role-play as imagined adult-selves. Kristina Ranalli explored parallels between the practice of drinking tea and the play-acting of the child’s tea party, particularly in the nineteenth century, as a gendered ritual of gentility; a method of socialisation and education, and an opportunity for exploratory and even transgressive play by “spontaneously creating mini-societies with rules of their own” (20). Such toys and objects were available through the Sears mail-order catalogue from the very beginning at the end of the nineteenth century (McGuire). Propelled by the post-war boom of suburban development and homeownership—that generation’s manifestation of the American Dream—concern with home décor and design was elevated among the American mainstream to a degree never before seen. There was a hunger for new, streamlined, efficient, modernist living. In his essay titled “Domesticating Modernity”, historian Jeffrey L. Meikle notes that many early modernist designers found that perhaps the most potent way to “‘domesticate’ modernism and make it more familiar was to miniaturise it; for example, to shrink the skyscraper and put it into the home as furniture or tableware” (143). Dr Timothy Blade, curator of the 1985 exhibition of girls’ toys at the University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Gallery—now the Goldstein Museum of Design—described in his introduction “a miniaturised world with little props which duplicate, however rudely, the larger world of adults” (5). Noting the power of such toys to reflect adult values of their time, Blade continues: “the microcosm of the child’s world, remarkably furnished by the miniaturised props of their parents’ world, holds many direct and implied messages about the society which brought it into being” (9). In large part, the mid-century Sears catalogues capture the spirit of an era when, as collector Thomas Holland observes, “little girls were still primarily being offered only the options of glamour, beauty and parenthood as the stuff of their fantasies” (175). Holland notes that “the Wishbooks of the fifties [and, I would add, the sixties] assumed most girls would follow in their mother’s footsteps to become full-time housewives and mommies” (1). Blade grouped toys into three categories: cooking, cleaning, and sewing. A tea set could arguably be considered part of the cooking category, but closer examination of the language used in marketing this object—“little hostesses”, et cetera—suggests an emphasis not on cooking but on serving or entertaining. This particular category was not prevalent in the era examined by Blade, but the cultural shifts of the mid-twentieth century, particularly the rapid popularisation of a suburban lifestyle, may have led to the use of entertaining as an additional distinct category of role play in the process of learning to become a “proper” homemaker. Sears and other retailers offered a wide variety of styles of toy tea sets during this era. Blade and numerous other sources observe that children’s toy furniture and appliances tended to reflect the style and aesthetic qualities of their contemporary parallels in the adult world, the better to associate the child’s objects to its adult equivalent. The toy tea set’s packaging trumpets messages intended to appeal to modernist values and identity including “Contemporary Design” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. The use of this coded marketing language, aimed particularly at parents, can be traced back several decades. In 1928 a group of American industrial and textile designers established the American Designers' Gallery in New York, in part to encourage American designers to innovate and adopt new styles such as those seen in the L’ Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925) in Paris, the exposition that sparked international interest in the Art Deco or Art Moderne aesthetic. One of the gallery founders, Ilonka Karasz, a Hungarian-American industrial and textile designer who had studied in Austria and was influenced by the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, publicised her new style of nursery furnishings as “designed for the very modern American child” (Brown 80). Sears itself was no stranger to the appeal of such language. The term “contemporary design” was ubiquitous in catalogue copy of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, used to describe everything from draperies (1959) and bedspreads (1961) to spice racks (1964) and the Lady Kenmore portable dishwasher (1961). An emphasis on the role of design in one’s life and surroundings can be traced back to efforts by MoMA. The museum’s interest in modern design hearkens back almost to the institution’s inception, particularly in relation to industrial design and the aestheticisation of everyday objects (Marshall). Through exhibitions and in partnership with mass-market magazines, department stores and manufacturer showrooms, MoMA curators evangelised the importance of “good design” a term that can be found in use as early as 1942. What Is Good Design? followed the pattern of prior exhibitions such as What Is Modern Painting? and situated modern design at the centre of exhibitions that toured the United States in the first half of the nineteen-fifties. To MoMA and its partners, “good design” signified the narrow identification of proper taste in furniture, home decor and accessories; effectively, the establishment of a design canon. The viewpoints enshrined in these exhibitions and partnerships were highly influential on the nation’s perception of taste for decades to come, as the trickle-down effect reached a much broader segment of consumers than those that directly experienced the museum or its exhibitions (Lawrence.) This was evident not only at high-end shops such as Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. Even mass-market retailers sought out well-known figures of modernist design to contribute to their offerings. Sears, for example, commissioned noted modernist designer and ceramicist Russel Wright to produce a variety of serving ware and decor items exclusively for the company. Notably for this study, he was also commissioned to create a toy tea set for children. The 1957 Wishbook touts the set as “especially created to delight modern little misses”. Within its Good Design series, MoMA exhibitions celebrated numerous prominent Nordic designers who were exploring simplified forms and new material technologies. In the 1968 Wishbook, the retailer describes the Porcelain Toy Tea Set as “Danish-inspired china for young moderns”. The reference to Danish design is certainly compatible with the modernist appeal; after the explosion in popularity of Danish furniture design, the term “Danish Modern” was commonly used in the nineteen-fifties and sixties as shorthand for pan-Scandinavian or Nordic design, or more broadly for any modern furniture design regardless of origin that exhibited similar characteristics. In subsequent decades the notion of a monolithic Scandinavian-Nordic design aesthetic or movement has been debunked as primarily an economically motivated marketing ploy (Olivarez et al.; Fallan). In the United States, the term “Danish Modern” became so commonly misused that the Danish Society for Arts and Crafts called upon the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to legally restrict the use of the labels “Danish” and “Danish Modern” to companies genuinely originating in Denmark. Coincidentally the FTC ruled on this in 1968, noting “that ‘Danish Modern’ carries certain meanings, and... that consumers might prefer goods that are identified with a foreign culture” (Hansen 451). In the case of the Porcelain Toy Tea Set examined here, Sears was not claiming that the design was “Danish” but rather “Danish-inspired”. One must wonder, was this another coded marketing ploy to communicate a sense of “Good Design” to potential customers? An examination of the formal qualities of the set’s components, particularly the simplified geometric forms and the handle style of the cups, confirms that it is unlike a traditional—say, Victorian-style—tea set. Punchard observes that during this era some American tea sets were actually being modelled on coffee services rather than traditional tea services (148). A visual comparison of other sets sold by Sears in the same year reveals a variety of cup and pot shapes—with some similar to the set in question—while others exhibit more traditional teapot and cup shapes. Coffee culture was historically prominent in Nordic cultures so there is at least a passing reference to that aspect of Nordic—if not specifically Danish—influence in the design. But what of the decorative motif? Simple curved lines were certainly prominent in Danish furniture and architecture of this era, and occasionally found in combination with straight lines, but no connection back to any specific Danish motif could be found even after consultation with experts in the field from the Museum of Danish America and the Vesterheim National Norwegian-American Museum (personal correspondence). However, knowing that the average American consumer of this era—even the design-savvy among them—consumed Scandinavian design without distinguishing between the various nations, a possible explanation could be contained in the promotion of Finnish textiles at the time. In the decade prior to the manufacture of the tea set a major design tendency began to emerge in the United States, triggered by the geometric design motifs of the Finnish textile and apparel company Marimekko. Marimekko products were introduced to the American market in 1959 via the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based retailer Design Research (DR) and quickly exploded in popularity particularly after would-be First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy appeared in national media wearing Marimekko dresses during the 1960 presidential campaign and on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. (Thompson and Lange). The company’s styling soon came to epitomise a new youth aesthetic of the early nineteen sixties in the United States, a softer and more casual predecessor to the London “mod” influence. During this time multiple patterns were released that brought a sense of whimsy and a more human touch to classic mechanical patterns and stripes. The patterns Piccolo (1953), Helmipitsi (1959), and Varvunraita (1959), all designed by Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi offered varying motifs of parallel straight lines. Maija Isola's Silkkikuikka (1961) pattern—said to be inspired by the plumage of the Great Crested Grebe—combined parallel serpentine lines with straight and angled lines, available in a variety of colours. These and other geometrically inspired patterns quickly inundated apparel and decor markets. DR built a vastly expanded Cambridge flagship store and opened new locations in New York in 1961 and 1964, and in San Francisco in 1965 fuelled in no small part by the fact that they remained the exclusive outlet for Marimekko in the United States. It is clear that Marimekko’s approach to pattern influenced designers and manufacturers across industries. Design historian Lesley Jackson demonstrates that Marimekko designs influenced or were emulated by numerous other companies across Scandinavia and beyond (72-78). The company’s influence grew to such an extent that some described it as a “conquest of the international market” (Hedqvist and Tarschys 150). Subsequent design-forward retailers such as IKEA and Crate and Barrel continue to look to Marimekko even today for modern design inspiration. In 2016 the mass-market retailer Target formed a design partnership with Marimekko to offer an expansive limited-edition line in their stores, numbering over two hundred items. So, despite the “Danish” misnomer, it is quite conceivable that designers working for or commissioned by Sears in 1968 may have taken their aesthetic cues from Marimekko’s booming work, demonstrating a clear understanding of the contemporary high design aesthetic of the time and coding the marketing rhetoric accordingly even if incorrectly. Conclusion The Sears catalogue plays a unique role in capturing cross-sections of American culture not only as a sales tool but also in Holland’s words as “a beautifully illustrated diary of America, it’s [sic] people and the way we thought about things” (1). Applying a rhetorical and material culture analysis to the catalogue and the objects within it provides a unique glimpse into the roles these objects played in mediating relationships, transmitting values and embodying social practices, tastes and beliefs of mid-century American consumers. Adult consumers familiar with the characteristics of the culture of “Good Design” potentially could have made a connection between the simplified geometric forms of the components of the toy tea set and say the work of modernist tableware designers such as Kaj Franck, or between the set’s graphic pattern and the modernist motifs of Marimekko and its imitators. But for a much broader segment of the population with a less direct understanding of modernist aesthetics, those connections may not have been immediately apparent. The rhetorical messaging behind the objects’ packaging and marketing used class and taste signifiers such as modern, contemporary and “Danish” to reinforce this connection to effect an emotional and aspirational appeal. These messages were coded to position the set as an effective transmitter of modernist values and to target parents with the ambition to create “appropriately modern” environments for their children. References Ancestry.com. “Historic Catalogs of Sears, Roebuck and Co., 1896–1993.” <http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1670>. Baker Furniture Inc. “Design Legacy: Our Story.” n.d. <http://www.bakerfurniture.com/design-story/ legacy-of-quality/design-legacy/>. Blade, Timothy Trent. “Introduction.” Child’s Play, Woman’s Work: An Exhibition of Miniature Toy Appliances: June 12, 1985–September 29, 1985. St. Paul: Goldstein Gallery, U Minnesota, 1985. Brown, Ashley. “Ilonka Karasz: Rediscovering a Modernist Pioneer.” Studies in the Decorative Arts 8.1 (2000-1): 69–91. Cross, Gary. “Gendered Futures/Gendered Fantasies: Toys as Representatives of Changing Childhood.” American Journal of Semiotics 12.1 (1995): 289–310. Dolansky, Fanny. “Playing with Gender: Girls, Dolls, and Adult Ideals in the Roman World.” Classical Antiquity 31.2 (2012): 256–92. Fallan, Kjetil. Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories. Berg, 2012. Folkmann, Mads Nygaard, and Hans-Christian Jensen. “Subjectivity in Self-Historicization: Design and Mediation of a ‘New Danish Modern’ Living Room Set.” Design and Culture 7.1 (2015): 65–84. Hansen, Per H. “Networks, Narratives, and New Markets: The Rise and Decline of Danish Modern Furniture Design, 1930–1970.” The Business History Review 80.3 (2006): 449–83. Hedqvist, Hedvig, and Rebecka Tarschys. “Thoughts on the International Reception of Marimekko.” Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashions, Architecture. Ed. Marianne Aav. Bard. 2003. 149–71. Highmore, Ben. The Design Culture Reader. Routledge, 2008. Holland, Thomas W. Girls’ Toys of the Fifties and Sixties: Memorable Catalog Pages from the Legendary Sears Christmas Wishbooks, 1950-1969. Windmill, 1997. Hucal, Sarah. "Scandi Crush Saga: How Scandinavian Design Took over the World." Curbed, 23 Mar. 2016. <http://www.curbed.com/2016/3/23/11286010/scandinavian-design-arne-jacobsen-alvar-aalto-muuto-artek>. Jackson, Lesley. “Textile Patterns in an International Context: Precursors, Contemporaries, and Successors.” Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashions, Architecture. Ed. Marianne Aav. Bard. 2003. 44–83. Kline, Stephen. “The Making of Children’s Culture.” The Children’s Culture Reader. Ed. Henry Jenkins. New York: NYU P, 1998. 95–109. Lawrence, Sidney. “Declaration of Function: Documents from the Museum of Modern Art’s Design Crusade, 1933-1950.” Design Issues 2.1 (1985): 65–77. Marshall, Jennifer Jane. Machine Art 1934. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. McGuire, Sheila. “Playing House: Sex-Roles and the Child’s World.” Child’s Play, Woman’s Work: An Exhibition of Miniature Toy Appliances : June 12, 1985–September 29, 1985. St. Paul: Goldstein Gallery, U Minnesota, 1985. Meikel, Jeffrey L. “Domesticating Modernity: Ambivalence and Appropriation, 1920–1940.” Designing Modernity; the Arts of Reform and Persuasion. Ed. Wendy Kaplan. Thames & Hudson, 1995. 143–68. O’Brien, Marion, and Aletha C. Huston. “Development of Sex-Typed Play Behavior in Toddlers.” Developmental Psychology, 21.5 (1985): 866–71. Olivarez, Jennifer Komar, Jukka Savolainen, and Juulia Kauste. Finland: Designed Environments. Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Nordic Heritage Museum, 2014. Oswell, David. The Agency of Children: From Family to Global Human Rights. Cambridge UP, 2013. Prown, Jules David. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio 17.1 (1982): 1–19. Punchard, Lorraine May. Child’s Play: Play Dishes, Kitchen Items, Furniture, Accessories. Punchard, 1982. Ranalli, Kristina. An Act Apart: Tea-Drinking, Play and Ritual. Master's thesis. U Delaware, 2013. Sears Corporate Archives. “What Is a Sears Modern Home?” n.d. <http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/index.htm>. "Target Announces New Design Partnership with Marimekko: It’s Finnish, Target Style." Target, 2 Mar. 2016. <http://corporate.target.com/article/2016/03/marimekko-for-target>. Teglasi, Hedwig. “Children’s Choices of and Value Judgments about Sex-Typed Toys and Occupations.” Journal of Vocational Behavior 18.2 (1981): 184–95. Thompson, Jane, and Alexandra Lange. Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes. Chronicle, 2010.

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In a recent gaming anthology, Henry Jenkins cannot help contrasting his son's cramped, urban, media-saturated existence with his own idyllic, semi-rural childhood. After describing his own Huck Finn meanderings over "the spaces of my boyhood" including the imaginary kingdoms of Jungleoca and Freedonia, Jenkins relates his version of his son's experiences: My son, Henry, now 16 has never had a backyard He has grown up in various apartment complexes, surrounded by asphalt parking lots with, perhaps, a small grass buffer from the street… Once or twice, when I became exasperated by my son's constant presence around the house I would … tell him he should go out and play. He would look at me with confusion and ask, where? … Who wouldn't want to trade in the confinement of your room for the immersion promised by today's video games? … Perhaps my son finds in his video games what I found in the woods behind the school, on my bike whizzing down the hills of suburban backstreets, or settled into my treehouse with a good adventure novel intensity of experience, escape from adult regulation; in short, "complete freedom of movement". (Jenkins 1998, 263-265) Games here are connected with a shrinking availability of domestic and public space, and a highly mediated experience of the world. Despite his best intentions, creeping into Jenkins's piece is a sense that games act as a poor substitute for the natural spaces of a "healthy" childhood. Although "Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear", they "offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement" (Jenkins 1998, 266). They emerge, then, as a palliation for the claustrophobic circ*mstances of contemporary urban life, though they offer only unreal spaces, replete with "lakes of fire … cities in the clouds … [and] dazzling neon-lit Asian marketplaces" (Jenkins 1998, 263), where the work of the childish imagination is already done. Despite Jenkins's assertion that games do offer "complete freedom of movement", it is hard to shake the feeling that he considers his own childhood far richer in exploratory and imaginative opportunities: Let me be clear I am not arguing that video games are as good for kids as the physical spaces of backyard play culture. As a father, I wish that my son would come home covered in mud or with scraped knees rather than carpet burns ... The psychological and social functions of playing outside are as significant as the impact of "sunshine and good exercise" upon our physical well-being. (Jenkins 1998, 266) Throughout the piece, games are framed by a romantic, anti-urban discourse: the expanding city is imagined as engulfing space and perhaps destroying childhood itself, such that "'sacred' places are now occupied by concrete, bricks or asphalt" (Jenkins 1998, 263). Games are complicit in this alienation of space and experience. If this is not quite Paul Virilio's recent dour contention that modern mass media forms work mainly to immobilise the body of the consumer--Virilio, luckily, has managed to escape the body-snatchers--games here are produced as a feeble response to an already-effected urban imprisonment of the young. Strikingly, Jenkins seems concerned about his son's "unhealthy" confinement to private, domestic space, and his inability to imaginatively possess a slice of the world outside. Jenkins's description of his son's confinement to the world of "carpet burns" rather than the great outdoors of "scraped knees" and "mud" implicitly leaves the distinction between domestic and public, internal and external, and even the imagined passivity of the domestic sphere as against the activity of the public intact. For those of us who see games as productive activities, which generate particular, unique kinds of pleasure in their own right, rather than as anaemic replacements for lost spaces, this seems to reduce a central cultural form. For those of us who have at least some sympathy with writers on the urban environment like Raban (1974) and Young (1990), who see the city's theatrical and erotic possibilities, Jenkins's fears might seem to erase the pleasures and opportunities that city life provides. Rather than seeing gamers and children (the two groups only partially overlap) as unwitting agents in their own confinement, we can arrive at a slightly more complex view of the relationship between games and urban space. By looking at the video games arcade as it is situated in urban retail space, we can see how gameplay simultaneously acts to regulate urban space, mediates a unique kind of urban performance, and allows sophisticated representations, manipulations and appropriations of differently conceived urban spaces. Despite being a long-standing feature of the urban and retail environment, and despite also being a key site for the "exhibition" of a by-now central media form, the video game arcade has a surprisingly small literature devoted to it. Its prehistory in pinball arcades and pachinko parlours has been noted (by, for example, Steven Poole 2000) but seldom deeply explored, and its relations with a wider urban space have been given no real attention at all. The arcade's complexity, both in terms of its positioning and functions, may contribute to this. The arcade is a space of conflicting, contradictory uses and tendencies, though this is precisely what makes it as important a space as the cinema or penny theatre before it. Let me explain why I think so. The arcade is always simultaneously a part of and apart from the retail centres to which it tends to attach itself.1 If it is part of a suburban shopping mall, it is often located on the ground floor near the entrance, or is semi-detached as cinema complexes often are, so that the player has to leave the mall's main building to get there, or never enter. If it is part of a city or high street shopping area, it is often in a side street or a street parallel to the main retail thoroughfare, or requires the player to mount a set of stairs into an off-street arcade. At other times the arcade is located in a space more strongly marked as liminal in relation to the city -- the seaside resort, sideshow alley or within the fences of a theme park. Despite this, the videogame arcade's interior is usually wholly or mostly visible from the street, arcade or thoroughfare that it faces, whether this visibility is effected by means of glass walls, a front window or a fully retractable sliding door. This slight distance from the mainstream of retail activity and the visibility of the arcade's interior are in part related to the economics of the arcade industry. Arcade machines involve relatively low margins -- witness the industry's recent feting and embrace of redemption (i.e. low-level gambling) games that offer slightly higher turnovers -- and are hungry for space. At the same time, arcades are dependent on street traffic, relentless technological novelty and their de facto use as gathering space to keep the coins rolling in. A balance must be found between affordability, access and visibility, hence their positioning at a slight remove from areas of high retail traffic. The story becomes more complicated, though, when we remember that arcades are heavily marked as deviant, disreputable spaces, whether in the media, government reports or in sociological and psychological literature. As a visible, public, urban space where young people are seen to mix with one another and unfamiliar and novel technologies, the arcade is bound to give rise to adult anxieties. As John Springhall (1998) puts it: More recent youth leisure… occupies visible public space, is seen as hedonistic and presents problems within the dominant discourse of 'enlightenment' … [T]he most popular forms of entertainment among the young at any given historical moment tend also to provide the focus of the most intense social concern. A new medium with mass appeal, and with a technology best understood by the young… almost invariably attracts a desire for adult or government control (160-161, emphasis mine) Where discourses of deviant youth have also been employed in extending the surveillance and policing of retail space, it is unsurprising that spaces seen as points for the concentration of such deviance will be forced away from the main retail thoroughfares, in the process effecting a particular kind of confinement, and opportunity for surveillance. Michel Foucault writes, in Discipline and Punish, about the classical age's refinements of methods for distributing and articulating bodies, and the replacement of spectacular punishment with the crafting of "docile bodies". Though historical circ*mstances have changed, we can see arcades as disciplinary spaces that reflect aspects of those that Foucault describes. The efficiency of arcade games in distributing bodies in rows, and side by side demonstrates that" even if the compartments it assigns become purely ideal, the disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular" (Foucault 1977, 143). The efficiency of games from Pong (Atari:1972) to Percussion Freaks (Konami: 1999) in articulating bodies in play, in demanding specific and often spectacular bodily movements and competencies means that "over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex" (Foucault 1977,153). What is extraordinary is the extent to which the articulation of bodies proceeds only through a direct engagement with the game. Pong's instructions famously read only "avoid missing ball for high score"--a whole economy of movement, arising from this effort, is condensed into six words. The distribution and articulation of bodies also entails a confinement in the space of the arcade, away from the main areas of retail trade, and renders occupants easily observable from the exterior. We can see that games keep kids off the streets. On the other hand, the same games mediate spectacular forms of urban performance and allow particular kinds of reoccupation of urban space. Games descended or spun off from Dance Dance Revolution (Konami: 1998) require players to dance, in time with thumping (if occasionally cheesy) techno, and in accordance with on-screen instructions, in more and more complex sequences on lit footpads. These games occupy a lot of space, and the newest instalment (DDR has just issued its "7th Mix") is often installed at the front of street level arcades. When played with flair, games such as these are apt to attract a crowd of onlookers to gather, not only inside, but also on the footpath outside. Indeed games such as these have given rise to websites like http://www.dancegames.com/au which tells fans not only when and where new games are arriving, but whether or not the positioning of arcades and games within them will enable a player to attract attention to their performance. This mediation of cyborg performance and display -- where success both achieves and exceeds perfect integration with a machine in urban space -- is particularly important to Asian-Australian youth subcultures, which are often marginalised in other forums for youthful display, like competitive sport. International dance gamer websites like Jason Ho's http://www.ddrstyle.com , which is emblazoned with the slogan "Asian Pride", explicitly make the connection between Asian youth subcultures and these new kinds of public performance. Games like those in the Time Crisis series, which may seem less innocuous, might be seen as effecting important inversions in the representation of urban space. Initially Time Crisis, which puts a gun in the player's hand and requires them to shoot at human figures on screen, might even be seen to live up to the dire claims made by figures like Dave Grossman that such games effectively train perpetrators of public violence (Grossman 1995). What we need to keep in mind, though, is that first, as "cops", players are asked to restore order to a representation of urban space, and second, that that they are reacting to images of criminality. When criminality and youth are so often closely linked in public discourse (not to mention criminality and Asian ethnicity) these games stage a reversal whereby the young player is responsible for performing a reordering of the unruly city. In a context where the ideology of privacy has progressively marked public space as risky and threatening,2 games like Time Crisis allow, within urban space, a performance aimed at the resolution of risk and danger in a representation of the urban which nevertheless involves and incorporates the material spaces that it is embedded in.This is a different kind of performance to DDR, involving different kinds of image and bodily attitude, that nevertheless articulates itself on the space of the arcade, a space which suddenly looks more complex and productive. The manifest complexity of the arcade as a site in relation to the urban environment -- both regulating space and allowing spectacular and sophisticated types of public performance -- means that we need to discard simplistic stories about games providing surrogate spaces. We reify game imagery wherever we see it as a space apart from the material spaces and bodies with which gaming is always involved. We also need to adopt a more complex attitude to urban space and its possibilities than any narrative of loss can encompass. The abandonment of such narratives will contribute to a position where we can recognise the difference between the older and younger Henrys' activities, and still see them as having a similar complexity and richness. With work and luck, we might also arrive at a material organisation of society where such differing spaces of play -- seen now by some as mutually exclusive -- are more easily available as choices for everyone. NOTES 1 Given the almost total absence of any spatial study of arcades, my observations here are based on my own experience of arcades in the urban environment. Many of my comments are derived from Brisbane, regional Queensland and urban-Australian arcades this is where I live but I have observed the same tendencies in many other urban environments. Even where the range of services and technologies in the arcades are different in Madrid and Lisbon they serve espresso and alcohol (!), in Saigon they often consist of a bank of TVs equipped with pirated PlayStation games which are hired by the hour their location (slightly to one side of major retail areas) and their openness to the street are maintained. 2 See Spigel, Lynn (2001) for an account of the effects and transformations of the ideology of privacy in relation to media forms. See Furedi, Frank (1997) and Douglas, Mary (1992) for accounts of the contemporary discourse of risk and its effects. References Douglas, M. (1992) Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London ; New York : Routledge. Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin,. Furedi, F.(1997) Culture of Fear: Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. London ; Washington : Cassell. Grossman, D. (1995) On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown. Jenkins, H. (1998) Complete freedom of movement: video games as gendered play spaces. In Jenkins, Henry and Justine Cassell (eds) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat : Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Poole, S. (2000) Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames. London: Fourth Estate. Raban, J. (1974) Soft City. London: Hamilton. Spigel, L. (2001) Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and the Postwar Suburbs. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Springhall, J. (1998) Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics : Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-rap, 1830-1996. New York: St. Martin's Press. Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Websites http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/s... (Time Crisis synopsis and shots) http://www.dancegames.com/au (Site for a network of fans revealing something about the culture around dancing games) http://www.ddrstyle.com (website of Jason Ho, who connects his dance game performances with pride in his Asian identity). http://www.pong-story.com (The story of Pong, the very first arcade game) Games Dance Dance Revolution, Konami: 1998. Percussion Freaks, Konami: 1999. Pong, Atari: 1972. Time Crisis, Namco: 1996. Links http://www.dancegames.com/au http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/shows/arcade/ag1154.php http://www.pong-story.com http://www.ddrstyle.com Citation reference for this article MLA Style Wilson, Jason A.. "Performance, anxiety" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php>. Chicago Style Wilson, Jason A., "Performance, anxiety" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Wilson, Jason A.. (2002) Performance, anxiety. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/performance.php> ([your date of access]).

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There is a disparity between expectations that the members of a community will work together for the common good — and the stark reality that human beings form into groups, or parties, to engage in conflict with each other. This is particularly the case in so-called popular governments that include some wider political involvement by the people. In ancient Greece stasis, or endemic conflict between the democratic and oligarchic elements of a city was very common. Likewise, the late Roman Republic maintained a division between the populares and the optimates. In both cases there was violence as both sides battled for dominance. For example, in late republican Rome street gangs formed that employed intimidation and violence for political ends.In seventeenth century England there was conflict between those who favoured royal authority and those who wished to see more power devolved to parliament, which led to Civil War in the 1640s. Yet the English ideal, as expressed by The Book of Common Prayer (1549; and other editions) was that the country be quietly governed. It seemed perverse that the members of the body politic should be in conflict with each other. By the late seventeenth century England was still riven by conflict between two groups which became designated as the Whigs and the Tories. The divisions were both political and religious. Most importantly, these divisions were expressed at the local level, in such things as the struggle for the control of local corporations. They were not just political but could also be personal and often turned nasty as families contended for local control. The mid seventeenth century had been a time of considerable violence and warfare, not only in Europe and England but across Eurasia, including the fall of the Ming dynasty in China (Parker). This violence occurred in the wake of a cooler climate change, bringing in its wake crop failure followed by scarcity, hunger, disease and vicious warfare. Millions of people died.Conditions improved in the second half of the seventeenth century and countries slowly found their way to a new relative stability. The Qing created a new imperial order in China. In France, Louis XIV survived the Fronde and his answer to the rage and divisions of that time was the imposition of an autocratic and despotic state that simply prohibited the existence of divisions. Censorship and the inquisition flourished in Catholic Europe ensuring that dissidence would not evolve into violence fuelled by rage. In 1685, Louis expelled large numbers of Protestants from France.Divisions did not disappear in England at the end of the Civil War and the Restoration of Charles II. Initially, it appears that Charles sought to go down the French route. There was a regulation of ideas as new laws meant that the state licensed all printed works. There was an attempt to impose a bureaucratic authoritarian state, culminating in the short reign of James II (Pincus, Ertman). But its major effect, since the heightened fear of James’ Catholicism in Protestant England, was to stoke the ‘rage of party’ between those who supported this hierarchical model of social order and those who wanted political power less concentrated (Knights Representation, Plumb).The issue was presumed to be settled in 1688 when James was chased from the throne, and replaced by the Dutchman William and his wife Mary. In the official language of the day, liberty had triumphed over despotism and the ‘ancient constitution’ of the English had been restored to guarantee that liberty.However, three major developments were going on in England by the late seventeenth century: The first is the creation of a more bureaucratic centralised state along the lines of the France of Louis XIV. This state apparatus was needed to collect the taxes required to finance and administer the English war machine (Pincus). The second is the creation of a genuinely popular form of government in the wake of the expulsion of James and his replacement by William of Orange (Ertman). This means regular parliaments that are elected every three years, and also a free press to scrutinise political activities. The third is the development of financial institutions to enable the war to be conducted against France, which only comes to an end in 1713 (Pincus). Here, England followed the example of the Netherlands. There is the establishment of the bank of England in 1694 and the creation of a national debt. This meant that those involved in finance could make big profits out of financing a war, so a new moneyed class developed. England's TransformationIn the 1690s as England is transformed politically, religiously and economically, this develops a new type of society that unifies strong government with new financial institutions and arrangements. In this new political configuration, the big winners are the new financial elites and the large (usually Whig) aristocratic landlords, who had the financial resources to benefit from it. The losers were the smaller landed gentry who were taxed to pay for the war. They increasingly support the Tories (Plumb) who opposed both the war and the new financial elites it helped to create; leading to the 1710 election that overwhelmingly elected a Tory government led by Harley and Bolingbroke. This government then negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, with the Whigs retaining a small minority.History indicates that the post-1688 developments do not so much quell the ‘rage of party’ as encourage it and fan the fires of conflict and discontent. Parliamentary elections were held every three years and could involve costly, and potentially financially ruinous, contests between families competing for parliamentary representation. As these elections involved open voting and attempts to buy votes through such means as wining and dining, they could be occasions for riotous behaviour. Regular electoral contests, held in an electorate that was much larger than it would be one hundred years later, greatly heightened the conflicts and kept the political temperature at a high.Fig. 1: "To Him Pudel, Bite Him Peper"Moreover, there was much to fuel this conflict and to ‘maintain the rage’: First, the remodelling of the English financial system combined with the high level of taxation imposed largely on the gentry fuelled a rage amongst this group. This new world of financial investments was not part of their world. They were extremely suspicious of wealth not derived from landed property and sought to limit the power of those who held such wealth. Secondly, the events of 1688 split the Anglican Church in two (Pincus). The opponents of the new finance regimes tended also to be traditional High Church Anglicans who feared the newer, more tolerant government policy towards religion. Finally, the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 meant that the English state was no longer willing to control the flow of information to the public (Kemp). The end result was that England in the 1690s became something akin to a modern public culture in which there was a relatively free flow of political information, constant elections held with a limited, but often substantial franchise, that was operating out of a very new commercial and financial environment. These political divisions were now deeply entrenched and very real passion animated each side of the political divide (Knights Devil).Under these circ*mstances, it was not possible simply to stamp out ‘the rage’ by the government repressing the voices of dissent. The authoritarian model for creating public conformity was not an option. A mechanism for lowering the political and religious temperature needed to arise in this new society where power and knowledge were diffused rather than centrally concentrated. Also, the English were aided by the return to a more benign physical environment. In economic terms it led to what Fischer terms the equilibrium of the Enlightenment. The wars of Louis XIV were a hangover from the earlier more desperate age; they prolonged the crisis of that age. Nevertheless, the misery of the earlier seventeenth century had passed. The grim visions of Calvinism (and Jansenism) had lost their plausibility. So the excessive violence of the 1640s was replaced by a more tepid form of political resistance, developing into the first modern expression of populism. So, the English achieved what Plumb calls ‘political stability’ were complex (1976), but relied on two things. The first was limiting the opportunity for political activity and the second was labelling political passion as a form of irrational behaviour – as an unsatisfactory or improper way of conducting oneself in the world. Emotions became an indulgence of the ignorant, the superstitious and the fanatical. This new species of humanity was the gentleman, who behaved in a reasonable and measured way, would express a person commensurate with the Enlightenment.This view would find its classic expression over a century later in Macaulay’s History of England, where the pre-1688 English squires are now portrayed in all their semi-civilised glory, “his ignorance and uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases, would, in our time, be considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian” (Macaulay 244). While the Revolution of 1688 is usually portrayed as a triumph of liberty, as stated, recent scholarship (Pincus, Ertman) emphasises how the attempts by both Charles and James to build a more bureaucratic state were crucial to the development of eighteenth century England. England was not really a land of liberty that kept state growth in check, but the English state development took a different path to statehood from countries such as France, because it involved popular institutions and managed to eliminate many of the corrupt practices endemic to a patrimonial regime.The English were as interested in ‘good police’, meaning the regulation of moral behaviour, as any state on the European continent, but their method of achievement was different. In the place of bureaucratic regulation, the English followed another route, later be termed in the 1760s as ‘civilisation’ (Melleuish). So, the Whigs became the party of rationality and reasonableness, and the Whig regime was Low Church, which was latitudinarian and amenable to rationalist Christianity. Also, the addition of the virtue and value of politeness and gentlemanly behaviour became the antidote to the “rage of party’”(Knights Devil 163—4) . The Whigs were also the party of science and therefore, followed Lockean philosophy. They viewed themselves as ‘reasonable men’ in opposition to their more fanatically inclined opponents. It is noted that any oligarchy, can attempt to justify itself as an ‘aristocracy’, in the sense of representing the ‘morally’ best people. The Whig aristocracy was more cosmopolitan, because its aristocrats had often served the rulers of countries other than England. In fact, the values of the Whig elite were the first expression of the liberal cosmopolitan values which are now central to the ideology of contemporary elites. One dimension of the Whig/Tory split is that while the Whig aristocracy had a cosmopolitan outlook as more proto-globalist, the Tories remained proto-nationalists. The Whigs became simultaneously the party of liberty, Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism, commerce and civilised behaviour. This is why liberty, the desire for peace and ‘sweet commerce’ came to be identified together. The Tories, on the other hand, were the party of real property (that is to say land) so their national interest could easily be construed by their opponents as the party of obscurantism and rage. One major incident illustrates how this evolved.The Trial of the High Church Divine Henry Sacheverell In 1709, the High Church Divine Henry Sacheverell preached a fiery sermon attacking the Whig revolutionary principles of resistance, and advocated obedience and unlimited submission to authority. Afterwards, for his trouble he was impeached before the House of Lords by the Whigs for high crimes and misdemeanours (Tryal 1710). As Mark Knights (6) has put it, one of his major failings was his breaching of the “Whig culture of politeness and moderation”. The Whigs also disliked Sacheverell for his charismatic appeal to women (Nicholson). He was found guilty and his sermons ordered to be burned by the hangman. But Sacheverell became simultaneously a martyr and a political celebrity leading to a mass outpouring of printed material (Knights Devil 166—186). Riots broke out in London in the wake of the trial’s verdict. For the Whigs, this stood as proof of the ‘rage’ that lurked in the irrational world of Toryism. However, as Geoffrey Holmes has demonstrated, these riots were not aimless acts of mob violence but were directed towards specific targets, in particular the meeting houses of Dissenters. History reveals that the Sacheverell riots were the last major riots in England for almost seventy years until the Lord Gordon anti-Catholic riots of 1780. In the short term they led to an overwhelming Tory victory at the 1710 elections, but that victory was pyrrhic. With the death of Queen Anne, followed by the accession of the Hanoverians to the throne, the Whigs became the party of government. Some Tories, such as Bolingbroke, panicked, and fled to France and the Court of the Pretender. The other key factor was the Treaty of Utrecht, brokered on England’s behalf by the Tory government of Harley and Bolingbroke that brought the Civil war to an end in 1713. England now entered an era of peace; there remained no longer the need to raise funds to conduct a war. The war had forced the English state to both to consolidate and to innovate.This can be viewed as the victory of the party of ‘politeness and moderation’ and the Enlightenment and hence the effective end of the ‘rage of party’. Threats did remain by the Pretender’s (James III) attempt to retake the English throne, as happened in 1715 and 1745, when was backed by the barbaric Scots.The Whig ascendancy, the ascendancy of a minority, was to last for decades but remnants of the Tory Party remained, and England became a “one-and one-half” party regime (Ertman 222). Once in power, however, the Whigs utilised a number of mechanisms to ensure that the age of the ‘rage of party’ had come to an end and would be replaced by one of politeness and moderation. As Plumb states, they gained control of the “means of patronage” (Plumb 161—88), while maintaining the ongoing trend, from the 1680s of restricting those eligible to vote in local corporations, and the Whigs supported the “narrowing of the franchise” (Plumb 102—3). Finally, the Septennial Act of 1717 changed the time between elections from three years to seven years.This lowered the political temperature but it did not eliminate the Tories or complaints about the political, social and economic path that England had taken. Rage may have declined but there was still a lot of dissent in the newspapers, in particular in the late 1720s in the Craftsman paper controlled by Viscount Bolingbroke. The Craftsman denounced the corrupt practices of the government of Sir Robert Walpole, the ‘robinocracy’, and played to the prejudices of the landed gentry. Further, the Bolingbroke circle contained some major literary figures of the age; but not a group of violent revolutionaries (Kramnick). It was true populism, from ideals of the Enlightenment and a more benign environment.The new ideal of ‘politeness and moderation’ had conquered English political culture in an era of Whig dominance. This is exemplified in the philosophy of David Hume and his disparagement of enthusiasm and superstition, and the English elite were also not fond of emotional Methodists, and Charles Wesley’s father had been a Sacheverell supporter (Cowan 43). A moderate man is rational and measured; the hoi polloi is emotional, faintly disgusting, and prone to rage.In the End: A Reduction of Rage Nevertheless, one of the great achievements of this new ideal of civility was to tame the conflict between political parties by recognising political division as a natural part of the political process, one that did not involve ‘rage’. This was the great achievement of Edmund Burke who, arguing against Bolingbroke’s position that 1688 had restored a unified political order, and hence abolished political divisions, legitimated such party divisions as an element of a civilised political process involving gentlemen (Mansfield 3). The lower orders, lacking the capacity to live up to this ideal, were prone to accede to forces other than reason, and needed to be kept in their place. This was achieved through a draconian legal code that punished crimes against property very severely (Hoppit). If ‘progress’ as later described by Macaulay leads to a polite and cultivated elite who are capable of conquering their rage – so the lower orders need to be repressed because they are still essentially barbarians. This was echoed in Macaulay’s contemporary, John Stuart Mill (192) who promulgated Orientals similarly “lacked the virtues” of an educated Briton.In contrast, the French attempt to impose order and stability through an authoritarian state fared no better in the long run. After 1789 it was the ‘rage’ of the ‘mob’ that helped to bring down the French Monarchy. At least, that is how the new cadre of the ‘polite and moderate’ came to view things.ReferencesBolingbroke, Lord. Contributions to the Craftsman. Ed. Simon Varney. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.Cowan, Brian. “The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell’s Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 28-46.Ertman, Thomas. Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.Fischer, David Hackett. The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, New York: Oxford UP, 1996.Holmes, Geoffrey. “The Sacheverell Riots: The Crowd and the Church in Early Eighteenth-Century London.” Past and Present 72 (Aug. 1976): 55-85.Hume, David. “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm.” Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985. 73-9. Hoppit, Julian. A Land of Liberty? England 1689—1727, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Kemp, Geoff. “The ‘End of Censorship’ and the Politics of Toleration, from Locke to Sacheverell.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 47-68.Knights, Mark. Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.———. The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.———. “Introduction: The View from 1710.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 1-15.Kramnick, Isaac. Bolingbroke & His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The History of England from the Accession of James II. London: Folio Society, 2009.Mansfield, Harvey. Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.Melleuish, Greg. “Civilisation, Culture and Police.” Arts 20 (1998): 7-25.Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty, Representative Government, the Subjection of Women. London: Oxford UP, 1971.Nicholson, Eirwen. “Sacheverell’s Harlot’s: Non-Resistance on Paper and in Practice.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 69-79.Parker, Geoffrey. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013.Pincus, Steve. 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.Plumb, John H. The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.The Tryal of Dr Henry Sacheverell before the House of Peers, 1st edition. London: Jacob Tonson, 1710.

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Human history has witnessed varied surveillance and counter-surveillance activities from time immemorial. Human beings could not surveille others effectively and accurately without the technology of their era. Technology is a tool that can empower both people and governments. The outcomes are different based on the users’ intentions and aims. 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu noted that ‘If you know both yourself and your enemy, you can win numerous (literally, "a hundred") battles without jeopardy’. His words still ring true. To be a good surveiller and counter-surveiller it is essential to know both sides, and in order to be good at these activities access to technology is vital. There is no doubt that knowledge is power, and without technology to access the information, it is impossible to be powerful. As we become more expert at technology, we will learn what makes surveillance and counter-surveillance more effective, and will be more powerful.“Surveillance” is one of the most important aspects of living in the convergent media environment. This essay illustrates government surveillance and counter-surveillance during the Iranian Green Movement (2009) on social and mobile media. The Green Movement refers to a non-violent movement that arose after the disputed presidential election on June 2009. After that Iran was facing its most serious political crisis since the 1979 revolution. Claims of vote fraud triggered massive street protests. Many took to the streets with “Green” signs, chanting slogans such as ‘the government lied’, and ‘where is my vote?’ There is no doubt that social and mobile media has played an important role in Iran’s contemporary politics. According to Internet World Stats (IWS) Internet users in 2009 account for approximately 48.5 per cent of the population of Iran. In 2009, Iran had 30.2 million mobile phone users (Freedom House), and 72 cellular subscriptions for every 100 people (World Bank). Today, while Iran has the 19th-largest population in the world, its blogosphere holds the third spot in terms of number of users, just behind the United States and China (Beth Elson et al.). In this essay the use of social and mobile media (technology) is not debated, but the extent of this use, and who, why and how it is used, is clearly scrutinised.Visibility and Surveillance There have been different kinds of surveillance for a very long time. However, all types of surveillance are based on the notion of “visibility”. Previous studies show that visibility is not a new term (Foucault Discipline). The new things in the new era, are its scale, scope and complicated ways to watch others without being watched, which are not limited to a specific time, space and group, and are completely different from previous instruments for watching (Andrejevic). As Meikle and Young (146) have mentioned ‘networked digital media bring with them a new kind of visibility’, based on different kinds of technology. Internet surveillance has important implications in politics to control, protect, and influence (Marx Ethics; Castells; Fuchs Critique). Surveillance has been improved during its long history, and evolved from very simple spying and watching to complicated methods of “iSpy” (Andrejevic). To understand the importance of visibility and its relationship with surveillance, it is essential to study visibility in conjunction with the notion of “panopticon” and its contradictory functions. Foucault uses Bentham's notion of panopticon that carries within itself visibility and transparency to control others. “Gaze” is a central term in Bentham’s view. ‘Bentham thinks of a visibility organised entirely around a dominating, overseeing gaze’ (Foucault Eye). Moreover, Thomson (Visibility 11) notes that we are living in the age of ‘normalizing the power of the gaze’ and it is clear that the influential gaze is based on powerful means to see others.Lyon (Surveillance 2) explains that ‘surveillance is any collection and processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purpose of influencing or managing those whose data have been granted…’. He mentions that today the most important means of surveillance reside in computer power which allows collected data to be sorted, matched, retrieved, processed, marketed and circulated.Nowadays, the Internet has become ubiquitous in many parts of the world. So, the changes in people’s interactions have influenced their lives. Fuchs (Introduction 15) argues that ‘information technology enables surveillance at a distance…in real time over networks at high transmission speed’. Therefore, visibility touches different aspects of people’s lives and living in a “glasshouse” has caused a lot of fear and anxiety about privacy.Iran’s Green Movement is one of many cases for studying surveillance and counter-surveillance technologies in social and mobile media. Government Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media in Iran, 2009 In 2009 the Iranian government controlled technology that allowed them to monitor, track, and limit access to the Internet, social media and mobiles communication, which has resulted in the surveillance of Green Movement’s activists. The Iranian government had improved its technical capabilities to monitor the people’s behavior on the Internet long before the 2009 election. The election led to an increase in online surveillance. Using social media the Iranian government became even more powerful than it was before the election. Social media was a significant factor in strengthening the government’s power. In the months after the election the virtual atmosphere became considerably more repressive. The intensified filtering of the Internet and implementation of more advanced surveillance systems strengthened the government’s position after the election. The Open Net Initiative revealed that the Internet censorship system in Iran is one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated censorship systems in the world. It emphasized that ‘Advances in domestic technical capacity have contributed to the implementation of a centralized filtering strategy and a reduced reliance on Western technologies’.On the other hand, the authorities attempted to block all access to political blogs (Jaras), either through cyber-security methods or through threats (Tusa). The Centre for Investigating Organized Cyber Crimes, which was founded in 2007 partly ‘to investigate and confront social and economic offenses on the Internet’ (Cyber Police), became increasingly important over the course of 2009 as the government combated the opposition’s online activities (Beth Elson et al. 16). Training of "senior Internet lieutenants" to confront Iran's "virtual enemies online" was another attempt that the Intelligence minister announced following the protests (Iran Media Program).In 2009 the Iranian government enacted the Computer Crime Law (Jaras). According to this law the Committee in Charge of Determining Unauthorized Websites is legally empowered to identify sites that carry forbidden content and report that information to TCI and other major ISPs for blocking (Freedom House). In the late fall of 2009, the government started sending threatening and warning text messages to protesters about their presence in the protests (BBC). Attacking, blocking, hacking and hijacking of the domain names of some opposition websites such as Jaras and Kaleme besides a number of non-Iranian sites such as Twitter were among the other attempts of the Iranian Cyber Army (Jaras).It is also said that the police and security forces arrested dissidents identified through photos and videos posted on the social media that many imagined had empowered them. Furthermore, the online photos of the active protesters were posted on different websites, asking people to identify them (Valizadeh).In late June 2009 the Iranian government was intentionally permitting Internet traffic to and from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter so that it could use a sophisticated practice called Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to collect information about users. It was reportedly also applying the same technology to monitor mobile phone communications (Beth Elson et al. 15).On the other hand, to cut communication between Iranians inside and outside the country, Iran slowed down the Internet dramatically (Jaras). Iran also blocked access to Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter and many blogs before, during and after the protests. Moreover, in 2009, text message services were shut down for over 40 days, and mobile phone subscribers could not send or receive text messages regardless of their mobile carriers. Subsequently it was disrupted on a temporary basis immediately before and during key protests days.It was later discovered that the Nokia Siemens Network provided the government with surveillance technologies (Wagner; Iran Media Program). The Iranian government built a complicated system that enabled it to monitor, track and intercept what was said on mobile phones. Nokia Siemens Network confirmed it supplied Iran with the technology needed to monitor, control, and read local telephone calls [...] The product allowed authorities to monitor any communications across a network, including voice calls, text messaging, instant messages, and web traffic (Cellan-Jones). Media sources also reported that two Chinese companies, Huawei and ZTE, provided surveillance technologies to the government. The Nic Payamak and Saman Payamak websites, that provide mass text messaging services, also reported that operator Hamrah Aval commonly blocked texts with words such as meeting, location, rally, gathering, election and parliament (Iran Media Program). Visibility and Counter-Surveillance The panopticon is not limited to the watchers. Similarly, new kinds of panopticon and visibility are not confined to government surveillance. Foucault points out that ‘the seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole’ (Discipline 207). What is important is Foucault's recognition that transparency, not only of those who are being observed but also of those who are observing, is central to the notion of the panopticon (Allen) and ‘any member of society will have the right to come and see with his own eyes how schools, hospitals, factories, and prisons function’ (Foucault, Discipline 207). Counter-surveillance is the process of detecting and mitigating hostile surveillance (Burton). Therefore, while the Internet is a surveillance instrument that enables governments to watch people, it also improves the capacity to counter-surveille, and draws public attention to governments’ injustice. As Castells (185) notes the Internet could be used by citizens to watch their government as an instrument of control, information, participation, and even decision-making, from the bottom up.With regards to the role of citizens in counter-surveillance we can draw on Jay Rosen’s view of Internet users as ‘the people formerly known as the audience’. In counter-surveillance it can be said that passive citizens (formerly the audience) have turned into active citizens. And this change was becoming impossible without mobile and social media platforms. These new techniques and technologies have empowered people and given them the opportunity to have new identities. When Thompson wrote ‘the exercise of power in modern societies remains in many ways shrouded in secrecy and hidden from the public gaze’ (Media 125), perhaps he could not imagine that one day people can gaze at the politicians, security forces and the police through the use of the Internet and mobile devices.Furthermore, while access to mobile media allows people to hold authorities accountable for their uses and abuses of power (Breen 183), social media can be used as a means of representation, organization of collective action, mobilization, and drawing attention to police brutality and reasons for political action (Gerbaudo).There is no doubt that having creativity and using alternative platforms are important aspects in counter-surveillance. For example, images of Lt. Pike “Pepper Spray Cop” from the University of California became the symbol of the senselessness of police brutality during the Occupy Movement (Shaw). Iranians’ Counter-Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media, 2009 Iran’s Green movement (2009) triggered a lot of discussions about the role of technology in social movements. In this regard, there are two notable attitudes about the role of technology: techno-optimistic (Shriky and Castells) and techno-pessimistic (Morozov and Gladwell) views should be taken into account. While techno-optimists overrated the role of social media, techno-pessimists underestimated its role. However, there is no doubt that technology has played a great role as a counter-surveillance tool amongst Iranian people in Iran’s contemporary politics.Apart from the academic discussions between techno-optimists and techno-pessimists, there have been numerous debates about the role of new technologies in Iran during the Green Movement. This subject has received interest from different corners of the world, including Western countries, Iranian authorities, opposition groups, and also some NGOs. However, its role as a means of counter-surveillance has not received adequate attention.As the tools of counter-surveillance are more or less the tools of surveillance, protesters learned from the government to use the same techniques to challenge authority on social media.Establishing new websites (such as JARAS, RASA, Kalemeh, and Iran green voice) or strengthening some previous ones (such as Saham, Emrooz, Norooz), also activating different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts to broadcast the voice of the Iranian Green Movement and neutralize the government’s propaganda were the most important ways to empower supporters of Iran’s Green Movement in counter-surveillance.‘Reporters Without Borders issued a statement, saying that ‘the new media, and particularly social networks, have given populations collaborative tools with which they can change the social order’. It is also mentioned that despite efforts by the Iranian government to prevent any reporting of the protests and due to considerable pressure placed on foreign journalists inside Iran, social media played a significant role in sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside world (Axworthy). However, at that moment, many thought that Twitter performed a liberating role for Iranian dissenters. For example, Western media heralded the Green Movement in Iran as a “Twitter revolution” fuelled by information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social media tools (Carrieri et al. 4). “The Revolution Will Be Twittered” was the first in a series of blog posts published by Andrew Sullivan a few hours after the news of the protests was released.According to the researcher’s observation the numbers of Twitter users inside Iran who tweeted was very limited in 2009 and social media was most useful in the dissemination of information, especially from those inside Iran to outsiders. Mobile phones were mostly influential as an instrument firstly used for producing contents (images and videos) and secondly for the organisation of protests. There were many photos and videos that were filmed by very simple mobile cell phones, uploaded by ordinary people onto YouTube and other platforms. The links were shared many times on Twitter and Facebook and released by mainstream media. The most frequently circulated story from the Iranian protests was a video of Neda Agha-Sultan. Her final moments were captured by some bystanders with mobile phone cameras and rapidly spread across the global media and the Internet. It showed that the camera-phone had provided citizens with a powerful means, allowing for the creation and instant sharing of persuasive personalised eyewitness records with mobile and globalised target populations (Anden-Papadopoulos).Protesters used another technique, DDOS (distributed denial of service attacks), for political protest in cyber space. Anonymous people used DDOS to overload a website with fake requests, making it unavailable for users and disrupting the sites set as targets (McMillan) in effect, shutting down the site. DDOS is an important counter-surveillance activity by grassroots activists or hackers. It was a cyber protest that knocked the main Iranian governmental websites off-line and caused crowdsourcing and false trafficking. Amongst them were Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's supreme leader’s websites and those which belong to or are close to the government or security forces, including news agencies (Fars, IRNA, Press TV…), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, the Police, and the Ministry of the Interior.Moreover, as authorities uploaded the pictures of protesters onto different platforms to find and arrest them, in some cities people started to put the pictures, phone numbers and addresses of members of security forces and plain clothes police officers who attacked them during the protests and asked people to identify and report the others. They also wanted people to send information about suspects who infringed human rights. Conclusion To sum up, visibility, surveillance and counter-surveillance are not new phenomena. What is new is the technology, which increased their complexity. As Foucault (Discipline 200) mentioned ‘visibility is a trap’, so being visible would be the weakness of those who are being surveilled in the power struggle. In the convergent era, in order to be more powerful, both surveillance and counter-surveillance activities aim for more visibility. Although both attempt to use the same means (technology) to trap the other side, the differences are in their subjects, objects, goals and results.While in surveillance, visibility of the many by the few is mostly for the purpose of control and influence in undemocratic ways, in counter-surveillance, the visibility of the few by the many is mostly through democratic ways to secure more accountability and transparency from the governments.As mentioned in the case of Iran’s Green Movement, the scale and scope of visibility are different in surveillance and counter-surveillance. The importance of what Shaw wrote about Sydney occupy counter-surveillance, applies to other places, such as Iran. She has stressed that ‘protesters and police engaged in a dance of technology and surveillance with one another. Both had access to technology, but there were uncertainties about the extent of technology and its proficient use…’In Iran (2009), both sides (government and activists) used technology and benefited from digital networked platforms, but their levels of access and domains of influence were different, which was because the sources of power, information and wealth were divided asymmetrically between them. Creativity was important for both sides to make others more visible, and make themselves invisible. Also, sharing information to make the other side visible played an important role in these two areas. References Alen, David. “The Trouble with Transparency: The Challenge of Doing Journalism Ethics in a Surveillance Society.” Journalism Studies 9.3 (2008): 323-40. 8 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616700801997224#.UqRFSuIZsqN›. 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