Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Mary's Gate“

On Sunday, October 23, 1983, a notable event occurred in San Francisco. A celebration of music, word, and prayer commemorated the five-hundredth birthday of the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther. Leaders of the Episcopal, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Lutheran traditions took part in the service. Representatives of many other denominations marched in the processional singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Choral settings from the Greek Orthodox service framed the liturgy. Most remarkable, the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco opened the ceremony, and the event took place in St. Mary's Cathedral. Reformation-rooted Protestant Christianity thus was recognized by a broad panorama of world Christian traditions that had lived side by side for well over a century in the strongly Catholic City of Saint Francis by the Golden Gate.

The play labor under Marx's alienated labor vision refers to the play as the purpose of the labor, this kind of labor is affected by consumer culture, street sports activities, electronic games and so on. This article through the analysis of Marx's alienated labor theory, and from the daily life of the selection of electronic games this case to explain the alienation mechanism behind the play labor, pointing out the new situation of players being exploited by capital. This paper analyzes Marx's alienated labor theory and makes an in-depth analysis of "play labor from the perspective of Marx's alienated labor". Through the analysis, it can be seen that play labor is a special form of alienated labor which is influenced by consumer culture, street sports activities and electronic games. It not only makes people feel "invisibly enslaved", but also affects the way of behavior and thinking in People's Daily life. In the current social environment, people are used to accepting the fast-food culture, lack of judgment and self-control, it is easy to become a free worker in the game industry chain under the cover of the casual meaning of online games. With the deep integration and development of platform capitalism and information capitalism, digital media technology has gradually erased the boundaries between reality and virtual, leisure and labor. Scholars have attributed this behavior of participating in online games for the purpose of entertainment and leisure and generating a large amount of surplus value for game companies to a new form of digital labor -- play labor.

The market size for pop toys retailing globally has a bright future, driven by the rise in disposable income, the rapid expansion of the pop culture business, and particularly the successful incubation of more high-quality IPs in the market. A lot of related industries and enterprises have transformed to the pop toy industry. However, since a unified industry standard and management norm has not yet been formed, the level of industry development is uneven. In this article, we conduct a case study on pop toy industry at Pop Mart, a key pioneer and promoter of pop toy industry in China. Since its creation 12 years ago, Pop Mart has succeeded in transforming from a simple and small toy collection shop to a famous IP brand that primarily develops its pop toy products. This study contributes to the present literature from two aspects. First, based on the 4P marketing theory, we analyze the marketing strategy of Pop Mart and explore its success, to make recommendations for the growth of China's pop toy culture game industry. Second, Pop Mart's internal strengths and internal weaknesses, external opportunities and external threats are examined using the SWOT model analysis to propose ideas and suggestions for its future development strategies in accordance with the circumstances of the moment and the prevailing economic climate.

Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar e analisar as metáforas presentes em slogans publicitários, bem como o valor semântico dos verbetes que as compõem. Como corpus, foram selecionadas as propagandas das marcas: Itaipava, Skol, Coca-Cola e Pet & Shopping. O aparato teórico para o desenvolvimento da pesquisa encontra-se nos estudos de Aulete (2020), Biderman (1998), Cançado (2008), Depecker (2012), Ferreira (2010), Ilari (2001) e Saussure (2006).

A film is a complex piece of mass media. Movies consist of audio and video that can affect the audience's emotions. There are various categories in film, one of which is drama series. This study uses Karl Marx's theory to describe and analyze the social class in the drama series 'Squid Game.' The research method used is semiotics, according to Roland Barthes. Karl Marx defines the concept of social class based on the integration of economic relations, occupation, and education. Based on the results of Roland Barthes' semiotic analysis that has been carried out in the drama series 'Squid Game,' it can be seen that there is a description of social class like Karl Marx's theory. Scenes and symbols in the drama series show a picture of social class based on the integration of economic relations where people with lower social status will be treated arbitrarily by those with higher social status. Film terdiri dari audio dan video yang dapat mempengaruhi emosi penonton. Ada berbagai macam kategori dalam film, salah satunya yaitu serial drama. Penelitian ini ingin memberikan gambaran dan menganalisis kelas sosial yang ada dalam serial drama ‘Squid Game’ dengan menggunakan teori milik Karl Marx. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah semiotik menurut Roland Barthes. Karl Marx mengartikan konsep kelas sosial didasarkan pada integrasi hubungan ekonomi, pekerjaan, dan pendidikan. Berdasarkan hasil analisis semiotika Roland Barthes yang telah dilakukan dalam serial drama ‘Squid Game’, dapat diketahui bahwa terdapat gambaran mengenai kelas sosial seperti teori Karl Marx. Adegan dan symbol dalam serial drama menunjukkan gambaran kelas sosial yang didasarkan pada integrasi hubungan ekonomi di mana orang-orang yang memiliki status sosial yang lebih rendah akan diperlakukan secara semena-mena oleh mereka yang memiliki status sosial lebih tinggi.

Objetivo: Este artigo objetivou explicitar o efeito gerado por estratgias de advergaming na atitude dos jogadores em relao marca, assim como a frequncia de lembrana e recordao proporcionadas. Mtodo: Foram comparadas as caractersticas das principais estratgias do advergaming, os advergames (jogos com temtica de marcas) e os in-game advertisings (jogos com insero de marcas). Para testar as hipteses de pesquisa foi realizado experimento com amostra de 165 estudantes universitrios, dividida de forma randmica em trs grupos que jogaram jogos criados na plataforma GameSalad para o estudo, com diferentes nveis de exposio de marca: jogo sem insero de marca, jogo com insero da marca fictcia no background (in-game advertising) e jogo com temtica da marca fictcia (advergame). Originalidade/Relevncia: Tendo em vista o escasso nmero de trabalhos sobre o tema advergaming, sobretudo em peridicos nacionais onde ainda no foram publicados trabalhos realizando experimentoa acerca de sua efetividade, este artigo contribui para melhor compreenso do tema, apresentando uma reflexo sobre a efetividade dos in-game advertisings e advergames. Resultados: Os resultados mostraram que advergames e in-game advertisings provocam uma mudana significativamente positiva na atitude em relao marca e que as frequncias observadas de lembrana e recordao da marca so significativamente maiores em advergames em comparao a in-game advertisings. Contribuies tericas/metodolgicas: O artigo apresenta evidncias de que a utilizao de advergaming efetiva na construo de uma atitude favorvel em relao marca, assim como no aspecto da construo da conscientizao de marca.

<em>Apart from being a medium for entertainment simulation, video games also provide a representation of the social world. Game industry developers always carry out research to provide socio-cultural, historical and philosophical system content to enrich the content in the game. The story background in video games aims to provide experiences and impressions for the players. This research aims to qualitatively explore forms of religious representation that are simulated in open world video games. So players can play role characters in the game to experience spirituality and religiosity. Either through latent and manifest narratives or through moral choices in the context of developing the storyline and Player character in the Game. This research uses Emile Durkehim's sociological perspective of religion regarding Karl Marx's totemism and commodity fetishism to observe the incarnation of the gaming industry as an altar of worship for its players, as well as Jean Baudrillard's postmodernist perspective with his simulacrum concept to analyze the form of simulation and representation of religious symbols that appear in the game. these open world games... This research finds that the use of simulations and the distribution of representations of religious signs or symbols in games forms a religion simulacrum or a blurring of spiritual boundaries between the pseudo and the real. Video games build the Player's construction of religiosity and spirituality virtually in a simulated world that contains ritual practices, ethics, morality, cosmology, metaphysics, and theology.</em>

Com o crescimento da concorrência e a competitividade organizacional, novas ações de mercado surgem para propiciar um diferencial às empresas, com diferentes ações de marketing. O objetivo do trabalho é verificar ações de marketing invisível empregadas por empresas em jogos eletrônicos voltados para os consoles do Playstation 4 por meio do game de futebol Pro Evolution Soccer 2017. Este estudo utiliza-se de figuras para ilustrar a teoria, e se classifica como descritiva, explicativa, dedutiva. As imagens mostram marcas e produtos das empresas que utilizaram essa ação de marketing invisível, com o intuito de atingir seu público alvo por meio de jogos eletrônicos do Playstation 4. Nota-se que as imagens ilustram como as empresas expuseram suas marcas e produtos, no contexto do jogo, sem demonstrar um anúncio ou propaganda tradicional. Uma visão que passe aos olhos do jogador e não pareça um apelo pela marca ou produto do anunciante. Logo, o marketing invisível, expõe marcas e produtos em jogos, por meio de figuras, demonstrando uma nova ação que as organizações utilizam para atingir seu público alvo, além de divulgação da marca e produto.

Contemporarily, the success of Bubble Mart can be attributed to the "blind box". In fact, it is problematic since there are no secrets or barriers in the blind box game and mechanism itself, and this cannot be the core driver of a fast-rising company. Therefore, this study will use Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning (STP), Product, Price, Promotion, Place (4P) and Political, Economic, Sociocultural, Technological, Environmental, Legal (PESTEL) to analyze the internal and external environment of Pop Mart in depth. To be specific, the strengths and weaknesses of Pop Mart's development are demonstrated and compared accordingly. Afterwards, the investment recommendations for Pop Mart are proposed. Moreover, the limitations of the current study and guideline further researches are offered. These results shed light on guiding further exploration of similar corporation in the industry.

Two decades ago, problems of alienation and fetishism were the focus of most English speaking studies of Marx’s philosophy. More recent work on Marx and Marxist themes has tended to avoid these questions in favor of discussions of explanation, exploitation, distributive justice and problems of class formation and co-ordination. The latter set of problems seem more readily addressable, if not always more tractable, using contemporary tools drawn from the philosophy of science, as well as methods of decision theory, game theory, and welfare economics. But the change in emphasis has not been without costs; gains in clarity and rigor have come at the price of abandoning Marx's most fundamental criticism of capitalism as a way of life. I shall argue that it is no coincidence that the shift to ‘rational choice’ Marxism has had precisely that cost.

O avanço do mercado de jogos eletrônicos, também conhecido como e-Sport, em que os jogadores competem entre si conectados à internet, vem crescendo desde a década de 1970 quando surgiram os primeiros torneios competitivos de video game disputados por meios eletrônicos offline e online e, com aumento da rentabilidade do setor a cada ano, por meio de patrocínios de empresas e audiência, somado ao crescimento no número de adeptos dessa prática, que é considerada um tipo de esporte. Somado a isso, a adesão das mídias online e offline para cobertura e divulgação do conteúdo gerado pela prática deste esporte está crescendo e sendo motivada pelo engajamento de fãs, empresas, em campeonatos nacionais e internacionais. O principal objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar o mercado dos e-Sports, sua relação com as mídias eletrônicas e digitais, assim como demonstrar o potencial de investimento para as marcas que desejarem atingir seu público-alvo por meio deste esporte.

The eGames business (online video games) in Spain generated more than 1.8 trillion euros in profits in 2016. Advertising is no stranger to the potential of this market, and brands study the best ways of approaching and adapting to the world of eGames. In this report, we analyze which the most effective advertising strategies for brands in the online video game world are. To do this, the players (eGamers) answered a 60 question survey that addressed issues such as playful habits, the viewing of advertisements in games, the purchase of advertised items and advertising in competitions. Korean and Spanish players answered the same questionnaire considering that South Korea has the most advanced video game industry in the world and Spain is the fourth European country in eGames and our subject of study. After the investigation, some of the most relevant results indicate that conventional online advertising does not attract the attention of gamers as consumers. We determined that the best strategy would be based on brand presence through products that are prescribed or used by professional gamers, since spectators, as they watch the games, also observe what elements and accessories the players use. El negocio de los eGames (videojuegos online) en España ha conseguido más de 1,8 billones de euros de beneficio en el año 2016. La publicidad no es ajena al potencial de este mercado y las marcas estudian cuáles son las mejores formas de acercarse y adaptarse al entorno de los eGames. En el presente trabajo se analizan las estrategias publicitarias más eficaces para las marcas en el mundo de los videojuegos en red. Para ello, se han investigado a los jugadores (eGamers) a través de una encuesta de 60 preguntas que abordaban cuestiones como hábitos lúdicos, visionado de publicidad en los juegos, compra de artículos anunciados o publicidad en competiciones. El mismo cuestionario se ha realizado tanto a jugadores coreanos, ya que la industria de los videojuegos en Corea del Sur es la más avanzada del mundo, como a jugadores españoles, al ser España el cuarto país europeo en eGames y ser nuestro objeto de estudio. Tras la investigación, algunos de los resultados más relevantes indican que la publicidad online convencional no llama la atención a los consumidores «gamers» y se determina que la mejor estrategia se basaría en la presencia de marca a través de productos prescritos o utilizados por los «gamers» profesionales, ya que los espectadores, a la vez que ven las partidas, observan qué elementos usan los jugadores.

This article examines competition among Wal-Mart, Kmart, and Target using two distinct but related approaches. The authors first develop and estimate a discrete game in which each chain's store presence and format decisions in local markets depend on the decisions of its competitors and market characteristics. This analysis is extended to evaluate the determinants of store revenues for each chain in local markets as a function of market characteristics, including the presence of competing firms. These regressions use the results of the initial model to correct for the endogeneity of observed market structures. The results from both exercises illustrate several important asymmetries across the firms. Kmart and Wal-Mart prefer similar markets, but Wal-Mart's competitive position is dominant enough to prevent Kmart's operation in otherwise attractive markets. In contrast, Target prefers substantially different market characteristics. In total, the results support a view of the industry as one in which Wal-Mart is dominant, Target serves more of a niche role, and Kmart struggles to find its footing.

Ancient Song Recovered: The Life and Music of Veljo Tormis, by Mimi S. Daitz. Pendragon Press, $54.00/£36.00.The Works of Eduard Tubin: Thematic-Bibliographical Catalogue of Works by Vardo Rumessen. International Eduard Tubin Society/Gehrmans Musikförlag, E.57.TORMIS: ‘Vision of Estonia’ II. The Ballad of Mary's Land; Reflections with Hando Runnel; Days of Outlawry; God Protect Us from War; Journey of the War Messenger; Let the Sun Shine!; Voices from Tammsaare's Herdboy Days; Forget-me-not; Mens' Songs. Estonian National Male Choir c. Ants Soots. Alba NCD 20.TORMIS: ‘Vision of Estonia’ III. The Singer; Songs of the Ancient Sea; Plague Memory; Bridge of Song; Going to War; Dialectical Aphorisms; Song about a Level Land; We Are Given; An Aboriginal Song; The Estonians' Political Parties Game; Song about Keeping Together; Martinmas Songs; Shrovetide Songs; Three I Had Those Words of Beauty. Estonian National Male Choir c. Ants Soots. Alba NCD 23.TAMBERG: Cyrano de Bergerac. Soloists, Orchestra and Chorus of Estonian National Opera c. Paul Mägi. CPO 999 832-2 (2-CD set).ROSENVALD: Violin Concerto Nos. 11 and 2, Quasi una fantasia2; Two Pastorales3; Sonata capricciosa4; Symphony No. 35; Nocturne6. 1,2Lemmo Erendi (vln), Tallinn CO c. Neeme Järvi, 2Estonian State SO c. Jüri Alperten; 3Estonian State SO c. Vello Pähn; 4Valentina Gontšarova (vln); 56Estonian State SO c. Neeme Järvi. Antes BM-CD 31.9197.DEAN: Winter Songs. TÜÜR: Architectonics I. VASKS: Music for a Deceased Friend. PÄRT: Quintettino. NIELSEN: Wind Quintet. Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, with Daniel Norman (tenor), c. Hermann Bäumer. BIS-CD–1332.TULEV: Quella sera; Gare de l'Est; Adiós/Œri Ráma in memoriam; Isopo; Be Lost in the Call. NYYD Ensemble c. Olari Elts. Eesti Raadio ERCD047.ESTONIAN COMPOSERS I: MÄGI: Vesper.1 KANGRO: Display IX.2 SUMERA: Shakespeare's Sonnets Nos. 8 & 90.3TAMBERG: Desiderium Concordiae.4 TULEV: String Quartet No. 1.5 EESPERE: Glorificatio.6 TORMIS: Kevade: Suite.71Estonian National SO c. Aivo Välja; 24NYYD Ensemble c. Olari Elts; 3Pirjo Levadi (soprano), Mikk Mikiver (narrator), Estonian National Boys' Choir, Estonian National SO c. Paul Mägi; 5Tallinn String Quartet; 6Kaia Urb (sop), Academic Male Choir of Tallinn Technical University c. Arvo Volmer; 7Estonian National SO c. Paul Mägi Eesti Raadio ERCD 031.ESTONIAN COMPOSERS II: TULVE: Traces.1 TALLY: Swinburne.2 KÕRVITS: Stream.3 STEINER: Descendants of Cain.4 KAUMANN: Long Play.5 LILL: Le Rite de Passage.6 SIMMER: Water of Life.71,5,6NYYD Ensemble c. Olari Elts; 2Ardo-Ran Varres (narrator), Iris Oja (sop), Alar Pintsaar (bar), Vambola Krigul (perc), Külli Möls (accordion), Robert Jürjendal (elec guitar); 3Virgo Veldi (sax), Madis Metsamart (perc); 4The Bowed Piano Ensemble c. Timo Steiner; 7Teet Järvi (vlc), Monika Mattieson (fl). Eesti Raadio ERCD032.ESTONIAN COMPOSERS III: GRIGORJEVA: Con misterio;1On Leaving. SUMERA: Pantomime; The Child of Dracula and Zombie. 1Tui Hirv (sop), 1Iris Oja (mezzo), 1Joosep Vahermägi (ten), 1Jaan Arder (bar), Hortus Musicus c. Andres Mustonen. Eeesti Raadio ERCD 045ESTONIAN COMPOSERS IV: KRIGUL: Walls.1 JÜRGENS: Redblueyellow.2 KÕRVER: Pre.3 KOTTA: Variations.4 SIIMER: Two Pieces.5 KAUMANN: Ausgewählte Salonstücke.6 AINTS: Trope.7 STEINER: In memoriam.81,6New Tallinn Trio; 2Liis Jürgens (harp); 3,8Voces Musicales Ensemble c. Risto Joost; 4Mati Mikalai (pno); 5Mikk Murdvee (vln), Tarmo Johannes (fl), Toomas Vavilov (cl), Mart Siimer (organ); 7Tarmo Johannes (fl). Eeesti Raadio ERCD 046.BALTIC VOICES 2: SISASK: Five songs from Gloria Patri. TULEV: And then in silence there with me be only You. NØRGÅRD: Winter Hymn. GRIGORJEVA: On Leaving (1999). SCHNITTKE: Three Sacred Hymns. Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir c. Paul Hillier. Harmonia Mundi HMU 907331.SCHNITTKE: Concerto for Chorus; Voices of Nature. PÄRT: Dopo la vittoria; Bogoróditse Djévo; I am the True Vine. Swedish Radio Choir c. Tõnu Kaljuste. BIS-CD-1157.PÄRT: Es sang vor langen Jahren; Stabat Mater; Magnificat; Nunc Dimittis; My Heart's in the Highlands; Zwei Sonatinen; Spiegel im Spiegel. Chamber Domaine; Stephen de Pledge (pno), Stephen Wallace (counter-ten), Choir of St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh c. Matthew Owens. Black Box BBM1071.

Traçadores de curva IxV para módulos fotovoltaicos (FV) são utilizados como um método de diagnóstico de problemas nos módulos como condições de sombreamento, conexões defeituosas e condições de degradação. Existem diversos tipos e marcas de traçadores disponibilizados comercialmente, mas seus custos são bastante elevados. A presente pesquisa aborda o desenvolvimento e a validação de um traçador de curva IxV para um módulo FV focando a simplicidade do dispositivo e o seu baixo custo. O traçador desenvolvido se baseia no método de carga eletrônica utilizando um MOSFET de potência como carga para o módulo. Através de uma adequada variação do sinal de tensão de gate-source do MOSFET é possível adquirir os pontos de intersecção das curvas IxV características do módulo FV e do MOSFET. Estes pontos são registrados através de uma placa de aquisição de dados, com PIC 18F2550, que é controlada via USB por um computador com uma interface gráfica para usuário desenvolvida com o softwareMATLAB garantindo maior flexibilidade e funcionalidade ao dispositivo. O processo de validação foi realizado através da comparação de resultados obtidos pelo traçador desenvolvido e por um traçador comercial sobre um mesmo módulo nas mesmas condições de temperatura e irradiância solar. Os resultados mostraram que as curvas do traçador desenvolvido e do traçador comercial ficaram bem próximas, com erros médios (entre os valores obtidos com o traçador desenvolvido e os valores obtidos com o traçador comercial) de corrente, tensão e potência menores do que 4,2%.

Parte-se do pressuposto que os processos de enunciação não se estabelecem apenas no âmbito dos dispositivos e seus agentes, como sugeriram, na literatura e no jornalismo, respectivamente, Genette (1988) e Motta (2013). É possível identificá-los também a partir das operações do sistema midiático, que é formado pelos dispositivos jornalísticos (sites, redes sociais, jornais, revistas etc.), quando em rede. Nesta perspectiva, o sistema é detentor de uma voz narrativa; torna-se, assim, um “quarto narrador”, de natureza multifacetada e plurivocal. Por se tratar de um objeto em movimento, que requer, no diálogo com Bergson (2005) e Marcondes Filho (2010), abordagem metodológica adequada, será identificado por meio da análise das marcas enunciativas que produz em seus movimentos. A reflexão será ilustrada por meio da análise de como se deu a repercussão midiática da narrativa literária Game of Thrones – A Guerra dos Tronos, de George Martin. A hipótese é que o quarto narrador, por realizar operações de natureza sistêmica, nos moldes de Luhmann (2009), não apenas reduz a complexidade de seus enunciados como transforma e é transformado nesta operação, reconfigurando toda uma ecologia midiática.

The ‘new Marxism of collective action’ is a term Lash and Urry have recently used to describe a new intellectual current in Marxism which seeks to apply rational choice theory, and particularly game theory, to key Marxian concepts like collective action, class, revolution and exploitation. This current is seen as part of a general shift within social science away from structure towards agency. This paper focuses on a concept which Lash and Urry's outline ignored: namely, exploitation. Granting the concept this attention is useful for a number of reasons. Firstly, by summarizing the general debate on the concept, both within the new Marxism of collective action and outside, the paper allows the discussion of exploitation to be placed in the context of the more general debate between structuralist and humanistic versions of Marxism; especially in the context of the debate about whether there can be a Marxist theory of ethics and injustice. Secondly, by outlining how the concept is understood by advocates of the new Marxism of collective action, the paper accords the concept the central status which advocates reserve for it. In consequence, the paper identifies differences between advocates of the new Marxism of collective action with respect to how exploitation is to be understood, which suggest that the intellectual current is not as homogeneous as Lash and Urry imply. Moreover, the paper stresses that the differences between them with regard to exploitation are more than just unhelpful disagreements over matters of definition, but represent fundamental disagreements about the validity of Marx's original formulations in contemporary society.

The paper analyses statues of Mary the Victorious (Maria victrix, Santa Maria de Victoria, Marija Zmagovalka, Maria vom Siege, Gyözedelmes Immaculata) in the fortified cities at the south-eastern frontier of the Habsburg Monarchy, highlighting some previously unidentified examples of this iconographic type in Petrovaradin and Alba Iulia. These cities were part of a comprehensive fortification system conceived by Eugene of Savoy following Habsburg victories over the Ottomans under his leadership. The paper examines comparative graphic, painterly, and sculptural works that may have influenced the authors of these sculptures. Notably, two altarpieces by Carlo Maratta (1625–1713), executed in the 1660s for the Franciscan church of S. Isidoro Agricola in Rome and the church of S. Agostino in Siena, emerge as highly influential in this context, with numerous artworks modelled upon them. The iconographic type of Mary the Victorious depicts the joint triumph of the Virgin Mary and her Child over Evil, with Christ piercing the personification of evil at their feet with a cross-shaped spear. This paper associates this specific iconographic choice with the origin of these artworks near the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier, interpreting it as an expression of Catholic and Habsburg triumphal rhetoric and propaganda. Some examples suggest probable Jesuit influence, as they were among the primary promoters of this iconographic type. In Osijek, a city of exceptional strategic importance on the south-eastern Habsburg-Ottoman frontier, the iconographic type of Mary the Victorious is represented by two examples. The earlier, more elaborate one, tentatively dated to the 1730s, originally adorned the city gate of Osijek’s fortress Tvrđa. In 1784, together with three other statues, it was placed on the outer perimeter of the Holy Trinity monument in the centre of Tvrđa. The second Osijek example is located in the Lower Town and dated by an inscription to 1757, when it was erected as a votive statue against the plague. Two public statues of Mary the Victorious are located in Petrovaradin, the second most important fortress on the south-eastern frontier of the Habsburg Monarchy. Unlike those from Osijek, the Petrovaradin statues are not free-standing, but inserted into the façade niches of public buildings in the suburbs of the Petrovaradin fortress. The polychromous wooden statue on the building of the Šajkaš Battalion stands out for its quality, with stylistic features pointing to the early decades of the 18th century. The second statue is located in the niche of the nearby Bridge Toll Office building. It is argued that the Jesuits or the Franciscans may have selected this iconographic type, as they were the key promoters of Mary the Victorious. The statues were probably commissioned to commemorate Mary’s role in the Christian victory over the Ottomans near Petrovaradin in 1716, as their locations suggest. Mary’s role as the saintly protector against the plague, which struck the area in 1738, should also be considered. In Alba Iulia, which was the easternmost point of Eugene’s chain of fortified cities, Mary the Victorious is the central statue on the side altar in the cathedral of St Michael, constructed around 1754. In conclusion, the paper presents two examples of sculptural and painterly depictions of Mary the Victorious in the wider frontier area (Požega, Valpovo), commissioned by the Jesuits or members of the Habsburg elite, since due to specific political circumstances, they emerge as key patrons of significant artworks in this region.

Resumo: A Ditadura Militar da Argentina deixou diversas marcas em sua sociedade. Respaldado pelo discurso da ameaça comunista e pelo suposto terrorismo de esquerda, o golpe foi deflagrado em março de 1976; iniciou-se aí um período que ficou conhecido como “Terrorismo de Estado” que se prolongou até 1983. Tendo em vista essas duas narrativas completamente opostas que se relacionam com a palavra “terrorismo”, o presente artigo aplica a Teoria Crítica das Relações Internacionais buscando-se a resposta: existia o terrorismo revolucionário ou o terrorismo de Estado? É possível que tenha existido os dois? E a pergunta mais importante: o que é o Terrorismo? Trata-se, portanto, de um jogo de perguntas e respostas, fazendo uso uma categoria – terrorismo – e um discurso que ora é aplicado por um lado, ora por outro. Abstract: The Military Dictatorship in Argentina left several marks in its society. Under the speech of the communist threat and by supposed left-wing terrorism, the coup d’état took place in March of 1976; after this, it has started a period that is known as “State Terrorism” that has ended only in 1983. In view of these two completely opposite narratives that are related to the word "terrorism", this article applies the Critical Theory of International Relations seeking the answer: was there revolutionary terrorism or state terrorism? Is it possible that the two have existed? And the most important question: What is Terrorism? It is, therefore, a question-and-answer game, using a category - terrorism - and a speech that is sometimes applied to one side or the other.

La innovación y el desarrollo tecnológico son una fuente crucial de competitividad dentro del entorno comercial global. En el siglo XXI, firmas automotrices alemanas como Audi, Volkswagen y Mercedes-Benz se han posicionado en el top de empresas con reconocimiento internacional por su calidad y prestigio innovador. No es ninguna novedad destacar que cada vez existen más compañías productoras de automóviles que se establecen a partir de la reproducción a bajo costo de los modelos de las principales marcas. Sin embargo, cabe destacar el hecho de que la industria automotriz alemana ha extendido su vinculación con las empresas ensambladoras de automóviles en China, que se han vuelto conocidas por duplicar el producto alemán. Mediante un análisis bajo los lentes de la seguridad económica, la dinámica del espionaje industrial moderno y la cultura del capitalismo chino, este trabajo se enfoca en evidenciar cómo el espionaje corporativo constituye una parte más del juego comercial moderno, particularmente en el contexto de la industria automotriz alemana en China. Así, se analizan los principales casos de espionaje chino de la industria alemana, las acciones defensivas emprendidas por Alemania y las estrategias que su industria automotriz prioriza para mantener la competitividad en un entorno de espionaje e incertidumbre. Abstract Innovation and technological development are a crucial source of competitiveness within the global trading environment. So far in the 21st century, some German automotive firms, such as Audi, Volkswagen, and Mercedes-Benz, have positioned at the top of internationally recognized car companies for their quality and innovative prestige. It is no novelty to mention that there are more and more car-producing companies, which reproduce the models of the main brands at a lower cost, and in doing so, they have positioned themselves internationally. However, it is especially noteworthy the fact that the German automobile industry has been spreading its linkage with the manufacturers and assemblers of cars in China, which have become famous by doubling the German product. This article shows how corporate espionage constitutes a part of the modern commercial game, particularly in the context of the German automotive industry in China, under the lens of economic security, the dynamics of modern industrial espionage and the culture of China's capitalism. For such ends, it discusses the main cases of Chinese espionage of the German industry, the defensive actions undertaken by the German Government, and the strategies that the German automotive industry prioritizes in order to maintain its competitiveness in an environment of espionage and uncertainty.

This book is the result of six years' intensive research and brainstorming by a group of South Africans under the editorship of J. du P. Bothma, the incumbent of the Eugene Marais Chair of Wildlife Management at the University of Pretoria. The group, comprising professional botanists and zoologists, veterinarians and wildlife managers, emphasises the fact that game (in all its characteristics and attributes) is unquestionably a natural asset in many parts of southern Africa

El uso de los videojuegos como una herramienta para apoyar a las marcas, es actualmente una tendencia importante, los videojugadores como los consumidores han cambiado, nuevos dispositivos y formas de establecer vínculos repercuten en la interacción con las empresas.El Dr. Martí Parreño nos comparte el análisis de las nuevas tendencias para plantear estrategias relacionadas con la comunicación de las marcas acercándose de forma directa en los videojuegos a nuevos segmentos de mercado y a los cambios que habremos de adaptarnos para seguir presentes como parte de la vida de los video jugadores.

Ryan Francis grew up in Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, Canada and is a member of Acadia First Nation. He played hockey in the United States while he completed an undergraduate degree in Sport Management before returning to Canada to obtain a Master of Physical Education in Administration, Curriculum, and Supervision. He is currently employed as Manager of Provincial Outreach and Coordination for the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage in its Communities, Sport, and Recreation Division. He is also the first ever Visiting Indigenous Fellow at Saint Mary’s University where he is leading projects in research and community collaboration all related to Indigenous sport participation and education. Ryan is perhaps best known for having helped launch the Indigenous Girls Hockey Program Nova Scotia, a role that contributed to his nomination for the National Hockey League’s prestigious Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award. He wrote this essay in his capacity as a Mi’kmaw hockey player and sport administrator about his perspective on racism in hockey and how the structure of mainstream hockey in Canada perpetuates exclusion.

O trabalho apresenta relações entre dança, diferença e identidade, a partir das vivências de uma das autoras com o sofrimento de um acidente vascular cerebral. Sempre relacionando a teoria à prática, as autoras oferecem um olhar crítico sobre uma formação em dança predominantemente clássica. O relato de retorno de uma das autoras aos palcos através da participação em trabalhos de dança contemporânea permeados por uma abordagem somática, principalmente nos métodos ideokinesis e Feldenkrais permite uma série de reflexões sobre dança e diferença na contemporaneidade, métodos de ensino, formas e marcas corporais ou mentais ocasionadas por modelos advindos do ballet.

The televised electoral debate, far from losing prominence in favor of social media, is confirmed to be a key instrument for political communication. The two televised events prior to the general elections of 28 April in Spain, which were broadcast 24 hours apart (by RTVE and Atresmedia), raised great expectations and prioritized a conflictive atmosphere. The objectives of this study are to determine the issues, strategies, and discursive ploys of the leader-influencers and to analyze the rhetorical features of the political language on Twitter. In the context of these two electoral debates (22 and 23 April, 2019), a comparative quantitative, qualitative, and discursive content analysis methodology is applied to a general sample of messages on TV (n1 = 2,892) and a specific sample of tweets published on the accounts of the political parties (n2 = 190). The issues debated (issue frame), the candidates’ strategies (game frame), and the level of influence on Twitter are analyzed through propaganda and fallacy mechanisms. The results confirm that both debates covered homogeneous themes with an active response from the audience and a trend towards fake spectacularized discourse. Resumen El debate electoral televisado, lejos de perder protagonismo en favor de las redes sociales, se confirma como instrumento clave para la comunicación política. Las dos convocatorias previas a las elecciones generales del 28 de abril en España, retransmitidas con 24 horas de diferencia (RTVE y Atresmedia) suscitaron niveles de máxima expectación y priorizaron el conflicto como encuadre. Son objetivos de este estudio conocer los temas, estrategias y juegos discursivos del líder influencer y analizar las marcas retóricas del lenguaje político en Twitter. En los dos debates electorales (22 y 23 de abril de 2019) se aplicó una metodología de análisis de contenido cuantitativo, cualitativo y discursivo comparado, sobre una muestra general de mensajes en TV (n1= 2.892) y una muestra específica de tweets publicados desde las cuentas de los partidos (n2= 190). Se analizan los temas del debate (issue frame), las estrategias del candidato (game frame) y el nivel de influencia en Twitter a través de mecanismos de propaganda y falacia. Los resultados constatan que ambos debates responden a temas homogéneos, una respuesta activa de la audiencia y una tendencia basada en el discurso falso de la espectacularización.

Wim Delvoye es un artista multidisciplinar que vive y trabaja entre Gante (Bélgica) y Brighton (Reino Unido). Sus proyectos artísticos se centran en aspectos diversos de la sociedad contemporánea, así como en los mensajes subliminales existentes en la publicidad y en los discursos políticos y religiosos. Su visión crítica y paródica de la realidad abre un debate que va más allá de la eterna discusión entre lo que es y lo que no es arte, ampliándolo hacia quién determina dicha dicotomía; en este sentido el artista muestra un especial interés por la artesanía y la cultura popular. En dicho contexto, el sujeto construye una identidad única a través de la edición de su propio cuerpo por medio de tatuajes y asume un personal discurso antropológico y artístico mostrando sus marcas exclusivas de diferenciación. A mediados de los años 90, Wim Delvoye comenzó a tatuar animales y, rápidamente, sus trabajos de tatuaje sobre pollos muertos y cerdos vivos cruzaron la delgada línea entre la ética y la estética. Proponía nuevas maneras de distribución, comercialización y exhibición del arte, por el hecho de tratarse de elementos perecederos o, incluso, de animales vivos. Algo más de una década después, el artista comentó el Art Farm Project en Pekín, en donde continuó su trabajo de tatuaje sobre pieles porcinas, y arrancó uno de sus trabajos mas controvertidos, el tatuaje de la espalda de Tim Steiner, una persona anónima que a partir de este momento se convirtió en un cuerpo editado y en un objeto artístico (Art Farm-Tim, 2008). En esta entrevista, SOBRE N06 propone desarrollar aquellos aspectos que tienen que ver especialmente con dichos proyectos artísticos, así como las circunstancias concretas relativas a su exposición y venta.

ABSTRACTThe teachers’ interest for creating an innovative and interactive learning approach has fostered the curiosity for creating Learning Objects in the form of interactive games that can be adapted to any topic and educational level by using digital resources such as Interactive Whitebords (IWBs).Taking into consideration that using the traditional IWBs involves a high economic investment, same that leads to a limited availability for teachers, a low-cost alternative has been found that can replicate the same features of interactivity that can be found in the leader commercial brands of IWBs. Such implementa-tion was carried out in conjunction with the development of a Learning Object (LO) in the form of a digital interactive game, which was the result of a final draft of the 'design of learning objects' class belonging to the Faculty of Education and Educa-tional Innovation of Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico.RESUMENEl interés de los docentes por generar un aprendizaje en forma innovadora e interactiva con sus alumnos ha incentivado la inquietud de elaborar Objetos de Aprendizaje (OA) en forma de juegos interactivos que puedan ser adaptados a cualquier tema y nivel educativo, utilizando recursos tecnológicos tales como las denominadas Pizarras Digitales Interac-tivas (PDI). Tomando en consideración que hacer uso de las tradicionales PDI implica generalmente una alta inversión económica, misma que conlleva a una limitada disponibilidad para los docentes, se presenta una alternativa de bajo costo que permite replicar las mismas características de interactividad que se podrían encontrar en las marcas comerciales líde-res en PDI. Dicha implementación se llevó a cabo en conjunto con el desarrollo de un Objeto de Aprendizaje (OA) en forma de juego digital interactivo, producto de un proyecto final de la materia llamada diseño de objetos de aprendizaje pertene-ciente a la Facultad de Pedagogía e Innovación Educativa de la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, localizada en la ciudad de Mexicali Baja California, México.

Lincolnshire, England. The crowd cheer when the ball breaks loose. From one end of the field to the other, the players chase, their snouts hovering just above the grass. It’s not a case of four legs being better, rather a novel way to attract customers to the Woodside Wildlife and Falconry Park. During the matches, volunteers are drawn from the crowd to hold goal posts at either end of the run the pigs usually race on. With five pigs playing, two teams of two and a referee, and a ball designed to leak feed as it rolls (Stevenson) the ten-minute competition is fraught with tension. While the pig’s contributions to “the beautiful game” (Fish and Pele 7) have not always been so obvious, it could be argued that specific parts of the animal have had a significant impact on a sport which, despite calls to fall into line with much of the rest of the world, people in Australia (and the US) are more likely to call soccer. The Football Precursors to the modern football were constructed around an inflated pig’s bladder (Price, Jones and Harland). Animal hide, usually from a cow, was stitched around the bladder to offer some degree of stability, but the bladder’s irregular and uneven form made for unpredictable movement in flight. This added some excitement and affected how ball games such as the often violent, calico matches in Florence, were played. In the early 1970s, the world’s oldest ball was discovered during a renovation in Stirling Castle, Scotland. The ball has a pig’s bladder inside its hand-stitched, deer-hide outer. It was found in the ceiling above the bed in, what was then Mary Queens of Scots’ bedroom. It has since been dated to the 1540s (McGinnes). Neglected and left in storage until the late 1990s, the ball found pride of place in an exhibition in the Smiths Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling, and only gained worldwide recognition (as we will see later) in 2006. Despite confirmed interest in a number of sports, there is no evidence to support Mary’s involvement with football (Springer). The deer-hide ball may have been placed to gather and trap untoward spirits attempting to enter the monarch’s sleep, or simply left by accident and forgotten (McGinnes in Springer). Mary, though, was not so fortunate. She was confined and forgotten, but only until she was put to death in 1587. The Executioner having gripped her hair to hold his prize aloft, realised too late it was a wig and Mary’s head bounced and rolled across the floor. Football Development The pig’s bladder was the central component in the construction of the football for the next three hundred years. However, the issue of the ball’s movement (the bounce and roll), the bladder’s propensity to burst when kicked, and an unfortunate wife’s end, conspired to push the pig from the ball before the close of the nineteenth-century. The game of football began to take its shape in 1848, when JC Thring and a few colleagues devised the Cambridge Rules. This compromised set of guidelines was developed from those used across the different ‘ball’ games played at England’s elite schools. The game involved far more kicking, and the pig’s bladders, prone to bursting under such conditions, soon became impractical. Charles Goodyear’s invention of vulcanisation in 1836 and the death of prestigious rugby and football maker Richard Lindon’s wife in 1870 facilitated the replacement of the animal bladder with a rubber-based alternative. Tragically, Mr Lindon’s chief inflator died as a result of blowing up too many infected pig’s bladders (Hawkesley). Before it closed earlier this year (Rhoads), the US Soccer Hall of Fame displayed a rubber football made in 1863 under the misleading claim that it was the oldest known football. By the late 1800s, professional, predominantly Scottish play-makers had transformed the game from its ‘kick-and-run’ origins into what is now called ‘the passing game’ (Sanders). Football, thanks in no small part to Scottish factory workers (Kay), quickly spread through Europe and consequently the rest of the world. National competitions emerged through the growing need for organisation, and the pig-free mass production of balls began in earnest. Mitre and Thomlinson’s of Glasgow were two of the first to make and sell their much rounder balls. With heavy leather panels sewn together and wrapped around a thick rubber inner, these balls were more likely to retain shape—a claim the pig’s bladder equivalent could not legitimately make. The rubber-bladdered balls bounced more too. Their weight and external stitching made them more painful to header, but also more than useful for kicking and particularly for passing from one player to another. The ball’s relatively quick advancement can thereafter be linked to the growth and success of the World Cup Finals tournament. Before the pig re-enters the fray, it is important to glance, however briefly, at the ball’s development through the international game. World Cup Footballs Pre-tournament favourites, Spain, won the 2010 FIFA World Cup, playing with “an undistorted, perfectly spherical ball” (Ghosh par. 7), the “roundest” ever designed (FIFA par.1). Their victory may speak to notions of predictability in the ball, the tournament and the most lucrative levels of professional endeavour, but this notion is not a new one to football. The ball’s construction has had an influence on the way the game has been played since the days of Mary Queen of Scots. The first World Cup Final, in 1930, featured two heavy, leather, twelve-panelled footballs—not dissimilar to those being produced in Glasgow decades earlier. The players and officials of Uruguay and Argentina could not agree, so they played the first half with an Argentine ball. At half-time, Argentina led by two goals to one. In the second half, Uruguay scored three unanswered goals with their own ball (FIFA). The next Final was won by Italy, the home nation in 1934. Orsi, Italy’s adopted star, poked a wildly swerving shot beyond the outstretched Czech keeper. The next day Orsi, obligated to prove his goal was not luck or miracle, attempted to repeat the feat before an audience of gathered photographers. He failed. More than twenty times. The spin on his shot may have been due to the, not uncommon occurrence, of the ball being knocked out of shape during the match (FIFA). By 1954, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) had sought to regulate ball size and structure and, in 1958, rigorously tested balls equal to the demands of world-class competition. The 1950s also marked the innovation of the swerving free kick. The technique, developed in the warm, dry conditions of the South American game, would not become popular elsewhere until ball technology improved. The heavy hand-stitched orb, like its early counterparts, was prone to water absorption, which increased the weight and made it less responsive, particularly for those playing during European winters (Bray). The 1970 World Cup in Mexico saw football progress even further. Pele, arguably the game’s greatest player, found his feet, and his national side, Brazil, cemented their international football prominence when they won the Jules Rimet trophy for the third time. Their innovative and stylish use of the football in curling passes and bending free kicks quickly spread to other teams. The same World Cup saw Adidas, the German sports goods manufacturer, enter into a long-standing partnership with FIFA. Following the competition, they sold an estimated six hundred thousand match and replica tournament footballs (FIFA). The ball, the ‘Telstar’, with its black and white hexagonal panels, became an icon of the modern era as the game itself gained something close to global popularity for the first time in its history. Over the next forty years, the ball became incrementally technologically superior. It became synthetic, water-resistant, and consistent in terms of rebound and flight characteristics. It was constructed to be stronger and more resistant to shape distortion. Internal layers of polyutherane and Syntactic Foam made it lighter, capable of greater velocity and more responsive to touch (FIFA). Adidas spent three years researching and developing the 2006 World Cup ball, the ‘Teamgeist’. Fourteen panels made it rounder and more precise, offering a lower bounce, and making it more difficult to curl due to its accuracy in flight. At the same time, audiences began to see less of players like Roberto Carlos (Brazil and Real Madrid CF) and David Beckham (Manchester United, LA Galaxy and England), who regularly scored goals that challenged the laws of physics (Gill). While Adidas announced the 2006 release of the world’s best performing ball in Berlin, the world’s oldest was on its way to the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Hamburg for the duration of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. The Mary Queen of Scot’s ball took centre spot in an exhibit which also featured a pie stand—though not pork pies—from Hibernian Football Club (Strang). In terms of publicity and raising awareness of the Scots’ role in the game’s historical development, the installation was an unrivalled success for the Scottish Football Museum (McBrearty). It did, however, very little for the pig. Heads, not Tails In 2002, the pig or rather the head of a pig, bounced and rolled back into football’s limelight. For five years Luis Figo, Portugal’s most capped international player, led FC Barcelona to domestic and European success. In 2000, he had been lured to bitter rivals Real Madrid CF for a then-world record fee of around £37 million (Nash). On his return to the Catalan Camp Nou, wearing the shimmering white of Real Madrid CF, he was showered with beer cans, lighters, bottles and golf balls. Among the objects thrown, a suckling pig’s head chimed a psychological nod to the spear with two sharp ends in William Golding’s story. Play was suspended for sixteen minutes while police tried to quell the commotion (Lowe). In 2009, another pig’s head made its way into football for different reasons. Tightly held in the greasy fingers of an Orlando Pirates fan, it was described as a symbol of the ‘roasting’ his team would give the Kaiser Chiefs. After the game, he and his friend planned to eat their mascot and celebrate victory over their team’s most reviled competitors (Edwards). The game ended in a nil-all draw. Prior to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, it was not uncommon for a range of objects that European fans might find bizarre, to be allowed into South African league matches. They signified luck and good feeling, and in some cases even witchcraft. Cabbages, known locally for their medicinal qualities, were very common—common enough for both sets of fans to take them (Edwards). FIFA, an organisation which has more members than the United Nations (McGregor), impressed their values on the South African Government. The VuVuZela was fine to take to games; indeed, it became a cultural artefact. Very little else would be accepted. Armed with their economy-altering engine, the world’s most watched tournament has a tendency to get what it wants. And the crowd respond accordingly. Incidentally, the ‘Jabulani’—the ball developed for the 2010 tournament—is the most consistent football ever designed. In an exhaustive series of tests, engineers at Loughborough University, England, learned, among other things, the added golf ball-like grooves on its surface made the ball’s flight more symmetrical and more controlled. The Jabulani is more reliable or, if you will, more predictable than any predecessor (Ghosh). Spanish Ham Through support from their Governing body, the Real Federación Española de Fútbol, Spain have built a national side with experience, and an unparalleled number of talented individuals, around the core of the current FC Barcelona club side. Their strength as a team is founded on the bond between those playing on a weekly basis at the Catalan club. Their style has allowed them to create and maintain momentum on the international stage. Victorious in the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship and undefeated in their run through the qualifying stages into the World Cup Finals in South Africa, they were tournament favourites before a Jabulani was rolled into touch. As Tim Parks noted in his New York Review of Books article, “The Shame of the World Cup”, “the Spanish were superior to an extent one rarely sees in the final stages of a major competition” (2010 par. 15). They have a “remarkable ability to control, hold and hide the ball under intense pressure,” and play “a passing game of great subtlety [ ... to] patiently wear down an opposing team” (Parks par. 16). Spain won the tournament having scored fewer goals per game than any previous winner. Perhaps, as Parks suggests, they scored as often as they needed to. They found the net eight times in their seven matches (Fletcher). This was the first time that Spain had won the prestigious trophy, and the first time a European country has won the tournament on a different continent. In this, they have broken the stranglehold of superpowers like Germany, Italy and Brazil. The Spanish brand of passing football is the new benchmark. Beautiful to watch, it has grace, flow and high entertainment value, but seems to lack something of an organic nature: that is, it lacks the chance for things to go wrong. An element of robotic aptitude has crept in. This occurred on a lesser scale across the 2010 FIFA World Cup finals, but it is possible to argue that teams and players, regardless of nation, have become interchangeable, that the world’s best players and the way they play have become identikits, formulas to be followed and manipulated by master tacticians. There was a great deal of concern in early rounds about boring matches. The world’s media focused on an octopus that successfully chose the winner of each of Germany’s matches and the winner of the final. Perhaps, in shaping the ‘most’ perfect ball and the ‘most’ perfect football, the World Cup has become the most predictable of tournaments. In Conclusion The origins of the ball, Orsi’s unrepeatable winner and the swerving free kick, popular for the best part of fifty years, are worth remembering. These issues ask the powers of football to turn back before the game is smothered by the hunt for faultlessness. The unpredictability of the ball goes hand in hand with the game. Its flaws underline its beauty. Football has so much more transformative power than lucrative evolutionary accretion. While the pig’s head was an ugly statement in European football, it is a symbol of hope in its South African counterpart. Either way its removal is a reminder of Golding’s message and the threat of homogeneity; a nod to the absence of the irregular in the modern era. Removing the curve from the free kick echoes the removal of the pig’s bladder from the ball. The fun is in the imperfection. Where will the game go when it becomes indefectible? Where does it go from here? Can there really be any validity in claiming yet another ‘roundest ball ever’? Chip technology will be introduced. The ball’s future replacements will be tracked by satellite and digitally-fed, reassured referees will determine the outcome of difficult decisions. Victory for the passing game underlines the notion that despite technological advancement, the game has changed very little since those pioneering Scotsmen took to the field. Shouldn’t we leave things the way they were? Like the pigs at Woodside Wildlife and Falconry Park, the level of improvement seems determined by the level of incentive. The pigs, at least, are playing to feed themselves. Acknowledgments The author thanks editors, Donna Lee Brien and Adele Wessell, and the two blind peer reviewers, for their constructive feedback and reflective insights. The remaining mistakes are his own. References “Adidas unveils Golden Ball for 2006 FIFA World Cup Final” Adidas. 18 Apr. 2006. 23 Aug. 2010 . 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/82/ IN The Name of God Amen I John Rastrick of Kings Lynn in the County of Norfolk Clerk being mindfull of my mortality and the uncertainty of this present Life and being Sommon'd by age and infirmities to bethink my Self of my Departure out of this world and having thro’ Gods mercy the free use of my reason and understanding Do make this my last Will and Testament, written all with my own hand in manner and form following first I Comitt my Soul into the hands of Jesus Christ my Glorified Redeemer and Intercessor and by his mediation into the hands of God my reconciled father with trust and hope of the heavenly felicity and my Body to be decently Interr'd without Unnecessary Expences at the Discretion of my Executrix in hopes of a glorious Resurrection to eternall Life thro’ the merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour and as Concerning that Earthly Estate wherewith God hath blessed me which I Shall leave behind me I dispose thereof as followeth Imprimis I doe hereby ratifye and confirm the Joynture that I have given to my dear wife Elizabeth by Indent bearing date the 29th day of May Anno Domini 1696 of my Estate in Heckington and Asgaby in the County of Lincoln willing that it goe according to the Tenor of the said Joynture and Settlement as also that Estate in Sutton St Marys and in Holland in Lincolnshire which Jane the quondam wife of James Horn Enjoyed as her Joynture by her said Husband and unto which my Son William Rastrick is heir at Law this (with the forementioned Estate at Heckington and Asgarby) I do hereby as far as I have power ratifye and confirm to the said my Son William as his Inheritance to be Enjoyed by him after the decease of his mother my present <dear> wife Elizabeth above mentioned Item I give and bequeath my now Dwelling house with the Gardens and appurtenances Situate lying and being in Spinner Lane in Kings Lynn in Norfolk aforesaid which I purchased of my good friend Mr John Williamson Deceased as also that Close or pasture conteining by Estimation four acres more or less lying in Kirkton near Boston in Lincolnshire near the gate called Forefen Stow which I bought of Gregory Mapleson late in the tenure of widow Lee of Brother Toft as also that three acres of pasture lying in Sutton St Marys in Holland in Lincolnshire aforesaid Given to my wife Elizabeth by her great uncle Mr John Horne /83/ of Lynn Regis in Norfolk aforesaid Unto my five Daughters Sarah Martha Hannah Ann and Deborah Willing and appointing that the said lands be sold and the money be Divided amongst them for their portions at the Discretion of their Mother my present dear wife Elizabeth aforesaid She having hereby bequeathed to her a power to Live in the said my mansion house in Spinner Lane in Lyn as long as She pleases and to retein or hold the other Lands in this paragraph bequeathed for her and her familys maintenance till her said Daughters Shall marry or be Some other honest way Disposed of by or with her their said Mothers liking and Consent and if any of them Dye before they be soe disposed of I will that the monys raised upon the said Lands be divided amongst the Survivors at her/their mothers Discretion Item my Will is that if my Son William Should Depart this Life having no family or heir of his own that then (after my wife Elizabeth's Decease) all my Estate and lands before mentioned or value of them when Sold (Excepting my four acres in Kirkton) shall be equally Divided amongst my Daughters aforesaid Share and Share like and if any of them die while Single her portion Shall be equally divided amongst her Surviving Sisters and my Will is that in case my Son William Should die without heir of his own Body that then the before Excepted four acres in Kirkton Shall be accounted no part of my Estate so Divided but it Shall be given and I hereby bequeath it in that case only to the Church of Kirkton in Holland aforesaid where I was Sometime Minister as an augmentation to the vicaridge there for Ever according to and by virtue of an act of parliament not Long Since made in such cases provided that is impowering and to make and so Setling such augmentactions and this Conditional provision I make partly in Consideration of a legacy once left me and given to me as minister there and partly also because my Daughters will in the said Case of their Brothers Death have Competent portions without the said pasture Item I give all my Books manuscripts mathematical Instruments Tellescopes Double Barometer and all other things whatsoever of that kind found in my study and parler adjoining Shelves Drawers Cases &c as also my picture done by Deconing To my Son William Rastrick provided and upon condition that he continue a minister and preacher of the Gospell whether in a Conforming or nonConforming Capacity But if he should not be a minister or Continue a preacher So that he shall have little occasion for them or Should depart this life in a Single State and leave no Son a Scholler to Enjoy them or capable of using them that my will is that if any pious learned Studious minister Conformist or non conformist Shall marry any of my Daughters he Shall have all my Books manuscripts &c before mentioned over and above what her portion as before provided or bequeathed Shall be But if that Should not be then my will is that yet my said Library shall not be auctioned out or Sold to any Booksellers but be disposed of to raise a publick Library for the use of the Dissenting Ministers in the City of Norwich leaving it to their liberty what (by Collection made) to give my Surviving Children for them or my Son William if he live and yet desist from preaching or the Dissenting ministers there for the time being may treat /84/ with the City and upon agreement for their own free use of it add my library to theirs selling the lesser of the Duplicates and with that mony buying Such Books as Shall yet be leanting to the whole and all to be managed at the Discretion of the said Dissenting ministers in Conjunction with an Equall number of the City Clergy whom they the Dissenting ministers shall chuse Item I give to my Son John Rastrick now or late in Carolina if he be yet living the Sum of five pounds of lawfull mony of England to be pay'd him within three months next after his return into England if he so return and also to his Children (if any such be prov'd to be) the Sum of twenty Shillings each to be paid them within the like terme after their arrival in England and if he or they Shall Settle and be diligent he in his Calling (which is that of a Stocking weaver) or they in any honest calling and Shall be of Sober life and Conversation then I hereby recommend to my Executrix to give him or them Such further Encouragement as She according to her ability and at her Discretion Shall think fitt Item I give unto my Son Samuel Rastrick at London Silk dyer the Sum of ten Shillings also to my Daughter Elizabeth the wife of Edmund Burton of Wisbich the Sum of five Shillings to be paid them within Six months after my Decease they having had their portions before Item I give to our maid Servant Susannah Hating (to be paid her within three months after my decease) the Sum of forty Shillings over and above her due wages Item all the rest of my goods and Chattles undisposed of I give and bequeath unto my said dear wife Elizabeth whom I do hereby constitute and appoint Sole Executrix of this my last Will and Testament to see my debts discharged and my legacys or childrens portions paid and my Body decently Interr'd at the least Expence posable and I do desire my good friend Mr Nathaniel Kinderley of Sechy Bridg to be Supervisor of this my last Will and Testament In witness whereof I have hereunto Set my hand and Seal the Twenty Sixth day of July in the year of our Lord one Thousand Seven Hundred twenty five John Rastrick Published and declared to be the last Will and Testament of John Rastrick the Testator and Signed and Sealed in the presence of us James Hackgill John Money Thomas Wilson

Introduction It used to be the case that for the mass of workers, work was something that was done in order to get by. A working class was simply the sum total of all those workers and their dependents whose wages paid for the necessities of life, providing the bare minimum for family reproduction, to secure a place and a lineage within the social order. However, work has now become something else. Work has become the privileged sign of a new kind of class, whose existence is guaranteed not so much by work, but by the very fact of holding a job. Society no longer divides itself between a ruling elite and a subordinated working class, but between a job-holding, job-aspiring class, and those excluded from holding a job; those unable, by virtue of age, infirmity, education, gender, race or demographics, to participate in the rewards of work. Today, these rewards are not only a regular salary and job satisfaction (the traditional consolations of the working class), but also a certain capacity to plan ahead, to gain control of one's destiny through saving and investment, and to enjoy the pleasures of consumption through the fulfilment of self-images. What has happened to transform the worker from a subsistence labourer to an affluent consumer? In what way has the old working class now become part of the consumer society, once the privileged domain of the rich? And what effects has this transformation had on capitalism and its desire for profit? These questions take on an immediacy when we consider that, in the recent Federal election held in Australia (November 11, 2001), voters in the traditional working class areas of western Sydney deserted the Labour Party (the party of the worker) and instead voted Liberal/conservative (the party of capital and small business). The fibro worker cottage valleys of Parramatta are apparently no more, replaced by the gentrified mansions of an aspiring worker formation, in pursuit of the wealth and independence once the privilege of the educated bourgeoisie. In this brief essay, I will outline an understanding of work in terms of its changing relation to capital. My aim is to show how the terrain of work has shifted so that it no longer operates in strict subordination to capital, and has instead become an investment in capital. The worker no longer works to subsist, but does so as an investment in the future. My argument is situated in the rich theoretical field set out by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalism, which described the labour/capital relation in terms of a repressive, extractive force (the power of capital over labour) and which has since been redefined by various poststructuralist theorists including Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus) in terms of the forces of productive desire. What follows then, is not a Marxist reading of work, but a reading of the way Marx sets forth work in relation to capital, and how this can be re-read through poststructuralism, in terms of the transformation of work from subordination to capital, to investment in capital; from work as the consequence of repression, to work as the fulfilment of desire. The Discipline of Work In his major work Capital Marx sets out a theory of labour in which the task of the worker is to produce surplus value: "Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is, by its very essence, the production of surplus-value. The worker produces not for himself, but for capital. It is no longer sufficient, therefore, for him simply to produce. He must produce surplus-value." (644) For Marx, surplus-value is generated when commodities are sold in the market for a price greater than the price paid to the worker for producing it: "this increment or excess over the original value I call surplus-value" (251). In order to create surplus value, the time spent by the worker in making a commodity must be strictly controlled, so that the worker produces more than required to fulfil his subsistence needs: ". . . since it is just this excess labour that supplies [the capitalist] with the surplus value" (1011). In other words, capital production is created through a separation between labour and capital: "a division between the product of labour and labour itself, between the objective conditions of labour and the subjective labour-power, was . . . the real foundation and the starting point of the process of capital production" (716). As Michael Ryan has argued, this separation was forced , through an allegiance between capital and the state, to guarantee the conditions for capital renewal by controlling the payment of labour in the form of a wage (84). Marx's analysis of industrialised capital in Capital thus outlines the way in which human labour is transformed into a form of surplus value, by the forced extraction of labour time: "the capitalist forces the worker where possible to exceed the normal rate of intensity [of work] and he forces him as best he can to extend the process of labour beyond the time necessary to replace the amount laid out in wages" (987). For Marx, capitalism is not a voluntary system; workers are not free to enter into and out of their relation with capital, since capital itself cannot survive without the constant supply of labour from which to extract surplus value. Needs and wants can only be satisfied within the labour/capital relation which homogenises labour into exchange value in terms of a wage, pegged to subsistence levels: "the capital earmarked for wages . . . belongs to the worker as soon as it has assumed its true shape of the means of subsistence destined to be consumed by him" (984). The "true shape" of wages, and hence the single, univocal truth of the wage labourer, is that he is condemned to subsistence consumption, because his capacity to share in the surplus value extracted from his own labour is circumscribed by the alliance between capital and the state, where wages are fixed and controlled according to wage market regulations. Marx's account of the labour/capital relation is imposing in its description of the dilemma of labour under the power of capital. Capitalism appears as a thermodynamic system fuelled by labour power, where, in order to make the system homogeneous, to produce exchange value, resistance is reduced: "Because it is capital, the automatic mechanism is endowed, in the person of the capitalist, with consciousness and a will. As capital, therefore, it is animated by the drive to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by man, that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier." (527) In the capitalist system resistance takes the form of a living residue within the system itself, acting as an "elastic natural barrier" to the extractive force of capital. Marx names this living residue "man". In offering resistance, that is, in being subjected to the force of capital, the figure of man persists as the incommensurable presence of a resistive force composed by a refusal to assimilate. (Lyotard 102) This ambivalent position (the place of many truths) which places man within/outside capital, is not fully recognised by Marx at this stage of his analysis. It suggests the presence of an immanent force, coming from the outside, yet already present in the figure of man (man as "offering" resistance). This force, the counter-force operating through man as the residue of labour, is necessarily active in its effects on the system. That is to say, resistance in the system is not resistance to the system, but the resistance which carries the system elsewhere, to another place, to another time. Unlike the force of capital which works on labour to preserve the system, the resistive force figured in man works its way through the system, transforming it as it goes, with the elusive power to refuse. The separation of labour and capital necessary to create the conditions for capitalism to flourish is achieved by the action of a force operating on labour. This force manifests itself in the strict surveillance of work, through supervisory practices: "the capitalist's ability to supervise and enforce discipline is vital" (Marx 986). Marx's formulation of supervision here and elsewhere, assumes a direct power relation between the supervisor and the supervised: a coercive power in the form of 'the person of the capitalist, with consciousness and a will'. Surplus value can only be extracted at the maximum rate when workers are entirely subjected to physical surveillance. As Foucault has shown, surveillance practices in the nineteenth century involved a panoptic principle as a form of surveillance: "Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals get caught up." (202) Power is not power over, but a productive power involving the commingling of forces, in which the resistive force of the body does not oppose, but complies with an authoritative force: "there is not a single moment of life from which one cannot extract forces, providing one knows how to differentiate it and combine it with others" (165). This commingling of dominant and resistive forces is distributive and proliferating, allowing the spread of institutions across social terrains, producing both "docile" and "delinquent" bodies at the same time: "this production of delinquency and its investment by the penal apparatus ..." (285, emphasis added). Foucault allows us to think through the dilemma posed by Marx, where labour appears entirely subject to the power of capital, reducing the worker to subsistence levels of existence. Indeed, Foucault's work allows us to see the figure of man, briefly adumbrated in quote from Marx above as "that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier", but refigured as an active, investing, transformative force, operating within the capitalist system, yet sending it on its way to somewhere else. In Foucauldian terms, self-surveillance takes on a normative function during the nineteenth century, producing a set of disciplinary values around the concepts of duty and respectability (Childers 409). These values were not only imposed from above, through education and the state, but enacted and maintained by the workers themselves, through the myriad threads of social conformity operating in daily life, whereby people made themselves suitable to each other for membership of the imagined community of disciplined worker-citizens. In this case, the wellbeing of workers gravitated to self-awareness and self-improvement, seen for instance in the magazines circulating at the time addressed to a worker readership (e.g. The Penny Magazine published in Britain from 1832-1845; see Sinnema 15). Instead of the satisfaction of needs in subsistence consumption, the worker was possessed by a desire for self-improvement, taking place in his spare time which was in turn, consolidated into the ego-ideal of the bourgeois self as the perfected model of civilised, educated man. Here desire takes the form of a repression (Freud 355), where the resistive force of the worker is channelled into maintaining the separation between labour and capital, and where the worker is encouraged to become a little bourgeois himself. The desire for self-improvement by the worker did not lead to a shift into the capitalist classes, but was satisfied in coming to know one's place, in being satisfied with fulfilling one's duty and in living a respectable life; that is in being individuated with respect to the social domain. Figure 1 - "The British Beehive", George Cruickshank's image of the hierarchy of labour in Victorian England (1840, modified 1867). Each profession is assigned an individualised place in the social order. A time must come however, in the accumulation of surplus-value, in the vast accelerating machine of capitalism, when the separation between labour and capital begins to dissolve. This point is reached when the residue left by capital in extracting surplus value is sufficient for the worker to begin consuming for its own sake, to engage in "unproductive expenditure" (Bataille 117) where desire is released as an active force. At this point, workers begin to abandon the repressive disciplines of duty and respectability, and turn instead to the control mechanisms of self-transformation or the "inventing of a self as if from scratch" (Massumi 18). In advanced capitalism, where the accrued wealth has concentrated not only profit but wages as well (a rise in the "standard of living"), workers cease to behave as subordinated to the system, and through their increased spending power re-enter the system as property owners, shareholders, superannuants and debtees with the capacity to access money held in banks and other financial institutions. As investment guru Peter Drucker has pointed out, the accumulated wealth of worker-owned superannuation or "pension" funds, is the most significant driving force of global capital today (Drucker 76-8). In the superannuation fund, workers' labour is not fully expended in the production of surplus value, but re-enters the system as investment on the workers' behalf, indirectly fuelling their capacity to fulfil desires through a rapidly accelerating circulation of money. As a consequence, new consumer industries begin to emerge based on the management of investment, where money becomes a product, subject to consumer choice. The lifestyles of the old capitalist class, itself a simulacra of aristocracy which it replaced, are now reproduced by the new worker-capitalist, but in ersatz forms, proliferating as the sign of wealth and abundance (copies of palatial homes replace real palaces, look-alike Rolex watches become available at cheap prices, medium priced family sedans take on the look and feel of expensive imports, and so forth). Unable to extract the surplus value necessary to feed this new desire for money from its own workforce (which has, in effect, become the main consumer of wealth), capital moves 'offshore' in search of a new labour pool, and repeats what it did to the labour pools in the older social formations in its relentless quest to maximise surplus value. Work and Control We are now witnessing a second kind of labour taking shape out of the deformations of the disciplinary society, where surplus value is not extracted, but incorporated into the labour force itself (Mules). This takes place when the separation between labour and capital dissolves, releasing quantities of "reserve time" (the time set aside from work in order to consume), which then becomes part of the capitalising process itself. In this case workers become "investors in their own lives (conceived of as capital) concerned with obtaining a profitable behaviour through information (conceived of as a production factor) sold to them." (Alliez and Feher 347). Gilles Deleuze has identified this shift in terms of what he calls a "control society" where the individuation of workers guaranteed by the disciplinary society gives way to a cybernetic modulation of "dividuals" or cypher values regulated according to a code (180). For dividualised workers, the resource incorporated into capital is their own lived time, no longer divided between work and leisure, but entirely "consummated" in capital (Alliez and Fehrer 350). A dividualised worker will thus work in order to produce leisure, and conversely enjoy leisure as a form of work. Here we have what appears to be a complete breakdown of the separation of labour and capital instigated by the disciplinary society; a sweeping away of the grounds on which labour once stood as a mass of individuals, conscious of their rivalry with capital over the spoils of surplus value. Here we have a situation where labour itself has become a form of capital (not just a commodity exchangeable on the market), incorporated into the temporalised body of the worker, contributing to the extraction of its own surplus value. Under the disciplinary society, the body of the worker became subject to panoptic surveillance, where "time and motion" studies enabled a more efficient control of work through the application of mathematical models. In the control society there is no need for this kind of panoptic control, since the embodiment of the panoptic principle, anticipated by Foucault and responsible for the individuation of the subject in disciplinary societies, has itself become a resource for extracting surplus value. In effect, dividualised workers survey themselves, not as a form of self-discipline, but as an investment for capitalisation. Dividuals are not motivated by guilt, conscience, duty or devotion to one's self, but by a transubjective desire for the other, the figure of a self projected into the future, and realised through their own bodily becoming. Unlike individuals who watch themselves as an already constituted self in the shadow of a super-ego, dividuals watch themselves in the image of a becoming-other. We might like to think of dividuals as self-correctors operating in teams and groups (franchises) whose "in-ness" as in-dividuals, is derived not from self-reflection, but from directiveness. Directiveness is the disposition of a habitus to find its way within programs designed to maximise performance across a territory. Following Gregory Bateson, we might say that directiveness is the pathway forged between a map and its territory (Bateson 454). A billiard ball sitting on a billiard table needs to be struck in such a way to simultaneously reduce the risk of a rival scoring from it, and maximise the score available, for instance by potting it into a pocket. The actual trajectory of the ball is governed by a logic of "restraint" (399) which sets up a number of virtual pathways, all but one of which is eliminated when the map (the rules and strategies of the game) is applied to the territory of the billiard table. If surveillance was the modus operandi of the old form of capitalism which required a strict control over labour, then directiveness is the new force of capital which wants to eliminate work in the older sense of the word, and replace it with the self-managed flow of capitalising labour. Marx's labour theory of value has led us, via a detour through Foucault and Deleuze, to the edge of the labour/capital divide, where the figure of man reappears, not as a worker subject to capital, but in some kind of partnership with it. This seems to spell the end of the old form of work, which required a strict delineation between labour and capital, where workers became rivals with capital for a share in surplus value. In the new formation of work, workers are themselves little capitalists, whose labour time is produced through their own investments back into the system. Yet, the worker is also subject to the extraction of her labour time in the necessity to submit to capital through the wage relation. This creates a reflexive snarl, embedded in the worker's own self-image, where work appears as leisure and leisure appears as work, causing labour to drift over capital and vice versa, for capital to drift over labour. This drifting, mobile relation between labour and capital cannot be secured through appeals to older forms of worker awareness (duty, responsibility, attentiveness, self-surveillance) since this would require a repression of the desire for self-transformation, and hence a fatal dampening of the dynamics of the market (anathema to the spirit of capitalism). Rather it can only be directed through control mechanisms involving a kind of forced partnership between capital and labour, where both parties recognise their mutual destinies in being "thrown" into the system. In the end, work remains subsumed under capital, but not in its alienated, disciplinary state. Rather work has become a form of capital itself, one's investment in the future, and hence as valuable now as it was before. It's just a little more difficult to see how it can be protected as a 'right' of the worker, since workers are themselves investors of their own labour, and not right-bearing individuals whose position in society has been fixed by the separation of labour from capital. References Alliez, Eric and Michel Feher. "The Luster of Capital." Zone1/2 (1987): 314-359. Bataille, Georges. 'The Notion of Expenditure'. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Trans. and Ed. Alan Stoekl. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985. 116-29. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. Childers, Joseph W. "Observation and Representation: Mr. Chadwick Writes the Poor." Victorian Studies37.3 (1994): 405-31. Deleuze, Gilles. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. --. Negotiations, 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Drucker, Peter F. Post-Capitalist Society. New York: Harper, 1993. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Freud, Sigmund. "The Ego and the Id". On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. The Pelican Freud Library, Vol 11. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. 339-407. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant,. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Massumi, Brian. "Everywhere You Wanted to Be: Introduction to Fear." The Politics of Everyday Fear. Ed. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 3-37. Mules, Warwick. "A Remarkable Disappearing Act: Immanence and the Creation of Modern Things." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.4 (2001). 15 Nov. 2001 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0108/disappear.php>. Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1982. Sinnema, Peter W. Dynamics of the Printed Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1998. Links http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1867-C1/ http://www.media-culture.org.au/0108/Disappear.html http://acnet.pratt.edu/~arch543p/help/Foucault.html http://acnet.pratt.edu/~arch543p/help/Deleuze.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mules, Warwick. "That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Mules.xml >. Chicago Style Mules, Warwick, "That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Mules.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Mules, Warwick. (2001) That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Mules.xml > ([your date of access]).

Introduction: Serial Space“It feels …like the edge of the world; far more remote than it actually is, perhaps because it looks at such immensity” (Godden “Black,” 38). This is the priest’s warning to Sister Clodagh in Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel Black Narcissus. The young, inexperienced Clodagh leads a group of British nuns through the Indian Himalayas and onto a remote mountain top above Mopu. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger adapted Godden’s novel into the celebrated feature film, Black Narcissus (1947). Following the novel, the film narrates the nuns’ mission to establish a convent, school, and hospital for the local population. Yet, immensity moves in mysterious ways. Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) loses her managerial grip. Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) cultivates wild flowers instead of vegetables. Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) sheds nun’s attire for red lipstick and a Parisian dress. The young Indian woman Kanchi (Jean Simmons) becomes a force of libidinous disturbance. At the twilight of the British Empire, white, western nuns experience the psychical effects of colonialism at the precipice. Taking such cues from Pressburger and Powell’s film, Michelle Williams Gamaker, an artist, filmmaker, and scholar, responds to Black Narcissus, both film and novel. She does so through a radical interpretation of her own. Gamaker William’s 24-minute film, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten (forthcoming, London 2018) is a longer “short,” which breaks the mould of what scholar Linda Hutcheon would term an “adaptation” (2006). For Hutcheon, there is a double “mode of engagement” between an original work and its adapted form (22). On the one hand, there is a “transcoding” (22). This involves “transporting” characters from a precedent work to its adapted form (11). On the other, there is an act of “creative interpretation” (22). The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten transports yet recreates the Indian “beggar girl” Kanchi, played by a “blacked up” white Hollywood actor Jean Simmons (Black Narcissus), into Williams Gamaker’s contemporary Kanchi, played by Krishna Istha. In this 2018 instalment, Kanchi is an Asian and transgender protagonist of political articulacy. Hence, Williams Gamaker’s film engages a double tactic of both transporting yet transforming Kanchi, as well as Sisters Clodagh and Philippa, from the feature film into The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. To analyse Williams Gamaker’s film, I will make a theoretical jump off the precipice, stepping from Hutcheon’s malleable concept of adaptation into a space of “trans-serial” narrative.In what follows, I shall read The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as an “episode” in a serial. The prior episodes, Williams Gamaker’s House of Women (London 2017, Berlin 2018) is a short, fictional, and surreal documentary about casting the role of Kanchi. It can be read as the next episode in Kanchi’s many incarnations. The relationship between Sister Clodagh (Kelly Hunter as voiceover) and Kanchi in House of Women develops from one of confrontation to a transgender kiss in the climatic beat of The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. Williams Gamaker’s film can be read as one of a series which is itself inflected with the elements of a “trans-serial.” Henry Jenkins argues that “transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels” (emphasis in original, “Transmedia”). I use the word “trans” to define the gap between novelistic texts and film. Throughout Williams Gamaker’s series, she uses many textual citations from Godden’s novel, and dialogue from Pressburger and Powell’s film. In other words, verbal elements as well as filmic images are adapted in Hutcheon’s sense and transmediated in Jenkins’s sense. To build the “serial” concept for my analysis requires re-working concepts from television studies. Jason Mittell introduces “narrative complexity” as the “redefinition of episodic forms under serial narration” (“Narrative,” 32). In serial TV, characters and narratives develop over a sequence of episodes and seasons. In serial TV, missing one episode can thwart the viewer’s reception of later ones. Mittell’s examples reveal the plasticity of the narrative complexity concept. He mentions TV series that play games with the audience’s expectations. As Mittell points out, Seinfeld has reflexive qualities (“Narrative,” 35) and Twin Peaks mixes genres (“Narrative,” 33). I would add that Lynch’s creative liberties offered characters who could appear and disappear while leaving their arcs hanging intriguingly unresolved. The creative possibilities of reflexivity via seriality, of characters who appear and disappear or return in different guises, are strategies that underpin William’s Gamaker’s short film serial. The third in her trilogy, The Eternal Return (in post-production 2018) fictionalises the life of Sabu, the actor who played the General’s son in Black Narcissus. Once again, the protagonist, this time male, is played by Krishna Istha, a non-binary transgender actor who, by taking all the lead roles in William’s Gamaker’s trilogy, grows over the serial as a malleable ethnic and transgender subject. Importantly, The Eternal Return carries residues of the characters from The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten by casting the same team of actors again (Charlotte Gallagher and myself Catherine Lord), and switching their genders. Istha played Kanchi in the previous two episodes. The General’s son, played by Sabu, courted Kanchi in Black Narcissus. In The Eternal Return, Istha crosses the character and gender boundary by playing Sabu. Such casting tactics subvert the gender and colonial hegemonies inherent in Pressburger and Powell’s film.The reflexive and experimental approach of Williams Gamaker’s filmmaking deploys serial narrative tactics for its political goals. Yet, the use of “serial” needs to be nuanced. Glen Creeber sets out three terms: “episodic,” “series” and “serial.” For Creeber, a series provides continuous storylines in which the connection between episodes is strong. In the serial format, the connection between the episodes is less foregrounded. While it is not possible to enjoy stand-alone episodes in a serial, at the same time, serials produce inviting gaps between episodes. Final resolutions are discouraged so that there are greater narrative possibilities for later seasons and the audience’s own game of speculative storytelling (11).The emerging “serial” gaps between Williams Gamaker’s episodes offer opportunities for political interpretation. From House of Women and The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, Kanchi develops an even stronger political voice. Kanchi’s character arc moves from the wordless obedience of Pressburger and Powell’s feature to the transgender voice of post-colonial discourse in House of Women. In the next episode, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, Kanchi becomes Clodagh’s guide both politically, spiritually, and erotically.I will read The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as both my primary case-study and as the third episode in what I shall theorise to be a four-part serial. The first is the feature film Black Narcissus. After this is Williams Gamaker’s House of Women, which is then followed by The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, my central case study here. There may be immediate objections to my argument that Williams Gamaker’s series can be read by treating Pressburger and Powell’s feature as the first in the series. After all, Godden’s novel could be theorised as the camouflaged pilot. Yet, a series or serial is defined as such when it is in the same medium. Game of Thrones (2011-) is a TV series that adapts George R.R. Martin’s novel cycle, but the novels are not episodes. In this regard, I follow Hutcheon’s emphasis on theorising adapted works as forged between different media, most commonly novels to films. The adaptive “deliveries” scatter through The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten with an ecological precision.Eco SeriesEcological descriptions from Godden’s novel and Pressburger and Powell’s mise-en-scene are performed in The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten through Kelly Hunter’s velvety voiceover as it enjoys a painterly language: butterflies daub the ferns with “spots of ochre, scarlet, and lemon sherbet.” Hutcheon’s term transcoding usefully describes the channelling of particles from the novelist’s text into an intensified, ecological language and cinematic mise-en-scene. The intensification involves an ingestion of Godden’s descriptive prose, which both mimics and adds an adjectival and alliterative density. The opening descriptions of the nuns’ arrival in Mopu is a case in point. In the novel, the grooms joke about the nuns’ habits appearing as “snows, tall and white” (Godden “Black,” 1). One man remarks that they look like “a row of teeth” (Godden “Black,” 2). Williams Gamaker resists shots of nuns as Godden described them, namely on Bhotiya ponies. Rather, projected onto a white screen is an image of white and red flowers slowly coming into focus. Kelly Hunter’s voiceover describes the white habits as a set of “pearly whites” which are “hungry for knowledge” and “eat into the landscape.” White, western nuns in white habits are metaphorically implied to be like a consuming mouth, eating into Indian territories and Indian people.This metaphor of colonial consumption finds its corollary in Godden’s memoirs where she describes the Pressburger, Powell, and Simons representation of Kanchi as “a basket of fruit, piled high and luscious and ready to eat” (“A House,” 24-5; 52). The nun’s quest colonially consumes Mopu’s natural environment. Presumably, nuns who colonially eat consume the colonised Other like fruit. The Kanchi of the feature film Black Narcissus is a supporting character, performed by Simmons as mute, feral and objectified. If Kanchi is to release herself from the “fruity” projections of sexism and racism, it will be through the filmmaker’s aesthetic and feminist tactic of ensuring that planets, trees, fruits and flowers become members of the film cast. If in episode 1 (Black Narcissus), plants and Asian subalterns are colonised, in episode 2, House of Women, these fruits and flowers turn up as smart, young Asian women actors with degrees in law and photography, ready to hold their own in the face of a faceless interviewer. In episode 3, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, it is important that Krishna Istha’s Kanchi, turning up like a magical character from another time and space (transformed from episode 1), commands the film set amidst an excess of flowers, plants and fruits. The visual overflow correlates with Kanchi’s assertiveness. Flowers and Kanchi know how to “answer back.”Like Black Narcissus the feature, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten relies heavily on a mise-en-scene of horticultural and mountain ecology. Just as Michael Powell filmed at Pinewood and Leonardslee Gardens in East Sussex, Williams Gamaker used Rotherhithe’s Brunel Museum roof Gardens and Sands Film Studios. The lusciousness of Leonardslee is film-intertextually echoed in the floral exuberance of the 2018 shots of Rotherhithe. After the crew have set up the classroom, interwoven with Kelly Hunter’s voiceover, there is a hard cut to a full, cinematic shot of the Leonardslee garden (fig. 1).Then cutting back to the classroom, we see Kanchi calmly surveying the set, of which she is the protagonist, with a projection of an encyclopaedic display of the flowers behind her. The soundtrack plays the voices of young women students intoning the names of flowers from delphinium to lupens.These meta-filmic moments are supported by the film’s sharp juxtaposition between classroom and outdoor scenes. In Pressburger and Powell’s school scenes, Sister Ruth attempts to teach the young General how to conjugate the French verb “recevoir.” But the lesson is not successfully received. The young General becomes aphasic, Kanchi is predictably mute and the children remain demure. Will colonialism let the Other speak? One way to answer back in episode 3 is through that transgressive discourse, the language of flowers.In The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, the young women study under Sister Clodagh and Sister Philippa (myself, Catherine Lord). The nuns teach botanical lists and their ecological contexts through rote learning. The young women learn unenthusiastically. What is highlighted is the ludicrous activity of repetition and abstractions. When knowledge becomes so objectified, so do natural environments, territories and people. Clodagh aligns floral species to British locations. The young women are relatively more engaged in the garden with Sister Philippa. They study their environment through sketching and painting a diverse range of flowers that could grow in non-British territory. Philippa is the now the one who becomes feral and silent, stroking stalks and petals, eschewing for the time being, the game of naming (fig. 2).However, lessons with colonial lexicons will be back. The young women look at screen projections of flowers. Sister Philippa takes the class through an alphabet: “D is for Dogbright … L is for Ladies’ Fingers.” Clodagh whirls through a list of long, Latin names for wild flowers in British Woodlands. Kanchi halts Clodagh’s act of associating the flowers with the British location, which colonizes them. Kanchi asks: “How many of us will actually travel, and which immigration border will test our botanical knowledge?” Kanchi then presents a radically different alphabet, including “Anne is African … Ian is Intersex … Lucy loves Lucy.” These are British names attributed to Africans, Arabs, and Asians, many of their identities revealed to be LGBQT-POC, non-binary, transgender, and on the move. Clodagh’s riposte is “How do you know you are not travelling already?” The flowers cannot be pinned down to one location. They cannot be owned by one nation.Like characters who travel between episodes, the travelling flowers represent a collision of spaces that undermine the hegemonies of race, gender and sexuality. In episode 1, Black Narcissus the feature film, the western nuns face the immensities of mountain atmosphere, ecology and an unfamiliar ethnic group. In episode 2, House of Women, the subalterns have transformed their role, achieving educational and career status. Such political and dramatic stakes are raised in episode 3, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. There is a strong focus on the overlapping oppressions of racial, colonial and ecological exploitation. Just as Kanchi has a character arc and serial development, so do plants, fauna, fruits, flowers and trees. ‘Post’-Space and Its AtmosphereThe British Empire colonised India’s ecological space. “Remember you and your God aren't on British Territory anymore” declares the auditioning Krishna Istha in House of Women. Kanchi’s calm, civil disobedience continues its migration into The Fruit is There to be Eaten between two simultaneously existing spaces, Mopu and Rotherhithe, London. According to literature scholar Brian McHale, postmodern worlds raise ontological questions about the dramatic space into which we are drawn. “Which” worlds are we in? Postmodern worlds can overlap between separate spaces and different temporalities (McHale 34-35). As McHale notes, “If entities can migrate across the semipermeable membrane that divides a fictional world from the real, they can also migrate between two different fictional worlds” (35).In The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, the semipermeable membrane between it and Black Narcissus folds together the temporalities of 1947 and 2018, and the terrains of India and London. Sister Philippa tells a Kanchi seeking Mopu, that “My dear, you are already here.” This would seem odd as Sister Philippa describes the death of a young man close to Saint Mary’s Church, London. The British capital and woodlands and the Himalayas co-exist as intensified, inter-crossing universes that disrupt the membranes between both colonial and ecological space-time, or what I term “post-space.”Williams Gamaker’s post-spaces further develop Pressburger and Powell’s latent critique of post-colonialism. As film scholar Sarah Street has observed, Black Narcissus the film performs a “post-colonial” exploration of the waning British Empire: “Out of the persistence of the colonial past the present is inflected with a haunting resonance, creating gaps and fissures” (31). This occurs in Powell’s film in the initial Calcutta scenes. The designer Alfred Junge made “God shots” of the nuns at dinner, creating from them the iconic shape of a cross. This image produces a sense of over-exactness. Once in the mountains, it is the spirit of exactitude that deteriorates. In contrast, Williams Gamaker prefers to reveal the relative chaos of setting up her world. We watch as the crew dress the school room. Un-ceremoniously, Kanchi arrives in shorts before she picks up a floral dress bearing the label “Kanchi.” There is then a shot in which Kanchi purveys the organised set, as though she is its organiser (fig. 3).Post-spaces are rich in atmosphere. The British agent Dean tells Clodagh in Black Narcissus the film that the mountain “is no place to put a nunnery” due its “atmosphere.” In the climactic scene of The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, Kanchi and Clodagh face two screens revealing the atmospheric projection of the high mountains, the black cut between them visible, like some shadowy membrane. Such aesthetic strategies continue Powell’s use of technical artifice. Street details the extensive labour of technical and craft work involved in creating the artificial world of Black Narcissus, its mountains, artificial colours, and hence atmosphere, all constructed at Pinewood studios. There was a vast amount of matte painting and painting on glass for special effects (19).William Gamaker’s screens (projection work by Sophie Bramley and Nick Jaffe) reflexively emphasise atmosphere as artifices. The atmosphere intensifies with the soundscape of mountain air and Wayne Urquhart’s original and haunting music. In Powell and Pressburger’s feature, Brian Easdale’s music also invokes a sense of mystery and vastness. Just as TV series and serials maintain musical and mise-scene-scene signatures from one episode to another, so too does Williams Gamaker reframe her precursor’s cinematic aesthetics with that of her own episode. Thus, serial as stylistic consistency is maintained between episodes and their post-spaces.At the edge of such spaces, Kanchi will scare Clodagh by miming a tight-rope walk across the mountain: it is both real and pretend, dramatic, but reflexively so. Kanchi walks a membrane between colliding worlds, between colonialism and its transgression. In this episode of extreme spirituality and eroticism, Kanchi reaches greater heights than in previous episodes, discoursing on the poetics of atmosphere: “… in the midst of such peaks, one can draw near what is truly placeless … the really divine.” Here, the membrane between the political and cultural regions and the mountains that eschew even the human, is about to be breached. Kanchi relates the legend of those who go naked in the snow. These “Abominable Men” are creatures who become phantoms when they merge with the mountain. If the fractures between locations are too spacious, as Kanchi warns, one can go mad. In this episode 3, Kanchi and Clodagh may have completed their journeys. In Powell and Pressburger’s interpretation, Sister Ruth discards nun’s attire for a Parisian, seductive dress and red lipstick. Yet, she does so for a man, Dean. However, the Sister Clodagh of 2018 is filmed in a very long take as she puts on an elegant dress and does her make-up. In a scene of philosophical intimacy with Kanchi, the newly dressed Clodagh confesses her experience of “immensity.” As they break through the erotic membrane separating their identities, both immersed in their full, queer, transgender kiss, all racial hierarchies melt into atmosphere (fig. 4).Conclusion: For a Pitch By making a film as one episode in a series, Williams Gamaker’s accomplishment is to enhance the meeting of narrative and political aims. As an arthouse film serial, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten has enabled definitions of “serial” to migrate from the field of television studies. Between Hutcheon’s “adaptation” and Mittell and Creeber’s articulations of “narrative complexity,” a malleable concept for arthouse seriality has emerged. It has stretched the theoretical limits of what can be meant by a serial in an arthouse context. By allowing the notion of works “adapted” to occur between different media, Henry Jenkins’ broader term of “transmedia storytelling” (Convergence) can describe how particles of Godden’s work transmigrate through episodes 1, 2, and 3, where the citational richness emerges most in episodes 3, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten.Because one novel informs all the episodes while each has entirely different narratives and genres, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten is not a serial adaptation, as is Game of Thrones. It is an experimental serial inflected with trans-serial properties. Kanchi evolves into a postcolonial, transgender, ecological protagonist who can traverse postmodern worlds. Perhaps the witty producer in a pitch meeting might say that in its serial context, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten is like a cross between two fantasy TV serials, still to be written: Transgender Peaks meets Kanchi Is the New Black. The “new black” is multifaceted and occupies multi-worlds in a post-space environment. ReferencesCreeber, Glen. Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen. London: BFI, 2004.Godden, Rumer. 1939. Black Narcissus: A Virago Modern Classic. London: Hatchette Digital, 2013.———. A House with Four Rooms. New York: William Morrow, 1989. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press, 2012.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.———. “Transmedia, 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan 1 Aug. 2011. 1 May 2012 <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html>.McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987.Powell, Michael. A Life in Movies: An Autobiography. London: Heinemann, 1986.Mittell, Jason. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall 2006): 29-40. Street, Sarah. Black Narcissus. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.FilmographyBlack Narcissus. Dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Pinewood Studios, 1947.House of Women. Dir. Michelle Williams Gamaker. Cinema Suitcase, 2017.The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. Dir. Michelle Williams Gamaker. Cinema Suitcase, 2018.The Eternal Return. Dir. Michelle Williams Gamaker. Cinema Suitcase, 2018-2019.

The twentieth was, from one perspective, the democratic century — a span of one hundred years which began with no fully functioning democracies in existence anywhere on the planet (if one defines democracy as a political system in which there is both universal suffrage and competitive elections), and ended with 120 countries out of 192 classified by the Freedom House think tank as ‘democratic’. There are of course still many societies where democracy is denied or effectively neutered — the remaining outposts of state socialism, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea; most if not all of the Islamic countries; exceptional states such as Singapore, unapologetically capitalist in its economic system but resolutely authoritarian in its political culture. Many self-proclaimed democracies, including those of the UK, Australia and the US, are procedurally or conceptually flawed. Countries emerging out of authoritarian systems and now in a state of democratic transition, such as Russia and the former Soviet republics, are immersed in constant, sometimes violent struggle between reformers and reactionaries. Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were accompanied by the intimidation of parties and politicians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s increasingly populist and authoritarian approach to leadership. The same Freedom House report which describes the rise of democracy in the twentieth century acknowledges that many self-styled democracies are, at best, only ‘partly free’ in their political cultures (for detailed figures on the rise of global democracy, see the Freedom House website Democracy’s Century). Let’s not for a moment downplay these important qualifications to what can nonetheless be fairly characterised as a century-long expansion and globalisation of democracy, and the acceptance of popular sovereignty, expressed through voting for the party or candidate of one’s choice, as a universally recognised human right. That such a process has occurred, and continues in these early years of the twenty-first century, is irrefutable. In the Gaza strip, Hamas appeals to the legitimacy of a democratic election victory in its campaign to be recognised as the voice of the Palestinian people. However one judges the messianic tendencies and Islamist ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it must be acknowledged that the Iranian people elected him, and that they have the power to throw him out of government next time they vote. That was never true of the Shah. The democratic resurgence in Latin America, taking in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia among others has been a much-noted feature of international politics in recent times (Alves), presenting a welcome contrast to the dictatorships and death squads of the 1980s, even as it creates some uncomfortable dilemmas for the Bush administration (which must champion democratic government at the same time as it resents some of the choices people may make when they have the opportunity to vote). Since 9/11 a kind of democracy has expanded even to Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit at the point of a gun, and with no guarantees of survival beyond the end of military occupation by the US and its coalition allies. As this essay was being written, Pakistan’s state of emergency was ending and democratic elections scheduled, albeit in the shadow cast by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Democracy, then — imperfect and limited as it can be; grudgingly delivered though it is by political elites in many countries, and subject to attack and roll back at any time — has become a global universal to which all claim allegiance, or at least pay lip service. The scale of this transformation, which has occurred in little more than one quarter of the time elapsed since the Putney debates of 1647 and the English revolution first established the principle of the sovereignty of parliament, is truly remarkable. (Tristram Hunt quotes lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in the Guardian to the effect that the Putney debates, staged in St Mary’s church in south-west London towards the end of the English civil war, launched “the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth” – “A Jewel of Democracy”, Guardian, 26 Oct. 2007) Can it be true that less than one hundred years ago, in even the most advanced capitalist societies, 50 per cent of the people — women — did not have the right to vote? Or that black populations, indigenous or migrant, in countries such as the United States and Australia were deprived of basic citizenship rights until the 1960s and even later? Will future generations wonder how on earth it could have been that the vast majority of the people of South Africa were unable to vote until 1994, and that they were routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed when they demanded basic democratic rights? Or will they shrug and take it for granted, as so many of us who live in settled democracies already do? (In so far as ‘we’ includes the community of media and cultural studies scholars, I would argue that where there is reluctance to concede the scale and significance of democratic change, this arises out of continuing ambivalence about what ‘democracy’ means, a continuing suspicion of globalisation (in particular the globalisation of democratic political culture, still associated in some quarters with ‘the west’), and of the notion of ‘progress’ with which democracy is routinely associated. The intellectual roots of that ambivalence were various. Marxist-leninist inspired authoritarianism gripped much of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Until that moment, it was still possible for many marxians in the scholarly community to view the idea of democracy with disdain — if not quite a dirty word, then a deeply flawed, highly loaded concept which masked and preserved underlying social inequalities more than it helped resolve them. Until 1989 or thereabouts, it was possible for ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be regarded as just one kind of democratic polity by the liberal and anti-capitalist left, which often regarded the ‘proletarian’ or ‘people’s’ democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or Vietnam as legitimate alternatives to the emerging capitalist norm of one person, one vote, for constituent assemblies which had real power and accountability. In terms not very different from those used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, belief in the value of democracy was conceived by this materialist school as a kind of false consciousness. It still is, by Noam Chomsky and others who continue to view democracy as a ‘necessary illusion’ (1989) without which capitalism could not be reproduced. From these perspectives voting gave, and gives us merely the illusion of agency and power in societies where capital rules as it always did. For democracy read ‘the manufacture of consent’; its expansion read not as progressive social evolution, but the universalisation of the myth of popular sovereignty, mobilised and utilised by the media-industrial-military complex to maintain its grip.) There are those who dispute this reading of events. In the 1960s, Habermas’s hugely influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere critiqued the manner in which democracy, and the public sphere underpinning it, had been degraded by public relations, advertising, and the power of private interests. In the period since, critical scholarly research and writing on political culture has been dominated by the Habermasian discourse of democratic decline, and the pervasive pessimism of those who see democracy, and the media culture which supports it, as fatally flawed, corrupted by commercialisation and under constant threat. Those, myself included, who challenged that view with a more positive reading of the trends (McNair, Journalism and Democracy; Cultural Chaos) have been denounced as naïve optimists, panglossian, utopian and even, in my own case, a ‘neo-liberal apologist’. (See an unpublished paper by David Miller, “System Failure: It’s Not Just the Media, It’s the Whole Bloody System”, delivered at Goldsmith’s College in 2003.) Engaging as they have been, I venture to suggest that these are the discourses and debates of an era now passing into history. Not only is it increasingly obvious that democracy is expanding globally into places where it never previously reached; it is also extending inwards, within nation states, driven by demands for greater local autonomy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the citizen is now able to vote not just in Westminster parliamentary elections (which determine the political direction of the UK government), but for European elections, local elections, and elections for devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The people of London can vote for their mayor. There would by now have been devolved assemblies in the regions of England, too, had the people of the North East not voted against it in a November 2004 referendum. Notwithstanding that result, which surprised many in the New Labour government who held it as axiomatic that the more democracy there was, the better for all of us, the importance of enhancing and expanding democratic institutions, of allowing people to vote more often (and also in more efficient ways — many of these expansions of democracy have been tied to the introduction of systems of proportional representation) has become consensual, from the Mid West of America to the Middle East. The Democratic Paradox And yet, as the wave of democratic transformation has rolled on through the late twentieth and into the early twenty first century it is notable that, in many of the oldest liberal democracies at least, fewer people have been voting. In the UK, for example, in the period between 1945 and 2001, turnout at general elections never fell below 70 per cent. In 1992, the last general election won by the Conservatives before the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, turnout was 78 per cent, roughly where it had been in the 1950s. In 2001, however, as Blair’s government sought re-election, turnout fell to an historic low for the UK of 59.4 per cent, and rose only marginally to 61.4 per cent in the most recent general election of 2005. In the US presidential elections of 1996 and 2000 turnouts were at historic lows of 47.2 and 49.3 per cent respectively, rising just above 50 per cent again in 2004 (figures by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). At local level things are even worse. In only the second election for a devolved parliament in Scotland (2003) turnout was a mere 48.5 per cent, rising to 50.5 in 2007. These trends are not universal. In countries with compulsory voting, they mean very little — in Australia, where voting in parliamentary elections is compulsory, turnout averages in the 90s per cent. In France, while turnouts for parliamentary elections show a similar downward trend to the UK and the UK, presidential contests achieve turnouts of 80-plus per cent. In the UK and US, as noted, the most recent elections show modest growth in turnout from those historic lows of the late 1990s and early Noughties. There has grown, nonetheless, the perception, commonplace amongst academic commentators as well as journalists and politicians themselves, that we are living through a ‘crisis’ of democratic participation, a dangerous decline in the tendency to vote in elections which undermines the legitimacy of democracy itself. In communication scholarship a significant body of research and publication has developed around this theme, from Blumler and Gurevitch’s Crisis of Public Communication (1996), through Barnett and Gaber’s Westminster Tales (2000), to more recent studies such as Lewis et al.’s Citizens or Consumers (2005). All presume a problem of some kind with the practice of democracy and the “old fashioned ritual” of voting, as Lewis et al. describe it (2). Most link alleged inadequacies in the performance of the political media to what is interpreted as popular apathy (or antipathy) towards democracy. The media are blamed for the lack of public engagement with democratic politics which declining turnouts are argued to signal. Political journalists are said to be too aggressive and hyper-adversarial (Lloyd), behaving like the “feral beast” spoken of by Tony Blair in his 2007 farewell speech to the British people as prime minister. They are corrosively cynical and a “disaster for democracy”, as Steven Barnett and others argued in the first years of the twenty first century. They are not aggressive or adversarial enough, as the propaganda modellists allege, citing what they interpret as supine media coverage of Coalition policy in Iraq. The media put people off, rather than turn them on to democracy by being, variously, too nice or too nasty to politicians. What then, is the solution to the apparent paradox represented by the fact that there is more democracy, but less voting in elections than ever before; and that after centuries of popular struggle democratic assemblies proliferate, but in some countries barely half of the eligible voters can be bothered to participate? And what role have the media played in this unexpected phenomenon? If the scholarly community has been largely critical on this question, and pessimistic in its analyses of the role of the media, it has become increasingly clear that the one arena where people do vote more than ever before is that presented by the media, and entertainment media in particular. There has been, since the appearance of Big Brother and the subsequent explosion of competitive reality TV formats across the world, evidence of a huge popular appetite for voting on such matters as which amateur contestant on Pop Idol, or X Factor, or Fame Academy, or Operatunity goes on to have a chance of a professional career, a shot at the big time. Millions of viewers of the most popular reality TV strands queue up to register their votes on premium phone lines, the revenue from which makes up a substantial and growing proportion of the income of commercial TV companies. This explosion of voting behaviour has been made possible by the technology-driven emergence of new forms of participatory, interactive, digitised media channels which allow millions to believe that they can have an impact on the outcome of what are, at essence, game and talent shows. At the height of anxiety around the ‘crisis of democratic participation’ in the UK, observers noted that nearly 6.5 million people had voted in the Big Brother UK final in 2004. More than eight million voted during the 2004 run of the BBC’s Fame Academy series. While these numbers do not, contrary to popular belief, exceed the numbers of British citizens who vote in a general election (27.2 million in 2005), they do indicate an enthusiasm for voting which seems to contradict declining rates of democratic participation. People who will never get out and vote for their local councillor often appear more than willing to pick up the telephone or the laptop and cast a vote for their favoured reality TV contestant, even if it costs them money. It would be absurd to suggest that voting for a contestant on Big Brother is directly comparable to the act of choosing a government or a president. The latter is recognised as an expression of citizenship, with potentially significant consequences for the lives of individuals within their society. Voting on Big Brother, on the other hand, is unmistakeably entertainment, game-playing, a relatively risk-free exercise of choice — a bit of harmless fun, fuelled by office chat and relentless tabloid coverage of the contestants’ strengths and weaknesses. There is no evidence that readiness to participate in a telephone or online vote for entertainment TV translates into active citizenship, where ‘active’ means casting a vote in an election. The lesson delivered by the success of participatory media in recent years, however — first reality TV, and latterly a proliferation of online formats which encourage user participation and voting for one thing or another — is that people will vote, when they are able and motivated to do so. Voting is popular, in short, and never more so, irrespective of the level of popular participation recorded in recent elections. And if they will vote in their millions for a contestant on X Factor, or participate in competitions to determine the best movies or books on Facebook, they can presumably be persuaded to do so when an election for parliament comes around. This fact has been recognised by both media producers and politicians, and reflected in attempts to adapt the evermore sophisticated and efficient tools of participatory media to the democratic process, to engage media audiences as citizens by offering the kinds of voting opportunities in political debates, including election processes, which entertainment media have now made routinely available. ITV’s Vote for Me strand, broadcast in the run-up to the UK general election of 2005, used reality TV techniques to select a candidate who would actually take part in the forthcoming poll. The programme was broadcast in a late night, low audience slot, and failed to generate much interest, but it signalled a desire by media producers to harness the appeal of participatory media in a way which could directly impact on levels of democratic engagement. The honourable failure of Vote for Me (produced by the same team which made the much more successful live debate shows featuring prime minister Tony Blair — Ask Tony Blair, Ask the Prime Minister) might be viewed as evidence that readiness to vote in the context of a TV game show does not translate directly into voting for parties and politicians, and that the problem in this respect — the crisis of democratic participation, such that it exists — is located elsewhere. People can vote in democratic elections, but choose not to, perhaps because they feel that the act is meaningless (because parties are ideologically too similar), or ineffectual (because they see no impact of voting in their daily lives or in the state of the country), or irrelevant to their personal priorities and life styles. Voting rates have increased in the US and the UK since September 11 2001, suggesting perhaps that when the political stakes are raised, and the question of who is in government seems to matter more than it did, people act accordingly. Meantime, media producers continue to make money by developing formats and channels on the assumption that audiences wish to participate, to interact, and to vote. Whether this form of participatory media consumption for the purposes of play can be translated into enhanced levels of active citizenship, and whether the media can play a significant contributory role in that process, remains to be seen. References Alves, R.C. “From Lapdog to Watchdog: The Role of the Press in Latin America’s Democratisation.” In H. de Burgh, ed., Making Journalists. London: Routledge, 2005. 181-202. Anderson, P.J., and G. Ward (eds.). The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Barnett, S. “The Age of Contempt.” Guardian 28 October 2002. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/comment/0,12123,820577,00.html>. Barnett, S., and I. Gaber. Westminster Tales. London: Continuum, 2001. Blumler, J., and M. Gurevitch. The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1996. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Lewis, J., S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2005. Lloyd, John. What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable, 2004. McNair, B. Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Cultural Chaos: News, Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge, 2006. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McNair, Brian. "Vote!." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/01-mcnair.php>. APA Style McNair, B. (Apr. 2008) "Vote!," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/01-mcnair.php>.

The twentieth was, from one perspective, the democratic century — a span of one hundred years which began with no fully functioning democracies in existence anywhere on the planet (if one defines democracy as a political system in which there is both universal suffrage and competitive elections), and ended with 120 countries out of 192 classified by the Freedom House think tank as ‘democratic’. There are of course still many societies where democracy is denied or effectively neutered — the remaining outposts of state socialism, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea; most if not all of the Islamic countries; exceptional states such as Singapore, unapologetically capitalist in its economic system but resolutely authoritarian in its political culture. Many self-proclaimed democracies, including those of the UK, Australia and the US, are procedurally or conceptually flawed. Countries emerging out of authoritarian systems and now in a state of democratic transition, such as Russia and the former Soviet republics, are immersed in constant, sometimes violent struggle between reformers and reactionaries. Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were accompanied by the intimidation of parties and politicians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s increasingly populist and authoritarian approach to leadership. The same Freedom House report which describes the rise of democracy in the twentieth century acknowledges that many self-styled democracies are, at best, only ‘partly free’ in their political cultures (for detailed figures on the rise of global democracy, see the Freedom House website Democracy’s Century). Let’s not for a moment downplay these important qualifications to what can nonetheless be fairly characterised as a century-long expansion and globalisation of democracy, and the acceptance of popular sovereignty, expressed through voting for the party or candidate of one’s choice, as a universally recognised human right. That such a process has occurred, and continues in these early years of the twenty-first century, is irrefutable. In the Gaza strip, Hamas appeals to the legitimacy of a democratic election victory in its campaign to be recognised as the voice of the Palestinian people. However one judges the messianic tendencies and Islamist ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it must be acknowledged that the Iranian people elected him, and that they have the power to throw him out of government next time they vote. That was never true of the Shah. The democratic resurgence in Latin America, taking in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia among others has been a much-noted feature of international politics in recent times (Alves), presenting a welcome contrast to the dictatorships and death squads of the 1980s, even as it creates some uncomfortable dilemmas for the Bush administration (which must champion democratic government at the same time as it resents some of the choices people may make when they have the opportunity to vote). Since 9/11 a kind of democracy has expanded even to Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit at the point of a gun, and with no guarantees of survival beyond the end of military occupation by the US and its coalition allies. As this essay was being written, Pakistan’s state of emergency was ending and democratic elections scheduled, albeit in the shadow cast by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Democracy, then — imperfect and limited as it can be; grudgingly delivered though it is by political elites in many countries, and subject to attack and roll back at any time — has become a global universal to which all claim allegiance, or at least pay lip service. The scale of this transformation, which has occurred in little more than one quarter of the time elapsed since the Putney debates of 1647 and the English revolution first established the principle of the sovereignty of parliament, is truly remarkable. (Tristram Hunt quotes lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in the Guardian to the effect that the Putney debates, staged in St Mary’s church in south-west London towards the end of the English civil war, launched “the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth” – “A Jewel of Democracy”, Guardian, 26 Oct. 2007) Can it be true that less than one hundred years ago, in even the most advanced capitalist societies, 50 per cent of the people — women — did not have the right to vote? Or that black populations, indigenous or migrant, in countries such as the United States and Australia were deprived of basic citizenship rights until the 1960s and even later? Will future generations wonder how on earth it could have been that the vast majority of the people of South Africa were unable to vote until 1994, and that they were routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed when they demanded basic democratic rights? Or will they shrug and take it for granted, as so many of us who live in settled democracies already do? (In so far as ‘we’ includes the community of media and cultural studies scholars, I would argue that where there is reluctance to concede the scale and significance of democratic change, this arises out of continuing ambivalence about what ‘democracy’ means, a continuing suspicion of globalisation (in particular the globalisation of democratic political culture, still associated in some quarters with ‘the west’), and of the notion of ‘progress’ with which democracy is routinely associated. The intellectual roots of that ambivalence were various. Marxist-leninist inspired authoritarianism gripped much of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Until that moment, it was still possible for many marxians in the scholarly community to view the idea of democracy with disdain — if not quite a dirty word, then a deeply flawed, highly loaded concept which masked and preserved underlying social inequalities more than it helped resolve them. Until 1989 or thereabouts, it was possible for ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be regarded as just one kind of democratic polity by the liberal and anti-capitalist left, which often regarded the ‘proletarian’ or ‘people’s’ democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or Vietnam as legitimate alternatives to the emerging capitalist norm of one person, one vote, for constituent assemblies which had real power and accountability. In terms not very different from those used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, belief in the value of democracy was conceived by this materialist school as a kind of false consciousness. It still is, by Noam Chomsky and others who continue to view democracy as a ‘necessary illusion’ (1989) without which capitalism could not be reproduced. From these perspectives voting gave, and gives us merely the illusion of agency and power in societies where capital rules as it always did. For democracy read ‘the manufacture of consent’; its expansion read not as progressive social evolution, but the universalisation of the myth of popular sovereignty, mobilised and utilised by the media-industrial-military complex to maintain its grip.) There are those who dispute this reading of events. In the 1960s, Habermas’s hugely influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere critiqued the manner in which democracy, and the public sphere underpinning it, had been degraded by public relations, advertising, and the power of private interests. In the period since, critical scholarly research and writing on political culture has been dominated by the Habermasian discourse of democratic decline, and the pervasive pessimism of those who see democracy, and the media culture which supports it, as fatally flawed, corrupted by commercialisation and under constant threat. Those, myself included, who challenged that view with a more positive reading of the trends (McNair, Journalism and Democracy; Cultural Chaos) have been denounced as naïve optimists, panglossian, utopian and even, in my own case, a ‘neo-liberal apologist’. (See an unpublished paper by David Miller, “System Failure: It’s Not Just the Media, It’s the Whole Bloody System”, delivered at Goldsmith’s College in 2003.) Engaging as they have been, I venture to suggest that these are the discourses and debates of an era now passing into history. Not only is it increasingly obvious that democracy is expanding globally into places where it never previously reached; it is also extending inwards, within nation states, driven by demands for greater local autonomy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the citizen is now able to vote not just in Westminster parliamentary elections (which determine the political direction of the UK government), but for European elections, local elections, and elections for devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The people of London can vote for their mayor. There would by now have been devolved assemblies in the regions of England, too, had the people of the North East not voted against it in a November 2004 referendum. Notwithstanding that result, which surprised many in the New Labour government who held it as axiomatic that the more democracy there was, the better for all of us, the importance of enhancing and expanding democratic institutions, of allowing people to vote more often (and also in more efficient ways — many of these expansions of democracy have been tied to the introduction of systems of proportional representation) has become consensual, from the Mid West of America to the Middle East. The Democratic Paradox And yet, as the wave of democratic transformation has rolled on through the late twentieth and into the early twenty first century it is notable that, in many of the oldest liberal democracies at least, fewer people have been voting. In the UK, for example, in the period between 1945 and 2001, turnout at general elections never fell below 70 per cent. In 1992, the last general election won by the Conservatives before the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, turnout was 78 per cent, roughly where it had been in the 1950s. In 2001, however, as Blair’s government sought re-election, turnout fell to an historic low for the UK of 59.4 per cent, and rose only marginally to 61.4 per cent in the most recent general election of 2005. In the US presidential elections of 1996 and 2000 turnouts were at historic lows of 47.2 and 49.3 per cent respectively, rising just above 50 per cent again in 2004 (figures by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). At local level things are even worse. In only the second election for a devolved parliament in Scotland (2003) turnout was a mere 48.5 per cent, rising to 50.5 in 2007. These trends are not universal. In countries with compulsory voting, they mean very little — in Australia, where voting in parliamentary elections is compulsory, turnout averages in the 90s per cent. In France, while turnouts for parliamentary elections show a similar downward trend to the UK and the UK, presidential contests achieve turnouts of 80-plus per cent. In the UK and US, as noted, the most recent elections show modest growth in turnout from those historic lows of the late 1990s and early Noughties. There has grown, nonetheless, the perception, commonplace amongst academic commentators as well as journalists and politicians themselves, that we are living through a ‘crisis’ of democratic participation, a dangerous decline in the tendency to vote in elections which undermines the legitimacy of democracy itself. In communication scholarship a significant body of research and publication has developed around this theme, from Blumler and Gurevitch’s Crisis of Public Communication (1996), through Barnett and Gaber’s Westminster Tales (2000), to more recent studies such as Lewis et al.’s Citizens or Consumers (2005). All presume a problem of some kind with the practice of democracy and the “old fashioned ritual” of voting, as Lewis et al. describe it (2). Most link alleged inadequacies in the performance of the political media to what is interpreted as popular apathy (or antipathy) towards democracy. The media are blamed for the lack of public engagement with democratic politics which declining turnouts are argued to signal. Political journalists are said to be too aggressive and hyper-adversarial (Lloyd), behaving like the “feral beast” spoken of by Tony Blair in his 2007 farewell speech to the British people as prime minister. They are corrosively cynical and a “disaster for democracy”, as Steven Barnett and others argued in the first years of the twenty first century. They are not aggressive or adversarial enough, as the propaganda modellists allege, citing what they interpret as supine media coverage of Coalition policy in Iraq. The media put people off, rather than turn them on to democracy by being, variously, too nice or too nasty to politicians. What then, is the solution to the apparent paradox represented by the fact that there is more democracy, but less voting in elections than ever before; and that after centuries of popular struggle democratic assemblies proliferate, but in some countries barely half of the eligible voters can be bothered to participate? And what role have the media played in this unexpected phenomenon? If the scholarly community has been largely critical on this question, and pessimistic in its analyses of the role of the media, it has become increasingly clear that the one arena where people do vote more than ever before is that presented by the media, and entertainment media in particular. There has been, since the appearance of Big Brother and the subsequent explosion of competitive reality TV formats across the world, evidence of a huge popular appetite for voting on such matters as which amateur contestant on Pop Idol, or X Factor, or Fame Academy, or Operatunity goes on to have a chance of a professional career, a shot at the big time. Millions of viewers of the most popular reality TV strands queue up to register their votes on premium phone lines, the revenue from which makes up a substantial and growing proportion of the income of commercial TV companies. This explosion of voting behaviour has been made possible by the technology-driven emergence of new forms of participatory, interactive, digitised media channels which allow millions to believe that they can have an impact on the outcome of what are, at essence, game and talent shows. At the height of anxiety around the ‘crisis of democratic participation’ in the UK, observers noted that nearly 6.5 million people had voted in the Big Brother UK final in 2004. More than eight million voted during the 2004 run of the BBC’s Fame Academy series. While these numbers do not, contrary to popular belief, exceed the numbers of British citizens who vote in a general election (27.2 million in 2005), they do indicate an enthusiasm for voting which seems to contradict declining rates of democratic participation. People who will never get out and vote for their local councillor often appear more than willing to pick up the telephone or the laptop and cast a vote for their favoured reality TV contestant, even if it costs them money. It would be absurd to suggest that voting for a contestant on Big Brother is directly comparable to the act of choosing a government or a president. The latter is recognised as an expression of citizenship, with potentially significant consequences for the lives of individuals within their society. Voting on Big Brother, on the other hand, is unmistakeably entertainment, game-playing, a relatively risk-free exercise of choice — a bit of harmless fun, fuelled by office chat and relentless tabloid coverage of the contestants’ strengths and weaknesses. There is no evidence that readiness to participate in a telephone or online vote for entertainment TV translates into active citizenship, where ‘active’ means casting a vote in an election. The lesson delivered by the success of participatory media in recent years, however — first reality TV, and latterly a proliferation of online formats which encourage user participation and voting for one thing or another — is that people will vote, when they are able and motivated to do so. Voting is popular, in short, and never more so, irrespective of the level of popular participation recorded in recent elections. And if they will vote in their millions for a contestant on X Factor, or participate in competitions to determine the best movies or books on Facebook, they can presumably be persuaded to do so when an election for parliament comes around. This fact has been recognised by both media producers and politicians, and reflected in attempts to adapt the evermore sophisticated and efficient tools of participatory media to the democratic process, to engage media audiences as citizens by offering the kinds of voting opportunities in political debates, including election processes, which entertainment media have now made routinely available. ITV’s Vote for Me strand, broadcast in the run-up to the UK general election of 2005, used reality TV techniques to select a candidate who would actually take part in the forthcoming poll. The programme was broadcast in a late night, low audience slot, and failed to generate much interest, but it signalled a desire by media producers to harness the appeal of participatory media in a way which could directly impact on levels of democratic engagement. The honourable failure of Vote for Me (produced by the same team which made the much more successful live debate shows featuring prime minister Tony Blair — Ask Tony Blair, Ask the Prime Minister) might be viewed as evidence that readiness to vote in the context of a TV game show does not translate directly into voting for parties and politicians, and that the problem in this respect — the crisis of democratic participation, such that it exists — is located elsewhere. People can vote in democratic elections, but choose not to, perhaps because they feel that the act is meaningless (because parties are ideologically too similar), or ineffectual (because they see no impact of voting in their daily lives or in the state of the country), or irrelevant to their personal priorities and life styles. Voting rates have increased in the US and the UK since September 11 2001, suggesting perhaps that when the political stakes are raised, and the question of who is in government seems to matter more than it did, people act accordingly. Meantime, media producers continue to make money by developing formats and channels on the assumption that audiences wish to participate, to interact, and to vote. Whether this form of participatory media consumption for the purposes of play can be translated into enhanced levels of active citizenship, and whether the media can play a significant contributory role in that process, remains to be seen. References Alves, R.C. “From Lapdog to Watchdog: The Role of the Press in Latin America’s Democratisation.” In H. de Burgh, ed., Making Journalists. London: Routledge, 2005. 181-202. Anderson, P.J., and G. Ward (eds.). The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Barnett, S. “The Age of Contempt.” Guardian 28 October 2002. < http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/comment/0,12123,820577,00.html >. Barnett, S., and I. Gaber. Westminster Tales. London: Continuum, 2001. Blumler, J., and M. Gurevitch. The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1996. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Lewis, J., S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2005. Lloyd, John. What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable, 2004. McNair, B. Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Cultural Chaos: News, Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge, 2006.

Biopunk is an intriguing development of that essential cultural reference point for the information age: cyberpunk. William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) did more than popularise the phrase cyberspace, it laid the basis for a genre that went on to capture the turbulent zeitgeist of a new digital age in which the promises of the much-vaunted, information society finally seemed possible. Karl Marx used the phrase "All that is solid melts into air..."1 to describe the profound social changes wrought by capitalism. It is also a fitting description of the apparent technology-induced paradigm shift in our contemporary perception of the world. Increasingly, solid, material structures are viewed in immaterial, informational terms and the boundaries between previously distinct categories are blurring. This paradigm shift has produced attendant tensions and the significance of biopunk resides in its cultural representation or 'playing out' our contemporary ontological confusion: physicality's newly problematic status. This article briefly samples the work of the British writers Jeff Noon and Michael Marshall Smith to argue that in the rapidly-approaching era of a fully-mapped human genome, biopunk provides a much-needed cathartic imaginative outlet for our growing confusion about the status of the physical in our brave new digital world. Viral Times -- Hybrid Confusion In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles it seems to me have been reversed ... the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. (Ballard 5) The notion that biopunk's imaginative excesses can provide potentially useful insights into the contemporary condition is backed by the sense that the traditional boundary between the real and imagined worlds has become irretrievably blurred. Thus J.G. Ballard suggests that the ubiquity and pervasiveness of modern technology has reversed our usual ontological categories, a sentiment endorsed by Columbus, a character from Noon's novel Pollen, who asserts that "what is presently inside the head will shortly be outside the head. The dream! The dream will live!" (193). The increasing perception of such an ontological reversal is reflected in claims that cyberpunk can be viewed as social theory (Burrows) whereas "Baudrillard's futuristic postmodern social theory can be read in turn as science fiction" (Kellner 299). Cyberpunk fiction utilises the pace of technological change as a permanent narrative back-drop, and having identified various social trends within late capitalism re-presents them with an 'exaggerated clarity' that has become its hallmark. Biopunk takes such exaggerations even further. It metaphorises cyberpunk's social instabilities into an alarming maelstrom of biological uncertainty: exaggerated clarity becomes exaggerated anxiety. Biopunk develops the informationally saturated mise-en-scène of cyberpunk by exploring further the implications of the increasing convergence between information as an abstract entity and its embodied manipulation in biological DNA. It pursues Marx's previously cited image of melting ephemerality with fictional fervour: "These days the doors between the two worlds were slippery, as though the walls were going fluid" (Noon, Pollen 92)2. Biopunk's fictional emphasis upon disorienting levels of fluidity reflects non-fictional concerns about the potential information overloading tendencies of digital technologies: "the tie between information and action has been severed ... we are glutted with information, drowning in information, we have no control over it, don't know what to do with it" (Postman 6). In Pollen, Noon provides a grotesque metaphorical representation of Postman's fears in his portrayal of a near-future Manchester struggling to cope with the after-effects of the widespread dispersal of a powerful fertility drug called Fecundity 10. The city is over-run by exponentially proliferating flora and fauna that combine in a frenetic confusion of unlikely hybrid genetic couplings. Noon uses a blurring of previously distinct genetic categories to symbolise society's inability to control the growth of information. His fiction 'fleshes out' digitally-induced anxieties with a sustained depiction of futuristic Hieronymous Bosch-like febrility and fecundity, or, to use a phrase of Baudrillard's, 'organic delirium': The Zombies were dancing and blooming around the shit and the dust, flowers sprouting from their tough skins, petals falling from their mouths. It was a fine show of fauna and flora, all mixed into one being. New species ... It was a time of happenings and flower power. A time of changes. That's why this hayfever wave is exciting me so much, despite the danger. It's got me in two minds, this fever. The flowers are making a come back, and the world is getting messier. The barricades are coming down. This city is so fucking juicy right now. (Noon, Pollen 117 & 166) Noon's Nymphomation is set in a near-future Manchester that is the testing site for a national lottery based upon a domino-like game. The neologism that provides the novel's title, continues his key theme of fecundity, it is used: ... to denote a complex mathematical procedure where numbers rather than being added together or multiplied or whatever, were actually allowed to breed with each other, to produce new numbers, which had something to do with 'breeding ever more pathways towards the goal'. (Noon, Nymphomation 119) Fecundity in this setting does not only apply to the mating of informational and biological entities but is also apparent in the meme-like transmission of a pervasive copulatory capitalist zeitgeist: "the naked populace, making foreplay to the domiviz, bone-eyed and numberfucked ... Even the air had a hard-on, bulging with mathematics. Turning the burbflies into a nympho-swarm, liquid streets alive with perverts ..." (Noon, Nymphomation 65) General fecundity is specifically manifested in a glut of commercial activity which the authorities no longer seem able to control: "the streets of Blurbchester were thick with the mergers, a corporate fog of brand images. People had to battle through them ... The Government was at a loss regarding the overwhelming messages; they knew the experiment had gone wrong ... but how to right it?" (240). Informational overload becomes a reproductive frenzy whereby corporate messages breed literally like flies. Gibson's dance of biz becomes an actual buzz: As the burbflies went out of control, blocking out the streetlights, making a cloud of logos. It was rutting season for the living verts, and all over the city the male blurbs were riding on the backs of females. Biting their necks, hoping for babyverts. The city, the pulsating city, alive with the rain and colours and the stench of nymphomation Mathemedia. Here we go, numberfucked ... (Noon, Nymphomation 159) In the real world, the process of technological change causes flux and confusion. Cyberpunk fiction represents this by describing dystopian social environments. Its protagonists revel in the loss of traditional and coherent social values such as law and order and community where its protagonists revel in an unlimited smorgasboard of privatised formerly public services. Biopunk's distinctive quality stems from its own peculiar perspective on such confusion, manifested in a distinctive attention to bodily substance and a whole bestiary of new hybrid life-forms. Fleshy Contempt For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. (Gibson, Neuromancer 12) This early passage from Neuromancer describes its protagonist's addictive relationship to the Matrix and provides a neat summary of cyberpunk's perspective on the growing subordination of the physical. Digital pleasure is experienced at the expense of alienation with the material environment. In Douglas Coupland's 'factional' work Microserfs (1995) the excessively manicured lawns at Microsoft headquarters merely represent an epiphenomenon of a more deeply-rooted societal trend towards the diminished importance of our physical sensibilities. Lego, or 'Satan's playtoy', is humorously identified as an emblematic commodity of this tendency due to the way in which it is responsible for brainwashing entire generations of youth from the information-dense industrialized nations into developing mind-sets that view the world as unitized, sterile, inorganic, and interchangeably modular ... Lego is, like, the perfect device to enculturate a citizenry intolerant of smell, intestinal by-products, nonadherence to unified standards, decay, blurred edges, germination and death. Try imagining a forest made of Lego. Good luck. Do you ever see Legos made from ice? dung? wood? iron? and sphagnum moss? No -- grotacious, or what? (Coupland 258) A typically distinguishing feature of biopunk is its willingness to stretch such aspects of the digital zeitgeist to their limits. In contrast to Coupland's easy humour and cyberpunk's "relaxed contempt for the flesh", biopunk refashions sentiments of unease with physical immediacy to take the form of nauseating disgust with the biological per se. In Spares, this is vividly embodied when, for example, objects fall into reality from the cyberspatial Gap: It was a bird, of a kind. A bird or a cat, either way. It was featherless, but stood a foot tall on spindly jointed legs; its face was avian but -- like the body -- fat and dotted with patchy, moulting orange fur. Two vestigial wings poked out of its side at right angles, looking as if they had been unceremoniously amputated with scissors and then re-cauterized. Most of the creature's skin was visible, an unhealthy white mess that appeared to be weeping fluid. The whole body heaved in and out as it sat, as if labouring for breath, and it gave of a smell of recent decay -- as if fresh-minted for death ... its beak opened. The hole this revealed looked less like a mouth than a churned wound, and the eyes, though vicious, were faltering ... The bird tried to take a step towards us, but the effort caused one of its legs to break. The top joint teetered in its socket and then popped out. The creature flopped onto its side. The skin over the joint tore like an over-ripe fruit, releasing a gout of matter that resembled nothing so much as a heavy period mixed with sour cream. (Smith 162) Biopunk's almost neo-gnostic distaste for flesh has arguably become increasingly apparent in William Gibson's later work. In Neuromancer, for example, the tone of 'relaxed contempt' is still evident in his description of the population's consumer demand: "Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification" (60). However, his vision is certainly less relaxed when, by the time of Idoru (1996), he describes how the media's audience ... is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the annointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth ... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections. (28-9) Conclusion Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance. (McLuhan 12) McLuhan's image of the dramatic visibility of sound right at the moment of its imminent supercedance is a useful way of conceptualising the significance of biopunk and its obsessive highlighting of bodies and their metaphoric power. Perhaps as we leap-frog the mechanical technologies of modernity into a postindustrial world where information attains the status of the fourth element, biopunk is performing an idiosyncratic eulogy at the funeral of physicality. Footnotes Marshall Berman uses this phrase for the title of his historical, socio-cultural exploration of capitalism and its effects. Further examples include: ... the world is getting very fluid these days. Very fluid. Dangerously so (Noon, Pollen 101) ... It was a fluid world and there was danger for everybody living there. (157) ... the real world is up for grabs, especially since the world has become so fluid. (200) ... Even time was becoming fluid under the new map (246) ... Coyote is howling now, turning the road into liquid so he can glide down its throat. (254) The world was dissolving and the new day bled away ... safety, the rules, cartography, instruction ... all the bad things were peeling away (278) References Ballard, J.G. Crash. London: Vintage, 1995. Berman, M. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. London: Verso, 1983. Burrows, R. "Cyberpunk as Social Theory." Imagining Cities. Eds. S. Westwood and J. Williams. London: Routledge, 1997. Coupland, D. Microserfs. London: Flamingo, 1995. Gibson, W. Neuromancer. London: Grafton, 1984. ---. Idoru. London:Viking, 1996. Kellner, D. Media Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. McLuhan, M. Understanding Media. New York: New American Library, 1964. Noon, Jeff. Vurt. Manchester: Ringpull, 1993. ---. Pollen. Manchester: Ringpull, 1995. ---. Nymphomation, London: Corgi, 1997. Postman, N. "Informing Ourselves to Death." German Informatics Society, Stuttgart. 1990. 26 June 2000 <http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Criticisms/informing_ourselves_to_death.paper>. Smith, M. M. Spares. London: HarperCollins, 1996. Stephenson, N. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul Taylor. "Fleshing Out the Maelstrom: Biopunk and the Violence of Information." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php>. Chicago style: Paul Taylor, "Fleshing Out the Maelstrom: Biopunk and the Violence of Information," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul Taylor. (2000) Fleshing Out the Maelstrom: Biopunk and the Violence of Information. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> ([your date of access]).