Journal articles on the topic 'Affaire des caricatures'

The aim of the article is to analyze the image of Agenor Gołuchowski in the light of caricatures published in Viennese satirical magazines (1895–1906). Agenor Gołuchowski the younger (1849–1921) was the only Pole in the position of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Austria- Hungary (1895–1906). More than once, he became the object of mockery in newspapers such as “Kikeriki!”, “Wiener Caricaturen”, or “Der Floh”. The article focuses on how Gołuchowski was portrayed in caricatures and on what aspects of his identity they were focused. Caricatures are a contribution to reflection on racial and national stereotypes in Viennese satire and the mentality of the late nineteenth century.

Abstract Stepan Fedorovich Sokolovskii (pen name Coré) served as the primary caricaturist for the prominent St. Petersburg newspaper Novoe vremia (New Times, 1868–1917) in the late 1890s and early 1900s. While his vibrant style and prolific output have led his cartoons to appear frequently in scholarship, few studies examine his work specifically. Interestingly, his illustrations for Novoe vremia focus almost exclusively on international politics, and thus, prominently engage in national and ethnic stereotypes. These caricatures not only offered eye-catching and amusing visual depictions of foreign relations, they also showed Russia’s imperial rivals as buffoonish back-stabbers that represented the worst excesses of imperialist exploitation. In this way, Sokolovskii’s works offer an intriguing snapshot of popular attitudes towards Russia’s allies and enemies. This essay surveys the broad themes of Sokolovskii’s work and examines the ways his drawings encapsulated complex international conflicts and offered pithy visual representations of Novoe vremia’s loyalist and nationalistic take on foreign affairs. Further, it fills a gap in the scholarship by shedding light on the biography of this prolific artist and examining his views on political caricature as a medium.

The publication of some caricatures of the prophet Mohammed by the Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, and their distribution around the globe provoked a tremendous outcry and debate, which even led to physical destruction and death. This raises fundamental questions about the nature of blasphemy, (self-)censorship and the freedom of expression, the responsibility of cartoonists, trans-cultural communication, and the power of caricature. The author, who played a direct role in the French part of this affair, reflects on the questions it raises and on his own practice of editorial cartooning.

In his essay titled “Drawing Blood” for Harper's magazine in June 2006, written as a response to the Muhammad cartoon affair, Art Spiegelman argued convincingly that a cartoon is, first and foremost, a cartoon. It sounds straightforward, but is it really? Following Spiegelman, we can define caricatures as charged or loaded images that compress ideas into memorable icons, namely clichés. A cartoon must have a point, and a good cartoon can change our perspective on the ruling order. Spiegelman opens his discussion with classical caricatures such as Honoré Daumier's 1831 depiction of King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua and George Grosz's 1926 attack on the “Pillars of Society” (“Stützen der Gesellschaft”) as beer-drinking, pamphlet-reading, swastika-wearing men without brains. Spiegelman acknowledges these cartoonists as “masters of insult,” who often had to face trial or imprisonment for their transgressions (45). The question is whether the twelve cartoons of Muhammad, published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005, are in any way compatible with the great tradition of caricature.

The article presents the review of the book of Russian historian and political scientist Vasili Molodiakov about one of the major figures of Nazi Germany – Reich minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop. This book is the first Russian-language biography of Ribbentrop as well as the first scientific biography of the minister. Molodiakov’s book serves as a perfect illustration of the event time and gives a very good idea of the diplomatic realia of the epoch.

The weekly French satirical newspaper, Charlie hebdo, which originally ran from 1969 to 1982, pending a revival in 1992, distinguishes itself through its bête et méchant ['stupid and nasty'] humorous heritage, defined in its parent publication, Hara-Kiri, as the freedom to make jokes on potentially any subject, however taboo. Whilst this satirical ethos predominated in Charlie hebdo up to 1982, its enduring place in the publication has become more ambiguous since 1992, with the abrupt sacking of Siné in July 2008 seemingly belying its vigorous defence of provocative humour in the context of the 2006 Danish caricature affair. An important underlying continuity nonetheless remains in Charlie hebdo and transcends the bête et méchant project: that of negotiating a space for satirical expression that has continuously engaged with both elements of bande dessinée and the rich French tradition of polemical editorial cartooning and caricature.

Studies of religion and politics have begun to force their way into the mainstream of the discipline thanks to their increasing methodological sophistication and theoretical ambition in addition to the push of real-world events. In comparative politics, puzzle-driven structured comparison has yielded new insights into the rationality of religious behavior, the weight of path dependence in shaping religious values, and the play of socioeconomic factors in shaping religion's vitality. In international relations, recognition of the importance of religious identities and values in the play of international affairs has spelled an advance over realist caricatures that long discounted ideas as epiphenomenal and focused on the quest for wealth and power as the sole driver of international politics. But notable lacunae remain. The comparative subfield still needs to reckon with the noninstrumental aspect of religious behavior, the power of religion as an independent variable, and the differential appeal, persuasiveness, and political salience of religious ideas over time. The IR subfield must move beyond “paradigm wars” focused on whether religion matters in international politics in favor of more empirically grounded, structured comparison to illuminate when and why religion matters in international affairs.

The phrase ‘affable to a fault’ could well be the severest understatement to characterise Esk’ia Mphahlele. He related warmly to everyone and did so with a natural and consummate ease. People meant everything to him and life was forever ripe with metaphor and analogy. He would cradle experiences, mull them over, toss them about, prod here and tickle there to extract and savour. All this coupled with a comical gait of flaying arms and a thunderous laughter made of him both a delightful caricature and a sage!

Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power is the latest attempt, following Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, to provide us with “The Answer,” an analysis of the way the world works to take away some of the pain of the uncertainties which have dogged us since the end of the Cold War. The pattern has been the same: first an article in a journal, striking a chord with a wider than usual readership and then the press in general, aided by an arresting sound-bite –(the titles in the case of Fukuyama and Huntington, the tag from the first page of Kagan's Policy Review article: “the Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.”). It is through such caricature, given just enough resonance to contemporary anxieties and provoking just enough outrage, that a viewpoint can gain currency among the journalists and policy wonks who set the parameters of the policy debate surrounding governments and legislators. To reinforce academic respectability, the articles were then expanded into books, to reveal, or create, the philosophical and historical underpinnings of the original argument. The timing of these publications creating a stir is everything: those moments when the worrying complexity of international relations cry out for the simplicity which a caricature can offer, when there is a demand to make the hard-to-calibrate risks in world affairs comprehensible through their replacement by goals achieved or threats cut and dried.

Although often cast by realists as an exemplar of moralist or rationalist thinking, Jürgen Habermas and certain commentators on his work reject this characterisation, highlighting elements of his thought that conflict with it. This article will examine dimensions of Habermas’s work that relate to many realist concerns in political theory. I argue that while he escapes the commonplace caricature of an abstract thinker who is inattentive to real world affairs, Habermas’s claims in relation to communication, historical and empirical context, and the development of rights in history, reveal a narrow consideration of what defines context and a progressivist narrative of history that fails to address seemingly outdated beliefs and political forces. An analysis of these issues can serve to inform understandings of these topics in realist thought and in political theory more broadly.

The licentious career of Caroline of Brunswick, the most notorious queen in modern British history, was only exceeded by that of her husband, George IV, and the scandal that emerged when he attempted to obtain a divorce inspired one of the most unusual episodes of nineteenth-century British history. For six months the attention of the country was focused on the queen's trial; massive demonstrations in her support were familiar sights in London streets and news of the matter dominated the columns of the press. The popular outpouring of support for the queen often took the form of reviling the king and his ministers, and revolution seemed to be in the air, yet because no lasting political change resulted from this tumult, historians have tended to dismiss the affair as relatively unimportant. However, to view this interlude primarily in terms of party politics is to overlook the fact that the majority of the people who formed the massive crowds that so alarmed the government were neither radicals nor reformers, and many, if not most of them were unenfranchised. In order to better understand the implications of this unrest, it is important to identify those factors that inspired British men and women to openly denigrate their ruler and to heap opprobrium on the members of government in defense of a woman who, ironically, many believed to be guilty as charged. Such an examination makes it clear that this was an event of profound cultural significance and was in some respects the first wide-spread popular expression of the moral standards that have come to be labelled “Victorian.”Any attempt to judge “public opinion” is fraught with difficulty. Most of the surviving journals, memoirs, and collections of letters from this period were written by members of the gentry and aristocracy; most of the middle and working-class people who actively demonstrated in support of the queen or who signed the numerous addresses sent to her have tended to remain silent and anonymous. Newspaper and other written accounts of the affair were often extremely partisan, for British society was sharply divided on this issue. Political caricatures, however, overcome some of these difficulties.

As Allina Waller notes in her introduction, for most Americans the Hatfield-McCoy feud conjures up "images of bearded mountaineers brandishing rifles and jugs of moonshine as they defend illegal stills from federal 'revenuers,' enforce 'shotgun' weddings, and lawlessly perpetuate inherited family grudges." Historians have generally reinforced this view, explaining this late nineteenth-century dispute as the natural product of premodern Appalachian culture, where irrational · family loyalties, rampant lawlessness, and routine violence were the norm. But in Feud Allina Waller brilliantly rescues the feudists and their world from popular stereotypes and historical misinterpretation. Instead of caricatures, Waller provides detailed and sympathetic treatments of protagonists such as "Old Ranel" McCoy, "Bad Frank" Phillips, and "Devil Anse" Hatfield. More than this, Waller explains the dispute. She convincingly argues that there were two distinct phases to the feud. Feud I (1878-82) was strictly a local affair. Here Waller demolishes much of the standard interpretation, making clear that: kinship was not the controlling variable, as economic ties and other factors resulted in McCoys on the Hatfield side, and vice-versa; the disputants (in keeping with their Appalachian neighbors) went to great lengths to secure legal remedies for their problems; and the violence that did occur (five killings in five years) was an aberration in Appalachian culture.

The paper analyses names that appeared in the pictures and in the texts of the humour magazines (a popular press genre of the era) published in the period immediately after the Tiszaeszlár Affair and the verdict of the Nyíregyháza court (from 28 May/4 June 1882 to 31 December 1883). Names were collected from the humour magazine Borsszem Jankó [‘Tom Thumb’], edited by Adolf Ágai, which aimed to convince its readers about the absurdity of the blood libel; and from Bolond Istók [‘Istók, the Fool’], edited by Lajos Bartók and Üstökös [‘The Comet’], edited by Endre Szabó, two anti-Semitic humour magazines. The author discusses how the magazines comment on name changes; the names of Israelite characters; German-sounding Jewish family names (several of which can be connected to the names of persons involved in the Nyíregyháza case), and how the names of the Israelites accused were the sources of humour and irony. It is noteworthy that the humour magazine authors referred to the persons involved with bynames, while also using fictitious toponyms. The volumes examined in the paper are not of interest for the sole reason that the adoption of Hungarian family names is a frequent topic in them, but also because names are the primarily source of humour and irony in the texts and caricatures. This was not typical of visual representations in the periods (the 1860s and the 1890s) discussed in previous studies by the same author.

The paper is to study the mythological late Soviet discourse about Orthodox seminaries and academies. The formation of this discourse took place in the conditions of alienation of a significant part of the Soviet intelligentsia from religion, which applies both to the humanitarian and technical intelligentsia. The sources of the formation of the corresponding mythologemes are atheistic propaganda materials, often representing religious relations in a caricatured, vulgarized form, stories of the older generation, often quite ignorant in religious matters, random information obtained from various sources, etc. Along with the Soviet intelligentsia, representatives of the clergy and lower clergy were also exposed to “church mythology”. First of all, this applies to the clergy who began their ministry in the years of perestroika. Many of them came to the church from a secular, sometimes atheistic background, so that they did not have family church traditions and were in many ways bearers of the late Soviet culture of everyday life. The discourse fixes the mythological idealization of spiritual education, with the emphasis on the deep study of classical languages and modern languages, continuity with pre-revolutionary schools, an exceptionally large competition of applicants. Along with the idealization of spiritual education, discourse records another extreme, which is largely a consequence of Soviet atheistic propaganda, portraying the church as a stronghold of ignorance and obscurantism. Negative reviews also demonstrate a significant range both in the harshness of criticism and in its accordance with reality (from fixing real moments in the life of church schools to mythological fantasies). The paper shows that negative reviews differ in the degree of temporal relevance and the desire to globalize the comments. Such reviews demonstrate varying degrees of familiarity with the real state of affairs.

Évidemment, je n’ai pas la prétention de posséder le « secret » d’une bonne homélie. Sinon, je pourrais faire des affaires auprès de mes confrères (et consœurs)[1] prédicateurs de francophonie, luthériens, réformés ou catholiques ! Mais si, avec le chanoine de Saint Maurice Guy Luisier, nous nous sommes risqués à publier un Anti-manuel de prédication, faisant suite à mon propre Petit manuel : La joie de prêcher, c’est que nous nous sommes dit que souvent, les caricatures quelque peu humoristiques valent mieux que de grands discours arides et sérieux. Et donc, en jouant sur l’incomplétude des chiffres 6 et 11 (la plénitude de 7 et 12 moins 1), nous nous sommes aventurés à expliciter les 66 (6 fois 11) tactiques du Diviseur et de ses sbires pour réussir à faire échouer à tout coup une homélie (66 pages de gauche « diaboliques »), en espérant que certains homélistes s’y reconnaîtraient, et à proposer en contrepoint sur les 66 pages de droite « angéliques » quelques répliques (thérapies et antidotes) poétiques, théologiques et rhétoriques, dont certaines tirées d’Evangelii gaudium du pape François, pour, au contraire, honorer cette tâche et susciter le goût de faire mieux.

Jane Austen’s canon has been expertly combed through for its moral implications, whether radically feminist or extremely conservative. Writing during the Napoleonic Wars, Austen was no stranger to politics, the military, or the implications both had on her life and her role in society. In the paper that follows, I posit that Austen channeled many of her opinions on England’s state of affairs through her male characters, who were the acting socio-political agents of the day. Through various caricatures of masculinity, Austen portrays masculine ideals and failures, both of which were rapidly evolving during her time. This research focuses on Austen’s portrayal of the “self-made man,” a form of masculinity which emerged following the American and French Revolutions, and grew to prominence in England following the Napoleonic Wars. These men quickly made places for themselves in society, particularly through the British Navy. They grew to rank and status through their own merit and skills, instead of high birth and landed title. Their increasing prominence threatened the very foundations of British society as Austen knew it. However, as this paper explores, Austen took care to present these men - and the changes they brought - in a positive light, showcasing the value in their revolutionary social movement. In the following essay, I demonstrate how, in doing so, Austen’s later novels, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, act as political tools which reveal how Austen’s opinions about England’s fragile state were revolutionary.

Jennifer Croll. Bad Girls of Fashion: Style Rebels from Cleopatra to Lady Gaga. Illustrated by Ada Buchholc. Annick Press, 2016.Vancouver journalist and fashion historian Jennifer Croll, author of Fashion that Changed the World (2014), has here shifted gears to acquaint younger readers with the role of fashion in the history of women’s empowerment and liberation. Through the lens of biography, Croll traces the gradual rise of Girl Power reflected in, and partly driven by, the fashion choices of forty women, all of them “Style Rebels.” She divides them into ten categories that include Leaders, Modernizers, Instigators, Gender-Benders, Radicals, Decadents, and Freaks.Egypt’s Queen Cleopatra VII and England’s Queen Elizabeth I crafted their regal images partly through their fashion choices; Cixi, the Dowager Empress of China, also outlawed the binding and deforming of girls’ feet; the excesses of Frances’s Queen Marie Antoinette helped to seal her doom; Amelia Bloomer and George Sand (aka Aurore Dupin) scandalized nineteenth-century society by shunning traditional women’s clothing; Coco Chanel replaced traditional corsetry and petticoats with comfortable fashions (and gave the world an eponymous perfume); fashion magazine editors Diana Vreeland and Anna Wintour reigned as arbiters (many said “dictators”) of late-twentieth-century fashion; artists as geographically and culturally diverse as Japan’s Yoko Ono and Rei Kawakubo and Mexico’s Frida Kahlo influenced fashion with their idiosyncratic styles; movie stars such as Louise Brooks, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Diane Keaton, and Cher Bono became trend-setters in fashion by expanding acceptable boundaries of femininity and gender; while pop-star singers Madonna, Lady Gaga, Björk, Rihana, Nicki Minaj, Beth Ditto, and the ladies of Pussy Riot pushed still further the limits of attention-grabbing self-expression in their attire (or lack of it).Croll’s cast of characters is a large one—this is only a partial list—but one that she stage-manages adroitly. It’s also one that could have been considerably expanded; one notes, for example, the absence of such iconic, fashion trend-setters as Katherine Hepburn and pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart. Book designer Natalie Olsen has provided a stunning layout, one awash in bold colours, and illustrated with both photographs and original, caricature portraits by Polish illustrator Ada Buchholc. In this serious contribution to social history, the author neither shuns, nor sensationalizes, but treats lightly some of her subjects’ love affairs, marital infidelities, sexual preferences, and the role and influence of Lesbian fashions. These nonetheless mark this excellent book as one best suited to older, the publishers suggest ages 12+, and adult readers. Recommended for all public, high-school, and academic curriculum libraries, as well as specialized women’s studies collections.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Merrill Distad Historian and author Merrill Distad enjoyed a four-decade career building libraries and library collections.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

In a media saturated world, doodles have recently received the kind of attention usually reserved for coverage of racy extra marital affairs, corrupt governance, and product malfunction. Former British Prime Minister Blair’s private doodling at a World Economic Forum meeting in 2005 raised suspicions that he, according to one keen graphologist, struggled “to maintain control in a confusing world," which infers he was attempting to cohere a scattershot, fragmentary series of events (Spiegel). However, placid-faced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sat nearby, actually scrawled the doodles. In this case, perhaps the scrawls mimicked the ambience in the room: Gates might have been ‘tuning’–registering the ‘white noise’ of the participants, letting his unconscious dictate doodles as a way to cope with the dissonance trekking in with the officialspeak. The doodles may have documented and registered the space between words, acting like deposits from his gestalt.Sometimes the most intriguing doodles co-exist with printed texts. This includes common vernacular graffiti that lines public and private books and magazines. Such graffiti exposes tensions in the role of readers as well as horror vacui: a fear of unused, empty space. Yet, school children fingering fresh pages and stiff book spines for the first few times often consider their book pages as sanctioned, discreet, and inviolable. The book is an object of financial and cultural investment, or imbued both with mystique and ideologies. Yet, in the e-book era, the old-fashioned, physical page is a relic of sorts, a holdover from coarse papyrus culled from wetland sage, linking us to the First Dynasty in Egypt. Some might consider the page as a vessel for typography, a mere framing device for text. The margins may reflect a perimeter of nothingness, an invisible borderland that doodles render visible by inhabiting them. Perhaps the margins are a bare landscape, like unmarred flat sand in a black and white panchromatic photo with unique tonal signature and distinct grain. Perhaps the margins are a mute locality, a space where words have evaporated, or a yet-to-be-explored environment, or an ambient field. Then comes the doodle, an icon of vernacular art.As a modern folklorist, I have studied and explored vernacular art at length, especially forms that may challenge and fissure aesthetic, cultural, and social mores, even within my own field. For instance, I contend that Grandma Prisbrey’s “Bottle Village,” featuring millions of artfully arranged pencils, bottles, and dolls culled from dumps in Southern California, is a syncretic culturescape with underlying feminist symbolism, not merely the product of trauma and hoarding (Ensminger). Recently, I flew to Oregon to deliver a paper on Mexican-American gravesite traditions. In a quest for increased multicultural tolerance, I argued that inexpensive dimestore objects left on Catholic immigrant graves do not represent a messy landscape of trinkets but unique spiritual environments with links to customs 3,000 years old. For me, doodles represent a variation on graffiti-style art with cultural antecedents stretching back throughout history, ranging from ancient scrawls on Greek ruins to contemporary park benches (with chiseled names, dates, and symbols), public bathroom latrinalia, and spray can aerosol art, including ‘bombing’ and ‘tagging’ hailed as “Spectacular Vernaculars” by Russell Potter (1995). Noted folklorist Alan Dundes mused on the meaning of latrinalia in Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia (1966), which has inspired pop culture books and web pages for the preservation and discussion of such art (see for instance, www.itsallinthehead.com/gallery1.html). Older texts such as Classic American Graffiti by Allen Walker Read (1935), originally intended for “students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology,” reveal the field’s longstanding interest in marginal, crude, and profane graffiti.Yet, to my knowledge, a monograph on doodles has yet to be published by a folklorist, perhaps because the art form is reconsidered too idiosyncratic, too private, the difference between jots and doodles too blurry for a taxonomy and not the domain of identifiable folk groups. In addition, the doodles in texts often remain hidden until single readers encounter them. No broad public interaction is likely, unless a library text circulates freely, which may not occur after doodles are discovered. In essence, the books become tainted, infected goods. Whereas latrinalia speaks openly and irreverently, doodles feature a different scale and audience.Doodles in texts may represent a kind of speaking from the ‘margin’s margins,’ revealing the reader-cum-writer’s idiosyncratic, self-meaningful, and stylised hieroglyphics from the ambient margins of one’s consciousness set forth in the ambient margins of the page. The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal spaces (both between and betwixt, in which the rules of page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned) are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank, surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak, however haphazardly and unconsciously, with and against the triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the ambient territory. If the book is borrowed, then the margins are also an intimate negotiation with shared or public space. The cryptic residue of the doodler now resides, waiting, for the city of eyes.Throughout history, both admired artists and Presidents regularly doodled. Famed Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi avoided strenuous studying by doodling in his books (Van Cleave 44). Both sides of the American political spectrum have produced plentiful inky depictions as well: roughshod Democratic President Johnson drew flags and pagodas; former Hollywood fantasy fulfiller turned politician Republican President Reagan’s specialty was western themes, recalling tropes both from his actor period and his duration acting as President; meanwhile, former law student turned current President, Barack Obama, has sketched members of Congress and the Senate for charity auctions. These doodles are rich fodder for both psychologists and cross-discipline analysts that propose theories regarding the automatic writing and self-styled miniature pictures of civic leaders. Doodles allow graphologists to navigate and determine the internal, cognitive fabric of the maker. To critics, they exist as mere trifles and offer nothing more than an iota of insight; doodles are not uncanny offerings from the recesses of memory, like bite-sized Rorschach tests, but simply sloppy scrawls of the bored.Ambient music theory may shed some light. Timothy Morton argues that Brian Eno designed to make music that evoked “space whose quality had become minimally significant” and “deconstruct the opposition … between figure and ground.” In fact, doodles may yield the same attributes as well. After a doodle is inserted into texts, the typography loses its primacy. There is a merging of the horizons. The text of the author can conflate with the text of the reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols with multiple intelligences–one manufactured and condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed end or beginning between the two no longer exists. The ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page. The blank spaces keep inviting responses. An emergent discourse is always in waiting, always threatening to overspill the text’s intended meaning. In fact, the doodles may carry more weight than the intended text: the hierarchy between authorship and readership may topple.Resistant reading may take shape during these bouts. The doodle is an invasion and signals the geography of disruption, even when innocuous. It is a leveling tool. As doodlers place it alongside official discourse, they move away from positions of passivity, being mere consumers, and claim their own autonomy and agency. The space becomes co-determinant as boundaries are blurred. The destiny of the original text’s meaning is deferred. The habitus of the reader becomes embodied in the scrawl, and the next reader must negotiate and navigate the cultural capital of this new author. As such, the doodle constitutes an alternative authority and economy of meaning within the text.Recent studies indicate doodling, often regarded as behavior that announces a person’s boredom and withdrawal, is actually a very special tool to prevent memory loss. Jackie Andrade, an expert from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, maintains that doodling actually “offsets the effects of selective memory blockade,” which yields a surprising result (quoted in “Doodling Gets”). Doodlers exhibit 29% more memory recall than those who passively listen, frozen in an unequal bond with the speaker/lecturer. Students that doodle actually retain more information and are likely more productive due to their active listening. They adeptly absorb information while students who stare patiently or daydream falter.Furthermore, in a 2006 paper, Andrew Kear argues that “doodling is a way in which students, consciously or not, stake a claim of personal agency and challenge some the values inherent in the education system” (2). As a teacher concerned with the engagement of students, he asked for three classes to submit their doodles. Letting them submit any two-dimensional graphic or text made during a class (even if made from body fluid), he soon discovered examples of “acts of resistance” in “student-initiated effort[s] to carve out a sense of place within the educational institution” (6). Not simply an ennui-prone teenager or a proto-surrealist trying to render some automatic writing from the fringes of cognition, a student doodling may represent contested space both in terms of the page itself and the ambience of the environment. The doodle indicates tension, and according to Kear, reflects students reclaiming “their own self-recognized voice” (6).In a widely referenced 1966 article (known as the “doodle” article) intended to describe the paragraph organisational styles of different cultures, Robert Kaplan used five doodles to investigate a writer’s thought patterns, which are rooted in cultural values. Now considered rather problematic by some critics after being adopted by educators for teacher-training materials, Kaplan’s doodles-as-models suggest, “English speakers develop their ideas in a linear, hierarchal fashion and ‘Orientals’ in a non-liner, spiral fashion…” (Severino 45). In turn, when used as pedagogical tools, these graphics, intentionally or not, may lead an “ethnocentric, assimilationist stance” (45). In this case, doodles likely shape the discourse of English as Second Language instruction. Doodles also represent a unique kind of “finger trace,” not unlike prints from the tips of a person’s fingers and snowflakes. Such symbol systems might be used for “a means of lightweight authentication,” according to Christopher Varenhorst of MIT (1). Doodles, he posits, can be used as “passdoodles"–a means by which a program can “quickly identify users.” They are singular expressions that are quirky and hard to duplicate; thus, doodles could serve as substitute methods of verifying people who desire devices that can safeguard their privacy without users having to rely on an ever-increasing number of passwords. Doodles may represent one such key. For many years, psychologists and psychiatrists have used doodles as therapeutic tools in their treatment of children that have endured hardship, ailments, and assault. They may indicate conditions, explain various symptoms and pathologies, and reveal patterns that otherwise may go unnoticed. For instance, doodles may “reflect a specific physical illness and point to family stress, accidents, difficult sibling relationships, and trauma” (Lowe 307). Lowe reports that children who create a doodle featuring their own caricature on the far side of the page, distant from an image of parent figures on the same page, may be experiencing detachment, while the portrayal of a father figure with “jagged teeth” may indicate a menace. What may be difficult to investigate in a doctor’s office conversation or clinical overview may, in fact, be gleaned from “the evaluation of a child’s spontaneous doodle” (307). So, if children are suffering physically or psychologically and unable to express themselves in a fully conscious and articulate way, doodles may reveal their “self-concept” and how they feel about their bodies; therefore, such creative and descriptive inroads are important diagnostic tools (307). Austrian born researcher Erich Guttman and his cohort Walter MacLay both pioneered art therapy in England during the mid-twentieth century. They posited doodles might offer some insight into the condition of schizophrenics. Guttman was intrigued by both the paintings associated with the Surrealist movement and the pioneering, much-debated work of Sigmund Freud too. Although Guttman mostly studied professionally trained artists who suffered from delusions and other conditions, he also collected a variety of art from patients, including those undergoing mescaline therapy, which alters a person’s consciousness. In a stroke of luck, they were able to convince a newspaper editor at the Evening Standard to provide them over 9,000 doodles that were provided by readers for a contest, each coded with the person’s name, age, and occupation. This invaluable data let the academicians compare the work of those hospitalised with the larger population. Their results, released in 1938, contain several key declarations and remain significant contributions to the field. Subsequently, Francis Reitman recounted them in his own book Psychotic Art: Doodles “release the censor of the conscious mind,” allowing a person to “relax, which to creative people was indispensable to production.”No appropriate descriptive terminology could be agreed upon.“Doodles are not communications,” for the meaning is only apparent when analysed individually.Doodles are “self-meaningful.” (37) Doodles, the authors also established, could be divided into this taxonomy: “stereotypy, ornamental details, movements, figures, faces and animals” or those “depicting scenes, medley, and mixtures” (37). The authors also noted that practitioners from the Jungian school of psychology often used “spontaneously produced drawings” that were quite “doodle-like in nature” in their own discussions (37). As a modern folklorist, I venture that doodles offer rich potential for our discipline as well. At this stage, I am offering a series of dictums, especially in regards to doodles that are commonly found adjacent to text in books and magazines, notebooks and journals, that may be expanded upon and investigated further. Doodles allow the reader to repopulate the text with ideogram-like expressions that are highly personalised, even inscrutable, like ambient sounds.Doodles re-purpose the text. The text no longer is unidirectional. The text becomes a point of convergence between writer and reader. The doodling allows for such a conversation, bilateral flow, or “talking back” to the text.Doodles reveal a secret language–informal codes that hearken back to the “lively, spontaneous, and charged with feeling” works of child art or naïve art that Victor Sanua discusses as being replaced in a child’s later years by art that is “stilted, formal, and conforming” (62).Doodling animates blank margins, the dead space of the text adjacent to the script, making such places ripe for spontaneous, fertile, and exploratory markings.Doodling reveals a democratic, participatory ethos. No text is too sacred, no narrative too inviolable. Anything can be reworked by the intimate graffiti of the reader. The authority of the book is not fixed; readers negotiate and form a second intelligence imprinted over the top of the original text, blurring modes of power.Doodles reveal liminal moments. Since the reader in unmonitored, he or she can express thoughts that may be considered marginal or taboo by the next reader. The original subject of the book itself does not restrict the reader. Thus, within the margins of the page, a brief suspension of boundaries and borders, authority and power, occurs. The reader hides in anonymity, free to reroute the meaning of the book. Doodling may convey a reader’s infantalism. Every book can become a picture book. This art can be the route returning a reader to the ambience of childhood.Doodling may constitute Illuminated/Painted Texts in reverse, commemorating the significance of the object in hitherto unexpected forms and revealing the reader’s codex. William Blake adorned his own poems by illuminating the skin/page that held his living verse; common readers may do so too, in naïve, nomadic, and primitive forms. Doodling demarcates tension zones, yielding social-historical insights into eras while offering psychological glimpses and displaying aesthetic values of readers-cum-writers.Doodling reveals margins as inter-zones, replete with psychogeography. While the typography is sanctioned, legitimate, normalised, and official discourse (“chartered” and “manacled,” to hijack lines from William Blake), the margins are a vernacular depository, a terminus, allowing readers a sense of agency and autonomy. The doodled page becomes a visible reminder and signifier: all pages are potentially “contested” spaces. Whereas graffiti often allows a writer to hide anonymously in the light in a city besieged by multiple conflicting texts, doodles allow a reader-cum-writer’s imprint to live in the cocoon of a formerly fossilised text, waiting for the light. Upon being opened, the book, now a chimera, truly breathes. Further exploration and analysis should likely consider several issues. What truly constitutes and shapes the role of agent and reader? Is the reader an agent all the time, or only when offering resistant readings through doodles? How is a doodler’s agency mediated by the author or the format of texts in forms that I have to map? Lastly, if, as I have argued, the ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page, what occurs in the age of digital or e-books? Will these platforms signal an age of acquiescence to manufactured products or signal era of vernacular responses, somehow hitched to html code and PDF file infiltration? Will bytes totally replace type soon in the future, shaping unforeseen actions by doodlers? Attached Figures Figure One presents the intimate graffiti of my grandfather, found in the 1907 edition of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book. The depiction is simple, even crude, revealing a figure found on the adjacent page to Lesson 248, “Of Characters Used in Punctuation,” which lists the perfunctory functions of commas, semicolons, periods, and so forth. This doodle may offset the routine, rote, and rather humdrum memorisation of such grammatical tools. The smiling figure may embody and signify joy on an otherwise machine-made bare page, a space where my grandfather illustrated his desires (to lighten a mood, to ease dissatisfaction?). Historians Joe Austin and Michael Willard examine how youth have been historically left without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. For instance, graffiti often found on walls and trains may reflect a sad reality: young people are pushed to appropriate “nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces within the landscape” (14). Indeed, book graffiti, like the graffiti found on surfaces throughout cities, may offer youth a sense of appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy: they take the page of the book, commit their writing or illustration to the page, discover some freedom, and feel temporarily independent even while they are young and disempowered. Figure Two depicts the doodles of experimental filmmaker Jim Fetterley (Animal Charm productions) during his tenure as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. His two doodles flank the text of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, regarded by most readers as an autobiographical poem that addresses her own suicide attempts. The story of Lazarus is grounded in the Biblical story of John Lazarus of Bethany, who was resurrected from the dead. The poem also alludes to the Holocaust (“Nazi Lampshades”), the folklore surrounding cats (“And like the cat I have nine times to die”), and impending omens of death (“eye pits “ … “sour breath”). The lower doodle seems to signify a motorised tank-like machine, replete with a furnace or engine compartment on top that bellows smoke. Such ominous images, saturated with potential cartoon-like violence, may link to the World War II references in the poem. Meanwhile, the upper doodle seems to be curiously insect-like, and Fetterley’s name can be found within the illustration, just like Plath’s poem is self-reflexive and addresses her own plight. Most viewers might find the image a bit more lighthearted than the poem, a caricature of something biomorphic and surreal, but not very lethal. Again, perhaps this is a counter-message to the weight of the poem, a way to balance the mood and tone, or it may well represent the larval-like apparition that haunts the very thoughts of Plath in the poem: the impending disease of her mind, as understood by the wary reader. References Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard. “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture.” Eds. Joe Austion and Michael Willard. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press, 1998. “Doodling Gets Its Due: Those Tiny Artworks May Aid Memory.” World Science 2 March 2009. 15 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090302_doodle›. Dundes, Alan. “Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia.” Papers of the Kroeber Anthropological Society 34: 91-105. Ensminger, David. “All Bottle Up: Reinterpreting the Culturescape of Grandma Prisbey.” Adironack Review 9.3 (Fall 2008). ‹http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/ensminger2.html›. Kear, Andrew. “Drawings in the Margins: Doodling in Class an Act of Reclamation.” Graduate Student Conference. University of Toronto, 2006. ‹http://gradstudentconference.oise.utoronto.ca/documents/185/Drawing%20in%20the%20Margins.doc›. Lowe, Sheila R. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis. New York: Alpha Books, 1999. Morton, Timothy. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem; a Study of Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2001). 6 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html›. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Read, Allen Walker. Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America. Waukesha, Wisconsin: Maledicta Press, 1997. Reitman, Francis. Psychotic Art. London: Routledge, 1999. Sanua, Victor. “The World of Mystery and Wonder of the Schizophrenic Patient.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8 (1961): 62-65. Severino, Carol. “The ‘Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims about Contrastive Rhetoric.” The Writing Center Journal 14.1 (Fall 1993): 44-62. Van Cleave, Claire. Master Drawings of the Italian Rennaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007. Varenhost, Christopher. Passdoodles: A Lightweight Authentication Method. Research Science Institute. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.

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

1. Introduction: How the word 'chat' can be demeaning I think the editors mean the word 'chat' to be something of a tease. They remind us that to call something 'chat' might be to strip it of anything more serious or substantial it might be doing and, by extension, to weaken pretty well all talk. It joins 'mere talk', 'rhetoric', 'chatter' and of course 'gossip', with the pungent flavouring of sexism as an added extra. It seems that chat is limp, directionless, passive. Whoever gets to call something 'chat' has scored a win in a battle. Let's just stay with this image for a moment. Suppose it is a rhetorical victory. Scored for which side? In a battle against who or what? Well, for a commonsense view of the world that rates objects over practices, things over their descriptions, and facts over the discovery of facts. And that commonsense view, of course, is the high street version of tangled scholars' web of philosophies -- realism, materialism and essentialism. But breathe easy, because I'm not going to get us stuck in that web. All I want to do is point out -- as has long been pointed out before, especially by feminists taking a cool look at 'female language' - that some uses of the word 'chat' betray a very old-fashioned view of language. To call this edition of M/C 'Chat' is to examine that attitude. The editors want to rate practices over objects, descriptions over what they describe, and the act of discovery over what is discovered. Or at least, even if one doesn't all want to go that far, to redress the balance a little in each case. The attitude the editors want to correct is a rather complacent one. It takes people's exchange of talk as just that; as a means of transmitting what's in one person's head into the head of the other person, more or less. Inefficient, noisy and unreliable, but fixable by technology. This is, of course the 'conduit' metaphor so devastatingly unmasked by Reddy in 1979. But it would be good to see some actual examples of real people really using the word; all this has been rather hypothetical so far. In fact, what we shall find is a bit of a paradox. It turns out, if I can prefigure the action, that when people use the word 'chat' to decribe some stretch of talk, what they want to do (at least in the data I have) is not to sneer at it -- quite the contrary. But it is nevertheless highly rhetorical. It does a job. The speaker tends to use it to promote a description of a warm, informal and above all blameless event, just when there might be reason to believe that in fact something rather different would be more accurate. 2. How to analyse talk as consequential? Let me pause for a moment. Soon I shall be doing a quick survey of some examples of actual live usage of the word. I should say, in parenthesis, that M/C offered me the wonderful opportunity of actually having a link to an audio sample of these extracts, and had the data come from public sources (say from talk radio or a political speech) then I would have jumped at the chance. That way you would have been able yourself to catch the flavour of the talk undiluted by transcription conventions and the overwhelming blandness of print. But all the extracts I shall use in the article are from private conversations, the participants in which didn't give permission for their voices to be broadcast, so I'm afraid that opportunity must be passed up. But given I have transcripts, what now? How to think about language-in-use? Obviously, I have to put my money where my mouth is and treat them not like 'chat' in that demeaning, inconsequential caricature I mentioned at the beginning (and against which this whole issue of M/C is dedicated). What are the broad alternatives available? There are, loosely speaking, two sorts of things one could do, familiar to all students of language. A couple of images will be helpful, if a bit crude. The first is the pearl necklace. Here, the interesting things about the talk are its content (pearls or ivory pieces?) and its setting (one string? two?). Less fancifully, the interest is in asking: what words, what speakers, what occasion? You can trace that from William Labov and his street-level sociolinguistics (1972), or further back if you want to. What you get is a thorough rejection of the words + settings = chat. You discover, by empirical comparison of what words in what settings, such thorough non-'chat' states of affairs as social location, social discourses and social power. If the pearl necklace doesn't appeal -- it seems a bit static perhaps -- then how about the origami bird? In its prior life as undistinguished flat sheet of paper it fails to command much attention. It's the transformation that fascinates. You have to fold it up to produce it, and you have to fold it up in a certain way if you don't want it to produce an aeroplane or a hat or just a disaster. The interesting things, of course, are the details (which side do you fold first? where do you tuck?) and how that produces the beautiful end result. Or, less fancifully, the sequential structure of talk in interaction, how one part supports and constrains the next and how a stretch of it achieves social goals (beautiful or otherwise). Now for the rest of the paper I'm going to try a bit of origami, or rather, some origami-in-reverse. I'm going to try and get across the spirit of Conversation Analysis and, without spraying around too many technical terms (indeed, any, if I can help it) I'm going to take a stretch of talk and see how it folds and tucks together to make it what it is. Doing that will, I hope, show up things about it that might pass unnoticed otherwise). Readers whose fancy is tickled for this sort of thing might well want to have a look at the references at the end of the article to take it all further. 3. Example 1. "about two years ago I came round an':: (..) spent some time chattin' didn't we" Let's make a start with this case. Here we have an encounter between a psychologist and a person he is about to interview. The interview proper hasn't actually started yet, and we can read the lines below as the interviewer 'working up to' the start of the interview proper. Part of it is to remind MA that the psychologist had seen him before. Notice how the psychologist uses the word 'chatting' to describe that earlier encounter. In line 11, MR describes his previous encounter as involving "chattin'. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. I know I shouldn't be calling in evidence which the reader can't get hold of, but Mark Rapley, the psychologist involved (and with whom I worked on the analysis; see Rapley and Antaki) pointed to that line and said to me that ('in fact') his previous dealings with MA, far from being 'chatting', had been a formal administration of a questionnaire, with all the paraphernalia of paper and pencil, and strict question and answer rights and obligations, all going down on the record. "Chattin'"? Calling it "chattin'" obliterates all that in favour of something altogether more homely and friendly. Look at what team of players it's sent out onto the field with: he "came round" (rather, than, say, 'paid an official visit') and "spent some time" (rather than 'completed my business'. They did it together -- hence the "didn't we?" The psychologist was "jus' (..) watchin' what was going on" -- not intervening, merely casually watching the world go by; note also the dropped g's. Now he's back to "see how you were gettin' on" (rather than 'administer a standardised assessment questionnaire'"). What an assembly. I'm trying to leave off any guess at what the interviewer's intentions or motives are -- we just can't know such things. But we can certainly have something to say about the effects his words give off. The origami structure that emerges from the folding is one of the 'chat' having been an interaction off the record, personal and friendly; all hearably at odds with the business the interviewer is officially prosecuting. 4. Example 2: "what Tim does (.) which is come and chat" Here is a very similar case, this time in a committee meeting: Again, I'll briefly gloss the scene (based on the previous talk, and visible in such terms as 'matters arising', the thanks expressed by one speaker to another, and the "we turn to" topic change in line 19/20). A committee meeting is in session, and AC is touting for new names to replace a member who is leaving. Committee membership is, by definition, something that is carefully regulated in standing orders and by convention, and is quite capable of being described in the most off-putting bureaucratic language (as it might be, say, were an errant member being disciplined for some infraction or other, and the thing became legalistic). Here it isn't. How does AC fold it up? AC in lines 1 to 9 is working up a request for other to nominate candidates to replace Tim Brown (all names are of course pseudonyms). We leave aside consideration of how he folds his talk so as to make the request as he does (rather than, say, deliver it as a petulant blast against his colleagues for not having provided him with any names so far). Our interest is in how the folds involve the description 'chat'. Like the psychologist interviewer in extract [1], AC bundles the 'chat' word into a description of the whole scene -- that the postgraduate representative will "come and chat," and that the interviewer "came round an':: (..)spent some time chattin'". To bundle up the description with the act of arrival is an elegantly efficient way of implying that this is the person's interest and motive in the interaction -- what they're there for. This way any candidate member can be reassured that the thing is much less onerous, official and formal than it would have sounded had AC used the bureaucratic description buried away in the Committee statutes. 'Chat', in this fold of the talk, works to eliminate the consequentiality and offputtingness of the event -- even though, of course, when the new member is inducted onto the Committee, he or she will be subject to all the dread rules and regulations that lurk in the other, hidden bureaucratic description. 5. Example 3: "we sat and chatted til about eleven" Here is another case, where, probably because the setting is not as institutional as in the first two, working out what 'chat' is doing will take us a bit more work. First the gloss. Gordon is on the phone to Danielle and talking about what he was doing the other night - we could dwell a little on his description of his guitar performance ('it went down really well') but we'll skip straight to where "chatted" appears. Unlike the previous two cases, it isn't bundled up with arrival at the scene ("come and chat" and "I came round an':: (..)spent some time chattin'"), but it does still get bundled with something -- sitting -- which parcels it up nicely as a combination-verb, something done while doing something else. Gordon and the others had no plans here; the food and wine had been consumed, then "we sat (0.3) an:' chatted (0.4) til: about eleven". Now what does such a description do for his then being struck by the thought that he'd go home and 'just phone her' (".hh then I thought (0.3) I'll come back (0.3) an' I'll jus' jus' phone you t'say that uh I'd like t'see you")? It's a magnificent play of accountability -- it holds off a collection of implications which might damage the tender sentiment presumably involved in wanting to tell someone you'd like to see them. Sitting and chatting is (notwithstanding the wine) not being drunk; it's with other people, so it's not sad-sack lonely rumination; still less is it insistent, stalking, recriminative or even violent obsession. Thinking of Danielle after (merely) being with others sitting and chatting till eleven disarms all of those possibilities; as the discursive psychologists have it (Edwards and Potter 1992) , this is a piece of 'stake management'. Gordon is inoculating himself against being seen to have the wrong sort of motivations. 'Chat' here is used as a part of a positive rhetorical strategy to have sentiments, but of the right sort. 6. Example 4: "I said to him, you know, come down 'n have a chat with me" One last example to see us out. This time we are in a marital counselling session, and the husband's ('Jeff') exams have been part of the topic of conversation, which I will gloss as being about the attention each partner pays to the other. 'Mary' now speaks. Once again the speaker is exploiting the pleasantly unspecific glow that 'chat' can have. Mary wanted Jeff to come down from 'upstairs' and 'have a chat' with her. Against this she puts words in his mouth: "I've gotta start my revising," and then her own commentary -- it was the same "every ni:ght, (.) for o:hh ye:ars.", regular as clockwork and at decidedly antisocial hours. She "never had anyone to ta:lk to" as a consequence. So the hearer is faced with Jeff's choice -- to come down from upstairs (remote, cold) and have a chat with Mary; or pursue his mechanical, laborious, self-centred and inconsiderate regime. There is, in her description, no contest; hence Jeff comes out looking something of a cold fish. Here is a lovely example of 'chat' once again being a good thing, loading the dice in the speaker's favour. 7. Concluding comments I started out saying that the word 'chat' was something of an insult. That certainly might apply when the word is used (or might be used, or is allegedly used) in a discussion about human action, and someone who wants to push the 'real', the 'material' and the 'consequential' might use 'chat' to dismiss an opponent who wants words to be responsible for some rather substantial things: reality, materiality and consequentiality. But there's a nice paradox. When you do take words seriously as doing things, and you look for what 'chat' does in people's actual usage, you find that it isn't an insult. Far from it. In the four cases we looked at the speaker was using 'chat' as a basically pleasant, socially positive and blameless description. Of course, they were doing so for rhetorical purposes, as words always are. But nevertheless there's a paradox there. In the abstract, nasty; in actuality, nice. The one thing that's constant is the fact that, in our analyses, both the hypothetical insulters and our actual glossers are using the word. In the mouths of both parties 'chat' is an interested description, as the discursive psychologists have it, following the tradition established by Garfinkel and, especially, Harvey Sacks (see, for example, the compendious Lectures on Conversation). It is always heard as a contrast (implicit or not) with something else, and does its work that way. Like it or not, 'chat' is no polite cipher. If you look at how it's folded and manipulated into the interaction, you see how it will smooth a potentially difficult interview, naturalise a possibly unwelcome encounter or set up a loaded distinction againt something mechanical and self-interested. All human life is here. If anyone needed persuading that 'chat' isn't chat, then the examples we've looked at here might have gone some way to doing so. References Atkinson, J. M., and J. Heritage, eds. Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Edwards, D., and J. Potter. Discursive Psychology. London: Sage, 1992. Labov, W. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1972. Rapley, M., and C. Antaki. "A Conversation Analysis of the 'Acquiescence' of People with Learning Disabilities." Journal of Community and Applied Psychology 6 (1996): 371-91. Reddy, M. J. "The Conduit Metaphor - A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language." Metaphor and Thought. Ed. A. Ortony. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1979. Sacks, H. Lectures on Conversation. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Notation The notation follows that of Gail Jefferson described in Atkinson and Heritage (ix - xvi), with the following deviations: (..) and (...) are untimed pauses of about .4 and .8 of a second approximately. The author would like to thank Liz Holt and Derek Edwards for permission to use transcript extracts 3 and 4, whose details are as follows -- Extract 3: Holt: 1988 Undated: Side I: Call 4 Extract 4: DE-JF/C1/S1 @ 12 June, 1993 Citation reference for this article MLA style: Charles Antaki. "Two Rhetorical Uses of the Description 'Chat'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/uses.php>. Chicago style: Charles Antaki, "Two Rhetorical Uses of the Description 'Chat'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/uses.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Charles Antaki. (2000) Two rhetorical uses of the description 'chat'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/uses.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionIt has been nearly half a century since the appearance of Susan Sontag’s landmark essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” The critic wrote of the public fascination with science fiction disaster films, claiming that, on the one hand “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another [but, on the other hand] from a political and moral point of view, it does” (224). Even if Sontag is right about aspects of the imagination of disaster not changing, the types, frequency, and magnitude of disasters and their representation in media and popular culture suggest that dynamic conditions prevail on both counts. Disaster has become a significantly urban phenomenon, and highly publicised “worst case” scenarios such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake highlight multiple demographic, cultural, and environmental contexts for visualising cataclysm. The 1950s and 60s science fiction films that Sontag wrote about were filled with marauding aliens and freaks of disabused science. Since then, their visual and dramatic effects have been much enlarged by all kinds of disaster scenarios. Partly imagined, these scenarios have real-life counterparts with threats from terrorism and the war on terror, pan-epidemics, and global climate change. Sontag’s essay—like most, if not all of the films she mentions—overlooked the aftermath; that is, the rebuilding, following extra-terrestrial invasion. It ignored what was likely to happen when the monsters were gone. In contrast, the psychological as well as the practical, social, and economic aspects of reconstruction are integral to disaster discourse today. Writing about how architecture might creatively contribute to post-conflict (including war) and disaster recovery, for instance, Boano elaborates the psychological background for rebuilding, where the material destruction of dwellings and cities “carries a powerful symbolic erosion of security, social wellbeing and place attachment” (38); these are depicted as attributes of selfhood and identity that must be restored. Similarly, Hutchison and Bleiker (385) adopt a view evident in disaster studies, that disaster-struck communities experience “trauma” and require inspired responses that facilitate “healing and reconciliation” as well as material aid such as food, housing, and renewed infrastructure. This paper revisits Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster,” fifty years on in view of the changing face of disasters and their representation in film media, including more recent films. The paper then considers disaster recovery and outlines the difficult path that “creative industries” like architecture and urban planning must tread when promising a vision of rebuilding that provides for such intangible outcomes as “healing and reconciliation.” We find that hopes for the seemingly positive psychologically- and socially-recuperative outcomes accompanying the prospect of rebuilding risk a variety of generalisation akin to wish-fulfilment that Sontag finds in disaster films. The Psychology of Science Fiction and Disaster FilmsIn “The Imagination of Disaster,” written at or close to the height of the Cold War, Sontag ruminates on what America’s interest in, if not preoccupation with, science fiction films tell us about ourselves. Their popularity cannot be explained in terms of their entertainment value alone; or if it can, then why audiences found (and still find) such films entertaining is something that itself needs explanation.Depicted in media like photography and film, utopian and dystopian thought have at least one thing in common. Their visions of either perfected or socially alienated worlds are commonly prompted by criticism of the social/political status quo and point to its reform. For Sontag, science fiction films portrayed both people’s worst nightmares concerning disaster and catastrophe (e.g. the end of the world; chaos; enslavement; mutation), as well as their facile victories over the kinds of moral, political, and social dissolution the films imaginatively depicted. Sontag does not explicitly attribute such “happy endings” to wish-fulfilling phantasy and ego-protection. (“Phantasy” is to be distinguished from fantasy. It is a psychoanalytic term for states of mind, often symbolic in form, resulting from infantile wish-fulfilment, desires and instincts.) She does, however, describe the kinds of fears, existential concerns (like annihilation), and crises of meaning they are designed (purpose built) to allay. The fears are a product of the time—the down and dark side of technology (e.g. depersonalisation; ambivalence towards science, scientists, and technology) and changes wrought in our working and personal lives by urbanisation. In short, then as now, science fictions films were both expressions of deep and genuine worries and of the pressing need to inventively set them to rest.When Sontag claims that “the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ” (224) from one period to another, this is because, psychologically speaking, neither the precipitating concerns and fears (death, loss of love, meaninglessness, etc.), nor the ways in which people’s minds endeavour to assuage them, substantively differ. What is different is the way they are depicted. This is unsurprisingly a function of the political, social, and moral situations and milieus that provide the context in which the imagination of disaster unfolds. In contemporary society, the extent to which the media informs and constructs the context in which the imagination operates is unprecedented.Sontag claims that there is little if any criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears the films depict (223). Instead, fantasy operates so as to displace and project the actual causes away from their all too human origins into outer space and onto aliens. In a sense, this is the core and raison d’etre for such films. By their very nature, science fiction films of the kind Sontag is discussing cannot concern themselves with genuine social or political criticism (even though the films are necessarily expressive of such criticism). Any serious questioning of the moral and political status quo—conditions that are responsible for the disasters befalling people—would hamper the operation of fantasy and its production of temporarily satisfying “solutions” to whatever catastrophe is being depicted.Sontag goes on to discuss various strategies science fiction employs to deal with such fears. For example, through positing a bifurcation between good and evil, and grossly oversimplifying the moral complexity of situations, it allows one to “give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings” (215) and to exercise feelings of superiority—moral and otherwise. Ambiguous feelings towards science and technology are repressed. Quick and psychologically satisfying fixes are sought for these by means of phantasy and the imaginative construction of invulnerable heroes. Much of what Sontag says can straightforwardly be applied to catastrophe in general. “Alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity embodied in the science fiction films lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (220). Sontag writes:In the films it is by means of images and sounds […] that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects in art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quality and ingenuity […] the science fiction film […] is concerned with the aesthetics of disaster […] and it is in the imagery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies. (212–13)In science fiction films, disaster, though widespread, is viewed intensively as well as extensively. The disturbances constitutive of the disaster are moral and emotional as well as material. People are left without the mental or physical abilities they need to cope. Government is absent or useless. We find ourselves in what amounts to what Naomi Zack (“Philosophy and Disaster”; Ethics for Disaster) describes as a Hobbesian second state of nature—where government is inoperative and chaos (moral, social, political, personal) reigns. Science fiction’s way out is to imaginatively construct scenarios emotionally satisfying enough to temporarily assuage the distress (anomie or chaos) experienced in the film.There is, however, a tremendous difference in the way in which people who face catastrophic occurrences in their lives, as opposed to science fiction, address the problems. For one thing, they must be far closer to complex and quickly changing realities and uncertain truths than are the phantastic, temporarily gratifying, and morally unproblematic resolutions to the catastrophic scenarios that science fiction envisions. Genuine catastrophe, for example war, undermines and dismantles the structures—material structures to be sure but also those of justice, human kindness, and affectivity—that give us the wherewithal to function and that are shown to be inimical to catastrophe as such. Disaster dispenses with civilization while catastrophe displaces it.Special Effects and Changing StorylinesScience fiction and disaster film genres have been shaped by developments in visual simulation technologies providing opportunities for imaginatively mixing fact and fiction. Developments in filmmaking include computer or digital techniques for reproducing on the screen what can otherwise only be imagined as causal sequences of events and spectacles accompanying the wholesale destruction of buildings and cities—even entire planets. Indeed films are routinely promoted on the basis of how cinematographers and technicians have advanced the state of the art. The revival of 3-D movies with films such as Avatar (2009) and Prometheus (2012) is one of a number of developments augmenting the panoramas of 1950s classics featuring “melting tanks, flying bodies, crashing walls, awesome craters and fissures in the earth, plummeting spacecraft [and] colourful deadly rays” (Sontag 213). An emphasis on the scale of destruction and the wholesale obliteration of recognisable sites emblematic of “the city” (mega-structures like the industrial plant in Aliens (1986) and vast space ships like the “Death Star” in two Star Wars sequels) connect older films with new ones and impress the viewer with ever more extraordinary spectacle.Films that have been remade make for useful comparison. On the whole, these reinforce the continuation and predictability of some storylines (for instance, threats of extra-terrestrial invasion), but also the attenuation or disappearance of other narrative elements such as the monsters and anxieties released by mid-twentieth century atomic tests (Broderick). Remakes also highlight emerging themes requiring novel or updated critical frameworks. For example, environmental anxieties, largely absent in 1950s science fiction films (except for narratives involving colliding worlds or alien contacts) have appeared en masse in recent years, providing an updated view on the ethical issues posed by the fall of cities and communities (Taylor, “Urban”).In The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and its remakes (1956, 1978, 1993), for example, the organic and vegetal nature of the aliens draws the viewer’s attention to an environment formed by combative species, allowing for threats of infestation, growth and decay of the self and individuality—a longstanding theme. In the most recent version, The Invasion (2007), special effects and directorial spirit render the orifice-seeking tendrils of the pod creatures threateningly vigorous and disturbing (Lim). More sanctimonious than physically invasive, the aliens in the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still are fed up with humankind’s fixation with atomic self-destruction, and threaten global obliteration on the earth (Cox). In the 2008 remake, the suave alien ambassador, Keanu Reeves, targets the environmental negligence of humanity.Science, including science as fiction, enters into disaster narratives in a variety of ways. Some are less obvious but provocative nonetheless; for example, movies dramatising the arrival of aliens such as War of the Worlds (1953 and 2005) or Alien (1979). These more subtle approaches can be personally confronting even without the mutation of victims into vegetables or zombies. Special effects technologies have made it possible to illustrate the course of catastrophic floods and earthquakes in considerable scientific and visual detail and to represent the interaction of natural disasters, the built environment, and people, from the scale of buildings, homes, and domestic lives to entire cities and urban populations.For instance, the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) runs 118 minutes, but has an uncertain fictional time frame of either a few weeks or 72 hours (if the film’s title is to taken literally). The movie shows the world as we know it being mostly destroyed. Tokyo is shattered by hailstones and Los Angeles is twisted by cyclones the likes of which Dorothy would never have seen. New York disappears beneath a mountainous tsunami. All of these events result from global climate change, though whether this is due to human (in) action or other causes is uncertain. Like their predecessors, the new wave of disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow makes for questionable “art” (Annan). Nevertheless, their reception opens a window onto broader political and moral contexts for present anxieties. Some critics have condemned The Day After Tomorrow for its scientific inaccuracies—questioning the scale or pace of climate change. Others acknowledge errors while commending efforts to raise environmental awareness (Monbiot). Coincident with the film and criticisms in both the scientific and political arena is a new class of environmental heretic—the climate change denier. This is a shadowy character commonly associated with the presidency of George W. Bush and the oil lobby that uses minor inconsistencies of science to claim that climate change does not exist. One thing underlying both twisting facts for the purposes of making science fiction films and ignoring evidence of climate change is an infantile orientation towards the unknown. In this regard, recent films do what science fiction disaster films have always done. While freely mixing truths and half-truths for the purpose of heightened dramatic effect, they fulfil psychological tasks such as orchestrating nightmare scenarios and all too easy victories on the screen. Uncertainty regarding the precise cause, scale, or duration of cataclysmic natural phenomena is mirrored by suspension of disbelief in the viability of some human responses to portrayals of urban disaster. Science fiction, in other words, invites us to accept as possible the flight of Americans and their values to Mexico (The Day After Tomorrow), the voyage into earth’s molten core (The Core 2003), or the disposal of lava in LA’s drainage system (Volcano 1997). Reinforcing Sontag’s point, here too there is a lack of criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears depicted in the films (223). Moreover, much like news coverage, images in recent natural disaster films (like their predecessors) typically finish at the point where survivors are obliged to pick up the pieces and start all over again—the latter is not regarded as newsworthy. Allowing for developments in science fiction films and the disaster genre, Sontag’s observation remains accurate. The films are primarily concerned “with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, in making a mess” (213) rather than rebuilding. The Imagination of Disaster RecoverySontag’s essay contributes to an important critical perspective on science fiction film. Variations on her “psychological point of view” have been explored. (The two discourses—psychology and cinema—have parallel and in some cases intertwined histories). Moreover, in the intervening years, psychological or psychoanalytical terms and narratives have themselves become even more a part of popular culture. They feature in recent disaster films and disaster recovery discourse in the “real” world.Today, with greater frequency than in the 1950s and 60s films arguably, representations of alien invasion or catastrophic global warming serve to background conflict resolutions of a more quotidian and personal nature. Hence, viewers are led to suspect that Tom Cruise will be more likely to survive the rapacious monsters in the latest The War of the Worlds if he can become less narcissistic and a better father. Similarly, Dennis Quaid’s character will be much better prepared to serve a newly glaciated America for having rescued his son (and marriage) from the watery deep-freezer that New York City becomes in The Day After Tomorrow. In these films the domestic and familial comprise a domain of inter-personal and communal relations from which victims and heroes appear. Currents of thought from the broad literature of disaster studies and Western media also call upon this domain. The imagination of disaster recovery has come to partly resemble a set of problems organised around the needs of traumatised communities. These serve as an object of urban governance, planning, and design conceived in different ways, but largely envisioned as an organic unity that connects urban populations, their pasts, and settings in a meaningful, psychologically significant manner (Furedi; Hutchison and Bleiker; Boano). Terms like “place” or concepts like Boano’s “place-attachment" (38) feature in this discourse to describe this unity and its subjective dimensions. Consider one example. In August 2006, one year after Katrina, the highly respected Journal of Architectural Education dedicated a special issue to New Orleans and its reconstruction. Opening comments by editorialist Barbara Allen include claims presupposing enduring links between the New Orleans community conceived as an organic whole, its architectural heritage imagined as a mnemonic vehicle, and the city’s unique setting. Though largely unsupported (and arguably unsupportable) the following proposition would find agreement across a number of disaster studies and resonates in commonplace reasoning:The culture of New Orleans is unique. It is a mix of ancient heritage with layers and adaptations added by successive generations, resulting in a singularly beautiful cultural mosaic of elements. Hurricane Katrina destroyed buildings—though not in the city’s historic core—and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot wipe out the memories and spirit of the citizens. (4) What is intriguing about the claim is an underlying intellectual project that subsumes psychological and sociological domains of reasoning within a distinctive experience of community, place, and memory. In other words, the common belief that memory is an intrinsic part of the human condition of shock and loss gives form to a theory of how urban communities experience disaster and how they might re-build—and justify rebuilding—themselves. This is problematic and invites anachronistic thinking. While communities are believed to be formed partly by memories of a place, “memory” is neither a collective faculty nor is it geographically bounded. Whose memories are included and which ones are not? Are these truly memories of one place or do they also draw on other real or imagined places? Moreover—and this is where additional circumspection is inspired by our reading of Sontag’s essay—does Allen’s editorial contribute to an aestheticised image of place, rather than criticism of the social and political conditions required for reconstruction to proceed with justice, compassionately and affectively? Allowing for civil liberties to enter the picture, Allen adds “it is necessary to enable every citizen to come back to this exceptional city if they so desire” (4). However, given that memories of places and desires for their recovery are not univocal, and often contain competing visions of what was and should be, it is not surprising they should result in competing expectations for reconstruction efforts. This has clearly proven the case for New Orleans (Vederber; Taylor, “Typologies”)ConclusionThe comparison of films invites an extension of Sontag’s analysis of the imagination of disaster to include the psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding. Can a “psychological point of view” help us to understand not only the motives behind capturing so many scenes of destruction on screen and television, but also something of the creative impulses driving reconstruction? This invites a second question. How do some impulses, particularly those caricatured as the essence of an “enterprise culture” (Heap and Ross) associated with America’s “can-do” or others valorised as positive outcomes of catastrophe in The Upside of Down (Homer-Dixon), highlight or possibly obscure criticism of the conditions which made cities like New Orleans vulnerable in the first place? The broad outline of an answer to the second question begins to appear only when consideration of the ethics of disaster and rebuilding are taken on board. If “the upside” of “the down” wrought by Hurricane Katrina, for example, is rebuilding of any kind, at any price, and for any person, then the equation works (i.e., there is a silver lining for every cloud). If, however, the range of positives is broadened to include issues of social justice, then the figures require more complex arithmetic.ReferencesAllen, Barbara. “New Orleans and Katrina: One Year Later.” Journal of Architectural Education 60.1 (2006): 4.Annan, David. Catastrophe: The End of the Cinema? London: Lorrimer, 1975.Boano, Camillo. “‘Violent Space’: Production and Reproduction of Security and Vulnerabilities.” The Journal of Architecture 16 (2011): 37–55.Broderick, Mick, ed. Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. London: Kegan Paul, 1996.Cox, David. “Get This, Aliens: We Just Don’t Care!” The Guardian 15 Dec. 2008 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/dec/15/the-day-the-earth-stood-still›. Furedi, Frank. “The Changing Meaning of Disaster.” Area 39.4 (2007): 482–89.Heap, Shaun H., and Angus Ross, eds. Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006.Hutchison, Emma, and Roland Bleiker. “Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma.” European Journal of Social Theory 11 (2008): 385–403.Lim, Dennis. “Same Old Aliens, But New Neuroses.” New York Times 12 Aug. 2007: A17.Monbiot, George. “A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall.” The Guardian 14 May 2004.Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1979. 209–25.Taylor, William M. “Typologies of Katrina: Mnemotechnics in Post-Disaster New Orleans.” Interstices 13 (2012): 71–84.———. “Urban Disasters: Visualising the Fall of Cities and the Forming of Human Values.” Journal of Architecture 11.5 (2006): 603–12.Verderber, Stephen. “Five Years After – Three New Orleans Neighborhoods.” Journal of Architectural Education 64.1 (2010): 107–20.Zack, Naomi. Ethics for Disaster. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.———. “Philosophy and Disaster.” Homeland Security Affairs 2, article 5 (April 2006): ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?article=2.1.5›.FilmographyAlien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Brandywine Productions, 1979.Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Brandywine Productions, 1986.Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Lightstorm Entertainment et al., 2009.The Core. Dir. Jon Amiel. Paramount Pictures, 2003.The Day after Tomorrow. Dir. Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox, 2004.The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Allied Artists, 1956; also 1978 and 1993.The Invasion. Dirs. Oliver Hirschbiegel and Jame McTeigue. Village Roadshow et al, 2007.Prometheus. Dir. Ridley Scott. Scott Free and Brandywine Productions, 2012Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1977.Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1983.Volcano. Dir. Mick Jackson. 20th Century Fox, 1997.War of the Worlds. Dir. George Pal. Paramount, 1953; also Steven Spielberg. Paramount, 2005.Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to Oenone Rooksby and Joely-Kym Sobott for their assistance and advice when preparing this article. It was also made possible in part by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

This article explores how fat women protesting challenges norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces. We use the term fat as a political reclamation; Fat Studies scholars and fat activists prefer the term fat, over the normative term “overweight” and the pathologising term “obese/obesity” (Lee and Pausé para 3). Who is and who isn’t fat, we suggest, is best left to self-determination, although it is generally accepted by fat activists that the term is most appropriately adopted by individuals who are unable to buy clothes in any store they choose. Using a tweet from conservative commentator Ann Coulter as a leaping-off point, we examine the narratives around women in the public sphere and explore how fat bodies might transgress further the norms set by society. The public representations of women in politics and protest are then are set in the context of ‘activist wisdom’ (Maddison and Scalmer) from two sides of the globe. Activist wisdom gives preference to the lived knowledge and experience of activists as tools to understand social movements. It seeks to draw theoretical implications from the practical actions of those on the ground. In centring the experiences of ourselves and other activists, we hope to expand existing understandings of body politics, gender, and political power in this piece. It is important in researching social movements to look both at the representations of protest and protestors in all forms of media as this is the ‘public face’ of movements, but also to examine the reflections of the individuals who collectively put their weight behind bringing social change.A few days after the 45th President of the United States was elected, people around the world spilled into the streets and participated in protests; precursors to the Women’s March which would take place the following January. Pictures of such marches were shared via social media, demonstrating the worldwide protest against the racism, misogyny, and overall oppressiveness, of the newly elected leader. Not everyone was supportive of these protests though; one such conservative commentator, Ann Coulter, shared this tweet: Image1: A tweet from Ann Coulter; the tweet contains a picture of a group of protestors, holding signs protesting Trump, white supremacy, and for the rights of immigrants. In front of the group, holding a megaphone is a woman. Below the picture, the text reads, “Without fat girls, there would be no protests”.Coulter continued on with two more tweets, sharing pictures of other girls protesting and suggesting that the protestors needed a diet programme. Kivan Bay (“Without Fat Girls”) suggested that perhaps Coulter was implying that skinny girls do not have time to protest because they are too busy doing skinny girl things, like buying jackets or trying on sweaters. Or perhaps Coulter was arguing that fat girls are too visible, too loud, and too big, to be taken seriously in their protests. These tweets provide a point of illustration for how fat women protesting challenge norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces While Coulter’s tweet was most likely intended as a hostile personal attack on political grounds, we find it useful in its foregrounding of gender, bodies and protest which we consider in this article, beginning with a review of fat girls’ role in social justice movements.Across the world, we can point to fat women who engage in activism related to body politics and more. Australian fat filmmaker and activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater makes documentaries, such as Aquaporko! and Nothing to Lose, that queer fat embodiment and confronts body norms. Newly elected Ontario MPP Jill Andrew has been fighting for equal rights for queer people and fat people in Canada for decades. Nigerian Latasha Ngwube founded About That Curvy Life, Africa’s leading body positive and empowerment site, and has organised plus-size fashion show events at Heineken Lagos Fashion and Design Week in Nigeria in 2016 and the Glitz Africa Fashion Week in Ghana in 2017. Fat women have been putting their bodies on the line for the rights of others to live, work, and love. American Heather Heyer was protesting the hate that white nationalists represent and the danger they posed to her friends, family, and neighbours when she died at a rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina in late 2017 (Caron). When Heyer was killed by one of those white nationalists, they declared that she was fat, and therefore her body size was lauded loudly as justification for her death (Bay, “How Nazis Use”; Spangler).Fat women protesting is not new. For example, the Fat Underground was a group of “radical fat feminist women”, who split off from the more conservative NAAFA (National Association to Aid Fat Americans) in the 1970s (Simic 18). The group educated the public about weight science, harassed weight-loss companies, and disrupted academic seminars on obesity. The Fat Underground made their first public appearance at a Women’s Equality Day in Los Angeles, taking over the stage at the public event to accuse the medical profession of murdering Cass Elliot, the lead singer of the folk music group, The Mamas and the Papas (Dean and Buss). In 1973, the Fat Underground produced the Fat Liberation Manifesto. This Manifesto began by declaring that they believed “that fat people are full entitled to human respect and recognition” (Freespirit and Aldebaran 341).Women have long been disavowed, or discouraged, from participating in the public sphere (Ginzberg; van Acker) or seen as “intruders or outsiders to the tough world of politics” (van Acker 118). The feminist slogan the personal is political was intended to shed light on the role that women needed to play in the public spheres of education, employment, and government (Caha 22). Across the world, the acceptance of women within the public sphere has been varied due to cultural, political, and religious, preferences and restrictions (Agenda Feminist Media Collective). Limited acceptance of women in the public sphere has historically been granted by those ‘anointed’ by a male family member or patron (Fountaine 47).Anti-feminists are quick to disavow women being in public spaces, preferring to assign them the role as helpmeet to male political elite. As Schlafly (in Rowland 30) notes: “A Positive Woman cannot defeat a man in a wrestling or boxing match, but she can motivate him, inspire him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him, and have power over him that he can never achieve over her with all his muscle.” This idea of women working behind the scenes has been very strong in New Zealand where the ‘sternly worded’ letter is favoured over street protest. An acceptable route for women’s activism was working within existing political institutions (Grey), with activity being ‘hidden’ inside government offices such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (Schuster, 23). But women’s movement organisations that engage in even the mildest form of disruptive protest are decried (Grey; van Acker).One way women have been accepted into public space is as the moral guardians or change agents of the entire political realm (Bliss; Ginzberg; van Acker; Ledwith). From the early suffrage movements both political actors and media representations highlighted women were more principled and conciliatory than men, and in many cases had a moral compass based on restraint. Cartoons showed women in the suffrage movement ‘sweeping up’ and ‘cleaning house’ (Sheppard 123). Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were celebrated for protesting against the demon drink and anti-pornography campaigners like Patricia Bartlett were seen as acceptable voices of moral reason (Moynihan). And as Cunnison and Stageman (in Ledwith 193) note, women bring a “culture of femininity to trade unions … an alternative culture, derived from the particularity of their lives as women and experiences of caring and subordination”. This role of moral guardian often derived from women as ‘mothers’, responsible for the physical and moral well-being of the nation.The body itself has been a sight of protest for women including fights for bodily autonomy in their medical decisions, reproductive justice, and to live lives free from physical and sexual abuse, have long been met with criticisms of being unladylike or inappropriate. Early examples decried in NZ include the women’s clothing movement which formed part of the suffrage movement. In the second half of the 20th century it was the freedom trash can protests that started the myth of ‘women burning their bras’ which defied acceptable feminine norms (Sawer and Grey). Recent examples of women protesting for body rights include #MeToo and Time’s Up. Both movements protest the lack of bodily autonomy women can assert when men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies for their entertainment, enjoyment, and pleasure. And both movements have received considerable backlash by those who suggest it is a witch hunt that might ensnare otherwise innocent men, or those who are worried that the real victims are white men who are being left behind (see Garber; Haussegger). Women who advocate for bodily autonomy, including access to contraception and abortion, are often held up as morally irresponsible. As Archdeacon Bullock (cited in Smyth 55) asserted, “A woman should pay for her fun.”Many individuals believe that the stigma and discrimination fat people face are the consequences they sow from their own behaviours (Crandall 892); that fat people are fat because they have made poor decisions, being too indulgent with food and too lazy to exercise (Crandall 883). Therefore, fat people, like women, should have to pay for their fun. Fat women find themselves at this intersection, and are often judged more harshly for their weight than fat men (Tiggemann and Rothblum). Examining Coulter’s tweet with this perspective in mind, it can easily be read as an attempt to put fat girl protestors back into their place. It can also be read as a warning. Don’t go making too much noise or you may be labelled as fat. Presenting troublesome women as fat has a long history within political art and depictions. Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic) was depicted as fat and ugly; she also reinforced an anti-suffragist position (Chenut 441). These images are effective because of our societal views on fatness (Kyrölä). Fatness is undesirable, unworthy of love and attention, and a representation of poor character, lack of willpower, and an absence of discipline (Murray 14; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 1).Fat women who protest transgress rules around body size, gender norms, and the appropriate place for women in society. Take as an example the experiences of one of the authors of this piece, Sandra Grey, who was thrust in to political limelight nationally with the Campaign for MMP (Grey and Fitzsimmons) and when elected as the President of the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union in 2011. Sandra is a trade union activist who breaches too many norms set for the “good woman protestor,” as well as the norms for being a “good fat woman”. She looms large on a stage – literally – and holds enough power in public protest to make a crowd of 7,000 people “jump to left”, chant, sing, and march. In response, some perceive Sandra less as a tactical and strategic leader of the union movement, and more as the “jolly fat woman” who entertains, MCs, and leads public events. Though even in this role, she has been criticised for being too loud, too much, too big.These criticisms are loudest when Sandra is alongside other fat female bodies. When posting on social media photos with fellow trade union members the comments often note the need of the group to “go on a diet”. The collective fatness also brings comments about “not wanting to fuck any of that group of fat cows”. There is something politically and socially dangerous about fat women en masse. This was behind the responses to Sandra’s first public appearance as the President of TEU when one of the male union members remarked “Clearly you have to be a fat dyke to run this union.” The four top elected and appointed positions in the TEU have been women for eight years now and both their fatness and perceived sexuality present as a threat in a once male-dominated space. Even when not numerically dominant, unions are public spaces dominated by a “masculine culture … underpinned by the undervaluation of ‘women’s worth’ and notions of womanhood ‘defined in domesticity’” (Cockburn in Kirton 273-4). Sandra’s experiences in public space show that the derision and methods of putting fat girls back in their place varies dependent on whether the challenge to power is posed by a single fat body with positional power and a group of fat bodies with collective power.Fat Girls Are the FutureOn the other side of the world, Tara Vilhjálmsdóttir is protesting to change the law in Iceland. Tara believes that fat people should be protected against discrimination in public and private settings. Using social media such as Facebook and Instagram, Tara takes her message, and her activism, to her thousands of followers (Keller, 434; Pausé, “Rebel Heart”). And through mainstream media, she pushes back on fatphobia rhetoric and applies pressure on the government to classify weight as a protected status under the law.After a lifetime of living “under the oppression of diet culture,” Tara began her activism in 2010 (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She had suffered real harm from diet culture, developing an eating disorder as a teen and being told through her treatment for it that her fears as a fat woman – that she had no future, that fat people experienced discrimination and stigma – were unfounded. But Tara’s lived experiences demonstrated fat stigma and discrimination were real.In 2012, she co-founded the Icelandic Association for Body Respect, which promotes body positivity and fights weight stigma in Iceland. The group uses a mixture of real life and online tools; organising petitions, running campaigns against the Icelandic version of The Biggest Loser, and campaigning for weight to be a protected class in the Icelandic constitution. The Association has increased the visibility of the dangers of diet culture and the harm of fat stigma. They laid the groundwork that led to changing the human rights policy for the city of Reykjavík; fat people cannot be discriminated against in employment settings within government jobs. As the city is one of the largest employers in the country, this was a large step forward for fat rights.Tara does receive her fair share of hate messages; she’s shared that she’s amazed at the lengths people will go to misunderstand what she is saying (Vilhjálmsdóttir). “This isn’t about hurt feelings; I’m not insulted [by fat stigma]. It’s about [fat stigma] affecting the livelihood of fat people and the structural discrimination they face” (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She collects the hateful comments she receives online through screenshots and shares them in an album on her page. She believes it is important to keep a repository to demonstrate to others that the hatred towards fat people is real. But the hate she receives only fuels her work more. As does the encouragement she receives from people, both in Iceland and abroad. And she is not alone; fat activists across the world are using Web 2.0 tools to change the conversation around fatness and demand civil rights for fat people (Pausé, “Rebel Heart”; Pausé, “Live to Tell").Using Web 2.0 tools as a way to protest and engage in activism is an example of oppositional technologics; a “political praxis of resistance being woven into low-tech, amateur, hybrid, alternative subcultural feminist networks” (Garrison 151). Fat activists use social media to engage in anti-assimilationist activism and build communities of practice online in ways that would not be possible in real life (Pausé, “Express Yourself” 1). This is especially useful for those whose protests sit at the intersections of oppressions (Keller 435; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 19). Online protests have the ability to travel the globe quickly, providing opportunities for connections between protests and spreading protests across the globe, such as SlutWalks in 2011-2012 (Schuster 19). And online spaces open up unlimited venues for women to participate more freely in protest than other forms (Harris 479; Schuster 16; Garrison 162).Whether online or offline, women are represented as dangerous in the political sphere when they act without male champions breaching norms of femininity, when their involvement challenges the role of woman as moral guardians, and when they make the body the site of protest. Women must ‘do politics’ politely, with utmost control, and of course caringly; that is they must play their ‘designated roles’. Whether or not you fit the gendered norms of political life affects how your protest is perceived through the media (van Acker). Coulter’s tweet loudly proclaimed that the fat ‘girls’ protesting the election of the 45th President of the United States were unworthy, out of control, and not worthy of attention (ironic, then, as her tweet caused considerable conversation about protest, fatness, and the reasons not to like the President-Elect). What the Coulter tweet demonstrates is that fat women are perceived as doubly-problematic in public space, both as fat and as women. They do not do politics in a way that is befitting womanhood – they are too visible and loud; they are not moral guardians of conservative values; and, their bodies challenge masculine power.ReferencesAgenda Feminist Media Collective. “Women in Society: Public Debate.” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 10 (1991): 31-44.Bay, Kivan. “How Nazis Use Fat to Excuse Violence.” Medium, 7 Feb. 2018. 1 May 2018 <https://medium.com/@kivabay/how-nazis-use-fat-to-excuse-violence-b7da7d18fea8>.———. “Without Fat Girls, There Would Be No Protests.” Bullshit.ist, 13 Nov. 2016. 16 May 2018 <https://bullshit.ist/without-fat-girls-there-would-be-no-protests-e66690de539a>.Bliss, Katherine Elaine. Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City. Penn State Press, 2010.Caha, Omer. Women and Civil Society in Turkey: Women’s Movements in a Muslim Society. London: Ashgate, 2013.Caron, Christina. “Heather Heyer, Charlottesville Victim, Is Recalled as ‘a Strong Woman’.” New York Times, 13 Aug. 2017. 1 May 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/heather-heyer-charlottesville-victim.html>.Chenut, Helen. “Anti-Feminist Caricature in France: Politics, Satire and Public Opinion, 1890-1914.” Modern & Contemporary France 20.4 (2012): 437-452.Crandall, Christian S. "Prejudice against Fat People: Ideology and Self-Interest." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66.5 (1994): 882-894.Damousi, Joy. “Representations of the Body and Sexuality in Communist Iconography, 1920-1955.” Australian Feminist Studies 12.25 (1997): 59-75.Dean, Marge, and Shirl Buss. “Fat Underground.” YouTube, 11 Aug. 2016 [1975]. 1 May 2018 <https://youtu.be/UPYRZCXjoRo>.Fountaine, Susan. “Women, Politics and the Media: The 1999 New Zealand General Election.” PhD thesis. Palmerston North, NZ: Massey University, 2002.Freespirit, Judy, and Aldebaran. “Fat Liberation Manifesto November 1973.” The Fat Studies Reader. Eds. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York: NYU P, 2009. 341-342.Garber, Megan. “The Selective Empathy of #MeToo Backlash.” The Atlantic, 11 Feb 2018. 5 Apr. 2018 <https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/02/the-selective-empathy-of-metoo-backlash/553022/>.Garrison, Edith. “US Feminism – Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave.” Feminist Studies 26.1 (2000): 141-170.Garvey, Nicola. “Violence against Women: Beyond Gender Neutrality.” Looking Back, Moving Forward: The Janus Women’s Convention 2005. Ed. Dale Spender. Masterton: Janus Trust, 2005. 114-120.Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Yale UP, 1992.Grey, Sandra. “Women, Politics, and Protest: Rethinking Women's Liberation Activism in New Zealand.” Rethinking Women and Politics: New Zealand and Comparative Perspectives. Eds. John Leslie, Elizabeth McLeay, and Kate McMillan. Victoria UP, 2009. 34-61.———, and Matthew Fitzsimons. “Defending Democracy: ‘Keep MMP’ and the 2011 Electoral Referendum.” Kicking the Tyres: The New Zealand General Election and Electoral Referendum of 2011. Eds. Jon Johansson and Stephen Levine. Victoria UP, 2012. 285-304.———, and Marian Sawer, eds. Women’s Movements: Flourishing or in Abeyance? London: Routledge, 2008.Harris, Anita. “Mind the Gap: Attitudes and Emergent Feminist Politics since the Third Wave.” Australian Feminist Studies 25.66 (2010): 475-484.Haussegger, Virginia. “#MeToo: Beware the Brewing Whiff of Backlash.” Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Mar. 2018. 1 Apr. 2018 <https://www.smh.com.au/national/metoo-beware-the-brewing-whiff-of-backlash-20180306-p4z33s.html>.Keller, Jessalynn. “Virtual Feminisms.” Information, Communication and Society 15.3(2011): 429-447.Kirston, Gill. “From ‘a Woman’s Place Is in Her Union’ to ‘Strong Unions Need Women’: Changing Gender Discourses, Policies and Realities in the Union Movement.” Labour & Industry: A Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work 27.4 (2017): 270-283.Kyrölä, Katariina. The Weight of Images. London: Routledge, 2014.Ledwith, Sue. “Gender Politics in Trade Unions: The Representation of Women between Exclusion and Inclusion.” European Review of Labour and Research 18.2 (2012): 185-199.Lyndsey, Susan. Women, Politics, and the Media: The 1999 New Zealand General Election. Dissertation. Massey University, 2002.Maddison, Sarah, and Sean Scalmer. Activist Wisdom: Practical Knowledge and Creative Tension in Social Movements. Sydney: UNSW P, 2006. Moynihan, Carolyn. A Stand for Decency: Patricia Bartlett & the Society for Promotion of Community Standards, 1970-1995. Wellington: The Society, 1995.Murray, Samantha. "Pathologizing 'Fatness': Medical Authority and Popular Culture." Sociology of Sport Journal 25.1 (2008): 7-21.Pausé, Cat. “Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat.” Somatechnics 21 (2012): 42-56.———. “Express Yourself: Fat Activism in the Web 2.0 Age.” The Politics of Size: Perspectives from the Fat-Acceptance Movement. Ed. Ragen Chastain. Praeger, 2015. 1-8.———. “Rebel Heart: Performing Fatness Wrong Online.” M/C Journal 18.3 (2015).Rowland, Robyn, ed. Women Who Do and Women Who Don’t Join the Women’s Movement. London: Routledge, 1984.Schuster, Julia. “Invisible Feminists? Social Media and Young Women’s Political Participation.” Political Science 65.1 (2013): 8-24.Sheppard, Alice. "Suffrage Art and Feminism." Hypatia 5.2 (1990): 122-136.Simic, Zora. “Fat as a Feminist Issue: A History.” Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism. Eds. Helen Hester and Caroline Walters. London: Ashgate, 2015. 15-36.Spangler, Todd. “White-Supremacist Site Daily Stormer Booted by Hosting Provider.” Variety, 13 Aug. 2017. 1 May 2018 <https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/daily-stormer-heather-heyer-white-supremacist-neo-nazi-hosting-provider-1202526544/>.Smyth, Helen. Rocking the Cradle: Contraception, Sex, and Politics in New Zealand. Steele Roberts, 2000.Tiggemann, Marika, and Esther D. Rothblum. "Gender Differences in Social Consequences of Perceived Overweight in the United States and Australia." Sex Roles 18.1-2 (1988): 75-86.Van Acker, Elizabeth. “Media Representations of Women Politicians in Australia and New Zealand: High Expectations, Hostility or Stardom.” Policy and Society 22.1 (2003): 116-136.Vilhjálmsdóttir, Tara. Personal interview. 1 June 2018.

Introduction In October 2008, the UK’s National Videogame Archive became a reality and after years of negotiation, preparation and planning, this partnership between Nottingham Trent University’s Centre for Contemporary Play research group and The National Media Museum, accepted its first public donations to the collection. These first donations came from Sony’s Computer Entertainment Europe’s London Studios who presented the original, pre-production PlayStation 2 EyeToy camera (complete with its hand-written #1 sticker) and Harmonix who crossed the Atlantic to deliver prototypes of the Rock Band drum kit and guitar controllers along with a slew of games. Since then, we have been inundated with donations, enquiries and volunteers offering their services and it is clear that we have exciting and challenging times ahead of us at the NVA as we seek to continue our collecting programme and preserve, conserve, display and interpret these vital parts of popular culture. This essay, however, is not so much a document of these possible futures for our research or the challenges we face in moving forward as it is a discussion of some of the issues that make game preservation a vital and timely undertaking. In briefly telling the story of the genesis of the NVA, I hope to draw attention to some of the peculiarities (in both senses) of the situation in which videogames currently exist. While considerable attention has been paid to the preservation and curation of new media arts (e.g. Cook et al.), comparatively little work has been undertaken in relation to games. Surprisingly, the games industry has been similarly neglectful of the histories of gameplay and gamemaking. Throughout our research, it has became abundantly clear that even those individuals and companies most intimately associated with the development of this form, do not hold their corporate and personal histories in the high esteem we expected (see also Lowood et al.). And so, despite the well-worn bluster of an industry that proclaims itself as culturally significant as Hollywood, it is surprisingly difficult to find a definitive copy of the boxart of the final release of a Triple-A title let alone any of the pre-production materials. Through our journeys in the past couple of years, we have encountered shoeboxes under CEOs’ desks and proud parents’ collections of tapes and press cuttings. These are the closest things to a formalised archive that we currently have for many of the biggest British game development and publishing companies. Not only is this problematic in and of itself as we run the risk of losing titles and documents forever as well as the stories locked up in the memories of key individuals who grow ever older, but also it is symptomatic of an industry that, despite its public proclamations, neither places a high value on its products as popular culture nor truly recognises their impact on that culture. While a few valorised, still-ongoing, franchises like the Super Mario and Legend of Zelda series are repackaged and (digitally) re-released so as to provide continuity with current releases, a huge number of games simply disappear from view once their short period of retail limelight passes. Indeed, my argument in this essay rests to some extent on the admittedly polemical, and maybe even antagonistic, assertion that the past business and marketing practices of the videogames industry are partly to blame for the comparatively underdeveloped state of game preservation and the seemingly low cultural value placed on old games within the mainstream marketplace. Small wonder, then, that archives and formalised collections are not widespread. However antagonistic this point may seem, this essay does not set out merely to criticise the games industry. Indeed, it is important to recognise that the success and viability of projects such as the NVA is derived partly from close collaboration with industry partners. As such, it is my hope that in addition to contributing to the conversation about the importance and need for formalised strategies of game preservation, this essay goes some way to demonstrating the necessity of universities, museums, developers, publishers, advertisers and retailers tackling these issues in partnership. The Best Game Is the Next Game As will be clear from these opening paragraphs, this essay is primarily concerned with ‘old’ games. Perhaps surprisingly, however, we shall see that ‘old’ games are frequently not that old at all as even the shiniest, and newest of interactive experiences soon slip from view under the pressure of a relentless industrial and institutional push towards the forthcoming release and the ‘next generation’. More surprising still is that ‘old’ games are often difficult to come by as they occupy, at best, a marginalised position in the contemporary marketplace, assuming they are even visible at all. This is an odd situation. Videogames are, as any introductory primer on game studies will surely reveal, big business (see Kerr, for instance, as well as trade bodies such as ELSPA and The ESA for up-to-date sales figures). Given the videogame industry seems dedicated to growing its business and broadening its audiences (see Radd on Sony’s ‘Game 3.0’ strategy, for instance), it seems strange, from a commercial perspective if no other, that publishers’ and developers’ back catalogues are not being mercilessly plundered to wring the last pennies of profit from their IPs. Despite being cherished by players and fans, some of whom are actively engaged in their own private collecting and curation regimes (sometimes to apparently obsessive excess as Jones, among others, has noted), videogames have, nonetheless, been undervalued as part of our national popular cultural heritage by institutions of memory such as museums and archives which, I would suggest, have largely ignored and sometimes misunderstood or misrepresented them. Most of all, however, I wish to draw attention to the harm caused by the videogames industry itself. Consumers’ attentions are focused on ‘products’, on audiovisual (but mainly visual) technicalities and high-definition video specs rather than on the experiences of play and performance, or on games as artworks or artefact. Most damagingly, however, by constructing and contributing to an advertising, marketing and popular critical discourse that trades almost exclusively in the language of instant obsolescence, videogames have been robbed of their historical value and old platforms and titles are reduced to redundant, legacy systems and easily-marginalised ‘retro’ curiosities. The vision of inevitable technological progress that the videogames industry trades in reminds us of Paul Duguid’s concept of ‘supersession’ (see also Giddings and Kennedy, on the ‘technological imaginary’). Duguid identifies supersession as one of the key tropes in discussions of new media. The reductive idea that each new form subsumes and replaces its predecessor means that videogames are, to some extent, bound up in the same set of tensions that undermine the longevity of all new media. Chun rightly notes that, in contrast with more open terms like multimedia, ‘new media’ has always been somewhat problematic. Unaccommodating, ‘it portrayed other media as old or dead; it converged rather than multiplied; it did not efface itself in favor of a happy if redundant plurality’ (1). The very newness of new media and of videogames as the apotheosis of the interactivity and multimodality they promise (Newman, "In Search"), their gleam and shine, is quickly tarnished as they are replaced by ever-newer, ever more exciting, capable and ‘revolutionary’ technologies whose promise and moment in the limelight is, in turn, equally fleeting. As Franzen has noted, obsolescence and the trail of abandoned, superseded systems is a natural, even planned-for, product of an infatuation with the newness of new media. For Kline et al., the obsession with obsolescence leads to the characterisation of the videogames industry as a ‘perpetual innovation economy’ whose institutions ‘devote a growing share of their resources to the continual alteration and upgrading of their products. However, it is my contention here that the supersessionary tendency exerts a more serious impact on videogames than some other media partly because the apparently natural logic of obsolescence and technological progress goes largely unchecked and partly because there remain few institutions dedicated to considering and acting upon game preservation. The simple fact, as Lowood et al. have noted, is that material damage is being done as a result of this manufactured sense of continual progress and immediate, irrefutable obsolescence. By focusing on the upcoming new release and the preview of what is yet to come; by exciting gamers about what is in development and demonstrating the manifest ways in which the sheen of the new inevitably tarnishes the old. That which is replaced is fit only for the bargain bin or the budget-priced collection download, and as such, it is my position that we are systematically undermining and perhaps even eradicating the possibility of a thorough and well-documented history for videogames. This is a situation that we at the National Videogame Archive, along with colleagues in the emerging field of game preservation (e.g. the International Game Developers Association Game Preservation Special Interest Group, and the Keeping Emulation Environments Portable project) are, naturally, keen to address. Chief amongst our concerns is better understanding how it has come to be that, in 2009, game studies scholars and colleagues from across the memory and heritage sectors are still only at the beginning of the process of considering game preservation. The IGDA Game Preservation SIG was founded only five years ago and its ‘White Paper’ (Lowood et al.) is just published. Surprisingly, despite the importance of videogames within popular culture and the emergence and consolidation of the industry as a potent creative force, there remains comparatively little academic commentary or investigation into the specific situation and life-cycles of games or the demands that they place upon archivists and scholars of digital histories and cultural heritage. As I hope to demonstrate in this essay, one of the key tasks of the project of game preservation is to draw attention to the consequences of the concentration, even fetishisation, of the next generation, the new and the forthcoming. The focus on what I have termed ‘the lure of the imminent’ (e.g. Newman, Playing), the fixation on not only the present but also the as-yet-unreleased next generation, has contributed to the normalisation of the discourses of technological advancement and the inevitability and finality of obsolescence. The conflation of gameplay pleasure and cultural import with technological – and indeed, usually visual – sophistication gives rise to a context of endless newness, within which there appears to be little space for the ‘outdated’, the ‘superseded’ or the ‘old’. In a commercial and cultural space in which so little value is placed upon anything but the next game, we risk losing touch with the continuities of development and the practices of play while simultaneously robbing players and scholars of the critical tools and resources necessary for contextualised appreciation and analysis of game form and aesthetics, for instance (see Monnens, "Why", for more on the value of preserving ‘old’ games for analysis and scholarship). Moreover, we risk losing specific games, platforms, artefacts and products as they disappear into the bargain bucket or crumble to dust as media decay, deterioration and ‘bit rot’ (Monnens, "Losing") set in. Space does not here permit a discussion of the scope and extent of the preservation work required (for instance, the NVA sets its sights on preserving, documenting, interpreting and exhibiting ‘videogame culture’ in its broadest sense and recognises the importance of videogames as more than just code and as enmeshed within complex networks of productive, consumptive and performative practices). Neither is it my intention to discuss here the specific challenges and numerous issues associated with archival and exhibition tools such as emulation which seek to rebirth code on up-to-date, manageable, well-supported hardware platforms but which are frequently insensitive to the specificities and nuances of the played experience (see Newman, "On Emulation", for some further notes on videogame emulation, archiving and exhibition and Takeshita’s comments in Nutt on the technologies and aesthetics of glitches, for instance). Each of these issues is vitally important and will, doubtless become a part of the forthcoming research agenda for game preservation scholars. My focus here, however, is rather more straightforward and foundational and though it is deliberately controversial, it is my hope that its casts some light over some ingrained assumptions about videogames and the magnitude and urgency of the game preservation project. Videogames Are Disappearing? At a time when retailers’ shelves struggle under the weight of newly-released titles and digital distribution systems such as Steam, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Marketplace, WiiWare, DSiWare et al bring new ways to purchase and consume playable content, it might seem strange to suggest that videogames are disappearing. In addition to what we have perhaps come to think of as the ‘usual suspects’ in the hardware and software publishing marketplace, over the past year or so Apple have, unexpectedly and perhaps even surprising themselves, carved out a new gaming platform with the iPhone/iPod Touch and have dramatically simplified the notoriously difficult process of distributing mobile content with the iTunes App Store. In the face of this apparent glut of games and the emergence and (re)discovery of new markets with the iPhone, Wii and Nintendo DS, videogames seem an ever more a vital and visible part of popular culture. Yet, for all their commercial success and seemingly penetration the simple fact is that they are disappearing. And at an alarming rate. Addressing the IGDA community of game developers and producers, Henry Lowood makes the point with admirable clarity (see also Ruggill and McAllister): If we fail to address the problems of game preservation, the games you are making will disappear, perhaps within a few decades. You will lose access to your own intellectual property, you will be unable to show new developers the games you designed or that inspired you, and you may even find it necessary to re-invent a bunch of wheels. (Lowood et al. 1) For me, this point hit home most persuasively a few years ago when, along with Iain Simons, I was invited by the British Film Institute to contribute a book to their ‘Screen Guides’ series. 100 Videogames (Newman and Simons) was an intriguing prospect that provided us with the challenge and opportunity to explore some of the key moments in videogaming’s forty year history. However, although the research and writing processes proved to be an immensely pleasurable and rewarding experience that we hope culminated in an accessible, informative volume offering insight into some well-known (and some less-well known) games, the project was ultimately tinged with a more than a little disappointment and frustration. Assuming our book had successfully piqued the interest of our readers into rediscovering games previously played or perhaps investigating games for the first time, what could they then do? Where could they go to find these games in order to experience their delights (or their flaws and problems) at first hand? Had our volume been concerned with television or film, as most of the Screen Guides are, then online and offline retailers, libraries, and even archives for less widely-available materials, would have been obvious ports of call. For the student of videogames, however, the choices are not so much limited as practically non-existant. It is only comparatively recently that videogame retailers have shifted away from an almost exclusive focus on new releases and the zeitgeist platforms towards a recognition of old games and systems through the creation of the ‘pre-owned’ marketplace. The ‘pre-owned’ transaction is one in which old titles may be traded in for cash or against the purchase of new releases of hardware or software. Surely, then, this represents the commercial viability of classic games and is a recognition on the part of retail that the new release is not the only game in town. Yet, if we consider more carefully the ‘pre-owned’ model, we find a few telling points. First, there is cold economic sense to the pre-owned business model. In their financial statements for FY08, ‘GAME revealed that the service isn’t just a key part of its offer to consumers, but its also represents an ‘attractive’ gross margin 39 per cent.’ (French). Second, and most important, the premise of the pre-owned business as it is communicated to consumers still offers nothing but primacy to the new release. That one would trade-in one’s old games in order to consume these putatively better new ones speaks eloquently in the language of obsolesce and what Dovey and Kennedy have called the ‘technological imaginary’. The wire mesh buckets of old, pre-owned games are not displayed or coded as treasure troves for the discerning or completist collector but rather are nothing more than bargain bins. These are not classic games. These are cheap games. Cheap because they are old. Cheap because they have had their day. This is a curious situation that affects videogames most unfairly. Of course, my caricature of the videogame retailer is still incomplete as a good deal of the instantly visible shopfloor space is dedicated neither to pre-owned nor new releases but rather to displays of empty boxes often sporting unfinalised, sometimes mocked-up, boxart flaunting titles available for pre-order. Titles you cannot even buy yet. In the videogames marketplace, even the present is not exciting enough. The best game is always the next game. Importantly, retail is not alone in manufacturing this sense of dissatisfaction with the past and even the present. The specialist videogames press plays at least as important a role in reinforcing and normalising the supersessionary discourse of instant obsolescence by fixing readers’ attentions and expectations on the just-visible horizon. Examining the pages of specialist gaming publications reveals them to be something akin to Futurist paeans dedicating anything from 70 to 90% of their non-advertising pages to previews, interviews with developers about still-in-development titles (see Newman, Playing, for more on the specialist gaming press’ love affair with the next generation and the NDA scoop). Though a small number of publications specifically address retro titles (e.g. Imagine Publishing’s Retro Gamer), most titles are essentially vehicles to promote current and future product lines with many magazines essentially operating as delivery devices for cover-mounted CDs/DVDs offering teaser videos or playable demos of forthcoming titles to further whet the appetite. Manufacturing a sense of excitement might seem wholly natural and perhaps even desirable in helping to maintain a keen interest in gaming culture but the effect of the imbalance of popular coverage has a potentially deleterious effect on the status of superseded titles. Xbox World 360’s magnificently-titled ‘Anticip–O–Meter’ ™ does more than simply build anticipation. Like regular features that run under headings such as ‘The Next Best Game in The World Ever is…’, it seeks to author not so much excitement about the imminent release but a dissatisfaction with the present with which unfavourable comparisons are inevitably drawn. The current or previous crop of (once new, let us not forget) titles are not simply superseded but rather are reinvented as yardsticks to judge the prowess of the even newer and unarguably ‘better’. As Ashton has noted, the continual promotion of the impressiveness of the next generation requires a delicate balancing act and a selective, institutionalised system of recall and forgetting that recovers the past as a suite of (often technical) benchmarks (twice as many polygons, higher resolution etc.) In the absence of formalised and systematic collecting, these obsoleted titles run the risk of being forgotten forever once they no longer serve the purpose of demonstrating the comparative advancement of the successors. The Future of Videogaming’s Past Even if we accept the myriad claims of game studies scholars that videogames are worthy of serious interrogation in and of themselves and as part of a multifaceted, transmedial supersystem, we might be tempted to think that the lack of formalised collections, archival resources and readily available ‘old/classic’ titles at retail is of no great significance. After all, as Jones has observed, the videogame player is almost primed to undertake this kind of activity as gaming can, at least partly, be understood as the act and art of collecting. Games such as Animal Crossing make this tendency most manifest by challenging their players to collect objects and artefacts – from natural history through to works of visual art – so as to fill the initially-empty in-game Museum’s cases. While almost all videogames from The Sims to Katamari Damacy can be considered to engage their players in collecting and collection management work to some extent, Animal Crossing is perhaps the most pertinent example of the indivisibility of the gamer/archivist. Moreover, the permeability of the boundary between the fan’s collection of toys, dolls, posters and the other treasured objects of merchandising and the manipulation of inventories, acquisitions and equipment lists that we see in the menus and gameplay imperatives of videogames ensures an extensiveness and scope of fan collecting and archival work. Similarly, the sociality of fan collecting and the value placed on private hoarding, public sharing and the processes of research ‘…bridges to new levels of the game’ (Jones 48). Perhaps we should be as unsurprised that their focus on collecting makes videogames similar to eBay as we are to the realisation that eBay with its competitiveness, its winning and losing states, and its inexorable countdown timer, is nothing if not a game? We should be mindful, however, of overstating the positive effects of fandom on the fate of old games. Alongside eBay’s veneration of the original object, p2p and bittorrent sites reduce the videogame to its barest. Quite apart from the (il)legality of emulation and videogame ripping and sharing (see Conley et al.), the existence of ‘ROMs’ and the technicalities of their distribution reveals much about the peculiar tension between the interest in old games and their putative cultural and economic value. (St)ripped down to the barest of code, ROMs deny the gamer the paratextuality of the instruction manual or boxart. In fact, divorced from its context and robbed of its materiality, ROMs perhaps serve to make the original game even more distant. More tellingly, ROMs are typically distributed by the thousand in zipped files. And so, in just a few minutes, entire console back-catalogues – every game released in every territory – are available for browsing and playing on a PC or Mac. The completism of the collections allows detailed scrutiny of differences in Japanese versus European releases, for instance, and can be seen as a vital investigative resource. However, that these ROMs are packaged into collections of many thousands speaks implicitly of these games’ perceived value. In a similar vein, the budget-priced retro re-release collection helps to diminish the value of each constituent game and serves to simultaneously manufacture and highlight the manifestly unfair comparison between these intriguingly retro curios and the legitimately full-priced games of now and next. Customer comments at Amazon.co.uk demonstrate the way in which historical and technological comparisons are now solidly embedded within the popular discourse (see also Newman 2009b). Leaving feedback on Sega’s PS3/Xbox 360 Sega MegaDrive Ultimate Collection customers berate the publisher for the apparently meagre selection of titles on offer. Interestingly, this charge seems based less around the quality, variety or range of the collection but rather centres on jarring technological schisms and a clear sense of these titles being of necessarily and inevitably diminished monetary value. Comments range from outraged consternation, ‘Wtf, only 40 games?’, ‘I wont be getting this as one disc could hold the entire arsenal of consoles and games from commodore to sega saturn(Maybe even Dreamcast’ through to more detailed analyses that draw attention to the number of bits and bytes but that notably neglect any consideration of gameplay, experientiality, cultural significance or, heaven forbid, fun. “Ultimate” Collection? 32Mb of games on a Blu-ray disc?…here are 40 Megadrive games at a total of 31 Megabytes of data. This was taking the Michael on a DVD release for the PS2 (or even on a UMD for the PSP), but for a format that can store 50 Gigabytes of data, it’s an insult. Sega’s entire back catalogue of Megadrive games only comes to around 800 Megabytes - they could fit that several times over on a DVD. The ultimate consequence of these different but complementary attitudes to games that fix attentions on the future and package up decontextualised ROMs by the thousand or even collections of 40 titles on a single disc (selling for less than half the price of one of the original cartridges) is a disregard – perhaps even a disrespect – for ‘old’ games. Indeed, it is this tendency, this dominant discourse of inevitable, natural and unimpeachable obsolescence and supersession, that provided one of the prime motivators for establishing the NVA. 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