Journal articles on the topic 'Anger turned against oneself'

Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion, Marlene K. Sokolon, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006, pp. 217.Marlene K. Sokolon has provided an intellectually stimulating and highly original work on Aristotle's understanding of the emotions, mainly as presented in his treatise the Art of Rhetoric. The central thesis of Sokolon's book manifests itself in her analysis of the emotion of anger. According to Sokolon, for Aristotle anger is the paradigmatic human emotion, defined as the desire for revenge for a dishonourable and undeserving public insult against oneself or those one loves. Of this desire for revenge, Sokolon argues that “for Aristotle, unique human anger is not ‘at’ something, but more properly ‘with’ what some other person did or intends to do. Anger and the other political emotions are certain kinds of judgments or perceptions about sociopolitical circumstances. Anger judges specific kinds of events with an acknowledged political, or what we now call ‘cultural,’ meaning” (p. 55). Thus, Sokolon argues that for Aristotle the emotional experience of anger occurs in social and political contexts where there are evaluations of worth in situations involving relations of power. But if anger is the paradigmatic human emotion, this means that anger is not simply representative of various political emotions, but illustrates that human emotion as such is an essentially political phenomenon. Sokolon's thesis, therefore, is that for Aristotle, “man is by nature a political animal” not simply because he possesses reason, the apparent claim of the Politics, but also because he experiences emotions.

Toward the end of his nine-year tenure as Fellow, Thomas Hooker awoke in his sleeping quarters at Emmanuel College terrified by a sense of “the Just Wrath of Heaven.” His God, the same God in whom he had always put his trust, had turned against him and was furious at his sinfulness. Dreading divine punishment, Hooker found himself “fill'd. . . with most unusual Degrees of Horror and Anguish.” Alone in the night, Hooker was haunted by the anger of a terrifying God.

AbstractThis paper reconstructs Nietzsche’s conception of spiritual illness, especially as exhibited in various forms of the bad conscience, and asks what positive, ennobling potential Nietzsche finds in it. The relevant concept of spirit is arrived at by reconstructing Nietzsche’s conception of life and then considering what reflexive life – life turned back against itself – would look like. It distinguishes four independent features of spiritual illness: the measureless drive to make oneself suffer, self-opacity (or mendaciousness), life-denial, and a self-undermining dynamic in which life exhausts the sources of its own vitality. The paper ends by considering various suggestions as to how these features of spiritual illness might also be preconditions of great spiritual health, including the preconditions for erecting new “ideals.”

Jean-Baptiste Morin, arguably Europe’s most noted astrologer and anti-Copernican, was a key figure in a bitter controversy involving Pierre Gassendi, Ismaël Boulliau, and a dozen other notable savants. News of the dispute captivated Learned Europe for two decades (1630-1650). It was not a backwater affair. After a humiliating quarrel on longitude, Morin expressed his anger by publicly pitting astrology against Copernicanism, by counterpointing the Copernican Question and the Astrology Question in matters of theology and cosmology. His strategy failed. Capitalizing on Morin’s challenge, the New Science not only turned a bitter personal dispute into a fruitful public debate, it firmly established its autonomy and authority. In the end, astrology was not simply marginalized – it did not die from collateral damage – and it did not die a natural death. The death of astrology was by public execution.

ObjectivesMalicious incidents involving chemical agents sometimes trigger high public concern. We aimed to (1) identify levels of emotion, perceived risk and behaviour change with regard to visiting Salisbury, 1 month after three people were poisoned with a nerve agent; and (2) test whether factors including receipt of information, beliefs about personal exposure and trust in government were associated with these outcomes.DesignA cross-sectional telephone survey of a random sample of Salisbury residents.SettingConducted between 5 and 13 April 2018.Participants500 residents aged 18 or over.Outcome measuresSelf-reported anxiety, anger, uncertainty, perceived risk to self and avoidance of Salisbury.ResultsAny degree of anxiety, anger and uncertainty was reported by 40.6%, 29.8% and 30.6% of participants, respectively. For the majority, the level of emotion reported was mild. Only 7.0% met the criteria for high anxiety and 5.2% reported feeling any risk to their health, whereas 18.6% reported avoiding Salisbury. Factors associated with avoidance of Salisbury included being female, unable to rule out exposure for oneself or of loved ones, believing the incident was targeted against the general public, and lower trust in the government and responding agencies. Hearing a lot or a little about the recovery support (eg, financial packages), as opposed to nothing at all, and being satisfied with this information were associated with reduced avoidance.ConclusionsAlthough the March 2018 Salisbury incident had a relatively modest impact on emotion and risk perception in the community, the number who reported avoiding the city was notable. In this, and in future incidents, assuring people that contamination resulted from a targeted, rather than indiscriminate, incident; demonstrating that contamination is contained within specific areas; improving communication about any financial support; and promoting trust in responding agencies should help provide additional reassurance to the community.

According to Daly, the church doctrines on the Triune God, Christology, Mariology and the Fall are all myths, originated from, and as a result of, patriarchy. Daly deals with many topics from a woman’s viewpoint such as deity, evil, Christology, morality and the church. Daly contends throughout her works that women’s power has been stolen from them through the ingrained structures of patriarchy and that women have to reclaim what is theirs. Daly believes that this means the castration of patriarchal language and images that are part of the structures of a sexist world. She sees patriarchy as a world religion and believes that all religions are subjects of patriarchy − living off female energy. Without any doubt, historically women were marginalised: not only in society but also within the church. However with this said, this article will contend that Daly has succumbed to her anger and rage against the patriarchal structures that oppressed her – and other women – placing the blame squarely on God. Daly rejected God as divine omnipotent, divine immutable and divine providence and objected to the fact that God is viewed as being changeless. The wrong ideas of God’s existence were a result of androcentric theological teachings and doctrines, and she turned away from the Christian faith altogether.

In his lectures on the philosophy of history Hegel passes this famous judgement on the French Revolution. “Anaxagoras had been the first to say that nous governs the world; but only now did humanity come to recognize that thought should rule spiritual actuality. This was thus a magnificent dawn”. What first gave rise to discontent in France, in Hegel's view, were the heavy burdens that pressed upon the people and the government's inability to procure for the Court the means of supporting its luxury and extravagance. But soon the new spirit of freedom and enlightenment began to stir in men's minds and carry them forward to revolution. “One should not, therefore, declare oneself against the assertion”, Hegel concludes, “that the Revolution received its first impulse from Philosophy” (VPW, p 924). However, Hegel points out that the legacy of the revolution is actually an ambiguous one. For, although the principles which guided the revolution were those of reason and were indeed magnificent – namely, that humanity is born to freedom and self-determination – they were held fast in their abstraction and turned “polemically”, and at times terribly, against the existing order (VPW, p 925). What ultimately triumphed in the revolution was thus not concrete reason itself, but abstract reason or understanding (VPW, p 923). In Hegel's view, the enduring legacy of such revolutionary understanding was, not so much the Terror, but the principle that “the subjective wills of the many should hold sway” (VPW, p 932). This principle, which Hegel calls the principle of “liberalism” and which we would call the principle of majority rule, has since spread from France to become one of the governing principles of modern stat. It has been used to justify granting universal suffrage, to justify depriving corporations and the nobility of the right to sit in the legislature, and in some cases to justify abolishing the monarchy. What is of crucial importance for Hegel, however, is that such measures have not rendered the state more modern and rational, but have in fact distorted the modern state.

§0. Introduction. Ask a beginning philosophy of mathematics student why we believe the theorems of mathematics and you are likely to hear, “because we have proofs!” The more sophisticated might add that those proofs are based on true axioms, and that our rules of inference preserve truth. The next question, naturally, is why we believe the axioms, and here the response will usually be that they are “obvious”, or “self-evident”, that to deny them is “to contradict oneself” or “to commit a crime against the intellect”. Again, the more sophisticated might prefer to say that the axioms are “laws of logic” or “implicit definitions” or “conceptual truths” or some such thing.Unfortunately, heartwarming answers along these lines are no longer tenable (if they ever were). On the one hand, assumptions once thought to be self-evident have turned out to be debatable, like the law of the excluded middle, or outright false, like the idea that every property determines a set. Conversely, the axiomatization of set theory has led to the consideration of axiom candidates that no one finds obvious, not even their staunchest supporters. In such cases, we find the methodology has more in common with the natural scientist's hypotheses formation and testing than the caricature of the mathematician writing down a few obvious truths and preceeding to draw logical consequences.The central problem in the philosophy of natural science is when and why the sorts of facts scientists cite as evidence really are evidence. The same is true in the case of mathematics. Historically, philosophers have given considerable attention to the question of when and why various forms of logical inference are truth-preserving. The companion question of when and why the assumption of various axioms is justified has received less attention, perhaps because versions of the “self-evidence” view live on, and perhaps because of a complacent if-thenism.

Contemporary culture is represented in the paper in the fairy tale optics in its ethical dimensions. Such prospects allow to ascertain ethical values which contemporaneity draws in archaic stratum of culture and generates basing on invariants of past. Using M. M. Bakhtin's ideas of great time of culture and outsideness, the author exposes a fairy tale as a phenomenon that once appeared in archaics but in every further cultural-historic period is able to represent its new facets what are unknown to all previous epochs. A fairy tale acts in therapeutic, orienting and educational functions since the time if its origins. Today a fairy tale has lost archaic horror tinge and obtained some romantic veil and moralistic color. These dimensions are reflected in an image of a hero. The paper points out the distinction between ethical and democratic heroes (the idea of M. E. Meletinsky). It is mentioned that content of an image of a democratic hero is better grasped by the N. Tec's concept a "dormant hero". It is a dormant hero whom contemporary culture comprehends most of all types of a fairy tale heroes. He leaves an impression that everybody can find oneself at his place. His heroic powers are ex- posed gradually. During the storytelling, it is turned out that he possesses definite virtues, personifies moral integrity. It is mentioned in the paper that today there are transformations in the comprehension what qualities are virtues. Qualities necessary for support of ancestors' cult as well as for keeping house were considered as virtues in archaic culture whereas contemporaneity represents in current fairy tale adaptations qualities clear for people today, such as valor, courage, resourcefulness, quick-wittedness. Virtues allow hero to negotiate obstacles, pass tests. Ethical pathos of a fairy tale is accumulated in victorious struggle against evil, for realization of justice, resumption of the lost equity. Ethical content of a fairy tale are visualized. At the basic level, visualization of good and evil is represented in immediate reality of beauty and ugliness. The second level of ethical content visualization is specified by imagination which allows audience to create images and visualize mean- ings in free flight of fancy. The third level is determined by proper ability of a fairy tale to use symbols. At that level, heroes are represented as symbols-keepers of cultural memory.

In the Bible it is often found a difficult part to understand, especially in this paper about the plan of the Lord who wanted to kill Moses. Even if you look deeper, Moses is a person sent by the LORD to free the nation of Israel from occupation in Egypt. This section needs to be examined more deeply, so that it can be searched for what is the basis of this action of the Lord, and at the same time what theological meanings are contained in this section, which are also relevant to present life. Through word study research efforts, it can be found that the plan of the Lord to kill Moses was not a playful plan, but it was a truly serious plan. But all these plans could be failed because Zipporah, the wife of Moses, succeeded in making atonement with the LORD through the foreskin of Moses 'son who was affixed to Moses' pubic. This indicates that the Lord's plan occurred because Moses was negligent in keeping his holiness, which is to circumcise his child. Holiness is the most important thing in carrying out all forms of service and call of God. If this holiness was ignored, then it could be that the Lord's plan to send someone turned into the anger of the LORD against the one sent.Abstrak: Dalam Alkitab seringkali dijumpai bagian yang sulit untuk dipahami. Terkait dengan tulisan ini, bagian yang sangat sulit itu adalah tentang rencana TUHAN yang hendak membunuh Musa. Padahal kalau dilihat lebih dalam lagi, Musa adalah orang yang diutus oleh TUHAN untuk membebaskan bangsa Israel dari kerja paksa di Mesir. Bagian ini perlu untuk diteliti lebih dalam lagi, agar dapat dicari apa yang menjadi dasar dari tindakan TUHAN ini, dan sekaligus ditarik makna teologi apa yang terkandung dalam bagian ini, yang juga relevan bagi kehidupan sekarang. Melalui studi kata, maka dapat dijumpai bahwa rencana TUHAN membunuh Musa bukanlah rencana yang main-main, tetapi merupakan rencana yang memang sungguh-sungguh. Namun semua rencana itu dapat digagal-kan karena ada Zipora, istri Musa, yang berhasil mengadakan upaya ‘pendamaian’ dengan TUHAN melalui kulit khatan anak Musa yang ditempelkan ke ‘kemaluan’ Musa. Ini menandakan bahwa rencana TUHAN itu terjadi karena Musa telah lalai dalam menjaga kekudusan dirinya, yaitu menyunatkan anaknya. Kekudusan meru-pakan hal terpenting dalam menjalankan segala bentuk pelayanan dan panggilan TUHAN. Apabila kekudusan ini diabaikan, maka bisa saja rencana TUHAN mengutus seseorang berubah menjadi kemarahan TUHAN terhadap yang diutus.

There is little dispute that the Iranian revolution, the ensuing hostagecrises in Tehmn and Beirut, the Salman Rushdie affair, and, finally, thePemian Gulf war have drastically changed the image of Islam in the West.The hetoric of the most ardent Muslim activists has been accepted at facevalue, and Islam has been identified as a revolutionary force with an axe togrind against the West. Although the Western phobia of Islam has somejustification, the West has allowed stereotypes and shibboleths to rule itsjudgment too easily. Explicitly, as well as implicitly, Islam is depicted in themedia and even academic literature as the religion of war, vengeance, anddestruction-as a force that is inimical to the orderly conduct of internationalrelations and the progress of society and politics. Islam is viewed as hostileto democracy, minority rights, and women's welfare. Islam as a world civilizationhas been reduced to Islamic fundamentalism, and even then the Westhas preferred to cling to political slogans rather than grapple with complexsociopolitical pmesses in undetstanding the theoretical and political challengeof Islamic movements.The radications of the simultaneous reduction of Islam to fundamentalismand the "mythologization" of fundamentalism are immediately clear.The West turned a blind eye to a brutal military coup in Algeria in 1991, believingthat martial rule would be a far better option for Algeria and the Westthan an Islamic government in Algiers. The reaction to the crisis in the formerrepublics of Yugoslavia has been equally perplexing, especially in the lightof Serbia's glorification of its genocidal carnage of Bosnians as "a worthycause" that Europe will eventually appreciate. After all, the Serbs are "doingEurope a favor by ridding it of the menace of Islam." Muslims have in factcharged, and rightly so, that the West follows a different set of standards ondemocracy and human rights when it comes to Muslim societies.Is the Western reaction to things Islamic mere genuflection or does it reveala more deep-seated anger and distrust of Islam? If the latter is the case,what will the consequences of such a policy be for global interests of theWest? The Islamic threat: Myth or Reality? offers answers to these queries.Esposito, a leading expert on Islamic studies who has written prolifically onthe relation of Islam to politics, provides a lucid examination of the roots ofMuslims' activism and the Westem response to it. He places the attitude ofIslamic movements towards the West in the context of the Muslim experience ...

Ever since Modernist and Capitalist systems started to steer human life, critical approaches towards these two phenomenon have treated as subjects in literary works. In such literary works, which question human being's perception of ethics, the relationship between power and person brings along the options of being included in the system and rejecting it. Standing against the "inevitable ending" which turns human being into an automat defined as "a bureaucratic steel cage" by Weber, Marx has relatively more optimistic attitude about the possibility of human to escape from the system.In his theatre play titled Gizler Çarşısı, Turgay Nar narrates how human is corrupted through violence and control methods of power within the scope of hierarchical relations in the world. Messages that the author aims to give to readers/audience may differ in almost every stage; yet the main theme can be read as tragedy of human being which keeps to be objectified in front of the power. The strength behind money and power ensures a control over crowds via violence, memory impairment and amnesia. The author ironically narrates how humanbeing comes into power and then systematically puts pressure on the same species in order to disidentify them and include them into the system. Accordingly, civilization does not prevent humanbeing's insanity; the one who feeds this wild order and sacrifices oneself to it is nothing else than humanbeing. In the work, it is also emphasized that humanbeing is going to face "blinding and corruption" as soon as the questioning about the world comes to an end.In his work titled Gizler Çarşısı, Turgay Nar ironically narrates how Beşikçi, an ordinary citizen, is systematically desensitized by the power and turned into a beast that does not hesitate to kill even his own child, through symbolical characters. ÖzetModernizm ve Kapitalizm sisteminin insanoğlunun hayatına yön vermeye başlamasıyla bu iki olguya yönelik eleştirel yaklaşımlar, edebî eserlerde sıkça işlenmiştir. İnsanın etik algısının da sorgulandığı bu tür eserlerde iktidar-birey arasındaki ilişki, sisteme dâhil olma veya sisteme karşı çıkma tercihlerini de beraberinde getirmektedir. Weber’in “bürokratik demir kafes” olarak tanımladığı ve insanın bir otomat haline dönüştürüldüğü “kaçınılmaz son”a karşı çıkan Marx; insanın sistemden uzaklaşabileceği konusunda daha iyimser bir tavır sergiler.Turgay Nar, Gizler Çarşısı adlı tiyatro metninde insanın dünyada hiyerarşik ilişkiler sarmalında iktidarın şiddet ve kontrol yöntemleriyle nasıl çürümeye uğratıldığını anlatır. Yazarın, okuyucuya/seyirciye vermek istediği mesajlar, hemen her sahnede değişse de ana tema iktidar karşısında nesneleşen insanın trajedisi olarak okunabilir. İktidar ve paranın gücü, kalabalıklar üzerinde şiddet, unutkanlık, hafıza kaybı gibi vasıtalarla denetim sağlar. Yazar, insanın iktidara geldikten sonra hemcinsi üzerinde sistematik bir baskı kurarak onu kimliksizleştirip sisteme dâhil ettiğini ironik bir tarzda bu eserinde işler. Buna göre, uygarlık, insanoğlunun cinnetini durduramamıştır; bu vahşi düzeni emziren ve kendini ona tutsak/kurban eden de insanın kendisidir. Eserde, dünyayla ilgili sorgulamanın kesildiği an insanın “körleşme ve çürüme”yle karşı karşıya kalacağı tehlikesi de dile getirilir.

Introduction Such symptoms as hard, complex, bodily or mental feelings, that turn our everyday life into a hell, at first, lead us to a doctor, and then - to a psychotherapist. A sick man is keen to get rid of a symptom. A doctor prescribes medication, that is ought to eliminate a symptom. A psychotherapist searches for a reason of the problem that needs to be removed. There is such an idea that a neurotic symptom, in particular, an anxiety - is a pathological (spare or extra) response of a body. It is generally believed that such anxiety doesn’t have some real, objective reasons and that it is the result of a nervous system disorder, or some disruption of a cognitive sphere etc. Meanwhile, it is known that in the majority of cases, medical examinations of anxious people show that they don’t have any organic damages, including nervous system. It often happens that patients even wish doctors have found at least any pathology and have begun its treatment. And yet - there is no pathology. All examinations indicate a high level of functionality of a body and great performance of the brain's work. Doctors throw their hands up, as they can't cure healthy people. One of my clients told me her story of such medical examinations (which I’ll tell you with her permission). She said that it was more than 10 years ago. So, when she told her doctor all of her symptoms - he seemed very interested in it. He placed a helmet with electrodes on her head and wore some special glasses, when, according to her words, he created some kind of stressful situation for her brain, as she was seeing some flashings of bright pictures in her eyes. She said that he had been bothered with her for quite a long time, and at the end of it he had told her that her brain had been performing the best results in all respects. He noted that he’d rarely got patients with such great health indicators. My client asked the doctor how rare that was. And he answered: “one client in two or three months.” At that moment my client didn’t know whether to be relieved, flattered or sad. But since then, when someone told her that anxiety was a certain sign of mental problems, or problems with the nervous system, or with a body in general, she answered that people who had anxiety usually had already got all the required medical examinations sufficiently, and gave them the advice to go through medical screening by themselves before saying something like that. Therefore, we see a paradoxical situation, when some experts point to a neurotic anxiety as if it is a kind of pathology, in other words - some result of a nervous system disorder. Other specialists in the same situation talk about cognitive impairments. And some, after all the examinations, are ready to send such patients into space Main text I don’t agree with the statement that any neurotic anxiety that happens is excessive and unfounded. It often happens that there is objective, specific and real causes for appearance of anxiety conditions. And these causes require solutions. And it’s not about some organic damages of the brain or nervous system. The precondition that may give a rise to anxiety disorder is the development of such a life story that at some stage becomes too toxic - when, on the one hand, a person interacts with the outside world in a way that destroys his or her personality, and, on the other hand, this person uses repression and accepts such situation as common and normal. Repression - is an essential condition for the development of a neurotic symptom. Sigmund Freud was the first who pointed this out. Repression is such a defense mechanism that helps people separate themselves from some unpleasant feelings of discomfort (pain) while having (external or internal) irritations. It is the situation when, despite the presence of irritations and painful feelings, a person, however, doesn't feel any of it and is not aware of them in his or her conscious mind. Repression creates the situation of so-called emotional anesthesia. As a result, a displacement takes place, so a body starts to signal about the existing toxic life situation via a symptom. Anxiety disorder is usually an appropriate response (symptom) of a healthy body to an unhealthy life situation, which is seen by a person as normal. And it’s common when such a person is surrounded by others (close people), who tend to benefit from such situation, and so they actively maintain this state of affairs, whether it is conscious for them or not. At the beginning of a psychotherapy almost all clients insist that everything is good in their lives, even great, as it is like in everyone else’s life. They say that they have only one problem, which is that goddamn symptom. So they focus all of their attention on that symptom. They are not interested in all the other aspects of their life, and they show their irritation when it comes to talking about it. People want to get rid of it, whatever it takes, but they often tend to keep their lives the way that it was. In such cases a psychotherapist is dealing with the resistance of clients, trying to turn their attention from a symptom to their everyday situation that includes their way of thinking, interactions with themselves and with others and with the external world in order to have the opportunity to see the real problem, to live it through, to rethink and to change the story of their lives. For better understanding about how it works I want to tell you three allegorical tales. The name of the first tale is “A frog in boiling water”. There is one scientific anecdote and an assumption (however, it is noted that such experiments were held in 19 century), that if we put a frog in a pot with warm water and start to slowly heat the water, then this frog get used to the temperature rise and stays in a hot water, the frog doesn’t fight the situation, slowly begins to lose its energy and at the last moment it couldn’t find enough strength and energy to get out of that pot. But if we throw a frog abruptly in hot water - it jumps out very quickly. It is likely that a frog, that is seating in boiling water, will have some responses of the body (symptoms). For example, the temperature of its body will rise, the same as the color of it, etc., that is an absolutely normal body response to the existing situation. But let us keep fantasizing further. Imagine a cartoon where such a frog is the magical cartoon hero, that comes to some magical cartoon doctor, shows its skin, that has changed the color, to the doctor, and asks to change the situation by removing this unpleasant symptom. So the doctor prescribes some medication to return the natural green color of the frog’s skin back. The frog gets back in its hot water. For some period of time this medication helps. But then, after a while, the frog’s body gets over the situation, and the redness of the frog's skin gets back. And the magical cartoon doctor states that the resistance of the body to this medication has increased, and each time prescribes some more and more strong drugs. In this example with the frog it is perfectly clear that the true solution of the problem requires the reduction of the water temperature in that pot. We could propose that magical cartoon frog to think and try to realize that: 1) the water in that pot is hot, and that is the reason why the skin is red; 2) the frog got used to this situation and that is why it is so unnoticeably for this frog; 3) if the temperature of the water in the pot still stay so hot, without any temperature drop, then all the medication works only temporarily; 4) if we lower the temperature in that pot - the redness disappears on its own, automatically and without any medication. Also this cartoon frog, that will go after the doctor to some cartoon physiotherapist, will face the necessity to give itself some answers for such questions as: 1) What is going on? Who has put this frog in that pot? Who is raising the temperature progressively? Who needs it? And what is the purpose or benefit for this person in that? Who benefits? 2) Why did the frog get into the pot? What are the benefits in it for the frog? Or why did the frog agree to that? 3) What does the frog lose when it gets out of this pot? What are the consequences of it for the frog? What does the frog have to face? What are the possible difficulties on the way? Who would be against the changes? With whom the frog may confront? 4) Is the frog ready to take control over its own pot in its own hands and start to regulate the temperature of the water by itself, so to make this temperature comfortable for itself? Is this frog ready to influence by itself on its own living space, to take the responsibility for it to itself? The example “A frog in boiling water” is often used as a metaphorical portrayal of the inability of people to respond (or fight back) to significant changes that slowly happen in their lives. Also this tale shows that a body, while trying to adjust to unfavorable living conditions, will react with a symptom. And it is very important to understand this symptom. Symptom - is the response of a body, it’s a way a body adjusts to some unfriendly environment. Symptom, on the one hand, informs about the existence of a problem, and from the other hand - tries to regulate this problem, at least in some way (like, to remove or reduce), at the level on which it can do it. The process is similar to those when, for example, in a body, while it suffers from some infectious disease, the temperature rises. Thus, on the one hand, the temperature informs about the existence of some infection. On the other hand, the temperature increase creates in a body the situation that is damaging for the infection. So, it would be good to think about in what way does an anxiety symptom help a body that is surrounded by some toxic life situation. And this is a good topic for another article. Here I want to emphasize that all the attempts to remove a symptom without a removal of a problem, without changing the everyday life story, may lead to strengthening of the symptom in the body. Even though the removal of a symptom without elimination of its cause has shown success, it only means that the situation was changed into the condition of asymptomatic existence of a problem. And it is, in its essence, a worse situation. For example, it can cause an occurrence of cancer. The tale “A frog in boiling water” is about the tendency of people to treat a symptom, instead of seeing their real problems, as its cause, and trying to solve it. People don’t want to see their problems, but it doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist. The problem does exist and it continues to destroy a person, unnoticeably for him or her. A person with panic disorder could show us anxiety that is out of control (fear, panic), which, by its essence, seems to exist without any logical reason. Meanwhile the body of such a person could be in such processes that are similar to those that occur in the conditions of some real dangers, when the instinct for self-preservation is triggered and an automatic response of a body to fight or flight implements for its full potential. We can see or feel signs of this response, for example, in cases when some person tries to avoid some real or imaginary danger via attempts to escape (the feeling of fear), or tries to handle the situation by some attempts to fight (the feeling of anger). As I mentioned before, many doctors believe that such fear is pathological, as there is no real reason for such intense anxiety. They may see the cause of the problem in worrisome temper, so they try to remove specifically anxiety rather than help such patients to understand specific reason of their anxiety, they use special psychotherapeutic methods that are designed to help clients to develop logical thinking, so it must help them to realize the groundlessness of their anxiety. In my point of view, such anxiety often has specific, real reasons, when this response of a body, fight or flight, is absolutely appropriate, but not excessive or pathological. Inadequacy, in fact, is in the unconsciousness, but not in the reactions of a body. For a better understanding of the role of anxiety in some toxic environment, that isn’t realized, I want to tell you another allegorical tale called “The wolf and the hare”. Let us imagine that two cages were brought together in one room. The wolf was inside one cage and the hare was in another. The cages were divided by some kind of curtain that makes it impossible for them to see each other. At this point a question arises whether the animals react to each other in some way in such a situation, or not? I think that yes, they will. Since there are a lot of other receptors that participate in the receiving and processing of the sensory information. As well as sight and hearing, we have of course a range of other senses. For example, animals have a strong sense of smell. It is well known that people, along with verbal methods of communicating information, like language and speaking, also have other means of transmitting information - non-verbal, such as tone of voice, intonation, look, gestures, body language, facial expressions etc., that gives us the opportunity to receive additional information from each other. The lie detector works by using this principle: due to detecting non-verbal signals, it distinguishes the level of the accuracy of information that is transmitted. It is assumed, that about 30% of information, that we receive from the environment, comes through words, vision, hearing, touches etc. This is the information that we are aware of in our consciousness, so we could consciously (logically) use it to be guided by. And approximately 70% of everyday information about the reality around us we receive non-verbally, and this information in the majority of cases could remain in us without any recognition. It is the situation when we’ve already known something, and we even have already started to respond to it via our body, but we still don’t know logically and consciously that we know it. We can observe the responses of our own body without understanding what are the reasons for such responses. We can recognize this unconscious information through certain pictures, associations, dreams, or with the help of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a great tool that can help to recognize the information from the unconscious mind, so that it can be logically processed further on, in other words, a person then receives the opportunity to indicate the real problems and to make right decisions. But let us return to the tale where the hare and the wolf stay in one room and don’t see each other, and, maybe, don’t hear, though - feel. These feelings (in other words - non-verbal information that the hare receives) activate a certain response in the hare’s body. And it reacts properly and adequately to the situation, for instance, the body starts to produce adrenaline and runs the response “fight or flight”. So the hare starts to behave accordingly and we could see the following symptoms: the hare is running around his cage, fussing, having some tremor and an increased heart rate, etc.. And now let us imagine this tale in some cartoon. The hare stays in its house, and the wolf wanders about this house. But the hare doesn’t see the wolf. Though the body of the hare gives some appropriate responses. And then that cartoon hare goes to a cartoon doctor and asks that doctor to give it some pill from its tremor and the increased heart rate. And in general asks to treat in some way this incomprehensible, confusing, totally unreasonable severe anxiety. If we try to replace the situation from this fairy-tale to a life story, we could see that it fits well to the script of interdependent relationships, where there are a couple “a victim and an aggressor”, and where such common for our traditional families’ occurrences as a domestic family violence, psychological and physical abuse take place. Only in 2019 a law was passed that follows the European norms and gives a legislative definition of such concepts as psychological domestic abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, bullying, that criminalizes all of these occurrences, establishes the punishment and directly points to people that could be a potential abuser. Among them are: a husband towards his wife, parents towards their children, a wife towards her husband, a superior towards a subordinate, a teacher towards his or her students, children towards each other etc.. When it comes to recognition of something as unacceptable, it seems more easy to put to that category such occurrences as physical and sexual abuse, as we could see here some obvious events. For example, beating or sexual harassment. Our society is ready to respond to these incidents in more or less adequate way, and to recognize them as a crime. But it is harder to deal with the recognition of psychological abuse as an offence. Psychological abuse in our families is common. Psychological abuse occurs through such situations, when one person, while using different psychological manipulations, such as violation of psychological borders, imposition of feeling of guilty or shame, etc., force another person to give up his or her needs and desires, and so in such a way make this person live another’s life. Such actions have an extremely negative effect on the mental health of these people, just as much as physical abuse. It can destroy a person from the inside, ruin self-esteem and a feeling of self-worth, create the situation of absolute dependence such victim from an abuser, including financial dependence etc.. It often happens that psychological abuse takes place against the backdrop of demonstrations of care and love. So you've got this story about the wolf and the hare, that are right next to each other, and the shield between two of them is a repression - a psychological defense mechanism, when a person turns a blind eye to such offences, that take place in his or her own life and towards him or her. And this person considers this as normal, doesn't realize, doesn't have a resource to realize, that it is a crime. Most importantly - doesn’t feel anything, as a repression takes place. But a body responds in a right way - from a certain point of the existence of such a toxic situation the response “fight or flight” is launched in a body at full, in other words - the fear and anxiety with the associated symptoms. The third allegorical tale I called “Defective suit”, which I read in the book of Clarissa Pinkola Estés with the name “Running With the Wolves". “Once one man came to a tailor and started to try on a suit. When he was standing in front of a mirror, he saw that the costume had uneven edges. - Don’t worry, - said the tailor. - If you hold the short edge of the suit by your left hand - nobody notices it. But then the man saw that a lapel of a jacket folded up a little bit. - It's nothing. You only need to turn your head and to nail it by your chin. The customer obeyed, but when he put on trousers, he saw that they were pulling. - All right, so just hold your trousers like this by your right hand - and everything will be fine, - the tailor comforts him. The client agreed with him and took the suit. The next day he put on his new suit and went for a walk, while doing everything exactly in the way that the tailor told him to. He waddled in a park, while holding the lapel by his chin, and holding the short edge of the suit by his left hand, and holding his trousers by his right hand. Two old men, who were playing checkers, left the game and started to watch him. - Oh, God! - said one of them. - Look at that poor cripple. - Oh, yes - the limp - is a disaster. But I'm wondering, where did he get such a nice suit?” Clarissa wrote: “The commentary of the second old man reflects the common response of the society to a woman, who built a great reputation for herself, but turned into a cripple, while trying to save it. “Yes, she is a cripple, but look how great her life is and how lovely she looks.” When the “skin” that we put on ourselves towards society is small, we become cripples, but try to hide it. While fading away, we try to waddle perky, so everyone could see that we are doing really well, everything is great, everything is fine”. As for me, this tale is also about the process of forming a symptom in a situation when one person tries very hard to match to another one, whether it is a husband, a wife or parents. It’s about a situation when such a person always tries to support the other one, while giving up his or her own needs and causing oneself harm in such a way by feeling a tension every day, that becomes an inner normality. And so this person doesn’t give oneself a possibility to relax, to be herself (or himself), to be spontaneous, free. As a result, in this situation the person, who was supported, looks perfect from the outside, but those who tried to match, arises some visible defect, like a limp - a symptom. And so this person lives like a cripple, under everyday stress and tension, trying to handle it, while sacrificing herself (or himself) and trying to maintain this situation, so not to lose the general picture of a beautiful family and to avoid shame. The tailor, who made this defective suit and tells how to wear the suit properly, in order to keep things going as they are going, often is a mother who raised a problematic child and then tells another person how to deal with her child in the right way. It is the situation when a mother-in-law tells her daughter-in-law how to treat her son properly. In other words, how to support him, when to keep silent, to handle, how to fit in, so that her problematic son and this relationship in general looks perfect. Or vice versa, when a mother-in-law tells her son-in-law how to support her problematic daughter, how to fit in etc.. When, for example, a woman acts like this in her marriage and with her husband, with these excessive efforts to fit in - then after a while everybody will talk like: “Look at this lovely man: he lives with his sick wife, and their family seems perfect!”. But when such a woman becomes brave enough to relax and to just let the whole thing go, everybody will see that the relationship in her marriage isn’t perfect, and it is the other one who has problems. Each time when someone tries excessively to match up to another one, while turning oneself in some kind of a cripple, - he or she, on the one hand, supports the comfort of that person, to whom he or she tries to match up, and on the other hand - such a situation always arises in that person such conditions as a continuous tension, anxiety, fear to act spontaneously. A symptom - is like a visible defect, that shows itself through the body (and may look like some kind of injury). It is the result of a hidden inner prison. As a result of evolution, a pain tells us about a problem that is needed to be solved. When we repress our pain we can’t see our needs and our problems at full. And then a body starts to talk to us via a symptom. Psychotherapy aims for providing a movement from a symptom to a resumption of sensitivity to feelings, a resumption of the ability to feel your psychological pain, so you can realize your own toxic story. In this perspective another fairy-tale looks interesting to analyze - it is Andersen's fairytale “Princess and the Pea”. In the tale a prince wanted to find a princess to marry. There was one requirement for women candidates, so the prince could select her among commoner - high level of sensitivity, as the real princess would feel a pea through the mountain of mattresses, and so she could have the ability to feel discomfort, to be in a good contact with her body, to tell about her discomfort without such feeling as shame and guilt, and to refuse that discomfort, so to have the readiness to solve her problems and to demand from others the respect for her needs. It is common for our culture that the expression “a princess on a pea” very often uses for a negative meaning. So people who are in good contact with their body and who can demand comfort for themselves are often called capricious. At the same time the heroes who are ready to suffer and to tolerate their pain, who are able to repress (stop to feel) their pain represents a good example to be followed in our society. So, we may see the next algorithm in cases of various anxiety disorders: the existence of some toxic situation that brings some danger to a person. And we need not to be confused: a danger exists not for a body, but for a personality. A toxic live situation as well as having a panic attack is not a threat for the health of a body (that is what medical examinations show), and vice versa - it’s like every day intensive sport training, that could be good for your health only to some degree. A toxic situation destroys a person as a personality, who longs for one self’s expression; the existence of such a defense mechanism as repression - it’s a life with closed eyes, in pink glasses, when there is inability (or the absence of the desire) to see its own toxic story; 3.the presence of a symptom - a healthy response of a body “fight or flight” to some toxic situation; displacement - it’s replacement of the attention from the situation to a symptom, when a person starts to see and search for the problem in some other place, not where it really is. A symptom takes as some spare, pathological reaction that we need to get rid of. The readiness to fight the symptom arises, and that is the goal of such methods of therapy as pharmacological therapy, CBT and many others; the absence of adequate actions that are directed towards the change of a toxic situation itself. The absence of the readiness to show aggression when it comes to protect its space. All of it is a mechanism of formation of primary anxiety and preparation for launch of secondary anxiety. A complete anxiety disorder is the interaction between a primary and a secondary anxiety.

Constantius, as though the Temple of Janus had been closed and all enemies had been laid low, was longing to visit Rome and, following the death of Magnentius, to hold a triumph, without a victory title and after shedding Roman blood. For he did not himself defeat any belligerent nation or learn that any had been defeated through the courage of his commanders, nor did he add anything to the empire, and in dangerous circumstances he was never seen to lead from the front, nor even to be among the front ranks. But he wanted to display an exaggeratedly long procession, standards stiff with gold and the beauty of his attendants, to a population who were living more peacefully, neither anticipating nor wishing to see this or anything like it. For perhaps he was unaware that some earlier emperors had been content with lictors in peacetime, but when the heat of battle could not allow inactivity, one of them had entrusted himself to a small fishing boat, blasted by raging gales, another had followed the example of the Decii and offered up his life in a vow for the state, and another had himself explored the enemy camp alongside the regular soldiers; that, in short, various of them had won renown for magnificent deeds, and so committed their glories to the distinguished memory of posterity. …When he was approaching the city, observing with a serene expression the respectful attendance of the Senate, and the venerable likenesses of the patrician families, he thought, not like Cineas, the legate of Pyrrhus, that a multitude of kings had been assembled together, but rather that this was the refuge of the whole world [cumque urbi propinquaret, senatus officia, reuerendasque patriciae stirpis effigies, ore sereno contemplans, non ut Cineas ille Pyrrhi legatus, in unum coactam multitudinem regum, sed asylum mundi totius adesse existimabat]. Next, when he turned his gaze to the general populace, he was astonished at the speed with which every type of men from everywhere had flowed into Rome. As though he were trying to terrify the Euphrates or the Rhine with the sight of arms, with the standards in front of him on each side, he sat alone in a golden chariot, glittering with the shimmer of many different precious stones, whose flashes seemed to produce a flickering light. After many others had preceded him, he was surrounded by dragons, woven from purple cloth and affixed to the golden, bejewelled tips of spears, open to the wind with their broad mouths and so hissing as though roused with anger, trailing the coils of their tails in the wind [eumque post antegressos multiplices alios, purpureis subtegminibus texti, circumdedere dracones, hastarum aureis gemmatisque summitatibus illigati, hiatu uasto perflabiles, et ideo uelut ira perciti sibilantes, caudarumque uolumina relinquentes in uentum]. Then there came a twin column of armed men, with shields and plumed helmets, shining with glittering light, clothed in gleaming cuirasses, with armoured horsemen, whom they call clibanarii, arranged among them, masked and protected by breastplates, encircled with iron bands, so that you might have thought them to be statues finished by the hand of Praxiteles, not men [sparsique catafracti equites, quos clibanarios dictitant, personati thoracum muniti tegminibus, et limbis ferreis cincti, ut Praxitelis manu polita crederes simulacra, non uiros]. Slender rings of metal plates, fitted to the curves of the body, clothed them, spread across all their limbs, so that, in whatever direction necessity moved their joints, their clothing moved likewise, since the joins had been made to fit so well.When he was hailed as Augustus with favourable cries, [Constantius] did not shudder at the din that thundered from hills and shores, but showed himself unmoved, as he appeared in his provinces. For, when passing through high gates, he stooped his short body, and, keeping his gaze straight, as though his neck were fixed, he turned his head neither right nor left, as though an image of a man, and he was never seen to nod when the wheel shook, or to spit or wipe or rub his face or nose, or to move his hand [nam et corpus perhumile curuabat portas ingrediens celsas, et uelut collo munito, rectam aciem luminum tendens, nec dextra uultum nec laeua flectebat, tamquam figmentum hominis, nec, cum rota concuteret, nutans, nec spuens, aut os aut nasum tergens uel fricans, manumue agitans uisus est umquam]. Although this behaviour was an affectation, it, and other aspects of his more private life, were however indications of extraordinary endurance, granted to him alone, as it was given to be supposed. This passage, which describes the aduentus of Constantius II into Rome in 357, is one of the best-known episodes in the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus. This historical work was completed by the retired military officer in around 390, with the surviving books covering the period from 353 to the aftermath of the Battle of Adrianople in 378. Unsurprisingly, this passage is also one of the most debated. Throughout his work, Ammianus regularly criticized Constantius as a weak, vicious ruler, influenced by women and, in particular, eunuchs, and so contrasted him with his cousin and successor Julian, the emperor who receives the most favourable treatment within this text. The degree and nature of criticism within this particular passage has, however, been the subject of a variety of wildly differing interpretations. It is clear that, at the outset, Ammianus is inveighing against the notion of holding a triumph for victory in a civil war, but there has been debate over whether Constantius was actually celebrating a triumph or merely the anniversary of his accession. Similarly, the description of the Senate as ‘the refuge of the whole world’ has been read in contrasting ways, being regarded as derogatory by Johannes Straub, as neutral, or even positive, by Pierre Dufraigne, and as respectful by R.C. Blockley. While this passage as a whole is generally read as an attack on Constantius for his pretentions to ill-deserved military glory, it also raises the question of whether Ammianus was also criticizing Constantius for the way in which he performed his aduentus, emphasizing his pompous and autocratic behaviour in order to contrast him with Julian, who preferred to behave more like a ciuilis princeps in public. Of course, such a reading almost inevitably produces a portrait of Ammianus as an impractically nostalgic figure, harking back to a style of rule which was anachronistic in the post-Diocletianic Later Roman Empire. In addition, Ammianus also presented Julian as performing an aduentus into Constantinople in 361, employing some phrases that were similar to those used to describe Constantius’ procession in 357. Furthermore, as John Matthews has illustrated, Ammianus’ presentations of the occasions when Julian eschewed late-antique imperial protocol are not without tinges of criticism, and his judgement on the propriety of different modes of imperial behaviour varied dependent on the context.

It was on the night of the 11th August 1914, when news of a great war in Europe reached us at Mbua2 (a town in the South Cameroons, about nine weeks or more from Duala,3 (or Kribbi) and that preparations were being made between the allied forces of the British and French for a war with the Germans in the Cameroons. Being a native of Cape Coast and a British subject employed in an English factory,4 it occurred to me that I would fare badly at the hands of either the German soldiers or the natives should this news be authentic. The inevitable trend of events was evident if war really broke out, the natives being mostly cannibals, would attack all aliens, irrespective of race or colour and eat their flesh before any assistance from the German Government could be obtained. My agent was stationed at Njassi,5 four days from Mbua, and until I heard from him, my sole duty was to remain at my place. There was hardly any signs of agitation noticeable in Mbua between the 12th and 14th August, but on the 15th August, but on the 15th the natives could be seen running hither and thither, with spears in their hands, removing their belongings to the bush, mysteriously disappearing and returning in a similar manner, with a seeming stern resolve to finally eradicate all foreigners. These wild ignorant people had long waited for this with wariness, and nothing could afford them a better chance than such an event. In a short time the whole country was thrown into a state of commotion so that by the 18th instant no woman or child could be seen in the town of Mbua except the men who appear and disappear concocting dangerous schemes, with surprising secrecy. Besides myself in Mbua there were the following clerks: two Kwitta6 clerks with 26 yard boys, five Cameroon native clerks with 30 yard boys and two Gabon clerks with 6 yard boys. I had ten yard boys. All these people were concerned with the safety of their stores and preparing some means of defence, should the natives attack us. On the 20th August I received a note from my boss intimating that he had been arrested by the German authorities, and his stores commandeered and, that sooner or later, a similar treatment would be meted out to me, so I closed up my accounts, and gave up myself to contemplation of the future. The natives in the meantime, were blackmailing and marauding traders in the outlying villages, but hesitated to take any other important steps. The reason assigned to this, apparently was they were waiting till the German forces had passed to meet the French troops, who were proceeding from Molando Nola7 etc. News reached us of the doings of the natives at Ndelele,8 Bisom, Deligoni9 etc, and it made the heart quail to see thousands of loads of goods, stores, etc and several traders passing down to Dume10 station to seek refuge. One by one my boys deserted me, until by the 23rd August only three remained with me, ultimately even these three boys would not remain in the yard, and I was left alone with the arduous task of looking after the factory which contained goods to the amount of over £2000. Grim despair stared me in the face, and I lost my equilibrium for want of sleep. During the day, I took snatches of sleep, and at nights I kept watch and took precaution to safe guard myself against an attack from the natives. Several petty stores in Mbua were plundered by the natives; on the 26th August the German troops passed. An appeal for protection was made by all the traders to the German officers, but they were told to take care of themselves. The natives fled to the bush on the arrival of the German troops, and the German officers incensed at this action, ordered their houses to be burnt down, and their cattle seized. Next day the troops proceeded on their way. Nothing of importance happened to break the tension that ensued between the 26th and 28th but on the 30th but on the 30th on a dark and chilly night, I was awakened from a reverie by a slight noise at the back of the store. Being prepared for any emergency of the kind I took a large cudgel and cautiously walked to the back of the house whence the sound proceeded. As I anticipated, a man was strenuously working to force an entrance into the store. Near him lay a battle axe and other dangerous implements, and at the sight of me, he rose and taking a heavy stone flung it at me. It hit me forcibly on the knee, and inflicted a most excruciating pain, suppressing a groan I sprang at him, and dealt him a heavy blow with my cudgel. He staggered back but closed up with me again. I threw away the cudgel and in a moment we were engaged in a deadly contest. Nothing could be more horrible than the deadly means with which he sought to overcome me. He was a heavy man but by no means a good fighter. He hit out viciously, desperately but aimlessly, while I concentrated every effort to bring him to the ground. We swayed together, to and fro, locked in a tight embrace, but with an ability, which I afterwards failed to conceive, I wrenched myself from him and dealt him a blow right above the abdomen. With a loud yell he turned and fled. Pursuit was useless, so gathering up his tools, I took them to the house and repaired the damage which he had done to my store. Since then I was wont to be more vigilant than ever. Friends far and near, urged upon me to escape, giving as their reasons, that I was a British subject and working for an English firm. At first, I seriously considered their advice, but on maturer consideration, I deemed it imprudent to go away and leave the store unguarded. So I determined to stay through thick and thin. I may here cite one remarkable letter which I received in connection with this matter. It ran thus:- ‘Don’t be a silly ass and say your sense of duty forces you to stay and protect your store. You know how unreasonable the Germans are, and what would be your fate, should you fall into their hands. Your only chance lies in escaping, and I believe the greatest crime one can commit against nature is to be obstinate and refuse a chance in the face of a disaster. You are committing that offence now, and your guardian angel may be looking down upon you with pity and contempt for your act of folly. For goodness sake go, and may luck attend you.' To this and other subsequent letters I briefly replied thanking the writers for their advice and stating that I considered it injudicious to act upon them. One by one all the traders removed from Mbua, so that by the end of August only three important stores remained, including mine. About the 11th September, I received another note from my boss intimating that he was being sent down to Ajoa,11th September, I received another note from my boss intimating that he was being sent down to Ajoa,11 as a prisoner of war, by the Germans, and that I should follow at once. I dare not go, without the sanction of the German Government and I wrote to say so. On the 22nd September, however, a German official with three soldiers arrived to commandeer my store. This official first asked for the key of the safe which I handed to him. When I called his attention to the goods in the store, he said the best thing he could think of was to set fire to the goods, and put me inside to burn with them. ‘Dem be shit cargo, and I no get no time for count dem!’ he said, and then with a vehemence which alarmed me, this great German cursed me, the English, and everything connected with the English, and emphasised his words by kicking the breakable articles in the store. This caused me to giggle, but unfortunately he looked up and saw me in this act, and after that he administered heavy blows and kicks to me, he ordered the soldiers to bind me up, and keep me in custody. I soon found myself in the hands of these unscrupulous soldiers, whose cruelty was proverbial throughout South Cameroons. All day they goaded me to pain and anger. They were indeed painfully jocular; they tickled me, pelted at me with stones, ordered me to lick the dirty soles of their boots, and to do all sorts of un-nameable things. The officer stood by in calm indifference to my sufferings; my mute anger grew till I felt I must choke; an innocent person kept in captivity for the populace to stare at, might feel as I felt. These torments continued all day and the least reluctance on my part to comply with their requests was rewarded with whips and kicks. In addition to this, the cord with which I was bound gnawed into my flesh and inflicted a pain beyond description. I cried aloud in my agony for forbearance and the louder I cried out the more the soldiers jeered at me. Gradually I lost consciousness, and then all became still blackness. When I recovered consciousness, the German officer was bending over me, and I was unbound. My hands were very much swollen; this officer, after a short reproof full of venomous invectives handed me a passport to Ajoa, and ordered me to provision myself for the journey, I made up two loads and that very night I left Mbua with my boys.12 Great was my thankfulness to God for my wonderful deliverance from a torturing death, and from the hands of these wicked people, and as I repeated the ‘magnificat’ the only song of thankfulness that I could think of at the moment I said my last farewell to Mbua.

The aim of the article is to provide answers to two research questions. Firstly, what in business practice is needed to convert a contact into beneficial relationship. And secondly, whether numerous personal contacts, the so-called “connections” are sufficient to achieve sustained success in creating business relationships. The authors responded the questions by using the results of research conducted among 419 companies. As a result they proposed a scheme of the development process from contact to a beneficial relationship. Introduction Relationships are formed between entities conducting business as an effect of repeated interactions. Although crucial to the business, the notion of relationships is often not entirely understood, due to the fact that relationships are not limited to formal relations between companies. In practice of running business, relationships are seen as a remedy for the lack of opportunities for the development of the company, ensuring the expansion and success of the business. This, in turn, promotes the belief in the need to establish numerous contacts, which then have to transform into relationships being the source of many benefits. But in practice the transformation of contacts into relationships is not so simple. Hence, two research questions arise, the answer to which will be given by this article. First, what in practice of doing business is needed to transform a contact into a beneficial relationship? Second, are numerous contacts, i.e. so-called “connections” sufficient to achieve sustainable success in building business relationships? This paper will present the results of the research conducted among 419 companies of different sizes in Poland. The research “The global and local dimension of business networks” was carried out from November 2014 to June 2015. The structure of the analysed companies corresponds to the general structure of companies in Poland – 87 percent of them are small and medium-sized companies (the remaining 13 percent are large entities) and 74 percent are private entities with national capital. In the survey, we asked the representatives of management of companies about the characteristics and benefits of relationships connecting their companies with their most important key customers and key suppliers. This enabled indication of the essential conditions necessary for the creation of beneficial relationships. The essence of relationships between companies A relationship is a phenomenon that is formed during a long time and is developed through repeated interactions between entities [Easton, 1992]. Thus, a relationship is defined as an interdependent process of continuous interaction and exchange between at least two entities within a business network [Holmund, Törnroos, 1997] or as a mutual orientation of two companies towards each other, which means that the companies are prepared to work together and expect such actions from each other [Johanson, Mattsson, 1987]. During the process of development of a relationship, the entities create strong and wide, social, economic, service, and technological bonds, in order to reduce total costs over time, and to increasethe added value, thus achieving mutual benefits [Anderson, Narus, 1991]. An important characteristic of relationships is the fact that they need a longer time to be formed. The emergence of a relationship takes time and effort on the part of both entities [Forsgren, et al., 2015, Håkansson, Ford, 2002, Szymura- Tyc, 2015]. A long-term nature can be described as a reciprocal expectation on the part of entities that the relationship will continue [Ratajczak-Mrozek, 2009], although unexpected events can always lead to its break. Another typical features describing the real relationships, as opposed to usual contacts, include trust, commitment, and also loyalty [Leszczyński, 2014, Morgan, Hunt, 1994, Farrelly, Quester, 2003]. These features are related to the concept of the quality of a relationship, taking into account that from the perspective of the company, not every relationship is equally important. Relationships are developed only with a limited number of entities [Håkansson, Waluszewski, 1992], and there is also the claim that an average company has ten important relationships [Håkansson, Henders, 1992], and a limited number of relationships stems from the investments that are required in order to develop them [Ford, Håkansson, 2006]. These investments involve commitment of resources, including financial resources, as well as time. The assumption concerning a limited number of important business relationships means that the interactions themselves may or may not lead to the development of a relationship [Blois, 1997]. Hence, more important is the question about the conditions of transferring individual interactions, embodied by the network of one-off contacts, into relationships that bring benefits. Key features and benefits of relationships between companies To answer the question on what is necessary to transform a contact into a beneficial relationship in practice of running the business, the answers obtained from 419 companies, as mentioned above, have been analysed. The method applied involved a survey delivered by post and via the Internet, with both questionnaires including the same research questions, and the companies could receive the questionnaire only once. The address list has been prepared on the basis of a nationwide company database Kompass Poland, and the sampling frame included companies from all around Poland, representing all sectors and all sizes of companies. The sample was selected at random. The return rate of 11.8 percent was obtained in the case of surveys by post, and 2.4 for Internet surveys, which led to the total of 419 responses. The questions about key relationships of companies were answered by the representatives of management, which was to provide representative opinions on important relationships from the perspective of the entire company. In the first phase, the characteristics of relationships have been analysed (see Figure 1), which enables identification of the most important areas distinguishing the relationships from all contacts of the company, and allows to indicate what is necessary to convert contacts into relationships. It is widely believed that the formation of relationships takes time. The presented research confirms this dependency. For a relationship to be established, it is essential to develop informal standards of cooperation and trust, and it usually takes time. What is more, the fact of building trust is proved not only by the duration of interactions, but also by the conviction about the long-term attitude of the partners towards joint activities. It must be emphasised that these conditions apply both to the relationships with customers, as well as with suppliers. Also the quality of what is going on in the course of cooperation is important. A relationship connected with routine assignments once in a while will not necessarily bring a wide spectrum of benefits. Among other things, the transformation of a contact into a relationship can be accelerated by a frequent and regular cooperation. Whereas, it is essential for this frequency to be related not only with keeping contacts, but with actual offering of benefits. The research conducted shows that each time 59 percent of relationships, both with key customers and suppliers, is based on the economic calculation (not excluding, however, at the same time, the importance of other factors), which indicates that the relationship is not only an idealistic vision of cooperation. Generally, the companies guided by maximising profits are looking for the most economical and financially beneficial solutions. Thus, the question arises, what might be the motives of the companies to maintain the remaining 40 percent of relationships? If in their case the most important is not the simple economic calculation, than they must be associated with other than strictly direct financial benefits. Relationships can bring not only financial benefits but also imply the improvement of flexibility and speed of operation, reduction of transaction costs, risks, and uncertainty by the creation of routine proceedings, unwritten principles of cooperation, trust and mutual adaptation. As a consequence, the closer the cooperation is, the more difficult it becomes to change the partner. On the other hand, if for almost 60 percent of the companies the economic factor plays an important role, in their case it can mean either the lack of place for other reasons to build relationships or the lack of differences in the perception of the existing key business partners. The latter creates a special market opportunity for those companies, that have already possessed the ability to build long-term business relationships based on non-financial factors, as it allows to stand out against the closest competitors. In this context, the research conducted showed the main benefits achieved by the companies thanks to relationships with key customers and suppliers, which is the second stage of the research (Figure 2). Apparently, there is a certain group of common benefits for all relationships, regardless of the type of a partner. They are related to the widely understood development (which may be supported in terms of economics, technology, competence, reputation), creation of new products, trust, and risk mitigation associated therewith. Moreover, in the case of key customer relationships, there are benefits associated with sales – directly, its growth and factors supporting it (recommendations and prestige). In turn, in the case of relationships with key suppliers, there are benefits related with the costs of operation (directly, reduction of costs, greater flexibility, and an increase in the margin). The broad range of benefits achieved by relationships at the same time indicates the key condition that must be satisfied to convert the contacts into relationships. If one of the parties does not achieve benefits, it means that there is no interest in the development of long-term and close relationships. In such a case, the relation is a rather forced contact (for example, due to the lack of alternatives in choosing a supplier, impossibility of allowing oneself to lose the customer providing revenues). Hence, for a contact to result in a relationship, it is necessary to appropriately identify and offer benefits sought by the other party. Speaking of relationships, the importance of having connections in the business is often emphasized. Meanwhile, the research conducted shows that the personal contacts are of a limited importance and in the absence of significant benefits, business relationships gradually erode. Bearing in mind the respondents’ answers, it should rather be stated that it is the effort made in the longer period to maintain mutually beneficial relationships, including frequent contacts with customers, that promotes the widening and deepening of the existing connections, which consequently sometimes also have the chance to be continued on the business and non-business grounds. In the above situation, contacts between people play a role in creating quality of the already existing relationships. It will be expressed in the way of communication, the depth and scope of cooperation, the distinguishing feature of which will be, in particular, the informal, direct and quick solving of emerging conflicts of interest or current problems. It should be remembered that the condition for this is the presence of benefits valued by both parties. Otherwise, the effort made sooner or later will begin to be perceived by one or the other side as unjustified. It is worth to note here that due to the dominant share of financial benefits in business relationships indicated in the research, the time horizon within which the parties assess the relationships, can be relatively short. And this in turn may affect the growth of their dynamics, and can cause their low resistance to changing conditions. Therefore, as indicated above, numerous contacts do not have to convert into numerous and durable relationships of the company at all. Wide personal contacts are good as a starting point, enable breaking through formal barriers associated with complex organisational structures or the lack of resources, and establishing the first contact between the companies, but not necessarily translate into real and beneficial relationships. On the other hand, business relationships do not have to be permanent, especially if they are based only on achieving financial benefits. The process of developing a contact into a beneficial relationship Building relationships takes time and requires orientation towards a long-term cooperation. For a contact to develop into a relationship, one needs to remember about the benefits that can be offered and which are important to the future or existing partner. But such benefits cannot be provided to all customers and suppliers, thus, it is important to be selective. It does not mean being closed to new contacts, on the contrary. It is important, however, to search for such contacts for which a high potential to build relationships based on mutual benefits can be indicated. Selectivity is not just a matter of choosing of those with whom direct contacts will be established, but relates also to the scope of time and effort necessary to be borne in order to transform particular contacts into established relationships. It may be considered that the expected benefits will be greater in the case of sustained involvement in several selected contacts and building business bonds with them, than in the case of blind devotion to establishing numerous contacts, and then making cursory attempts to “build relationships” with everybody. In this context, a considerable involvement of time and resources in building bonds with customers and suppliers that are guided only by the economic calculation (in this case the only criterion will always be a lower price), who, guided by undisclosed premises showed a lack of loyalty or turned out to be opportunist entities, who value immediate benefits more than long-term cooperation, may be found doubtful. Based on the survey, several key conditions necessary for the transformation of the established contact with a potential partner into a long-term beneficial relationship can be distinguished. They include the selectivity in relation to contacts, focusing on the target group (not – the more the better), discovering of this group and offering significant benefits to them, and then devoting time and keeping appropriate frequency of contacts. At the same time, these conditions are reflected in the process of developing relationships, which can be divided into four main stages, as shown in Figure 3. How might this process look like in practice, for example, in relation to a company providing B2B (business-tobusiness) services? The first stage can pose some difficulties, especially when one does not have extensive““connections”, and the target group, which can be offered the most benefits, while maximising one’s own, has not been precisely defined. After gaining interest in a potential partner that meets certain criteria, where the personal contacts can turn out to be helpful, the company oriented towards building longterm relationships will be more focused on awakening and increasing confidence than on maximising their financial benefits in the short-term. Due to the lack of previous experience in working together, and the risk associated therewith, the first contacts may be limited to rather small assignments. The development of the relationship at this stage will be promoted by considerable commitment, frequent contacts between people, ensuring that certain benefits have been achieved, which in turn should build trust, which will allow for the continuation of cooperation and obtaining new, possibly larger assignments. They will be an opportunity to strengthen cooperation, mutual matching, simplifying and making the operations more routine, which will greatly reduce the costs incurred and will improve the profitability of orders. In turn, a well-established cooperation will promote building relationships aiming at achieving objectives other than purely financial (Figure 2). Summary and managerial implications The suggestions presented in this article are not a guarantee of success and building beneficial, long-term relationships with every business partner. The results of the research indicate, however, that the orientation towards the simultaneous achievement of financial and nonfinancial benefits by both sides of the relationship is not common, and therefore, it may become a significant factor differentiating the company from others operating on the given market. Above all, however, this will require time, added value offered to the other partner, selection of and concentration on the most prospective partners, and effort spent on searching for mutually beneficial solutions and maintenance of proper daily contacts. Sometimes, despite the efforts undertaken, there may appear disappointment, frustration and discouragement. This is due to the fact that the assessment of the benefits arising from business relationships may change together with changing circumstances, and even despite the best efforts of one of the partners, the overall balance of benefits may lead the other party to decide to terminate or limit the existing relationship. Potential benefits of permanent business relationships, indicated by the surveyed respondents, however, are high enough to fully justify this effort. On the other hand, it may be so large that despite its efforts the entity will be able to create only few or one strong relationship with its business partner. It is, therefore, recommended for this partner to be significant or at least with a large development potential. It is important to recognise that a personal feeling and gaining a direct contact to a decision-maker of a potential business partner does not necessarily mean that there will be a commercial transaction completed, and even more, that one managed to establish a lasting business relationship. As shown in the article, there is still a long way to go, and requires crossing a number of stages of the defined process of developing the contact into the beneficial relationship.

The article presents the results of a study on the predominant emotional components in adolescent girls with eating disorders, which manifested itself in the form of anorexia nervosa. In connection with the growing popularization of stereotypical body parameters and the relevance of healthy eating in modern life among adolescent girls, there is an increase in the trend towards various eating disorders. The main predominant groups subject to such deviations are precisely adolescent girls and adolescent girls. Identifying the initial emotional manifestations caused by anorexia nervosa is essential for planning preventive school programs. The research used such methods as observation, oral questioning (conversation) and "Cognitive-emotive test" Yu.M. Orlova, N.D. Tvorogova. The analysis of the data obtained made it possible to identify the predominant components of emotional disorders, namely the mechanisms of psychological defense, which are probably worth paying attention to psychologists for more competent work. The mechanisms of psychological defense turned out to be: aggression against oneself and protection from shame. The neglect of such a serious problem by school psychological services can only exacerbate the growth of these disorders. An approximate plan of preventive measures was developed, consisting of the main types of necessary work, namely: diagnostics, education, prevention, group sessions and individual assistance aimed at this category of adolescent girls and all participants in the general educational process. When developing this plan, recommendations were given for its implementation. Also, with individual work, it is worth paying special attention to the correction of emotional disorders.

One of the least-remarked upon features of Israel's Operation Defensive Shield was the massive popular response it engendered at the popular level throughout the Islamic world (and in many other countries in Europe and Asia): within days, hundreds of thousands of people from Morocco in the west to Indonesia and Malaysia in the east had taken to the streets to protest Israel's assault on the Palestinian territories and U .S. support of Israel. In the Arab countries, where reactions were strongest (the estimated attendance of a single demonstration in Rabat, Morocco, ranged from 500,000 to a million), angry protesters, even in places such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, railed against the passivity and impotence of the Arab regimes; in a number of countries, U.S. diplomatic facilities were attacked, and protests turned violent; demonstrators were killed in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Yemen. Common patterns included the role of satellite television coverage of Israeli destruction in galvanizing popular anger, massive collections of funds and supplies to send to Palestine amounting to tens of millions of dollars, and boycotts of American-made goods that continued after the demonstrations had died down in May 2002, and indeed are still in force in many places. Moreover, while Islamic groups spearheaded the demonstrations in some countries, everywhere secular and civil society groups had a strong presence. What differed from country to country was how the governments handled the protests——by co-optation, repression, and combinations thereof. The following are brief reports on the public response in the four countries bordering Israel and in Turkey.

IntroductionThis paper explores the different meanings that individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds associate with being authentic. It builds on previous research (Menendez 11) that found quantitative differences in terms of the meanings individuals from Eastern and Western backgrounds tend to associate with being authentic. Using qualitative analysis, it describes in more detail how individuals from these two backgrounds construct their different meanings of authenticity.Authenticity has become an overriding moral principle in contemporary Western societies and has only recently started to be contested (Feldman). From cultural products to individuals’ discourses, authenticity pervades Western culture (Lindholm; Potter; Vannini and Williams). On an individual level, the ideal of authenticity is reflected in the maxim “be true to yourself.” The social value of authenticity has a relatively recent history in the Western world of approximately 200 years (Trilling). It started to develop alongside the notion of individuality during modernity (Taylor, Sources; Trilling). The Romantic movement consolidated its cultural influence (Taylor, Sources). In the 1960s, the Hippy movement revived authenticity as a countercultural discourse, although it has progressively become mainstream through consumer culture and therapeutic discourses (Binkley).Most of the studies in the literature on authenticity as a cultural phenomenon are theoretical, conducted from a philosophical perspective (Ferrara; Guignon; Taylor, Ethics), but few of them are empirical, mostly from sociology (Erickson; Franzese, Thine; Turner, Quest; Vannini, Authenticity). Part of this dearth of empirical research on authenticity is due to the difficulties that researchers encounter in attempting to define what it means to be authentic (Franzese, Authenticity 87). Sociologists study the phenomenological experience of being true to oneself, but are less attentive to the metaphysical notion of being a “true self” (Vannini, Dead 236–37). Trying to preserve this open approach, without judging individuals on how “authentic” they are, is what makes defining authenticity difficult. For this reason, sociologists have defined being authentic in a broad sense as “an individual’s subjective sense that their behaviour, appearance, self, reflects their sense of core being. One’s sense of core being is composed of their values, beliefs, feelings, identities, self-meanings, etc.” (Franzese, Authenticity 87); this is the definition of authenticity that I use here. Besides being scarce, the sociological empirical studies on authenticity have been conducted with individuals from Western backgrounds and, thus, have privileged authenticity as a Western cultural construct. This paper tries to contribute to this field of research by: (1) contributing more empirical investigation and (2) providing cross-cultural comparison between individuals from Eastern and Western backgrounds.The literature on cross-cultural values associates Eastern societies with collective (Hofstede, Hofstede and Mirkov 95–97; 112–17) and material or survival (Inglehart and Welzel 51–57; 61–65) values, while Western societies tend to be linked to the opposite kind of values: individual, post-material or self-expression (WVS). For example, societies that score high in survival values are likely to be African (e.g., Zimbabwe) Middle Eastern (e.g., Morocco and Jordan) or Asian (e.g., Bangladesh) countries, while societies that score high in self-expression values tend to be European (e.g., Sweden) or English speaking (e.g., Australia) countries. Nevertheless, there are some exceptions, the case of Japan, for example, which tends to score high in self-expression values despite being an “Eastern” society (WVS). These differences also tend to be reflected among Eastern minorities living in Western countries (Chua and Rubenfeld). Collective values emphasise harmony in relations and prioritise the needs of the group over the individual; on the other hand, individual values emphasise self-expression. Material or survival values accentuate the satisfaction of “basic” needs, in Abraham Maslow’s terms (21), such as physiological or security needs, and imply practising thrift and delaying immediate gratification; by contrast, post-material or self-expression values stress the satisfaction of “higher” needs, such as freedom of speech, equality, or aesthetic needs.The sociologist Ralph Turner (Real) created a theoretical framework to organize individuals’ discourses around authenticity: the “impulsive” and “institutional” categories. One of Turner’s assumptions is particularly important in understanding the differences between these two categories: individuals tend to consider the self as an objective entity that, despite only existing in their minds, feels “real” to them. This can have consequences for the meanings they ascribe to certain internal subjective states, such as cognitions or emotions, which can be interpreted as indicators of their authentic selves (990–91).The institutional and impulsive categories are two different ways of understanding authenticity that present several differences (991–95). Two among them are most relevant to understand the differences that I discuss in this paper. The first one has to do with the individual’s locus of the self, whether the self is conceptualized as located “outside” or “inside” the individual. Impulsive interpretations of authenticity have an internal sense of authenticity as “being,” while institutional conceptualizations have an external sense of authenticity as “becoming.” For “impulsives,” the authentic self is something that must be searched for. Impulsives look within to discover their “true self,” which is often in opposition to society’s roles and its expectations of the individual. On the other hand, for “institutionals” authentic is achieved through external effort (Turner, Quest 155); it is something that individuals achieve through regular practice, often aligned with society’s roles and their expectations of the individual (Turner, Real 992).The second difference has to do with the management of emotions. For an institutional understanding of authenticity, individuals are true to their own authentic selves when they are in full control of their capacities and emotions. By contrast, from an impulsive point of view, individuals are true to themselves when they are spontaneous, accepting and freely expressing their emotions, often by breaking the internal or external controls that society imposes on them (Turner, Real 993).Although individuals can experience both types of authenticity, previous research on this topic (Menendez) has shown that institutional experiences tend to happen more frequently among Easterners, and impulsive experiences tend to occur more frequently among Westerners. In this paper, I show how Easterners and Westerners construct institutional and impulsive meanings of authenticity respectively; what kind of authenticity work individuals from these two backgrounds do when they conceptualize their authentic selves; how they interpret internal subjective states as expressions of who they are; and what stories they tell themselves about who they are.I suggest that these stories, although they may look purely individual, can also be social. Individuals from Western backgrounds tend to interpret impulsive experiences of authenticity as expressing their authentic selves, as they are informed by the individual and post-material values of Western societies. In contrast, individuals from Eastern backgrounds tend to interpret institutional experiences of authenticity as expressing their authentic selves, as they have been socialized in the more collective and material values of Eastern societies.Finally, and before I proceed to the analysis, I would like to acknowledge a limitation of this study. The dichotomies that I use to explain my argument, such as the Western and Eastern or the impulsive and institutional categories, can constitute a limitation for this paper because they cannot reflect nuances. They can be easily contested. For example, the division between Eastern and Western societies is often seen as ideological and Turner’s distinction between institutional and impulsive experiences of authenticity can create artificial separations between the notions of self and society or reason and passion (Solomon 173). However, these concepts have not been used for ideological or simplifying purposes, but to help explain distinguishable cultural orientations towards authenticity in the data.MethodologyI completed 20 interviews (from 50 minutes to 2 hours in length) with 20 students at La Trobe University (Australia), between September 2012 and April 2013. The 20 interviewees (9 females and 11 males), ranged from 18 to 58 years old (the median age was 24 years old). The sample was theoretically designed to cover as many diverse cultural backgrounds as possible. I asked the interviewees questions about: moments they had experienced that felt either authentic and inauthentic, what constitutes a life worth-living, and the impact their cultural backgrounds might have had on their conceptions of their true selves.The 20 interviewees were born in 13 different countries. According to the extensive dataset on cultural values, the World Values Survey (WVS), these 13 countries have different percentages of post-materialists—individuals who choose post-material instead of material values (Inglehart and Welzel 54–56). Table 1 shows the percentages of post-materialists in each of the interviewees’ countries of birth. Table 1: Percentages of post-materialists in the interviewees’ countries of birth Country % of post-materialists WVS Wave United Kingdom 22.8 2005 – 2009 Australia 20.5 2010 – 2014 United States 16.7 2010 – 2014 Israel 11.6 2000 – 2004 Finland 11.3 2005 – 2009 Greece (Turkey) 10.7 2010 – 2014 South Africa 7.7 2005 – 2009 Malaysia 5.6 2010 – 2014 Ghana 4.2 2010 – 2014 India 4 2005 – 2009 China 2.5 2010 – 2014 Egypt 1.1 2010 – 2014 Note: These data are based on the 4-item post-materialism index question (Y002) of World Values Survey (WVS). I use three different waves of data (2000–2004, 2005–2009, and 2010–2014). Greece did not have any data in World Values Survey, so its data have been estimated considering the results from Turkey, which is the most similar country in geographical and cultural terms that had data available.In my model, I consider “Western” societies as those that have more than 10% post-materialists, while “Eastern” societies have less than 10% post-materialists. As shown in Table 1 and mentioned earlier, Western countries (English speaking or European) tend to have higher percentages of post-materialists than Eastern societies (African, Asian and Middle Eastern).Thus, as Table 2 shows, the interviewees who were born in a Western society are ascribed to one group, while individuals born in an Eastern society are ascribed to another group. Although many overseas-born interviewees have lived in Australia for periods that range from 6 months to 10 years, they were ascribed to the “East” and “West” groups solely based on their country of birth. Even though these individuals may have had experiences of socialization in Australia, I assume that they have been primarily socialized in the values of their ethnic backgrounds and the countries where they were born, via their parents’ educational values or through direct experience, during the time that they lived in their countries of birth. According to my definition of authenticity, individuals’ values inform their understanding of authenticity, therefore, the values from their ethnic backgrounds can also influence their understanding of authenticity.In the first phase of the analysis, I used Grounded Theory (Charmaz), with categories directly emerging from the data, to analyse my interviewees’ stories. In the second stage, I reviewed these categories in combination with Turner’s categories of impulsive and institutional, applying them to classify the stories.Table 2: Distribution of participants between “East” and “West” West (n=11) East (n=9) Australia (n=5) China (n=2) United Kingdom (n=2) India (n=2) United States (n=1) South Korea (n=1) Greece (n=1) South Africa (n=1) Finland (n=1) Egypt (n=1) Israel (n=1) Ghana (n=1) Malaysia (n=1) ResultsAlthough I interviewed 20 participants, due to space-constraints, I illustrate my argument with only 4 interview extracts from 4 of the interviewees: 2 interviewees from Western backgrounds and 2 from Eastern backgrounds. However, these stories are representative of the trends found for the whole sample. I show how Easterners and Westerners construct their authentic selves in institutional and impulsive senses respectively through the two key characteristics that I presented in the introduction: locus of the self and management of emotions.In the first instance, Rachel (from Australia, 24 years old), a Western respondent, shows an impulsive locus of the self as “being.” Authenticity is discovered through self-acceptance of an uncomfortable emotion, like a “bad mood:”I think the times when I want to say, ‘oh, I wasn’t myself’, I usually was. My bad moods are more ‘me’. My bad moods are almost always the ‘real me’. [So you consider that your authentic self is something that is there, inside you, that you have to discover, or it is something outside yourself, that you can achieve?] I think it is something that you have to discover for yourself. I think it is different for everyone. [But would you say that it is something that is there already or it is something that you become?] No, I think it is something that is there already.On the other hand, Rani (from China, 24 years old), an Eastern respondent, interprets authenticity as “becoming;” authenticity does not pre-exist—as in the case of Rachel—but is something “external” to her idea of self. Rani becomes herself by convincing herself that she conforms to society’s ideals of physical beauty. Unlike the process of self-acceptance that Rachel described, Rani develops authentic selfhood by “lying” to herself or, as she says, “through some lies”:I have heard this sentence, like ‘you have to be yourself to others’, but I think it is really hard to do this. I think people still need some ‘acting’ things in their life. You need to act, not to say to act as another person, but sometimes like let’s say to be polite or make other people like you, you need acting. And sometimes if you are doing the ‘acting things’ a lot, you are going to believe this is true (she laughs). [Like others will believe that you are something that you are not?] I think at the beginning, maybe that’s not, but… because some people wake up every morning and say to the mirror, ‘you are very beautiful, you are the most beautiful girl in the world’, then, you will be happy and you will actually become beautiful. I think it is not like lie to yourself, but it is just being confident. Maybe at the beginning you are not going to believe that you are beautiful… like, what is this sentence? ‘Being true to yourself’, but actually doing this everyday, then that’s true, you will become, you will be confident. [So that means you can be yourself also through…] Through some lies. [So you don’t think that there is something inside you that you have to kind of discover?] No.Eastern and Western respondents also tend to interpret emotions differently. Westerners are more likely to interpret them in more impulsive terms than Easterners, who interpret them in a more institutional light. As we can see in the following extract, Sean, a Western respondent (born in Australia, but raised in England, 41 years old), feels inauthentic because he could not express his dislike of a co-worker he did not get along with:In a six months job I had before I came to Australia, I was an occupational therapist in a community. There was a girl in the administration department who was so rude. I wanted to say: ‘look darling you are so rude. It is really unpleasant talking to you. Can you just be nice? It would be just so much better and you will get more done and you will get more from me’. That’s what I should have said, but I didn’t say it. I didn’t, why? Maybe it is that sort of culture of not saying things or maybe it is me not being assertive enough. I don’t think I was being myself. Because my real self wanted to say: ‘look darling, you are not helping matters by being a complete bitch’. But I didn’t say that. I wasn’t assertive enough.In a similar type of incident, Ben, an Eastern respondent (from Ghana, 32 years old), describes an outburst he had with a co-worker who was annoying him. Unlike Sean, Ben expressed his anger to the co-worker, but he does not consider this to be a manifestation of his authentic self. For Ben, to act authentically one must control their emotions and try help others:I don’t know if that is myself or if that is not myself, but sometimes I get angry, I get upset, and I am the open type. I am the type that I can’t keep something in me, so sometimes when you make me annoyed, I just response. There is this time about this woman, in a class, that I was in Ghana. She was an older woman, a respected woman, she kept annoying me and there was one day that I couldn’t take it any longer, so I just burst up and I just… I don’t know what I said, I just… said a lot of bad things to her. The woman, she was shocked. I also felt shocked because I thought I could control myself, so that’s me… I don’t want to hide my feelings, I just want to come out with what I think when you make me annoyed, but those times, when I come out, I don’t like them, because I think it contradicts who I really am, someone who is supposed to help or care. I don’t like that aspect. You know somebody could be bossy, so he or she enjoys shouting everybody. I don’t enjoy that, but sometimes it is something that I cannot even control. Someone pushes me to the limit, and I just can’t keep that anger, and it comes out. I won’t say that is ‘me,’ I wouldn’t say that that is me. I don’t think that is a ‘true me’. [Why?] Because the true me would enjoy that experience the way I enjoy helping people instead.Unlike the two accounts from Rachel and Rani, these two last passages from Sean and Ben describe experiences of inauthenticity, where the authentic self cannot be expressed. What is important in these two passages is not their behaviour, but how they attribute their own emotions to their sense of authentic selfhood. Sean identifies his authentic self with the “impulsive” self who expresses his emotions, while Ben identifies his authentic self with the “institutional” self who is in control of his emotions. Sean feels inauthentic because he could not express his angry feelings to the co-worker, whereas Ben feels inauthentic because he could not control his outburst. Ben still hesitates about which side of himself can be attributed to his authentic self, for example, he says that he is “the open type” or that he does not want to “hide [his] feelings”, but he eventually identifies his authentic self with his institutional self.The choices that Sean and Ben make about the emotions that they attribute to their authentic selves could be motivated by their respective ethnic backgrounds. Like Rachel, Sean identifies his authentic self with a socially unacceptable emotion: anger. Consistent with his Western background, Sean’s sense of authenticity emphasizes the needs of the individual over the group and sees suppression of emotions as repressive. On the other hand, Ben reasons that since he does not enjoy being angry as much as he enjoys helping others, expressing anger is not a manifestation of authenticity. His authentic self is linked to his institutional self. Ben’s values are infused with altruism, which reflects the collective values that tend to be associated with his Eastern background. For him, suppression of emotions might not mean repression, but can foster authenticity instead.DiscussionBoth ways of interpreting authenticity, impulsive and institutional, look for self-consistency and the need to tell a coherent story to ourselves about who we are. The results section of this paper showed how Easterners and Westerners conceptualize authenticity. Easterners understand authenticity differently to Western discourses of the authentic. These alternative understandings offer viable solutions to the self-consistency problem. They present external, rather than internal, ways of conceiving the authentic self, and regulative, rather than expressive, approaches to emotions. As I mentioned earlier, Eastern societies are associated with collective and material values, while Western ones are related to individual and post-material values. These divisions in terms of values are reflected in individuals’ self-constructs. Individuals in Western societies tend to have a more independent idea of the self, whereas individuals in Eastern societies are more likely to have an interdependent one (Kitayama). An interdependent idea of the self values connectedness and conceptualizes the self in relation to others, so it can generate an institutional approach to authenticity, where the idea of the authentic self is not something that individuals search for inside themselves, but something that individuals become through their participation in social roles. This was evident in the example of Rani, whose idea of being authentic as “becoming” seemed to be an extension of her more interdependent self-construct and the need to fit in society.A regulative approach to emotions has also been associated with Easterners (Cheung and Park), on the basis of their collective values and interdependent self-constructs. For individuals from a Western background, with a more independent sense of self, as in the case of Sean, suppressing emotions tends to be seen negatively as being inauthentic, a form of repression. However, for individuals with interdependent self-constructs, this can be not only less harmful (feeling less inauthentic), but can even be beneficial because they tend to prioritize the needs of others (Le and Impett). This is evident in the example of Ben, for whom suppressing aanger does not make him feel inauthentic because he identifies his authentic self with the self that is in control of his emotions and helps others. This understanding of authenticity is aligned with the collective values of his ethnic background.In sum, ideas of authenticity seem to vary culturally according to the repertoires and values systems that inform them. Thus, even what we think might be our most intimate or individual experiences, like our experiences of authenticity and ideas of who we are, can also be socially constructed. This paper has tried to demonstrate the importance of sociology for the study of authenticity as a cultural phenomenon.ReferencesBinkley, Sam. Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.Charmaz, Kathy. Constructing Grounded Theory. London: Sage, 2013.Cheung, Rebecca and Irene Park. “Anger Supression, Interdependent Self-Construal, and Depression among Asian American and European American College Students”. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 16.4 (2010): 517–25.Chua, Amy, and Jed Rubenfeld. The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America. New York: The Penguin P, 2014.Erickson, Rebecca J. When Emotion Is the Product: Self, Society, and (In)Authenticity in a Postmodern World. 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Markus. “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation.” Psychological Review 98.2 (1991): 224–53.Le, Bonnie M., and Emily A. Impett. “When Holding Back Helps: Supressing Negative Emotions during Sacrifice Feels Authentic and Is Beneficial for Highly Interdependent People”. Pscyhological Science 24.9 (2013): 1809–15.Lindholm, Charles. Culture and Authenticity. Malden: Blackwell, 2008.Maslow, Abraham H. Toward a Psychology of Being. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1968.Menendez, Ramon. “The Culture of Authenticity: An Empirical Study of La Trobe University Students from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds.” Proceedings of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) Conference, 25-28 November. Melbourne: Monash U, 2013.Potter, Andrew. The Authenticity Hoax How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves. Carlton North: Scribe, 2010.Solomon, Robert C. “Notes on Emotion, ‘East and West.’” Philosophy East and West 45.2 (1995): 171–202.Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.———. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972.Turner, Ralph. “Is There a Quest for Identity?” The Sociological Quarterly 16.2 (1975): 148–61.———. “The Real Self: From Institution to Impulse.” The American Journal of Sociology 81.5 (1976): 989–1016.Vannini, Phillip. Authenticity and Power in the Academic Profession. Ph.D. Thesis, Whasington: Whashington State U, 2004.———. “Dead Poet’s Society: Teaching, Publish-or-Perish, and Professors’ Experiences of Authenticity.” Symbolic Interaction 29.2 (2006): 235–57.———, and J. Patrick Williams. Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.WVS. World Values Survey. World Values Survey Association. 18 Feb. 2015 ‹http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp›.

Watt, Mélanie. Bug in a Vacuum. Toronto, Ontario: Tundra Books, 2015. Print.“It was on top of the world when it happened. Its entire life changed with the switch of a button.” – So begins Bug in a Vacuum, a fun yet serious exploration of the range of emotions one can feel when coping with an unexpected event. A bug’s life is suddenly interrupted when it is sucked up into a vacuum while flying about a house. Tossed and turned, it awakes inside the vacuum and becomes aware of its confinement. As the bug comes to terms with his predicament, it undergoes an emotional journey of denial, bargaining, anger, despair and acceptance. Interlaced between the bug’s journey, a small dog undergoes the same emotions as it copes with the loss of a toy that was also sucked up by the vacuum.Watt, who is well known for her work on the Scaredy Squirrel series, has truly achieved a golden mean with Bug in a Vacuum. The story is simple and yet deals with very complex emotions. It would be an excellent way to broach the subject of coping and emotions with children, especially those confronting a loss or change. Children can laugh at the bug’s struggles but then also relate to them. The text flows at a good pace, while the illustrations draw you in to explore extra details.The artwork of Bug in Vacuum is particularly unique in that it uses mixed media. The colors are muted and earthy in quality. The textures of furniture, carpets and the interior of the vacuum contrast against the glossy super-large eyes of both the bug and his canine companion. The mixture of artistic and digital textures creates a visually stimulating story of its own, that the reader will want to revisit.With such an excellent narrative and engaging illustrations Bug in Vacuum is bound to become a favorite of children and adults alike.Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Hanne PearceHanne Pearce has worked at the University of Alberta Libraries in various support staff positions since 2004 and is currently a Public Service Librarian at the HT Coutts Education and Physical Education Library. Aside from being an avid reader she has continuing interests in writing, photography, graphic design and knitting.

Introduction Since December 2010 the dramatic spectacle of the spread of mass uprisings, civil unrest, and protest across North Africa and the Middle East have been chronicled daily on mainstream media and new media. Broadly speaking, the Arab Spring—as it came to be known—is challenging repressive, corrupt governments and calling for democracy and human rights. The convulsive events linked with these debates have been striking not only because of the rapid spread of historically momentous mass protests but also because of the ways in which the media “have become inextricably infused inside them” enabling the global media ecology to perform “an integral part in building and mobilizing support, co-ordinating and defining the protests within different Arab societies as well as trans-nationalizing them” (Cottle 295). Images of mass protests have been juxtaposed against those of individuals prepared to self-destruct for political ends. Video clips and photographs of the individual suffering of Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation and the Bahraini Abdulhad al-Khawaja’s emaciated body foreground, in very graphic ways, political struggles that larger events would mask or render invisible. Highlighting broad commonalties does not assume uniformity in patterns of protest and media coverage across the region. There has been considerable variation in the global media coverage and nature of the protests in North Africa and the Middle East (Cottle). In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen uprisings overthrew regimes and leaders. In Syria it has led the country to the brink of civil war. In Bahrain, the regime and its militia violently suppressed peaceful protests. As a wave of protests spread across the Middle East and one government after another toppled in front of 24/7 global media coverage, Bahrain became the “Arab revolution that was abandoned by the Arabs, forsaken by the West … forgotten by the world,” and largely ignored by the global media (Al-Jazeera English). Per capita the protests have been among the largest of the Arab Spring (Human Rights First) and the crackdown as brutal as elsewhere. International organizations have condemned the use of military courts to trial protestors, the detaining of medical staff who had treated the injured, and the use of torture, including the torture of children (Fisher). Bahraini and international human rights organizations have been systematically chronicling these violations of human rights, and posting on Websites distressing images of tortured bodies often with warnings about the graphic depictions viewers are about to see. It was in this context of brutal suppression, global media silence, and the reluctance of the international community to intervene, that the Bahraini-Danish human rights activist Abdulhad al-Khawaja launched his “death or freedom” hunger strike. Even this radical action initially failed to interest international editors who were more focused on Egypt, Libya, and Syria, but media attention rose in response to the Bahrain Formula 1 race in April 2012. Pro-democracy activists pledged “days of rage” to coincide with the race in order to highlight continuing human rights abuses in the kingdom (Turner). As Al Khawaja’s health deteriorated the Bahraini government resisted calls for his release (Article 19) from the Danish government who requested that Al Khawaja be extradited there on “humanitarian grounds” for hospital treatment (Fisk). This article does not explore the geo-politics of the Bahraini struggle or the possible reasons why the international community—in contrast to Syria and Egypt—has been largely silent and reluctant to debate the issues. Important as they are, those remain questions for Middle Eastern specialists to address. In this article I am concerned with the overlapping and interpenetration of two ecologies. The first ecology is the ethical framing of a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction intended to achieve political ends. The second ecology is the operation of global media where international inaction inadvertently foregrounds the political struggles that larger events and discourses surrounding Egypt, Libya, and Syria overshadow. What connects these two ecologies is the body of the hunger striker, turned into a spectacle and mediated via a politics of affect that invites a global public to empathise and so enter into his suffering. The connection between the two lies in the emaciated body of the hunger striker. An Ecological Humanities Approach This exploration of two ecologies draws on the ecological humanities and its central premise of connectivity. The ecological humanities critique the traditional binaries in Western thinking between nature and culture; the political and social; them and us; the collective and the individual; mind, body and emotion (Rose & Robin, Rieber). Such binaries create artificial hierarchies, divisions, and conflicts that ultimately impede the ability to respond to crises. Crises are major changes that are “out of control” driven—primarily but not exclusively—by social, political, and cultural forces that unleash “runaway systems with their own dynamics” (Rose & Robin 1). The ecological humanities response to crises is premised on the recognition of the all-inclusive connectivity of organisms, systems, and environments and an ethical commitment to action from within this entanglement. A founding premise of connectivity, first articulated by anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson, is that the “unit of survival is not the individual or the species, but the organism-and-its-environment” (Rose & Robin 2). This highlights a dialectic in which an organism is shaped by and shapes the context in which it finds itself. Or, as Harries-Jones puts it, relations are recursive as “events continually enter into, become entangled with, and then re-enter the universe they describe” (3). This ensures constantly evolving ecosystems but it also means any organism that “deteriorates its environment commits suicide” (Rose & Robin 2) with implications for the others in the eco-system. Bateson’s central premise is that organisms are simultaneously independent, as separate beings, but also interdependent. Interactions are not seen purely as exchanges but as dynamic, dialectical, dialogical, and mutually constitutive. Thus, it is presumed that the destruction or protection of others has consequences for oneself. Another dimension of interactions is multi-modality, which implies that human communication cannot be reduced to a single mode such as words, actions, or images but needs to be understood in the complexity of inter-relations between these (see Rieber 16). Nor can dissemination be reduced to a single technological platform whether this is print, television, Internet, or other media (see Cottle). The final point is that interactions are “biologically grounded but not determined” in that the “cognitive, emotional and volitional processes” underpinning face-to-face or mediated communication are “essentially indivisible” and any attempt to separate them by privileging emotion at the expense of thought, or vice versa, is likely to be unhealthy (Rieber 17). This is most graphically demonstrated in a politically-motivated hunger strike where emotion and volition over-rides the survivalist instinct. The Ecology of a Prison Hunger Strike The radical nature of a hunger strike inevitably gives rise to medico-ethical debates. Hunger strikes entail the voluntary refusal of sustenance by an individual and, when prolonged, such deprivation sets off a chain reaction as the less important components in the internal body systems shut down to protect the brain until even that can no longer be protected (see Basoglu et al). This extreme form of protest—essentially an act of self-destruction—raises ethical issues over whether or not doctors or the state should intervene to save a life for humanitarian or political reasons. In 1975 and 1991, the World Medical Association (WMA) sought to negotiate this by distinguishing between, on the one hand, the mentally/psychological impaired individual who chooses a “voluntary fast” and, on the other hand, the hunger striker who chooses a form of protest action to secure an explicit political goal fully aware of fatal consequences of prolonged action (see Annas, Reyes). This binary enables the WMA to label the action of the mentally impaired suicide while claiming that to do so for political protesters would be a “misconception” because the “striker … does not want to die” but to “live better” by obtaining certain political goals for himself, his group or his country. “If necessary he is willing to sacrifice his life for his case, but the aim is certainly not suicide” (Reyes 11). In practice, the boundaries between suicide and political protest are likely to be much more blurred than this but the medico-ethical binary is important because it informs discourses about what form of intervention is ethically appropriate. In the case of the “suicidal” the WMA legitimises force-feeding by a doctor as a life-saving act. In the case of the political protestor, it is de-legitimised in discourses of an infringement of freedom of expression and an act of torture because of the pain involved (see Annas, Reyes). Philosopher Michel Foucault argued that prison is a key site where the embodied subject is explicitly governed and where the exercising of state power in the act of incarceration means the body of the imprisoned no longer solely belongs to the individual. It is also where the “body’s range of significations” is curtailed, “shaped and invested by the very forces that detain and imprison it” (Pugliese 2). Thus, prison creates the circumstances in which the incarcerated is denied the “usual forms of protest and judicial safeguards” available outside its confines. The consequence is that when presented with conditions that violate core beliefs he/she may view acts of self-destruction—such as hunger strikes or lip sewing—as one of the few “means of protesting against, or demanding attention” or achieving political ends still available to them (Reyes 11; Pugliese). The hunger strike implicates the state, which, in the act of imprisoning, has assumed a measure of power and responsibility for the body of the individual. If a protest action is labelled suicidal by medical professionals—for instance at Guantanamo—then the force-feeding of prisoners can be legitimised within the WMA guidelines (Annas). There is considerable political temptation to do so particularly when the hunger striker has become an icon of resistance to the state, the knowledge of his/her action has transcended prison confines, and the alienating conditions that prompted the action are being widely debated in the media. This poses a two-fold danger for the state. On the one hand, there is the possibility that the slow emaciation and death while imprisoned, if covered by the media, may become a spectacle able to mobilise further resistance that can destabilise the polity. On the other hand, there is the fear that in the act of dying, and the spectacle surrounding death, the hunger striker would have secured the public attention to the very cause they are championing. Central to this is whether or not the act of self-destruction is mediated. It is far from inevitable that the media will cover a hunger strike or do so in ways that enable the hunger striker’s appeal to the emotions of others. However, when it does, the international scrutiny and condemnation that follows may undermine the credibility of the state—as happened with the death of the IRA member Bobby Sands in Northern Ireland (Russell). The Media Ecology and the Bahrain Arab Spring The IRA’s use of an “ancient tactic ... to make a blunt appeal to sympathy and emotion” in the form of the Sands hunger strike was seen as “spectacularly successful in gaining worldwide publicity” (Willis 1). Media ecology has evolved dramatically since then. Over the past 20 years communication flows between the local and the global, traditional media formations (broadcast and print), and new communication media (Internet and mobile phones) have escalated. The interactions of the traditional media have historically shaped and been shaped by more “top-down” “politics of representation” in which the primary relationship is between journalists and competing public relations professionals servicing rival politicians, business or NGOs desire for media attention and framing issues in a way that is favourable or sympathetic to their cause. However, rapidly evolving new media platforms offer bottom up, user-generated content, a politics of connectivity, and mobilization of ordinary people (Cottle 31). However, this distinction has increasingly been seen as offering too rigid a binary to capture the complexity of the interactions between traditional and new media as well as the events they capture. The evolution of both meant their content increasingly overlaps and interpenetrates (see Bennett). New media technologies “add new communicative ingredients into the media ecology mix” (Cottle 31) as well as new forms of political protests and new ways of mobilizing dispersed networks of activists (Juris). Despite their pervasiveness, new media technologies are “unlikely to displace the necessity for coverage in mainstream media”; a feature noted by activist groups who have evolved their own “carnivalesque” tactics (Cottle 32) capable of creating the spectacle that meets television demands for action-driven visuals (Juris). New media provide these groups with the tools to publicise their actions pre- and post-event thereby increasing the possibility that mainstream media might cover their protests. However there is no guarantee that traditional and new media content will overlap and interpenetrate as initial coverage of the Bahrain Arab Spring highlights. Peaceful protests began in February 2011 but were violently quelled often by Saudi, Qatari and UAE militia on behalf of the Bahraini government. Mass arrests were made including that of children and medical personnel who had treated those wounded during the suppression of the protests. What followed were a long series of detentions without trial, military court rulings on civilians, and frequent use of torture in prisons (Human Rights Watch 2012). By the end of 2011, the country had the highest number of political prisoners per capita of any country in the world (Amiri) but received little coverage in the US. The Libyan uprising was afforded the most broadcast time (700 minutes) followed by Egypt (500 minutes), Syria (143), and Bahrain (34) (Lobe). Year-end round-ups of the Arab Spring on the American Broadcasting Corporation ignored Bahrain altogether or mentioned it once in a 21-page feature (Cavell). This was not due to a lack of information because a steady stream has flowed from mobile phones, Internet sites and Twitter as NGOs—Bahraini and international—chronicled in images and first-hand accounts the abuses. However, little of this coverage was picked up by the US-dominated global media. It was in this context that the Bahraini-Danish human rights activist Abdulhad Al Khawaja launched his “freedom or death” hunger strike in protest against the violent suppression of peaceful demonstrations, the treatment of prisoners, and the conduct of the trials. Even this radical action failed to persuade international editors to cover the Bahrain Arab Spring or Al Khawaja’s deteriorating health despite being “one of the most important stories to emerge over the Arab Spring” (Nallu). This began to change in April 2012 as a number of things converged. Formula 1 pressed ahead with the Bahrain Grand Prix, and pro-democracy activists pledged “days of rage” over human rights abuses. As these were violently suppressed, editors on global news desks increasingly questioned the government and Formula 1 “spin” that all was well in the kingdom (see BBC; Turner). Claims by the drivers—many of who were sponsored by the Bahraini government—that this was a sports event, not a political one, were met with derision and journalists more familiar with interviewing superstars were diverted into covering protests because their political counterparts had been denied entry to the country (Fisk). This combination of media events and responses created the attention, interest, and space in which Al Khawaja’s deteriorating condition could become a media spectacle. The Mediated Spectacle of Al Khawaja’s Hunger Strike Journalists who had previously struggled to interest editors in Bahrain and Al Khawaja’s plight found that in the weeks leading up to the Grand Prix and since “his condition rapidly deteriorated”’ and there were “daily updates with stories from CNN to the Hindustan Times” (Nulla). Much of this mainstream news was derived from interviews and tweets from Al Khawaja’s family after each visit or phone call. What emerged was an unprecedented composite—a diary of witnesses to a hunger strike interspersed with the family’s struggles with the authorities to get access to him and their almost tangible fear that the Bahraini government would not relent and he would die. As these fears intensified 48 human rights NGOs called for his release from prison (Article 19) and the Danish government formally requested his extradition for hospital treatment on “humanitarian grounds”. Both were rejected. As if to provide evidence of Al Khawaja’s tenuous hold on life, his family released an image of his emaciated body onto Twitter. This graphic depiction of the corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction was re-tweeted and posted on countless NGO and news Websites (see Al-Jazeera). It was also juxtaposed against images of multi-million dollar cars circling a race-track, funded by similarly large advertising deals and watched by millions of people around the world on satellite channels. Spectator sport had become a grotesque parody of one man’s struggle to speak of what was going on in Bahrain. In an attempt to silence the criticism the Bahraini government imposed a de facto news blackout denying all access to Al Khawaja in hospital where he had been sent after collapsing. The family’s tweets while he was held incommunicado speak of their raw pain, their desperation to find out if he was still alive, and their grief. They also provided a new source of information, and the refrain “where is alkhawaja,” reverberated on Twitter and in global news outlets (see for instance Der Spiegel, Al-Jazeera). In the days immediately after the race the Danish prime minister called for the release of Al Khawaja, saying he is in a “very critical condition” (Guardian), as did the UN’s Ban-Ki Moon (UN News and Media). The silencing of Al Khawaja had become a discourse of callousness and as global media pressure built Bahraini ministers felt compelled to challenge this on non-Arabic media, claiming Al Khawaja was “eating” and “well”. The Bahraini Prime Minister gave one of his first interviews to the Western media in years in which he denied “AlKhawaja’s health is ‘as bad’ as you say. According to the doctors attending to him on a daily basis, he takes liquids” (Der Spiegel Online). Then, after six days of silence, the family was allowed to visit. They tweeted that while incommunicado he had been restrained and force-fed against his will (Almousawi), a statement almost immediately denied by the military hospital (Lebanon Now). The discourses of silence and callousness were replaced with discourses of “torture” through force-feeding. A month later Al Khawaja’s wife announced he was ending his hunger strike because he was being force-fed by two doctors at the prison, family and friends had urged him to eat again, and he felt the strike had achieved its goal of drawing the world’s attention to Bahrain government’s response to pro-democracy protests (Ahlul Bayt News Agency). Conclusion This article has sought to explore two ecologies. The first is of medico-ethical discourses which construct a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction to achieve particular political ends. 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Roberts, David. “Blame Iran: A Dangerous Response to the Bahraini Uprising.” (20 August 2011). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/20/bahraini-uprising-iran› Rose, Deborah Bird and Libby Robin. “The Ecological Humanities in Action: An Invitation.” Australian Humanities Review 31-32 (April 2004). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-April-2004/rose.html›. Russell, Sharman. Hunger: An Unnatural History. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Turner, Maran. “Bahrain’s Formula 1 is an Insult to Country’s Democratic Reformers.” CNN. (20 April 2012). 1 June 2012. ‹http://articles.cnn.com/2012-04-20/opinion/opinion_bahrain-f1-hunger-strike_1_abdulhadi-al-khawaja-bahraini-government-bahrain-s-formula?_s=PM:OPINION›. United Nations News & Media. “UN Chief Calls for Respect of Human Rights of Bahraini People.” (24 April 2012). 1 June 2012 ‹http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/2012/04/un-chief-calls-respect-of-human-rights-of-bahraini-people›. Willis, David. “IRA Capitalises on Hunger Strike to Gain Worldwide Attention”. Christian Science Monitor. (29 April 1981): 1.

Rage can come from anywhere, it ignites as a flash of lightening and hisses rapidly down a darkened tunnel, landing wherever it finds a target. Sigmund Freud, and many other psychoanalysts, have attempted to explain the inception of human’s two primordial emotions, rage and fear – encapsulated in the popular phrase, fight or flight. Our earliest historical records detail the myriad battles that determined the world’s future course of events. Without rage, and its adjutants, violence and war, the world’s countries would not exist with their current boundaries. In fact, our species, Homo sapiens would necessarily have evolved through a different course. Since 2016, the public has been outraged by current events at an unprecedented level: the confluence of the election of US President Donald Trump, the struggles over the UK’s Brexit, and the revelations of systematic sexual abuse of women and African Americans, culminating in the recent #metoo and the #blacklivesmatter social media campaigns. More and more women have protested against sexual abuse, and recently the free-verse poem book Shout, from pop cultural icon Laurie Halse Anderson, “raise[s] urgent alarms, warning against the evils propagated by a culture that values dominance over respect” (Feldman 52). The rage revolution is here now. The nine articles included in this issue of M/C Journal on ‘rage’ unpack the concept of rage and its significant linkages to injustice, anger, personal and sexual abuse of women and minority cultures, violence and war. It is no surprise that many authors have chosen to focus on women’s rage and anger. Below, three articles develop the themes of political disenfranchisement for women and Indigenous cultures with a special emphasis on Australia, and the significant role that clothing plays in group-based activism.In the feature article, Angelika Heurich explores the fraught territory of women’s rights starting with the slogan: ‘the personal is the political’. In both the First and Second Waves of feminism, she reports, “concerns about issues of inequality, including sexuality, the right to abortion, availability of childcare, and sharing of household duties” became “personal problems” rather than a matter for national debate and policy changes (Hanisch qtd. in Heurich). Heurich cites the need for “feminist intervention in the state” (van Acker 120). These issues are very much alive today: how can enraged women change government policy in a meaningful way to address past and present injustices? Author Jo Coghlan further develops the theme of protestation with how clothing depicts the history of dissent. Coghlan’s argument suggests that the political efficacy of dress can perform “an ideological function that either bring[s] diverse members of society together for a cause ... or act[s] as a fence to keep identities separate” (Coghlan qtd Barnard). Clothing, as liberation, was celebrated in Mahatma Gandhi’s hand-spun cotton that symbolised the separation of India from Great Britain. Later, the Australian Aborigines’ Black Protest Committee adopted a set of particular colours for their movement towards equality, in this case, red, black and yellow worn first in 1982. To continue the theme, Lisa Hackett outlines the response of women’s rage’ to how their garments remain unsuitable from several standpoints. Hackett notes that the issues that surround fast fashion inspire women’s anger by its production: clothing that is cheaply made, in workplaces of virtual slavery, and made of unsustainable fabrics which lead to mountains of discarded garments in the world’s landfills. These problems inspire the rage of women who desire to protect the environment and also seek clothing that fits over forced obsolescence. Even as this issue on ‘rage’ widely presents people, activities and events that are driven by rage – across the broad spectrum of personal, artistic and cultural and socio-political storytelling, we also sought solutions in productive and/or philosophical frameworks that could explore how to ameliorate conditions under which rage arises. So the next two articles address the under-used (and under-implemented) word civility. In his article “Of ‘Rage of Party’ and the Coming of Civility”, Greg Melleuish presents the English Civil War as a case study. This conflict between the Royalists and Parliamentarians disrupted the authority of the crown, and resulted in a more moderated English government, in stark contrast to regime changes later on the European continent (e.g., the French Revolution). Melleuish offers that a “new ideal of ‘politeness and moderation’ had conquered English political culture” and promoted civility as a standard of behaviour for the government and worthy individuals. This concept of civility would later evolve to introduce philosophies of the Enlightenment. A collection of authors (Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Madalena Grobbelaar, Eyal Gringart, Alise Bender, and Rose Williams) have worked through the serious issues of ‘intimate civility’ – to encourage pathways to counteract ‘rage’ and its impact on the most vulnerable in society, especially women and children. The authors, in their coinage of the term, “envisage intimate civility – and our relationships – as dynamic, dialectical, discursive and interactive, above and beyond dualism.” They introduce a ‘decalogue’ of civility, relying on notions of politeness, respect, and emphasise dialogue between the affected parties and the Australian government’s campaigns and policies on domestic and sexual violence to reduce rage in the arena of interpersonal and intergenerational conflicts. The last articles in this M/C Journal issue on ‘rage’ address the media side of the equation. These authors all deal with aspects of rage as expressed on various screens, as films, television series or downloads to other devices. Richard Gehrmann, in his analysis of the Hollywood film American Sniper (2014), first provides a capsule timeline of conflicts in the Middle East, from the Second World War to the current day’s ongoing battles in Syria and elsewhere in the region. He highlights the propaganda-based, pro-American ‘jingoism’ presented in American Sniper, contrasting its portrayal of the returned veteran Chris Kyle with other true-life accounts of US Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. Gehrmann presents a bleak commentary on the ‘hot and cold rage’ required of the lone sniper, while many ‘hot’ unresolved issues, including the refugee crisis, remain in the Middle East situation. American Sniper’s celebration of the lone gunman contributes to the acceptance of violence in an America where mass shootings indicate an ever-growing expression of individual rage.”In his article on ‘Cage rage’, Sasa Miletic outlines Hollywood actor Nicholas Cage and his violent, sometimes over-acted outbursts on film as one of “the most famous Internet memes”. Miletic asks: has the overexpression of anger depicted in ‘Cage rage’ become “a pop cultural reminder “that rage, for a lack of a better word, is good ... or can [his filmic rage] only serve for catharsis on an individual level?” With this question, Miletic explores Nicholas Cage throughout his acting career, and presents his argument that the potential for ‘double-reading’ of his angry overacting in movies is a sort of ‘parapraxis’ – or “a Freudian slip of the tongue, a term borrowed by Elsaesser and Wedel (131). Miletic’s exploration of ‘Cage rage’ introduces new concepts of rage from the contemporary Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.The exploration of rage in film now turns to Jessica Gildersleeve’s article that locates ambiguous meanings of rage in recent television adaptations based in the Australian outback. Guildersleeve explores the two adaptations Wake in Fright (2017) and Mystery Road (2108) for how they depict rage: “in this context rage is turned to melancholy and thus to self-destruction, [serving] as an allegory for the state of the contemporary nation.” Gildersleeve notes that previous Australian authors have outlined the trope of ‘outback noir,’ and in her analysis of these two adaptations, she realigns the previous literary analysis of ‘noir’ to the emerging genre of Outback Gothic horror. The two shows depict the force of inward rage that turns to melancholy from different perspectives. While Wake in Fright (2107) seems to offer no hope for the future, Mystery Road harnesses the power of rage to locate a potential way to reconcile the two ‘classic’ opposing factions that inhabit the Outback: the colonisers and the indigenous Aborigines. Lastly, this collection on ‘rage’ comes full circle, back to the omnipresent ‘women’s rage’.From the viewpoint of Gothic literary traditions, and their challengers, author Katharine Hawkins develops the trope of Monstrous gothic through women’s roles depicted in Showtime’s television series, Penny Dreadful (2014-2016). Here, Hawkins echoes the themes from the introductory articles: as women must comply with men and their comforts, women’s rage turns both inward and outward. In Penny Dreadful, the actress Billie Piper constitutes a figure of the “Monstrous Gothic Feminine” arising from “the parlours of bored Victorian housewives into a contemporary feminist moment that is characterised by a split between respectable diplomacy and the visibility of female rage.” Piper’s Bride figure then mutates “from coerced docility [towards] abject, sexualised anger” which makes itself heard in the show’s second season (2016). Hawkins discussion introduces Ahmed’s figure of the “kill joy”, which becomes “a term to refer to feminists – particularly black feminists – whose actions or presence refuse this obligation, and in turn project their discomfort outwards, instead of inwards.” In summary, rage is with us, always. But there is hope that the outward expression of women’s rage, and of other disenfranchised populations as echoed in the #metoo and #blacklivesmatter movements will change the culture of global politics to value respect over violence. References Anderson, Laurie Halse. Shout. New York: Penguin Random House.Barnard, Malcolm. Fashion as Communication. New York: Routledge, 1996.Elsaesser, Thomas, and Michael Wedel, Körper Tod und Technik: Metamorphosen des Kriegsfilms. Paderborn: Konstanz University Press, 2016.Feldman, Lucy. “A Voice for Others Speaks for Herself.” TIME, 11 Mar. 2019: 52-53.Hanisch, Carol. “Introduction: The Personal Is Political.” 2006. 18 Sep. 2016 <http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html>.Van Acker, Elizabeth. Different Voices: Gender and Politics in Australia. Melbourne: MacMillan Education Australia, 1999.Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, 2009.

Women in federal politics are under-represented today and always have been. At no time in the history of the federal parliament have women achieved equal representation with men. There have never been an equal number of women in any federal cabinet. Women have never held an equitable number of executive positions of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) or the Liberal Party. Australia has had only one female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and she was the recipient of sexist treatment in the parliament and the media. A 2019 report by Plan International found that girls and women, were “reluctant to pursue a career in politics, saying they worry about being treated unfairly.” The Report author said the results were unsurprisingwhen you consider how female politicians are still treated in Parliament and the media in this country, is it any wonder the next generation has no desire to expose themselves to this world? Unfortunately, in Australia, girls grow up seeing strong, smart, capable female politicians constantly reduced to what they’re wearing, comments about their sexuality and snipes about their gender.What voters may not always see is how women in politics respond to sexist treatment, or to bullying, or having to vote against their principles because of party rules, or to having no support to lead the party. Rather than being political victims and quitting, there is a ground-swell of women who are fighting back. The rage they feel at being excluded, bullied, harassed, name-called, and denied leadership opportunities is being channelled into rage against the structures that deny them equality. The rage they feel is building resilience and it is building networks of women across the political divide. This article highlights some female MPs who are “maintaining the rage”. It suggests that the rage that is evident in their public responses is empowering them to stand strong in the face of adversity, in solidarity with other female MPs, building their resilience, and strengthening calls for social change and political equality.Her-story of Women’s MovementsThroughout the twentieth century, women stood for equal rights and personal empowerment driven by rage against their disenfranchisement. Significant periods include the early 1900s, with suffragettes gaining the vote for women. The interwar period of 1919 to 1938 saw women campaign for financial independence from their husbands (Andrew). Australian women were active citizens in a range of campaigns for improved social, economic and political outcomes for women and their children.Early contributions made by women to Australian society were challenges to the regulations and of female sexuality and reproduction. Early twentieth century feminist organisations such The Women’s Peace Army, United Association of Women, the Australian Federation of Women’s Societies for Equal Citizenship, the Union of Australian Women, the National Council of Women, and the Australian Federation of Women Voters, proved the early forerunners to the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). It was in many of these early campaigns that the rage expressed in the concept of the “personal is political” (Hanisch) became entrenched in Australian feminist approaches to progressive social change. The idea of the “personal is political” encapsulated that it was necessary to challenge and change power relations, achievable when women fully participated in politics (van Acker 25). Attempts by women during the 1970s to voice concerns about issues of inequality, including sexuality, the right to abortion, availability of childcare, and sharing of household duties, were “deemed a personal problem” and not for public discussion (Hanisch). One core function of the WLM was to “advance women’s positions” via government legislation or, as van Acker (120) puts it, the need for “feminist intervention in the state.” However, in advocating for policy reform, the WLM had no coherent or organised strategy to ensure legislative change. The establishment of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), together with the Femocrat strategy, sought to rectify this. Formed in 1972, WEL was tasked with translating WLM concerns into government policy.The initial WEL campaign took issues of concern to WLM to the incoming Whitlam government (1972-1975). Lyndall Ryan (73) notes: women’s liberationists were the “stormtroopers” and WEL the “pragmatic face of feminism.” In 1973 Whitlam appointed Elizabeth Reid, a member of WLM, as Australia’s first Women’s Advisor. Of her appointment, Reid (3) said, “For the first time in our history we were being offered the opportunity to attempt to implement what for years we had been writing, yelling, marching and working towards. Not to respond would have felt as if our bluff had been called.” They had the opportunity in the Whitlam government to legislatively and fiscally address the rage that drove generations of women to yell and march.Following Reid were the appointments of Sara Dowse and Lyndall Ryan, continuing the Femocrat strategy of ensuring women were appointed to executive bureaucratic roles within the Whitlam government. The positions were not well received by the mainly male-dominated press gallery and parliament. As “inside agitators” (Eisenstein) for social change the central aim of Femocrats was social and economic equity for women, reflecting social justice and progressive social and public policy. Femocrats adopted a view about the value of women’s own lived experiences in policy development, application and outcome. The role of Senator Susan Ryan is of note. In 1981, Ryan wrote and introduced the Sex Discrimination Bill, the first piece of federal legislation of its type in Australia. Ryan was a founding member of WEL and was elected to the Senate in 1975 on the slogan “A woman’s place is in the Senate”. As Ryan herself puts it: “I came to believe that not only was a woman’s place in the House and in the Senate, as my first campaign slogan proclaimed, but a feminist’s place was in politics.” Ryan, the first Labor woman to represent the ACT in the Senate, was also the first Labor woman appointed as a federal Minister.With the election of the economic rationalist Hawke and Keating Governments (1983-1996) and the neoliberal Howard Government (1996-2007), what was a “visible, united, highly mobilised and state-focused women’s movement” declined (Lake 260). This is not to say that women today reject the value of women’s voices and experiences, particularly in politics. Many of the issues of the 1970s remain today: domestic violence, unequal pay, sexual harassment, and a lack of gender parity in political representation. Hence, it remains important that women continue to seek election to the national parliament.Gender Gap: Women in Power When examining federal elections held between 1972 and 2016, women have been under-represented in the lower house. In none of these elections have women achieved more than 30 per cent representation. Following the 1974 election less that one per cent of the lower house were women. No women were elected to the lower house at the 1975 or 1977 election. Between 1980 and 1996, female representation was less than 10 per cent. In 1996 this rose to 15 per cent and reached 29 per cent at the 2016 federal election.Following the 2016 federal election, only 32 per cent of both chambers were women. After the July 2016 election, only eight women were appointed to the Turnbull Ministry: six women in Cabinet and two women in the Outer Cabinet (Parliament of Australia). Despite the higher representation of women in the ALP, this is not reflected in the number of women in the Shadow Cabinet. Just as female parliamentarians have never achieved parity, neither have women in the Executive Branch.In 2017, Australia was ranked 50th in the world in terms of gender representation in parliament, between The Philippines and South Sudan. Globally, there are 38 States in which women account for less than 10 per cent of parliamentarians. As at January 2017, the three highest ranking countries in female representation were Rwanda, Bolivia and Cuba. The United Kingdom was ranked 47th, and the United States 104th (IPU and UNW). Globally only 18 per cent of government ministers are women (UNW). Between 1960 and 2013, 52 women became prime ministers worldwide, of those 43 have taken office since 1990 (Curtin 191).The 1995 United Nations (UN) Fourth World Conference on Women set a 30 per cent target for women in decision-making. This reflects the concept of “critical mass”. Critical mass proposes that for there to be a tipping balance where parity is likely to emerge, this requires a cohort of a minimum of 30 per cent of the minority group.Gender scholars use critical mass theory to explain that parity won’t occur while there are only a few token women in politics. Rather, only as numbers increase will women be able to build a strong enough presence to make female representation normative. Once a 30 per cent critical mass is evident, the argument is that this will encourage other women to join the cohort, making parity possible (Childs & Krook 725). This threshold also impacts on legislative outcomes, because the larger cohort of women are able to “influence their male colleagues to accept and approve legislation promoting women’s concerns” (Childs & Krook 725).Quotas: A Response to Gender InequalityWith women representing less than one in five parliamentarians worldwide, gender quotas have been introduced in 90 countries to redress this imbalance (Krook). Quotas are an equal opportunity measure specifically designed to re-dress inequality in political representation by allocating seats to under-represented groups (McCann 4). However, the effectiveness of the quota system is contested, with continued resistance, particularly in conservative parties. Fine (3) argues that one key objection to mandatory quotas is that they “violate the principle of merit”, suggesting insufficient numbers of women capable or qualified to hold parliamentary positions.In contrast, Gauja (2) suggests that “state-mandated electoral quotas work” because in countries with legislated quotas the number of women being nominated is significantly higher. While gender quotas have been brought to bear to address the gender gap, the ability to challenge the majority status of men has been limited (Hughes).In 1994 the ALP introduced rule-based party quotas to achieve equal representation by 2025 and a gender weighting system for female preselection votes. Conversely, the Liberal Party have a voluntary target of reaching 50 per cent female representation by 2025. But what of the treatment of women who do enter politics?Fig. 1: Portrait of Julia Gillard AC, 27th Prime Minister of Australia, at Parliament House, CanberraInside Politics: Misogyny and Mobs in the ALPIn 2010, Julia Gillard was elected as the leader of the governing ALP, making her Australia’s first female Prime Minister. Following the 2010 federal election, called 22 days after becoming Prime Minister, Gillard was faced with the first hung parliament since 1940. She formed a successful minority government before losing the leadership of the ALP in June 2013. Research demonstrates that “being a female prime minister is often fraught because it challenges many of the gender stereotypes associated with political leadership” (Curtin 192). In Curtin’s assessment Gillard was naïve in her view that interest in her as the country’s first female Prime Minister would quickly dissipate.Gillard, argues Curtin (192-193), “believed that her commitment to policy reform and government enterprise, to hard work and maintaining consensus in caucus, would readily outstrip the gender obsession.” As Curtin continues, “this did not happen.” Voters were continually reminded that Gillard “did not conform to the traditional.” And “worse, some high-profile men, from industry, the Liberal Party and the media, indulged in verbal attacks of a sexist nature throughout her term in office (Curtin 192-193).The treatment of Gillard is noted in terms of how misogyny reinforced negative perceptions about the patriarchal nature of parliamentary politics. The rage this created in public and media spheres was double-edged. On the one hand, some were outraged at the sexist treatment of Gillard. On the other hand, those opposing Gillard created a frenzy of personal and sexist attacks on her. Further attacking Gillard, on 25 February 2011, radio broadcaster Alan Jones called Gillard, not only by her first-name, but called her a “liar” (Kwek). These attacks and the informal way the Prime Minister was addressed, was unprecedented and caused outrage.An anti-carbon tax rally held in front of Parliament House in Canberra in March 2011, featured placards with the slogans “Ditch the Witch” and “Bob Brown’s Bitch”, referring to Gillard and her alliance with the Australian Greens, led by Senator Bob Brown. The Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and other members of the Liberal Party were photographed standing in front of the placards (Sydney Morning Herald, Vertigo). Criticism of women in positions of power is not limited to coming from men alone. Women from the Liberal Party were also seen in the photo of derogatory placards decrying Gillard’s alliances with the Greens.Gillard (Sydney Morning Herald, “Gillard”) said she was “offended when the Leader of the Opposition went outside in the front of Parliament and stood next to a sign that said, ‘Ditch the witch’. I was offended when the Leader of the Opposition stood next to a sign that ascribed me as a man’s bitch.”Vilification of Gillard culminated in October 2012, when Abbott moved a no-confidence motion against the Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper. Abbott declared the Gillard government’s support for Slipper was evidence of the government’s acceptance of Slipper’s sexist attitudes (evident in allegations that Slipper sent a text to a political staffer describing female genitals). Gillard responded with what is known as the “Misogyny speech”, pointing at Abbott, shaking with rage, and proclaiming, “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man” (ABC). Apart from vilification, how principles can be forsaken for parliamentary, party or electoral needs, may leave some women circumspect about entering parliament. Similar attacks on political women may affirm this view.In 2010, Labor Senator Penny Wong, a gay Member of Parliament and advocate of same-sex marriage, voted against a bill supporting same-sex marriage, because it was not ALP policy (Q and A, “Passion”). Australian Marriage Equality spokesperson, Alex Greenwich, strongly condemned Wong’s vote as “deeply hypocritical” (Akersten). The Sydney Morning Herald (Dick), under the headline “Married to the Mob” asked:a question: what does it now take for a cabinet minister to speak out on a point of principle, to venture even a mild criticism of the party position? ... Would you object if your party, after fixing some areas of discrimination against a minority group of which you are a part, refused to move on the last major reform for that group because of ‘tradition’ without any cogent explanation of why that tradition should remain? Not if you’re Penny Wong.In 2017, during the postal vote campaign for marriage equality, Wong clarified her reasons for her 2010 vote against same-sex marriage saying in an interview: “In 2010 I had to argue a position I didn’t agree with. You get a choice as a party member don’t you? You either resign or do something like that and make a point, or you stay and fight and you change it.” Biding her time, Wong used her rage to change policy within the ALP.In continuing personal attacks on Gillard, on 19 March 2012, Gillard was told by Germaine Greer that she had a “big arse” (Q and A, “Politics”) and on 27 August 2012, Greer said Gillard looked like an “organ grinder’s monkey” (Q and A, “Media”). Such an attack by a prominent feminist from the 1970s, on the personal appearance of the Prime Minister, reinforced the perception that it was acceptable to criticise a woman in this position, in ways men have never been. Inside Politics: Leadership and Bullying inside the Liberal PartyWhile Gillard’s leadership was likely cut short by the ongoing attacks on her character, Liberal Deputy leader Julie Bishop was thwarted from rising to the leadership of the Liberal Party, thus making it unlikely she will become the Liberal Party’s first female Prime Minister. Julie Bishop was Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2013 to 2018 and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party from 2007 to 2018, having entered politics in 1998.With the impending demise of Prime Minister Turnbull in August 2018, Bishop sought support from within the Liberal Party to run for the leadership. In the second round of leadership votes Bishop stood for the leadership in a three-cornered race, coming last in the vote to Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison. Bishop resigned as the Foreign Affairs Minister and took a seat on the backbench.When asked if the Liberal Party would elect a popular female leader, Bishop replied: “When we find one, I’m sure we will.” Political journalist Annabel Crabb offered further insight into what Bishop meant when she addressed the press in her red Rodo shoes, labelling the statement as “one of Julie Bishop’s chilliest-ever slapdowns.” Crabb, somewhat sardonically, suggested this translated as Bishop listing someone with her qualifications and experience as: “Woman Works Hard, Is Good at Her Job, Doesn't Screw Up, Loses Out Anyway.”For political journalist Tony Wright, Bishop was “clearly furious with those who had let their testosterone get the better of them and their party” and proceeded to “stride out in a pair of heels in the most vivid red to announce that, despite having resigned the deputy position she had occupied for 11 years, she was not about to quit the Parliament.” In response to the lack of support for Bishop in the leadership spill, female members of the federal parliament took to wearing red in the parliamentary chambers signalling that female members were “fed up with the machinations of the male majority” (Wright).Red signifies power, strength and anger. Worn in parliament, it was noticeable and striking, making a powerful statement. The following day, Bishop said: “It is evident … that there is an acceptance of a level of behaviour in Canberra that would not be tolerated in any other workplace across Australia" (Wright).Colour is political. The Suffragettes of the early twentieth century donned the colours of purple and white to create a statement of unity and solidarity. In recent months, Dr Kerryn Phelps used purple in her election campaign to win the vacated seat of Wentworth, following Turnbull’s resignation, perhaps as a nod to the Suffragettes. Public anger in Wentworth saw Phelps elected, despite the electorate having been seen as a safe Liberal seat.On 21 February 2019, the last sitting day of Parliament before the budget and federal election, Julie Bishop stood to announce her intention to leave politics at the next election. To some this was a surprise. To others it was expected. On finishing her speech, Bishop immediately exited the Lower House without acknowledging the Prime Minister. A proverbial full-stop to her outrage. She wore Suffragette white.Victorian Liberal backbencher Julia Banks, having declared herself so repelled by bullying during the Turnbull-Dutton leadership delirium, announced she was quitting the Liberal Party and sitting in the House of Representatives as an Independent. Banks said she could no longer tolerate the bullying, led by members of the reactionary right wing, the coup was aided by many MPs trading their vote for a leadership change in exchange for their individual promotion, preselection endorsements or silence. Their actions were undeniably for themselves, for their position in the party, their power, their personal ambition – not for the Australian people.The images of male Liberal Members of Parliament standing with their backs turned to Banks, as she tended her resignation from the Liberal Party, were powerful, indicating their disrespect and contempt. Yet Banks’s decision to stay in politics, as with Wong and Bishop is admirable. To maintain the rage from within the institutions and structures that act to sustain patriarchy is a brave, but necessary choice.Today, as much as any time in the past, a woman’s place is in politics, however, recent events highlight the ongoing poor treatment of women in Australian politics. Yet, in the face of negative treatment – gendered attacks on their character, dismissive treatment of their leadership abilities, and ongoing bullying and sexism, political women are fighting back. They are once again channelling their rage at the way they are being treated and how their abilities are constantly questioned. They are enraged to the point of standing in the face of adversity to bring about social and political change, just as the suffragettes and the women’s movements of the 1970s did before them. The current trend towards women planning to stand as Independents at the 2019 federal election is one indication of this. Women within the major parties, particularly on the conservative side of politics, have become quiet. Some are withdrawing, but most are likely regrouping, gathering the rage within and ready to make a stand after the dust of the 2019 election has settled.ReferencesAndrew, Merrindahl. Social Movements and the Limits of Strategy: How Australian Feminists Formed Positions on Work and Care. Canberra. Australian National University. 2008.Akersten, Matt. “Wong ‘Hypocrite’ on Gay Marriage.” SameSame.com 2010. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.samesame.com.au/news/5671/Wong-hypocrite-on-gay-marriage>.Banks, Julia. Media Statement, 27 Nov. 2018. 20 Jan. 2019 <http://juliabanks.com.au/media-release/statement-2/>.Childs, Sarah, and Mona Lena Krook. “Critical Mass Theory and Women’s Political Representation.” Political Studies 56 (2008): 725-736.Crabb, Annabel. “Julie Bishop Loves to Speak in Code and She Saved Her Best One-Liner for Last.” ABC News 28 Aug. 2018. 20 Jan. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-28/julie-bishop-women-in-politics/10174136>.Curtin, Jennifer. “The Prime Ministership of Julia Gillard.” Australian Journal of Political Science 50.1 (2015): 190-204.Dick, Tim. “Married to the Mob.” Sydney Morning Herald 26 July 2010. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://m.smh.com.au/federal-election/married-to-the-mob-20100726-0r77.html?skin=dumb-phone>.Eisenstein, Hester. Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996.Fine, Cordelia. “Do Mandatory Gender Quotas Work?” The Monthly Mar. 2012. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2012/march/1330562640/cordelia-fine/status-quota>.Gauja, Anika. “How the Liberals Can Fix Their Gender Problem.” The Conversation 13 Oct. 2017. 16 Oct. 2017 <https://theconversation.com/how-the-liberals-can-fix-their-gender-problem- 85442>.Hanisch, Carol. “Introduction: The Personal is Political.” 2006. 18 Sep. 2016 <http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html>.Hughes, Melanie. “Intersectionality, Quotas, and Minority Women's Political Representation Worldwide.” American Political Science Review 105.3 (2011): 604-620.Inter-Parliamentary Union. Equality in Politics: A Survey of Women and Men in Parliaments. 2008. 25 Feb. 2018 <http://archive.ipu.org/pdf/publications/equality08-e.pdf>.Inter-Parliamentary Union and United Nations Women. Women in Politics: 2017. 2017. 29 Jan. 2018 <https://www.ipu.org/resources/publications/infographics/2017-03/women-in-politics-2017>.Krook, Mona Lena. “Gender Quotas as a Global Phenomenon: Actors and Strategies in Quota Adoption.” European Political Science 3.3 (2004): 59–65.———. “Candidate Gender Quotas: A Framework for Analysis.” European Journal of Political Research 46 (2007): 367–394.Kwek, Glenda. “Alan Jones Lets Rip at ‘Ju-liar’ Gillard.” Sydney Morning Herald 25 Feb. 2011. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/alan-jones-lets-rip-at-juliar-gillard-20110224-1b7km.html>.Lake, Marilyn. Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999.McCann, Joy. “Electoral Quotas for Women: An International Overview.” Parliament of Australia Library 14 Nov. 2013. 1 Feb. 2018 <https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1314/ElectoralQuotas>.Parliament of Australia. “Current Ministry List: The 45th Parliament.” 2016. 11 Sep. 2016 <http://www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamentary_library/parliamentary_handbook/current_ministry_list>.Plan International. “Girls Reluctant to Pursue a Life of Politics Cite Sexism as Key Reason.” 2018. 20 Jan. 2019 <https://www.plan.org.au/media/media-releases/girls-have-little-to-no-desire-to-pursue-a-career-in-politics>.Q and A. “Mutilation and the Media Generation.” ABC Television 27 Aug. 2012. 28 Sep. 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3570412.htm>.———. “Politics and Porn in a Post-Feminist World.” ABC Television 19 Mar. 2012. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3451584.htm>.———. “Where Is the Passion?” ABC Television 26 Jul. 2010. 23 Mar. 2018 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s2958214.htm?show=transcript>.Reid, Elizabeth. “The Child of Our Movement: A Movement of Women.” Different Lives: Reflections on the Women’s Movement and Visions of Its Future. Ed. Jocelynne Scutt. Ringwood: Penguin 1987. 107-120.Ryan, L. “Feminism and the Federal Bureaucracy 1972-83.” Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions. Ed. Sophie Watson. Sydney: Allen and Unwin 1990.Ryan, Susan. “Fishes on Bicycles.” Papers on Parliament 17 (Sep. 1992). 1 Mar. 2018 <https://www.aph.gov.au/~/~/link.aspx?_id=981240E4C1394E1CA3D0957C42F99120>.Sydney Morning Herald. “‘Pinocchio Gillard’: Strong Anti-Gillard Emissions at Canberra Carbon Tax Protest.” 23 Mar. 2011. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/pinocchio-gillard-strong-antigillard-emissions-at-canberra-carbon-tax-protest-20110323-1c5w7.html>.———. “Gillard v Abbott on the Slipper Affair.” 10 Oct. 2012. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-09/gillard-vs-abbott-on-the-slipper-affair/4303618>.United Nations Women. Facts and Figures: Leadership and Political Participation. 2017. 1 Mar. 2018 <http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/leadership-and-political-participation/facts-and-figures>.Van Acker, Elizabeth. Different Voices: Gender and Politics in Australia. Melbourne: MacMillan Education Australia, 1999.Wright, Tony. “No Handmaids Here! Liberal Women Launch Their Red Resistance.” Sydney Morning Herald 17 Sep. 2018. 20 Jan. 2019 <https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/no-handmaids-here-liberal-women-launch-their-red-resistance-20180917-p504bm.html>.Wong, Penny. “Marriage Equality Plebiscite.” Interview Transcript. The Project 1 Aug. 2017. 1 Mar. 2018 <https://www.pennywong.com.au/transcripts/the-project-2/>.

The Gothic is not always suited to women’s emancipation, but it is very well suited to women’s anger, and all other instances of what Barbara Creed (3) would refer to as ‘abject’ femininity: excessive, uncanny and uncontained instances that disturb patriarchal norms of womanhood. This article asserts that the conventions of the Gothic genre are well suited to expressions of women’s rage; invoking Sarah Ahmed’s work on the discomforting presence of the kill-joy in order to explore how the often-alienating processes of uncensored female anger coincide with contemporary notions of the Monstrous Feminine. This should not suggest that the Gothic is a wholly feminist genre - one need only look to Jane Eyre to observe the binarised construction of Gothic women as either ‘pure’ or ‘deviant’: virginal heroine or mad woman in the attic. However, what is significant about the Gothic genre is that it often permits far more in-depth, even sympathetic explorations of ‘deviant femininity’ that are out of place elsewhere.Indeed, the normative, rationalist demand for good health and accommodating cheerfulness is symptomatic of what Queer Crip scholar Katarina Kolářová (264) describes as ‘compulsory, curative positivity’ – wherein the Monstrousness of deviant femininity, Queerness and disability must be ‘fixed’ in order to produce blithe, comforting feminine docility. It seems almost too obvious to point to The Yellow Wallpaper as a perfect exemplar of this: the physician husband of Gillman’s protagonist literally prescribes indolence and passivity as ‘cures’ for what may well be post-partum depression – another instance of distinctly feminine irrationality that must be promptly contained. The short story is peppered through with references to the protagonist’s ‘illness’ as a source of consternation or discomfort for her husband, who declares, “I feel easier with you now” (134) as she becomes more and more passive.The notion of men’s comfort is important within discussions of women’s anger – not only within the Gothic, but within a broader context of gendered power and privileged experience. Sara Ahmed’s Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness asserts that we “describe as happy a situation that you wish to defend. Happiness translates its wish into a politics, a wishful politics, a politics that demands that others live according to a wish” (573) For Ahmed, happiness is not solely an individual experience, but rather is relational, and as much influenced by normative systems of power as any other interpersonal process.It has historically fallen upon women to sacrifice their own happiness to ensure that men are comfortable; being quiet and unargumentative, remaining both chase and sexually alluring, being maternal and nurturing, while scrupulously censoring any evidence of pregnancy, breastfeeding or menstrual cycles (Boyer 79). If a woman has ceased to be happy within these terms, then she has failed to be a good woman, and experiences what Ahmed refers to as a ‘negative affect’ – a feeling of being out of place. To be out of place is to be an ‘affect alien’: one must either continue feeling alienated or correct one’s feelings (Ahmed 582). Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild uses the analogy of a bride feeling miserable at her wedding, obliging herself to bring her feelings in-line with what is expected of her, “Sensing a gap between the ideal feeling and the actual feeling she tolerated, the bride prompts herself to be happy” (Hochschild 61).Ahmed uses to the term ‘Kill Joy’ to refer to feminists – particularly black feminists – whose actions or presence refuse this obligation, and in turn project their discomfort outwards, instead of inwards. The stereotype of the angry black woman, or the humourless feminist persist because these women are not complicit in social orders that hold the comfort of white men as paramount (583); their presence is discomforting.Contrary to its title, Killing Joy does not advocate for an end to happiness. Rather, one might understand the act of killing joy as a tactic of subjective honesty – an acknowledgement of dis-ease, of one’s alienation and displacement within the social contract of reciprocal happiness. Here I use the word dis-ease as a deliberate double entendre – implying both the experience of a negative affect, as well as the apparent social ‘illness’ of refusing acquiescent female joy. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the protagonist’s passive femininity is ironically both the antithesis and the cause of her Monstrous transformation, demonstrating an instance of feminine liminality that is the hallmark of the Gothic heroine.Here I introduce the example of Lily Frankenstein, a modern interpretation of the Bride of the Creature, portrayed by Billie Piper in the Showtime series Penny Dreadful. In Shelley’s novel the Bride is commissioned for the Creature’s contentment, a contract that Frankenstein acknowledges she could not possibly have consented to (Shelley 206). She is never given sentience or agency; her theoretical existence and pre-natal destruction being premised entirely on the comfort of men. Upon her destruction, the Creature cries, “Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness?” (Shelley 209). Her first film portrayal by Elsa Lanchester in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1936) is iconic, but brief. She is granted no dialogue, other than a terrified scream, followed by a goose-like hiss of disgust at Boris Karloff’s lonely Creature. Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) merges the characters of Elizabeth and the Bride into the same doomed woman. After being murdered by the Creature, she is resurrected by Frankenstein – and consequently fought over by both. Her inevitable suicide is her one moment of tragic autonomy.Penny Dreadful is the first time that the Bride has been given an opportunity to speak for herself. Lily’s character arc is neither that of the idealised, innocent victim, nor is she entirely abject and wanton: she is – quite literally – two women in one. Before she is re-animated and conditioned by Victor Frankenstein to be the perfect bride, she was Brona, a predictably tragic, Irish street-walker with a taste for whisky and a consumptive cough. Diane Long Hoeveler describes the ambiguous duality of the Gothic feminine arising from the fantasies of middle-class woman writing gothic fiction during the 19th century (106). Drawing upon Harriet Guest’s examination of the development of femininity in early Gothic literature, Hoeveler asserts that women may explore the ‘deviant’ pleasures of wanton sexuality and individualistic, sadistic power while still retaining the chaste femininity demanded of them by their bourgeois upbringings. As both innocent victim of patriarchy and Monstrous Feminine, the construction of the gothic heroine simultaneously criminalises and deifies women.I assert that Penny Dreadful demonstrates the blurring of these boundaries in such a way that the fantasy of the sympathetic, yet Monstrous Gothic Feminine is launched out of the parlours of bored Victorian housewives into a contemporary feminist moment that is characterised by a split between respectable diplomacy and the visibility of female rage. Her transition from coerced docility and abject, sexualised anger manifests in the second season of the show. The Creature – having grown impatient and jealous – comes to collect his Bride and is met with a furious refusal.Lily’s rage is explosive. Her raw emotion is evidently startling to the Creature, who stands in astonishment and fear at something even more monstrous and alien than himself – a woman’s unrestrained anger. For all his wretched ‘Otherness’ and misery, he is yet a man - a bastard son of the Enlightenment, desperate to be allowed entrance into the hallowed halls of reason. In both Shelley’s original novel and the series, he tries (and fails) to establish himself as a worthy and rational citizen; settling upon the Bride as his coveted consolation prize for his Monstrous failure. If he cannot be a man as his creator was, then he shall have a companion that is ‘like’ him to soothe his pain.Consequently, Lily’s refusal of the Creature is more than a rejection – it is the manifestation of an alien affect that has been given form within the undead, angry woman: a trifecta of ‘Otherness’. “Shall we wonder the pastures and recite your fucking poetry to the fucking cows?” She mocks the Creature’s bucolic, romantic ideals, killing his joyful phantasy that she, as his companion, will love and comfort him despite his Monstrousness (“Memento Mori”).Lily’s confrontation of the Creature is an unrestrained litany of women’s pain – the humiliation of corsetry and high heels, the slavery of marriage, the brutality of sexual coercion: all which Ahmed would refer to as the “signs of labour under the sign of happiness” (573). These are the pains that women must hide in order to maintain men’s comfort, the sacrificial emotional labours which are obfuscated by the mandates of male-defined femininity. The Gothic’s nurturance of anger transforms Lily’s outburst from an act of cruelty and selfishness to a site of significant feminine abjection. Through this scene Hochschild’s comment takes on new meaning: Lily – being quite literally the Bride (or the intended Bride) of the Creature – has turned the tables and has altered the process of disaffection – and made herself happy at the expense of men.Lily forms a militia of ‘fallen’ women from whom she demands tribute: the bleeding, amputated hands of abusive men. The scene is a thrilling one, recalling the misogyny of witch trials, sexual violence and exploitation as an army of angry kill joys bang on the banquet table, baying for men’s blood (“Ebb Tide”). However, as seems almost inevitable, Lily’s campaign is short-lived. Her efforts are thwarted and her foot soldiers either murdered or fled. We last see her walking dejectedly through the London fog, her fate and future unknown.Lily’s story recalls an instance of the ‘bad feminism’ that nice, respectable, mainstream feminists seek to distance themselves from. In her discussion of the acquittal of infamous castatrix Lorena Bobbitt, poet Katha Pollitt (65-66) observes the scramble by “nice, liberal middle-class professional” feminists to distance themselves from the narratives of irrational rage that supposedly characterise ‘victim feminism’ – opting instead for the comforting ivory towers of self-control and diplomacy.Lily’s speech to her troops is seen partly through the perspective of an increasingly alarmed Dorian Gray, who has hitherto been enjoying the debauched potential of these liberated, ‘deviant’ women, recalling bell hooks’ observation that “ultimately many males revolted when we stated that our bodies were territories that they could not occupy at will. Men who were ready for female sexual liberation if it meant free pussy, no strings attached, were rarely ready for feminist female sexual agency” (41). This is no longer a coterie of wanton women that he may enjoy, but a sisterhood of angry, vengeful kill-joys that will not be respectable, or considerate of his feelings in their endeavours.Here, parallels arise between the absolutes drawn between women as agents or victims, and the positioning of women as positive, progressive ‘rational’ beings or melancholic kill-joys that Ahmed describes. We need only turn to the contemporary debate surrounding the MeToo movement (and its asinine, defensive response of ‘Not All Men’) to observe that the process of identifying oneself as a victim has – for many – become synonymous with weakness, even amongst other feminists. Notably, Germaine Greer referred to the movement as ‘whinging’, calling upon women to be more assertive, instead of wallowing in self-victimisation and misandry, as Lily supposedly does (Miller).While Greer may be a particularly easy strawman, her comments nonetheless recall Judith Halberstam’s observations of prescriptive paternalism (maternalism?) within Western feminist discourse. His chapter Shadow Feminisms uses the work of Gayatri Spivak to describe how triumphalist narratives of women’s liberation often function to restrict the terms of women’s agency and expression – particularly those of women of colour.Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? asserts that the colonial narratives inherent within white feminists’ attempts to ‘save’ non-Western women are premised upon the imagined heroicism of the individual, which in turn demands the rejection of ‘subaltern’ strategies like passiveness, anger and refusal. She asks, “does the category of resistance impose a teleology of progressive politics on the analytics of power?” (9). Put more simply, both Halberstam and Spivak beg the question of why it is necessary for women and other historically marginalised groups to adopt optimistic and respectable standards of agency? Especially when those terms are pre-emptively defined by feminists like Greer.Halberstam conceptualises Shadow Feminisms in the melancholic terms of refusal, undoing, failure and anger. Even in name, Shadow Feminism is well suited to the Gothic – it has no agenda of triumphant, linear progress, nor the saccharine coercion of individualistic optimism. Rather, it emphasises the repressed, quiet forms of subversion that skulk in the introspective, resentful gloom. This is a feminism that cannot and will not let go of its traumas or its pain, because it should not have to (Halberstam, Queer Art 128-129).Thus, the Monstrousness of female rage is given space to acknowledge, rather than downplay or dismiss the affective-alienation of patriarchy. To paraphrase scholars Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace, the Gothic allows women to explore the hidden or censured expressions of dissatisfaction and resentment within patriarchal societies, being a “coded expression of women’s fears of entrapment within the domestic and within the female body” (Smith & Wallace 2).It may be easy to dismiss the Gothic as eldritch assemblages of Opheliac madness and abject hyperbole, I argue that it is valuable precisely because it invites the opening of festering wounds and the exploration of mouldering sepulchres that are shunned by the squeamish mainstream; coaxing the skeletons from the closet so that they may finally air their musty grievances. As Halberstam states in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, the Gothic represents the return of the repressed and thus encourages rather than censors the exploration of grief, madness and irrationality (Skin Shows 19). Accordingly, we may understand Lily’s rage as what Halberstam would refer to as a Monstrous Technology (21-22) – more specifically, a technology of the Monstrous Feminine: a significant site of disruption within Gothic narratives that not only ‘shows’ the source of its abjection, but angrily airs its dirty laundry for everyone to see.Here emerges the distinction between the ‘non-whinging’, respectable feminism advocated by the likes of Greer and Lily’s Monstrous, Gothic Feminism. Observing a demonstration by a group of suffragettes, Lily describes their efforts as unambitious – “their enemies are same, but they seek equality” (“Good and Evil Braided Be”). Lily has set her sights upon mastery. By allowing her rage to manifest freely, her movement has manifested as the violent misandry that anti-suffragists and contemporary anti-feminists alike believe is characteristic of women’s liberation, provoking an uncomfortable moment for ‘good’ feminists who desperately wish to avoid such pejorative stereotypes.What Lily offers is not ethical. It does not conform to any justifiable feminist ideology. She represents that which is repressed, a distinctly female rage that has no place within any rational system of belief. Nonetheless, Lily remains a sympathetic character, her “doomed, keening women” (“Ebb Tide”) evoking a quiet, subversive thrill of solidarity that must be immediately hushed. This, I assert, is indicative of the liminal ambiguity that makes the Monstrous Feminine so unsettling, and so significant.And Monsters are always significant. Their ‘Otherness’ functions like lighthouses of meaning. Further, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (6) reminds us, Monsters signify not only the fragile boundaries of human subjectivity and discourse, but also the origins of the alterity that defines them. Like the tragic creature of Shelley’s masterpiece, Monsters eventually follow their creators home to demand an explanation – their revenant terror demands accountability (Cohen 20). What Lily exemplifies does not have to make others comfortable, and it is under no obligation to remain within any standards of ethics. To return one last time to Halberstam, I argue that the Monstrosity manifested within female rage is valuable precisely because it because it obliges us “to be unsettled by the politically problematic connections history throws our way” (Halberstam, Queer Art 162). Therefore, to be angry, to dwell on traumatic pasts, and to revel in the ‘failure’ of negativity is to ensure that these genealogies are not ignored.When finally captured, Victor Frankenstein attempts to lobotomise her, promising to permanently take away the pain that is the cause of her Monstrous rage. To this, Lily responds: “there are some wounds that can never heal. There are scars that make us who we are, but without them, we don’t exist” (“Perpetual Night and the Blessed Dark”). Lily refuses to let go of her grief and her anger, and in so doing she fails to coalesce within the placid, docile femininity demanded by Victor Frankenstein. But her refusal is not premised in an obdurate reactionism. Rather, it is a tactic of survival. By her own words, without her trauma – and that of countless women before her – she does not exist. The violence of rape, abuse and the theft of her agency have defined her as both a woman and as a Monster. “I’m the sum part of one woman’s days. No more, no less”, she tells Frankenstein. To eschew her rage is to deny its origin.So, to finish I ask readers to take a moment, and dwell on that rage. On women’s rage. On yours. On the rage that may have been directed at you. Does that make you uncomfortable?Good.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35.3 (2010): 571-593.Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 3-25.Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993.“Ebb Tide.”. Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.“Good and Evil Braided Be.” Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. USA: Duke UP, 1995.———. The Queer Art of Failure. USA: Duke UP, 2011.Hoeveler, Diane. “The Female Gothic, Beating Fantasies and the Civilizing Process.” Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity. Eds. Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998. 101-132.hooks, bell. Communion: The Female Search for Love. USA: Harper Collins, 2003.Kolářová, Kristina. “The Inarticulate Post-Socialist Crip: On the Cruel Optimism of Neo-Liberal Transformation in the Czech Republic.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8.3 (2014): 257-274.“Memento Mori.” Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2015.Miller, Nick. “Germaine Greer Challenges #MeToo Campaign.” Sydney Morning Herald, 21 Jan. 2018.“Perpetual Night/The Blessed Dark.” Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.Pollitt, Katha. “Lorena’s Army.” “Bad Girls”/“Good Girls”: Women, Sex & Power in the Nineties. Eds. Nan Bauer Maglin and Donna Perry. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996. 65-67.Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus. Australia: Penguin Books, 2009 [1818].Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988.Smith, Andrew, and Diana Wallace. “The Female Gothic: Now and Then”. Gothic Studies 6.1 (2004): 1-7.

The concept of war is inextricably linked to violence, and military action almost always resounds with the emotion and language of rage. Since the War on Terror began in September 2001, post-9/11 expressions of terror and rage have influenced academics to evaluate rage and its meanings (Gildersleeve and Gehrmann). Of course, it has directly influenced the lives of those affected by global conflicts in war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa. The populace there has reacted violently to military invasions with a deep sense of rage, while in the affluent West, rage has also infiltrated everyday life through clothes, haircuts, and popular culture as military chic became ‘all the rage’ (Rall 177). Likewise, post-9/11 popular films directly tap into rage and violence to explain (or justify?) conflict and war. The film version of the life of United States Iraq veteran Chris Kyle in American Sniper (2014) reveals fascinating depictions of rage through the perspective of a highly trained shooter who waits patiently above the battlefield, watching for hours before taking human life with a carefully planned long-distance shot. The significance of the complexities of rage as presented in this film are discussed later. Foundations of Rage: Colonial Legacy, Arab Spring, and ISISThe War on Terror may have purportedly began with the rage of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda missions and the responding rage of George Bush’s America determined to seek vengeance for 9/11, but the rage simmering in the Middle East has deeper origins. This includes: the rejection of the Shah of Iran's secular dictatorship in 1979, the ongoing trauma of an Arab Palestinian state that was promised in 1947, and the blighted hopes of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism that offered so much in the 1950s but failed to deliver. But these events should not be considered in isolation from events of the whole 20th century, in particular the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the Allied forces, especially Britain and France after the First World War. The history of injustice that Robert Fisk has chronicled in a monumental volume reveals the complexity and nuances of an East-West conflict that continued to fracture the Middle East. In a Hollywood-based film such as American Sniper it is easy to depict the region from a Western perspective without considering the cycle of injustice and oppression that gave birth to the rage that eventually lashed out at the West. Rage can also be rage against war, or rage about the mistreatment of war victims. The large-scale protests against the war before the 2003 Iraq invasion have faded into apparent nothingness, despite nearly two decades of war. Protest rage appears to have been replaced by outrage on behalf of the victims of war; the refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and those displaced by the ever- spreading conflict that received a new impetus in 2011 with the Arab Spring democracy movements. One spark point for rage ignited when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi embarked on his act of self-immolation in protest against harassment by public officials. This moment escalated into a kaleidoscope of collective rage as regimes were challenged from Syria to Libya, but met with a tragic aftermath. Sadly, democratic governments did not emerge, but turned into regimes of extremist violence exemplified in the mediaeval misogynistic horror now known as ISIS, or IS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Hassan). This horror intensified as millions of civilised Syrians and Iraqis sought to flee their homelands. The result was the movement of peoples, which included manipulation by ruthless people smugglers and detention by governments determined to secure borders — even even as this eroded decades of consensus on the rights of refugees. One central image, that of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s corpse washed up on a beach (Smith) should invoke open rage. Here, the incongruity was that a one-time Turkish party beach for affluent 18 to 35-year-olds from Western Europe would signify the death place of a Syrian refugee child, now displaced by war. The historical significance of East/West conflicts in the Middle East, recent events post- Arab Spring, the resulting refugee crisis in the region, and global anti-war protests should be foremost when examining Clint Eastwood's film about an American military sniper in Iraq.Hot Rage and Cold Rage Recent mass shootings in the United States have delineated factions within the power of rage: it seems to blow either hot or cold. US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan was initially calm when he embarked on a public expression of rage, wounding 30 people and murdering 13 others in a mass shooting event in 2009 (MacAskill). Was this to be categorised as the rage of a nihilist, an Islamist - or as just another American mass shooting like events in Orlando or Sandy Hook? The war journalist and film maker Sebastian Junger authored a study on belonging, where he linked mass shootings (or rampage killings) to social stress and disunity, as a “tendency rising steadily in the US since the 1980s” (115-116). In contrast, the actions of a calm and isolated shooter on a rooftop can be justified as acceptable behaviour if this occurs during war. Now in the case of Chris Kyle, he normalised his tale of calm killing, as an example identified by action “built on a radically asymmetric violence” (Pomarede 53).Enemy at the Gates The point is that sniper killings can be presented in film as morally good. For example, the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates portrays a duel of two snipers in Stalingrad, Russia. This is a fictionalised contest of a fictionalised event, because there was only tangential evidence that Russian sniper hero Vasily Zaytsev actually engaged in a three-day sniper duel with his German enemy during the Second World War. Enemy at the Gates presents the sniper as an acceptable figure in mass popular culture (or even a hero?), which provides the justification for American Sniper. However, in this instance, viewers could recognise a clear struggle between good and evil.Politically, Enemy at the Gates, whether viewed from a conservative or a progressive perspective, presents a struggle between a soldier of the allies (the Soviet Union) and the forces of Nazism, undeniably the most evil variant of fascism. We can interpret this as a defence of the communist heartland, or the defence of a Russian motherland, or the halting of Nazi aggression at its furthest expansion point. Whichever way it is viewed, the Russian sniper is a good man, and although in the movie’s plot the actor Ralph Fiennes as political commissar injects a dimension of manipulation and Stalinist authoritarian control, this does not detract from the idea of the hero defeating evil with single aimed shots. There is rage, but it is overshadowed by the moral ‘good.’American Sniper The true story of Chris Kyle is quite simple. A young man grows up in Texas with ‘traditional’ American values, tries sport and University, tries ranch life, and joins the US Navy Special Forces. He becomes a SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) team member, and is trained as a specialist sniper. Kyle excels as a sniper in Iraq, where he self-identifies as America's most successful sniper. He kills a lot of enemies in Iraq, experiences multiple deployments followed by the associated trauma of reintegration to family life and redeployment, suffers from PTSD, returns to civilian life in America and is himself shot dead by a distressed veteran, in an ironic act of rage. Admired by many, the veracity of Kyle’s story is challenged by others, a point I will return to. As noted above, Kyle kills a lot of people, many of whom are often unaware of his existence. In his book On Killing, Lieutenant-Colonel David Grossman notes this a factor that actually causes the military to have a “degree of revulsion towards snipers” (109), which is perhaps why the movie version of Kyle’s life promotes a rehabilitation of the military in its “unambiguous advocacy of the humility, dedication, mastery, and altruism of the sniper” as hero (Beck 218). Most enlisted soldiers never actually kill their enemies, but Kyle kills well over 100 while on duty.The 2012 book memoir of United States Navy sniper Chris Kyle at war in Iraq became a national cultural artefact. The film followed in 2014, allowing the public dramatisation of this to offer a more palatable form for a wider audience. It is noted that military culture at the national level is malleable and nebulous (Black 42), and these constructs are reflected in the different variants of American Sniper. These cultural products are absorbed differently when consumed by the culture that has produced them (the military), as compared to the way that they are consumed by the general public, and the book American Sniper reflects this. Depending upon readers’ perspectives, it is a book of raw honesty or nationalistic jingoism, or perhaps both. The ordinary soldier’s point of view is reiterated and directed towards a specifically American audience. Despite controversy and criticism the book was immensely successful, with weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. While it naturally appealed to many in its primary American audience, from an Australian perspective, the jingoism of this book jars. In fact, it really jars a lot, to the point of being quite challenging to read. That Australian readers would have difficulty with this text is probably appropriate, because after all, the book was not created for Australians but for Americans.On the other hand, Americans have produced balanced accounts of the soldier experience in Iraq. A very different exemplar is Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury blog that became the book The Sandbox (2007). Here American men and women soldiers wrote their own very revealing stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in autobiographical accounts that ranged from nuanced explanations of the empathy for the soldier’s predicament, to simple outright patriotism. TIn their first-hand accounts of war showed a balance of ordinary pathos, humour – and the raw brutality of a soldier finding the neck stem of a human spine on the ground after a suicide bomb attack (Trudeau 161) – and even this seems more palatable to read than American Sniper. A similar book on the US military sniper experience (Cavallaro and Larsen) also shows it is possible to incorporate a variety of perspectives without patriotic jingoism, or even military propaganda being predominant.In contrast to the book, the film American Sniper narrates a more muted story. The movie is far more “saccharine”, in the words of critical Rolling Stone reviewer Matt Taibbi, but still reflects a nationalistic attitude to war and violence — appropriate to the mood of the book. American producer/director Clint Eastwood has developed his own style for skipping around the liminal space that exists between thought-provoking analysis and populism, and American Sniper is no exception. The love story of Chris Kyle and his wife Taya looks believable, and the intensity of military training and war fighting, including the dispassionate thoughts of Kyle as sniper, are far more palatable in the film version than as the raw words on the page.The Iraq War impacted on millions of Americans, and it is the compelling images shown re-living Chris Kyle’s funeral at the film’s conclusion that leaves a lasting message. The one-time footballer’s memorial service is conducted in a Texas football stadium and this in itself is poignant: but it is the thousands of people who lined the highway overpasses for over 200 miles to farewell him and show respect as his body travels towards the funeral in the stadium, that gives us an insight into the level of disenchantment and rage at America’s loss. This is a rage fuelled by losing their military ‘empire’ coupled with a traumatised search for meaning that Jerry Lembcke sees as inextricably linked to US national failure in war and the tragedy of an individual soldier’s PTSD. Such sentiments seem intimately connected to Donald Trump’s version of America, and its need to exercise global power. Kyle died before Trump’s election, but it seems evident that such rage, anger and alienation experienced by a vast segment of the American population contributed to the election result (Kluger). Calm Cold Calculation Ironically, the traditional sniper embodies the antithesis of hot-blooded rage. Firing any long- distance range weapon with accuracy requires discipline, steady breathing and intense muscle control. Olympic shooting or pentathlons demonstrate this, and Gina Cavallaro and Matt Larsen chronicle both sniper training and the sniper experience in war. So, the notion of sniper shooting and rage can only coexist if we accept that rage becomes the cold, calculating rage of a person doing a highly precise job when killing enemies. In the book, Kyle clearly has no soldierly respect for his Iraqi insurgent enemies and is content to shoot them down one by one. In the film, there is greater emphasis on Kyle having more complex emotions based around the desire to protect his fellow soldiers by shooting in a calm and detached fashion at his designated targets.Chris Kyle’s determination to kill his enemies regardless of age or gender seems at odds with the calm detached passivity of the sniper. The long-distance shooter should be dispassionate but Kyle experiences rage as he kills to protect his fellow soldiers. Can we argue he exhibits ‘cold rage’ not ‘hot rage’, but rage none the less? It would certainly seem so. War Hero and Fantasist?In life, as in death, Chris Kyle presents a figure of controversy, being praised by the political far right, yet condemned by a diverse coalition that included radicals, liberals, and even conservatives such as former soldier Michael Fumento. Fumento commented that Kyle’s literary embellishments and emphasis on his own prowess denigrated the achievements of fellow American snipers. Reviewer Lindy West described him as “a hate filled killer”, only to become a recipient of rage and hatred from Kyle supporters. Paul Rieckhoff described the film as not the most complex nor deepest nor provocative, but the best film made about the Iraq war for its accuracy in storytelling and attention to detail.Elsewhere, reviewer Mark Kermode argues that the way the film is made introduces a significant ambiguity: that we as an audience can view Kyle as either a villain, a hero, or a combination of both. Critics have also examined Kyle’s reportage on his military exploits, where it seems he received less fewer medals than he claimed, as well as his ephemeral assertion that he shot looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Lamothe). In other claims, the US courts have upheld the assertion of former wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura that Kyle fabricated a bar-room brawl between the two. But humans are complex beings, and Drew Blackburn sees it as “entirely plausible to become both a war hero and a liar” in his candid (Texas-based) assessment of one person who was, like many of us, a multifaceted figure.Conclusion This article has addressed the complicated issues of rage originating in the historical background of military actions that have taken place in the East/West conflicts in the Middle East that began in the region after the Second World War, and continue to the present day. Rage has become a popular trope within popular culture as military chic becomes ‘all the rage’. Rage is inextricably linked to the film American Sniper. Patriotism and love of his fellow soldiers motivated Chris Kyle, and his determination to kill his country’s enemies in Iraq and protect the lives of his fellow American soldiers is clear, as is his disdain for both his Iraqi allies and enemies. With an ever- increasing number of mass shootings in the United States, the military sniper will be a hero revered by some and a villain reviled by others. Rage infuses the film American Sniper, whether the rage of battle, rage at the moral dilemmas his role demands, domestic rage between husband and wife, PTSD rage, or rage inspired following his pointless murder. But rage, even when it expresses a complex vortex of emotions, remains dangerous for those who are obsessed with guns, and look to killing others either as a ‘duty’ or to soothe an individual crisis of confidence. ReferencesAmerican Sniper. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Brothers, 2014.Beck, Bernard. “If I Forget Thee: History Lessons in Selma, American Sniper, and A Most Violent Year.” Multicultural Perspectives 17.4 (2015): 215-19.Black, Jeremy. War and the Cultural Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.Blackburn, Drew. “How We Talk about Chris Kyle.” Texas Monthly 2 June 2016. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/chris-kyle-rorschach/>.Cavallaro, Gina, and Matt Larsen. Sniper: American Single-Shot Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guildford, Connecticut: Lyons, 2010. Enemy at the Gates. Dir. Jean-Jaques Annaud. Paramount/Pathe, 2001.Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.Fumento, Michael. “American Sniper’s Myths and Misrepresentations.” The American Conservative 13 Mar. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/clint-eastwoods-fabricated-sniper/>.Gildersleeve, Jessica, and Richard Gehrmann. “Memory and the Wars on Terror”. Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 1-19.Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.Hassan, Hassan. “The True Origins of ISIS.” The Atlantic 30 Nov. 2018. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/>.Kermode, Mark. “American Sniper Review – Bradley Cooper Stars in Real-Life Tale of Legendary Marksman.” The Guardian 18 Jan. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/18/american-sniper-review-bradley-cooper-real-life-tale-legendary-marksman>.Kluger, Jeffrey. “America's Anger Is Out of Control.” TIME 1 June 2016. 17 Feb. 2019 <http://time.com/4353606/anger-america-enough-already>.Kyle, Chris. American Sniper. New York: Harper, 2012. Junger, Sebastian. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. London: Fourth Estate, 2016.Lamothe, Dan. “How ‘American Sniper’ Chris Kyle’s Truthfulness Is in Question Once Again.” 25 May 2016. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/05/25/how-american-sniper-chris-kyles-truthfulness-is-in-question-once-again/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d8806f2b8d3a>.Lembcke, Jerry. PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-Empire America. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013.Pomarède, Julien. “Normalizing Violence through Front-Line Stories: The Case of American Sniper.” Critical Military Studies 4.1 (2018): 52-71. Rall, Denise N. “Afterword: The Military in Contemporary Fashion.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 177-179. Rieckhoff, Paul. “A Veteran's View of American Sniper.” Variety 16 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://variety.com/2015/film/opinion/a-veterans-view-of-american-sniper-guest-column-1201406349/>.Smith, Heather, and Richard Gehrmann. “Branding the Muscled Male Body as Military Costume.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 57-71.Smith, Helena. “Shocking Images of Drowned Syrian Boy Show Tragic Plight of Refugees.” The Guardian 2 Sep. 2015. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/shocking-image-of-drowned-syrian-boy-shows-tragic-plight-of-refugees>.Stanford, David (ed.). The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2007.Taibbi, Matt. “American Sniper Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticise.” Rolling Stone 21 Jan. 2015. <https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/american-sniper-is-almost-too-dumb-to-criticize-240955/>.Trudeau, Garry B. The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrew McMeel Publishing, 2007.West, Lindy. “The Real American Sniper Was a Hate-Filled Killer: Why Are Simplistic Patriots Treating Him as a Hero?” The Guardian 6 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/06/real-american-sniper-hate-filled-killer-why-patriots-calling-hero-chris-kyle>.

"Love Will Tear Us Apart" When routine bites hard, And ambitions are low, And resentment rides high, But emotions won't grow, And we're changing our ways, taking different roads. Then love, love will tear us apart, again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Why is the bedroom so cold? You've turned away on your side. Is my timing that flawed? Our respect runs so dry. Yet there's still this appeal that we've kept through our lives But love, love will tear us apart, again. Love, love will tear us apart, again. You cry out in your sleep, All my failings exposed. And there's a taste in my mouth, As desperation takes hold. Just that something so good just can't function no more But love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Ian Curtis (1980) [in Curtis 1995:170-71] Watching the film 24 Hour Party People (2002), I remembered how much I used to love the bleak and danceable music that came from Manchester, England in the 1970s and 1980s. The early part of the film focuses on the aftermath of the Sex Pistols’ first visit to Manchester in 1976 and depicts the creation of Factory Records by Tony Wilson and the formation of Joy Division, one of the label’s most promising bands. Most of the band members were part a small group of people who were present at the Sex Pistols’ concert. The film shows the rise of the band and the strange allure of singer Ian Curtis, who killed himself in 1980 days before the band was set to embark on its first tour of the United States. After his death, Curtis became a figure of cult adoration and fascination. He remains so today. One of Joy Division’s most popular songs is “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (1980), reputedly about the dissolution of Curtis’s marriage (for more on this relationship, see the memoir of Curtis’s wife [1995]). In his brief life, Curtis’s recorded vocals were more announced than sung. In a dark, distant baritone, his lyrics sounded almost android-like, hinting at melody without indulging in the maudlin excess of the pop song. His distance from love song sentimentality often moved to a near yell that revealed painful sadness instead of irony (as in the lyrics and style of Morrissey of The Smiths, for example). Unlike the angry manic vocals that had already become a cliché in punk following Sex Pistols Johnny Lydon’s nasal wailing, Curtis offered the disturbing chest voice of melancholia. The band’s sound, as it began to evolve from three-chord punk to a more complicated and innovative collaboration of elements, included syncopated drum beats, a prominent bass line that flirted with funk rhythm, and a dirge-like guitar. In some songs, such as “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” a synthesizer was included, repeating and harmonizing to the repeated chorus. Such an embellishment was unheard of in guitar-oriented rock music at the time. Thus “Love” succeeds on three levels: it is an anthem of the “doom element” in relationships; it is musically adventuresome, and at the same time it is a dance song, played ad infinitum in the new wave dance halls of the 1980s. (Later, New Order, a band created in the wake of Curtis’s death and also on Factory Records, had an even bigger dance hit with the song “Blue Monday,” depicting another kind of failed romance.) To suggest an interpretation of the song lyrics: the couple’s love is all but doomed. Set in a depressing Northern England, there is no way for love to succeed: there is no room for “something so good”. Curtis doesn’t blame the failure of the relationship on either himself or the beloved in the song; there are traditions at work that cause the closeness of the relationship to dissolve into distance. In the song, it is suggested that the protagonist is unable to satisfy his lover, and yet the couple are unable to speak about it and the beloved turns away. Thus, he and his lover inherit a scenario that sets a mechanism to work against them. They cannot conquer their silences. Romeo and Juliet had the visible force of warring clans to defeat their love. In Curtis’s song, however, there are invisible social forces and the inadequacy of communication itself working against the couple. That their love is doomed is not so new. What makes the song sad is not that love tears them apart; the sadness is that love tears them apart again. Even though they have been through this torment before, there is no way to avoid its return. Without knowing it, they have called upon Love to bring it back. Of course, romantic love is often – if not usually – the province of popular song, from the ballad to the contemporary dance song. Disco, for example, perpetuated two sides of this fixation on love. One was the declaration of the ecstasy and spirituality of sexual love heard in Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” (1977) or Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real” (1979); the other was the manifesto of outliving the heartbreak caused by a deceitful lover (Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” [1978] or more recently, Whitney Houston’s “Its Not Right But Its Okay” [1999]). Love could be a savior to a lonely soul, providing the singer (and by extension, the dancing listener) with bodily pleasure. When disco singers, (usually female, usually black) sang of love’s demise, it was due to a lowly, no-good man revealing his true self. Yet in these tales, the failure of love sparked the ability of a smart, able woman to live an honorable life – even if she must do it on her own and find a divinity in herself. In disco, Love flirted with religion. Punk rock, at its inception, turned away from love as subject matter. For example, John Lydon, lead singer of the Sex Pistols (then known as Johnny Rotten) was quoted as saying that love was something felt for a cat or a dog. In a setting squeezed dry of spirituality and sexual bliss, for him love was illusionary and diversionary. Punk seemed to invest itself in other emotions, such as anger, and screamed about institutions, leaders, traditions—including the traditions of pop music itself. Yet love quickly returned as subject matter to punk music. The Buzzcocks, unlike the polemically political band The Clash, turned to romance and sex as subject matter. They debuted as the opening act at the Sex Pistols’ second visit to Manchester, and became known for bittersweet, uptempo love songs such as “What Do I Get?” (1978) and “Ever Fallen In Love With Someone (You Shouldn't've Fallen In Love With)?” (1978). Even “Orgasm Addict” (1977) tells the tale of a Casanova of sorts. The beloved in a Buzzcocks’ song was gender ambiguous, and the lyrics’ tone was ironic – if not sarcastic – about love’s misery. The band matched buzzsaw guitar with catchy melodies; the Buzzcocks wrote breakneck love songs you could dance to, even if the dancing was a bit of a flail. Singer Pete Shelley may seem to suffer from near-abject rejection, but he did so with abundant energy. Even John Lydon, in his later incarnation as the singer of Public Image Limited (PiL), penned the lyrics to the song “This is Not a Love Song (1983).” He screeched the words in the title over and over, and hence suggested that as much as the song was anti-romance, there was no way around Love. It returns endlessly, even if love was – as concept, as reality – to be rejected as part of a political conspiracy to turn one into a duped consumer of sounds, images, and stories. Love was inevitable. You are just going to end up feeling something for somebody. To rephrase a million pop songs (as done in the film Moulin Rouge (2001) in its medley of “silly love songs”): love is going to get you, it lifts you up where you belong, but it doesn’t live here anymore, although it may come back when you least expect it, you can’t hurry it… We, as listeners, let the song’s sentiment substitute for what we cannot say. Songs are emotional surrogates for the couple as well as the single in recovery. Regardless, we search the airwaves for our song. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was this song in 1980, perfect for the failed romantic who dressed in dark colors, drew up lists of things s/he hated, and was prone to mourn a relationship even as it was beginning. As such this song was perfect for me back then, especially since it had a good beat and I could dance to its timely and timeless sadness. The pop song, then, is a site of endless, popular philosophizing on the nature of Love. Many of these songs, when they don’t blame the world for not letting love last, depict Love as if were a force, or an entity out there in the universe. When it enters our atmosphere (via Cupid?), it wreaks havoc and produces harmony, however fleeting. This metaphysical story of love, however, is far from the psychoanalytic tale of the origins of love. For psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, love is no mystery. It’s a production process. The baby learns to love through its relationship with the mother and, in particular – at least at first – with the mother’s breast. The mother’s breast provides nourishment for the hungry infant as well as sensuality and security. Through this activity the infant learns to love, for love is made through these intimate connections. Also for Klein, the ability to hate is created when the mother does not provide for her child. The dynamics of this relationship enable fantasy on the part of the child. Melanie Klein writes in “Love, Guilt, and Reparation” that “the baby who feels a craving for his mother’s breast when it is not there may imagine it to be there, i.e. he may imagine the satisfaction which he derives from it” (60). Thus, even as an infant, one is given to flights of fantasy, imagining all sorts of sources of nourishment and sensuality. One can surmise that since every child has to grow up and lose the intensity of this first connection, one can see that love becomes affiliated with loss. All sorts of complaints toward parents, and later, lovers, are unavoidable – blame it on our psyches which are factories of fantasy and embedded remembrances. We have to grow up and move from a succession of psychic and real homes. No wonder everyone worries about the beloved leaving, for each of us has been left before. The story of love that Klein tells does, though, have a tentative happy ending, for we are not entirely prisoners of our experiences: “If we have become able, deep in our unconscious minds, to clear our feelings to some extent towards our parents of grievances, and have forgiven them for the frustrations we had to bear, then we can be at peace with ourselves and are able to love others in the true sense of the word” (119). But no doubt, it is a big “if” that begins her sentence. Importantly, in Klein’s view, love is not an external, or otherworldly force; it is made via the needs and interactions of the infantile and maternal body. Equally importantly, though, this process necessitates separation and hence the psychoanalytic love story is one in which the protagonist is taught to love and lose in rapid succession – and requires reparation. Love is both inescapable and impossible. With such a sad narrative lodged in our unconscious, one can understand the reasons why songwriters resort to the metaphysics and divinity of love. Even though love hurts in its endings, as Curtis suggests, we have a history of trying it all over again. No listener ever believed Dionne Warwick when she sang the Burt Bacharach/Hal David song “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” (1969). Dionne probably picked up the pieces of her broken heart and found the next guy who she knew in the back of her mind was all wrong for her. As Freud insists, we are compelled to repeat behavior patterns that do not always result in pleasure. This is not because all humans are born masochists. Rather, as Freud argues in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1961), humans have “an instinct for mastery” that requires repetition. (10). Freud discovered this “instinct” through observing a child playing a game with a wooden reel and a piece of string when his mother leaves him alone. In the game, the child holds onto the string and throws the reel over the edge of the bed. He narrates his action by saying “fort” (gone) and then “da” (there). Freud reads this game as a kind of allegory for the loss he feels with his mother’s sporadic disappearances. The good doctor wonders why a child would replicate such a hurtful experience. He suggests that this game gives the child a compensatory sense of power over the inability to control the actions of his mother. Freud deems the child’s game “a cultural achievement” and an “instinctual renunciation” (of satisfaction). Contemporary readers may well be wary of Freud’s use of the word “instinct.” But I suggest that the will to continue to find love is not only due to a desire to find’s one soul-mate (or to put it more mundanely, “life partner”) although this desire is indeed a crucial impetus for the renewed search. We persevere in this almost futile endeavor to find the perfect romantic love in part due to a compulsion to repeat. The love song, even when it pontificates about remorse and pain in pseudo-abstract terms, is often a grown up version of the child’s “fort-da” game. The sad love song is a social device for coping with pain by restating it in a narrated and sung form. That’s why some of the best tunes are the most woeful ones. And “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is one of the best—it provokes many a listener to sing along with the song’s sorrow while dancing in brooding near-abandon. Works Cited Curtis, Deborah. Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division. London: Faber, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Norton, 1961. Klein, Melanie. “Love, Guilt and Reparation.” Love, Hate and Reparation. Eds. Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere. New York: Norton, 1964. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Miller, Edward D.. "Why Does Love Tear Us Apart? " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/whydoeslovetearusapartagain.php>. APA Style Miller, E. D., (2002, Nov 20). Why Does Love Tear Us Apart? . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/whydoeslovetearusapartagain.html

I am not afraid to say unembellished I am dying but I do not want to do it looking the other way (Lorde 48) In this poem, written by Audre Lorde shortly before her death from breast cancer, Lorde seems to echo the sentiments of Butler and Rosenblum in their collaborative cancer narrative, Cancer in Two Voices, which deals with the experience of disease and dying. Yet in representing their experience of cancer collaboratively, Butler and Rosenblum not only avoid "looking the other way," but construct a text with which they can look to - and garner support from - each other, as well as a larger community. In Cancer in Two Voices Sandra Butler and Barbara Rosenblum necessarily transgress and re-approach dominant metaphors (or "embellishments") of breast cancer and disease by presenting us with a "cancer narrative" which is written collaboratively, in two voices. Consequently, this text presents the experience of breast cancer in the voices of both the "survivor" and "victim," the "healthy" and "ill," the "object" and "subject." In their vacillation between the "I" and the "we," Butler and Rosenblum simultaneously support and resist dominant representations of breast cancer as a terrifying, dichotomizing, solitary condition. In her introduction, Butler describes breast cancer as "a shared epidemic - a collective experience" (iv), indicating from the start that the "two voices" which invoke and involve their community in the experience of cancer consciously resist solitude in favour of solidarity. In choosing to construct their narrative in two voices, Butler and Rosenblum attempt to approach and reconfigure an illness that has been repeatedly figured as isolating and taboo as, rather, sacred and communal. One of the most evident ways in which Butler and Rosenblum implicate the reader in a community which can no longer remain "at a safe distance" from the disease is by linking together traumatic experiences and images of breast cancer victims, Holocaust Survivors, and AIDS victims. The cancer narrative itself is prefaced by a section entitled "Coming Home - 1983" which evokes images of Holocaust survivors and discusses their sense of Jewish identity. Foreshadowing her own experience of a scarred body on the beach, Barbara describes the Holocaust survivors that she met: "I went to the beach with them and saw their scarred bodies...they excavated the flesh of my living relatives" (6). Later, on vacation with Sandy, Barbara goes swimming naked: "Freedom, complete freedom for my mutilated body. Freedom to swim, to move, to announce to the world I am whole in spirit if not in form, with an inkling of wholeness in my new form. Sandy and I snuggled in the water, her body unbelievably comforting and close to mine. Glorious freedom painted on her face as well" (73). In this image, although Rosenblum refers to her "mutilated body," the image is overtaken by that of a couple, comforted by each other's bodies. In this way, she heals the scars and indicates how others might heal their scars. It is interesting, however, that this special moment of comfort between two lovers occurs while Sandy and Barbara are in another "element." In many ways, the double-voiced narrative of Cancer in Two Voices acts as a collaboration (i.e. an act of treason) against the patriarchal, in stitutional powers which traditionally generate and control the dominant metaphors and treatments of breast cancer. Rosenblum and Butler transfer the role of the "oppressor" or "enemy" onto the male doctors as well as the disease itself (53-54). In particular, Barbara expresses her anger at the medical establishment by chronicling her malpractice suit against Kaiser Hospital, which failed to diagnose her cancerous tumor sooner. Thus, Butler and Rosenblum transform the patriarchal institution of medicine into a force which is as culpable as the cancer itself. Marcella Paul explains that "an outstanding characteristic of the illness is the secretiveness which has been associated with it. The presence of cancer is often denied or concealed by both cancer victims and their doctors, and this secrecy suggests that the illness is viewed as dirty and evil as well as painful and life-threatening" (32-33). Furthermore, since the breast cancer 'victim' is identified with the disease itself, she (her very identity) becomes denied, concealed, "dirty." Thus, another way in which Butler and Rosenblum resist dominant approaches to cancer is to write frankly and openly about the disease and its effects. Rosenblum writes, "[t]he major identity change I made was my decision to be public with my cancer. I was going to enter it, use it, embrace it, and eventually incorporate it as part of me. I was going to write about it in my journals, in my articles. I was going to counsel women who needed help" (67). Rather than identifying the disease as 'outside' herself, Rosenblum resolves to immerse her identity in it and, in doing so, perhaps change the character of (and the way that women respond to) the disease itself. Similarly, Butler works to help "other women to see. To look into their lives without flinching or turning away" (99). Just as Butler and Rosenblum bear witness to Barbara's disease, so too do they insist on the importance of "being seen - something that as a lesbian couple [they] have never taken for granted" - in their decision to have a ceremony of commitment (Butler 117). Perhaps, Butler and Rosenblum's inclusion of the dimensions of their lesbian relationship in the cancer narrative adds another layer of resistance against the dominant (i.e. phallic, patriarchal) taboos of cancer - another way in which Butler and Rosenblum rupture and re-figure the traditional modes of narration, images, and metaphors of disease. Julia Watson reads autobiographies "as acts not just of coming to voice but as negotiations in naming the unspeakable" (141); thus, Butler and Rosenblum 'speak' the 'unspeakable' on two accounts: their lesbian relationship and their experience of breast cancer. There are times in the cancer narrative when the concept of "us" and of "community" which Butler and Rosenblum construct fails to console. As Barbara undergoes the pain of chemotherapy and advanced cancer, she writes that a "painful disentangling is necessary" for both her and Sandra. Despite their closeness, Barbara's ability to communicate with Sandra is impeded by her sense of isolation. Rosenblum writes, "I feel totally alone in my cancer. Alone in my agony. Alone in the pain" (95). Whereas Barbara expresses the solitary experience of being in her body, Sandra writes that "her body has become 'our' body" (172). This is one significant place where Butler's and Rosenblum's collaborative and communal paradigms break down. Rosenblum explains, "when I have sensations in my body, it's an unsharable experience . Even a private language such as I have with Sandy, is a self-contradiction. There cannot be private language . I observe myself trying to talk but am isolated in an imprisoned, solipsistic world, experiencing the terror, panic, and isolation because we believe in common language, common culture, common understandings" (129-130). The physical pain, experienced by only one of the "two voices" interferes with Butler and Rosenblum's desire for commonalities. As a result, Rosenblum must express her experience in solitude - alone, despite Sandy's "wanting to be included" (169). Barbara acknowledges the truth in the dominant metaphors of cancer as isolating, but juxtaposes it with a sense of connectedness. Although her belief in their connectedness has been shaken by her unbearable loneliness, Barbara asserts that this very loneliness connects her to the human condition, and therefore to a wider human community. Similarly, while Rosenblum describes her "unstable body" as "terrifying and confusing," resulting in a sense of helplessness, instability, and unpredictability (163), perhaps this journal/letter-writing - a chronicle of the instability of Barbara's body - is a means of gaining control and stability over her condition. It is a way of climbing out of her "crisis of meaning," of attempting to resist the sense that she is "no longer fluent in the language of [her] body, its signs and symbols" (165). In writing, Rosenblum looks "for new, stable ground" (166). She asserts, "[i]nstead of losing myself, instead of being consumed by this disease - and it can consume you if you don't watch it - instead, I grew. I turned it into a possibility for opening up to myself, for discovering, and for exploring new areas" (193). Rosenblum's account of her mastectomy resists the sense of dreaded mutilation. Despite her "horrified" reaction the first time she looked at her chest - "I touched myself at least twenty-five times a day, looking for my breast. But it wasn't there anymore...I hated my body" - Barbara's horror wears off (36). In "Living in an Unstable Body," Rosenblum writes: "Losing a breast did alter my body image, as well as my body, but I never felt a diminishment of my femininity. My breasts were never the center of my womanness" (160). Furthermore, upon witnessing Deena Metzger's mastectomy scar, Butler describes "a tree of life tattooed over her scar, her chest now 'an illuminated manuscript'" (31). Perhaps Cancer in Two Voices is the same sort of "illuminated manuscript" as Metzger's tattoo - one which reinvents the image of the mastectomy as a body illuminated rather than mutilated. Rather than "look away" from the mastectomy scar, Sandra approaches it with tenderness, even kissing it: "my mouth moving along the ruffled skin of her scar brought tears to both our eyes" (31). Similarly, the cancer narrative that Butler and Rosenblum write together is a means of looking at, touching, and publicly displaying the scars (emotional and physical) that result from breast cancer. Thus, perhaps it is accurate to say, that in writing a cancer narrative in two voices, Sandra and Barbara's individual voices are raised to the level of collective experience and - in refiguring dominant metaphors - the cancer narrative is given alternate form and is introduced into the community rather than being excluded from it. References Butler, Sandra and Barbara Rosenblum. Cancer in Two Voices. Expanded Edition. Duluth: Spinsters Ink, 1991. Godard, Barbara. "Women of Letters (Reprise): in Collaboration in the Feminine: Writings on Women and Culture from Tessera Ed. Barbara Godard. Toronto: Second Story Press, 1994, 258-306. Lorde, Audre. "Today Is Not the Day," The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance (New York: Norton, 1993) 48. Paul, Marcella L. "Cancer as Metaphor: The Function of Illness in Manuel Puig's Publis angelical" in Chasqui - Revista de literatura latinoamericana. 17:1 (1988 May): 31-41. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor & Aids and its Metaphors. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1990. Watson, Julia. "Unspeakable Differences: The Politics of Gender in Lesbian and Heterosexual Women's Autobiographies" in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. 139-68. Zeiger, Melissa F. Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Ubiquitous in airports, border checkpoints, and other securitised spaces throughout the world, full-body imaging scanners claim to read bodies in order to identify if they pose security threats. Millimetre-wave body imaging machines—the most common type of body scanner—display to the operating security agent a screen with a generic body outline. If an anomaly is found or if an individual does not align with the machine’s understanding of an “average” body, a small box is highlighted and placed around the “problem” area, prompting further inspection in the form of pat-downs or questioning. In this complex security regime governed by such biometric, body-based technologies, it could be argued that nonalignment with bodily normativity as well as an attendant failure to reveal oneself—to become “transparent” (Hall 295)—marks a body as dangerous. As these algorithmic technologies become more pervasive, so too does the imperative to critically examine their purported neutrality and operative logic of revelation and readability.Biometric technologies are marketed as excavators of truth, with their optic potency claiming to demask masquerading bodies. Failure and bias are, however, an inescapable aspect of such technologies that work with narrow parameters of human morphology. Indeed, surveillance technologies have been taken to task for their inherent racial and gender biases (Browne; Pugliese). Facial recognition has, for example, been critiqued for its inability to read darker skin tones (Buolamwini and Gebru), while body scanners have been shown to target transgender bodies (Keyes; Magnet and Rodgers; Quinan). Critical security studies scholar Shoshana Magnet argues that error is endemic to the technological functioning of biometrics, particularly since they operate according to the faulty notion that bodies are “stable” and unchanging repositories of information that can be reified into code (Magnet 2).Although body scanners are presented as being able to reliably expose concealed weapons, they are riddled with incompetencies that misidentify and over-select certain demographics as suspect. Full-body scanners have, for example, caused considerable difficulties for transgender travellers, breast cancer patients, and people who use prosthetics, such as artificial limbs, colonoscopy bags, binders, or prosthetic genitalia (Clarkson; Quinan; Spalding). While it is not in the scope of this article to detail the workings of body imaging technologies and their inconsistencies, a growing body of scholarship has substantiated the claim that these machines unfairly impact those identifying as transgender and non-binary (see, e.g., Beauchamp; Currah and Mulqueen; Magnet and Rogers; Sjoberg). Moreover, they are constructed according to a logic of binary gender: before each person enters the scanner, transportation security officers must make a quick assessment of their gender/sex by pressing either a blue (corresponding to “male”) or pink (corresponding to “female”) button. In this sense, biometric, computerised security systems control and monitor the boundaries between male and female.The ability to “reveal” oneself is henceforth predicated on having a body free of “abnormalities” and fitting neatly into one of the two sex categorisations that the machine demands. Transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals, particularly those who do not have a binary gender presentation or whose presentation does not correspond to the sex marker in their documentation, also face difficulties if the machine flags anomalies (Quinan and Bresser). Drawing on a Foucauldian analysis of power as productive, Toby Beauchamp similarly illustrates how surveillance technologies not only identify but also create and reshape the figure of the dangerous subject in relation to normative configurations of gender, race, and able-bodiedness. By mobilizing narratives of concealment and disguise, heightened security measures frame gender nonconformity as dangerous (Beauchamp, Going Stealth). Although national and supranational authorities market biometric scanning technologies as scientifically neutral and exact methods of identification and verification and as an infallible solution to security risks, such tools of surveillance are clearly shaped by preconceptions and prejudgements about race, gender, and bodily normativity. Not only are they encoded with “prototypical whiteness” (Browne) but they are also built on “grossly stereotypical” configurations of gender (Clarkson).Amongst this increasingly securitised landscape, creative forms of artistic resistance can offer up a means of subverting discriminatory policing and surveillance practices by posing alternate visualisations that reveal and challenge their supposed objectivity. In his 2018 audio-video artwork installation entitled SANCTUM, UK-based American artist Zach Blas delves into how biometric technologies, like those described above, both reveal and (re)shape ontology by utilising the affectual resonance of sexual submission. Evoking the contradictory notions of oppression and pleasure, Blas describes SANCTUM as “a mystical environment that perverts sex dungeons with the apparatuses and procedures of airport body scans, biometric analysis, and predictive policing” (see full description at https://zachblas.info/works/sanctum/).Depicting generic mannequins that stand in for the digitalised rendering of the human forms that pass through body scanners, the installation transports the scanners out of the airport and into a queer environment that collapses sex, security, and weaponry; an environment that is “at once a prison-house of algorithmic capture, a sex dungeon with no genitals, a weapons factory, and a temple to security.” This artistic reframing gestures towards full-body scanning technology’s germination in the military, prisons, and other disciplinary systems, highlighting how its development and use has originated from punitive—rather than protective—contexts.In what follows, we adopt a methodological approach that applies visual analysis and close reading to scrutinise a selection of scenes from SANCTUM that underscore the sadomasochistic power inherent in surveillance technologies. Analysing visual and aural elements of the artistic intervention allows us to complicate the relationship between transparency and recognition and to problematise the dynamic of mandatory complicity and revelation that body scanners warrant. In contrast to a discourse of visibility that characterises algorithmically driven surveillance technology, Blas suggests opacity as a resistance strategy to biometrics' standardisation of identity. Taking an approach informed by critical security studies and queer theory, we also argue that SANCTUM highlights the violence inherent to the practice of reducing the body to a flat, inert surface that purports to align with some sort of “core” identity, a notion that contradicts feminist and queer approaches to identity and corporeality as fluid and changing. In close reading this artistic installation alongside emerging scholarship on the discriminatory effects of biometric technology, this article aims to highlight the potential of art to queer the supposed objectivity and neutrality of biometric surveillance and to critically challenge normative logics of revelation and readability.Corporeal Fetishism and Body HorrorThroughout both his artistic practice and scholarly work, Blas has been critical of the above narrative of biometrics as objective extractors of information. Rather than looking to dominant forms of representation as a means for recognition and social change, Blas’s work asks that we strive for creative techniques that precisely queer biometric and legal systems in order to make oneself unaccounted for. For him, “transparency, visibility, and representation to the state should be used tactically, they are never the end goal for a transformative politics but are, ultimately, a trap” (Blas and Gaboury 158). While we would simultaneously argue that invisibility is itself a privilege that is unevenly distributed, his creative work attempts to refuse a politics of visibility and to embrace an “informatic opacity” that is attuned to differences in bodies and identities (Blas).In particular, Blas’s artistic interventions titled Facial Weaponization Suite (2011-14) and Face Cages (2013-16) protest against biometric recognition and the inequalities that these technologies propagate by making masks and wearable metal objects that cannot be detected as human faces. This artistic-activist project contests biometric facial recognition and their attendant inequalities by, as detailed on the artist’s website,making ‘collective masks’ in workshops that are modelled from the aggregated facial data of participants, resulting in amorphous masks that cannot be detected as human faces by biometric facial recognition technologies. The masks are used for public interventions and performances.One mask explores blackness and the racist implications that undergird biometric technologies’ inability to detect dark skin. Meanwhile another mask, which he calls the “Fag Face Mask”, points to the heteronormative underpinnings of facial recognition. Created from the aggregated facial data of queer men, this amorphous pink mask implicitly references—and contests—scientific studies that have attempted to link the identification of sexual orientation through rapid facial recognition techniques.Building on this body of creative work that has advocated for opacity as a tool of social and political transformation, SANCTUM resists the revelatory impulses of biometric technology by turning to the use and abuse of full-body imaging. The installation opens with a shot of a large, dark industrial space. At the far end of a red, spotlighted corridor, a black mask flickers on a screen. A shimmering, oscillating sound reverberates—the opening bars of a techno track—that breaks down in rhythm while the mask evaporates into a cloud of smoke. The camera swivels, and a white figure—the generic mannequin of the body scanner screen—is pummelled by invisible forces as if in a wind tunnel. These ghostly silhouettes appear and reappear in different positions, with some being whipped and others stretched and penetrated by a steel anal hook. Rather than conjuring a traditional horror trope of the body’s terrifying, bloody interior, SANCTUM evokes a new kind of feared and fetishized trope that is endemic to the current era of surveillance capitalism: the abstracted body, standardised and datafied, created through the supposedly objective and efficient gaze of AI-driven machinery.Resting on the floor in front of the ominous animated mask are neon fragments arranged in an occultist formation—hands or half a face. By breaking the body down into component parts— “from retina to fingerprints”—biometric technologies “purport to make individual bodies endlessly replicable, segmentable and transmissible in the transnational spaces of global capital” (Magnet 8). The notion that bodies can be seamlessly turned into blueprints extracted from biological and cultural contexts has been described by Donna Haraway as “corporeal fetishism” (Haraway, Modest). In the context of SANCTUM, Blas illustrates the dangers of mistaking a model for a “concrete entity” (Haraway, “Situated” 147). Indeed, the digital cartography of the generic mannequin becomes no longer a mode of representation but instead a technoscientific truth.Several scenes in SANCTUM also illustrate a process whereby substances are extracted from the mannequins and used as tools to enact violence. In one such instance, a silver webbing is generated over a kneeling figure. Upon closer inspection, this geometric structure, which is reminiscent of Blas’s earlier Face Cages project, is a replication of the triangulated patterns produced by facial recognition software in its mapping of distance between eyes, nose, and mouth. In the next scene, this “map” breaks apart into singular shapes that float and transform into a metallic whip, before eventually reconstituting themselves as a penetrative douche hose that causes the mannequin to spasm and vomit a pixelated liquid. Its secretions levitate and become the webbing, and then the sequence begins anew.In another scene, a mannequin is held upside-down and force-fed a bubbling liquid that is being pumped through tubes from its arms, legs, and stomach. These depictions visualise Magnet’s argument that biometric renderings of bodies are understood not to be “tropic” or “historically specific” but are instead presented as “plumbing individual depths in order to extract core identity” (5). In this sense, this visual representation calls to mind biometrics’ reification of body and identity, obfuscating what Haraway would describe as the “situatedness of knowledge”. Blas’s work, however, forces a critique of these very systems, as the materials extracted from the bodies of the mannequins in SANCTUM allude to how biometric cartographies drawn from travellers are utilised to justify detainment. These security technologies employ what Magnet has referred to as “surveillant scopophilia,” that is, new ways and forms of looking at the human body “disassembled into component parts while simultaneously working to assuage individual anxieties about safety and security through the promise of surveillance” (17). The transparent body—the body that can submit and reveal itself—is ironically represented by the distinctly genderless translucent mannequins. Although the generic mannequins are seemingly blank slates, the installation simultaneously forces a conversation about the ways in which biometrics draw upon and perpetuate assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality.Biometric SubjugationOn her 2016 critically acclaimed album HOPELESSNESS, openly transgender singer, composer, and visual artist Anohni performs a deviant subjectivity that highlights the above dynamics that mark the contemporary surveillance discourse. To an imagined “daddy” technocrat, she sings:Watch me… I know you love me'Cause you're always watching me'Case I'm involved in evil'Case I'm involved in terrorism'Case I'm involved in child molestersEvoking a queer sexual frisson, Anohni describes how, as a trans woman, she is hyper-visible to state institutions. She narrates a voyeuristic relation where trans bodies are policed as threats to public safety rather than protected from systemic discrimination. Through the seemingly benevolent “daddy” character and the play on ‘cause (i.e., because) and ‘case (i.e., in case), she highlights how gender-nonconforming individuals are predictively surveilled and assumed to already be guilty. Reflecting on daddy-boy sexual paradigms, Jack Halberstam reads the “sideways” relations of queer practices as an enactment of “rupture as substitution” to create a new project that “holds on to vestiges of the old but distorts” (226). Upending power and control, queer art has the capacity to both reveal and undermine hegemonic structures while simultaneously allowing for the distortion of the old to create something new.Employing the sublimatory relations of bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism (BDSM), Blas’s queer installation similarly creates a sideways representation that re-orientates the logic of the biometric scanners, thereby unveiling the always already sexualised relations of scrutiny and interrogation as well as the submissive complicity they demand. Replacing the airport environment with a dark and foreboding mise-en-scène allows Blas to focus on capture rather than mobility, highlighting the ways in which border checkpoints (including those instantiated by the airport) encourage free travel for some while foreclosing movement for others. Building on Sara Ahmed’s “phenomenology of being stopped”, Magnet considers what happens when we turn our gaze to those “who fail to pass the checkpoint” (107). In SANCTUM, the same actions are played out again and again on spectral beings who are trapped in various states: they shudder in cages, are chained to the floor, or are projected against the parameters of mounted screens. One ghostly figure, for instance, lies pinned down by metallic grappling hooks, arms raised above the head in a recognisable stance of surrender, conjuring up the now-familiar image of a traveller standing in the cylindrical scanner machine, waiting to be screened. In portraying this extended moment of immobility, Blas lays bare the deep contradictions in the rhetoric of “freedom of movement” that underlies such spaces.On a global level, media reporting, scientific studies, and policy documents proclaim that biometrics are essential to ensuring personal safety and national security. Within the public imagination, these technologies become seductive because of their marked ability to identify terrorist attackers—to reveal threatening bodies—thereby appealing to the anxious citizen’s fear of the disguised suicide bomber. Yet for marginalised identities prefigured as criminal or deceptive—including transgender and black and brown bodies—the inability to perform such acts of revelation via submission to screening can result in humiliation and further discrimination, public shaming, and even tortuous inquiry – acts that are played out in SANCTUM.Masked GenitalsFeminist surveillance studies scholar Rachel Hall has referred to the impetus for revelation in the post-9/11 era as a desire for a universal “aesthetics of transparency” in which the world and the body is turned inside-out so that there are no longer “secrets or interiors … in which terrorists or terrorist threats might find refuge” (127). Hall takes up the case study of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (infamously known as “the Underwear Bomber”) who attempted to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear while onboard a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on 25 December 2009. Hall argues that this event signified a coalescence of fears surrounding bodies of colour, genitalia, and terrorism. News reports following the incident stated that Abdulmutallab tucked his penis to make room for the explosive, thereby “queer[ing] the aspiring terrorist by indirectly referencing his willingness … to make room for a substitute phallus” (Hall 289). Overtly manifested in the Underwear Bomber incident is also a desire to voyeuristically expose a hidden, threatening interiority, which is inherently implicated with anxieties surrounding gender deviance. Beauchamp elaborates on how gender deviance and transgression have coalesced with terrorism, which was exemplified in the wake of the 9/11 attacks when the United States Department of Homeland Security issued a memo that male terrorists “may dress as females in order to discourage scrutiny” (“Artful” 359). Although this advisory did not explicitly reference transgender populations, it linked “deviant” gender presentation—to which we could also add Abdulmutallab’s tucking of his penis—with threats to national security (Beauchamp, Going Stealth). This also calls to mind a broader discussion of the ways in which genitalia feature in the screening process. Prior to the introduction of millimetre-wave body scanning technology, the most common form of scanner used was the backscatter imaging machine, which displayed “naked” body images of each passenger to the security agent. Due to privacy concerns, these machines were replaced by the scanners currently in place which use a generic outline of a passenger (exemplified in SANCTUM) to detect possible threats.It is here worth returning to Blas’s installation, as it also implicitly critiques the security protocols that attempt to reveal genitalia as both threatening and as evidence of an inner truth about a body. At one moment in the installation a bayonet-like object pierces the blank crotch of the mannequin, shattering it into holographic fragments. The apparent genderlessness of the mannequins is contrasted with these graphic sexual acts. The penetrating metallic instrument that breaks into the loin of the mannequin, combined with the camera shot that slowly zooms in on this action, draws attention to a surveillant fascination with genitalia and revelation. As Nicholas L. Clarkson documents in his analysis of airport security protocols governing prostheses, including limbs and packies (silicone penis prostheses), genitals are a central component of the screening process. While it is stipulated that physical searches should not require travellers to remove items of clothing, such as underwear, or to expose their genitals to staff for inspection, prosthetics are routinely screened and examined. This practice can create tensions for trans or disabled passengers with prosthetics in so-called “sensitive” areas, particularly as guidelines for security measures are often implemented by airport staff who are not properly trained in transgender-sensitive protocols.ConclusionAccording to media technologies scholar Jeremy Packer, “rather than being treated as one to be protected from an exterior force and one’s self, the citizen is now treated as an always potential threat, a becoming bomb” (382). Although this technological policing impacts all who are subjected to security regimes (which is to say, everyone), this amalgamation of body and bomb has exacerbated the ways in which bodies socially coded as threatening or deceptive are targeted by security and surveillance regimes. Nonetheless, others have argued that the use of invasive forms of surveillance can be justified by the state as an exchange: that citizens should willingly give up their right to privacy in exchange for safety (Monahan 1). Rather than subscribing to this paradigm, Blas’ SANCTUM critiques the violence of mandatory complicity in this “trade-off” narrative. Because their operationalisation rests on normative notions of embodiment that are governed by preconceptions around gender, race, sexuality and ability, surveillance systems demand that bodies become transparent. This disproportionally affects those whose bodies do not match norms, with trans and queer bodies often becoming unreadable (Kafer and Grinberg). The shadowy realm of SANCTUM illustrates this tension between biometric revelation and resistance, but also suggests that opacity may be a tool of transformation in the face of such discriminatory violations that are built into surveillance.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 149–68.Beauchamp, Toby. “Artful Concealment and Strategic Visibility: Transgender Bodies and U.S. State Surveillance after 9/11.” Surveillance & Society 6.4 (2009): 356–66.———. Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2019.Blas, Zach. “Informatic Opacity.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 9 (2014). <http://www.joaap.org/issue9/zachblas.htm>.Blas, Zach, and Jacob Gaboury. 2016. “Biometrics and Opacity: A Conversation.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 31.2 (2016): 154-65.Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81 (2018): 1-15.Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2015.Clarkson, Nicholas L. “Incoherent Assemblages: Transgender Conflicts in US Security.” Surveillance & Society 17.5 (2019): 618-30.Currah, Paisley, and Tara Mulqueen. “Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport.” Social Research 78.2 (2011): 556-82.Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.Hall, Rachel. “Terror and the Female Grotesque: Introducing Full-Body Scanners to U.S. Airports.” Feminist Surveillance Studies. Eds. Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2015. 127-49.Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99.———. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997.Kafer, Gary, and Daniel Grinberg. “Queer Surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 17.5 (2019): 592-601.Keyes, O.S. “The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2. CSCW, Article 88 (2018): 1-22.Magnet, Shoshana Amielle. When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.Magnet, Shoshana, and Tara Rodgers. “Stripping for the State: Whole Body Imaging Technologies and the Surveillance of Othered Bodies.” Feminist Media Studies 12.1 (2012): 101–18.Monahan, Torin. Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, 2006.Packer, Jeremy. “Becoming Bombs: Mobilizing Mobility in the War of Terror.” Cultural Studies 10.5 (2006): 378-99.Pugliese, Joseph. “In Silico Race and the Heteronomy of Biometric Proxies: Biometrics in the Context of Civilian Life, Border Security and Counter-Terrorism Laws.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 23 (2005): 1-32.Pugliese, Joseph. Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics New York: Routledge, 2010.Quinan, C.L. “Gender (In)securities: Surveillance and Transgender Bodies in a Post-9/11 Era of Neoliberalism.” Eds. Stef Wittendorp and Matthias Leese. Security/Mobility: Politics of Movement. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2017. 153-69.Quinan, C.L., and Nina Bresser. “Gender at the Border: Global Responses to Gender Diverse Subjectivities and Non-Binary Registration Practices.” Global Perspectives 1.1 (2020). <https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2020.12553>.Sjoberg, Laura. “(S)he Shall Not Be Moved: Gender, Bodies and Travel Rights in the Post-9/11 Era.” Security Journal 28.2 (2015): 198-215.Spalding, Sally J. “Airport Outings: The Coalitional Possibilities of Affective Rupture.” Women’s Studies in Communication 39.4 (2016): 460-80.

Scenario: You are exhausted after a long day at work and collapse in front of the television for some mindless entertainment. One of your favourite comedy shows is on. You begin to relax. You laugh a couple of times. There's a commercial break. You watch the first ad for a hardware store, giving it only half your attention. And then there's another ad, something about a father and son in a car together and then ". WOOOMPH! A truck slams into the car. The message is "Speed kills!" Or there are people playing and sunbathing on a beach, happy holidays, and then vultures descend and surround them. The message is "Slip! Slop! Slap! Don't die in the sun this summer". Or someone is shown smoking a cigarette and the caption reads : "Give up now. You'll soon stop dying for a cigarette". This might be accompanied by scenes of a post-mortem, dissections of human lungs or brain. Context Threat appeals are used frequently in health and road safety promotion. Many use the threat of death as the consequence of undesirable behaviours, for example, "Quit smoking or you'll die' (Henley and Donovan). ("Non-death threats' appeal to other consequences such as "Quit smoking or your skin will age'.) There is an implicit notion of premature death threat, although this is rarely stated explicitly. When reminded of our risk of premature death, we are reminded by extension of the ultimate inevitability of our death. An understanding of the philosophy of existentialism can help us understand why consumers may, quite reasonably, tune out, or literally switch off health promotion messages that remind them of their own death. This paper explores the effect on consumers of these mass media invocations of the fear of death, or "death threats'. Verbatim comments are included from six focus groups conducted on fear and health promotion. Groups were delineated by age (16-20 years, 21-29 years and 30-49 years), gender, and socio-economic status (blue collar/white collar) (Henley). What is existential dread? Fear is one of the primary human emotions (along with anger, sadness, love, joy and surprise) and "dread' is one of the emotion names associated with fear (Shaver et al. 1067). We do not need to learn how to feel fear. We have to learn what to fear, however. Despite the joke about death and taxes, death is uniquely inevitable. (Some people do manage to avoid taxes!) In his definitive work, Denial of Death, Becker stated his belief that knowledge of our own death is the source of 'man's peculiar and greatest anxiety' (70); it's what makes us human. Existentialists think that knowing about the inevitability of our own death can be overwhelming, arousing the worst fear imaginable, "existential dread' (Bugental 287). Existential philosophers and psychologists believe that part of this anxiety stems from the existential dread of "not being'. Discussing Heidegger's analysis of the meaning of death in Being and Time, Barrett put it this way: The point is that I may die at any moment, and therefore death is my possibility now. It is like a precipice at my feet. It is also the most extreme and absolute of my possibilities: extreme, because it is the possibility of not being and hence cuts off all other possibilities; absolute, because man can surmount all other heartbreaks, even the deaths of those he loves, but his own death puts an end to him (201). The essence of existential philosophy is this idea that we are all deeply, terribly afraid of death. Fear of death can be seen even in very young children (Anthony, The child's; Anthony, The discovery; Nagy) who express considerable anxiety about death, but quickly learn from their parents and others how to deny it (Yalom). Existential psychologists have suggested that the fear of our own death is the cause of much of our psychopathology (Yalom). Existentialists believe that the most common response to existential anxiety is to deny it, creating in oneself a 'state of forgetfulness of being' as far as possible. Weisman described three levels of denial in terminally ill patients: "first-order denial' of the facts of illness; "second-order denial' of the implications of the illness; and "third-order denial' of death itself. He noted that often a patient moves from first and second order denial into "middle knowledge' (i.e., acceptance of near death), but then relapses. Weisman remarked that this relapse is often the signal that the terminal phase has begun. This aspect of denial is a complicated factor in the complex measurement of death anxiety. When people say they are not afraid of death, who can say whether they are denying fear or truly not afraid? In either case, health promotion appeals that threaten death may not be effective, either because the fear is denied or because there is no fear. In focus groups exploring people's concepts of death (Henley 111), few people acknowledged being afraid of their own death and many specifically stated that they were not afraid of their own death. One woman voiced the universal difficulty of truly conceiving what it might be like "not to be' (Kastenbaum and Aisenberg) when she said: 'death seems like such an unrealistic proposition'. People did acknowledge fears about death, such as dying painfully, so health promotion messages that threaten these other dimensions of death anxiety may be more effective. Health promotion practitioners frequently use these related death fears. The fear of causing death, for example, is used in road safety advertisements. However, this discussion on existential fear is limited to threat appeals of death per se. Death threats in health promotion Is arousing existential dread an effective way to market healthy behaviours? At first sight, it seems logical that the threat of death would be more persuasive than lesser threats and yet it may not be the most effective approach. There is some evidence that lesser threats may be more effective for some groups of adolescents and young adults for smoking (Donovan and Leivers), and for road safety behaviours (Donovan et al.). For example, for some 18 year old males, the threat of being caught drinking and driving, of losing their driving licence and, thus, their new-found independence may be a more effective deterrent than the threat of dying in a car accident (Donovan et al.). The humiliation of being arrested and charged for drink-driving may be the most powerful persuader for adults of all ages (Bevins). For men attending the Jerusalem Centre for Impotency and Fertility, impotence was reported a more persuasive threat than death: 78% of men who were told that smoking causes impotence quit smoking, compared to 40% who quit when told that smoking causes heart attacks ("No smoking tip"). One woman in a focus group said, 'you tend to think short-term, "can I afford a $100 fine?" rather than long-term, "this is my life." If I stop to think about it, obviously I'm more afraid of dying than $100 [fine], but that's not what I think about' (Henley 95). This makes sense in the context of forgetfulness, the denial of death. We don't want to be reminded of our death so we switch off the death message. Lesser threats may be more easily internalised. Does arousing existential dread do any harm? Perhaps. Job suggested that fear arousal is likely to be effective only for specific behaviours that successfully reduce the level of fear arousal and that high-fear messages may actually increase behaviours that people employ to reduce anxiety, such as smoking and alcohol consumption. People high in anxiety are hypothesised to be hypersensitive to threats and likely to employ a restricted range of self-soothing coping behaviours to reduce negative affect (Wickramasekera and Price). Death threat appeals such as "Quit smoking or you'll die' may arouse defensive, counter-productive responses, at least in some people, because it is impossible to identify any specific behaviour that could successfully reduce the particular, unique fear of death per se. Firestone identified a number of psychological defences against death anxiety, including self-nourishing and addictive habits, such as smoking and overeating. Ironically, these same behaviours are frequently the subject of health promotion campaigns. If such campaigns arouse death anxiety in an effort to curb defensive responses to death anxiety, there clearly could be an increase rather than a decrease in those defensive responses. Arousing death anxiety might contribute to fatalistic thinking. Job described some people's defenses against very high fear, for example, "...you've got to go sometime' or "...when your number's up, your number's up'. In focus groups, people commented, 'if an accident is going to happen, it's going to happen' and 'what's the point of giving up [unhealthy behaviours] if you get run over by a bus tomorrow?' (Henley 95, 108). Rippetoe and Rogers found that fatalistic thinking occurred when subjects did not believe that the recommended behaviour would avert the threat. That is, people may realise that quitting smoking could avert lung cancer and even some causes of premature death but that nothing can avert death itself. Fatalism may be one of the most maladaptive responses because the threat is acknowledged but rendered ineffective (Rippetoe and Rogers). Social marketers can make some of their persuasive communications more effective if they are more mindful of consumers' existential fears. A sensitivity to consumers' psychological defences against existential fear may result in more effective use of threat appeals in health promotion. Mindfulness Mindful that the title of this paper itself may arouse some existential dread, I end with a comment on the existentialist alternative to denial. Existentialists advocate a state of 'mindfulness of being' or 'ontological mode' (Heidegger, quoted in Yalom 31) in which "one remains mindful of being, not only mindful of the fragility of being but mindful, too ... of one's responsibility for one's own being." (Yalom 31). The existentialist strives to be as mindful, as present in the moment, and therefore as authentic as possible. This involves the acceptance of existential anxiety as an appropriate and reasonable response to the human condition (Bugental). Some focus group participants wanted to know in advance that they were going to die, 'so you can fit things in you'd want to do and say goodbye'. Others thought it was better not to know or 'you'd start having regrets'. One person pointed out that we do know in advance: 'you know you're going to die sometime!'. This last comment was followed by a sober, almost shocked silence suggesting that, even while we are freely discussing death on one level, the full meaning of death may still elude us. As consumers of health promotion messages, we are exposed to many reminders of our finite existence. If we sit mindlessly in front of the television receiving these messages, we may feel some unresolved discomfort. People talk about looking away, or switching channels when particularly shocking ads are shown. The existentialist alternative response would be to embrace these reminders and use them to sustain a state of mindfulness. With this state of mindfulness comes a heightened sense of responsibility for one's own being. It is in this ontological mode that we are most likely to adopt the healthy behaviours recommended in health promotion messages. By hearing the death threat openly, and acting to protect ourselves from at least those causes of premature death that may lie within our control, we may be able to discover a fuller experience of what it means to be alive. References Anthony, Sylvia. The Child's Discovery of Death. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1940. Anthony, Sylvia. The Discovery of Death in Childhood and After. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Education, 1973. Barrett, W. Irrational Man, A Study in Existential Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1958. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press, 1973. Bevins, John. "Using Advertising to Sell and Promote Health and Healthy Products". Paper presented at the ACHPER Health Products and Services Marketing Seminar. Kuring-gai College, Sydney, 1987. Bugental, J. F. T. The Search for Authenticity: An Existential-analytic Approach to Psychotherapy. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965. Donovan, Robert J., and Sue Leivers. Young Women and Smoking. Report to Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health. Perth: Donovan Research, 1988. Donovan, Robert J., Nadine Henley, Geoffrey Jalleh, and Clive Slater. Road Safety Advertising: An Empirical Study and Literature Review. Canberra: Federal Office of Road Safety, 1995. Firestone, Robert W. "Psychological Defenses against Death Anxiety." Death Anxiety Handbook: Research, Instrumentation, and Application. Series in Death Education, Aging, and Health Care. Ed. Robert A. Neimeyer. Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis, 1994. 217-241. Henley, Nadine R. "Fear Arousal in Social Marketing: Death vs Non-death Threats." Doctoral Dissertation, University of Western Australia, Perth, 1997. Henley, Nadine and Robert J. Donovan. "Threat Appeals in Social Marketing: Death as a "Special Case'". International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 4.4 (1999): 300-319. Job, R. F. Soames. "Effective and Ineffective Use of Fear in Health Promotion Campaigns." American Journal of Public Health, 78 (1988): 163-167. Kastenbaum, R., and R. Aisenberg. The Psychology of Death. London: Duckworth, 1974. Nagy, Maria H. "The Child's View of Death." The Meaning of Death. Ed. Herman Feifel. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959. 79-98. "No Smoking Tip for Lovers". Daily Telegraph, (1994, September 24): p. 4. Rippetoe, P.A. and Rogers, R.W. "Effects of components of protection-motivation theory on adaptive and maladaptive coping with a health threat." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52.3 (1987): 596-604. Shaver, P., J. Schwartz, D. Kirson, and C. O'Connor. "Emotion Knowledge: Further Exploration of a Prototype Approach." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52.6 (1987): 1061-1086. Weisman, A.D. On dying and denying: A psychiatric study of terminality. New York: Behavioral Publications, 1972. Wickramasekera, Ian and Daniel C. Price. "Morbid Obesity, Absorption, Neuroticism, and the High Risk Model of Threat Perception." American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 39 (1997): 291-301. Yalom, I. D. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, 1980. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Henley, Nadine. "You will die! " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/youwilldie.php>. Chicago Style Henley, Nadine, "You will die! " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/youwilldie.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Henley, Nadine. (2002) You will die! . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/youwilldie.php> ([your date of access]).

In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism’s transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: “a work needs only to be interesting” (184).That art galleries could be sites of timely socio-political issues, rather than timeless intuitions undersigned by medium specificity, is one of the more familiar origin stories of postmodernism. Few artists symbolize this shift more than Hans Haacke, whose 2019 exhibition All Connected, at the New Museum, New York, examined the legacy of his outward-looking work. Born in Germany in 1936, and a New Yorker since 1965, Haacke has been linked to the term “institutional critique” since the mid 1980s, after Mel Ramsden’s coining in 1975, and the increased recognition of kindred spirits such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers. These artists have featured in books and essays by the likes of Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois, but they are also known for their own contributions to art discourse, producing hybrid conceptions of the intellectual postmodern artist as historian, critic and curator.Haacke was initially fascinated by kinetic sculpture in the early 1960s, taking inspiration from op art, systems art, and machine-oriented research collectives such as Zero (Germany), Gruppo N (Italy) and GRAV (France, an acronym of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel). Towards the end of the decade he started to produce more overtly socio-political work, creating what would become a classic piece from this period, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 (1969). Here, in a solo exhibition at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, the artist invited viewers to mark their birthplaces and places of residence on a map. Questioning the statistical demography of the Gallery’s avant-garde attendees, the exhibition anticipated the meticulous sociological character of much of his practice to come, grounding New York art – the centre of the art world – in local, social, and economic fabrics.In the forward to the catalogue of All Connected, New Museum Director Lisa Philips claims that Haacke’s survey exhibition provided a chance to reflect on the artist’s prescience, especially given the flourishing of art activism over the last five or so years. Philips pressed the issue of why no other American art institution had mounted a retrospective of his work in three decades, since his previous survey, Unfinished Business, at the New Museum in 1986, at its former, and much smaller, Soho digs (8). It suggests that other institutions have deemed Haacke’s work too risky, generating too much political heat for them to handle. It’s a reputation the artist has cultivated since the Guggenheim Museum famously cancelled his 1971 exhibition after learning his intended work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971) involved research into dubious New York real estate dealings. Guggenheim director Thomas Messer defended the censorship at the time, going so far as to describe it as an “alien substance that had entered the art museum organism” (Haacke, Framing 138). Exposé was this substance Messer dare not name: art that was too revealing, too journalistic, too partisan, and too politically viscid. (Three years later, Haacke got his own back with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974, exposing then Guggenheim board members’ connections to the copper industry in Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende had just been overthrown with US backing.) All Connected foregrounded these institutional reveals from time past, at a moment in 2019 when the moral accountability of the art institution was on the art world’s collective mind. The exhibition followed high-profile protests at New York’s Whitney Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Louvre, and the British Museum. These and other arts organisations have increasingly faced pressures, fostered by social media, to end ties with unethical donors, sponsors, and board members, with activist groups protesting institutional affiliations ranging from immigration detention centre management to opioid and teargas manufacturing. An awareness of the limits of individual agency and autonomy undoubtedly defines this era, with social media platforms intensifying the encumbrances of individual, group, and organisational identities. Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1, 1969 Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 2, 1969-71Unfinished BusinessUnderscoring Haacke’s activist credentials, Philips describes him as “a model of how to live ethically and empathetically in the world today”, and as a beacon of light amidst the “extreme political and economic uncertainty” of the present, Trump-presidency-calamity moment (7). This was markedly different to how Haacke’s previous New York retrospective, Unfinished Business, was received, which bore the weight of being the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York following the Guggenheim controversy. In the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, then New Museum director Marcia Tucker introduced his work as a challenge, cautiously claiming that he poses “trenchant questions” and that the institution accepts “the difficulties and contradictions” inherent to any museum staging of his work (6).Philips’s and Tucker’s distinct perspectives on Haacke’s practice – one as heroically ethical, the other as a sobering critical challenge – exemplify broader shifts in the perception of institutional critique (the art of the socio-political reveal) over this thirty-year period. In the words of Pamela M. Lee, between 1986 and 2019 the art world has undergone a “seismic transformation”, becoming “a sphere of influence at once more rapacious, acquisitive, and overweening but arguably more democratizing and ecumenical with respect to new audiences and artists involved” (87). Haacke’s reputation over this period has taken a similar shift, from him being a controversial opponent of art’s autonomy (an erudite postmodern conceptualist) to a figurehead for moral integrity and cohesive artistic experimentation.As Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out in the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, a potential trap of such a retrospective is that, through biographical positioning, Haacke might be seen as an “exemplary political artist” (210). With this, the specific political issues motivating his work would be overshadowed by the perception of the “great artist” – someone who brings single-issue politics into the narrative of postmodern art, but at the expense of the issues themselves. This is exactly what Douglas Crimp discovered in Unfinished Business. In a 1987 reflection on the show, Crimp argued that, when compared with an AIDS-themed display, Homo Video, staged at the New Museum at the same time, reviewers of Haacke’s exhibition tended to analyse his politics “within the context of the individual artist’s body of work … . Political issues became secondary to the aesthetic strategies of the producer” (34). Crimp, whose activism would be at the forefront of his career in subsequent years, was surprised at how Homo Video and Unfinished Business spawned different readings. Whereas works in the former exhibition tended to be addressed in terms of the artists personal and partisan politics, Haacke’s prompted reflection on the aesthetics-politics juxtaposition itself. For Crimp, the fact that “there was no mediation between these two shows”, spoke volumes about the divisions between political and activist art at the time.New York Times critic Michael Brenson, reiterating a comment made by Fredric Jameson in the catalogue for Unfinished Business, describes the timeless appearance of Haacke’s work in 1986, which is “surprising for an artist whose work is in some way about ideology and history” (Brenson). The implication is that the artist gives a surprisingly long aesthetic afterlife to the politically specific – to ordinarily short shelf-life issues. In this mode of critical postmodernism in which we are unable to distinguish clearly between intervening in and merely reproducing the logic of the system, Haacke is seen as an astute director of an albeit ambiguous push and pull between political specificity and aesthetic irreducibility, political externality and the internalist mode of art about art. Jameson, while granting that Haacke’s work highlights the need to reinvent the role of the “ruling class” in the complex, globalised socio-economic situation of postmodernism, claims that it does so as representative of the “new intellectual problematic” of postmodernism. Haacke, according Jameson, stages postmodernism’s “crisis of ‘mapping’” whereby capitalism’s totalizing, systemic forms are “handled” (note that he avoids “critiqued” or “challenged”) by focusing on their manifestation through particular (“micro-public”) institutional means (49, 50).We can think of the above examples as constituting the postmodern version of Haacke, who frames very specific political issues on the one hand, and the limitless incorporative power of appropriative practice on the other. To say this another way, Haacke, circa 1986, points to specific sites of power struggle at the same time as revealing their generic absorption by an art-world system grown accustomed to its “duplicate anything” parameters. For all of his political intent, the artistic realm, totalised in accordance with the postmodern image, is ultimately where many thought his gestures remained. The philosopher turned art critic Arthur Danto, in a negative review of Haacke’s exhibition, portrayed institutional critique as part of an age-old business of purifying art, maintaining that Haacke’s “crude” and “heavy-handed” practice is blind to how art institutions have always relied on some form of critique in order for them to continue being respected “brokers of spirit”. This perception – of Haacke’s “external” critiques merely serving to “internally” strengthen existing art structures – was reiterated by Leo Steinberg. Supportively misconstruing the artist in the exhibition catalogue, Steinberg writes that Haacke’s “political message, by dint of dissonance, becomes grating and shrill – but shrill within the art context. And while its political effectiveness is probably minimal, its effect on Minimal art may well be profound” (15). Hans Haacke, MOMA Poll, 1970 All ConnectedSo, what do we make of the transformed reception of Haacke’s work since the late 1980s: from a postmodern ouroboros of “politicizing aesthetics and aestheticizing politics” to a revelatory exemplar of art’s moral power? At a period in the late 1980s when the culture wars were in full swing and yet activist groups remained on the margins of what would become a “mainstream” art world, Unfinished Business was, perhaps, blindingly relevant to its times. Unusually for a retrospective, it provided little historical distance for its subject, with Haacke becoming a victim of the era’s propensity to “compartmentalize the interpretive registers of inside and outside and the terms corresponding to such spatial­izing coordinates” (Lee 83).If commentary surrounding this 2019 retrospective is anything to go by, politics no longer performs such a parasitic, oppositional or even dialectical relation to art; no longer is the political regarded as a real-world intrusion into the formal, discerning, longue-durée field of aesthetics. The fact that protests inside the museum have become more visible and vociferous in recent years testifies to this shift. For Jason Farrago, in his review of All Connected for the New York Times, “the fact that no person and no artwork stands alone, that all of us are enmeshed in systems of economic and social power, is for anyone under 40 a statement of the obvious”. For Alyssa Battistoni, in Frieze magazine, “if institutional critique is a practice, it is hard to see where it is better embodied than in organizing a union, strike or boycott”.Some responders to All Connected, such as Ben Lewis, acknowledge how difficult it is to extract a single critical or political strategy from Haacke’s body of work; however, we can say that, in general, earlier postmodern questions concerning the aestheticisation of the socio-political reveal no longer dominates the reception of his practice. Today, rather than treating art and politics are two separate but related entities, like form is to content, better ideas circulate, such as those espoused by Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, for whom what counts as political is not determined by a specific program, medium or forum, but by the capacity of any actor-network to disrupt and change a normative social fabric. Compare Jameson’s claim that Haacke’s corporate and museological tropes are “dead forms” – through which “no subject-position speaks, not even in protest” (38) – with Battistoni’s, who, seeing Haacke’s activism as implicit, asks the reader: “how can we take the relationship between art and politics as seriously as Haacke has insisted we must?”Crimp’s concern that Unfinished Business perpetuated an image of the artist as distant from the “political stakes” of his work did not carry through to All Connected, whose respondents were less vexed about the relation between art and politics, with many noting its timeliness. The New Museum was, ironically, undergoing its own equity crisis in the months leading up to the exhibition, with newly unionised staff fighting with the Museum over workers’ salaries and healthcare even as it organised to build a new $89-million Rem Koolhaas-designed extension. Battistoni addressed these disputes at-length, claiming the protests “crystallize perfectly the changes that have shaped the world over the half-century of Haacke’s career, and especially over the 33 years since his last New Museum exhibition”. Of note is how little attention Battistoni pays to Haacke’s artistic methods when recounting his assumed solidarity with these disputes, suggesting that works such as Creating Consent (1981), Helmosboro Country (1990), and Standortkultur (Corporate Culture) (1997) – which pivot on art’s public image versus its corporate umbilical cord – do not convey some special aesthetico-political insight into a totalizing capitalist system. Instead, “he has simply been an astute and honest observer long enough to remind us that our current state of affairs has been in formation for decades”.Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008 Hans Haacke, Wide White Flow, 1967/2008 Showing Systems Early on in the 1960s, Haacke was influenced by the American critic, artist, and curator Jack Burnham, who in a 1968 essay, “Systems Esthetics” for Artforum, inaugurated the loose conceptualist paradigm that would become known as “systems art”. Here, against Greenbergian formalism and what he saw as the “craft fetishism” of modernism, Burnham argues that “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” (30). Burnham thought that emergent contemporary artists were intuitively aware of the importance of the systems approach: the significant artist in 1968 “strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society”, and pays particular attention to relationships between organic and non-organic systems (31).As Michael Fried observed of minimalism in his now legendary 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, this shift in sixties art – signalled by the widespread interest in the systematic – entailed a turn towards the spatial, institutional, and societal contexts of receivership. For Burnham, art is not about “material entities” that beautify or modify the environment; rather, art exists “in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment” (31). At the forefront of his mind was land art, computer art, and research-driven conceptualist practice, which, against Fried, has “no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame” (32). In a 1969 lecture at the Guggenheim, Burnham confessed that his research concerned not just art as a distinct entity, but aesthetics in its broadest possible sense, declaring “as far as art is concerned, I’m not particularly interested in it. I believe that aesthetics exists in revelation” (Ragain).Working under the aegis of Burnham’s systems art, Haacke was shaken by the tumultuous and televised politics of late-1960s America – a time when, according to Joan Didion, a “demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community” (41). Haacke cites Martin Luther King’s assassination as an “incident that made me understand that, in addition to what I had called physical and biological systems, there are also social systems and that art is an integral part of the universe of social systems” (Haacke, Conversation 222). Haacke created News (1969) in response to this awareness, comprising a (pre-Twitter) telex machine that endlessly spits out live news updates from wire services, piling up rolls and rolls of paper on the floor of the exhibition space over the course of its display. Echoing Burnham’s idea of the artist as a programmer whose job is to “prepare new codes and analyze data”, News nonetheless presents the museum as anything but immune from politics, and technological systems as anything but impersonal (32).This intensification of social responsibility in Haacke’s work sets him apart from other, arguably more reductive techno-scientific systems artists such as Sonia Sheridan and Les Levine. The gradual transformation of his ecological and quasi-scientific sculptural experiments from 1968 onwards could almost be seen as making a mockery of the anthropocentrism described in Fried’s 1967 critique. Here, Fried claims not only that the literalness of minimalist work amounts to an emphasis on shape and spatial presence over pictorial composition, but also, in this “theatricality of objecthood” literalness paradoxically mirrors (153). At times in Fried’s essay the minimalist art object reads as a mute form of sociality, the spatial presence filled by the conscious experience of looking – the theatrical relationship itself put on view. Fried thought that viewers of minimalism were presented with themselves in relation to the entire world as object, to which they were asked not to respond in an engaged formalist sense but (generically) to react. Pre-empting the rise of conceptual art and the sociological experiments of post-conceptualist practice, Fried, unapprovingly, argues that minimalist artists unleash an anthropomorphism that “must somehow confront the beholder” (154).Haacke, who admits he has “always been sympathetic to so-called Minimal art” (Haacke, A Conversation 26) embraced the human subject around the same time that Fried’s essay was published. While Fried would have viewed this move as further illustrating the minimalist tendency towards anthropomorphic confrontation, it would be more accurate to describe Haacke’s subsequent works as social-environmental barometers. Haacke began staging interactions which, however dry or administrative, framed the interplays of culture and nature, inside and outside, private and public spheres, expanding art’s definition by looking to the social circulation and economy that supported it.Haacke’s approach – which seems largely driven to show, to reveal – anticipates the viewer in a way that Fried would disapprove, for whom absorbed viewers, and the irreduction of gestalt to shape, are the by-products of assessments of aesthetic quality. For Donald Judd, the promotion of interest over conviction signalled scepticism about Clement Greenberg’s quality standards; it was a way of acknowledging the limitations of qualitative judgement, and, perhaps, of knowledge more generally. In this way, minimalism’s aesthetic relations are not framed so much as allowed to “go on and on” – the artists’ doubt about aesthetic value producing this ongoing temporal quality, which conviction supposedly lacks.In contrast to Unfinished Business, the placing of Haacke’s early sixties works adjacent to his later, more political works in All Connected revealed something other than the tensions between postmodern socio-political reveal and modernist-formalist revelation. The question of whether to intervene in an operating system – whether to let such a system go on and on – was raised throughout the exhibition, literally and metaphorically. To be faced with the interactions of physical, biological, and social systems (in Condensation Cube, 1963-67, and Wide White Flow, 1967/2008, but also in later works like MetroMobiltan, 1985) is to be faced with the question of change and one’s place in it. Framing systems in full swing, at their best, Haacke’s kinetic and environmental works suggest two things: 1. That the systems on display will be ongoing if their component parts aren’t altered; and 2. Any alteration will alter the system as a whole, in minor or significant ways. Applied to his practice more generally, what Haacke’s work hinges on is whether or not one perceives oneself as part of its systemic relations. To see oneself implicated is to see beyond the work’s literal forms and representations. Here, systemic imbrication equates to moral realisation: one’s capacity to alter the system as the question of what to do. Unlike the phenomenology-oriented minimalists, the viewer’s participation is not always assumed in Haacke’s work, who follows a more hermeneutic model. In fact, Haacke’s systems are often circular, highlighting participation as a conscious disruption of flow rather than an obligation that emanates from a particular work (148).This is a theatrical scenario as Fried describes it, but it is far from an abandonment of the issue of profound value. In fact, if we accept that Haacke’s work foregrounds intervention as a moral choice, it is closer to Fried’s own rallying cry for conviction in aesthetic judgement. As Rex Butler has argued, Fried’s advocacy of conviction over sceptical interest can be understood as dialectical in the Hegelian sense: conviction is the overcoming of scepticism, in a similar way that Geist, or spirit, for Hegel, is “the very split between subject and object, in which each makes the other possible” (Butler). What is advanced for Fried is the idea of “a scepticism that can be remarked only from the position of conviction and a conviction that can speak of itself only as this scepticism” (for instance, in his attempt to overcome his scepticism of literalist art on the basis of its scepticism). Strong and unequivocal feelings in Fried’s writing are informed by weak and indeterminate feeling, just as moral conviction in Haacke – the feeling that I, the viewer, should do something – emerges from an awareness that the system will continue to function fine without me. In other words, before being read as “a barometer of the changing and charged atmosphere of the public sphere” (Sutton 16), the impact of Haacke’s work depends upon an initial revelation. It is the realisation not just that one is embroiled in a series of “invisible but fundamental” relations greater than oneself, but that, in responding to seemingly sovereign social systems, the question of our involvement is a moral one, a claim for determination founded through an overcoming of the systemic (Fry 31).Haacke’s at once open and closed works suit the logic of our algorithmic age, where viewers have to shift constantly from a position of being targeted to one of finding for oneself. Peculiarly, when Haacke’s online digital polls in All Connected were hacked by activists (who randomized statistical responses in order to compel the Museum “to redress their continuing complacency in capitalism”) the culprits claimed they did it in sympathy with his work, not in spite of it: “we see our work as extending and conversing with Haacke’s, an artist and thinker who has been a source of inspiration to us both” (Hakim). This response – undermining done with veneration – is indicative of the complicated legacy of his work today. Haacke’s influence on artists such as Tania Bruguera, Sam Durant, Forensic Architecture, Laura Poitras, Carsten Höller, and Andrea Fraser has less to do with a particular political ideal than with his unique promotion of journalistic suspicion and moral revelation in forms of systems mapping. It suggests a coda be added to the sentiment of All Connected: all might not be revealed, but how we respond matters. Hans Haacke, Large Condensation Cube, 1963–67ReferencesBattistoni, Alyssa. “After a Contract Fight with Its Workers, the New Museum Opens Hans Haacke’s ‘All Connected’.” Frieze 208 (2019).Bishara, Hakim. “Hans Haacke Gets Hacked by Activists at the New Museum.” Hyperallergic 21 Jan. 2010. <https://hyperallergic.com/538413/hans-haacke-gets-hacked-by-activists-at-the-new-museum/>.Brenson, Michael. “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke.” New York Times 19 Dec. 1988. <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/19/arts/artin-political-tone-worksby-hans-haacke.html>.Buchloh, Benjamin. “Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason.” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7.1 (1968).Butler, Rex. “Art and Objecthood: Fried against Fried.” Nonsite 22 (2017). <https://nonsite.org/feature/art-and-objecthood>.Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano Gioni (eds.). Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Crimp, Douglas. “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?” In Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1. Washington: Bay P, 1987.Danto, Arthur C. “Hans Haacke and the Industry of Art.” In Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (eds.), The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste. London: Routledge, 1987/1998.Didion, Joan. The White Album. London: 4th Estate, 2019.Farago, Jason. “Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners.” New York Times 31 Oct. 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/arts/design/hans-haacke-review-new-museum.html>.Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (June 1967).Fry, Edward. “Introduction to the Work of Hans Haacke.” In Hans Haacke 1967. Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011.Glueck, Grace. “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show.” New York Times 7 Apr. 1971.Gudel, Paul. “Michael Fried, Theatricality and the Threat of Skepticism.” Michael Fried and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2018.Haacke, Hans. Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-5. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1976.———. “Hans Haacke in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Haacke, Hans, et al. “A Conversation with Hans Haacke.” October 30 (1984).Haacke, Hans, and Brian Wallis (eds.). Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.“Haacke’s ‘All Connected.’” Frieze 25 Oct. 2019. <https://frieze.com/article/after-contract-fight-its-workers-new-museum-opens-hans-haackes-all-connected>.Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Complete Writings 1959–1975. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1965/1975.Lee, Pamela M. “Unfinished ‘Unfinished Business.’” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Ragain, Melissa. “Jack Burnham (1931–2019).” Artforum 19 Mar. 2019. <https://www.artforum.com/passages/melissa-ragain-on-jack-burnham-78935>.Sutton, Gloria. “Hans Haacke: Works of Art, 1963–72.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Tucker, Marcia. “Director’s Forward.” Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“Let us not doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” (C. S. Peirce) Introduction Doubting has always had a somewhat bad name. A “doubting Thomas” is a pejorative term for one who doubts what he or she has not witnessed first-hand, a saying which derives originally from Thomas the Apostle’s doubting of the resurrected Christ. That doubt is the opposite of faith or conviction seems to cast doubt in a bad light. There is also the saying “He has the strength of his convictions” which seems to imply we ought correspondingly to say, “He has the weakness of his doubts”. One might recall that Socrates was likened to an electric eel because his peculiar form of questioning had the power to stun his interlocutors by crushing their pet convictions and cherished beliefs under the weight of the wise man’s reasonable doubts. Despite this bad press, however, doubting is a rational activity motivated by a vitally important concern for the truth, for getting things right. And our capacity to nurture reasonable doubts and to take them seriously is now more important than ever. Consider these examples: 1) In the modern world we are relying more and more on the veracity of the Internet’s enormous and growing mass of data often without much thought about its epistemic credentials or provenance. But who or what underwrites its status as information, its presumption of truth? 2) The global financial crisis depended upon the fact that economists and bank analysts placed unbounded confidence in being able to give mathematically precise models for risk, chance and decision-making under conditions of unavoidable ignorance and uncertainty. Why weren’t these models doubted before the crisis? 3) The CIA helped build the case for war in Iraq by not taking properly into account the scant and often contradictory evidence that Saddam Hussain’s regime had weapons of mass destruction. The neat alignment of US neo-conservative policy and CIA “intelligence” ought to have raised serious doubts that might have derailed the justification for war and its inevitable casualties and costs. (See Burns in this issue — Eds.) 4) On the other hand, it is quite likely that corporations that stand to lose large sums of money are fuelling unreasonable doubts about climate change—to what extent we are responsible for it, what the chances are of mitigating its effects, etc.—through misinformation and misdirection. In this paper I want to go a step beyond these specific instances of the value of appropriate doubt. Learning how to doubt, when to doubt and what to doubt is at the heart of a powerful pragmatist approach to philosophy—understood as reflective thinking at its best. After considering two ways of thinking about doubt, I shall outline the pragmatist approach and then briefly consider its bearing on the problems of dogmatism and bullshit in contemporary society. Two Notions of Doubt It is important to distinguish doubts about beliefs from doubts about certainty. That is, in everyday parlance the term “doubt” seems to have two connotations depending on which of these notions it is contrasted with. First of all, doubt can be contrasted with belief. To doubt a belief is to be in “twosome twiminds” as James Joyce aptly put it: a state of neither believing nor disbelieving but hovering between the two, without committing oneself, undecided. To doubt in this sense is to sit on the fence, to vacillate over a truth commitment, to remain detached. In this context doubt is not disbelief but, rather, un-belief. Secondly, doubt can be contrasted with certainty, the absence of doubt. To doubt something that we thought was certain is not to doubt whether it is true or reasonable to believe. If someone asks what the colour of my car is and I say it’s painted blue they might then say, “How do you know that someone has not painted it red in your absence?” This is, of course, possible but it is not at all likely. Even if it causes me to be very slightly doubtful—and, as we shall see, pragmatism offers reasons to block this step—it would not lead me to actually doubt what the colour of my car is. To be less than fully certain is consistent with continuing to believe and doing so for good (even overwhelming) reasons. Of course, some forms of belief such as religious faith may require certainty, in which case to doubt them at all is tantamount to undermining the required attitude. There is also a notion of absolute certainty, meaning the impossibility of doubt. Descartes inaugurates modern philosophy by employing a method of extreme and radical doubting in order to discover absolutely certain (i.e. indubitable) truths. His Meditations involves solipsistic doubts about whether there is an external world, including one’s own body and other people, since perhaps its all a myriad of one’s own subjective experiences. Clearly such philosophical doubt concerns matters that are not ordinarily doubted or even seen as open to doubt. As we shall see, pragmatism sides with common sense here. A Pragmatist Perspective on Doubt With this preliminary distinction in place we can now list four pragmatist insights about doubt that help to reveal its fruitfulness and importance for critical reflection in any field, including philosophy itself: 1) Genuine doubts require reasons. Genuine doubts, doubts we are required to take seriously, arise from particular problematic situations for definite reasons. One does not doubt at will just as one does not believe at will. I cannot believe that I am the Wimbledon tennis champion just by willing to believe it. So, too, I cannot doubt what I believe just by willing to doubt it. I cannot doubt that it is a sunny day if everything speaks in favour of its being so: I’m outside, seeing the sun and clear blue skies etc. Some philosophers think that the mere conceivability or possibility of error is enough to generate a live doubt but pragmatists contest this. For example, is knowledge of what I see before me now undermined because I am not able to rule out the possibility that my brain is being artificially stimulated to induce experiences, as seen in The Matrix? Such brain-in-a-vat doubts are not genuine for the pragmatist because they do not constitute a legitimate reason to doubt. Why? For one thing we have no actual machine that can create an artificial temporally extended “world image” through brain stimulation. These are merely conceivable or “paper” doubts, unliveable paradoxes that we think about in the study but do not take seriously in everyday life. Of course, if we did have such a machine—and it is not clear that this is even technically possible today—this situation would no doubt change. 2) There are no absolute certainties (guaranteed indubitable truths). As we have seen, ordinarily the term “certainty” stands for the actual absence of doubt. That is what we might call subjective certainty since where I am free of doubt another might be doubtful. Subjective certainty is the common state of most people most of the time about many things such as what their name is, where they live, who their family and friends are, what they like to eat etc. There is also Descartes’s notion of what cannot be doubted under any circumstances, which we might call absolute certainty. Traditional philosophy believed it could discover absolute certainties by means of reason alone, these truths being called a priori. At the heart of pragmatism are doubts about all propositions that were previously regarded as absolute certainties. That is, there are no a priori truths in the traditional sense according to the pragmatist. Nothing is guaranteed to be true come what may, even the truths of logic or mathematics which we currently cannot imagine being false. It was at one time thought to be a necessary truth that two straight lines both perpendicular to another straight line never meet… that was, until the nineteenth century discovery of Riemannian geometry. What was supposedly a necessary a priori truth turned out to be false in this context. That anything can be doubted does not mean that everything can be doubted all at once. The attempt to doubt all one’s worldly beliefs presumably includes doubting that one knows the meaning of the words one uses in raising this very doubt (since one doubts the meaning of the term “doubt” itself)—or doubting whether one knows the contents of one’s thoughts—in which case one would undermine the sense of one’s doubts in the very attempt to doubt. But that makes no sense. The moral is that if doubt is to make sense then it might be wide-reaching but it cannot be fully universal. The human desire for absolute certainty is probably inescapable so the lessons of fallibilism need to be hard won again and again. Anything can be doubted—in so far as it makes sense to do so. This is the pragmatist doctrine of fallibilism. It is the position one gets by making room for doubt in one’s system of beliefs without lapsing into complete skepticism. 3) Inquiry is the fallibilistic removal of doubt. Doubt is an unsettled state of mind and “the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion” (Peirce, "Fixation" 375). We are, by nature, epistemically conservative and retain our body of beliefs, or as many of them as possible, in the face of positive reasons for doubt. A doubt stimulates us to an inquiry, which ends by dissolving the doubt and, perhaps, a slight readjustment of our network of beliefs. Since this inquiry is a fallible one nothing is guaranteed to be held fast: there are no eternal truths or indispensable methods. Ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics developed techniques for doubting whether we have any reason to believe one thing rather than another. A famous argument-form they explored is called Agrippa’s Trilemma. If we ask why we should believe any given belief then we must give another belief to serve as a reason. But then the same question arises for it in turn and so on. If we are to avoid the looming infinite regress of reasons for reasons we seem to only have two unpalatable options: either to argue viciously in a circle; or to simply stop at some arbitrary point. The argument thus seems to show that nothing we believe is justified. Pragmatism blocks this trilemma at its origin by arguing that our beliefs conform to a default-and-challenge structure. Current beliefs have the status of default entitlements unless or until specific challenges to them (real doubts) are legitimately raised. On this conception we can be entitled to the beliefs we actually have without requiring reasons for them simply because we have them and lack any good reason for doubt. In an image owed to Otto Neurath, we rebuild our wooden ship of beliefs whilst at sea, replacing planks as need be but, since we must stay afloat, never all planks at once (Quine). Inquiry demands the removal of all actual doubt, not all possible doubt. A belief is, as Charles Peirce conceives it, a habit of action. To doubt a belief, then, is to undermine one’s capacity to act in the relevant respect. The ancient philosopher, Pyrrho, was reputed to need handlers to stop him putting his hands into fire or walking off cliffs because, as a radical skeptic, he lacked the relevant beliefs about fire and falling to make him aware of any danger. The pragmatist, oriented towards action and human practices, does not rest content with his doubts but overcomes them in favour of settled beliefs by way of “a continual process of re-experimenting and re-creating” (Dewey 220) 4) Inquiry requires a democratic ethics. The pragmatist conception of inquiry rehabilitates Plato’s analogy between self and society: the norms of how one is to conduct one’s inquiries are the norms of democratic society. Inquiry is a cooperative human interaction with an environment not, as in the Cartesian tradition, a private activity of solitary a priori reflection. It depends on a social conception of (fallible) reason—understood as intelligent action— which conforms to the democratic ethical principles of the fair and equal right of all to be heard, an invitation and openness to criticism, the toleration of dissenting voices, and instituting methods to help cooperatively resolve disagreements, etc. We inquire in medias res (in the middle of things)—that is, from the midst of our current beliefs and convictions within a community of inquirers. There is no need for a Cartesian propaedeutic doubt to weed out any trace of falsity at the start of inquiry. From the pragmatist point of view we must learn to live with the ineliminable possibility of error and doubt, and of inevitable shortcomings in both our answers and methods. Problems can be overcome as they arise through a self-correcting experimental method of inquiry in which nothing is sacred. A key feature of this conception of inquiry is that it places reasonable doubt at its centre: 1) a sustained doubting of old “certainties” of traditional authorities (e.g. religious, political) or of traditional a priori reason (philosophy); 2) a constant need to distinguish genuine or live doubts from philosophical or paper doubts; 3) and the idea that genuine doubts are both the stimulant to a new inquiry and, when dissolved, signal its end. Dogmatism The importance of the pragmatist conceptions of inquiry and doubt can be appreciated by seeing that various pathologies of believing—pathologies of how to form and maintain beliefs that—are natural to us. Of particular note are dogmatism and fanaticism, which are forms of fixed believing unhinged from rational criticism and sustained without regard to such matters as evidential support, reasonableness and plausibility within the wider community of informed inquirers. Since they divide the world into us and them, fellow-believers and the rest, they inevitably lead to disagreements and hostility. Dogmatists and fanatics loom large in the contemporary world as evidenced by the widespread and malevolent influence of religious, ideological and political dogmas, confrontational forms of nationalism, and fanatical “true believers” in all shapes and forms from die-hard conspiracy theorists to adherents of fad diets and the followers of self-appointed gurus and cult-leaders. The great problem with such forms of believing is that they leave no room for reasonable doubts, which history tells us inevitably arise in matters of human social life and our place in the world. And as history also tells us we go to war and put each other to death over matters of belief and disbelief; of conviction and its lack. Think of Socrates, Jesus, the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Oscar Romero to name only a small few who have been killed for their beliefs. A great virtue of pragmatism is its anti-authoritarian stance, which is achieved by building doubt into its very methodology and by embracing a democratic ethos that makes each person equally answerable to reasonable doubt. From this perspective dogmatists and fanatical believers are ostracised as retaining an outmoded authoritarian conception of believing that has been superseded in the most successful branches of human inquiry—such as the natural sciences. Bullshit To bullshit is to talk without knowing what one is talking about. Harry Frankfurt has observed, “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit” (117); and he goes on to argue that bullshitters are “a greater enemy of truth than liars are” (132). Liars care about the truth since they are trying to deceive others into believing what is not true. Bullshitters may say what is true but more often exaggerate, embellish and window-dress. Their purposes lies elsewhere than getting things right so they do not really care whether what they say is true or false or a mixture of the two. Politicians, advertising agents, salesmen and drug company representatives are notorious for bullshitting. Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman” is a famous example of political bullshit. He said it for purely political reasons and when he was found to have lied (the evidence being the infamous unwashed dress of Monica Lewinsky) he changed the lie into a truth by redefining the word “sex”—another example of bullshit. The bullshitter can speak the truth but what matters is always the spin. The bullshitter need not (contra Frankfurt) hide his own lack of concern for the truth. He plays at truth-telling but he can do this more or less openly. The so-called bullshit artist may even try to make a virtue out of revealing his bullshit as the bullshit it is, thereby making his audience complicit. But the great danger of bullshit is not so much to others, as to oneself. Inveterate bullshitters are inevitably tempted to believe their own bullshit leading to a situation in which they do not know their own minds. Only one who knows his own mind is aware of what he is committed to, and what he takes responsibility for in the wider community of inquirers who rely on each other for information and reasonable criticism. Doubting provides a defence against bullshitters since it blocks their means: the doubter reaffirms a concern for the truth including the truth about oneself, which the bullshitter is wilfully avoiding. To doubt is to withhold a commitment to the truth through a demand not to commit too hastily or for the wrong reasons. A concern for the truth, for getting things right, is thus central to the practice of reasonable doubting. And reasonably doubting, in turn, depends on knowing one’s own mind, what truths one is committed to, and what epistemic responsibilities one thus incurs to justify and defend truths and to criticise falsehood. Democracy and fallibilist inquiry were borne of doubts about the benevolence, wisdom and authority of tyrants, dictators, priests and kings. Their continued vitality depends on maintaining a healthy skepticism about the beliefs of others and about whether we know our own minds. Only so can we sustain our vital concern for the truth in the face of the pervasive challenges of dogmatists and bullshitters. References Descartes, R. “Meditations on First Philosophy.” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Vols. I-III. J. Cottingham et. al., eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985/1641. Dewey, J. The Middle Works, 1899-1924 Vol 12. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Dewey, J. The Middle Works, 1899-1924 Vol 14. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Frankfurt, H. “On Bullshit.” The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988. Joyce, J. Finnegan’s Wake. Penguin: London, 1999/1939. Peirce, C.S. “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” 1868. In The Essential Peirce.———. “The Fixation of Belief.” 1877. In The Essential Peirce. ———. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” 1878. In The Essential Peirce. ———. The Essential Peirce: Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. ———. The Essential Peirce: Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Quine, W.V. Theories and Things. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Scepticism. Trans. J. Barnes & J. Annas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Wittgenstein, L. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.

IntroductionThe popularity of social networking sites (SNSs) bears witness to thriving movement protests worldwide. The development of new hardware technologies such as mobile devices and digital cameras, in particular, has fast enhanced visual communications among users that help document and broadcast contemporary social movements. Using social media with these technologies thus presents new opportunities for grassroots social movement organisations (SMOs) and activist groups to become narrators of their activist lives, and to promote solidarity and recognition for advancing varied civic and political agendas. With the case of a student activist group that led and organised a 10-day occupation protest in Hong Kong, this article examines the idea of new media-savvy SMOs as political curators that employ SNS platforms to (co-)create digital narratives at large-scale movement protests. Invoking the concepts of curation and choreography, it highlights how these processes can work together to encourage contentious engagement and collaboration in contemporary social movements.The New Media-Savvy SMO as Political CuratorWhereas traditional social movement studies stressed the importance of pre-existing social networks and organisational structures for collective action, developments in new information and communication technologies (ICTs) challenge the common theories of how people are drawn into and participate in social movements. In recent years, a spate of research has particularly emphasised the ability of individuals and small groups to self-organise on the Internet (e.g. Rheingold). Lately, observing the use of SNSs such as Facebook and Twitter in contemporary social movements, work in this area has focused on how SNSs enable movement diffusion through personal networks and individuals’ online activities even without either the aid or the oversight of an organisation (e.g. Shirky).However, horizontal activism self-organised by atomised new media users seems insufficient as an explanation of how many recent protest movements achieved their high tides. While the flourishing literature shows writers have correctly centred their study on the changing dynamics in control over information and the growing importance of individual users’ contributions, it fails to account for the crucial role that SMOs continue to play. In fact, recent studies consistently observe the continuing importance of SMOs in mobilising and coordinating collective actions in online environments (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, Collective). Whereas new ICTs have provided activist groups with the instrument to deal with their contentious activities with less cueing and leadership from conventional institutionalised structures, SMOs have created their own new media resources. Nowadays, a significant percentage of protest participants have received their information from online platforms that are run by or affiliated with these organisations. The critical questions remain about the kinds of communication methods they utilise to activate and integrate independent activists’ networks and participation, especially in emerging social media environments.Unfortunately, existing research tends to overlook the discursive potentials and cultural dimensions in online activism while emphasising the cost-effectiveness and organisational function of new ICTs. In particular, social movement and new media scholars merely attended to the ways in which digital media enable widescale, relatively un-coordinated contributions to repositories of resources for networks of activists and interest groups, as SNS applications stress the importance of user participation, openness, and network effects in the processes of content production and sharing. However, the mere existence or even “surplus” (Shirky 27) of “second-order communal goods” (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, “Reconceptualizing” 372)—a collection of resources created collectively but without a bounded community, through video-posting, tagging, and circulation practices engaged in by individuals—does not accidentally result in critical publics that come to take part in political activism. Rather, social movements are, above all, the space for manifesting ideas, choices, and a collective will, in which people produce their own history through their cultural creations and social struggles (Touraine). As such, the alteration of meaning, the struggle to define the situation, and the discursive practices carried out within a social movement are all major aspects of social movements and change (Melucci).Indeed, SMOs and marginalised communities worldwide have increasingly learnt the ability to become narrators of their activist and community lives, and to express solidarity and recognition afforded through technology adoption. The recent proliferation of social media applications and mobile digital technologies has allowed activist groups to create and distribute their own stories regarding concrete actions, ongoing campaigns, and thematic issues of protest movements on more multimedia platforms. In order to advance political ideas and collective action frames, they may bring together a variety of online content in such a way that the collated materials offer a commentary on a subject area by articulating and negotiating new media artefacts, while also inviting responses. Therefore, not only are the new media channels for activist communication comparatively inexpensive, but they also provide for a richer array of content and the possibility of greater control by SMOs over its (re-)creation, maintenance, and distribution for potential digital narrating. To understand how digital narrating takes place in contemporary protest movements with SNSs, we now turn to two analytic concepts—curation and choreography.Social Media Content Curation and Choreography Curation, as a new media practice, involves finding, categorising, and organising relevant online content on specific issues. For instance, museums and libraries may have curators to select and feature digital items for collection and display, improving the types of information accessible to a public audience. In protest movements, SMOs and political actors may also curate peer-produced content on SNS platforms so as to filter and amplify useful information for mobilising collective action. In fact, this process by SMOs and political actors is particularly important, as it helps sort and draw timely attention to these information sources, especially at times when users are faced with a large amount of noise created by millions of producers (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker). More importantly, not only does content curating entail the selection and preservation of online materials that may facilitate collective action, but it may also involve the (re-)presentation of selected content by telling stories not being told or by telling existing stories in a different way (Fotopoulou and Couldry). In contrast to professional collecting, it is a much more deliberate process, one which clearly articulates and puts forwards (opportunities for) new meanings or new understanding of a subject (Franks). For example, when new media content is re-posted or shared in its original form but in a new context, digital narrating occurs as it may result in a new or additional layer of meaning (Baym and Shah). Therefore, more than merely expending information resources available to activists, the power of curation can be understood primarily as discursive, as users may pick up particular versions of reality in interpreting social issues and protest movements (Bekkers, Moody, and Edwards).Moreover, nowadays, social media curating is not restricted to text but also includes image and video streaming, as the development of mobile devices and digital cameras has facilitated and enhanced instant communication and information retrieval almost regardless of location. The practice of content curating with SNSs may also involve the process of choreographing with various social media modules, such as posting a series of edited pictures under an overarching schema and organising user-generated photos into an album that suggests a particular theme. Rather than simply using a single visual item designed to tell a story, the idea of choreographing is thus concerned with how curated items are seen and experienced from the users’ perspectives as it “allows curators not just to expose elements of a story but to tell a structured tale with the traditional elements of beginning, middle and end” (Franks 288).In practice, the implementation of choreography can be envisioned to bring together the practice of content curating and that of enhancing and connecting contentious engagement at protest movements. For example, when SMOs make use of images and video to help frame an issue in a more advanced way by sharing a picture with a comment added on Facebook, they may at once, whether consciously or unconsciously, suggest possible endorsement to the selected content and/or the source—may it be that of an individual user or a formal organisation—while drawing attention to the image and circulating it beyond the original network for which it was posted (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker). As such, by posting pictures with captions and sharing user-generated photos that do not belong to the SMO but are produced by other users, curating and choreographing with social media content can create a temporary space for practicing mutual recognition and extending the relationship between the SMO and the larger public. Combined, they may therefore “entail the creation of norms and boundaries in particular user communities and their platforms” (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker 239).This article examines the ways in which a new media-savvy SMO employed SNS platforms to (co-)create digital narratives, with the case of the 2012 Anti-National Education Movement in Hong Kong. By highlighting how social media content curating and choreographing may work together to encourage engagement and collaboration at large-scale protests, we can better understand how emerging SNS-enabled affordances can be translated into concrete contentious activities, as well as the discursive aspects and cultural expressions of using new media platforms and digital technologies in contemporary protest movements.Digital Narrating for Grassroots Mobilisation Since 2010, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government has undertaken “national education” curriculum reform. However, the worry about mainland-Chinese style national education in schools brought people out to defend values that were held dear in Hong Kong. Scholarism, a new media-savvy SMO founded by about 20 secondary school students in May 2011, became the first pressure group formed against the “Moral and National Education” curriculum and became the leading activist group. On 30 August 2012, about 50 members and supporters of Scholarism started occupying the public area in front of the government’s headquarters, while three of its members went on a hunger strike. At the same time, Scholarism made active use of Facebook to undertake grassroots mobilisation, prompting both online activism and offline participation. On 7 September, over 120,000 people went to Occupy Headquarters. The next day, the Chief Executive, C. Y. Leung, succumbed to the pressure and declared that the curriculum would not be imposed in Hong Kong schools. In order to initiate a grassroots mobilisation, upon the beginning of Occupy Headquarters, Scholarism carried out the new media practice of telling the story of the student hunger strikers on Facebook to create a “moral shock” (Jasper 106) among the general public. On the first day of the occupation protest, 30 August, a poster on the hunger strike was released by Scholarism on its Facebook page. Instead of providing detailed information about the protest movement, this poster was characterised by the pictures of the three student hunger strikers. The headline message simply stated “We have started the hunger strike.” This poster was very popular among Facebook users; it accumulated more than 16,000 likes.By appealing to the hardships and sufferings of the three student hunger strikers, more photos were uploaded to narrate the course of the hunger strike and the occupation protest. In particular, pictures with captions added were posted on Facebook every couple of hours to report on the student hunger strikers’ latest situation. Although the mobilising power of these edited pictures did not come from their political ideology or rational argumentation, they sought to appeal to the “martyr-hood” of the student activists. Soon thereafter, as the social media updates of the student hunger strikers spread, feelings of shock and anger grew rapidly. Most of the comments that were posted under the updates and photos of the student hunger strikers on Scholarism’s Facebook page protested against the government’s brutality.In addition, as the movement grew, Scholarism extended the self-reporting activities on Facebook from members to non-members. For instance, it frequently (self-)reported on the amount of people joining the movement days and nights. This was especially so on 7 September, when Scholarism uploaded multiple photos and text messages to report on the physical movement of the 120,000 people. As a movement strategy, the display of images of protests and rallies on the Internet can help demonstrate the legitimacy, unity, numbers, and commitment of people supporting the movement goals (Carty and Onyett). Curating and choreographing with protest images on Facebook therefore facilitated the symbolic interactions and emotional exchanges among activists for maintaining movement solidarity and consolidating activist identity.To demonstrate the public support for its organisation and the movement, Scholarism extensively reported on its own, as well as other, protest activities and efforts on Facebook against the introduction of the “Moral and National Education” curriculum, creating unprecedented parallel public records of these events. In fact, throughout the entire movement protest, Scholarism took tight photo records of protest activities, systematically organised them into albums, and uploaded them onto Facebook every day between 30 August and 8 September.Content Co-Creation for Counter-Hegemonic ExpressionsFrom a (neo-)Gramscian perspective, counter-hegemony is often embedded and embodied in music, novels, drama, movies, and so on (Boggs). An example of counter-hegemony in the traditional media is a documentary that questions the government’s involvement in a war (Cohen). Therefore, popular culture in the media may help foster counter-hegemony on the terrain of civil society in preparation for political change (Pratt). For Chinese communities in East Asia, pop music, for example, had played a significant role in organising patriotic feelings in mass protest events, such as the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989 and the many subsequent protests in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere against the violence of the Beijing government (Chow 153). During the occupation protest, Facebook was turned into an open and flexible discursive space, in which cutting-edge counter-hegemonic narratives were produced, distributed, and expressed. Scholarism and many individual activists adopted the social media platform to (co-)create activists’ discourses and knowledge in order to challenge the dominant political and cultural codes (Melucci). An example is a poster created by Scholarism, posted on its Facebook page on 4 September. The title message of this poster is: “This is not the government headquarters. This is our CIVIC SQUARE. Come and occupy!” This message represents a discursive intervention that seeks to “illuminate the limits of normative discourses of knowledge and power” (Lane 138). It did so by replacing the original, official name and meaning of the government headquarters as well as its authority with the counter-hegemonic idea of “civic square,” a term developed and coined by Scholarism during the occupation protest to represent the public space in front of the headquarters.Moreover, the Facebook page of Scholarism was by no means the only source of content out of which counter-hegemonic knowledge and discourses were produced. Conversely, most of the new media artefacts observed on the Facebook page of Scholarism were originally created by and posted on, and therefore re-posted and shared from, the Facebook pages of other individual or group users. They are in forms of text, picture, video, and the like that sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Hong Kong government, ridicule the rationale of the “Moral and National Education” curriculum, and discredit figures in the opposition.An example is a cartoon made by an individual user and re-posted on the Facebook page of Scholarism on 2 September, the day before schools restarted in Hong Kong after the summer break. This cartoon features a schoolboy in his school uniform, who is going to school with a bunch of identical locks tied to his head. The title message is: “School begins, keep your brain safe.” This cartoon was created to ridicule the rationale of the introduction of the “Moral and National Education” by “making visible the underlying and hidden relations of power on which the smooth operation of government repression depends” (Lane 136).Another new media artefact re-posted on the Facebook page of Scholarism was originally created by a well-known Hong Kong cartoon painter of a major local newspaper. This cartoon sought to humanise the student activists and to condemn the brutality of the Hong Kong government. It paints an imagined situation in which a public conversation between the Secretary for Education, Hak-kim Eddie Ng, and the three students on the hunger strike takes place. In this cartoon, Ng is cast as the wholesaler of the “Moral and National Education” curriculum. Holding a bottle of liquid in his hand, he says to the students: “This is the tears of the chief executive from last night. Kids, should you all go home now?”Thus, counter-hegemonic expressions did not flow unidirectionally from Scholarism to the society at large. The special role of Scholarism was indeed to curate and choreograph new media artefacts by employing social media modules such as re-posting and sharing user-generated content. In so doing, it facilitated the mobilisation of the occupation protest and instant collaboration, as it connected scattered activities, turned them into a collective, and branded it with a common identity, conviction, and/or purpose.ConclusionThis article has briefly looked at the case of a new media-savvy SMO in Hong Kong as an example of how activist groups can become political curators at large-scale protest events. In particular, it highlights the concepts of curation and choreography in explaining how emerging SNS-enabled affordances can be translated into concrete contentious activities. This article argues that, rather than simply producing and disseminating content on SNS platforms, SMOs today have learnt to actively construct stories about protest movements with social media modules such as (re-)posting edited pictures and sharing user-generated photos in order to mobilise effective political interventions and sustain a vibrant participatory culture.ReferencesBaym, Geoffrey, and Chirag Shah. “Circulating Struggle: The On-Line Flow of Environmental Advocacy Clips from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.” Information Communication & Society 14.7 (2011): 1017–38. Bekkers, Victor, Rebecca Moody, and Arthur Edwards. “Micro-Mobilization, Social Media and Coping Strategies: Some Dutch Experiences.” Policy and Internet 3.4 (2011): 1–29. Bennett, W. Lance, Alexandra Segerberg, and Shawn Walker. “Organization in the Crowd: Peer Production in Large-Scale Networked Protests.” Information, Communication & Society 17.2 (2014): 232–60. Bimber, Bruce, Andrew J. 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There is an old Danish fable that says that the Devil was watching when God created the earth, and that, as the creation progressed, he became increasingly agitated over the wondrous achievements he was made to witness. At the end of it all, the Devil turned to God, and said, ‘Now, watch this.’ He created Iceland. It’s a vision of the country that resembles my own. I have always thought of Iceland as the island apart. The place that came last in the earth’s construction, whoever the engineer, and so remains forever distant. Perhaps that’s because, for me, Iceland is a home far from home. It is the country that I am from, and the place to which I am always tending—in my reading, my travels, and my thoughts. But since we left when I was ten, I am only ever in Iceland for mere glimpses of the Devil’s work, and always leave wanting more, some kind of deeper involvement. Perhaps all of his temptations are like that. Iceland’s is an inverted landscape, stuck like a plug on the roof of the Earth, revealing all the violence and destruction of the layers beneath. The island expands as the tectonic plates beneath it move. It grows by ten centimetres a year, but in two different directions—one towards the States, and the other towards Europe. I have noticed something similar happening to me. Each year, the fissure is a little wider. I come to be more like a visitor, and less like the one returning to his birthplace. I last visited in February just gone, to see whether Iceland was still drifting away from me and, indeed, from the rest of the world. I was doing research in Germany, and set aside an extra week for Reykjavík, to visit friends and family, and to see whether things were really as bad as they appeared to be from Brisbane, where I have lived for most of my life. I had read countless bleak reports of financial ruin and social unrest, and yet I couldn’t suppress the thought that Iceland was probably just being Iceland. The same country that had fought three wars over cod; that offered asylum to Bobby Fischer when no-one else would take him; and that allowed Yoko Ono to occupy a small island near Reykjavík with a peace sculpture made of light. Wasn’t it always the country stuck out on its own, with a people who claimed their independent spirit, and self-reliance, as their most-prized values? No doubt, things were bad. But did Iceland really mean to tie itself closer to Europe as a way out of the economic crisis? And what would this mean for its much-cherished sense of apartness? I spent a week of clear, cold days talking to those who made up my Iceland. They all told me what I most wanted to hear—that nothing much had changed since the financial collapse in 2008. Yes, the value of the currency had halved, and this made it harder to travel abroad. Yes, there was some unemployment now, whereas before there had been none. And, certainly, those who had over-extended on their mortgages were struggling to keep their homes. But wasn’t this the case everywhere? If it wasn’t for Icesave, they said, no-one would spare a thought for Iceland. They were referring to the disastrous internet bank, a wing of the National Bank of Iceland, which had captured and then lost billions in British and Dutch savings. The result was an earthquake in the nation’s financial sector, which in recent years had come to challenge fishing and hot springs as the nation’s chief source of wealth. In a couple of months in late 2008, this sector all but disappeared, or was nationalised as part of the Icelandic government’s scrambling efforts to salvage the economy. Meanwhile, the British and Dutch governments insisted on their citizens’ interests, and issued such a wealth of abuse towards Iceland that the country must have wondered whether it wasn’t still seen, in some quarters, as the Devil’s work. At one point, the National Bank—my bank in Iceland—was even listed by the British as a terrorist organization. I asked whether people were angry with the entrepreneurs who caused all this trouble, the bankers behind Icesave, and so on. The reply was that they were all still in London. ‘They wouldn’t dare show their faces in Reykjavík.’ Well, that was new, I thought. It sounded like a different kind of anger, much more bitter than the usual, fisherman’s jealous awareness of his neighbours’ harvests. Different, too, from the gossip, a national addiction which nevertheless always struck me as being rather homely and forgiving. In Iceland, just about everyone is related, and the thirty or so bankers who have caused the nation’s bankruptcy are well-known to all. But somehow they have gone too far, and their exile is suspended only by their appearances in the newspapers, the law courts, or on the satirical T-shirts sold in main street Laugavegur. There, too, you saw the other side of the currency collapse. The place was buzzing with tourists, unusual at this dark time of year. Iceland was half-price, they had been told, and it was true—anything made locally was affordable, for so long unthinkable in Iceland. This was a country that had always prided itself on being hopelessly expensive. So perhaps what was being lost in the local value of the economy would be recouped through the waves of extra tourists? Certainly, the sudden cheapness of Iceland had affected my decision to come, and to stay in a hotel downtown rather than with friends. On my last full day, a Saturday, I joined my namesake Kári for a drive into the country. For a while, our conversation was taken up with the crisis: the President, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, had recently declined to sign a bill that ensured that Iceland repaid its debts to the British and Dutch governments. His refusal meant a referendum on the bill in the coming March. No-one doubted that the nation would say no. The terms were unfair. And yet it was felt that Iceland’s entry into the EU, and its adoption of the Euro in place of the failed krónur, were conditional on its acceptance of the blame apportioned by international investors, and Britain in particular. Britain, one recalled, was the enemy in the Cod Wars, when Iceland had last entered the international press. Iceland had won that war. Why not this one, as well? That Iceland should suddenly need the forgiveness and assistance of its neighbours was no surprise to them. The Danes and others had long been warning Icelandic bankers that the finance sector was massively over-leveraged and bound for failure at the first sign of trouble in the international economy. I remember being in Iceland at the time of these warnings, in May 2007. It was Eurovision Song Contest month, and there was great local consternation at Iceland’s dismal showing that year. Amid the outpouring of Eurovision grief, and accusations against the rest of Europe that it was block-voting small countries like Iceland out of the contest, the dire economic warnings from the Danes seemed small news. ‘They just didn’t like the útrásarvíkingar,’ said Kári. That is, the Danes were simply upset that their former colonial children had produced offspring of their own who were capable of taking over shops, football clubs, and even banks in main streets of Copenhagen, Amsterdam and London. With interests as glamorous as West Ham United, Hamleys, and Karen Millen, it is not surprising that the útrásarvíkingar, or ‘Viking raiders’, were fast attaining the status of national heroes. Today, it’s a term of abuse rather than pride. The entrepreneurs are exiled in the countries they once sought to raid, and the modern Viking achievement, rather like the one a thousand years before, is a victim of negative press. All that raiding suddenly seems vain and greedy, and the ships that bore the raiders—private jets that for a while were a common sight over the skies of Reykjavík—have found new homes in foreign lands. The Danes were right about the Icelandic economy, just as they’d been right about the Devil’s landscaping efforts. But hundreds of years of colonial rule and only six decades of independence made it difficult for the Icelanders to listen. To curtail the flight of the new Vikings went against the Icelandic project, which from the very beginning was about independence. A thousand years before, in the 870s, Iceland had been a refuge. The medieval stories—known collectively as the sagas—tell us that the island was settled by Norwegian chieftains who were driven out of the fjordlands of their ancestors by the ruthless King Harald the Fair-Haired, who demanded total control of Norway. They refused to humble themselves before the king, and instead took the risk of a new life on a remote, inhospitable island. Icelandic independence, which was lost in the 1260s, was only regained in full in 1944, after Denmark had fallen under German occupation. Ten years later, with the war over and Iceland in the full stride of its independence, Denmark began returning the medieval Icelandic manuscripts that it had acquired during the colonial era. At that point, says the common wisdom, Icelanders forgave the Danes for centuries of poor governance. Although the strict commercial laws of the colonial period had made it all but impossible for Icelanders to rise out of economic hardship, the Danes had, at least, given the sagas back. National sovereignty was returned, and so too the literature that dated back to the time the country had last stood on its own. But, most powerfully, being Icelandic meant being independent of one’s immediate neighbours. Halldór Laxness, the nation’s Nobel Laureate, would satirize this national characteristic in his most enduring masterpiece, Sjálfstætt fólk, or Independent People. It is also what the dominant political party of the independence period, Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn, The Independence Party, has long treasured as a political ideal. To be Icelandic means being free of interference. And in a country of independent people, who would want to stop the bankers on their raids into Europe? Or, for that matter, who was now going to admit that it was time to join Europe instead of emphasizing one’s apartness from it? Kári and I turned off the south road out of Reykjavík and climbed into the heath. From here, the wounds of the country’s geological past still dominated the surface of the land. Little wonder that Jules Verne claimed that the journey to the centre of the world began on Snæfellsnes, a peninsula of volcanoes, lava, and ice caps on a long arm of land that extends desperately from the west of the island, as if forever in hope of reaching America, or at the very least Greenland. It was from Snæfellsnes that Eirík the Red began his Viking voyages westwards, and from where his famous son Leif would reach Vínland, the Land of Vines, most probably Newfoundland. Eight hundred years later, during the worst of the nation’s hardships—when the famines and natural disasters of the late eighteenth century reduced the nation almost to extinction—thousands of Icelanders followed in Leif’s footsteps, across the ‘whale road’, as the Vikings called it, to Canada, and mainly Winnipeg, where they recreated Iceland in an environment arguably even more hostile than the one they’d left. At least there weren’t any volcanoes in Winnipeg. In Iceland, you could never escape the feeling that the world was still evolving, and that the Devil’s work was ongoing. Even the national Assembly was established on one of the island’s most visible outward signs of the deep rift beneath—where a lake had cracked off the heath around it, which now surrounded it as a scar-scape of broken rocks and torn cliffs. The Almannagjá, or People’s Gorge, which is the most dramatic part of the rift, stands, or rather falls apart, as the ultimate symbol of Icelandic national unity. That is Iceland, an island on the edge of Europe, and forever on the edge of itself, too, a place where unity is defined by constant points of separation, not only in the landscape as it crunches itself apart and pushes through at the weak points, but also in a persistently small social world—the population is only 320,000—that is so closely related that it has had little choice but to emphasise the differences that do exist. After a slow drive through the low hills near Thingvellir, we reached the national park, and followed the dirt roads down to the lake. It’s an exclusive place for summerhouses, many of which now seem to stand as reminders of the excesses of the past ten years: the haphazardly-constructed huts that once made the summerhouse experience a bit of an adventure were replaced by two-storey buildings with satellite dishes, spa baths, and the ubiquitous black Range Rovers parked outside—the latter are now known as ‘Game Overs’. Like so much that has been sold off to pay the debts, the luxury houses seem ‘very 2007,’ the local term for anything unsustainable. But even the opulent summerhouses of the Viking raiders don’t diminish the landscape of Thingvellir, and a lake that was frozen from the shore to about fifty metres out. At the shoreline, lapping water had crystallized into blue, translucent ice-waves that formed in lines of dark and light water. Then we left the black beach for the site of the old Assembly. It was a place that had witnessed many encounters, not least the love matches that were formed when young Icelanders returned from their Viking raids and visits to the courts of Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland, and England. On this particular day, though, the site was occupied by only five Dutchmen in bright, orange coats. They were throwing stones into Öxará, the river that runs off the heath into the Thingvellir lake, and looked up guiltily as we passed. I’m not sure what they felt bad about—throwing stones in the river was surely the most natural thing to do. On my last night, I barely slept. The Saturday night street noise was too much, and my thoughts were taken with the ever-apart Iceland, and with the anticipation of my returning to Brisbane the next day. Reykjavík the party town certainly hadn’t changed with the financial crisis, and nor had my mixed feelings about living so far away. The broken glass and obscenities of a night out didn’t ease until 5am, when it was time for me to board the Flybus to Keflavík Airport. I made my way through the screams and drunken stumblers, and into the quiet of the dark bus, where, in the back, I could just make out the five Dutchmen who, the day before, Kári and I had seen at Thingvellir, and who were now fast asleep and emitting a perfume of vodka and tobacco smoke that made it all the way to the front. It had all seemed too familiar not to be true—the relentless Icelandic optimism around its independence, the sense that it would always be an up-and-down sort of a place anyway, and the jagged volcanoes and lava fields that formed the distant shadows of the half-hour drive to the airport. The people, like the landscape, were fixed on separation, and I doubted that the difficulties with Europe would force them in any other direction. And I, too, was on my way back, as uncertain as ever about Iceland and my place in it. I returned to the clinging heat and my own separation from home, which, as before, I also recognized as my homecoming to Brisbane. Isn’t that in the nature of split affinities, to always be nearly there but never quite there? In the weeks since my return, the Icelanders have voted by referendum to reject the deal made for the repayment of the Icesave debts, and a fresh round of negotiations with the British and Dutch governments begins. For the time being, Iceland retains its right to independence, at least as expressed by the right to sidestep the consequences of its unhappy raids into Europe. Pinning down the Devil, it seems, is just as hard as ever.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marcus Clarke famously described the Australian outback as displaying a “Weird Melancholy” (qtd. in Gelder 116). The strange sights, sounds, and experiences of Australia’s rural locations made them ripe for the development of the European genre of the Gothic in a new location, a mutation which has continued over the past two centuries. But what does it mean for Australia’s Gothic landscapes to be associated with the affective qualities of the melancholy? And more particularly, how and why does this Gothic effect (and affect) appear in the most accessible Gothic media of the twenty-first century, the television series? Two recent Australian television adaptations, Wake in Fright (2017, dir. Kriv Stenders) and Mystery Road (2018, dir. Rachel Perkins) provoke us to ask the question: how does their pictorial representation of the Australian outback and its inhabitants overtly express rage and its close ties to melancholia, shame and violence? More particularly, I argue that in both series this rage is turned inwards rather than outwards; rage is turned into melancholy and thus to self-destruction – which constructs an allegory for the malaise of our contemporary nation. However, here the two series differ. While Wake in Fright posits this as a never-ending narrative, in a true Freudian model of melancholics who fail to resolve or attend to their trauma, Mystery Road is more positive in its positioning, allowing the themes of apology and recognition to appear, both necessary for reparation and forward movement.Steven Bruhm has argued that a psychoanalytic model of trauma has become the “best [way to] understand the contemporary Gothic and why we crave it” (268), because the repressions and repetitions of trauma offer a means of playing out the anxieties of our contemporary nation, its fraught histories, its conceptualisations of identity, and its fears for the future. Indeed, as Bruhm states, it is precisely because of the way in which “the Gothic continually confronts us with real, historical traumas that we in the west have created” that they “also continue to control how we think about ourselves as a nation” (271). Jerrold E. Hogle agrees, noting that “Gothic fiction has always begun with trauma” (72). But it is not only that Gothic narratives are best understood as traumatic narratives; rather, Hogle posits that the Gothic is uniquely situated as a genre for dealing with the trauma of our personal and national histories because it enables us to approach the contradictions and conflicts of traumatic experience:I find that the best of the post-9/11 uses of Gothic in fiction achieve that purpose for attentive readers by using the conflicted un-naturalness basic to the Gothic itself to help us concurrently grasp and conceal how profoundly conflicted we are about the most immediate and pervasive cultural “woundings” of our western world as it has come to be. (75)Hogle’s point is critical for its attention to the different ways trauma can be dealt with in texts and by readers, returning in part to Sigmund Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia: where mourning is the ‘healthy’ process of working through or narrativising trauma. However, melancholia coalesces into a denial or repression of the traumatic event, and thus, as Freud suggests, its unresolved status reappears during nightmares and flashbacks, for example (Rall 171). Hogle’s praise for the Gothic, however, lies in its ability to move away from that binary, to “concurrently grasp and conceal” trauma: in other words, to respond simultaneously with mourning and with melancholy.Hogle adds to this classic perspective of melancholia through careful attention to the way in which rage inflects these affective responses. Under a psychoanalytic model, rage can be seen “as an infantile response to separation and loss” (Kahane 127). The emotional free-rein of rage, Claire Kahane points out, “disempowers us as subjects, making us subject to its regressive vicissitudes” (127; original emphasis). In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler explicates this in more detail, making clear that this disempowerment, this inability to clearly express oneself, is what leads to melancholia. Melancholia, then, can be seen as a loss or repression of the identifiable cause of the original rage: this overwhelming emotion has masked its original target. “Insofar as grief remains unspeakable”, Butler posits, “the rage over the loss can redouble by virtue of remaining unavowed. And if that very rage over loss is publicly proscribed, the melancholic effects of such a proscription can achieve suicidal proportions” (212). The only way to “survive” rage in this mutated form of melancholia is to create what Butler terms “collective institutions for grieving”; these enablethe reassembling of community, the reworking of kinship, the reweaving of sustaining relations. And insofar as they involve the publicisation and dramatisation of death, they call to be read as life-affirming rejoinders to the dire psychic consequences of a grieving process culturally thwarted and proscribed. (212-13)Butler’s reading thus aligns with Hogle’s, suggesting that it is in our careful attendance to the horrific experience of grief (however difficult) that we could navigate towards something like resolution – not a simplified narrative of working through, to be sure, but a more ethical recognition of the trauma which diverts it from its repressive impossibilities. To further the argument, it is only by transforming melancholic rage into outrage, to respond with an affect that puts shame to work, that rage will become politically effective. So, outrage is “a socialised and mediated form of rage … directed toward identifiable and bounded others in the external world” (Kahane 127-28). Melancholia and shame might then be seen to be directly opposed to one another: the former a failure of rage, the latter its socially productive incarnation.The Australian Gothic and its repetition of a “Weird Melancholy” exhibit this affective model. Ken Gelder has emphasised the historical coincidences: since Australia was colonised around the same time as the emergence of the Gothic as a genre (115), it has always been infused with what he terms a “colonial melancholia” (119). In contemporary Gothic narratives, this is presented through the repetition of the trauma of loss and injustice, so that the colonial “history of brutal violence and exploitation” (121) is played out, over and over again, desperate for resolution. Indeed, Gelder goes so far as to claim that this is the primary fuel for the Gothic as it manifests in Australian literature and film, arguing that since it is “built upon its dispossession and killings of Aboriginal people and its foundational systems of punishment and incarceration, the colonial scene … continues to shadow Australian cultural production and helps to keep the Australian Gothic very much alive” (121).That these two recent television series depict the ways in which rage and outrage appear in a primal ‘colonial scene’ which fixes the Australian Gothic within a political narrative. Both Wake in Fright and Mystery Road are television adaptations of earlier works. Wake in Fright is adapted from Kenneth Cook’s novel of the same name (1961), and its film adaptation (1971, dir. Ted Kotcheff). Mystery Road is a continuation of the film narrative of the same name (2013, dir. Ivan Sen), and its sequel, Goldstone (2016, dir. Ivan Sen). Both narratives illustrate the shift – where the films were first viewed by a high-culture audience attracted to arthouse cinema and modernist fiction – to the re-makes that are viewed in the domestic space of the television screen and/or other devices. Likewise, the television productions were not seen as single episodes, but also linked to each network’s online on-demand streaming viewers, significantly broadening the audience for both works. In this respect, these series both domesticate and democratise the Gothic. The televised series become situated publicly, recalling the broad scale popularity of the Gothic genre, what Helen Wheatley terms “the most domestic of genres on the most domestic of media” (25). In fact, Deborah Cartmell argues that “adaptation is, indeed, the art form of democracy … a ‘freeing’ of a text from the confined territory of its author and of its readers” (8; emphasis added). Likewise, André Bazin echoes this notion that the adaptation is a kind of “digest” of the original work, “a literature that has been made more accessible through cinematic adaptation” (26; emphasis added). In this way, adaptations serve to ‘democratise’ their concerns, focussing these narratives and their themes as more publically accessible, and thus provoking the potential for a broader cultural discussion. Wake in FrightWake in Fright describes the depraved long weekend of schoolteacher John Grant, who is stuck in the rural town of Bundinyabba (“The Yabba”) after he loses all of his money in an ill-advised game of “Two Up.” Modernising the concerns of the original film, in this adaptation John is further endangered by a debt to local loan sharks, and troubled by his frequent flashbacks to his lost lover. The narrative does display drug- and alcohol-induced rage in its infamous pig-shooting (originally roo-shooting) scene, as well as the cold and threatening rage of the loan shark who suspects she will not be paid, both of which are depicted as a specifically white aggression. Overall, its primary depiction of rage is directed inward, rather than outward, and in this way becomes narrowed down to emphasise a more individual, traumatic shame. That is, John’s petulant rage after his girlfriend’s rejection of his marriage proposal manifests in his determination to stolidly drink alone while she swims in the ocean. When she drowns while he is drunk and incapable to rescue her, his inaction becomes the primary source of his shame and exacerbates his self-focused, but repressed rage. The subsequent cycles of drinking (residents of The Yabba only drink beer, and plenty of it) and gambling (as he loses over and over at Two-Up) constitute a repetition of his original trauma over her drowning, and trigger the release of his repressed rage. While accompanying some locals during their drunken pig-shooting expedition, his rage finds an outlet, resulting in the death of his new acquaintance, Doc Tydon. Like John, Doc is the victim of a self-focused rage and shame at the death of his young child and the abdication of his responsibilities as the town’s doctor. Both John and Doc depict the collapse of authority and social order in the “Weird Melancholy” of the outback (Rayner 27), but this “subversion of the stereotype of capable, confident Australian masculinity” (37) and the decay of community and social structure remains static. However, the series does not push forward towards a moral outcome or a suggestion of better actions to inspire the viewer. Even his desperate suicide attempt, what he envisions as the only ‘ethical’ way out of his nightmare, ends in failure and is covered up by the local police. The narrative becomes circular: for John is returned to The Yabba every time he tries to leave, and even in the final scene he is back in Tiboonda, returned to where he started, standing at the front of his classroom. But importantly, this cycle mimics John’s cycle of unresolved shame, suggests an inability to ‘wake’ from this nightmare of repetition, with no acknowledgement of his individual history and his complicity in the traumatic events. Although John has outlived his suicide attempt, this does not validate his survival as a rebirth. Rather, John’s refusal of responsibility and the accompanying complicity of local authorities suggests the inevitability of further self-damaging rage, shame, and violence. Outback NoirBoth Wake in Fright and Mystery Road have been described as “outback noir” (Dolgopolov 12), combining characteristics of the Gothic, the Western, and film noir in their depictions of suffering and the realisation (or abdication) of justice. Greg Dolgopolov explains that while traditional “film noir explores the moral trauma of crime on its protagonists, who are often escaping personal suffering or harrowing incidents from their pasts” (12), these examples of Australian (outback) noir are primarily concerned with “ancestral trauma – that of both Indigenous and settler. Outback noir challenges official versions of events that glide over historical massacres and current injustices” (12-13).Wake in Fright’s focus on John’s personal suffering even as his crimes could become allegories for national trauma, aligns this story with traditional film noir. Mystery Road is caught up with a more collectivised form of trauma, and with the ‘colonialism’ of outback noir means this adaptation is more effective in locating self-rage and melancholia as integral to social and cultural dilemmas of contemporary Australia. Each series takes a different path to the treatment of race relations in Australia within a small and isolated rural context. Wake in Fright chooses to ignore this historical context, setting up the cycle of John’s repression of trauma as an individual fate, and he is trapped to repeat it. On the other hand, Mystery Road, just like its cinematic precursors (Mystery Road and Goldstone), deals with race as a specific theme. Mystery Road’s nod to the noir and the Western is emphasised by the character of Detective Jay Swan: “a lone gunslinger attempting to uphold law and order” (Ward 111), he swaggers around the small township in his cowboy hat, jeans, and boots, stoically searching for clues to the disappearance of two local teenagers. Since Swan is himself Aboriginal, this transforms the representation of authority and its failures depicted in Wake in Fright. While the police in Wake in Fright uphold the law only when convenient to their own goals, and further, to undertake criminal activities themselves, in Mystery Road the authority figures – Jay himself, and his counterpart, Senior Sergeant Emma James, are prominent in the community and dedicated to the pursuit of justice. It is highly significant that this sense of justice reaches beyond the present situation. Emma’s family, the Ballantynes, have been prominent landowners and farmers in the region for over one hundred years, and have always prided themselves on their benevolence towards the local Indigenous population. However, when Emma discovers that her great-grandfather was responsible for the massacre of several young Aboriginal men at the local waterhole, she is overcome by shame. In her horrified tears we see how the legacy of trauma, ever present for the Aboriginal population, is brought home to Emma herself. As the figurehead for justice in the town, Emma is determined to label the murders accurately as a “crime” which must “be answered.” In this acknowledgement and her subsequent apology to Dot, she finds some release from this ancient shame.The only Aboriginal characters in Wake in Fright are marginal to the narrative – taxi drivers who remain peripheral to the traumas within the small town, and thus remain positioned as innocent bystanders to its depravity. However, Mystery Road is careful to avoid such reductionist binaries. Just as Emma discovers the truth about her own family’s violence, Uncle Keith, the current Aboriginal patriarch, is exposed as a sexual predator. In both cases the men, leaders in the past and the present, consider themselves as ‘righteous’ in order to mask their enraged and violent behaviour. The moral issue here is more than a simplistic exposition on race, rather it demonstrates that complexity surrounds those who achieve power. When Dot ultimately ‘inherits’ responsibility for the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission this indicates that Mystery Road concludes with two female figures of authority, both looking out for the welfare of the community as a whole. Likewise, they are involved in seeking the young woman, Shevorne, who becomes the focus of abuse and grief, and her daughter. Although Jay is ultimately responsible for solving the crime at the heart of the series, Mystery Road strives to position futurity and responsibility in the hands of its female characters and their shared sense of community.In conclusion, both television adaptations of classic movies located in Australian outback noir have problematised rage within two vastly different contexts. The adaptations Wake in Fright and Mystery Road do share similar themes and concerns in their responses to past traumas and how that shapes Gothic representation of the outback in present day Australia. However, it is in their treatment of rage, shame, and violence that they diverge. Wake in Fright’s failure to convert rage beyond melancholia means that it fails to offer any hope of resolution, only an ongoing cycle of shame and violence. But rage, as a driver for injustice, can evolve into something more positive. In Mystery Road, the anger of both individuals and the community as a whole moves beyond good/bad and black/white stereotypes of outrage towards a more productive form of shame. In doing so, rage itself can elicit a new model for a more responsible contemporary Australian Gothic narrative.References Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” Film Adaptation. 1948. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2000. 19-27.Bruhm, Steven. “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 259-76.Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge, 1993.Cartmell, Deborah. “100+ Years of Adaptations, or, Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy.” A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Ed. Deborah Cartmell. Chichester: Blackwell, 2012. 1-13.Dolgopolov, Greg. “Balancing Acts: Ivan Sen’s Goldstone and ‘Outback Noir.’” Metro 190 (2016): 8-13.Gelder, Ken. “Australian Gothic.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. London: Routledge, 2007. 115-23.Hogle, Jerrold E. “History, Trauma and the Gothic in Contemporary Western Fictions.” The Gothic World. Eds. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend. London: Routledge, 2014. 72-81.Kahane, Claire. “The Aesthetic Politics of Rage.” States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence, and Social Change. Eds. Renée R. Curry and Terry L. Allison. New York: New York UP, 1996. 126-45.Perkins, Rachel, dir. Mystery Road. ABC, 2018.Rall, Denise N. “‘Shock and Awe’ and Memory: The Evocation(s) of Trauma in post-9/11 Artworks.” Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 163-82.Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.Stenders, Kriv, dir. Wake in Fright. Roadshow Entertainment, 2017.Ward, Sarah. “Shadows of a Sunburnt Country: Mystery Road, the Western and the Conflicts of Contemporary Australia.” Screen Education 81 (2016): 110-15.Wheatley, Helen. “Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Women, Domesticity and the Gothic Adaptation on Television.” Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives. Eds. Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. 149-65.

From the mid-twentieth century, state and public conceptions of deviance and crime control have turned increasingly punitive (Hallett 115; Hutchinson 138). In a Western context, criminal justice has long been retributive, prioritising punishment over rehabilitation (Wenzel et al. 26). Within that context, there has been an increase in punitiveness—understood here as a measure of a punishment’s severity—the intention of which has been to help restore the moral imbalance created by offending while also deterring future crime (Wenzel et al. 26). Entangled with the global spread of neoliberal capitalism, punitiveness has become internationally pervasive to a near-hegemonic degree (Sparks qtd. in Jennings et al. 463; Unnever and Cullen 100).The punitive turn has troubling characteristics. Punitive policies can be expensive, and increased incarceration stresses the criminal justice system and leads to prison overcrowding (Hutchinson 135). Further, punitiveness is not only applied unequally across categories such as class, race, and age (Unnever and Cullen 105-06; Wacquant 212) but the effectiveness of punitive policy relative to its costs is contested (Bouffard et al. 466, 477; Hutchinson 139). Despite this, evidence suggests public demand is driving punitive policymaking, but that demand is only weakly related to crime rates (Jennings et al. 463).While discussion of punitiveness in the public sphere often focuses on measures such as boot camps for young offenders, increased incarceration, and longer prison sentences, punitiveness also has a darker side. Our research analysing discussion taking place on a large, regional, crime-focused online forum reveals a startling degree and intensity of violence directed at offenders and related groups. Members of the discussion forum do propose unsurprising measures such as incarceration and boot camps, but also an array of violent alternatives, including beating, shooting, dismemberment, and conversion into animal food. This article draws on our research to explore why discussion of punitiveness can be so intensely violent.Our research applies thematic analysis to seven discussion threads posted to a large regional online forum focused on crime, made between September and November 2017. One discussion thread per week of the study period was purposively sampled based on relevance to the topic of punitiveness, ultimately yielding 1200 individual comments. Those comments were coded, and the data and codes were reiteratively analysed to produce categories, then basic, organising, and global themes. We intended to uncover themes in group discussion most salient to punitiveness to gain insight into how punitive social interactions unfold and how those who demand punitiveness understand their interactions and experiences of crime. We argue that, in this online forum, the global theme—the most salient concept related to punitiveness—is a “subaltern citizenship”. Here, a clear division emerges from the data, where the group members perceive themselves as “us”—legitimate citizens with all attendant rights—in opposition to an external “them”, a besieging group of diverse, marginalised Others who have illegitimately usurped certain rights and who victimise citizens. Group members often deride the state as too weak and untrustworthy to stop this victimisation. Ironically, the external Others perceived by the group to hold power are themselves genuinely marginalised, though the group does not recognise or see that form of marginalisation as legitimate. In this essay, to preserve the anonymity of the forum and its members, we refer to them only as “the Forum”, located in “the City”, and refrain from direct quotes except for commonly used words or phrases that do not identify individuals.It is also important to note that the research described here deliberately focused on a specific group in a specific space who were concerned about specific groups of offenders. Findings and discussion, and the views on punitiveness described, cannot be generalised to the broader community. Nor do we suggest these views can be considered representative of all Forum members as we present here only a limited analysis of some violent discourse emerging from our research. Likewise, while our discussion often centres on youth and other marginalised groups in the context of offending, we do not intend to imply that offending is a characteristic of these groups.Legitimate CitizenshipCommonly, citizenship is seen as a conferred status denoting full and equal community membership and the rights and responsibilities dictated by community values and norms (Lister 28-29). Western citizenship norms are informed by neoliberal capitalist values: individual responsibility, an obligation to be in paid employment, participation in economic consumption, the sanctity of ownership, and that the principal role of government is to defend the conditions under which these norms can freely thrive (Walsh 861-62). While norms are shaped by laws and policy frameworks, they are not imposed coercively or always deployed consciously. These norms exist as shared behavioural expectations reproduced through social interaction and embodied as “common sense” (Kotzian 59). As much as Western democracies tend to a universalist representation of one, undifferentiated citizenship, it is clear that gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, and migrant status all exist in different relationships to citizenship as an identity category. Glass ceilings, stolen generations, same-sex marriage debates, and Australian Government proposals to strip citizenship from certain types of criminal offender all demonstrate that the lived experience of norms surrounding citizenship is profoundly unequal for some (Staeheli et al. 629-30). An individual’s citizenship status, therefore, more accurately exists on a spectrum between legitimacy—full community membership, possessing all rights and living up to all associated responsibilities—and illegitimacy—diminished membership, with contested rights and questionable fulfilment of associated responsibilities—depending on the extent of their deviation from societal norms.Discussing punitiveness, Forum members position themselves as “us”, that is, legitimate citizens. Words such as “we” and “us” are used as synonyms for society and for those whose behaviours are “normal” or “acceptable”. Groups associated with offending are described as “they”, “them”, and their behaviours are “not normal”, “disgusting”, “feral”, and merit the removal of “them” from civilisation, usually to “the middle of nowhere” or “the Outback”. Possession of legitimate citizenship is implicit in assuming authority over what is normal and who should be exiled for failing the standard.Another implicit assumption discernible in the data is that Forum members perceive the “normal we” as good neoliberal citizens. “We” work hard, own homes and cars, and take individual responsibility. There is a strong imputation of welfare dependency among offenders, the poor, and other suspect groups. Offending is presented as something curable by stripping offenders or their parents of welfare payments. Members earn their status as legitimate citizens by adhering to the norms of neoliberal citizenship in opposition to potential offenders to whom the benefits of citizenship are simply doled out.Forum members also frame their citizenship as legitimate by asserting ownership over community spaces and resources. This can be seen in their talking as if they, their sympathetic audience, and “the City” are the same (for example, declaring that “the City” demands harsher punishments for juvenile offenders). There are also calls to “take back” the streets, the City, and Australia from groups associated with offending. That a space can and should be “taken back” implies a pre-existing state of control interrupted by those who have no right to ownership. At its most extreme, the assertion of ownership extends to a conviction that members have the right to position offenders as enemies of the state and request that the army, the ultimate tool of legitimate state violence, be turned against them if governments and the criminal justice system are too “weak” or “soft” to constrain them.The Illegitimate OtherThroughout the data, perceived offenders are spoken of with scorn and hatred. “Perceived offenders” may include offenders and their family, youths, Indigenous people, and people of low socioeconomic status, and these marginalised groups are referenced so interchangeably it can be difficult to determine which is being discussed.Commenting on four “atsi [sic] kids” who assaulted an elderly man, group members asserted “they” should be shot like dogs. The original text gives no antecedents to indicate whether “they” is meant to indicate youths, Indigenous youths, or offenders in general. However, Australia has a colonial history of conflating crime and indigeneity and shooting Indigenous people to preserve white social order (Hill and Dawes 310, 312), a consequence of the tendency of white people to imagine criminals as black (Unnever and Cullen 106). It must be noted that the racial identity of individual Forum members is unknown. This does constitute a limitation in the original study, as identity categories such as race and class intersect and manifest in social interactions in complex ways. However, that does not prevent analysis of the text itself.In the Forum’s discursive space, “they” is used to denote offenders, Indigenous youths, youths, or the poor interchangeably, as if they were all a homogeneous, mutually synonymous “Other”. Collectively, these groups are represented as so generally hopeless that they are imagined as choosing to offend so they will be sentenced to the comforts of “holiday camp” prisons where they can access luxuries otherwise beyond their reach: freedom from addicted parents, medical care, food, television, and computers. A common argument, that crime is an individual choice, is often based on the idea that prison is a better option for the poor than going home. As a result, offending by marginalised offenders is reconstructed as a rational choice or a failure of individual responsibility rather than a consequence of structural inequality.Further, parents of those in suspect populations are blamed for intergenerational maintenance of criminality. They are described as too drunk or drugged to care, too unskilled in parenting due to their presumed dreadful upbringing, or too busy enjoying their welfare payments to meet their responsibility to control their children or teach them the values and skills of citizenship. Comments imply parents probably participated in their children’s crimes even when no evidence suggests that possibility and that some groups simply cannot be trusted to raise disciplined children owing to their inherent moral and economic dissipation. That is, not just offenders but entire groups are deemed illegitimate, willing to enjoy benefits of citizenship such as welfare payments but unwilling or unable to earn them by engaging with the associated responsibilities. This is a frequent argument for why they deserve severely punitive punishment for deviance.However, the construction of the Other as illegitimate in Forum discussions reaches far beyond imagining them as lacking normative skills and values. The violence present on the Forum is startling in its intensity. Prevalent within the data is the reduction of people to insulting nicknames. Terms used to describe people range from the sarcastic— “little darlings”—through standard abusive language such as “bastards”, “shits”, “dickheads”, “lowlifes”, to dehumanising epithets such as “maggots”, “scum”, and “subhuman arsewipes”. Individually and collectively, “they” are relentlessly framed as less than human and even less than animals. They are “mongrels” and “vermin”. In groups, they are “packs”, and they deserve to be “hunted” or just shot from helicopters. They are unworthy of life. “Oxygen thieves” is a repeated epithet, as is the idea that they should be dropped out at sea to drown. Other suggestions for punishment include firing squads, lethal injections, and feeding them to animals.It is difficult to imagine a more definitive denial of legitimacy than discursively stripping individuals and groups of their humanity (their most fundamental status) and their right to existence (their most fundamental right as living beings). The Forum comes perilously close to casting the Other as Agamben’s homo sacer, humans who live in a “state of exception”, subject to the state’s power but excluded from the law’s protection and able to be killed without consequence (Lechte and Newman 524). While it would be hyperbole to push this comparison too far—given Agamben had concentration camps in mind—the state of exception as a means of both excluding a group from society and exercising control over its life does resonate here.Themes Underlying PunitivenessOur findings indicate the theme most salient to punitive discussion is citizenship, rooted in persistent concerns over who is perceived to have it, who is not, and what should be done about those Others whose deviance renders their citizenship less legitimate. Citizenship norms—real or aspirational—of society’s dominant groups constitute the standards by which Forum members judge their experiences of and with crime, perceived offenders, the criminal justice system, and the state. However, Forum members do not claim a straightforward belonging to and sharing in the maintenance of the polity. Analysis of the data suggests Forum members consider their legitimate citizenship tainted by external forces such as politics, untrustworthy authorities and institutions, and the unconstrained excess of the illegitimate Other. That is, they perceive their citizenship to be simultaneously legitimate and undeservedly subaltern.According to Gramsci, subaltern populations are subordinate to dominant groups in political and civil society, lulled by hegemonic norms to cooperate in their own oppression (Green 2). Civil society supports the authority of political society and, in return, political society uses the law and criminal justice system to safeguard civil society’s interests against unruly subalterns (Green 7). Rights and responsibilities of citizenship reside within the mutual relationship between political and civil society. Subalternity, by definition, exists outside this relationship, or with limited access to it.Forum members position themselves as citizens within civil society. They lay emphatic claim to fulfilling their responsibilities as neoliberal citizens. However, they perceive themselves to be denied the commensurate rights: they cannot rely on the criminal justice system to protect them from the illegitimate Other. The courts are “soft”, and prisons are “camps” with “revolving doors”. Authorities pamper offenders while doing nothing to stop them from hurting their victims. Human rights are viewed as an imposition by the UN or as policy flowing from a political sphere lacking integrity and dominated by “do gooders”. Rights are reserved only for offenders. Legitimate citizens no longer even have the right to defend themselves. The perceived result is a transfer of rights from legitimate to illegitimate, from deserving to undeserving. This process elides from view the actual subalterns of Australian society—here, most particularly Indigenous people and the socioeconomically vulnerable—and reconstructs them as oppressors of the dominant group, who are reframed as legitimate citizens unjustly made subaltern.The Violence in PunitivenessOn the Forum, as in the broader world, a sense of “white victimisation”—the view, unsupported by history or evidence, that whites are an oppressed people within a structure systematically doling out advantage to minorities (King 89)—is a recurrent legitimising argument for punitiveness and vigilantism. Amid the shrinking social safety nets and employment precarity of neoliberal capitalism, competitiveness increases, and white identity forms around perceived threats to power and status incurred by “losing out” to minorities (Sacks and Lindholm 131). One 2011 study finds a majority of white US citizens believe themselves subject to more racism than black people (King 89). However, these assumptions of whiteness tend to be spared critical examination because, in white-dominated societies, whiteness is the common-sense norm in opposition to which other racial categories are defined (Petray and Collin 2). When whiteness is made the focus of critical questioning, white identities gain salience and imaginings of the “dark other” and besieged white virtues intensify (Bonilla-Silva et al. 232).With respect to feelings of punitiveness, Unnever and Cullen (118-19) find that the social cause for punitiveness in the United States is hostility towards other races, that harsh punishments, including the death penalty, are demanded and accepted by the dominant group because they are perceived to mostly injure “people they do not like” (Unnever and Cullen 119). Moreover, perception that a racial group is inherently criminal amplifies more generalised prejudices against them and diminishes the capacity of the dominant group to feel empathy for suffering inflicted upon them by the criminal justice system (Unnever and Cullen 120).While our analysis of the Forum supports these findings where they touch on crimes committed by Indigenous people, they invite a question. Why, where race is not a factor, do youths and the socioeconomically disadvantaged also inspire intensely violent punitiveness as described above? We argue that the answer relates to status. From this perspective, race becomes one of several categories of differentiation from legitimate citizenship through an ascription of low status.Wenzel, Okimoto, and Cameron (29) contend punitiveness, with respect to specific offences, varies according to the symbolic meaning the offence holds for the observer. Crimes understood as a transgression against status or power inspire a need for “revenge, punishment, and stigmatisation” (Wenzel et al. 41) and justify an increase in the punitiveness required (Wenzel et al. 29, 34). This is particularly true where an offence is deemed to make someone unfit for community membership, such that severe punishment serves as a symbolic marker of exile and a reaffirmation for the community of the violated values and norms (Wenzel et al. 41). Indeed, as noted, Forum posts regularly call for offenders to be removed from society, exiled to the outback, or shipped beyond Australia’s territorial waters.Further, Forum members’ perception of subaltern citizenship, with its assumption of legitimate citizenship as being threatened by undeserving Others, makes them view crime as implicitly a matter of status transgression. This is intensified by perception that the political sphere and criminal justice system are failing legitimate citizens, refusing even to let them defend themselves. Virulent name-calling and comparisons to animals can be understood as attempts by the group to symbolically curtail the undeservedly higher status granted to offenders by weak governments and courts. More violent demands for punishment symbolically remove offenders from citizenship, reaffirm citizen values, and vent anger at a political and criminal justice system deemed complicit, through weakness, in reducing legitimate citizens to subaltern citizens.ConclusionsIn this essay, we highlight the extreme violence we found in our analysis of an extensive online crime forum in a regional Australian city. We explore some explanations for violent public punitiveness, highlighting how members identify themselves as subaltern citizens in a battle against undeserving Others, with no support from a weak state. This analysis centres community norms and a problematic conception of citizenship as drivers of both public punitiveness and dissatisfaction with crime control policy and the criminal justice system. We highlight a real dissonance between community needs and public policy that may undermine effective policymaking. That is, evidence-based crime control policies, successful crime prevention initiatives, and falling crime rates may not increase public satisfaction with how crime is dealt with if policymakers pursue those measures without regard for how citizens experience the process.While studies such as that by Wenzel, Okimoto, and Cameron identify differences in status between legitimate citizens and offenders as amplifiers of punitiveness, we suggest the amplification may be mediated by the status relationship between legitimate citizens and authority figures within legitimate society. The offender and their crime may not contribute as much to the public’s outrage as commonly assumed. Instead, public punitiveness may predominantly arise from the perception that the political sphere, media, and criminal justice system respond to citizens’ experience of crime in ways that devalue the status of legitimate citizens. At least in the context of this regional city, this points to something other than successful crime control being integral to building more effective and satisfactory crime control policy: in this case, the need to rebuild trust between citizens and authority groups.ReferencesBonilla-Silva, Eduardo, Carla Goar, and David G. 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I love memory. It reminds me of who I am and how to get home, whether there's bread in the freezer and if I've already seen a movie. It's less helpful on whether I've already met someone and utterly useless in reminding me if I owe money. Overall, though, I'd rather have it than not. Psychologists and philosophers tell us that memory is one of the ways in which we maintain the integrity of the self. I've never met anyone who's lost his memory, but we've all seen movies in which it happens. First, you lose your memory, then you're accused of a crime you can't remember committing. I forget how it turns out but I did once see a documentary about a man who'd lost his memory. It was horrible. It was driving him insane. He could remember his wife, but couldn't remember when he'd last seen her. He thought it was years ago although it had only been 5 minutes. Every time she entered the room, he traversed paroxysms of agony as though seeing her again after an eternity of waiting. The experience was overwhelming for both of them. Of course, psychoanalysts are unequivocal about the importance of memory: repressed memories are the very stuff of the unconscious and analysis helps us remember. When memories are repressed, bad things happen. As Breuer and Freud stated in 1893, "hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences". History has also long been concerned to discover a true memory, or at least an official one. And history has become one of the main cultural battlegrounds over the right way to remember. But lately, memory has become big business. Entire industries are devoted to selling it back to us. Not private memories, but the likely memories of a group. For example, my newsagent carries at least 3 "nostalgia" magazines, replete with loving photographs of old toys, reprints of old ads, interviews with old personalities, and so on. Fortunately, they're all just a bit too old and the absence of my personal nostalgia reassures me that I'm not quite as decrepit as Generation Xers claim. Nonetheless, amongst my 200-odd TV channels, there is one devoted exclusively to old shows, TVLand. It broadcasts nothing later than 1981 and, though its policies are clearly guided by contractual availability and cost, specialises in TV of the mid-1960s. Now that is getting dangerously close to home. And I confess that, after 30 years, re-viewing episodes of Julia or Petticoat Junction or The Mod Squad ("one's white, one's black, one's blond") is an experience both compelling and embarrassing. And again, this summer, as for the past 15 years, movie screens were awash in retro-films. Not films with old-fashioned plots or deliberately nostalgic styles -- such as Raiders of the Lost Ark -- but films based on cultural artefacts of the near past: The Avengers, Lost in Space, Sergeant Bilko, McHale's Navy, another Batman, The Mask of Zorro, etc. Indeed, now that we've lived through roughly six Star Treks, Mission Impossible, The Flintstones, The Twilight Zone, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Jetsons, and in view of the fact that even now -- even as I write these very lines -- locations are being scouted for Gilligan's Island: The Movie, it seems appropriate to ask if there is a single TV show of the 1960s which will NOT become a major Hollywood movie? That's not all. I have access to approximately 10 "golden oldies" music stations, some specialising solely in "PowerHits of the '70s" or "Yesterday's Country" or "Hits of the Big Band Era". In fact, I think Big Band is making a comeback on the pop charts. Maybe everything old is new again. On the other hand, memory has also become highly political. Much more that I ever remembered. All over the world, governments and institutions are rushing to remember the wrongs of the past and issue sincere apologies. President Clinton apologised to Japanese Americans, some Australian state and local governments to Aborigines, Canada to the displaced Inuit, Tony Blair to the Irish, Swiss banks to the victims of Nazi gold. The return of the repressed is apparently highly therapeutic and certainly very virtuous. Strangely, though, the institutional process of memory recovery is happening at precisely the time that the same recovered memory theory is under attack in the courts. After having been a potent argument in the 1980s, especially in cases involving a sexual component, recovered memory is now widely discredited. Indeed, even movies-of-the-week which at one time preached recovered memory as unassailable truth now regularly use it as the cover of false accusations and gross miscarriages of justice. Even the Canadian Minister of Justice is under pressure to review the cases of all persons jailed as a result of its use. It would seem that after having been private for so many years, memory has gone public. It's a political tool, a legal argument, a business. The opposite of hysteria: we suffer from too much memory. Which leads me to my problem. I can't remember Princess Diana. This is no doubt because I avoided all mention of her when she was alive. And when she died, I was away. Not far away but conceptually away. Away from the media. I didn't follow the news till days later, when it was all over and TV had moved on to something else. Her exit, of course, was rather nasty. Not the sort of thing I'd want to witness, but certainly the sort of thing I'd like to know about. And it didn't exactly happen away from the public eye. There was, it is said, a crush of paparazzi in hot pursuit. And there are allegedly tons of photographs. So how come we haven't seen any? How have the authorities managed to control all those pictures? Supremely concerned with her image in life, Diana is fortunate that others are concerned with it in death. At least the absence of photographs allows us to preserve an unblemished memory of Diana, beautiful, beneficent, almost a people's princess. It does seem though that her memory, like her fame, is largely a by-product of media exposure. If you're in it, everyone knows about you. You're everywhere, inescapable. Your smiling face beams down on millions, your every thought reported. And it's not just the excessive, tabloid press, the fake news programmes, and the tawdry scandal sheets that indulge in this oversaturation -- although they do indulge quite a bit -- but all media. Obviously, competitive pressures are to blame. And probably also a cultivated appetite for the sordid and the scandalous. The upside of so much attention, of course, is that, once you're gone, there will be lots of images and sound bites to remember you by. These will be recycled again and again and again. Today's fragments of time are tomorrow's memories. Consequently, if you must be a public figure, try to have a good exit. Consider perhaps James Dean's advice to "live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse." Especially a good looking corpse. Of course, if you're out of it -- out of the media system, that is -- then, you're just out of it. Nobody will remember you anyway. This is why Elvis will never die and John Kennedy will never stop dying. Except perhaps for his heavy Las Vegas phase, virtually all of the images of the King show him as magnetic, powerful, and exciting. Colonel Parker was careful about that. Elvis constantly exudes energy, an all-too-palpable physicality, forever re-energised and re-distributed by the film images of him. And the posters, and the sound of his voice, and the myth of his wildness. Fortunately, though, Elvis had the good grace to expire privately, beyond the public eye. In this, he resembled Marilyn, Rock Hudson, and Walt Disney. Of that event, he left no record. Indeed, the absence of such a record has allowed the remaining images to fuel a new myth. Endlessly re-circulated in a media sub-system, the images prove that Elvis lives! Consequently, people -- usually those first contacted by aliens -- keep spotting him at 7-Elevens, supermarket checkouts, and isolated gas stations. Apparently, he just wanted to live life normally. The fame had become too intrusive. And who could begrudge him that? So he faked his death, left no trace, and wandered off into the wilderness. To this extent, Elvis shares the fate of Hitler and the Romanovs whose deaths were deliberately obscured. As a result, Hitler lives on, at times on a desert island, sometimes in a bunker deep beneath the earth. And wasn't that Alexis, the tsarevitch? And over there, Anastasia? Aren't they having lunch with Amelia Earhardt? Kennedy, though, left a bad image, the queasy head shot. Too public, too visible, too shocking. It wasn't what James Dean meant. And that one image has absorbed all the others. This is ironic because Kennedy was the first president to look and behave like an actor whereas it would be years before an actor could look and behave like the president. Kennedy loved the camera and the camera, as they say, loved him. He had a permanent staff photographer who generated thousands of shots. He embraced television as no president had before, dominating the televised debates, holding live press conferences, opening the White House to TV tours. He invited Robert Drew to film his 1959 nomination campaign in Primary, giving him, as is always said in these cases, "unprecedented access". But the only pictures we remember come from Dallas. Gloria Steinem called it "the day the future died". Then, if we think really hard, we remember the funeral. But we can hardly remember anything else. Pictures of Jack campaigning, playing with the kids, receiving Marilyn's birthday greetings, are almost surprising. They're so fresh, as though we'd never seen them before. Kennedy should have died like Elvis, he would have lived longer in the imagination. As it is, he only ever dies and the very publicness of his death seems to have authorised its endless restaging. Has any film ever been more publicly scrutinised, examined, and re-created than the Zapruder film? The incident has littered the culture with such stock phrases as 'lone gunman' and 'grassy knoll'. It's also the birthplace of every crazy conspiracy theory. And everyone from the Warren Commission to Oliver Stone and Jerry Seinfeld has used the phrase "Back, and to the left". It's not surprising that our memory of public events should be bound up with images of those events. Most of us, most of the time, have no other access to them. This knowledge, combined with the pervasiveness of the media system, has led clever marketers of all sorts, to attempt to stage what Daniel Boorstin in 1961 called "pseudo-events". Events which exist for the benefit of the camera, with no real substance of their own. Their purpose is precisely to create an image, a feeling, a mood. Of course, every propagandist of any skill understood these facts long before Boorstin. How many photographs were doctored on Stalin's orders? How often was the mole on Mao's chin repainted? How often was Lenin's face itself repainted with embalming fluid? And didn't Adolf Hitler surround himself with the most exquisite filmmakers, photographers, and image-makers available? You just can't dictate without a firm grasp of your image. And that's the other side of modern times. Increasingly, we all have a firm grasp of image. We are no longer the media dupes which moralists frequently presume. The media have made us all rather sophisticated in the ways of the media. Everyone understands that politicians manage their images and stage events. Everyone knows that advertising is only creatively truthful. No one believes that what happens in a film really happens. We all realise that most of what's seen on TV is spin doctoring. We're hardened. And this is no doubt why the creamy sincerity of the eager tears which now attend public disclosures, the touchy-feely goodness of anyone who can "feel our pain" are so much in demand. No matter how fake, how contrived, how manipulative, they at least look like the real thing. At one time, popular culture merely suggested shock and violence. It did not show them directly. The Kennedy assassination marked the end of that time as people turned away from the screen in horror, asking "Did they have to show us that?" We're now in a time when popular culture suggests nothing and shows everything, in as much detail as possible. This is the moment of Diana's death and we turn to our screens demanding to see more, shouting "We have a right to know!" But a slippage may be happening. We know so much about media operations -- or believe that we do -- that the media may be losing their ability to define events and construct memory. This appears to be one of the lessons of the Diana coverage: the paparazzi in particular, and the media in general, were at fault. Public anger was directed not at her driver, her companions or her lifestyle, but at the media. That the behaviour of the paparazzi remains to be fully elucidated, and that Diana had the weight of accumulated prestige and exposure on her side, make meaningful commentary more difficult, but there is a clear sense in which the public sided with perceived sincerity and genuineness and against perceived exploitation. Clearly, these matters are always open to revision, but the anger directed against the media in this affair spoke of pent-up rage, of long nursed grudges, of a generalised judgment that the media have done more harm than good. Something similar is happening in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. The US media are apparently obsessed with this event and greatly agitated by the necessity of further coverage. Public opinion, however, has indicated just as firmly that it doesn't care and wants the whole thing to go away. There's a split between the definitional power of the media and public opinion, a drifting apart that wasn't supposed to happen. Media commentators of both the left and the right, both those who believe in media effects and those who decry the concentration of ownership, have long agreed on one thing: the media have too much power to tell us what to think. And yet, in this case, it's not happening. Indeed, 10 years from now, what will we remember? That Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky had an affair or that the media were very agitated about it? The way in which media images are linked to popular memory may be changing. We are less concerned with whether the media got the event right than with how they approached it at all. Already, concern over the Gulf War centres as much on the manner of coverage as on the legitimacy of the war's objectives. And the old complaint that the media cover elections as strategic horse races, thereby ignoring substantive issues, presumes the naivety of the audience. Everyone can tell exactly what the media are doing. So what will we remember? How will we feel in 40 years examining old footage of today's newscasts? Memory fades and images are about emotion. Will we experience the diffuse grimness of the WWII veteran watching Saving Private Ryan, identifying less with specific acts than with the general feeling of the moment? Probably. But perhaps we'll also carry with us a second layer of meaning, an equally diffuse recognition that the moment was constructed. I was watching a documentary last night about Hitler's last days. I'm sure everyone's seen it or something like it. The very fact I can be sure of this is the measure of the media's ability to shape popular memory. Hitler, visibly ailing, emerges from his bunker to acknowledge his last line of defence, a string of soldiers who are really only children. He stops as though to speak to one and pats the boy on the cheek. It's a profoundly creepy moment. One feels discomfort and distaste at being so close, one is acutely aware of the distance between the image's intention and the reality of which we have knowledge. Then, suddenly and imperceptibly, the camera shifts angles and follows Hitler down the line of soldiers, a standard travelling shot. It's invisible because that's the way military reviews are always shown. It works because we want a good view. It's compelling because it draws us into the scene. It looks so real and is plainly read that way, as historical actuality footage. But it's also plainly constructed. And that's increasingly what we see nowadays. We see the way in which images intend to connect to emotions. Maybe it's the future of all memory, to be disjointed and creepy. To acknowledge simultaneously the reality of the event and its fakeness. Rather like the performance of Hollywood actors or US presidents or publicly proffered sentiment. Clearly, we won't be dealing with the return of the repressed as we'll remember everything. We'll just have too much memory. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul Attallah. "Too Much Memory." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.2 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/memory.php>. Chicago style: Paul Attallah, "Too Much Memory," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/memory.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul Attallah. (1998) Too much memory. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/memory.php> ([your date of access]).

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

By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).

1909–22: Turkey exterminated over 1.5 million of its ethnically Armenian, and hundreds of thousands of its ethnically Greek and Assyrian, citizens. Most died in 1915. This period of decimation in now widely called the Armenian Genocide (Balakian 179-80).1910: Siamanto first published his poem, The Dance: “The corpses were piled as trees, / and from the springs, from the streams and the road, / the blood was a stubborn murmur.” When springs run red, when the dead are stacked tree-high, when “everything that could happen has already happened,” then time is nothing: “there is no future [and] the language of civilised humanity is not our language” (Nichanian 142).2007: In my novel The Edge of the World a ceramic bowl, luminous blue, recurs as motif. Imagine you are tiny: the bowl is broken but you don’t remember breaking it. You’re awash with tears. You sit on the floor, gather shards but, no matter how you try, you can’t fix it. Imagine, now, that the bowl is the sky, huge and upturned above your head. You have always known, through every wash of your blood, that life is shockingly precarious. Silence—between heartbeats, between the words your parents speak—tells you: something inside you is terribly wrong; home is not home but there is no other home; you “can never be fully grounded in a community which does not share or empathise with the experience of persecution” (Wajnryb 130). This is the stubborn murmur of your body.Because time is nothing, this essay is fragmented, non-linear. Its main characters: my mother, grandmother (Hovsanna), grandfather (Benyamin), some of my mother’s older siblings (Krikor, Maree, Hovsep, Arusiak), and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Ottoman military officer, Young Turk leader, first president of Turkey). 1915–2013: Turkey invests much energy in genocide denial, minimisation and deflection of responsibility. 24 April 2012: Barack Obama refers to the Medz Yeghern (Great Calamity). The use of this term is decried as appeasement, privileging political alliance with Turkey over human rights. 2003: Between Genocide and Catastrophe, letters between Armenian-American theorist David Kazanjian and Armenian-French theorist Marc Nichanian, contest the naming of the “event” (126). Nichanian says those who call it the Genocide are:repeating every day, everywhere, in all places, the original denial of the Catastrophe. But this is part of the catastrophic structure of the survivor. By using the word “Genocide”, we survivors are only repeating […] the denial of the loss. We probably cannot help it. We are doing what the executioner wanted us to do […] we claim all over the world that we have been “genocided;” we relentlessly need to prove our own death. We are still in the claws of the executioner. We still belong to the logic of the executioner. (127)1992: In Revolution and Genocide, historian Robert Melson identifies the Armenian Genocide as “total” because it was public policy intended to exterminate a large fraction of Armenian society, “including the families of its members, and the destruction of its social and cultural identity in most or all aspects” (26).1986: Boyajian and Grigorian assert that the Genocide “is still operative” because, without full acknowledgement, “the ghosts won’t go away” (qtd. in Hovannisian 183). They rise up from earth, silence, water, dreams: Armenian literature, Armenian homes haunted by them. 2013: My heart pounds: Medz Yeghern, Aksor (Exile), Anashmaneli (Indefinable), Darakrutiun (Deportation), Chart (Massacre), Brnagaght (Forced migration), Aghed (Catastrophe), Genocide. I am awash. Time is nothing.1909–15: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was both a serving Ottoman officer and a leader of the revolutionary Young Turks. He led Ottoman troops in the repulsion of the Allied invasion before dawn on 25 April at Gallipoli and other sites. Many troops died in a series of battles that eventually saw the Ottomans triumph. Out of this was born one of Australia’s founding myths: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs), courageous in the face of certain defeat. They are commemorated yearly on 25 April, ANZAC Day. To question this myth is to risk being labelled traitor.1919–23: Ataturk began a nationalist revolution against the occupying Allies, the nascent neighbouring Republic of Armenia, and others. The Allies withdrew two years later. Ataturk was installed as unofficial leader, becoming President in 1923. 1920–1922: The last waves of the Genocide. 2007: Robert Manne published A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide, calling for a recontextualisation of the cultural view of the Gallipoli landings in light of the concurrence of the Armenian Genocide, which had taken place just over the rise, had been witnessed by many military personnel and widely reported by international media at the time. Armenian networks across Australia were abuzz. There were media discussions. I listened, stared out of my office window at the horizon, imagined Armenian communities in Sydney and Melbourne. Did they feel like me—like they were holding their breath?Then it all went quiet. Manne wrote: “It is a wonderful thing when, at the end of warfare, hatred dies. But I struggle to understand why Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide continue to exist for Australians in parallel moral universes.” 1992: I bought an old house to make a home for me and my two small children. The rooms were large, the ceilings high, and behind it was a jacaranda with a sturdy tree house built high up in its fork. One of my mother’s Armenian friends kindly offered to help with repairs. He and my mother would spend Saturdays with us, working, looking after the kids. Mum would stay the night; her friend would go home. But one night he took a sleeping bag up the ladder to the tree house, saying it reminded him of growing up in Lebanon. The following morning he was subdued; I suspect there were not as many mosquitoes in Lebanon as we had in our garden. But at dinner the previous night he had been in high spirits. The conversation had turned, as always, to politics. He and my mother had argued about Turkey and Russia, Britain’s role in the development of the Middle East conflict, the USA’s roughshod foreign policy and its effect on the world—and, of course, the Armenian Genocide, and the killingof Turkish governmental representatives by Armenians, in Australia and across the world, during the 1980s. He had intimated he knew the attackers and had materially supported them. But surely it was the beer talking. Later, when I asked my mother, she looked at me with round eyes and shrugged, uncharacteristically silent. 2002: Greek-American diva Diamanda Galas performed Dexifiones: Will and Testament at the Perth Concert Hall, her operatic work for “the forgotten victims of the Armenian and Anatolian Greek Genocide” (Galas).Her voice is so powerful it alters me.1925: My grandmother, Hovsanna, and my grandfather, Benyamin, had twice been separated in the Genocide (1915 and 1922) and twice reunited. But in early 1925, she had buried him, once a prosperous businessman, in a swamp. Armenians were not permitted burial in cemeteries. Once they had lived together in a big house with their dozen children; now there were only three with her. Maree, half-mad and 18 years old, and quiet Hovsep, aged seven,walked. Then five-year-old aunt, Arusiak—small, hungry, tired—had been carried by Hovsanna for months. They were walking from Cilicia to Jerusalem and its Armenian Quarter. Someone had said they had seen Krikor, her eldest son, there. Hovsanna was pregnant for the last time. Together the four reached Aleppo in Syria, found a Christian orphanage for girls, and Hovsanna, her pregnancy near its end, could carry Arusiak no further. She left her, promising to return. Hovsanna’s pains began in Beirut’s busy streets. She found privacy in the only place she could, under a house, crawled in. Whenever my mother spoke of her birth she described it like this: I was born under a stranger’s house like a dog.1975: My friend and I travelled to Albany by bus. After six hours we were looking down York Street, between Mount Clarence and Mount Melville, and beyond to Princess Royal Harbour, sapphire blue, and against which the town’s prosperous life—its shopfronts, hotels, cars, tourists, historic buildings—played out. It took away my breath: the deep harbour, whaling history, fishing boats. Rain and sun and scudding cloud; cliffs and swells; rocky points and the white curves of bays. It was from Albany that young Western Australian men, volunteers for World War I, embarked on ships for the Middle East, Gallipoli, sailing out of Princess Royal Harbour.1985: The Australian Government announced that Turkey had agreed to have the site of the 1915 Gallipoli landings renamed Anzac Cove. Commentators and politicians acknowledged it as historic praised Turkey for her generosity, expressed satisfaction that, 70 years on, former foes were able to embrace the shared human experience of war. We were justifiably proud of ourselves.2005: Turkey made her own requests. The entrance to Albany’s Princess Royal Harbour was renamed Ataturk Channel. A large bronze statue of Ataturk was erected on the headland overlooking the Harbour entrance. 24 April 1915: In the town of Hasan Beyli, in Cilicia, southwest Turkey, my great grandfather, a successful and respected businessman in his 50s, was asleep in his bed beside his wife. He had been born in that house, as had his father, grandfather, and all his children. His brother, my great uncle, had bought the house next door as a young man, brought his bride home to it, lived there ever since; between the two households there had been one child after another. All the cousins grew up together. My great grandfather and great uncle had gone to work that morning, despite their wives’ concerns, but had returned home early. The women had been relieved to see them. They made coffee, talked. Everyone had heard the rumours. Enemy ships were massing off the coast. 1978: The second time in Albany was my honeymoon. We had driven into the Goldfields then headed south. Such distance, such beautiful strangeness: red earth, red rocks; scant forests of low trees, thin arms outstretched; the dry, pale, flat land of Norseman. Shimmering heat. Then the big, wild coast.On our second morning—a cool, overcast day—we took our handline to a jetty. The ocean was mercury; a line of cormorants settled and bobbed. Suddenly fish bit; we reeled them in. I leaned over the jetty’s side, looked down into the deep. The water was clear and undisturbed save the twirling of a pike that looked like it had reversed gravity and was shooting straight up to me. Its scales flashed silver as itbroke the surface.1982: How could I concentrate on splicing a film with this story in my head? Besides the desk, the only other furniture in the editing suite was a whiteboard. I took a marker and divided the board into three columns for the three generations: my grandparents, Hovsanna and Benyamin; my mother; someone like me. There was a lot in the first column, some in the second, nothing in the third. I stared at the blankness of my then-young life.A teacher came in to check my editing. I tried to explain what I had been doing. “I think,” he said, stony-faced, “that should be your third film, not your first.”When he had gone I stared at the reels of film, the white board blankness, the wall. It took 25 years to find the form, the words to say it: a novel not a film, prose not pictures.2007: Ten minutes before the launch of The Edge of the World, the venue was empty. I made myself busy, told myself: what do you expect? Your research has shown, over and over, this is a story about which few know or very much care, an inconvenient, unfashionable story; it is perfectly in keeping that no-one will come. When I stepped onto the rostrum to speak, there were so many people that they crowded the doorway, spilled onto the pavement. “I want to thank my mother,” I said, “who, pretending to do her homework, listened instead to the story her mother told other Armenian survivor-women, kept that story for 50 years, and then passed it on to me.” 2013: There is a section of The Edge of the World I needed to find because it had really happened and, when it happened, I knew, there in my living room, that Boyajian and Grigorian (183) were right about the Armenian Genocide being “still operative.” But I knew even more than that: I knew that the Diaspora triggered by genocide is both rescue and weapon, the new life in this host nation both sanctuary and betrayal. I picked up a copy, paced, flicked, followed my nose, found it:On 25 April, the day after Genocide memorial-day, I am watching television. The Prime Minister stands at the ANZAC memorial in western Turkey and delivers a poetic and moving speech. My eyes fill with tears, and I moan a little and cover them. In his speech he talks about the heroism of the Turkish soldiers in their defence of their homeland, about the extent of their losses – sixty thousand men. I glance at my son. He raises his eyebrows at me. I lose count of how many times Kemal Ataturk is mentioned as the Father of Modern Turkey. I think of my grandmother and grandfather, and all my baby aunts and uncles […] I curl over like a mollusc; the ache in my chest draws me in. I feel small and very tired; I feel like I need to wash.Is it true that if we repeat something often enough and loud enough it becomes the truth? The Prime Minister quotes Kemal Ataturk: the ANZACS who died and are buried on that western coast are deemed ‘sons of Turkey’. My son turns my grandfather’s, my mother’s, my eyes to me and says, It is amazing they can be so friendly after we attacked them.I draw up my knees to my chest, lay my head and arms down. My limbs feel weak and useless. My throat hurts. I look at my Australian son with his Armenian face (325-6).24 April 1915 cont: There had been trouble all my great grandfather’s life: pogrom here, massacre there. But this land was accustomed to colonisers: the Mongols, the Persians, latterly the Ottomans. They invade, conquer, rise, fall; Armenians stay. This had been Armenian homeland for thousands of years.No-one masses ships off a coast unless planning an invasion. So be it. These Europeans could not be worse than the Ottomans. That night, were my great grandfather and great uncle awoken by the pounding at each door, or by the horses and gendarmes’ boots? They were seized, each family herded at gunpoint into its garden, and made to watch. Hanging is slow. There could be no mistakes. The gendarmes used the stoutest branches, stayed until they were sure the men weredead. This happened to hundreds of prominent Armenian men all over Turkey that night.Before dawn, the Allies made landfall.Each year those lost in the Genocide are remembered on 24 April, the day before ANZAC Day.1969: I asked my mother if she had any brothers and sisters. She froze, her hands in the sink. I stared at her, then slipped from the room.1915: The Ottoman government decreed: all Armenians were to surrender their documents and report to authorities. Able-bodied men were taken away, my grandfather among them. Women and children, the elderly and disabled, were told to prepare to walk to a safe camp where they would stay for the duration of the war. They would be accompanied by armed soldiers for their protection. They were permitted to take with them what they could carry (Bryce 1916).It began immediately, pretty young women and children first. There are so many ways to kill. Months later, a few dazed, starved survivors stumbled into the Syrian desert, were driven into lakes, or herded into churches and set alight.Most husbands and fathers were never seen again. 2003: I arrived early at my son’s school, parked in the shade, opened The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, and began to read. Soon I was annotating furiously. Ruth Wajnryb writes of “growing up among innocent peers in an innocent landscape” and also that the notion of “freedom of speech” in Australia “seems often, to derive from that innocent landscape where reside people who have no personal scars or who have little relevant historical knowledge” (141).1984: I travelled to Vancouver, Canada, and knocked on Arusiak’s door. Afraid she would not agree to meet me, I hadn’t told her I was coming. She was welcoming and gracious. This was my first experience of extended family and I felt loved in a new and important way, a way I had read about, had observed in my friends, had longed for. One afternoon she said, “You know our mother left me in an orphanage…When I saw her again, it was too late. I didn’t know who they were, what a family was. I felt nothing.” “Yes, I know,” I replied, my heart full and hurting. The next morning, over breakfast, she quietly asked me to leave. 1926: When my mother was a baby, her 18 year-old sister, Maree, tried to drown her in the sea. My mother clearly recalled Maree’s face had been disfigured by a sword. Hovsanna, would ask my mother to forgive Maree’s constant abuse and bad behaviour, saying, “She is only half a person.”1930: Someone gave Hovsanna the money to travel to Aleppo and reclaim Arusiak, by then 10 years old. My mother was intrigued by the appearance of this sister but Arusiak was watchful and withdrawn. When she finally did speak to my then five-year-old mother, she hissed: “Why did she leave me behind and keep you?”Soon after Arusiak appeared, Maree, “only half a person,” disappeared. My mother was happy about that.1935: At 15, Arusiak found a live-in job and left. My mother was 10 years old; her brother Hovsep, who cared for her before and after school every day while their mother worked, and always had, was seventeen. She adored him. He had just finished high school and was going to study medicine. One day he fell ill. He died within a week.1980: My mother told me she never saw her mother laugh or, once Hovsep died, in anything other than black. Two or three times before Hovsep died, she saw her smile a little, and twice she heard her singing when she thought she was alone: “A very sad song,” my mother would say, “that made me cry.”1942: At seventeen, my mother had been working as a live-in nanny for three years. Every week on her only half-day off she had caught the bus home. But now Hovsanna was in hospital, so my mother had been visiting her there. One day her employer told her she must go to the hospital immediately. She ran. Hovsanna was lying alone and very still. Something wasn’t right. My mother searched the hospital corridors but found no-one. She picked up a phone. When someone answered she told them to send help. Then she ran all the way home, grabbed Arusiak’s photograph and ran all the way back. She laid it on her mother’s chest, said, “It’s all right, Mama, Arusiak’s here.”1976: My mother said she didn’t like my boyfriend; I was not to go out with him. She said she never disobeyed her own mother because she really loved her mother. I went out with my boyfriend. When I came home, my belongings were on the front porch. The door was bolted. I was seventeen.2003: I read Wajnryb who identifies violent eruptions of anger and frozen silences as some of the behaviours consistent in families with a genocidal history (126). 1970: My father had been dead over a year. My brothers and I were, all under 12, made too much noise. My mother picked up the phone: she can’t stand us, she screamed; she will call an orphanage to take us away. We begged.I fled to my room. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t keep still. I paced, pressed my face into a corner; shook and cried, knowing (because she had always told us so) that she didn’t make idle threats, knowing that this was what I had sometimes glimpsed on her face when she looked at us.2012: The Internet reveals images of Ataturk’s bronze statue overlooking Princess Royal Harbour. Of course, it’s outsized, imposing. The inscription on its plinth reads: "Peace at Home/ Peace in the World." He wears a suit, looks like a scholar, is moving towards us, a scroll in his hand. The look in his eyes is all intensity. Something distant has arrested him – a receding or re-emerging vision. Perhaps a murmur that builds, subsides, builds again. (Medz Yeghern, Aksor, Aghed, Genocide). And what is written on that scroll?2013: My partner suggested we go to Albany, escape Perth’s brutal summer. I tried to explain why it’s impossible. There is no memorial in Albany, or anywhere else in Western Australia, to the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide. ReferencesAkcam, Taner. “The Politics of Genocide.” Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 11 Dec. 2011. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watchv=OxAJaaw81eU&noredirect=1genocide›.Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigress: The Armenian Genocide. London: William Heinemann, 2004.BBC. “Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938).” BBC History. 2013. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/ataturk_kemal.shtml›.Boyajian, Levon, and Haigaz Grigorian. “Psychological Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide.”The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. Ed. Richard Hovannisian. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987. 177–85.Bryce, Viscount. The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916.Galas, Diamanda. Program Notes. Dexifiones: Will and Testament. Perth Concert Hall, Perth, Australia. 2001.———.“Dexifiones: Will and Testament FULL Live Lisboa 2001 Part 1.” Online Video Clip. YouTube, 5 Nov. 2011. Web. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvVnYbxWArM›.Kazanjian, David, and Marc Nichanian. “Between Genocide and Catastrophe.” Loss. Eds. David Eng and David Kazanjian. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003. 125–47.Manne, Robert. “A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide.” The Monthly Feb. 2007. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/turkish-tale-gallipoli-and-armenian-genocide-robert-manne-459›.Matiossian, Vartan. “When Dictionaries Are Left Unopened: How ‘Medz Yeghern’ Turned into a Terminology of Denial.” The Armenian Weekly 27 Nov. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/11/27/when-dictionaries-are-left-unopened-how-medz-yeghern-turned-into-terminology-of-denial/›.Melson, Robert. Revolution and Genocide. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Nicholson, Brendan. “ASIO Detected Bomb Plot by Armenian Terrorists.” The Australian 2 Jan. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/cabinet-papers/asio-detected-bomb-plot-by-armenian-terrorists/story-fnbkqb54-1226234411154›.“President Obama Issues Statement on Armenian Remembrance Day.” The Armenian Weekly 24 Apr. 2012. 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/04/24/president-obama-issues-statement-on-armenian-remembrance-day/›.Polain, Marcella. The Edge of the World. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2007.Siamanto. “The Dance.” Trans. Peter Balakian and Nervart Yaghlian. Adonias Dalgas Memorial Page 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.terezakis.com/dalgas.html›.Stockings, Craig. “Let’s Have a Truce in the Battle of the Anzac Myth.” The Australian 25 Apr. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/lets-have-a-truce-in-the-battle-of-the-anzac-myth/story-e6frgd0x-1226337486382›.Wajnryb, Ruth. The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2001.

What strikes me about the habits of the people who spend so much time on the Net—well, it’s so new that we don't know what will come next—is in fact precisely how niche in character it is. You ask people what nets they are on, and they’re all so specialised! The Argentines on the Argentine Net and so forth. And it’s particularly the Argentines who are not in Argentina. (Anderson, in Gower, par. 5) The preceding quotation, taken from his 1996 interview with Eric Gower, sees Benedict Anderson reflecting on the formation of imagined, transnational communities on the Internet. Anderson is, of course, famous for his work on how nationalism, as an “imagined community,” gets constructed through the shared consumption of print media (6-7, 26-27); although its readers will never all see each other face to face, people consuming a newspaper or novel in a shared language perceive themselves as members of a collective. In this more recent interview, Anderson recognised the specific groupings of people in online communities: Argentines who find themselves outside of Argentina link up online in an imagined diaspora community. Over the course of the last decade and a half since Anderson spoke about Argentinian migrants and diaspora communities, we have witnessed an exponential growth of new forms of digital communication, including social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), Weblogs, micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), and video-sharing sites (e.g. YouTube). Alongside these new means of communication, our current epoch of globalisation is also characterised by migration flows across, and between, all continents. In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai recognised that “the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation” have altered the ways the imagination operates. Furthermore, these two pillars, human motion and digital mediation, are in constant “flux” (44). The circulation of people and digitally mediatised content proceeds across and beyond boundaries of the nation-state and provides ground for alternative community and identity formations. Appadurai’s intervention has resulted in increasing awareness of local, transnational, and global networking flows of people, ideas, and culturally hybrid artefacts. In this article, we analyse the various innovative tactics taken up by migrant youth to imagine digital diasporas. Inspired by scholars such as Appadurai, Avtar Brah and Paul Gilroy, we tease out—from a postcolonial perspective—how digital diasporas have evolved over time from a more traditional understanding as constituted either by a vertical relationship to a distant homeland or a horizontal connection to the scattered transnational community (see Safran, Cohen) to move towards a notion of “hypertextual diaspora.” With hypertextual diaspora, these central axes which constitute the understanding of diaspora are reshuffled in favour of more rhizomatic formations where affiliations, locations, and spaces are constantly destabilised and renegotiated. Needless to say, diasporas are not homogeneous and resist generalisation, but in this article we highlight common ways in which young migrant Internet users renew the practices around diaspora connections. Drawing from research on various migrant populations around the globe, we distinguish three common strategies: (1) the forging of transnational public spheres, based on maintaining virtual social relations by people scattered across the globe; (2) new forms of digital diasporic youth branding; and (3) the cultural production of innovative hypertexts in the context of more rhizomatic digital diaspora formations. Before turning to discuss these three strategies, the potential of a postcolonial framework to recognise multiple intersections of diaspora and digital mediation is elaborated. Hypertext as a Postcolonial Figuration Postcolonial scholars, Appadurai, Gilroy, and Brah among others, have been attentive to diasporic experiences, but they have paid little attention to the specificity of digitally mediated diaspora experiences. As Maria Fernández observes, postcolonial studies have been “notoriously absent from electronic media practice, theory, and criticism” (59). Our exploration of what happens when diasporic youth go online is a first step towards addressing this gap. Conceptually, this is clearly an urgent need since diasporas and the digital inform each other in the most profound and dynamic of ways: “the Internet virtually recreates all those sites which have metaphorically been eroded by living in the diaspora” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 396). Writings on the Internet tend to favour either the “gold-rush” mentality, seeing the Web as a great equaliser and bringer of neoliberal progress for all, or the more pessimistic/technophobic approach, claiming that technologically determined spaces are exclusionary, white by default, masculine-oriented, and heteronormative (Everett 30, Van Doorn and Van Zoonen 261). For example, the recent study by Ito et al. shows that young people are not interested in merely performing a fiction in a parallel online world; rather, the Internet gets embedded in their everyday reality (Ito et al. 19-24). Real-life commercial incentives, power hierarchies, and hegemonies also get extended to the digital realm (Schäfer 167-74). Online interaction remains pre-structured, based on programmers’ decisions and value-laden algorithms: “people do not need a passport to travel in cyberspace but they certainly do need to play by the rules in order to function electronically” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Narratives” 405). We began our article with a statement by Benedict Anderson, stressing how people in the Argentinian diaspora find their space on the Internet. Online avenues increasingly allow users to traverse and add hyperlinks to their personal websites in the forms of profile pages, the publishing of preferences, and possibilities of participating in and affiliating with interest-based communities. Online journals, social networking sites, streaming audio/video pages, and online forums are all dynamic hypertexts based on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding. HTML is the protocol of documents that refer to each other, constituting the backbone of the Web; every text that you find on the Internet is connected to a web of other texts through hyperlinks. These links are in essence at equal distance from each other. As well as being a technological device, hypertext is also a metaphor to think with. Figuratively speaking, hypertext can be understood as a non-hierarchical and a-centred modality. Hypertext incorporates multiplicity; different pathways are possible simultaneously, as it has “multiple entryways and exits” and it “connects any point to any other point” (Landow 58-61). Feminist theorist Donna Haraway recognised the dynamic character of hypertext: “the metaphor of hypertext insists on making connections as practice.” However, she adds, “the trope does not suggest which connections make sense for which purposes and which patches we might want to follow or avoid.” We can begin to see the value of approaching the Internet from the perspective of hypertext to make an “inquiry into which connections matter, why, and for whom” (128-30). Postcolonial scholar Jaishree K. Odin theorised how hypertextual webs might benefit subjects “living at the borders.” She describes how subaltern subjects, by weaving their own hypertextual path, can express their multivocality and negotiate cultural differences. She connects the figure of hypertext with that of the postcolonial: The hypertextual and the postcolonial are thus part of the changing topology that maps the constantly shifting, interpenetrating, and folding relations that bodies and texts experience in information culture. Both discourses are characterised by multivocality, multilinearity, openendedness, active encounter, and traversal. (599) These conceptions of cyberspace and its hypertextual foundations coalesce with understandings of “in-between”, “third”, and “diaspora media space” as set out by postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha and Brah. Bhabha elaborates on diaspora as a space where different experiences can be articulated: “These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation (4). (Dis-)located between the local and the global, Brah adds: “diaspora space is the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ are contested” (205). As youths who were born in the diaspora have begun to manifest themselves online, digital diasporas have evolved from transnational public spheres to differential hypertexts. First, we describe how transnational public spheres form one dimension of the mediation of diasporic experiences. Subsequently, we focus on diasporic forms of youth branding and hypertext aesthetics to show how digitally mediated practices can go beyond and transgress traditional formations of diasporas as vertically connected to a homeland and horizontally distributed in the creation of transnational public spheres. Digital Diasporas as Diasporic Public Spheres Mass migration and digital mediation have led to a situation where relationships are maintained over large geographical distances, beyond national boundaries. The Internet is used to create transnational imagined audiences formed by dispersed people, which Appadurai describes as “diasporic public spheres”. He observes that, as digital media “increasingly link producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audiences themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres” (22). Media and communication researchers have paid a lot of attention to this transnational dimension of the networking of dispersed people (see Brinkerhoff, Alonso and Oiarzabal). We focus here on three examples from three different continents. Most famously, media ethnographers Daniel Miller and Don Slater focused on the Trinidadian diaspora. They describe how “de Rumshop Lime”, a collective online chat room, is used by young people at home and abroad to “lime”, meaning to chat and hang out. Describing the users of the chat, “the webmaster [a Trini living away] proudly proclaimed them to have come from 40 different countries” (though massively dominated by North America) (88). Writing about people in the Greek diaspora, communication researcher Myria Georgiou traced how its mediation evolved from letters, word of mouth, and bulletins to satellite television, telephone, and the Internet (147). From the introduction of the Web, globally dispersed people went online to get in contact with each other. Meanwhile, feminist film scholar Anna Everett draws on the case of Naijanet, the virtual community of “Nigerians Living Abroad”. She shows how Nigerians living in the diaspora from the 1990s onwards connected in global transnational communities, forging “new black public spheres” (35). These studies point at how diasporic people have turned to the Internet to establish and maintain social relations, give and receive support, and share general concerns. Establishing transnational communicative networks allows users to imagine shared audiences of fellow diasporians. Diasporic imagination, however, goes beyond singular notions of this more traditional idea of the transnational public sphere, as it “has nowadays acquired a great figurative flexibility which mostly refers to practices of transgression and hybridisation” (Ponzanesi, “Diasporic Subjects” 208). Below we recognise another dimension of digital diasporas: the articulation of diasporic attachment for branding oneself. Mocro and Nikkei: Diasporic Attachments as a Way to Brand Oneself In this section, we consider how hybrid cultural practices are carried out over geographical distances. Across spaces on the Web, young migrants express new forms of belonging in their dealing with the oppositional motivations of continuity and change. The generational specificity of this experience can be drawn out on the basis of the distinction between “roots” and “routes” made by Paul Gilroy. In his seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Gilroy writes about black populations on both sides of the Atlantic. The double consciousness of migrant subjects is reflected by affiliating roots and routes as part of a complex cultural identification (19 and 190). As two sides of the same coin, roots refer to the stable and continuing elements of identities, while routes refer to disruption and change. Gilroy criticises those who are “more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation which is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes” (19). He stresses the importance of not just focusing on one of either roots or routes but argues for an examination of their interplay. Forming a response to discrimination and exclusion, young migrants in online networks turn to more positive experiences such as identification with one’s heritage inspired by generational specific cultural affiliations. Here, we focus on two examples that cross two continents, showing routed online attachments to “be(com)ing Mocro”, and “be(coming) Nikkei”. Figure 1. “Leipe Mocro Flavour” music video (Ali B) The first example, being and becoming “Mocro”, refers to a local, bi-national consciousness. The term Mocro originated on the streets of the Netherlands during the late 1990s and is now commonly understood as a Dutch honorary nickname for youths with Moroccan roots living in the Netherlands and Belgium. A 2003 song, Leipe mocro flavour (“Crazy Mocro Flavour”) by Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B, familiarised a larger group of people with the label (see Figure 1). Ali B’s song is exemplary for a wider community of youngsters who have come to identify themselves as Mocros. One example is the Marokkanen met Brainz – Hyves (Mo), a community page within the Dutch social networking site Hyves. On this page, 2,200 youths who identify as Mocro get together to push against common stereotypes of Moroccan-Dutch boys as troublemakers and thieves and Islamic Moroccan-Dutch girls as veiled carriers of backward traditions (Leurs, forthcoming). Its description reads, “I assume that this Hyves will be the largest [Mocro community]. Because logically Moroccans have brains” (our translation): What can you find here? Discussions about politics, religion, current affairs, history, love and relationships. News about Moroccan/Arabic Parties. And whatever you want to tell others. Use your brains. Second, “Nikkei” directs our attention to Japanese migrants and their descendants. The Discover Nikkei website, set up by the Japanese American National Museum, provides a revealing description of being and becoming Nikkei: As Nikkei communities form in Japan and throughout the world, the process of community formation reveals the ongoing fluidity of Nikkei populations, the evasive nature of Nikkei identity, and the transnational dimensions of their community formations and what it means to be Nikkei. (Japanese American National Museum) This site was set up by the Japanese American National Museum for Nikkei in the global diaspora to connect and share stories. Nikkei youths of course also connect elsewhere. In her ethnographic online study, Shana Aoyama found that the social networking site Hi5 is taken up in Peru by young people of Japanese heritage as an avenue for identity exploration. She found group confirmation based on the performance of Nikkei-ness, as well as expressions of individuality. She writes, “instead of heading in one specific direction, the Internet use of Nikkei creates a starburst shape of identity construction and negotiation” (119). Mocro-ness and Nikkei-ness are common collective identification markers that are not just straightforward nationalisms. They refer back to different homelands, while simultaneously they also clearly mark one’s situation of being routed outside of this homeland. Mocro stems from postcolonial migratory flows from the Global South to the West. Nikkei-ness relates to the interesting case of the Japanese diaspora, which is little accounted for, although there are many Japanese communities present in North and South America from before the Second World War. The context of Peru is revealing, as it was the first South American country to accept Japanese migrants. It now hosts the second largest South American Japanese diaspora after Brazil (Lama), and Peru’s former president, Alberto Fujimoro, is also of Japanese origin. We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets blurred as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties, initiates subcultures and offers resistance to mainstream western cultural forms. Digital spaces are used to exert youthful diaspora branding. Networked branding includes expressing cultural identities that are communal and individual but also both local and global, illustrative of how “by virtue of being global the Internet can gift people back their sense of themselves as special and particular” (Miller and Slater 115). In the next section, we set out how youthful diaspora branding is part of a larger, more rhizomatic formation of multivocal hypertext aesthetics. Hypertext Aesthetics In this section, we set out how an in-between, or “liminal”, position, in postcolonial theory terms, can be a source of differential and multivocal cultural production. Appadurai, Bhabha, and Gilroy recognise that liminal positions increasingly leave their mark on the global and local flows of cultural objects, such as food, cinema, music, and fashion. Here, our focus is on how migrant youths turn to hypertextual forms of cultural production for a differential expression of digital diasporas. Hypertexts are textual fields made up of hyperlinks. Odin states that travelling through cyberspace by clicking and forging hypertext links is a form of multivocal digital diaspora aesthetics: The perpetual negotiation of difference that the border subject engages in creates a new space that demands its own aesthetic. This new aesthetic, which I term “hypertext” or “postcolonial,” represents the need to switch from the linear, univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive encounters characterising the performance of the same to that of non-linear, multivocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters that are marked by repetition of the same with and in difference. (Cited in Landow 356-7) On their profile pages, migrant youth digitally author themselves in distinct ways by linking up to various sites. They craft their personal hypertext. These hypertexts display multivocal diaspora aesthetics which are personal and specific; they display personal intersections of affiliations that are not easily generalisable. In several Dutch-language online spaces, subjects from Dutch-Moroccan backgrounds have taken up the label Mocro as an identity marker. Across social networking sites such as Hyves and Facebook, the term gets included in nicknames and community pages. Think of nicknames such as “My own Mocro styly”, “Mocro-licious”, “Mocro-chick”. The term Mocro itself is often already multilayered, as it is often combined with age, gender, sexual preference, religion, sport, music, and generationally specific cultural affiliations. Furthermore, youths connect to a variety of groups ranging from feminist interests (“Women in Charge”), Dutch nationalism (“I Love Holland”), ethnic affiliations (“The Moroccan Kitchen”) to clothing (the brand H&M), and global junk food (McDonalds). These diverse affiliations—that are advertised online simultaneously—add nuance to the typical, one-dimensional stereotype about migrant youth, integration, and Islam in the context of Europe and Netherlands (Leurs, forthcoming). On the online social networking site Hi5, Nikkei youths in Peru, just like any other teenagers, express their individuality by decorating their personal profile page with texts, audio, photos, and videos. Besides personal information such as age, gender, and school information, Aoyama found that “a starburst” of diverse affiliations is published, including those that signal Japanese-ness such as the Hello Kitty brand, anime videos, Kanji writing, kimonos, and celebrities. Also Nikkei hyperlink to elements that can be identified as “Latino” and “Chino” (Chinese) (104-10). Furthermore, users can show their multiple affiliations by joining different “groups” (after which a hyperlink to the group community appears on the profile page). Aoyama writes “these groups stretch across a large and varied scope of topics, including that of national, racial/ethnic, and cultural identities” (2). These examples illustrate how digital diasporas encompass personalised multivocal hypertexts. With the widely accepted adagio “you are what you link” (Adamic and Adar), hypertextual webs can be understood as productions that reveal how diasporic youths choose to express themselves as individuals through complex sets of non-homogeneous identifications. Migrant youth connects to ethnic origin and global networks in eclectic and creative ways. The concept of “digital diaspora” therefore encapsulates both material and virtual (dis)connections that are identifiable through common traits, strategies, and aesthetics. Yet these hypertextual connections are also highly personalised and unique, offering a testimony to the fluid negotiations and intersections between the local and the global, the rooted and the diasporic. Conclusions In this article, we have argued that migrant youths render digital diasporas more complex by including branding and hypertextual aesthetics in transnational public spheres. Digital diasporas may no longer be understood simply in terms of their vertical relations to a homeland or place of origin or as horizontally connected to a clearly marked transnational community; rather, they must also be seen as engaging in rhizomatic digital practices, which reshuffle traditional understandings of origin and belonging. Contemporary youthful digital diasporas are therefore far more complex in their engagement with digital media than most existing theory allows: connections are hybridised, and affiliations are turned into practices of diasporic branding and becoming. There is a generational specificity to multivocal diaspora aesthetics; this specificity lies in the ways migrant youths show communal recognition and express their individuality through hypertext which combines affiliation to their national/ethnic “roots” with an embrace of other youth subcultures, many of them transnational. These two axes are constantly reshuffled and renegotiated online where, thanks to the technological possibilities of HTML hypertext, a whole range of identities and identifications may be brought together at any given time. We trust that these insights will be of interest in future discussion of online networks, transnational communities, identity formation, and hypertext aesthetics where much urgent and topical work remains to be done. References Adamic, Lada A., and Eytan Adar. “You Are What You Link.” 2001 Tenth International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong. 26 Apr. 2010. ‹http://www10.org/program/society/yawyl/YouAreWhatYouLink.htm›. Ali B. “Leipe Mocro Flavour.” ALIB.NL / SPEC Entertainment. 2007. 4 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www3.alib.nl/popupAlibtv.php?catId=42&contentId=544›. Alonso, Andoni, and Pedro J. Oiarzabal. Diasporas in the New Media Age. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2010. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. 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"Interactivity implies two agencies in conversation, playfully and spontaneously developing a mutual discourse" -- Sandy Stone (11) I. On Interactivity The difference between interactivity as it is performed across the page and the screen, maintains Sandy Stone, is that virtual texts and virtual communities can embody a play ethic (14). Inserted like a mutation into the corporate genome, play ruptures the encyclopaedic desire to follow seamless links to a buried 'meaning' and draws us back to the surface, back into real-time conversation with the machine. Hypertext theorists see this as a tactic of resistance to homogenisation. As we move across a hypertextual reading space, we produce the text in this unfolding now, choosing pathways which form a map in the space of our own memories: where we have been, where we are, where we might yet be. Play is occupying oneself with diversions. II. Space, Time and Composition Reading in time, we create the text in the space of our own memories. Hypertext theorists maintain that the choices we make around every corner, the spontaneity and contingency involved in these choices, are the bringing into being of a (constantly replaced) electronic palimpsest, a virtual geography. The dislocation which occurs as we engage in nodal leaps draws us back to the surface, rupturing our experience of the narrative and bringing us into a blissful experience of possibility. III. War against the Line There is the danger, on the one hand, of being subsumed by the passive subject position demanded by infotainment culture and the desire it encourages to seek the satisfaction of closure by following seamless links to a buried 'meaning'. On the other hand, we risk losing efficiency and control over the unfolding interaction by entering into an exchange which disorientates us with infinite potential. We cannot wildly destratify. The questions we ask must seek to keep the conversation open. In order to establish a new discursive territory within which to understand this relationship, we should view the interface not simply as a transparency which enables interaction with the machine as 'other', but as a text, a finely-wrought behavioural map which "exists at the intersection of political and ideological boundary lands" (Selfe & Selfe 1). As we write, so are we written by the linguistic contact zones of this terrain. Hypertext is thus a process involving the active translation of modes of being into possible becomings across the interface. The geographic 'space' we translate into a hypertext "is imaginational... . We momentarily extend the linear reading act into a third dimension when we travel a link" (Tolva 4). A literal spatial representation would break from the realm of hypertext and become a virtual reality. Thus, the geographic aspect is not inherent to the system itself but is partially translated into the geometry of the medium via our experience and perception (the 'map'), a process describing our 'line of flight' as we evolve in space. Directional flows between time and its traditional subordination to space in representation implode across the present-tense of the screen and time literally surfaces. Our experience of the constantly-replaced electronic palimpsest is one of temporal surrender: "we give in to time, we give way to time, we give in with time"(Joyce 219). In other words, the subject of hypertext subverts the traditional hierarchy and writes for space, producing the 'terrain' in the unfolding now in the Deleuzian sense, not in space as desired by the State. Johnson-Eilola aligns the experience of hypertext with the Deleuzian War Machine, a way of describing the speed and range of virtual movement created when the animal body splices into the realm of technology and opens an active plane of conflict.. The War Machine was invented by the nomads -- it operates by continual deterritorialisation in a tension-limit with State science, what we might call the command-control drive associated with geometric, dynamic thought and the sedentary culture of the Line. It "exemplifies" the avant-garde mentality that hypertext theorists have been associating with the electronic writing space (Moulthrop, "No War Machine" 1). Playing outside. The State desires an end to the resistance to totalisation promulgated by contingent thought and its thermodynamic relationship to space: the speed which assumes a probabilistic, vortical motion, actually drawing smooth space itself. The war machine is thus an open system opposed to classical mechanics via its grounding in active contingencies and spatio-temporal production. The nomad reads and writes for space, creating the temporal text in the space of her own memory, giving way to time and allowing existent points to lapse before the trajectory of flight. Nomad thought is not dependent on any given theory of relationship with the medium, but works via disruption and (re)distribution, the gaps, stutterings and gasp-like expressions experienced when we enter into conversation with the hypertext. The danger is that the war machine might be appropriated by the State, at which point this light-speed communication becomes of the utmost importance in the war against space and time. As speed and efficient retrieval replace real-space across the instantaneity and immediacy of the terminal, the present-time sensory faculties of the individual are marginalised as incidental and she becomes "the virtual equivalent of the well-equipped invalid" (Virilio 5). In other words, as the frame of real-space and present-time disappears, the text of the reader/writer becomes "sutured" into the discourse of the State, the only goal to gain "complete speed, to cover territory in order for the State to subdivide and hold it through force, legislation or consent" (Virilio, qtd. in Johnson-Eilola). This is when the predetermined geometry of hypertext becomes explicit. The progressive subsumption (or "suturing") of the multiple, nomadic self into the discourse of the computer occurs when "the terms of the narrative are heightened, as each 'node' in the hypertext points outwards to other nodes [and] readers must compulsively follow links to arrive at the 'promised plenitude' at the other end of the link" (Johnson-Eilola 391). When we no longer reflect on the frame and move towards complete speed and efficiency, when we stop playing on the surface and no longer concern ourselves with diversion, the war machine has been appropriated by the State. In this case, there is no revolutionary 'outside' to confront in interaction, as all has been marshalled towards closure. Keeping the conversation open means continuously reflecting on the frame. We cannot wildly destratify and lose control entirely by moving in perpetual bewilderment, but we can see the incompleteness of the story, recognising the importance of local gaps and spaces. We can work with the idea that the "dyad of smooth/striated represents not a dialectic but a continuum" (Moulthrop, "Rhizome" 317) that can be turned more complex in its course. Contingency and play reside in the intermezzo, the "dangerous edges, fleeting, attempting to write across the boundaries between in-control and out-of-control" (Johnson-Eilola 393). The war machine exists as at once process and product, the translation between smooth-striated moving in potentia: the nomadic consciousness can recognise this process and live flux as reality itself, or consistency. In sum, we avoid subsumption and appropriation by holding open the function of the text as process in our theorising, in our teaching, in our reading and writing across the hypertextual environment. We can either view hypertext as a tool or product which lends itself to efficient, functional use (to organise information, to control and consume in an encyclopaedic fashion), or we can view it as a process which lends itself to nomadic thought and resistance to totalisation in syncopated flows, in cybernetic fits and starts. This is our much-needed rhetoric of activity. IV. An Alternative Story No matter their theoretical articulation, such claims made for hypertext are fundamentally concerned with escaping the logocentric geometry of regulated time and space. Recent explorations deploying the Deleuzian smooth/striated continuum make explicit the fact that the enemy in this literary 'war' has never been the Line or linearity per se, but "the nonlinear perspective of geometry; not the prison-house of time but the fiction of transcendence implied by the indifferent epistemological stance toward time" (Rosenberg 276). Although the rhizome, the war machine, the cyborg and the nomad differ in their particularities and composition, they all explicitly play on the dislocated, time-irreversible processes of chaos theory, thermodynamics and associated 'liberatory' topological perspectives. Rosenberg's essay makes what I consider to be a very disruptive point: hypertext merely simulates the 'smooth', contingent thought seen to be antithetical to regulated space-time and precise causality due to its fundamental investment in a regulated, controlled and (pre)determined geometry. Such a deceptively smooth landscape is technonarcissistic in that its apparent multiplicity actually prescribes to a totality of command-control. Hypertext theorists have borrowed the terms 'multilinear', 'nonlinear' and 'contingency' from physics to articulate hypertext's resistance to the dominant determinist episteme, a framework exemplified by the term 'dynamics', opposing it to "the irreversible laws characteristic of statistical approximations that govern complex events, exemplified by the term, 'thermodynamics'" (Rosenberg 269). This resistance to the time-reversible, non-contingent and totalised worldview has its ideological origins in the work of the avant-garde. Hypertext theorists are fixated with quasi-hypertextual works that were precursors to the more 'explicitly' revolutionary texts in the electronic writing space. In the works of the avant-garde, contingency is associated with creative freedom and subversive, organic logic. It is obsessively celebrated by the likes of Pynchon, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage. Hypertext theorists have reasoned from this that 'nonlinear' or 'multilinear' access to information is isomorphic with such playful freedom and its contingent, associative leaps. Theorists align this nonsequential reasoning with a certain rogue logic: the 'fluid nature of thought itself' exemplified by the explicitly geographic relationship to space-time of the Deleuzian rhizome and the notion of contingent, probabilistic 'becomings'. Hypertext participates fully in the spatio-temporal dialectic of the avant-garde. As Moulthrop observes, the problem with this is that from a topological perspective, 'linear' and 'multilinear' are identical: "lines are still lines, logos and not nomos, even when they are embedded in a hypertextual matrix" ("Rhizome" 310). The spatio-temporal dislocations which enable contingent thought and 'subversive' logic are simply not sustained through the reading/writing experience. Hypertextual links are not only reversible in time and space, but trace a detached path through functional code, each new node comprising a carefully articulated behavioural 'grammar' that the reader adjusts to. To assume that by following 'links' and engaging in disruptive nodal leaps a reader night be resisting the framework of regulated space-time and determinism is "to ignore how, once the dislocation occurs, a normalcy emerges ... as the hypertext reader acclimates to the new geometry or new sequence of lexias" (Rosenberg 283). Moreover, the searchpath maps which earlier theorists had sensed were antithetical to smooth space actually exemplify the element of transcendent control readers have over the text as a whole. "A reader who can freeze the text, a reader who is aware of a Home button, a reader who can gain an instant, transcendent perspective of the reading experience, domesticates contingencies" (Rosenberg 275). The visual and behavioural grammar of hypertext is one of transcendent control and determined response. Lines are still lines -- regulated, causal and not contingent -- even when they are 'constructed' by an empowered reader. Hypertext is thus invested (at least in part) in a framework of regularity, control and precise function. It is inextricably a part of State apparatus. The problem with this is that the War Machine, which best exemplifies the avant-garde's insurgency against sedentary culture, must be exterior to the State apparatus and its regulated grid at all times. "If we acknowledge this line of critique (which I think we must), then we must seriously reconsider any claims about hypertext fiction as War Machine, or indeed as anything en avant" (Moulthrop, "No War Machine" 5). Although hypertext is not revolutionary, it would be the goal of any avant-garde use of hypertext to find a way to sustain the experience of dislocation that would indicate liberation from the hegemony of geometry. I would like to begin to sketch the possibility of 'contingent interaction' through the dislocations inherent to alternative interfaces later in this story. For the time being, however, we must reassess all our liberation claims. If linearity and multilinearity are identical in terms of geometric relations to space-time, "why should they be any different in terms of ideology", asks Moulthrop ("Rhizome" 310). V. On Interactivity Given Rosenberg's critique against any inherently revolutionary qualities, we must acknowledge that hypermedia "marks not a terminus but a transition," Moulthrop writes ("Rhizome" 317). As a medium of exchange it is neither smooth nor striated, sophist nor socratic, 'work' nor 'text': it is undergoing an increasingly complex phase transition between such states. This landscape also gives rise to stray flows and intensities, 'Unspecified Enemies' which exist at the dangerous fissures and edges. We must accept that we will never escape the system, but we are presented with opportunities to rock the sedentary order from within. As a group of emerging electronic artists see it, the dis-articulation of the point'n'click interface is where interaction becomes reflection on the frame in fits and starts. "We believe that the computer, like everything else, is composed in conflict," explain the editors of electronic magazine I/O/D. "If we are locked in with the military and with Disney, they are locked in not just with us, but with every other stray will-to-power" (Fuller, Interview 2). Along with Adelaide-based group Mindflux, these artists produce hypertext interfaces that involve sensory apparatus and navigational skills that have been marginalised as incidental in the disabling interactive technologies of mainstream multimedia. Sound, movement, proprioception, an element of randomness and assorted other sensory circuits become central to the navigational experience. By enlisting marginalised senses, "we are not proposing to formulate a new paradigm of multimedial correctness," stresses Fuller, "but simply exploring the possibility of more complicated feedback arrangements between the user and the machine" (Fuller, qtd. in Barnet 48). The reader must encounter the 'lexias' contained in the system via the stray flows, intensities, movements, stratas and organs that are not proper to the system but shift across the interface and the surface of her body. In Fuller's electronic magazine, the reader is called upon to converse with the technology outside of the domesticated circuits of sight, dislocating the rigorous hierarchy of feedback devices which privilege the sight-machine and disable contingent interaction in a technonarcissistic fashion. The written information is mapped across a 'fuzzy' sound-based interface, sensitive at every moment to the smallest movements of the reader's fingers on the keys and mouse: the screen itself is black, its swarm of links and hotspots dead to the eye. The reader's movements produce different bleeps and beats, each new track opening different entrances and exits through the information in dependence upon the fluctuating pitch and tempo of her music. Without the aid of searchpaths and bright links, she must move in a state of perpetual readjustment to the technology, attuned not to the information stored behind the interface, but to the real-time sounds her movements produce. What we are calling play, Fuller explains, "is the difference between something that has a fixed grammar on the one hand and something that is continually and openly inventing its own logic on the other" (Fuller & Pope 4). The electronic writing space is not inherently liberatory, and the perpetual process of playing with process across the interface works to widen the 'fissures across the imperium' only for a moment. According to Fuller and Joyce, the 'process of playing with process' simply means complicating the feedback arrangements between the user's body and the machine. "We need to find a way of reading sensually ... rather than, as the interactive artist Graham Weinbren puts it, descending 'into the pit of so-called multimedia, with its scenes of unpleasant 'hotspots,' and 'menus' [that] leaves no room for the possibility of a loss of self, of desire in relation to the unfolding'" remarks Joyce (11). Interactivity which calls upon a mind folded everywhere within the body dislocates the encyclopaedic organisation of data that "preserves a point of privilege from where the eye can frame objects" by enlisting itinerant, diffuse desires in an extended period of readjustment to technology (Fuller & Pope 3). There are no pre-ordained or privileged feedback circuits as the body is seen to comprise a myriad possible elements or fragments of a desiring-machine with the potential to disrupt the flow, to proliferate. Mainstream multimedia's desire for 'informational hygiene' would have us transcend this embodied flux and bureaucratise the body into organs. Information is fed through the circuits of sight in a Pavlovian field of buttons and bright links: interactivity is misconceived as choice-making, when 'response' is a more appropriate concept. When the diffuse desire which thrives on disruption and alternative paradigms is written out in favour of informational hygiene, speed and efficient retrieval replace embodied conversation. "Disembodied [interaction] of this kind is always a con... . The entropic, troublesome flesh that is sloughed off in these fantasies of strongly male essentialism is interwoven with the dynamics of self-processing cognition and intentionality. We see computers as embodied culture, hardwired epistemology" (Fuller 2). Avant-garde hypertext deepens the subjective experience of the human-computer interface: it inscribes itself across the diffuse, disruptive desires of the flesh. Alternative interfaces are not an ideological overhaul enabled by the realm of technê, but a space for localised break-outs across the body. Bifurcations are enacted on the micro level by desiring-machines, across an interface which seeks to dislocate intentionality in conjunction with the marginalised sensory apparatus of the reader, drawing other minds, other organs into localised conversation with command-control. "The user learns kinesthetically and proprioceptively that the boundaries of self are defined less by the skin than by the [local] feedback loops connecting body and simulation in a techno-bio-integrated circuit" (Hayles 72). She oscillates between communication and control, play and restraint: not a nomad but a "human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms" (ATP, 422). VI. Desire Working from across the territory we have covered, we might say that electronic interaction 'liberates' us from neither the Line nor the flesh: at its most experimental, it is nothing less than reading embodied. References Barnet, Belinda. "Storming the Interface: Mindvirus, I/O/D and Deceptive Interaction." Artlink: Australian Contemporary Art Quarterly 17:4 (1997). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Fuller, Matt and Simon Pope. "Warning: This Computer Has Multiple Personality Disorder." 1993. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.altx.com/wordbombs/popefuller.php>. ---, eds. I/O/D2. Undated. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.pHreak.co.uk/i_o_d/>. Hayles, Katherine N. "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" October Magazine 66 (Fall 1993): 69-91. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. "Control and the Cyborg: Writing and Being Written in Hypertext." Journal of Advanced Composition 13:2 (1993): 381-99. Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext, Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Moulthrop, Stuart. "No War Machine." 1997. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/essays/war_machine.php>. ---. "Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 299-319. Rosenberg, Martin E. "Physics and Hypertext: Liberation and Complicity in Art and Pedagogy." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 268-298. Selfe, Cynthia L., and Richard J. Selfe. "The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones." College Composition and Communication 45.4: 480-504. Stone, Allucquére Roseanne. The War of Desire and Technology. London: MIT Press, 1996. Tolva, John. "Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word." 1993. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman/HT96/P43/pictura.htm>. Virilio, Paul. "The Third Interval: A Critical Transition." Rethinking Technologies. Ed. Verena Conley. London: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 3-12. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Belinda Barnet. "In the Garden of Forking Paths: Contingency, Interactivity and Play in Hypertext." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php>. Chicago style: Belinda Barnet, "In the Garden of Forking Paths: Contingency, Interactivity and Play in Hypertext," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Belinda Barnet. (1998) In the garden of forking paths: contingency, interactivity and play in hypertext. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php> ([your date of access]).

On 12 March 2020, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte announced a lockdown of Manila to stop the spread of COVID-19. The cities, provinces, and islands of the Philippines remained under various levels of community quarantine for the remainder of the year. Under the strictest lockdown measures, known as Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), no one aged below 21 or over 60 years was allowed out, a curfew was implemented between 10pm and 5am, and only one person per household, carrying a quarantine pass, was allowed to go out for essential items (Bainbridge & Vimonsuknopparat; Ratcliffe & Fonbuena). The policing of these measures was strict, with a heavy reliance on police and military to enforce health protocols (Hapal). In early April, Duterte warned that violators of the lockdown who caused trouble could be shot (Reuters). Criticisms concerning the dissemination of information about the pandemic were exacerbated when on 5 May, 2020, Filipinos lost an important source of news and entertainment as the country’s largest media network ABS-CBN was shut down after the government denied the renewal of its broadcast franchise (Gutierrez; “ABS-CBN”; “Independent Broadcaster”). The handling of the pandemic by the Duterte government has been characterised by inaction, scapegoating, and framed as a war on an existential threat (Hapal). This has led to feelings of frustration, anger, and despair that has impacted and been incorporated into the artistic expression of some Filipino creatives (Esguerra, “Reflecting”). As they did in the rest of the world, social media platforms became a vital source of entertainment for many facing these harsh lockdown measures in the Philippines in 2020. Viral forms included the sharing of videos of recipes for whipped Dalgona coffee and ube-pandesal on TikTok, binge-watching KDramas like Crash Landing on You on Netflix, playing Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch, and watching Thailand’s Boys’ Love genre web series 2Gether: The Series on YouTube. Around the world, many arts and cultural organisations turned to online platforms to continue their events during the COVID-19 pandemic. #RomanceClass, a Filipino community of authors, artists, and actors who consume, produce, and enact mostly self-published English-language romance fiction in the Philippines, also turned to these platforms to hold their community’s live literature events. This article analyses this shift by #RomanceClass. It contends that, due to their nature as an independent, born-digital literary organisation, they were able to adapt swiftly and effectively to online-only events in response to the harshness of the Filipino lockdown, creating new forms of artistic innovation by adopting the aesthetics of Zoom into their creative practice (for example, name tags and gallery camera view). This aesthetic swiftly became familiar to people all over the world in 2020, and adopting digital platforms encodes within it the possibility for a global audience. However, while #RomanceClass are and have been open to a global audience, and their creative innovations during the pandemic have clearly been informed by transcultural online trends, this article argues that their adoption of digital platforms and creative innovations represented a continuation of their existing ethos, producing material explicitly intended for a Filipino audience, and more specifically, their existing community, prioritising community connection over any more expansive marketing efforts (McAlister et al.). The Live Literature of #RomanceClass The term #RomanceClass refers to a biblio-community of authors, readers, artists, and actors, all involved in the production and consumption of English-language romance novels in the Philippines. #RomanceClass began online in 2013 via a free writing class run predominantly on Facebook by author Mina V. Esguerra (for more on this, see McAlister et al.). As the community has developed, in-person events have become a major part of the community’s activities. However, as a born-digital social formation, #RomanceClass has always existed, to some extent, online. Their comfort in digital spaces was key to their ability to pivot swiftly to the circumstances in the Philippines during the lockdowns in 2020. One of the most distinctive practices of #RomanceClass is their live reading events. Prior to 2020, community members would gather in April for April Feels Day, and in October for Feels Fest for events where local actors would read curated passages from community-authored romance novels, and audiences’ verbal and physical responses became part of the performance. The live readings represent a distinctive form of live literature – that is, events where literature is the dominant art form presented or performed (Wiles), a field which encompasses phenomena like storytelling festivals, author readings, and literary festivals (Dane; Harvey; Weber; Wilson). In October 2019, we interviewed several #RomanceClass community members and attended one of these live reading events, Feels Fest, where we observed that the nature of the event very clearly reflected the way the community functions: they are “highly professionalised, but also tightly bound on an affective level, regularly describing [themselves] as a found family” (McAlister et al. 404). Attendance at live readings is capped (50 people, for the event we attended). The events are thus less about audience-building than they are community-sustaining, something which they do by providing community comforts. In particular, this includes kilig, a Filipino term referring to a kind of affective romantic excitement, usually demonstrated by the audience members in reaction to the actors’ readings. While the in-person component is very important to the live reading events, they have always spanned online and offline contexts – the events are usually live-tweeted by participants, and the readings are recorded and posted to YouTube by an official community videographer, with the explicit acknowledgment that if you attended the event, you are more than welcome to relive it as many times as you want. (Readings which contain a high degree of sexual content are not searchable on YouTube so as not to cause any harm to the actors, but the links are made privately available to attendees.) However, the lockdown measures implemented in the Philippines in 2020 meant that only the online context was available to the community – and so, like so many other arts communities around the world, they were forced to adapt. We tend to think of platforms like Zoom as encoded with the potential to allow people into a space who might not have been able to access it before. However, in their transition to an online-only context, #RomanceClass clearly sought to prioritise the community-sustaining practices of their existing events rather than trying in any major way to court new, potentially global, audiences. This prioritisation of community, rather than marketing, provided a space for #RomanceClass authors to engage cathartically with their experiences of lockdown in the Philippines (Esguerra, “Reflecting”). Embracing the Zoom Aesthetic: #RomanceClass in 2020 #RomanceClass’s first online event in 2020 was April Feels Day 2020, which occurred not long after lockdown began in the Philippines. Its production reflects the quick transition to an online-only co-presence space. It featured six books recently published by community authors. For each, the author introduced the book, and then an actor read an excerpt – a different approach to that hitherto taken in live events, where two actors, playing the roles of the romantic protagonists, would perform the readings together. Like the in-person live readings, April Feels Day 2020 was a synchronous event with a digital afterlife. It was streamed via Twitch, and participants could log on to watch and join the real-time conversations occurring in the chat. Those who did not sign up for a Twitch account could still watch the stream and post about the event on Twitter under the hashtag #AprilFeelsDay2020. After the event, videos featuring each book were posted to YouTube, as they had been for previous in-person live reading events, allowing participants to relive the experience if they so desired, and for authors to use as workshopping tools to allow them to hear how their prose and characters’ voices sounded (something which several authors reported doing with recordings of live readings in our interviews with them in 2019). April Feels Day 2020 represented a speedy pivot to working and socialising from home by the #RomanceClass community, something enabled by the existing digital architecture they had built up around their pre-pandemic live reading events, and their willingness to experiment with platforms like Twitch. However, it also represented a learning experience, a place to begin to think about how they might adapt creatively to the circumstances provoked by the global pandemic. They innovated in several ways. For instance, they adopted mukbang – a South Korean internet phenomenon which has become popular worldwide, wherein a host consumes a large amount of food while interacting with their audience in an online audiovisual broadcast – in their Mukbang Nights videos, where a few members of #RomanceClass would eat food and discuss their books (Anjani et al.). Food is a beloved part of both #RomanceClass events and books (“there’s lots of food, always. At some point someone always describes what the characters are eating. No exceptions”, author Carla de Guzman told us when we interviewed her in 2019), and so their adoption of mukbang shows the ways in which their 2020 digital events sought to recreate established forms of communal cohesion in a virtual co-presence space. An even more pointed example of this is their Hello, Ever After web series, which drew on the growing popularity of born-digital web series in Southeast Asia and other virtual performances around the globe. Hello, Ever After was both a natural extension of and significantly differed from #RomanceClass in-person live events. Usually, April Feels Day and October Feels Fest feature actors reading and performing passages from already published community books. By contrast, Hello, Ever After featured original short scripts written by community authors. These scripts took established characters from these authors’ novels and served as epilogues, where viewers could see how these characters and their romances fared during the pandemic. Like in-person live reading events – and unlike the digital April Feels Day 2020 – it featured two actors playing virtually side-by-side, reinforcing that one of the key pleasures derived from the reading events is the kilig produced through the interaction between the actors playing against each other (something we also observed in our 2019 fieldwork: the community has developed hashtags to refer specifically to the live reading performance interactions of some of their actors, such as #gahoates, in reference to actors Gio Gahol and Rachel Coates). The scenes are purposefully written as video chats, which allows not only for the fact that the actors were unable to physically interact with each other because of the lockdowns, but also tapped into the Zoom communication aesthetic that commandeered many people’s personal and professional communications during COVID-19 restrictions. Although the web series used a different video conferencing technology, community member Tania Arpa, who directed the web series episodes, adapted the nameplate feature that displayed the characters’ names to more closely align with the Zoom format, demonstrating #RomanceClass’s close attentiveness to developments in the global media environment. Zoom and other virtual co-presence platforms became essentially universal in 2020. One of their affordances was that people could virtually attend events from anywhere in the world, which encodes in it the possibility of reaching a broader, more global audience base. However, #RomanceClass maintained their high sensitivity to the local Filipino context through Hello, Ever After. By setting episodes during the Philippines’ lockdown, emphasised by the video chat mise en scène, Hello, Ever After captures the nuances of the sociopolitical and sometimes mundane aspects of the local pandemic response. Moreover, the series features characters known to and beloved by the community, as the episodes function as epilogues to #RomanceClass books, taking place in what An Goris calls the “post-HEA” [happily ever after] space. #RomanceClass books are available digitally – and have a readership – outside the Philippines, and so the Hello, Ever After web series is theoretically a text that can be enjoyed by many. However, the community was not necessarily seeking to broaden their audience base through Hello, Ever After; it was community-sustaining, rather than community-expanding. It built on the extant repository of community knowledge and affect by using characters that #RomanceClass members know intimately and have emotional connections to, who are not as familiar and legible to those outside the community, intended for an audience with a level of genre knowledge (McAlister et al.; Fletcher et al.). While the pandemic experience these characters were going through was global, as the almost universal familiarity with the Zoom aesthetic shows, Hello, Ever After was highly attentive to the local context. Almost all the episodes featured “Easter eggs” and dialogues that pointed to local situations that only members of the targeted Filipino audience would understand and be familiar with, echoing the pandemic challenges of the country’s present reality. Episodes featured recurrent themes like dissatisfaction with the government’s slow response and misaligned priorities, anger towards politicians exacerbating the impact of the pandemic with poor health and transportation policies, and recognition of voluntary service and aid rendered by private individuals. For example, the first episode, Make Good Days, an epilogue to Mina V. Esguerra’s novel What Kind of Day, focusses on the challenges “essential worker” hero Ben (played by Raphael Robes) faces as a local politician’s speechwriter, who has been tasked to draft a memorial speech for his boss to deliver in honour of an acquaintance who has succumbed to COVID-19. He has developed a “3:00 habit” of a Zoom call with his partner Naya (Rachel Coates), mirroring the “3:00 habit” or “3:00 Prayer to the Divine Mercy” many Catholic Filipino devotees pray and recite daily at that specific hour, a habit reinforced through schools, churches, and media, where entertainment shows allow time for the prayer to be televised. Ben and Naya’s conversation in this particular 3:00 call dwells on what they think Filipino citizens deserve, especially from local government officials who repeatedly fail them (Baizas; Torres). They also discuss the impact that the pandemic has had on Naya’s work life. She runs a tourism and travel business – which is the way that the two characters met in What Kind of Day – which she has been forced to close because of the pandemic. Naya grieves not just for the dream job she has had to give up, but also sympathises with the enormous number of Filipinos who suddenly became unemployed because of the economy closing down (Tirona). Hello, Ever After draws together the political realities of living in the Philippines during the pandemic with the personal, by showing the effects of these realities on characters like Ben and Naya, who are well-known to the #RomanceClass community. #RomanceClass books encompass a wide variety of protagonists, and so the episodes of Hello, Ever After were able to explore how the lives of health workers, actors, single parents, students, scientists, office workers, development workers, CEOs and more could be impacted by the pandemic and the lockdowns in the Philippines. They also allowed the authors to express some of their personal frustrations with living through quarantine, something they admit fueled some parts of the scripts (“Behind the Scenes: Hello, Ever After”). #RomanceClass novels like What Kind of Day all end happily, with the romantic protagonists together (in contrast to a lot of other Filipino media, which ends unhappily – for more on this, see McAlister et al.). Make Good Days and the other episodes of Hello, Ever After reflect the grim realities of pandemic life in the Philippines; however, they do not undercut this happy ending, and instead seek to reinforce it. Through Hello, Ever After, the community literally seeks to “make good days” for themselves by creating opportunities to access the familiar comfort and warmth of kilig scenes. Kilig refers to a kind of affective romantic emotion that usually has a physical manifestation (Trinidad, “Shipping”; “Kilig”). It does not have an equivalent word or phrase in English, but can be used as a noun to denote a thrilling state of excitement or as an adjective to describe moments or scenes that evoke this feeling. Creating and becoming immersed in kilig is central to #RomanceClass texts and events: authors attempt to produce kilig through their writing, and actors attempt to provoke it during live reading performances (something which, as mentioned above, was probably made more difficult in the one-actor live readings of the fully online Aprils Feels Day 2020, as much of the kilig is generated by the interactions between the actors). Kilig scenes are plentiful in Hello, Ever After. For instance, in Make Good Days, Naya asks Ben to name a thing he hated before the pandemic that he now misses. He replies that he misses being stuck in traffic with her – that he still hates traffic, but he misses spending that time with her. Escapism was a high priority for many people and communities creating art during the 2020 lockdowns. Given this, it is interesting that #RomanceClass chose to create kilig in their web series by leaning into the temporal moment and creating material specifically revolving around the lockdown in the Philippines, showing couples like Ben and Naya supporting each other and sharing their pandemic-caused burdens. Hello, Ever After both reflected the harsh reality in which the community found themselves but also gave them something to cling to in the hardest days of lockdown, showing that kilig could be found even in the toughest of circumstances when both characters and community members found themselves separated. Conclusion As a community which began in a digital space, #RomanceClass was well-positioned to pivot to an online-only environment during the pandemic, even though in-person events had become such a distinctive part of their community outputs. They experimented and innovated significantly in 2020, producing a range of digital outputs, including the Hello, Ever After web series. On the surface, this does not seem especially unusual: many arts organisations innovated digitally during the pandemic. What was particularly notable about #RomanceClass’s digital outputs, however, was that they were not designed to be marketing tools. They were not actively courting a new audience; rather, outputs like Hello, Ever After were designed to be community-sustaining, providing the existing audience comfort, familiarity, and kilig in a situation (local and global) that was not in any way comfortable or familiar. We Will Be Okay is the title of the second Hello, Ever After video, an epilogue to Celestine Trinidad’s Ghost of a Feeling: a neat summary of the message the episodes offered to the #RomanceClass audience through these revisitings of beloved characters and relationships. As we have discussed elsewhere, #RomanceClass is a professionalised community, but their affective ties are very strong (McAlister et al.). Their digital outputs during the pandemic showed this, and demonstrated again the way their community bonds are reinforced through their repeated re-engagement with their texts, just as their pre-pandemic forms of live literature did. There was kilig to be found in revisiting well-known couples, even in depressing circumstances. As the community engage together with these new epilogues and share their affective reactions, their social ties are reinforced – even when they are forced to be separated. References “ABS-CBN: Philippines’ Biggest Broadcaster Forced Off Air.” BBC, 5 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52548703>. Anjani, Laurensia, et al. “Why Do People Watch Others Eat Food? 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Gutierrez, Jason. “Philippine Congress Officially Shuts Down Leading Broadcaster.” New York Times, 10 July 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/world/asia/philippines-congress-media-duterte-abs-cbn.html>. Hapal, Karl. “The Philippines’ COVID-19 Response: Securitising the Pandemic and Disciplining the Pasaway.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs (2021). <http://doi.org/10.1177/1868103421994261>. Harvey, Hannah. “On the Edge of the Storytelling World: The Festival Circuit and the Fringe.” Storytelling, Self, Society 4.2 (2008): 134-151. “Independent Broadcaster ABS-CBN Shut Down by Philippines Government in ‘Crushing Blow’ to Press Freedom.” ABC News, 6 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-06/philippines-news-outlet-closure-abs-cbn-duterte/12218416>. “Make Good Days.” Dir. Tania Arpa. RomanceClass, 26 June 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqpij-S7DU&t=5s>. McAlister, Jodi, Claire Parnell, and Andrea Anne Trinidad. “#RomanceClass: Genre World, Intimate Public, Found Family.” Publishing Research Quarterly 36 (2020): 403-417. Ratcliffe, Rebecca, and Carmela Fonbuena. “Millions in Manila Back in Lockdown as Duterte Loses Control of Coronavirus Spread.” The Guardian, 4 Aug. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/04/millions-in-manila-philippines-back-in-lockdown-as-duterte-loses-control-of-coronavirus-spread>. Reuters. “‘Shoot Them Dead’ – Philippine Leader Says Won’t Tolerate Lockdown Violators.” CNBC, 2 April 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/02/philippines-duterte-threatens-to-shoot-lockdown-violators.html>. Tirona, Ana Olivia A. “Unemployment Rate Hits Record High in 2020.” Business World, 9 Mar. 2021. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.bworldonline.com/unemployment-rate-hits-record-high-in-2020/>. Torres, Thets. “5 Times the Government Disobeyed and Ignored Their Own Laws.” NoliSoli, 13 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://nolisoli.ph/80192/ph-government-disobeyed-and-ignored-their-own-laws-ttorres-20200513/>. Trinidad, Andrea Anne. “‘Kilig to the Bones!’: Kilig as the Backbone of the Filipino Romance Experience.” Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference, 2020. ———. “‘Shipping’ Larry Stylinson: What Makes Pairing Appealing Boys Romantic?” Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference, 2018. Trinidad, Celestine. Ghost of a Feeling. Self-published, 2018. Weber, Millicent. Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. Cham: Palgrave, 2018. “We Will Be Okay.” Dir. Tania Arpa. RomanceClass, 3 July 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed2SamGU3Tk>. Wiles, Ellen. “Live Literature and Cultural Value: Explorations in Experiential Literary Ethnography.” PhD thesis. University of Stirling, 2019. Wilson, Michael. Storytelling and Theatre: Contemporary Professional Storytellers and Their Art. Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2005.

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

IntroductionThis paper addresses two separate notions of embodiment – western maternal embodiment and art making as a form of embodied critical resistance. It takes as its subject breeder; my unpublished five minute video installation from 2012, which synthesises these two separate conceptual framings of embodiment as a means to visually and conceptually rupture dominant ideologies surrounding Australian motherhood. Emerging from a paradoxical landscape of fear, loathing and desire, breeder is my dark satirical take on ambivalent myths surrounding suburban Australian motherhood. Portraying my white, heavily pregnant body breeding, cooking and consuming pink, sugar-coated butterflies, breeder renders literal the Australian mother as both idealised nation-builder and vilified, self-indulgent abuser. A feminine reification of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, breeder attempts to make visible my own grapplings with maternal ambivalence, to complicate even further, the already strained position of motherhood within the Australian cultural imaginary. Employing the mediums of video and performance to visually manifest an ambivalent protagonist who displays both nurturing maternal ideals and murderous inclinations, breeder pushes contradictory maternal expectations to their breaking point and challengingly offers the following proposition: “This is what you want; but what you’ll get is so much more than you bargained for” (Grosz 136). Drawing upon critical, feminist theorising that challenges idealised views of motherhood; accounts of motherhood by mothers themselves; as well as my own personal grapplings with maternal expectations, this paper weaves reflexive writing with textual analysis to explore how an art-based methodology of embodied critical resistance can problematise representations of motherhood within Australia. By visualising the disjuncture between dominant representations of motherhood that have saturated Australian mainstream media since the late 1990s and the complex ambivalent reality of some women’s actual experiences of mothering, this paper discusses how breeder’s intimate portrayal of maternal domesticity at the limits of tolerability, critically resists socially acceptable mothering practices by satirising the cultural construct of motherhood as a means “to use it, deform it, and make it groan and protest” (Nietzsche qtd. in Gutting).Contradictory Maternal KnowledgeImages of motherhood are all around us; communicating ideals and stereotypes that tell us how mothers should feel, think and act. But these images and the concepts of motherhood that underpin them are full of contradictions. Cultural representations of the idealised and sometimes “yummy mummy” - middle class, attractive, healthy, sexy and heterosexual – (see Fraser; Johnson), contrast with depictions of “bad” mothers, leading to motherhood being simultaneously idealised and demonised within the popular press (Bullen et al.; McRobbie, Top Girls; McRobbie, In the Aftermath; McRobbie, Reflections on Feminism; Walkerdine et al.). Mothers own accounts of motherhood reflect these unsettling contradictions (Miller; Thomson et al.; Wilkinson). Claiming the maternal experience is both “heaven and hell” due to the daily experience of irreconcilable and contradictory feelings (Coward), mothers (myself included), silently struggle between feelings of extreme love and opposing feelings of failure, despair and hate as we get caught up in trying to achieve a set of ideals that promulgate standards of perfection that are beyond our reach. Surrounded by images of motherhood that do not resonate with the contradictory nature of the lived maternal experience, mothers are “torn in two” as we desperately try to reconcile or find absolution for maternal emotions that dominant cultural representations of motherhood render unacceptable. According to Roszika Parker, this complicated and contradictory experience where a mother has both loving and hating feelings for her child is that of maternal ambivalence; a form of exquisite suffering that oscillates between the overwhelming affect of blissful gratification and the raw edges of bitter resentment (Parker 1). As Parker states, maternal ambivalence refers to:Those fleeting (or not so fleeting) feelings of hatred for a child that can grip a mother, the moment of recoil from a much loved body, the desire to abandon, to smash the untouched plate of food in a toddler’s face, to yank a child’s arm while crossing the road, scrub too hard with a face cloth, change the lock on an adolescent or the fantasy of hurling a howling baby out of the window (5).However, it is not only feelings of hatred that stir up ambivalence in the mother, so too can the overwhelming intensity of love itself render the rush of ambivalence so surprising and so painful. Commenting on the extreme contradictory emotions that fill a mother and how not only excessive hatred, but excessive love can turn dangerously fatal, Parker turns to Simone De Beauvoir’s idea of “carnal plenitude”; that is, where the child elicits from the mother, the emotion of domination; where the child becomes the “other” who is both prey and double (30). For Parker, De Beauvoir’s “carnal plenitude” is imaged by mothers in a myriad of ways, from a desire to gobble up the child, to feelings of wanting to gather the child into a fatal smothering hug. Commenting on her own unsettling love/hate relationship with her child, Adrienne Rich describes her experiences of maternal ambivalences as “the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves and blissful gratification and tenderness” (363). Unable to come to terms with this paradox at the core of the unfolding process of motherhood, our culture defends itself against this illogical ambivalence in the mother by separating the good nurturing mother from the bad neglectful mother in an attempt to deny the fact that they are one and the same. Resulting in a culture that either denigrates or idealises mothers, we are constantly presented with images of the good perfect nurturing mother and her murderous alter ego; the bad fatal mother who neglects and smothers. This means that how a mother feels about mothering or the meaning it has for her, is heavily determined by cultural representations of motherhood. Arguing for a creative transformation of the maternal that breaches the mutual exclusivities that separate motherhood, I am called to action by Susan Rubin Suleiman, who writes (quoting psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch): “Mothers don’t write, they are written” (Suleiman 5). As a visual attempt to negotiate, translate and thus “write” my lived experience of Australian motherhood, breeder gives voice to the raw material of contradictory (and often taboo experiences) surrounding maternal embodiment and subjectivity. Hijacking and redeploying contradictory understandings and representations of Australian motherhood to push maternal ideals to their breaking point, breeder seeks to create a kind of “mother trouble” that challenges the disjuncture between dominant social constructions of motherhood designed to keep us assigned to our proper place. Viscerally embracing the reality that much of life with small children revolves around loss of control and disintegration of physical boundaries, breeder visually explores the complex and contradictory performances surrounding lived experiences of mothering within Australia to complicate even further the already strained position of western maternal embodiment.Situated Maternal KnowledgeOver the last decade and a half, women’s bodies and their capacity to reproduce have become centre stage in the unfolding drama of Australian economic policy. In 1999 fears surrounding dwindling birth-rates and less future tax revenue, led then Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett to address a number of exclusive private girls’ schools. Making Australia-wide headlines, Kennett urged these affluent young women to abandon their desire for a university degree and instead invited them to consider motherhood as the ultimate career choice (Dever). In 2004, John Howard’s Liberal government made headlines as they announced the new maternity allowance; a $3000 lump-sum financial incentive for women to leave work and have babies. Ending this announcement by urging the assembled gathering of mostly male reporters to go home and have “one for the Dad, one for the Mum and one for the Country” (Baird and Cutcher 103), Federal Treasurer Peter Costello made a last ditch effort to save Baby Boomers from their imminent pensionless doom. Failing to come to terms with the impending saturation of the retirement market without the appropriate tax payer support, the Liberal Government turned baby-making into the ultimate Patriotic act as they saw in women bodies, the key to prevent Australia’s looming economic crisis. However, not all women’s bodies were considered up to the job of producing the longed for “Good tax-paying Citizen” (Tyler). Kennett only visited exclusive private girls’ schools (Ferrier), headhunting only the highest calibre of affluent breeders. Blue-collar inter-mingling was to be adamantly discouraged. Costello’s 2004 “baby bonus” catch-cry not only caused international ire, but also implicitly relegated the duty of child-bearing patriotism to a normalised heterosexual, nuclear family milieu. Unwed or lesbian mothers need not apply. Finally, as government spokespeople repeatedly proclaimed that the new maternity allowance was not income tested, this suggested that the target nation-builder breeder demographic was the higher than average income earner. Let’s get it straight people – only highly skilled, high IQ’s, heterosexual, wedded, young, white women were required in this exclusive breeding program (see Allen and Osgood; Skeggs; Tyler). And if the point hadn’t already been made perfectly clear, newspaper tabloids, talkback radio and current affairs programs all over the country were recruited to make sure the public knew exactly what type of mother Australia was looking for. Out of control young, jobless single mothers hit the headlines as fears abounded that they were breeding into oblivion. An inherently selfish and narcissistic lot, you could be forgiven for thinking that Australia was running rampant with so-called bogan single mothers, who left their babies trapped in hot airless cars in casino carparks all over the country as they spent their multiple “baby bonus’” on booze, ciggies, LCD’s and gambling (see Milne; O’Connor; Simpson and Dowling). Sucking the economy dry as they leeched good tax-payer dollars from Centrelink, these undesirables were the mothers Australia neither needed nor wanted. Producing offspring relegated to the category of bludgerhood before they could even crawl, these mothers became the punching bag for the Australian cultural imaginary as newspaper headlines screamed “Thou Shalt Not Breed” (Gordon). Seen as the embodiment of horror regarding the ever out-of-control nature of women’s bodies, these undesirable mothers materialised out of a socio-political landscape that although idealised women’s bodies as Australia’s economic saviour, also feared their inability to be managed and contained. Hoarding their capacity to reproduce for their own selfish narcissistic desires, these white trash mothers became the horror par excellence within the Australian cultural imaginary as they were publically regarded as the vilified evil alter-ego of the good, respectable white affluent young mother Australian policy makers were after. Forums all over the country were inundated. “Yes,” the dominant voices seemed to proclaim: “We want to build our population. We need more tax-paying citizens. But we only want white, self-less, nurturing, affluent mothers. We want women who can breed us moral upstanding subjects. We do not want lazy good for nothing moochers.” Emerging from this paradoxical maternal landscape of fear, loathing and desire, breeder is a visual and performative manifestation of my own inability to come to terms with the idealisation and denigration of motherhood within Australia. Involving a profound recognition that the personal is still the political, I not only attempt to visually trace the relationship between popular Australian cultural formations and individual experiences, but also to visually “write” my own embodied grapplings with maternal ambivalence. Following the premise that “critique without resistance is empty and resistance without critique is blind” (Hoy 6), I find art practice to be a critically situated and embodied act that can openly resist the power of dominant ideologies by highlighting maternal corporeal transgressions. A creative destablising action, I utilise the mediums of video and performance within breeder to explore personal, historical and culturally situated expectations of motherhood within Australia as a means to subvert dominant ideologies of motherhood within the Australian cultural imaginary. Performing Maternal KnowledgeReworking Goya’s Romantic Gothic vision of fatherhood in Saturn Devouring His Children, breeder is a five minute two-screen video performance that puts an ironic twist to the “good” and “bad” myths of Australian motherhood. Depicting myself as the young white heavily pregnant protagonist breeding monarch butterflies in my suburban backyard, sugar-coating, cooking and then eating them, breeder uses an exaggerated kitsch aesthetic to render literal the Australian mother as both idealistic nation-builder and self-indulgent abuser. Selfishly hoarding my breeding potential for myself, luxuriating and devouring my “offspring” for my own pleasure and delight rather than for the common good, breeder simultaneously defies and is complicit with motherhood expectations within the suburban Australian imaginary. Filmed in my backyard in the southern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, breeder manifests my own maternal ambivalence and deliberately complicates the dichotomous and strained position motherhood holds in western society. Breeder is presented as a two screen video installation. The left screen is a fast-paced, brightly coloured, jump-cut narrative with a pregnant protagonist (myself). It has three main scenes or settings: garden, kitchen and terrace. The right screen is a slow-moving flow of images that shows the entire monarch butterfly breeding cycle in detail; close ups of eggs slowly turning into caterpillars, caterpillars creating cocoons and the gradual opening of wings as butterflies emerge from cocoons. All the while, the metamorphic cycle is aided by the pregnant protagonist, who cares for them until she sets them free of their breeding cage. In the left screen, apricot roses, orange trees, yellow hibiscus bushes, lush green lawns, a swimming pool and an Aussie backyard garden shed are glimpsed as the pregnant protagonist runs, jumps and sneaks up on butterflies while brandishing a red-handled butterfly net; dressed in red high heels and a white lace frock. Bunnies with pink bows jump, dogs in pink collars bark and a very young boy dressed in a navy-blue sailor suit all make cameo appearances as large monarch butterflies are collected and placed inside a child’s cherry red insect container. In a jump-cut transition, the female protagonist appears in a stark white kitchen; now dressed in a bright pink and apricot floral apron and baby-pink hair ribbon tied in a bow in her blonde ponytail. Standing behind the kitchen bench, she carefully measures sugar into a bowl. She then adds pink food colouring into the crystal white sugar, turning it into a bright pink concoction. Cracking eggs and separating them, she whisks the egg whites to form soft marshmallow peaks. Dipping a paint brush into the egg whites, she paints the fluffy mixture onto the butterflies (now dead), which are laid out on a well-used metal biscuit tray. Using her fingers to sprinkle the bright pink sugar concoction onto the butterflies, she then places them into the oven to bake and stands back with a smile. In the third and final scene, the female protagonist sits down at a table in a garden terrace in front of French-styled doors. Set for high tea with an antique floral tea pot and cup, lace table cloth and petit fours, she pours herself a cup of tea. Adding a teaspoon of sugar, she stirs and then selects a strawberry tart from a three-tiered high-tea stand that holds brightly iced cupcakes, cherry friands, tiny lemon meringue pies, sweet little strawberry tarts and pink sugar coated butterflies. Munching her way through tarts, pies, friands and cupcakes, she finally licks her lips and fuchsia tipped fingers and then carefully chooses a pink sugar coated butterfly. Close ups of her crimson coated mouth show her licking the pink sugar-crumbs from lips and fingers as she silently devours the butterfly. Leaning back in chair, she smiles, then picks up a pink leather bound book and relaxes as she begins to read herself into the afternoon. Screen fades to black. ConclusionAs a mother I am all fragmented, contradictory; full of ambivalence, love, guilt and shame. After seventeen years and five children, you would think that I would be used to this space. Instead, it is a space that I battle to come to terms with each and every day. So how to strategically negotiate engrained codes of maternity and embrace the complexities of embodied maternal knowledge? Indeed, how to speak of the difficulties and incomparable beauties of the maternal without having those variously inflected and complex experiences turn into clichés of what enduring motherhood is supposed to be? Visually and performatively grappling with my own fallout from mothering ideals and expectations where sometimes all I feel I am left with is “a monster of selfishness and intolerance” (Rich 363), breeder materialises my own experiences with maternal ambivalence and my inability to reconcile or negotiate multiple contradictory identities into a single maternal position. Ashamed of my self, my body, my obsessions, my anger, my hatred, my rage, my laughter, my sorrow and most of all my oscillation between a complete and utter desire to kill each and every one of my children and an overwhelming desire to gobble them all up, I make art work that is embedded in the grime and grittiness of my everyday life as a young mother living in the southern suburbs of Western Australia. A life that is most often mundane, sometimes sad, embarrassing, rude and occasionally heartbreaking. A life filled with such simple joy and such complicated sorrow. A life that in reality, is anything but manageable and contained. Although this is my experience, I know that I am not the only one. As an artist I engage in the embodied and critically resistant practice of sampling from my “mother” identities in order to bring out multiple, conflictive responses that provocatively encourage new ways of thinking and acknowledging embodied maternal knowledge. Although claims abound that this results in a practice that is “too personal” or “too specific” (Liss xv), I do not believe that this in fact risks reifying essentialism. Despite much feminist debate over the years regarding essentialist/social constructivist positions, I would still rather use my body as a site of embodied knowledge then rhetorically give it up. Acting as a disruption and challenge to the concepts of idealised or denigrated maternal embodiment, the images and performances of motherhood in breeder then, are more than simple acknowledgements of the reality of the good and bad mother, or acts reclaiming an identity that they taught me to despise (Cliff) or rebelling against having to be a "woman" at all. Instead, breeder is a lucid and explicit declaration of intent that politely refuses to keep every maternal body in its place.References Allen, Kim, and Jane Osgood. “Young Women Negotiating Maternal Subjectivities: The Significance of Social Class.” Studies in the Maternal. 1.2 (2009). 30 July 2012 ‹www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk›.Almond, Barbara. The Monster Within. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.Baird, Marian, and Leanne Cutcher. “’One for the Father, One for the Mother and One for the Country': An Examination of the Construction of Motherhood through the Prism of Paid Maternity Leave.” Hecate 31.2 (2005): 103-113. Bullen, Elizabeth, Jane Kenway, and Valerie Hey. “New Labour, Social Exclusion and Educational Risk Management: The Case of ‘Gymslip Mums’.” British Educational Research Journal. 26.4 (2000): 441-456.Cliff, Michelle. Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise. Michigan: Persephone Press, 1980.Coward, Ross. “The Heaven and Hell of Mothering: Mothering and Ambivalence in the Mass Media.” In Wendy Hollway and Brid Featherston, eds. Mothering and Ambivalence. London: Routledge, 1997.Dever, Maryanne. “Baby Talk: The Howard Government, Families and the Politics of Difference.” Hecate 31.2 (2005): 45-61Ferrier, Carole. “So, What Is to Be Done about the Family?” Australian Humanities Review (2006): 39-40.Fraser, Liz. The Yummy Mummy Survival Guide. New York: Harper Collins, 2007.Gutting, Gary. Foucault: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.Gordon, Josh. “Thou Shalt Not Breed.” The Age, 9 May 2010.Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1986.Hoy, David C. Critical Resistance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.Johnson, Anna. The Yummy Mummy Manifesto: Baby, Beauty, Body and Bliss. New York: Ballantine, 2009.Liss, Andrea. Feminist Art and the Maternal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.McRobbie, Angela. “Top Girls: Young Women and the Post-Feminist Sexual Contract.” Cultural Studies. 21. 4. (2007): 718-737.---. In the Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. 2008.---. “Reflections on Feminism, Immaterial Labour and the Post-Fordist Regime.” New Formations 70 (Winter 2011): 60-76. 30 July 2012 ‹http://dx.doi.org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/10.3898/NEWF.70.04.2010›.Miller, Tina. Making Sense of Motherhood: A Narrative Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005.Milne, Glenn. “Baby Bonus Rethink.” The Courier Mail 11 Nov. 2006. 30 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national-old/baby-bonus-rethink/story-e6freooo-1111112507517›.O’Connor, Mike. “Baby Bonus Budget Handouts a Luxury We Can Ill Afford.” The Courier Mai. 5 Dec. 2011. 30 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/handouts-luxury-we-can-ill-afford/story-e6frerdf-1226213654447›.Parker, Roszika. Mother Love/Mother Hate, London: Virago Press, 1995.Rich, Adrienne. “Anger and Tenderness.” In M. Davey, ed. Mother Reader. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.Simpson, Kirsty, and Jason Dowling. “Gambling Soars in Child Bonus Week”. The Sunday Age Aug. 2004. 28 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/handouts-luxury-we-can-ill-afford/story-e6frerdf-1226213654447›.Skeggs, Beverly. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage, 1997.Suleiman, Susan. “Writing and Motherhood,” Mother Reader Ed. Moyra Davey. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. 113-138Thomson, Rachel, Mary Jane Kehily, Lucy Hadfield, and Sue Sharpe. Making Modern Mothers. Bristol: Policy Press, 2011. 30 July 2012 ‹http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?K=9781847426055&sf1=keyword&st1=motherhood&m=1&dc=16›.Tyler, Imogen. “’Chav Mum, Chav Scum’: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain.” Feminist Media Studies 8.2. (2008): 17-34. 31 July 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680770701824779›.Walkerdine, Valerie, Helen Lucey, and Melody June. Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class. London: Palgrave. 2001. Wilkinson, Tony. Uncertain Surrenders: The Coexistence of Beauty and Menace in the Maternal Bond and Photography. PhD thesis. Perth: Edith Cowan University, 2012. 31 July 2012 ‹http://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1458&context=theses›.

Contemporary approaches to agency and film authorship, such as performativity and “techniques of the self,” (Staiger, 2003) provide an explanation for the expression of agency within the always-already-existing structure of the text, yet fail to account for, firstly, how the individual determines which agential choices to make and, then, interacts with society with causality and efficacy (Staiger, 2003). Critical Realism, in particular Archer’s 2003 theory of the internal conversation (Structure), provides an alternative theoretical framework to postmodernism by acknowledging both the existence of orders of reality that impact upon the individual’s choices, and the effects of cultural and societal structures. I would suggest that postmodernism has restricted our understanding of human agency and how individual choice is determined within the highly structured creative industries. Although interplay between agency and structure applies to all creative collaborators, in this essay I will focus on the agency of the screenwriter as author (an overlooked aspect of film authorship), as Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) provides an excellent illustration of the function of the internal conversation in the development of a screenplay. Adaptation, written by highly regarded contemporary screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, also presents an interesting comment on the role of the screenwriter within the Hollywood film industry, and foregrounds the notion of creative film authorship. The film can be considered a postmodern film, in its intertextuality, deconstruction of both the subject and the filmic structure, the parodic theme and the oppositional characterisation. Charlie Kaufman even becomes his own textual creation represented in the film, and many of the other characters in the film are based on actual people. However, the film also contains representations of reality, conflicting accounts of authorial intent, and a positioning of the subject and object that realises reflexive deliberation and human agency. Thematically, the film expresses a philosophical concern with individual human identity, and societal interaction and development. I would suggest that, although the film is usually considered a fine example of the postmodern film, from a Critical Realist perspective, it can be read as providing a critique of the “postmodern condition”, in particular the repetitive, formulaic mainstream Hollywood film. Archer argues that there must of necessity be both a separation of the individual from society or culture and an acknowledged mingling of self and society. Agency is dependent upon engagement with social and cultural structures, but this could not happen unless there were other (non-social) identifiable aspects to the individual (Structure, 7). According to Archer, natural reality consists of three orders: nature, which concerns physical well-being; practice, where performative achievement is necessary for work; and the social, where the individual’s main concern is in the achievement of self-worth (Structure, 138). The sense of self, or continuity of consciousness, constitutes the natural human and is universal. Therefore the individual, although a part of society, does not exist because of society, but because of reality. Without this continuing sense of self, an individual would not be able to “appropriate social expectations and … recognise what is expected of them” (“Realism”, 13). For society to function effectively, people must have a continuity of consciousness that transcends society. Human agency “originates in people themselves, from their own concerns, forged in the space between the self and reality as a whole” (“Realism”, 12). This is a liminal space—that is, an unstructured area of imagination—in which a screenwriter who wishes to create original acts of authoring operates. The internal conversation takes the form of a dialogue conducted with oneself, not with society, but about society. The individual conducts a conversation between their subjective self, which asks a question, and their objective self, which provides the answer. The person is speaking to themselves, but occupying transitory positions in order to process information, thoughts, and possible courses of action. It is a method for arriving at self-knowledge and decisions through the process of “discernment, deliberation and dedication” (Archer, Structure, 138). Through this internal process, individuals prioritise their concerns, and how they will accommodate those other necessary aspects of reality that may impinge on what they care about most. This process develops and changes as individuals mature, and as they are affected by all aspects of reality. The internal conversation provides a conciliatory approach to the interplay between the filmic culture industry and the individual screenwriter. The screenwriter as author can be seen to negotiate personal projects within the structural constraints and enablements of the film production process, and to enact agency through personal reflexive deliberation, choice and thematic style. How socially efficacious the resulting screenplay is depends upon the screenwriter’s authorship skills, the story’s cultural resonance, societal relevance, and the freedoms and impositions encountered within the filmic industry structure. Adaptation can be read as illustrative of this process. The film opens with an inner dialogue. “Kaufman” (the character, as opposed to Charlie Kaufman, the writer) is questioning, and answering, himself regarding his concerns. He considers his current situation, and his ability as a screenwriter, then deliberates on possible strategies for improving himself. This inner conversation continues throughout the film, both as voiceover, and as a dual characterisation, that of “Kaufman” in relation to his identical twin brother, Donald. Immediately we are given an insight into “Kaufman’s” mind. He is concerned with his health, his work practices and his self-worth. The three orders of reality are then presented as themes in the film. Nature is addressed through the subject of the book: orchids and their adaptability, and how this relates to human beings and their mutability. Practice is seen in “Kaufman’s” and Donald’s opposite approaches to writing a screenplay, the effects of the accepted industry format and expectations, and the eventual resolution of the film. Finally, society itself is questioned through the contrasting self-worth of the characters. “Kaufman” compares himself to: Orlean, as a competent writer; Laroche, as possessor of self-esteem and passion; and Donald, as carefree and socially adept. That the film encompasses all orders of reality reinforces Archer’s point that individuals must conceive of projects that “establish … satisfactory practices in the three orders … [as this process is] the inescapable condition for human beings to survive or thrive” (Structure, 138). “Kaufman” entertains the project of adapting a book into a screenplay when he meets with Valerie, an attractive executive producer. However, once he has entered into the project, he must negotiate the limitations and possibilities of the cultural structures of both the film industry and the book. “Kaufman” is considered for the adaptation because of his reputation as an unusual screenwriter. However, when he states that he wants to let the movie exist, and not turn it into a typical Hollywood product with car chases, turning the orchids into poppies, cramming in sex and guns, and characters learning profound life lessons, Valerie suggests that Orlean and Laroche could fall in love. Immediately “Kaufman’s” ideas are constrained. He is subjected to the hierarchical structure of the Hollywood film industry where the producer holds power. The screenwriter is an employee, contracted to do a job: that is, write a screenplay that can be made into a high-grossing film. As well, “Kaufman” has read the book and wishes to stay true to Orlean’s story. This poses another limitation, especially given that The Orchid Thief is a non-fiction book, a factual account of a rather unique individual (John Laroche) who came to Orlean’s attention when Laroche was charged with orchid poaching from a Florida state preserve. The book has no narrative structure, but digresses among Laroche’s story, Orlean’s personal reflections, the passion orchids inspire in enthusiasts, and the history of orchids and orchid hunters. However, once “Kaufman” has accepted the project, he must begin his process of deliberation and creation, and negotiate his strategy for completing the screenplay. If we take the fictional identical twin brother Donald to be “Kaufman’s” alter-ego, the two characters can be seen as separate facets of “Kaufman’s” negotiation of The Orchid Thief project, and their conversation reflects an internal dialogue of deliberation. By juxtaposing Donald and “Kaufman” as both the subjective (or speaking) self, and the objective (or answering) self, we can follow the internal dialogue that “Kaufman” conducts during the film. This highlights “Kaufman’s” concerns and possible choices regarding the project he has undertaken. He questions the task ahead of him and weighs the options available. The easy way forward would simply be to write a repetitive generic Hollywood film, and still get paid a lot of money. But “Kaufman” has ideals, and values his writing as a craft: as creating a literary work. In contrast, Donald finds it easy to write a screenplay by following the accepted cultural order, whereas “Kaufman” has personal (authorial) concerns that he wishes to express. “Kaufman’s” specific interests take precedence in his work and can be seen as other orders of reality impinging upon the social order. In order to understand the book he is adapting (and also to fulfill his own personal concerns as agential author) “Kaufman” must attempt to encompass the natural-order theme of the book, and the social-order expectations of the film industry. He has to decide which is more important. Initially, “Kaufman’s” preference is for the reality of the book, the actuality of how the world is, and this is where his interests as both a writer and an individual lie. This focus can be seen through the themes of Charlie Kaufman’s other screenplays. In his films, his main thematic concern—as he himself states—is “issues of self and why I’m me and not that other person” (cited in Kennedy). Charlie Kaufman delves deep into the notion of subjectivity, agency and human consciousness. However “Kaufman” (and, the implication is, in real life Charlie) is constrained by the cultural order of Hollywood which, although he tries to evade it, continually imposes limitations upon the completion of this screenplay. Donald is that side of “Kaufman” which keeps reminding him that, although he has freedom as a respected screenwriter, there are some aspects of writing for film that cannot be discounted. “Kaufman” and Donald are two sides of the same coin. They represent “Kaufman’s” inner dialogue and his internal conflict. The twin screenwriting characters personify his struggle to produce a screenplay that satisfies his ultimate personal convictions as a unique and creative writer (to remain true to the thematic concerns of the book) and the need to conform to the accepted Hollywood ideal of a high-budget feature film. The film can also be read as the actual writing of the screenplay unfolding on the screen. As “Kaufman” writes it, this is what we see visually. For the first two acts of the film, “Kaufman” succeeds in portraying his thematic concerns with the progress of life, and the necessity of change, and his involvement in the process of screenwriting. In this he stays true to Orlean’s book, even including digressive “chapters” where he not only introduces the real characters (that is, the story of the book), but also investigates the history of orchids and the concept of adaptability. “Kaufman” balances these thematic interests against each other through his own process of writing the screenplay. He also addresses issues that are of concern to him personally. He deliberates on these through the juxtaposition of his character “Kaufman” with those of Orlean and Laroche. He regards Orlean as the consummate writer, shown comfortably working in her office, in contrast to “Kaufman” hunched over an old typewriter perched on a chair. Laroche is a passionate individual who becomes engrossed in projects, but can then abandon them completely. “Kaufman” finds this difficult, as he is a screenwriter who, although passionate about his craft, cannot distance himself from his project. These oppositions are further reinforced through the character of Donald, who adopts a formulaic approach to writing his own film, to finishing his thriller-screenplay, while “Kaufman” is still struggling with his own adaptation. Once Donald has completed his film, he divests himself of all interest in it except for how much money he will receive. Donald also shows passion, not for his craft, but for women, whereas “Kaufman” finds it difficult to maintain a continuing relationship and resorts to fantasy and masturbation. “Kaufman” becomes so involved in the writing of the screenplay that Orlean becomes a part of his sexual fantasies, yet he cannot bring himself to meet her face to face. The opposition and comparison of these three characters, “Kaufman”-and-Donald (as one composite character), Orlean, and Laroche, is also reflected in Donald’s screenplay, The Three. Donald’s screenplay is about a cop, trying to find a serial killer’s latest victim; she becomes his Holy Grail. However, Donald’s three characters are, in fact, all the one character, who is suffering from multiple personality disorder. In Adaptation, “Kaufman” is questioning himself about aspects of his personality and providing the answers to those queries through other characters. As the search for perfection is Laroche’s Holy Grail, and passion is Orlean’s, for “Kaufman” it is the completion of the screenplay with integrity and aplomb. What “Kaufman” questions about the filmic reality of, and complications with, Donald’s screenplay are in fact included in “Kaufman’s” own screenplay that we see unfolding on the screen. The two screenplays are questioning and answering each other, and represent an internal conversation. Through these characterisations (and in particular the dialogic interactions with Donald), “Kaufman” is diagnosing his circumstances. By the end of the second act, “Kaufman” is coming to a realisation that it would have been much easier to write something else, anything else (including The Three), than attempting to complete the project he has started, and maintain his stance regarding the truth of the book, and the reality of life. In the third act, “Kaufman” accepts that he cannot complete his project and admits he needs help. However, he cannot simply cease working, as this would reflect on his other concerns: those of his own well-being and his work ethic, as well as his social standing as a Hollywood screenwriter. He is dedicated to completing the screenplay, but has to reassess his methods, and his options. His deliberations become more conventional, in keeping with the need to accommodate the constraints of the Hollywood cultural structure, and it is here that “Kaufman” must abandon his idealistic approach and allow Donald to take over. “Kaufman” cannot sustain his original concern of staying true to Orlean’s book and also maintaining the screenplay structure. He has to negotiate the limitations and consider new possibilities. According to Archer, “Once an agential project has activated a constraint or enablement, there is no single answer about what is to be done, and therefore no one predictable outcome” (Structure, 131). This is illustrated in the film, through the variant scenic possibilities “Kaufman” imagines and attempts to coalesce into his screenplay. However, he cannot bring the screenplay to an acceptable (and therefore, satisfactory) climax and resolution. “Kaufman” becomes like the serial killer in Donald’s script, who, because he is forcing his victim to eat herself, is also eating himself to death. In the same way, the film begins to consume and kill the characters one by one. “Kaufman” has a problem that he must overcome. He achieves this by making the third act a fiction of reality, and the characters into caricatures. The third act, “Kaufman’s” Japanese paper ball which, when dropped into water turns into a flower, is a metaphor, where the film turns back on itself. Instead of showing the reality of the book, the book becomes a fiction of the film. Donald takes over, and the climax of the film provides all the conventions of a typical Hollywood film: much more like Donald’s generic thriller than “Kaufman’s” initial premise. All “Kaufman’s” detested conventions are included: Orlean and Laroche fall in love, the Ghost Orchid is a potent psychedelic, there are guns, car chases, and death. “Kaufman” as protagonist learns a profound life lesson, and the deus ex machina is included, not once, but twice. An unsuspecting Ranger causes an horrific car accident and Laroche gets attacked by an alligator. Orobouros has been let loose. The characters have turned on themselves and are being deconstructed to death. Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay both encompasses the postmodern and rejects it. Through his writing skill, his unique plot conventions and his character development, he lays bare the contemporary conceptions of reality, filmic reality, and the influence of Hollywood production on both the audience and the screenwriter. He addresses the oppositional: the creative voice and the clichéd utterance; reality and fiction; disappointment and fulfillment; entrapment and freedom; and creates a new totality, a unique film that provides an alternative to the tired screenwriting paradigm. That he has managed to adapt a non-fiction book, insert real people as characters within the film, and write a critically acclaimed screenplay, shows both his skill and craft as a screenwriter and his efficacious agency. He has posited that there is an alternative to the conventional Hollywood film and that film can pose the “big” questions, about life, about what it means to be human and why things don’t change. Charlie Kaufman has taken the postmodern film, turned it inside out, and managed to not only expose the fiction, but embrace the reality. Adaptation provides a visual example of both the interplay between individual agency and socio-cultural structure and the screenwriter as author. For most of the film, “Kaufman” occupies a liminal space that—although existing in reality—is separate from society and the natural world. This, it could be said, is the “in-between space” of the practice of the screenwriter. It is a creative area of communitas (in the case of the screenwriter, as singular, rather than as a group); an unstructured equality that exists between boundaries, and where meaning is found in the imagination of a writer. In this liminal space, the author lives in a world of images and words, of personal concerns and the desire to share stories, but is always mindful of the restricted, accepted, mainstream film structure. The screenwriter’s liminal space is both expressively free and creatively constricted. Yet, because of this, the screenwriter provides an excellent example of the role of the internal conversation in the mediation of agency within cultural and societal structures. A discussion of agency and authorship is not simply a matter of repetitive cultural discourses, or existing social structures, but an incorporation of all orders of reality. It is through the formulation of specific projects that agents interact with social and structural power. Adaptation presents the Critical Realist concept that human beings and society are continually changing and developing, and neither agents, nor structure, can restrict the other completely. The creative agent absorbs current shifts in culture and society, reflects topical concerns, and envisages and expresses alternative ideas, even those opposed to postmodernism. Authorial agency, and indeed all individual human agency, is an ongoing process of adapting, however, as Mahatma Ghandi stated, “Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation”. References Archer, Margaret S. “Realism and the Problem of Agency.” Journal of Critical Realism 5.1 (2002). 28 Aug. 2005 http://journalofcriticalrealism.org/archive/JCRv5n1_archer11.pdf>. ———. Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Kaufman, Charlie and Kaufman, Donald. Adaptation 2000. 14 May 2005 http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/adaptationnov2000.pdf>. Kennedy, L. “Charlie Kaufman: Confessions of an Original ‘Mind’”. Denver Post 26 Mar. 2004. Staiger, Janet. “Authorship Approaches.” In Authorship and Film. Eds David Gerstner and Janet Staiger. New York: Routledge, 2003. 27-59. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McMerrin, Michelle. "Agency in Adaptation." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/03-mcmerrin.php>. APA Style McMerrin, M. (May 2007) "Agency in Adaptation," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/03-mcmerrin.php>.

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.

This article aims to throw new light on the representation of women who cook as necessarily perpetuating a domestic ideology in which women are confined to the home. Traditionally, cookbooks written by women have disseminated both cooking information and rules and practices for running an effective household, which have contributed to the ideologies that underpin female domestic practice. However, the evolution of social media platforms, such as Pinterest, which enable the user to actively select and visually display culinary masterpieces on a digital pinboard, have provided a forum for women’s voices and a novel means of expression that is available to the amateur cook and professional chef alike. This article will argue that the creation of a virtual cookbook, via Pinterest, is a means of empowering women, which is central to the lexicon of feminist debate. Rather than being the victims of domestic servitude, this article will argue that the women who create virtual cookbooks do so by choice, and as a means of pleasing the self, irrespective of achieving domestic or marital bliss. Cookbooks “provide a range of insights into everyday life, such as attitudes towards food, domestic economy and the roles of women” (Wessell and Wishart 1). The proliferation of the cooking industry in the form of television programs, celebrity chefs, and social media channels seemingly devoted to the display of culinary artefacts, has transformed what was once a domestic chore into a professional practice. Traditionally, cookbooks that contained information on both the preparation and cooking of food and advice on how to run an effective household were more like guidebooks for women on how to achieve domestic and marital happiness. According to Jenny Lawson, well-known and highly acclaimed cookbooks such as Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management were published as a reaction against eating-out, which was drawing men away from the home. “This aligned a cultural expectation of female domestic servitude with gaining the love and respect of a male partner” (Lawson 348) and reinforced the now familiar proverb that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. More recently, How to be a Domestic Goddess highlights the distance between feminism and cooking (Lawson). The book, according to Joanne Hollows, equates baking with a false consciousness and suggests that baking is not far removed from domestic enslavement. This conceptualisation of the-woman-in-the-kitchen is intimately bound to the views of second-wave feminists who believe that cooking is a sign of traditional femininity, which is at odds with a feminist identity (Ashley et al.). This argument situates cooking and food within debates about the sexual division of labour and positions women as providers of food for others. “Women frequently use food to offer pleasure to family members, yet have difficulty experiencing food as pleasurable themselves, particularly in a domestic context” (Hollows 184). Anne Murcott’s It’s a Pleasure to Cook for Him argues that the choice of what to cook and eat is invariably done in the service of some others. Marjorie DeVault similarly asserts that it is the relationship between cooking and caring that cements the relationship between cooking and femininity, while Charles and Kerr conclude that because women fear gaining weight, they deprive themselves of pleasure and so prepare food for others to give pleasure. Women fundamentally cook to please, and please men in particular (Charles and Kerr). For Charles and Kerr, the pleasure that women get from cooking for men is a by-product of the pleasure they receive from caring for others. The notion that women cook out of a desire to care for others is an argument left over from the patrilineal delineations outlined in Biblical texts. Western civilisation has drawn its leading metaphors and definitions of gender from the Bible, specifically the Book of Genesis. As a result of the Fall, which proceeded Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden, the sexual division of labour emerged. Adam was instructed to work, and Eve was punished with the pain of childbearing and motherhood. Traditionalist assumptions posited that the assignment of different tasks and roles to men and women was evidence of the naturalness of their respective responsibilities. This explanation focused on women’s reproductive capacity and reiterated motherhood—central to which was an obligation to care for and nurture others—as a woman’s chief goal, which was necessary for the continued promulgation of the species (Lerner). In the nineteenth century, the credibility of this argument was questioned and a scientific explanation was used to justify patriarchy and women’s place within the home. Darwinian theories continued to define women according to their maternal role and justified their exclusion from economic and educational opportunities on the grounds that this was in the best interests of the survival of the species (Lerner). This contributed to the prevailing “cult of domesticity” that was the hallmark of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. According to this ideological position, true women were supposed to devote themselves to unpaid domestic labour and refrain from paid work. Each of these positions served to reinforce women’s responsibility within the home and, for centuries, women have participated in their own subordination by internalising the proscriptive belief that they exist solely to propagate the human race. If caring and nurturing others is the condition on which cooking is deemed to be “feminine”, then cooking to please oneself should negate the argument that cooking is a “feminine” activity. This article will suggest that the creation of virtual cookbooks on Pinterest enables women to resist societies continued attempts at defining femininity in increasingly restrictive ways. It will be argued that women who create virtual cookbooks do so by choice and as a means of pleasing the self. The representation of celebrity chef Nigella Lawson will be used to elucidate the reconceptualisation of cooking as a pleasurable activity. She is able to distinguish between leisure time and work-related culinary activity and, in so doing, she is represented as enjoying cooking in and of itself, not as a domestic responsibility. Building on this notion of cooking as pleasure, it will be argued that women who create virtual cookbooks on Pinterest do so by choice, for both personal and professional reasons, and irrespective of a desire to please others. Whilst Pinterest has raised significant debate as to whether or not it actually perpetuates gender stereotypes traditionally associated with cooking and femininity, this article will suggest that the desire to cook and a belief in equal rights for women are not mutually exclusive. For the purpose of this article, feminism and contemporary femininity are articulated around the idea of choice. Women are not choosing to create virtual cookbooks on Pinterest for the benefit of men. They are choosing to embrace this platform and are using it as a means of creative expression and an outlet of empowerment that transforms cooking from a domestic chore into an activity with public significance. This “promotes a new female relationship with food, enabling the other sides of femininity, those subversive, darker, abject possibilities to surface” (Lawson, Food Legacies 361), which ultimately grants women moments of agency and transcendence through cooking. Nigella Lawson, who cooks out of a desire for solitary pleasure, epitomises the changing nature of the cookbook throughout the last century. In Feast, she advocates the need for self-satisfaction and independence: “At its most basic, perhaps, is the quiet satisfaction of knowing one is fending for oneself, the instrument of one’s own survival” (4). According to Elisabeth Nathanson, “thinking about cooking as personally satisfying, rather than as a task associated with taking care of one’s family, denotes a new articulation of contemporary femininity” (318). For the purpose of this article then, feminism simply refers to the notion of choice and pleasing the self. Cooking is no longer an activity conducted solely by women in the privacy of their own home, for the purpose of caring for others. Female celebrity chefs, such as Nigella Lawson, draw attention to a particular ethos of pleasing the self as opposed to others. According to Jenny Lawson, Nigella Lawson renegotiates her cooking duties for her own cause (Food Legacies). She disrupts notions of female care and responsibility by “embracing self-satisfaction and indulgence” (Lawson, Disturbing 82) and, in this way, she negotiates a feminine identity that “hovers between the polarised figures of ‘the feminist’ and ‘the housewife’” (Hollows 180). According to Hollows, Nigella Lawson’s work offers an alternative way of imagining women’s relationship to food, which is based on the pleasure of cooking and eating, rather than pleasing others. The Nigella Lawson cooking philosophy posits that cooking should be pleasurable and should start from a desire to eat. Lawson is represented as aware of what she wants to eat and she does not defer to the preferences of others. She separates cooking from the notion of “cooking for”, which allows us to appreciate cooking as a pleasure in, and of, itself. It should be noted, however, that Nigella Lawson is a successful businesswoman who has made her success from her status as a woman-in-the-kitchen. Her programs are carefully constructed to show her prioritising leisure time and cooking to please the self (Lawson, Food Legacies). Although Lawson has encouraged women to cook to please, this is not the sole reason why she cooks. Her brand identity depends on her appearing as though she cooks for pleasure and yet she is undoubtedly, at least in part, driven by economic motivations. Although the cookbooks of the past have promoted a particular lifestyle for other women to emulate (Lawson, Disturbing), they nevertheless represented elements of the private sphere where women were able to wield authority and bequeath their knowledge to other women (Theophano). Throughout history, Janet Theophano notes, women have shared their prize recipes as a vehicle for making themselves visible. As early as the eighteenth century, cookbooks were a way for women to gain economic independence and authority. The formation of cookbooks provided women with an opportunity to enter the professional domain of culinary writing, which served to remove cooking from domestic life. Flora Pell’s Our Cookery Book, first published in 1916, blurred the boundary between the notion of private and public spheres. Pell advocated that a woman’s place was in the home and she upheld socially conservative gender roles and yet she was, paradoxically, a career woman who remained unmarried until she was sixty years old (Wessell and Wishart). Pell’s cookbook reinforced stereotypes of the woman-in-the-kitchen and domestic goddess, whose primary occupation in life was to please others and men in particular. The emergence of Pinterest in 2010, however, a virtual platform that enables the user to post and share images of whatever they choose, has further transformed cooking from a “chore without glamour or choice” (Wessell and Brien 87) into an optional, albeit pleasurable, form of play. This innovative platform has opened up new possibilities for users, more than 70 per cent of whom are women, to find novel means of personal expression via the creation of virtual cookbooks. Pinterest has been self-defined as a space that is perfect for recipe sharing, which is not dissimilar to the practice of compiling family recipes into a book and cutting and pasting extracts from a magazine into one’s own personal collection. Pinterest, however, enables the user to share this collection with others and transforms what has been seen as a private practice into a public activity. Pinterest has transformed the creation of a personal recipe collection from a domestic chore into a commercial venture, which is evident when scrolling through endless pins promoting catering businesses and cake-baking services. Pinterest is, potentially, a great tool for enhancing and even structuring the user’s culinary dreams. The platform has not been without its critics who are polarized, between those who believe that women who use this tool to curate digital recipe collections are in some way undoing or even killing feminism by pinning images that reinforce stereotypes of femininity, and those who believe that because women are pinning these images by choice, it defies traditional notions of femininity previously attached to cooking. The former view posits that female users of Pinterest are pinning images that are aligned with the “traditional” woman, such as cooking, do-it-yourself home-wares and crafts, rather than the “modern” woman who does not want to be seen as different from a man. Advocates of Pinterest, in contrast, argue that the platform is a natural path for reform, noting, in particular, the increased opportunity it provides women for voice and creative expression. This latter position supports the central premise of this article, which suggests that a woman can have both an interest in cooking and a belief in equal rights for women. In the words of Antonia Hayes “we have the luxury of choosing what sort of woman we want to be, including the freedom to be both a feminist and a connoisseur of cauliflower pizzas” (online). Pinterest celebrates the fact that there is no right or wrong way to be a woman. As a platform, Pinterest allows women to rewrite the meanings that have been assigned to them as passive individuals, devoid of a voice, and provides women with the opportunity for expression through the self-publication of digital cookbooks. In Amy Odell’s How Pinterest is Killing Feminism, she labels Pinterest “the Mormon housewife’s image bookmarking service of choice”, which creates a “Stepford Wife” version of identity that is hollow and uncreative. Odell argues that the user-generated content, which is made up predominantly of recipes, home décor, fitness, and fashion, is evidence that women are conditioned to “seek out the retrograde, materialistic content that women’s magazines have been hawking for decades” (online). She further asserts that, “adult women are still conditioned to think about diet and exercise and looking beautiful … so it makes sense that they’d pin these things” (online). She takes particular issue with the diet recipes on Pinterest, such as low-carbohydrate pizza crusts made with crumbed cauliflower, which she argues are indicative of women’s internalised belief that they must be thin in order to be beautiful. This is an image that she argues is synonymous with women’s magazines and Pinterest alike, which she sees as being similarly inundated with images of unrealistic body types. The difference, however, which Odell overlooks, is that the content on Pinterest does not bombard us like a magazine or billboard. The content on Pinterest is user-generated; it is uploaded by our fellow Pinterest users. Women are curating their own experience on the site. They are not victims but actors. Odell’s stance is the antithesis of a feminist argument as it makes women the victims of the media. In order to buy into her argument, you have to assume that all female Pinterest users are one dimensional and easily led, which hardly sounds like a powerful feminist position. Odell’s argument also neglects the role played by male chefs, such as Jamie Oliver, whose recipe books are attempting to curb the obesity epidemic, by focusing on quick and easy meals that are also nutritionally beneficial, hence their respective titles underlining that they are “30-minute” and “15-minute meals”. Given that the latter involves the atempted preparation of an entire meal in 15-minutes, you can rest assured that you will be eating salads that can easily be tossed together in this stringent time frame, rather than sweets and treats. That being said, no one is accusing Oliver of being a victim of the media’s unrealistic portrayal of the human body simply because he advocates the cooking of healthy recipes. This begs the question as to why women who pin healthy recipes, such as cauliflower pizza crusts, and create virtual cookbooks are necessarily victims of the unattainable body syndrome. Odell suggests that cooking and feminism are mutually exclusive and she makes the uncomfortable suggestion that by pinning diet recipes that perpetuate negative body image, and posting and disseminating pretty pictures of culinary delights, women are, as the title of her post suggests, killing feminism. Odell’s diatribe is being met with fierce opposition by Pinterest users who identify as post-feminists. Post-feminists posit that gender equality has been achieved and that women are free to choose their lifestyles in both public and private worlds (Nathanson). This article builds on the premise that pinners perform post-feminism and that women curate visual manifestations of their capacity to “have-it-all”; choice, empowerment and licensed transgression. Nathan Jurgenson, the author of “Pinterest and Feminism” argues that Pinterest is giving women what they want, which is the whole point. In the same way that Nigella Lawson cooks out of a desire for solitary pleasure, women are using Pinterest as a form of leisure time entertainment that is separate from work time. The creation of virtual cookbooks on Pinterest is a pastime that women engage in selfishly. It is an escape from their domestic responsibilities because it is something that they do for themselves and no one else. Amelia McDonnell acknowledges that she wants to spend time drooling over a recipe that she intends to make on the weekend and invites Odell to share the pork chops she made—the recipe for which she found on Pinterest and cooked for herself because she is single and happy. Her satirical response to Odell reinforces the notion of self-satisfaction and independence that accompanies cooking. Like Nigella Lawson, who promotes a fantasy of domestic pleasure on her own terms, both women renegotiate what it means to be a public woman disseminating cooking practices (Lawson, Food Legacies). Antonia Hayes rejects Odell’s premise that Pinterest is killing feminism and accuses the latter of perpetuating the sexism that continues to pervade society. Hayes acknowledges that you can have an interest in cooking and interior design, whilst simultaneously espousing beliefs in equal rights for women: “Kitchen porn and feminism aren’t mutually exclusive” (online). As a self-proclaimed feminist and Pinterest user, with an ever-expanding virtual cookbook, it is easy to resent Odell’s remark that pinning photos of cauliflower crust pizzas is setting the women’s movement back decades. As Hayes asserts “it’s just as damaging to tell women that they’re killing feminism by liking pretty pictures as it is to tell them that in order to be feminine you must dress, act, look a certain way. It’s the same constructed view albeit from a different angle” (online). Self-proclaimed feminists like Odell, who tell us that “only a certain kind of woman (the Pinterest-rejecting, domesticity hater) deserves equal rights and respect” (online), are actually perpetuating the sexism that they are trying to combat. In so doing, they pose questions about notions of agency, choice and desire, which speak to longstanding debates and dilemmas in feminist theory.Since when did it become anti-feminist to like something that is visually pleasing? I have a Pinterest account and I am a feminist. However, if recent criticism on Pinterest is to be believed, these two things are antithetical. If traditional femininity posits that women should be passive, submissive, and silent, then the very nature of Pinterest, which requires the user to actively choose, post, and share images with others, is the very antithesis of these traits. Pinterest users, who create virtual cookbooks out of a desire to please the self, irrespective of any domestic obligations, are active, dominant and communicative. Women are choosing to publish cookbooks in their leisure time, which stands in direct to contrast to the productive demands of work time. Pinterest, a platform renowned for its capacity to render even the most productive individuals into serial procrastinators and time wasters, is the epitome of a leisure time activity. Rather than cooking for their husbands and children, as is their “heaven-appointed mission,” according to Flora Pell, women are scrolling through pins, creating a virtual cookbook of the culinary delights that they will make for themselves to enjoy.ReferencesAshley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones, and Ben Taylor. Food and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Charles, Nickie, and Marrion Kerr. Women, Food and Families: Power, Status, Love, Anger. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988. DeVault, Marjorie. Feeding the Family: The Social Organisation of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994. Hayes, Antonio. “Pinterest and the Modern Feminist.” 2012. 5 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/life/7803000/Pinterest-and-the-modern-feminist› Hollows, Joanne. “Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess: Post-feminism and Cooking.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6.2 (2003): 179–202. Jurgenson, Nathan. “Pinterest and Feminism.” The Society Pages. 5 Mar. 2012. 25 Mar. 2013 ‹http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/03/05/pinterest-and-feminism› Lawson, Jenny. “Disturbing Objects: Making, Eating and Watching Food in Popular Culture And Performance Practice.” Platform 3.2 (2008): 79–99. Lawson, Jenny. “Food Legacies: Playing the Culinary Feminine.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 21.3 (2011): 337–66. Lawson, Nigella. How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Lawson, Nigella Feast: Food to Celebrate Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 2006. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. London: Oxford UP, 1986. McDonnell, Amelia. “The Soapbox: Oh Please, Pinterest Isn’t ‘Killing’ Feminism.” 2 Oct. 2012. 28 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.thefrisky.com/2012-10-02/the-soapbox-oh-please-pinterest-isnt-killing-feminism› Murcott, Anne. It’s A Pleasure To Cook For Him: Food, Mealtimes and Gender In Some South Wales Households. London: Heinemann, 1983. Nathanson, Elizabeth. “As Easy As Pie: Cooking Shows, Domestic Efficiency and Postfeminist Temporality.” Television and New Media 10.4 (2009): 311–30. Odell, Amy. “How Pinterest is Killing Feminism.” 2012. 19 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.buzzfeed.com/amyodell/how-pinterest-is-killing-feminism›. Oliver, Jamie. Jamie's 30-Minute Meals. London: Michael Joseph, 2010. ---. Jamie’s 15-Minute Meals. London: Michael Joseph, 2012. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Wessell, Adele, and Wishart, Alison. “Recipes for Reading Culinary Heritage: Flora Pell and Her Cookery Book.” reCollections 1.5 (2010): 1–19. Wessell, Adele, and Brien, Donna. “Australian Cookbooks For Young Readers: from Flora Pell to Junior Masterchef.” The International Journal for the Practice and Theories of Writing for Children and Children’s Literature 3.1 (2011): 76–90.

It has been fifteen months since the World Health Organisation declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic and the first lockdowns went into effect, dramatically changing the social landscape for millions of individuals worldwide. Overnight, it seemed, Zoom became the default platform for video conferencing, rapidly morphing from brand name to eponymous generic—a verb and a place and mode of being all at once. This nearly ubiquitous transition to remote work and remote play was both unprecedented and entirely anticipated. While teleworking, digital commerce, online learning, and social networking were common fare by 2020, in March of that year telepresence shifted from option to mandate, and Zooming became a daily practice for tens of millions of individuals worldwide. In an era of COVID-19, our relationships and experiences are deeply intertwined with our ability to “Zoom”. This shift resulted in new forms of artistic practice, new modes of pedagogy, and new ways of social organising, but it has also created new forms (and exacerbated existing forms) of exploitation, inequity, social isolation, and precarity. For millions, of course, lockdowns and restrictions had a profound impact that could not be mitigated by the mediated presence offered by way of Zoom and other video conferencing platforms. For those of us fortunate enough to maintain a paycheck and engage in work remotely, Zoom in part highlighted the degree to which a network logic already governed our work and our labour within a neoliberal economy long before the first lockdowns began. In the introduction to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Lyotard identifies a “logic of maximum performance” that regulates the contemporary moment: a cybernetic framework for understanding what it means to communicate—one that ultimately frames all political, social, and personal interactions within matrices of power laid out in terms of performativity and optimisation (xxiv.) Performativity serves as a foundation for not only how a system operates, but for how all other elements within that system express themselves. Lyotard writes, “even when its rules are in the process of changing and innovations are occurring, even when its dysfunctions (such as strikes, crises, unemployment, or political revolutions) inspire hope and lead to a belief in an alternative, even then what is actually taking place is only an internal readjustment, and its results can be no more than an increase in the system’s ‘viability’” (11-12). One may well add to this list of dysfunctions global pandemics. Zoom, in effect, offered universities, corporations, mass media outlets, and other organisations a platform to “innovate” within an ongoing network logic of performativity: to maintain business as usual in a moment in which nothing was usual, normal, or functional. Zoom foregrounds performativity in other senses as well, to the extent that it provides a space and context for social performance. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman explores how social actors move through their social environments, managing their identities in response to the space in which they find themselves and the audience (who are also social actors) within those spaces. For Goffman, the social environment provides the primary context for how and why social actors behave the way that they do. Goffman further denotes different spaces where our performances may shift: from public settings to smaller audiences, to private spaces where we can inhabit ourselves without any performance demands. The advent of social media, however, has added new layers to how we understand performance, audience, and public and private social spaces. Indeed, Goffman’s assertion that we are constantly managing our impressions feels particularly accurate when considering the added pressures of managing our identities in multiple social spaces, both face to face and online. Thus, when the world shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, and all forms of social interactions shifted to digital spaces, the performative demands of working from home became all the more complex in the sharp merging of private and public spaces. Thus, discussions and debates arose regarding proper “Zoom etiquette”, for different settings, and what constituted work-appropriate attire when working from home (a debate that, unsurprisingly, became particularly gendered in nature). Privacy management was a near constant narrative as we began asking, who can be in our spaces? How much of our homes are we required to put on display to other classmates, co-workers, and even our friends? In many ways, the hyper-dependence on Zoom interactions forced an entry into the spaces that we so often kept private, leaving our social performances permanently on display. Prior to COVID-19, the networks of everyday life had already produced rather porous boundaries between public and private life, but for the most part, individuals managed to maintain some sort of partition between domestic, intimate spaces, and their public performances of their professional and civic selves. It was an exception in The Before Times, for example, for a college professor to be interrupted in the midst of his BBC News interview by his children wandering into the room; the suspended possibility of the private erupting in the midst of a public social space (or vice versa) haunts all of our network interactions, yet the exceptionality of these moments speaks to the degree to which we sustained an illusion of two distinct stages for performance in a pre-pandemic era. Now, what was once the exception has become the rule. As millions of individuals found themselves Zooming from home while engaging co-workers, clients, patients, and students in professional interactions, the interpenetration of the public and private became a matter of daily fare. And yes, while early on in the pandemic several newsworthy (or at least meme-worthy) stories circulated widely on mass media and social media alike, serving as teleconferencing cautionary tales—usually involving sex, drugs, or bowel movements—moments of transgressive privacy very much became the norm: we found ourselves, in the midst of the workday, peering into backgrounds of bedrooms and kitchens, examining decorations and personal effects, and sharing in the comings and goings of pets and other family members entering and leaving the frame. Some users opted for background images or made use of blurring effects to “hide the mess” of their daily lives. Others, however, seemed to embrace the blur itself, implicitly or explicitly accepting the everydayness of this new liminality between public and private life. And while we acknowledge the transgressive nature of the incursions of the domestic and the intimate into workplace activities, it is worth noting as well that this incursion likewise takes place in the opposite direction, as spaces once designated as private became de facto workplace settings, and fell under the purview of a whole range of workplace policies that dictated appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. Not least of these intrusions are the literal and ideological apparatuses of surveillance that Zoom and other video conferencing platforms set into motion. In the original conception of the Panopticon, the observer could see the observed, but those being observed could not see their observers. This was meant to instill a sense of constant surveillance, whether the observer was there or not. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault considered those observed through the Panopticon as objects to be observed, with no power to turn the gaze back towards the structures of power that infiltrated their existence with such invasive intent. With Zoom, however, as much as private spaces have been infiltrated by work, school, and even family and friends, those leading classes or meetings may also feel a penetrative gaze by those who observe their professional performances, as many online participants have pushed back against these intrusions with cameras and audio turned off, leaving the performer with an audience of black screens and no indication of real observers behind them or not. In these unstable digital spaces, we vacillate between observed and observer, with the lines between private and public, visible and invisible, utterly blurred. Yet we should not lose sight of the fact that the panoptic power of the platform itself is hardly optic and remains one degree removed from its users, at the level of data extraction, collection, and exchange. In an already data-dependent era, more privacy and personal data has become available than ever before through online monitoring and the constant use of Zoom in work and social interactions. Such incursions of informatic biopower require further consideration within an emerging discussion of digital capital. There has also been the opportunity for these transformative, digital spaces to be used for an invited gaze into artistic and imaginative spaces. The global pandemic hit many industries hard, but in particular, artists and performers, as well as their performance venues, saw a massive loss of space, audiences, and income. Many artists developed performance spaces through online video conferencing in order to maintain their practice and their connection to their audiences, while others developed new curriculums and worked to find accessible ways for community members to participate in online art programming. Thus, though performers may still be faced with black squares as their audience, the invited gaze allows for artistic performances to continue, whether as digital shorts, live streamed music sets, or isolated cast members performing many roles with a reduced cast list. Though the issue of access to the technology and bandwidth needed to partake in these performances and programming is still front of mind, the presentation of artistic performances through Zoom has allowed in many other ways for a larger audience reach, from those who may not live near a performance centre, to others who may not be able to access physical spaces comfortably or safely. The ideology of ongoing productivity and expanded, remote access baked into video conferencing platforms like Zoom is perhaps most apparent in the assumptions of access that accompanied the widespread use of these platforms, particularly in the context of public institutions such as schools. In the United States, free market libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute have pointed to the end of “Net Neutrality” as a boon for infrastructure investment that led to greater broadband access nationwide (compared to a more heavily regulated industry in Europe). Yet even policy think tanks such as the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation—with its mission to “formulate, evaluate, and promote policy solutions that accelerate innovation and boost productivity to spur growth, opportunity, and progress”—acknowledged that although the U.S. infrastructure supported the massive increase in bandwidth demands as schools and businesses went online, gaps in rural access and affordability barriers for low income users mean that more needs to be done to bring about “a more just and effective broadband network for all Americans”. But calls for greater access are, in effect, supporting this same ideological framework in which greater access presumably equates with greater equity. What the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, we would argue, is the degree to which those most in need of services and support experience the greatest degree of digital precarity, a point that Jenny Kennedy, Indigo Holcombe-James, and Kate Mannell foreground in their piece “Access Denied: How Barriers to Participate on Zoom Impact on Research Opportunity”. As they note, access to data and devices provide a basic threshold for participation, but the ability to deploy these tools and orient oneself toward these sorts of engagements suggests a level of fluency beyond what many high-risk/high-need populations may already possess. Access reveals a disposition toward global networks, and as such signals one’s degree of social capital within a network society—a “state nobility” for the digital age (Bourdieu.) While Zoom became the default platform for a wide range of official and institutional practices, from corporate meetings to college class sessions, we have seen over the past year unanticipated engagements with the platform as well. Zoombombing offers one form of evil media practice that disrupts the dominant performativity logic of Zoom and undermines the assumptions of rational exchange that still drive much of how we understand “effective” communication (Fuller and Goffey). While we may be tempted to dismiss Zoombombing and other forms of “shitposting” as “mere” trollish distractions, doing so does not address the political agency of strategic actions on these platforms that refuse to abide by “an intersubjective recognition that is based on a consensus about values or on mutual understanding” (Habermas 12). Kawsar Ali takes up these tactical uses in “Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy: Zoom-Bombing Anti-Racism Efforts” and explores how alt-right and white supremacist groups have exploited these strategies not only as a means of disruption but as a form of violence against participants. A cluster of articles in this issue take up the question of creative practice and how video conferencing technologies can be adapted to performative uses that were perhaps not intended or foreseen by the platform’s creators. xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman offer up one such project in “Epic Hand Washing: Synchronous Participation and Lost Narratives”, which paired live performances of handwashing in domestic spaces with readings from literary texts that commented upon earlier pandemics and plagues. While Zoom presents itself as a tool to keep a neoliberal economy flowing, we see modes of use such as burrough’s and Starnaman’s performative piece that are intentionally playful, at the same time that they attempt to address the lived experiences of lockdown, confinement, and hygienic hypervigilance. Claire Parnell, Andrea Anne Trinidad, and Jodi McAlister explore another form of playful performance through their examination of the #RomanceClass community in the Philippines, and how they adapted their biannual reading and performance events of their community-produced English-language romance fiction. While we may still use comparative terms such as “face-to-face” and “virtual” to distinguish between digitally-mediated and (relatively) unmediated interactions, Parnell et al.’s work highlights the degree to which these technologies of mediation were already a part of this community’s attempt to support and sustain itself. Zoom, then, became the vehicle to produce and share community-oriented kilig, a Filipino term for embodied, romantic affective response. Shaun Wilson’s “Creative Practice through Teleconferencing in the Era of COVID-19” provides another direct reflection on the contemporary moment and the framing aesthetics of Zoom. Through an examination of three works of art produced for screen during the COVID-19 pandemic, including his own project “Fading Light”, Wilson examines how video conferencing platforms create “oscillating” frames that speak to and comment on each other at the same time that they remain discrete and untouched. We have opened and closed this issue with bookends of sorts, bringing to the fore a range of theoretical considerations alongside personal reflections. In our feature article, “Room without Room: Affect and Abjection in the Circuit of Self-Regard”, Ricky Crano examines the degree to which the aesthetics of Zoom, from its glitches to its default self-view, create modes of interaction that drain affect from discourse, leaving its users with an impoverished sense of co-presence. His focus is explicitly on the normative uses of the platform, not the many artistic and experimental misappropriations that the platform likewise offers. He concludes, “it is left to artists and other experimenters to expose and undermine the workings of power in the standard corporate, neoliberal modes of engagement”, which several of the following essays in this issue then take up. And we close with “Embracing Liminality and ‘Staying with the Trouble’ on (and off) Screen”, in which Tania Lewis, Annette Markham, and Indigo Holcombe-James explore two autoethnographic studies, Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking and The Shut-In Worker, to discuss the liminality of our experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, on and off—and in between—Zoom screens. Rather than suggesting a “return to normal” as mask mandates, social distancing, and lockdown restrictions ease, they attempt to “challenge the assumption that stability and certainty is what we now need as a global community … . How can we use the discomfort of liminality to imagine global futures that have radically transformative possibilities?” This final piece in the collection we take to heart, as we consider how we, too, can stay in the trouble, and consider transformative futures. Each of these pieces offers a thoughtful contribution to a burgeoning discussion on what Zooming means to us as academics, teachers, researchers, and community members. Though investigations into the social effects of digital spaces are not new, this moment in time requires careful and critical investigation through the lens of a global pandemic as it intersects with a world that has never been more digital in its presence and social interactions. The articles in this volume bring us to a starting point, but there is much more to cover: issues of disability and accessibility, gender and physical representations, the political economy of digital accessibility, the transformation of learning styles and experiences through a year of online learning, and still more areas of investigation to come. It is our hope that this volume provides a blueprint of sorts for other critical engagements and explorations of how our lives and our digital landscapes have been impacted by COVID-19, regardless of the instability of our connections. We would like to thank all of the contributors and peer reviewers who made this fascinating issue possible, with a special thanks to the Cultural Studies Association New Media and Digital Cultures Working Group, where these conversations started … on Zoom, of course. References Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility. Stanford UP, 1998. Brake, Doug. “Lessons from the Pandemic: Broadband Policy after COVID-19.” Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 13 July 2020. <http://itif.org/publications/2020/07/13/lessons-pandemic-broadband-policy-after-covid-19>. “Children Interrupt BBC News Interview – BBC News.” BBC News, 10 Mar. 2017. <http://youtu.be/Mh4f9AYRCZY>. Firey, Thomas A. “Telecommuting to Avoid COVID-19? Thank the End of ‘Net Neutrality.’” The Cato Institute, 16 Apr. 2020. <http://www.cato.org/blog/telecommuting-avoid-covid-19-thank-end-net-neutrality>. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Penguin, 2020. Fuller, Matthew, and Andrew Goffey. Evil Media. MIT P, 2012. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor, 2008. Habermas, Jürgen. On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction. Polity, 2001. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. U of Minnesota P, 1984. “WHO Director-General's Opening Remarks at the Media Briefing on COVID-19 – 11 March 2020.” World Health Organization, 11 Mar. 2020. <http://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020>. “Zoom Etiquette: Tips for Better Video Conferences.” Emily Post. <http://emilypost.com/advice/zoom-etiquette-tips-for-better-video-conferences>.

Film adaptation is an ambiguous term, both semantically and conceptually. Among its multiple connotations, the word “adaptation” may signify an artistic composition that has been recast in a new form, an alteration in the structure or function of an organism to make it better fitted for survival, or a modification in individual or social activity in adjustment to social surroundings. What all these definitions have in common is a tacitly implied hierarchy and valorisation: they presume the existence of an origin to which the recast work of art is indebted, or of biological or societal constraints to which the individual should conform in order to survive. The bias implied in the very connotations of the word has affected the theory and study of film adaptation. This bias is most noticeably reflected in the criterion of fidelity, which has been the major standard for evaluating film adaptations ever since George Bluestone’s 1957 pivotal Novels into Films. “Fidelity criticism,” observes McFarlane, “depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct ‘meaning’ which the film-maker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with” (7). But such an approach, Leitch argues, is rooted in several unacknowledged but entrenched misconceptions. It privileges literature over film, casts a false aura of originality on the precursor text, and ignores the fact that all texts, whether literary or cinematic, are essentially intertexts. As Kristeva, along with other poststructuralist theorists, has taught us, any text is an amalgam of others, a part of a larger fabric of cultural discourse (64-91). “A text is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”, writes Barthes in 1977 (146), and 15 years later film theoretician Robert Stam elaborates: “The text feeds on and is fed into an infinitely permutating intertext, which is seen through evershifting grids of interpretation” (57). The poststructuralists’ view of texts draws on the structuralists’ view of language, which is conceived as a system that pre-exists the individual speaker and determines subjectivity. These assumptions counter the Romantic ideology of individualism, with its associated concepts of authorial originality and a text’s single, unified meaning, based on the author’s intention. “It is language which speaks, not the author,” declares Barthes, “to write is to reach the point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not me” (143). In consequence, the fidelity criterion of film adaptation may be regarded as an outdated vestige of the Romantic world-view. If all texts quote or embed fragments of earlier texts, the notion of an authoritative literary source, which the cinematic version should faithfully reproduce, is no longer valid. Film adaptation should rather be perceived as an intertextual practice, contributing to a dynamic interpretive exchange between the literary and cinematic texts, an exchange in which each text can be enriched, modified or subverted. The relationship between Jonathan Nolan’s short story “Memento Mori” and Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2001) is a case in point. Here there was no source text, as the writing of the story did not precede the making of the film. The two processes were concurrent, and were triggered by the same basic idea, which Jonathan discussed with his brother during a road trip from Chicago to LA. Christopher developed the idea into a film and Jonathan turned it into a short story; he also collaborated in the film script. Moreover, Jonathan designed otnemem> (memento in reverse), the official Website, which contextualises the film’s fictional world, while increasing its ambiguity. What was adapted here was an idea, and each text explores in different ways the narrative, ontological and epistemological implications of that idea. The story, the film and the Website produce a multi-layered intertextual fabric, in which each thread potentially unravels the narrative possibilities suggested by the other threads. Intertextuality functions to increase ambiguity, and is therefore thematically relevant, for “Memento Mori”, Memento and otnemem> are three fragmented texts in search of a coherent narrative. The concept of narrative may arguably be one of the most overused and under-defined terms in academic discourse. In the context of the present paper, the most productive approach is that of Wilkens, Hughes, Wildemuth and Marchionini, who define narrative as a chain of events related by cause and effect, occurring in time and space, and involving agency and intention. In fiction or in film, intention is usually associated with human agents, who can be either the characters or the narrator. It is these agents who move along the chain of causes and effects, so that cause-effect and agency work together to make the narrative. This narrative paradigm underpins mainstream Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960. In Narration in the Fiction Film, David Bordwell writes: The classical Hollywood film presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals. … The story ends with a decisive victory or defeat, a resolution of the problem, and a clear achievement, or non achievement, of the goals. The principal causal agency is thus the character … . In classical fabula construction, causality is the prime unifying principle. (157) The large body of films flourishing in America between the years 1941 and 1958 collectively dubbed film noir subvert this narrative formula, but only partially. As accurately observed by Telotte, the devices of flashback and voice-over associated with the genre implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth and foregrounds the rift between reality and perception (3, 20). Yet in spite of the narrative experimentation that characterises the genre, the viewer of a classical film noir film can still figure out what happened in the fictional world and why, and can still reconstruct the story line according to sequential and causal schemata. This does not hold true for the intertextual composite consisting of Memento, “Memento Mori” and otnemem>. The basic idea that generated the project was that of a self-appointed detective who obsessively investigates and seeks to revenge his wife’s rape and murder, while suffering from a total loss of short term memory. The loss of memory precludes learning and the acquisition of knowledge, so the protagonist uses scribbled notes, Polaroid photos and information tattooed onto his skin, in an effort to reconstruct his fragmented reality into a coherent and meaningful narrative. Narrativity is visually foregrounded: the protagonist reads his body to make sense of his predicament. To recap, the narrative paradigm relies on a triad of terms: connectedness (a chain of events), causality, and intentionality. The basic situation in Memento and “Memento Mori”, which involves a rupture in the protagonist’s/narrator’s psychological time, entails a breakdown of all three pre-requisites of narrativity. Since the protagonists of both story and film are condemned, by their memory deficiency, to living in an eternal present, they are unable to experience the continuity of time and the connectedness of events. The disruption of temporality inevitably entails the breakdown of causality: the central character’s inability to determine the proper sequence of events prevents him from being able to distinguish between cause and effect. Finally, the notion of agency is also problematised, because agency implies the existence of a stable, identifiable subject, and identity is contingent on the subject’s uninterrupted continuity across time and change. The subversive potential of the basic narrative situation is heightened by the fact that both Memento and “Memento Mori” are focalised through the consciousness and perception of the main character. This means that the story, as well as the film, is conveyed from the point of view of a narrator who is constitutionally unable to experience his life as a narrative. This conundrum is addressed differently in the story and in the film, both thematically and formally. “Memento Mori” presents, in a way, the backdrop to Memento. It focuses on the figure of Earl, a brain damaged protagonist suffering from anterograde amnesia, who is staying in a blank, anonymous room, that we assume to be a part of a mental institution. We also assume that Earl’s brain damage results from a blow to the head that he received while witnessing the rape and murder of his wife. Earl is bent on avenging his wife’s death. To remind himself to do so, he writes messages to himself, which he affixes on the walls of his room. Leonard Shelby is Memento’s cinematic version of Earl. By Leonard’s own account, he has an inability to form memories. This, he claims, is the result of neurological damage sustained during an attack on him and his wife, an attack in which his wife was raped and killed. To be able to pursue his wife’s killers, he has recourse to various complex and bizarre devices—Polaroid photos, a quasi-police file, a wall chart, and inscriptions tattooed onto his skin—in order to replace his memory. Hampered by his affliction, Leonard trawls the motels and bars of Southern California in an effort to gather evidence against the killer he believes to be named “John G.” Leonard’s faulty memory is deviously manipulated by various people he encounters, of whom the most crucial are a bartender called Natalie and an undercover cop named Teddy, both involved in a lucrative drug deal. So far for a straightforward account of the short story and the film. But there is nothing straightforward about either Memento or “Memento Mori”. The basic narrative premise, consisting of a protagonist/narrator suffering from a severe memory deficit, is a condition entailing far-reaching psychological and philosophical implications. In the following discussion, I would like to focus on these two implications and to tie them in to the notions of narrativity, intertextuality, and eventually, adaptation. The first implication of memory loss is the dissolution of identity. Our sense of identity is contingent on our ability to construct an uninterrupted personal narrative, a narrative in which the present self is continuous with the past self. In Oneself as Another, his philosophical treatise on the concept of selfhood, Paul Ricoeur queries: “do we not consider human lives to be more readable when they have been interpreted in terms of the stories that people tell about them?” He concludes by observing that “interpretation of the self … finds in narrative, among others signs and symbols, a privileged form of mediation” (ft. 114). Ricoeur further suggests that the sense of selfhood is contingent on four attributes: numerical identity, qualitative identity, uninterrupted continuity across time and change, and finally, permanence in time that defines sameness. The loss of memory subverts the last two attributes of personal identity, the sense of continuity and permanence over time, and thereby also ruptures the first two. In “Memento Mori” and Memento, the disintegration of identity is formally rendered through the fragmentation of the literary and cinematic narratives, respectively. In Jonathan Nolan’s short story, traditional linear narrative is disrupted by shifts in point of view and by graphic differences in the shape of the print on the page. “Memento Mori” is alternately narrated in the first and in the third person. The first person segments, which constitute the present of the story, are written by Earl to himself. As his memory span is ten-minute long, his existence consists of “just the same ten minutes, over and over again” (Nolan, 187). Fully aware of the impending fading away of memory, Earl’s present-version self leaves notes to his future-version self, in an effort to situate him in time and space and to motivate him to the final action of revenge. The literary device of alternating points of view formally subverts the notion of identity as a stable unity. Paradoxically, rather than setting him apart from the rest of us, Earl’s brain damage foregrounds his similarity. “Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions,” observes Earl, comforting his future self by affirming his basic humanity, “Your problem is a little more acute, maybe, but fundamentally the same thing” (Nolan, 189). His observation echoes Beckett’s description of the individual as “the seat of a constant process of decantation … to the vessel containing the fluid of past time” (Beckett, 4-5). Identity, suggests Jonathan Nolan, following Beckett, among other things, is a theoretical construct. Human beings are works in progress, existing in a state of constant flux. We are all fragmented beings—the ten-minute man is only more so. A second strategy employed by Jonathan to convey the discontinuity of the self is the creation of visual graphic disunity. As noted by Yellowlees Douglas, among others, the static, fixed nature of the printed page and its austere linearity make it ideal for the representation of our mental construct of narrative. The text of “Memento Mori” appears on the page in three different font types: the first person segments, Earl’s admonitions to himself, appear in italics; the third person segments are written in regular type; and the notes and signs are capitalised. Christopher Nolan obviously has recourse to different strategies to reach the same ends. His principal technique, and the film’s most striking aspect, is its reversed time sequence. The film begins with a crude Polaroid flash photograph of a man’s body lying on a decaying wooden floor. The image in the photo gradually fades, until the camera sucks the picture up. The photograph presents the last chronological event; the film then skips backwards in ten-minute increments, mirroring the protagonist’s memory span. But the film’s time sequence is not simply a reversed linear structure. It is a triple-decker narrative, mirroring the three-part organisation of the story. In the opening scene, one comes to realise that the film-spool is running backwards. After several minutes the film suddenly reverses and runs forward for a few seconds. Then there is a sudden cut to a different scene, in black and white, where the protagonist (who we have just learned is called Leonard) begins to talk, out of the blue, about his confusion. Soon the film switches to a color scene, again unconnected, in which the “action” of the film begins. In the black and white scenes, which from then on are interspersed with the main action, Leonard attempts to understand what is happening to him and to explain (to an unseen listener) the nature of his condition. The “main action” of the film follows a double temporal structure: while each scene, as a unit of action, runs normally forward, each scene is triggered by the following, rather than by the preceding scene, so that we are witnessing a story whose main action goes back in time as the film progresses (Hutchinson and Read, 79). A third narrative thread, interspersed with the other two, is a story that functions as a foil to the film’s main action. It is the story of Sammy Jankis: one of the cases that Leonard worked on in his past career as an insurance investigator. Sammy was apparently suffering from anterograde amnesia, the same condition that Leonard is suffering from now. Sammy’s wife filed an insurance claim on his behalf, a claim that Leonard rejected on the grounds that Sammy’s condition was merely psychosomatic. Hoping to confirm Leonard’s diagnosis, Sammy’s diabetic wife puts her husband to the test. He fails the test as he tenderly administers multiple insulin injections to her, thereby causing her death. As Leonard’s beloved wife also suffered from diabetes, and as Teddy (the undercover cop) eventually tells Leonard that Sammy never had a wife, the Sammy Jankis parable functions as a mise en abyme, which can either corroborate or subvert the narrative that Leonard is attempting to construct of his own life. Sammy may be seen as Leonard’s symbolic double in that his form of amnesia foreshadows the condition with which Leonard will eventually be afflicted. This interpretation corroborates Leonard’s personal narrative of his memory loss, while tainting him with the blame for the death of Sammy’s wife. But the camera also suggests a more unsettling possibility—Leonard may ultimately be responsible for the death of his own wife. The scene in which Sammy, condemned by his amnesia, administers to his wife a repeated and fatal shot of insulin, is briefly followed by a scene of Leonard pinching his own wife’s thigh before her insulin shot, a scene recurring in the film like a leitmotif. The juxtaposition of the two scenes suggests that it is Leonard who, mistakenly or deliberately, has killed his wife, and that ever since he has been projecting his guilt onto others: the innocent victims of his trail of revenge. In this ironic interpretive twist, it is Leonard, rather than Sammy, who has been faking his amnesia. The parable of Sammy Jankis highlights another central concern of Memento and “Memento Mori”: the precarious nature of truth. This is the second psychological and philosophical implication of what Leonard persistently calls his “condition”, namely his loss of memory. The question explicitly raised in the film is whether memory records or creates, if it retains the lived life or reshapes it into a narrative that will confer on it unity and meaning. The answer is metaphorically suggested by the recurring shots of a mirror, which Leonard must use to read his body inscriptions. The mirror, as Lacan describes it, offers the infant his first recognition as a coherent, unique self. But this recognition is a mis-recognition, for the reflection has a coherence and unity that the subject both lacks and desires. The body inscriptions that Leonard can read only in the mirror do not necessarily testify to the truth. But they do enable him to create a narrative that makes his life worth living. A Lacanian reading of the mirror image has two profoundly unsettling implications. It establishes Leonard as a morally deficient, rather than neurologically deficient, human being, and it suggests that we are not fundamentally different from him. Leonard’s intricate system of notes and body inscriptions builds up an inventory of set representations to which he can refer in all his future experiences. Thus when he wakes up naked in bed with a woman lying beside him, he looks among his Polaroid photographs for a picture which he can match with her, which will tell him what the woman’s name is and what he can expect from her on the basis of past experience. But this, suggest Hutchinson and Read, is an external representation of operations that all of us perform mentally (89). We all respond to sensory input by constructing internal representations that form the foundations of our psyche. This view underpins current theories of language and of the mind. Semioticians tell us that the word, the signifier, refers to a mental representation of an object rather than to the object itself. Cognitivists assume that cognition consists in the operation of mental items which are symbols for real entities. Leonard’s apparently bizarre method of apprehending reality is thus essentially an externalisation of memory. But if, cognitively and epistemologically speaking, Lennie is less different from us than we would like to think, this implication may also extend to our moral nature. Our complicity with Leonard is mainly established through the film’s complex temporal structure, which makes us viscerally share the protagonist’s/narrator’s confusion and disorientation. We become as unable as he is to construct a single, coherent and meaningful narrative: the film’s obscurity is built in. Memento’s ambiguity is enhanced by the film’s Website, which presents a newspaper clipping about the attack on Leonard and his wife, torn pages from police and psychiatric reports, and a number of notes from Leonard to himself. While blurring the boundaries between story and film by suggesting that Leonard, like Earl, may have escaped from a mental institution, otnemem> also provides evidence that can either confirm or confound our interpretive efforts, such as a doctor’s report suggesting that “John G.” may be a figment of Leonard’s imagination. The precarious nature of truth is foregrounded by the fact that the narrative Leonard is trying to construct, as well as the narrative in which Christopher Nolan has embedded him, is a detective story. The traditional detective story proceeds from a two-fold assumption: truth exists, and it can be known. But Memento and “Memento Mori” undermine this epistemological confidence. They suggest that truth, like identity, is a fictional construct, derived from the tales we tell ourselves and recount to others. These tales do not coincide with objective reality; they are the prisms we create in order to understand reality, to make our lives bearable and worth living. Narratives are cognitive patterns that we construct to make sense of the world. They convey our yearning for coherence, closure, and a single unified meaning. The overlapping and conflicting threads interweaving Memento, “Memento Mori” and the Website otnemem> simultaneously expose and resist our nostalgia for unity, by evoking a multiplicity of meanings and creating an intertextual web that is the essence of all adaptation. References Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana, 1977. Beckett, Samuel. Proust. London: Chatto and Windus, 1931. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Berkley and Los Angeles: California UP, 1957. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Hutchinson, Phil, and Rupert Read. “Memento: A Philosophical Investigation.” Film as Philosophy: Essays in Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell. Ed. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2005. 72-93. Kristeva, Julia. “World, Dialogue and Novel.” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Rudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. 64-91. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Ēcrits: A Selection. New York: Norton 1977. 1-7. Leitch, Thomas. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45.2 (2003): 149-71. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Nolan, Jonathan. “Memento Mori.” The Making of Memento. Ed. James Mottram. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. 183-95. Nolan, Jonathan. otnemem. 24 April 2007 http://otnemem.com>. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000. 54-76. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana and Chicago: Illinois UP, 1989. Wilkens, T., A. Hughes, B.M. Wildemuth, and G. Marchionini. “The Role of Narrative in Understanding Digital Video.” 24 April 2007 http://www.open-video.org/papers/Wilkens_Asist_2003.pdf>. Yellowlees Douglass, J. “Gaps, Maps and Perception: What Hypertext Readers (Don’t) Do.” 24 April 2007 http://www.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf3/douglas_p3.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (May 2007) "Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>.

Introduction Greater resilience is associated with the ability to self-organise, and with social learning as part of a process of adaptation and transformation (Goldstein 341). This article deals with responses to a crisis in a Norwegian community in the late 1880s, and with some of the many internal conflicts it caused. The crisis and the subsequent conflicts in this particular community, Volda, were caused by a number of processes, driven mostly by external forces and closely linked to the expansion of the capitalist mode of production in rural Norway. But the crisis also reflects a growing nationalism in Norway. In the late 1880s, all these causes seemed to come together in Volda, a small community consisting mostly of independent small farmers and of fishers. The article employs the concept of ‘resilience’ and the theory of resilience in order better to understand how individuals and the community reacted to crisis and conflict in Volda in late 1880, experiences which will cast light on the history of the late 1880s in Volda, and on individuals and communities elsewhere which have also experienced such crises. Theoretical Perspectives Some understandings of social resilience inspired by systems theory and ecology focus on a society’s ability to maintain existing structures. Reducing conflict to promote greater collaboration and resilience, however, may become a reactionary strategy, perpetuating inequalities (Arthur, Friend and Marschke). Instead, the understanding of resilience could be enriched by drawing on ecological perspectives that see conflict as an integral aspect of a diverse ecology in continuous development. In the same vein, Grove has argued that some approaches to anticipatory politics fashion subjects to withstand ‘shocks and responding to adversity through modern institutions such as human rights and the social contract, rather than mobilising against the sources of insecurity’. As an alternative, radical politics of resilience ought to explore political alternatives to the existing order of things. Methodology According to Hall and Lamont, understanding “how individuals, communities, and societies secured their well-being” in the face of the challenges imposed by neoliberalism is a “problem of understanding the bases for social resilience”. This article takes a similarly broad approach to understanding resilience, focusing on a small group of people within a relatively small community to understand how they attempted to secure their well-being in the face of the challenges posed by capitalism and growing nationalism. The main interest, however, is not resilience understood as something that exists or is being produced within this small group, but, rather, how this group produced social imaginaries of the past and the future in cooperation and conflict with other groups in the same community. The research proceeds to analyse the contributions mainly of six members of this small group. It draws on existing literature on the history of the community in the late 1800s and, in particular, biographies of Synnøve Riste (Øyehaug) and Rasmus Steinsvik (Gausemel). In addition, the research builds on original empirical research of approximately 500 articles written by the members of the group in the period from 1887 to 1895 and published in the newspapers Vestmannen, Fedraheimen and 17de Mai; and will try to re-tell a history of key events, referring to a selection of these articles. A Story about Being a Woman in Volda in the Late 1880s This history begins with a letter from Synnøve Riste, a young peasant woman and daughter of a local member of parliament, to Anders Hovden, a friend and theology student. In the letter, Synnøve Riste told her friend about something she just had experienced and had found disturbing (more details in Øyehaug). She first sets her story in the context of an evangelical awakening that was gaining momentum in the community. There was one preacher in particular who seemed to have become very popular among the young women. He had few problems when it comes to women, she wrote, ironically. Curious about the whole thing, Synnøve decided to attend a meeting to see for herself what was going on. The preacher noticed her among the group of young women. He turned his attention towards her and scolded her for her apparent lack of religious fervour. In the letter she explained the feeling of shame that came over her when the preacher singled her out for public criticism. But the feeling of shame soon gave way to anger, she wrote, before adding that the worst part of it was ‘not being able to speak back’; as a woman at a religious meeting she had to hold her tongue. Synnøve Riste was worried about the consequences of the religious awakening. She asked her friend to do something. Could he perhaps write a poem for the weekly newspaper the group had begun to publish only a few months earlier? Anders Hovden duly complied. The poem was published, anonymously, on Wednesday 17 March 1888. Previously, the poem says, women enjoyed the freedom to roam the mountains and valleys. Now, however, a dark mood had come over the young women. ‘Use your mind! Let the madness end! Throw off the blood sucker! And let the world see that you are a woman!’ The puritans appreciated neither the poem nor the newspaper. The newspaper was published by the same group of young men and women who had already organised a private language school for those who wanted to learn to read and write New Norwegian, a ‘new’ language based on the old dialects stemming from the time before Norway lost its independence and became a part of Denmark and then, after 1814, Sweden. At the language school the students read and discussed translations of Karl Marx and the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The newspaper quickly grew radical. It reported on the riots following the hanging of the Haymarket Anarchists in Chicago in 1886. It advocated women’s suffrage, agitated against capitalism, argued that peasants and small farmers must learn solidarity from the industrial workers defended a young woman in Oslo who was convicted of killing her newborn baby and published articles from international socialist and anarchist newspapers and magazines. Social Causes for Individual Resilience and Collaborative Resilience Recent literature on developmental psychology link resilience to ‘the availability of close attachments or a supportive and disciplined environment’ (Hall and Lamont 13). Some psychologists have studied how individuals feel empowered or constrained by their environment. Synnøve Riste clearly felt constrained by developments in her social world, but was also resourceful enough to find ways to resist and engage in transformational social action on many levels. According to contemporary testimonies, Synnøve Riste must have been an extraordinary woman (Steinsvik "Synnøve Riste"). She was born Synnøve Aarflot, but later married Per Riste and took his family name. The Aarflot family was relatively well-off and locally influential, although the farms were quite small by European standards. Both her father and her uncle served as members of parliament for the (‘left’) Liberal Party. From a young age she took responsibility for her younger siblings and for the family farm, as her father spent much time in the capital. Her grandfather had been granted the privilege of printing books and newspapers, which meant that she grew up with easy access to current news and debates. She married a man of her own choosing; a man substantially older than herself, but with a reputation for liberal ideas on language, education and social issues. Psychological approaches to resilience consider the influence of cognitive ability, self-perception and emotional regulation, in addition to social networks and community support, as important sources of resilience (Lamont, Welburn and Fleming). Synnøve Riste’s friend and lover, Rasmus Steinsvik, later described her as ‘a mainspring’ of social activity. She did not only rely on family, social networks and community support to resist stigmatisation from the puritans, but she was herself a driving force behind social activities that produced new knowledge and generated communities of support for others. Lamont, Welburn and Fleming underline the importance for social resilience of cultural repertoires and the availability of ‘alternative ways of understanding social reality’ (Lamont, Welburn and Fleming). Many of the social activities Synnøve Riste instigated served as arenas for debate and collaborative activity to develop alternative understandings of the social reality of the community. In 1887, Synnøve Riste had relied on support from her extended family to found the newspaper Vestmannen, but as the group around the language school and newspaper gradually produced more radical alternative understandings of the social reality they came increasingly into conflict with less radical members of the Liberal Party. Her uncle owned the printing press where Vestmannen was printed. He was also a member of parliament seeking re-election. And he was certainly not amused when Rasmus Steinsvik, editor of Vestmannen, published an article reprimanding him for his lacklustre performance in general and his unprincipled voting in support of a budget allocating the Swedish king a substantial amount of money. Steinsvik advised the readers to vote instead for Per Riste, Synnøve Riste’s liberal husband and director of the language school. The uncle stopped printing the newspaper. Social Resilience in Volda The growing social conflicts in Volda might be taken to indicate a lack of resilience. This, however, would be a mistake. Social connectedness is an important source of social resilience (Barnes and Hall 226). Strong ties to family and friends matter, as does membership in associations. Dense networks of social connectedness are related to well-being and social resilience. Inversely, high levels of inequality seem to be linked to low levels of resilience. Participation in democratic processes has also been found to be an important source of resilience (Barnes and Hall 229). Volda was a small community with relatively low levels of inequality and local cultural traditions underlining the importance of cooperation and the obligations of everyone to participate in various forms of communal work. Similarly, even though a couple of families dominated local politics, there was no significant socioeconomic division between the average and the more prosperous farmers. Traditionally, women on the small, independent farms participated actively in most aspects of social life. Volda would thus score high on most indicators predicting social resilience. Reading the local newspapers confirms this impression of high levels of social resilience. In fact, this small community of only a few hundred families produced two competing newspapers at the time. Vestmannen dedicated ample space to issues related to education and schools, including adult education, reflecting the fact that Volda was emerging as a local educational centre; local youths attending schools outside the community regularly wrote articles in the newspaper to share the new knowledge they had attained with other members of the community. The topics were in large part related to farming, earth sciences, meteorology and fisheries. Vestmannen also reported on other local associations and activities. The local newspapers reported on numerous political meetings and public debates. The Liberal Party was traditionally the strongest political party in Volda and pushed for greater independence from Sweden, but was divided between moderates and radicals. The radicals joined workers and socialists in demanding universal suffrage, including, as we have seen, women’s right to vote. The left libertarians in Volda organised a ‘radical left’ faction of the Liberal Party and in the run-up to the elections in 1888 numerous rallies were arranged. In some parts of the municipality the youth set up independent and often quite radical youth organisations, while others established a ‘book discussion’. The language issue developed into a particularly powerful source for social resilience. All members of the community shared the experience of having to write and speak a foreign language when communicating with authorities or during higher education. It was a shared experience of discrimination that contributed to producing a common identity. Hing has shown that those who value their in-group ‘can draw on this positive identity to provide a sense of self-worth that offers resilience’. The struggle for recognition stimulated locals to arrange independent activities, and it was in fact through the burgeoning movement for a New Norwegian language that the local radicals in Volda first encountered radical literature that helped them reframe the problems and issues of their social world. In his biography of Ivar Mortensson Egnund, editor of the newspaper Fedraheimen and a lifelong collaborator of Rasmus Steinsvik, Klaus Langen has argued that Mortensson Egnund saw the ideal type of community imagined by the anarchist Leo Tolstoy in the small Norwegian communities of independent small farmers, a potential model for cooperation, participation and freedom. It was not an uncritical perspective, however. The left libertarians were constantly involved in clashes with what they saw as repressive forces within the communities. It is probably more correct to say that they believed that the potential existed, within these communities, for freedom to flourish. Most importantly, however, reading Fedraheimen, and particularly the journalist, editor and novelist Arne Garborg, infused this group of local radicals with anti-capitalist perspectives to be used to make sense of the processes of change that affected the community. One of Garborg’s biographers, claims that no Norwegian has ever been more fundamentally anti-capitalist than Garborg (Thesen). This anti-capitalism helped the radicals in Volda to understand the local conflicts and the evangelical awakening as symptoms of a deeper and more fundamental development driven by capitalism. A series of article in Vestmannen called for solidarity and unity between small farmers and the growing urban class of industrial workers. Science and Modernity The left libertarians put their hope in science and modernity to improve the lives of people. They believed that education was the key to move forward and get rid of the old and bad ways of doing things. The newspaper was reporting the latest advances in natural sciences and life sciences. It reported enthusiastically about the marvels of electricity, and speculated about a future in which Norway could exploit the waterfalls to generate it on a large scale. Vestmannen printed articles in defence of Darwinism (Egnund), new insights from astronomy (Steinsvik "Kva Den Nye Astronomien"), health sciences, agronomy, new methods of fishing and farming – and much more. This was a time when such matters mattered. Reports on new advances in meteorology in the newspaper appeared next to harrowing reports about the devastating effects of a storm that surprised local fishermen at sea where many men regularly paid with their lives. Hunger was still a constant threat in the harsh winter months, so new knowledge that could improve the harvest was most welcome. Leprosy and other diseases continued to be serious problems in this region of Norway. Health could not be taken lightly, and the left libertarians believed that science and knowledge was the only way forward. ‘Knowledge is a sweet fruit,’ Vestmannen wrote. Reporting on Darwinism and astronomy again pitted Vestmannen against the puritans. On several occasions the newspaper reported on confrontations between those who promoted science and those who defended a fundamentalist view of the Bible. In November 1888 the signature ‘-t’ published an article on a meeting that had taken place a few days earlier in a small village not far from Volda (Unknown). The article described how local teachers and other participants were scolded for holding liberal views on science and religion. Anyone who expressed the view that the Bible should not be interpreted literally risked being stigmatised and ostracised. It is tempting to label the group of left libertarians ‘positivists’ or ‘modernists’, but that would be unfair. Arne Garborg, the group’s most important source of inspiration, was indeed inspired by Émile Zola and the French naturalists. Garborg had argued that nothing less than the uncompromising search for truth was acceptable. Nevertheless, he did not believe in objectivity; Garborg and his followers agreed that it was not possible or even desirable to be anything else than subjective. Adaptation or Transformation? PM Giærder, a friend of Rasmus Steinsvik’s, built a new printing press with the help of local blacksmiths, so the newspaper could keep afloat for a few more months. Finally, however, in 1888, the editor and the printer took the printing press with them and moved to Tynset, another small community to the east. There they joined forces with another dwindling left libertarian publication, Fedraheimen. Generations later, more details emerged about the hurried exit from Volda. Synnøve Riste had become pregnant, but not by her husband Per. She was pregnant by Rasmus Steinsvik, the editor of Vestmannen and co-founder of the language school. And then, after giving birth to a baby daughter she fell ill and died. The former friends Per and Rasmus were now enemies and the group of left libertarians in Volda fell apart. It would be too easy to conclude that the left libertarians failed to transform the community and a closer look would reveal a more nuanced picture. Key members of the radical group went on to play important roles on the local and national political scene. Locally, the remaining members of the group formed new alliances with former opponents to continue the language struggle. The local church gradually began to sympathise with those who agitated for a new language based on the Norwegian dialects. The radical faction of the Liberal Party grew in importance as the conflict with Sweden over the hated union intensified. The anarchists Garborg and Steinsvik became successful editors of a radical national newspaper, 17de Mai, while two other members of the small group of radicals went on to become mayors of Volda. One was later elected member of parliament for the Liberal Party. Many of the more radical anarchist and communist ideas failed to make an impact on society. However, on issues such as women’s rights, voting and science, the left libertarians left a lasting impression on the community. It is fair to say that they contributed to transforming their society in many and lasting ways. Conclusion This study of crisis and conflict in Volda indicate that conflict can play an important role in social learning and collective creativity in resilient communities. There is a tendency, in parts of resilience literature, to view resilient communities as harmonious wholes without rifts or clashes of interests (see for instance Goldstein; Arthur, Friend and Marschke). Instead, conflicts should rather be understood as a natural aspect of any society adapting and transforming itself to respond to crisis. Future research on social resilience could benefit from an ecological understanding of nature that accepts polarisation and conflict as a natural part of ecology and which helps us to reach deeper understandings of the social world, also fostering learning, creativity and the production of alternative political solutions. This research has indicated the importance of social imaginaries of the past. Collective memories of ‘what everybody knows that everybody else knows’ about ‘what has worked in the past’ form the basis for producing ideas about how to create collective action (Swidler 338, 39). Historical institutions are pivotal in producing schemas which are default options for collective action. In Volda, the left libertarians imagined a potential for freedom in the past of the community; this formed the basis for producing an alternative social imaginary of the future of the community. The social imaginary was not, however, based only on local experience and collective memory of the past. Theories played an important role in the process of trying to understand the past and the present in order to imagine future alternatives. The conflicts themselves stimulated the radicals to search more widely and probe more deeply for alternative explanations to the problems they experienced. This search led them to new insights which were sometimes adopted by the local community and, in some cases, helped to transform social life in the long-run. References Arthur, Robert, Richard Friend, and Melissa Marschke. "Fostering Collaborative Resilience through Adaptive Comanagement: Reconciling Theory and Practice in the Management of Fisheries in the Mekong Region." 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