Journal articles on the topic 'Captain Marvel'

Captain Marvel: Gender Equality in the Perspective of Superhero. Gender equality is something that can be a concern lately so it can be used as an issue in the creation of a work of art, because the ‘value’ of women is considered lower than men in various activities or daily activities. A big American movie studio, Marvel Studios, released a film with a female superhero named Captain Marvel. The emergence of the film made the writer want to examine about this superhero much deeper. The method employed for this paper was deconstruction approach by linking it to the phenomenon occurring in the society. Hopefully this article will strengthen the perspective of gender equality by studying the character of Captain Marvel through her portrayed character, sign, and color of her superhero costume. Keywords: Captain Marvel, gender equality, superhero, Marvel Studios, movie

This thesis deals with the anxieties experienced by the leaders of superhero teams in Civil War II, Iron Man and Captain Marvel. Through their anxieties in Civil War II, I tried to reveal the causes of their anxieties and their ways to reduce these uneasy feelings. To analyze the causes of these two characters’ anxieties, I used two of the theory of anxiety, reality and moral anxiety. I found that there are two causes that make Iron Man feel anxieties which are the reaction of Captain Marvel towards Ulysses’ prophecies and his responsibility both as a superhero and as a leader to protect people from the outcome of Ulysses’ prophecies. On the other hand, Captain Marvel also feels anxieties from the blame of Iron Man and her responsibility both as a superhero and as a public officer to protect people from dystopian future. Iron Man uses two defense mechanisms, which are splitting and rationalization. On the other hand, Captain Marvel also uses two defense mechanism, which are idealization and rationalization. These defense mechanisms are used by both, Iron Man and Captain Marvel to ease their reality and moral anxiety.

Approaches the recent death of Captain America sideline of Marvel Comics from the perspective of political theology and philosophical messianism as these ideas appear in the works of Giorgio Agamben, Rene Girard, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Schmitt.

The cAja-’ib al-Hind ( Marvels of India) is a collection of sea stories allegedly compiled by Captain Buzurg Ibn Shahriya-r (d. 399/1009) which belongs to an Arabo-Islamic literary genre called the caja-’ib, containing themes of entertainment—things that are marvellous and strange. But these stories are not merely entertaining, they are an additional resource for the modern researcher because they also reflect the realities of daily life in seafaring communities of the Indian Ocean in the ninth and tenth centuries. Among the tales of the fantastic and the marvel, we find the simple humanity of the seafarers, something lacking in the purely factual, medieval, geographical and historical texts. A complementary model to the understanding of the maritime landscape of a group or community is proposed in this article. The stories model in this article demonstrates the relationship of an occupational group with other seafarers in a trans-regional Indian Ocean trade.

The contemporary visibility of women’s accomplishments and popular outcry in the face of injustice and/or violence might suggest that women have achieved their aim of putting long-fought feminist principles in the spotlight and have finally earned equality. However, let us not forget that, in the face of violence, the hegemonic matrix of intelligibility has also historically defined women victims by their ‘injurability’, so, intrinsically vulnerable, thus justifying the need of the system to assist them. It is not surprising, then, that, as a response to vulnerability, empowerment is celebrated. In this context, one would think that a blockbuster, such as Captain Marvel (2019), would reproduce the hegemonic economy of recognition where the subjects of violence are either treated as devoid of agency or offered empowerment through a neoliberal individualizing logic. However, the controversy that the film and its female protagonist raised (for adopting explicit feminist language to challenge patriarchy), along with the outcry of white angry men (symptomatized in male film critics) and the Internet nerd-culture (members of which considered themselves aggrieved by the film), provide a fruitful ground to look into the communicative logic of victimhood. Captain Marvel can help us to explore not only the chiaroscuros and phallacy of the victim versus empowered subject script but also the implicit logic that obscures the divisions that this logic perpetuates. In this respect, we are interested in analyzing how the movie stages: 1. The assignation and construction of female vulnerability in a hegemonic shared cultural narrative that privileges the construction of the empowered subject obscuring the politics of emotions; 2. The possibilities of empowerment before such a narrative and in relation to reclaiming historical and personal memories; 3. The sharing of the condition of vulnerability across gender and geographical boundaries and its relation with the criminalization of other vulnerable others such as aliens.

Abstract In the 2011 superhero movie, Captain America: The First Avenger (produced by Marvel Studios, directed by Joe Johnston) the main opponent of the title character is a Nazi officer, Johann Schmidt, who turns out to be a kind of superhuman entity, the Red Skull. Throughout the movie, viewers can follow the process of him gradually leaving behind his identity as a Nazi officer, and presenting himself as the leader of the occult-high-tech terrorist organization, the Hydra. At a certain point we can see him visited by one of the scientists working for him, Doctor Zola, whom he puts wise to his plans. During the conversation a portrait is being painted of the Red Skull, but we cannot see his face, only that the artist uses a huge amount of red paint. In the background, excerpts of Wagner’s operas are being played, which is very unusual in a Marvel movie. The question is, should the viewer recognize the diegetic music and notice the possible reference to the painting Las Meninas by Velázquez? How the detection of these intermedial references and the awareness of the act of trespassing media borders would affect the semiotic processes of interpretation? And also, how would the more precise identification of the cited materials change the semiotic modality of intermediality here? The article tries to answer these questions by interpreting the scene and the role of the references in question within the entire film through the prism of intermedial semiotics.

In 1979, writer Tom DeFalco was paired with artist and cocreator of Spider-Man, Steve Ditko, to work on an issue ofMachine Man, one of the many superheroes populating the universe of Marvel Comics. Instead of the usual introduction and business chatter, Ditko challenged DeFalco during a first conversation: “Are you Tom? What gives you the right to write about heroes?” (Tucker 2012). By the time of this exchange, Ditko had not only (co-) created and continued numerous superhero stories, ranging from Captain Atom to Dr. Strange or the Hulk, but he had also dedicated a lot of thought to the question as to what composed true heroism. In the 1960s, he had already found answers in a place not uncommon for that time, namely, in the novels of a Russian immigrant whose work should serve, in her own words, as “the projection of an ideal man” (Rand 1943, ix; 1975, 162; 2005, 230): Ayn Rand (1905–1982).

Background: Assessment of basketball shoes as personal protection equipment (PPE) at the collegiate level is unique. Objective: The purpose of Part I in this pilot study was to examine the effect of shoe design on jump height in elite male and female National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division 1 basketball student-athletes. Method: Each team selected two pairs of AdidasTM branded shoes. The male student-athletes selected the AdidasTM Harden Vol. 3 and the AdidasTM SM Pro basketball shoes. The female student-athletes selected the AdidasTM Harden Vol. 3 and the AdidasTM Captain Marvel basketball shoes. A total of sixteen basketball student-athletes (six males, ten females) performed an acute series of four styled basketball jumps on two ForceDecksTM Force Platforms while trying to maximize jump height by tapping VertecTM Jump Vanes. Two trials were performed in each shoe and for each type of jump which included a countermovement jump, drop jump from 30cm, step and jump, and a series of plyometric jumps. Results: The results of this pilot study indicated a non-significant effect of basketball shoe design on jump height while performing an acute series of basketball style jumps for either the male or female basketball student-athletes. However, there were significant differences in jump height and peak power between the male and female basketball student-athletes (p = 0.001). Conclusion: In addition to the results, the use of quantitative performance testing on the effectiveness of basketball shoe designs as PPE may assist in the mitigation of non-contact ankle and lower limb injuries.

Background: Assessing basketball shoe comfort and fit as personal protection equipment (PPE) at the collegiate level is unique. Objective: The purpose of Part II in this pilot study was to examine the effect of shoe design on the perception of comfort and fit after performing an acute series of jumps in elite male and female National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division 1 basketball student-athletes. Method: A total of sixteen basketball student-athletes (six males, ten females) performed two rounds of acute series of four styled basketball jumps on two ForceDecksTM Force Platforms while trying to maximize jump height by tapping VertecTM Jump Vanes. The male student-athletes selected the AdidasTM Harden Vol. 3 and the AdidasTM SM Pro basketball shoes. The female student-athletes selected the Adidas Harden Vol. 3 and the Adidas Captain Marvel basketball shoes. Upon completion of each round of jumps, the student-athlete recorded their perception of comfort on a 110mm Visual Analog Scale (VAS) and fit on a seven-point Likert rating scale based against their most comfortable basketball shoes ever worn. Results: Results of this pilot study reported, on average, the male student-athletes preferred comfort and fit of the Adidas SM Pro basketball shoes and the female student-athletes preferred the Adidas Harden Vol. 3 basketball shoe, though differences were non-significant at p > 0.05. Conclusion: The use of a human factors assessment tool to evaluate basketball shoe comfort and fit and the influence of rated comfort and fit parameters on basketball jumping performance proved viable.

EM TORNO DA POÉTICA DE MARCELO ARIEL, O DADO DA TRANSDISCIPLINARIDADE, TAL COMO FORMULA FÉLIX GUATTARI, PODE SER CAPTADO COMO NORTEADOR DE UMA ESCRITA EMBASADA NA VIDA SOCIAL, NA PROBLEMÁTICA ECOLÓGICA E NAS NOVAS CONFIGURAÇÕES DA ARTE, EM UMA ÉPOCA REGIDA PELA TECNOLOGIA E PELA GLOBALIZAÇÃO DA ECONOMIA.

Au début des années 1920, l’architecture cinématographique en est encore à ses balbutiements. Si une poignée d’architectes (Henri Sauvage, Marcel Oudin, E. Vergnes, Charles Siclis, Auguste Bluysen) et d’exploitants aspire à la naissance d’une architecture spécifique, adaptée à la projection et affranchie de toute filiation avec l’héritage théâ­tral, l’éclectisme des solutions mises en oeuvre – parfois même leur archaïsme – témoigne de l’effervescence de ces années de recherche. En France, il faut attendre le lancement commercial des films sonorisés, puis leur généra­lisation au cours des années 1930, pour que le cinéma connaisse une seconde naissance. Les directeurs de salles deviennent les maîtres d’ouvrage d’un important chantier de sonorisation et de modernisation des lieux de projection. Saisissant cette opportunité pour inventer une architecture qui satisfasse pleinement aux exigences du spectacle et de l’exploitation cinématographiques, les architectes captent et mettent à l’épreuve le concept même de modernité.

Proust and Hergé: on some similarities between À la Recherche du temps perdu and Les Aventures de Tintin. Part I. Marcel Proust and Hergé seem to have nothing in common. Their works are indeed very different: they do not belong to the same genre, nor treat the same themes or have the same public. What parallel could be established between À la Recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), which revolutionized the genre of the novel, and Les Aventures de Tintin (The Adventures of Tintin), a series of comic albums apparently intended only for children? A closer study reveals however that Proust and Hergé, beyond what one could think at first sight, share deep similarities on wh ich this article, published in two parts, will focus. First of all, À la Recherche du temps perdu as well as Les Aventures de Tintin rest on the creation of a specific world, which can be characterized by Balzac’s principle of returning characters and by the importance of the imaginary of space (Proust’s rêveries about the names of places, Hergé’s fictitious geography). Moreover, Proust and Hergé’s characters have a very singular language and linguistic features which can be identified easily (let us think of Dr. Cottard’s puns, of Odette’s anglicisms, etc. in Proust, o r of Captain Haddock’s insults or Dupond and Dupont’s slips of the tongue in Hergé). Eventually, Proust and Hergé both develop a reflection on time which gives rise to a singular temporality in their books, and more precisely a reflection on lost and regained time, with two opposite situations and therefore two opposite conceptions for each of the authors. This first part of our study focuses on the principle of returning characters adopted by Proust and Hergé, on their imaginary of space and on the language of their characters, while the second part, which will be published in the next issue of Interlitteraria, will be devoted to the problematics of time.

The Sculpture Collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest has been enriched in recent years with twenty-one marble portrait reliefs carved by Giovanni Bonazza (1654–1736) and his workshop. Fifteen reliefs were transferred within the institution and six were purchased from a private collection, but the identical creator and size, the uniform plaster framing and the themes of seventeen pieces – portraits of Italian rulers in the period of great migrations and the early Middle Ages – made it perfectly clear that they are pieces of a relief series scattered at an unknown date. The four “character heads” without caption, which deviate in theme from the series, are typical items of Venetian baroque sculpture.The search for the provenance of the reliefs led the author to the collector and art patron Miklós Jankovich (1773–1846), who possessed sixty-two marble reliefs (or sixty-four in later sources) which represented – to quote the collection inventories ‘Hunnish, Goth, Longobard kings and their successors who reigned in Italy after the Roman emperors’ from Alaric to emperor Saint Henry. Jankovich probably bought the series from the heirs of István Marczibányi after his death in 1810. In 1836 it passed into the National Museum as part of the first Jankovich collection. The inventorying of the paintings and sculptures in the Jankovich collection was interrupted by the great flood of Pest in spring 1838, and that must be the cause why the relief series was not included in the stock of the museum and its provenance got gradually forgotten. In 1924 the reliefs kept in the repository of the Collection of Antiquities as “insignificant items for the museum” not belonging to its collecting profile began to be sorted out. Thirty items were auctioned off in the Ernst Museum, twenty pieces were exchanged with László Mautner, an antiquities dealer in Budapest for an array of archaeological and historical objects. In the National Museum eleven portraits of kings and four character heads remained, delivered as “remnant” of the Historical Collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1943, from where they were transferred to the Hungarian National Gallery in 1957. The relief series from Giovanni Bonazza’s workshop once in the Jankovich collection must have been the only complete series of kings (though only known from second-hand information) which was carved after the book of engravings by the historian Emanuele Tesauro of Turin, Del regno d’Italia sotto I barbari, published in Turin in 1664. Its dispersion is an irretrievable loss.

The Sculpture Collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest has been enriched in recent years with twenty-one marble portrait reliefs carved by Giovanni Bonazza (1654–1736) and his workshop. Fifteen reliefs were transferred within the institution and six were purchased from a private collection, but the identical creator and size, the uniform plaster framing and the themes of seventeen pieces – portraits of Italian rulers in the period of great migrations and the early Middle Ages – made it perfectly clear that they are pieces of a relief series scattered at an unknown date. The four “character heads” without caption, which deviate in theme from the series, are typical items of Venetian baroque sculpture.The search for the provenance of the reliefs led the author to the collector and art patron Miklós Jankovich (1773–1846), who possessed sixty-two marble reliefs (or sixty-four in later sources) which represented – to quote the collection inventories ‘Hunnish, Goth, Longobard kings and their successors who reigned in Italy after the Roman emperors’ from Alaric to emperor Saint Henry. Jankovich probably bought the series from the heirs of István Marczibányi after his death in 1810. In 1836 it passed into the National Museum as part of the first Jankovich collection. The inventorying of the paintings and sculptures in the Jankovich collection was interrupted by the great flood of Pest in spring 1838, and that must be the cause why the relief series was not included in the stock of the museum and its provenance got gradually forgotten. In 1924 the reliefs kept in the repository of the Collection of Antiquities as “insignificant items for the museum” not belonging to its collecting profile began to be sorted out. Thirty items were auctioned off in the Ernst Museum, twenty pieces were exchanged with László Mautner, an antiquities dealer in Budapest for an array of archaeological and historical objects. In the National Museum eleven portraits of kings and four character heads remained, delivered as “remnant” of the Historical Collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1943, from where they were transferred to the Hungarian National Gallery in 1957. The relief series from Giovanni Bonazza’s workshop once in the Jankovich collection must have been the only complete series of kings (though only known from second-hand information) which was carved after the book of engravings by the historian Emanuele Tesauro of Turin, Del regno d’Italia sotto I barbari, published in Turin in 1664. Its dispersion is an irretrievable loss.

O presente texto tem por objeto de análise as características dos programas da televisão francesa que abordaram a temática das favelas da cidade do Rio de Janeiro/Brasil, em documentos que foram ao ar entre abril de 1964 e maio de 2003. Não se analisarão as imagens propriamente ditas, ou seja, os aspectos particulares pelos quais as cenas e/ou quadros foram construídos, mas identificar-se-ão características próprias dos documentos audiovisuais que trataram a temática das favelas, em relação aos programas, temas abordados, duração e horário da emissão. Foram utilizadas duas bases de dados da Inathèque de France, a saber: a base do Dépôt Legal e os Archives INA TV (IMAGO). A análise dos resultados sugere que, na TV francesa, o ícone predominante da sociedade carioca é o de uma sociedade dicotômica, ricos de um lado, e pobres na favela. Esse ícone foi construído através de diversos programas, em que imagens e cenas cotidianas das favelas, sob o gênero de noticiários e magazines, foram transmitidas em boa parte entre 11h31min e 13h30min, nos canais TF1, FR2 e FR3 (70% do total das emissões). Gêneros mais longos, como documentários, com tendência a produzir um quadro de análise e propor uma explicação por vezes mais abrangente, se fizeram presentes, em geral, após 22:30h, nos canais FR2, FR3, Canal + e Arte. Assinala-se na conclusão que a estrutura socioespacial do Rio de Janeiro é mais complexa do que a captada pelo modelo dualista indicado pelos programas analisados. Tal matização socioespacial está ausente nos documentos audiovisuais transmitidos pela TV francesa, e isso os leva a abordar o tema da favela no Rio de Janeiro de uma visão mítico-romântica como a iconizada no filme de Marcel Camus, Orfeu Negro. Palavras-chave: Rio de Janeiro; imagem da divisão social da cidade; favelas; Inathèque de France; televisão francesa. Abstract: The objective of this article is to analyze the characteristics of French television broadcasts that approach the theme of favelas (slums) in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in TV programs aired from April 1964 to May 2003. The purpose was not to analyze the images per se, but to identify the characteristics of audiovisuals dealing with the issue of favelas, in terms of the programs, the themes covered, duration, and the time of the day in which the programs were broadcasted. Two different data basis were used from the Inathèque de France, namely the Dépôt Legal and the Archives INA TV (IMAGO). Analysis of the results suggests a sharp social division in Rio de Janeiro through the image of the favelas as reported on French TV under the genre of news broadcasts and magazines, mostly aired from 11:31 to13:30 PM), on channels TF1, FR2, and FR3 (70% of broadcasts). Longer genres such as documentaries, tending to produce a more in-depth analysis and sometimes proposing a broader explanation of the phenomenon were generally only aired after 10:30 PM, both on the FR2, FR3, Canal+ and Arte channels. The conclusion highlights that Rio de Janeiro’s socio-spatial structure is more complex than that captured by such a dualistic model. The city’s socio-spatial nuances are lacking in the audiovisual programs broadcasted by French TV, and the approach to the favela issue is thus based on a mythical-romantic view as portrayed in Black Orpheus, by Marcel Camus. Keywords: Rio de Janeiro; social division image; slums; Inathèque de France; television broadcasts.

Mit Mythen Leben, the 2004 study of Roman sarcophagi by Paul Zanker and Björn Ewald, has appeared (with updated references) in English. This is a cause for gladness among all Anglophones engaged in the teaching of ancient art, because for non-German readers there was frankly nothing to match the intellectual scope and illustrative quality of Zanker–Ewald. Our only regret may be that students will find this explanation of the imagery on the sarcophagi so convincing that further debate seems futile. It is well known that Roman sarcophagi, of which thousands survive from the second and third centuries ad, have had a ‘presence’ or ‘afterlife’ in Western art history for many centuries: some were even re-used for Christian burials (the tale of one such case in Viterbo, the so-called ‘Bella Galiana’ sarcophagus, might be one addendum to the bibliography here). But what did they once signify? Many were produced in marble workshops of the eastern Mediterranean, from which the suspicion arises that Roman customers may not have exercised much discrimination when it came to selecting a subject or decorative scheme. (Our authors rather sidestep the question of how much was carved at sites of origin, such as Aphrodisias, then completed – with portrait features added? – in Rome.) Accepting, however, that an elaborate sarcophagus was a considerable investment – the cost calculated as about six months’ or even a year's salary for a captain in the Praetorian Guard – and supposing that the imagery were more than a status symbol, we are left with essentially two options. One is to follow the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont and others in analysing the iconography in terms of its clues to Roman beliefs about the afterlife. For certain images of myth this seems to work very well – the story of Alcestis, for example; for others, rather abstruse allegories must be sought: what eschatology is lodged in Medea's tragedy, or a scene of Achilles on Skyros? The alternative is to follow Zanker and Ewald in supposing that the sarcophagi do not so much represent the belief systems of the deceased as offer a sort of visual counselling to the bereaved. Hence the title – living with myths, not dying with them: for the regular occasions on which Romans were obliged to remember and honour the dead (parentalia, rosaria, etc.), sarcophagi on display in family burial enclosures provided ‘encouragement to free association’ (31) in various therapeutic and consolatory ways. These of course encompass some of Cumont's reconstructions of Stoic comfort and so on – but with its emphasis upon the response of viewers, the Zanker–Ewald approach clearly allows more flexibility of significance. To say that the message often reduces to ‘it could be worse’ is a brutal summary of the sympathetic and subtle readings expounded in this book. Yet occasionally one could wish for more sophistry. For example, in discussing the consolatory potential of images of Niobe and her unfortunate offspring – a ‘massacre of the innocents’ with obvious pertinence to mors immatura – the authors allude (74) to the curious persuasive strategy deployed by Achilles when he, at last in a mood to yield up the mangled body of Hector, invites the grief-stricken Priam to supper (Il. 24.603 ff.). As Malcolm Willcock long ago showed (CQ 14 [1964], 141 ff.), Achilles resorts to a formulaic paradeigma: ‘You must do this, because X, who was in more or less the same situation as you, and a more significant person, did it.’ Only in this the case the a fortiori argument relies upon a rather implausible twist to the usual story, namely that Niobe, having witnessed the deaths of her twelve children – and with their corpses still unburied, since everyone in the vicinity has been turned to stone – adjourns to dinner. No other telling of the myth mentions this detail: indeed, Niobe herself is usually the one turned to stone. Of course this version suits Achilles well enough: if Niobe lost all her children but not her appetite, why should Priam, who has lost merely one of his many sons and daughters, hesitate to share a meal? But did Homer expect his audience to be disconcerted by such mythical manipulation, or was it typical of what happened when myth served as consolation? And if Achilles/Homer may resort to such embroidery, did educated Romans feel inclined to do likewise? Was this part of the presence of myth in ‘everyday life’?

Paul Cornell’s work for the ‘Big Two’ U.S. comic publishers transfers a distinctly British (mostly English) sensibility into a field where cues normally revolve around American cultural iconography and values. The key to his authorship is Cornell’s homespun method which, unlike 1970s and 1980s efforts of Marvel’s UK wing that transplanted American characters into a postcard-like Britain, explores a British dimension of the Marvel Universe that offers a challenge to the codes of that realm. Whether working with established heroes such as Captain Britain, twists on archetypes like Knight and Squire (English analogues of Batman and Robin), or superheroic ‘big guns’ like Wolverine, Cornell writes against tired, automatic canonicity. This paper mainly focuses on the directly British representations in the Cornell titles Captain Britain and MI-13 (2008-9) and Knight and Squire (2010).

Abstract In 2007, Captain America, or Cap to his peers, died outside the courthouse where he would answer for leading a band of superheroes against the government’s Superhuman Registration Act in a plot line Fox and Friends took issue with, condemning Marvel Comics for killing Cap “while we’re at war,” referring to President George W. Bush’s war on terror. In 2008, former sidekick Bucky took up the Cap banner. Legacy characters are common in comics, but fans noted an unexpected addition to the costume: a handgun. Cap’s shield, a symbol of defense, now had an offensive accent. News media outlets lauded the new gun as a “sign of the times,” as Rolling Stone said, considering it a critique on the post-9/11 cultural landscape, but fan communities felt uneasy about the decision. The gun’s presence on Bucky Cap’s belt marks a continuous period of exceptionality, the kind Giorgio Agamben warns against in State of Exception. When Bucky’s predecessor would return to the role of Captain America, the sidearm would no longer remain, but the character would confront issues related to guns, and media and fans would once again respond. Even though Cap only encounters guns a few times during the 2010s, reception to these moments is more significant than that of characters who regularly use lethal weapons. Fetishistic emphasis on Captain America’s gun exposes the state of exception inherent in all superhero media, prompting a digital discourse across professional and amateur platforms on gun-related subjects. This project analyzes how superhero media portray gun use and the subsequent reception from both news media and digital fandom. A sampling of comics, television series, and films are textually analyzed, along with digital news media and online fan forums pertaining to those examples.

In the context of increasing familiarity with mainstream superhero comics and their characters, a wide range of readers are being exposed to the values regarding gender and social control being communicated in this genre. Therefore, it is important to assess whether social control is signified differently for males and females in superhero comics. This presentation will begin with a discussion of why it is important to study comics and graphic novels. I will then outline the concept of social control and criminological theories centered on this idea before demonstrating why superheroes may be understood as agents of social control. This will bring me to a discussion of preliminary findings of a qualitative content analysis of issues of Batman, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Ms Marvel, Justice League of America, and New Avengers comics released from May to October 2007. In examining the leadership positions, the formal and informal methods employed, those over whom social control is exercised, and relative success of each superhero in these issues, I am seeking to assess whether social control is portrayed as being exercised by male and female superheroes in different ways and to identify how this happens. The results of this content analysis will be compared with previous studies of women police officers to assess whether representations of female agents of social control in superhero comics are consistent with the experiences of real‐life criminal justice practitioners. Finally, the reasons for and implications of the nature of such media constructions will be briefly explored to encourage other students to study comics and graphic novels.

Résumé Le présent article vise à dégager les procédés, dans des textes à la visée narrative explicite, qui problématisent expressément et redéfinissent l’autorité narrative, sans pour autant sacrifier la captatio illusionis, c’est-à-dire l’adhésion du lecteur à la fiction. Les trois textes retenus, à dominante événementielle mais savants – Un an de Jean Echenoz (1997), L’Histoire de Pi de Yann Martel (2002), Lauve le pur de Richard Millet (2000) –, s’inscrivent dans la mouvance du retour au récit ; cette narrativité, revue à la lumière des acquis de la modernité, présente divers degrés et positionnements de l’autorité narrative et attire ainsi l’attention sur les modalités d’adhésion et les enjeux de crédibilité du discours fictionnel. Nous estimons que cette réflexion caractérise précisément tout un pan du roman contemporain.

Don't be afraid - it's only a flesh wound. The organs are intact although there is a threat of amputation, which we all know can easily be tolerated if the remaining bones are plentiful and sound and they are held in place by a tough skin. Where there's a will there's a will not and the National Museum of Australia (NMA) will not lie down in the face of Australian Government attempts to cut off its funding blood and give its guts a good going over. Not yet. Not for eternity. The NMA opened in March 2001 in Canberra, Australia's national capital. The buildings were designed by ARM (Ashton Raggatt McDougall), an architectural firm based in Melbourne, with landscape design by Room 4.1.3. Like other galleries and museums constructed in the last 20 years such as the Gugenheim in Bilbao and Libeskind's Jewish Museum, the NMA buildings and landscape are as much an exhibit as that which they contain. In fact the Jewish Museum first opened without containing anything other than space; the proper concern of architecture, some say. The strong colours and shapes of the NMA stand out in the grey, Modernist-inspired, concrete environment that is Canberra - some say this place is a perversion of Walter and Marion Burley Griffin's original plans for a garden wonderland; others marvel that the spirit of the original plan has even partially survived. I say, good bones and plenty of them. Bernard Tschumi says that society expects architecture to reflect its ideals and domesticate its deeper fears(72). This is certainly the brand of architecture that the Australian government thought it was ordering when it allocated funds for the building of a national museum. Not that Aussies have fears which need domesticating. No fear. A few secrets, some dirty laundry, a scar or two. But it can be argued that ARM have excoriated fear; they have tattooed it across the national forehead and said “read me if you can and if you dare”. ARM have provided a building which appears to be mostly skin. Hide the national scars under a national symbol that is all surface. A skin, but one which encases an undifferentiated body; of work, of nationhood, of stuff. The skin of the NMA is a site for writing; giant Braille dots the surface of the building, a confusion between writing and reading. For most, the dots are impossible to read – too large and too high to touch with human fingers and indecipherable by most who visit even if the scale and location would allow them to be touched. How did they have the nerve ending to write a writing that only hands can read; only hands so big that they have lost the delicate sense of touch, thereby rendering the Braille unreadable. Make a ceiling so high that it takes twenty million to change a light-bulb. Make a statement so clever that no-one gets it. Along with the Braille, the word eternity winds under and over, across and through the guts of the NMA. Howard Raggatt of ARM writes that having designed the shapes of the building forms, they “laid them out like dressmaking patterns, to press upon them this single stencilled script” – using software they superimposed the forms over a graphic of Arthur Stace’s Eternity and wrapped the Museum in it (45). Arthur Stace claimed that he was divinely inspired to write the word in ephemeral chalk an estimated 500,000 times on the footpaths of Sydney over a thirty-year period. He summoned the citizens to acknowledge the power of God. Raggatt says that its use on the outside of the NMA “encourages our hope to read this land”. And the text thickens. Is the writing of eternity on the national skin of the NMA a tattoo or stigmata? Derrida talks of these – tattoo and stigmata - in Writing and Difference in discussing the relationship between critical discourse and clinical discourse and focuses on Antonin Artuad’s “theatre of cruelty” (Artaud also inspired Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the body without organs). Derrida begins with an exploration of the tendency to associate the work of art with the mental state of the artist. However from his specific critique of structuralism, he moves into much broader territory. Artuad’s attempts to make a verbal, not a grammatical theatre, “a graphism which …[is] an incarnation of the letter and a bloody tattoo” are judged by Derrida (and Artaud himself) to have been wanting precisely because such a tattoo “paralyzes gesture and silences the voice … represses the shout and the chance for a still unorganised voice” (235). Where the text (or in Artaud’s terms, breath) is “spirited/stolen…in order to place it in an order” the text is tattoo and it cannot hope to overturn the effects of power because it is on the surface rather than in opposition to it. By contrast, stigmata is a wound that cuts beneath the surface, “substituted for the text” that “undertakes neither a renewal, nor a critique” but “intends the effective, active, and non-theoretical destruction of Western civilization and its religions” (227). Text as stigmata is spirited/inspired rather than spirited/stolen. Granted, this section of Writing and Difference speaks of Artaud’s work in the context of theatre, however the theatrical metaphor is appropriate for the NMA – stand in the middle of the Garden of Australian Dreams surrounded by viewing platforms, and you understand that you are in the middle of a performance. But what does eternity do in this arena, on and under this skin? I have already described the writing of eternity around the NMA’s structure. Within the museum (in its stomach, it seems, when one seeks it out) is the small exhibition space built around the theme of eternity. Of course, it is a permanent exhibition – how could it be anything else. This space speaks to the people aspect of the NMA’s land, nation, people themes through “emotions” of separation, mystery, hope, joy, loneliness, thrill, devotion, fear, chance, and passion. The exhibits here are the stories of individuals. The black dress of Baby Azaria Chamberlain (who is alleged to have been killed by a dingo, a wild Australian native dog) (mystery) and an elaborate costume from the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (thrill) are examples of the representations of Australian individuals. The eternity theme was chosen after the individual stories were selected and the curator realized that the NMA collection included one of the few remaining examples of Stace’s handiwork – one preserved on the back of the door of an outdoor toilet (if only there were space in this article to explore the significance of this in terms of Derrida’s linking of God and shit!). Marion Stell, the exhibition curator, writes that she believed this provided a link between the emotions as well as representing a fascinating individual story in its own right. Interestingly, the recentre view of the NMA that recommends the de/recon-struction of the Garden ofAustralian Dreams , a teleological recasting of the Circa multimedia theatre(criticized for presenting too episodic a view of Australian history) and the Horizons gallery (allegedly too limited in its presentation of the stories of migrants), commends the Eternity gallery, despite its depictions of gays and lesbians, those who have taken on the courts and won and other transgressors. The private sphere of individual lives seems too unimportant to take on? And if so, is this a strength of eternity at NMA or a weakness? Eternity slips under the radar as only such a slippery word can. And the review makes no mention of the writing on the outside of the building. How could you miss a word so big, so utterly big? Did the review panel confuse BIG with BenIGn? This word eternity, this script eternity. Inside the museum in the eternity gallery it is the street tattoo, the written surface of the traditional museum which reflects, mirror-like, what the visitor wishes to feel. There, it is Aussie icon-become-cliché. Attached firmly to the maker of the original marks, Arthur Stace, footpath font designer and illiterate messenger of God, it carries the trace of the God on whose behalf he wrote. And who in the current world political climate would dare to take on God’s messenger, no matter whose God. In that gallery it is spirited/stolen and, tattoo-like, it represses the uninhibited shout of difference through imposition of an order; the somewhat transgressive stories of individuals such as Lindy Chamberlain (Azaria’s mother, who was first convicted of her murder and then pardoned) and indeed, Arthur Stace, are rendered “safer” by the direct reproduction of Stace’s script. Originally, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, Stace’s eternity assumed auratic qualities that ironically it acquired, rather than lost, through repetition and reproduction on Sydney’s footpaths. However it’s use more recently– remember it was emblazoned on both the Sydney Harbour Bridge for the Millenium celebrations and in the2000 Sydney Olympic opening ceremony for its ability to call up a trace of the sublime – have turned it into an Australian brand name, designed to re/produce thoughts of a grand and glorious Australia, an Australia which neither Lindy Chamberlain nor Arthur Stace might have experienced. (The City of Sydney has gone so far as to copyright the Stace eternity script). But outside, scarred into the skin, too big to read, too black to ignore, eternity operates paradoxically at a more subtle level. Appearing as if pure ornament, black squiggles on a blatantly referential structure, with this use of Stace’s eternity ARM have tackled the issue of timelessness and architecture through invoking time in its entirety. They have invoked the quasi-religious contemplative response that the Stace rendering of the word engenders when it takes us by surprise. Eternity written on the surface of the NMA is stigmata, Stace’s eternity spirited/inspired rather than spirited/stolen. It is a flow of meaning that invokes the evangelistic incantations of Stace at a size which multiplies the possible meanings through its appeal to illiteracy and illegibility, and with a resilience which refuses to be washed away by reviews and revisions of the Museum. Derrida says that “to overthrow the power of the literal work is not to erase the letter, but only to subordinate it to the incidence of illegibility or at least of illiteracy” (225). Eternity. Legend has it that for a while some larrikin followed in Stace's footsteps changing eternity to maternity. Perhaps in the fullness of eternity a Government-appointed review panel can retrospectively declare the stigmata a harmless word better suited to a bland Australia. Like tomato or cricket or captain cook. For the foreseeable past and future, it remains eternity. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Viking, 1972Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London:Routledge, 2001. Raggatt, Howard. "Rabbits, Dogs and Butterflies." National Museum of Australia: Tangled Destinies. Melbourne: Images, 2002. 44-47. Stell, Marion, ed. Eternity: Stories from the Emotional Heart of Australia. Canberra: National Museum of Australia,2001.Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge: MIT P,1994. Links http://www.a-r-m.com.au/ http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/projects/pro.html?ID=2 http://www.nma.gov.au/ http://www.nma.gov.au/aboutus/council_and_committees/review http://www.room413.com.au/Museum/Museum.html http://www.skewarch.com/architects/gerhy/gerhy-gug.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Williams, Jordan. "The Stigmata or the Tattoo" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/06-williams.php>. APA Style Williams, J. (2004, Jan 12). The Stigmata or the Tattoo. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/06-williams.php>

As a genre, science fiction deals with possible futures, imagining places and technologies that typically do not exist in audiences’ own lives. Science fiction film takes this directive a step further by creating visual representations of these futures and possibilities, presenting audiences with imagined ideas of what new technologies or unfamiliar places might look like. Thus, although any science fiction text can describe sociocultural and technological futures, science fiction film goes a step further by providing images that viewers do not have to envision for themselves. This difference can enable science fiction films to deliver even more incisive stories and commentaries on futuristic technologies as “sociotechnical assemblages” (Gillespie 18) – that is, as machines whose possibilities stem from humans’ interactions with them as much as from the technologies themselves.Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra maintain that today’s society is already interested in a real-world version of sociotechnologies: they call this interest the “prosthetic impulse” (4). For Smith and Morra, the prosthetic impulse can denote either “ways that the body and technology come into contact with one another” (4) or else any exploration of boundaries between technoculture and “the body, its histories, and its mutability” (6). However, Smith and Morra also warn that the prosthetic impulse often creates unreasonable expectations of what technology can accomplish: a prosthetic can “assume an epic status that is out of proportion with its abilities to fulfill our ambitions for it” (Smith and Morra 2), and the drive to “enhance” human bodies’ capabilities can signify beliefs that abled bodies are the standard, desirable norm (S. Smith).Science fiction films in turn often pick up on real-world ideas such as Smith and Morra’s prosthetic impulse as new ways of visualizing possible futures. Knowledgeable fans could undoubtedly list several examples of prosthetics in favorite sci-fi movies, including those donned by Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker, Star Trek’s Borg collective, Mad Max: Fury Road’s Imperator Furiosa, and many more. However, these films can also heighten the prosthetic’s immoderately “epic status” (Smith and Morra 2) and result in “our fantasies for technological possibility [being] played out across depictions of impairment” (Hung par. 10). In science fiction film, then, the prosthetic impulse can strongly reinforce problematic assumptions about what human beings “need” to have added, augmented, or replaced in order to function according to subjective norms.Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, though, expands the implications of the prosthetic impulse even further by broadening the types of bodies, losses, and functions that we imagine prosthetics can address. Set in a dystopian future where human-driven climate change has decimated the environment, world governments have instituted mandatory birth control, and socioeconomic stratification has skyrocketed, A.I. Artificial Intelligence speaks directly to Vivian Carol Sobchack’s 2006 concern that “theoretical use of the prosthetic metaphor tends to transfer agency [from] human actors to human artifacts” (23), though it does so in a novel way.The film’s human characters, or “human actors” to use Sobchack’s term, expend their creativity and resources not to address the issues of environmental catastrophe, starvation, and class warfare that humans themselves have created: instead, they turn to manufacturing advanced robots, or “mechas”, that are literally “human artifacts” (Sobchack 23) created to help humanity avoid the debilitating consequences of its own destructive actions. As a result, the film’s mecha characters, seen most clearly in the “child-substitute mecha” David and the mecha prostitute Gigolo Joe, are positioned as prosthetic humans intended to fill social roles and functions that human beings themselves are incapable of fully satisfying.The Prosthetic HumanEven though it offers a new angle to this concept, A.I. Artificial Intelligence is hardly the only science fiction film concerned with some configuration of the prosthetic impulse. In fact, several other science fiction films incorporate one of three other versions, each building up to more and more complex possibilities before we reach the prosthetic human as envisioned in A.I.The first – and arguably most common – treatment of the prosthetic impulse in science fiction film is found in the partial prosthetic, where technology is depicted as replacing or repairing one visible part of the perceptible bodily whole. Common versions of the partial prosthetic include replacements for limbs or even certain organs, with examples such as Luke Skywalker’s prosthetic hand in Star Wars, the techno-organic Borg collective in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Bucky Barnes’s metal arm in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and other Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films, and Furiosa’s metal arm in Mad Max: Fury Road. The partial prosthetic in science fiction film is the most analogous to real-world prosthetics, despite problematic conflations created by this comparison (S. Smith), and the partial prosthetic is also the one that Mailee Hung is describing when she maintains that in science fiction film “it is technological, or even technophilic, fantasy that is being explored rather than the spectrum of human ability” (par. 11).A second treatment of the prosthetic impulse in science fiction film is visible in the full-body prosthetic, which denotes a technology that completely encloses or envelops the human body. Anne McCaffrey offers an early example of this type with her “Ship Who Sang” series (1961–1969), where “brainships” are created when children with severe physical disabilities but above-average brains can be rescued from euthanasia by having their minds linked with spaceships. Thankfully, later science fiction narratives tend to avoid most of the eugenicist and ableist overtones plaguing McCaffrey’s work. Science fiction films also offer examples of full-body prosthetics that can be departed or disengaged from at will, and these prosthetics may be used to enhance an abled body rather than housing a disabled one. Examples of full-body prosthetics in science fiction film include the boxing robots of Real Steel (2011), the Jaegers of Pacific Rim (2013) and Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), the genetically-engineered alien bodies operated by remote human pilots in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), and the police robot MOOSE in Chappie (2015), among others. In these cases, the full-body prosthetic is a technological entity that must be interfaced with by a human consciousness – and sometimes the whole human body – in order to perform some function that the human body alone cannot accomplish.A third way of depicting the prosthetic impulse in science fiction film can be found in what Victor Grech calls Pinocchio Syndrome, or a “reverse prosthetic impulse” (265). Here technological, non-human characters “desire to become human” (Grech 263) and often attempt to gain humanity in the form of a human body, “its histories, and its mutability” (Smith and Morra 6) that will replace their own mechanical components. Examples of this third type include Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994 television, 1994–2002 films) and NDR-113/Andrew of the novelette “Bicentennial Man” (1967), the novel Positronic Man (1992), and the film Bicentennial Man (1999). Data is an android, and Andrew is a service robot, who both explore what it would mean to “be” human and actively pursue different means of achieving humanness – Data through human emotions and NDR-113/Andrew through a fully human body.All three of these science fiction versions – the partial prosthetic, the full prosthetic, and the reverse prosthetic impulse or Pinocchio Syndrome – tend to reinforce Smith and Morra’s warning that the prosthetic, both as an aid and as a technology, can “assume an epic status that is out of proportion with its abilities to fulfill our ambitions for it” (2). Put differently, just because these technologies exist within the films’ storyworlds does not mean that they can fix the characters’ or even the worlds’ problems, and the plots of many science fiction films actually stem from these assumptions.Of these three versions, Grech’s “reverse prosthetic impulse” (265) might initially seem the most applicable to A.I. Artificial Intelligence, particularly because most of the film follows David’s quest to find the Blue Fairy of the Pinocchio tale and petition her to make him “a real boy” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). However, even Grech’s term does not fully cover what Spielberg’s film is attempting through its characters and its setting. Unlike robot characters who embody Grech’s reverse prosthetic impulse, David is not attempting to “become” human: instead, he articulates his struggle as the desire to “become real”, which prioritizes not humanness via a human body but instead David’s self-perceived ability to better fulfill a particular role within a nuclear family. Moreover, unlike the ways in which Data and NDR-113/Andrew fulfill primarily career-adjacent roles in their respective storyworlds – Data as a ship’s officer, NDR-113/Andrew initially as a caretaker and butler – A.I. Artificial Intelligence depicts a world in which mechas are both an “essential” form of labor in a decimated global economy, but can also be constructed to fill specifically social roles such as child or lover. Where robots like Data and NDR-113/Andrew enact a reverse prosthetic impulse in their yearning to “become” human (Grech 263), thus treating humanness and the human body as prosthetics to technology, David as a “child-substitute mecha” and Gigolo Joe as a “lover robot” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence) are more like prosthetic humans.In A.I. Artificial Intelligence, humans attempt to replace, enhance, or augment specific interpersonal relationships using “human artifacts” that function like Sobchack’s “human actors” – only, better than those human actors ever could be. David is continually described as a child who demonstrates unconditional love but never loses his temper, catches ill, or grows older; Gigolo Joe describes mecha prostitutes like himself as “the guiltless pleasures of the lonely human being” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence) and promises that they will never get pregnant, clingy, or tired of sex. Because David is a “toy boy” and Gigolo Joe is a “boy toy” (Sobchack 2) – both meant to enhance different types of human relationships without the inconveniences that a human actor would bring into the picture – A.I. Artificial Intelligence is also imagining sociocultural structures like the nuclear family or the heterosexual romantic relationship as the wholes, the social bodies, that the prosthetic human will supposedly repair. Here the prosthetic impulse becomes human beings’ drive to use reparative technologies to replace other human beings entirely, rather than simply parts or functions of the human body.David as Prosthetic HumanDavid’s role as a prosthetic human meant to repair or augment human relationships is made clear even before the character himself first appears onscreen. Instead, the film’s initial scene follows Professor Allen Hobby, the scientist who leads the team that later creates David, as he pitches a new mecha of “a qualitatively different order” to a skeptical audience (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). Hobby contends that his new robot will be capable of love “like a child for its parents” instead of the “sensuality simulators” already available (A.I. Artificial Intelligence), and moreover, that this kind of love “will be the key by which they [mechas] acquire a kind of sub-consciousness never before achieved. An inner world of metaphor, of intuition, of self-motivated reasoning, of dreams” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). However, these plans are quickly challenged by a female scientist who poses a moral question: “Isn’t the real conundrum [whether] you can get a human to love them back?” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). Hobby then cycles through three responses to his peer’s question, all of which point to the ways in which David is positioned as a prosthetic human.First, Hobby stresses that this new mecha will be “a perfect child caught in a freeze-frame: always loving, never ill, never changing” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). His claim implies that families want or need a perfect child, and also that childhood perfection entails unwavering physical health, a permanently positive attitude, and unshakeable devotion to the parent(s) – all features that a real human child, as Sobchack’s “human actor”, cannot provide. Then too, Hobby’s claim that David is a child caught in “freeze-frame” perfection also hints that, as a form of technology, a prosthetic human supersedes many of a biological human’s limitations: just moments later, for example, the film’s audience learns that David’s adoptive family the Swintons have a young son, Martin, who has been placed in a cryogenic chamber until his terminal illness can be treated. For David, being “caught in a freeze-frame” of eternal and “perfect” childhood is beneficial to the Swintons, who will then experience his love and participation in their family unit forever – unlike Martin, who when similarly “frozen” cannot express or reciprocate familial affection at all, and so has been superseded by David.Hobby’s second response to the female scientist’s moral question is to assert that David, as a “child-substitute mecha” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence), will answer both a market need and a human one: because world governments issue a limited number of pregnancy licenses, Hobby argues, mechas like David may become many families’ only way of having children. Here, the family unit is imagined as incomplete without offspring, to the extent that there is a species-wide “human need” for children (A.I. Artificial Intelligence) even though global catastrophes such as climate change and mass starvation are unavoidable threats to real children’s future welfare. To this end, Hobby positions a “child-substitute mecha” like David as a prosthetic for the family unit, filling in for children without taking up any of the resources needed to raise an actual member of the population who will then face and inherit unfixable global issues. Moreover, toward the end of A.I. audiences also learn that David was created to look like Hobby’s own dead son, meaning that this entire line of child-substitute mechas has stemmed from Hobby’s own grief – and perhaps his need of a prosthetic to repair it.Finally, Hobby’s last response to his peer’s challenge is to ask: “In the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). This rhetorical question reiterates how Hobby built David, reminding Hobby’s challenger – and by extension the film’s audience – that human actors are technology’s creators. The question’s rhetorical nature also implies that a creator’s status translates to their right to use such created technologies however they choose – regardless of the potential harm to either the prosthetic human or the "real" humans around them.Thus, although most of A.I. Artificial Intelligence does follow David’s journey to become “real”, it is important to realize that this quest actually stems from his being a prosthetic human rather than just Pinocchio Syndrome or a “reverse prosthetic impulse” (Grech 265). The very features of unconditional love, eternal innocence, and unchanging health that initially made David so attractive to the grieving Swintons are the same attributes that later lead to the family’s hostility when Martin does recover, and David is eventually abandoned in the woods – the prosthetic human child ousted for the “real” human child he was intended to replace. David’s longing to become “a real boy” so that Monica Swinton will return his love and welcome him home stems from his realization that he was always just a “technological substitution” (Hung par. 9) for Martin, and because of this, David’s desire to “become real” is better understood as him seeking to become a true part of the whole nuclear family instead of remaining a replacement or attachment to it. Rather than just “desire to become human” (Grech 263), David seeks to move from being a “human artifact” to becoming a “human actor” (Sobchack 23).Gigolo Joe as Prosthetic HumanWhile Gigolo Joe also serves as a prosthetic human in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, he does so in different ways than David. As a “child-substitute mecha”, David was created for intentionally prosthetic ends: even though he “can never be anything more than an approximate substitute” (Rosenbaum 74), he was still made specifically to repair or complete family units like the Swintons, rendering them “whole” by taking the place of an unavailable human child. As a mecha prostitute, though, Gigolo Joe was not created with prosthetic ends in mind: he was made to augment or supplement sexual experiences on a temporary basis, not to replace a long-term human partner or to make a sexual or romantic relationship whole by his presence within it. Also in obvious contrast to David, Gigolo Joe addresses sexual appetite rather than a need for filial love, provides short-term pleasure instead of a long-term connection, and is never intended to be seen by the film’s human characters as a human man instead of a male-shaped mecha. These are crucial differences between the two mechas’ purposes, functions, and target audiences, and Sobchack sums up this disparity by describing David and Gigolo Joe as two different types of “love machines” that remain “[s]uspended between an ironic Kubrickian critique of technological man and his Spielbergian redemption” (12–13).However, these differences between David and Gigolo Joe also translate into their being different kinds of prosthetic human. Where David was created to be a prosthetic human in the context of a childless family, replacing a needed member in order to make that family whole, Gigolo Joe takes the initiative to position himself as a prosthetic human, substituting the technology of his mecha body for the various physiological and/or emotional shortcomings of absent human sexual partners. Then too, where David rejects and attempts to outstrip his status as a “technological substitution” (Hung par. 9) for a human being, Gigolo Joe seems to exult in his part as substitute for human being.Audiences are shown this difference immediately. Where David is introduced through descriptions by Hobby, the scientist who created him and knows exactly what he wants David to accomplish, Gigolo Joe is introduced in person, alongside a nervous young woman who has apparently solicited him for sex. This unnamed woman admits that she has never had sex with a mecha before, and Gigolo Joe quickly discovers bruises from physical abuse by a human partner. In implied contrast to this unseen human partner, Gigolo Joe remains quiet, respectful, and gentle as he navigates the young woman’s communication of her fears and desires: he also assures her first that “once you’ve had a lover robot, you’ll never want a real man again” and then that “you are a goddess ... [and] you deserve much better in your life. You deserve me” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). Both implicitly and explicitly, then, Gigolo Joe promises to provide his client with sexual and pseudo-romantic fulfillment: Sobchack frames this appeal as Gigolo Joe's ability to "satisfy every female sexual need and desire (including the illusion of romance) without wearing out” (5). But Gigolo Joe can only accomplish all of this because he is a perceptible, self-aware substitution for a human man – and a substitution that does not replicate the intentions and behaviors of his clients' "real" human partners.Gigolo Joe returns frequently to this idea that substitution is positive. Later, for instance, he explains to several fascinated teenage boys that mecha prostitutes “are the guiltless pleasures of the lonely human being. You’re not going to get us pregnant or have us to supper with Mommy and Daddy” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence), emphasizing that humans do not need to fulfill any social obligations toward mechas precisely because they are not “real” lovers. Gigolo Joe also pitches mecha sex workers by reminding his listeners that “We work under you, we work on you, and we work for you. Man made us better at what we do than was ever humanly possible” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence), suggesting that a substitute sexual partner will offer technological advantages over their human counterparts.Through dialogues and exchanges such as these, Gigolo Joe positions himself as a prosthetic human, acknowledging that he and his sex worker peers were not really meant to “repair” or “complete” human relationships even as he also maintains that mechas do replace human partners in important ways, even if temporarily. However, Gigolo Joe also recognizes the realities of being a prosthetic human in ways that David seems incapable of. For instance, when one of his clients is murdered by her human partner for seeking a replacement lover, Gigolo Joe realizes immediately that the man won’t even be suspected while Gigolo Joe himself automatically takes the blame. Similarly, Gigolo Joe is the one who can tell David that Monica Swinton “loves what you do for her, as my customers love what it is I do for them. But she does not love you. . . You were designed and built specific like the rest of us” (A.I. Artificial Intelligence). David rejects this warning, demonstrating that his creation as a prosthetic human has made him impervious to that same reality, but Gigolo Joe’s positioning himself as a prosthetic human has made him aware that being “designed and built specific” to meet humans’ needs does not negate the dangers that come along with a designed, perfected form of substitution.Prosthetic Humans and the End of HumanityThe ending of AI: Artificial Intelligence has baffled critics and audiences alike since its theatrical release. Are the alien-like Specialists real, or does David imagine these beings as a means of explaining away Hobby’s entire line of child-substitute mechas? Does David actually see Monica again, or is this the robotic equivalent of a comforting dream before he dies? Frances Flannery-Dailey outlines nine possible ways of understanding how the film ends before noting that its ambiguity and length often frustrate audiences, leaving them with a negative impression of the film.No matter which way we try to explain the ending of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, though, it is worth noting the presence of the Specialists, who claim that they are advanced beings that evolved from mechas following humanity’s extinction. Though Flannery-Daily correctly questions whether the Specialists actually exist or else are just dream-specters of David's “death”, their presence at the end of the film suggests at least the possibility of a distant future in which the prosthetic human has completely overtaken and supplanted the “real” humans that David so wanted to join. This potential ending, as well as David’s and Gigolo Joe’s poor treatment by "real" humans throughout the film, all demonstrate that the prosthetic humans in A.I. Artificial Intelligence suffer from more than the “epic status” that Smith and Morra assign to real-world prosthetics (2), or even the shortcomings visible in other versions of the prosthetic impulse as depicted in science fiction films. Instead, A.I. Artificial Intelligence becomes bleak when we realize that these prosthetic humans actually function very well, even when (wrongly) touted as miracle technologies (Smith and Morra 2), and that instead it is humans, their needs, and their visions that have fallen sadly short. Both David and Gigolo Joe do exactly what they were "designed and built specific” to do (A.I. Artificial Intelligence) and more, yet humanity has destroyed both them and itself by the end of the film regardless.ReferencesA.I. Artificial Intelligence. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2001. Flannery-Dailey, Frances. "Robot Heavens and Robot Dreams: Ultimate Reality in A.I. and Other Recent Films." Journal of Religion & Film 7.2 (2016). 1 July 2019 <https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol7/iss2/7>.Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.Grech, Victor. "The Pinocchio Syndrome and the Prosthetic Impulse." Intelligence Unbound: The Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds. Eds. Russel Blackford and Damien Broderick. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. 263–278.Hung, Mailee. “We Are More than Our Machines.” Bitch Media (24 Aug. 2017). 2 July 2019 <https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/more-our-machines/aesthetics-and-prosthetics-science-fiction>.Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "A Matter of Life and Death: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Directed by Steven Spielberg)." Film Quarterly 65.3 (2012): 74-78.Smith, Susan. "‘Limbitless Solutions’: The Prosthetic Arm, Iron Man and the Science Fiction of Technoscience." Medical Humanities 42.4 (2016): 259–264.Smith, Marquard, and Joanne Morra. “Introduction.” The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Eds. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. 1–15. Sobchack, Vivian. “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality.” The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Eds. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 17–42.Sobchack, Vivian Carol. "Love Machines: Boy Toys, Toy Boys and the Oxymorons of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence." Science Fiction Film and Television 1.1 (2009): 1–13.

Ever since I tripped over Tiddles while I was carrying a pile of discs into the studio, I’ve known it was possible to get a laugh out of gramophone records!Max Bygraves In 1978 the music critic Lester Bangs published a typically pugnacious essay with the fighting title, “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies.” Before deliciously launching into his execution of Uri Geller’s self-titled album or Rick Dees’ The Original Disco Duck, Bangs asserts that because that decade was history’s silliest, it stands to reason “that ridiculous records should become the norm instead of anomalies,” that abominations should be the best of our time (Bangs, 1978). This absurd pretzel logic sounds uncannily like Jacques Derrida’s definition of the “post” condition, since for it to arrive it begins by not arriving (Derrida 1987, 29). Lester is thinking like a poststructuralist. The oddness of the most singularly odd album out in Bangs’ greatest misses of the seventies had nothing to do with how ridiculous it was, but the fact that it even existed at all. (Bangs 1978) The album was entitled The Best of Marcel Marceao. Produced by Michael Viner the album contained four tracks, with two identical on both sides: “Silence,” which is nineteen minutes long and “Applause,” one minute. To underline how extraordinary this gramophone record is, John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1959) is cacophonous by comparison. While Bangs agrees with popular opinion that The Best of Marcel Marceao the “ultimate concept album,” he concluded that this is “one of those rare records that never dates” (Bangs, 1978). This tacet album is a good way to start thinking about the Classical Gas project, and the ironic semiotics at work in it (Tofts & Gye 2011). It too is about records that are silent and that never date. First, the album’s cover art, featuring a theatrically posed Marceau, implies the invitation to speak in the absence of speech; or, in our terms, it is asking to be re-written. Secondly, the French mime’s surname is spelled incorrectly, with an “o” rather than “u” as the final letter. As well as the caprice of an actual album by Marcel Marceau, the implicit presence and absence of the letters o and u is appropriately in excess of expectations, weird and unexpected like an early title in the Classical Gas catalogue, Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (classical-gas.com) Like a zootrope animation, it is impossible not to see the o and u flickering at one at the same time on the cover. In this duplicity it performs the conventional and logical permutation of English grammar. Silence invites difference, variation within a finite lexical set and the opportunity to choose individual items from it. Here is album cover art that speaks of presence and absence, of that which is anticipated and unexpected: a gramophone recoding without sound. In this the Marceau cover is one of Roland Barthes’ mythologies, something larger than life, structured like a language and structured out of language (Barthes 1982). This ambiguity is the perfidious grammar that underwrites Classical Gas. Images, we learned from structuralism, are codified, or rather, are code. Visual remix is a rhetorical gesture of recoding that interferes with the semiotic DNA of an image. The juxtaposition of text and image is interchangeable and requires our imagination of what we are looking at and what it might sound like. This persistent interplay of metaphor and metonymy has enabled us to take more than forty easy listening albums and republish them as mild-mannered recordings from the maverick history of ideas, from Marxism and psychoanalysis, to reception theory, poststructuralism and the writings of critical auteurs. Foucault à gogo, for instance, takes a 1965 James Last dance album and recodes it as the second volume of The History of Sexuality. In saying this, we are mindful of the ambivalence of the very possibility of this connection, to how and when the eureka moment of remix recognition occurs, if at all. Mix and remix are, after Jean Baudrillard, both precession and procession of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1983). The nature of remix is that it is always already elusive and anachronistic. Not everyone can be guaranteed to see the shadow of one text in dialogue with another, like a hi-fi palimpsest. Or another way of saying this, such an epiphany of déjà vu, of having seen this before, may happen after the fact of encounter. This anachrony is central to remix practices, from the films of Quentin Tarrantino and the “séance fictions” of Soda_Jerk, to obscure Flintstones/Goodfellas mashups on YouTube. It is also implicit in critical understandings of an improbable familiarity with the superabundance of cultural archives, the dizzying excess of an infinite record library straight out of Jorge Luis Borges’ ever-expanding imagination. Drifting through the stacks of such a repository over an entire lifetime any title found, for librarian and reader alike, is either original and remix, sometime. Metalanguages that seek to counter this ambivalence are forms of bad faith, like film spoilers Brodie’s Notes. Accordingly, this essay sets out to explain some of the generic conventions of Classical Gas, as a remix project in which an image’s semiotic DNA is rewired and recontextualised. While a fake, it is also completely real (Faith in fakes, as it happens, may well be a forthcoming Umberto Eco title in the series). While these album covers are hyperreal, realistic in excess of being real, the project does take some inspiration from an actual, rather than imaginary archive of album covers. In 2005, Jewish artist Dani Gal happened upon a 1968 LP that documented the events surrounding the Six Day War in Israel in 1967. To his surprise, he found a considerable number of similar LPs to do with significant twentieth century historical events, speeches and political debates. In the artist’s own words, the LPs collected in his Historical Record Archive (2005-ongoing) are in fact silent, since it is only their covers that are exhibited in installations of this work, signifying a potential sound that visitors must try to audition. As Gal has observed, the interactive contract of the work is derived from the audience’s instinct to “try to imagine the sounds” even though they cannot listen to them (Gal 2011, 182). Classical Gas deliberately plays with this potential yearning that Gal astutely instils in his viewer and aspiring auditor. While they can never be listened to, they can entice, after Gilles Deleuze, a “virtual co-existence” of imaginary sound that manifests itself as a contract between viewer and LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). The writer Jeffrey Sconce condensed this embrace of the virtual as something plausibly real when he pithily observed of the Classical Gas project that it is “the thrift-bin in my fantasy world. I want to play S/Z at 78 rpm” (Sconce 2011). In terms of Sconce’s spectral media interests the LPs are haunted by the trace of potential “other” sounds that have taken possession of and appropriated the covers for another use (Sconce 2000).Mimetic While most albums are elusive and metaphoric (such as Freud’s Totem and Taboo, or Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference), some titles do make a concession to a tantalizing, mimetic literalness (such as Das Institut fur Sozialforschung). They display a trace of the haunting subject in terms of a tantalizing echo of fact or suggestion of verifiable biography. The motivation here is the recognition of a potential similarity, since most Classical Gas titles work by contrast. As with Roland Barthes’ analysis of the erotics of the fashion system, so with Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty: it is “where the garment gapes” that the tease begins. (Barthes 1994, 9) Or, in this instance, where the cigarette smokes. (classical-gas.com) A casual Max Bygraves, paused in mid-thought, looks askance while lighting up. Despite the temptation to read even more into this, a smoking related illness did not contribute to Bygraves’ death in 2012. However, dying of Alzheimer’s disease, his dementia is suggestive of the album’s intrinsic capacity to be a palimpsest of the co-presence of different memories, of confused identities, obscure realities that are virtual and real. Beginning with the album cover itself, it has to become an LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). First, it is a cardboard, planar sleeve measuring 310mm squared, that can be imprinted with a myriad of different images. Secondly, it is conventionally identified in terms of a title, such as Organ Highlights or Classics Up to Date. Thirdly it is inscribed by genre, which may be song, drama, spoken word, or novelty albums of industrial or instrumental sounds, such as Memories of Steam and Accelerated Accordians. A case in point is John Woodhouse And His Magic Accordion from 1969. (classical-gas.com) All aspects of its generic attributes as benign and wholesome accordion tunes are warped and re-interpreted in Classical Gas. Springtime for Kittler appeared not long after the death of its eponymous philosopher in 2011. Directed by Richard D. James, also known as Aphex Twin, it is a homage album to Friedrich Kittler by the PostProducers, a fictitious remix collective inspired by Mel Brooks whose personnel include Mark Amerika and Darren Tofts. The single from this album, yet to be released, is a paean to Kittler’s last words, “Alle Apparate auschalten.” Foucault à gogo (vol. 2), the first album remixed for this series, is also typical of this archaeological approach to the found object. (classical-gas.com) The erasure and replacement of pre-existing text in a similar font re-writes an iconic image of wooing that is indicative of romantic album covers of this period. This album is reflective of the overall project in that the actual James Last album (1968) preceded the publication of the Foucault text (1976) that haunts it. This is suggestive of how coding and recoding are in the eye of the beholder and the specific time in which the remixed album is encountered. It doesn’t take James Last, Michel Foucault or Theodor Holm Nelson to tell you that there is no such thing as a collective memory with linear recall. As the record producer Milt Gabler observes in the liner notes to this album, “whatever the title with this artist, the tune remains the same, that distinct and unique Foucault à gogo.” “This artist” in this instance is Last or Foucault, as well as Last and Foucault. Similarly Milt Gabler is an actual author of liner notes (though not on the James Last album) whose words from another album, another context and another time, are appropriated and deftly re-written with Last’s Hammond à gogo volume 2 and The History of Sexuality in mind as a palimpsest (this approach to sampling liner notes and re-writing them as if they speak for the new album is a trope at work in all the titles in the series). And after all is said and done with the real or remixed title, both artists, after Umberto Eco, will have spoken once more of love (Eco 1985, 68). Ambivalence Foucault à gogo is suggestive of the semiotic rewiring that underwrites Classical Gas as a whole. What is at stake in this is something that poststructuralism learned from its predecessor. Taking the tenuous conventionality of Ferdinand de Saussure’s signifier and signified as a starting point, Lacan, Derrida and others embraced the freedom of this arbitrariness as the convention or social contract that brings together a thing and a word that denotes it. This insight of liberation, or what Hélène Cixous and others, after Jacques Lacan, called jouissance (Lacan 1992), meant that texts were bristling with ambiguity and ambivalence, free play, promiscuity and, with a nod to Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival (Bakhtin 1984). A picture of a pipe was, after Foucault after Magritte, not a pipe (Foucault 1983). This po-faced sophistry is expressed in René Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” of 1948, which screamed out that the word pipe could mean anything. Foucault’s reprise of Magritte in “This is Not a Pipe” also speaks of Classical Gas’ embrace of the elasticity of sign and signifier, his “plastic elements” an inadvertent suggestion of vinyl (Foucault 1983, 53). (classical-gas.com) This uncanny association of structuralism and remixed vinyl LPs is intimated in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Its original cover art is straight out of a structuralist text-book, with its paired icons and words of love, rain, honey, rose, etc. But this text as performed by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians in New York in 1956 is no less plausible than Saussure’s lectures in Geneva in 1906. Cultural memory and cultural amnesia are one and the same thing. Out of all of the Classical Gas catalogue, this album is arguably the most suggestive of what Jeffrey Sconce would call “haunting” (Sconce, 2000), an ambivalent mixing of the “memory and desire” that T.S. Eliot wrote of in the allusive pages of The Waste Land (Eliot 1975, 27). Here we encounter the memory of a bookish study of signs from the early twentieth century and the desire for its vinyl equivalent on World Record Club in the 1960s. Memory and desire, either or, or both. This ambivalence was deftly articulated by Roland Barthes in his last book, Camera Lucida, as a kind of spectral haunting, a vision or act of double seeing in the perception of the photographic image. This flickering of perception is never static, predictable or repeatable. It is a way of seeing contingent upon who is doing the looking and when. Barthes famously conceptualised this interplay in perception of an between the conventions that culture has mandated, its studium, and the unexpected, idiosyncratic double vision that is unique to the observer, its punctum (Barthes 1982, 26-27). Accordingly, the Cours de linguistique générale is a record by Saussure as well as the posthumous publication in Paris and Lausanne of notes from his lectures in 1916. (Barthes 1982, 51) With the caption “Idiot children in an institution, New Jersey, 1924,” American photographer Lewis Hine’s anthropological study declares that this is a clinical image of pathological notions of monstrosity and aberration at the time. Barthes though, writing in a post-1968 Paris, only sees an outrageous Danton collar and a banal finger bandage (Barthes 1982, 51). With the radical, protestant cries of the fallout of the Paris riots in mind, as well as a nod to music writer Greil Marcus (1989), it is tempting to see Hine’s image as the warped cover of a Dead Kennedys album, perhaps Plastic Surgery Disasters. In terms of the Classical Gas approach to recoding, though, this would be far too predictable; for a start there is neither a pipe, a tan cardigan nor a chenille scarf to be seen. A more heart-warming, suitable title might be Ray Conniff’s 1965 Christmas Album: Here We Come A-Caroling. Irony (secretprehistory.net) Like our Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices project (Tofts & Gye), Classical Gas approaches the idea of recoding and remixing with a relentless irony. The kind of records we collect and the covers which we use for this project are what you would expect to find in the hutch of an old gramophone player, rather than “what’s hot” in iTunes. The process of recoding the album covers seeks to realign expectations of what is being looked at, such that it becomes difficult to see it in any other way. In this an album’s recoded signification implies the recognition of the already seen, of album covers like this, that signal something other than what we are seeing; colours, fonts etc., belonging to a historical period, to its genres and its demographic. One of the more bucolic and duplicitous forms of rhetoric, irony wants it both ways, to be totally lounge and theoretically too-cool-for school, as in Rencontre Terrestre by Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet. (classical-gas.com) This image persuades through the subtle alteration of typography that it belongs to a style, a period and a vibe that would seem to be at odds with the title and content of the album, but as a totality of image and text is entirely plausible. The same is true of Roland Barthes’ S/Z. The radical semiologist invites us into his comfortable sitting room for a cup of coffee. A traditional Times font reinforces the image of Barthes as an avuncular, Sunday afternoon story-teller or crooner, more Alistair Cooke/Perry Como than French Marxist. (classical-gas.com) In some instances, like Histoire de Tel Quel, there is no text at all on the cover and the image has to do its signifying work iconographically. (classical-gas.com) Here a sixties collage of French-ness on the original Victor Sylvester album from 1963 precedes and anticipates the re-written album it has been waiting for. That said, the original title In France is rather bland compared to Histoire de Tel Quel. A chic blond, the Eiffel Tower and intellectual obscurity vamp synaesthetically, conjuring the smell of Gauloises, espresso and agitated discussions of Communism on the Boulevard St. Germain. With Marcel Marceao with an “o” in mind, this example of a cover without text ironically demonstrates how Classical Gas, like The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices, is ostensibly a writing project. Just as the images are taken hostage from other contexts, text from the liner notes is sampled from other records and re-written in an act of ghost-writing to complete the remixed album. Without the liner notes, Classical Gas would make a capable Photoshop project, but lacks any force as critical remix. The redesigned and re-titled covers certainly re-code the album, transform it into something else; something else that obviously or obliquely reflects the theme, ideas or content of the title, whether it’s Louis Althusser’s Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon or Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference. If you don’t hear the ruggedness of Leslie Fiedler’s essays in No! In Thunder then the writing hasn’t worked. The liner notes are the albums’ conscience, the rubric that speaks the tunes, the words and elusive ideas that are implied but can never be heard. The Histoire de Tel Quel notes illustrate this suggestiveness: You may well think as is. Philippe Forest doesn’t, not in this Éditions du Seuil classic. The titles included on this recording have been chosen with a dual purpose: for those who wish to think and those who wish to listen. What Forest captures in this album is distinctive, fresh and daring. For what country has said it like it is, has produced more robustesse than France? Here is some of that country’s most famous talent swinging from silk stockings, the can-can, to amour, presented with the full spectrum of stereo sound. (classical-gas.com) The writing accurately imitates the inflection and rhythm of liner notes of the period, so on the one hand it sounds plausibly like a toe-tapping dance album. On the other, and at the same time, it gestures knowingly to the written texts upon which it is based, invoking its rigours as a philosophical text. The dithering suggestiveness of both – is it music or text – is like a scrambled moving image always coming into focus, never quite resolving into one or the other. But either is plausible. The Tel Quel theorists were interested in popular culture like the can-can, they were fascinated with the topic of love and if instead of books they produced albums, their thinking would be auditioned in full stereo sound. With irony in mind, then, it’s hardly surprising to know that the implicit title of the project, that is neither seen nor heard but always imminent, is Classical Gasbags. (classical-gas.com) Liner notes elaborate and complete an implicit narrative in the title and image, making something compellingly realistic that is a composite of reality and fabulation. Consider Adrian Martin’s Surrealism (A Quite Special Frivolity): France is the undeniable capital of today’s contemporary sound. For Adrian Martin, this is home ground. His French soul glows and expands in the lovely Mediterranean warmth of this old favourite, released for the first time on Project 3 Total Sound Stereo. But don’t be deceived by the tonal and melodic caprices that carry you along in flutter-free sound. As Martin hits his groove, there will be revolution by night. Watch out for new Adrian Martin releases soon, including La nuit expérimentale and, his first title in English in many years, One more Bullet in the Head (produced by Bucky Pizzarelli). (classical-gas.com) Referring to Martin’s famous essay of the same name, these notes allusively skirt around his actual biography (he regularly spends time in France), his professional writing on surrealism (“revolution by night” was the sub-title of a catalogue for the Surrealism exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1993 to which he contributed an essay) (Martin 1993), as well as “One more bullet in the head,” the rejected title of an essay that was published in World Art magazine in New York in the mid-1990s. While the cover evokes the cool vibe of nouvelle vague Paris, it is actually from a 1968 album, Roma Oggi by the American guitarist Tony Mottola (a real person who actually sounds like a fictional character from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America, a film on which Martin has written a book for the British Film Institute). Plausibility, in terms of Martin’s Surrealism album, has to be as compellingly real as the sincerity of Sandy Scott’s Here’s Sandy. And it should be no surprise to see the cover art of Scott’s album return as Georges Bataille’s Erotism. Gramophone The history of the gramophone represents the technological desire to write sound. In this the gramophone record is a ligature of sound and text, a form of phonographic writing. With this history in mind it’s hardly surprising that theorists such as Derrida and Kittler included the gramophone under the conceptual framework of a general grammatology (Derrida 1992, 253 & Kittler 1997, 28). (classical-gas.com) Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology is the avatar of Classical Gas in its re-writing of a previous writing. Re-inscribing the picaresque Pal Joey soundtrack as a foundation text of post-structuralism is appropriate in terms of the gramme or literate principle of Western metaphysics as well as the echolalia of remix. As Derrida observes in Of Grammatology, history and knowledge “have always been determined (and not only etymologically or philosophically) as detours for the purpose of the reappropriation of presence” (Derrida 1976, 10). A gas way to finish, you might say. But in retrospect the ur-text that drives the poetics of Classical Gas is not Of Grammatology but the errant Marcel Marceau album described previously. Far from being an oddity, an aberration or a “novelty” album, it is a classic gramophone recording, the quintessential writing of an absent speech, offbeat and untimely. References Bahktin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Bangs, Lester. “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies”. Phonograph Record Magazine, March, 1978. Reproduced at http://rateyourmusic.com/list/dacapo/the_ten_most_ridiculous_records_of_the_seventies__by_lester_bangs. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Flamingo, 1982. ---. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Granada, 1982. ---. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ---. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987. ---. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Eco, Umberto. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985. Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe. Trans. James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. ---. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1985. Gal, Dani. Interview with Jens Hoffmann, Istanbul Biennale Companion. Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts, 2011. Kittler, Friedrich. “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems. Ed. John Johnston. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960): The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989. Martin, Adrian. “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema,” in Surrealism: Revolution by Night. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1993. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. ---. Online communication with authors, June 2011. Tofts, Darren and Lisa Gye. The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices. 2010-ongoing. http://www.secretprehistory.net/. ---. Classical Gas. 2011-ongoing. http://www.classical-gas.com/.