Journal articles on the topic 'Co-verbal communicative action'

The traditional view holds that professional interpreters should be transparent, invisible, passive, neutral, and detached, a view reiterated and reinforced in the prescribed interpreters’ codes of conduct of national and international professional organizations. Such an idealized role construct, however, is from time to time deconstructed in real-life face-to-face interpreting events. In this paper, face-to-face interpreting is seen as a three-way communicative event in which the interpreter is a co-constructor of the interaction and can therefore be a powerful figure. From the perspective of interpreting as a socially-situated activity, the paper adopts Michel Foucault’s concept of power, defining it not as the traditionally dominating force to monopolize, control, or rule, but as a kind of strategy, disposition, maneuver, tactic, or technique, functioning in a network of relations. Although interpreters often lack institutional power, they may be equipped with power within the exchange as a result of their bilingual and bicultural expertise. They may exercise this power by adopting various verbal and non-verbal strategies to negotiate, coordinate, check, and balance power relations. This can be specifically manifested in interpreters’ social action as co-interlocutors, empowerment figures, or in the adoption of a non-neutral stance. Examples are cited from authentic interpreting events to analyze interpreters’ power-at-work, focusing on their verbal and non-verbal behaviors, in particular, their positioning and gaze.

AbstractIn this study of affordances for second language (L2) learning in World of Warcraft (WoW) group play, we compared three gameplay episodes spanning a semester-long course. Applying multimodal analysis framed by ecological, dialogical and distributed (EDD) views (Zheng and Newgarden, forthcoming), we explored four English as a second language learners’ verbalizations and avatar actions. Players learned to take skilled linguistic action as they coordinated recurrent WoW gameplay activities (questing, planning next moves, traveling, learning a skill, etc.). Frequent activities matched Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) speaking proficiency descriptors, used widely in L2 teaching and learning (L2TL), providing evidence that players engaged in the types of communicative activities interaction-oriented classroom approaches develop. However, in the WoW context, interactions were not planned, but emerged as players dynamically directed the course of play. Furthermore, modalities of avatar-embodiment and conversing over Skype allowed players to flexibly integrate language and actions to co-act toward game goals, discuss non-game topics during play, or demonstrate comprehension with avatar actions alone, an affordance for less verbal players. This research builds on previous work (Zheng, Newgarden & Young, 2012) relating WoW’s multiplayer activities and L2 learners’ skilled linguistic actions. We refer to Chemero’s (2009) model of the animal-environment system to explain how L2 learners develop abilities to take skilled linguistic action by acting on affordances in WoW. The EDD framework presented may enable other researchers to account for more of the complexities involved in L2 learning in multimodal, multiplayer virtual environments.

ES Este estudio de caso utiliza el análisis de la conversación para examinar la interacción verbal en las conversaciones didácticas de tres manuales de español como lengua extranjera (de ahora en adelante ELE) empleados en la educación secundaria sueca. La observación de dichas conversaciones revela algunos patrones problemáticos en cuanto a la secuencialidad de las acciones, a la presencia sistemática de silencios entre turnos de palabra y, en general, a la falta de coordinación entre co-participantes. Otros fenómenos típicos de la interacción espontánea, como por ejemplo los solapamientos entre turnos de palabra, las reparaciones o las co-construcciones faltan por completo en los materiales analizados. En la perspectiva de una enseñanza de idiomas comunicativa y orientada a la acción, el artículo sostiene que en la preparación de este tipo de soportes didácticos habría que tener más en cuenta la estrecha relación existente entre lengua hablada y acción social. Palabras clave: ANÁLISIS DE LA CONVERSACIÓN, COMPRENSIÓN AUDITIVA, ELE, ENSEÑANZA DE ELE, SUECIA, INTERACCIÓN, SECUENCIALIDAD, ACCIÓN SOCIAL EN This case study adopts the theory and method of conversation analysis to examine recorded dialogues in three textbooks for Spanish as a Foreign Language used in Swedish secondary education. The analyses of these conversations reveal some problematic patterns regarding the sequence of actions, the systematic presence of gaps between turns at talk, and a frequent lack of coordination between co-participants. Other phenomena that are typical of spontaneous interactions, such as overlaps between turns, repair sequences or co-constructions, are completely missing in the analyzed materials. From the perspective of communicative and action-oriented language teaching, the article maintains that in the preparation of this type of pedagogical supports, the authors should consider the close relationship between spoken language and social action. Key words: CONVERSATION ANALYSIS, LISTENING COMPREHENSION, SPANISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE, SPANISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING, SWEDEN, INTERACTION, SEQUENTIALITY, SOCIAL ACTION IT Questo studio di caso si avvale dell’analisi della conversazione per esaminare le interazioni verbali nelle conversazioni didattiche di tre manuali di spagnolo come lingua straniera adottati presso le scuole secondarie svedesi. L’osservazione di queste conversazioni rivela alcune costanti problematiche relativamente alla sequenzialità delle azioni, alla presenza sistematica di silenzi tra i turni di parola e, in generale, alla mancanza di coordinamento tra i co-partecipanti. Inoltre, altri fenomeni tipici dell’interazione spontanea, come, per esempio, le sovrapposizioni dei turni, le riparazioni e le co-costruzioni mancano del tutto nei materiali analizzati. Nell’ottica di una glottodidattica comunicativa e orientata all’azione, questo studio sostiene che la stretta relazione esistente tra lingua orale e azione sociale dovrebbe essere tenuta in maggiore considerazione nella preparazione di questo tipo di materiali didattici. Parole chiave: ANALISI DELLA CONVERSAZIONE, COMPRENSIONE ORALE, SPAGNOLO COME LINGUA STRANIERA, INSEGNAMENTO DI SPAGNOLO COME LINGUA STRANIERA, SVEZIA, INTERAZIONE, SEQUENZIALITÀ, AZIONE SOCIALE

Abstract Joint actions typically require that information relevant for performing a task together is available to the interaction partners. In some situations, such information is perceptually retrievable and salient enough for co-actors to simply use it. In other situations, the relevant information needs to be actively shared among co-actors, e.g., by making it more perceptually salient or indicating it by means of a conventional signal. Here we consider a third case, where the information is not perceptually available and cannot be communicated by conventional means. How do joint action partners coordinate in such situations? We propose that co-actors resort to ostensive communication, that is, they draw attention to the fact that they intend to communicate some specific information. Two experiments tested the proposed role of ostensive communication for joint action. In a non-verbal joint building task, the category membership of different objects was known to only one person in a dyad, who needed to inform the partner which object type to use. In line with our hypothesis, most participants highlighted a particular object category with an ostensive gesture (characterized by containing more submovements than a natural placing movement) to resolve perceptual ambiguity. We conclude that ostensive communication is especially useful for joint action in situations where task-relevant information is not available to all co-actors and where it cannot be perceptually highlighted or conventionally communicated.

The topic of the online communication — university staff cuts — generated divergent and highly emotive views expressed in a variety of verbal actions/social practices ranging from language play to face threatening acts of verbal aggression that showed the potential to escalate into serious interpersonal conflict. Posters’ alignment practices are explored to reveal how interpersonal work in verbal conflict is co-constructed. Analysis of topic development, posters’ stance and shifting targets reveals that participants’ communicative behaviors are not driven exclusively towards resolution, rather to ‘battle it out’ engaging in a variety of verbal actions, playful and aggressive. Actions reflect posters’ highly developed sociopragmatic competence based on their socialization into an argument culture, weaving in and out of sociability, play and aggression, simultaneously reflecting discourse patterns more typically associated with the adversarial discursive behaviors of less experienced language users.

In analyses of the grammatical structure of sign languages (Liddell, 2003), “classifier forms” which play a major role in these spatialised grammars, are looked upon as a “gestural” component of sign language. Kendon (2004) pointed out that some of the organizational principles of co-verbal gesturing can be compared to “classifiers” in sign languages. In this paper drawing on previous analyses of LIS (Italian Sign Language) metaphors in discourse (Russo, 2004a, 2005) the role of “classifier forms” in SL metaphors is examined and compared with some aspects of gestural metaphors produced during academic lectures in Italian. It is shown that similarities and differences between the two communicative devices can be pointed out only if the multimodal organization of both face-to-face speech activity and face-to-face sign language communication is taken into account. The gestural actions produced by speakers and the non-manual gestures produced by signers are interpreted as framing a speech act unit in this way providing a perspective for the interpretation of the lexical items within it. The distinction between langue and parole proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) is discussed and reframed by this analysis.

Purpose This paper aims to develop a taxonomy of value co-creation types occurring in firm-customer interactions on social media. Design/methodology/approach In total, 570 destination marketing organization (DMO)-initiated posts on Weibo and 3,137 responses were collected to develop a taxonomy by conducting qualitative empirical-to-conceptual analysis. To apply the taxonomy through conceptual-to-empirical analysis, 100 DMO-initiated posts and 823 responses were collected. Findings The communication-focused value co-creation taxonomy shows a variety of co-creators, verbal and non-verbal communicative co-creation actions facilitated by social media, and different co-created value types. Research limitations/implications This study used a single social media platform and selected three DMOs’ Weibo accounts. Future research should focus on other types of firms and different social media platforms. Practical implications This study used a single social media platform and selected three DMOs’ Weibo accounts. Future research should focus on other types of firms and different social media platforms. Originality/value This study enriches the tourism literature and the general marketing literature by examining value co-creation from a communication perspective and provides a comprehensive classification of value co-creation opportunities on social media.

Abstract What is linguistic communication and what is it not? Even if we often convey meanings through visible bodily actions, these are rarely considered part of human language. However, co-verbal gestures have compositional structure and semantic significance, while highly iconic structures are essential in sign languages. This paper offers a review of major studies conducted in our lab on the continuity from actions to gestures to words/signs in development. After a brief introduction, we show how gestures may bridge the gap between actions and words and how this interrelationship extends beyond early childhood and across cultures. We stress the role of sign language and multimodal communication in the study of language as a form of action and present recent research on motoric aspects of human communication. Studying the visible actions of speakers and signers leads to a revision of the traditional dichotomy between linguistic and enacted, and to the development of a new approach to embodied language.

Drama is action, verbal drama is speech action, and the dramatic text is subject to a similar set of rules as that governing the extra-literary communication situation. Dramatic irony, the very essence of drama itself, is generated by a dual, mutually interactive process of communication, whereby the audience is “written into” the text in a way distinguishing it from other literary genres, and by a systematic flouting of the rules governing communication. Pas de deux demonstrates the peculiar duality of dramatic discourse by its complex exploitation of the breakdown/non-breakdown of Grice’s Co-operative Principle-. communication/non-communication becomes reversible and, therefore, mutually constitutive concepts “releasing meaning” and conveying the “ideology” of this play.

AbstractIt has been largely accepted that face-to-face consecutive interpreting should be studied as a communicative event and an interactive process. Linguistic methods, including conversation analysis, have been used to investigate interactive elements in the discourse, such as turn-taking, adjacency pair, overlapping speech, repair, etc. Researchers acknowledge that participants' verbal behaviours in the turn-by-turn interactions are co-constructed by all participants; however, little has been said about the co-constructive mechanism. This research aimed to provide a better understanding of the generic mechanism of such co-construction, hoping to inform the training for interpreters and medical professionals who work with them.Using conversation analysis, I recorded seven naturally occurring interpreter-mediated GP consultations in the UK. Participants included two GPs, three professional and ad hoc interpreters and seven patients speaking either Urdu, Mirpuri Punjabi or Czech.My analysis elaborates on the inter-determination between the types of information the primary speakers (doctor and patient) produce in the current turn and the consequent actions the interpreter undertakes in the next turn, and also points out that such inter-determination is not definite in that the interpreter's turn design is also influenced by their own characteristics. This analysis emphasises that the interpreter, both professional and ad hoc, is key to the quality of the doctor-patient communication and doctors can alter their own behaviours to optimise the interpreter's turn-design and thus the communication outcome.This research provides an insight into the co-construction of the triadic interactions in interpreted medical consultations. With a better understanding of this mechanism, doctors may be taught to alter their verbal behaviours to optimise the interpreter's performance and thus improve their communication with patients. This interactional framework may also help us understand other critical issues of power, identify, cultural competence, etc.

Psychotherapy influences through implicit as well as explicit communications. Having two therapists presents couples with a novel relationship with which the internal worlds of partners can interact. This offers a potentially mutative experience for integrating fractured minds and relationships. Following a critical review of the arguments originally offered in the UK for using two therapists in couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and incorporating research that highlights the significance of the parental couple for developing “triangular capacity” in infants, the authors (who have worked as co-therapists for many years) consider and illustrate its value as a form of what Ogden (1994) described as “interpretive action”. Interpretive action relates to non-verbal means by which therapists communicate their understanding of unconscious intersubjective dynamics affecting the therapeutic process.

Objective: There are significant points of alignment between a macrocognitive frame of teamwork and a communication perspective. This commentary explores these touch points in regard to use of teams in sociotechnical systems (STS). Background: The macrocognitive framework emphasizes a team’s shared mental models whereas a communication frame emphasizes that shared meaning among team members is more frequently implicitly than explicitly recorded in their messages. Both acknowledge that communication (in macrocognition) or messages (in communication) serve as an index of team members’ goal-directed behavior. The two approaches differ in the role of communication: as information exchange in macrocognition as compared with verbal and nonverbal symbols composing messages for which senders and receivers co-construct meaning. Method: This commentary uses relevant literature to explicate the communication position. Results: From a communication perspective, individuals are simultaneously sending and receiving messages, communication is continual and processual, and meaning construction is dependent on relationship awareness and development among communication partners as well as the context. Conclusion: The authors posit that meaning cannot be constructed solely from messages, nor can meaning be constructed by one person. Furthermore, sharing information is not the same as communicating. Application: Architects and users of STS should be interested in designing systems that improve team communication—a goal that is interdependent with understanding how communication fails in the use of such systems. Drilling down to the fundamental properties of communication is essential to understanding how and why meaning is created among team members (and subsequent action).

Abstract Conversational facial gestures are not emotional expressions (Ekman, 1997). Facial gestures are co-speech gestures – configurations of the face, eyes, and/or head that are synchronized with words and other co-speech gestures. Facial gestures are the most frequent facial actions in dialogue, and the majority serve pragmatic (meta-communicative) rather than referential functions. A qualitative microanalysis of a close-call story illustrates three pragmatic facial gestures in their macro- and micro-context: (a) The narrator’s thinking faces (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1986) occurred as the narrator was getting started, and they accompanied verbal collateral signals of delay, such as “uh” or “um”. (b) The narrator pointed at his hand gestures with his head and eyes (Streeck, 1993), drawing the addressee’s attention to depictions that would later be crucial to the close call. (c) The meta-communicative functions of smiles included marking the narrator’s description of danger as ironic or humorous, hinting at key elements, and acknowledging errors.

Promoting pupils’ face-to-face promotive interaction (FtFPI) is crucial for effective cooperative learning (CL) in group work. This article provides insight into interpersonal behaviour and supportive communication as two important aspects of FtFPI. Sixteen pupils 9–10 years of age were videotaped in four structured mixed-ability groups during CL sessions at two primary schools in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The features of FtFPI that pupils use for peer support in small CL groups and on interfering factors that pupils encounter during FtFPI were analysed using a thematic hybrid approach. The study found that pupils used verbal and non-verbal features for co-learners’ responsive actions during FtFPI. However, the findings also revealed some factors that interfere with the pupils’ FtFPI, such as having insufficient knowledge and personal skills about peer attention, encouragement and praising. The study recommends that future studies should implement the intervention necessary to foster both teachers’ and pupils’ understanding and functional knowledge of FtFPI for successful small CL groups.

The article investigates resources used by parties in interaction to successfully complete each others’ utterances. Among the different ways in which recipients can demonstrate their understanding, collaborative completions are the most convincing since they display not only recipients’ understanding of the stance or the import of a turn-in-progress, but the minute analysis of the action itself. The article starts with a discussion of syntactic and action-sequential features of talk that can account for collaborative turn sequences and then focuses on other, non-verbal resources that may be made relevant at particular interactional junctures. An analysis of the several instances of collaborative completions illustrates the use of visually accessible features of the surround, gestural and postural conduct, and gaze direction in collaborative turn sequences. It is suggested that an interplay of these multiple modalities enables the participants to collaborate in co-constructing single syntactic units of talk. The electronic edition of this article includes audio-visual data.

The article analyzes the principle of systemacy in the speech process study which is implemented in the approach to speech analysis where speech is considered an element of a system consisting of joint activity (JA) of communicants and their verbal communication (VC), this system determining all speech actions of the communicants. The subject of the theory of speech processes systemacy is the organization of the system that reflects the connections arising between interacting and communicating communicants, learned by the researcher, i.e., the connections that determine the communicants’ mutual speech control over each other’s behavior. The research method used in the article is a theoretical and metatheoretical analysis of the main provisions of the system-activity approach to the speech process study. People’s behavior is controlled by means of symbolic messages, which is possible only with a similar image of the world among the communicants, the latter being developed while acquiring identical subject culture. Subject-empirical culture is the substance of consciousness, the acquisition of which ensures the common consciousness of native speakers, and which is an obligatory prerequisite for sign communication, since the bodies of linguistic signs, being only a substance, do not themselves carry any knowledge. Speech processes carried out by the co-actors in the JA are determined by the structure of JA and VC, and in addition to that, by the whole society, whose culture they have acquired and which now, in the form of images of consciousness, constitutes the content side of linguistic signs. System determination specifies both constant and variable properties of speech processes.

Digital media is a platform of immediate presence that rests on a demediatized communication. It favors virtual collective action that allows digital citizens, in contexts of accentuated social inequality, to construe themselves as anti-establishment. Our research explores the co-participative construction of an online shitstorm, in comments posted on websites generated to respond to power abuse and inequity in Chilean society. The construction of citizens’ anger in digital discourse will be analyzed in light of the postulates of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and in the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The corpus analyzed consists of 500 comments issued between April and July 2016 to contest a powerful Chilean businessman who uploads a video to YouTube to defend himself from the public verbal attacks of a congressman. The results of the analysis show representations related to corruption, power abuse and inequity from people who conceal in the economic power they have to assert they are ordinary citizens.

The paper presents an analysis of charisma-correlates in the language of political leaders in modern German and Ukrainian political discourse and answers the question of whether an ideal type can be an object of multimodal phonetical research. The discursive description of charismatic leaders in German and Ukrainian political discourse and the discovery of their contrastive features relies on biological, social, psychological and linguistic parameters forming their charismatic discourse portraits. Of decisive importance in this context, is the rhetoric of public appearance, expressive combative position, hortatority, timbral, prosodic and gesture-mimic characteristics further perceived and attributed to its carriers as charisma. Charismatic politicians have always been characterised by sharp statements, categorical views and mobilising speech. Inspirited or pep rhetoric is inherent in politicians whose position is contrary to the majority of the public, the opinion of their political allies, members of Parliament, etc. We can observe its manifestations in moments of acute crisis in political life. The prosodic specifics of charismatical discourse are characterised by intensification of all its dynamic, tonal, and temporal components. In phonetical studies, this acoustic effect is referred to as prosodic intensity understanding it as abrupt changes in pitch, loudness, tempo variations, and pauses in important utterances containing addresses, appeals and concepts with positive semantics. Charismatic rhetoric is also formed by the kinetic (gesture and mimic) component that is functionally related the prosodic representation of speech making communication more effective. A gesture is the action or movement of the body through which one individual signals another individual about his presence, his intentions regarding objects. Charismatic political communications are characterised primarily by accentuating or co-speech gestures that represent movements of the body, especially the arms/hands, by which the speaker explains, complements his words, highlights the key points, emphasises or amplifies a verbal utterance. A gesture is perceived by the addressee as a kinematic form of verbal charisma-appeal through which he exercises his influence on his followers and/or opponents encouraging them to commit actions aimed at achieving a particular goal. Charismatic rhetoric originates in political communication in times of crisis and is characteristic of politicians whose stand is not consistent with the majority position. Charismatic enthusiasm and inspiration are ethnically coloured (German rapsodicity, Ukrainian monotony) and are reflected in prosodic and gesture emphasis accompanying both independent and dependent parts of speech indicating the autonomy of charismatic rhetoric as a model. The results of this study can be applied in discourse studies, applied phonetics, comparative linguistics, and political communication.

This article explores the socio-discursive competence of young children in Galician pre-schools. In particular, it deals with the way in which children – aged from 2;10 to 4;05 years – combine embodied actions and verbal resources to co-narrate stories with peers and adults. Using an audiovisual corpus of naturally occurring interactions, we have conducted a qualitative and multimodal analysis, observing how children react to diverse footings and negotiate participation frameworks in multiparty interactions. The findings suggest three progressive stages in the development of socio-discursive competence in which children use different strategies: (a) the stage of interactive proto-narrations, (b) the stage of collaborative narrations and (c) the stage of polyphonic monologue narrations. Our detailed examination reveals (a) a progressive increase in the diversity of the participation frameworks represented by children, as well as in the complexity of the multimodal resources they use, and (b) a rise in children’s grammatical repertoire linked to an improvement in children’s (meta)pragmatic skills.

85 Background: Texas Oncology (TXO) is a dedicated oncology practice consisting of more than 400 physicians and 57 radiation oncologists at 52 sites of service. In order to enhance communications of the rad onc team, establish accountability by using metrics, and engage continuous improvement, we initiated a program to establish regional quality committees in each radiation oncology practice site. Methods: In 2015, the TXO leadership approved the formation of Regional Quality Committees (RQC) at each site. The key members of each RQC include a Physician Chair, a Physicist Co-Chair, Chief Therapist, Radiation Safety Officer, Dosimetrist, and Nurse. Meeting frequency was recommended monthly, but quarterly meetings were required. Meeting documentation reporting was required including a formal agenda, minutes for items discussed, and listing of attendees. Metrics with regard to RQC activities were reported and recorded beginning in 2016. The 2016 Action plan for the RQC at each site included documentation of timeout procedure, regular chart rounds, new patient conference, as well as a mortality and morbidity conference. Results: See table. Conclusions: Within 3 calendar quarters, a functional RQC was established in all 52 radiation oncology practice sites within TXO. Compliance with the action plan was high with regard to action items not requiring multiple physician participants (RQC committee, timeout, chart rounds, CQI projects, performance metrics). Compliance was lower in activities that required multiple physician participation. Verbal feedback was positive regarding the RQC program. Respecting time demands of physicians, education, and communication were identified as key success factors in the RQC program. [Table: see text]

Successful joint action requires negotiation, especially in the event of goal incongruence. This article addresses goal incongruence in joint musical performance by manipulating the congruence of score instructions (congruent/incongruent) regarding tempo (speed) and dynamics (sound intensity) given to piano duos. The aim is to investigate how co-performers negotiate incongruent instructions for tempo and dynamics by balancing the prioritisation of individual goals versus the joint outcome and how this negotiation is modulated by musical expertise and personality (locus of control). In total, 14 pairs of pianists, who were not informed of the congruence manipulation, were placed back-to-back and were directed to achieve a successful performance over four repeated performances without verbal communication. Interpersonal coordination generally improved from the first to final performance in the congruent and incongruent conditions for both the tempo and dynamics tasks. Furthermore, in incongruent conditions, results suggest that performers prioritise the joint performance in the tempo task, but prioritise their own performance in the dynamics task. Although individual performance appears to be modulated by musical expertise, the balance of individual/joint performance across the duo is not influenced by musical part (melody vs accompaniment), expressive instruction, musical expertise or locus of control.

Focusing on word search sequences initiated by ESL learners in conversation tutoring, this study examines how the participants use gestures in order to facilitate language learning as well as mutual understanding. Adopting the methodological framework of Conversation Analysis, it analyzes two particular sequential contexts: (a) when a tutee uses gestures without a candidate solution to her/his word search, directly soliciting the tutor’s co-participation; and (b) when a tutee uses gestures with a candidate solution to her/his word search but there is mismatch between the candidate solution and the accompanying gesture. A fine-grained analysis of the participants’ moment-by-moment verbal and nonverbal actions reveals that gestures create multimodally enhanced opportunities for language learning by allowing the tutor to offer lexical items that are new or unfamiliar to the tutee and/or to provide corrective feedback on the lexical errors. The findings from this study offer implications for the role of gesture in L2 learning and for some of the key concepts in second language acquisition such as output, corrective feedback, and communication strategies.

Participation in qualitative research frequently relies upon recall and verbal expression, which may be difficult for some people with dementia. While the use of arts-based and visual methods are transforming dementia care, exploratory research and evaluation methods have lagged behind with regard to the use of innovative qualitative approaches. This scoping review identified innovative qualitative methods that have been used to effectively engage and involve people with dementia in social and health research. Systematic searches of academic databases, Google Scholar, and hand searches identified 24 peer-reviewed articles published since 2010 for inclusion. Analysis focused on a description of both the motivation and methods ascribed by the researchers and how the capacities of people with dementia were engaged as part of the research process. The most frequently used innovative method was Photovoice. Action research, case study, narrative production, ethnography, participatory filmmaking and theater, co-research, and mixed methods were also used. Regardless of methodology, most studies used a participatory approach that incorporated visual methods alongside adapted semistructured or unstructured interviews. Researchers were focused on inclusion, empowerment, self-expression, flexibility, and communication when selecting methods. Providing an appropriate research environment and committing time for repeat contact, observation, and engagement were important considerations.

This paper surveys the research methods and approaches used in the multidisciplinary field of applied language studies or language education over the last fourty years. Drawing on insights gained in psycho- and sociolinguistics, educational linguistics and linguistic anthropology with regard to language and culture, it is organized around five major questions that concern language educators. The first is: How is cultural meaning encoded in the linguistic sign? It discusses how the use of a symbolic system affects thought, how speakers of different languages think differently when speaking, and how speakers of different discourses (across language or in the same language) have different cultural worldviews. The second question is: How is cultural meaning expressed pragmatically through verbal action? It discusses the realization of speech acts across cultures, culturally-inflected conversation analysis, and the use of cultural frames. The third question is: How is culture co-constructed by participants in interaction? It discusses how applied linguistics has moved from a structuralist to a constructivist view of language and culture, from performance to performativity, and from a focus on culture to a focus on historicity and subjectivity. The fourth question is: How is research on language and culture affected by language technologies? The print culture of the book, the virtual culture of the Internet, the online culture of electronic exchanges all have their own ways of redrawing the boundaries of what may be said, written and done within a given discourse community. They are inextricably linked to issues of power and control. The last section explores the current methodological trends in the study of language and culture: the increased questioning and politicization of cultural reality, the increased interdisciplinary nature of research, the growing importance of reflexivity, and the noticeable convergence of intercultural communication studies and applied language studies in the study of language and culture.

The embodiment approach has shown that motor neural networks are involved in the processing of action verbs. There is developmental evidence that embodied effects on verb processing are already present in early years. Yet, the ontogenetic origin of this motor reuse in action verbs remains unknown. This longitudinal study investigates the co-occurrence of manual verbs and actions during mother-child daily routines (free play, bathing, and dining) when children were 1 to 2 (Group 1) and 2 to 3 (Group 2) years old. Eight mother-child dyads were video-recorded in 3-month intervals across 12 months (27 recording hours), and the timing of verbs and manual actions (21,876 entries) were coded by independent observers. Results showed that the probability of matched verb-action co-occurrences were much higher (0.80 and 0.77) than that of random co-occurrences (0.13 and 0.15) for Group 1 and Group 2, respectively. The distributions of the verb-action temporal intervals in both groups were quite symmetrical and skewed with the peak corresponding to both 0.00 s synchronic intervals (8% of the cases) and the shortest +5 s interval (40% of the cases). Mother-led instances occurred in both groups whereas child-led instances were restricted to Group 2. Mothers pragmatically aligned their verbal productions, since they repeatedly used (74%) those verbs they shared with their children’s repertoire (31%). In conclusion, the early multisensory communicative and manipulative scene affords grounding of verb meanings on the ongoing actions, facilitating verb-action pairing in the realm of social interactions, providing a new dimension to the prevailing solipsistic approach to embodiment.

The article presents the results of analysis of the communicative intentions of the speakers realising negative assessment strategies in informal communication, modelled in the English feature film discourse. The research is done within the methodological framework of a cognitive-communicative approach to language where the communicative strategy of negative assessment is viewed as a cognitive-affective-volitional-conative mental structure of the speaker objectivised in verbal/co-verbal means of expression of negative assessment of a certain object, person, action or situation in an act of communication. Hyper-intention of negative assessment is realised through hyponymic communicative intentions of: 1) disapproval (the object is negatively assessed since it does not meet the subject’s expectations / the subject is motivated by the need to express himself/herself), 2) censure (the object-addressee is negatively assessed since it deviates from the ethic norms / the subject is motivated by the need to express the assessment before the addressee to urge him/her to reconcile with the expectations of the society), 3) criticism (the object-addressee is negatively assessed since it deviates from the utilitarian norms / the subject is motivated by the need to express the assessment before the object to urge him/her to reconcile with «the common sense»), and 4) depreciation (the object is negatively assessed since he/she does not fit the subject’s etalon/ the subject is motivated by the need to express he/she is not interested in the object). Negative assessment can be accompanied by such emotional attitudes of the subject toward the object as contempt, neglect, dissatisfaction, indignation, anger, irritation, hate, surprise, desperation, disappointment, etc. Intentions of negative assessment are distinguished from those of blame (the subject informs the addressee that the subject blames the object for taking/not taking some (un)ethical action), reproach (the subject informs the object/addressee that he/she failed the subjects’ expectations causing the subject emotional trauma) and insult (the subjects intends to hurt the object/addressee). Irony/sarcasm are addressed as implicit means of expressing negative assessment which, depending on the situation, can be realised as disapproval, censure, criticism or depreciation.

Empathic communication (EC) in healthcare occurs when patients express empathic opportunities, such as emotions, to which doctors respond empathically. This interactional process during which participants try to achieve specific communicative goals (e.g., seeking and displaying empathy) serves as a context in which doctors and patients perform verbal and nonverbal actions and collaboratively co-construct meaning. This applies to interpreter-mediated consultations (IMCs) too, where interpreters perform additional actions of a similar kind. However, there is a dearth of research on the ways in which participants perform these actions in the context of EC, and how these actions in turn help (re)shape the context of EC in IMCs (Theys et al., 2020). To date, any tools for studying EC investigate participants’ actions in isolation, without studying them in the context of EC or in relation to the participants’ awareness of their own and others’ ongoing interactions. In this article, we present the Empathic Communication Analytical Framework (ECAF). The tool draws on valid, complementary analytical tools that allow for a fine-grained, three-level multimodal analysis of interactions. The first level of analysis allows for instances of EC in spoken language IMCs to be identified and for participants’ verbal actions in the context of EC to be studied. The second level allows analysts to investigate participants’ verbal and nonverbal actions in the previously identified context of EC. The third level of analysis links the participants’ concurrent verbal and nonverbal (inter)actions to their levels of attention and awareness and shows how participants’ actions are shaped and in turn help to reshape the context of EC in IMCs. In this article, we present the various levels of the ECAF framework, discuss its application to real-life data, and adopt a critical stance towards its affordances and limitations by looking into one excerpt of EC in IMCs. It is shown that the three distinct yet interconnected levels of analysis in the ECAF framework allow participants’ concurrent multimodal interactions in the context of EC to be studied.

AbstractDespite recent developments in integrating autonomous and human-like robots into many aspects of everyday life, social interactions with robots are still a challenge. Here, we focus on a central tool for social interaction: verbal communication. We assess the extent to which humans co-represent (simulate and predict) a robot’s verbal actions. During a joint picture naming task, participants took turns in naming objects together with a social robot (Pepper, Softbank Robotics). Previous findings using this task with human partners revealed internal simulations on behalf of the partner down to the level of selecting words from the mental lexicon, reflected in partner-elicited inhibitory effects on subsequent naming. Here, with the robot, the partner-elicited inhibitory effects were not observed. Instead, naming was facilitated, as revealed by faster naming of word categories co-named with the robot. This facilitation suggests that robots, unlike humans, are not simulated down to the level of lexical selection. Instead, a robot’s speaking appears to be simulated at the initial level of language production where the meaning of the verbal message is generated, resulting in facilitated language production due to conceptual priming. We conclude that robots facilitate core conceptualization processes when humans transform thoughts to language during speaking.

IntroductionThe horror film Hush (2016) has attracted attention since its release due to the uniqueness of its central character—a deaf–mute author who lives in a world of silence. Maddie Young (Kate Siegel) moves into a remote cabin in the woods to recover from a breakup and finish her new novel. Aside from a cat, she is alone in the house, only engaging with loved ones via online messaging or video chats during which she uses American Sign Language (ASL). Maddie cannot hear nor speak, so writing is her primary mode of creative expression, and a key source of information for the audience. This article explores both the presence and absence of text in Hush, examining how textual “captions” of various kinds are both provided and withheld at key moments. As an author, Maddie battles the limits of written language as she struggles with writer’s block. As a person, she fights the limits of silence and isolation as a brutal killer invades her retreat. Accordingly, this article examines how the interplay between silence, text, and sound invites viewers to identify with the heroine’s experience and ultimate triumph.Hush is best described as a slasher—a horror film in which a single (usually male) killer stalks and kills a series of victims with relentless determination (Clover, Men, Women). Slashers are about close, visceral killing—blood and the hard stab of the knife. With her big brown eyes and gentle presence, quiet, deaf Maddie is clearly framed as a lamb to slaughter in the opening scenes. Indeed, throughout Hush, Maddie’s lack of hearing is leveraged to increase suspense and horror. The classic pantomime cry of “He’s behind you!” is taken to dark extremes as the audience watches a nameless man (John Gallagher Jr.) stalk the writer in her isolated house. She is unable to hear him enter the building, unable to sense him looming behind her. Neither does she hear him killing her friend outside on the porch, banging her body loudly against the French doors.And yet, despite her vulnerability, she rises to the challenge. Fighting back against her attacker using a variety of multisensory strategies, Maddie assumes the role of the “Final Girl” in this narrative. As Carol Clover has explained, the Final Girl is a key trope of slasher films, forming part of their essential structure. While others in the film are killed, “she alone looks death in the face; but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B)” (Clover, Her Body, Himself). However, reviews and discussions of Hush typically frame Maddie as a Final Girl with a difference. Adding disability into the equation is seen as “revolutionising” the trope (Sheppard) and “updating the Final Girl theory” for a new age (Laird). Indeed, the film presents its Final Girl as simultaneously deaf and powerful—a twist that potentially challenges the dynamics of the slasher and representations of disability more generally.My Weakness, My StrengthThe opening sequence of Hush introduces Maddie’s deafness through the use of sound, silence, and text. Following an establishing shot sweeping over the dark forest and down to her solitary cottage, the film opens to warm domesticity. Close-ups of onion, eggs, and garlic being prepared are accompanied by clear, crisp sounds of crackling, bubbling, slicing, and frying. The camera zooms out to focus on Maddie, busy at her culinary tasks. All noises begin to fade. The camera focuses on Maddie’s ear as audio is eliminated, replaced by silence. As she continues to cook, the audience experiences her world—a world devoid of sound. These initial moments also highlight the importance of digital communication technologies. Maddie moves smoothly between devices, switching from laptop computer to iPhone while sharing instant messages with a friend. Close-ups of these on-screen conversations provide viewers with additional narrative information, operating as an alternate form of captioning from within the diegesis. Snippets of text from other sources are likewise shown in passing, such as the author’s blurb on the jacket of her previous novel. The camera lingers on this book, allowing viewers to read that Maddie suffered hearing loss and vocal paralysis after contracting bacterial meningitis at 13 years old. Traditional closed captioning or subtitles are thus avoided in favour of less intrusive forms of expositional text that are integrated within the plot.While hearing characters, such as her neighbour and sister, use SimCom (simultaneous communication or sign supported speech) to communicate with her, Maddie signs in silence. Because the filmmakers have elected not to provide captions for her signs in these moments, a—typically non-ASL speaking—hearing audience will inevitably experience disruptions in comprehension and Maddie’s conversations can therefore only be partially understood. This allows for an interesting role reversal for viewers. As Katherine A. Jankowski (32) points out, deaf and hard of hearing audiences have long expressed dissatisfaction with accessing the spoken word on television and film due to a lack of closed captioning. Despite the increasing technological ease of captioning digital media in the 21st century, this barrier to accessibility continues to be an ongoing issue (Ellis and Kent). The hearing community do not share this frustrating background—television programs that include ASL are captioned to ensure hearing viewers can follow the story (see for example Beth Haller’s article on Switched at Birth in this special issue). Hush therefore inverts this dynamic by presenting ASL without captions. Whereas silence is used to draw hearing viewers into Maddie’s experience, her periodic use of ASL pushes them out again. This creates a push–pull dynamic, whereby the hearing audience identify with Maddie and empathise with the losses associated with being deaf and mute, but also realise that, as a result, she has developed additional skills that are beyond their ken.It is worth noting at this point that Maddie is not the first Final Girl with a disability. In the 1967 thriller Wait until Dark, for instance, Audrey Hepburn plays Susy Hendrix, a blind woman trapped in her home by three crooks. Martin F. Norden suggests that this film represented a “step forward” in cinematic representations of disability because its heroine is not simply an innocent victim, but “tough, resilient, and resourceful in her fight against the criminals who have misrepresented themselves to her and have broken into her apartment” (228). Susy’s blindness, at first presented as a source of vulnerability and frustration, becomes her strength in the film’s climax. Bashing out all the lights in the apartment, she forces the men to fight on her terms, in darkness, where she holds the upper hand. In a classic example of Final Girl tenacity, Susy stabs the last of them to death before help arrives. Maddie likewise uses her disability as a tactical advantage. An enhanced sense of touch allows her to detect the killer when he sneaks up behind her as she feels the lightest flutter upon the hairs of her neck. She also wields a blaring fire alarm as a weapon, deafening and disorienting her attacker, causing him to drop his knife.The similarities between these films are not coincidental. During an interview, director Mike Flanagan (who co-wrote Hush with wife Siegel) stated that they were directly informed by Wait until Dark. When asked about the choice to make Maddie’s character deaf, he explained that “it kind of happened because Kate and I were out to dinner and we were talking about movies we liked. One of the ones that we stumbled on that we both really liked was Wait Until Dark” (cited in Thurman). In the earlier film, director Terence Young used darkness to blind the audience—at times the screen is completely black and viewers must listen carefully to work out what is happening. Likewise, Flanagan and Siegel use silence to effectively deafen the audience at crucial moments. The viewers are therefore forced to experience the action as the heroines do.You’re Gonna Die Screaming But You Won’t Be HeardHorror films often depend upon sound design for impact—the most mundane visuals can be made frightening by the addition of a particular noise, effect, or tune. Therefore, in the context of the slasher genre, one of the most unique aspects of Hush is the absence of the Final Girl’s vocalisation. A mute heroine is deprived of the most basic expressive tool in the horror handbook—a good scream. “What really won me over,” comments one reviewer, “was the fact that this particular ‘final girl’ isn’t physically able to whinge or scream when in pain–something that really isn’t the norm in slasher/home invasion movies” (Gorman). Yet silence also plays an important part in this genre, “when the wind stops or the footfalls cease, death is near” (Whittington 183). Indeed, Hush’s tagline is “silence can be killer.”The arrival of the killer triggers a deep kind of silence in this particular film, because alternative captions, text, and other communicative techniques (including ASL) cease to be used or useful when the man begins terrorising Maddie. This is not entirely surprising, as the abject failure of technology is a familiar trope in slasher films. As Clover explains, “the emotional terrain of the slasher film is pretechnological” (Her Body, Himself, 198). In Hush, however, the focus on text in this context is notable. There is a sense that written modes of communication are unreliable when it counts. The killer steals her phone, and cuts electricity and Internet access to the house. She attempts to use the neighbours’ Wi-Fi via her laptop, but does not know the password. Quick thinking Maddie even scrawls backwards messages on her windows, “WON’T TELL. DIDN’T SEE FACE,” she writes in lipstick, “BOYFRIEND COMING HOME.” In response, the killer simply removes his mask, “You’ve seen it now” he says. They both know there is no boyfriend. The written word has shifted from being central to Maddie’s life, to largely irrelevant. Text cannot save her. It is only by using other strategies (and senses) that Maddie empowers herself to survive.Maddie’s struggles to communicate and take control are integral to the film’s unfolding narrative, and co-writer Siegel notes this was a conscious theme: “A lot of this movie is … a metaphor for feeling unheard. It’s a movie about asserting yourself and of course as a female writer I brought a lot to that.” In their reflection on the limits of both verbal and written communication, the writers of Hush owe a debt to another source of inspiration—Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series. Season four, episode ten, also called Hush, was first aired on 14 December 1999 and features a critically acclaimed storyline in which the characters all lose their ability to speak. Voices from all over Sunnydale are stolen by monstrous fairytale figures called The Gentlemen, who use the silence to cut fresh hearts from living victims. Their appearance is heralded by a morbid rhyme:Can’t even shout, can’t even cry The Gentlemen are coming by. Looking in windows, knocking on doors, They need to take seven and they might take yours. Can’t call to mom, can’t say a word, You’re gonna die screaming but you won’t be heard.The theme of being “unheard” is clearly felt in this episode. Buffy and co attempt a variety of methods to compensate for their lost voices, such as hanging message boards around their necks, using basic text-to-voice computer software, and drawing on overhead projector slides. These tools essentially provide the captions for a story unfolding in silence, as no subtitles are provided. As it turns out, in many ways the friends’ non-verbal communication is more effective than their spoken words. Patrick Shade argues that the episode:celebrates the limits and virtues of both the nonverbal and the verbal. … We tend to be most readily aware of verbal means … but “Hush” stresses that we are embodied creatures whose communication consists in more than the spoken word. It reminds us that we have multiple resources we regularly employ in communicating.In a similar way, the film Hush emphasises alternative modes of expression through the device of the mute Final Girl, who must use all of her sensory and intellectual resources to survive. The evening begins with Maddie at leisure, unable to decide how to end her fictional novel. By the finale she is clarity incarnate. She assesses each real-life scene proactively and “writes” the end of the film on her own terms, showing that there is only one way to survive the night—she must fight.Deaf GainIn his discussion of disability and cinema, Norden explains that the majority of films position disabled people as outsiders and “others” because “filmmakers photograph and edit their work to reflect an able-bodied point of view” (1). The very apparatus of mainstream film, he argues, is designed to embody able-bodied experiences and encourage audience identification with able-bodied characters. He argues this bias results in disabled characters positioned as “objects of spectacle” to be pitied, feared or scorned by viewers. In Hush, however, the audience is consistently encouraged to identify with Maddie. As she fights for her life in the final scenes, sound fades away and the camera assumes a first-person perspective. The man is above, choking her on the floor, and we look up at him through her eyes. As Maddie’s groping hand finds a corkscrew and jabs the spike into his neck, we watch his death through her eyes too. The film thus assists viewers to apprehend Maddie’s strength intimately, rather than framing her as a spectacle or distanced “other” to be pitied.Importantly, it is this very core of perceived vulnerability, yet ultimate strength, that gives Maddie the edge over her attacker in the end. In this way, Maddie’s disabilities are not solely represented as a space of limitation or difference, but a potential wellspring of power. Hence the film supports, to some degree, the move to seeing deafness as gain, rather than loss:Deafness has long been viewed as a hearing loss—an absence, a void, a lack. It is virtually impossible to think of deafness without thinking of loss. And yet Deaf people do not often consider their lives to be defined by loss. Rather, there is something present in the lives of Deaf people, something full and complete. (Bauman and Murray, 3)As Bauman and Murray explain, the shift from “hearing loss” to “deaf gain” involves focusing on what is advantageous and unique about the deaf experience. They use the example of the Swiss national snowboarding team, who hired a deaf coach to boost their performance. The coach noticed they were depending too much on sound and used earplugs to teach a multi-sensory approach, “the earplugs forced them to learn to depend on the feel of the snow beneath their boards [and] the snowboarder’s performance improved markedly” (6). This idea that removing sound strengthens other senses is a thread that runs throughout Hush. For example, it is the loss of hearing and speech that are credited with inspiring Maddie’s successful writing career and innovative literary “voice”.Lennard J. Davis warns that framing people as heroic or empowered as a result of their disabilities can feed counterproductive stereotypes and perpetuate oppressive systems. “Privileging the inherent powers of the deaf or the blind is a form of patronizing,” he argues, because it traps such individuals within the concept of innate difference (106). Disparities between able and disabled people are easier to justify when disabled characters are presented as intrinsically “special” or “noble,” as this suggests inevitable divergence, rather than structural inequality. While this is something to keep in mind, Hush skirts the issue by presenting Maddie as a flawed, realistic character. She does not possess superpowers; she makes mistakes and gets injured. In short, she is a fallible human using what resources she has to the best of her abilities. As such, she represents a holistic vision of a disabled heroine rather than an overly glorified stereotype.ConclusionHush is a film about the limits of text, the gaps where language is impossible or insufficient, and the struggle to be heard as a woman with disabilities. It is a film about the difficulties surrounding both verbal and written communication, and our dependence upon them. The absence of closed captions or subtitles, combined with the use of alternative “captioning”—in the form of instant messaging, for instance—grounds the narrative in lived space, rather than providing easy extra-textual solutions. It also poses a challenge to a hearing audience, to cross the border of “otherness” and identify with a deaf heroine.Returning to the discussion of the Final Girl characterisation, Clover argues that this is a gendered device combining both traditionally feminine and masculine characteristics. The fluidity of the Final Girl is constant, “even during that final struggle she is now weak and now strong, now flees the killer and now charges him, now stabs and is stabbed, now cries out in fear and now shouts in anger” (Her Body, Himself, 221). Men viewing slasher films identify with the Final Girl’s “masculine” traits, and in the process find themselves looking through the eyes of a woman. In using a deaf character, Hush suggests that an evolution of this dynamic might also occur along the dis/abled boundary line. Maddie is a powerful survivor who shifts between weak and strong, frightened and fierce, but also between disabled and able. This portrayal encourages the audience to identify with her empowered traits and in the process look through the eyes of a disabled woman. Therefore, while slashers—and horror films in general—are not traditionally associated with progressive representations of disabilities, this evolution of the Final Girl may provide a fruitful topic of both research and filmmaking in the future.ReferencesBauman, Dirksen, and Joseph J. Murray. “Reframing: From Hearing Loss to Deaf Gain.” Trans. Fallon Brizendine and Emily Schenker. Deaf Studies Digital Journal 1 (2009): 1–10. <http://dsdj.gallaudet.edu/assets/section/section2/entry19/DSDJ_entry19.pdf>.Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1992.———. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations 20 (1987): 187–228.Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. Disability and New Media. New York: Routledge, 2011.Gorman, H. “Hush: Film Review.” Scream Horror Magazine (2016) <http://www.screamhorrormag.com/hush-film-review/>.Jankowski, Katherine A. Deaf Empowerment: Emergence, Struggle, and Rhetoric. Washington: Gallaudet UP, 1997.Laird, E.E. “Updating the Final Girl Theory.” Medium (2016) <https://medium.com/@TheFilmJournal/updating-the-final-girl-theory-b37ec0b1acf4>.Norden, M.F. Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1994.Shade, Patrick. “Screaming to Be Heard: Community and Communication in ‘Hush’.” Slayage 6.1 (2006). <http://www.whedonstudies.tv/uploads/2/6/2/8/26288593/shade_slayage_6.1.pdf>.Sheppard, D. “Hush: Revolutionising the Final Girl.” Eyes on Screen (2016). <https://eyesonscreen.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/hush-revolutionising-the-final-girl/>.Thurman, T. “‘Hush’ Director Mike Flanagan and Actress Kate Siegel on Their New Thriller!” Interview. Bloody Disgusting (2016). <http://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/3384092/interview-hush-mike-flanagan-kate-siegel/>.Whittington, W. “Horror Sound Design.” A Companion to the Horror Film. Ed. Harry M. Benshoff. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2014: 168–185.

Introduction I am on the phone with a journalist discussing my research into anti-vaccination. As the conversation winds up, they ask a question I have come to expect: "how big do you think this is?" My answer is usually some version of the following: that we have no way of knowing. I and my fellow researchers can only see the information that is public or in the sunlight. How anti-vaccination information spreads through private networks is dark to us. It is private and necessarily so. This means that we cannot track how these conversations spread in the private or parochial spaces of Facebook, nor can we consider how they might extend into other modes of mediated communication. Modern communication is a complex and multiplatform accomplishment. Consider this: I am texting with my friend, I send her a selfie, in the same moment I hear a notification, she has DMed me a relevant Instagram post via that app. I move to Instagram and share another post in response; we continue our text message conversation there. Later in the day, I message her on Facebook Messenger while participating in a mutual WhatsApp group chat. The next day we Skype, and while we talk, we send links back and forth, which in hindsight are as clear as hieroglyphics before the Rosetta stone. I comment on her Twitter post, and we publicly converse back and forth briefly while other people like our posts. None of these instances are discrete conversational events, even though they occur on different platforms. They are iterations on the same themes, and the archival properties of social media and private messaging apps mean that neither of you forgets where you left off. The conversation slides not only between platforms and contexts but in and out of visibility. Digitally mediated conversation hums in the background of daily life (boring meetings, long commutes and bad dates) and expands our understanding of the temporal and sequential limits of conversation. In this article, I will explore digitally-mediated cross-platform conversation as a problem in two parts, and how we can understand it as part of the 'dark social'. Specifically, I want to draw attention to how 'dark' online spaces are part of our everyday communicative practices and are not necessarily synonymous with the illicit, illegal, or deviant. I argue that the private conversations we have online are also part of the dark social web, insofar as they are hidden from the public eye. When I think of dark social spaces, I think of what lies beneath the surface of murky waters, what hides behind in backstage areas, and the moments between platforms. In contrast, 'light' (or public) social spaces are often perceived as siloed. The boundaries between these platforms are artificially clean and do not appear to leak into other spaces. This article explores the dark and shadowed spaces of online conversation and considers how we might approach them as researchers. Conversations occur in the backchannels of social media platforms, in private messaging functions that are necessarily invisible to the researcher's gaze. These spaces are distinct from the social media activity analysed by Marwick and boyd. Their research examining teens' privacy strategies on social media highlights how social media posts that multiple audiences may view often hold encoded meanings. Social media posts are a distinct and separate category of activity from meditated conversations that occur one to one, or in smaller group chat settings. Second is the disjunction between social media platforms. Users spread their activity across any number of social media platforms, according to social and personal logics. However, these movements are difficult to capture; it is difficult to see in the dark. Platforms are not hermeneutically sealed off from each other, or the broader web. I argue that understanding how conversation moves between platforms and in the backstage spaces of platforms are two parts of the same dark social puzzle. Conversation Online Digital media have changed how we maintain our social connections across time and space. Social media environments offer new possibilities for communication and engagement as well as new avenues for control. Calls and texts can be ignored, and our phones are often used as shields. Busying ourselves with them can help us avoid unwanted face-to-face conversations. There are a number of critiques regarding the pressure of always-on contact, and a growing body of research that examines how users negotiate these demands. By examining group messaging, Mannell highlights how the boundaries of these chats are porous and flexible and mark a distinct communicative break from previous forms of mobile messaging, which were largely didactic. The advent of group chats has also led to an increasing complication of conversation boundaries. One group chat may have several strands of conversation sporadically re-engaged with over time. Manell's examination of group chats empirically illustrates the complexity of digitally-mediated conversations as they move across private, parochial, and public spaces in a way that is not necessarily temporally linear. Further research highlights the networked nature of digitally mediated interpersonal communication and how conversations sprawl across multiple platforms (Burchell). Couldry (16, 17) describes this complex web as the media manifold. This concept encompasses the networked platforms that comprise it and refers to its embeddedness in daily life. As we no longer “log on” to the internet to send and receive email, the manifold is both everywhere and nowhere; so too are our conversations. Gershon has described the ways we navigate the communicative affordances of these platforms as “media ideologies" which are the "beliefs, attitudes, and strategies about the media they [individuals] use" (391). Media ideologies also contain implicit assumptions about which platforms are best for delivering which kinds of messages. Similarly, Burchell argues that the relational ordering of available media technologies is "highly idiosyncratic" (418). Burchell contends that this idiosyncratic ordering is interdependent and relational, and that norms about what to do when are both assumed by individuals and learnt in their engagement with others (418). The influence of others allows us to adjust our practices, or as Burchell argues, "to attune and regulate one's own conduct … and facilitate engagement despite the diverse media practices of others" (418). In this model, individuals are constantly learning and renegotiating norms of conversation on a case by case, platform by platform basis. However, I argue that it is more illuminating to consider how we have collectively developed an implicit and unconscious set of norms and signals that govern our (collective) conduct, as digitally mediated conversation has become embedded in our daily lives. This is not to say that everyone has the same conversational skill level, but rather that we have developed a common toolbox for understanding the ebb and flow of digitally mediated conversations across platforms. However, these norms are implicit, and we only have a partial understanding of how they are socially achieved in digitally-mediated conversation. What Lies Beneath Most of what we do online is assumed not to be publicly visible. While companies like Facebook trace us across the web and peer into every nook and cranny of our private use patterns, researchers have remained focussed on what lies above in the light, not below, in the dark. This has meant an overwhelming focus on single platform studies that rely on the massification of data as a default measure for analysing sentiment and behaviour online. Sociologically, we know that what occurs in dark social spaces, or backstage, is just as important to social life as what happens in front of an audience (Goffman). Goffman's research uses the metaphor of the theatre to analyse how social life is accomplished as a performance. He highlights that (darkened) backstage spaces are those where we can relax, drop our front, and reveal parts of our (social) self that may be unpalatable to a broader audience. Simply, the public data accessible to researchers on social media are “trace data”, or “trace conversation”, from the places where conversations briefly leave (public) footprints and can be tracked and traced before vanishing again. Alternatively, we can visualise internet researchers as swabbing door handles for trace evidence, attempting to assemble a narrative out of a left-behind thread or a stray fingerprint. These public utterances, often scraped through API access, are only small parts of the richness of online conversation. Conversations weave across multiple platforms, yet single platforms are focussed on, bracketing off their leaky edges in favour of certainty. We know the social rules of platforms, but less about the rules between platforms, and in their darker spaces. Conversations briefly emerge into the light, only to disappear again. Without understanding how conversation is achieved and how it expands and contracts and weaves in and out of the present, we are only ever guessing about the social dynamics of mediated conversation as they shift between light, dark, and shadow spaces. Small things can cast large shadows; something that looms large may be deceptively small. Online they could be sociality distorted by disinformation campaigns or swarms of social bots. Capturing the Unseen: An Ethnomethodological Approach Not all data are measurable, computable, and controllable. There is uncertainty beyond what computational logics can achieve. Nooks and crannies of sociality exist beyond the purview of computable data. This suggests that we can apply pre-digital social research methods to capture these “below the surface” conversations and understand their logics. Sociologists have long understood that conversation is a social accomplishment. In the 1960s, sociologist Harvey Sacks developed conversation analysis as an ethnomethodological technique that seeks to understand how social life is accomplished in day-to-day conversation and micro-interactions. Conversation analysis is a detailed and systematic account of how naturally-occurring talk is socially ordered, and has been applied across a number of social contexts, including news interviews, judicial settings, suicide prevention hotlines, therapy sessions, as well as regular phone conversations (Kitzinger and Frith). Conversation analysis focusses on fine-grained detail, all of the little patterns of speech that make up a conversation; for example, the pauses, interruptions, self-corrections, false starts, and over-speaking. Often these too are hidden features of conversation, understood implicitly, but hovering on the edges of our social knowledge. One of the most interesting uses of conversational analysis is to understand refusal, that is, how we say 'no' as a social action. This body of research turns common-sense social knowledge – that saying no is socially difficult – into a systemic schema of social action. For instance, acceptance is easy to achieve; saying yes typically happens quickly and without hesitation. Acceptances are not qualified; a straightforward 'yes' is sufficient (Kitzinger and Frith). However, refusals are much more socially complex. Refusal is usually accomplished by apologies, compliments, and other palliative strategies that seek to cushion the blow of refusals. They are delayed and indirect conversational routes, indicating their status as a dispreferred social action, necessitating their accompaniment by excuses or explanations (Kitzinger and Frith). Research by Kitzinger and Frith, examining how women refuse sexual advances, illustrates that we all have a stock of common-sense knowledge about how refusals are typically achieved, which persists across various social contexts, including in our intimate relationships. Conversation analysis shows us how conversation is achieved and how we understand each other. To date, conversation analysis techniques have been applied to spoken conversation but not yet extended into text-based mediated conversation. I argue that we could apply insights from conversation analysis to understand the rules that govern digitally mediated conversation, how conversation moves in the spaces between platforms, and the rules that govern its emergence into public visibility. What rules shape the success of mediated communication? How can we understand it as a social achievement? When conversation analysis walks into the dark room it can be like turning on the light. How can we apply conversation analysis, usually concerned with the hidden aspects of plainly visible talk, to conversation in dark social spaces, across platforms and in private back channels? There is evidence that the norms of refusal, as highlighted by conversation analysis, are persistent across platforms, including in people's private digitally-mediated conversations. One of the ways in which we can identify these norms in action is by examining technology resistance. Relational communication via mobile device is pervasive (Hall and Baym). The concentration of digitally-mediated communication into smartphones means that conversational norms are constantly renegotiated, alongside expectations of relationship maintenance in voluntary social relationships like friendship (Hall and Baym). Mannell also explains that technology resistance can include lying by text message when explaining non-availability. These small, habitual, and often automatic lies are categorised as “butler lies” and are a polite way of achieving refusal in digitally mediated conversations that are analogous to how refusal is accomplished in face-to-face conversation. Refusals, rejections, and, by extension, unavailability appear to be accompanied by the palliative actions that help us achieve refusal in face-to-face conversation. Mannell identifies strategies such as “feeling ill” to explain non-availability without hurting others' feelings. Insights from conversation analysis suggest that on balance, it is likely that all parties involved in both the furnishing and acceptance of a butler lie understand that these are polite fabrications, much like the refusals in verbal conversation. Because of their invisibility, it is easy to assume that conversations in the dark social are chaotic and disorganised. However, there are tantalising hints that the reverse is true. Instead of arguing that individuals construct conversational norms on a case by case, platform by platform basis, I suggest that we now have a stock of common-sense social knowledge that we also apply to cross-platform mediated communication. In the spaces where gaps in this knowledge exist, Szabla and Blommaert argue that actors use existing norms of interactions and can navigate a range of interaction events even in online environments where we would expect to see a degree of context collapse and interactional disorganisation. Techniques of Detection How do we see in the dark? Some nascent research suggests a way forward that will help us understand the rhythms of cross-platform mediated conversation. Apps have been used to track participants' messaging and calling activities (Birnholtz, Davison, and Li). This research found a number of patterns that signal a user's attention or inattention, including response times and linguistic clues. Similarly, not-for-profit newsroom The Markup built a Facebook inspector called the citizen browser, a "standalone desktop application that was distributed to a panel of more than 1000 paid participants" (Mattu et al.). The application works by being connected to a participant's Facebook account and periodically capturing data from their Facebook feeds. The data is automatically deidentified but is still linked to the demographic information that participants provide about themselves, such as gender, race, location, and age. Applications like these point to how researchers might reliably collect interaction data from Facebook to glimpse into the hidden networks and interactions that drive conversation. User-focussed data collection methods also help us, as researchers, to sever our reliance on API access. API-reliant research is dependent on the largesse of social media companies for continued access and encourages research on the macro at the micro's expense. After all, social media and other digital platforms are partly constituted by the social acts of their users. Without speech acts that constitute mediated conversation, liking, sharing GIFs, and links, as well as the gaps and silences, digital platforms cease to exist. Digital platforms are not just archives of “big data”, but rather they are collections of speech and records of how our common-sense knowledge about how to communicate has stretched and expanded beyond face-to-face contexts. A Problem of Bots Ethnomethodological approaches have been critiqued as focussing too much on the small details of conversation, on nit-picking small details, and thus, as unable to comment on macro social issues of oppression and inequality (Kitzinger and Frith 311). However, understanding digitally-mediated conversation through the lens of talk-as-human-interaction may help us untangle our most pressing social problems across digital platforms. Extensive research examines platforms such as Twitter for “inauthentic” behaviour, primarily identifying which accounts are bots. Bots accounts are programmed Twitter accounts (for example) that automatically tweet information on political or contentious issues, while mimicking genuine engagement. Bots can reply to direct messages too; they converse with us as they are programmed to act as “humanly” as possible. Despite this, there are patterns of behaviour and engagement that distinguish programmed bot accounts, and a number of platforms are dedicated to their detection. However, bots are becoming increasingly sophisticated and better able to mimic “real” human engagement online. But there is as yet no systematic framework regarding what “real” digitally mediated conversation looks like. An ethnomethodological approach to understanding this would better equip platforms to understand inauthentic activity. As Yang and colleagues succinctly state, "a supervised machine learning tool is only as good as the data used for its training … even the most advanced [bot detection] algorithms will fail with outdated training datasets" (8). On the flipside, organisations are using chat bots to deliver cognitive behavioural therapy and assist people in moments of psychological distress. But the bots do not feel human; they reply instantly to any message sent. Some require responses in the form of emojis. The basis of therapy is talk. Understanding more accurately how naturally-occurring talk functions in online spaces could create more sensitive and genuinely therapeutic tools. Conclusion It is easy to forget that social media have largely mainstreamed over the last decade; in this decade, crucial social norms about how we converse online have developed. These norms allow us to navigate our conversations, with intimate friends and strangers alike across platforms, both in and out of public view, in ways that are often temporally non-sequential. Dark social spaces are a matter of intense marketing interest. Advertising firm Disruptive Advertising identified the very spaces that are the focus of this article as “dark social”: messaging apps, direct messaging, and native mobile apps facilitate user activity that is "not as easily controlled nor tracked". Dark social traffic continues to grow, yet our understanding of why, how, and for whom trails behind. To make sense of our social world, which is increasingly indistinguishable from online activity, we need to examine the spaces between and behind platforms, and how they co-mingle. Where are the spaces where the affordances of multiple platforms and technologies scrape against each other in uncomfortable ways? How do users achieve intelligible conversation not just because of affordances, but despite them? Focussing on micro-sociological encounters and conversations may also help us understand what could build a healthy online ecosystem. How are consensus and agreement achieved online? What are the persistent speech acts (or text acts) that signal when consensus is achieved? To begin where I started, to understand the scope and power of anti-vaccination sentiment, we need to understand how it is shared and discussed in dark social spaces, in messaging applications, and other backchannel spaces. Taking an ethnomethodological approach to these conversational interactions could also help us determine how misinformation is refused, accepted, and negotiated in mediated conversation. Focussing on “dark conversation” will help us more richly understand our social world and add much needed insight into some of our pressing social problems. References Burchell, Kenzie. "Everyday Communication Management and Perceptions of Use: How Media Users Limit and Shape Their Social World." Convergence 23.4 (2017): 409–24. Couldry, Nick. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Polity, 2012. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Penguin, 1990. Gershon, Ilana. The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Cornell University Press, 2010. Hall, Jeffrey A., and Nancy K. Baym. "Calling and Texting (Too Much): Mobile Maintenance Expectations, (Over)dependence, Entrapment, and Friendship Satisfaction." New Media & Society 14.2 (2012): 316–31. Hall, Margaret, et al. "Editorial of the Special Issue on Following User Pathways: Key Contributions and Future Directions in Cross-Platform Social Media Research." International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction 34.10 (2018): 895–912. Kitzinger, Celia, and Hannah Frith. "Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal." Discourse & Society 10.3 (1999): 293–316. Ling, Rich. "Soft Coercion: Reciprocal Expectations of Availability in the Use of Mobile Communication." First Monday, 2016. Mannell, Kate. "A Typology of Mobile Messaging's Disconnective Affordances." Mobile Media & Communication 7.1 (2019): 76–93. ———. "Plural and Porous: Reconceptualising the Boundaries of Mobile Messaging Group Chats." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 25.4 (2020): 274–90. Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. "Networked Privacy: How Teenagers Negotiate Context in Social Media." New Media & Society 16.7 (2014): 1051–67. Mattu, Surya, Leon Yin, Angie Waller, and Jon Keegan. "How We Built a Facebook Inspector." The Markup 5 Jan. 2021. 9 Mar. 2021 <https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/01/05/how-we-built-a-facebook-inspector>. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation: Volumes I and II. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Blackwell, 1995. Szabla, Malgorzata, and Jan Blommaert. "Does Context Really Collapse in Social Media Interaction?" Applied Linguistics Review 11.2 (2020): 251–79.

IntroductionIn 2008, researchers at New York University’s Computational Neuroimaging Laboratory challenged our contemporary understanding of audience with an alternative approach to engaging some of the most essential questions regarding film consumption. The study itself used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner during the “free viewing of films” allowing researchers the opportunity to see which sections of the brain are activated during certain parts of the viewing (Hasson et al. 2). In an effort to overcome limitations of fMRI imaging, the researchers further utilized an inter-subjective correlation (ISC) technique to validate their findings. Simply put, ISC looks at the similar effects in neuroimaging across a range of viewers for the same rhetorical artifact; the higher the similarity, the more confident the researchers are that the impact of the film is the same for most or all viewers. This impact is said to “control” the viewers mental and emotional state in that they can be a reliable way to predict a viewer’s “emotions, thoughts, [and] attitudes” (Hasson et al. 2). The researchers termed their work “neurocinematics” and concluded that this new approach could “contribute to the cognitive movement in film theory, analogous to contributions that neuroscience has made to cognitive and social psychology.” (Hasson et al. 21).Since the publication of this research, there have been over a dozen academic essays published, including additional work in the hard sciences, and contributions from psychology and literary and film studies (see Cohen, Shavalian and Rube; Loschky et al.; Erincin; Kauttonen, Hlushchuk and Tikka; Christoforou et al.). Many seem to be responding to the original authors’ calls for neurocinematics to be “a new interdisciplinary field” between “cognitive neuroscience and film studies” that is “part of a larger endeavor that looks for connections between neuroscience and art” (Hasson et al. 1, 21). Noticeably missing from their call for an inter-disciplinary approach, however, is one that includes rhetorical studies. In fact, to date, there has only been a single publication referring to neurocinematics in communication studies – an essay that was not specific to film nor audience, and that limited its discussion to the effectiveness of fMRI imaging (see Weber, Mangus and Huskey). It is the argument of this essay that rhetorical studies should be included in neurocinematics for two reasons: first, rhetorical studies can provide an alternative theoretical understanding of narrative that should prove to be enlightening for this emerging field; and second, rhetorical studies can provide the necessary ethical positioning for this emerging field.The Rhetorical Studies AlternativeThe first justification for the inclusion of rhetorical studies in neurocinematics is the alternative theoretical approach to narrative that rhetoricians can provide. The original neurocinematics research found that structured stories provided a much higher degree of ISC than open-ended, unstructured “real life” depictions. The researchers showed 10 minutes of Sergio Leone’s film, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and a 10-minute stable shot of a Saturday afternoon in Washington Square Park that represented an unstructured, real-life event. The researchers concluded that, “a mere mechanical reproduction of reality, with no directorial intention or intervention, is not sufficient by itself for controlling viewer’s brain activity” (Hasson et al. 8). That the “slice of real life” didn’t have the same predictive functions as the “intentional construction of the film’s sequence through aesthetic means” has important implications for rhetorical studies (Hasson et al. 9). It’s not cinematic imagery alone that corresponds to brain activations, but the construction of story and the aesthetic elements of narrative presentations (that is to say, the creation of rhetoric) that has predictive functions. In A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke notes that dramatism “invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action” (xxii). For Burke, all of our stories are the product of thought, whether it be conscious or unconscious, and this thought belies how we view the world of symbols in which we live. Michael Overington contends that dramatismaddresses the empirical questions of how persons explain their actions to themselves and others, what the cultural and social structural influences on these interpretations might be, and what effect connotational links among the explanatory (motivational) terms might have on these explanations and hence, on action itself. (133)Language is the vehicle for human behaviour and represents how we describe the world to ourselves and to others so that “a rhetor’s language can be used to discover motive” (Foss, Foss and Trapp 200). Film is nothing short of a dramatistic explanation that allows us the opportunity to dissect it with more detail to determine the worldview not only of the auteur, but of the spectator as well. Although film studies has its own theories on story and structure, a “systematic application” of Burke’s dramatism “enables an observer to reconstruct various perspectives of ‘reality’” (Stewart, Smith, and Denton 168). When compared to film studies, as an academic discipline, rhetorical studies offers an alternative understanding of narrative. Film studies asks us to apply a structural model to a narrative, while rhetorical studies asks us to apply a systems model that unmasks a narrative. As an example, film studies might examine a film’s structure, looking at the rising action of subplot B as it corresponds in the third reel to the declining action of the subplot A before denouement. As an alternative example, rhetorical studies could offer a dramatistic reading to examine the motivations of scenic ratios between the two subplots as it defines cinematic reality for the audience. Although neurocinematics may help predict the affective impact of the subplots for an audience, it is currently rooted in a structural assumption of audience and narrative, which fails to provide a full account of the spectator’s experience as it relates to the filmmaker’s rhetorical motivation. The addition of rhetorical studies to the conversation can provide an alternative approach and give an additional richness to our understandings of audience.While film studies may engage the ideological function of films, rhetorical studies amplifies their findings. In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin writes,the storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work … is itself an artisanal form of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure ‘in itself’ or gist of a thing, like information or a report. It submerges the thing into the life of the story-teller, in order to bring it out of him again. (149)For Benjamin, the storyteller is an artisan that exists external to the rhetorical artifact itself, which, of course, means that the structural focus of film studies falls inevitably short. Further, Benjamin argues that there is an ideological component to both narrative and its medium. He writes, “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature but by history” (Benjamin "Reproducibility" 255, emphasis in original). The oral tradition of storytelling is different, as is the storytelling of the novel, film, and so on. Indeed, it is the goal of neurocinematics to illustrate how the rhetoric of film is distinct from other forms of narrative discourse, which necessarily demands an inter-disciplinary focus that allows for an interrogation of the ideological functions that exist both within and without the text, which is what Burke’s dramatism provides.Further, Walter Fisher’s work with narrative extends the role of rhetorical theory into what should be discussed in neurocinematics. Fisher contends that the narrative form is something that is unique to humans, but something that all humans engage in; for him, “stories are fundamental to communication because they provide structure for our experience as humans and because they influence people to live in communities that share common explanations and understandings” (Burgchardt 239). As noted earlier, neurocinematics argues that there is a coherence in cinematic narratives that don’t exist in “slice of life” filmic images. Similarly, Walter Fisher contends that this “coherence” is inborn in the narrative being (his homo narran) “their inherent awareness of narrative probability, what constitutes a coherent story, and their constant habit of testing narrative fidelity, whether the stories they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives” (8). The neurocinematics researchers conclude that, “the ISC analysis of brain activity can also serve as a measurement of systematic differences in how various groups of individuals … respond to the same film” (Hasson et al. 20). Fisher notes that the philosophical foundation of the rational world paradigm (which he sets opposite his narrative paradigm) “is epistemology. Its linguistic materials are self-evident propositions, demonstrations, and proofs, the verbal expressions of certain and probably knowing” (4). The danger with neurocinematics rooted in pure rationality is that it co-opts the narrative function, makes the spectator as agent and film as object separate from one another (when ISC begs that they interact), and brackets off questions such as ethics. Fisher concludes, “With knowledge of agents, we can hope to find that which is reliable or trustworthy; with knowledge of objects, we can hope to discover that which has the quality of veracity. The world requires both kinds of knowledge” (18). Of course, this question demands a discussion of ethics, which the current approach to neurocinematics explicitly denies as a subject of inquiry. The authors write, different filmmakers differ in the level of control they choose to impose on viewers, and out methods are not designed to judge this, but rather to measure the effect of a given film on different target groups. Thus the critical evaluation of each film is outside the domain of this research. (Hasson et al. 21-2)This is the danger Fisher warns of. The assumption that neurocinematics can be a purely descriptive project is not only unfeasible, but also unconscionable. Unlike researchers who deny the place of ideology and ethics, “rhetorical critics, of course, have long recognized the centrality of ideology to persuasive discourse” (Burgchardt 451). To illustrate why this is a vital issue for neurocinematics, let’s take its existing descriptive project to its logical conclusion. Theoretically, researchers could reach a point where there was a 100% ISC, meaning that there existed a cinematic formula that would impact every audience member the same way and would “control” their emotional and mental states – for neurocinematics this would constitute the “perfect” film. This “perfect” film, however, wouldn’t exist in a research vacuum, but in a morass of culture, politics, and ideology. Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek notes the impact that Nine-Eleven had on film:the ultimate twist in this link between Hollywood and the ‘war on terrorism’ occurred when the Pentagon decided to solicit the help of Hollywood: … at the beginning of November 2001, there was a series of meetings between White House advisors and senior Hollywood executives with the aim of co-ordinating the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the ‘war against terrorism’ by getting the right ideological meaning across not only to Americans, but to the Hollywood public around the globe – the ultimate empirical proof that Hollywood does in fact function as an ‘ideological state apparatus’. (16)The ethical implications are overwhelming: propaganda films are nothing new, but neurocinematics has the potential to usher in a whole new type of propaganda cinema, under the guise of entertainment, that is 100% effective. The original neurocinematic research argued that “the ISC measurement should probably not be used to evaluate the aesthetic, artistic, social, or political value of movies” (Hasson et al. 21). Conversely, rhetorical studies demands that criticism and scholarship not only comment on texts, but ethical considerations “will not be averted either by ignoring it or placing it beyond our provence” (Wander 18).Further, the very goal of neurocinematics demands the critical reaction that current rhetorical theory is prepared to provide. The stated end-game for neurocinematics is to determine how films discursively interact with a viewer’s mental state and, therefore, their affective response to an aesthetic experience. Raymie McKerrow notes that critical rhetorical theory must examine “the manner in which discourse insinuates itself in the fabric of social power, and thereby ‘effects’ the status of knowledge among the members of the social group” (92). Michael Calvin McGee argues, “We do not ‘observe’ objects and human actions … we construct these phenomena through rational acts of ‘selecting,’ ‘coordinating,’ ‘interpreting,’ and ‘applying’ sensory data” (48). There is no potential for a non-normative descriptive project inside of these parameters; there is no neutral observation by the spectator, the filmic experience is one that is constructed internally. Neurocinematics notes that there are interactions between brain spheres (e.g. neocortex and the amygdala) that create an intersubjective experience (which is quantitatively described with the ISC), but to explain, even descriptively, what is occurring in these viewers requires determining what the audience “knows” and how the discursive impact of the film effects them neurologically. The field of neurocinematics is not morally neutral, though it insists on presenting itself that way. At its most basic level, the researchers are not separate from the ethical and ideological functions of their studies: they make normative claims about which films are “worthy” of study, they manufacture inter-subjective reality with their critical reactions to the artifacts, and their communicative reporting in the essay itself provides agency to the film while simultaneously denying agency to the viewers. Further, when neurocinematics is taken to its logical conclusion (the ability to manufacture the descriptively “perfect” film – one with a 100% ISC), the ethical concerns are overwhelming. With Hollywood films operating more and more as a part of the ideological state apparatus, the potential for highly effective propaganda films becomes more and more real, and more and more frightening. If the conclusions by these researchers is true, that these films “control” our mental states, then the power of such propaganda films could be devastating.ConclusionThis essay has argued that rhetorical scholars have not only a unique opportunity, but an ethical obligation, to insert ourselves into one of the most innovative inter-disciplinary fields to emerge in recent history. Neurocinematics has the potential to transform cognitive neuroscience and film studies both and it is imperative that rhetoricians insert themselves into this dialogue. First, the work that rhetorical studies has done on storytelling, narrative, and dramatism provides unique perspectives that have been overlooked by the structural models of film studies. Further, the scientists driving neurocinematics forward deny the need for political and value claims to be assessed to their work. Rhetorical studies has the opportunity to challenge these illusions of neutrality and help neuroscientists to understand that their work is, indeed, ideological, and that the dangers of ideology manifest themselves when these perspectives are pushed to the side under the guise of neutrality. ReferencesBenjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller." Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and others. Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. "Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility." Trans. Edmund Jephcott and others. Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Burgchardt, Carl, ed. Readings in Rhetorical Criticism. Third ed. State College: Strata Publishing, 2005. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945. Christoforou, Christoforos, Spyros Christou-Champi, Fofi Constantinidou, and Maria Theodorou. "From the Eyes and the Heart: A Novel Eye-Gaze Metric That Predicts Video Preferences of a Large Audience." Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1-11. Cohen, Anna-Lisa, Elliot Shavalian, and Moshe Rube. "The Power of the Picture: How Narrative Film Captures Attention and Disrupts Goal Pursuit." PLoS ONE 10.12 (2015): 1-8. Erincin, Serap. "Dance in Translation: Subjectivity, Failed Spectatorship and Tolerance." Word & Text: A Journal of Literary Studies & Linguistics 2.2 (2012): 156-70. Fisher, Walter. "Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument." Communication Monographs 51.1 (1984): 1-22. Foss, Sonja K., Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp. Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric. Third ed. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 2002. Hasson, Uri, Ohad Landesman, Barbara Knappmeyer, Ignacio Vallines, Nava Rubin, and David J. Heeger. "Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film." Projections 2.1 (2008): 1-26. Kauttonen, Janne, Yevhen Hlushchuk, and Pia Tikka. "Optimizing Methods for Linking Cinematic Features to fMRI Data." NeuroImage 110 (2015): 136-48. Loschky, Lester C., Adam M. Larson, Joseph P. Magliano, and Tim J. Smith. "What Would Jaws Do? The Tyranny of Film and the Relationship between Gaze and Higher-Level Narrative Film Comprehension." PLoS ONE 10.11 (2015): 1-23. McKerrow, Raymie E. "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis." Communication Monographs 56.2 (1989): 91. Overington, Michael A. "Kenneth Burke and the Method of Dramatism." Theory & Society 4.1 (1977): 131. Stewart, Charles J., Craig Allen Smith, and Robert E. Denton Jr. Persuasion and Social Movements. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1994. Wander, Philip C. "The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism." Central States Speech Journal 34 (1983): 1-18. Weber, René, J. Michael Mangus, and Richard Huskey. "Brain Imaging in Communication Research: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Evaluating fMRI Studies." Communication Methods & Measures 9.1/2 (2015): 5-29. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. New York: Verso, 2002.

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to account for the central role played by freezing in several types of linguistic change and to come back to one of the main questions raised by the comparison between languages. This study focuses on the shift from the referential function to a more pragmatic function. It studies three pairs of expressions in German and French: glatt / carrément; schließlich / finalement; tu vois / siehst du and écoute / hör (mal). The word ‘fixedness’ is not used here as it is in the phraseological tradition (and within Europhras). Indeed, in this paper it designates the formal frozenness of polylexical forms (one of the usual defining features of phrasemes) as well as the functional frozenness of forms that are not necessarily polylexical.The cases presented here are examples of three different levels: the level of the speaker, the discourse level and the interaction level. The types of fixedness which have been analysed result from morphological, syntactic and semantic freezing and those forms acquire a pragmatic function: in the domain of adjectives glatt / carrément shift to the function of predicative particles; the adverbs schließlich / finalement assume the function of argument markers, and the verbal forms siehst du / tu vois illustrate the gradual passage from perception to cognition, therefore to the function of interpretative guidance.Those forms have undergone an “erosion” process in both languages. However they present a noteworthy invariant. The partial differences in their functions show that the dynamics of change depend on the variations in the preservation and exploitation of some of the features of the original forms. The common points and the differences are linked with the gradual nature of the process of pragmaticalization, and the changes at play can be observed “in the making”.The first section of the paper presents a general description of pragmaticalization (in its basic meaning of passage from the lexical-grammatical sphere to the pragmatic sphere) and its various manifestations (decategorization, deparadigmaticization, etc. (cf. Dostie 2004)), the other three parts of the paper are devoted to the description of the markers in French and in German.The German adjective glatt shows how characterization - from the implicature <ohne Widerstand> - tends to become more subjective as it applies to human behaviours and speech acts. That shift to internal perspective (Traugott and König 1991: 208-209), which follows from a metaphorical process, can be considered to precede pragmaticalization. In some cases the characterization moves to predication, which is presented by the speaker as being “at the limit of what could be expected”; the event in question can be interpreted as felicitous or infelicitous. According to the principle of secondary “resonance” (Black 1977) the metaphorical reading of that lexeme is maintained even when an utterance obviously expresses an evaluation. The same process is at work for the French adjective carré and the adverbial form carrément. The adverb carrément focuses the features <direct> and <without consideration> in the same way as glatt does, it shows the speaker’s evaluative intention concerning the somewhat unexpected quality of the process (an action or a behaviour). As is the case with glatt the shift results in the expression of the speaker’s attitude (or judgement), in accordance with what Traugott and König call semanticpragmatic Tendency III (1991: 209).The third part of this paper deals with the domain of temporality and it is devoted to an example of shift to the discourse and interpretative functions. The lexemes schließlich and finalement also undergo two shifts: the former evolves from a de re temporality (it precedes the last step in a sequence of events) to a de dicto temporality (when it precedes the last step in a sequence of data); the second shift is from discursive temporality to a purely argumentative function and connects those lexemes with rival phraseological units (with which, however, they are not synonymous) such as nicht zuletzt, letzten Endes, letztendlich or en fin de compte, tout compte fait, and au total.The paper ends with forms that are clearly phraseological - since they are polylexical forms - which focus the relation between cognition and interaction. Those forms are what the francophone tradition refers to as “énoncés parenthétiques”. They are verbs designating two basic modes of perception (voir / sehen and entendre-écouter / hören) in a form indicating proximity and interaction (second person, interrogative or imperative forms: vois-tu / tu vois / siehst du, écoute / hör (mal)) which are used to point to cognitive phenomena. The call to the addressee or co-enunciator’s perception is highlighted by “an enunciative staging” (“mise en scène énonciative”, cf. Détrie 2010) aiming at sharing and adherence.The comparison between the two languages shows that for the same kind of linguistic material, German and French shift easily from physical perception to intellectual perception while in the case of French the shift can go as far as to designate the mental process of comprehension.The pair voir / sehen is evidence of this difference at the end of the pragmaticalization process: while the verb voir contains the semantic feature <comprehension>, that function tends to be performed by other forms in German including the verbs wissen and verstehen. Another interesting point of difference is that the French tu vois has a punctuating (Bolly 2010) and structuring use when it focuses a constituent; this is a use that its German counterpart does not share.There is also a clear difference between écouter and hören: the passage from the call to auditory perception to cognitive perception is similar in both languages, however only French uses the verb écouter in a clearly interactive function mentioned in studies carried out so far (Rodrigues Somolinos 2003), so as to avoid disagreement and the risk of a face threatening act. Ecoute is used in that way when an argument is added afterwards to justify an assertion in order to avoid a reproach. In German that function is served mainly by lexemes belonging to another word category such as adverbs, discourse markers, or even more elaborate verbal forms at the beginning of a speaker’s turn.This study is too short to draw general conclusions but the following points summarize its most salient aspects:a) The forms tending to pragmaticalize meet the need to underline the speaker’s discursive activity in the interaction; they are also explicit marks of the call to the necessary constitution of shared knowledge.b) In both languages similar phenomena concerning the process of pragmaticalization can be observed. Beyond lexical parallels and a similar shift to an internal perspective the divergences are linked with differences in metaphorization (base domain or degree) and in the distribution of competing forms.c) Lastly, the shift of the functions analysed in this paper does not mean that the lexical contents of those forms fade with the loss of the referential function. The change of level (referential > predicative > discursive > argumentative) maintains the main features of the units concerned. The process of metaphorization which is often the basis of the functional shift results from the mapping of some features from one domain to the other, which guarantees a certain semantic stability. What is more, the interpretation of some features can result into certain meaning effects and certain functions.This study remains incomplete and must be broadened with a corpus analysis. However it lays stress on one of the domains where a language can be followed “in the making”. Functional and semantic freezing is a slow process which, in the case examined here, is still going on and which can be watched “live”. The pragmatic level is also to be associated with the need to produce a visible enunciative gesture and that visibility is guaranteed as long as the shift is perceptible.

This paper provides embedded, reflective practice-based insight arising from my experience collaborating to produce online and print-on-demand editions of a magazine showcasing the photography of members of haphazart! Contemporary Abstracts group (hereafter referred to as haphazart!). The group’s online visual, textual and activity-based practices via the photo sharing social networking site Flickr are portrayed as achieving cohesive visual identity. Stylistic analysis of pictures in support of this claim is not attempted. Rather negotiation, that Elliot has previously described in M/C Journal as innate in collaboration, is identified as the unifying factor. However, the collaborators’ adherence to Flickr’s communication platform proves problematic in the editorial context. Some technical incoherence with possible broader cultural implications is encountered during the process of repurposing images from screen to print. A Scan of Relevant Literature The photographic gaze perceives and captures objects which seem to ‘carry within them ready-made’ a work of art. But the reminiscences of the gaze are only made possible by knowing and associating with groups that define a tradition. The list of valorised subjects is not actually defined with reference to a culture, but rather by familiarity with a limited group. (Chamboredon 144) As part of the array of socio-cultural practices afforded by Web 2.0 interoperability, sites of produsage (Bruns) are foci for studies originating in many disciplines. Flickr provides a rich source of data that researchers interested in the interface between the technological and the social find useful to analyse. Access to the Flickr application programming interface enables quantitative researchers to observe a variety of means by which information is propagated, disseminated and shared. Some findings from this kind of research confirm the intuitive. For example, Negoecsu et al. find that “a large percentage of users engage in sharing with groups and that they do so significantly” ("Analyzing Flickr Groups" 425). They suggest that Flickr’s Groups feature appears to “naturally bring together two key aspects of social media: content and relations.” They also find evidence for what they call hyper-groups, which are “communities consisting of groups of Flickr groups” ("Flickr Hypergroups" 813). Two separate findings from another research team appear to contradict each other. On one hand, describing what they call “social cascades,” Cha et al. claim that “content in the form of ideas, products, and messages spreads across social networks like a virus” ("Characterising Social Cascades"). Yet in 2009 they claim that homocity and reciprocity ensure that “popularity of pictures is localised” ("Measurement-Driven Analysis"). Mislove et al. reflect that the affordances of Flickr influence the growth patterns they observe. There is optimism shared by some empiricists that through collation and analysis of Flickr tag data, the matching of perceptual structures of images and image annotation techniques will yield ontology-based taxonomy useful in automatic image annotation and ultimately, the Semantic Web endeavour (Kennedy et al.; Su et al.; Xu et al.). Qualitative researchers using ethnographic interview techniques also find Flickr a valuable resource. In concluding that the photo sharing hobby is for many a “serious leisure” activity, Cox et al. propose that “Flickr is not just a neutral information system but also value laden and has a role within a wider cultural order.” They also suggest that “there is genuinely greater scope for individual creativity, releasing the individual to explore their own identity in a way not possible with a camera club.” Davies claims that “online spaces provide an arena where collaboration over meanings can be transformative, impacting on how individuals locate themselves within local and global contexts” (550). She says that through shared ways of describing and commenting on images, Flickrites develop a common criticality in their endeavour to understand images, each other and their world (554).From a psychologist’s perspective, Suler observes that “interpersonal relationships rarely form and develop by images alone” ("Image, Word, Action" 559). He says that Flickr participants communicate in three dimensions: textual (which he calls “verbal”), visual, and via the interpersonal actions that the site affords, such as Favourites. This latter observation can surely be supplemented by including the various games that groups configure within the constraints of the discussion forums. These often include submissions to a theme and voting to select a winning image. Suler describes the place in Flickr where one finds identity as one’s “cyberpsychological niche” (556). However, many participants subscribe to multiple groups—45.6% of Flickrites who share images share them with more than 20 groups (Negoescu et al., "Analyzing Flickr Groups" 420). Is this a reflection of the existence of the hyper-groups they describe (2009) or, of the ranging that people do in search of a niche? It is also probable that some people explore more than a singular identity or visual style. Harrison and Bartell suggest that there are more interesting questions than why users create media products or what motivates them to do so: the more interesting questions center on understanding what users will choose to do ultimately with [Web2.0] capabilities [...] in what terms to define the success of their efforts, and what impact the opportunity for individual and collaborative expression will have on the evolution of communicative forms and character. (167) This paper addresseses such questions. It arises from a participatory observational context which differs from that of the research described above. It is intended that a different perspective about online group-based participation within the Flickr social networking matrix will avail. However, it will be seen that the themes cited in this introductory review prove pertinent. Context As a university teacher of a range of subjects in the digital media field, from contemporary photomedia to social media to collaborative multimedia practice, it is entirely appropriate that I embed myself in projects that engage, challenge and provide me with relevant first-hand experience. As an academic I also undertake and publish research. As a practicing new media artist I exhibit publically on a regular basis and consider myself semi-professional with respect to this activity. While there are common elements to both approaches to research, this paper is written more from the point of view of ‘reflective practice’ (Holmes, "Reconciling Experimentum") rather than ‘embedded ethnography’ (Pink). It is necessarily and unapologetically reflexive. Abstract Photography Hyper-Group A search of all Flickr groups using the query “abstract” is currently likely to return around 14,700 results. However, only in around thirty of them does the group name, its stated rules and, the stream of images that flow through the pool arguably reflect a sense of collective concept and aesthetic that is coherently abstract. This loose complex of groups comprises a hyper-group. Members of these groups often have co-memberships, reciprocal contacts, and regularly post images to a range of groups and comment on others’ posts to be found throughout. Given that one of Flickr’s largest groups, Black and White, currently has around 131,150 members and hosts 2,093,241 items in its pool, these abstract special interest groups are relatively small. The largest, Abstract Photos, has 11,338 members and hosts 89,306 items in its pool. The group that is the focus of this paper, haphazart!, currently has 2,536 members who have submitted 53,309 items. The group pool is more like a constantly flowing river because the most recently added images are foremost. Older images become buried in an archive of pages which cannot be reverse accessed at a rate greater than the seven pages linked from a current view. A member’s presence is most immediate through images posted to a pool. This structural feature of Flickr promotes a desire for currency; a need to post regularly to maintain presence. Negotiating Coherence to the Abstract The self-managing social dynamics in groups has, as Suler proposes to be the case for individuals, three dimensions: visual, textual and action. A group integrates the diverse elements, relationships and values which cumulatively constitute its identity with contributions from members in these dimensions. First impressions of that identity are usually derived from the group home page which consists of principal features: the group name, a selection of twelve most recent posts to the pool, some kind of description, a selection of six of the most recent discussion topics, and a list of rules (if any). In some of these groups, what is considered to constitute an abstract photographic image is described on the group home page. In some it is left to be contested and becomes the topic of ongoing forum debates. In others the specific issue is not discussed—the images are left to speak for themselves. Administrators of some groups require that images are vetted for acceptance. In haphazart! particular administrators dutifully delete from the pool on a regular basis any images that they deem not to comply with the group ethic. Whether reasons are given or not is left to the individual prosecutor. Mostly offending images just disappear from the group pool without trace. These are some of the ways that the coherence of a group’s visual identity is established and maintained. Two groups out of the abstract photography hyper-group are noteworthy in that their discussion forums are particularly active. A discussion is just the start of a new thread and may have any number of posts under it. At time of writing Abstract Photos has 195 discussions and haphazart! — the most talkative by this measure—has 333. Haphazart! invites submissions of images to regularly changing themes. There is always lively and idiosyncratic banter in the forum over the selection of a theme. To be submitted an image needs to be identified by a specific theme tag as announced on the group home page. The tag can be added by the photographer themselves or by anyone else who deems the image appropriate to the theme. An exhibition process ensues. Participant curators search all Flickr items according to the theme tag and select from the outcome images they deem to most appropriately and abstractly address the theme. Copies of the images together with comments by the curators are posted to a dedicated discussion board. Other members may also provide responses. This activity forms an ongoing record that may serve as a public indicator of the aesthetic that underlies the group’s identity. In Abstract Photos there is an ongoing discussion forum where one can submit an image and request that the moderators rule as to whether or not the image is ‘abstract’. The same group has ongoing discussions labelled “Hall of Appropriate” where worthy images are reposted and celebrated and, “Hall of Inappropriate” where images posted to the group pool have been removed and relegated because abstraction has been “so far stretched from its definition that it now resides in a parallel universe” (Askin). Reasons are mostly courteously provided. In haphazart! a relatively small core of around twelve group members regularly contribute to the group discussion board. A curious aspect of this communication is that even though participants present visually with a ‘buddy icon’ and most with a screen name not their real name, it is usual practice to address each other in discussions by their real Christian names, even when this is not evident in a member’s profile. This seems to indicate a common desire for authenticity. The makeup of the core varies from time to time depending on other activities in a member’s life. Although one or two may be professionally or semi-professionally engaged as photographers or artists or academics, most of these people would likely consider themselves to be “serious amateurs” (Cox). They are internationally dispersed with bias to the US, UK, Europe and Australia. English is the common language though not the natural tongue of some. The age range is approximately 35 to 65 and the gender mix 50/50. The group is three years old. Where Do We Go to from Here? In early January 2009 the haphazart! core was sparked into a frenzy of discussion by a post from a member headed “Where do we go to from here?” A proposal was mooted to produce a ‘book’ featuring images and texts representative of the group. Within three days a new public group with invited membership dedicated to the idea had been established. A smaller working party then retreated to a private Flickr group. Four months later Issue One of haphazart! magazine was available in print-on-demand and online formats. Following however is a brief critically reflective review of some of the collaborative curatorial, editorial and production processes for Issue Two which commenced in early June 2009. Most of the team had also been involved with Issue One. I was the only newcomer and replaced the person who had undertaken the design for Issue One. I was not provided access to the prior private editorial ruminations but apparently the collaborative curatorial and editorial decision-making practices the group had previously established persisted, and these took place entirely within the discussion forums of a new dedicated private Flickr group. Over a five-month period there were 1066 posts in 54 discussions concerning matters such as: change of format from the previous; selection of themes, artists and images; conduct of and editing of interviews; authoring of texts; copyright and reproduction. The idiom of those communications can be described as: discursive, sporadic, idiosyncratic, resourceful, collegial, cooperative, emphatic, earnest and purposeful. The selection process could not be said to follow anything close to a shared manifesto, or articulation of style. It was established that there would be two primary themes: the square format and contributors’ use of colour. Selection progressed by way of visual presentation and counter presentation until some kind of consensus was reached often involving informal votes of preference. Stretching the Limits of the Flickr Social Tools The magazine editorial collaborators continue to use the facilities with which they are familiar from regular Flickr group participation. However, the strict vertically linear format of the Flickr discussion format is particularly unsuited to lengthy, complex, asynchronous, multithreaded discussion. For this purpose it causes unnecessary strain, fatigue and confusion. Where images are included, the forums have set and maximum display sizes and are not flexibly configured into matrixes. Images cannot readily be communally changed or moved about like texts in a wiki. Likewise, the Flickrmail facility is of limited use for specialist editorial processes. Attachments cannot be added. This opinion expressed by a collaborator in the initial, open discussion for Issue One prevailed among Issue Two participants: do we want the members to go to another site to observe what is going on with the magazine? if that’s ok, then using google groups or something like that might make sense; if we want others to observe (and learn from) the process - we may want to do it here [in Flickr]. (Valentine) The opinion appears socially constructive; but because the final editorial process and production processes took place in a separate private forum, ultimately the suggested learning between one issue and the next did not take place. During Issue Two development the reluctance to try other online collaboration tools for the selection processes requiring visual comparative evaluation of images and trials of sequencing adhered. A number of ingenious methods of working within Flickr were devised and deployed and, in my opinion, proved frustratingly impractical and inefficient. The digital layout, design, collation and formatting of images and texts, all took place on my personal computer using professional software tools. Difficulties arose in progressively sharing this work for the purposes of review, appraisal and proofing. Eventually I ignored protests and insisted the team review demonstrations I had converted for sharing in Google Documents. But, with only one exception, I could not tempt collaborators to try commenting or editing in that environment. For example, instead of moving the sequence of images dynamically themselves, or even typing suggestions directly into Google Documents, they would post responses in Flickr. To Share and to Hold From the first imaginings of Issue One the need to have as an outcome something in one’s hands was expressed and this objective is apparently shared by all in the haphazart! core as an ongoing imperative. Various printing options have been nominated, discussed and evaluated. In the end one print-on-demand provider was selected on the basis of recommendation. The ethos of haphazart! is clearly not profit-making and conflicts with that of the printing organisation. Presumably to maintain an incentive to purchase the print copy online preview is restricted to the first 15 pages. To satisfy the co-requisite to make available the full 120 pages for free online viewing a second host that specialises in online presentation of publications is also utilised. In this way haphazart! members satisfy their common desires for sharing selected visual content and ideas with an online special interest audience and, for a physical object of art to relish—with all the connotations of preciousness, fetish, talisman, trophy, and bookish notions of haptic pleasure and visual treasure. The irony of publishing a frozen chunk of the ever-flowing Flickriver, whose temporally changing nature is arguably one of its most interesting qualities, is not a consideration. Most of them profess to be simply satisfying their own desire for self expression and would eschew any critical judgement as to whether this anarchic and discursive mode of operation results in a coherent statement about contemporary photographic abstraction. However there remains a distinct possibility that a number of core haphazart!ists aspire to transcend: popular taste; the discernment encouraged in camera clubs; and, the rhetoric of those involved professionally (Bourdieu et al.); and seek to engage with the “awareness of illegitimacy and the difficulties implied by the constitution of photography as an artistic medium” (Chamboredon 130). Incoherence: A Technical Note My personal experience of photography ranges from the filmic to the digital (Holmes, "Bridging Adelaide"). For a number of years I specialised in facsimile graphic reproduction of artwork. In those days I became aware that films were ‘blind’ to the psychophysical affect of some few particular paint pigments. They just could not be reproduced. Even so, as I handled the dozens of images contributed to haphazart!2, converting them from the pixellated place where Flickr exists to the resolution and gamut of the ink based colour space of books, I was surprised at the number of hue values that exist in the former that do not translate into the latter. In some cases the affect is subtle so that judicious tweaking of colour levels or local colour adjustment will satisfy discerning comparison between the screenic original and the ‘soft proof’ that simulates the printed outcome. In other cases a conversion simply does not compute. I am moved to contemplate, along with Harrison and Bartell (op. cit.) just how much of the experience of media in the shared digital space is incomparably new? Acknowledgement Acting on the advice of researchers experienced in cyberethnography (Bruckman; Suler, "Ethics") I have obtained the consent of co-collaborators to comment freely on proceedings that took place in a private forum. They have been given the opportunity to review and suggest changes to the account. References Askin, Dean (aka: dnskct). “Hall of Inappropriate.” Abstract Photos/Discuss/Hall of Inappropriate, 2010. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.flickr.com/groups/abstractphotos/discuss/72157623148695254/>. Bourdieu, Pierre, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredeon, and Dominique Schnapper. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. 1965. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Bruckman, Amy. Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet. 2002. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html>. Bruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Proceedings: Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology 2006. Perth: Murdoch U, 2006. 275–84. ———, and Mark Bahnisch. Social Media: Tools for User-Generated Content. 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“What's the brief?” is an everyday question within the graphic design process. Moreover, the concept and importance of a design brief is overtly understood well beyond design practice itself—especially among stakeholders who work with designers and clients who commission design services. Indeed, a design brief is often an assumed and expected physical or metaphoric artefact for guiding the creative process. When a brief is lacking, incomplete or unclear, it can render an already ambiguous graphic design process and discipline even more fraught with misinterpretation. Nevertheless, even in wider design discourse, there appears to be little research on design briefs and the briefing process (Jones and Askland; Paton and Dorst). It seems astonishing that, even in Peter Phillips’s 2014 edition of Creating the Perfect Design Brief, he feels compelled to comment that “there are still no books available about design briefs” and that the topic is only “vaguely” covered within design education (21). While Phillips’s assertion is debatable if one draws purely from online vernacular sources or professional guides, it is supported by the lack of scholarly attention paid to the design brief. Graphic design briefs are often mentioned within design books, journals, and online sources. However, this article argues that the format, function and use of such briefs are largely assumed and rarely identified and studied. Even within the broader field of design research, the tendency appears to be to default to “the design brief” as an assumed shorthand, supporting Phillips’s argument about the nebulous nature of the topic. As this article contextualises, this is further problematised by insufficient attention cast on graphic design itself as a specific discipline. This article emerges from a wider, multi-stage creative practice study into graphic design practice, that used experimental performative design research methods to investigate graphic designers’ professional relationships with stakeholders (Meron, Strangely). The article engages with specific outcomes from that study that relate to the design brief. The article also explores existing literature and research and argues for academics, the design industry, and educationalists, to focus closer attention on the design brief. It concludes by suggesting that experimental and collaborative design methods offers potential for future research into the design brief. Contextualising the Design Brief It is critical to differentiate the graphic design brief from the operational briefs of architectural design (Blyth and Worthington; Khan) or those used in technical practices such as software development or IT systems design, which have extensive industry-formalised briefing practices and models such as the waterfall system (Petersen et al.) or more modern processes such as Agile (Martin). Software development and other technical design briefs are necessarily more formulaically structured than graphic design briefs. Their requirements are generally empirically and mechanistically located, and often mission-critical. In contrast, the conceptual nature of creative briefs in graphic design creates the potential for them to be arbitrarily interpreted. Even in wider design discourse, there appears to be little consistency about the form that a brief takes. Some sources indicate that a brief only requires one page (Elebute; Nov and Jones) or even a single line of text (Jones and Askland). At other times briefs are described as complex, high-level documents embedded within processes which designers respond to with the aim of producing end products to satisfy clients’ requirements (Ambrose; Patterson and Saville). Ashby and Johnson (40) refer to the design brief as a “solution neutral” statement, the aim being to avoid preconceptions or the narrowing of the creative possibilities of a project. Others describe a consultative (Walsh), collaborative and stakeholder-inclusive process (Phillips). The Scholarly Brief Within scholarly design research, briefs inevitably manifest as an assumed artefact or process within each project; but the reason for their use or antecedents for chosen formats are rarely addressed. For example, in “Creativity in the Design Process” (Dorst and Cross) some elements of the design brief are described. The authors also describe at what stage of the investigation the brief is introduced and present a partial example of the brief. However, there is no explanation of the form of the brief or the reasons behind it. They simply describe it as being typical for the design medium, adding that its use was considered a critical part of addressing the design problem. In a separate study within advertising (Johar et al.), researchers even admit that the omission of crucial elements from the brief—normally present in professional practice—had a detrimental effect on their results. Such examples indicate the importance of briefs for the design process, yet further illustrating the omission of direct engagement with the brief within the research design, methodology, and methods. One exception comes from a study amongst business students (Sadowska and Laffy) that used the design brief as a pedagogical tool and indicates that interaction with, and changes to, elements of a design brief impact the overall learning process of participants, with the brief functioning as a trigger for that process. Such acknowledgement of the agency of a design brief affirms its importance for professional designers (Koslow et al.; Phillips). This use of a brief as a research device informed my use of it as a reflective and motivational conduit when studying graphic designers’ perceptions of stakeholders, and this will be discussed shortly. The Professional Brief Professionally, the brief is a key method of communication between designers and stakeholders, serving numerous functions including: outlining creative requirements, audience, and project scope; confirming project requirements; and assigning and documenting roles, procedures, methods, and approval processes. The format of design briefs varies from complex multi-page procedural documents (Patterson and Saville; Ambrose) produced by marketing departments and sent to graphic design agencies, to simple statements (Jones and Askland; Elebute) from small to medium-sized businesses. These can be described as the initial proposition of the design brief, with the following interactions comprising the ongoing briefing process. However, research points to many concerns about the lack of adequate briefing information (Koslow, Sasser and Riordan). It has been noted (Murray) that, despite its centrality to graphic design, the briefing process rarely lives up to designers’ expectations or requirements, with the approach itself often haphazard. This reinforces the necessarily adaptive, flexible, and compromise-requiring nature of professional graphic design practice, referred to by design researchers (Cross; Paton and Dorst). However, rather than lauding these adaptive and flexible designer abilities as design attributes, such traits are often perceived by professional practitioners as unequal (Benson and Dresdow), having evolved by the imposition by stakeholders, rather than being embraced by graphic designers as positive designer skill-sets. The Indeterminate Brief With insufficient attention cast on graphic design as a specific scholarly discipline (Walker; Jacobs; Heller, Education), there is even less research on the briefing process within graphic design practice (Cumming). Literature from professional practice on the creation and function of graphic design briefs is often formulaic (Phillips) and fractured. It spans professional design bodies, to templates from mass-market printers (Kwik Kopy), to marketing-driven and brand-development approaches, in-house style guides, and instructional YouTube videos (David). A particularly clear summary comes from Britain’s Design Council. This example describes the importance of a good design brief, its requirements, and carries a broad checklist that includes the company background, project aims, and target audience. It even includes stylistic tips such as “don’t be afraid to use emotive language in a brief if you think it will generate a shared passion about the project” (Design Council). From a subjective perspective, these sources appear to contain sensible professional advice. However, with little scholarly research on the topic, how can we know that, for example, using emotive language best informs the design process? Why might this be helpful and desirable (or otherwise) for designers? These varied approaches highlight the indeterminate treatment of the design brief. Nevertheless, the very existence of such diverse methods communicates a pattern of acknowledgement of the criticality of the brief, as well as the desire, by professional bodies, commentators, and suppliers, to ensure that both designers and stakeholders engage effectively with the briefing process. Thus, with such a pedagogic gap in graphic design discourse, scholarly research into the design brief has the potential to inform vernacular and formal educational resources. Researching the Design Brief The research study from which this article emerges (Meron, Strangely) yielded outcomes from face-to-face interviews with eleven (deidentified) graphic designers about their perceptions of design practice, with particular regard to their professional relationships with other creative stakeholders. The study also surveyed online discussions from graphic design forums and blog posts. This first stage of research uncovered feelings of lacking organisational gravitas, creative ownership, professional confidence, and design legitimacy among the designers in relation to stakeholders. A significant causal factor pointed to practitioners’ perceptions of lacking direct access to and involvement with key sources of creative inspiration and information; one specific area being the design brief. It was a discovery that was reproduced thematically during the second stage of the research. This stage repurposed performative design research methods to intervene in graphic designers’ resistance to research (Roberts, et al), with the goal of bypassing practitioners’ tendency to portray their everyday practices using formulaic professionalised answers (Dorland, View). In aiming to understand graphic designers’ underlying motivations, this method replaced the graphic designer participants with trained actors, who re-performed narratives from the online discussions and designer interviews during a series of performance workshops. Performative methodologies were used as design thinking methods to defamiliarise the graphic design process, thereby enabling previously unacknowledged aspects of the design process to be unveiled, identified and analysed. Such defamiliarisation repurposes methods used in creative practice, including design thinking (Bell, Blythe, and Sengers), with performative elements drawing on ethnography (Eisner) and experimental design (Seago and Dunne). Binding these two stages of research study together was a Performative Design Brief—a physical document combining narratives from the online discussions and the designer interviews. For the second stage, this brief was given to a professional theatre director to use as material for a “script” to motivate the actors. In addition to identifying unequal access to the creative process as a potential point of friction, this study yielded outcomes suggesting that designers were especially frustrated when the design brief was unclear, insufficiently detailed, or even missing completely. The performative methodology enabled a refractive approach, using performative metaphor and theatre to defamiliarise graphic design practice, portraying the process through a third-party theatrical prism. This intervened in graphic designers’ habitual communication patterns (Dorland, The View). Thus, combining traditional design research methods with experimental interdisciplinary ones, enabled outcomes that might not otherwise have emerged. It is an example of engaging with the fluid, hybrid (Heller, Teaching), and often elusive practices (van der Waarde) of graphic design. Format, Function, and Use A study (Paton and Dorst) among professional graphic designers attempts to dissect practitioners’ perceptions of different aspects of briefing as a process of ‘framing’. Building on the broader theories of design researchers such as Nigel Cross, Bryan Lawson, and Donald Schön, Paton and Dorst suggest that most of the designers preferred a collaborative briefing process where both they and client stakeholders were directly involved, without intermediaries. This concurs with the desire, from many graphic designers that I interviewed, for unobstructed engagement with the brief. Moreover, narratives from the online discussions that I investigated suggest that the lack of clear frameworks for graphic design briefs is a hotly debated topic, as are perceptions of stakeholder belligerence or misunderstanding. For example, in a discussion from Graphic Design Forums designer experiences range from only ever receiving informal verbal instructions—“basically, we’ve been handed design work and they tell us ‘We need this by EOD’” (VFernandes)—to feeling obliged to pressure stakeholders to provide a brief—“put the burden on them to flesh out the details of a real brief and provide comprehensive material input” (HotButton) —to resignation to an apparent futility of gaining adequate design briefs from stakeholders because— “they will most likely never change” (KitchWitch). Such negative assumptions support Koslow et al.’s assertion that the absence of a comprehensive brief is the most “terrifying” thing for practitioners (9). Thus, practitioners’ frustrations with stakeholders can become unproductive when there is an inadequate design brief, or if the creative requirements of a brief are otherwise removed from the direct orbit of graphic designers. This further informs a narrative of graphic designers perceiving some stakeholders as gatekeepers of the design brief. For example, one interviewed designer believed that stakeholders ‘don’t really understand the process’ (Patricia). Another interviewee suggested that disorganised briefs could be avoided by involving designers early in the process, ensuring that practitioners had direct access to the client as a creative source, rather than having to circumnavigate stakeholders (Marcus). Such perceptions appeared to reinforce beliefs among these practitioners that they lack design capital within the creative process. These perceptions of gatekeeping of the design brief support suggestions of designers responding negatively when stakeholders approach the design process from a different perspective (Wall and Callister), if stakeholders assume a managerial position (Jacobs) and, in particular, if stakeholders are inexperienced in working with designers (Banks et al.; Holzmann and Golan). With such little clarity in the design briefing process, future research may consider comparisons with industries with more formalised briefing processes, established professional statuses, or more linear histories. Indeed, the uneven historical development of graphic design (Frascara; Julier and Narotzky) may influence the inconsistency of its briefing process. Inconsistency as Research Opportunity The inconsistent state of the graphic design brief is reflective of the broader profession that it resides within. Graphic design as a profession remains fluid and inconsistent (Dorland, Tell Me; Jacobs), with even its own practitioners unable to agree on its parameters or even what to call the practice (Meron, Terminology). Pedagogically, graphic design is still emerging as an independent discipline (Cabianca; Davis), struggling to gain capital outside of existing and broader creative practices (Poynor; Triggs). The inherent interdisciplinarity (Harland) and intangibility of graphic design also impact the difficulty of engaging with the briefing process. Indeed, graphic design’s practices have been described as “somewhere between science and superstition (or fact and anecdote)” (Heller, Teaching par. 3). With such obstacles rendering the discipline fractured (Ambrose et al.), it is understandable that stakeholders might find engaging productively with graphic design briefs challenging. This can become problematic, with inadequate stakeholder affinity or understanding of design issues potentially leading to creative discord (Banks et al.; Holzmann and Golan). Identifying potentially problematic and haphazard aspects of the design brief and process also presents opportunities to add value to research into broader relationships between graphic designers and stakeholders. It suggests a practical area of study with which scholarly research on collaborative design approaches might intersect with professional graphic design practice. Indeed, recent research suggests that collaborative approaches offer both process and educational advantages, particularly in the area of persona development, having the ability to discover the “real” brief (Taffe 394). Thus, framing the brief as a collaborative, educative, and negotiative process may allow creative professionals to elucidate and manage the disparate parts of a design process, such as timeframes, stakeholders, and task responsibilities, as well as the cost implications of stakeholder actions such as unscheduled amendments. It can encourage the formalisation of incomplete vernacular briefs, as well as allow for the influence of diverse briefing methods, such as the one-page creative brief of advertising agencies, or more formal project management practices while allowing for some of the fluidity of more agile approaches: acknowledging that changes may be required while keeping all parties informed and involved. In turn, collaborative approaches may contribute towards enabling the value of contributions from both graphic designers and stakeholders and it seems beneficial to look towards design research methodologies that promote collaborative pathways. Mark Steen, for example, argues for co-design as a form of design thinking for enabling stakeholders to combine knowledge with negotiation to implement change (27). Collaborative design methods have also been advocated for use between designers and users, with stakeholders on shared projects, and with external collaborators (Binder and Brandt). Others have argued that co-design methods facilitate stakeholder collaboration “across and within institutional structures” while challenging existing power relations, albeit leaving structural changes largely unaffected (Farr 637). The challenge for collaborative design research is to seek opportunities and methodologies to conduct design brief research within a graphic design process that often appears amorphous, while also manifesting complex designer–stakeholder dynamics. Doubly so, when the research focus—the graphic design brief—often appears as nebulous an entity as the practice it emerges from. Conclusion The research discussed in this article suggests that graphic designers distrust a creative process that itself symbolises an inconsistent, reactive, and often accidental historical development of their profession and pedagogy. Reflecting this, the graphic design brief emerges almost as a metaphor for this process. The lack of overt discussion about the format, scope, and process of the brief feeds into the wider framework of graphic design’s struggle to become an independent scholarly discipline. This, in turn, potentially undermines the professional authority of graphic design practice that some of its practitioners believe is deficient. Ultimately, the brief and its processes must become research-informed parts of graphic design pedagogy. Embracing the brief as a pedagogical, generative, and inseparable part of the design process can inform the discourse within education, adding scholarly value to practice and potentially resulting in increased agency for practitioners. The chameleon-like nature of graphic design’s constant adaptation to ever-changing industry requirements makes research into the role and influences of its briefing process challenging. Thus, it also follows that the graphic design brief is unlikely to quickly become as formalised a document or process as those from other disciplines. But these are challenges that scholars and professionals must surely embrace if pedagogy is to gain the research evidence to influence practice. As this article argues, the often obfuscated practices and inherent interdisciplinarity of graphic design benefit from experimental research methods, while graphic designers appear responsive to inclusive approaches. Thus, performative methods appear effective as tools of discovery and collaborative methodologies offer hope for organisational intervention. References Ambrose, Gavin. Design Thinking for Visual Communication. Fairchild, 2015. Ambrose, Gavin, Paul Harris, and Nigel Ball. The Fundamentals of Graphic Design. Bloomsbury, 2020. Ashby, M.F., and Kara Johnson. Materials and Design: The Art and Science of Material Selection in Product Design. Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2010. 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Susanne Bier and David Farr’s 2016 television adaptation of John le Carré’s novel The Night Manager (“Manager”) indexes the resilience of traditional Christian misogyny in contemporary British-American media. In the first episode of the series, Sophie (Aure Atika)’s partner Freddie Hamid (David Avery) brutally beats her. In the subsequent scene, despite her scars, Sophie has a sex scene with the eponymous night manager Pine (Tom Hiddlestone). Sophie’s eye socket and the left side of her face bear fresh bruises and wounds throughout the sex scene. And in the sixth and final episode, Pine and Jed (Elizabeth Debicki) have sex after she has been tortured at length by her partner Roper’s (Hugh Laurie) henchman, at Roper’s request. Jed’s neck, face, and arms bear bruises from the torture.These sex scenes function as a space of revelation. I interpret the women’s wounds and injuries alongside a feminist-critical tradition of reading noir on screen. Inaugurated by Ann Kaplan’s 1978 Women in Film Noir, many feminist commentators have since made the claim that women in noir achieve a peculiar significance, and their key scenes a subversive meaning; “in excess of” their punitive treatment within the narrative (Kaplan 5; Harvey 31; Tasker Working Girls 117). My reading emphasizes a tension between Manager’s patriarchal narrative framing and these two sex scenes that I argue disrupt and subvert the former.That Sophie and Jed are brutalised by their partners does not tell us much: it is a routine expectation in British-American film and television that “bad guys” are tough on “their” chicks. It is only after these violent encounters with their partners, when the women share “romantic” moments with Pine, that the text’s patriarchal entitlement is laid bare (“revelation” stems from Late Latin revelare to “lay bare”). Forgetting about their cuts, injuries and bruises, they desire Pine, remove their clothes, and are stimulated, stimulating, pleasuring, and pleasured. Director Bier and writer Farr assume that a 2016 British and American audience will (i) find these encounters between Sophie and Pine, and Pine and Jed, to be romantic and tender; and also (ii) find Pine’s behavior consistent with that of a “savior”. These expectations regarding audience complicity are truly revelatory.Sophie and Jed’s wounds constitute a space of revelation: the wounds are in excess of, and spill over, the patriarchal narrative framing. Their wounds indicate that the narrative has approached a moment of excessive patriarchal entitlement—emphasising extreme power imbalances between Pine and the women—and break through the narrative framing and encourage feminist enquiry. I use feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon’s theory of consent to argue that, given this blatant power inequity, it could be interpreted the characters have different perspectives of the sexual act and it is questionable whether the women are in fact consenting (182).Critical ReceptionAcademic engagement with John le Carré’s well-respected espionage novels continues to emerge, including the books of Myron Aronoff, Tony Barley, Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman, John Cobbs, David Monaghan, Peter Lewis and Peter Wolfe. There are a small number of academic commentaries exploring the screen adaptations of his novels, including Eric Morgan’s “Whores and Angels” and Geraint D’Arcy’s “Essentially, Another Man’s Woman”. Unfortunately, there are almost no academic commentaries on Manager, with the exception of Gunhild Agger’s “Geopolitical Location and Plot in The Night Manager”, and none that focus on the handling of gender themes within it.However, there are abundant mainstream media articles and reviews of Manager. I randomly selected seven of these articles and reviews in order to gauge the response to these sex scenes within a 2016 British-American media community. I looked at articles and reviews by Hal Boedeker, Caitlin Flynn, Tim Goodman, Jeff Jensen, Tom Lamont, Jasper Rees, and Claire Webb. None of the articles mention the theme of “gender” or note the gendered violence in the series. The reviews are complicit with the patriarchal narrative framing, and introduce Sophie and Jed in terms of their physical appearances and in their relation to principal male characters. “Beautiful and pale” Jed is “girlfriend of Bogeyman arms dealer” (Jensen), and is also referred to as “Roper’s long-legged trophy girlfriend” (Rees). Sophie, in a “sultry brunette corner” is a “tempting, tragic damsel-in-distress” (Rees) and “arouses Pine” (Jensen). However, reviewers describe the character Burr (who is male in the novel but played by Olivia Colman in the series) with greater dignity and detail. Introducing the character Sophie (Aure Atika), reviewer Tom Goodman does not refer to her by character or actress name despite the fact he introduces male characters by both. Instead, Sophie is a “beautiful connected woman” and is subsequently referred to as “the woman” (Goodman). This anonymity of Sophie as character, and Atika as actor, indexes the Christian misogyny in operation here: in Genesis, Adam only names Eve after the fall of man (New International Version, Gen. 3:20). Goodman’s textual erasure supports Sophie’s vulnerability and expendability within the narrative logic. Indeed, the reviews recapitulate stock noir themes, suggesting that the women are seductively manipulative: Goodman implies that both Bier and Debicki both deploy beauty so as to distract or beguile (Goodman), and Jensen notes that the women are “sultry with danger” (Jensen).Commentators and reviewers have likened Manager, with good reason, to screen adaptations of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. This is a useful comparison for the purposes of clarifying my own analytical approach. Lisa Funnell and Klaus Dodds’s Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond, endorse a feminist geopolitical sensibility that audits which bodies are vulnerable, and which are disposable (14). Bond, like Manager’s Pine, is fundamentally privileged and invulnerable (14). Their account of Bond also describes Pine: “white, cis-gender, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied… British, attended Cambridge… he can move, act, and perform; gain access to places, spaces and resources” (1). Sophie’s vulnerability counterpoints Pine’s privilege. Against Pine’s athletic form and blond features stands the “foreign” Sophie, iterated through an emphasis on her dark features, silk dresses (that reference kaftans), and accented language (she delivers English language lines with a strong accent and discloses to Pine that she has tried to “Anglicise” her identity and has changed name). Sophie’s social and financial precarity seems behind her decision to become the mistress of violent gangster Freddie Hamid (in “Episode One” Sophie explains that Hamid “owns her”). By the end of this episode Hamid has violently beaten her then later murdered her. And even though the character Jed is white and American, it is implied that financial necessity is behind her choice of Richard Roper as partner. Jed is violently tortured and beaten in “Episode Six”.Funnell and Dodds also note Bond’s capacity to sexually satisfy women as a key dimension of his hegemonic masculinity (1). In Manager, the spectator is presumed complicit with the narrative framing and is expected to uncritically accept Pine’s extreme desirability to women. The assumption of Pine’s sexiness and sexual competency together constitute his entitlement, made clear in sex scenes between him and Sophie, and him and Jed. These sex scenes follow events of gendered violence and I raise the possibility that they also constitute instances of gendered violence.Noir Feminine ArchetypesReviewers have pointed out that Manager engages with the noir tradition (Jensen). Sophie and Jed are both “fallen” women, reflecting the Christian heritage of the noir tradition, though incarnate different noir archetypes (Allen 6). Mysterious and seductive Sophie emerges as a femme fatale in the first episode: the dark and seductive girlfriend of gangster Freddie Hamid, Sophie entrusts Pine with delicate and dangerous information, leading him into a dark world. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the snake convinces Eve that the fruit does not bring death but instead knowledge. Eve wishes to share this knowledge with her partner “but keep the odds of knowledge in my power / without co-partner?” ultimately precipitating the fall of Adam and mankind (Milton 818). Sophie shares information regarding Hamid and Roper’s illegal arms deal with Pine. There are two transgressions on her part: she shares her partner’s confidential information with Pine and then has an affair with him. Hamid murders Sophie for the betrayals. However, Sophie’s murder does not erase her narrative significance: the event motivates protagonist Pine in his chief quest to ‘bring Roper down’, and as Boedeker concurs, the narrative’s action is “driven by this event”. Indeed, Yvonne Tasker notes the dual function of the femme fatale: she is both “an archetype which suggests an equation between female sexuality, death and danger” and also “functions as the vibrant centre of the narrative” (Tasker 117).Pine’s later love interest Jed is an example of the more complicated “good-bad girl” noir type, as Andrew Spicer has usefully coined it (92). The “good-bad girl” occupies a morally ambiguous space between the (dangerously sexy) femme fatale and (fundamentally decent) “girl-next-door” (Spicer 92). Both “good” and “bad”, Jed is unmarried but living with villain Roper, whom she has presumably selected out of economic necessity; she is a mother, but this does not bestow her with maternal legitimacy as she keeps her son a secret and is physically remote from him. Jed finds “real love” with Pine and betrays Roper in assisting Pine’s espionage plot. Roper’s henchman punishes Jed for the betrayal (in the torture scene Roper laments “I saw how you looked at him last night”; “Episode 6”).Despite the routine sexism and punitive thrust of the noir narrative, the women’s “romantic” sex scenes with Pine are laden with subversive significance. In her analysis of women in noir, Sylvia Harvey argues:Despite the ritual punishment of acts of transgression, the vitality with which these acts are endowed produces an excess of meaning which cannot finally be contained. Narrative resolutions cannot recuperate their subversive significance. (31)The visibility of Sophie and Jed’s wounds throughout their respective sex scenes with Pine signals an excessive patriarchal entitlement that disrupts the narrative logic and invites us to question the women’s perspectives. My analysis of the scenes is informed by feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon’s argument that under unequal power relations consent is fraught, if not impossible (180). MacKinnon argues that women’s beliefs and reactions are shaped by power inequality, including the threat of male violence, economic dependence, and need (175).Analysis of Sophie and Pine’s InteractionsI first analyse Sophie’s dialogue because I seek to demonstrate that there is a communication breakdown in play: Sophie is asking Pine for help and safety while Pine thinks she is seducing him. Sophie’s verbal exchanges with Pine can be read in two different ways: (i) according to the patriarchal narrative framing (the spectator is positioned alongside Pine, seeing Sophie as scopophilic object); or (ii) from a feminist perspective that takes Sophie’s situation and perspective into account (Mulvey 835-36). Sophie’s language is legible as flirtation. If we are uncritically complicit with the narrative framing, Sophie is usually trying to arrange time alone with Pine because she desires him. However, if we emphasise Sophie’s perspective, she is asking for privacy, discretion, and help to stay alive (and to save the lives of others too, given that she is foiling an arms deal). Catharine MacKinnon’s observation that “men are systematically conditioned not even to notice what women want” plays out elegantly in the scenes between Pine and Sophie (181). Pine manages to discern that Sophie needs some sort of help, but shows no regard for her perspective or the significant power inequality between the two of them. From their earliest interaction in “Episode One” Sophie addresses Pine in a flirtatious way. In an audacious request, although it is ‘below’ his duties as manager she insists he make her a coffee and cheekily demands he sit with her while she drinks it. Their interaction is a standard flirtatious tête-à-tête, entailing the playful query “what do you [Pine] know of me?” Sophie begs Pine to copy some documents for her in his office even though he points out that his colleague performs such duties. Sophie suggestively demands “I would prefer to use your office”. It seems that by insisting on time alone with him, Sophie’s goal is that Pine does the task, rather than the task be done per se. However, it promptly transpires that Sophie sought a private location in order to share classified information with him, having noted at an earlier date Pine’s friendship with a British diplomat. She asks him to “hold onto” the documents “in case something happens to her”.Pine nonetheless passes on these classified documents to this contact.Sophie and Pine’s next interaction follows a similar pattern: she rings him from her hotel room and asks him to bring her a scotch. He suggests alternative ways she can procure a drink, yet she confirms the real object of her desire (“I want you”). Pine smirks as he approaches her room. Sophie’s declaration appears as (i) a desirous statement and invitation to come to her room for sex but it is in fact (ii) a demand that Pine (specifically) comes to her room, because she wants to know with whom he shared the documents and to reveal to him the injuries she received as a punishment for his leak.After realising the danger he has put her in, Pine takes her to a remote house to secure her safety. Once inside, she implores “why do you sit so far away?” which sounds like a request for closeness, perhaps even that he touch her. Yet the extent of her desired proximity, and the nature of the touch she requests, can be interpreted in (at least) two ways. Certainly, Pine believes that she desires sexual intercourse with him. The spectator is meant to interpret this request along those lines by virtue of Atika’s seductive delivery. Pine explains that he sits with distance “out of respect” and Sophie teases “is that why you came all the way here, to respect me?” This remark reveals Sophie’s assumption that Pine’s assistance has been transactional (help in exchange for sex) and the content indicates the kind of sex she assumes he expects (“disrespectful” sex, or at least sex that playfully skirts the boundaries of respect). In a declaration that stands up as a positive affirmation of consent under British and American law, Sophie announces: “I want one of your many selves to sleep with me tonight.”From a freshly bruised eye socket, Sophie lovingly stares at Pine. Extra-diegetic strings instruct us that the moment is romantic. Pine strokes the (unbruised side) side of her face. Could her question “why do you sit so far away?” have been a request that he sit near her, place an arm around her shoulder, hold her hand, stroke her forehead, perhaps even tend to her wounds? Might the request that he “sleep with [her] tonight” have been a request that he sleep in the cottage, albeit on the floor?Sophie and Pine are subsequently displayed naked, limbs entangled. A new shot, a close-up of the right side of her face, displays a scab atop her eyebrow, a deeply bruised eye socket, further bruises down her cheeks, and a split lip. The muscular, broad Pine is atop Sophie and thrusting; Sophie’s split lip smiles in ecstasy and gratitude. A post-coital shot follows: she stares lovingly down at him with her facial injuries on full display, her dark eyes stare into his lucid green. Pine asks Sophie’s “real name”. Samira recounts that she changed her name to Sophie in order to “be more Western”. The power inequality is manifest on gendered, cultural, social, and physical lines: in order to advance her social position, Samira has sought to Anglicise herself and partnered with a violent (though influential) criminal (who has recently brutalised her). Her life is in danger, she is (depicted as) dark and foreign and ostensibly has no social or support network (is isolated enough to appeal to a hotel manager for help). Meanwhile, Pine is Western university-educated, a spectacle of white male athletic privilege, and has elite connections with British intelligence.Catharine MacKinnnon argues that consent is only a meaningful option if the parties are equally powerful (174). Sophie’s extreme vulnerability renders their situations patently unequal. As MacKinnon argues “when perspective is bound up with situation, and [that] situation is unequal, whether or not a contested interaction is authoritatively considered rape comes down to whose meaning wins” (182). I do not argue that Pine rapes Sophie per se. However, the revealing of Sophie’s injuries efficiently articulates the power inequality in their situations and thus problematises a straightforward assumption of her consent. MacKinnon’s argues that rape occurs “somewhere between” the following three factors (182). First, “what the woman actually wanted” (Sophie wanted to save the lives of others (by foiling an arms deal) and not die for the breach). Second, “what she was able to express about what she wanted” (class/gender/race power dynamics may have frustrated Sophie’s ability to articulate her needs and might have motivated her sexually suggestive tenor). Third, “what the man comprehended she wanted” (Pine assumes that Sophie, like all women, sexually desire him).Analysis of Jed and Pine’s InteractionsThe injustice of Pine and Sophie’s sexual encounter finds its counterpart in Pine’s sexual encounter with Jed in the final episode of the series (“Episode Six”). Roper discovers that Jed has given a third party (Pine and his colleagues) access to his private (incriminating) files. Roper instructs his henchman to torture Jed until she identifies this third party. The henchman holds Jed by the back of her neck and dunks her head repeatedly into bathwater. The camera reveals deep bruises on her arms. Jed refuses to identify her beloved (Pine) as the ‘rat’, yet the astute Roper nevertheless surmises “you must care deeply about the person you are protecting”.Alas, the dominant narrative must go on: Roper and Pine attend to an arms deal; the deal fails because Pine has set Roper up to appear as though he has robbed the buyers (and so on). Burr and Pine’s mission to “bring down” Roper has been completed. I keep wondering what Roper’s henchman has been doing to Jed during this “men’s business”. Alas, after Pine has completed the job, we encounter Jed again. She is in bed, her limbs entangled with Pine’s. The camera positioning and shot sequencing are almost identical to the sex scene between Pine and Sophie in “Episode One”. A medium close-up from the left reveals Pine thrusting atop Jed. Through pale moonlight the viewer discerns injures on Jed’s face and chin.The morning after this (brief) sex scene, Pine and Jed discuss her imminent departure (“home” to New York, to be reunited with her son). Debicki’s performance is tremendously tender: her lip trembles, her voice shakes as she swallows tears. Jed is sad because she is bidding Pine farewell, and, as she verbalises to Pine, she is nervous about whether her son will “recognise her”. Does Jed’s torture also give her grounds to weep and tremble? Ever a gentleman, Pine clasps her hand, and while marching her to her taxi, we see more bruises atop her left arm.I am also not arguing that Pine raped Jed. Yet given what Jed had endured earlier that day – torture by drowning, as commissioned and witnessed by her own partner – was sexual intercourse what she desired or needed? The visibility of Jed’s injuries throughout the sex scene marks an apotheosis of patriarchal entitlement. Might a fraternal or (even remedial) touch have been Pine’s first priority? Does Jed need a hug? Does she need ice? Had Pine been educated or socialised in a different tradition, one remotely attuned to what anyone might need after a disastrously traumatic and violent event, he might not have found penetrative sex an appropriate remedy. Pine’s absolute security in his own sexual desirability meant that he found the activity suitable, yet her injuries break my blind faith in his sexiness. I wish to raise the possibility that intercourse after this event might have compounded the violent events Jed endured that day. Contrary to the narrative’s implication, penetrative intercourse (even with Tom Hiddleston) might not heal Sophie or Jed’s wounds.ConclusionI am not a humourless feminist immune to the entertaining (and often entertainingly preposterous) dimensions of the spy and action genre. In fact, I enthusiastically await subsequent screen adaptations of le Carré’s work and the next Bond instalment. This is not a call to “cancel” a genre, text, director or writer. Biblically, a “revelation” has always instructed humans on how to live in this life. These sex scenes do not merely lay bare extreme patriarchal entitlement but might instruct directors and writers working within the genre to keep wounds, and wounded women, out of their sex scenes. I think that is a modest request. ReferencesAgger, Gunhild. “Geopolitical Location and Plot in The Night Manager.” Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 7 (2017): 27-42.Allen, Virginia. The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon. Troy, New York: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1983.Aronoff, Myron. The Spy Novels of John le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Politics. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.Barley, Tony. Taking Sides: The Fiction of John le Carré. Philadelphia: Open U, 1986.Boedeker, Hal. “‘Night Manager’: Check in for Tom Hiddleston.” Orlando Sentinel, 16 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv-guy/os-night-manager-check-in-for-tom-hiddleston-20160416-story.html>.Bruccoli, Matthew, and Judith Baughman. Conversations with John le Carré. Oxford: U of Mississippi P, 2004.Cobbs, John. Understanding John le Carré. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1998.D’arcy, Geraint. “‘Essentially, Another Man’s Woman’: Information and Gender in the Novel and Adaptations of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” Adaptation 7.3 (2014): 275-90.Funnell, Lisa, and Klaus Dodds. Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.Flynn, Caitlin. “Who Is Sophie on ‘The Night Manager’? Aure Atika’s Character Will Drive the Thriller.” Bustle, 20 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.bustle.com/articles/155498-who-is-sophie-on-the-night-manager-aure-atikas-character-will-drive-the-thriller>. Goodman, Tim. “Critic's Notebook: 'The Night Manager' Glosses over Its Flaws with Beauty and Talent.” Hollywood Reporter, 28 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bastard-machine/critics-notebook-night-manager-glosses-888648>.Harvey, Sylvia. “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1980. 30-38.Jackson, Emily. “Catharine MacKinnon and Feminist Jurisprudence: A Critical Appraisal.” Journal of Law and Society 19.2 (1992): 195-213.Jensen, Jeff. “‘The Night Manager’: EW Review.” Entertainment Weekly, 14 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://ew.com/article/2016/04/14/the-night-manager-review/>. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Introduction.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1980. 1-5.Lamont, Tom. “Elizabeth Debicki: ‘We Fought about How Sexy I Should Be’.” The Guardian, 8 Oct. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/08/elizabeth-debicki-fought-a-lot-how-sexy-should-be-the-night-manager>. Lewis, Peter. John le Carré. New York: Ungar, 1985.MacKinnon, Catharine. Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Eds. Mary Waldrep and Susan Rattiner. United States: Dover Publications, 2005.Monaghan, David. The Novels of John le Carré: The Art of Survival. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.———. Smiley’s Circus: A Guide to the Secret World of John le Carré. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986.Morgan, Eric. “Whores and Angels of Our Striving Selves: The Cold War Films of John le Carré, Then and Now.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 36.1 (2016): 88-103.Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 833-44.The Night Manager. Dir. S. Bier. Screenplay D. Farr. UK/USA: BBC and AMC, 2016.Rees, Jasper. “The Night Manager, Episode 1: Brilliant Event Drama.” The Telegraph, 20 Apr. 2016. 2 June 2020 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/02/19/the-night-manager-episode-1-event-drama-of-the-highest-calibre/>.Scheppele, Kim. “The Reasonable Woman.” The Responsive Community, Rights and Responsibilities 1.4 (1991): 36–47.Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. London: Routledge, 1998.———. “Women in Film Noir.” A Companion to Film Noir. Eds. Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 353-68.Sauerberg, Lars Ole. Secret Agents in Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984.Webb, Claire. “Where to Find the Plush Hotels and Lush Locations in The Night Manager”. Radio Times, 21 Feb. 2016. 2 June 2020 <http://www.radiotimes.com/ news/2016-02-21/where-to-find-the-plush-hotels-and-lush-locations-inthe-night-manager>.Wolfe, Peter. Corridors of Deceit: The World of John le Carré. Madison, WI: Popular P, 1987.

She's the dollars, she's my protection; she's a promise, in the year of election. Sister, I can't let you go; I'm like a preacher, stealing hearts at a traveling show. For love or money, money, money... Desire -- U2, "Desire" (1988) For the love of money. In the worship of things. Desire has traditionally been employed by advertising as a means of selling product. Regardless of culture, more powerful than context, desire is invoked as one of capitalism's iron-clad codes of quality. The Uses of Desire in Advertising Specifically, two variants have been most common. That in which desire is: (1) stimulated or (2) sated by a product. Crucial to advertisers, in both cases the product is more powerful than the thing the audience finds most powerful: the physical surge, the emotional rush, the chemical compulsion we label "desire". In the case of the former, a typical approach has been to create an equation in which product intervenes in the relationship between man and woman (and it is always man and woman), stimulating the psycho-physiological desire of one for the other. A classic pre-post design. Absent the product, desire would not arise, ad text often alleges. This tack is well captured in this ad for a perfume. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that the ad reader will desire desire. If so, he or she -- equally desirous of this turn of events -- will insert him or herself into the scenario, engaging in a symbolic, if not actual purchase of the product1. As we saw above, desire is often depicted via substitute symbols -- flashing red neon, burning matches, flame-blowers, stifling heat and raging brush fires2. The product is then used to extinguish such signs -- metaphorically quenching desire. This is the satiation variant identified at the outset. Standardised Desire? This last is an Australian ad, but in a wide variety of contexts, the same formula of product/desire appears. A recent Malaysian ad, for instance, plays out like this: a motorbike roars up to a doorstep; its leather-clad rider dismounts. Removing the helmet we find beneath a ... beautiful long-haired woman. Cut to a medium shot of the front door opening. A similarly-clad male leans against the molding. Rugged, firm, slightly aloof. Cut to product name: Dashing for Men. Followed by a picture of the cologne. "The Dashing Sensation" is then posted -- ripe with the implication that the cologne has worked its magical, magnetic attraction uniting female and male. It should be pointed out that Malaysia is a market with a significant western presence. Its top advertising firms are American, British and Italian. Thus, if one were curious as to whether desire was inherently a "cultural universal" or rather due to accession (i.e. the movement of intellectual and corporate capital), Euro-American presence would certainly be a factor to consider 3. Innovating Desire Bringing us to Japan. Desire is also a major theme there, as well. However, there, Japanese firms dominate ad production. And, interestingly, though the above-mentioned formulations do appear, desire in Japan also has its own specialised discourse. Rather than a relationship between the consumable and the consumer's emotional/physical state, discourse about desire can transpire independent of the product. Desire is often simply about desire. This is in keeping with a trend (or, more formally, a stage) of development Japanese advertising has achieved -- what I call "product-least advertising"; a condition in which discourse is about many things other than consumption. One of these things being desire. In closing I will wonder what this might say about Japanese society. Japanese Approaches to Desire As noted above, it is not the case that messages of product-induced desire do not appear in Japan. They are certainly more pervasive than in their Islamic neighbor, Malaysia. And, like America, desire is treated in an array of ways. Object-Mediated Desire One approach, admittedly less conventional, posits the product as medium. Only through the product will desire be manifested. In this ad, though verbal substitutes are invoked -- "lust", "love", "lick", "pinch", bite", "touch" -- desire is the guiding force as the figures trapped inside the product's bar code move mechanically toward physical consummation. Of particular note is the product's multi-faceted relationship to desire: it subsumes desire, stimulates it, provides a forum and means for its expression, and is the device securing its culmination ... the ad text is ambiguous as to which is controlling. This is a definitive "postmodern ad", pregnant with shifting perspective, situational action, oppositional signs and interpretive possibilities. The kind of text so-called "cultural studies" intends by the term "polysemy" (the notion that multiple meanings are contained in any sign -- see Fiske). In the case of desire, postmodern ads tell us not that desire is multiple. Rather, it is a singular (i.e. universally experienced) condition which may be differentially manifested and variously interpretable vis-à-vis singular object/products. Object-Induced Desire For instance, in this ad, again for instant noodles, two salarymen contemplate the statement "this summer's new product is stimulating". Each conjures a different image of just what "stimulating" means. For the younger man, a veritable deluge of sexual adoration; for his elder, an assault by a gang of femmes toughs. And while the latter man's fantasy would not qualify as the conventional definition of "desire", the former would. Thus, despite its polysemic trappings, the ad varies little from the standard approach outlined at the outset (plates 1 and 2). It posits that the product possesses sufficient power to stimulate desire for its consumer in external, unrelated others. Object-Directed Desire One of sociology's earliest complaints about capitalism was its reduction of people to the status of things. Social relations became instrumental acts aimed at achieving rational ends; the personalities, thoughts and qualities of those human agents engaged in the exchange become secondary to the sought good. Advertising, according to early semiotic critiques (see for instance Williamson), has only intensified this predilection, though in a different way. Ads instrumentalise by creating equality between the product presented and the person doing the presenting. When the presenter and product are conflated -- as in the case where a major star clasps the product to her bosom and addresses the camera with: "it's my Nice Once" (the product name) -- the objectification of the human subject may be unavoidable. The material and corporeal meld. She cherishes the drink. If we desire her (her status, her style, her actual physical being) but are realistic (and thus willing to settle for a substitute) ... we can settle for the simulation (her drink). This kind of vicarious taking, this symbolic sharing is common in advertising. Played out over and over the audience quickly learns to draw an equal sign between the two depicted objects (product and star). Purchasing one enables us to realise our desire (however incompletely) for the other. Sometimes the product and person are separated, but in a way that the discourse is about longing. The product is consumed because the human can't be -- perhaps a less satisfactory substitute, but a replacement, nonetheless. Or, as in the ad below, the two might be interchangeable. Interior. Bright yellow room without any discernible features. No walls, windows or furniture. Tight shot of black fishnet stockings, barely covered by a yellow dress. The legs swivel in a chair, allowing a fleeting shot of the model's crotch. Cut to a darkened interior. The product sits next to a set of wrenches. Cut back to first interior. Medium tight of the model's bare shoulders. She spins in her chair. Cut to the mechanic working on the engine of a car. Female voiceover: "Hey! Work AGAIN? ... Let's play!" Cut to tight shot of her pursed lips. "Hey! ... let's go for a drive", accompanying consecutive shots of the mechanic wiping sweat from his brow and the vamp's derriere. Next, a sequence of fast, tight images: mechanic revving the engine, the model's face, then her upper body viewed through heavily-ventilated apparel. "Oh", she says, "cars are cuter, huh?" The mechanic pauses to consider. Walks over to the product, pops the top. "When it comes to that sort of man..." her VO says as he gulps the drink, "women are suckers". Tight on woman's face: "(he's a) rake", she pouts. To better appreciate this endemic correspondence between objectification and desire, consider this ad for a car named "Rosso" ("red" in Italian, "aka" in Japanese). The model, "Anna", is tinted head to toe in red (red, of course, being the universal signifier for passion and desire)4. She and/or the car rouse enough passion in a male by-stander to literally make his blood boil. This, in turn, produces steam which, in turn, sends air current of sufficient force to propel Anna's skirt skyward. This, in turn, converts the man's face into an embarrassed and/or impassioned red. "Rosso!" he gushes enthusiastically -- reference to car, his condition, Anna and, presumably, her panties5. Thus, the desire for things -- people included -- is by no means disappearing in Japanese advertising. The name of the game is still to sell that which has been produced. Although Japanese ads have moved toward a decentring of product -- an introduction of consumption-least discourse, with a concomitant increase in popular cultural and societal content -- the great majority still speak in the language of "here it is, buy it!" The prevailing tenor is still object-oriented. And the spill-over, as we just saw, is a tendency to depict humans and their interactions in objectified terms. A recent ad, for the discount store LLAOX, is rather stark in this regard. A young man displays photos of the many items (guitars, television, appliances) he found at LLAOX. In the final shot, of an attractive woman standing in front of the items, he proudly boasts: "I found her at LLAOX, too!" Subject-Oriented Desire Like ads in other countries, then, Japanese ads tend to place the object ahead of the subject. Desire for the person depicted in the ad is either ancillary to the desire expressed for the product, or else exists as a function of the subject's objectified status. However, an accreting number of Japanese ads have begun orienting desire toward one or both of the subjects in the ad, over or independent of the object for sale. A man and woman in their early thirties sit at a table sipping whiskey. The woman leans toward the man and in a perky voice utters: "Hey, let's turn in soon." The man protests, pointing to the drink: "we haven't finished this, yet." The woman tilts her head. She insists "let's head home." Then in a conspiratorial undertone "it's that day" and winks. The man's elbow falls off the tabletop. The woman blows him a kiss. Cut to a cat hiding beneath one of his paws in embarrassment. (Source: Nikka All Malt Whiskey -- Japan, 1993) Admittedly, not all ad discourse involves desire. But of late considerable ad space has been devoted to human relations and longing6. Consider this promo for a health drink. A man stands on his verandah in his t-shirt and pyjama bottoms. He looks groggy. Cut to a young woman watering her plants on the adjacent porch. "Hey!" she coos to her bushes, "are you lively?" She tends the pots along the centre divider. Is she addressing her foliage or the young man on the other side? He cranes his neck to steal a peek. She seems unaware. He lays his head on his forearms, admiring her. Cut to a shot of her regarding the product; drinking it; savouring the taste. The text reads: "With Lactia you will bloom beautifully." The woman enthuses audibly: "happiness!" Her voyeur, still in thrall, emits a sigh, suddenly straightens and declares aloud (in English): "Nice!" The previous two examples feature desire by adults. Considerable contemporary desire-centred discourse, however, focuses on teens. In these cases the product is sometimes introduced as a symbol for desire -- as in this case of a potato chip which snaps crisply each time a boy's romantic advance is repelled. A boy and girl walk along a boardwalk. The boy tentatively reaches for his partner's hand. Just then an approaching bicyclist toots his horn and cleaves a path between the two. A superimposed chip snaps. Next, seated on the shoreline, the boy reaches out again. Suddenly, a wind-blown ball rolls past, prompting his intended to abruptly vacate her position. He is left, literally clutching air. Another chip snaps again. The boy reaches out to touch the girl's handprint in the sand. He utters "I like you". The girl turns and asks "what did you say?" He impotently shrugs "nothing at all." Cut to a box of the chips. This youthful obsession with desire plays prominently in ads. First, because it fits well with the "mini-drama" format currently favoured in Japanese advertising. Second, because it is an effective technique for capturing viewer interest. The emotional tugs keep the audience attending to the ad beyond the first viewing. In the following ad, while desire for the product is the punch line, the entire ad is structured around unrequited desire. The confusion of the former for the latter not only redounds to product value, but predisposes the audience toward empathy and engagement. A teenage girl in her plaid uniform steers her bike into its berth outside school. Her voiceover identifies the bike name, shows how one touch locks the wheel in place and the seat in the vertical position. "Oh!" a quavering male voice utters off camera. "Can I ask name?" Japanese being a language that often operates without articles and pronouns, we aren't sure which name he means. Quick zoom in on the girl's expectant expression. "Eh?" she asks breathlessly. Her narration stops, her heart soars, glowing a vibrant red over her white sweater. "The bike's name", her interlocutor clarifies. All at once, the throbbing red heart is extinguished, fading to a black circular smudge. Her expectant smile dissolves into disappointment. Not all scenarios are downers, however. In the following case the product is a prop -- at best an accoutrement -- in the teenage game of expressing desire. A spry girl pours hot water into two cups. Off camera an older female voice asks whether she isn't supposed to be resting. "Don't worry about it", the girl replies. Cut to exterior shot. She's wearing a short coat, backing through the front door with the two cups in her hands. Cut to an angled reaction shot: a handsome boy leans across his bike, placing a letter in the post. He holds the letter up. "This", he says. Cut to the girl, now leaning against the entryway of the building, sipping her drink. Haltingly, in a breathy voice, she utters: "To... tomorrow... would have been... okay. But..." Japanese being the language of implication we read this as "it's fine the way it is working out." With the girl in the foreground, we see the boy leaning against the entryway on the opposite side contemplating his drink. Cut to a long angled shot from high above. The two teens sup in the cool evening air, alone, intimate, yet separated by the building's bright entrance. The narrator closes with a message about the nutritional value of the drink -- wholly unrelated to the unequivocal web of intimacy spun by these two youths. This ad offers us a perfect take on how desire is constructed and reproduced in contemporary ads in Japan. A perfect place for us to close. Evolving Desire? Desire is not new to advertising, but the form in which it is currently being expressed is. In Japan, at least, where commercials strive for polysemy in the volatile, evanescent and ultimately quixotic struggle for audience attention, communication is increasingly about things unrelated to the product. High on the list are affection, intimacy and sexuality -- aspects of human existence which bear considerable connection to desire. Reproduced in a variety of forms, played out in an array of contexts, by a variety of demographic "types", such commercial communications have the effect of centralising desire as a major theme in contemporary Japanese society7. The increase in so-called "secondary discourse"8 about human longing is palpable. But what to make of it? Clear explanations lie in "social evolution" -- factors such as: Japan's remarkable achievement of its postwar economic goals; its subsequent economic meltdown and accreting political malaise; the dramatic decline in corporate loyalty; disintegration of the family; increased urbanisation, atomisation and anomie; the stratification of generations and economic classes; increased materialism and attention to status; the concomitant loss of a personal raison d'être and collective moral beacon. In fact, all the reasons that Emile Durkheim diagnosed in fin de siècle France in inventing the discipline of sociology and Murakami Ryu has recently discerned a century later in fin de siècle Japan. Desire is a manifestation of social breakdown, as well as a plea for its resolution. As we enter a new century -- indeed a new millenium -- it is an empirical question worth monitoring whether the Japanese obsession with desire will continue to swell. Footnotes 1. Although the claims in this paper are qualitative, rather than quantitative, without question it is true that both men and women in Japanese television advertising are depicted as desiring. In this way, one could claim that desire exists independent of gender in ads. At the same time, it is almost certain that desire is often depicted as being manifested differentially by men and women. However, as one can infer from the data below, this is not always so (viz. "True Love"). Moreover, while women (or men) might more often fit one or another of the constructs below (i.e. object-mediated, object-induced, object-directed, subject-oriented) than their opposite number, cases can generally be found in which both (male and female) are depicted desiring in each of the stated relationships. 1. Thinking of this (fire-desire) symbol-set generally (and this ad specifically), one is reminded of the Springsteen lyric: At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet and a freight train running through the middle of my head; Only you can cool my desire. I'm on fire. -- Bruce Springsteen: "I'm on Fire" (1984) Reminding one of the lyric by Shocking Blue from their decade-spanning Number 1 single (1970 by the Dutch band as well as the 1986 cover version by Bananarama): I'm your Venus, I'm your fire at your desire. If not the Earth, Wind and Fire phrasing from "That's the Way of the World" (1975): Hearts of fire, creates love desire... Of course, the fire/desire combo might also have become a universal association due to the easy opportunity (at least in English) to commit a rhyme (no matter how cloddish). 2. It has yet to be determined that desire is a cultural universal. However, the universal presence and relatively uniform logic of the "machinery of capitalism" (a major aspect of which is advertising) certainly serves as a powerful prod. That machinery overlaps culture and tends to act on it in relatively similar ways (one of which may just be the discourse about desire). This, of course, makes no claims about universal outcomes. I have addressed the interaction of capitalism and context and the themes of global/local, homogeneity/heterogeneity, universal/particular in a series of articles concerning information transfer, body, color, and advertising form in comparative context. Please see my home page for references to and greater detail on this work. 3. Regarding red as signifier, see Branston & Stafford (7). Also see my work on color universals ("The Color of Meaning") and culture-specific colour conventions ("The Color of Difference"). 4. Support for this interpretation can be found in other ads, as ideas and practices in Japanese advertising tend to travel in twos or threes. During this same period, Suzuki Move placed Leonardo DiCaprio behind the wheel. As he tooled around the city, his accelleration was such as to raise the skirts of two by-standers. DiCaprio promptly braked, placed the car in reverse, rolled astride the two women, and impishly pointing at each, identified the shade of underpants ("white and strawberry") they were sporting. 5. And let me reiterate: All such depictions are exclusively about sexual/emotional longing between men and women. 6. As I am mainly working with Japanese data in this article, I feel comfortable only seeking to draw conclusions about Japanese society. Certainly, one could fathom conducting the same sort of analysis and arriving at the same general conclusions about other postmodern, capitalist, commercial-centred, consumer-oriented societies. 7. The word is O'Barr's. It bears considerable similarity to Barthes's "second order signification". Plates 1 Caliente perfume (USA, 1994) 9 Georgia canned coffee (Japan, 1999) 2 Old Spice cologne (USA, 1994) 10 Rosso (Japan, 1998) 3 Coke (Australia, 1994) 11 LLAOX (Japan, 1999) 4 Dashing cologne (Malaysia, 1997) 12 Lactia (Japan, 1997) 5 Cup Noodles (Japan, 1998) 13 5/8 and 3/5 Chips (Japan, 1993) 6 Cup Noodles (Japan, 1998) 14 Gachyarinko (Japan, 1999) 7 Nescafe Excella (ice coffee; Japan, 1999) 15 Hotpo (health drink; Japan 1999) 8 Various ads References Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Jonathan Cape, 1972 (1957). Branston, G., and R. Stafford. The Media Student's Book. London: Routledge, 1996. Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Methuen, 1987. Holden, Todd. "The Color of Meaning: The Significance of Black and White in Television Commercials." Interdisciplinary Information Sciences 3.2 (1997): 125-146. ---. "The Color of Difference: Critiquing Cultural Convergence via Television Advertising" Interdisciplinary Information Sciences 5.1 (1999): 15-36. O'Barr. Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising. Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1994. Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyers, 1979. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden. "The Evolution of Desire in Advertising: From Object-Obsession to Subject-Affection." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php>. Chicago style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden, "The Evolution of Desire in Advertising: From Object-Obsession to Subject-Affection," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden. (1999) The evolution of desire in advertising: from object-obsession to subject-affection. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php> ([your date of access]).