Journal articles on the topic 'Constitutional spatial theory'

Abstract In this article, I consider a curious blind spot in constitutional scholarship concerning the resurging rural/urban divide—a readily evident phenomenon closely associated with political resentment and anti-establishment sentiments—and how we may begin to address that challenge through creative constitutional designs. Specifically, I draw upon insights from comparative constitutionalism to discuss four main areas of constitutional law and theory that appear to hold some intellectual promise in this context: (i) formal constitutional commitment at the national level to recognizing the urban/rural divide and commitment to addressing it; (ii) creative electoral system designs that take into account the spatial dimension of politics; (iii) spatial pluralization based on concepts such as “mixed constitutions,” “community standards,” and “margin of appreciation”; and (iv) rethinking elements of equalization and fiscal federalism more generally. Taken together, the four directions I discuss here offer a repertoire of constitutional design possibilities that hold promise in mitigating the resurging rural/urban gulf. More generally, they serve as an invitation to constitutional thinkers to shake up the rather stagnant constitutional thought of spatial governance, and to think creatively about the ever-expanding urban/rural divide and its consequences for the theory and practice of 21st century constitutional democracy.

Extensive urbanization and the consequent rise of megacities are among the most significant demographic phenomena of our time. Our constitutional institutions and constitutional imagination, however, have not even begun to catch up with the new reality. In this article, I address four dimensions of the great constitutional silence concerning the metropolis: ( a) the tremendous interest in cities throughout much of the social sciences, as contrasted with the meager attention to the subject in constitutional theory and practice; ( b) the right to the city in theory and practice; ( c) a brief account of what national constitutions actually say about cities, and more significantly what they do not; and ( d) the dominant statist stance embedded in national constitutional orders, in particular as it addresses the sovereignty and spatial governance of the polity, as a main explanatory factor for the lack of vibrant constitutional discourse concerning urbanization in general and the metropolis in particular.

Indivisibility of the French republic – sovereignty and French republicanism – universalism in French political thought – spatial and social dimensions of the indivisibility doctrine – indivisibility and identity-based classifications – Dilution of the indivisibility doctrine – a crisis of French universalism

AbstractExtensive urbanization is one of the most significant demographic and geopolitical phenomena of our time. Yet, with few exceptions, constitutional theory has failed to turn its attention to this crucial trend. In particular, the burgeoning constitutional literature aimed at addressing phenomena such as democratic backsliding, constitutional retrogression, and populist threats to judicial independence and the rule of law has failed to respond to the significance of place as an emerging cleavage in contemporary politics. An alarming disconnect has emerged between constitutionalism's overwhelmingly statist (or Westphalian) outlook and the reality of geographically localized concentration of worldviews, policy preferences, and political identities. In this essay, I identify urban agglomeration and the accompanying resurgence of the urban-rural divide as posing a critical challenge to liberal constitutional democracy, and argue that the time is ripe to pay closer attention to the spatial dimension of constitutional governance and its impact on the rise of anti-establishment political resentment. To that end, in the essay's final part I identify several areas of constitutional law and theory that appear to hold some intellectual promise in thinking creatively about mitigating the urban-rural divide, and about the mounting urban challenge more generally.

The subject. The article is devoted to integration of conflictology theory in legal science. The purpose of the paper is to confirm or disprove hypothesis that theoretical mechanisms of conflictology may be effectively applied into constitutional legal theory to prevent con‐ stitutional legal conflicts.The methodology of the study includes general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, description) and sociological approach.The main results and scope of their application. The author describes the genesis of legal conflictology theory in different humanitarian sciences and its periodization, including integration of conflictology theory in legal science. The author substantiates necessity and justification of application of theoretical and methodological bases of science of conflictology in the constitutional and municipal law for the purpose of forecasting, identification and the resolution of the corresponding constitutional and legal conflicts.Conflictology of constitutional and municipal law is a research level of legal conflictology. The subject of this kind of conflictology are legal conflicts in constitutional and municipal law, their prediction, identification and resolution. It is necessary to take into account the following postulates of the General theory of conflictology in the study of legal conflicts in constitutional and municipal law:– the conflict is natural, objective and acts as an integral property of social life;– the social conflict at the same time acts as a stabilizing factor of functioning of social system;– social conflict is a complex social phenomenon as well as a process having structural, spatial‐temporal and dynamic characteristics;– the organic connection of law conflict with the law. The legal conflict arises about legal phenomena, it is realized under the influence and with the application of legal norms, it is resolved on the basis of legal regulation;– there is a special kind of political conflict that arises within the existing government, where each of the groups within the ruling class has more private interests and its own vision of the situation.Conflictology of constitutional and municipal law bases on the general theoretical postulates of the science of social conflicts. Constitutional conflict is a political type of social conflict – a disagreement between the subjects of constitutional and municipal legal relations over constitutional values, which can be transformed into legally significant conflict and generate legal consequences.Conclusions. The object of scientific knowledge of legal conflictology in constitutional and municipal law is a constitutional and legal conflict, the study of which should be based on the above postulates of the general theory of conflictology, and can not be limited to purely legal knowledge.

This discussion has two main parts: theoretical and empirical. The task of the first part is to determine the notion of the region as such (the problem not sufficiently cleared up so far). Namely, it is necessary to delimit the region both from the notion of local self-administration and from the notion of state. The region differs from local self-administration in possessing a qualitatively higher degree of authority, authority for the original regulation of legal relations, legislation in the material sense. The region differs from the state in the fact that the authority of the subject with statal (constitutional) authority in principle has above it only the social legal norm as the content of the joint (collective) legal act of a stronger part of the nation in a state. On the contrary, the region has to be subjugated to the constitutional authority of the state in whose borders it is located. There are two basic types of regions: the region as a state fragment and region as a public service. The former is similar to the state, because it has its own state organs (organs with their own authority of coercion), while the latter does not have such organs. Furthermore, regions could be comprehensively divided into non-incorporated autonomous territories, separate original parts of a state and the regions included into the regional state. This discussion accepts as politically most, relevant the division of regions into the regions within monarchies and the regions within republics. (Due to the spatial limitations the third category, regions under the regime of international law, could not have been included into the discussion). Naturally, this discussion could not have been comprehensive when it comes to regions, so it discussed only the most interesting examples. Thus as examples of the regions in monarchies, it presented dominions within the British Empire and Finland within the Russian Empire, and of the regions in republics, the regions in Italy.

Most geo-engineering cases have non-linearity. Particularly, the material non-linearity is an important character of geo-engineering cases. Due to the randomness of materials’ spatial variation as well as boundary conditions’ fluctuation, these cases’ study incorporates stochastic theory. Stochastic finite element method is applicable for the randomness. The visco-plasto constitution is helpful for non-linear stochastic FEM application. The algorithm for non-linear stochastic FEM was established.

A number of social theorists have attempted to elaborate poststructuralist analytics that capture the dialectics of social structure and human agency. Giddens proposes a ‘general theory’, centered on the notion of ‘structuration’. He is particularly important to geography because he suggests that the spatiality of social practices belongs at the center of social theory and historical analysis. Systems of social practices are defined by their time–space characteristics. There are problems in the corpus of Giddens's work that require attention, however, before such a theory can be fully viable. These include: Giddens's derogation of intentional action in favor of practical knowledge; his notion that structure is ‘instantiated’; his concept of power; his treatment of material resources; and his lack of attention to discursive strategies. From an examination of these areas of Giddens's work, it can be seen that he advances several, inconsistent, theories of social change. In a reinvigorated theoretical human geography, based on the analysis of interaction in time and space, these problem areas must be tackled.

Tourist maps cannot be understood as signs or symbolic representations of an already constituted destination space. They are spatial devices playing an active role in the constitution of such space. To grasp this generative capacity, the author proposes conceiving tourist maps as diagrams, in the sense first introduced by Foucault and further developed by Deleuze and Guattari. Looking at very diverse tourist maps of Berlin and relying on selected spatial theory, this article examines four diagrammatic operations through which tourist maps constitute destination space: extending matter, edging experience, placing objects, and folding displacement. The article concludes by assessing the virtual ontological status of the space thus constituted.

AbstractThe article ventures a critique of the logic of ‘temporal othering’ in contemporary International Relations (IR) theory. Originally articulated in the field of European integration, this logic presupposes a possibility for a political community to constitute its identity without any spatial delimitation by means of casting as Other its own past, whose repetition in the future it seeks to avoid. While the image of contemporary Europe as ‘othering’ its own past has been subjected to empirical criticism, this article makes a conceptual argument for the indissociability of temporal and spatial aspects in any act of othering. Drawing on Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel, I argue that any historical action is necessarily spatiotemporal, combining the abstraction of temporal negation with the concrete actuality of a negated spatial being. Alternatives to the logic of sovereign territoriality are therefore not to be sought in the temporal aspect of othering, but rather by pursuing the possibility of self-constitution in the absence of any negating action whatsoever. The article concludes with an outline of such an alternative ethos, developed on the basis of Giorgio Agamben's reconstruction of the Hegelian-Kojèvian problematic of the end of history and his theory of the subject.

Time is a key element of consciousness as it includes multiple timescales from shorter to longer ones. This is reflected in our experience of various short-term phenomenal contents at discrete points in time as part of an ongoing, more continuous, and long-term ‘stream of consciousness’. Can Integrated Information Theory (IIT) account for this multitude of timescales of consciousness? According to the theory, the relevant spatiotemporal scale for consciousness is the one in which the system reaches the maximum cause-effect power; IIT currently predicts that experience occurs on the order of short timescales, namely, between 100 and 300 ms (theta and alpha frequency range). This can well account for the integration of single inputs into a particular phenomenal content. However, such short timescales leave open the temporal relation of specific phenomenal contents to others during the course of the ongoing time, that is, the stream of consciousness. For that purpose, we converge the IIT with the Temporo-spatial Theory of Consciousness (TTC), which, assuming a multitude of different timescales, can take into view the temporal integration of specific phenomenal contents with other phenomenal contents over time. On the neuronal side, this is detailed by considering those neuronal mechanisms driving the non-additive interaction of pre-stimulus activity with the input resulting in stimulus-related activity. Due to their non-additive interaction, the single input is not only integrated with others in the short-term timescales of 100–300 ms (alpha and theta frequencies) (as predicted by IIT) but, at the same time, also virtually expanded in its temporal (and spatial) features; this is related to the longer timescales (delta and slower frequencies) that are carried over from pre-stimulus to stimulus-related activity. Such a non-additive pre-stimulus-input interaction amounts to temporo-spatial expansion as a key mechanism of TTC for the constitution of phenomenal contents including their embedding or nesting within the ongoing temporal dynamic, i.e., the stream of consciousness. In conclusion, we propose converging the short-term integration of inputs postulated in IIT (100–300 ms as in the alpha and theta frequency range) with the longer timescales (in delta and slower frequencies) of temporo-spatial expansion in TTC.

The constitutive role of the media in relation to society has, arguably, not received the attention it deserves from those interested in the spatial constitution of society, A case could be made, for example, that the most dramatic manifestation of the relation between the media and space—viz globalisation—has led to a failure to appreciate the multifaceted scales and dimensions of this relation. Thus, though sometimes sensitive to the local scale, notions of globalisation have seemingly indirectly caused the neglect of a more thoroughgoing examination of space and time within media theory. Rather than develop such a critique, however, I seek here to demonstrate the difficulties involved in such a reconsideration of media theory. Accordingly, in the paper I provide an analysis of the temporal bias in existing media theory—examining, in particular, Jhally's political-economic analysis of the television-advertising airtime market—and proceed to offer an alternative spatial analysis of television advertising, using a case study of the United Kingdom. The difficulty of integrating the two accounts serves to question the adequacy of existing media theory, thus demonstrating the importance of detailed theoretical and empirical work in helping to understand the increasingly significant role of the media in relation to society, space, and time.

Sexuality, gender, and class (with race, ethnicity, physical mobility, and other social categories related to power) are deeply implicated in the constitution of each other as social relations. Spatial structures and conflicts that are constitutive of class relations are therefore also constitutive of sexuality. An examination of recent developments in feminist, lesbian and gay, and radical social theory, and certain elements of the historical geography of capitalism, reveals specific ways in which this is so. Urban spatial designs in Britain and the USA in the 19th and 20th centuries, for example, implicate hegemonic constructions of sexuality in gender-based and class-based spatial divisions of labor. Similarly, struggles over the social definitions of sexuality have involved individuals and groups recoding spaces that have been devalued by the market in potentially counterhegemonic ways. Thus, struggles over sexuality manifest themselves as struggles over sexual representations of, and sexual symbols in, space as well as over spatial organization. Indeed, these sorts of struggles may actually be more important in the contemporary era than those concerning the spatial organization of sexuality. This is because the sociospatial construction of otherness, which has as much to do with representational and symbolic space as with physical space, has become key to the survival of capitalism.

This is a review of two new and important developments in thermal science. First, there exist fundamental optima in the constitution and operation of flow (nonequilibrium) systems, man-made and natural. These optima can be identified based on the simplest models that still retain the essential features of the real systems. Examples are the spatial allocation of heat transfer area in a power plant, and the temporal optimization of on & off processes. The second development is that the engineering method of modeling and optimization has been extended to natural systems, animate and inanimate (e.g., tree networks). This step has been named constructal theory for the reasons given in Section 3. The objective of such work is to predict the macroscopic spatial and temporal structure (organization) that is everywhere. It is to inject a dose of determinsm (theory) in a field that until recently considered natural structures to be nondeterministic: results of chance and necessity. These developments bring to mind the advice left to us by J. W. Gibbs more than one hundred years ago: "One of the principal objects of theoretical research in any department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity."

Abstract. Law is on the one hand indispensable for the constitution of space, and, on the other, legal orders emerge or develop in specific local situations. Does the question of the law exist in geographical theories and how has it been received? The article raises the issue of a missing link in geographical theorisation: Are the legal dimensions of social spatialities sufficiently considered? This text aims at enriching geographical theory formation through legal dimensions, especially by translating legal studies’ contributions into geographical questions who experience a specific spatial turn. On the one hand, the concept “geographicity of Law” is being developed for this purpose. On the other hand, two examples will be used to illustrate how geographical theory can benefit from legal dimensions: the right to public space and the issue of urbanness.

This article traces the in situ production of space in a multi-unit residential building under construction in Berlin. Looking at how space is constituted in an unfinished building, it shows how material objects become loci of meaning-making in the constitution of a new building and future home. Through examining a group of future dwellers engaged in the participatory planning of a residential building, it argues that this is a community building a house in order to build an idealised community in the future. They negotiate an uncertain future community through objects in the built environment over which they have control in the present. Using relational spatial theory, the activities of planning the built environment are shown as inextricably linked to producing the meanings and significance of objects. Through looking at three objects in the built environment: an information hut, raised flowerbeds and interior windows, the active production of the relational space of inhabitation can be witnessed on-the-ground, through concrete activities, long before dwelling commences and the sites and ideas of homes are achieved.

Taking Liu Manwen’s self-portraiture series, especially her Ordinary Life and Monologue, as examples, this article argues that the self-subject via self-portraiture comes to terms through social-cultural constitution and visual articulation. With face masked and body wrapped, Liu Manwen’s self-portraiture locates a troubled self against familial relations and social-cultural confinement and searches for self-expression through mirror reflection and spatial articulation. Issues specific to the discussion include spatial anxiety, where the self reconciles familial place and social space; psychological exploration, where the split self negotiates between the symbolic and the semiotic through mirror reflection; and bodily disguise, where the self conceals and reveals troubled identity through a masked face and bandage-wrapped body.

The cultural heritage resources along Weihe river system in Xi’an Metropolitan Area are diverse, with the feature of linear distribution. Nevertheless the existing heritage sites in protection are separated and unrelated, in addition the surrounding environment has been destroyed to a large extent, and thus the requirement for regional protection of heritage is urgent. On the basis of theory and methodology of Heritage Corridor, initial surveys of local heritage have been done, the basic data and information has been combed, heritage constitution as well as features of spatial and diachronic distribution has been discussed, heritage value has been analyzed, and then the concept and thought of the construction of Weihe Water System Heritage Corridor in Xi’an Metropolitan Area is proposed, to provide basic research framework for regional heritage protection.

- It was with singular anticipation that in his writings on Hippodamus Aristotle placed social and spatial control in relation to each other: in this perspective planning is not only the art of building a city, but it is also a tool of government and the spatial order produced by planning is presented as an instrument of social control. The name Hippodamus is associated with a checkerboard urban layout, known as a ‘Hippodamus' grid'. Hippodamus was not the inventor of the grid which had been in use many centuries before him, but he can be considered as the inventor of planning, if it is defined as an instrument of social control through the control of space. The exercise performed on Hippodamus is designed to underline the association between a grid and constitution and to identify the political nature of planning practices in motives that are more radical than those normally recognised for it. It is also an attempt to ask questions about the criteria that govern planning action and to identify the elements that characterise it in order to condense them into a concept of planning, whose independence does not divorce planning actions from political designs. The paper concludes with the basics of a theory of social order planning.

This article seeks to elaborate a framework for the study of diversity in forms of labour using Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development (UCD). It argues that labour markets are constituted by systemic processes of capital accumulation and uneven development in the global economy, but that these processes have highly differentiated outcomes in terms of the forms of labour that have historically emerged within and across national boundaries. Exploring some of the neglected elements of different forms of labour, including non-waged labour, the article demonstrates how we might conceptualise the way in which combinations of labour forms exist within any given space of the world economy. Using the examples of both internal and transnational migration, it argues that charting the social and spatial relations of production, and the labouring experiences and forms of worker politics associated with them, is an effective way of understanding the constitution and restructuring of different forms of labour.

The enactment of Regional Regulation of Medan City Number 13 of 2011 and Regional Regulation Number 2 of 2016 have not accommodated the importance of Cultural values in the process of formation on spatial and region planning so that the RTRW development carried out by the Medan City government is only based on regulation alone without looking further into the social context and culture. According to Von Savigny's Theory, the formation of law must be based on people's souls (Volkgeist) as the raw material for the formation of law. Therefore, in the formation of regional regulations must pay attention to the cultural values of the indigenous people of an area. The inclusion of Malay cultural values in regional regulations in Medan City is a form of the realization of the state implementing Article 18B paragraph (2) of the 1945 Constitution. Integration of the cultural values of the Malay people in Medan City into regional regulations is carried out through the implementation of the legislative functions of the Medan City Government and DPRD to accommodate and protect the soul of the nation from the original tribe of Medan City whose existence has been marginalized. Revitalizing the cultural value of the Deli Malay in Medan City into spatial and region regulation is a form of protection of the Medan city government towards the cultural, historical and social values of the Malay people in the Medan City.

This paper captures the value of public participation as a redeemer of South African municipalities in land use planning. In this paper, it is argued that there is scant public participation in local government developmental matters, especially in land-use planning. South African municipalities are congested due to lack of public participation in land-use planning in the municipal arena. This is despite the fact that the constitution requires active public engagement in questions of developing local administration. The challenge of inactive public participation endures throughout the IDP, and this is now perceived as a dream wish. It is further argued that it is important to involve the public in land-use, especially in the following categories: commercial, residential, public facilities, industrial, and open spaces. The arguments in this paper were also founded on Patsy Healey's 1997 theory of collaborative planning. Collaborative planning theory has been used to develop ideas and arguments. This is a conceptual paper based on secondary data. The paper relied heavily on current literature on public participation and land-use planning. Despite the arrival of democracy in South Africa, the theoretical findings of this research indicated that there is still apartheid in spatial planning. It is also discovered that the adopted South African apartheid spatial planning continues to overlook community involvement in municipal land-use planning. When it comes to planning, the study proposes that municipal authorities follow the Batho Pele principles. At the municipal level, public engagement should not be passive but interactive and consultative. Finally, the paper advocates for land-use planning reforms and the use of active public engagement to save South African municipalities from congestion.

The framework of stylistics in the esoteric knowledge of Walking Through Fire stands as a model-view-device that categorically focuses on the differentiation concerning the cumulative and formation constant of information representation and the equilibrium contact within the information is presented and performed. The model theory of point of view within engrosses the ideological assessment, spatial and temporal continuum, and psychological operation. The realm of stylometry involves an experiment set for a meticulous language model. Therefore, stylistic analysis impels the domain of structural narratology to frame the properties considered inside the progress of the narrative to propel the models of the theory, the affiliation of distinctive models to each other, and their interaction with structural linguistic and formal language. The traditional narrative and modern narrative background inserted in the narrative interactive design and narrative discourse, become a combinatorial principle and a composite reflective configuration that determine the incontestability clause of stylistic analysis as a method of examining systematically and in aspect the constitution of both literature and language. the realm of intentionality through the techniques of representation, a system of cognition and the content of representation, embodies an associate and illuminates direction, which ultimately upholds a retrievable procedure of analysis.

This paper critically engages with the concepts of ‘feelings of safety’ and ‘fear of crime’ as they have been deployed in recent politics of community safety. While the first part of the paper discusses the staging of what is referred to as a dispositif of safety, which discursively frames subjective–spatial relations in powerful ways, the second part moves towards an understanding of lived experiences of spaces and places that unfold within, but also beyond, the dispositif of safety. For this purpose, the German concept of Geborgenheit is introduced. For a theoretical elaboration of this concept, Walter Benjamin's work around experience and temporality is referred to and articulated with Deleuzian theory. An analysis of Geborgenheit, it is argued, displaces hegemonic notions of ‘safety’ by addressing the dynamics that enable subjects to open up to and nest within a place. The paper concludes with a discussion of vignettes from a qualitative study in Berlin in order to exemplify the constitution of geographies of Geborgenheit in the context of recent safety politics.

AbstractShadows are intriguing phenomena. They do not have mass or energy. So, they are unable to have some basic characteristics of the objects of which they are shadows: they cannot move by themselves and they cannot experience the same kind of changes. At first sight, any theory of perception can skip this optical phenomenon or look at it only as a side-effect. Actually, in order to be seen objects must be illuminated and one of the consequences of this is that they project a shadow over the surrounding space. Is that all? In this paper I will argue that, from a phenomenological point of view (or at least from a Husserlian oriented phenomenology), shadows, with their specific hyletic data, must be considered as an element of the process of constitution of spatial-temporal objectivities. In other words, shadows no less than other predicates, like extension or hardness, although in a different manner, belong to the a priori structure of those objectivities. This means that their ontological status is quite different from that of fictitious objects or hallucinations. To show this I will draw mainly in Husserl’s Lesson Thing and Space, from 1907, and other unpublished texts during Husserl’s lifetime, like the second volume of the Ideas and the Lesson of 1925 on Psychological Phenomenology.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to look at the emergence of “gated communities” in Ghana. It explores gated communities as a nexus of social and spatial relations within the context of urban inequality. It is concerned with the phenomenon in which the rich now live in isolation behind barbed wires and gates, fearing for their lives and properties. Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts a sociological approach to the study. It does so initially by focusing on the social constitution of a gated community. The gate becomes a focal point of the analysis because by its function, it separates the residents from others. This spatial construction of gated communities does not only preserve the social stratification of class and demographic groups, it institutionalises this already extant stratification. The paper, therefore, uses social inequality and the status attainment theory as the basis of its work. Status processes play a part in the development of powerful inequalities, which shape the structure of groups and societies as well as, directly and indirectly, the opportunities of individuals (Berger et al., 1980). Findings The paper finds that although people feel safer behind gates, at the same time the fear of the outside world increases for them. Their desire to find a small area in which they feel secure, meanwhile, only expands the vast areas in which they feel insecure. It notes that security can be achieved only and much better, if the causes of insecurity, namely poverty and exclusion, are addressed. Originality/value The paper wades into the gated communities’ phenomenon. It contributes to the discussion in which social difference and inequality have become more marked features of urban society. Its relevance lies in the fact that it analyses this issue through a sociological perspective.

The purpose of the paper is to evaluate the dynamics of implementing climate change objectives within the South African local government. Climate change has been intensifying over the years and cities are recognised to be vulnerable. The promulgation of various acts and plans, such as the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996), Spatial Planning and Land Use and Management Act (SPLUMA), National Urban Development Framework and Integrated Development Plan (IDP), is to ensure environmental protection inclusive of climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, the multiplicity of challenges, such as budgetary constraints, lack of political will, capacitated personnel, coupled with service delivery backlogs, deter the commitment by the municipality to implement measures to adapt and mitigate climate change. The persistence of climate change effects around the city has reduced the resilience of South African cities. The resilient theory asserts that cities must have the ability to operate post any perturbation. The adaptation to climate change around the city is important to ensure the system’s ability to be resilient. The study found that the multiplicity of factors, interplaying within the City of Polokwane, demonstrates difficulties to adapt and mitigating climate change. The study concludes that the employment of solar systems, maintenance of drainage systems and proper planning are key determinants of affective planning in an attempt to mitigate and adapt to climate change

Access analysis – an archaeological method? Access analysis is a methodological instrument for analysing spatial structures developed by B. Hillier and J. Hanson (Hillier & Hanson 1984). This form of analysis was defined in the middle of the 1980s with reference to working up architectural plans. As the method does not only operate with the physical relations, but also regards these as a constitution of social circumstances and ideas, the method has also been employed by archaeologists. If one is able to understand social structures by reading and analysing spatial structures, one is working oneself into a central field of archaeology.The method takes a building’s spatial structure as its starting point. In order to carry out an analysis like this it is necessary to know the complete structure of a building. According to a developed scheme with symbols representing the different building elements, the spatial structure is translated into gamma-maps. According to the hierarchic position of the depth of a single element in proportion to the whole building, these maps are translated into justified gamma-maps. Access to the whole building as well as to the individual rooms in reciprocal relation is a prerequisite for the analysis. That is, justified gamma-maps graphically represent a building’s spatial structures and can be interpreted from the structures’ reciprocal relations (Figs. 1-5).However, as the method was not defined and developed with reference to an archaeological context, there are problematic elements in translating the method from its original context into archaeology. Various elements will be ignored when using access analysis as a methodological instrument in archaeology.There are problematic elements in reducing the spatial structure of a building to symbols with simplified connotative characters in connection with the transcription into gamma-maps. First of all, the relative sizes and shapes of the rooms will be ignored. They cannot simply be characterized as standardized sizes (Fig. 6).Further, not only physical elements are overlooked in gamma-maps and justified gamma-maps. Several elements will not appear through spatial structures and will thus not be taken into consideration in Hillier & Hanson’s analytic model. Examples are possible room decorations, symbolism in location and room distribution of a building, tradition and building material. Several of these elements would not be recognized in an archaeological excavation, but are likely to have been of importance in contemporary culture. The problem with these elements is that even if they were recognized in the archaeological material, their significance practically could not be established without non-archaeological information. It is in fact a previous knowledge or concept of a society that contributes to interpretation of a building’s social structures in Hillier & Hanson’s analytic model.As access analysis focuses on physical relations, a vital aspect is lacking that makes buildings what they are for both society and individuals: the human use and understanding of a building. Also, the aspect of time is overlooked in gamma-maps. The context in which a building is to be read and understood is changing throughout time. This is clearly a weakness in this way of analysing. Access analysis can be characterized as static, as opposed to the social reality in which a building operates. And this very conflict influences the result of the analysis in a negative way.An example of the practical use of access analysis is Neil Price’s article, ”House and Home in Viking Age Iceland. Cultural Expression in Scandinavian Colonial Architecture.” With a starting point in access analysis, he analyses Viking houses in Iceland. His aim is to find a Scandinavian idea of the concept of home. He does point out how spatial structures of the houses change through time, and how active factors must be a result of the inhabitants and their social structure. However, this is no more than one can tell just by the spatial structures of the houses and the theory of the method. Conclusions based only on the access analysis method as in this case seem to be no more than an argumentative circle. As shown by this example, it is important to recognize the limitations of the method when using it for archaeology. As mentioned above, several other factors must be taken into consideration.Theoretically, the method implies that one agrees with Hillier & Hanson that there is a relatively direct relationship between physical and social structures. Even at this point there are objections as to the use of access analysis and its basic theory within archaeology.Even though the gamma-maps represent building structures graphically in a way that permits a relatively easy comparison between houses, the method has its limitations. And the conclusion must be that Hillier & Hanson do not provide a general theory for analysing spatial structures and the social structures behind these.Kirsten Pugdahl PedersenAarhus UniversitetTranslated by Annette Lerche Trolle

ABSTRACT: In the poststructuralist turn, a less unified and universalizing concept of space as merely a meaningless stage is proposed. Such notion, as Michel Foucault announced in the 1970s, will no longer be perceived by its fixity or a simply referential aspect, acquiring, among different forums of discussion in the Humanities, a dynamic character. In parallel fashion, studies concerning the constitution of subjectivity point towards its oscillating status, showing how the subject is the product of multiple discourses, which makes any demarcating of solid frontiers, a hard task. The present work aims at analyzing the novel Alias Grace (1996) by Margaret Atwood, under the light of spatial criticism, as well as Gender theory, deconstructing essentialisms around women. In this novel, Atwood gives voice to the historical figure Grace Marks, young Irish immigrant in the XIX century, which becomes mentor and accomplice of the murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his mistress and governess of the house, Nancy Montgomery. The author constructs a self-aware character-narrator who will know how to manipulate, through language, the many contexts in which she finds herself in, reversing the hierarchy of discourse, re-signifying her allegedly inferior position. Works by Philip Wegner and Neil Smith around the notion of space, Lorna McLean and Marilyn Barber about the Irish immigration in Canada, as well as Linda Hutcheon, Chris Weedon, and Jane Flax’s theories will be the theoretical apparatus of this investigation. KEYWORDS: Gender, Space, Post-colonialism, Margaret Atwood. __________________________________ RESUMO: A guinada Pós-estruturalista de meados do século XX propôs uma visão menos unificada e universalizante do conceito de espaço, este visto anteriormente como um mero cenário. Tal noção, conforme prenunciava Foucault nos anos 1970, não mais será compreendida por sua fixidez ou valor referencial, adquirindo, nos mais variados fóruns de discussão nas Humanidades, um caráter dinâmico. Paralelamente, estudos voltados para a constituição do sujeito apontam para seu status oscilante, demonstrando como este é produto de uma multiplicidade de discursos, o que dificultaria qualquer tentativa em se demarcar fronteiras sólidas para o mesmo. Este trabalho tem por objetivo analisar o romance Alias Grace (1996) de Margaret Atwood à luz da crítica espacial e da teoria do gênero a fim de desconstruir essencialismos sobre o sujeito-mulher. No romance, Atwood dá voz a uma figura histórica, Grace Marks. Esta jovem imigrante irlandesa do século XIX muda-se para o Canadá, onde acaba se envolvendo no homicídio duplo de seu patrão, Thomas Kinnear e sua amante e governanta, Nancy Montgomery. Atwood constrói uma personagem-narradora autoconsciente que saberá manipular, através da linguagem, os diferentes contextos (sociais e geográficos) nos quais se vê inserida, revertendo a hierarquia do discurso, ressignificando sua suposta condição frágil e inferior. Trabalhos de Philip Wegner e Neil Smith quanto à noção de espaço, Lorna McLean e Marilyn Barber sobre a imigração irlandesa no Canadá, bem como de teóricas do gênero como Linda Hutcheon, Chris Weedon e Jane Flax, entre outros servirão de aporte teórico desta investigação. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Gênero, Espaço, Pós-colonialismo, Margaret Atwood.

In this paper I develop an idea of commemorative ‘dis(re)membering’ as a tool for a critical, nonessentialist reconfiguration of memorial landscapes, heritage discourse, and dominant official narratives of the past. The notion of commemorative dis(re)membering is not limited to any one particular case but is a general approach which fundamentally questions taken-for-granted assumptions about memorialization as a social process. The empirical focus of the paper is on Swedish labor-company camps established by the military in the late 1930s. I present a historical background to the camps, and proceed to consider the discourse that framed and enabled the creation of them. In reference to Continental European social theory and philosophy, I address the position of the camps in relation to the constitution of the law and the social imaginary. I proceed to situate the argument in the context of recent attempts to address forms of ‘dissonant heritage’ and pave the ground for a critique of heritage logocentrism. This critique is then advanced through an elaboration of dis(re)membering in relation to overarching issues of democracy, subjectivity, identity, citizenship, and the role of the past in the present. Finally, I propose a permanent replacement of the imaginary lineage of heritage with a ‘rhizome history’ of ‘disinheritance‘. In suggesting the erasure of heritage, I propose that objects of the past should be mobilized as disinheritance assemblages for critical and subversive purposes in order to make the past implode into the present and across spatial scales in ways that unsettle fundamental social imaginary significations.

Abstract Re-examining Marius Sophus Lie’s Ph.D. thesis Over en Classe geometriske Transformationer from 1871 I found that its bearings on the “nature of Cartesian geometry” are that it “translates any geometric theorem into an algebraic one and thus…of the geometry of space a representation of the algebra of three variable quantities” with both the algebraic and “geometrical transformation…consisting of a transition from a point to a straight line as element…through a particularly remarkable transformation” in which “the Plücker line geometry can be transformed into a sphere geometry”, by its “straight lines of length equal to zero” partial derivative elements “turning…into the sphere’s rectilinear generatrices” both as “partial differential equations of the first order” and physical “geodetic curves” under the “general equation system f(x, y, z, dx, dy, dz) = 0” and its “spatial reciprocity” that “relative to the given line complex” in x, y, z “corresponds a certain curve-net” in the simultaneous “line element (dx, dy, dz)”. This is a revolutionary geometric algebra discovery of the constitution of our Universe as a stru ctural phase transition between Straight and Round, transcending Hermann Grassmann’s Ausdehnungslehre (1844/1862) and William Kingdom Clifford’s Space-theory of Matter (1876) by the infinitesimal transformations opening up spherical geometry in its real form identity state later assigned as SO(3). The continuous groups, whose vast field occupied the rest of his all too short life were not mentioned in the thesis but implied both in the term Classe (class) geometriske transformationer and the coverage of their principles in an “unlimited manifold of possible systems”; e.g. “turning rounded curves into rounded curves” and “straight lines into straight lines”, where “one can choose any space-curve which depends upon three parameters as the element of the geometry of the space”, and it “is possible to create a representation of an algebra that embraces an arbitrary number of variables.” Important examples were given, except of course of the still dormant elementary particles. Now, as the prime of matter’s appearance they step forth as the most natural to examine by the true Lie algebras in their original form. When over a long series of years I have scientifically carried out this, the result as here so far concluded is a concrete cellular automaton building kit of the Standard Model and all its features, and their mechanisms and dealings in a structural R3×SO(3) wave-packet organization, both inwards from the elementary particles and outwards via the periodic table of the atoms over the further hierarchical growth of this in molecular and crystal stages to an isotropic space-filling of the whole classical Euclidean Universe in harmonic exchange with its relativistic spherical moiety, and the dark mass and energy collectively worked out in the differential interstice between them.

This essay places Eugen Ehrlich and Hans Kelsen afresh in their common context, the late Habsburg Empire. It reframes Ehrlich's legal sociology and Kelsen's pure theory of law as co-original and connected responses to the problem of legal universals under conditions of fractured sovereignty and imperial diversity. At first glance, Kelsen and Ehrlich seem antipodes, an impression apparently confirmed by their prickly exchange in the 1910s: while Kelsen made universality reside in the formal features and sequences of imputation that held the normative order together, Ehrlich claimed that every normative system which purported to be meta-social and meta-cultural merely camouflaged its local conditions of emergence. Once resituated in their Habsburg environment, these strategies can be read as articulations of a broader set of common proclivities. Ehrlich's and Kelsen's proficiency in the empire's techniques of plurality management enabled them to demystify the state and to dismantle the nation: both perceived the state as a juristic construction, hence they unmasked its alleged social, cultural, and ontological unity as a delusion. The same held true for the nation: Ehrlich challenged its supremacy by showing that social relationships—“associations”—cut across national divides, while Kelsen delegitimized the nation's status as a rights-bearing collective and blurred the distinction between citizens and alien residents, working toward the civic enfranchisement of the latter. This dovetailed with Ehrlich's and Kelsen's unmaking of the distinction between private and public law: the false belief in the latter's superiority over the former served to license arbitrary rule. Both jurists deterritorialized state sovereignty by highlighting the brittleness of spatial dominion and the artificiality of political boundaries: Ehrlich and Kelsen discovered a gamut of sovereign authorities with overlapping spatial areas of jurisdiction that coexisted within the Habsburg polity. This in turn permitted them to effectively transcend the distinction between domestic and international law: while, according to Ehrlich, the state fizzled out on the local level, Kelsen redescribed it from a global perspective, turning it into a mere subordinate organ of world law. Ehrlich's legal pluralism and Kelsen's pure theory were the two most successful juristic legacies of the Habsburg polity whose imprint they bore. Both creatively reworked Habsburg constitutional reality into templates of legal order that survived the empire's demise.

PurposeThe article presents research results of an ethnographic survey within the German police. The focus is on practices of spatial production and the functions of spaces.Design/methodology/approachThe article draws on data from the DFG-funded research project KORSIT (Social Construction of security-related Spaces) based on an ethnographic survey in the German police force (https://www.dhpol.de/korsit). Participant observations were conducted in police stations in two large German cities (pseudonymised as “Dillenstadt” and “Rosenberg”). It involved 60 guided interviews with police officers at different levels of the hierarchy, as well as further interviews with local and societal actors for contrasting purposes. The data was analysed on the basis of grounded theory (Strauss and Cobin, 1996).FindingsThis paper shed light on institutional spatial knowledge, which is the basis of police practices, is preceded by experience-based narratives. In an expanded perspective, the paper argues that urban spaces themselves can be understood as materialisations of social practices that serve as social demarcation that legitimise unequal styles of action in the different precinct within the German police. In terms of a relational conceptualisation of space, it is shown that the categories of ethnicity and gender interrelate within the institutional production of space.Originality/valueThe article links organisational research with sociological spatial research and provides basic explanatory models on the conditions of emergence and the persistence of discriminatory practices within the police.

A theoretical account of the genesis and internal spatial structure of cities is given. The essence of the urbanisation process is described in terms of the following main developmental phases: (a) the emergence of relationships based on specialisation and interdependence in society; (b) the pre-eminent role of the division of labour within these relationships and its recomposition in dense spatial nodes of human activity; and (c) the concomitant formation of the networked intra-urban spaces of the city. These phases are then contextualised within three intertwined dimensions of urban materiality, namely, an internal dimension (the internal organisation and spatial dynamics of the city), a socially ambient dimension (the relational structure of society at large) and an exogenous dimension (the geographic outside of the city). In light of this account, an evaluative review of what I designate ‘the new critical urban theory’ is carried out, with special reference to planetary urbanisation, postcolonial urban theory and comparativist methodologies. I argue that while every individual city represents a uniquely complex combination of social conjunctures, there are nonetheless definite senses in which urban phenomena are susceptible to investigation at the highest levels of theoretical generality.

AbstractAmong the founders of sociology, it was Georg Simmel who provided the most thorough analysis and theory of space. This paper aims to reconstruct Simmel’s spatial theory and his observations of spatial relations. The German sociologist engaged with spatiality in a threefold way. First, he tried to provide a systematic social theory of space; second, analyzing spatial relations was important for his diagnosis of modernity; third, he dealt with the subjective constitutions of space in his shorter, essayistic writings. This paper argues that the importance of the third strand for a sociological understanding of space has seldom been recognized in sociology. In addition, it also shows that despite the diversity in perspectives, there is an underlying coherence to Simmel’s theory of space. As a result, it becomes evident that Simmel was not only ground-breaking in conceptualizing space from a sociological point of view, but that his theory of space continues to be inspirational and relevant to this day for interpreting the entanglement of social and spatial relations.

Abstract The present article examines the new position of social movements in constitutional settings. It argues that social movements – both structured and unstructured – have rearranged themselves both normatively and spatially to create new means to influence law and politics. The article sketches out new forms in which social movements have understood their ways of organizing and the possibilities for advancing legal and political change in constitutional settings. Using Judith Butler’s theory of assemblage and Bruno Latour’s concept of terrestriality, the article examines how social movements read constitutional settings, such as domestic constitutional apparatuses and international institutions, to advance their political and legal agendas. The article does not limit itself to a pure public law perspective but also incorporates insights from public international law.

The COVID-19 crisis has resulted in physical distancing regulations, disrupting traditional practices of establishing and maintaining social relationships. We draw attention to digital nomadism as a mature case of navigating sociality in uncertainty to investigate how the linking value of materiality establishes social proximity without geographic contiguity through physical, virtual, and imagined practices. Using Miller’s (1987) theory of materiality and triangulating data collected from in-depth interviews and netnography, this study details the material constitution of co-presence with others in physical distance. We propose that consumers oscillate between work—instrumental practices of signaling and curating—and play—emotional practices of belonging and indulging—to experience social linking across different spatial and temporal frameworks.

This is a review of two new and important developments in thermal science. First, there exist fundamental optima in the constitution and operation of flow (nonequilibrium) systems, man-made and natural. These optima can be identified based on the simplest models that still retain the essential features of the real systems. Examples are the spatial allocation of heat transfer area in a power plant, and the temporal optimization of on & off processes. The second development is that the engineering method of modeling and optimization has been extended to natural systems, animate and inanimate (e.g., tree networks). This step has been named constructal theory for the reasons given in Section 3. The objective of such work is to predict the macroscopic spatial and temporal structure (organization) that is everywhere. It is to inject a dose of determinsm (theory) in a field that until recently considered natural structures to be nondeterministic: results of chance and necessity. These developments bring to mind the advice left to us by J. W. Gibbs more than one hundred years ago: "One of the principal objects of theoretical research in any department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity."

Compact city strategies have become central to the development of urban sustainability politics. Cities across the globe are pursuing high-density, mixed-use developments and energy-efficient transportation systems. However, the correlation between compact city strategies and achieved sustainability is largely taken for granted in public and academic debates. Providing a spatial critique of the theory guiding compact city policy and practice, this article demonstrates how the prioritisation of urban form and territorial boundaries in measuring sustainability ultimately ignores the societal and environmental effects and foundations of current compact city approaches. Building upon this critique, I argue for a relational orientation that can attune research and practice to the compact city’s intensive and extensive constitution and consequently to its actual and potential (re)production. Analysing Oslo’s involvement in the EU network ‘Sub>Urban: Reinventing the Fringe’, and work that has followed from this network, the article develops three critical perspectives to advance compact city theorisation beyond traditional frameworks: (1) the relational topographies of the compact city; (2) the relational intensities of the compact city; and (3) the planetary constitution of the compact city. In doing so, a critical geography of how the compact city is produced – discursively and materially – is proposed.

AbstractApplying Michel Henry’s philosophical framework to the phenomenological analysis of religious experience, the author introduces a concept of material introspection and a new theory of the constitution of religious experience in phenomenologically material interiority. As opposed to ordinary mental self-scrutiny, material introspection happens when the usual outgoing attention is reverted onto embodied self-awareness in search of mystical self-knowledge or union with God. Such reversal posits the internal field of consciousness with the self-disclosure of phenomenological materiality. As shown by the example of Vedantic self-inquiry, material introspection is conditioned on the attitude ‘I “see” myself’ and employs reductions which relieve phenomenological materiality from the structuring influence of intentionality; the telos of material introspection is expressed by the inward self-transcendence of intentional consciousness into purified phenomenological materiality. Experience in material introspection is constituted by the self-affection and self-luminosity of phenomenological materiality; experience is recognized as religious due to such essential properties as the capacity of being self-fulfilled, and specific qualitative “what it’s like”(s). Drawing on more than 5000 live accounts of internal religious experience, it is shown that introspective attention can have different trajectories, producing, within a temporal extension of material introspection, different spatial modifications of embodied self-awareness and a variety of corresponding religious experiences.

The author takes a social argument—that spaces can be racialized—and asks whether the directionality of the association between space and race reflects a limitation of extant scholarship and an underlaying commitment to race as a social terminus. In response to David Delany’s 2002 articulation of how race constructs space, the author offers an inversion of this line of thinking. The author argues that the dominant view among social scientists is that space takes the position of a dependent variable whose constitution is predicted on a series of independent variables, including race. An intellectual commitment to questioning the ontological status of race requires, however, a purposeful flip in the typical causal assumptions about the relationship between race and space. Informed by racial formation theory and Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualization of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space, the author argues that racialization is tightly tethered to the production of knowledge about space. Instead of asking how race creates space, the author questions the ontological status of race itself by providing a theoretical argument that racialization is predicated upon understandings of space. Specifically, the author presents theoretical scaffolding that may be used by future researchers to explore how space creates race and racial categories.

In an installation presented at the Cooper Gallery in New York in 2005, the British-American artist Carey Young located six vinyl lines on the floor and walls of a room. She then placed an inscription announcing that the American Constitution would temporarily not apply to those who decided to stand within the space defined by the lines. In this political yet playful installation entitled Declared Void , Young points to the grey zones of the legal system, while also questioning the social role of architecture, and even our understanding of what constitutes a defined space. In a piece entitled Double Game , 1999, the artist Sophie Calle worked with Paul Auster in a performance piece in which they mutually entered a contract according to which Calle played the role of a character in one of Auster’s novels. It involved her deliberately appropriating various sites in New York City in such a way that the accepted conventions of their public use were overturned. Converting, for example, a telephone booth into a decorated interior space for private use she temporarily broke basic spatial contracts about the shared use of spaces in the city while, simultaneously, placing the ‘contract’ at the center of the work. Similarly, the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra has played with notions of the contract and our contractual use and reading of spaces in works such as A line of 160cm tattooed on 4 people , 2000, in which he uses the gallery setting as a spatial symbol that ‘legitimizes’ the contracting of four prostitutes in an agreement that allows their bodies to be indelibly marked in the name of an art performance. Following a tradition evident since the 1950s, the work of these artists has used the notion of the contract and the social ambiguities of space in a way that has either been foregrounded in their final pieces, or is indispensable to the discomfort created by their work. Operating in a blurred legal and spatial zone, these artists question the jurist’s notions of the contract and the architect’s ideas of space. As a result, they also open up both disciplines to a cross disciplinary reading that investigates their real and conceptual overlaps. In creating works that invite a ‘contractual’ (and thus immaterial) reading of physical space and an examination of the ‘real’ (and thus material) consequences of the contract they allow us to consider issues of direct importance to the theory of law; architecture’s role in contemporary society; and how a cross disciplinary perspective of these issues potentially opens architecture and the contract – understood as social artefacts – to the full implications of a reading through the prism of Hannah Arendt’s ‘subjective in-between’ – a realm in which the “intangible is no less real than the world of things we visible have in common”.

A protected and warningly coloured butterfly can become a muellerian mimic of another species in two steps: (i) a major mutation converts the pattern of the less protected species to an approximate resemblance of the better protected (one-way convergence); (ii) after the spread of this mutant, the species, which now resemble each other sufficiently to be mistaken one for the other by predators, undergo mutual convergence, using whatever major or minor genetic variation is available to them. Although sometimes one or other step might occur alone, in general early theorists were mistaken in attributing muellerian mimicry to only one of these processes. By hybridizing races of Heliconius melpomene and races of H. erato (a pair of parallel mimetic species from the neotropics, held in mutual muellerian mimicry across wide inter-racial variations in colour pattern) we have shown that, as expected from the two-step theory, the races differ at a number (two to nine) of genetic loci, usually unlinked or loosely linked, including at least one mutant of major effect in each case. We describe the genetic constitution of eight races of H. melpomene (for 11 loci affecting colour pattern) and of eight races of H. erato (for up to 15 loci), and have started to identify the linkage groups. Map distances for those loci that are linked range from around 0.3 to zero in males, with no recombination in females. Muellerian mimicry is expected to produce total uniformity of pattern: universal exceptions to this are the existence of distinct mimicry rings flying within the same habitat, geographical variation within nearly all the more widespread species (divergence in the face of normalizing selection), and, in a few species, polymorphism or sexual dimorphism. Sympatric mimicry rings will, according to the two-step model of evolution, persist indefinitely if their patterns are so distinct that under no circumstances do predators mistake one for the other. Gradual mutual convergence is then impossible, although members of a weakly protected mimicry ring that can produce a mutation giving sufficient initial resemblance to a better protected ring can still be captured by it. Batesian mimics promote this by lowering the protection of the ring that they belong to, but their models can escape only in this way as normalizing selection prevents their gradual evolution away from the batesian mimic. If the rings are too distinct in pattern even this capture of species becomes impossible as no single mutant is able to bridge the gap between the two patterns, and the necessary two mutations will be extremely unlikely to occur together. The five principal sympatric mimicry rings of the mature neotropical rain forests are very distinct in their appearance The capture of a species by another ring can produce geographical variation both in the species captured and in the capturing ring, whose pattern is somewhat altered by mutual convergence with the captured species in the second step of the evolution of the muellerian resemblance. We suggest that the striking differences between the races within H. melpomene, H. erato and other Heliconius species resulted from these effects of inter-ring capture. Distributional evidence suggests that this chiefly occurred in refuges formed by the contraction of the neotropical rain forests during the cool dry periods in the Quaternary; these, by differential extinction of elements of the flora and fauna of different refuges, could have produced long-term changes in the relative abundances of the mimicry rings, and hence (as the protection given to a ring is proportional to its abundance) somewhat different capture events in each refuge. Several existing species confirm that this mode of evolution occurs, by retaining a distinctive pattern in the absence of any other remotely similar species, but becoming mimetic in areas where they encounter a pattern somewhat like their own. The isolated populations of Heliconius hermathena show this particularly clearly; the effect can be discerned also in H. melpomene and H. erato . Although polymorphism in muellerian mimics is largely unexplained, in two species of Heliconius it may result from the existence of two or more similar but slightly differing ‘sub-rings’ among their comimics in the family Ithomiidae, which show both spatial and temporal heterogeneity in their local distribution, which apparently is able to maintain a polymorphic equilibrium in the more uniformly distributed Heliconius . We have tentatively reconstructed the ancestral patterns of H. melpomene and erato by two independent methods: first, as dominant genes are much more likely to be incorporated than recessive ones during changes of pattern, the phenotype produced by the recessive alleles at all the known loci will be close to the ancestral pattern; secondly, species that are becoming mimics evolve more than those that are not, so that non-mimetic relatives of melpomene and erato will have a pattern close to ancestral. Both methods suggest, for both species, that the ancestor was a black butterfly with yellow (or possibly white) bars, and it may be that melpomene and erato have been comimics for a very long time. Previous climatic cycles in the Quaternary have apparently caused full speciation within two mutually mimetic evolving lineages, producing pairs of parallel mimetic species within the genus, of which melpomene and erato constitute one pair.

Whichever way you look at it, self is bound up with consciousness, so it seems useful to review some of the more significant existing conceptions of this relationship. A claim by Mikhail Bakhtin can serve as an anchoring point for this discussion. He firmly predicates the formation of self not just on the existence of an individual consciousness, but on what might be called a double or social (or dialogic) consciousness. Summarising his argument, Pam Morris writes: 'A single consciousness could not generate a sense of its self; only the awareness of another consciousness outside the self can produce that image.' She goes on to say that, 'Behind this notion is Bakhtin's very strong sense of the physical and spatial materiality of bodily being,' and quotes directly from Bakhtin's essay as follows: This other human being whom I am contemplating, I shall always see and know something that he, from his place outside and over against me, cannot see himself: parts of his body that are inaccessible to his own gaze (his head, his face and its expression), the world behind his back . . . are accessible to me but not to him. As we gaze at each other, two different worlds are reflected in the pupils of our eyes . . . to annihilate this difference completely, it would be necessary to merge into one, to become one and the same person. This ever--present excess of my seeing, knowing and possessing in relation to any other human being, is founded in the uniqueness and irreplaceability of my place in the world. (Bakhtin in Morris 6 Recent investigations in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind lay down a challenge to this social conception of the self. Notably, it is a challenge that does not involve the restoration of any variant of Cartesian rationalism; indeed, it arguably over--privileges rationalism's subjective or phenomenological opposite. 'Self' in this emerging view is a biologically generated but illusory construction, an effect of the operation of what are called 'neural correlates of consciousness' (NCC). Very briefly, an NCC refers to the distinct pattern of neurochemical activity, a 'neural representational system' -- to some extent observable by modern brain--imaging equipment – that corresponds to a particular configuration of sense--phenomena, or 'content of consciousness' (a visual image, a feeling, or indeed a sense of self). Because this science is still largely hypothetical, with many alternative terms and descriptions, it would be better in this limited space to focus on one particular account – one that is particularly well developed in the area of selfhood and one that resonates with other conceptions included in this discussion. Thomas Metzinger begins by postulating the existence within each person (or 'system' in his terms) of a 'self--model', a representation produced by neural activity -- what he calls a 'neural correlate of self--consciousness' -- that the individual takes to be the actual self, or what Metzinger calls the 'phenomenal self'. 'A self--model is important,' Metzinger says, 'in enabling a system to represent itself to itself as an agent' (293). The individual is able to maintain this illusion because 'the self--model is the only representational structure that is anchored in the brain by a continuous source of internally generated input' (297). In a manner partly reminiscent of Bakhtin, he continues: 'The body is always there, and although its relational properties in space and in movement constantly change, the body is the only coherent perceptual object that constantly generates input.' The reason why the individual is able to jump from the self--model to the phenomenal self in the first place is because: We are systems that are not able to recognise their subsymbolic self--model as a model. For this reason, we are permanently operating under the conditions of a 'naïve--realistic self--misunderstanding': We experience ourselves as being in direct and immediate epistemic contact with ourselves. What we have in the past simply called a 'self' is not a non--physical individual, but only the content of an ongoing dynamical process – the process of transparent self—modeling. (Metzinger 299) The question that nonetheless arises is why it should be concluded that this self--model emerges from subjective neural activity and not, say, from socialisation. Why should a self--model be needed in the first place? Metzinger's response is to say that there is good evidence 'for some kind of innate 'body prototype'' (298), and he refers to research that shows that even children born without limbs develop self--models which sometimes include limbs, or report phantom sensations in limbs that have never existed. To me, this still leaves open the possibility that such children are modelling their body image on strong identification with human others. But be that as it may, one of the things that remains unclear after this relatively rich account of contemporary or scientific phenomenology is the extent to which 'neural consciousness' is or can be supplemented by other kinds of consciousness, or indeed whether neural consciousness can be overridden by the 'self' acting on the basis of these other kinds of consciousness. The key stake in Metzinger's account is 'subjectivity'. The reason why the neural correlate of self--consciousness is so important to him is: 'Only if we find the neural and functional correlates of the phenomenal self will we be able to discover a more general theoretical framework into which all data can fit. Only then will we have a chance to understand what we are actually talking about when we say that phenomenal experience is a subjective phenomenon' (301). What other kinds of consciousness might there be? It is significant that, not only do NCC exponents have little to say about the interaction with other people, they rarely mention language, and they are unanimously and emphatically of the opinion that the thinking or processing that takes place in consciousness is not dependent on language, or indeed any signifying system that we know of (though conceivably, it occurs to me, the neural correlates may signify to, or 'call up', each other). And they show little 'consciousness' that a still influential body of opinion (informed latterly by post--structuralist thinking) has argued for the consciousness shaping effects of 'discourse' -- i.e. for socially and culturally generated patterns of language or other signification to order the processing of reality. We could usefully coin the term 'verbal correlates of consciousness' (VCC) to refer to these patterns of signification (words, proverbs, narratives, discourses). Again, however, the same sorts of questions apply, since few discourse theorists mention anything like neuroscience: To what extent is verbal consciousness supplemented by other forms of consciousness, including neural consciousness? These questions may never be fully answerable. However, it is interesting to work through the idea that NCC and VCC both exist and can be in some kind of relation even if the precise relationship is not measurable. This indeed is close to the case that Charles Shepherdson makes for psychoanalysis in attempting to retrieve it from the misunderstanding under which it suffers today: We are now familiar with debates between those who seek to demonstrate the biological foundations of consciousness and sexuality, and those who argue for the cultural construction of subjectivity, insisting that human life has no automatically natural form, but is always decisively shaped by contingent historical conditions. No theoretical alternative is more widely publicised than this, or more heavily invested today. And yet, this very debate, in which 'nature' and 'culture' are opposed to one another, amounts to a distortion of psychoanalysis, an interpretive framework that not only obscures its basic concepts, but erodes the very field of psychoanalysis as a theoretically distinct formation (2--3). There is not room here for an adequate account of Shepherdson's recuperation of psychoanalytic categories. A glimpse of the stakes involved is provided by Shepherdson's account, following Eugenie Lemoine--Luccione, of anorexia, which neither biomedical knowledge nor social constructionism can adequately explain. The further fact that anorexia is more common among women of the same family than in the general population, and among women rather than men, but in neither case exclusively so, thereby tending to rule out a genetic factor, allows Shepherdson to argue: [A]norexia can be understood in terms of the mother--daughter relation: it is thus a symbolic inheritance, a particular relation to the 'symbolic order', that is transmitted from one generation to another . . . we may add that this relation to the 'symbolic order' [which in psychoanalytic theory is not coextensive with language] is bound up with the symbolisation of sexual difference. One begins to see from this that the term 'sexual difference' is not used biologically, but also that it does not refer to general social representations of 'gender,' since it concerns a more particular formation of the 'subject' (12). An intriguing, and related, possibility, suggested by Foucault, is that NCC and VCC (or in Foucault's terms the 'visible' and the 'articulable'), operate independently of each other – that there is a 'disjunction' (Deleuze 64) or 'dislocation' (Shepherdson 166) between them that prevents any dialectical relation. Clearly, for Foucault, the lack of dialectical relation between the two modes does not mean that both are not at all times equally functional. But one can certainly speculate that, increasingly under postmodernity and media saturation, the verbal (i.e. the domain of signification in general) is influential. And if linguistic formations -- discourses, narratives, etc. -- can proliferate and feed on each other unconstrained by other aspects of reality, we get the sense of language 'running away with itself' and, at least for a time, becoming divorced from a more complete sense of reality. (This of course is basically the argument of Baudrillard.) The reverse may also be possible, in certain periods, although the idea that language could have no mediating effect at all on the production of reality (just inconsequential fluff on the surface of things) seems far--fetched in the wake of so much postmodern and media theory. However, the notion is consistent with the theories of hard--line materialists and genetic determinists. But we should at least consider the possibility that some sort of shaping interaction between NCC and VCC, without implicating the full conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis, is continuously occurring. This possibility is, for me, best realised by Jacques Derrida when he writes of an irreducible interweaving of consciousness and language (the latter for Derrida being a cover term for any system of signification). This interweaving is such that the significatory superstructure 'reacts upon' the 'substratum of non--expressive acts and contents', and the name for this interweaving is 'text' (Mowitt 98). A further possibility is that provided by Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus -- the socially inherited schemes of perception and selection, imparted by language and example, which operate for the most part below the level of consciousness but are available to conscious reflection by any individual lucky enough to learn how to recognise that possibility. If the subjective representations of NCC exist, this habitus can be at best only partial; something denied by Bourdieu whose theory of individual agency is founded in what he has referred to as 'the relation between two states of the social' – i.e. 'between history objectified in things, in the form of institutions, and history incarnate in the body, in the form of that system of durable dispositions I call habitus' (190). At the same time, much of Bourdieu's thinking about the habitus seems as though it could be consistent with the kind of predictable representations that might be produced by NCC. For example, there are the simple oppositions that structure much perception in Bourdieu's account. These range from the obvious phenomenological ones (dark/light; bright/dull; male/female; hard/soft, etc.) through to the more abstract, often analogical or metaphorical ones, such as those produced by teachers when assessing their students (bright/dull again; elegant/clumsy, etc.). It seems possible that NCC could provide the mechanism or realisation for the representation, storage, and reactivation of impressions constituting a social model--self. However, an entirely different possibility remains to be considered – which perhaps Bourdieu is also getting at – involving a radical rejection of both NCC and VCC. Any correlational or representational theory of the relationship between a self and his/her environment -- which, according to Charles Altieri, includes the anti--logocentrism of Derrida -- assumes that the primary focus for any consciousness is the mapping and remapping of this relationship rather than the actions and purposes of the agent in question. Referring to the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, Altieri argues: 'Conciousness is essentially not a way of relating to objects but of relating to actions we learn to perform . . . We do not usually think about objects, but about the specific form of activity which involves us with these objects at this time' (233). Clearly, there is not yet any certainty in the arguments provided by neuroscience that neural activity performs a representational role. Is it not, then, possible that this activity, rather than being a 'correlate' of entities, is an accompaniment to, a registration of, action that the rest of the body is performing? In this view, self is an enactment, an expression (including but not restricted to language), and what self--consciousness is conscious of is this activity of the self, not the self as entity. In a way that again returns us towards Bakhtin, Altieri writes: '>From an analytical perspective, it seems likely that our normal ways of acting in the world provide all the criteria we need for a sense of identity. As Sidney Shoemaker has shown, the most important source of the sense of our identity is the way we use the spatio--temporal location of our body to make physical distinctions between here and there, in front and behind, and so on' (234). Reasonably consistent with the Wittgensteinian view -- in its focus on self--activity -- is that contemporary theorisation of the self that compares in influence with that posed by neuroscience. This is the self avowedly constructed by networked computer technology, as described by Mark Poster: [W]hat has occurred in the advanced industrial societies with increasing rapidity . . . is the dissemination of technologies of symbolisation, or language machines, a process that may be described as the electronic textualisation of daily life, and the concomitant transformations of agency, transformations of the constitution of individuals as fixed identities (autonomous, self--regulating, independent) into subjects that are multiple, diffuse, fragmentary. The old (modern) agent worked with machines on natural materials to form commodities, lived near other workers and kin in urban communities, walked to work or traveled by public transport, and read newspapers but engaged as a communicator mostly in face--to--face relations. The new (postmodern) agent works mostly on symbols using computers, lives in isolation from other workers and kin, travels to work by car, and receives news and entertainment from television. . . . Individuals who have this experience do not stand outside the world of objects, observing, exercising rational faculties and maintaining a stable character. The individuals constituted by the new modes of information are immersed and dispersed in textualised practices where grounds are less important than moves. (44--45) Interestingly, Metzinger's theorisation of the model--self lends itself to the self--mutability -- though not the diffusion -- favoured by postmodernists like Poster. [I]t is . . . well conceivable that a system generates a number of different self--models which are functionally incompatible, and therefore modularised. They nevertheless could be internally coherent, each endowed with its own characteristic phenomenal content and behavioral profile. . . this does not have to be a pathological situation. Operating under different self--models in different situational contexts may be biologically as well as socially adaptive. Don't we all to some extent use multiple personalities to cope efficiently with different parts of our lives? (295--6) Poster's proposition is consistent with that of many in the humanities and social sciences today, influenced variously by postmodernism and social constructionism. What I believe remains at issue about his account is that it exchanges one form of externally constituted self ('fixed identity') for another (that produced by the 'modes of information'), and therefore remains locked in a logic of deterministic constitution. (There is a parallel here with Altieri's point about Derrida's inability to escape representation.) Furthermore, theorists like Poster may be too quickly generalising from the experience of adults in 'textualised environments'. Until such time as human beings are born directly into virtual reality environments, each will, for a formative period of time, experience the world in the way described by Bakhtin – through 'a unified perception of bodily and personal being . . . characterised . . . as a loving gift mutually exchanged between self and other across the borderzone of their two consciousnesses' (cited in Morris 6). I suggest it is very unlikely that this emergent sense of being can ever be completely erased even when people subsequently encounter each other in electronic networked environments. It is clearly not the role of a brief survey like this to attempt any resolution of these matters. Indeed, my review has made all the more apparent how far from being settled the question of consciousness, and by extension the question of selfhood, remains. Even the classical notion of the homunculus (the 'little inner man' or the 'ghost in the machine') has been put back into play with Francis Crick and Christof Koch's (2000) neurobiological conception of the 'unconscious homunculus'. The balance of contemporary evidence and argument suggests that the best thing to do right now is to keep the questions open against any form of reductionism – whether social or biological. One way to do this is to explore the notions of self and consciousness as implicated in ongoing processes of complex co--adaptation between biology and culture -- or their individual level equivalents, brain and mind (Taylor Ch. 7). References Altieri, C. "Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: a Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory." Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. Ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey. New York: Routledge, 2001. Bourdieu, P. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Crick, F. and Koch, C. "The Unconscious Homunculus." Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Ed. Thomas Metzinger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Deleuze, G. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Metzinger, T. "The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience: A Representationalist Analysis of the First-Person Perspective." Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Ed. Thomas Metzinger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Morris, P. (ed.). The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Mowitt, J. Text: The Genealogy of an Interdisciplinary Object. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. Poster, M. Cultural History and Modernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Shepherdson, C. Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 2000. Taylor, M. C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Wallace, Derek. "'Self' and the Problem of Consciousness" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Wallace.html &gt. Chicago Style Wallace, Derek, "'Self' and the Problem of Consciousness" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Wallace.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Wallace, Derek. (2002) 'Self' and the Problem of Consciousness. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Wallace.html &gt ([your date of access]).

The bodies of disordered women … offer themselves as an aggressively graphic text for the interpreter—a text that insists, actually demands, that it be read as a cultural statement, a statement about gender. (Bordo, 94)Violence is transgressive in fundamental ways. It erases boundaries, and imposes agency over others, or groups of others. The assumed social stance is to disapprove, morally and ethically, as a ‘good’ and ‘moral’ female subject. My current research has made me question the simplicity of this approach, to interrogate how aggression socialises power and how resistance to structural violence might look. I analyse three cultural practices to consider the social demarcations around aggression and gender, both within overt acts of violence and in less overt protocols. This research will focus on artistic practices as they offer unique embodied ways to “challenge our systems of representation and knowledge” (Szylak 2).The three creative works reviewed: the 2009 Swedish film the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the work Becoming an Image by Canadian non-binary/transgender artist Cassils, and Gambit Lines, by artist Carolyn Craig, each contest gendered modes of normativity within the space of the Cultural Screen (Silverman). The character of Lisbeth Salander in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo subverts the aggressor female/femme fatale trope in Western cinema by confusing and expanding visual repertoires around aggression, while artists Cassils and Carolyn Craig re-draw how their biologically assigned female bodies perform power in the Cultural Screen by activating bodily feedback loops for the viewer’s gaze.The Aggressor ModeThe discussion of these three works will centre on the ‘female aggressor trope’, understood here as the static coda of visual practices of female power/aggression in the western gaze. This article considers how subverting such representations of aggression can trigger an “epistemic crisis that allows gender categories to change,” in particular in the way protocols of power are performed over female and trans subjectivities (Butler, Athletic 105). The tran/non-binary subject state in the work of Cassils is included in this discussion of the female aggressor trope as their work directly subverts the biological habitus of the female body, that is, the artist’s birth/biologically assigned gender (Bourdieu). The transgender state they perform – where the body is still visibly female but refusing its constraints - offers a radical framework to consider new aggressive stances for non-biologically male bodies.The Cultural Screen and Visual RepresentationsI consider that aggression, when performed through the mediated position of a creative visual practice (as a fictional site of becoming) can deconstruct the textual citations that form normative tropes in the Cultural Screen. The Screen, for this article, is considered asthe site at which the gaze is defined for a particular society, and is consequently responsible both for the way in which the inhabitants of that society experience the gaze’s effects, and for much of the seeming particularity of that society’s visual regime. (Silverman 135)The Screen functions as a suite of agreed metaphors that constitute a plane of ‘reality’ that defines how we perform the self (Goffman). It comprises bodily performance, our internal gaze (of self and other) and the visual artefacts a culture produces. Each of the three works discussed here purposely intervenes with this site of gender production within the Cultural Screen, by creating new visual artefacts that expand permissible aggressive repertoires for female assigned bodies. Deconstructing the Cultural ScreenThe history of images … can be read as a cultural history of the human body. (Belting 17)Cinematic representations play a key role in producing the visual primers that generate social ‘acts’. For this reason I examine the Swedish film Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women, 2009), released as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for foreign audiences, as an example of an expanding range of female aggressor representations in film, and one of particular complexity in the way it expands on representational politics. I consider how specific scripting, dialogue and casting decisions in the lead female character of Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace) serve to deconstruct the female aggressor trope (as criminal or sexual provocateur) to allow her character to engage in aggressive acts outside of the cliché of the deviant woman. This disrupts the fixity of assigned body protocols on the social grid to expand their gendered habitus (Bourdieu).Key semiotic relations in the film’s characterisation of Lisbeth prevent her performance of aggression from moving into the clichés of erotic or evil feminine typologies. Her character remains unfixed, moving between a continuous state of unfolding in response to necessity and desire. Here, she exhibits an agency usually denoting masculinity. This allows her violence a positive emancipatory affect, one that avoids the fixity of the representational tropes of the deviant woman or the femme fatale. Her character draws upon both tropes, but reformulates them into a postmodern hybridity, where aggression slips from its sexualised/deviant fetish state into an athletic political resistance. Signification is strategically confused as Lisbeth struts through the scaffolding of normalcy in her insurgent gender game. Her post-punk weaponised attire draws on the repertoire of super heroes, rock stars and bondage mistresses, without committing to any. The libidinal component of violence/aggression is not avoided, but acknowledged, both in its patriarchal formula and Lisbeth’s enactment of revenge as embodied pleasure.The visual representation of both lead actors is also of interest. Both Lisbeth and Mikael have visible acne scars. This small breach in aesthetic selection affects how we view and consume them as subjects and objects on the Screen. The standard social more for the appearance of male and female leads is to use faces modeled on ideas of symmetry and perfection. These tendencies draw upon the cultural legacies of physiognomy that linked moral character with attractiveness schedules and that continue to flourish in the Cultural Screen (Lavater; Principe and Langlois). This decision to feature faces with minor flaws appropriates the camera’s gaze to re-consider schedules of normalcy, in particular value and image index as they relate to gendered representations. This aesthetic erasure of the Western tradition of stereotyped representations permits transitional spaces to emerge within the binary onslaught. Technology is also appropriated in the film as a space for a performative ‘switching’ of the gender codes of fixity. In her role as undercover researcher, Lisbeth’s control of code gives her both a monetised agency and an informational agency. The way that she types takes on an almost aggressive assertion. Each stroke is active and purposeful, as she exerts control through her interface with digital space. This is made explicit early in the film when she appropriates the gaze of technology (a particularly male semiotic code) to extract agency from within the structural discourse of patriarchy itself. In this scene, she forces her guardian to watch footage of his own act of raping her. Here Lisbeth uses the apparatus of the gaze to re-inscribe it back over his body. This structural inversion of the devices of control is made even more explicit when Lisbeth then brands him with text. Here ‘writing on the body’ becomes manifest.The director also frames initial scenes of Lisbeth’s nude body in subtle ways that fracture the entrenched history of representations of women, where the female as object exists for the gaze of male desire (Berger). Initially all we see are her shoulders. They are powerful and she moves like a boxer, inhabiting space and flexing her sinew. When we do see her breasts, they are neutered from the dominant coda of the “breasted experience” (Young). Instead, they function as a necessary appendage that she acknowledges as part of the technology of her body, not as objectified male desire.These varied representational modes built within Lisbeth’s characterisation, inhabit and subvert the female aggressor trope (as deviant), to offer a more nuanced portrayal where the feminine is still worn, but as both a masquerade and an internal emancipatory dialogue. That is, the feminine is permitted to remain whilst the masculine (as aggressive code) is intertwined into non-binary relations of embodied agency. This fluidity refracts the male gaze from imposing spectatorial control via the gaze.Cassils The Canadian non-binary/transgender artist Cassils also uses the body as semiotic technology to deny submission to the dominant code of the Cultural Screen. They re-image the self with bodybuilding, diet and steroids to exit their biologically female structural discourse into a more fluid gendered state. This state remains transitive as their body is not surgically ‘reassigned ‘ back into normative codes (male or female assignations) but instead inhabits the trans pronoun of ‘they/their’. This challenges the Cultural Screen’s dependence on fixed binary states through which to allocate privilege. This visible reshaping also permits entry into more aggressive bodily protocols via the gaze (through the spectorial viewpoint of self and other).Cassils ruptures the restrictive habitus of female/trans subjectivity to enable more expansive gestures in the social sphere, and a more assertive bodily performance. This is achieved by appropriating the citational apparatus of male aggression via a visual reframing of its actions. Through daily repetitive athletic training Cassils activates the proprioceptive loops that inform their gendered schema and the presentation of self (Goffman). This training re-scripts their socially inscribed gender code with semiotically switched gender ‘acts’. This altered subjectivity is made visible for the viewer through performance to destablise the Screen of representation further via the observers’ gaze.In their work Becoming an Image (2012- current), Cassils performs against a nine hundred kilogram lump of clay for twenty minutes in complete darkness, fractured only by an intermittent camera flash that documents the action. This performance contests the social processes that formulate the subject as ‘image’. By using bodily force (aggressive power) against an inert lump of clay, Cassils enacts the frustration and affect that the disenfranchised Other feels from their own gender shaping (Bhaba). The images taken by the camera during this performance reflect a ferocious refusal, an animal intent, a state of battle. The marks and residues of their bodily ‘acts’ shape the clay in an endurance archive of resistance, where the body’s trace/print forms the material itself along with the semiotic residue of the violence against transgender and female bodies. In some ways, the body of Cassils and the body of clay confront each other through Cassils’s aggressive remolding of the material of social discourse itself.The complicity of photography in sustaining representational discourse is highlighted within Cassils’s work through the intertextual rupturing of the performance with the camera flash and through the title of the work. To Become an Image invokes the processes of the darkroom itself, where the photographer controls image development, whilst the aggressive flash reflects the snapshot of violence, where the gendered subject is ‘imaged’ (formulated and confined) without permission by the observer schedules of patriarchy. The flash also leaves a residual trace in the retinas of the viewer, a kind of image burn, perhaps chosen to mimic the fear, intrusion and coercion that normalcy’s violence impinges over Othered subjects. The artist converts these flash generated images into wallpaper that is installed into the gallery space, usually the day after the performance. Thus, Cassils’s corporeal space is re-inscribed onto the walls of the institutional archive of representations – to evoke both the domestic (wallpaper as home décor), the public domain (the white walls of institutional rhetoric) and the Cultural Screen.Carolyn Craig The work of Carolyn Craig also targets representations that substantiate the Cultural Screen. She uses performative modes in the studio to unravel her own subjective habitus, in particular targeting the codes that align female aggression with deviancy. Her work isolates the action of making a fist to re-inscribe how the aggression code is ‘read’ as embodied knowledge by women. Two key articles by Thomas Schubert that investigated how making a fist is perceived differently between genders (in terms of interiorised power) informed her research. Both studies found that when males make a fist they experience an enhanced sense of power, while women did not. In fact, in the studies, they experienced a slight decrease in their sense of comfort in the world (their embodied sense of agency). Schubert surmised this reflected gender-based protocols in relation to the permissible display of aggression, as “men are culturally less discouraged to use bodily force, which will frequently be associated with success and power gain [whilst women] are culturally discouraged from using bodily force” (Schubert 758). These studies suggest how anchored gestures of aggression are to male power schemas and their almost inaccessibility to women. When artists re-formulate such (existing) input algorithms by inserting new representations of female aggression into the Cultural Screen, they sever the display of aggression from the exclusive domain of the masculine. This circulates and incorporates a broader visual code that informs conceptual relations of power.Craig performs the fisting action in the studio to neuter this existing code using endurance, repetition and parody (fig. 1). Parody activates a Bakhtian space of Carnivalesque, a unique space in the western cultural tradition that permits transgressive inversions of gender, power and normativity (Hutcheon). By making and remaking a fist through an absurdist lens, the social scaffolding attached to the action (fear, anxiety, transgression) is diluted. Repetition and humour breaks down the existing code, and integrates new perceptual schema through the body itself. Parody becomes a space of slippage, one that is a precursor to a process of (re)constitution within the social screen, so that Craig can “produce representation” rather than be (re)presentation (Schneider 51). This transitory state of Carnivalesque produces new relational fields (both bodily and visual) that are then projected back into the Screen of normativity to further dislodge gender fixity. Figure 1: Carolyn Craig, Gambit Lines (Angles of Incidence #1), 2016. Etchings from performance on folded aluminium, 25.5 x 34 x 21cm. This nullifies the power of the static image of deviancy (the woman as specimen) and ferments leakages into broader representational fields. Craig’s fisting actions target the proprioceptive feedback loops that make women fear their own bodies’ potential of violence, that make us retreat from the citational acts of aggression. Her work tilts embodied retreat (as fear) through the distorted mimesis of parody to initiate a Deleuzian space of agentic potential (Deleuze and Guattari). This is re-inserted into the Cultural Screen as suites of etchings grounded in the representational politics, and historical genealogy of printed matter, to bring the historical conditions of formation of knowledge into review.Conclusion The aggressor trope as used within the works discussed, produces a more varied representational subject. This fosters subjectivities outside the restraints of normativity and its imposed gendered habitus. The performance of aggression by bodies not permissibly branded to script such acts forces static representations embedded through the Cultural Screen into “an unstable and troubled terrain, a crisis of knowledge, a situation of not-knowing”. This state of representational confusion leads to a “risking of gender itself … that exposes our knowledge about gender as tenuous, contested, and ungrounded in a thorough and productively disturbing sense” (Butler, Athletic 110). Tropes that define binary privilege, when dislodged in such a way, become accessible to fluidity or erasure. This allows more nuanced gender allocation to schedules of power.The Cultural Screen produces and projects the metaphors we live by and its relations to power are concrete (Johnson and Lakoff). Even small-scale incursions into masculine domains of agency (such as the visual display of aggression) have a direct correlation to the allocation of resources, both spatial, economic and subjective. The use of the visual can re-train the conceptual parameters of the cultural matrix to chip small ways forward to occupy space with our bodies and intellects, to assume more aggressive stances in public, to speak over people if I feel the need, and to be rewarded for such actions in a social context. I still feel unable to propose direct violence as a useful action but I do admit to having a small poster of Phoolan Devi in my home and my admiration for such women is deep.ReferencesBelting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2011.Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 2008.Bhaba, Homi. "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism.” Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Cultures. Eds. Russell Ferguson and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990. 71-89.Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy et al. New York: Colombia UP, 1997. 90-110.Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.Butler, Judith. “Athletic Genders: Hyperbolic Instance and/or the Overcoming of Sexual Binarism.” Stanford Humanities Review 6 (1998): 103-111.———. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal (1988): 519–31.Cassils. Becoming an Image. ONE Archive, Los Angeles. Original performance. 2012.Craig, Carolyn. “Gambit Lines." The Deviant Woman. POP Gallery, Brisbane. 2016.Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987.Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [Män Som Hatar Kvinnor]. Dir. Niels Arden Oplev. Stockholm: Yellowbird, 2009.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Allen Lane, 1969.Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985.Johnson, Mark, and George Lakoff. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.Lavater, John Caspar. Essays in Physiognomy Designed to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind. Vol. 1. London: Murray and Highley, 1789.Principe, Connor, and Judith Langlois. "Shifting the Prototype: Experience with Faces Influences Affective and Attractiveness Preferences." Social Cognition 30.1 (2012): 109-120.Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997.Schubert, Thomas W., and Sander L. Koole. “The Embodied Self: Making a Fist Enhances Men’s Power-Related Self-Conceptions.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45.4 (2009): 828–834.Schubert, Thomas W. “The Power in Your Hand: Gender Differences in Bodily Feedback from Making a Fist.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30.6 (2004): 757–769.Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.Szylak, Aneta. The Field Is to the Sky, Only Backwards. Brooklyn, NY: International Studio and Curatorial Program, 2013.Young, Iris Marion. “Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling.” On Female Body Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

There is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points it connects up, certain relatively free or unbounded points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. (Deleuze, “Foucault” 37) Monty Cantsin: Why do we use a pervert software robot to exploit our collective consensual mind? Letitia: Because we want the thief to be a digital entity. Monty Cantsin: But isn’t this really blasphemic? Letitia: Yes, but god – in our case a meta-cocktail of authorship and copyright – can not be trusted anymore. (Amazon Noir, “Dialogue”) In 2006, some 3,000 digital copies of books were silently “stolen” from online retailer Amazon.com by targeting vulnerabilities in the “Search inside the Book” feature from the company’s website. Over several weeks, between July and October, a specially designed software program bombarded the Search Inside!™ interface with multiple requests, assembling full versions of texts and distributing them across peer-to-peer networks (P2P). Rather than a purely malicious and anonymous hack, however, the “heist” was publicised as a tactical media performance, Amazon Noir, produced by self-proclaimed super-villains Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, and Ubermorgen.com. While controversially directed at highlighting the infrastructures that materially enforce property rights and access to knowledge online, the exploit additionally interrogated its own interventionist status as theoretically and politically ambiguous. That the “thief” was represented as a digital entity or machinic process (operating on the very terrain where exchange is differentiated) and the emergent act of “piracy” was fictionalised through the genre of noir conveys something of the indeterminacy or immensurability of the event. In this short article, I discuss some political aspects of intellectual property in relation to the complexities of Amazon Noir, particularly in the context of control, technological action, and discourses of freedom. Software, Piracy As a force of distribution, the Internet is continually subject to controversies concerning flows and permutations of agency. While often directed by discourses cast in terms of either radical autonomy or control, the technical constitution of these digital systems is more regularly a case of establishing structures of operation, codified rules, or conditions of possibility; that is, of guiding social processes and relations (McKenzie, “Cutting Code” 1-19). Software, as a medium through which such communication unfolds and becomes organised, is difficult to conceptualise as a result of being so event-orientated. There lies a complicated logic of contingency and calculation at its centre, a dimension exacerbated by the global scale of informational networks, where the inability to comprehend an environment that exceeds the limits of individual experience is frequently expressed through desires, anxieties, paranoia. Unsurprisingly, cautionary accounts and moral panics on identity theft, email fraud, pornography, surveillance, hackers, and computer viruses are as commonplace as those narratives advocating user interactivity. When analysing digital systems, cultural theory often struggles to describe forces that dictate movement and relations between disparate entities composed by code, an aspect heightened by the intensive movement of informational networks where differences are worked out through the constant exposure to unpredictability and chance (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning”). Such volatility partially explains the recent turn to distribution in media theory, as once durable networks for constructing economic difference – organising information in space and time (“at a distance”), accelerating or delaying its delivery – appear contingent, unstable, or consistently irregular (Cubitt 194). Attributing actions to users, programmers, or the software itself is a difficult task when faced with these states of co-emergence, especially in the context of sharing knowledge and distributing media content. Exchanges between corporate entities, mainstream media, popular cultural producers, and legal institutions over P2P networks represent an ongoing controversy in this respect, with numerous stakeholders competing between investments in property, innovation, piracy, and publics. Beginning to understand this problematic landscape is an urgent task, especially in relation to the technological dynamics that organised and propel such antagonisms. In the influential fragment, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze describes the historical passage from modern forms of organised enclosure (the prison, clinic, factory) to the contemporary arrangement of relational apparatuses and open systems as being materially provoked by – but not limited to – the mass deployment of networked digital technologies. In his analysis, the disciplinary mode most famously described by Foucault is spatially extended to informational systems based on code and flexibility. According to Deleuze, these cybernetic machines are connected into apparatuses that aim for intrusive monitoring: “in a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long” (“Control and Becoming” 175). Such a constant networking of behaviour is described as a shift from “molds” to “modulation,” where controls become “a self-transmuting molding changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (“Postscript” 179). Accordingly, the crisis underpinning civil institutions is consistent with the generalisation of disciplinary logics across social space, forming an intensive modulation of everyday life, but one ambiguously associated with socio-technical ensembles. The precise dynamics of this epistemic shift are significant in terms of political agency: while control implies an arrangement capable of absorbing massive contingency, a series of complex instabilities actually mark its operation. Noise, viral contamination, and piracy are identified as key points of discontinuity; they appear as divisions or “errors” that force change by promoting indeterminacies in a system that would otherwise appear infinitely calculable, programmable, and predictable. The rendering of piracy as a tactic of resistance, a technique capable of levelling out the uneven economic field of global capitalism, has become a predictable catch-cry for political activists. In their analysis of multitude, for instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe the contradictions of post-Fordist production as conjuring forth a tendency for labour to “become common.” That is, as productivity depends on flexibility, communication, and cognitive skills, directed by the cultivation of an ideal entrepreneurial or flexible subject, the greater the possibilities for self-organised forms of living that significantly challenge its operation. In this case, intellectual property exemplifies such a spiralling paradoxical logic, since “the infinite reproducibility central to these immaterial forms of property directly undermines any such construction of scarcity” (Hardt and Negri 180). The implications of the filesharing program Napster, accordingly, are read as not merely directed toward theft, but in relation to the private character of the property itself; a kind of social piracy is perpetuated that is viewed as radically recomposing social resources and relations. Ravi Sundaram, a co-founder of the Sarai new media initiative in Delhi, has meanwhile drawn attention to the existence of “pirate modernities” capable of being actualised when individuals or local groups gain illegitimate access to distributive media technologies; these are worlds of “innovation and non-legality,” of electronic survival strategies that partake in cultures of dispersal and escape simple classification (94). Meanwhile, pirate entrepreneurs Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleische – associated with the notorious Piratbyrn – have promoted the bleeding away of Hollywood profits through fully deployed P2P networks, with the intention of pushing filesharing dynamics to an extreme in order to radicalise the potential for social change (“Copies and Context”). From an aesthetic perspective, such activist theories are complemented by the affective register of appropriation art, a movement broadly conceived in terms of antagonistically liberating knowledge from the confines of intellectual property: “those who pirate and hijack owned material, attempting to free information, art, film, and music – the rhetoric of our cultural life – from what they see as the prison of private ownership” (Harold 114). These “unruly” escape attempts are pursued through various modes of engagement, from experimental performances with legislative infrastructures (i.e. Kembrew McLeod’s patenting of the phrase “freedom of expression”) to musical remix projects, such as the work of Negativland, John Oswald, RTMark, Detritus, Illegal Art, and the Evolution Control Committee. Amazon Noir, while similarly engaging with questions of ownership, is distinguished by specifically targeting information communication systems and finding “niches” or gaps between overlapping networks of control and economic governance. Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com (meaning ‘Day after Tomorrow,’ or ‘Super-Tomorrow’) actually describe their work as “research-based”: “we not are opportunistic, money-driven or success-driven, our central motivation is to gain as much information as possible as fast as possible as chaotic as possible and to redistribute this information via digital channels” (“Interview with Ubermorgen”). This has led to experiments like Google Will Eat Itself (2005) and the construction of the automated software thief against Amazon.com, as process-based explorations of technological action. Agency, Distribution Deleuze’s “postscript” on control has proven massively influential for new media art by introducing a series of key questions on power (or desire) and digital networks. As a social diagram, however, control should be understood as a partial rather than totalising map of relations, referring to the augmentation of disciplinary power in specific technological settings. While control is a conceptual regime that refers to open-ended terrains beyond the architectural locales of enclosure, implying a move toward informational networks, data solicitation, and cybernetic feedback, there remains a peculiar contingent dimension to its limits. For example, software code is typically designed to remain cycling until user input is provided. There is a specifically immanent and localised quality to its actions that might be taken as exemplary of control as a continuously modulating affective materialism. The outcome is a heightened sense of bounded emergencies that are either flattened out or absorbed through reconstitution; however, these are never linear gestures of containment. As Tiziana Terranova observes, control operates through multilayered mechanisms of order and organisation: “messy local assemblages and compositions, subjective and machinic, characterised by different types of psychic investments, that cannot be the subject of normative, pre-made political judgments, but which need to be thought anew again and again, each time, in specific dynamic compositions” (“Of Sense and Sensibility” 34). This event-orientated vitality accounts for the political ambitions of tactical media as opening out communication channels through selective “transversal” targeting. Amazon Noir, for that reason, is pitched specifically against the material processes of communication. The system used to harvest the content from “Search inside the Book” is described as “robot-perversion-technology,” based on a network of four servers around the globe, each with a specific function: one located in the United States that retrieved (or “sucked”) the books from the site, one in Russia that injected the assembled documents onto P2P networks and two in Europe that coordinated the action via intelligent automated programs (see “The Diagram”). According to the “villains,” the main goal was to steal all 150,000 books from Search Inside!™ then use the same technology to steal books from the “Google Print Service” (the exploit was limited only by the amount of technological resources financially available, but there are apparent plans to improve the technique by reinvesting the money received through the settlement with Amazon.com not to publicise the hack). In terms of informational culture, this system resembles a machinic process directed at redistributing copyright content; “The Diagram” visualises key processes that define digital piracy as an emergent phenomenon within an open-ended and responsive milieu. That is, the static image foregrounds something of the activity of copying being a technological action that complicates any analysis focusing purely on copyright as content. In this respect, intellectual property rights are revealed as being entangled within information architectures as communication management and cultural recombination – dissipated and enforced by a measured interplay between openness and obstruction, resonance and emergence (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning” 52). To understand data distribution requires an acknowledgement of these underlying nonhuman relations that allow for such informational exchanges. It requires an understanding of the permutations of agency carried along by digital entities. According to Lawrence Lessig’s influential argument, code is not merely an object of governance, but has an overt legislative function itself. Within the informational environments of software, “a law is defined, not through a statue, but through the code that governs the space” (20). These points of symmetry are understood as concretised social values: they are material standards that regulate flow. Similarly, Alexander Galloway describes computer protocols as non-institutional “etiquette for autonomous agents,” or “conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system” (7). In his analysis, these agreed-upon standardised actions operate as a style of management fostered by contradiction: progressive though reactionary, encouraging diversity by striving for the universal, synonymous with possibility but completely predetermined, and so on (243-244). Needless to say, political uncertainties arise from a paradigm that generates internal material obscurities through a constant twinning of freedom and control. For Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, these Cold War systems subvert the possibilities for any actual experience of autonomy by generalising paranoia through constant intrusion and reducing social problems to questions of technological optimisation (1-30). In confrontation with these seemingly ubiquitous regulatory structures, cultural theory requires a critical vocabulary differentiated from computer engineering to account for the sociality that permeates through and concatenates technological realities. In his recent work on “mundane” devices, software and code, Adrian McKenzie introduces a relevant analytic approach in the concept of technological action as something that both abstracts and concretises relations in a diffusion of collective-individual forces. Drawing on the thought of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, he uses the term “transduction” to identify a key characteristic of technology in the relational process of becoming, or ontogenesis. This is described as bringing together disparate things into composites of relations that evolve and propagate a structure throughout a domain, or “overflow existing modalities of perception and movement on many scales” (“Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action” 201). Most importantly, these innovative diffusions or contagions occur by bridging states of difference or incompatibilities. Technological action, therefore, arises from a particular type of disjunctive relation between an entity and something external to itself: “in making this relation, technical action changes not only the ensemble, but also the form of life of its agent. Abstraction comes into being and begins to subsume or reconfigure existing relations between the inside and outside” (203). Here, reciprocal interactions between two states or dimensions actualise disparate potentials through metastability: an equilibrium that proliferates, unfolds, and drives individuation. While drawing on cybernetics and dealing with specific technological platforms, McKenzie’s work can be extended to describe the significance of informational devices throughout control societies as a whole, particularly as a predictive and future-orientated force that thrives on staged conflicts. Moreover, being a non-deterministic technical theory, it additionally speaks to new tendencies in regimes of production that harness cognition and cooperation through specially designed infrastructures to enact persistent innovation without any end-point, final goal or natural target (Thrift 283-295). Here, the interface between intellectual property and reproduction can be seen as a site of variation that weaves together disparate objects and entities by imbrication in social life itself. These are specific acts of interference that propel relations toward unforeseen conclusions by drawing on memories, attention spans, material-technical traits, and so on. The focus lies on performance, context, and design “as a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration” (Thrift 295). This later point is demonstrated in recent scholarly treatments of filesharing networks as media ecologies. Kate Crawford, for instance, describes the movement of P2P as processual or adaptive, comparable to technological action, marked by key transitions from partially decentralised architectures such as Napster, to the fully distributed systems of Gnutella and seeded swarm-based networks like BitTorrent (30-39). Each of these technologies can be understood as a response to various legal incursions, producing radically dissimilar socio-technological dynamics and emergent trends for how agency is modulated by informational exchanges. Indeed, even these aberrant formations are characterised by modes of commodification that continually spillover and feedback on themselves, repositioning markets and commodities in doing so, from MP3s to iPods, P2P to broadband subscription rates. However, one key limitation of this ontological approach is apparent when dealing with the sheer scale of activity involved, where mass participation elicits certain degrees of obscurity and relative safety in numbers. This represents an obvious problem for analysis, as dynamics can easily be identified in the broadest conceptual sense, without any understanding of the specific contexts of usage, political impacts, and economic effects for participants in their everyday consumptive habits. Large-scale distributed ensembles are “problematic” in their technological constitution, as a result. They are sites of expansive overflow that provoke an equivalent individuation of thought, as the Recording Industry Association of America observes on their educational website: “because of the nature of the theft, the damage is not always easy to calculate but not hard to envision” (“Piracy”). The politics of the filesharing debate, in this sense, depends on the command of imaginaries; that is, being able to conceptualise an overarching structural consistency to a persistent and adaptive ecology. As a mode of tactical intervention, Amazon Noir dramatises these ambiguities by framing technological action through the fictional sensibilities of narrative genre. Ambiguity, Control The extensive use of imagery and iconography from “noir” can be understood as an explicit reference to the increasing criminalisation of copyright violation through digital technologies. However, the term also refers to the indistinct or uncertain effects produced by this tactical intervention: who are the “bad guys” or the “good guys”? Are positions like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (something like freedom or tyranny) so easily identified and distinguished? As Paolo Cirio explains, this political disposition is deliberately kept obscure in the project: “it’s a representation of the actual ambiguity about copyright issues, where every case seems to lack a moral or ethical basis” (“Amazon Noir Interview”). While user communications made available on the site clearly identify culprits (describing the project as jeopardising arts funding, as both irresponsible and arrogant), the self-description of the artists as political “failures” highlights the uncertainty regarding the project’s qualities as a force of long-term social renewal: Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com had daily shootouts with the global mass-media, Cirio continuously pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Ludovico and Bernhard resisted kickback-bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. (“Press Release”) Here, the adaptive and flexible qualities of informatic commodities and computational systems of distribution are knowingly posited as critical limits; in a certain sense, the project fails technologically in order to succeed conceptually. From a cynical perspective, this might be interpreted as guaranteeing authenticity by insisting on the useless or non-instrumental quality of art. However, through this process, Amazon Noir illustrates how forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation. Just as hackers are legitimately employed to challenge the durability of network exchanges, malfunctions are relied upon as potential sources of future information. Indeed, the notion of demonstrating ‘autonomy’ by illustrating the shortcomings of software is entirely consistent with the logic of control as a modulating organisational diagram. These so-called “circuit breakers” are positioned as points of bifurcation that open up new systems and encompass a more general “abstract machine” or tendency governing contemporary capitalism (Parikka 300). As a consequence, the ambiguities of Amazon Noir emerge not just from the contrary articulation of intellectual property and digital technology, but additionally through the concept of thinking “resistance” simultaneously with regimes of control. This tension is apparent in Galloway’s analysis of the cybernetic machines that are synonymous with the operation of Deleuzian control societies – i.e. “computerised information management” – where tactical media are posited as potential modes of contestation against the tyranny of code, “able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people’s real desires” (176). While pushing a system into a state of hypertrophy to reform digital architectures might represent a possible technique that produces a space through which to imagine something like “our” freedom, it still leaves unexamined the desire for reformation itself as nurtured by and produced through the coupling of cybernetics, information theory, and distributed networking. This draws into focus the significance of McKenzie’s Simondon-inspired cybernetic perspective on socio-technological ensembles as being always-already predetermined by and driven through asymmetries or difference. As Chun observes, consequently, there is no paradox between resistance and capture since “control and freedom are not opposites, but different sides of the same coin: just as discipline served as a grid on which liberty was established, control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness” (71). Why “openness” should be so readily equated with a state of being free represents a major unexamined presumption of digital culture, and leads to the associated predicament of attempting to think of how this freedom has become something one cannot not desire. If Amazon Noir has political currency in this context, however, it emerges from a capacity to recognise how informational networks channel desire, memories, and imaginative visions rather than just cultivated antagonisms and counterintuitive economics. As a final point, it is worth observing that the project was initiated without publicity until the settlement with Amazon.com. There is, as a consequence, nothing to suggest that this subversive “event” might have actually occurred, a feeling heightened by the abstractions of software entities. To the extent that we believe in “the big book heist,” that such an act is even possible, is a gauge through which the paranoia of control societies is illuminated as a longing or desire for autonomy. As Hakim Bey observes in his conceptualisation of “pirate utopias,” such fleeting encounters with the imaginaries of freedom flow back into the experience of the everyday as political instantiations of utopian hope. Amazon Noir, with all its underlying ethical ambiguities, presents us with a challenge to rethink these affective investments by considering our profound weaknesses to master the complexities and constant intrusions of control. It provides an opportunity to conceive of a future that begins with limits and limitations as immanently central, even foundational, to our deep interconnection with socio-technological ensembles. References “Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime.” http://www.amazon-noir.com/>. Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia, 1991. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Crawford, Kate. “Adaptation: Tracking the Ecologies of Music and Peer-to-Peer Networks.” Media International Australia 114 (2005): 30-39. Cubitt, Sean. “Distribution and Media Flows.” Cultural Politics 1.2 (2005): 193-214. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. ———. “Control and Becoming.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 169-176. ———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 177-182. Eriksson, Magnus, and Rasmus Fleische. “Copies and Context in the Age of Cultural Abundance.” Online posting. 5 June 2007. Nettime 25 Aug 2007. Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Harold, Christine. OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. McKenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. ———. “The Strange Meshing of Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action.” Culture, Theory and Critique 47.2 (2006): 197-212. Parikka, Jussi. “Contagion and Repetition: On the Viral Logic of Network Culture.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 7.2 (2007): 287-308. “Piracy Online.” Recording Industry Association of America. 28 Aug 2007. http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php>. Sundaram, Ravi. “Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India.” Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain. Delhi, Sarai Media Lab, 2001. 93-99. http://www.sarai.net>. Terranova, Tiziana. “Communication beyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics of Information.” Social Text 22.3 (2004): 51-73. ———. “Of Sense and Sensibility: Immaterial Labour in Open Systems.” DATA Browser 03 – Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. Ed. Joasia Krysa. New York: Autonomedia, 2006. 27-38. Thrift, Nigel. “Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification.” Economy and Society 35.2 (2006): 279-306. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dieter, Michael. "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>. APA Style Dieter, M. (Oct. 2007) "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>.

In foregrounding the performative character of hate speech, legal scholars and activists have sought to demonstrate why hate speech should be prohibited not only on the basis of what it says but on the basis of what it does. In this article I examine the conditions upon which hate speech has been posited as performative speech in order to consider how virtual environments trouble existing understandings of hate speech. In particular, this article seeks to show how cyberspace may in fact create the conditions for a more immediate and radical recontextualisation and recirculation of hate speech where speed operates as a potential source of resistance. In foregrounding the performative character of hate speech, legal scholars and activists have sought to demonstrate why hate speech should be prohibited not only on the basis of what it says but on the basis of what it does. In this article I examine the conditions upon which hate speech has been posited as performative speech in order to consider how virtual environments trouble existing understandings of hate speech. In particular, this article seeks to show how cyberspace may in fact create the conditions for a more immediate and radical recontextualisation and recirculation of hate speech where speed operates as a potential source of resistance. Judith Butler maintains that "speech is always in some ways out of our control" (15). This is not to suggest that our speech is bound to misfire. Instead, Butler's claim draws attention to the range of possibilities located precisely within the failed speech act, revealing how such misfires offer the possibility that certain words which carry the potential to injure may eventually become "disjointed from their power to injure and recontextualised in more affirmative modes" (15). Whereas Langston suggests that such speech events inevitably work to silence intended victims, Butler recognises how the subject may also be inaugurated through such linguistic injuries. She maintains that to be injured through language is to "suffer a loss of context, that is, not to know where you are" (4). The "loss of context" or disorientation she claims might result from hate speech not only suggests that hate speech is context-specific but also that hate speech, understood as a performance, might transform or even produce a speaker's social location. In this view, the very words used to "put someone in their place" may also enable people to speak up from their position on the margins of power. Thus, the repetition of hate speech does not necessarily reinforce certain words' power to injure but may result in a pattern of "slippages" which enables the meaning and force of such speech to eventually come undone. In order to understand the impact of hate speech in virtual environments, it is useful to consider how the spatial and temporal character of cyberspace affects the repetitions to which Butler refers. While we typically speak of cyber-space, the emergence of cyberspace has arguably resulted in an increased preoccupation with time. For Virilio, the shift from space to time appears to be most visible in cyberspace, which he maintains does not represent a space so much as a particular temporal dimension where speed, not territory, holds the most strategic value. However, he further maintains that we have also reached a moment when humans, who have already surpassed the sound and heat barriers, are left with nothing to race against but speed of light -- something which can never be surpassed. And, as he warns, like other technological revolutions, this one is bound to result in an accident, this time not a physical one but instead one which will throw history itself into a disarray. "Cyberspace looms up like a transfer accident in substantial reality", he warns, "what gets damaged is no longer the substance, the materiality of the tangible world, it is the whole of its constitution" (Open Sky 131). Thus, cyberspace not only appears to give rise to an accelerated sort of time but to create the conditions under which we run the risk of suffering a "fundamental loss of orientation" (Speed and Information). I would like to consider how the speed and subsequent loss of orientation Virilio associates with virtual environments may in fact be the very condition which opens up the possibility for a more immediate and radical recontextualisation of hate speech in such spaces. In positing cyberspace as a radically discontinuous space, Virilio implies that cyberspace may represent a break with history itself. One need only consider how quickly existing forms of inequity have become entrenched in cyberspace to understand the extent to which it is not an entirely new or autonomous space. It follows then that the pattern of perlocutionary effects which apparently enables certain words to injure is not disrupted simply because such words are circulating in a virtual space. However, this is not to suggest that subordinate speech necessarily acts identically on line and off. If to be injured through language is to "suffer a loss of context, that is, not to know where you are" (Butler 4), what might it mean to suffer a loss of context in cyberspace? What might it mean to become disoriented in a space where one's context is always and already destabilised? And, what sorts of possibilities are created in cyberspace when one is thrust into an ill-fitting or undesirable social location? I maintain that in cyberspace the potential to suffer a loss of context as a result of a linguistic injury is always partially foreclosed by the fact that one never knows precisely where one is to begin with. It follows that in cyberspace the intended victim of a verbal assault is also at least less likely to become disarmed, debilitated, and silenced. Without overemphasising the agency one gains in virtual environments, is it not possible that one's ability to "talk back", while not guaranteed, may be made significantly more likely, if only due to the fact that one's rhetorical skills are unlikely to be rendered worthless in the face of physical threats? To illustrate the extent to which the illocutionary force of hate speech may be undermined by the spatial and temporal character of virtual environments, I draw attention to Reverend Phelps's "godhatesfags.com" site. Once you move past the yellow construction sign reading "Warning -- Gospel Preaching Ahead", you discover a list of Bible Passages which apparently confirm the site's claim that "god hates fags". The site also contains a list of so-called "fag churches" and a variety of news items that draw attention to the supposed dangers of the growing global gay agenda. However, while the Website is clearly offensive, it also seems to produce the possibility for politically promising misinterpretations. The Website's editorials on subjects as diverse as Canada's "gay Mafia" and Finland's allegedly lesbian Prime Minister and news about Phelps's intention to carry out "missionary work" in both of these demonic nations seems more likely to amuse than offend many of the site's visitors. The site's tendency to misinterpellate everyone from lesbians to P-FLAG mothers as "fags" may be read as another amusing misfire, another failed attempt on the part of Phelps to demonise gays, lesbians, and their supporters. While Phelps's claims are bound to misfire in any context, the ability to find Phelps's claims immediately humourous appears to be at least partially linked to their context. People who seek to prohibit hate speech not only on the basis of what it says but also on the basis of what it does typically maintain that the effects of hate speech are immediate, final, and ultimately, debilitating (Langston; MacKinnon; Matsuda et al.). In cyberspace, such claims appear to be even less easily established than in the material world. As previously argued, the speed associated with virtual environments seems to produce a disorienting effect, making the potential to suffer a "loss of context" in the face of a linguistic "attack" at least less likely. In addition, in contrast to the material world, where an encounter with hate speech is likely to lead to a feeling of entrapment if not complete debilitation, cyberspace invests people with an unprecedented degree of mobility. As a result, in sharp contrast to the experience one might have encountering Phelps's message in a public space near their home, the person who encounters Phelps's message online, where neither proximity nor distance hold their traditional values, can escape both quickly and with little effort. However, it is also important to consider the extent to which the speed associated with virtual spaces may also affect the pace at which potentially injurious words, images, and ideas are recirculated and recontextualised. Building on Butler, I have emphasised that hate speech is always repeatable speech. If we take for granted the fact that cyberspace not only increases the amount of speech generated but also the rate at which such speech is recontextualised and redeployed, it would appear as if the potential exists both for the amount of hate speech in circulation to increase and for such speech to be repeated more often and more rapidly. If we further accept the claim that the repetition of hate speech is always an imperfect one, bound to result in some loss of meaning or minor transgression, it becomes possible to see how this highly indeterminable context may also enable hate speech to be reclaimed more quickly. Once again, "godhatesfags.com" serves as a useful example. Shortly after Phelps's Website appeared, online monitoring organisations, including Hate Watch, established direct links to the site. The link between Hate Watch and "godhatesfags.com" not only serves to place Phelps's online activities under surveillance but also to recontextualise the site. Viewed through their link, Phelps's site is quite literally framed by the Hate Watch site, and subsequently, recontextualised by their anti-hate discourse in a surprisingly direct manner. In addition, various features of Phelps's site have also been parodied and appropriated. "Godhatesfigs.com", which among other features includes a list of bible passages which allegedly confirm the Website's claim that "god hates figs", is one such example. The creators of "Godlovesfags.com" gained notoriety when they managed to steal Phelps's domain name and redirect all "godhatesfags" visitors to their counter site for seventy-two hours. "Godhatesphelps" is another site that seeks to parody and repeat aspects of Phelps's message in an effort to reveal the absurd nature of Phelps's claims. Shortly after Phelps's Website appeared, online monitoring organisations, including Hate Watch, established direct links to the site. The link between Hate Watch and "godhatesfags.com" not only serves to place Phelps's online activities under surveillance but also to recontextualise the site. Viewed through their link, Phelps's site is quite literally framed by the Hate Watch site, and subsequently, recontextualised by their anti-hate discourse in a surprisingly direct manner. In addition, various features of Phelps's site have also been parodied and appropriated. "Godhatesfigs.com", which among other features includes a list of bible passages which allegedly confirm the Website's claim that "god hates figs", is one such example. The creators of "Godlovesfags.com" gained notoriety when they managed to steal Phelps's domain name and redirect all "godhatesfags" visitors to their counter site for seventy-two hours. "Godhatesphelps" is another site that seeks to parody and repeat aspects of Phelps's message in an effort to reveal the absurd nature of Phelps's claims. References Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. 15th ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. (Original work published in 1962.) Butler, Judith. Excited Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Langston, Rae. Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts. Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993): 293-330. Matsuda, M.J., et al. Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. San Francisco: Westview Press, 1993. MacKinnon, C. Only Words. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Virilio, Paul. "Global Algorithm 1.7: The Silence of the Lambs: Paul Virilio in Conversation (with C.Oliveira)." CTHEORY 1995. 18 June 1999 <http://www.ctheory.com/ga1.7-silence.php>. Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Trans. J. Rose. New York: Verso, 1997. Virilio, Paul. "Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!" CTHEORY 18.3 (1995). 18 June 1999 <http://www.dds.nl/~n5m/texts/virilio.htm>. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromololgy. Trans. M. Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Kate Eichhorn. "Cyberhate and Performative Speech in Accelerated Time(s)." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/cyberhate.php>. Chicago style: Kate Eichhorn, "Cyberhate and Performative Speech in Accelerated Time(s)," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/cyberhate.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Kate Eichhorn. (2000) Cyberhate and performative speech in accelerated time(s). M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/cyberhate.php> ([your date of access]).

For the past twenty years, academics and other social commentators have, by and large, shared the view that the phase of modernity through which we are currently passing is defined by two interrelated catalysts of change: the physical movement of people and the virtual movement of information around the globe. As we enter the second decade of the new millennium, it is certainly a timely moment to reflect upon the ways in which the prognoses of the scholars and scientists writing in the late twentieth century have come to pass, especially since—during the time this special issue has been in press—the revolutions that are gathering pace in the Arab world appear to be realising the theoretical prediction that the ever-increasing “flows” of people and information would ultimately bring about the end of the nation-state and herald an era of transnationalism (Appadurai, Urry). For writers like Arjun Appadurai, moreover, the concept of diaspora was key to grasping how this new world order would take shape, and how it would operate: Diasporic public spheres, diverse amongst themselves, are the crucibles of a postnational political order. The engines of their discourse are mass media (both interactive and expressive) and the movement of refugees, activists, students, laborers. It may be that the emergent postnational order proves not to be a system of homogeneous units (as with the current system of nation-states) but a system based on relations between heterogeneous units (some social movements, some interest groups, some professional bodies, some non-governmental organizations, some armed constabularies, some judicial bodies) ... In the short run, as we can see already, it is likely to be a world of increased incivility and violence. In the longer run, free from the constraints of the nation form, we may find that cultural freedom and sustainable justice in the world do not presuppose the uniform and general existence of the nation-state. This unsettling possibility could be the most exciting dividend of living in modernity at large. (23) In this editorial, we would like to return to the “here and now” of the late 1990s in which theorists like Arjun Appaduri, Ulrich Beck, John Urry, Zygmunt Bauman, Robert Robertson and others were “imagining” the consequences of both globalisation and glocalisation for the twenty-first century in order that we may better assess what is, indeed, coming to pass. While most of their prognoses for this “second modernity” have proven remarkably accurate, it is their—self-confessed—inability to forecast either the nature or the extent of the digital revolution that most vividly captures the distance between the mid-1990s and now; and it is precisely the consequences of this extraordinary technological revolution on the twin concepts of “glocality” and “diaspora” that the research featured in this special issue seeks to capture. Glocal Imaginaries Appadurai’s endeavours to show how globalisation was rapidly making itself felt as a “structure of feeling” (Williams in Appadurai 189) as well as a material “fact” was also implicit in our conceptualisation of the conference, “Glocal Imaginaries: Writing/Migration/Place,” which gave rise to this special issue. This conference, which was the culmination of the AHRC-funded project “Moving Manchester: Literature/Migration/Place (2006-10)”, constituted a unique opportunity to gain an international, cross-disciplinary perspective on urgent and topical debates concerning mobility and migration in the early twenty-first century and the strand “Networked Diasporas” was one of the best represented on the program. Attracting papers on broadcast media as well as the new digital technologies, the strand was strikingly international in terms of the speakers’ countries of origin, as is this special issue which brings together research from six European countries, Australia and the Indian subcontinent. The “case-studies” represented in these articles may therefore be seen to constitute something of a “state-of-the-art” snapshot of how Appadurai’s “glocal imaginary” is being lived out across the globe in the early years of the twenty-first century. In this respect, the collection proves that his hunch with regards to the signal importance of the “mass-media” in redefining our spatial and temporal coordinates of being and belonging was correct: The third and final factor to be addressed here is the role of the mass-media, especially in its electronic forms, in creating new sorts of disjuncture between spatial and virtual neighborhoods. This disjuncture has both utopian and dystopian potentials, and there is no easy way to tell how these may play themselves out in the future of the production of locality. (194) The articles collected here certainly do serve as testament to the “bewildering plethora of changes in ... media environments” (195) that Appadurai envisaged, and yet it can clearly also be argued that this agent of glocalisation has not yet brought about the demise of the nation-state in the way (or at the speed) that many commentators predicted. Digital Diasporas in a Transnational World Reviewing the work of the leading social science theorists working in the field during the late 1990s, it quickly becomes evident that: (a) the belief that globalisation presented a threat to the nation-state was widely held; and (b) that the “jury” was undecided as to whether this would prove a good or bad thing in the years to come. While the commentators concerned did their best to complexify both their analysis of the present and their view of the future, it is interesting to observe, in retrospect, how the rhetoric of both utopia and dystopia invaded their discourse in almost equal measure. We have already seen how Appadurai, in his 1996 publication, Modernity at Large, looks beyond the “increased incivility and violence” of the “short term” to a world “free from the constraints of the nation form,” while Roger Bromley, following Agamben and Deleuze as well as Appadurai, typifies a generation of literary and cultural critics who have paid tribute to the way in which the arts (and, in particular, storytelling) have enabled subjects to break free from their national (af)filiations (Pearce, Devolving 17) and discover new “de-territorialised” (Deleuze and Guattari) modes of being and belonging. Alongside this “hope,” however, the forces and agents of globalisation were also regarded with a good deal of suspicion and fear, as is evidenced in Ulrich Beck’s What is Globalization? In his overview of the theorists who were then perceived to be leading the debate, Beck draws distinctions between what was perceived to be the “engine” of globalisation (31), but is clearly most exercised by the manner in which the transformation has taken shape: Without a revolution, without even any change in laws or constitutions, an attack has been launched “in the normal course of business”, as it were, upon the material lifelines of modern national societies. First, the transnational corporations are to export jobs to parts of the world where labour costs and workplace obligations are lowest. Second, the computer-generation of worldwide proximity enables them to break down and disperse goods and services, and produce them through a division of labour in different parts of the world, so that national and corporate labels inevitably become illusory. (3; italics in the original) Beck’s concern is clearly that all these changes have taken place without the nation-states of the world being directly involved in any way: transnational corporations began to take advantage of the new “mobility” available to them without having to secure the agreement of any government (“Companies can produce in one country, pay taxes in another and demand state infrastructural spending in yet another”; 4-5); the export of the labour market through the use of digital communications (stereotypically, call centres in India) was similarly unregulated; and the world economy, as a consequence, was in the process of becoming detached from the processes of either production or consumption (“capitalism without labour”; 5-7). Vis-à-vis the dystopian endgame of this effective “bypassing” of the nation-state, Beck is especially troubled about the fate of the human rights legislation that nation-states around the world have developed, with immense effort and over time (e.g. employment law, trade unions, universal welfare provision) and cites Zygmunt Bauman’s caution that globalisation will, at worst, result in widespread “global wealth” and “local poverty” (31). Further, he ends his book with a fully apocalyptic vision, “the Brazilianization of Europe” (161-3), which unapologetically calls upon the conventions of science fiction to imagine a worst-case scenario for a Europe without nations. While fourteen or fifteen years is evidently not enough time to put Beck’s prognosis to the test, most readers would probably agree that we are still some way away from such a Europe. Although the material wealth and presence of the transnational corporations strikes a chord, especially if we include the world banks and finance organisations in their number, the financial crisis that has rocked the world for the past three years, along with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ascendancy of Al-Qaida (all things yet to happen when Beck was writing in 1997), has arguably resulted in the nations of Europe reinforcing their (respective and collective) legal, fiscal, and political might through rigorous new policing of their physical borders and regulation of their citizens through “austerity measures” of an order not seen since World War Two. In other words, while the processes of globalisation have clearly been instrumental in creating the financial crisis that Europe is presently grappling with and does, indeed, expose the extent to which the world economy now operates outside the control of the nation-state, the nation-state still exists very palpably for all its citizens (whether permanent or migrant) as an agent of control, welfare, and social justice. This may, indeed, cause us to conclude that Bauman’s vision of a world in which globalisation would make itself felt very differently for some groups than others came closest to what is taking shape: true, the transnationals have seized significant political and economic power from the nation-state, but this has not meant the end of the nation-state; rather, the change is being experienced as a re-trenching of whatever power the nation-state still has (and this, of course, is considerable) over its citizens in their “local”, everyday lives (Bauman 55). If we now turn to the portrait of Europe painted by the articles that constitute this special issue, we see further evidence of transglobal processes and practices operating in a realm oblivious to local (including national) concerns. While our authors are generally more concerned with the flows of information and “identity” than business or finance (Appaduri’s “ethnoscapes,” “technoscapes,” and “ideoscapes”: 33-7), there is the same impression that this “circulation” (Latour) is effectively bypassing the state at one level (the virtual), whilst remaining very materially bound by it at another. In other words, and following Bauman, we would suggest that it is quite possible for contemporary subjects to be both the agents and subjects of globalisation: a paradox that, as we shall go on to demonstrate, is given particularly vivid expression in the case of diasporic and/or migrant peoples who may be able to bypass the state in the manufacture of their “virtual” identities/communities) but who (Cohen) remain very much its subjects (or, indeed, “non-subjects”) when attempting movement in the material realm. Two of the articles in the collection (Leurs & Ponzanesi and Marcheva) deal directly with the exponential growth of “digital diasporas” (sometimes referred to as “e-diasporas”) since the inception of Facebook in 2004, and both provide specific illustrations of the way in which the nation-state both has, and has not, been transcended. First, it quickly becomes clear that for the (largely) “youthful” (Leurs & Ponzanesi) participants of nationally inscribed networking sites (e.g. “discovernikkei” (Japan), “Hyves” (Netherlands), “Bulgarians in the UK” (Bulgaria)), shared national identity is a means and not an end. In other words, although the participants of these sites might share in and actively produce a fond and nostalgic image of their “homeland” (Marcheva), they are rarely concerned with it as a material or political entity and an expression of their national identities is rapidly supplemented by the sharing of other (global) identity markers. Leurs & Ponzanesi invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “rhizome” to describe the way in which social networkers “weave” a “rhizomatic path” to identity, gradually accumulating a hybrid set of affiliations. Indeed, the extent to which the “nation” disappears on such sites can be remarkable as was also observed in our investigation of the digital storytelling site, “Capture Wales” (BBC) (Pearce, "Writing"). Although this BBC site was set up to capture the voices of the Welsh nation in the early twenty-first century through a collection of (largely) autobiographical stories, very few of the participants mention either Wales or their “Welshness” in the stories that they tell. Further, where the “home” nation is (re)imagined, it is generally in an idealised, or highly personalised, form (e.g. stories about one’s own family) or through a sharing of (perceived and actual) cultural idiosyncrasies (Marcheva on “You know you’re a Bulgarian when …”) rather than an engagement with the nation-state per se. As Leurs & Ponzanesi observe: “We can see how the importance of the nation-state gets obscured as diasporic youth, through cultural hybridisation of youth culture and ethnic ties initiate subcultures and offer resistance to mainstream cultural forms.” Both the articles just discussed also note the shading of the “national” into the “transnational” on the social networking sites they discuss, and “transnationalism”—in the sense of many different nations and their diasporas being united through a common interest or cause—is also a focus of Pikner’s article on “collective actions” in Europe (notably, “EuroMayDay” and “My Estonia”) and Harb’s highly topical account of the role of both broadcast media (principally, Al-Jazeera) and social media in the revolutions and uprisings currently sweeping through the Arab world (spring 2011). On this point, it should be noted that Harb identifies this as the moment when Facebook’s erstwhile predominantly social function was displaced by a manifestly political one. From this we must conclude that both transnationalism and social media sites can be put to very different ends: while young people in relatively privileged democratic countries might embrace transnationalism as an expression of their desire to “rise above” national politics, the youth of the Arab world have engaged it as a means of generating solidarity for nationalist insurgency and liberation. Another instance of “g/local” digital solidarity exceeding national borders is to be found in Johanna Sumiala’s article on the circulatory power of the Internet in the Kauhajoki school shooting which took place Finland in 2008. As well as using the Internet to “stage manage” his rampage, the Kauhajoki shooter (whose name the author chose to withhold for ethical reasons) was subsequently found to have been a member of numerous Web-based “hate groups”, many of them originating in the United States and, as a consequence, may be understood to have committed his crime on behalf of a transnational community: what Sumiala has defined as a “networked community of destruction.” It must also be noted, however, that the school shootings were experienced as a very local tragedy in Finland itself and, although the shooter may have been psychically located in a transnational hyper-reality when he undertook the killings, it is his nation-state that has had to deal with the trauma and shame in the long term. Woodward and Brown & Rutherford, meanwhile, show that it remains the tendency of public broadcast media to uphold the raison d’être of the nation-state at the same time as embracing change. Woodward’s feature article (which reports on the AHRC-sponsored “Tuning In” project which has researched the BBC World Service) shows how the representation of national and diasporic “voices” from around the world, either in opposition to or in dialogue with the BBC’s own reporting, is key to the way in which the Commission has changed and modernised in recent times; however, she is also clear that many of the objectives that defined the service in its early days—such as its commitment to a distinctly “English” brand of education—still remain. Similarly, Brown & Rutherford’s article on the innovative Australian ABC children’s television series, My Place (which has combined traditional broadcasting with online, interactive websites) may be seen to be positively promoting the Australian nation by making visible its commitment to multiculturalism. Both articles nevertheless reveal the extent to which these public service broadcasters have recognised the need to respond to their nations’ changing demographics and, in particular, the fact that “diaspora” is a concept that refers not only to their English and Australian audiences abroad but also to their now manifestly multicultural audiences at home. When it comes to commercial satellite television, however, the relationship between broadcasting and national and global politics is rather harder to pin down. Subramanian exposes a complex interplay of national and global interests through her analysis of the Malayalee “reality television” series, Idea Star Singer. Exported globally to the Indian diaspora, the show is shamelessly exploitative in the way in which it combines residual and emergent ideologies (i.e. nostalgia for a traditional Keralayan way of life vs aspirational “western lifestyles”) in pursuit of its (massive) audience ratings. Further, while the ISS series is ostensibly a g/local phenomenon (the export of Kerala to the rest of the world rather than “India” per se), Subramanian passionately laments all the progressive national initiatives (most notably, the campaign for “women’s rights”) that the show is happy to ignore: an illustration of one of the negative consequences of globalisation predicted by Beck (31) noted at the start of this editorial. Harb, meanwhile, reflects upon a rather different set of political concerns with regards to commercial satellite broadcasting in her account of the role of Al-Jazeera and Al Arabiya in the recent (2011) Arab revolutions. Despite Al-Jazeera’s reputation for “two-sided” news coverage, recent events have exposed its complicity with the Qatari government; further, the uprisings have revealed the speed with which social media—in particular Facebook and Twitter—are replacing broadcast media. It is now possible for “the people” to bypass both governments and news corporations (public and private) in relaying the news. Taken together, then, what our articles would seem to indicate is that, while the power of the nation-state has notionally been transcended via a range of new networking practices, this has yet to undermine its material power in any guaranteed way (witness recent counter-insurgencies in Libya, Bahrain, and Syria).True, the Internet may be used to facilitate transnational “actions” against the nation-state (individual or collective) through a variety of non-violent or violent actions, but nation-states around the world, and especially in Western Europe, are currently wielding immense power over their subjects through aggressive “austerity measures” which have the capacity to severely compromise the freedom and agency of the citizens concerned through widespread unemployment and cuts in social welfare provision. This said, several of our articles provide evidence that Appadurai’s more utopian prognoses are also taking shape. Alongside the troubling possibility that globalisation, and the technologies that support it, is effectively eroding “difference” (be this national or individual), there are the ever-increasing (and widely reported) instances of how digital technology is actively supporting local communities and actions around the world in ways that bypass the state. These range from the relatively modest collective action, “My Estonia”, featured in Pikner’s article, to the ways in which the Libyan diaspora in Manchester have made use of social media to publicise and support public protests in Tripoli (Harb). In other words, there is compelling material evidence that the heterogeneity that Appadurai predicted and hoped for has come to pass through the people’s active participation in (and partial ownership of) media practices. Citizens are now able to “interfere” in the representation of their lives as never before and, through the digital revolution, communicate with one another in ways that circumvent state-controlled broadcasting. We are therefore pleased to present the articles that follow as a lively, interdisciplinary and international “state-of-the-art” commentary on how the ongoing revolution in media and communication is responding to, and bringing into being, the processes and practices of globalisation predicted by Appadurai, Beck, Bauman, and others in the 1990s. The articles also speak to the changing nature of the world’s “diasporas” during this fifteen year time frame (1996-2011) and, we trust, will activate further debate (following Cohen) on the conceptual tensions that now manifestly exist between “virtual” and “material” diasporas and also between the “transnational” diasporas whose objective is to transcend the nation-state altogether and those that deploy social media for specifically local or national/ist ends. Acknowledgements With thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for their generous funding of the “Moving Manchester” project (2006-10). Special thanks to Dr Kate Horsley (Lancaster University) for her invaluable assistance as ‘Web Editor’ in the production of this special issue (we could not have managed without you!) and also to Gail Ferguson (our copy-editor) for her expertise in the preparation of the final typescript. References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. Beck, Ulrich. What is Globalization? Trans. Patrick Camiller. Cambridge: Polity, 2000 (1997). Bromley, Roger. Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Pearce, Lynne, ed. Devolving Identities: Feminist Readings in Home and Belonging. London: Ashgate, 2000. Pearce, Lynne. “‘Writing’ and ‘Region’ in the Twenty-First Century: Epistemological Reflections on Regionally Located Art and Literature in the Wake of the Digital Revolution.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 13.1 (2010): 27-41. Robertson, Robert. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Urry, John. Sociology beyond Societies. London: Routledge, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982.