Journal articles on the topic 'Deleuze, Gilles. Mille plateaux'

(francuski) Pendant les ann?es 1970, Gilles Deleuze ?labore avec F?lix Guattari et Claire Parnet les concepts d'agencement et de diagramme: au moins jusqu'? Mille plateaux (1980), agencement et diagramme - rebaptis?s machine concr?te et machine abstraite -, constitueront le soubassement th?orique de l'ensemble du travail de Deleuze. Or, l'id?e de diagramme doit beaucoup au Foucault de Surveiller et punir avec lequel Deleuze m?ne un dialogue th?orique ininterrompu pendant ces ann?es-l?: elle cristallise pour lui un enjeu de taille, celui de penser la mutation des structures historiques hors des sch?mas dominants du structuralisme et du marxisme. Deleuze, penseur du devenir, se confrontant ? Foucault, historien-g?n?alogiste des transformations: au coeur de cette confrontation sur le diagramme, surgissent deux conceptions distinctes de la mutation que Deleuze s'efforce de concilier dans son livre sur Foucault.

(francuski) Cet article trouve son point d?part dans une note de Mille plateaux, o? Deleuze et Guattari sugg?rent l'id?e que le secret ne trouve pas son origine dans un appareil d'?tat mais dans la ?machine de guerre?, ruinant du m?me coup l'apparente homog?n?it? entre le secret et l'appareil d'?tat. Cette th?se d?coule de la n?cessit? logique de ne plus d?finir le secret ? partir de la position d'un contenu cach? (toujours perceptible en droit). L'exposition de cette exigence logique permettra d'assigner une forme primitive et une forme d?riv?e du secret, dont l'enjeu est ici triple: (1) montrer le rapport sp?cifique de l'Etat au secret: l'Etat ne produit du secret qu'en le maintenant dans des limites qui pervertissent sa nature; (2) appr?hender les modalit?s selon lesquelles l'appareil d'Etat organise la perception du secret d'Etat: l'appareil d'Etat ne fonctionne au secret d'Etat qu'? condition d'en hi?rarchiser pr?cis?ment la perception, selon des seuils dont la communication est r?gl?e; (3) connecter l'id?e de secret ? sa potentialit? r?volutionnaire, toujours susceptible de miner l'organisation d'un appareil d'Etat: parce que le secret a son origine dans la machine de guerre - qui est formellement ext?rieure ? l'appareil d'?tat - et il introduit dans celui-ci un facteur de tension.

Beau travail de Claire Denis fait partie des films qui nous invitent à les aborder sous l’angle de la répétition. Figure esthétique majeure des arts du xxe siècle, la répétition peut aussi être une forme discrète qui circule d’image en image. Parfois elle se cache et se déguise d’un plan à l’autre au sein d’un même film. Dans une approche analytique, l’auteure de cet article emploie la notion de « plan de consistance » présentée par Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari dans Mille plateaux (1980) pour proposer une étude figurative des formes de la répétition dans Beau travail. Deleuze et Guattari ont défini le « plan de consistance » comme un espace formel qui est simultanément un fond et un volume, une armature et une trame. Cet espace résiste dans la durée. En termes de cinéma, le plan de consistance d’un film est élaboré par l’articulation des plans, par la composition des cadres, par les mouvements qui animent l’espace ou les trajets qui le parcourent. Il constitue un repère visuel parfois fuyant, en mouvement mais repérable. L’analyse de Beau travail montre que les répétitions, loin de simplement construire des effets narratifs ou scéniques, participent de la mise en place d’un socle perceptif à la fois récurrent et variable, d’une trame visuelle reconnaissable et instable. L’auteure met ainsi au jour, dans l’économie figurative de ce film d’inspiration littéraire et musicale, l’élaboration de ce « plan de consistance » comme fond visible et invisible du montage filmique.

O artigo analisa fatos recentes relacionados ao combate à prostituição no Brasil, baseado em lei incoerente e ultrapassada, para, inspirado pela leitura de Mille Plateaux, de Deleuze e Guatarri, apontar a perigosa vitalidade do desejo fascista na sociedade brasileira contemporânea.

This article proposes a reading of Ricoeur and Deleuze from their respective interpretations of Spinoza's thought. Ricoeur and Deleuze are placed in the center of the Spinoza-Renaissance that took place in France in the Fifties and Sixties. However, Ricoeur's Spinozism is still largely unknown. The first two parts of the article concern Spinoza's concepts of conatus and essentia actuosa, emphasizing their importance for Ricoeur's hermeneutics of symbols, especially in relation to his reading of Jean Nabert. The following three sections concern Deleuze and the role of Spinoza's thought in the genesis of rhizomatic ontology in Mille plateaux. The last part of the article seeks to explore the possibility of a dialogue between Ricoeur and Deleuze.

I come to praise contemporary French philosophy not to bury it. My aim is not to hail the appearance in France of a native brand of analytic philosophy—in itself an important event in the last decade—but to describe the indirect and selective importation of certain Anglo-Saxon concepts by French philosophers whose practice is far from analytic; and also to describe the resultant misunderstanding. In this paper I shall analyse the use of pragmatic concepts—and of the concept ‘pragmatics’—in the recent work by Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, and I shall try to show that these concepts are the object of a creative misunderstanding, of a misprision.

I come to praise contemporary French philosophy not to bury it. My aim is not to hail the appearance in France of a native brand of analytic philosophy—in itself an important event in the last decade—but to describe the indirect and selective importation of certain Anglo-Saxon concepts by French philosophers whose practice is far from analytic; and also to describe the resultant misunderstanding. In this paper I shall analyse the use of pragmatic concepts—and of the concept ‘pragmatics’—in the recent work by Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, and I shall try to show that these concepts are the object of a creative misunderstanding, of a misprision.

Este artigo tem o objetivo de propor em linhas gerais uma alternativa ao discurso antropológico-humanista do pensamento filosófico, que predominava em fins do século XIX, e que ainda hoje estende seus efeitos ao pensamento da filosofia sobre a educação e sobre o tema do sujeito e da subjetividade no processo educativo. Essa alternativa está proposta na forma de uma síntese do conceito de devir, pensado por Deleuze e Guattari na obra Mille Plateaux, com o conceito de infância compreendida como signo do novo, da afirmação, da diferença e da criação no pensamento. Propõe-se, desse modo, pensar a dimensão ética e política da subjetividade e dos modos de subjetivação a partir do conceito de devir-criança, como um signo capaz de colocar a relação pedagógica e a produção de subjetividade que dela resulta no cruzamento de intensidades e singularidades pré-individuais que o acontecimento nos abre, e da experiência que com elas somos capazes de criar.

(francuski) Repartant de la premi?re courbe d'?laboration du concept de 'devenir- Mineur' de Deleuze et Guattari (de Kafka Pour une litt?rature mineure ? Mille plateaux), nous interrogeons le rapport entre les deux lignes de probl?matisation de ce concept: une analyse des antagonismes historiques dont les minorit?s sociales sont aujourd'hui le lieu 'surd?termin?' l'identification d'un type de position au sein des modes collectifs d'?nonciation. Par l?, nous soulevons ?galement le probl?me de ce que peut signifier politiquement occuper une position de minorit? dans le discours (th?orique, litt?raire, philosophique?). C'est en ce sens que nous confrontons les luttes de minorit?s au sch?me de la lutte des classes, que nous examinons certains liens (liens de prolongement, d'int?gration, mais aussi de diff?renciation) entre les processus de 'prol?tarisation' et de 'minoration', et que nous reposons sur cette base la question d'un nouvel internationalisme.

The reception of Circe's island in and through Classical Antiquity has largely focused on the enigmatic sorceress herself. The long literary chain of interpretive topoi—Circe the witch, the whore, the temptress—stretches from Apollonius, Virgil, Ovid, and Dio Chrysostom to Spenser, Calderón, Joyce, Margaret Atwood, and Madeline Miller. Her role as Odysseus’ benefactor, so unmistakable in Homer, is soon forgotten; to Virgil, she is above all dea saeva, (‘the savage goddess’, Aen. 7.19). One distinguishing feature of Circe and her reception is the focus on representation: the enchantment of Circe, as Greta Hawes puts it, is above all a study in allegory. From the moment Circe put a spell on Odysseus’ companions, transforming them into animals in Book 10 of the Odyssey, Circe has invited analogical reasoning, centered on what the transformation from one being into another represents. More often than not, this transformation is interpreted according to a dualist thinking about humans and animals: subjects are transformed from one being into another being, thus representing some moral or physical degradation. This article, by contrast, concentrates on Circe's island through the lens of becoming-animal, the concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the tenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…’. I explicate the concept of becoming-animal by applying it to a Deleuzian encounter with Circe's island, both in its ancient articulations and in its various receptions, including H.G. Wells's science fiction novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.

The rise of networked social movements contesting neo-liberal globalization and protesting the summits of global finance and governance organizations has posed an analytical challenge to social movement theorists and called into question the applicability to this global milieu of the familiar concepts and heuristics utilized in social movement studies. In this article, we argue that the self-defining alter-globalization movement(s) might instead be engaged with as an expression and effect of global complexity, and we draw upon a ‘minor’ literature in social movement studies that includes Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze and Alberto Melucci to illustrate our claims. This article uses a Deleuzian reading of complexity to describe the phase space of the ‘movement of movements’, and its perturbation of global civil society through the iteration of sense-making processes (reflexive framing) and the exploration of singularities inhering in social movement ‘plateaux’. Those transnational gatherings, protests and social forums facilitated by computer-mediated communications and the advent of unprecedented mobility which constitute a ‘shadow realm’ that remains largely invisible to political exchange theories operating within the conceptual confines of the nation-state.

Information and knowledge have never been produced so rapidly. Production that finally does not communicate, nor does it act, nor does it have the positive effects that are desired of transference to society. Hyperactivities, fascism, various pathologies, and contradictions, went into such an enterprise. And along with the most daring technological and scientific advances, an unmentionable barbarity is advancing in an overwhelming way. The planetary dangers that result from this production that is not communicated and which we often only become aware of do not cease to threaten us every day and insistently knock on the door. An ambiguous and dangerous global context makes us recover a hypothesis that is more than fifty years old. Proposed by Bateson with a very wide reach the concept of "double bind" helps us to think the relationship between education knowledge and politics.ResumoNunca se produziu tanto e tão aceleradamente informação e conhecimento. Produção que finalmente não se comunica, nem age, nem tem os efeitos positivos que se desejam de transferência para a sociedade. Hiperatividades, fascismos, patologias variadas, contradições e impasses entravam tamanho empreendimento. E a par dos avanços tecnológicos e científicos mais ousados uma barbárie inominável avança de forma avassaladora. Os perigos planetários que resultam desta produção que não se comunica e de que só amiúde nos tornamos conscientes não deixam de nos ameaçar todos os dias e bater com insistência à porta. Um contexto global tão ambíguo e perigoso faz-nos recuperar uma hipótese com mais de cinquenta anos. Proposta por Bateson com um alcance bastante vasto, o conceito de duplo impasse ou “double bind” ajuda-nos a pensar a relação entre educação, conhecimento e política.Keywords: Communication, Contradiction, Double bind, Populism.Palavras-chave: Comunicação, Contradição, Duplo impasse, Populismo.ReferencesBATESON, G. Vers une écologie de l’esprit. (Vol. 1 e 2), Paris: Seuil, 1980.BATESON, G.; RUESCH, J. Communication et société. Paris: Seuil, 1988.DELEUZE, G.; GUATTARI, F. L’Anti-Œdipe. Paris: Minuit, 1972.DELEUZE, G.; GUATTARI, F. Mille plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1980.DELEUZE, G.; GUATTARI, F. O que é a Filosofia?. Lisboa: Presença, 1992.DELEUZE, G. Crítica e clínica. Lisboa: Ed. Século XXI, 2000.WATZLAWICK, P.; BEAVIN, J. H.; JACKSON, D. D. Pragmatics of human communication. A study of interactional patterns, pathologies and paradoxes. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1967.WATZLAWICK, P.; WEAKLAND, J.; FISCH, R. Changements: paradoxes et psychothérapie. Paris: Seuil,1975.

Resumo: O presente artigo visa mostrar algumas reflexões existentes no pensamento do filósofo francês Michel Foucault concernente à ontologia do presente, às relações de poder e à heterotopia. A atualidade analisada por Foucault está vinculada ao aspecto vital de cada época, nas formas de vivência dos indivíduos, principalmente, aqueles considerados pela normatividade e normalidade das relações de poder como sendo marginais, anormais, resíduos, infames. Assim, Foucault aproxima-se do trabalho desenvolvido por Sebastião Salgado ao relatar e denunciar os homens infames, habitantes dos espaços heterótopos.Palavras-chave: Michel Foucault. Ontologia do presente. Heterotopia. Homens infames. Sebastião Salgado. Abstract: This paper aims to show some reflections about the thoughts of the French philosopher Michel Foucault concerning the ontology of the present, power relations and heterotopia. actuality analyzed by Foucault is linked to the vital aspect of each age, in the ways of individuals living, especially, those considered by the power relations of normativity and normality as marginal, abnormal, waste, infamous. Therefore, Foucault approach his work to the work developed by Sebastião Salgado reporting and denouncing the infamous men, inhabitants of heterotopical spaces.Keywords: Michel Foucault. Ontology of the present. Heterotopia. Infamous men. Sebastião Salgado. REFERÊNCIASBAUMAN, Zygmunt; LYON, David. A vigilância líquida como pós-pan-óptico. In: ______. Vigilância líquida. Tradução de Carlos Alberto Medeiros. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2013, p. 55-74. CASTRO, Edgardo. Vocabulário Foucault: um percurso pelos seus temas, conceitos e autores. Tradução de Ingrid Müller. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2009.DELEUZE, Gilles. Michel Foucault: rachar as coisas, rachar as palavras. In: Conversações (1972-1990). 3. ed. Tradução de Peter Pál Perlbart. São Paulo : 34, 2013.FOUCAULT, Michel. As palavras e as coisas: uma arqueologia das ciências humanas (1966). 8. ed. Tradução de Salma Tannus Muchail. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1999._______. Des espaces autres (1984). In : _______. Dits et ecrits II (1976-1988). Paris: Gallimard, 2001b, p. 1571-1581. _______. Em defesa da sociedade. Curso no Collège de France (1975-1976). Tradução de Maria Ermantina Galvão. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1997. (Coleção: tópicos)._______. La vie des hommes infâmes (1977). In: _______. Dits et ecrits II (1976-1988). Paris: Gallimard, 2001b, p. 237-253._______. Les anormaux (1975). In: _______. Dits et ecrits I (1954-1975). Paris: Gallimard, 2001a, p. 1690-1696.FOUCAULT, Michel. Microfísica do poder. 22 ed. Rio de Janeiro, Graal, 2006a._______. O poder psiquiátrico. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 2006b._______. Poder e saber (1977). In: MOTTA, Manoel Barros da (Org.). Estratégia, poder-saber. Tradução de Vera Lúcia Avellar Ribeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2003, p. 223-240. (Col. Ditos & Escritos IV).FURTADO, Rafael Nogueira. A atualidade como questão: ontologia do presente em Michel Foucault. In: Natureza humana, vol.17, n.1, São Paulo (2015), p. 144-156. Disponível em: <http://pepsic.bvsalud.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1517-24302015000100007> (acessado em: 16.08.2016).JAQUET, Gabriela. É preciso questionar o presente: Foucault, o diagnóstico, a Aufklärung, Anais da XIII Semana Acadêmica do PPG em Filosofia da PUCRS, Porto Alegre, RS (2014). Disponível em: <http://ebooks.pucrs.br/edipucrs/anais/semanadefilosofia/XIII/9.pdf> (acessado em: 16.08.2016).REVEL, Judith. Foucault, une pensée du discontinu. Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2010.WENDERS, Wim. O sal da terra [documentário]. Autoria: Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Wim Wenders, David Rosier. Produção: Decia Films. Co-produção: Amazonas Images, Fondazione Solares dele Arti com apoio de La région Île-de-France, Les Amis de la Maison Européenne de la Photographie (2014), 1 DVD (115 min).ZENDRON, Rute Coelho. O fotógrafo, Dossiê migrações, Esboços. In: Revista do programa de pós-graduação em História da UFSC, v.10, n.10, Florianópolis (2002), p. 83-95. Disponível em: <https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/esbocos/article/view/389/9854> (acessado em: 16.08.2016).

"El arte no es jamás un fin, es sólo un instrumento para trazar líneas de vida"Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (1980)Esperamos que la intención y contenidos de este monográfico que ahora está a la vista, no sugiera una alusión a moda alguna. No nos hemos alinderado en torno a la Paz al hilo de conversaciones, acuerdos, plebiscitos, plazos, disentimientos, etc. Para nuestra facultad, la Paz no es asunto coyuntural, se ha forjado como complemento medular y estructural de reflexiones, investigaciones y procesos de formación que ahora pueden hacerse visibles. Equiparamos Arte y Paz, por considerar el Arte como camino, vemos en él, y en la Educación, la construcción de seres humanos integrales, individuos no fragmentados ni escindidos, con cuerpo, mente y espíritu, capaces de construir ese relato nacional que tanto necesitamos. El Arte es, también, imbricación de sociedades, culturas, territorios y prácticas a modo de sedimentos a los que se supeditan dinámicas de construcción de identidad, representación de colectivos, constitución de subjetividades, producción de formas de ser y habitar en un mundo cada vez más frágil.En tales condiciones vemos la Educación y el Arte como acontecimientos (Deleuze, 2005), en sentido heideggeriano (1997) como “ámbito oscilante, mediante el cual hombre y ser se alcanzan uno a otro y alcanzan lo suyo esencial” (pág. 89), el arte se muestra entonces, como la esencia de ese ser hombre, puede ser eso que nos constituye y hace del arte el ser o ese habitar estético del hombre. El arte como acontecimiento es fundante de nuevos sujetos, por ello es en sí mismo un acto en potencia, imaginémonos entonces, toda la carga simbólica de transformación que él conlleva.Es que Arte, Educación (y la Paz) han de afectar al individuo, le ocasionan ciertas crisis; ¡trastornan! La experiencia educativa comparte con la experiencia estética el efecto de alterar sensibilidades, emociones e intelectos, transformar las subjetividades a propósito de la ruptura creada por el acontecimiento. Como se trata de generar futuro vivible, un escenario cada vez más posible de Paz exige reconfigurar el proyecto educativo de la nación considerando volver a la persona, a la producción de sentido estético de sí, al reconocimiento, la aceptación propia y ajena, la construcción simbólica de la reparación y el acercamiento al Otro. Tener a la vista la Paz es, de suyo, el entorno que nos define como promesa de un futuro posible y escenario de creación factible.El Arte nos recuerda nuestra compleja plasticidad, lo que hace decir a Richard Rorty (1996), uno de los más renombrados filósofos de la actualidad, que no hay humanos paradigmáticos; empero, una educación centrada en la persona y nucleada en torno a procesos estéticos y pacificadores, abrirá compuertas para su constitución. El arte es en sí mismo acontecimiento, y, como la Paz, añade vida a la vida, o si no observemos los efectos estéticos del perdón y la reconciliación en los que volvemos al núcleo vital de la humanidad: el anhelo y la certeza de cambio. En el arte, como la educación y en el perdón: hay trasformación, porque son, ante todo, conmemoración de la vida, acontecimientos confirmativos. Lo decimos en palabras de Mario Perniola (2001) “Para la existencia de lo estético se hace esencial, al menos, la posibilidad del fin de un conflicto, de una paz venidera, de un momento pacificador en el que dolor y lucha se vean, sino definitivamente cesados, sí, al menos, momentáneamente suspendidos”. (p. 194). ReferenciasDeleuze, G. (2005) Lógica del sentido. Barcelona: Paidós.Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980) Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et schizofrenia. Paris: Les Ediciones du Minuit.Heidegger, M. (1997). Ser y tiempo. Santiago de Chile: Editorial UniversitariaPerniola, M. (2001) La estética del siglo XX. Madrid: Antonio Machado Libros.Rorty, R. (1996) Contingencia, Ironía y solidaridad. Barcelona: Paidós.

As Earth heats up and water vapourises, “Adapt” is a word that is frequently invoked right now, in a world seething with change and challenge. Its Oxford English Dictionary definitions—“to fit, to make suitable; to alter so as to fit for a new use”—give little hint of the strangely divergent moral values associated with its use. There is, of course, the word’s unavoidable Darwinian connotations which, in spite of creationist controversy, communicate a cluster of positive values linked with progress. By contrast, the literary use of adapt is frequently linked with negative moral values. Even in our current “hyper-adaptive environment” (Rizzo)—in which a novel can become a theme park ride can become a film can become a computer game can become a novelisation—an adaptation is seen as a debasement of an original, inauthentic, inferior, parasitic (Hutcheon, 2-3). A starting point from which to explore the word’s “positive”—that is, evolutionary—use is the recently released Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, which argues the necessity of adapting in order to survive. Indeed, an entire section is titled “Policy responses for adaptation,” outlining—among other things—“an economic framework for adaptation”; “barriers and constraints to adaptation”; and “how developing countries can adapt to climate change” (403). Although evolution is not directly mentioned, it is evoked through the review’s analysis of a dire situation which compels humans to change in response to their changing environment. Yet the mere existence of the review, and its enumeration of problems and solutions, suggests that human adaptive abilities are up to the task, drawing on positive traits such as resilience, flexibility, agility, innovation, creativity, progressiveness, appropriateness, and so on. These values, and their connection to the evolutionary use of “adapt”, infuse 21st-century life. “Adapt,” “evolution”, and that cluster of values are entwined so closely that recalling effort is required to remind oneself that “adapt” existed before evolutionary theory. And whether or not one accepts the premise of evolution—or even understands it beyond the level of reductive popular science—it provides an irresistible metaphor that underlies areas as diverse as education, business, organisational culture, politics, and law. For example, Judith Robinson’s article “Education as the Foundation of the New Economy” quotes Canada’s former deputy prime minister John Manley: “The future holds nothing but change. … Charles Darwin said, ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change.’” Robinson adds: “Education is how we equip our people with the ability to adapt to change.” Further examples show “adapt” as a positive metaphor for government. A study into towns in rural Queensland discovered that while some towns “have reinvented themselves and are thriving,” others “that are not innovative or adaptable” are in decline (Plowman, Ashkanasy, Gardner and Letts, 8). The Queensland Government’s Smart State Strategy also refers to the desirability of adapting: “The pace of change in the world is now so rapid—and sometimes so unpredictable—that our best prospects for maintaining our lead lie in our agility, flexibility and adaptability.” The Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training, in setting national research priorities, identifies “An Environmentally Sustainable Australia” and in that context specifically mentions the need to adapt: “there needs to be an increased understanding of the contributions of human behaviour to environmental and climate change, and on [sic] appropriate adaptive responses and strategies.” In the corporate world, the Darwinian allusion is explicit in book titles such as Geoffrey Moore’s 2005 Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution: “Moore’s theme is innovation, which he sees as being necessary to the survival of business as a plant or animal adapting to changes in habitat” (Johnson). Within organisations, the metaphor is also useful, for instance in D. Keith Denton’s article, “What Darwin Can Teach Us about Success:” “In order to understand how to create and manage adaptability, we need to look first at how nature uses it. … Species that fail to adapt have only one option left.” That option is extinction, which is the fate of “over 99% of all species that have ever existed.” However, any understanding of “adapt” as wholly positive and forward-moving is too simplistic. It ignores, for example, aspects of adaptation that are dangerous to people (such as the way the avian influenza virus or simian AIDS can adapt so that humans can become their hosts). Bacteria rapidly adapt to antibiotics; insects rapidly adapt to pesticides. Furthermore, an organism that is exquisitely adapted to a specific niche becomes vulnerable with even a small disturbance in its environment. The high attrition rate of species is breathtakingly “wasteful” and points to the limitations of the evolutionary metaphor. Although corporations and education have embraced the image, it is unthinkable that any corporation or educational system would countenance either evolution’s tiny adaptive adjustments over a long period of time, or the high “failure” rate. Furthermore, evolution can only be considered “progress” if there is an ultimate goal towards which evolution is progressing: the anthropocentric viewpoint that holds that “the logical and inevitable endpoint of the evolutionary process is the human individual,” as Rizzo puts it. This suggests that the “positive” values connected with this notion of “adapt” are a form of self-congratulation among those who consider themselves the “survivors”. A hierarchy of evolution-thought places “agile,” “flexible” “adaptors” at the top, while at the bottom of the hierarchy are “stagnant,” “atrophied” “non-adaptors”. The “positive” values then form the basis for exclusionary prejudices directed at those human and non-human beings seen as being “lower” on the evolutionary scale. Here we have arrived at Social Darwinism, the Great-Chain-of-Being perspective, Manifest Destiny—all of which still justify many kinds of unjust treatment of humans, animals, and ecosystems. Literary or artistic meanings of “adapt”—although similarly based on hierarchical thinking (Shiloh)—are, as mentioned earlier, frequently laden with negative moral values. Directly contrasting with the evolutionary adaptation we have just discussed, value in literary adaptation is attached to “being first” rather than to the success of successors. Invidious dichotomies that actually reverse the moral polarity of Darwinian adaptation come into play: “authentic” versus “fake”, “original” versus “copy”, “strong” versus “weak”, “superior” versus “inferior”. But, as the authors collected in this issue demonstrate, the assignment of a moral value to evolutionary “adapt”, and another to literary “adapt”, is too simplistic. The film Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002)—discussed in three articles in this issue—deals with both these uses of the word, and provides the impetus to these authors’ explorations of possible connections and contrasts between them. Evidence of the pervasiveness of the concept is seen in the work of other writers, who explore the same issues in a range of cultural phenomena, such as graffiti, music sampling, a range of activities in and around the film industry, and several forms of identity formation. A common theme is the utter inadequacy of a single moral value being assigned to “adapt”. For example, McMerrin quotes Ghandi in her paper: “Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.” Shiloh argues: “If all texts quote or embed fragments of earlier texts, the notion of an authoritative literary source, which the cinematic version should faithfully reproduce, is no longer valid.” Furnica, citing Rudolf Arnheim, points out that an adaptation “increases our understanding of the adapted work.” All of which suggests that the application of “adapt” to circumstances of culture and nature suggests an “infinite onion” both of adaptations and of the “core samples of difference” that are the inevitable corollary of this issue’s theme. To drill down into the products of culture, to peel back the “facts” of nature, is only ever to encounter additional and increasingly minute variations of the activity of “adapt”. One never hits the bottom of difference and adaptation. Still, why would you want to, when the stakes of “adapt” might be little different from the stakes of life itself? At least, this is the insight that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze—in all its rhizomatic variations—seems constantly to be leading us towards: “Life” (capitalised) is a continual germination that feeds on a thousand tiny adaptations of open-ended desire and of a ceaselessly productive mode of difference. Besides everything else that they do, all of the articles in this issue participate—in one way or another—in this notion of “adapt” as a constant impetus towards new configurations of culture and of nature. They are the proof (if such proof were to be requested or required) that the “infinite onion” of adaptation and difference, while certainly a mise en abyme, is much more a positive “placing into infinity” than a negative “placing into the abyss.” Adaptation is nothing to be feared; stasis alone spells death. What this suggests, furthermore, is that a contemporary ethics of difference and alterity might not go far wrong if it were to adopt “adapt” as its signature experience. To be ever more sensitive to the subtle nuances, to the evanescences on the cusp of nothingness … of adaptation … is perhaps to place oneself at the leading edge of cultural activity, where the boundaries of self and other have, arguably, never been more fraught. Again, all of the contributors to this issue dive—“Alice-like”—down their own particular rabbit holes, in order to bring back to the surface something previously unthought or unrecognised. However, two recent trends in the sciences and humanities—or rather at the complex intersection of these disciplines—might serve as useful, generalised frameworks for the work on “adapt” that this issue pursues. The first of these is the upwelling of interest (contra Darwinism) in the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). For Lamarck, adaptation takes a deviation from the Darwinian view of Natural Selection. Lamarckism holds, in distinction from Darwin, that the characteristics acquired by individuals in the course of their (culturally produced) lifetimes can be transmitted down the generations. If your bandy-legged great-grandfather learnt to bend it like Beckham, for example, then Manchester United would do well to sign you up in the cradle. Lamarck’s ideas are an encouragement to gather up, for cultural purposes, ever more refined understandings of “adapt”. What this pro-Lamarckian movement also implies is a new “crossing-over point” of the natural/biological with the cultural/acquired. The second trend to be highlighted here, however, does more than merely imply such a refreshed configuration of nature and culture. Elizabeth Grosz’s recent work directly calls the bluff of the traditional Darwinian (not to mention Freudian) understanding of “biology as destiny”. In outline form, we propose that she does this by running together notions of biological difference (the male/female split) with the “ungrounded” difference of Deleuzean thinking and its derivatives. Adaptation thus shakes free, on Grosz’s reading, from the (Darwinian and Freudian) vestiges of biological determinism and becomes, rather, a productive mode of (cultural) difference. Grosz makes the further move of transporting such a “shaken and stirred” version of biological difference into the domains of artistic “excess”, on the basis that “excessive” display (as in the courting rituals of the male peacock) is fundamentally crucial to those Darwinian axioms centred on the survival of the species. By a long route, therefore, we are returned, through Grosz, to the interest in art and adaptation that has, for better or for worse, tended to dominate studies of “adapt”, and which this issue also touches upon. But Grosz returns us to art very differently, which points the way, perhaps, to as yet barely recognised new directions in the field of adaptation studies. We ask, then, where to from here? Responding to this question, we—the editors of this issue—are keen to build upon the groundswell of interest in 21st-century adaptation studies with an international conference, entitled “Adaptation & Application”, to be held on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia in early 2009. The “Application” part of this title reflects, among other things, the fact that our conference will be, perhaps uniquely, itself an example of “adapt”, to the extent that it will have two parallel but also interlocking strands: adaptation; application. Forward-thinking architects Arakawa and Gins have expressed an interest in being part of this event. (We also observe, in passing, that “application”, or “apply”, may be an excellent theme for a future issue of M/C Journal…) Those interested in knowing more about the “Adaptation and Application” conference may contact either of us on the email addresses given in our biographical notes. There are several groups and individuals that deserve public acknowledgement here. Of course, we thank the authors of these fourteen articles for their stimulating and reflective contributions to the various debates around “adapt”. We would also like to acknowledge the hugely supportive efforts of our hard-pressed referees. Equally, our gratitude goes out to those respondents to our call for papers whose submissions could not be fitted into this already overflowing issue. What they sent us kept the standard high, and many of the articles rejected for publication on this occasion will, we feel sure, soon find a wider audience in another venue (the excellent advice provided by our referees has an influence, in this way, beyond the life of this issue). We also wish to offer a very special note of thanks to Linda Hutcheon, who took time out from her exceptionally busy schedule to contribute the feature article for this issue. Her recent monograph A Theory of Adaptation is essential reading for all serious scholars of “adapt”, as is her contribution here. We are honoured to have Professor Hutcheon’s input into our project. Special thanks are also due to Gold-Coast based visual artist Judy Anderson for her “adaptation of adaptation” into a visual motif for our cover image. This inspiring piece is entitled “Between Two” (2005; digital image on cotton paper). Accessing experiences perhaps not accessible through words alone, Anderson’s image nevertheless “speaks adaptation”, as her Artist’s Statement suggests: The surface for me is a sensual encounter; an event, shifting form. As an eroticised site, it evokes memories of touch. … Body, object, place are woven together with memory; forgetting and remembering. The tactility and materiality of touching the surface is offered back to the viewer. These images are transitions themselves. As places of slippage and adaptation, they embody intervals on many levels; between the material and the immaterial, the familiar and the strange. Their source remains obscure so that they might represent spaces in-between—overlooked places that open up unexpectedly. If we have learned just one thing from the experience of editing the M/C Journal ‘adapt’ issue, it is that our theme richly rewards the sort of intellectual and creative activity demonstrated by our contributors. Much has been done here; much remains to be done. Some of this work will take place, no doubt, at the “Adaptation and Application” conference, and we hope to see many of you on the Gold Coast in 2009. But for now, it’s over to you, to engage with what you might encounter here, and to work new “adaptations” upon it. References Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training. Environmentally Sustainable Australia. 2005. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/policies_issues_reviews /key_issues/national_research_priorities/priority_goals /environmentally_sustainable_australia.htm>. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaux. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Denton, D Keith. “What Darwin Can Teach Us about Success.” Development and Learning in Organizations 20.1 (2006): 7ff. Furnica, Ioana. “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’: Carlos Saura’s Carmen Adaptation.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 . Grosz, Elizabeth. In the Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Sensation”. Plenary III Session. 9th Annual Comparative Literature Conference. Gilles Deleuze: Texts and Images: An International Conference. University of South Carolina, Columbia. 7 April 2007. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Johnson, Cecil. “Darwinian Notions of Corporate Innovation,” Boston Globe, 15 Jan. 2006: L.2. McMerrin, Michelle. “Agency in Adaptation.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/03 mcmerrin.php mcmerrin.php>. Neimanis, Astrida. “A Feminist Deleuzian Politics? It’s About Time.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (2006): 154-8. Plowman, Ian, Neal M. Ashkanasy, John Gardner, and Malcolm Letts. Innovation in Rural Queensland: Why Some Towns Thrive while Others Languish: Main Report. University of Queensland/Department of Primary Industries. Queensland, Dec. 2003. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www2.dpi.qld.gov.au/business/14778.html>. Queensland Government. Smart State Strategy 2005-2015 Timeframe. 2007. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www.smartstate.qld.gov.au/strategy/strategy05_15/timeframes.shtm>. Rizzo, Sergio. “Adaptation and the Art of Survival.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/02-rizzo.php>. Shiloh, Ilana. “Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>. Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change. 2006. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_ economics_climate_change/stern_review_report.cfm>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Delamoir, Jeannette, and Patrick West. "Editorial." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Delamoir, J., and P. West. (May 2007) "Editorial," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/00-editorial.php>.

Amongst the hundreds of emails that made their way to error@media-culture.org.au over the last ten months, I received the following correspondence: Failure noticeHi. This is the qmail-send program at sv01.wadax.ne.jp.I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.namewithheld@s.vodafone.ne.jp>:210.169.171.135 does not like recipient.Remote host said: 550 Invalid recipient:namewithheld@s.vodafone.ne.jp>Giving up on 210.169.171.135. Email of this sort marks a moment that is paradoxically odd and all too familiar in the digital exchanges of everyday life. The failure message arrives to tell me something “didn’t work out.” This message shows up in my email account looking no different from any other correspondence—only this one hails from the system itself, signalling a failure to communicate. Email from the “mailer-daemon” calls attention to both the logic of the post that governs email (a “letter” sent to an intended address at the intention of some source) and the otherwise invisible logic of informatic protocols, made visible in the system failure of a “permanent error.” In this particular instance, however, the failure notice is itself a kind of error. I never emailed namewithheld@s.vodafone.ne.jp—and by the mailer-daemon’s account, such a person does not exist. It seems that a spammer has exploited an email protocol as a way of covering his tracks: when a deliver-to path fails, the failure notice bounces to a third site. The failure notice marks the successful execution of a qmail protocol, but its arrival at our account is still a species of error. In most circumstances, error yields an invalid result. In calculation, error marks a kind of misstep that not only corrupts the end result, but all steps following the error. One error begets others. But as with the failure notice, error often marks not only the misdirections of a system, but also the system’s internal logic. The failure notice corresponds to a specific category of error—a potential error that the system must predict before it has actually occurred. While the notice signals failure (permanent error), it does so within the successful, efficient operation of a communicative system. What is at issue, then, is less a matter of whether or not error occurs than a system’s ability to handle error as it arises. Control systems attempt to close themselves off to error’s misdirections. If error signals a system failure, the “failure notice” of error foregrounds the degree to which in “societies of control” every error is a fatal error in that Baudrillardian sense—a failure that is subsumed in the operational logic of the system itself (40). Increasingly, the networks of a global marketplace require a rationalisation of processes and an introduction of informatic control systems to minimise wastage and optimise output. An informatic monoculture expresses itself through operational parameters that define communication according to principles of maximum transmission. In effect, in the growing dominance of a network society, we are witnessing the transcendence of a social and cultural system that must suppress at all costs the failure to communicate. This global communication system straddles a paradoxical moment of maximum exchange and maximum control. With growing frequency, social and commercial processes are governed by principles of quality assurance, what Lyotard defined nearly thirty years ago as a “logic of maximum performance” (xxiv). As Six Sigma standards migrate from the world of manufacturing to a wide range of institutions, we find a standard of maximum predictability and minimum error as the latest coin of the realm. Utopia is now an error-free world of 100% efficiency, accuracy, and predictability. This lure of an informatic “monoculture” reduces communication to a Maxwell’s demon for capturing transmission and excluding failure. Such a communicative system establishes a regime of signs that thrives upon the drift and flow of a network of signifiers, but that affirms its power as a system in its voracious incorporation of signs within a chain of signification (Deleuze and Guattari 111-117). Error is cast out as abject, the scapegoat “condemned as that which exceeds the signifying regime’s power of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 117). Deleuze and Guattari describe this self-cycling apparatus of capture as “a funeral world of terror,” the terror of a black-hole regime that ultimately depends upon a return of the same and insures that everything that circulates communicates…or is cast off as abject (113). This terror marks a relation of control, one that depends upon a circulation of signs but that also insists all flows fall within its signifying regime. To speak of the “terror of information” is more than metaphorical to the extent that this forced binary (terror of signal/error of noise) imposes a kind of violence that demands a rationalisation of all singularities of expression into the functionalities of a quantifiable system. To the extent that systems of information imply systems of control, the violence of information is less metaphor than metonym, as it calls into high relief the scapegoat error—the abject remainder whose silenced line of flight marks the trajectory of the unclean. This cybernetic logic of maximum performance demands that error is either contained within the predictable deviations of a system’s performance, or nullified as outlying and asignifying. Statistics tells us that we are best off ignoring the outlier. This logic of the normal suggests that something very risky occurs when an event or an instance falls outside the scope of predicable variance. In the ascendancy of information, error, deviance, and outlying results cast a long shadow. In Norbert Wiener’s account of informatic entropy, this drift from systematic control marked a form of evil—not a Manichean evil of bad actors, but rather an Augustinian evil: a falling away from the perfection of order (34-36). Information utopia banishes error as a kind of evil—an aberration that is decidedly off the path of order and control. This cybernetic logic functions at all levels, from social systems theory to molecular biology. Our diseases are now described as errors in coding, transcription, or transmission—genetic anomalies, cancerous loop scripts, and neurochemical noise. Mutation figures as an error in reproduction—a straying from faithful replication and a falling away from the Good of order and control. But we should keep in mind that when we speak of “evil” in the context of this cybernetic logic, that evil takes on a specific form. It is the evil of the errant. Or to put it another way: it is the evil of the Sesame Street Muppet, Bert. In 2001, a U.S. high school student named Dino Ignacio created a graphic of the Muppet, Bert, with Osama bin Laden—part of his humorous Website project, “Bert is Evil.” A Pakistani-based publisher scanning the Web for images of bin Laden came across Ignacio’s image and, apparently not recognising the Sesame Street character, incorporated it into a series of anti-American posters. According to Henry Jenkins’s account of the events, in the weeks that followed, “CNN reporters recorded the unlikely sight of a mob of angry protestors marching through the streets chanting anti-American slogans and waving signs depicting Bert and bin Laden” (1-2). As the story of the Bert-sighting spread, new “Bert is evil” Websites sprang up, and Ignacio found himself the unwitting centre of a full-blown Internet phenomenon. Jenkins finds in this story a fascinating example of what he calls convergence culture, the blurring of the line between consumer and producer (3). From a somewhat different critical perspective, Mark Poster reads this moment of misappropriation and misreading as emblematic of global networked culture, in which “as never before, we must begin to interpret culture as multiple cacophonies of inscribed meanings as each cultural object moves across cultural differences” (11). But there is another moral to this story as well, to the extent that the convergence and cacophony described here occur in a moment of error, an errant slippage in which signification escapes its own regime of signs. The informatic (Augustinian) evil of Bert the Muppet showing up at an anti-American rally in Pakistan marks an event-scene in which an “error” not only signifies, but in its cognitive resonance, begins to amplify and replicate. At such moments, the “failure notice” of error signals a creative potential in its own right—a communicative context that escapes systemic control. The error of “evil Bert” introduces noise into this communicative system. It is abject information that marks an aberration within an otherwise orderly system of communication, an error of sorts marking an errant line of flight. But in contrast to the trance-like lure of 100% efficiency and maximum performance, is there not something seductive in these instances of error, as it draws us off our path of intention, leading us astray, pulling us toward the unintended and unforeseen? In its breach of predictable variance, error gives expression to the erratic. As such, “noise” marks a species of error (abject information) that, by failing to signify within a system, simultaneously marks an opening, a poiesis. This asignifying poetics of “noise,” marked by these moments of errant information, simultaneously refuses and exceeds the cybernetic imperative to communicate. This poetics of noise is somewhat reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s discussion of Claude Shannon’s information theory in The Open Work. For Shannon, the gap between signal and selection marks a space of “equivocation,” what Warren Weaver calls “an undesirable … uncertainty about what the message was” (Shannon and Weaver 21). Eco is intrigued by Shannon’s insight that communication is always haunted by equivocation, the uncertainty that the message received was the signal sent (57-58). Roland Barthes also picks up on this idea in S/Z, as N. Katherine Hayles notes in her discussion of information theory and post-structuralism (46). For these writers, equivocation suggests a creative potential in entropy, in that noise is, in Weaver’s words, “spurious information” (Shannon and Weaver 19). Eco elaborates on Shannon and Weaver’s information theory by distinguishing between actual communication (the message sent) and its virtuality (the possible messages received). Eco argues, in effect, that communication reduces information in its desire to actualise signal at the expense of noise. In contrast, poetics generates information by sustaining the equivocation of the text (66-68). It is in this tension between capture and escape marked by the scapegoats of error and noise that I find a potential for a contemporary poetics within a global network society. Error reveals the degree to which everyday life plays itself out within this space of equivocation. As Stuart Moulthrop addressed nearly ten years ago, our frequent encounters with “Error 404” on the Web calls attention to “the importance of not-finding”: that error marks a path in its own right, and not merely a misstep. Without question, this poetics of noise runs contrary to a dominant, cybernetic ideology of efficiency and control. By paying attention to drift and lines of flight, such erratic behaviour finds little favour in a world increasingly defined by protocol and predictable results. But note how in its attempt to capture error within its regime of signs, the logic of maximum performance is not above recuperating the Augustinian evil of error as a form of “fortunate fall.” Even in the Six Sigma world of 100% efficiency, does not corporate R & D mythologise the creative moment that allows error to turn a profit? Post-It Notes® and Silly Putty® present two classic instances in which happenstance, mistake, and error mark a moment in which “thinking outside of the box” saves the day. Error marks a kind of deviation from—and within—this system: a “failure” that at the same time marks a potential, a virtuality. Error calls attention to its etymological roots, a going astray, a wandering from intended destinations. Error, as errant heading, suggests ways in which failure, mutation, spurious information, and unintended results provide creative openings and lines of flight that allow for a reconceptualisation of what can (or cannot) be realised within social and cultural forms. While noise marks a rupture of signification, it also operates within the framework of a cybernetic imperative that constantly attempts to capture the flows that threaten to escape its operational parameters. As networks become increasingly social, this logic of rationalisation and abstraction serves as a dialectical enclosure for an information-based culture industry. But error also suggests a strategy of misdirection, getting a result back other than what one expected, and in doing so turns the cybernetic imperative against itself. “Google-bombing,” for example, creates an informatic structure that plays off of the creative potential of equivocation. Here, error of a Manichean sort introduces noise into an information system to produce unexpected results. Until recently, typing the word “failure” into the search engine Google produced as a top response George Bush’s Webpage at www.whitehouse.gov. By building Webpages in which the text “failure” links to the U.S. President’s page, users “hack” Google’s search algorithm to produce an errant heading. The cybernetic imperative is turned against itself; this strategy of misdirection enacts a “fatal error” that evokes the logic of a system to create an opening for poeisis, play, and the unintended. Information networks, no longer secondary to higher order social and cultural formations, now define the function and logic of social space itself. This culture of circulation creates equivalences by way of a common currency of “information,” such that “viral” distribution defines a social event in its own right, regardless of the content of transmission. While a decade earlier theorists speculated on the emergence of a collective intelligence via global networks, the culture of circulation that has developed online would seem to indicate that “emergence” and circulation are self-justifying events. In the moment of equivocation—not so much beyond good and evil, but rather in the spaces between signal and noise—slippage, error, and misdirection suggest a moment of opening in contrast to the black hole closures of the cybernetic imperative. The violence of an informatic monoculture expresses itself in this moment of insistence that whatever circulates signifies, and that which cannot communicate must be silenced. In such an environment, we would do well to examine these failures to communicate, as well as the ways in which error and noise seduce us off course. In contrast to the terror of an eternal return of the actual, a poetics of noise suggests a virtuality of the network, an opening of the possible in an increasingly networked society. The articles in this issue of M/C Journal approach error from a range of critical and social perspectives. Essays address the ways in which error marks both a misstep and an opening. Throughout this issue, the authors address error as both abject and privileged instance in a society increasingly defined by information networks and systems of control. In our feature article, “Revealing Errors,” Benjamin Mako Hill explores how media theorists would benefit from closer attention to errors as “under-appreciated and under-utilised in their ability to reveal technology around us.” By allowing errors to communicate, he argues, we gain a perspective that makes invisible technologies all the more visible. As such, error provides a productive moment for both interpretive and critical interventions. Two essays in this issue look at the place of error and noise within the work of art. Rather than foregrounding a concept of “medium” that emphasises clear, unimpeded transmission, these authors explore the ways in which the errant and unintended provide for a productive aesthetic in its own right. Using Shannon’s information theory, and in particular his concept of equivocation, Su Ballard’s essay, “Information, Noise, and et al.’s ‘maintenance of social solidarity-instance 5,” explores the productive error of noise in the digital installation art of a New Zealand artists’ collective. Rather than carefully controlling the viewer’s experience, et al.’s installation places the viewer within a field of equivocation, in effect encouraging misreadings and unintended insertions. In a similar vein, Tim Barker’s essay, “Error, the Unforeseen, and the Emergent: The Error of Interactive Media Art” examines the productive error of digital art, both as an expression of artistic intent and as an emergent expression within the digital medium. This “glitch aesthetic” foregrounds the errant and uncontrollable in any work of art. In doing so, Barker argues, error also serves as a measure of the virtual—a field of potential that gestures toward the “unforeseen.” The virtuality of error provides a framework of sorts for two additional essays that, while separated considerably in subject matter, share similar theoretical concerns. Taking up the concept of an asignifying poetics of noise, Christopher Grant Ward’s essay, “Stock Images, Filler Content, and the Ambiguous Corporate Message” explores how the stock image industry presents a kind of culture of noise in its attempt to encourage equivocation rather than control semiotic signal. By producing images that are more virtual than actual, visual filler provides an all-too-familiar instance of equivocation as a field of potential and a Derridean citation of undecidibility. Adi Kuntsman takes a similar theoretic tack in “‘Error: No Such Entry’: Haunted Ethnographies of Online Archives.” Using a database retrieval error message, “no such entry,” Kuntsman reflects upon her ethnographic study of an online community of Russian-Israeli queer immigrants. Error messages, she argues, serve as informatic “hauntings”—erasures that speak of an online community’s complex relation to the construction and archiving of a collective history. In the case of a database retrieval error—as in the mailer-daemon’s notice of the “550” error—the failure of an address to respond to its hailing calls attention to a gap between query and expected response. This slippage in control is, as discussed above, and instance of an Augustinian error. But what of the Manichean—the intentional engagement in strategies of misdirection? In Kimberly Gregson’s “Bad Avatar! Griefing in Virtual Worlds,” she provides a taxonomy of aberrant behaviour in online gaming, in which players distort or subvert orderly play through acts that violate protocol. From the perspective of many a gamer, griefing serves no purpose other than annoyance, since it exploits the rules of play to disrupt play itself. Yet in “Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control,” Michael Dieter calls attention to “how the forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation.” The Amazon Noir project exploited vulnerabilities in Amazon.com’s Search Inside!™ feature to redistribute thousands of electronic texts for free through peer-to-peer networks. Dieter demonstrates how this “tactical media performance” challenged a cybernetic system of control by opening it up to new and ambiguous creative processes. Two of this issue’s pieces explore a specific error at the nexus of media and culture, and in keeping with Hill’s concept of “revealing errors,” use this “glitch” to lay bare dominant ideologies of media use. In her essay, “Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress,” Elizabeth Losh focuses on a highly public misreading of a Battlefield 2 fan video by experts from the Science Applications International Corporation in their testimony before Congress on digital terrorism. Losh argues that Congress’s willingness to give audience to this misreading is a revealing error in its own right, as it calls attention to the anxiety of experts and power brokers over the control and distribution of information. In a similar vein, in Yasmin Ibrahim’s essay, “The Emergence of Audience as Victims: The Issue of Trust in an Era of Phone Scandals,” explores the revealing error of interactive television gone wrong. Through an examination of recent BBC phone-in scandals, Ibrahim explores how failures—both technical and ethical—challenge an increasingly interactive audience’s sense of trust in the “reality” of mass media. Our final essay takes up the theme of mutation as genetic error. Martin Mantle’s essay, “‘Have You Tried Not Being a Mutant?’: Genetic Mutation and the Acquisition of Extra-ordinary Ability,” explores “normal” and “deviant” bodies as depicted in recent Hollywood retellings of comic book superhero tales. Error, he argues, while signalling the birth of superheroic abilities, marks a site of genetic anxiety in an informatic culture. Mutation as “error” marks the body as scapegoat, signalling all that exceeds normative control. In each of these essays, error, noise, deviation, and failure provide a context for analysis. In suggesting the potential for alternate, unintended outcomes, error marks a systematic misgiving of sorts—a creative potential with unpredictable consequences. As such, error—when given its space—provides an opening for artistic and critical interventions. References “Art Fry, Inventor of Post-It® Notes: ‘One Man’s Mistake is Another’s Inspiration.” InventHelp. 2004. 14 Oct. 2007 http://www.inventhelp.com/articles-for-inventors-art-fry.asp>. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil. Trans. James Benedict. New York: Verso, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3-7. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1987. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. “Googlebombing ‘Failure.’” Official Google Blog. 16 Sep. 2005. 14 Oct. 2007 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/googlebombing-failure.html>. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1999. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2006. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1984. Moulthrop, Stuart. “Error 404: Doubting the Web.” 2000. 14 Oct. 2007 http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/essays/404.html>. Poster, Mark. Information Please. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006. Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1949. “Silly Putty®.” Inventor of the Week. 3 Mar. 2003. 14 Oct. 2007 http://web.mit.edu/Invent/iow/sillyputty.html>. Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 1988. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Nunes, Mark. "Failure Notice." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Nunes, M. (Oct. 2007) "Failure Notice," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/00-editorial.php>.

Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it. (Virginia Woolf 38) From briefcases to drugs, and from boxing rings to tower blocks, this issue of M/C Journal turns its attention to the diverse materialities that make up our social worlds. Across a variety of empirical contexts, the collected papers employ objects, structures, and spaces as lenses onto corporeality, extending and unsettling habitual understandings of what a body is and does. By exploring everyday encounters among bodies and other materialities, the contributors elucidate the material processes through which human corporeality is enacted and imagined, produced and unmade.That materialities “tell stories” of bodies is an implicit tenet of embodied existence. In biomedical practice, for example, the thermometer assigns a value to a disease process which might already be felt, whereas the blood pressure cuff sets in motion a story of illness that is otherwise hidden or existentially absent. In so doing, such objects recast corporeality, shaping not only experiences of embodied life, but also the very matter of embodiment.Whilst recognising that objects are “companion[s] in life experience” (Turkle 5), this issue seeks to go beyond a sole focus on embodied experience, and explore the co-constitutive entanglements of embodiment and materiality. The collected papers examine how bodies and the material worlds around them are dialectically forged and shaped. By engaging with a specific object, structure, or space, each paper reflects on embodiment in ways that take account of its myriad material dynamics. BodiesHow to conceptualise the body and attend to its complex relationships with sociality, identity, and agency has been a central question in many recent strands of thinking across the humanities and social sciences (see Blackman; Shilling). From discussions of embodiment and personhood to an engagement with the affective and material turns, these strands have challenged theoretical emphases on body/mind dualisms that have historically informed much thinking about bodies in Western thought, turning the analytic focus towards the felt experience of embodied being.Through these explorations of embodiment, the body, as Csordas writes, has emerged as “the existential ground of culture” (135). Inspired by phenomenology, and particularly by the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Csordas has theorised the body as always-already inter-subjective. In constant dynamic interaction with self, others, and the environment, the body is both creative and created, constituting culture while being constituted by it. As such, bodies continuously materialise through sensory experiences of oneself and others, spaces and objects, such that the embodied self is at once both material and social.The concept of embodiment—as inter-subjective, dynamic, and experientially focussed—is central to this collection of papers. In using the term corporeality, we build on the concept of embodiment in order to interrogate the material makings of bodies. We attend to the ways in which objects, structures, and spaces extend into, and emanate from, embodied experiences and bodily imaginings. Being inherently inter-subjective, bodies are therefore not individual, clearly bounded entities. Rather, the body is an "infinitely malleable and highly unstable culturally constructed product” (Shilling 78), produced, shaped, and negated by political and social processes. Studies of professional practice—for example, in medicine—have shown how the body is assembled through culturally specific, sometimes contingent, arrangements of knowledges and practices (Berg and Mol). Such arrangements serve to make the body inherently “multiple” (Mol) as well as mutable.A further challenge to entrenched notions of singularity and boundedness has been offered by the “affective turn” (Halley and Clough) in the humanities and social sciences (see also Gregg and Siegworth; Massumi; Stewart). Affect theory is concerned with the felt experiences that comprise and shape our being-in-the-world. It problematises the discursive boundaries among emotive and visceral, cognitive and sensory, experiences. In so doing, the affective turn has sought to theorise inter-subjectivity by engaging with the ways in which bodily capacities arise in relation to other materialities, contexts, and “force-relations” (Seigworth and Gregg 4). In attending to affect, emphasis is placed on the unfinishedness of both human and non-human bodies, showing these to be “perpetual[ly] becoming (always becoming otherwise)” (3, italics in original). Affect theory thereby elucidates that a body is “as much outside itself as in itself” and is “webbed in its relations” (3).ObjectsIn parallel to the “affective turn,” a “material turn” across the social sciences has attended to “corporeality as a practical and efficacious series of emergent capacities” which “reveals both the materiality of agency and agentic properties inherent in nature itself” (Coole and Frost 20). This renewed attention to the “stuff” (Miller) of human and non-human environments and bodies has complemented, but also challenged, constructivist theorisations of social life that tend to privilege discourse over materiality. Engaging with the “evocative objects” (Turkle) of everyday life has thereby challenged any assumed distinction between material and social processes. The material turn has, instead, sought to take account of “active processes of materialization of which embodied humans are an integral part, rather than the monotonous repetitions of dead matter from which human subjects are apart” (Coole and Frost 8).Key to this material turn has been a recognition that matter is not lumpen or inert; rather, it is processual, emergent, and always relational. From Bergson, through Deleuze and Guattari, to Bennett and Barad, a focus on the “vitality” of matter has drawn questions about the agency of the animate and inanimate to the fore. Engaging with the agentic capacities of the objects that surround us, the “material turn” recognises human agency as always embedded in networks of human and non-human actors, all of whom shape and reshape each other. This is an idea influentially articulated in Actor-Network-Theory (Latour).In an exposition of Actor-Network-Theory, Latour writes: “Scallops make the fisherman do things just as nets placed in the ocean lure the scallops into attaching themselves to the nets and just as data collectors bring together fishermen and scallops in oceanography” (107, italics in original). Humans, non-human animals, objects, and spaces are thus always already entangled, their capacities realised and their movements motivated, directed, and moulded by one another in generative processes of responsive action.Embodied Objects: The IssueAt the intersections of a constructivist and materialist analysis, Alison Bartlett’s paper draws our attention to the ways in which “retro masculinity is materialised and embodied as both a set of values and a set of objects” in Nancy Meyers’s film The Intern. Bartlett engages with the business suit, the briefcase, and the handkerchief that adorn Ben the intern, played by Robert De Niro. Arguing that his “senior white male body” is framed by the depoliticised fetishisation of these objects, Bartlett elucidates how they construct, reinforce, or interrupt the gaze of others. The dynamics of the gaze are also the focus of Anita Howarth’s analysis of food banks in the UK. Howarth suggests that the material spaces of food banks, with their queues of people in dire need, make hunger visible. In so doing, food banks draw hunger from the hidden depths of biological intimacy into public view. Howarth thus calls attention to the ways in which individual bodies may be caught up in circulating cultural and political discursive regimes, in this case ones that define poverty and deservingness. Discursive entanglements also echo through Alexandra Littaye’s paper. Like Bartlett, Littaye focusses on the construction and performance of gender. Autoethnographically reflecting on her experiences as a boxer, Littaye challenges the cultural gendering of boxing in discourse and regulation. To unsettle this gendering, Littaye explores how being punched in the face by male opponents evolved into an experience of camaraderie and respect. She contends that the boxing ring is a unique space in which violence can break down definitions of gendered embodiment.Through the changing meaning of such encounters between another’s hand and the mutable surfaces of her face, Littaye charts how her “body boundaries were profoundly reconfigured” within the space of the boxing ring. This analysis highlights material transformations that bodies undergo—agentially or unagentially—in moments of encounter with other materialities, which is a key theme of the issue. Such material transformation is brought into sharp relief by Fay Dennis’s exploration of drug use, where ways of being emerge through the embodied entanglements of personhood and diamorphine, as the drug both offers and reconfigures bodily boundaries. Dennis draws on an interview with Mya, who has lived experience of drug use, and addiction treatment, in London, UK. Her analysis parses Mya’s discursive construction of “becoming normal” through the everyday use of drugs, highlighting how drugs are implicated in creating Mya’s construction of a “normal” embodied self as a less vulnerable, more productive, being-in-the-world.Moments of material transformation, however, can also incite experiences of embodied extremes. This is elucidated by the issue’s feature paper, in which Roy Brockington and Nela Cicmil offer an autoethnographic study of architectural objects. Focussing on two Brutalist housing developments in London, UK, they write that they “feel small and quite squashable in comparison” to the buildings they traverse. They suggest that the effects of walking within one of these vast concrete entities can be likened to having eaten the cake or drunk the potion from Alice in Wonderland (Carroll). Like the boxing ring and diamorphine, the buildings “shape the physicality of the bodies interacting within them,” as Brockington and Cicmil put it.That objects, spaces, and structures are therefore intrinsic to, rather than set apart from, the dynamic processes through which human bodies are made or unmade ripples through this collection of papers in diverse ways. While Dennis’s paper focusses on the potentiality of body/object encounters to set in motion mutual processes of becoming, an interest in the vulnerabilities of such processes is shared across the papers. Glimpsed in Howarth’s, as well as in Brockington and Cicmil’s discussions, this vulnerability comes to the fore in Bessie Dernikos and Cathlin Goulding’s analysis of teacher evaluations as textual objects. Drawing on their own experiences of teaching at high school and college levels, Dernikos and Goulding analyse the ways in which teacher evaluations are “anything but dead and lifeless;” they explore how evaluations painfully intervene in or interrupt corporeality, as the words on the page “sink deeply into [one’s] skin.” These words thereby enter into and impress upon bodies, both viscerally and emotionally, their affective power unveiling the agency that imbues a lit screen or a scribbled page.Yet, importantly, this issue also demonstrates how bodies actively forge the objects, spaces, and environments they encounter. Paola Esposito’s paper registers the press of bodies on material worlds by exploring the collective act of walking with golden thread, a project that has since come to be entitled “Walking Threads.” Writing that the thread becomes caught up in “the bumpy path, trees, wind, and passers-by,” Esposito explores how these intensities and forms register on the moving collective of bodies, just as those bodies also press into, and leave traces on, the world around them. That diverse materialities thereby come to be imbued with, or perhaps haunted by, the material and affective traces of (other) bodies, is also shown by the metonymic resonance between Littaye’s face and her coach’s pad: each bears the marks of another’s punch. Likewise, in Bartlett’s analysis of The Intern, Ben is described as having “shaped the building where the floor dips over in the corner” due to the heavy printers he used in his previous, analogue era, job.This sense of the marks or fragments left by the human form perhaps emerges most resonantly in Michael Gantley and James Carney’s paper. Exploring mortuary practices in archaeological context, Gantley and Carney trace the symbolic imprint of culture on the body, and of the body on (material) culture; their paper shows how concepts of the dead body are informed by cultural anxieties and technologies, which in turn shape death rituals. This discussion thereby draws attention to the material, even molecular, traces left by bodies, long after those bodies have ceased to be of substance. The (im)material intermingling of human and non-human bodies that this highlights is also invoked, albeit in a more affective way, by Chris Stover’s analysis of improvisational musical spaces. Through a discussion of “musical-objects-as-bodies,” Stover shows how each performer leaves an imprint on the musical bodies that emerge from transient moments of performance. Writing that “improvised music is a more fruitful starting place for thinking about embodiment and the co-constitutive relationship between performer and sound,” Stover suggests that performers’ bodies and the music “unfold” together. In so doing, he approaches the subject of bodies beyond the human, probing the blurred intersections among human and non-human (im)materialities.Across the issue, then, the contributors challenge any neat distinction between bodies and objects, showing how diverse materialities “become” together, to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari. This blurring is key to Gantley and Carney’s paper. They write that “in post-mortem rituals, the body—formerly the manipulator of objects—becomes itself the object that is manipulated.” Likewise, Esposito argues that “we generally think of objects and bodies as belonging to different domains—the inanimate and the animate, the lifeless and the living.” Her paper shares with the others a desire to illuminate the transient, situated, and often vulnerable processes through which bodies and (other) materialities are co-produced. Or, as Stover puts it, this issue “problematise[s] where one body stops and the next begins.”Thus, together, the papers explore the many dimensions and materialities of embodiment. In writing corporeality, the contributors engage with a range of theories and various empirical contexts, to interrogate the material dynamics through which bodies processually come into being. The issue thereby problematises taken-for-granted distinctions between bodies and objects. The corporeality that emerges from the collected discussions is striking in its relational and dynamic constitution, in the porosity of (imagined) boundaries between self, space, subjects, and objects. As the papers suggest, corporeal being is realised through and within continuously changing relations among the visceral, affective, and material. Such relations not only make individual bodies, but also implicate socio-political and ecological processes that materialise in structures, technologies, and lived experiences. We offer corporeality, then, as a framework to illuminate the otherwise hidden, politically contingent, becomings of embodied beings. ReferencesBarad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2003): 801–831.Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010.Berg, Marc, and Annemarie Mol (eds.) Differences in Medicine: Unraveling Practices, Techniques, and Bodies. Durham, NC: Duke, 1998.Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. London: Henry Holt and Company, 1911Blackman, Lisa. The Body: Key Concepts. London: Berg, 2008.Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. London: Macmillan, 1865.Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Eds. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Durham, NC: Duke, 2010. 1-46.Csordas, Thomas J. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8.2 (1993): 135-156.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2004.Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory Seigworth (eds.) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke, 2010.Halley, Jean, and Patricia Ticineto Clough. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Massumi, Brian. The Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962Miller, Daniel. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.Mol, Anemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002.Seigworth, Gregory, and Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth. Durham, NC: Duke, 2010. 1-28.Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. Nottingham: SAGE Publications, 2012.Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.Turkle, Sherry. “The Things That Matter.” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Ed. Sherry Turkle. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007.Woolf, Virginia. Street Haunting. London: Penguin Books, 2005.

The past two decades have seen the publication of at least half a dozen books that consider the part that fairs, circuses, sideshows and freakshows play in the continuing cultural labour to define, categorise and control the human body, including Robert Bogdan’s Freakshow, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies, and her edited collection Freakery, and Rachel Adams’s Sideshow USA. These writers cast the freakshow as a theatre of culture, worthy of critical attention precisely because of the ways in which it has provided a popular forum for staging, solidifying and transforming ideas about the body and bodily difference, and because of its prominence in the project of modernity (Garland-Thomson “From Wonder to Error” 2-13). They point to the theatrical mechanisms by which the freakshow maps cultural anxieties about corporeal difference across ‘suitable’ bodies. For, as Bogdan (3) says, being a freak is far more than a fact of biology. The freak personae that populate the Western cultural imaginary—the fat lady, the bearded lady, the hermaphrodite and the geek—can only be produced by a performative isolation, manipulation and exaggeration of the peculiar characteristics of particular human bodies. These peculiarities have to be made explicit, in Rebecca Schneider’s (1) terms; the horror-inducing tropes of the savage, the bestial and the monstrous have to be cast across supposedly suitable and compliant flesh. The scopic mechanisms of the freakshow as a theatre, as a cabinet of corporeal curiosities in which spectators are excited, amazed and edified by the spectacle of the extraordinary body, thus support the specific forms of seeing and looking by which freak bodies are produced. It would, however, be a mistake to suggest that the titillating threat of this face-to-face encounter with the Levinasian other fully destabilises the space between signifier and signified, between the specific body and the symbolic framework in which it sits. In a somewhat paradoxical cultural manoeuvre, the ableist, sexist and racist symbolic frameworks of the freakshow unfold according to what Deleuze and Guattari (178) would call a logic of sameness. The roles, relationships and representational mechanisms of the freakshow—including the ‘talkers’ that frame the spectator’s engagement with the extraordinary body of the freak—in fact function to delineate “degrees of deviance” (178) or difference from an illusory bodily norm. So configured, the monstrous corporeality of the freak is also monstrously familiar, and is made more so by the freak spectacle’s frequent emphasis on the ways in which non-normative bodies accommodate basic functions such as grooming and eating. In such incarnations, the scenography and iconography of the freakshow in fact draws spectators into performative (mis)recognitions that manage the difference of other bodies by positioning them along a continuum that confirms the stability of the symbolic order, and the centrality of the able, white, male self in this symbolic order. Singular, specific, extraordinary bodies are subject to what might, in a Levinasian paradigm, be called the violence of categorisation and comprehension (“Is Ontology Fundamental?” 9). The circumstances of the encounter reduce the radical, unreadable difference of the other, transporting them “into the horizon of knowledge” (“Transcendence and Height” 12), and transforming them into something that serves the dominant cultural logic. In this sense, Petra Kuppers suggests, “the psychic effects of the freak spectacle have destabilizing effects, assaulting the boundaries of firm knowledge about self, but only to strengthen them again in cathartic effect” (45). By casting traits they abhor across the freak body (Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies 55-56), spectators become complicit in this abhorrence; comforted, cajoled and strangely pleasured by a sense of distance from what they desire not to be. The subversive potential of the prodigious body evaporates (Garland-Thomson “From Wonder to Error” 3; Extraordinary Bodies 78). An evaporation more fully effected, writers on the freakshow explain, as the discursive construct of the freak was drawn into the sphere of medical spectacle in the late nineteenth century. As the symbolic framework for understanding disabled bodies ‘advances’ from the freak, the monster and the mutant to the medical specimen (Garland-Thomson “From Wonder to Error” 13; Extraordinary Bodies 70, 78-80; Synder and Mitchell 370-373; Stephens 492), the cultural trajectory away from extraordinary bodies with the capacity to expand the classes and categories of the human is complete. The medical profession finally fulfils the cultural compulsion to abstract peculiar bodily characteristics into symptoms, and, as Foucault says in The Birth of the Clinic, these symptoms become surveillable, and controllable, within an objective schema of human biology. Physical differences and idiosyncrasies are “enclosed within the singularity of the patient, in that region of ‘subjective symptoms’ that—for the doctor—defines not only the mode of knowledge, but the world of objects to be known” (xi). The freak body becomes no more than an example of human misfortune, to be examined, categorised and cared for by medical experts behind closed doors, and the freakshow fades from the stage of popular culture (Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies 70). There can, of course, be no denying the need to protect people with disabilities from exploitation at the service of a cultural fetish that enacts a compulsion to define and control bodily difference. However, recent debates in disability, cultural and performance studies have been characterised by the desire to reconsider the freakshow as a site for contesting some of the cultural logics it enacts. Theorists like Synder and Mitchell argue that medical discourse “disarms the [disabled] body of its volatile potency” (378), in the process denying people with disabilities a potentially interesting site to contest the cultural logics by which their bodies are defined. The debate begins with Bogdan’s discussion of the ways in which well-meaning disability activists may, in their desire to protect people with disabilities from exploitative practices and producers, have overlooked the fact that freakshows provided people with disabilities a degree of independence and freedom otherwise impossible (280-81). After all, as disabled performer Mat Fraser says in his documentary Born Freak, The Victorian marvels found fame and some fortune, and this actually raised the visibility, even the acceptability, of disabled people in general during a time when you could be attacked on the streets just for looking different. These disabled performers found independence and commanded respect.… If I had been born a hundred years ago, given the alternatives of—what? living the life of a village monster or idiot or being poked or prodded for cataloguing by medical types—there’s no doubt about it, I would have wanted to be in show business. (Born Freak) This question of agency extends to discussion of whether disabled performers like Fraser can, by consciously appropriating the figures, symbols and scenography of the freakshow, start to deconstruct the mechanisms by which this contested sphere of cultural practice has historically defined them, confronting spectators with their own complicity in the construction of the freak. In her analysis of Coney Island’s Sideshows by the Seashore, Elizabeth Stephens reflects on this contemporary sideshow’s capacity to reclaim the political currency of the freak. For Stephens, sideshows are sites in which norms about the body, its limits and capabilities, are theatricalized and transformed into spectacle, but, in which, for this very reason, they can also be contested. Non-normative bodies are not simply exhibited or put on display on the sideshow stage, but are rather performed as the unstable—indeed, destabilising—product of the dynamic interrelationship between performer, audience and theatrical space. (486) Theorists like Stephens (487) point to disabled performers who manipulate the scopic and discursive mechanisms of the sideshow, street performance and circus, setting them against more or less personal accounts of the way their bodies have historically been seen, to disrupt the modes of subjection the freak spectacle makes possible and precipitate a crisis in prescribed categories of meaning. Stephens (485-498) writes of Mat Fraser, who reperformed the historical personal of the short-armed Sealo the Sealboy, and Jennifer Miller, who reperformed the persona of Zenobia the bearded lady, at Sideshows by the Seashore. Sharon Mazer (257-276) writes of Katy Dierlam, who donned a Dolly Dimples babydoll dress to reperform the clichéd fat lady figure Helon Melon, again at Sideshows by the Seashore, counterposing Melon’s monstrous obesity with comments affirming her body’s potent humanity, and quotes from feminist scholars and artists such as Suzy Orbach, Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle. Sharon Synder and David Mitchell (383) write of Mary Duffy, who reperforms the armless figure of the Venus de Milo. These practices constitute performative interventions into the cultural sphere, aligned with a broader set of contemporary performance practices which contest the symbolic frameworks by which racial and gender characteristics are displayed on the popular stage in similar ways. Their confrontational performance strategies recall, for instance, the work of American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who reappropriates colonial and pop cultural figurations of the racialised body in works like Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit…, in which he and Coco Fusco cast themselves as two caged savages. In such works, Gómez-Peña and his collaborators use parallel performance strategies to engage the “spectacle of the Other-as-freak” (297). “The idea is to exaggerate the features of fear and desire in the Anglo imagination and ‘spectacularize’ our ‘extreme identities’, so to speak, with the clear understanding that these identities have been invented by the surgery of the global media” (297) Gómez-Peña says. These remobilisations of the monstrous operate within the paradigm of the explicit, a term Schneider coined a decade ago to describe the performance art practices of women who write the animalised, sexualised characteristics with which they are symbolically aligned across their own corporeally ‘suitable’ bodies, replaying their culturally assigned identities “with a voluble, ‘in your face’ vengeance” (100), “a literal vengeance” (109). Such practices reclaim the destablising potential of the freak spectacle, collapsing, complicating or exploding the space between signifier and signified to show that the freak is a discursive construct (22-23), and thus for Schneider, following Benjamin, threatening the whole symbolic system with collapse (2, 6). By positioning their bodies as a ground that manifestly fails to ground the reality they represent, these performers play with the idea that the reality of the freak is really just part of the order of representation. There is nothing behind it, nothing beyond it, nothing up the magician’s sleeve—identity is but a sideshow hall of mirrors in which the ‘blow off’ is always a big disappointment. Bodies marked by disability are not commodified, or even clearly visible, in the Western capitalist scopic economy in the same way as Schneider’s women performers. Nevertheless, disabled performers still use related strategies to reclaim a space for what Schneider calls a postmodern politics of transgression (4), exposing “the sedimented layers of signification themselves” (21), rather than establishing “an originary, true or redemptive body” (21) beneath. The contestational logic of these modes of practice notwithstanding, Stephens (486) notes that performers still typically cite a certain ambivalence about their potential. There are, after all, specific risks for people with disabilities working in this paradigm that are not fully drawn out in the broader debate about critical reappropriation of racist and sexist imagery in performance art. Mobilisations of the freak persona are complicated by the performer’s own corporeal ‘suitability’ to that persona, by the familiar theatrical mechanisms of recognition and reception (which can remain undertheorised in meta-level considerations of the political currency of the freakshow in disability and cultural—rather than performance—studies), and by a dominant cultural discourse that insists on configuring disability as an individual problem detached from the broader sphere of identity politics (Sandahl 598-99). In other words, the territory that still needs to be addressed in this emergent field of practice is the ethics of reception, and the risk of spectatorial (mis)recognitions that reduce the political potency of the freak spectacle. The main risk, of course, is that mobilisations of the freak persona may still be read by spectators as part of the phenomenon they are trying to challenge, the critical counterpositions failing to register, or failing to disrupt fully the familiar scopic and discursive framework. More problematically, the counterpositions themselves may be reduced by spectators to a rhetorical device that distances them from the corporeal reality of the encounter with the other, enabling them to interpret or explain the experience of disability as a personal experience by which an individual comes to accommodate their problems. Whilst the human desire to construct narrative and psychological contexts for traumatic experience cannot be denied, Carrie Sandahl (583) notes that there is a risk that the encounter with the disabled body will be interpreted as part of the broader phenomenon Synder and Mitchell describe in Narrative Prosthesis, in which disability is little more than a metaphor for the problems people have to get past in life. In this interpretative paradigm, disability enters a discursive and theoretical terrain that fails to engage fully the lived experience of the other. Perhaps most problematically, mobilisations of the freak persona may be read as one more manifestation of the distinctively postmodern desire to break free from the constraints of culturally condoned identity categories. This desire finds expression in the increasingly prevalent cultural phenomenon of voluntary enfreakment, in which people voluntarily differentiate, or queer their own experience of self. As Fraser says when he finds out that a company of able-bodied freaks is competing with him for audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, “[t]he irony is, these days, everyone is trying to get in on our act” (Born Freak). In a brave new world where everybody wants to be a freak, activist artists “must be watchful”, Gómez-Peña warns, “for we can easily get lost in the funhouse of virtual mirrors, epistemological inversions, and distorted perceptions” (288). The reclamation of disability as a positive metaphor for a more dispersed set of human differences in the spectacle of daily life (287-98), and in theoretical figurations of feminist philosophy that favour the grotesque, the monstrous and the mechanical (Haraway Simians, Cyborgs and Women; Braidotti Nomadic Subjects), raises questions for Garland-Thomson (“Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” 9) and Sandahl (581-83). If “disability serves as a master trope for difference,” Sandahl says, then anybody can adopt it “…to serve as a metaphor expressing their own outsider status, alienation and alterity, not necessarily the social, economic and political concerns of actual disabled people” (583). The work of disabled performers can disappear into a wider sphere of self-differentiated identities, which threatens to withdraw ‘disability’ as a politically useful category around which a distinctive group of people can generate an activist politics. To negotiate these risks, disabled performers need to work somewhere between a specific, minoritarian politics and a universal, majoritarian politics, as Sedgwick describes in Epistemology of the Closet (91; cf. Garland-Thompson “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” 5; cf. Stephens 493). Performers need to make their experience of otherness explicit, so that their corporeal specificity is not abstracted into a symbolic system that serves the dominant cultural logic. Performers need to contextualise this experience in social terms, so that it is not isolated from the sphere of identity politics. But performers cannot always afford to allow the freak persona to become one more manifestation of the myriad idiosyncratic identities that circulate in the postmodern popular imaginary. It is by negotiating these risks that performers encourage spectators to experience—if only fleetingly, and provisionally—a relationship to the other that is characterised not by generalisation, domestication and containment (Levinas “Substitution” 80, 88), but by respect for the other’s radical alterity, by vulnerability, and, in Derrida’s reformation of Levinasian ethics, by a singular, reciprocal and undecidable responsibility towards the other (Derrida 60-70). This is what Levinas would call an ethical relationship, in which the other exists, but as an excess, a class of being that can be recognised but never seized by comprehension (“Is Ontology Fundamental?” 7, “Transcendence and Height” 17), or sublimated as a category of, or complement to, the same (13, “Meaning and Sense” 51). Mat Fraser’s mobilisation of Sealo the Sealboy is one of the most engaging examples of the way disabled performers negotiate the complexities of this terrain. On his website, Fraser says he has always been aware of the power of confrontational presentations of his own body, and has found live forms that blur the boundaries between freakshow, sideshow and conventional theatre the best forums for “the more brutal and confrontational aspect of my investigation into disability’s difficult interface with mainstream cultural concerns” (MatFraser.co.uk). Fraser’s appropriation of Sealo was born of a fascination with the historical figure of Stanley Berent. “Stanley Berent was an American freakshow entertainer from the 1940s who looked like me,” Fraser says. “He had phocomelia. That’s the medical term for my condition. It literally means seal-like limbs. Berent’s stage name was Sealo the Sealboy” (Born Freak). Fraser first restaged Sealo after a challenge from Dick Zigun, founder of the modern Sideshows by the Seashore. He restaged Berant’s act, focused on Berant’s ability to do basic things like shaving and sawing wood with his deformed hands, for the sideshow’s audiences. While Fraser had fun playing the character on stage, he says he felt a particular discomfort playing the character on the bally platform used to pull punters into the sideshow from the street outside. “There is no powerful dynamic there,” Fraser laments. “It’s just ‘come look at the freak’” (Born Freak). Accordingly, after a season at Sideshows by the Seashore, Fraser readapted the experience as a stage play, Sealboy: Freak, in which Sealo is counterposed with the character Tam, “a modern disabled actor struggling to be seen as more than a freak” (Born Freak). This shift in the theatrical mechanisms by which he stages the freak gives Fraser the power to draw contemporary, politically correct spectators at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival into the position of sideshow gawkers, confronting them with their own fascination with his body. A potent example is a post-audition scene, in which Tam says I read this book once that said that the mainstream will only see a disabled performer in the same way they view a performing seal. Very clever, but just mimicry. No. No it can’t be like that anymore. We’ve all moved on. People are no longer more fascinated by how I do things, rather than what I say. I am an actor, not a fucking freak. (Born Freak) But, as Tam says this, he rolls a joint, and spectators are indeed wrapped up in how he does it, hardly attending to what he says. What is interesting about Fraser’s engagement with Sealo in Sealboy: Freak is the way he works with a complicated—even contradictory—range of presentational strategies. Fraser’s performance becomes explicit, expositional and estranging by turns. At times, he collapses his own identity into that of the freak, the figure so stark, so recognisable, so much more harshly drawn than its real-life referent, that it becomes a simulacrum (cf. Baudrillard 253-282), exceeding and escaping the complications of the human corporeality beneath it. Fraser allows spectators to inhabit the horror, and the humour, his disabled identity has historically provoked, reengaging the reactions they hide in everyday life. And, perhaps, if they are an educated audience at the Fringe, applauding themselves for their own ability to comprehend the freak, and the crudity of sideshow display. However, self-congratulatory comprehension of the freak persona is interrupted by the discomforting encounter with Tam, suspending—if only provisionally—spectators’ ability to reconcile this reaction with their credentials as a politically correct audience. What a closer look at mobilisations of the freak in performances such as Fraser’s demonstrates is that manipulating the theatrical mechanisms of the stage, and their potential to rapidly restructure engagement with the extraordinary body, enables performers to negotiate the risk of (mis)recognition embedded in the face-to-face encounter between self and spectator. So configured, the stage can become a site for contesting the cultural logic by which the disabled body has historically been defined. It can challenge spectators to experience—if fleetingly—the uncertainties of the face-to-face encounter with the extraordinary body, acknowledging this body’s specificity, without immediately being able to abstract, domesticate or abdicate responsibility for it—or abdicate responsibility for their own reaction to it. Whilst spectators’ willingness to reflect further on their complicity in the construction of the other remains an open and individual question, these theatrical manipulations can at least increase the chance that the cathartic effect of the encounter with the so-called freak will be disrupted or deferred. References Adams, Rachel. Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chigaco Press, 2001. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precision of Simulacra”. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1984, 253-282. Born Freak. Dir. Paul Sapin. Written Paul Sapin and Mat Fraser. 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Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Extreme States: Issues of Scale—Political, Performative, Emotional”, the Australasian Association for Drama Theatre and Performance Studies Annual Conference 2007.