Journal articles on the topic 'Emergency gate closure'

In July 1987, a section of the southwest wall of Sault Ste. Marie Lock failed during a locking operation when a portion of limestone facing, 60 m by 8 m, separated from the rubble backing wall. Engineering investigations resulted in the selection of the Recreational Lock Option, involving either downsizing the lock chamber within the existing lock or constructing a new lock as the most viable solutions. A Dry Dock Option, where the lock would be used to store craft during the winter months, was also considered. However, this option was abandoned during the course of testing. The engineering investigations also revealed that the emergency swing dam, constructed upstream of the existing lock to protect the system should the lock gates be damaged or carried away (as happened in 1909), was in poor condition and required rehabilitation in the order of over $0.5 million. A stop log emergency system was proposed as an alternative safety device designed to stop the flow of water through the canal in the event of gate failure. Physical hydraulic model studies were carried out to evaluate the feasibility of using an emergency stop log system. The tests showed that stop logs constructed with solid horizontal web plates top and bottom result in unacceptably high hydraulic downpull forces. Open truss stop logs can be deployed to stop the flow of water through the canal in the event of gate failure. The follower should also be constructed as an open truss such that the areas of steel exposed to the flow at the top and bottom of the follower are minimized. Hydraulic uplift forces that could prevent closure can be reduced by increasing the space between the stop log and the follower. Physical hydraulic model studies of the lock filling-emptying systems are described. The first and preferred option consists of downsizing the existing lock and retaining part of the existing wooden culverts and emptying system, if possible. A new filling port, filling valves, and supply culvert would be constructed upstream. In the event that the existing wooden culverts are found to be unserviceable, a second option was considered. This second option would be to fill in the wooden culverts and then construct a new filling port, filling valves, and supply culvert that would discharge into the lock through the upstream breast wall just above floor level. The existing emptying system would be retained or rebuilt. The third option, if both the filling and discharge culverts have to be condemned, would be to build a new lock. The results of the hydraulic model studies carried out to explore these three options are described.Key words: emergency closure, stop logs, follower, canal, lock, downpull, uplift, crane capacity, filling-emptying system, culverts.

The concept of emergence exists in many fields such as Philosophy, Information Science, and Biology. With respect to the modern video game, emergence can potentially manifest as emergent narrative and/or gameplay. In this paper, the authors engage in a critical discussion about what it means for an interactive video game to have emergence. The authors frame the discussion of emergence as a close critical look at the games Papers, Please and Gone Home. From these analyses, the authors propose a concept of “Player-side emergence in games,” in which emergence in the form of narrative is expressible and observable in games which rely not on the game software itself, but also upon the complex system of the human mind for reconstruction of the game experience and a subsequent expression of emergence. The authors contend that such an emergent design consideration is potentially useful for designers who are trying to address the trade-off of Ludo-Narrative Dissonance.

The regulation of sluice gates（control gates, dividing gates and exit sluices） in water delivery canal is very important and complicated especially in emergency conditions. Most of existing achievements are about canal control theory or based on normal operation condition, lack of researches about emergency joint dispatch under accident conditions and its internal mechanism. In this paper, a mathematical model for emergency dispatch of a long water delivery canal was established to study gate control modes. Some typical operating conditions were selected as study cases and some indicators which could affect safety and economical efficiency of project operation like water level, return water, gate action times were selected as measuring indices. The simulation calculations about different gate control modes of control gates and exit sluices（control speed, open and close time, action frequency, etc）were carried out, through changing gate group control modes to simulate disturbances in emergency regulating process, then track the unsteady flow hydraulic response of channel, analyze the variation of hydraulic parameter, ascertain the relationship between disturbances and channel hydraulic response, summarize the induction mechanism at last. The results can enrich canal gate emergency control theory and improve operation safety and economical efficiency. They can also provide scientific guidances for operation of water diversion projects to enhance emergency disposal ability, and it has strong academic and practical value.

For the sudden upstream water interruption in the canal of an emergency, the existing research method guiding gate control is mainly feed-forward compensation algorithm, under which algorithm the interruption of water diversions is the upstream first and then the downstream. In order to achieve a more flexible water demand for different water diversions purpose, this study used PI water level difference feedback control algorithm to control the gate under this condition. The research results showed that the PI water level difference feedback control algorithm can make the change trend of water level of multi-pool close and reduce the rate of water level decline, and thus prolong the continuous delivery time of pools with offtake delivery demand under sudden upstream water interruption. Moreover, the PI water level difference method has good robustness and can be applied to more complex combinations of inflow and delivery changes. This study provides another way of thinking for the regulation of the gate in the case of sudden upstream water interruption.

Purpose High head gates are commonly used in hydropower plants for flow regulation and emergence closure. Hydrodynamic downpull can be a critical parameter in design of the lifting mechanism. The purpose of this paper is to show that a simplified two-dimensional (2D) computational fluid dynamics solution can be used in the prediction of the downpull force on the gate lip by comparison of computed results to experimentally measured data. Design/methodology/approach In this study, ANSYS FLUENT CFD software was used to obtain 2D numerical solution for the flow field around a generic gate model located in a power intake structure which was previously used in an experimental study. Description of the flow domain, computational grid resolution, requirements on setting appropriate boundary conditions and methodology in describing downpull coefficient are discussed. Total number of 245 simulations for variable gate lip geometry and gate openings were run. The downpull coefficient evaluated from the computed pressure field as function of gate opening and lip angle are compared with the experimental results. Findings The computed downpull coefficient agrees well with the previous experimental results, except one gate with small lip angle where a separation bubble forms along the lip, which is responsible from this deviation. It is observed that three-dimensional (3D) effects are confined to the large gate openings where downpull is minimum or even reversed. Research limitations/implications In large gate openings, three dimensionality of the flow around gate slots plays an important role and departure from 2D solutions become more pronounced. In that case, one might need to perform a 3D solution instead. Practical implications This paper presents a very fast and accurate way to predict downpull force on high head gates in the absence of experimental data. Originality/value An extensive amount of simulations are run within the scope of this study. It is shown that knowing its limitations, 2D numerical models can be used to calculate downpull for a wide range of gate openings without the need of expensive experimental models.

<p><em>The 6</em><em>th </em><em>century of Islam witnessed the first emergence of the new class of ‘ulama that tended to “close” the gate of ijtihad. By the closure of the gate of ijtihad I do not mean that the gate of ijtihad can indeed be closed. At some point of its development, the legal system of various schools of thought of Islam has finally been established, the resultant consequence of which being that some ‘ulama felt that ijtihad can only be done on elaborating further the views of the previous ‘ulama and not on proposing original views on particular legal issue of Islam. Al-Suyuti emerged during the era where legal system of Islam has already been established. He claims interestingly, that he is a mujtahid mutlaq, that is, some one who has the absolute and independent authority to do ijtihad and to extrapolate rules from the legal sources of Islam. This comes as a sharp contrast to the general belief at the time that no mujtahid mutlaq may any longer emerge. Al-Suyuti wrote al-Radd to legitimize his claim; a claim that inevitably prompted a strong</em></p><em>objection from his fellow legalists. Although his claim was not received with enthusiasm from the public, al-Suyuti has nonetheless made a valuable contribution in the field of the study of ijtihad. His works are applauded as a great evaluation on the subject. On various occasions, al-Suyuti wrote that the Muslim intellectuals should not be satisfied with the views of the previous ‘ulama (taqlid) and that they should instead exercise their intellectual acumen via ijtihad.</em>

ABSTRACT Determining whether to close a commercial, recreational, or subsistence fishery after an oil spill is a difficult emergency decision that must be made quickly by California state authorities. California state law now states that fisheries affected by a spill must be closed within 24 hours of a spill of one barrel (42 gallons) or more of oil, unless it can be determined that the actual risk is non-existent or has been mitigated. However, assessing the amount of oil truly spilled, the status of spilled oil containment versus spreading rate, and determining which fisheries are in the potential path of oil are all confounding factors. While the goal of the law is to protect people from consuming fish or shellfish that exceed established petroleum contaminant thresholds, caution is used to make sure fisheries are not closed unnecessarily. The California fishery closure protocol articulates the separate, specific, and coordinated roles and responsibilities of the Department of Fish and Game (DFG) and the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA). These protocols are internal to the two involved California state agencies, and are separate from any fishery closure decisions that might be made by the National Marine Fisheries Service for spills in federal waters.

Because of the continuous burst of emergency events (EEs) recently, emergency decision making (EDM) has become an active research topic due to its crucial role in relieving and reducing various losses and damages (property, lives, environment, etc.) caused by EEs. Current EDM studies based on prospect theory (PT) have considered decision maker’s (DM’s) psychological behavior, which is very important in the EDM process because it affects DM’s decision behavior directly, particularly under the uncertainty decision environment. However, those studies neglected an important fact that different emergency situations should be handled by different measures to show the pertinence and effectiveness of the emergency response in the real world, which has been taken into consideration in EDM studies based on game theory (GT). Different behavior experiments show that DMs usually have limited rationality when involved in risk and an uncertain decision environment, in which their psychological behavior has distinct impacts on their decision choice and behavior. Nevertheless, the existing studies of EDM based on GT build on an assumption that DMs are totally rational; however, it is obvious that such an assumption is unreasonable and far from the real-world situation. Motivated by these limitations pointed out previously, this study proposes a novel EDM method combining GT and PT that considers not only the DM’s psychological behavior, but also takes different situations’ handling for EEs into account, which is closer to the EDM problems in reality. An example and comparison with other methods are provided to demonstrate the validity and rationality of the proposed method for coping with real-world EDM problems.

Abstract:Wittgenstein remarks that “What belongs to a language game is a whole culture”, and that describing the language games in which the “words we call expressions of aesthetic judgement” are used implies describing “the culture of a period” (LA 1966: 8). Without aiming at a full reconstruction, the paper addresses the gradual emergence of the close conceptual connection between “language game” and “culture” in Wittgenstein’s manuscripts. The apparently obvious idea that “language game” and “form of life” (or “culture”) belong together or even coincide was originally missing. The paper picks out few episodes from Wittgenstein’s philosophical development. The first chapter shows that the topic of cultural diversity emerges in Wittgenstein’s reception of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, but still plays only a limited role in his first criticism of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. The second chapter discusses the emergence of the term “language game” and establishes that Wittgenstein’s first language games do not yet imply something like an “anthropological view”. Real and imaginary “peoples” and “tribes” make their first appearance in remarks that ascribe a “primitive” arithmetic to them (chapter 3). Finally, with an eye to the possible influence of Sraffa and Malinowski, the fourth section shows how the Brown Book conceives translation as holistic cultural comparison.

The emergence of gesture-based computing and inexpensive gesture recognition technology such as the Kinect have opened doors for a new generation of educational games. Gesture based-based interfaces make it possible to provide user interfaces that are more nature and closer to the tasks being carried out, and helping students that learn best through movement (compared to audio and vision). For younger students, motion interfaces can stimulate development of motor skills and let students be physically active during the school day. In this article, an evaluation is presented of a Kinect educational game where students learn to recycle using body gestures. The focus of the evaluation was to investigate potential advantages using gesture-interfaces in educational games, how the game affected the students' engagement, motivation and learning, and if there were any social preferences for playing the game. The results show that elementary school students get highly motivated and engaged playing a Kinect recycling game. The students also report that they learn from playing this game and prefer such game-based learning to traditional lectures. Finally, the students preferred playing this game as a multi-player game, where the boys preferred to play competitive while the girls preferred playing collaboratively.

In an artificial society where agents repeatedly interact with one another, effective coordination among agents is generally a challenge. This is especially true when the participating agents are self-interested, and that there is no central authority to coordinate, and direct communication or negotiation are not possible. Recently, the problem was studied in a paper by Hao and Leung, where a new repeated game mechanism for modeling multi-agent interactions as well as a new reinforcement learning based agent learning method were proposed. In particular, the game mechanism differs from traditional repeated games in that the agents are anonymous, and the agents interact with randomly chosen opponents during each iteration. Their learning mechanism allows agents to coordinate without negotiations. The initial results had been promising. However, extended simulation also reveals that the outcomes are not stable in the long run in some cases, as the high level of cooperation is eventually not sustainable. In this work, we revisit he problem and propose a new learning mechanism as follows. First, we propose an enhanced Q-learning-based framework that allows the agents to better capture both the individual and social utilities that they have learned through observations. Second, we propose a new concept of \social attitude" for determining the action of the agents throughout the game. Simulation results reveal that this approach can achieve higher social utility, including close-to-optimal results in some scenarios, and more importantly, the results are sustainable with social norms emerging.

Forestry markets are in a constant process of change of their rules of the game. This is due to the fact that preferences, scarcities and technological means are in a steady process of development. However, this process of change in the rules of the game does not only take place, as often assumed, on the political level, but it is a co-evolutionary process of political, administrative and market governance and emergence. The so-called institutional entrepreneurs play a major role in this process of change. The present paper takes a closer look at the activities of those entrepreneurs and their positive and negative effects, and develops an analytical framework, based on the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework. Current examples of institutional change in the forestry sector are used to illustrate our arguments.

SUMMARY Voltage-gated Na+ channels play important functional roles in the generation of electrical excitability in most vertebrate and invertebrate species. These channels are members of a superfamily that includes voltage-gated K+, voltage-gated Ca2+ and cyclic-nucleotide-gated channels. There are nine genes encoding voltage-gated Na+ channels in mammals, with a tenth homologous gene that has not been shown to encode a functional channel. Other vertebrate and invertebrate species have a smaller number of Na+ channel genes. The mammalian genes can be classified into five branches in a phylogenetic tree, and they are localized on four chromosomes. Four of the branches representing the four chromosomal locations probably resulted from the chromosomal duplications that led to the four Hox gene clusters. These duplications occurred close to the emergence of the first vertebrates. The fifth branch probably evolved from a separate ancestral Na+ channel gene. There are two branches in the invertebrate tree, although members of only one of those branches have been demonstrated to encode functional voltage-gated Na+ channels. It is possible that the other branch may have diverged, so that its members do not represent true voltage-gated Na+ channels. Vertebrate and invertebrate Na+ channels appear to be derived from a single primordial channel that subsequently evolved independently in the two lineages.

This study is an attempt to close the loop between simulation and reality. Many industries are of the opinion that a simulation does not really predict the actual process and is only a colorful plot for presentation. An accurate simulation can save cost by a multitude of ways like material savings, process optimization, cycle time reduction, improved quality of parts and so on. A validation of the simulation in a real time scenario will instil necessary confidence in the accuracy of the simulation study thereby closing the loop between simulation and reality In the present study, the mold flow analysis is conducted for the back plate of LED emergency light with the help of Autodesk moldflow simulation software to generate the gate location, feed system building, cooling channel wizard, fill time and to check warpage and then the result is verified by superimposing the scan data of the physical part which is scanned in Steinbichler Blue Light 3D Scanner and CAD model in Geomagic verify.

This paper looks at UFO religions, and considers the major factors that have played a role in the emergence and development of these alternative religious movements - from reports of close encounters of the third and fourth kinds and science fiction production, to alternative ideological elaborations of contacts with extraterrestrial worlds. It looks at the basic theological premises, iconography, activities, and, more generally, cultural precepts of several UFO religious movements (the Aetherius Society, Heaven's Gate, Unarius, the Raelian movement). Attention is drawn to the religious connotations of UFO discourse, and its motifs of "otherness" and "supernaturalness". In addition, the relation between the roles and themes promoted within the contactee movement and the accounts of persons claiming to have been abducted by aliens is explored. Finally, the paper highlights the key existential questions and identifies the themes and motifs with which UFO religionists present themselves to the public.

IntroductionThe terms catastrophe and disaster have been frequently heard worldwide due to situations like earthquakes, floods and events provoked by man as the September 11th and Anthrax attack. Catastrophe means all situations where material and human resources available in a healthcare facility are not enough to assist a large number of victims admitted at the same time. Accreditation requires having a plan to manage effectively those situations, assessing safely as much victims as possible.ObjectiveTo describe the catastrophe plan and its management in a private hospital.MethodologyHospital Albert Einstein is located close to a huge soccer game stadium and near to the State Government Hall. This was the reason to have a plan focusing on casualties with a large number of victims. The literature was revised to choose the triage methodology. Triage to identify the priority of patients' assessment based on their condition, possibility of treatment and determining discharge for those without visible risk. Simulation was implemented, followed by debriefing to register lessons learned.ResultsAn algorithm was developed with a crisis center and defining care and support areas in the organizations to manage the victims at Emergency Room and triage field. The plan was effectively deflagrated twice: 47 victims from a bus accident and 25 from a policeman strike. Debriefing was done in all opportunities and communication is the main issue; 15 simulations have been done for training purpose, with specific goals.ConclusionHospital is a high risk environment itself for an internal or external incident depending on its localization. A disaster plan is necessary to improve everyone safety, to organize resources, to respond effectively to such situations and take the organization back to regular operation as soon as possible. Simulations are essential to guarantee staff competency and organization support and response to adverse situations.

While globalization is largely theorized in terms of trans-border flows, this article suggests an exploratory sociological framework for analyzing globalization as consisting of systemic processes of closure and containment. The suggested framework points at the emergence of a global mobility regime that actively seeks to contain social movement both within and across borders. The mobility regime is theorized as premised upon a pervasive “paradigm of suspicion” that conflates the perceived threats of crime, immigration, and terrorism, thus constituting a conceptual blueprint for the organization of global risk-management strategies. The article draws on multiple examples, singling out some elementary forms of the mobility regime, emphasizing the sociological affinity between guarded borders on the one hand and gated communities on the other. In particular, the article aims at theorizing the translation of the paradigm of suspicion into actual technologies of social screening designed to police the mobility of those social elements that are deemed to belong to suspect social categories. Specifically, the article points at biosocial profiling as an increasingly dominant technology of intervention. Biosocial profiling, in turn, is theorized in juxtaposition to other modalities of power, namely, legal and disciplinary measures.

Nitrogen-fixing bacteria (rhizobia) have symbiotic relationships with legumes: they inhabit legume root nodules and convert atmospheric nitrogen to a plant available form in exchange for photosynthates. Generally, this symbiotic process called biological nitrogen fixation is mutually beneficial to both plants and bacteria. Using this mechanism symbionts acquire alternative sources of hard-to-reach individual growth resources (carbon for rhizobia and nitrogen for plants). However, not all rhizobia provide fixed nitrogen to the host plant honestly: some of them can behave as a kind of cheaters. Unlimited cheating rhizobia strains propagation may potentially disrupt the symbiotic relationships. This raises the question of plant–rhizobia mutualism evolutionary stability. This paper presents the results of the legume–rhizobia interactions investigation implemented as AnyLogic agent-based models. Three modifications of interaction model ("one plant – one strain of rhizobia", "one plant – several strains of rhizobia", "one plant with root nitrogen uptake – several strains of rhizobia") in the form of evolutionary games in two populations (rhizobia and plants) are considered by the authors. Simulated natural selection is driven by populations heterogeneity: each agent has its own cooperation parameter which determines its strategy in evolutionary game. In the set of numerical experiments the following results were obtained. Simulated populations tend to become homogeneous with cooperation parameter value close to the theoretically optimal. Such degenerated structure of populations is evolutionarily stable and maximizes the total growth of the entire symbiotic system. Thus, the logic of symbionts co-development simulation itself prevents the emergence of parasitic strategies and automatically provides rational and mutually beneficial partnership sustainability. This remains true in the early stages of ontogenesis or under the assumption that life cycle duration is unlimited.

Latin American countries were the first in the developing world on the path of economic integration. In the region, back in the early 1960’s were created the integration groupings, with the aim of strengthening trade ties between the neighboring States and their position in the world economy. As a result, the integration process has been going on for about six decades, transforming the economies of Latin America. Integration largely determines the main vectors of development of foreign trade relations, affects the direction of cross-border investment flows, strengthens corporate relationships and the emergence of various forms of production cooperation, stimulates scientific and technological cooperation, “pushes” the countries of the region towards closer political interaction. At the same time Latin American integration appears a complex and contradictory phenomenon, its history has known periods of high activity and long pauses, reversals, attempts by individual States to revise the rules of the game, receive unilateral benefits. In recent years, the integration process in Latin America acquires new features and characteristics, increasing its importance for the social and economic future of the region.

At first this book looks like another eye-catching, fear-mongering title aboutIslam. Are these books promoted by profit-hungry publishers or by underpaidfretful academics? Or has Islam become fair game for a wider unrestrainedacademia replacing the Orientalist school with newer analytical tools? Somepreliminary remarks, or a contextualization, might be useful here.Whatever its “resurgent” form, Islam is presenting something of an enigmaticchallenge for all. From the bazaars of the East to the sidewalks of the West,it refuses to lie down or go away. Attempts to discount it, ignore it or even suppressit have not succeeded. This hauntingly recurring phenomenon (p. 1) needsto be relabeled and reassessed. But the doubt lingers that representing it as “terrorism,”“theocracy,” “obscurantism,” “fundamentalism,” or “religious extremism”has muddied waters even more. Feeding popular fears with such preconfiguredterminology has neither satiated curiosity, quelled fears, nor broughtanyone closer to the truth.Compounding the picture is the “location” of the writers of such works: theworld-view, epistemology, discourse theory, or narrative framework fromwhich they approach Islam. The much-heralded objectivity of academia issacrosanct no more. Relativity, subjectivity, and the actor’s point of view are invogue. Old Orientalist views and definitions of the non-Occidental world arebeing overwhelmed by an array of (neo-Orientalist) analyses from a variety ofdiscourse perspectives.These analytical tools, even if applied with some success to their own societiesand disciplines this past century, don’t seem to have much of a shelf lifewhile some are less effective than others: positivist assertions fast give way torealist or inteqretivist ones; modernist perspectives to postmodemist ones; andstructuralist interpretations to poststructuralist ones. And when applied to Islamand Muslim societies, the results of these approaches can be bewildering (asshown by Rushdie’s Satanic Verses), and so can their effects (as shown byHuntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations prognostication).From its side, the Muslim world is all the more perplexed at the persistenceof such stereotypical labeling and analyses. Generally unfamiliar with these“new” tools, their reaction is either to ignore this “demonology of fundamentalism”(p. 16) or to interpret it as another of the West’s conspiracies against Islam.Sometimes it results in outright hostility (as shown by Khomeini’s fatwa andBradford’s book burning) or crude attempts at redress in reciprocal terms (as inAkbar Ahmed‘s Postmodernity and Islam). To western experts, such reactionscan only seem woefully inadequate.Furthermore, the apparently monolithic scenario of western experts with theirwestern critiques of the non-West is complicated by the emerging presence ofnonwestern migrants and their offspring on the westem academic scene. Taken ...

One of the main features of Burle Marx’s biography is the idea that he discovered the aesthetic qualities of tropical flora that came to characterize his famous new approach to landscape design during a juvenile visit to Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Gardens, in the 1920s. Having been born [1909] in São Paulo, he is supposed not to have had previous contact with tropical spontaneous richness, thanks to the Europeanized taste that prevailed there. As any young member of the local elites with a disposition towards an artistic career, his family trip to Europe was an essential condition for close contact with the avant-garde tendencies of early 20th century. Ever since the 19th century, that pattern of contact of Brazilian prospective artists with ‘civilization’ had entailed the emergence of different trends of ‘nativist’ renderings of metropolitan taste. In such a context, the peculiar aspect of RBM’s European début was the ‘discovery’ of tropical nature and not only that of the formal, ‘universal’ language of high culture. The discussion of what is involved in this game of mirrors is the aim of this paper.

The article touches on the issues of humanization of modern technologically advanced education, analyzes the synergy factors of information technology and spiritually-oriented pedagogy to prepare a new generation of humanist managers. For this, the role of narrative and storytelling in the process of creating educational computer games that form the competence of making managerial decisions is determined. An analysis of the knowledge structure of educational games on the basis of the proposed methodology for developing their plot shows the need to balance the processes of formalization of educational processes in the game, preserving narrative by referring to works of folk art, classical fiction as sources of implicit knowledge. The threats of formalization and automation of modern education are described. It has been found that “relay” learning is superficial, it does not contribute to the formation of critical and systemic thinking. As a result, this leads to the emergence of a generation of techno-button-managers. It is indicated that the preservation and effective translation of deep narratives containing educational humanistic meanings is a priority for designers of educational video games. The components of the game by D. Gray, game history and pedagogical strategies in the MDA model are compared, which made it possible to clarify the meaning of the terms “narrative”, “plot”, “storytelling”, to determine the place of their greatest actualization in the process of creating educational computer games. Considering the general tendency of the techno-environment to reduce, optimize and formalize, the task of preserving tacit knowledge, correct translation of it into over-formalized knowledge (morals, formulas) through effective storytelling, embodied in "active learning" of computer games, is crucial. In this case, the narrative plays the role of a base of spiritual-oriented knowledge, and with the help of storytelling it balances the spiritual-ethical meanings and educational results of a business video game. The meaning of the terms "narratives" and "storytelling" is considered, the Ukrainian-language terms-analogues are proposed. The importance of adhering to the principle of non-linear game plot for increasing the effectiveness of business games is revealed. The close relationship of business games with case studies, project- and problem-based training was emphasized. The correlation of narratology and ludology of the game is shown in the matrix of transformation of professional competencies and procedures for making managerial decisions into the rules of the game, their metaphorization and translation into script phrases. It is shown that the gamification of training exercises and situations is a synergy of creative and information-analytical work with databases and game design project documents. The core of educational game design is the balance of narrative and storytelling, explicit and implicit knowledge. This balance is achieved through effective collaboration and communication between all participants in the educational and business processes. Creation of virtual learning environments in which a future leader has an opportunity to formulate and comprehensively develop the competencies of business communication and managerial decision-making in situations of uncertainty and ethical dilemmas is a promising area of digital education.

En los últimos años hemos visto una tendencia hacia un cambio en los conceptos y metodologías de entrenamiento de fútbol. El paradigma tradicional ha dado paso a nuevas propuestas que entienden el juego desde un plano holístico. Esta ruptura ha supuesto la aparición de nuevas formas de concebir el entrenamiento, emergiendo métodos de entrenamiento que se acercan a la especificidad del deporte. A día de hoy, contamos con diversos métodos de trabajo, entre los cuales podríamos citar el microciclo estructurado y la periodización táctica como lo que mayor interés y repercusión han suscitado debido a su utilización por entrenadores de éxito. En este sentido, la periodización táctica se fundamenta en la concepción del modelo de juego como elemento fundamental de donde parten los diferentes patrones de juego que deben ser reproducidos posteriormente en el entrenamiento. Debido a la falta de propuesta prácticas que manifiesten pautas claras para el desarrollo de un modelo de juego, en este trabajo trataremos de llevar a cabo un diseño propio a partir de i) un análisis conceptual sobre el modelo de juego, ii) identificación de los elementos que este debe de contener y iii) desarrollo práctico de cada uno de los elementos que sirva como hoja de ruta para aquellos profesionales que quieran profundizar en esta forma de concebir el entrenamiento en fútbol.Abstract. In recent years, we have identified a trend towards a change in the concepts and methodologies of soccer training. The traditional paradigm has given way to new proposals that understand the game from a holistic perspective. This break has led to the emergence of new ways of conceiving training. These training methods are close to each sport’s specificity. One of the methods that has raised more interest, due to its repercussions in professional soccer thanks to successful coaches, is the Tactical Periodization. This idea is based on the conception of game model as a fundamental element from which different game patterns grow, each of them needing to be reproduced later in the training. On account of a lack of practical proposals showing clear guidelines for the development of a game model, we try to present a personal design starting from i) a conceptual analysis of the game model, ii) the identification of the elements that this model needs to show, and iii) a practical development of each element, which serves as route map for those professionals who wish to delve into this training approach in soccer.

Background Keeping up motivation to learn when socially isolated during a pandemic can be challenging. In medical schools, the COVID-19 pandemic required a complete switch to e-learning without any direct patient contact despite early reports showing that medical students preferred face-to-face teaching in clinical setting. We designed close to real-life patient e-learning modules to transmit competency-based learning contents to medical students and evaluated their responses about their experience. Methods Weekly e-learning cases covering a 10-week leading symptom-based curriculum were designed by a team of medical students and physicians. The internal medicine curriculum (HeiCuMed) at the Heidelberg University Medical School is a mandatory part of clinical medical education in the 6th or 7th semester. Case-design was based on routine patient encounters and covered different clinical settings: preclinical emergency medicine, in-patient and out-patient care and follow-up. Individual cases were evaluated online immediately after finishing the respective case. The whole module was assessed at the end of the semester. Free-text answers were analyzed with MaxQDa following Mayring`s principles of qualitative content analyses. Results N = 198 students (57.6% female, 42.4% male) participated and 1252 individual case evaluations (between 49.5% and 82.5% per case) and 51 end-of-term evaluations (25.8% of students) were collected. Students highly appreciated the offer to apply their clinical knowledge in presented patient cases. Aspects of clinical context, interactivity, game-like interface and embedded learning opportunities of the cases motivated students to engage with the asynchronously presented learning materials and work through the cases. Conclusions Solving and interpreting e-learning cases close to real-life settings promoted students’ motivation during the COVID-19 pandemic and may partially have compensated for missing bedside teaching opportunities.

[First paragraph]Zouk: World Music in the West lndies. JOCELYNE GuiLBAULT (with GAGE AVERILL, ÉDOUARD BENOIT & GREGORY RABESS). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. xxv + 279 pp. and compact disk. (Cloth US$ 55.00, Paper US$ 27.75) Calypso Calaloo: Early Carnival Music in Trinidad. DONALD R. HlLL. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. xvi + 344 pp. and compact disk. (Cloth US$ 49.95, Paper US$ 24.95) Calypso & Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad. GORDON ROHLEHR. Port of Spain: Gordon Rohlehr, 1990. x + 613 pp. (Paper US$ 40.00)In 1983, from my Hstening post in Cayenne, the southernmost extension of the French Caribbean, I reported that "popular musicians in the Lesser Antilles are in the process of breathing life into new musical varieties blending soka, cadence, and reggae" (Bilby 1985:211). Little did I know that what I was describing was the sudden emergence, at that very moment, of an entirely new music in French Guiana's fellow Départements d'Outre-Mer to the north, Martinique and Guadeloupe. Down in Cayenne, which has always had close ties to the French Antilles, there was a feeling in the air that some fresh and invigorating cultural trend was about to burst forth. Even in the Maroon villages of the French Guianese interior, where I relocated in early 1984, the excitement was palpable.

Accurate crop type maps play an important role in food security due to their widespread applicability. Optical time series data (TSD) have proven to be significant for crop type mapping. However, filling in missing information due to clouds in optical imagery is always needed, which will increase the workload and the risk of error transmission, especially for imagery with high spatial resolution. The development of optical imagery with high temporal and spatial resolution and the emergence of deep learning algorithms provide solutions to this problem. Although the one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and gate recurrent unit (GRU) models have been used to classify crop types in previous studies, their ability to identify crop types using optical TSD with missing information needs to be further explored due to their different mechanisms for handling invalid values in TSD. In this research, we designed two groups of experiments to explore the performances and characteristics of the 1D CNN, LSTM, GRU, LSTM-CNN, and GRU-CNN models for crop type mapping using unfilled Sentinel-2 (Sentinel-2) TSD and to discover the differences between unfilled and filled Sentinel-2 TSD based on the same algorithm. A case study was conducted in Hengshui City, China, of which 70.3% is farmland. The results showed that the 1D CNN, LSTM-CNN, and GRU-CNN models achieved acceptable classification accuracies (above 85%) using unfilled TSD, even though the total missing rate of the sample values was 43.5%; these accuracies were higher and more stable than those obtained using filled TSD. Furthermore, the models recalled more samples on crop types with small parcels when using unfilled TSD. Although LSTM and GRU models did not attain accuracies as high as the other three models using unfilled TSD, their results were almost close to those with filled TSD. This research showed that crop types could be identified by deep learning features in Sentinel-2 dense time series images with missing information due to clouds or cloud shadows randomly, which avoided spending a lot of time on missing information reconstruction.

Purpose This paper aims to evaluate the students’ perception of their learning experiences concerning serious gaming and gamification instructions and determines whether they were motivated enough and engaged during the educative process in a resource-poor context. Moreover, the study evaluated the impact of interactive instructional environment outcomes in terms of students’ perceptions of the learning catalysed by gamified systems, particularly in enhancing attitude change coupled with knowledge acquisition. Design/methodology/approach This study used a qualitative research design technique to collect the data. A total of 108 first year secondary school students participated in a sexual health literacy course that lasted for a five-week learning period. Using a cluster-sampling technique, three classes were randomly assigned to serious gaming, gamification and teacher-centred instructions. Individual face-to-face interviews were used to assess students’ perceives required satisfaction with three instructions. Data were audio-recorded, and coding analysis was used using NVivo software facilitated qualitative data analysis. Findings The results show that serious gaming and gamification instructions trumped the traditional teacher-centred instruction method. While intervention students were all positive about the serious gaming and gamification instructions, non-intervention students were negative about conservative teacher-centered learning whose limited interactivity also undermined learning relative to the two innovative interventions. Research limitations/implications As a justification to limit face-to-face classes, this study may be useful during an emergency phenomenon, including the current situation of amid COVID-19. The implementation of serious gaming and gamification as remotely instructional options could be among the measures to protect educational communities through reducing close-proximity, and eventually, control contamination and the spread of viruses. Originality/value The application of serious gaming and game elements should not be conceptualised as universal but context-specific. This study shows that particularism is essential to optimise the results in terms of coming up with a specific design based on the scope of evaluation for positive results and develop an intervention that will work, especially in the resource-poor context of the developing world.

Traditionally the processes of globalization and the issues of world politics related to hegemony are studied separately in the scientific literature. In this article the authors propose the synthesis of both of these approaches based on the model of transactional and innovative economy spatially structured as a system of “global gateways”. The globalization is conceived in the article as a process of reinforcement of network connections of different parts of the globe. The network is distributed unevenly around the world. The increase of globalization processes stimulates the strengthening of the network interactions and saturation of it with resources. The decline of the globalization we are witnessing at the moment results in the weakening of network relations. Spatial heterogeneity of globalization produces inequality in resource distribution on social as well as regional and country level. Due to this fact the system of global economy based on these gateways requires the stability of political institutes. In the 19th-20th centuries the system of maintenance of global stability (known in IR as hegemonic stability) was established. Increasing globalization provides the effective interaction between economic and political spheres. Declining globalization produces a gap between gateways’ demands for political stability and a hegemon’s ability to provide it. Recently the USA’s abilities as global hegemon have shrunk dramatically in relative terms as well as American electorate’s willingness to bear the costs of hegemony. Washington is unable to maintain stable functioning of “the rules of the game” neither separately, nor with its allies. This situation may be described as “the crisis of US-centric globalization”. The crisis of globalization relates to decline of international regimes, rise of uncertainty and conflicts on all levels of world politics. Presumably, it’s a long-term process. And at the end it may cause the establishment of new political form of economic globalization (e.g. transition to the model of hegemony of a group of superpowers, a scenario mostly close to generally accepted in Russia idea of multi-polar world), or emergence of a new hegemon (e.g. China).

The article examines the historical prerequisites for the formation of the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism, analyzes its main provisions, and its impact on the foreign and domestic policy of the independent Ukrainian state. The Ukrainian national idea was formed in the late 19th first half of the 20th century. It was based on three fundamental provisions: the Russian state is the enemy of Ukrainian independence and therefore in the interests of Ukraine its weakening, and even better disintegration; the Russian population in Ukraine is a very serious obstacle to the formation of an independent Ukrainian state, and therefore it should be assimilated; the independence of the Ukrainian state can be guaranteed only by close cooperation with European countries, which will help it in defending its independence in the confrontation with “Asian” Russia, as Ukraine is a European country, part of Europe. On the basis of these ideological provisions it was supposed to form a Ukrainian identity. As the article emphasizes, the national Ukrainian idea in this form contains a very large charge of conflict with Russia, inevitably leads to a clash of their geopolitical interests. The proclamation of Ukraine’s independence in 1991 meant the emergence of a second Russian state, whose population had to be transformed into a Ukrainian nation. The ruling political elite of the country with the support of the Ukrainian intelligentsia as the ideological basis for the construction of the Ukrainian nation state and the Ukrainian nation adopted the basic tenets of the Ukrainian national idea, which was formed in the first half of the 20th century and put them at the basis of its foreign and domestic policy. All Ukrainian Presidents, though with varying degrees of determination and consistency, implemented them. Kiev’s policy of strengthening the country’s independence implied independence from Russia, which is seen as the main threat to the national security of the young Ukrainian state. The article states that the presidential elections of 2019 and the defeat of P. Poroshenko showed that the majority of Ukrainian society does not accept such an identity. They need an identity on other principles, which in Ukraine have not yet developed and are not visible. So far, there are no political forces, political party, that could formulate them and put them in the basis of statehood and nation-building. The current President V. Zelensky in his policy is guided by old ideas and visions. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the formation of the New Independent States, Russia did not immediately realize the scale of the challenges and threats to the country’s security from Ukraine. Sobering occurred under the influence of the “Orange Revolution”, when Kiev abandoned the policy of multivectors and began to pursue a pronounced pro-Western policy. At the same time, Moscow begins to realize that it will not be able to enter the community of democratic states on its own terms, and begins to position itself as an independent center of power, opposing the West. Strengthening its positions in this confrontation, it connects with the consolidation of the post-Soviet states around itself within the framework of integration projects, first EvrAzES, and then the EAEU. Moscow linked their successful implementation with Ukraine’s participation in their implementation, because it believed that without it these projects would not be effective. However, Kiev did not want to support these plans, focusing “on entering Europe”. According to the author, from that moment the foreign policy strategies of both countries began to differ in principle and the two countries from strategic partners turned into geopolitical rivals. The West supported Kiev in its pro-Western foreign policy, considering it as an element of deterrence of Russia’s great-power ambitions. Both Moscow and the West tried to drag Kiev to their side. The coup d’etat carried out by nationalist forces in Kiev in February 2014 seemed to mean the West’s victory in this peculiar tug-of-war. In response, Moscow annexed Crimea and supported the struggle of the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR against the Kiev government. As a result, Ukraine has embarked on a tough confrontation with Russia, seeing it as an aggressor and an enemy. The author of the article comes to the conclusion, that overcoming the confrontation between them will take a lot of time and effort and for the foreseeable historical perspective the relations between them will be based on the principles of the zero-sum game. In these circumstances, there is no need to talk about partnership and cooperation, as it is a question of relations between two hostile States. The most that can be expected is to maintain a “cold peace” between them. But such a state can be achieved only if relations between Russia and the West are normalized, and a new Cold War is eliminated.

For unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to be successfully deployed and integrated within the national airspace, it is imperative that they possess the capability to effectively complete their missions without compromising the safety of other aircraft, as well as persons and property on the ground. This necessity creates a natural requirement for UAS that can respondto uncertain environmental conditions and emergent failures in real-time, with robustness and resilience close enough to those of manned systems. We introduce a system that meets this requirement with the design of a real-time onboard system health management (SHM) capability to continuously monitor sensors, software, and hardware components. This system can detect and diagnose failures and violations of safety or performance rules during the flight of a UAS. Our approach to SHM is three-pronged, providing: (1) real-time monitoring of sensor and software signals; (2) signal analysis, preprocessing, and advanced on-the-fly temporal and Bayesian probabilistic fault diagnosis; and (3) an unobtrusive, lightweight, read-only, low-power realization using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) that avoids overburdening limited computing resources or costly re-certification of flight software. We call this approach rt-R2U2, a name derived from its requirements. Our implementation provides a novel approach of combining modular building blocks, integrating responsive runtime monitoring of temporal logic system safety requirements with model-based diagnosis and Bayesian network-based probabilistic analysis. We demonstrate this approach using actual flight data from theNASA Swift UAS.

Protected areas such as the Kruger National Park (KNP) face many management challenges, of which ensuring a healthy flow of rivers into the park is one of the most important. Although previous management policies isolated the KNP from its neighbours, this position has changed as the KNP seeks to negotiate a respected ‘place’ for water and conservation in a competitive environment. A major catalyst for this re-orientation has been the response from the KNP to the growing water crisis where its position needed to be seen within the wider catchment and policy context in South Africa. This paper presents an overview of the transforming management practices of the KNP in a changing political, socio-economic and environmental context, through the lens of water resources. We show that the KNP management model moved beyond inward-looking, isolationist policies to adopt responsivity to major change factors. The new approach was applied first in the sphere of river management in the KNP after which it spread to other domains such as fire and game management. It explicitly incorporates an experimental–reflexive orientation and considers management as a process of learningby- doing. This paper strives to review the transformation since the onset of explicit adaptive management of these rivers. The development of a new stewardship, based on a stakeholdercentred vision and on learning-focused management, has been a main achievement for the KNP. A closer partnership between researchers, managers and field staff, supported with buyin and co-learning, has led to a management framework based on a clear vision informed by stakeholder involvement, an objectives hierarchy, a scoping of management options, a monitoring system and a reflective evaluation process with feedback loops. Although developed through a focus on rivers, the framework can be embraced for the management of ecosystems as a whole.Conservation implications: The explicit adoption of strategic adaptive management for the rivers entering the KNP has had considerable implications not only with regard to management practice within the park, but also for the relationships with neighbours. This has also meant setting and implementing new goals and priorities with managers and staff.

Abstract A 61 years old female with history of rheumatic arthritis and Sjogren Syndrom resorted to the emergency room in December of 2017 for pleuritic chest pain and dyspnea. An angioCT showed a luminal filling defect at the left inferior pulmonary artery with extension to the segmentar vessels. A pulmonary embolism (PE) was diagnosed and the patient was admitted. The study performed, including transthoracic echocardiogram (TTE) was unremarkable. Patient was discharged after 15 days treated with a direct oral anticoagulant. Six months later she returned to the emergency room with the same complaints. A new angioCT showed reduction of the previous luminal filling defects, but a focal defect in the filling of the right atrium (RA) was visualized. A TTE showed a mass (17 mm) at the RA with apparent origin at the superior vena cava. A presumptive diagnostic of atrial thrombus was done and patient started therapy with vitamin K antagonist. Three months later, TTE was repeated and the mass was still present (19 mm). Five months later, the mass was still visualized at TTE (17 mm). A transesophagic echocardiogram confirmed the presence of a RA mass with 30x22 mm of major dimensions, with close relation with the interatrial septum suggestive of a tumor. A cardiac magnetic resonance revealed a RA mass without vascularization. A cardiac gated CT showed at the RA a low density nodular image of 26x22 mm at the axial plan, with an extension of 28 mm, adjacent to the posterior wall of the RA. After contrast administration, some areas did not had significant captation while some did, aspects compatible with a "pseudoenhancement" aspect. A positron tomography showed mild to moderate FDG captation at the RA. Meanwhile, patient was under anticoagulation for 2 years with no regression of the mass. For this reason, patient was oriented to cardiac surgery. The mass was resected and the histology revealed a RA myxoma. Cardiac masses can be due to tumour, thrombus or vegetation. In this case, the mass was highly considered to be a thrombus due to the presence of multiple risk factors: prothrombotic disease and pulmonary embolism. However, the fact that the mass did not reduce with therapy raised suspicion of other diagnosis. Although rare, myxomas can be found in the RA, and should be included in the differential diagnosis of right-sided intracardiac masses. Although myxomas are histologically benign, potential for embolization and sudden death make surgical resection a priority. Its diagnosis has now increased with the use of echocardiogradiography, and has made it the main modality for the evaluation of myxomas. PE is the most dreaded and devastating complication of right-sided myxoma. In cases of RA myxomas, clinically evident PE events are uncommon. Nevertheless, there have been reports of embolization of thrombi or tumor fragments into the pulmonary vessels in cases of right in approximately 3.2% of myxoma patients.

Introduction Ever-enduring advancements in science and technology promise to offer solutions to problems or simply to make life a bit easier. However, not every advancement has only positive effects, but can also have undesired, negative ramifications. This article will take a closer look at Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DXHR), a dystopian video game which promises to put players in the position of deciding whether the science of human enhancement is a way to try to play God, or whether it enables us “to become the Gods we’ve always been striving to be” (Eidos Montreal, “Deus Ex: Human Revolution”). In this article I will argue that DXHR creates a space in which players can virtually witness future technologies for human performance enhancement without the need to alter their own bodies. DXHR is special particularly in two respects: first, the developers have achieved a high credibility and scientific realism of the enhancement technologies depicted in the game which can be described as being “diegetic prototypes” (Kirby, “The Future Is Now ” 43); second, the game directly invites players to reflect upon the impact and morality of human enhancement. It does so through a story in line with the cyberpunk genre, which envisions not only the potential benefits of an emergent technology, but has an even stronger focus on the negative contingencies. The game and its developers foresee a near-future society that is split into two fractions due to human enhancement technologies which come in the form of neuro-implants and mechanical prosthetics; and they foresee a near-future setting in which people are socially and economically forced to undergo enhancement surgery in order to keep up with the augmented competition. DXHR is set in the year 2027 and the player takes control of Adam Jensen, an ex-SWAT police officer who is now the chief of security of Sarif Industries, one of the world's leading biotechnology companies that produce enhancement technologies. Augmented terrorists attack Sarif Industries, abduct the head scientists, and nearly kill Jensen. Jensen merely survives because his boss puts him through enhancement surgery, which replaces many parts of his body with mechanical augmentations. In the course of the game it becomes clear that Jensen has been augmented beyond any life-saving necessity that grants him superhuman abilities and allows him to find and defeat the terrorists, but the augmentations also challenge his humanity. Is Jensen a human, a cyborg, or has he become more machine than man? DXHR grants players the illusion of immersion into a virtual world in which augmentations exist as a matter of fact and in which a certain level of control can be practiced. Players take up the role of a character distinctly more powerful and capable than the person in control, exceeding the limits of human abilities. The superior abilities are a result of scientific and technological advancements implying that every man or woman is able to attain the same abilities by simply acquiring augmentations. Thus, with the help of the playable character, Adam Jensen, the game lets players experience augmentations without any irreparable damages done to their bodies, but the experience will leave a lasting impression on players regarding the science of human enhancement. The experience with augmentations happens through and benefits from the effect of “virtual witnessing”: The technology of virtual witnessing involves the production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication. Through virtual witnessing the multiplication of witnesses could be, in principle, unlimited. (Shapin and Schaffer 60) In other words, simply by reading about and/or seeing scientific advancements, audiences can witness them without having to be present at the site of creation. The video game, hereby, is itself the medium of virtual witnessing whereby audiences can experience scientific advancements. Nevertheless, the video game is not just about reading or seeing potential future enhancement technologies, but permits players to virtually test-drive augmentations—to actually try out three-dimensionally rendered prototypes on a virtual body. In order to justify this thesis, a couple of things need to be clarified that explain in which ways the virtual witnessing of fictional enhancements in DXHR is a valid claim. Getting into the Game First I want to briefly describe how I investigated the stated issue. I have undertaken an auto-ethnography (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner) of DXHR, which concretely means that I have analytically played DXHR in an explorative fashion (Aarseth) trying to discover as many elements on human enhancement that the game has to offer. This method requires not only close observation of the virtual environment and documentation through field notes and screenshots, but also self-reflection of the actions that I chose to take and that were offered to me in the course of the game. An essential part of analytically playing a game is to be aware that the material requires “the activity of an actual player in order to be accessible for scrutiny” (Iversen), and that the player’s input fundamentally shapes the gaming experience (Juul 42). The meaning of the game is contingent upon the contribution of the player, especially in times in which digital games grant players more and more freedom in terms of narrative construction. In contrast to traditional narrative, the game poses an active challenge to the player which entails the need to become better in relation to the game’s mechanics and hence “studying games … implies interacting with the game rules and exploring the possibilities created by these rules, in addition to studying the graphical codes or the narration that unfolds” (Malliet). It is important to highlight that, although the visual representation of human enhancement technologies has an enormous potential impact on the player’s experience, it is not the only crucial element. Next to the representational shell, the core of the game, i.e. “how game rules and interactions with game objects and other players are structured” (Mäyrä 165), shapes the virtual witnessing of the augmentations in just an important way. Finally, the empirical material that was collected was analyzed and interpreted with the help of close-reading (Bizzocchi and Tanenbaum 395). In addition to the game itself, I have enriched my empirical material with interviews of developers of the game that are partly freely available on the Internet, and with the promotional material such as the trailers and a website (Eidos Montreal, “Sarif Industries”) that was released prior to the game. Sociotechnical Imaginaries In this case study of DXHR I have not only investigated how augmented bodies and enhancement technologies are represented in this specific video game, but also attempted to uncover which “sociotechnical imaginaries” (Jasanoff and Kim) underlie the game and support the virtual witnessing experience. Sociotechnical imaginaries are defined as “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects” (Jasanoff and Kim 120). The concept appeared to be suitable for this study as it covers and includes “promises, visions and expectations of future possibilities” (Jasanoff and Kim 122) of a technology as well as “implicit understandings of what is good or desirable in the social world writ large” (Jasanoff and Kim 122–23). The game draws upon several imaginaries of human enhancement. For example, the most basic imaginary in the game is that advanced engineered prosthetics and implants will be able to not only remedy dysfunctional parts of the human body, but will be able to upgrade these. Apart from this idea, the two prevailing sociotechnical imaginaries that forward the narrative can be subsumed as the transhumanist and the purist imaginary. The latter views human enhancement, with the help of science and technology, as unnatural and as a threat to humanity particularly through the power that it grants to individuals, while the former transports the opposing view. Transhumanism is: the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. (Chrislenko et al.) The transhumanist imaginary in the game views technological development of the body as another step in the human evolution, not as something abhorrent to nature, but a fundamental human quality. Similar ideas can be found in the writings of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Gehlen, who both view the human being’s need to improve as part of its culture. Gehlen described the human as a “Mängelwesen”—a ‘deficient’ creature—who is, in contrast to other species, not specialized to a specific environment, but has the ability to adapt to nearly every situation because of this deficiency (Menne, Trutwin, and Türk). Freud even denoted the human as a “Prothesengott”—a god of prostheses: By means of all his tools, man makes his own organs more perfect—both the motor and the sensory—or else removes the obstacles in the way of their activity. Machinery places gigantic power at his disposal which, like his muscles, he can employ in any direction; ships and aircraft have the effect that neither air nor water can prevent his traversing them. With spectacles he corrects the defects of the lens in his own eyes; with telescopes he looks at far distances; with the microscope he overcomes the limitations in visibility due to the structure of his retina. (Freud 15) Returning to DXHR, how do the sociotechnical imaginaries matter for the player? Primarily, the imaginaries cannot be avoided as they pervade nearly every element in the game, from the main story that hinges upon human enhancement over the many optional side missions, to contextual elements such as a conference on “the next steps in human evolution” (Eidos Montreal, “Deus Ex: Human Revolution”). Most importantly, it impacts the player’s view in a crucial way. Human enhancement technologies are presented as controversial, neither exclusively good nor bad, which require reflection and perhaps even legal regulation. In this way, DXHR can be seen as offering the player a restricted building set of sociotechnical imaginaries of human enhancement, whereby the protagonist, Adam Jensen, becomes the player’s vessel to construct one’s own individual imaginary. In the end the player is forced to choose one of four outcomes to complete the game, and this choice can be quite difficult to make. Anticipation of the Future It is not unusual for video games to feature futuristic technologies that do not exist in the real world, but what makes DXHR distinct from others is that the developers have included an extent of information that goes beyond any game playing necessity (see Figures 1 & 2). Moreover, the information is not fictional but the developers have taken strategic steps to make it credible. Mary DeMarle, the narrative designer, explained at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2011, that a timeline of augmentation was created during the production phase in which the present state of technology was extrapolated into the future. In small incremental steps the developers have anticipated which enhancement technologies might be potentially feasible by the year 2027. Their efforts were supported by the science consultant, Will Rosellini, who voluntarily approached the development team to help. Being a neuroscientist, he could not have been a more fitting candidate for the job as he is actively working and researching in the biotechnology sector. He has co-founded two companies, MicroTransponder Inc., which produces tiny implantable wireless devices to interface with the nervous system to remedy diseases (see Rosellini’s presentation at the 2011 Comic-Con) and Rosellini Scientific, which funds, researches and develops advanced technological healthcare solutions (Rosellini; Rosellini Scientific). Due to the timeline which has been embedded explicitly and implicitly, no augmentation appears as a disembodied technology without history in the game. For example, although the protagonist wears top-notch military arm prostheses that appear very human-like, this prosthesis is depicted as one of the latest iterations and many non-playable characters possess arm prostheses that appear a lot older, cruder and more industrial than those of Jensen. Furthermore, an extensive description employing scientific jargon for each of the augmentations can be read on the augmentation overview screen, which includes details about the material composition and bodily locations of the augmentations. Figure 1: More Info Section of the Cybernetic Arm Prosthesis as it appears in-game (all screenshots taken with permission from Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011), courtesy of Eidos Montreal) More details are provided through eBooks, which are presented in the form of scientific articles or conference proceedings, for which the explorative gamer is also rewarded with valuable experience points upon finding which are used to activate and upgrade augmentations. The eBooks also reflect the timeline as each eBook is equipped with a year of publication between 2001 and 2022. Despite the fact that these articles have been supposedly written by a fictional character, the information is authentic and taken from actual scientific research papers, whereby some of these articles even include a proper scientific citation. Figure 2: Example of a Darrow eBook The fact that a scientist was involved in the production of the game allows classifying the augmentations as “diegetic prototypes” which are “cinematic depictions of future technologies … that demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, benevolence and viability” (“The Future Is Now” 43). Diegetic prototypes are fictional, on-screen depictions of technologies that do not exist in that form in real life and have been created with the help of a science consultant. They have been placed in movies to allay anxieties and doubts and perhaps to even provoke a longing in audiences to see depicted technologies become reality (Kirby, “The Future Is Now” 43). Of course the aesthetic appearance of the prototypes has an impact on audiences’s desire, and particularly the artificial arms of Jensen that have been designed in an alluring fashion as can be seen in the following figure: Figure 3: Adam Jensen and arm prosthesis An important fact about diegetic prototypes—and about prototypes (see Suchman, Trigg, and Blomberg) in general—is that they are put to specific use and are embedded and presented in an identifiable social context. Technological objects in cinema are at once both completely artificial—all aspects of their depiction are controlled—and normalized as practical objects. Characters treat these technologies as a ‘natural’ part of their landscape and interact with these prototypes as if they are everyday parts of their world. … fictional characters are ‘socializing’ technological artifacts by creating meanings for the audience, ‘which is tantamount to making the artifacts socially relevant’. (Kirby, “Lab Coats” 196) The power of DXHR is that the diegetic prototypes—the augmentations—are not only based on real world scientific developments and contextualized in a virtual social space, but that the player has the opportunity to handle the augmentations. Virtual Testing Virtual witnessing of the not-yet-existent augmentations is supported by scientific descriptions, articles, and the appearance of the technologies in DXHR, but the moral and ethical engagement is established by the player’s ability to actively use the augmentations and by the provision of choice how to use them. As mentioned, most of the augmentations are inactive and must first be activated by accumulating and spending experience points on them. This requires the player to make reflections on the potential usage and how a particular augmentation will lead to the successful completion of a mission. This means that the player has to constantly decide how s/he wants to play the game. Do I want to be able to hack terminals and computers or do I rather prefer getting mission-critical information by confronting people in conversation? Do I want to search for routes where I can avoid enemy detection or do I rather prefer taking the direct route through the enemy lines with heavy guns in hands? This recurring reflection of which augmentation to choose and their continuous usage throughout the game causes the selected augmentations to become valuable and precious to the player because they transform from augmentations into frequently used tools that facilitate challenge and reduce difficulty of certain situations. In addition, the developers have ensured that no matter which approach is taken, it will always lead to success. This way the role-playing elements of the game are accentuated and each player will construct their own version of Jensen. However, it may be argued that DXHR goes beyond mere character building. There is a breadth of information and opinions on human enhancement offered, but also choices that are made invite players to reflect upon the topic of human enhancement. Among the most conspicuous instances in the game, that involve the player’s choice, are the conversations with other non-playable characters. These are events in the game which require the player to choose one out of three responses for Jensen, and hence, these determine to some extent Jensen’s attitude towards human enhancement. Thus, in the course of the game players might discover their own conviction and might compose their own imaginary of human enhancement. Conclusion This article has explored that DXHR enables players to experience augmentations without being modified themselves. The game is filled with various sociotechnical imaginaries of prosthetic and neurological human enhancement technologies. The relevance of these imaginaries is increased by a high degree of credibility as a science consultant has ensured that the fictional augmentations are founded upon real world scientific advancements. The main story, and much of the virtual world, hinge upon the existence and controversy of these sorts of technologies. Finally, the medium ‘videogame’ allows taking control of an individual, who is heavily augmented with diegetic prototypes of future enhancement technologies, and it also allows using and testing the increased abilities in various situations and challenges. All these elements combined enable players to virtually witness not-yet-existent, future augmentations safely in the present without the need to undertake any alterations of their own bodies. This, in addition to the fact that the technologies are depicted in an appealing fashion, may create a desire in players to see these augmentations become reality. Nevertheless, DXHR sparks an important incentive to critically think about the future of human enhancement technologies.References Aarseth, Espen. “Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis.” DAC Conference, Melbourne, 2003. 14 Apr. 2013 ‹http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Aarseth.pdf›. Bizzocchi, J., and J. Tanenbaum. “Mass Effect 2: A Case Study in the Design of Game Narrative.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 32.5 (2012): 393-404. Chrislenko, Alexander, et al. “Transhumanist FAQ.” humanity+. 2001. 18 July 2013 ‹http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-faq/#top›. Eidos Montreal. “Deus Ex: Human Revolution.” Square Enix. 2011. PC. ———. “Welcome to Sarif Industries: Envisioning a New Future.” 2011. 14 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.sarifindustries.com›. Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung 12.1 (2010): n. pag. 9 July 2013 ‹http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095›. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Aylesbury, England: Chrysoma Associates Limited, 1929. Iversen, Sara Mosberg. “In the Double Grip of the Game: Challenge and Fallout 3.” Game Studies 12.2 (2012): n. pag. 5 Feb. 2013 ‹http://gamestudies.org/1202/articles/in_the_double_grip_of_the_game›. Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyun Kim. “Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea.” Minerva 47.2 (2009): 119–146. Juul, Jesper. “A Clash between Game and Narrative.” MA thesis. U of Copenhagen, 1999. 29 May 2013 ‹http://www.jesperjuul.net/thesis/›. Kirby, David A. Lab Coats in Hollywood. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011. ———. “The Future Is Now : Diegetic Prototypes and the Role of Popular Films in Generating Real-World Technological Development.” Social Studies of Science 40.1 (2010): 41-70. Malliet, Steven. “Adapting the Principles of Ludology to the Method of Video Game Content Analysis Content.” Game Studies 7.1 (2007): n. pag. 28 May 2013 ‹http://gamestudies.org/0701/articles/malliet›. Mäyrä, F. An Introduction to Game Studies. London: Sage, 2008. Menne, Erwin, Werner Trutwin, and Hans J. Türk. Philosophisches Kolleg Band 4 Anthropologie. Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1986. Rosellini, Will, and Mary DeMarle. “Deus Ex: Human Revolution.” Comic Con. San Diego, 2011. Panel. Rosellini Scientific. “Prevent. Restore. Enhance.” 2013. 25 May 2013 ‹http://www.roselliniscientific.com›. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Suchman, Lucy, Randall Trigg, and Jeanette Blomberg. “Working Artefacts: Ethnomethods of the Prototype.” The British Journal of Sociology 53.2 (2002): 163-79. Image Credits All screenshots taken with permission from Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011), courtesy of Eidos Montreal.

BackgroundThe sinoatrial/sinus node (SAN) is the primary pacemaker of the heart. In humans, SAN is surrounded by the paranodal area (PNA). Although the PNA function remains debated, it is thought to act as a subsidiary atrial pacemaker (SAP) tissue and become the dominant pacemaker in the setting of sinus node disease (SND). Large animal models of SND allow characterization of SAP, which might be a target for novel treatment strategies for SAN diseases.MethodsA goat model of SND was developed (n = 10) by epicardially ablating the SAN and validated by mapping of emergent SAP locations through an ablation catheter and surface electrocardiogram (ECG). Structural characterization of the goat SAN and SAP was assessed by histology and immunofluorescence techniques.ResultsWhen the SAN was ablated, SAPs featured a shortened atrioventricular conduction, consistent with the location in proximity of atrioventricular junction. SAP recovery time showed significant prolongation compared to the SAN recovery time, followed by a decrease over a follow-up of 4 weeks. Like the SAN tissue, the SAP expressed the main isoform of pacemaker hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated channel 4 (HCN4) and Na+/Ca2+ exchanger 1 (NCX1) and no high conductance connexin 43 (Cx43). Structural characterization of the right atrium (RA) revealed that the SAN was located at the earliest activation [i.e., at the junction of the superior vena cava (SVC) with the RA] and was surrounded by the paranodal-like tissue, extending down to the inferior vena cava (IVC). Emerged SAPs were localized close to the IVC and within the thick band of the atrial muscle known as the crista terminalis (CT).ConclusionsSAN ablation resulted in the generation of chronic SAP activity in 60% of treated animals. SAP displayed development over time and was located within the previously discovered PNA in humans, suggesting its role as dominant pacemaker in SND. Therefore, SAP in goat constitutes a promising stable target for electrophysiological modification to construct a fully functioning pacemaker.

Figure 1 Recently I was walking down a street in The Mission district of San Francisco, which has a high proportion of the city’s Mexican population, when I was struck by a mural on the side of a shop. Vivid and colourful, the mural depicted a large Aztec face surrounded by lush jungle, aesthetically balanced by a carved stone face on the other end of the mural (Figure 1). It was not the beauty, size or colour of the artwork that most impressed me but the way it replicated art I had seen days before walking around Aztec ruins near Mexico City. The paintings I had seen at these pyramids were close to two thousand years old, and this mural, complete with ‘tags’, was created with spray-paint in (probably) the last few years. One was in the ‘traditional home’ of the Aztecs, Mexico, and the other in the Mexican neighbourhood of a neo-colonial American city. However, while one site was celebrating people long since dead, the other a vibrantly alive culture in the cityscape of San Francisco. The migrant, or the diasporic community, is central to many contemporary discussions on the effect of increased globalisation on human cultures and societies (Chambers ). This is not to suggest, however, that globalisation or its impact on human cultures is only a recent phenomenon. Such an assumption implies a sense of amnesia about the processes of migration and diaspora that both instigated, and developed from, processes such as colonisation. San Francisco’s Mexican community do not represent the colonised indigenous people of the United States (US), but they have been affected by a colonial history of their own and the neo-colonialism of the US through processes such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This rendering, while obviously reductionist, indicates the complex nature of the position of Mexican migrants in San Francisco, and the multiple places, events, histories, countries, politics and policies that shape their journey. The picture of an Aztec face, situated within a largely Mexican neighbourhood, fiercely facing San Francisco presents a number of questions around ideas of culture, hybridity and thirdspace that are connected to theories of complexity. The concept of complexity provides a rich framework through which to engage with themes of culture and hybridity, explored through this symbolic painted presence in the urban landscape. Engagement with complexity theories can illustrate the already present, albeit unarticulated, engagement with complexity in concepts such as cultural hybridity, as well as opening up new ways in which to engage with such ideas. In this paper, I seek to illustrate how complexity can develop concepts in humanities, allowing for a greater exploration and sense of adventure of what is and can be. I will explore the idea of culture and its complexity, and how it can be enriched by complexity. It is an exploration of what can be produced and is emerging rather than the (continued) search for the ‘real’ or an uncovering of bedrock ‘truth’ in social science. As a number of commentators have argued, this idea continues to persist in social science research, despite the apparent changes wrought by poststructuralist thought (Crang, “There Is Nothing”; Crang, “New Orthodoxy”; Lorimer). This article seeks to contribute to current dialogues regarding how theories of complexity might enrich social science research using the concept of culture. The limitations of paper size and breadth of topic shape this article as gesturing towards the possibilities of engaging with the notion of complexity in social science, explored using the symbol of a mural and its location within the Mission District of San Francisco. There are a number of theoretical positions that fall under the notion of complexity; these include chaos theory, catastrophe theory, mathematical complexity and fractals (Manson). From the 1970s, there has been an increasing acceptance and application of complexity theories into social science and popular knowledge, in particular from the late 1990s (Nowotny; Thrift; Manson; Urry, Global Complexity). In my discussion of complexity I am drawing on the translations of these ideas into the domain of social science. I am looking at the disjuncture between cause and effect and the concept of emergence (Thrift; Urry, Global Complexity). These concepts, I argue, can be used to develop areas in the social science such as post-colonial theory that may, at first, seem unrelated. As complexity theory is, well, so complex and really an umbrella term or a "scientific amalgam", it is important to clarify how these theories will be interpreted here (Thrift). Emergence, according to Urry, is the way in which things self-organise over time (Urry, “The Complexities” 33). To expand on this, emergence can be described as the process of self-organisation of things (human and non-human) to create a new entity, an assemblage (Urry, Global Complexity). A central idea of emergence is that complexity is more than ‘complicated’, more than simply the coming together of multiple entities or aspects. The relationship between its parts constitute a new set of entities that make the whole more than the sum of its parts (Urry, Global Complexity; Thrift). It is also the process though which new hybrid entities emerge from this assemblage of previously separate entities. To return to the mural, an analysis of this painting (based on the hypothesis that it has been created by the diaspora from Mexico in San Francisco) would suggest it has emerged through an assemblage of processes of migration, issues of cultural heritage, ideas of authentic tradition, resistance, social inequity, difference and (possibly) a shopkeepers desire for a nice wall. All the known (and unknown) elements, human and non-human, that have (hypothetically) influenced this murals creation do not simply fit together in an equation that automatically results in ‘graffiti art’. Instead it has emerged due to a unique coming together of elements, an assemblage, in a particular time and geographical location. The disjuncture between cause and effect highlighted in a complexity perspective is illustrated here as it is possible to see the process of colonisation of Mexico and the United States has started a chain of events that have lead to the creation of this mural. However, there is no direct line of cause and effect that the act of colonisation would lead to the construction of such a mural. While we can begin to unpack this process in hindsight, the emergent processes that have lead to its creation ensure that such an endeavour will not easily or ever produce a simple equation for its occurrence. Cultural Complexity Social science in many ways relies on the notion that things are not easily analysed, not simply quantifiable or knowable (Dwyer and Limb). The actual language of complexity, however, has generally been missing from such discussions. This absence has limited the ability or, perhaps more accurately, the willingness to articulate logically and rationally what it means to gesture to an unknowingness, to processes of which outcomes cannot be fully predicted or explained (Lorimer; Crang, “There Is Nothing”). It is perhaps only now that it has been ‘validated’ through scientific knowledge such as physics, that we can embrace these ideas explicitly in social science. Using the notion of culture I will illustrate how complexity has been part of social science before it was articulated as such, what complexity theory offers in relation to the social world and how it might be engaged in relation to theory such cultural hybridity. The concept of culture in social science has expanded from the notion of fixed, homogenous ‘way of life’ in a specific geographic space, in early anthropological accounts, to a more complex processual view of culture (Ang, Not Speaking; Couldry). The work of Raymond Williams was seminal in the development of this idea of culture, which continues to be a central aspect of disciplines such as cultural geography and cultural studies (Anderson and Gale; Anderson et al.; Anderson; Ang, “Predicament”; Ang, Not Speaking). This work illustrates the complexities of culture as not only porous and shifting at its boundaries but also internally differentiated so that cultural coherence cannot be assumed (Anderson; Ang, “Predicament”). In terms of complexity theory, the entities that together form a ‘culture’ exist outside of the culture and can in turn work to destabilise and change the culture internally (DeLanda). While recognising that there have always been flows of people, trade and ideas around the world, it has been argued that the current epoch sees these flows at an unprecedented rate (Appadurai; Castells). The level of trans-national migration and movement of people, and the disruption of space and time created by processes of globalisation, further challenge conceptions of culture as fixed or homogenous (Couldry). This expansion of the notion of culture has dual connotations for my reading of the mural. The mural depicts a ‘traditional’ image of Mexican culture before it was affected by contemporary globalisation, but this is being depicted from the position of a diasporic subject in downtown San Francisco. In the painting of this mural it is possible to see the tension between idealisations of more traditional conceptions of a fixed, homogenous culture and the changes wrought on this culture by globalisation. The contrast of the painting’s subject and its location conveys the process of emergence of the (imagined) Mexican-American painter’s hybrid identity. Global Complexity These developments in cultural theory present a complex notion of culture, highlighting the influence of globalisation in creating this complexity. The interjection of complexity theory into social science more recently can enrich these readings of the complexity of cultural systems. It provides an overarching framework through which to organise and analyse concepts such as culture, but also can also connect this dynamic and processual ‘culture’ to a broader system of human and non-human entities. According to Urry, the global “comprises a set of emergent systems possessing properties and patterns that are often far from equilibrium. Complexity emphasises that there are diverse networked time-space paths, that there are often massive disproportionalities between cause and effects, and that unpredictable and yet irreversible patterns seem to characterise all social and physical systems.” (Urry, Global Complexity 8). A key notion of global complexity as discussed by Urry is that the ‘global’ is comprised and created through networks, drawing on the work of Appadurai and Castells. This coming together or connection of a multitude of varied human and non-human entities is seen to produce the emergence of things not connected to their cause, highlighting the disconnection between cause and effect. However, while it emphasises a disjuncture between cause and effect in terms of prediction, complexity theory has also been utilised to illustrate how things assemble together and from these things new things are made. Entities such as cultural hybridity can be seen as emerging from complex assemblages – time, place, people – from which unexpected, unpredictable entities emerge. The mural in San Francisco can be seen as one such entity. Thirdspace To complete gesture towards the use of complexity theory in research on culture, I would like to engage with the notion of thirdspace. This concept contributes to discussions of cultural complexity, as it seeks to describe the emergence of new hybrid forms created by the coming together of different cultural entities. The subject of the migrant, that I have sought to discuss in relation to the mural, is perhaps the epitome of the hybrid figure in the ‘in-between space’ as Ian Chambers has discussed. Chambers discusses the migrant as in-between home and the new country, and the processes of change that migrants undergo, taking on from the new but not letting go completely of the ‘old’, and so to become something different again. Homi Bhabha also discusses the idea of the hybrid, but presents the ‘in-between’ space as a product of the colonial encounter. Bhabha uses to the term ‘thirdspace’ to describe the hybridity that arises from the forced co-existence of groups with different histories, from different places, in a shared space. This creates a ‘thirdspace’ that is not of ‘One nor the Other but something else besides, in between” (Bhabha 219). It is this space of emergence that is simultaneously a space of unknowableness that is being presented by these theorists. The concept of thirdspace engenders an understanding of the complexity that social changes bring about as they facilitate or force the interaction of different groups. While complexity may mean that we do not know what the result is of such a coming together or intersection, the concept of a thirdspace allows us to see the intricacies of the complexity that is created illustrated by the case of the mural. A complexity framework also indicates to the assemblage of multiplicity of entities – human and non-human, material and immaterial – that these hybrid subjects have emerged from, enriching the possible field for social science enquiry. While the hybrid – human or non-human entity – is not simply a sum of its parts, or that which came together to produce it, it does provide pointers to follow in uncovering the intricacies of its make up. It is, however, also the unknowableness, the newness, produced that makes it more than a composite that injects both challenge and wonder into intellectual endeavor. Conclusion In attempting to draw common threads through these examples of cultural theory I wish to highlight how the notion of complexity supports theories such as hybridity that seek to outline rather than map certain social processes. The multiple and complex subjectivities and experiences that emerge from the colonial encounter, or process of migration do not lend themselves to easy counting or mapping. To dissect such experiences for greater understanding, to attempt to put it all together like a puzzle to find a true picture surely creates an incomplete picture. Beginning instead from a position of complexity does not deny the need to explore such processes but suggests different methods and different outcomes are sought. It gestures towards a different framework through which to understanding the world. The interjection of complexity theory into the social sciences offers a rich conceptual framework through which to re-look at and develop ideas already central to such research. As a mural on a wall in San Francisco connects to 2000 year old frescos on pyramids at the edge of Mexico City, so too does it speak to us of diaspora, hybridity, and the thirdspaces that arise post-colonially in a globalised world. The effect of these processes on ideas of culture, identity and place, the local and the global are all engaged and enhanced by complexity theories that present ideas of emergence. Urry argues that complexity breaks down any connection between cause and effect. It tells us of the unknowability of things, and so indicates that what we can map or frame within a research project or paper is always incomplete. It opens a space for wonder, for possibility, for change. It breaks down certainty and the idea that there is a process or reality that can be made known through social inquiry. Adopting this approach may seem like an abdication, suggesting a level of futility to research, a giving up or giving in. However, it can instead inspires us to look beyond what we assume is true or the obvious effect from a particular cause, to explore the complexity of the processes through which things come into being. It is this idea that I have attempted to gesture towards in considering the places, people, time and multiple other entities have assembled in the creation of a single piece of graffiti art. It is to say that the greatest value of complexity theory to social science research is perhaps not that it provides answers but that it gestures to (multiple) beginnings. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Jayde Cahir and my two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, for providing the funding to attend the American Association of Geographers Annual Conference in San Francisco. References Anderson, Kay. “Introduction.” Cultural Geographies. Eds. Kay Anderson and Fay Gale. 2nd ed. Australia: Addision Wesley Longman, 1999. 1-21. Anderson, Kay, et al. “A Rough Guide.” Handbook of Cultural Geography. Eds. Kay Anderson et al. London: Sage, 2003. 1-35. Anderson, Kay, and Fay Gale, eds. Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992. Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. New York: Routledge, 2001. ———. “The Predicament of Diversity: Multiculturalism in Practice at the Art Museum.” ethnicities 5.3 (2005): 305-20. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Public Worlds, Volume 1. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 2004. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture and Identity. London: Routledge, 1994. Couldry, Nick. Inside Culture: Re-Imagining the Method of Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 2000. Crang, Mike. “Qualitative Methods: The New Orthodoxy?” Progress in Human Geography 26.2 (2002): 647-55. ———. “Qualitative Methods: There Is Nothing outside the Text?” Progress in Human Geography 29.2 (2005): 225-33. DeLanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. Dwyer, Claire, and Melanie Limb. “Introduction: Doing Qualitative Research in Geography.” Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers: Issues and Debates. Eds. Claire Dwyer and Melanie Limb. London: Arnold, 2001. 1-22. Lorimer, Hayden. “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-than-Representational’.” Progress in Human Geography 29.1 (2005): 83-94. Manson, Steven M. “Simplifying Complexity: A Review of Complexity Theory.” Geoforum 32 (2001): 405-14. Nowotny, Helga. “The Increase of Complexity and Its Reduction: Emergent Interfaces between the Natural Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences.” Theory, Culture and Society 22.5 (2005): 15-31. Thrift, Nigel. “The Place of Complexity.” Theory, Culture and Society 16.3 (1999): 31-69. Urry, John. “The Complexities of the Global.” Theory, Culture and Society 22.5 (2005): 235-54. ———. Global Complexity. Oxford: Polity, 2003. Williams, Raymond. Culture. Glasgow: Fontanta Paperbacks, 1981. Citation reference for this article MLA Style James, Sarah. "Culture and Complexity: Graffiti on a San Francisco Streetscape." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/07-james.php>. APA Style James, S. (Jun. 2007) "Culture and Complexity: Graffiti on a San Francisco Streetscape," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/07-james.php>.

Introduction In October 2008, the UK’s National Videogame Archive became a reality and after years of negotiation, preparation and planning, this partnership between Nottingham Trent University’s Centre for Contemporary Play research group and The National Media Museum, accepted its first public donations to the collection. These first donations came from Sony’s Computer Entertainment Europe’s London Studios who presented the original, pre-production PlayStation 2 EyeToy camera (complete with its hand-written #1 sticker) and Harmonix who crossed the Atlantic to deliver prototypes of the Rock Band drum kit and guitar controllers along with a slew of games. Since then, we have been inundated with donations, enquiries and volunteers offering their services and it is clear that we have exciting and challenging times ahead of us at the NVA as we seek to continue our collecting programme and preserve, conserve, display and interpret these vital parts of popular culture. This essay, however, is not so much a document of these possible futures for our research or the challenges we face in moving forward as it is a discussion of some of the issues that make game preservation a vital and timely undertaking. In briefly telling the story of the genesis of the NVA, I hope to draw attention to some of the peculiarities (in both senses) of the situation in which videogames currently exist. While considerable attention has been paid to the preservation and curation of new media arts (e.g. Cook et al.), comparatively little work has been undertaken in relation to games. Surprisingly, the games industry has been similarly neglectful of the histories of gameplay and gamemaking. Throughout our research, it has became abundantly clear that even those individuals and companies most intimately associated with the development of this form, do not hold their corporate and personal histories in the high esteem we expected (see also Lowood et al.). And so, despite the well-worn bluster of an industry that proclaims itself as culturally significant as Hollywood, it is surprisingly difficult to find a definitive copy of the boxart of the final release of a Triple-A title let alone any of the pre-production materials. Through our journeys in the past couple of years, we have encountered shoeboxes under CEOs’ desks and proud parents’ collections of tapes and press cuttings. These are the closest things to a formalised archive that we currently have for many of the biggest British game development and publishing companies. Not only is this problematic in and of itself as we run the risk of losing titles and documents forever as well as the stories locked up in the memories of key individuals who grow ever older, but also it is symptomatic of an industry that, despite its public proclamations, neither places a high value on its products as popular culture nor truly recognises their impact on that culture. While a few valorised, still-ongoing, franchises like the Super Mario and Legend of Zelda series are repackaged and (digitally) re-released so as to provide continuity with current releases, a huge number of games simply disappear from view once their short period of retail limelight passes. Indeed, my argument in this essay rests to some extent on the admittedly polemical, and maybe even antagonistic, assertion that the past business and marketing practices of the videogames industry are partly to blame for the comparatively underdeveloped state of game preservation and the seemingly low cultural value placed on old games within the mainstream marketplace. Small wonder, then, that archives and formalised collections are not widespread. However antagonistic this point may seem, this essay does not set out merely to criticise the games industry. Indeed, it is important to recognise that the success and viability of projects such as the NVA is derived partly from close collaboration with industry partners. As such, it is my hope that in addition to contributing to the conversation about the importance and need for formalised strategies of game preservation, this essay goes some way to demonstrating the necessity of universities, museums, developers, publishers, advertisers and retailers tackling these issues in partnership. The Best Game Is the Next Game As will be clear from these opening paragraphs, this essay is primarily concerned with ‘old’ games. Perhaps surprisingly, however, we shall see that ‘old’ games are frequently not that old at all as even the shiniest, and newest of interactive experiences soon slip from view under the pressure of a relentless industrial and institutional push towards the forthcoming release and the ‘next generation’. More surprising still is that ‘old’ games are often difficult to come by as they occupy, at best, a marginalised position in the contemporary marketplace, assuming they are even visible at all. This is an odd situation. Videogames are, as any introductory primer on game studies will surely reveal, big business (see Kerr, for instance, as well as trade bodies such as ELSPA and The ESA for up-to-date sales figures). Given the videogame industry seems dedicated to growing its business and broadening its audiences (see Radd on Sony’s ‘Game 3.0’ strategy, for instance), it seems strange, from a commercial perspective if no other, that publishers’ and developers’ back catalogues are not being mercilessly plundered to wring the last pennies of profit from their IPs. Despite being cherished by players and fans, some of whom are actively engaged in their own private collecting and curation regimes (sometimes to apparently obsessive excess as Jones, among others, has noted), videogames have, nonetheless, been undervalued as part of our national popular cultural heritage by institutions of memory such as museums and archives which, I would suggest, have largely ignored and sometimes misunderstood or misrepresented them. Most of all, however, I wish to draw attention to the harm caused by the videogames industry itself. Consumers’ attentions are focused on ‘products’, on audiovisual (but mainly visual) technicalities and high-definition video specs rather than on the experiences of play and performance, or on games as artworks or artefact. Most damagingly, however, by constructing and contributing to an advertising, marketing and popular critical discourse that trades almost exclusively in the language of instant obsolescence, videogames have been robbed of their historical value and old platforms and titles are reduced to redundant, legacy systems and easily-marginalised ‘retro’ curiosities. The vision of inevitable technological progress that the videogames industry trades in reminds us of Paul Duguid’s concept of ‘supersession’ (see also Giddings and Kennedy, on the ‘technological imaginary’). Duguid identifies supersession as one of the key tropes in discussions of new media. The reductive idea that each new form subsumes and replaces its predecessor means that videogames are, to some extent, bound up in the same set of tensions that undermine the longevity of all new media. Chun rightly notes that, in contrast with more open terms like multimedia, ‘new media’ has always been somewhat problematic. Unaccommodating, ‘it portrayed other media as old or dead; it converged rather than multiplied; it did not efface itself in favor of a happy if redundant plurality’ (1). The very newness of new media and of videogames as the apotheosis of the interactivity and multimodality they promise (Newman, "In Search"), their gleam and shine, is quickly tarnished as they are replaced by ever-newer, ever more exciting, capable and ‘revolutionary’ technologies whose promise and moment in the limelight is, in turn, equally fleeting. As Franzen has noted, obsolescence and the trail of abandoned, superseded systems is a natural, even planned-for, product of an infatuation with the newness of new media. For Kline et al., the obsession with obsolescence leads to the characterisation of the videogames industry as a ‘perpetual innovation economy’ whose institutions ‘devote a growing share of their resources to the continual alteration and upgrading of their products. However, it is my contention here that the supersessionary tendency exerts a more serious impact on videogames than some other media partly because the apparently natural logic of obsolescence and technological progress goes largely unchecked and partly because there remain few institutions dedicated to considering and acting upon game preservation. The simple fact, as Lowood et al. have noted, is that material damage is being done as a result of this manufactured sense of continual progress and immediate, irrefutable obsolescence. By focusing on the upcoming new release and the preview of what is yet to come; by exciting gamers about what is in development and demonstrating the manifest ways in which the sheen of the new inevitably tarnishes the old. That which is replaced is fit only for the bargain bin or the budget-priced collection download, and as such, it is my position that we are systematically undermining and perhaps even eradicating the possibility of a thorough and well-documented history for videogames. This is a situation that we at the National Videogame Archive, along with colleagues in the emerging field of game preservation (e.g. the International Game Developers Association Game Preservation Special Interest Group, and the Keeping Emulation Environments Portable project) are, naturally, keen to address. Chief amongst our concerns is better understanding how it has come to be that, in 2009, game studies scholars and colleagues from across the memory and heritage sectors are still only at the beginning of the process of considering game preservation. The IGDA Game Preservation SIG was founded only five years ago and its ‘White Paper’ (Lowood et al.) is just published. Surprisingly, despite the importance of videogames within popular culture and the emergence and consolidation of the industry as a potent creative force, there remains comparatively little academic commentary or investigation into the specific situation and life-cycles of games or the demands that they place upon archivists and scholars of digital histories and cultural heritage. As I hope to demonstrate in this essay, one of the key tasks of the project of game preservation is to draw attention to the consequences of the concentration, even fetishisation, of the next generation, the new and the forthcoming. The focus on what I have termed ‘the lure of the imminent’ (e.g. Newman, Playing), the fixation on not only the present but also the as-yet-unreleased next generation, has contributed to the normalisation of the discourses of technological advancement and the inevitability and finality of obsolescence. The conflation of gameplay pleasure and cultural import with technological – and indeed, usually visual – sophistication gives rise to a context of endless newness, within which there appears to be little space for the ‘outdated’, the ‘superseded’ or the ‘old’. In a commercial and cultural space in which so little value is placed upon anything but the next game, we risk losing touch with the continuities of development and the practices of play while simultaneously robbing players and scholars of the critical tools and resources necessary for contextualised appreciation and analysis of game form and aesthetics, for instance (see Monnens, "Why", for more on the value of preserving ‘old’ games for analysis and scholarship). Moreover, we risk losing specific games, platforms, artefacts and products as they disappear into the bargain bucket or crumble to dust as media decay, deterioration and ‘bit rot’ (Monnens, "Losing") set in. Space does not here permit a discussion of the scope and extent of the preservation work required (for instance, the NVA sets its sights on preserving, documenting, interpreting and exhibiting ‘videogame culture’ in its broadest sense and recognises the importance of videogames as more than just code and as enmeshed within complex networks of productive, consumptive and performative practices). Neither is it my intention to discuss here the specific challenges and numerous issues associated with archival and exhibition tools such as emulation which seek to rebirth code on up-to-date, manageable, well-supported hardware platforms but which are frequently insensitive to the specificities and nuances of the played experience (see Newman, "On Emulation", for some further notes on videogame emulation, archiving and exhibition and Takeshita’s comments in Nutt on the technologies and aesthetics of glitches, for instance). Each of these issues is vitally important and will, doubtless become a part of the forthcoming research agenda for game preservation scholars. My focus here, however, is rather more straightforward and foundational and though it is deliberately controversial, it is my hope that its casts some light over some ingrained assumptions about videogames and the magnitude and urgency of the game preservation project. Videogames Are Disappearing? At a time when retailers’ shelves struggle under the weight of newly-released titles and digital distribution systems such as Steam, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Marketplace, WiiWare, DSiWare et al bring new ways to purchase and consume playable content, it might seem strange to suggest that videogames are disappearing. In addition to what we have perhaps come to think of as the ‘usual suspects’ in the hardware and software publishing marketplace, over the past year or so Apple have, unexpectedly and perhaps even surprising themselves, carved out a new gaming platform with the iPhone/iPod Touch and have dramatically simplified the notoriously difficult process of distributing mobile content with the iTunes App Store. In the face of this apparent glut of games and the emergence and (re)discovery of new markets with the iPhone, Wii and Nintendo DS, videogames seem an ever more a vital and visible part of popular culture. Yet, for all their commercial success and seemingly penetration the simple fact is that they are disappearing. And at an alarming rate. Addressing the IGDA community of game developers and producers, Henry Lowood makes the point with admirable clarity (see also Ruggill and McAllister): If we fail to address the problems of game preservation, the games you are making will disappear, perhaps within a few decades. You will lose access to your own intellectual property, you will be unable to show new developers the games you designed or that inspired you, and you may even find it necessary to re-invent a bunch of wheels. (Lowood et al. 1) For me, this point hit home most persuasively a few years ago when, along with Iain Simons, I was invited by the British Film Institute to contribute a book to their ‘Screen Guides’ series. 100 Videogames (Newman and Simons) was an intriguing prospect that provided us with the challenge and opportunity to explore some of the key moments in videogaming’s forty year history. However, although the research and writing processes proved to be an immensely pleasurable and rewarding experience that we hope culminated in an accessible, informative volume offering insight into some well-known (and some less-well known) games, the project was ultimately tinged with a more than a little disappointment and frustration. Assuming our book had successfully piqued the interest of our readers into rediscovering games previously played or perhaps investigating games for the first time, what could they then do? Where could they go to find these games in order to experience their delights (or their flaws and problems) at first hand? Had our volume been concerned with television or film, as most of the Screen Guides are, then online and offline retailers, libraries, and even archives for less widely-available materials, would have been obvious ports of call. For the student of videogames, however, the choices are not so much limited as practically non-existant. It is only comparatively recently that videogame retailers have shifted away from an almost exclusive focus on new releases and the zeitgeist platforms towards a recognition of old games and systems through the creation of the ‘pre-owned’ marketplace. The ‘pre-owned’ transaction is one in which old titles may be traded in for cash or against the purchase of new releases of hardware or software. Surely, then, this represents the commercial viability of classic games and is a recognition on the part of retail that the new release is not the only game in town. Yet, if we consider more carefully the ‘pre-owned’ model, we find a few telling points. First, there is cold economic sense to the pre-owned business model. In their financial statements for FY08, ‘GAME revealed that the service isn’t just a key part of its offer to consumers, but its also represents an ‘attractive’ gross margin 39 per cent.’ (French). Second, and most important, the premise of the pre-owned business as it is communicated to consumers still offers nothing but primacy to the new release. That one would trade-in one’s old games in order to consume these putatively better new ones speaks eloquently in the language of obsolesce and what Dovey and Kennedy have called the ‘technological imaginary’. The wire mesh buckets of old, pre-owned games are not displayed or coded as treasure troves for the discerning or completist collector but rather are nothing more than bargain bins. These are not classic games. These are cheap games. Cheap because they are old. Cheap because they have had their day. This is a curious situation that affects videogames most unfairly. Of course, my caricature of the videogame retailer is still incomplete as a good deal of the instantly visible shopfloor space is dedicated neither to pre-owned nor new releases but rather to displays of empty boxes often sporting unfinalised, sometimes mocked-up, boxart flaunting titles available for pre-order. Titles you cannot even buy yet. In the videogames marketplace, even the present is not exciting enough. The best game is always the next game. Importantly, retail is not alone in manufacturing this sense of dissatisfaction with the past and even the present. The specialist videogames press plays at least as important a role in reinforcing and normalising the supersessionary discourse of instant obsolescence by fixing readers’ attentions and expectations on the just-visible horizon. Examining the pages of specialist gaming publications reveals them to be something akin to Futurist paeans dedicating anything from 70 to 90% of their non-advertising pages to previews, interviews with developers about still-in-development titles (see Newman, Playing, for more on the specialist gaming press’ love affair with the next generation and the NDA scoop). Though a small number of publications specifically address retro titles (e.g. Imagine Publishing’s Retro Gamer), most titles are essentially vehicles to promote current and future product lines with many magazines essentially operating as delivery devices for cover-mounted CDs/DVDs offering teaser videos or playable demos of forthcoming titles to further whet the appetite. Manufacturing a sense of excitement might seem wholly natural and perhaps even desirable in helping to maintain a keen interest in gaming culture but the effect of the imbalance of popular coverage has a potentially deleterious effect on the status of superseded titles. Xbox World 360’s magnificently-titled ‘Anticip–O–Meter’ ™ does more than simply build anticipation. Like regular features that run under headings such as ‘The Next Best Game in The World Ever is…’, it seeks to author not so much excitement about the imminent release but a dissatisfaction with the present with which unfavourable comparisons are inevitably drawn. The current or previous crop of (once new, let us not forget) titles are not simply superseded but rather are reinvented as yardsticks to judge the prowess of the even newer and unarguably ‘better’. As Ashton has noted, the continual promotion of the impressiveness of the next generation requires a delicate balancing act and a selective, institutionalised system of recall and forgetting that recovers the past as a suite of (often technical) benchmarks (twice as many polygons, higher resolution etc.) In the absence of formalised and systematic collecting, these obsoleted titles run the risk of being forgotten forever once they no longer serve the purpose of demonstrating the comparative advancement of the successors. The Future of Videogaming’s Past Even if we accept the myriad claims of game studies scholars that videogames are worthy of serious interrogation in and of themselves and as part of a multifaceted, transmedial supersystem, we might be tempted to think that the lack of formalised collections, archival resources and readily available ‘old/classic’ titles at retail is of no great significance. After all, as Jones has observed, the videogame player is almost primed to undertake this kind of activity as gaming can, at least partly, be understood as the act and art of collecting. Games such as Animal Crossing make this tendency most manifest by challenging their players to collect objects and artefacts – from natural history through to works of visual art – so as to fill the initially-empty in-game Museum’s cases. While almost all videogames from The Sims to Katamari Damacy can be considered to engage their players in collecting and collection management work to some extent, Animal Crossing is perhaps the most pertinent example of the indivisibility of the gamer/archivist. Moreover, the permeability of the boundary between the fan’s collection of toys, dolls, posters and the other treasured objects of merchandising and the manipulation of inventories, acquisitions and equipment lists that we see in the menus and gameplay imperatives of videogames ensures an extensiveness and scope of fan collecting and archival work. Similarly, the sociality of fan collecting and the value placed on private hoarding, public sharing and the processes of research ‘…bridges to new levels of the game’ (Jones 48). Perhaps we should be as unsurprised that their focus on collecting makes videogames similar to eBay as we are to the realisation that eBay with its competitiveness, its winning and losing states, and its inexorable countdown timer, is nothing if not a game? We should be mindful, however, of overstating the positive effects of fandom on the fate of old games. Alongside eBay’s veneration of the original object, p2p and bittorrent sites reduce the videogame to its barest. Quite apart from the (il)legality of emulation and videogame ripping and sharing (see Conley et al.), the existence of ‘ROMs’ and the technicalities of their distribution reveals much about the peculiar tension between the interest in old games and their putative cultural and economic value. (St)ripped down to the barest of code, ROMs deny the gamer the paratextuality of the instruction manual or boxart. In fact, divorced from its context and robbed of its materiality, ROMs perhaps serve to make the original game even more distant. More tellingly, ROMs are typically distributed by the thousand in zipped files. And so, in just a few minutes, entire console back-catalogues – every game released in every territory – are available for browsing and playing on a PC or Mac. The completism of the collections allows detailed scrutiny of differences in Japanese versus European releases, for instance, and can be seen as a vital investigative resource. However, that these ROMs are packaged into collections of many thousands speaks implicitly of these games’ perceived value. In a similar vein, the budget-priced retro re-release collection helps to diminish the value of each constituent game and serves to simultaneously manufacture and highlight the manifestly unfair comparison between these intriguingly retro curios and the legitimately full-priced games of now and next. Customer comments at Amazon.co.uk demonstrate the way in which historical and technological comparisons are now solidly embedded within the popular discourse (see also Newman 2009b). Leaving feedback on Sega’s PS3/Xbox 360 Sega MegaDrive Ultimate Collection customers berate the publisher for the apparently meagre selection of titles on offer. Interestingly, this charge seems based less around the quality, variety or range of the collection but rather centres on jarring technological schisms and a clear sense of these titles being of necessarily and inevitably diminished monetary value. Comments range from outraged consternation, ‘Wtf, only 40 games?’, ‘I wont be getting this as one disc could hold the entire arsenal of consoles and games from commodore to sega saturn(Maybe even Dreamcast’ through to more detailed analyses that draw attention to the number of bits and bytes but that notably neglect any consideration of gameplay, experientiality, cultural significance or, heaven forbid, fun. “Ultimate” Collection? 32Mb of games on a Blu-ray disc?…here are 40 Megadrive games at a total of 31 Megabytes of data. This was taking the Michael on a DVD release for the PS2 (or even on a UMD for the PSP), but for a format that can store 50 Gigabytes of data, it’s an insult. Sega’s entire back catalogue of Megadrive games only comes to around 800 Megabytes - they could fit that several times over on a DVD. The ultimate consequence of these different but complementary attitudes to games that fix attentions on the future and package up decontextualised ROMs by the thousand or even collections of 40 titles on a single disc (selling for less than half the price of one of the original cartridges) is a disregard – perhaps even a disrespect – for ‘old’ games. Indeed, it is this tendency, this dominant discourse of inevitable, natural and unimpeachable obsolescence and supersession, that provided one of the prime motivators for establishing the NVA. As Lowood et al. note in the title of the IGDA Game Preservation SIG’s White Paper, we need to act to preserve and conserve videogames ‘before it’s too late’.ReferencesAshton, D. ‘Digital Gaming Upgrade and Recovery: Enrolling Memories and Technologies as a Strategy for the Future.’ M/C Journal 11.6 (2008). 13 Jun 2009 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/86›.Buffa, C. ‘How to Fix Videogame Journalism.’ GameDaily 20 July 2006. 13 Jun 2009 ‹http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/features/how-to-fix-videogame-journalism/69202/?biz=1›. ———. ‘Opinion: How to Become a Better Videogame Journalist.’ GameDaily 28 July 2006. 13 Jun 2009 ‹http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/features/opinion-how-to-become-a-better-videogame-journalist/69236/?biz=1. ———. ‘Opinion: The Videogame Review – Problems and Solutions.’ GameDaily 2 Aug. 2006. 13 Jun 2009 ‹http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/features/opinion-the-videogame-review-problems-and-solutions/69257/?biz=1›. ———. ‘Opinion: Why Videogame Journalism Sucks.’ GameDaily 14 July 2006. 13 Jun 2009 ‹http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/features/opinion-why-videogame-journalism-sucks/69180/?biz=1›. Cook, Sarah, Beryl Graham, and Sarah Martin eds. Curating New Media, Gateshead: BALTIC, 2002. Duguid, Paul. ‘Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book.’ In Gary Nunberg, ed. The Future of the Book. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. 63–101. French, Michael. 'GAME Reveals Pre-Owned Trading Is 18% of Business.’ MCV 22 Apr. 2009. 13 Jun 2009 ‹http://www.mcvuk.com/news/34019/GAME-reveals-pre-owned-trading-is-18-per-cent-of-business›. Giddings, Seth, and Helen Kennedy. ‘Digital Games as New Media.’ In J. Rutter and J. Bryce, eds. Understanding Digital Games. London: Sage. 129–147. Gillen, Kieron. ‘The New Games Journalism.’ Kieron Gillen’s Workblog 2004. 13 June 2009 ‹http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/?page_id=3›. Jones, S. The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies, New York: Routledge, 2008. Kerr, A. The Business and Culture of Digital Games. London: Sage, 2006. Lister, Martin, John Dovey, Seth Giddings, Ian Grant and Kevin Kelly. New Media: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Lowood, Henry, Andrew Armstrong, Devin Monnens, Zach Vowell, Judd Ruggill, Ken McAllister, and Rachel Donahue. Before It's Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper. IGDA, 2009. 13 June 2009 ‹http://www.igda.org/wiki/images/8/83/IGDA_Game_Preservation_SIG_-_Before_It%27s_Too_Late_-_A_Digital_Game_Preservation_White_Paper.pdf›. Monnens, Devin. ‘Why Are Games Worth Preserving?’ In Before It's Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper. IGDA, 2009. 13 June 2009 ‹http://www.igda.org/wiki/images/8/83/IGDA_Game_Preservation_SIG_-_Before_It%27s_Too_Late_-_A_Digital_Game_Preservation_White_Paper.pdf›. ———. ‘Losing Digital Game History: Bit by Bit.’ In Before It's Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper. IGDA, 2009. 13 June 2009 ‹http://www.igda.org/wiki/images/8/83/IGDA_Game_Preservation_SIG_-_Before_It%27s_Too_Late_-_A_Digital_Game_Preservation_White_Paper.pdf›. Newman, J. ‘In Search of the Videogame Player: The Lives of Mario.’ New Media and Society 4.3 (2002): 407-425.———. ‘On Emulation.’ The National Videogame Archive Research Diary, 2009. 13 June 2009 ‹http://www.nationalvideogamearchive.org/index.php/2009/04/on-emulation/›. ———. ‘Our Cultural Heritage – Available by the Bucketload.’ The National Videogame Archive Research Diary, 2009. 10 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.nationalvideogamearchive.org/index.php/2009/04/our-cultural-heritage-available-by-the-bucketload/›. ———. Playing with Videogames, London: Routledge, 2008. ———, and I. Simons. 100 Videogames. London: BFI Publishing, 2007. Nutt, C. ‘He Is 8-Bit: Capcom's Hironobu Takeshita Speaks.’ Gamasutra 2008. 13 June 2009 ‹http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3752/›. Radd, D. ‘Gaming 3.0. Sony’s Phil Harrison Explains the PS3 Virtual Community, Home.’ Business Week 9 Mar. 2007. 13 June 2009 ‹http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/mar2007/id20070309_764852.htm?chan=innovation_game+room_top+stories›. Ruggill, Judd, and Ken McAllister. ‘What If We Do Nothing?’ Before It's Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper. IGDA, 2009. 13 June 2009. ‹http://www.igda.org/wiki/images/8/83/IGDA_Game_Preservation_SIG_-_Before_It%27s_Too_Late_-_A_Digital_Game_Preservation_White_Paper.pdf›. 16-19.

IntroductionThis essay will focus on some of the connections between digitally transmitted stories, games, narrative processes, and the discipline whose ostensible job is the study of storytelling, namely literature. My observations will be limited to the specific case of computer games, storytelling, and what is often unproblematically referred to as “literature,” in order to focus attention on historical and contemporary features of the development of the relationship between the two that remain largely unexamined. Therefore, one goal of this essay is to re-think this relationship from a fresh perspective, whose “freshness” derives from reopening the past and re-examining what is overlooked when games scholars talk about “narrative” and “literature” as though they were interchangeable.Further, I will discuss the dissemination of narrative on/through various platforms before mass-media, such as textually transmitted stories that anticipate digitally disseminated narrative. This will include specific examples as well as a more general a re-examination of claims made on the topic of literature, narrative and computer games, via a brief review of disciplinary insights from the study of digital games and narrative. The following is therefore intended as a view of games and (literary) narrative in pre-digital forms as an attempt to build bridges between media studies and other disciplines by calling for a longer, developmental history of games, narrative and/or literature that considers them together rather than as separate territories.The Stakes of the Game My reasons for re-examining games and narrative scholarship include my desire to discuss a number of somewhat less-than-accurate or misleading notions about narrative and literature that have been folded into computer game studies, where these notions go unchallenged. I also want to point out a body of work on literature, mimesis and play that has been overlooked in game studies, and that would be helpful in thinking about stories and some of the (digital) platforms through which they are disseminated.To begin by responding to the tacit question of why it is worth asking what literary studies have to do with videogames, my answer resides in the link between play, games and storytelling forged by Aristotle in the Poetics. As a function of imitative play or “mimesis,” he claims, art forms mimic phenomena found in nature such as the singing of birds. So, by virtue of the playful mimetic function ascribed to the arts or “poesis,” games and storytelling are kindred forms of play. Moreover, the pretend function common to art forms such as realist fictional narratives that are read “as if” the story were true, and games played “as if” their premises were real, unfold in playfully imitative ways that produce possible worlds presented through different media.In the intervening centuries, numerous scholars discussed mimesis and play from Kant and Schiller in the 18th century, to Huizinga, and to many scholars who wrote on literature, mimesis and play later in the 20th century, such as Gadamer, Bell, Spariousu, Hutchinson, and Morrow. More recently, games scholar Janet Murray wrote that computer games are “a kind of abstract storytelling that resembles the world of common experience but compresses it in order to heighten interest,” hence even Tetris acts as a dramatic “enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990’s” allowing them to “symbolically experience agency,” and “enact control over things outside our power” (142, 143). Similarly, Ryan has argued that videogames offer micro stories that are mostly about the pleasure of discovering nooks and crannies of on-line, digital possible worlds (10).At the same time, a tendency developed in games studies in the 1990s to eschew any connection with narrative, literature and earlier scholarship on mimesis. One example is Markku Eskelinen’s article in Game Studies wherein he argued that “[o]utside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Eskelinen then explains that “when games and especially computer games are studied and theorized they are almost without exception colonized from the fields of literary, theatre, drama and film studies.” As Eskelinen’s argument attests, his concern is disciplinary territorialisation rather than stories and their transmedial dissemination, whereas I prefer to take an historical approach to games and storytelling, to which I now direct my attention.Stepping Back Both mimesis and interactivity are central to how stories are told and travel across media. In light thereof, I recall the story of Zeuxis who, in the 5th century BC, introduced a realistic method of painting. As the story goes, Zeuxis painted a boy holding a bunch of grapes so realistically that it attracted birds who tried to enter the world of the painting, whereupon the artist remarked that, were the boy rendered as realistically as the grapes, he would have scared the birds away. Centuries later in the 1550s, the camera obscura and mirrors were used to project scenery as actors moved in and out of it as an early form of multimedia storytelling entertainment (Smith 22). In the late 17th century, van Mieris painted The Raree Show, representing an interactive travelling storyboard and story master who invited audience participation, hence the girl pictured here, leaning forward to interact with the story.Figure 1: The Raree Show (van Mieris)Numerous interactive narrative toys were produced in the 18th and 19th, such as these storytelling playing cards sold as a leaf in The Great Mirror of Folly (1720). Along with the plays, poems and cartoons also contained in this volume dedicated to the South Sea Bubble crisis of 1720, the cards serve as a storyboard with plot lines that follow suits, so that hearts picks up one narrative thread, and clubs, spades and diamonds another. Hence while the cards could be removed for gaming they could also be read as a story in a medium that, to borrow games scholar Espen Aarseth’s terminology, requires non-trivial physical or “ergodic effort” on the part of readers and players.Figure 2: playing cards from The Great Mirror of Folly (1720) In the 20th century examples of interactive and ergodic codex fiction abound, including Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel [Glass Bead Game] (1943, 1949), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962), and Winterson’s PowerBook (2001) that conceptually and/or physically mimic and anticipate hypertext. More recently, Chloé Delaume’s Corpus Simsi (2003) explicitly attempts to remediate a MMORPG as the title suggests, just as there are videogames that attempt, in various ways, to remediate novels. I have presented these examples to argue for a long-continuum view of storytelling and games, as a series of attempts to produce stories—from Zeuxis grapes to PowerBook and beyond—that can be entered and interacted with, at least metaphorically or cognitively. Over time, various game-like or playful interfaces from text to computer have invited us into storyworlds while partially impeding or opening the door to interaction and texturing our experience of the story in medium-specific ways.The desire to make stories interactive has developed across media, from image to text and various combinations thereof, as a means of externalizing an author’s imagination to be activated by opening and reading a novel, or by playing a game wherein the story is mediated through a screen while players interact to change the course of the story. While I am arguing that storytelling has for centuries striven to interpolate spectators or readers by various means and though numerous media that would eventually make storytelling thoroughly and not only metaphorically interactive, I want now to return briefly to the question of literature.Narrative vs LiteratureThe term “literature” is frequently assumed to be unambiguous when it enters discussions of transmedia storytelling and videogames. What literature “is” was, however, hotly debated in the 1980s-90s with many scholars concluding that literature is a construct invented by “old dead white men,” resulting in much criticism on the topic of canon formation. Yet, without rehearsing the arguments produced in previous decades on the topic of literariness, I want to provide a few examples of what happens when games scholars and practitioners assume they know what literature is and then absorb or eschew it in their own transmedia storytelling endeavours.The 1990s saw the emergence of game studies as a young discipline, eager to burst out of the crucible of English Departments that were, as Eskelinen pointed out, the earliest testing grounds for the legitimized study of games. Thus ensued the “ludology vs narratology” debate wherein “ludologists,” keen to move away from literary studies, insisted that games be studied as games only, and participated in what Gonzalo Frasca famously called the “debate that never happened.” Yet as short-lived as the debate may have been, a negative and limited view of literature still inheres in games studies along with an abiding lack of awareness of the shared origins of stories, games, and thinking about both that I have attempted to sketch out thus far.Exemplary of arguments on the side of “ludology,” was storytelling game designer Chris Crawford’s keynote at Mediaterra 2007, in which he explained that literariness is measured by degrees of fun. Hence, whereas literature is highly formulaic and structured, storytelling is unconstrained and fun because storytellers have no rigid blueprint and can change direction at any moment. Yet, Crawford went on to explain how his storytelling machine works by drawing together individual syntactic elements, oddly echoing the Russian formalists’ description of literature, and particularly models that locate literary production at the intersection of the axis of selection, containing linguistic elements such as verbs, nouns, adjectives and so on, and the axis of combination governed by rules of genre.I foreground Crawford’s ludological argument because it highlights some of the issues that arise when one doesn’t care to know much about the study of literature. Crawford understands literature as rule-based, rigid and non-fun, and then trots out his own storytelling-model based or rigid syntactical building blocks and rule-based laws of combination, without the understanding the irony. This returns me to ludologist Eskelinen who also argued that “stories are just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrappings to games”. In either case, the matter of “story” is stretched over the rigid syntax of language, and the literary structuralist enterprise has consisted precisely in peeling back that narrative skin or “gift wrap” to reveal the bones of human cognitive thought processes, as for example, when we read rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy. In the words of William Carlos Williams, poetry is a machine made out of words, from whose nuts and bolts meaning emerges when activated, similar to programing language in a videogame whose story is eminent and comes into being as we play.Finally, the question of genre hangs in the background given that “literature” itself is potentially transmedia because its content can take many forms and be transmitted across diverse platforms. Importantly in this regard the novel, which is the form most games scholars have in mind when drawing or rejecting connections between games and literature, is itself a shape-shifting, difficult-to-define genre whose form, as the term novel implies, is subject to the constant imperative to innovate across media as it has done over time.Different Approaches While I just highlighted inadequacies in some of the scholarship on games and narrative (or “literature” when narrative is defined as such) there is work on interactive storytelling and the transmedia dissemination of stories explicitly as games that deals with some of these issues. In their article on virtual bodies in Dante’s Inferno (2010), Welsh and Sebastian explain that the game is a “reboot of a Trecento poem,” and discuss what must have been Dante’s own struggle in the 14th century to “materialize sin through metaphors of suffering,” while contending “with the abstractness of the subject matter [as well as] the representational shortcomings of language itself,” concluding that Dante’s “corporeal allegories must become interactive objects constructed of light and math that feel to the user like they have heft and volume” (166). This notion of “corporeal allegories” accords with my own model of a “body hermeneutic” that could help to understand the reception of stories transmitted in non-codex media: a poetics of reading that includes how game narratives “engage the body hapitically” (Goggin 219).Likewise, Kathi Berens’s work on “Novel Games: Playable Books on iPad” is exemplary of what literary theory and game texts can do for each other, that is, through the ways in which games can remediate, imitate or simply embody the kind of meditative depth that we encounter in the expansive literary narratives of the 19th century. In her reading of Living Will, Berens argues that the best way to gauge meaning is not in the potentialities of its text, but rather “in the human performance of reading and gaming in new thresholds of egodicity,” and offers a close reading that uncovers the story hidden in the JavaScript code, and which potentially changes the meaning of the game. Here again, the argument runs parallel to my own call for readings that take into account the visceral experience of games, and which demands a configurative/interpretative approach to the unfolding of narrative and its impact on our being as a whole. Such an approach would destabilize the old mind/body split and account for various modes of sensation as part of the story itself. This is where literary theory, storytelling, and games may be seen as coming together in novels like Delaume’s Corpus Simsi and a host of others that in some way remediate video games. Such analyses would include features of the platform/text—shape, topography, ergodicity—and how the story is disseminated through the printed text, the authors’ websites, blogs and so on.It is likewise important to examine what literary criticism that has dealt with games and storytelling in the past can do for games. For example, if one agrees with Wittgenstein that language is inherently game-like or ludic and that, by virtue of literature’s long association with mimesis, its “as if” function, and its “autotelic” or supposedly non-expository nature, then most fiction is itself a form of game. Andrew Ferguson’s work on Finnegan’s Wake (1939) takes these considerations into account while moving games and literary studies into the digital age. Ferguson argues that Finnegan’s Wake prefigures much of what computers make possible such as glitching, which “foregrounds the gaps in the code that produces the video-game environment.” This he argues, is an operation that Joyce performed textually, thereby “radically destabilizing” his own work, “leading to effects [similar to] short-circuiting plot events, and entering spaces where a game’s normal ontological conditions are suspended.” As Ferguson points out, moreover, literary criticism resembles glitch hunting as scholars look for keys to unlock the puzzles that constitute the text through which readers must level up.Conclusion My intention has been to highlight arguments presented by ludologists like Eskelinnen who want to keep game studies separate from narrative and literary studies, as well as those game scholars who favour a narrative approach like Murray and Ryan, in order to suggest ways in which a longer, historical view of how stories travel across platforms might offer a more holistic view of where we are at today. Moreover, as my final examples of games scholarship suggest, games, and games that specifically remediate works of literature such as Dante’s Inferno, constitute a rapidly moving target that demands that we keep up by finding new ways to take narrative and ergodic complexity into account.The point of this essay was not, therefore, to adapt a position in any one camp but rather to nod to the major contributors in a debate which was largely about institutional turf, and perhaps never really happened, yet still continues to inform scholarship. At the same time, I wanted to argue for the value of discussing the long tradition of understanding literature as a form of mimesis and therefore as a particular kind of game, and to show how such an understanding contributes to historically situating and analysing videogames. Stories can be experienced across multiple platforms or formats, and my ultimate goal is to see what literary studies can do for game studies by trying to show that the two share more of the same goals, elements, and characteristics than is commonly supposed.ReferencesAristotle. Poetics, Trans. J. Hutton. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.Behrens, Kathi. “‘Messy’ Ludology: New Dimensions of Narrator Unreliability in Living Will.” No Trivial Effort: Essays on Games and Literary Theory. Eds. Joyce Goggin and Timothy Welsh. Bloomsbury: Forthcoming.Bell, D. Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1993. Delaume, Chloé. Corpus Simsi. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2003.Eskelinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation”. Game Studies 1.1 (2011). <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/>. Ferguson, Andrew. “Let’s Play Finnegan’s Wake.” Hypermedia Joyce Studies 13 (2014). <http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v13_1/main/essays.php?essay=ferguson>. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, Trans. Barden and Cumming. New York: Crossroad, 1985.Goggin, Joyce. “A Body Hermeneutic?: Corpus Simsi or Reading like a Sim.” The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory. Eds. G.F. Mitrano and Eric Jarosinski. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. 205-223.Hesse, Hermann. The Glass Bead Game [Das Glasperlenspiel]. Trans. Clara Winston. London: Picador, 2002.Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff cop, 1938.Hutchinson, Peter. Games Authors Play. New York: Metheun, 1985.James, Joyce. Finnegan’s Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1939.Morrow, Nancy. Dreadful Games: The Play of Desire and the 19th-Century Novel. Ohio: Kent State UP, 1988.Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1997.Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962.Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Saporta, Marc. Composition No. 1. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962.Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003.Spariosu, Mihai. Literature, Mimesis and Play. Tübigen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1982.Winterson, Janette. The PowerBook. London: Vintage, 2001.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan: 1972.

Michael Watts of Purdue University reviews “Better Living through Economics” edited by John J. Siegfried. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Twelve papers and fourteen comments explore the fundamental contributions of economic research to important public policy decisions over the past half century. Papers discuss the evolution of emissions trading; better living through improved price indexes; economics and the Earned Income Tax Credit;….” Arthur J. Robson of Simon Fraser University reviews “The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences” by Herbert Gintis. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Explores how key concepts from the behavioral sciences can complement game theory in providing insights into human behavior. Discusses decision theory and human behavior; game theory--basic concepts; game theory and human behavior; rationalizability and common knowledge of rationality; extensive for….” Robert A. Margo of Boston University and NBER reviews “Top Incomes: A Global Perspective” edited by A. B. Atkinson and T. Piketty. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Thirteen papers examine top incomes in ten OECD countries and focus on the contrast between continental Europe and English-speaking countries. Papers discuss top Indian incomes, 1922-2000; income inequality and progressive income taxation in China and India, 1986-2015; the evolution of income concentration….” Charles Wyplosz of The Graduate Institute, Geneva reviews “Europe and the Euro” edited by Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Eleven papers with comments, drawn from an NBER conference on “Europe and the Euro” held in October 2008, examine a number of issues related to the euro, including the effects of the euro on reform of goods and labor markets; its influence on business cycles and trade among members; and whether the ….” Anne Krueger of Johns Hopkins University reviews “Misadventures of the Most Favored Nations: Clashing Egos, Inflated Ambitions, and the Great Shambles of the World Trade System” by Paul Blustein. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Explores whether the global trading system, specifically the World Trade Organization (WTO), is at risk of joining the financial system in crisis, and chronicles the major events in the system over the last decade. Discusses the 2001 WTO meeting in Doha, Qatar; the story of the global trading system….” Chong Xiang of Purdue University and NBER reviews “International Trade with Equilibrium Unemployment” by Carl Davidson and Steven J. Matusz. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Considers how to create economic models that accurately reflect the real-world connections between international trade and labor markets using equilibrium unemployment modeling. Discusses the structure of simple general equilibrium models with frictional unemployment; trade and search-generated unemployment….” Raymond Robertson of Macalester College reviews “Unequal Partners: The United States and Mexico” by Sidney Weintraub. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Examines the repercussions of the dependent-dominant relationship between Mexico and the United States. Discusses Mexico's political economy; trade--from closure to opening; foreign direct investment and finance--from resistance to welcome; narcotics--effects of profits from U.S. consumption; energy….” Jules H. van Binsbergen of Northwestern University, Stanford University, and NBER reviews “Anticipating Correlations: A New Paradigm for Risk Management” by Robert Engle. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Presents a collection of new methods for estimating and forecasting correlations for large systems of assets. Discusses correlation economics; correlations in theory; models for correlation; dynamic conditional correlation; dynamic conditional correlation performance; the MacGyver method; generalize….” Andreas Bergh of Lund University and Research Institute for Industrial Economics reviews “Nordics in Global Crisis: Vulnerability and Resilience” by Thorvaldur Gylfason, Bengt Holmström, Sixten Korkman, Hans Tson Söderström, and Vesa Vihriälä. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Presents a report on the global financial and economic crisis from the point of view of small open economies, focusing on the Nordic countries. Discusses putting the crisis into perspective; the crisis and the global policy response; the panic of 2007-08--a modern bank run; looking back at volatility….” Teresa A. Sullivan of University of Virginia reviews “Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities” by James C. Garland. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Examines how to reform the economic model of public higher education, drawing upon the example of Miami University of Ohio. Discusses where the money comes from; market forces in higher education; why public universities cannot restrain costs; the university prime directive; whether the faculty are ….” Martin Hall of University of Salford reviews “Financing Higher Education Worldwide: Who Pays? Who Should Pay?” by D. Bruce Johnstone and Pamela N. Marcucci.. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Explores the financing of higher education from an international comparative perspective, focusing on the strategy of cost-sharing. Discusses diverging trajectories of higher education's costs and public revenues worldwide; financial austerity and solutions on the cost side; the perspective and policy….” Lee Branstetter of Carnegie Mellon University reviews “Offshoring in the Global Economy: Microeconomic Structure and Macroeconomic Implications” by Robert C. Feenstra. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Presents lectures given by Robert C. Feenstra at the Stockholm School of Economics in September 2008, focusing on the role of trade versus technological change in explaining wage movements and their effect on workers. Lectures discuss microeconomic structure in the context of the Heckscher-Ohlin structure….” James E. Rauch of University of California, San Diego reviews “Emergent Economies, Divergent Paths: Economic Organization and International Trade in South Korea and Taiwan” by Robert C. Feenstra and Gary G. Hamilton. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Studies the business groups in South Korea and Taiwan and what their different paths of development say about economic organization. Discusses the problem of economic organization; interpreting business groups in South Korea and Taiwan; a model of business groups--the interaction of authority and market….” Michael Bikard of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER reviews “The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times” edited by David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Eighteen papers examine the history of entrepreneurship throughout the world since antiquity. Papers discuss global enterprise and industrial performance--an overview; entrepreneurs--from the Near Eastern takeoff to the Roman collapse; Neo-Babylonian entrepreneurs; the scale of entrepreneurship in Middle….” Per Skedinger of Research Institute of Industrial Economics reviews “Reforming the Welfare State: Recovery and Beyond in Sweden” edited by Richard B. Freeman, Birgitta Swedenborg, and Robert Topel. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins, “Nine papers examine Sweden's recovery from crisis and the role that the country's welfare state institutions and policy reforms played in that recovery. Papers discuss searching for optimal inequality-incentives; policies affecting work patterns and labor income for women; wage determination and employment….”

There is, in our sense of place, little cognisance of what lies underground. Yet our sense of place, instinctive, unconscious, primeval, has its own underground: the secret spaces which mirror our insides; the world beneath the skin. Our roots lie beneath the ground, with the minerals and the dead. (Hughes 83) The-Home-and-Away-Game Imagine the earth-grounded, “diagrammatological” trajectory of a footballer who as one member of a team is psyching himself up before the start of a game. The siren blasts its trumpet call. The footballer bursts out of the pavilion (where this psyching up has taken place) to engage in the opening bounce or kick of the game. And then: running, leaping, limping after injury, marking, sliding, kicking, and possibly even passing out from concussion. Finally, the elation accompanying the final siren, after which hugs, handshakes and raised fists conclude the actual match on the football oval. This exit from the pavilion, the course the player takes during the game itself, and return to the pavilion, forms a combination of stasis and movement, and a return to exhausted stasis again, that every player engages with regardless of the game code. Examined from a “diagrammatological” perspective, a perspective Rowan Wilken (following in the path of Gilles Deleuze and W. J. T. Mitchell) understands as “a generative process: a ‘metaphor’ or way of thinking — diagrammatic, diagrammatological thinking — which in turn, is linked to poetic thinking” (48), this footballer’s scenario arises out of an aerial perspective that depicts the actual spatial trajectory the player takes during the course of a game. It is a diagram that is digitally encoded via a sensor on the footballer’s body, and being an electronically encoded diagram it can also make available multiple sets of data such as speed, heartbeat, blood pressure, maybe even brain-wave patterns. From this limited point of view there is only one footballer’s playing trajectory to consider; various groupings within the team, the whole team itself, and the diagrammatological depiction of its games with various other teams might also be possible. This singular imagining though is itself an actuality: as a diagram it is encoded as a graphic image by a satellite hovering around the earth with a Global Positioning System (GPS) reading the sensor attached to the footballer which then digitally encodes this diagrammatological trajectory for appraisal later by the player, coach, team and management. In one respect, this practice is another example of a willing self-surveillance critical to explaining the reflexive subject and its attribute of continuous self-improvement. According to Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club, this is a technique the club uses as a part of game/play assessment, a system that can provide a “running map” for each player equipped with such a tracking device during a game. As the Fremantle Club’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Ben Tarbox says of this tactic, “We’re getting a physiological profile that has started to build a really good picture of how individual players react during a game” (21). With a little extra effort (and some sizeable computer processing grunt) this two dimensional linear graphic diagram of a footballer working the football ground could also form the raw material for a three-dimensional animation, maybe a virtual reality game, even a hologram. It could also be used to sideline a non-performing player. Now try another related but different imagining: what if this diagrammatological trajectory could be enlarged a little to include the possibility that this same player’s movements could be mapped out by the idea of home-and-away games; say over the course of a season, maybe even a whole career, for instance? No doubt, a wide range of differing diagrammatological perspectives might suggest themselves. My own particular refinement of this movement/stasis on the footballer’s part suggests my own distinctive comings and goings to and from my own specific piece of home country. And in this incessantly domestic/real world reciprocity, in this diurnally repetitive leaving and coming back to home country, might it be plausible to think of “Home as Capital of the Region”? If, as Walter Benjamin suggests in the prelude to his monumental Arcades Project, “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” could it be that both in and through my comings and goings to and from this selfsame home country, my own burgeoning sense of regionality is constituted in every minute-by-minutiae of lived experience? Could it be that this feeling about home is manifested in my every day-to-night manoeuvre of home-and-away-and-away-and-home-making, of every singular instance of exit, play/engage, and the return home? “Home, Capital of the Region” then examines the idea that my home is that part of the country which is the still-point of eternal return, the bedrock to which I retreat after the daily grind, and the point from which I start out and do it all again the next day. It employs, firstly, this ‘diagrammatological’ perspective to illustrate the point that this stasis/movement across country can make an electronic record of my own psychic self-surveillance and actualisation in-situ. And secondly, the architectural plan of the domestic home (examined through the perspective of critical regionalism) is used as a conduit to illustrate how I am physically embedded in country. Lastly, intermingling these digressive threads is chora, Plato’s notion of embodied place and itself an ancient regional rendering of this eternal return to the beginning, the place where the essential diversity of country decisively enters the soul. Chora: Core of Regionality Kevin Lynch writes that, “Our senses are local, while our experience is regional” (10), a combination that suggests this regional emphasis on home-and-away-making might be a useful frame of reference (simultaneously spatiotemporal, both a visceral and encoded communication) for me to include as a crucial vector in my own life-long learning package. Regionality (as, variously, a sub-generic categorisation and an extension/concentration of nationality, as well as a recently re-emerged friend/antagonist to a global understanding) infuses my world of home with a grounded footing in country, one that is a site of an Eternal Return to the Beginning in the micro-world of the everyday. This is a point John Sallis discusses at length in his analysis of Plato’s Timaeus and its founding notion of regionality: chora. More extended absences away from home-base are of course possible but one’s return to home on most days and for most nights is a given of post/modern, maybe even of ancient everyday experience. Even for the continually shifting nomad, nightfall in some part of the country brings the rest and recreation necessary for the next day’s wanderings. This fundamental question of an Eternal Return to the Beginning arises as a crucial element of the method in Plato’s Timaeus, a seemingly “unstructured” mythic/scientific dialogue about the origins and structure of both the psychically and the physically implaced world. In the Timaeus, “incoherence is especially obvious in the way the natural sequence in which a narrative would usually unfold is interrupted by regressions, corrections, repetitions, and abrupt new beginnings” (Gadamer 160). Right in the middle of the Timaeus, in between its sections on the “Work of Reason” and the “Work of Necessity”, sits chora, both an actual spatial and bodily site where my being intersects with my becoming, and where my lived life criss-crosses the various arts necessary to articulating a recorded version of that life. Every home is a grounded chora-logical timespace harness guiding its occupant’s thoughts, feelings and actions. My own regionally implaced chora (an example of which is the diagrammatological trajectory already outlined above as my various everyday comings and goings, of me acting in and projecting myself into context) could in part be understood as a graphical realisation of the extent of my movements and stationary rests in my own particular timespace trajectory. The shorthand for this process is ‘embedded’. Gregory Ulmer writes of chora that, “While chorography as a term is close to choreography, it duplicates a term that already exists in the discipline of geography, thus establishing a valuable resonance for a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory” (Heuretics 39, original italics). Chorography is the geographic discipline for the systematic study and analysis of regions. Chora, home, country and regionality thus form an important multi-dimensional zone of interplay in memorialising the game of everyday life. In light of these observations I might even go so far as to suggest that this diagrammatological trajectory (being both digital and GPS originated) is part of the increasingly electrate condition that guides the production of knowledge in any global/regional context. This last point is a contextual connection usefully examined in Alan J. Scott’s Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order and Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. Their analyses explicitly suggest that the symbiosis between globalisation and regionalisation has been gathering pace since at least the end of World War Two and the Bretton Woods agreement. Our emerging understanding of electracy also happens to be Gregory Ulmer’s part-remedy for shifting the ground under the intense debates surrounding il/literacy in the current era (see, in particular, Internet Invention). And, for Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow’s analysis of “Australian Everyday Cultures” (“Media Culture and the Home” 57–86), it is within the home that our un.conscious understanding of electronic media is at its most intense, a pattern that emerges in the longer term through receiving telegrams, compiling photo albums, listening to the radio, home- and video-movies, watching the evening news on television, and logging onto the computer in the home-office, media-room or home-studio. These various generalisations (along with this diagrammatological view of my comings and goings to and from the built space of home), all point indiscriminately to a productive confusion surrounding the sedentary and nomadic opposition/conjunction. If natural spaces are constituted in nouns like oceans, forests, plains, grasslands, steppes, deserts, rivers, tidal interstices, farmland etc. (and each categorisation here relies on the others for its existence and demarcation) then built space is often seen as constituting its human sedentary equivalent. For Deleuze and Guatteri (in A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”) these natural spaces help instigate a nomadic movement across localities and regions. From a nomadology perspective, these smooth spaces unsettle a scientific, numerical calculation, sometimes even aesthetic demarcation and order. If they are marked at all, it is by heterogenous and differential forces, energised through constantly oscillating intensities. A Thousand Plateaus is careful though not to elevate these smooth nomadic spaces over the more sedentary spaces of culture and power (372–373). Nonetheless, as Edward S. Casey warns, “In their insistence on becoming and movement, however, the authors of A Thousand Plateaus overlook the placial potential of settled dwelling — of […] ‘built places’” (309, original italics). Sedentary, settled dwelling centred on home country may have a crust of easy legibility and order about it but it also formats a locally/regionally specific nomadic quality, a point underscored above in the diagrammatological perspective. The sedentary tendency also emerges once again in relation to home in the architectural drafting of the domestic domicile. The Real Estate Revolution When Captain Cook planted the British flag in the sand at Botany Bay in 1770 and declared the country it spiked as Crown Land and henceforth will come under the ownership of an English sovereign, it was also the moment when white Australia’s current fascination with real estate was conceived. In the wake of this spiking came the intense anxiety over Native Title that surfaced in late twentieth century Australia when claims of Indigenous land grabs would repossess suburban homes. While easily dismissed as hyperbole, a rhetorical gesture intended to arouse this very anxiety, its emergence is nonetheless an indication of the potential for political and psychic unsettling at the heart of the ownership and control of built place, or ‘settled dwelling’ in the Australian context. And here it would be wise to include not just the gridded, architectural quality of home-building and home-making, but also the home as the site of the family romance, another source of unsettling as much as a peaceful calming. Spreading out from the boundaries of the home are the built spaces of fences, bridges, roads, railways, airport terminals (along with their interconnecting pathways), which of course brings us back to the communications infrastructure which have so often followed alongside the development of transport infrastructure. These and other elements represent this conglomerate of built space, possibly the most significant transformation of natural space that humanity has brought about. For the purposes of this meditation though it is the more personal aspect of built space — my home and regional embeddedness, along with their connections into the global electrosphere — that constitutes the primary concern here. For a sedentary, striated space to settle into an unchallenged existence though requires a repression of the highest order, primarily because of the home’s proximity to everyday life, of the latter’s now fading ability to sometimes leave its presuppositions well enough alone. In settled, regionally experienced space, repressions are more difficult to abstract away, they are lived with on a daily basis, which also helps to explain the extra intensity brought to their sometimes-unsettling quality. Inversely, and encased in this globalised electro-spherical ambience, home cannot merely be a place where one dwells within avoiding those presuppositions, I take them with me when I travel and they come back with me from afar. This is a point obliquely reflected in Pico Iyer’s comment that “Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere” (185). While our sense of home may well be, according to J. Douglas Porteous, “the territorial core” of our being, when other arrangements of space and knowledge shift it must inevitably do so as well. In these shifts of spatial affiliation (aided and abetted by regionalisation, globalisation and electronic knowledge), the built place of home can no longer be considered exclusively under the illusion of an autonomous sanctuary wholly guaranteed by capitalist property relations, one of the key factors in its attraction. These shifts in the cultural, economic and psychic relation of home to country are important to a sense of local and regional implacement. The “feeling” of autonomy and security involved in home occupation and/or ownership designates a component of this implacement, a point leading to Eric Leed’s comment that, “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Globalising and regionalising forces make this feeling of autonomy and security dynamic, shifting the ground of home, work-place practices and citizenship allegiances in the process. Gathering these wide-ranging forces impacting on psychic and built space together is the emergence of critical regionalism as a branch of architectonics, considered here as a theory of domestic architecture. Critical Regionality Critical regionalism emerged out of the collective thinking of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism), and as these authors themselves acknowledge, was itself deeply influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford during the first part of the twentieth century when he was arguing against the authority of the international style in architecture, a style epitomised by the Bauhaus movement. It is Kenneth Frampton’s essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” that deliberately takes this question of critical regionalism and makes it a part of a domestic architectonic project. In many ways the ideas critical regionalism espouses can themselves be a microcosm of this concomitantly emerging global/regional polis. With public examples of built-form the power of the centre is on display by virtue of a building’s enormous size and frequently high-cultural aesthetic power. This is a fact restated again and again from the ancient world’s agora to Australia’s own political bunker — its Houses of Parliament in Canberra. While Frampton discusses a range of aspects dealing with the universal/implaced axis across his discussion, it is points five and six that deserve attention from a domestically implaced perspective. Under the sub-heading, “Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form” is where he writes that, Here again, one touches in concrete terms this fundamental opposition between universal civilization and autochthonous culture. The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of “cultivating” the site. (26, original italics) The “totally flat datum” that the universalising tendency sometimes presupposes is, within the critical regionalist perspective, an erroneous assumption. The “cultivation” of a site for the design of a building illustrates the point that built space emerges out of an interaction between parallel phenomena as they contrast and/or converge in a particular set of timespace co-ordinates. These are phenomena that could include (but are not limited to) geomorphic data like soil and rock formations, seismic activity, inclination and declension; climatic considerations in the form of wind patterns, temperature variations, rainfall patterns, available light and dark, humidity and the like; the building context in relation to the cardinal points of north, south, east, and west, along with their intermediary positions. There are also architectural considerations in the form of available building materials and personnel to consider. The social, psychological and cultural requirements of the building’s prospective in-dwellers are intermingled with all these phenomena. This is not so much a question of where to place the air conditioning system but the actuality of the way the building itself is placed on its site, or indeed if that site should be built on at all. A critical regionalist building practice, then, is autochthonous to the degree that a full consideration of this wide range of in-situ interactions is taken into consideration in the development of its design plan. And given this autochthonous quality of the critical regionalist project, it also suggests that the architectural design plan itself (especially when it utilised in conjunction with CAD and virtual reality simulations), might be the better model for designing electrate-centred projects rather than writing or even the script. The proliferation of ‘McMansions’ across many Australian suburbs during the 1990s (generally, oversized domestic buildings designed in the abstract with little or no thought to the above mentioned elements, on bulldozed sites, with powerful air-conditioning systems, and no verandas or roof eves to speak of) demonstrates the continuing influence of a universal, centralising dogma in the realm of built place. As summer temperatures start to climb into the 40°C range all these air-conditioners start to hum in unison, which in turn raises the susceptibility of the supporting infrastructure to collapse under the weight of an overbearing electrical load. The McMansion is a clear example of a built form that is envisioned more so in a drafting room, a space where the architect is remote-sensing the locational specificities. In this envisioning (driven more by a direct line-of-sight idiom dominant in “flat datum” and economic considerations rather than architectural or experiential ones), the tactile is subordinated, which is the subject of Frampton’s sixth point: It is symptomatic of the priority given to sight that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that the tactile is an important dimension in the perception of built form. One has in mind a whole range of complementary sensory perceptions which are registered by the labile body: the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses it own confinement; the momentum of an induced gait and the relative inertia of the body as it traverses the floor; the echoing resonance of our own footfall. (28) The point here is clear: in its wider recognition of, and the foregrounding of my body’s full range of sensate capacities in relation to both natural and built space, the critical regionalist approach to built form spreads its meaning-making capacities across a broader range of knowledge modalities. This tactility is further elaborated in more thoroughly personal ways by Margaret Morse in her illuminating essay, “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam”. Paradoxically, this synaesthetic, syncretic approach to bodily meaning-making in a built place, regional milieu intensely concentrates the site-centred locus of everyday life, while simultaneously, the electronic knowledge that increasingly underpins it expands both my body’s and its region’s knowledge-making possibilities into a global gestalt, sometimes even a cosmological one. It is a paradoxical transformation that makes us look anew at social, cultural and political givens, even objective and empirical understandings, especially as they are articulated through national frames of reference. Domestic built space then is a kind of micro-version of the multi-function polis where work, pleasure, family, rest, public display and privacy intermingle. So in both this reduction and expansion in the constitution of domestic home life, one that increasingly represents the location of the production of knowledge, built place represents a concentration of energy that forces us to re-imagine border-making, order, and the dynamic interplay of nomadic movement and sedentary return, a point that echoes Nicolas Rothwell’s comment that “every exile has in it a homecoming” (80). Albeit, this is a knowledge-making milieu with an expanded range of modalities incorporated and expressed through a wide range of bodily intensities not simply cognitive ones. Much of the ambiguous discontent manifested in McMansion style domiciles across many Western countries might be traced to the fact that their occupants have had little or no say in the way those domiciles have been designed and/or constructed. In Heidegger’s terms, they have not thought deeply enough about “dwelling” in that building, although with the advent of the media room the question of whether a “building” securely borders both “dwelling” and “thinking” is now open to question. As anxieties over border-making at all scales intensifies, the complexities and un/sureties of natural and built space take ever greater hold of the psyche, sometimes through the advance of a “high level of critical self-consciousness”, a process Frampton describes as a “double mediation” of world culture and local conditions (21). Nearly all commentators warn of a nostalgic, romantic or a sentimental regionalism, the sum total of which is aimed at privileging the local/regional and is sometimes utilised as a means of excluding the global or universal, sometimes even the national (Berry 67). Critical regionalism is itself a mediating factor between these dispositions, working its methods and practices through my own psyche into the local, the regional, the national and the global, rejecting and/or accepting elements of these domains, as my own specific context, in its multiplicity, demands it. If the politico-economic and cultural dimensions of this global/regional world have tended to undermine the process of border-making across a range of scales, we can see in domestic forms of built place the intense residue of both their continuing importance and an increased dependency on this electro-mediated world. This is especially apparent in those domiciles whose media rooms (with their satellite dishes, telephone lines, computers, television sets, games consuls, and music stereos) are connecting them to it in virtuality if not in reality. Indeed, the thought emerges (once again keeping in mind Eric Leed’s remark on the literate-configured sense of autonomy that is further enhanced by a separate physical address and residence) that the intense importance attached to domestically orientated built place by globally/regionally orientated peoples will figure as possibly the most viable means via which this sense of autonomy will transfer to electronic forms of knowledge. If, however, this here domestic habitué turns his gaze away from the screen that transports me into this global/regional milieu and I focus my attention on the physicality of the building in which I dwell, I once again stand in the presence of another beginning. This other beginning is framed diagrammatologically by the building’s architectural plans (usually conceived in either an in-situ, autochthonous, or a universal manner), and is a graphical conception that anchors my body in country long after the architects and builders have packed up their tools and left. This is so regardless of whether a home is built, bought, rented or squatted in. Ihab Hassan writes that, “Home is not where one is pushed into the light, but where one gathers it into oneself to become light” (417), an aphorism that might be rephrased as follows: “Home is not where one is pushed into the country, but where one gathers it into oneself to become country.” For the in-and-out-and-around-and-about domestic dweller of the twenty-first century, then, home is where both regional and global forms of country decisively enter the soul via the conduits of the virtuality of digital flows and the reality of architectural footings. Acknowledgements I’m indebted to both David Fosdick and Phil Roe for alerting me to the importance to the Fremantle Dockers Football Club. The research and an original draft of this essay were carried out under the auspices of a PhD scholarship from Central Queensland University, and from whom I would also like to thank Denis Cryle and Geoff Danaher for their advice. References Benjamin, Walter. “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London: New Left Books, 1973. 155–176. Bennett, Tony, Michael Emmison and John Frow. Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Berry, Wendell. “The Regional Motive.” A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. 63–70. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. “The Diagram.” The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin Boundas. Trans. Constantin Boundas and Jacqueline Code. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 193–200. Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. 16–30. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus.” Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. 156–193. Hassan, Ihab. “How Australian Is It?” The Best Australian Essays. Ed. Peter Craven. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000. 405–417. Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 145–161. Hughes, John. The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays. Sydney: Giramondo, 2004. Iyer, Pico. “Australia 1988: Five Thousand Miles from Anywhere.” Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World. London: Jonathon Cape, 1993. 173–190. “Keeping Track.” Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club. Edition 3, September (2005): 21. Leed, Eric. “‘Voice’ and ‘Print’: Master Symbols in the History of Communication.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, 1980. 41–61. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis. “The Suppression and Rethinking of Regionalism and Tropicalism After 1945.” Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization. Eds. Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre and Bruno Stagno. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2001. 14–58. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis. Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World. New York: Prestel, 2003. Lynch, Kevin. Managing the Sense of a Region. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1976. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Diagrammatology.” Critical Inquiry 7.3 (1981): 622–633. Morse, Margaret. “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam.” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Ed. Hamid Naficy. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. 63–74. Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Trans. Desmond Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1973. Porteous, J. Douglas. “Home: The Territorial Core.” Geographical Review LXVI (1976): 383-390. Rothwell, Nicolas. Wings of the Kite-Hawk: A Journey into the Heart of Australia. Sydney: Pidador, 2003. Sallis, John. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indianapolis UP, 1999. Scott, Allen J. Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Storper, Michael. The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. New York: The Guildford Press, 1997. Ulmer, Gregory L. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. New York: John Hopkins UP, 1994. Ulmer, Gregory. Internet Invention: Literacy into Electracy. Longman: Boston, 2003. Wilken, Rowan. “Diagrammatology.” Illogic of Sense: The Gregory Ulmer Remix. Eds. Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye. Alt-X Press, 2007. 48–60. Available at http://www.altx.com/ebooks/ulmer.html. (Retrieved 12 June 2007)

By most accounts, “resilience” is a pretty resilient concept. Or policy instrument. Or heuristic tool. It’s this last that really concerns us here: resilience not as a politics, but rather as a descriptive device for attempts in the humanities—particularly in rhetoric and cultural studies—to adequately describe a discursive event. Or rather, to adequately describe a class of discursive events: those that involve rhetorical resistance by victimised subjects. I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Descriptive; Reading) that Peircean semiosis, inflected by a rhetorical postulate of genre, equips us well to closely describe a discursive event. Here, I want briefly to suggest that resilience—“discursive” resilience, to coin a term—might usefully supplement these hypotheses, at least from time to time. To support this suggestion, I’ll signal some uses of resilience before turning briefly to a case study: a sensational Argentine homicide case, which occurred in October 2002, and came to be known as the caso Belsunce. At the time, Argentina was wracked by economic crises and political instability. The imposition of severe restrictions on cash withdrawals from bank deposits had provoked major civil unrest. Between 21 December 2001 and 2 January 2002, Argentines witnessed a succession of five presidents. “Resilient” is a term that readily comes to mind to describe many of those who endured this catastrophic period. To describe the caso Belsunce, however—to describe its constitution and import as a discursive event—we might appeal to some more disciplinary-specific understandings of resilience. Glossing Peircean semiosis as a teleological process, Short notes that “one and the same thing […] may be many different signs at once” (106). Any given sign, in other words, admits of multiple interpretants or uptakes. And so it is with resilience, which is both a keyword in academic disciplines ranging from psychology to ecology and political science, and a buzzword in several corporate domains and spheres of governmental activity. It’s particularly prevalent in the discourses of highly networked post-9/11 Anglophone societies. So what, pray tell, is resilience? To the American Psychological Association, resilience comprises “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity.” To the Resilience Solutions Group at Arizona State University, resilience is “the capacity to recover fully from acute stressors, to carry on in the face of chronic difficulties: to regain one’s balance after losing it.” To the Stockholm Resilience Centre, resilience amounts to the “capacity of a system to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds,” while to the Resilience Alliance, resilience is similarly “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” (Walker and Salt xiii). The adjective “resilient” is thus predicated of those entities, individuals or collectivities, which exhibit “resilience”. A “resilient Australia,” for example, is one “where all Australians are better able to adapt to change, where we have reduced exposure to risks, and where we are all better able to bounce back from disaster” (Australian Government). It’s tempting here to synthesise these statements with a sense of “ordinary language” usage to derive a definitional distillate: “resilience” is a capacity attributed to an entity which recovers intact from major injury. This capacity is evidenced in a reaction or uptake: a “resilient” entity is one which suffers some insult or disturbance, but whose integrity is held to have been maintained, or even enhanced, by its resistive or adaptive response. A conjecturally “resilient” entity is thus one which would presumably evince resilience if faced with an unrealised aversive event. However, such abstractions ignore how definitional claims do rhetorical work. On any given occasion, how “resilience” and its cognates are construed and what they connote are a function, at least in part, of the purposes of rhetorical agents and the protocols and objects of the disciplines or genres in which these agents put these terms to work. In disciplines operating within the same form of life or sphere of activity—disciplines sharing general conventions and broad objects of inquiry, such as the capacious ecological sciences or the contiguous fields of study within the ambit of applied psychology—resilience acts, at least at times, as a something of a “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer). Correlatively, across more diverse and distant fields of inquiry, resilience can work in more seemingly exclusive or contradictory ways (see Handmer and Dovers). Rhetorical aims and disciplinary objects similarly determine the originary tales we are inclined to tell. In the social sciences, the advent of resilience is often attributed to applied psychology, indebted, in turn, to epidemiology (see Seery, Holman and Cohen Silver). In environmental science, by contrast, resilience is typically taken to be a theory born in ecology (indebted to engineering and to the physical sciences, in particular to complex systems theory [see Janssen, Schoon, Ke and Börner]). Having no foundational claim to stake and, moreover, having different purposes and taking different objects, some more recent uptakes of resilience, in, for instance, securitisation studies, allow for its multidisciplinary roots (see Bourbeau; Kaufmann). But if resilience is many things to many people, a couple of commonalities in its range of translations should be drawn out. First, irrespective of its discipline or sphere of activity, talk of resilience typically entails construing an object of inquiry qua system, be that system an individual, a community of circumstance, a state, a socio-ecological unit or some differently delimited entity. This bounded system suffers some insult with no resulting loss of structural, relational, functional or other integrity. Second, resilience is usually marshalled to promote a politics. Resilience talk often consorts with discourses of meliorative action and of readily quantifiable practical effects. When the environmental sciences take the “Earth system” and the dynamics of global change as their objects of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the elaboration and implementation of natural resource management policy. Proponents of socio-ecological resilience see the resilience hypothesis as enabling a demonstrably more enlightened stewardship of the biosphere (see Folke et al.; Holling; Walker and Salt). When applied psychology takes the anomalous situation of disadvantaged, at-risk individuals triumphing over trauma as its declared object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the positing and identification of personal and environmental resources or protective factors which would enable the overcoming of adversity. Proponents of psychosocial resilience see this concept as enabling the elaboration and implementation of interventions to foster individual and collective wellbeing (see Goldstein and Brooks; Ungar). Similarly, when policy think-tanks and government departments and agencies take the apprehension of particular threats to the social fabric as their object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience—or of a lack thereof—is critical to the elaboration and implementation of urban infrastructure, emergency planning and disaster management policies (see Drury et al.; Handmer and Dovers). However, despite its often positive connotations, resilience is well understood as a “normatively open” (Bourbeau 11) concept. This openness is apparent in some theories and practices of resilience. In limnological modelling, for example, eutrophication can result in a lake’s being in an undesirable, albeit resilient, turbid-water state (see Carpenter et al.; Walker and Meyers). But perhaps the negative connotations or indeed perverse effects of resilience are most apparent in some of its political uptakes. Certainly, governmental operationalisations of resilience are coming under increased scrutiny. Chief among the criticisms levelled at the “muddled politics” (Grove 147) of and around resilience is that its mobilisation works to constitute a particular neoliberal subjectivity (see Joseph; Neocleous). By enabling a conservative focus on individual responsibility, preparedness and adaptability, the topos of resilience contributes critically to the development of neoliberal governmentality (Joseph). In a practical sense, this deployment of resilience silences resistance: “building resilient subjects,” observe Evans and Reid (85), “involves the deliberate disabling of political habits. […] Resilient subjects are subjects that have accepted the imperative not to resist or secure themselves from the difficulties they are faced with but instead adapt to their enabling conditions.” It’s this prospect of practical acquiescence that sees resistance at times opposed to resilience (Neocleous). “Good intentions not withstanding,” notes Grove (146), “the effect of resilience initiatives is often to defend and strengthen the political economic status quo.” There’s much to commend in these analyses of how neoliberal uses of resilience constitute citizens as highly accommodating of capital and the state. But such critiques pertain to the governmental mobilisation of resilience in the contemporary “advanced liberal” settings of “various Anglo-Saxon countries” (Joseph 47). There are, of course, other instances—other events in other times and places—in which resilience indisputably sorts with resistance. Such an event is the caso Belsunce, in which a rhetorically resilient journalistic community pushed back, resisting some of the excesses of a corrupt neoliberal Argentine regime. I’ll turn briefly to this infamous case to suggest that a notion of “discursive resilience” might afford us some purchase when it comes to describing discursive events. To be clear: we’re considering resilience here not as an anticipatory politics, but rather as an analytic device to supplement the descriptive tools of Peircean semiosis and a rhetorical postulate of genre. As such, it’s more an instrument than an answer: a program, perhaps, for ongoing work. Although drawing on different disciplinary construals of the term, this use of resilience would be particularly indebted to the resilience thinking developed in ecology (see Carpenter el al.; Folke et al.; Holling; Walker et al.; Walker and Salt). Things would, of course, be lost in translation (see Adger; Gallopín): in taking a discursive event, rather than the dynamics of a socio-ecological system, as our object of inquiry, we’d retain some topological analogies while dispensing with, for example, Holling’s four-phase adaptive cycle (see Carpenter et al.; Folke; Gunderson; Gunderson and Holling; Walker et al.). For our purposes, it’s unlikely that descriptions of ecosystem succession need to be carried across. However, the general postulates of ecological resilience thinking—that a system is a complex series of dynamic relations and functions located at any given time within a basin of attraction (or stability domain or system regime) delimited by thresholds; that it is subject to multiple attractors and follows trajectories describable over varying scales of time and space; that these trajectories are inflected by exogenous and endogenous perturbations to which the system is subject; that the system either proves itself resilient to these perturbations in its adaptive or resistive response, or transforms, flipping from one domain (or basin) to another may well prove useful to some descriptive projects in the humanities. Resilience is fundamentally a question of uptake or response. Hence, when examining resilience in socio-ecological systems, Gallopín notes that it’s useful to consider “not only the resilience of the system (maintenance within a basin) but also coping with impacts produced and taking advantage of opportunities” (300). Argentine society in the early-to-mid 2000s was one such socio-political system, and the caso Belsunce was both one such impact and one such opportunity. Well-connected in the world of finance, 57-year-old former stockbroker Carlos Alberto Carrascosa lived with his 50-year-old sociologist turned charity worker wife, María Marta García Belsunce, close to their relatives in the exclusive gated community of Carmel Country Club, Pilar, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. At 7:07 pm on Sunday 27 October 2002, Carrascosa called ambulance emergencies, claiming that his wife had slipped and knocked her head while drawing a bath alone that rainy Sunday afternoon. At the time of his call, it transpired, Carrascosa was at home in the presence of intimates. Blood was pooled on the bathroom floor and smeared and spattered on its walls and adjoining areas. María Marta lay lifeless, brain matter oozing from several holes in her left parietal and temporal lobes. This was the moment when Carrascosa, calm and coherent, called emergency services, but didn’t advert the police. Someone, he told the operator, had slipped in the bath and bumped her head. Carrascosa described María Marta as breathing, with a faint pulse, but somehow failed to mention the holes in her head. “A knock with a tap,” a police source told journalist Horacio Cecchi, “really doesn’t compare with the five shots to the head, the spillage of brain matter and the loss of about half a litre of blood suffered by the victim” (Cecchi and Kollmann). Rather than a bathroom tap, María Marta’s head had met with five bullets discharged from a .32-calibre revolver. In effect, reported Cecchi, María Marta had died twice. “While perhaps a common conceit in fiction,” notes Cecchi, “in reality, dying twice is, by definition, impossible. María Marta’s two obscure endings seem to unsettle this certainty.” Her cadaver was eventually subjected to an autopsy, and what had been a tale of clumsiness and happenstance was rewritten, reinscribed under the Argentine Penal Code. The autopsy was conducted 36 days after the burial of María Marta; nine days later, she was mentioned for the second time in the mainstream Argentine press. Her reappearance, however, was marked by a shift in rubrics: from a short death notice in La Nación, María Marta was translated to the crime section of Argentina’s dailies. Until his wife’s mediatic reapparition, Carroscosa and other relatives had persisted with their “accident” hypothesis. Indeed, they’d taken a range of measures to preclude the sorts of uptakes that might ordinarily be expected to flow, under functioning liberal democratic regimes, from the discovery of a corpse with five projectiles lodged in its head. Subsequently recited as part of Carrascosa’s indictment, these measures were extensively reiterated in media coverage of the case. One of the more notorious actions involved the disposal of the sixth bullet, which was found lying under María Marta. In the course of moving the body of his half-sister, John Hurtig retrieved a small metallic object. This discovery was discussed by a number of family members, including Carrascosa, who had received ballistics training during his four years of naval instruction at the Escuela Nacional de Náutica de la Armada. They determined that the object was a lug or connector rod (“pituto”) used in library shelving: nothing, in any case, to indicate a homicide. With this determination made, the “pituto” was duly wrapped in lavatory paper and flushed down the toilet. This episode occasioned a range of outraged articles in Argentine dailies examining the topoi of privilege, power, corruption and impunity. “Distinguished persons,” notes Viau pointedly, “are so disposed […] that in the midst of all that chaos, they can locate a small, hard, steely object, wrap it in lavatory paper and flush it down the toilet, for that must be how they usually dispose of […] all that rubbish that no longer fits under the carpet.” Most often, though, critical comment was conducted by translating the reporting of the case to the genres of crime fiction. In an article entitled Someone Call Agatha Christie, Quick!, H.A.T. writes that “[s]omething smells rotten in the Carmel Country; a whole pile of rubbish seems to have been swept under its plush carpets.” An exemplary intervention in this vein was the work of journalist and novelist Vicente Battista, for whom the case (María Marta) “synthesizes the best of both traditions of crime fiction: the murder mystery and the hard-boiled novels.” “The crime,” Battista (¿Hubo Otra Mujer?) has Rodolfo observe in the first of his speculative dialogues on the case, “seems to be lifted from an Agatha Christie novel, but the criminal turns out to be a copy of the savage killers that Jim Thompson usually depicts.” Later, in an interview in which he correctly predicted the verdict, Battista expanded on these remarks: This familiar plot brings together the English murder mystery and the American hard-boiled novels. The murder mystery because it has all the elements: the crime takes place in a sealed room. In this instance, sealed not only because it occurred in a house, but also in a country, a sealed place of privilege. The victim was a society lady. Burglary is not the motive. In classic murder mystery novels, it was a bit unseemly that one should kill in order to rob. One killed either for a juicy sum of money, or for revenge, or out of passion. In those novels there were neither corrupt judges nor fugitive lawyers. Once Sherlock Holmes […] or Hercule Poirot […] said ‘this is the murderer’, that was that. That’s to say, once fingered in the climactic living room scene, with everyone gathered around the hearth, the perpetrator wouldn’t resist at all. And everyone would be happy because the judges were thought to be upright persons, at least in fiction. […] The violence of the crime of María Marta is part of the hard-boiled novel, and the sealed location in which it takes place, part of the murder mystery (Alarcón). I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Belsunce) that the translation of the case to the genres of crime fiction and their metaanalysis was a means by which a victimised Argentine public, represented by a disempowered and marginalised fourth estate, sought some rhetorical recompense. The postulate of resilience, however, might help further to describe and contextualise this notorious discursive event. A disaffected Argentine press finds itself in a stability domain with multiple attractors: on the one hand, an acquiescence to ever-increasing politico-juridical corruption, malfeasance and elitist impunity; on the other, an attractor of increasing contestation, democratisation, accountability and transparency. A discursive event like the caso Belsunce further perturbs Argentine society, threatening to displace it from its democratising trajectory. Unable to enforce due process, Argentina’s fourth estate adapts, doing what, in the circumstances, amounts to the next best thing: it denounces the proceedings by translating the case to the genres of crime fiction. In so doing, it engages a venerable reception history in which the co-constitution of true crime fiction and investigative journalism is exemplified by the figure of Rodolfo Walsh, whose denunciatory works mark a “politicisation of crime” (see Amar Sánchez Juegos; El sueño). Put otherwise, a section of Argentina’s fourth estate bounced back: by making poetics do rhetorical work, it resisted the pull towards what ecology calls an undesirable basin of attraction. Through a show of discursive resilience, these journalists worked to keep Argentine society on a democratising track. 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In the mass media, the primacy of ever more intimate perspectives on violent confrontation, which has long been a staple of journalistic profit and practice, has undergone a crucial transformation over the last century. From an overt eagerness to take an active role in the experience of war to a coy, self-promoting emphasis on the risks of the trade, the representation of violent subjects has consistently been filtered through reportorial, yet tremendous change has befallen the role of professional interlocutors in the serving up the experience of war and violent conflict for domestic consumption. The triumph of a technologised perspective has eclipsed journalistic agency, collapsing the distinction between the pen and the sword in a way that reporters, for all their efforts to command the prestige of each, could never achieve. The focus on the fight, narrowed to the point of impact, strips away orienting discourses to produce a dehumanised perspective that is, if no more or less violent in its own right, unquestioning in its pursuit of the vivid sensation violence provides. In this essay, I hope to illuminate some of the relationships between pen and sword that have evolved from the time of my own historical period of specialisation, the Cuban-Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, to the unfortunate juncture at which we find ourselves a century later. I will begin, however, in the middle, for it is in my own experience of looking for a fight, finding and reporting on it, and then, later, as a historian, reflecting upon the phenomenon in historical comparison with previous correspondents, that I arrived at the conclusions presented here. My work as a “front-line” correspondent took place in environments largely lacking front lines or sophisticated machinery. From skulking about in back alleys to avoid Duvalier’s secret police in Haiti, I had graduated to the “low intensity conflict” of the Philippines. Sporadic and isolated though such violence might be, it was nonetheless my mission to seek it out and capitalise upon it. I felt long past appreciating the news value of being in the line of fire, however, I was soon speeding madly from the scene of my first at-risk gunplay, on February 7, 1986, the day of the Marcos-Aquino election, prelude to the People Power revolution later that month. That violence begets violence, incidental and otherwise, was being made all too clear: as I listened to the thumps representing the likely ends of roadside dogs and cats unfortunate enough to be in the way of the speeding getaway car driven by my Filipino oppositionist hosts, I noted that my ostensibly peaceful guides were vigorously contemplating an armed response. There was news value in the scene, but I was sickened by their rapid descent into revenge mode. My disappointment was not entirely based on aversion to the addictive and infectious power of violence, however: in showing that they, too, were capable of bloodshed, my once-sympathetic guides were spoiling a clean story line. In the moment, knowing my market, I was, it must be admitted, every bit as inclined to value a sharp image over a nuanced portrait as the narrowly focused machine I at other times decry. My article presented the story in diverse detail, but the market logic of its genesis had directed it toward the singular, violent departure point on which I did, indeed, focus when, asked that morning where I wanted to go, I had responded, “Wherever there’s going to be fighting.” In addition to market considerations holding violence as the highest news value, though, my approach had roots in the aspiring war correspondent’s classic infatuation with getting a piece of the action. Just as soldiers need a war to amass the medals and experience necessary for rapid advancement, journalists can extract from exposure to the most arresting stories professional opportunity and, often, the thrill of a lifetime. The cultural capital offered by a role in a good fight is a currency subjected to official devaluation over the years, but in the marketplace of personal identity, war stories retain worth. My students appear to like hearing them; I must admit that I can revel in telling one. Like an accounting of scars and scares past, it celebrates triumph over threats large and small. Even a well-established reputation is no bar to glory-seeking on the basis of proximity to the fight. Top New York Times reporter R.W. Apple’s tale of a bullet passing through the loose folds of his trousers was undermined by the absence of evidence (other reporters could not believe he would throw out so treasured a souvenir), but it only serves to emphasise all the more the delicious appeal to reporters of a physical link to the fighting. Such anecdotes, and the ascendant prestige accorded photojournalists, who must place themselves closer to the action than those who only have to write about it, serve to emphasise the emergence of an informal pecking order based on proximity to peril. This emphasis on risk, with its evocation of potential sacrifice, represents a historical change. Where today facing danger is a featured facet of journalistic practice, a century ago the emphasis was on dishing it out. For example, I found in the Manuscript Division of the U.S. Library of Congress a letter from John Barrett, the first journalist to suggest military action in the Philippines to a national American audience, in which he wrote to his mother of having derived “great pleasure in firing five or six shots at the enemy.” Despite his former rank as consul to Siam and the position of power and distinction he enjoyed as correspondent for both the prestigious North American Review and the widely-read network of newspapers headed by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, Barrett sought parity with simple soldiers whose institutional base more readily connoted glory. "[I] may not be an enlisted soldier but in my way as a correspondent of the greatest daily newspapers of the world—i.e., the most extensively read—bear a responsibility quite equal to a lesser officer unto those who are on the rank.” he wrote to his mother on June 26, 1898, adding, “I would not send any 'fake' account of the battle even if ordered to do so by the editor himself and if I do not send a 'fake' story I must be at the front where I can see what is actually done." Barrett’s location of the “actual” war at the front lines, where hot lead and blood were imagined to flow freely, adhered to a prevailing press perspective valorizing immersion in the fight. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, widespread acceptance was accorded to the notion of the superiority of “hard-won” knowledge, gained through exposure to combat (or perhaps, as in the case of a rival interlocutor of Philippine affairs, Dean Worcester, to alternative threats such head-hunters). In part a reflection of the rough-edged Social Darwinism holding up such survivors as the “fittest” and in part a simple testament to the universal power of warrior myths, battle-certified claims to a higher degree of both patriotism and veracity were an effective rhetorical trump card against the reasoned, impassioned pleas for caution and humanity emerging from the mostly older men of letters leading the anti-imperialist movement. Other reporters of the age also won fame for their activist roles. One of Hearst’s other minions, Karl Decker, engineered an 1897 jailbreak in Cuba that brought to a nationwide audience New York Journal’s tale of the “Cuban girl martyr,” Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros. Other reporters fought alongside the Cuban rebels, sweetening the romantic notion of siding with the underdog—which contributed mightily to the popularity of the “yellow” press’ sensational accounts of war. While the insertion of such blatant reportorial machismo into war reporting has diminished with time and the supposed rise of objectivity as a guiding standard, the interest of media audiences in intimate details of the experience of war has not diminished, and the technologies available to answer such demands have proliferated. From the “living room war” so roundly decried by those who mistakenly saw the seeds of defeat in enhanced public access to the details of war in Vietnam, we have “advanced” to a perspective on warfare that is funneled through the dispassionate gaze of the weapons themselves. The video game metaphor for war, popularised during and since the first Persian Gulf War, gave rise to a missile’s-eye-view that rendered apparently superfluous the role of the reporter. Government restrictions on press access to war zones, instituted in Grenada in 1983 and carried to new lengths in Iraq in 1991, further contributed to the marginalisation of the reportorial agency. It did not help that reporters did so poor and tardy a job of exposing as false the notions of technological infallibility promoted by officialdom. Their failure to question the Big Lie of reported Patriot missile accuracy in striking down Iraqi Scuds only served to support the notion that machines were more reliable than men. Meanwhile, the celebrity of “Scud Stud” Arthur Kent was largely based on his positioning before a pyrotechnic backdrop of flares, tracers, and the occasional missile, which helped keep alive the impression that a reporter’s importance is contingent upon close physical connection with the scene of the fight. Today, we see the new face of war through the lens of the Predator, an unmanned drone that can both gather and disseminate information and issue a deadly strike. The bomber-camera combo dissolves the dated dichotomy constructed as pen vs. sword. All too frequently a false construction in the first place, the “which is mightier?” question nonetheless offered value in its oppositional frame. Even if reporters understood the supremacy of arms, and tied their own identities to their use in diverse and sometimes contradictory fashion, their ability to wield words had a self-interested way of conveying the hazards of war, and thus at least some of its potential human consequences. Akin to the dashboard-cam that has pervaded consciousness in the age of “Cops” and other all-car-chase-all-the-time forms of television, the machine vision that orders and produces audience perceptions of distant fighting has sidelined the reportorial perspective, putting the viewer in the imaginary cockpit. Has the stripping away of reportorial mediation produced any more or less humane or accurate an impression? Despite the often pugnacious and self-glorifying approach of reporters seeking to validate their vitality and influence, the removal of journalistic agency has left the field open for manipulation by the controllers of the bomber-camera combo, and thus has impoverished public understanding of the deadly spiral violence inspires. There is historical precedent, or at least parallel, for this, and it is not encouraging. Public enthusiasm for taking the Philippines was stirred in 1898 by the ease with which the technologically superior new American gunboats destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. Newspapers filled page after page with illustrations and descriptions of naval ordnance, inspiring a fusion of technophilia and war fever that helped prepare the way for the United States’ rapid conversion from an anti-imperialist polity into an expanding power with global ambitions and concomitant responsibilities and exposures. What began as an ostensibly diversionary military manoeuver designed to keep Spanish ships from playing a highly unlikely role in reinforcing the defense of Cuba—a preemptive strike, to use a currently popular term—grew, through an initial affinity for the new fighting machines, into an engagement that ended up portending a transoceanic American empire and altered national destinies to go with it. Not long after, bogged down in a grisly and unexpectedly lengthy land war against Filipino independence-seekers, Americans had reason to rethink their assumptions about the ease with which wars could be prosecuted. The Philippine-American war has been largely erased from American history, along with the accounts of the war correspondents who covered it. But the legacy of globalised imperial violence it initiated lives on, with the next installment coming soon. Check your local listings. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Vaughan, Christopher. "If It Bleeds, It Leads" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/04-ifitbleeds.php>. APA Style Vaughan, C., (2003, Feb 26). If It Bleeds, It Leads. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/04-ifitbleeds.html

0. IntroductionIf we follow the line of much literature surrounding airports and urban mobility, the emphasis often falls on the fact that these spaces are designed to handle the mega-scale and super-human pace of mass transit. Airports have rightly been associated with velocity, as zones of rapid movement managed by enormous processing systems that guide bodies and things in transit (Pascoe; Pearman; Koolhaas; Gordon; Fuller & Harley). Yet this emphasis tends to ignore the spectrum of tempos and flows that are at play in airport terminals — from stillness to the much exalted hyper-rapidity of mobilized publics in the go-go world of commercial aviation.In this photo essay I'd like to pull a different thread and ask whether it's possible to think of aeromobility in terms of “uneven, differential mobility” (Bissell 280). What would it mean to consider waiting and stillness as forms of bodily engagement operating over a number of different scales and temporalities of movement and anticipation, without privileging speed over stillness? Instead of thinking mobility and stillness as diametrically opposed, can we instead conceive of them as occupying a number of different spatio-temporal registers in a dynamic range of mobility? The following is a provisional "visual ethnography" constructed from photographs of air terminal light boxes I have taken over the last five years (in Amsterdam, London, Chicago, Frankfurt, and Miami). Arranged into a "taxonomy of differentiality", each of these images comes from a slightly different angle, mode or directionality. Each view of these still images displayed in billboard-scale light-emitting devices suggests that there are multiple dimensions of visuality and bodily experience at play in these image-objects. The airport is characterized by an abundance of what appears to be empty space. This may be due to the sheer scale of mass transport, but it also arises from a system of active and non-active zones located throughout contemporary terminals. This photo series emphasises the "emptiness" of these overlooked left-over spaces that result from demands of circulation and construction.1. We Move the WorldTo many travellers, airport gate lounges and their surrounding facilities are loaded with a variety of contradictory associations and affects. Their open warehouse banality and hard industrial sterility tune our bodies to the vast technical and commercial systems that are imbricated through almost every aspect of contemporary everyday life.Here at the departure gate the traveller's body comes to a moment's rest. They are granted a short respite from the anxious routines of check in, body scans, security, information processing, passport scanning, itineraries, boarding procedures and wayfaring the terminal. The landside processing system deposits them at this penultimate point before final propulsion into the invisible airways that pipe them into their destination. We hear the broadcasting of boarding times, check-in times, name's of people that break them away from stillness, forcing people to move, to re-arrange themselves, or to hurry up. Along the way the passenger encounters a variety of techno-spatial experiences that sit at odds with the overriding discourse of velocity, speed and efficiency that lie at the centre of our social understanding of air travel. The airline's phantasmagorical projections of itself as guarantor and enabler of mass mobilities coincides uncomfortably with the passenger's own wish-fulfilment of escape and freedom.In this we can agree with the designer Bruce Mau when he suggests that these projection systems, comprised of "openings of every sort — in schedules, in urban space, on clothes, in events, on objects, in sightlines — are all inscribed with the logic of the market” (Mau 7). The advertising slogans and images everywhere communicate the dual concept that the aviation industry can deliver the world to us on time while simultaneously porting us to any part of the world still willing to accept Diners, VISA or American Express. At each point along the way these openings exhort us to stop, to wait in line, to sit still or to be patient. The weird geographies depicted by the light boxes appear like interpenetrating holes in space and time. These travel portals are strangely still, and only activated by the impending promise of movement.Be still and relax. Your destination is on its way. 2. Attentive AttentionAlongside the panoramic widescreen windows that frame the choreography of the tarmac and flight paths outside, appear luminous advertising light boxes. Snapped tightly to grid and locked into strategic sightlines and thoroughfares, these wall pieces are filled with a rotating menu of contemporary airport haiku and ersatz Swiss graphic design.Mechanically conditioned air pumped out of massive tubes creates the atmosphere for a very particular amalgam of daylight, tungsten, and fluorescent light waves. Low-oxygen-emitting indoor plants are no match for the diesel-powered plant rooms that maintain the constant flow of air to every nook and cranny of this massive processing machine. As Rem Koolhaas puts it, "air conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air conditioning unites them" (Koolhaas). In Koolhaas's lingo, these are complex "junkspaces" unifying, colliding and coalescing a number of different circulatory systems, temporalities and mobilities.Gillian Fuller reminds us there is a lot of stopping and going and stopping in the global circulatory system typified by air-terminal-space.From the packing of clothes in fixed containers to strapping your belt – tight and low – stillness and all its requisite activities, technologies and behaviours are fundamental to the ‘flow’ architectures that organize the motion of the globalizing multitudes of today (Fuller, "Store" 63). It is precisely this functional stillness organised around the protocols of store and forward that typifies digital systems, the packet switching of network cultures and the junkspace of airports alike.In these zones of transparency where everything is on view, the illuminated windows so proudly brought to us by J C Decaux flash forward to some idealized moment in the future. In this anticipatory moment, the passenger's every fantasy of in-flight service is attended to. The ultimate in attentiveness (think dimmed lights, soft pillows and comfy blankets), this still image is captured from an improbable future suspended behind the plywood and steel seating available in the moment —more reminiscent of park benches in public parks than the silver-service imagined for the discerning traveller.3. We Know ChicagoSelf-motion is itself a demonstration against the earth-binding weight of gravity. If we climb or fly, our defiance is greater (Appleyard 180).The commercial universe of phones, cameras, computer network software, financial instruments, and an array of fancy new gadgets floating in the middle of semi-forgotten transit spaces constitutes a singular interconnected commercial organism. The immense singularity of these claims to knowledge and power loom solemnly before us asserting their rights in the Esperanto of "exclusive rollover minutes", "nationwide long distance", "no roaming charges" and insider local knowledge. The connective tissue that joins one part of the terminal to a commercial centre in downtown Chicago is peeled away, revealing techno-veins and tendrils reaching to the sky. It's a graphic view that offers none of the spectacular openness and flights of fancy associated with the transit lounges located on the departure piers and satellites. Along these circulatory ribbons we experience the still photography and the designer's arrangement of type to attract the eye and lure the body. The blobby diagonals of the telco's logo blend seamlessly with the skyscraper's ribbons of steel, structural exoskeleton and wireless telecommunication cloud.In this plastinated anatomy, the various layers of commercially available techno-space stretch out before the traveller. Here we have no access to the two-way vistas made possible by the gigantic transparent tube structures of the contemporary air terminal. Waiting within the less travelled zones of the circulatory system we find ourselves suspended within the animating system itself. In these arteries and capillaries the flow is spread out and comes close to a halt in the figure of the graphic logo. We know Chicago is connected to us.In the digital logic of packet switching and network effects, there is no reason to privilege the go over the stop, the moving over the waiting. These light box portals do not mirror our bodies, almost at a complete standstill now. Instead they echo the commercial product world that they seek to transfuse us into. What emerges is a new kind of relational aesthetics that speaks to the complex corporeal, temporal, and architectural dimensions of stillness and movement in transit zones: like "a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts” (Bourriaud 11). 4. Machine in the CaféIs there a possible line of investigation suggested by the fact that sound waves become visible on the fuselage of jet planes just before they break the sound barrier? Does this suggest that the various human senses are translatable one into the other at various intensities (McLuhan 180)?Here, the technological imaginary contrasts itself with the techno alfresco dining area enclosed safely behind plate glass. Inside the cafes and bars, the best businesses in the world roll out their biggest guns to demonstrate the power, speed and scale of their network coverage (Remmele). The glass windows and light boxes "have the power to arrest a crowd around a commodity, corralling them in chic bars overlooking the runway as they wait for their call, but also guiding them where to go next" (Fuller, "Welcome" 164). The big bulbous plane sits plump in its hangar — no sound barriers broken here. It reassures us that our vehicle is somewhere there in the network, resting at its STOP before its GO. Peeking through the glass wall and sharing a meal with us, this interpenetrative transparency simultaneously joins and separates two planar dimensions — machinic perfection on one hand, organic growth and death on the other (Rowe and Slutsky; Fuller, "Welcome").Bruce Mau is typical in suggesting that the commanding problem of the twentieth century was speed, represented by the infamous image of a US Navy Hornet fighter breaking the sound barrier in a puff of smoke and cloud. It has worked its way into every aspect of the design experience, manufacturing, computation and transport.But speed masks more than it reveals. The most pressing problem facing designers and citizens alike is growth — from the unsustainable logic of infinite growth in GDP to the relentless application of Moore's Law to the digital networks and devices that define contemporary society in the first world. The shift of emphasis from speed to growth as a time-based event with breaking points and moments of rupture has generated new possibilities. "Growth is nonlinear and unpredictable ... Few of us are ready to admit that growth is constantly shadowed by its constitutive opposite, that is equal partners with death” (Mau 497).If speed in part represents a flight from death (Virilio), growth invokes its biological necessity. In his classic study of the persistence of the pastoral imagination in technological America, The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx charted the urge to idealize rural environments at the advent of an urban industrialised America. The very idea of "the flight from the city" can be understood as a response to the onslaught of technological society and it's deathly shadow. Against the murderous capacity of technological society stood the pastoral ideal, "incorporated in a powerful metaphor of contradiction — a way of ordering meaning and value that clarifies our situation today" (Marx 4). 5. Windows at 35,000 FeetIf waiting and stillness are active forms of bodily engagement, we need to consider the different layers of motion and anticipation embedded in the apprehension of these luminous black-box windows. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg notes that the Old Norse derivation of the word window “emphasizes the etymological root of the eye, open to the wind. The window aperture provides ventilation for the eye” (103).The virtual windows we are considering here evoke notions of view and shelter, open air and sealed protection, both separation from and connection to the outside. These windows to nowhere allow two distinct visual/spatial dimensions to interface, immediately making the visual field more complex and fragmented. Always simultaneously operating on at least two distinct fields, windows-within-windows provide a specialized mode of spatial and temporal navigation. As Gyorgy Kepes suggested in the 1940s, the transparency of windows "implies more than an optical characteristic; it implies a broader spatial order. Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations" (Kepes 77).The first windows in the world were openings in walls, without glass and designed to allow air and light to fill the architectural structure. Shutters were fitted to control air flow, moderate light and to enclose the space completely. It was not until the emergence of glass technologies (especially in Holland, home of plate glass for the display of commercial products) that shielding and protection also allowed for unhindered views (by way of transparent glass). This gives rise to the thesis that windows are part of a longstanding architectural/technological system that moderates the dual functions of transparency and separation. With windows, multi-dimensional planes and temporalities can exist in the same time and space — hence a singular point of experience is layered with many other dimensions. Transparency and luminosity "ceases to be that which is perfectly clear and becomes instead that which is clearly ambiguous" (Rowe and Slutsky 45). The light box air-portals necessitate a constant fluctuation and remediation that is at once multi-planar, transparent and "hard to read". They are informatic.From holes in the wall to power lunch at 35,000 feet, windows shape the manner in which light, information, sights, smells, temperature and so on are modulated in society. "By allowing the outside in and the inside out, [they] enable cosmos and construction to innocently, transparently, converge" (Fuller, "Welcome" 163). Laptop, phone, PDA and light box point to the differential mobilities within a matrix that traverses multiple modes of transparency and separation, rest and flight, stillness and speed.6. Can You Feel It?Increasingly the whole world has come to smell alike: gasoline, detergents, plumbing, and junk foods coalesce into the catholic smog of our age (Illich 47).In these forlorn corners of mobile consumption, the dynamic of circulation simultaneously slows and opens out. The surfaces of inscription implore us to see them at precisely the moment we feel unseen, unguided and off-camera. Can you see it, can you feel it, can you imagine the unimaginable, all available to us on demand? Expectation and anticipation give us something to look forward to, but we're not sure we want what's on offer.Air travel radicalizes the separation of the air traveller from ground at one instance and from the atmosphere at another. Air, light, temperature and smell are all screened out or technologically created by the terminal plant and infrastructure. The closer the traveller moves towards stillness, the greater the engagement with senses that may have been ignored by the primacy of the visual in so much of this circulatory space. Smell, hunger, tiredness, cold and hardness cannot be screened out.In this sense, the airplanes we board are terminal extensions, flying air-conditioned towers or groundscrapers jet-propelled into highways of the air. Floating above the horizon, immersed in a set of logistically ordained trajectories and pressurized bubbles, we look out the window and don't see much at all. Whatever we do see, it's probably on the screen in front of us which disconnects us from one space-time-velocity at the same time that it plugs us into another set of relations. As Koolhaas says, junkspace is "held together not by structure, but by skin, like a bubble" (Koolhaas). In these distended bubbles, the traveler momentarily occupies an uncommon transit space where stillness is privileged and velocity is minimized. The traveler's body itself is "engaged in and enacting a whole kaleidoscope of different everyday practices and forms" during the course of this less-harried navigation (Bissell 282).7. Elevator MusicsThe imaginary wheel of the kaleidoscope spins to reveal a waiting body-double occupying the projected territory of what appears to be a fashionable Miami. She's just beyond our reach, but beside her lies a portal to another dimension of the terminal's vascular system.Elevators and the networks of shafts and vents that house them, are to our buildings like veins and arteries to the body — conduits that permeate and structure the spaces of our lives while still remaining separate from the fixity of the happenings around them (Garfinkel 175). The terminal space contains a number of apparent cul-de-sacs and escape routes. Though there's no background music piped in here, another soundtrack can be heard. The Muzak corporation may douse the interior of the elevator with its own proprietary aural cologne, but at this juncture the soundscape is more "open". This functional shifting of sound from figure to ground encourages peripheral hearing, providing "an illusion of distended time", sonically separated from the continuous hum of "generators, ventilation systems and low-frequency electrical lighting" (Lanza 43).There is another dimension to this acoustic realm: “The mobile ecouteur contracts the flows of information that are supposed to keep bodies usefully and efficiently moving around ... and that turn them into functions of information flows — the speedy courier, the networking executive on a mobile phone, the scanning eyes of the consumer” (Munster 18).An elevator is a grave says an old inspector's maxim, and according to others, a mechanism to cross from one world to another. Even the quintessential near death experience with its movement down a long illuminated tunnel, Garfinkel reminds us, “is not unlike the sensation of movement we experience, or imagine, in a long swift elevator ride” (Garfinkel 191).8. States of SuspensionThe suspended figure on the screen occupies an impossible pose in an impossible space: half falling, half resting, an anti-angel for today's weary air traveller. But it's the same impossible space revealed by the airport and bundled up in the experience of flight. After all, the dimension this figures exists in — witness the amount of activity in his suspension — is almost like a black hole with the surrounding universe collapsing into it. The figure is crammed into the light box uncomfortably like passengers in the plane, and yet occupies a position that does not exist in the Cartesian universe.We return to the glossy language of advertising, its promise of the external world of places and products delivered to us by the image and the network of travel. (Remmele) Here we can go beyond Virilio's vanishing point, that radical reversibility where inside and outside coincide. Since everybody has already reached their destination, for Virilio it has become completely pointless to leave: "the inertia that undermines your corporeity also undermines the GLOBAL and the LOCAL; but also, just as much, the MOBILE and the IMMOBILE” (Virilio 123; emphasis in original).In this clinical corner of stainless steel, glass bricks and exit signs hangs an animated suspension that articulates the convergence of a multitude of differentials in one image. Fallen into the weirdest geometry in the world, it's as if the passenger exists in a non-place free of all traces. Flows and conglomerates follow one another, accumulating in the edges, awaiting their moment to be sent off on another trajectory, occupying so many spatio-temporal registers in a dynamic range of mobility.ReferencesAppleyard, Donald. "Motion, Sequence and the City." The Nature and Art of Motion. Ed. Gyorgy Kepes. New York: George Braziller, 1965. Adey, Peter. "If Mobility Is Everything Then It Is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities." Mobilities 1.1 (2006): 75–95. Bissell, David. “Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities.” Mobilities 2.2 (2007): 277-298.Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Paris: Les Presses du Reel, 2002. Classen, Constance. “The Deodorized City: Battling Urban Stench in the Nineteenth Century.” Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism. Ed. Mirko Zardini. Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 2005. 292-322. Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006. Fuller, Gillian, and Ross Harley. Aviopolis: A Book about Airports. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005. Fuller, Gillian. "Welcome to Windows: Motion Aesthetics at the Airport." Ed. Mark Salter. Politics at the Airport. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2008. –––. "Store Forward: Architectures of a Future Tense". Ed. John Urry, Saolo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring. Air Time Spaces: Theory and Method in Aeromobilities Research. London: Routledge, 2008. 63-75.Garfinkel, Susan. “Elevator Stories: Vertical Imagination and the Spaces of Possibility.” Up Down Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks. Ed. Alisa Goetz. London: Merrell, 2003. 173-196. Gordon, Alastair. Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure. New York: Metropolitan, 2004.Illich, Ivan. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of Stuff. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985. Kepes, Gyorgy. Language of Vision. New York: Dover Publications, 1995 (1944). Koolhass, Rem. "Junkspace." Content. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.btgjapan.org/catalysts/rem.html›.Lanza, Joseph. "The Sound of Cottage Cheese (Why Background Music Is the Real World Beat!)." Performing Arts Journal 13.3 (Sep. 1991): 42-53. McLuhan, Marshall. “Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another.” McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Ed. Gerald Emanuel Stearn. Middlesex: Penguin, 1967. 172-182. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London: Oxford U P, 1964. Mau, Bruce. Life Style. Ed. Kyo Maclear with Bart Testa. London: Phaidon, 2000. Munster, Anna. Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. New England: Dartmouth, 2006. Pascoe, David. Airspaces. London: Reaktion, 2001. Pearman, Hugh. Airports: A Century of Architecture. New York: Abrams, 2004. Remmele, Mathias. “An Invitation to Fly: Poster Art in the Service of Civilian Air Travel.” Airworld: Design and Architecture for Air Travel. Ed. Alexander von Vegesack and Jochen Eisenbrand. Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2004. 230-262. Rowe, Colin, and Robert Slutsky. Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal. Perspecta 8 (1963): 45-54. Virilio, Paul. City of Panic. Trans. Julie Rose. Oxford: Berg, 2005.

Reality TV has emerged as a visible site for contemporary debates over modern fame. In fact, while issues of ‘taste’ and cultural value have long since shaped conceptions of celebrity (Turner, Bonner, Marshall 178), the issue of fame has played a central role in the negative cultural criticisms of Reality TV. Reality programming is often invoked as short-hand to illustrate the moral ills of contemporary fame – as if it has somehow swept away the certainties of ‘the past’ where discourses of public recognition, visibility and reward are concerned. In exploring Reality TV as a site of contemporary fame, I examine here some of these claims to ‘transformation’, not so much to defend the form’s participation in celebrity culture, as to indicate that there is more going on here than these (increasingly familiar) critiques appear to suggest. We can note, for example, their tendency to simplify the history of fame (which of course then makes it far easier to situate Reality TV as a conclusive break with the past). Equally, these criticisms seem of limited use when it comes to considering what is clearly a broader cultural fascination with fame in Reality TV. Furthermore, such critiques tend to operate at a very general level, often paying little attention to how fame is actually articulated in Reality TV, and the possibilities of differences between formats. The period 2000-1 saw a number of global reality game shows emerge in the UK and elsewhere and in general terms, critics often foregrounded fame as part of a broader negative response to the use of factual programming as primarily entertainment. The pervasive screen examples of ‘would-be presenters’ or ‘wannabe models’ were invoked as antithetical to perceptions of factual programming’s traditionally more ‘worthy’ (and implicitly public service) agenda (Holmes, “All”). But in the context of fame, it is more appropriate to suggest that a number of critical positions on Reality TV have emerged. For example, in what is probably the most prevalent perspective in circulation, contestants have persistently been constructed as exemplifying, and in many ways accelerating, a shift toward a fame culture in which an emphasis on ‘famous for being famous’ has regrettably triumphed over the concepts of ‘talent’ and ‘hard work’ (Holmes, “All”) (even though this perspective is clearly far from new) (see Marshall 9-11). Second, and related to the emphasis on ‘undeserved’ fame above, has been a position which foregrounds the prominence of falsity and manufacture. Here, Reality TV contestants are seen as falling victim to the manipulative powers of a ruthless fame-making machine. Often yoked to an emphasis on the ephemeral nature of their celebrity, here we encounter cautionary tales about the price of public visibility and the lure of immediate wealth, a penalty when, as one programme put it, ‘instant television fame is over in a dream’ (Tonight with Trevor McDonald, ITV1, 13 Feb. 2004). In contrast, the centrality of the ‘ordinary’ person turned celebrity has been read in terms of democratisation, both in relation to access to the televisual airwaves (a position championed by broadcasters and producers, for example) (Bazalgette) and to the dynamics of public/ media visibility itself (see Biressi and Nunn). These positions clearly intersect, their distinctions largely inflected by the perspective of the observer. For example, what is the producer’s claim to ‘democratisation’ is the critic’s class-based distaste for all these ‘awful ordinary’ people on television (see Bazalgette). While each of these positions is limited and simplistic, collectively they do speak to changing cultural conceptions of fame. Joshua’s Gamson’s (Claims, “Assembly”) work in particular has usefully suggested a picture in which certain positions on, or ‘explanations of fame’, have had a historical significance in vying for cultural visibility (although the contours of these narratives must be swiftly drawn here). With the growth of the arts and technologies and the establishment of celebrity as a mass phenomenon (see Gamson, “Assembly” 261), public visibility became increasingly detached from aristocratic standing, with discourses of democracy – as epitomised by the American context – increasingly coming to the fore. With the Hollywood studio system representing celebrity’s later period of industrialisation, and with a controlled production system producing celebrities for a mass audience, the earlier theme of ‘greatness’ became muted into questions of ‘star quality’ and ‘talent’ (Gamson, “Assembly” 264). While the focus may now have been predominantly on the culture of the ‘personality’, Gamson argues that the primary narrative was still one of ‘natural’ rise (“Assembly” 264). However, what is crucial here is that the increasing visibility of the publicity machine itself gradually began to pose a threat to this myth. Shaped by industrial and cultural shifts such as the decline of the Hollywood studio system and the emergence of television, as well as the increasing growth of celebrity journalism, the second half of the 20th century witnessed the increasing prevalence of the ‘manufacture’ discourse, where it henceforth becomes what Gamson describes as a ‘serious contender’ in explaining celebrity (Claims 44). This is not to suggest that the older ideological myths of fame are entirely obscured but rather that, perhaps as never before, the two positions precariously jostle for visibility in the same space. Indeed, Gamson suggests that by the late 20th century, it was possible to discern strategies intended to ‘cope’ with the increasing potential for disjuncture here. In particular, he points toward the twin devices of the ‘exposure’ of the process and the construction of an ironic and mocking perspective on celebrity culture, both of which can be seen to offer the audience a flattering position of power (Claims 276). In many ways, Reality TV would appear to be paradigmatic of these discursive shifts in fame. While I emphasise the specificity of particular formats below, Reality TV in the form of Big Brother, Pop Idol or celebrity-reality shows (such as I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!), have made a particular claim to ‘reveal’ or ‘expose’ the process of fame construction – whether in terms of following ‘ordinary’ hopefuls from the audition stages to their entrance into the media world, or by claiming to offer us an unprecedented ‘access’ to existing celebrities (‘stripping’ away the celebrity façade). (While of course what Richard Dyer termed ‘the negotiation of authenticity’, or the bid to think in terms of ‘really’, has long since structured the textual mediation of celebrity, it can conceivably be seen to have witnessed an accelerated shift in these contexts.) Equally, in terms of the decline of older myths of fame, these shows exhibit a self-conscious acknowledgement of the process of image production and construction, and the use of celebrity for commercial purposes. Lastly, in mediating the threat of the manufacture discourse, they evidently speak quite explicitly to an emphasis on the ‘power’ of the audience given that, through the now familiar use of interactivity (see Holmes, “But”), they construct the audience as operating as the ultimate creator of the celebrity. This already begins to indicate how, responding to and participating in particular discursive shifts in fame, Reality TV negotiates contemporary discourses on celebrity in complex and contradictory ways. Yet this would also need to acknowledge the differences and specificities of particular formats. For example, Big Brother may well be invoked as the ultimate example of the decline of older myths of fame. The programme does not suggest that a special ‘talent’, or ‘hard work’, are necessary for fame. Indeed, time in the house is clearly organised around an excess of leisured time in which, as the primary antidotes to boredom, eating, sleeping and sunbathing are repetitiously played out before the camera’s gaze. Contestants talk self-consciously about being ‘produced’ as celebrities while in the house (in terms of the programme and wider press coverage), with the understanding that each other’s behaviour and self-presentation is clearly directed to this end. The highly opportunistic and potentially calculating conception of fame is thus self-consciously displayed in the programme itself. In comparison, drawing on the older genre of the TV talent show, the Reality pop programmes such as Popstars (2001, UK), Pop Idol (2001-2, 2003, UK), Fame Academy (2002, 2003, UK) and most recently, The X-Factor (2004, UK) are more explicitly configured around the ‘search’ for a star. In this respect, they are specifically concerned with dramatising a power relationship between music industry and audience, a dialogue which is mapped onto the narrative of the star-making process. Certainly, on one level, they are self-consciously a product of the manufacture era of fame, produced for the scrutiny of a media-aware audience entirely conversant with the concept of ‘image’ construction. In tracking the contestants through auditions, training and re-styling, we witness the open production of the famous self – often trying on different ‘images’ week by week – and the ideological constraints (such as those pertaining to body image or physical appearance) under which this process must take place. The judges equally claim to be representative articulations of the ‘reality’ of the business by foregrounding the importance of image ‘packaging’ and the selling of the self. (As the notoriously ‘nasty’ judge Simon Cowell explains in one edition of Pop Idol, ‘Ten year old girls in Hull have to want to be you… They have to buy into the “image”. Do you see?’) (12 Sep. 2003). In short, they often boldly foreground the capitalistic nature of celebrity production. But at the same time, these programmes clearly draw upon, and arguably engage the audience by, much articulating older myths of fame. Given that, in Gamson’s terms, the pervasive nature of the manufacture discourse ultimately represents a threat to the commercial enterprise of celebrity, these shows provide exemplary evidence of the ways in which the two claims-to-fame stories continue to jostle for cultural legitimacy. Celebrating a mythic emphasis on a unique, authentic and gifted self, there is a persistent bid to lay claim to an indefinable sense of ‘specialness’. Indeed, the phrases ‘you’ve got “star quality” or the “X factor” have become an increasingly self-conscious convention in the shows themselves – as suggested by the naming of the most recent UK format, The X-Factor. In their emphasis on ‘ordinariness’, ‘lucky breaks’, ‘specialness’ and ‘hard work’, they are paradigmatic of the meritocratic ideology of the ‘access myth’ (Dyer, Stars). As Fame Academy’s singing coach Carrie Grant gravely tells the contestants: ‘The only place where “success” comes before work is in the dictionary’ (14 Dec. 2002). In this respect, without the irony or humour that has become such a pervasive aspect of contemporary celebrity coverage (see Gamson, Claims, “Assembly”), the programmes clearly also re-peddle traditional explanations of fame for contemporary cultural consumption (Holmes, “Reality”). Dismissals of these programmes in terms of their promotion of ‘manufactured pop’ ignore the fact that ‘authenticity’ is not really configured around the music itself. Pop music (and particularly TV pop) has historically been configured as ‘the most inauthentic music’ (Moore 220), whether in terms of industrial production, form/ sound, or artist expression and identity. But in many ways the programmes openly acknowledge the derivative and packaged nature of ‘pop’. The aspirant pop stars often sing cover versions on the shows (although they are valued and praised for inserting their ‘individual’ style), and in Pop Idol we witness each of the three finalists record the winning song in the studio prior to the result of the (live) television vote. In this respect, evoking Adorno’s famous critique of popular music’s standardised form, their voice is a cog in a wider machine – a component part which can be substituted and exchanged. But Reality TV’s serial form, aesthetic style and pursuit of ‘the real’, asks us to buy into the authenticity of the self, that the participants are – despite the image packaging – somehow the same person that auditioned at the start. There is often equally the suggestion that Reality TV may bring out the ‘real’, ‘special’ self that was partly inside all along: As one contestant in Fame Academy is chastised after a live performance: ‘We’ve had you showing that you can be Westlife or Bryan Adams, but have we had Barry yet? Where, Barry, is the “Barryness” of Barry?’ (19 Sep. 2003). But in broad terms, with factory workers, waitresses or train drivers turning into superstars, contestants are often imagined as being more ‘authentic’ because of their class background, something which has historically been conceived to signify ‘ordinariness’ within narratives of fame. This is again paradigmatic of the older, traditional discourse of the success myth (and its close companion, the American Dream) (Dyer, Stars). In the Reality format, this is also factored though the sense that we have ‘known’ them in the moment of authentic ‘pre-fame’, when, in short, they were ‘just like us’. In the context of his wider argument that stars work to articulate ideas of personhood or selfhood (Dyer, Stars), one of Richard Dyer’s key interventions was to suggest that stars function to work through discourses of individualism (see also Marshall). Working from a broadly Marxist perspective, he explained how the perpetual attempt to negotiate authenticity in the star image worked to promote a particular concept of personhood on which capitalist society depends. Dyer conceptualised this as ‘a separable, coherent quality, located “inside” consciousness and variously termed “the self”, “the soul”, “the subject”…’ (9). Although, in the context of contemporary celebrity culture and the discourses of postmodernism, Dyer’s model of the self has been critiqued and challenged (see Lovell, King), it by no means seems redundant here. We are absolutely encouraged to seek out, recognise, and believe in, the ‘inner’ self in Reality TV, while the highly performative and mediated context of the form makes this quest more paradoxical than ever. In fact, while programmes such as Big Brother and Pop Idol may display significantly different discourses on, or explanations of fame, this ideology of selfhood permeates much of Reality TV. While in Big Brother there is much self-reflexive and dizzying discussion of ‘who is being their real selves? Who is simply playing up for the camera?’, we are asked to judge the contestants (and they are asked to judge each other), precisely by this criteria of ‘authenticity’. We only need note that – from Big Brother, the pop programmes to the celebrity-reality shows – winners are often chosen and applauded because they are seen to have been the most ‘true’ to themselves. Again, despite the self-reflexive and performative context of Reality TV, this suggests highly conservative ideologies of selfhood and individualism. As Dyer reminds us, we have historically valued stars who appear to ‘bear witness to the continuousness of their own selves’, given that ‘sincerity and authenticity are two qualities greatly prized in stars’ (11). While it is not my intention to make assumptions about audience reading strategies here, it is worth noting that existing audience research (Hill, Jones) into Reality TV has emphasised how viewers indeed obtain satisfaction from the search for ‘the real’ in Reality TV, and from actively negotiating the tensions between construction, performance and authenticity. Annette Hill describes how the ‘game’ is ‘to find the “truth” in the spectacle/performance environment’ (337), and as this quote implies, this is far from suggesting that audiences have given up on the idea of ‘the real’ in Reality TV (Hill, Jones). The primary site on which this is played out is the representation of the self – an arena which stardom and celebrity has historically placed centre stage (Dyer, Marshall). As this suggests, then, the two fields have much to discuss. While I have only touched briefly on the detail of the formats here, this discussion emphasises how Reality TV demands closer consideration in the context of claims suggesting its ‘transformation’ of celebrity. Its position with a longer history of fame, the specificities of particular formats, and the ideological parameters in which they function, all question any simple or homogenous interpretation of its impact on celebrity culture. References Adorno, Theodor. “On Popular Music.” 1941. On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. Eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. London: Routledge, 1990. 22-38. Bazalgette, Peter. “Big Brother and Beyond.” Television (Oct. 2001): 20-3. Biressi, Anita, and Heather Nunn “The Especially Remarkable: Celebrity and Social Mobility in Reality TV.” Mediactive 2 (2004): 44-58. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1979 (reprinted 1998). Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: BFI, 1986. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Gamson, Joshua. “The Assembly Line of Greatness: Celebrity in Twentieth-Century America.” Popular Culture: Production and Consumption. Eds. C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 259-82. Hill, Annette “Big Brother: The Real Audience.” Television and New Media 3.3 (2002): 323-41. Holmes, Su. “’All You’ve Got to Worry about Is Having a Cup of Tea and Doing a Bit of Sunbathing…’: Approaching Celebrity in Big Brother.” Understanding Reality TV. Eds. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn. London: Routledge, 2004. 111-35. Holmes, Su. “But This Time You Choose!: Approaching the Interactive Audience of Reality TV.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.2 (2004): 213-31. Holmes, Su. “Reality Goes Pop!: Reality TV, Popular Music and Narratives of Stardom in Pop Idol.” Television and New Media 5.2 (2004): 147-72. Jones, Janet. “Show Your Real Face: A Fan Study of the UK Big Brother Transmissions (2000, 2001, 2002).” New Media and Society 5.3 (2003): 400-21. King, Barry. “Embodying an Elastic Self: The Parametrics of Contemporary Stardom.” Contemporary Hollywood Stardom. Eds. Thomas Austin and Martin Barker. London: Arnold, 2003. 29-44. Lovell, Alan. “I Went in Search of Deborah Kerr, Jodie Foster and Julianne Moore But Got Waylaid…” Contemporary Hollywood Stardom. Eds. Thomas Austin and Martin Barker. London: Arnold, 2003. 259-70. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Holmes, Susan. "'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?': Conceptualising Fame in Reality TV." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/07-holmes.php>. APA Style Holmes, S. (Nov. 2004) "'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?': Conceptualising Fame in Reality TV," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/07-holmes.php>.

In Ireland today, we eat more pigmeat per capita, approximately 32.4 kilograms, than any other meat, yet you very seldom if ever see a pig (C.S.O.). Fat and flavour are two words that are synonymous with pig meat, yet scientists have spent the last thirty years cross breeding to produce leaner, low-fat pigs. Today’s pig professionals prefer to use the term “pig finishing” as opposed to the more traditional “pig fattening” (Tuite). The pig evokes many themes in relation to cuisine. Charles Lamb (1775-1834), in his essay Dissertation upon Roast Pig, cites Confucius in attributing the accidental discovery of the art of roasting to the humble pig. The pig has been singled out by many cultures as a food to be avoided or even abhorred, and Harris (1997) illustrates the environmental effect this avoidance can have by contrasting the landscape of Christian Albania with that of Muslim Albania.This paper will focus on the pig in Irish cuisine and culture from ancient times to the present day. The inspiration for this paper comes from a folklore tale about how Saint Martin created the pig from a piece of fat. The story is one of a number recorded by Seán Ó Conaill, the famous Kerry storyteller and goes as follows:From St Martin’s fat they were made. He was travelling around, and one night he came to a house and yard. At that time there were only cattle; there were no pigs or piglets. He asked the man of the house if there was anything to eat the chaff and the grain. The man replied there were only the cattle. St Martin said it was a great pity to have that much chaff going to waste. At night when they were going to bed, he handed a piece of fat to the servant-girl and told her to put it under a tub, and not to look at it at all until he would give her the word next day. The girl did so, but she kept a bit of the fat and put it under a keeler to find out what it would be.When St Martin rose next day he asked her to go and lift up the tub. She lifted it up, and there under it were a sow and twelve piglets. It was a great wonder to them, as they had never before seen pig or piglet.The girl then went to the keeler and lifted it, and it was full of mice and rats! As soon as the keeler was lifted, they went running about the house searching for any hole that they could go into. When St Martin saw them, he pulled off one of his mittens and threw it at them and made a cat with that throw. And that is why the cat ever since goes after mice and rats (Ó Conaill).The place of the pig has long been established in Irish literature, and longer still in Irish topography. The word torc, a boar, like the word muc, a pig, is a common element of placenames, from Kanturk (boar’s head) in West Cork to Ros Muc (headland of pigs) in West Galway. The Irish pig had its place in literature well established long before George Orwell’s English pig, Major, headed the dictatorship in Animal Farm. It was a wild boar that killed the hero Diarmaid in the Fenian tale The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne, on top of Ben Bulben in County Sligo (Mac Con Iomaire). In Ancient and Medieval Ireland, wild boars were hunted with great fervour, and the prime cuts were reserved for the warrior classes, and certain other individuals. At a feast, a leg of pork was traditionally reserved for a king, a haunch for a queen, and a boar’s head for a charioteer. The champion warrior was given the best portion of meat (Curath Mhir or Champions’ Share), and fights often took place to decide who should receive it. Gantz (1981) describes how in the ninth century tale The story of Mac Dathó’s Pig, Cet mac Matach, got supremacy over the men of Ireland: “Moreover he flaunted his valour on high above the valour of the host, and took a knife in his hand and sat down beside the pig. “Let someone be found now among the men of Ireland”, said he, “to endure battle with me, or leave the pig for me to divide!”It did not take long before the wild pigs were domesticated. Whereas cattle might be kept for milk and sheep for wool, the only reason for pig rearing was as a source of food. Until the late medieval period, the “domesticated” pigs were fattened on woodland mast, the fruit of the beech, oak, chestnut and whitethorn, giving their flesh a delicious flavour. So important was this resource that it is acknowledged by an entry in the Annals of Clonmacnoise for the year 1038: “There was such an abundance of ackornes this yeare that it fattened the pigges [runts] of pigges” (Sexton 45). In another mythological tale, two pig keepers, one called ‘friuch’ after the boars bristle (pig keeper to the king of Munster) and the other called ‘rucht’ after its grunt (pig keeper to the king of Connacht), were such good friends that the one from the north would bring his pigs south when there was a mast of oak and beech nuts in Munster. If the mast fell in Connacht, the pig-keeper from the south would travel northward. Competitive jealousy sparked by troublemakers led to the pig keepers casting spells on each other’s herds to the effect that no matter what mast they ate they would not grow fat. Both pig keepers were practised in the pagan arts and could form themselves into any shape, and having been dismissed by their kings for the leanness of their pig herds due to the spells, they eventually formed themselves into the two famous bulls that feature in the Irish Epic The Táin (Kinsella).In the witty and satirical twelfth century text, The Vision of Mac Conglinne (Aisling Mhic Conglinne), many references are made to the various types of pig meat. Bacon, hams, sausages and puddings are often mentioned, and the gate to the fortress in the visionary land of plenty is described thus: “there was a gate of tallow to it, whereon was a bolt of sausage” (Jackson).Although pigs were always popular in Ireland, the emergence of the potato resulted in an increase in both human and pig populations. The Irish were the first Europeans to seriously consider the potato as a staple food. By 1663 it was widely accepted in Ireland as an important food plant and by 1770 it was known as the Irish Potato (Mac Con Iomaire and Gallagher). The potato transformed Ireland from an under populated island of one million in the 1590s to 8.2 million in 1840, making it the most densely populated country in Europe. Two centuries of genetic evolution resulted in potato yields growing from two tons per acre in 1670 to ten tons per acre in 1800. A constant supply of potato, which was not seen as a commercial crop, ensured that even the smallest holding could keep a few pigs on a potato-rich diet. Pat Tuite, an expert on pigs with Teagasc, the Irish Agricultural and Food Development Authority, reminded me that the potatoes were cooked for the pigs and that they also enjoyed whey, the by product of both butter and cheese making (Tuite). The agronomist, Arthur Young, while travelling through Ireland, commented in 1770 that in the town of Mitchelstown in County Cork “there seemed to be more pigs than human beings”. So plentiful were pigs at this time that on the eve of the Great Famine in 1841 the pig population was calculated to be 1,412,813 (Sexton 46). Some of the pigs were kept for home consumption but the rest were a valuable source of income and were shown great respect as the gentleman who paid the rent. Until the early twentieth century most Irish rural households kept some pigs.Pork was popular and was the main meat eaten at all feasts in the main houses; indeed a feast was considered incomplete without a whole roasted pig. In the poorer holdings, fresh pork was highly prized, as it was only available when a pig of their own was killed. Most of the pig was salted, placed in the brine barrel for a period or placed up the chimney for smoking.Certain superstitions were observed concerning the time of killing. Pigs were traditionally killed only in months that contained the letter “r”, since the heat of the summer months caused the meat to turn foul. In some counties it was believed that pigs should be killed under the full moon (Mahon 58). The main breed of pig from the medieval period was the Razor Back or Greyhound Pig, which was very efficient in converting organic waste into meat (Fitzgerald). The killing of the pig was an important ritual and a social occasion in rural Ireland, for it meant full and plenty for all. Neighbours, who came to help, brought a handful of salt for the curing, and when the work was done each would get a share of the puddings and the fresh pork. There were a number of days where it was traditional to kill a pig, the Michaelmas feast (29 September), Saint Martins Day (11 November) and St Patrick’s Day (17 March). Olive Sharkey gives a vivid description of the killing of the barrow pig in rural Ireland during the 1930s. A barrow pig is a male pig castrated before puberty:The local slaughterer (búistéir) a man experienced in the rustic art of pig killing, was approached to do the job, though some farmers killed their own pigs. When the búistéirarrived the whole family gathered round to watch the killing. His first job was to plunge the knife in the pig’s heart via the throat, using a special knife. The screeching during this performance was something awful, but the animal died instantly once the heart had been reached, usually to a round of applause from the onlookers. The animal was then draped across a pig-gib, a sort of bench, and had the fine hairs on its body scraped off. To make this a simple job the animal was immersed in hot water a number of times until the bristles were softened and easy to remove. If a few bristles were accidentally missed the bacon was known as ‘hairy bacon’!During the killing of the pig it was imperative to draw a good flow of blood to ensure good quality meat. This blood was collected in a bucket for the making of puddings. The carcass would then be hung from a hook in the shed with a basin under its head to catch the drip, and a potato was often placed in the pig’s mouth to aid the dripping process. After a few days the carcass would be dissected. Sharkey recalls that her father maintained that each pound weight in the pig’s head corresponded to a stone weight in the body. The body was washed and then each piece that was to be preserved was carefully salted and placed neatly in a barrel and hermetically sealed. It was customary in parts of the midlands to add brown sugar to the barrel at this stage, while in other areas juniper berries were placed in the fire when hanging the hams and flitches (sides of bacon), wrapped in brown paper, in the chimney for smoking (Sharkey 166). While the killing was predominantly men’s work, it was the women who took most responsibility for the curing and smoking. Puddings have always been popular in Irish cuisine. The pig’s intestines were washed well and soaked in a stream, and a mixture of onions, lard, spices, oatmeal and flour were mixed with the blood and the mixture was stuffed into the casing and boiled for about an hour, cooled and the puddings were divided amongst the neighbours.The pig was so palatable that the famous gastronomic writer Grimod de la Reyniere once claimed that the only piece you couldn’t eat was the “oink”. Sharkey remembers her father remarking that had they been able to catch the squeak they would have made tin whistles out of it! No part went to waste; the blood and offal were used, the trotters were known as crubeens (from crúb, hoof), and were boiled and eaten with cabbage. In Galway the knee joint was popular and known as the glúiníns (from glún, knee). The head was roasted whole or often boiled and pressed and prepared as Brawn. The chitterlings (small intestines) were meticulously prepared by continuous washing in cool water and the picking out of undigested food and faeces. Chitterlings were once a popular bar food in Dublin. Pig hair was used for paintbrushes and the bladder was occasionally inflated, using a goose quill, to be used as a football by the children. Meindertsma (2007) provides a pictorial review of the vast array of products derived from a single pig. These range from ammunition and porcelain to chewing gum.From around the mid-eighteenth century, commercial salting of pork and bacon grew rapidly in Ireland. 1820 saw Henry Denny begin operation in Waterford where he both developed and patented several production techniques for bacon. Bacon curing became a very important industry in Munster culminating in the setting up of four large factories. Irish bacon was the brand leader and the Irish companies exported their expertise. Denny set up a plant in Denmark in 1894 and introduced the Irish techniques to the Danish industry, while O’Mara’s set up bacon curing facilities in Russia in 1891 (Cowan and Sexton). Ireland developed an extensive export trade in bacon to England, and hams were delivered to markets in Paris, India, North and South America. The “sandwich method” of curing, or “dry cure”, was used up until 1862 when the method of injecting strong brine into the meat by means of a pickling pump was adopted by Irish bacon-curers. 1887 saw the formation of the Bacon Curers’ Pig Improvement Association and they managed to introduce a new breed, the Large White Ulster into most regions by the turn of the century. This breed was suitable for the production of “Wiltshire” bacon. Cork, Waterford Dublin and Belfast were important centres for bacon but it was Limerick that dominated the industry and a Department of Agriculture document from 1902 suggests that the famous “Limerick cure” may have originated by chance:1880 […] Limerick producers were short of money […] they produced what was considered meat in a half-cured condition. The unintentional cure proved extremely popular and others followed suit. By the turn of the century the mild cure procedure was brought to such perfection that meat could [… be] sent to tropical climates for consumption within a reasonable time (Cowan and Sexton).Failure to modernise led to the decline of bacon production in Limerick in the 1960s and all four factories closed down. The Irish pig market was protected prior to joining the European Union. There were no imports, and exports were subsidised by the Pigs and Bacon Commission. The Department of Agriculture started pig testing in the early 1960s and imported breeds from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. The two main breeds were Large White and Landrace. Most farms kept pigs before joining the EU but after 1972, farmers were encouraged to rationalise and specialise. Grants were made available for facilities that would keep 3,000 pigs and these grants kick started the development of large units.Pig keeping and production were not only rural occupations; Irish towns and cities also had their fair share. Pigs could easily be kept on swill from hotels, restaurants, not to mention the by-product and leftovers of the brewing and baking industries. Ed Hick, a fourth generation pork butcher from south County Dublin, recalls buying pigs from a local coal man and bus driver and other locals for whom it was a tradition to keep pigs on the side. They would keep some six or eight pigs at a time and feed them on swill collected locally. Legislation concerning the feeding of swill introduced in 1985 (S.I.153) and an amendment in 1987 (S.I.133) required all swill to be heat-treated and resulted in most small operators going out of business. Other EU directives led to the shutting down of thousands of slaughterhouses across Europe. Small producers like Hick who slaughtered at most 25 pigs a week in their family slaughterhouse, states that it was not any one rule but a series of them that forced them to close. It was not uncommon for three inspectors, a veterinarian, a meat inspector and a hygiene inspector, to supervise himself and his brother at work. Ed Hick describes the situation thus; “if we had taken them on in a game of football, we would have lost! We were seen as a huge waste of veterinary time and manpower”.Sausages and rashers have long been popular in Dublin and are the main ingredients in the city’s most famous dish “Dublin Coddle.” Coddle is similar to an Irish stew except that it uses pork rashers and sausage instead of lamb. It was, traditionally, a Saturday night dish when the men came home from the public houses. Terry Fagan has a book on Dublin Folklore called Monto: Murder, Madams and Black Coddle. The black coddle resulted from soot falling down the chimney into the cauldron. James Joyce describes Denny’s sausages with relish in Ulysses, and like many other Irish emigrants, he would welcome visitors from home only if they brought Irish sausages and Irish whiskey with them. Even today, every family has its favourite brand of sausages: Byrne’s, Olhausens, Granby’s, Hafner’s, Denny’s Gold Medal, Kearns and Superquinn are among the most popular. Ironically the same James Joyce, who put Dublin pork kidneys on the world table in Ulysses, was later to call his native Ireland “the old sow that eats her own farrow” (184-5).The last thirty years have seen a concerted effort to breed pigs that have less fat content and leaner meat. There are no pure breeds of Landrace or Large White in production today for they have been crossbred for litter size, fat content and leanness (Tuite). Many experts feel that they have become too lean, to the detriment of flavour and that the meat can tend to split when cooked. Pig production is now a complicated science and tighter margins have led to only large-scale operations being financially viable (Whittemore). The average size of herd has grown from 29 animals in 1973, to 846 animals in 1997, and the highest numbers are found in counties Cork and Cavan (Lafferty et al.). The main players in today’s pig production/processing are the large Irish Agribusiness Multinationals Glanbia, Kerry Foods and Dairygold. Tuite (2002) expressed worries among the industry that there may be no pig production in Ireland in twenty years time, with production moving to Eastern Europe where feed and labour are cheaper. When it comes to traceability, in the light of the Foot and Mouth, BSE and Dioxin scares, many feel that things were much better in the old days, when butchers like Ed Hick slaughtered animals that were reared locally and then sold them back to local consumers. Hick has recently killed pigs for friends who have begun keeping them for home consumption. This slaughtering remains legal as long as the meat is not offered for sale.Although bacon and cabbage, and the full Irish breakfast with rashers, sausages and puddings, are considered to be some of Ireland’s most well known traditional dishes, there has been a growth in modern interpretations of traditional pork and bacon dishes in the repertoires of the seemingly ever growing number of talented Irish chefs. Michael Clifford popularised Clonakilty Black Pudding as a starter in his Cork restaurant Clifford’s in the late 1980s, and its use has become widespread since, as a starter or main course often partnered with either caramelised apples or red onion marmalade. Crubeens (pigs trotters) have been modernised “a la Pierre Kaufman” by a number of Irish chefs, who bone them out and stuff them with sweetbreads. Kevin Thornton, the first Irish chef to be awarded two Michelin stars, has roasted suckling pig as one of his signature dishes. Richard Corrigan is keeping the Irish flag flying in London in his Michelin starred Soho restaurant, Lindsay House, where traditional pork and bacon dishes from his childhood are creatively re-interpreted with simplicity and taste.Pork, ham and bacon are, without doubt, the most traditional of all Irish foods, featuring in the diet since prehistoric times. Although these meats remain the most consumed per capita in post “Celtic Tiger” Ireland, there are a number of threats facing the country’s pig industry. Large-scale indoor production necessitates the use of antibiotics. European legislation and economic factors have contributed in the demise of the traditional art of pork butchery. Scientific advancements have resulted in leaner low-fat pigs, many argue, to the detriment of flavour. Alas, all is not lost. There is a growth in consumer demand for quality local food, and some producers like J. Hick & Sons, and Prue & David Rudd and Family are leading the way. The Rudds process and distribute branded antibiotic-free pig related products with the mission of “re-inventing the tastes of bygone days with the quality of modern day standards”. Few could argue with the late Irish writer John B. Keane (72): “When this kind of bacon is boiling with its old colleague, white cabbage, there is a gurgle from the pot that would tear the heart out of any hungry man”.ReferencesCowan, Cathal and Regina Sexton. Ireland's Traditional Foods: An Exploration of Irish Local & Typical Foods & Drinks. Dublin: Teagasc, 1997.C.S.O. Central Statistics Office. Figures on per capita meat consumption for 2009, 2010. Ireland. http://www.cso.ie.Fitzgerald, Oisin. "The Irish 'Greyhound' Pig: an extinct indigenous breed of Pig." History Ireland13.4 (2005): 20-23.Gantz, Jeffrey Early Irish Myths and Sagas. New York: Penguin, 1981.Harris, Marvin. "The Abominable Pig." Food and Culture: A Reader. Eds. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York: Routledge, 1997. 67-79.Hick, Edward. Personal Communication with master butcher Ed Hick. 15 Apr. 2002.Hick, Edward. Personal Communication concerning pig killing. 5 Sep. 2010.Jackson, K. H. Ed. Aislinge Meic Con Glinne, Dublin: Institute of Advanced Studies, 1990.Joyce, James. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London: Granada, 1977.Keane, John B. Strong Tea. Cork: Mercier Press, 1963.Kinsella, Thomas. The Táin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.Lafferty, S., Commins, P. and Walsh, J. A. Irish Agriculture in Transition: A Census Atlas of Agriculture in the Republic of Ireland. Dublin: Teagasc, 1999.Mac Con Iomaire, Liam. Ireland of the Proverb. Dublin: Town House, 1988.Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín and Pádraic Óg Gallagher. "The Potato in Irish Cuisine and Culture."Journal of Culinary Science and Technology 7.2-3 (2009): 1-16.Mahon, Bríd. Land of Milk and Honey: The Story of Traditional Irish Food and Drink. Cork:Mercier, 1998.Meindertsma, Christien. PIG 05049 2007. 10 Aug. 2010 http://www.christienmeindertsma.com.Ó Conaill, Seán. Seán Ó Conaill's Book. Bailie Átha Cliath: Bhéaloideas Éireann, 1981.Sexton, Regina. A Little History of Irish Food. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1998.Sharkey, Olive. Old Days Old Ways: An Illustrated Folk History of Ireland. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 1985.S.I. 153, 1985 (Irish Legislation) http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1985/en/si/0153.htmlS.I. 133, 1987 (Irish Legislation) http://www.irishstatuebook.ie/1987/en/si/0133.htmlTuite, Pat. Personal Communication with Pat Tuite, Chief Pig Advisor, Teagasc. 3 May 2002.Whittemore, Colin T. and Ilias Kyriazakis. Whitmore's Science and Practice of Pig Production 3rdEdition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.

IntroductionDespite claims that the importance of distance has been reduced due to technological and communications improvements (Cairncross; Friedman; O’Brien), the ‘power of place’ still resonates, often intensifying the role of geography (Christopherson et al.; Morgan; Pratt; Scott and Storper). Within the film industry, there has been a decentralisation of production from Hollywood, but there remains a spatial logic which has preferenced particular centres, such as Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney and Prague often led by a combination of incentives (Christopherson and Storper; Goldsmith and O’Regan; Goldsmith et al.; Miller et al.; Mould). The emergence of high end television, television programming for which the production budget is more than £1 million per television hour, has presented new opportunities for screen hubs sharing a very similar value chain to the film industry (OlsbergSPI with Nordicity).In recent years, interventions have proliferated with the aim of capitalising on the decentralisation of certain activities in order to attract international screen industries production and embed it within local hubs. Tools for building capacity and expertise have proliferated, including support for studio complex facilities, infrastructural investments, tax breaks and other economic incentives (Cucco; Goldsmith and O’Regan; Jensen; Goldsmith et al.; McDonald; Miller et al.; Mould). Yet experience tells us that these will not succeed everywhere. There is a need for a better understanding of both the capacity for places to build a distinctive and competitive advantage within a highly globalised landscape and the relative merits of alternative interventions designed to generate a sustainable production base.This article first sets out the rationale for the appetite identified in the screen industries for co-location, or clustering and concentration in a tightly drawn physical area, in global hubs of production. It goes on to explore the latest trends of decentralisation and examines the upturn in interventions aimed at attracting mobile screen industries capital and labour. Finally it introduces the Scottish screen industries and explores some of the ways in which Scotland has sought to position itself as a recipient of screen industries activity. The paper identifies some key gaps in infrastructure, most notably a studio, and calls for closer examination of the essential ingredients of, and possible interventions needed for, a vibrant and sustainable industry.A Compulsion for ProximityIt has been argued that particular spatial and place-based factors are central to the development and organisation of the screen industries. The film and television sector, the particular focus of this article, exhibit an extraordinarily high degree of spatial agglomeration, especially favouring centres with global status. It is worth noting that the computer games sector, not explored in this article, slightly diverges from this trend displaying more spatial patterns of decentralisation (Vallance), although key physical hubs of activity have been identified (Champion). Creative products often possess a cachet that is directly associated with their point of origin, for example fashion from Paris, films from Hollywood and country music from Nashville – although it can also be acknowledged that these are often strategic commercial constructions (Pecknold). The place of production represents a unique component of the final product as well as an authentication of substantive and symbolic quality (Scott, “Creative cities”). Place can act as part of a brand or image for creative industries, often reinforcing the advantage of being based in particular centres of production.Very localised historical, cultural, social and physical factors may also influence the success of creative production in particular places. Place-based factors relating to the built environment, including cheap space, public-sector support framework, connectivity, local identity, institutional environment and availability of amenities, are seen as possible influences in the locational choices of creative industry firms (see, for example, Drake; Helbrecht; Hutton; Leadbeater and Oakley; Markusen).Employment trends are notoriously difficult to measure in the screen industries (Christopherson, “Hollywood in decline?”), but the sector does contain large numbers of very small firms and freelancers. This allows them to be flexible but poses certain problems that can be somewhat offset by co-location. The findings of Antcliff et al.’s study of workers in the audiovisual industry in the UK suggested that individuals sought to reconstruct stable employment relations through their involvement in and use of networks. The trust and reciprocity engendered by stable networks, built up over time, were used to offset the risk associated with the erosion of stable employment. These findings are echoed by a study of TV content production in two media regions in Germany by Sydow and Staber who found that, although firms come together to work on particular projects, typically their business relations extend for a much longer period than this. Commonly, firms and individuals who have worked together previously will reassemble for further project work aided by their past experiences and expectations.Co-location allows the development of shared structures: language, technical attitudes, interpretative schemes and ‘communities of practice’ (Bathelt, et al.). Grabher describes this process as ‘hanging out’. Deep local pools of creative and skilled labour are advantageous both to firms and employees (Reimer et al.) by allowing flexibility, developing networks and offsetting risk (Banks et al.; Scott, “Global City Regions”). For example in Cook and Pandit’s study comparing the broadcasting industry in three city-regions, London was found to be hugely advantaged by its unrivalled talent pool, high financial rewards and prestigious projects. As Barnes and Hutton assert in relation to the wider creative industries, “if place matters, it matters most to them” (1251). This is certainly true for the screen industries and their spatial logic points towards a compulsion for proximity in large global hubs.Decentralisation and ‘Sticky’ PlacesDespite the attraction of global production hubs, there has been a decentralisation of screen industries from key centres, starting with the film industry and the vertical disintegration of Hollywood studios (Christopherson and Storper). There are instances of ‘runaway production’ from the 1920s onwards with around 40 per cent of all features being accounted for by offshore production in 1960 (Miller et al., 133). This trend has been increasing significantly in the last 20 years, leading to the genesis of new hubs of screen activity such as Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney and Prague (Christopherson, “Project work in context”; Goldsmith et al.; Mould; Miller et al.; Szczepanik). This development has been prompted by a multiplicity of reasons including favourable currency value differentials and economic incentives. Subsidies and tax breaks have been offered to secure international productions with most countries demanding that, in order to qualify for tax relief, productions have to spend a certain amount of their budget within the local economy, employ local crew and use domestic creative talent (Hill). Extensive infrastructure has been developed including studio complexes to attempt to lure productions with the advantage of a full service offering (Goldsmith and O’Regan).Internationally, Canada has been the greatest beneficiary of ‘runaway production’ with a state-led enactment of generous film incentives since the late 1990s (McDonald). Vancouver and Toronto are the busiest locations for North American Screen production after Los Angeles and New York, due to exchange rates and tax rebates on labour costs (Miller et al., 141). 80% of Vancouver’s production is attributable to runaway production (Jensen, 27) and the city is considered by some to have crossed a threshold as:It now possesses sufficient depth and breadth of talent to undertake the full array of pre-production, production and post-production services for the delivery of major motion pictures and TV programmes. (Barnes and Coe, 19)Similarly, Toronto is considered to have established a “comprehensive set of horizontal and vertical media capabilities” to ensure its status as a “full function media centre” (Davis, 98). These cities have successfully engaged in entrepreneurial activity to attract production (Christopherson, “Project Work in Context”) and in Vancouver the proactive role of provincial government and labour unions are, in part, credited with its success (Barnes and Coe). Studio-complex infrastructure has also been used to lure global productions, with Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney all being seen as key examples of where such developments have been used as a strategic priority to take local production capacity to the next level (Goldsmith and O’Regan).Studies which provide a historiography of the development of screen-industry hubs emphasise a complex interplay of social, cultural and physical conditions. In the complex and global flows of the screen industries, ‘sticky’ hubs have emerged with the ability to attract and retain capital and skilled labour. Despite being principally organised to attract international production, most studio complexes, especially those outside of global centres need to have a strong relationship to local or national film and television production to ensure the sustainability and depth of the labour pool (Goldsmith and O’Regan, 2003). Many have a broadcaster on site as well as a range of companies with a media orientation and training facilities (Goldsmith and O’Regan, 2003; Picard, 2008). The emergence of film studio complexes in the Australian Gold Coast and Vancouver was accompanied by an increasing role for television production and this multi-purpose nature was important for the continuity of production.Fostering a strong community of below the line workers, such as set designers, locations managers, make-up artists and props manufacturers, can also be a clear advantage in attracting international productions. For example at Cinecitta in Italy, the expertise of set designers and experienced crews in the Barrandov Studios of Prague are regarded as major selling points of the studio complexes there (Goldsmith and O’Regan; Miller et al.; Szczepanik). Natural and built environments are also considered very important for film and television firms and it is a useful advantage for capturing international production when cities can double for other locations as in the cases of Toronto, Vancouver, Prague for example (Evans; Goldsmith and O’Regan; Szczepanik). Toronto, for instance, has doubled for New York in over 100 films and with regard to television Due South’s (1994-1998) use of Toronto as Chicago was estimated to have saved 40 per cent in costs (Miller et al., 141).The Scottish Screen Industries Within mobile flows of capital and labour, Scotland has sought to position itself as a recipient of screen industries activity through multiple interventions, including investment in institutional frameworks, direct and indirect economic subsidies and the development of physical infrastructure. Traditionally creative industry activity in the UK has been concentrated in London and the South East which together account for 43% of the creative economy workforce (Bakhshi et al.). In order, in part to redress this imbalance and more generally to encourage the attraction and retention of international production a range of policies have been introduced focused on the screen industries. A revised Film Tax Relief was introduced in 2007 to encourage inward investment and prevent offshoring of indigenous production, and this has since been extended to high-end television, animation and children’s programming. Broadcasting has also experienced a push for decentralisation led by public funding with a responsibility to be regionally representative. The BBC (“BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2014/15”) is currently exceeding its target of 50% network spend outside London by 2016, with 17% spent in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Channel 4 has similarly committed to commission at least 9% of its original spend from the nations by 2020. Studios have been also developed across the UK including at Roath Lock (Cardiff), Titanic Studios (Belfast), MedicaCity (Salford) and The Sharp Project (Manchester).The creative industries have been identified as one of seven growth sectors for Scotland by the government (Scottish Government). In 2010, the film and video sector employed 3,500 people and contributed £120 million GVA and £120 million adjusted GVA to the economy and the radio and TV sector employed 3,500 people and contributed £50 million GVA and £400 million adjusted GVA (The Scottish Parliament). Beyond the direct economic benefits of sectors, the on-screen representation of Scotland has been claimed to boost visitor numbers to the country (EKOS) and high profile international film productions have been attracted including Skyfall (2012) and WWZ (2013).Scotland has historically attracted international film and TV productions due to its natural locations (VisitScotland) and on average, between 2009-2014, six big budget films a year used Scottish locations both urban and rural (BOP Consulting, 2014). In all, a total of £20 million was generated by film-making in Glasgow during 2011 (Balkind) with WWZ (2013) and Cloud Atlas (2013), representing Philadelphia and San Francisco respectively, as well as doubling for Edinburgh for the recent acclaimed Scottish films Filth (2013) and Sunshine on Leith (2013). Sanson (80) asserts that the use of the city as a site for international productions not only brings in direct revenue from production money but also promotes the city as a “fashionable place to live, work and visit. Creativity makes the city both profitable and ‘cool’”.Nonetheless, issues persist and it has been suggested that Scotland lacks a stable and sustainable film industry, with low indigenous production levels and variable success from year to year in attracting inward investment (BOP Consulting). With regard to crew, problems with an insufficient production base have been identified as an issue in maintaining a pipeline of skills (BOP Consulting). Developing ‘talent’ is a central aspect of the Scottish Government’s Strategy for the Creative Industries, yet there remains the core challenge of retaining skills and encouraging new talent into the industry (BOP Consulting).With regard to film, a lack of substantial funding incentives and the absence of a studio have been identified as a key concern for the sector. For example, within the film industry the majority of inward investment filming in Scotland is location work as it lacks the studio facilities that would enable it to sustain a big-budget production in its entirety (BOP Consulting). The absence of such infrastructure has been seen as contributing to a drain of Scottish talent from these industries to other areas and countries where there is a more vibrant sector (BOP Consulting). The loss of Scottish talent to Northern Ireland was attributed to the longevity of the work being provided by Games of Thrones (2011-) now having completed its six series at the Titanic Studios in Belfast (EKOS) although this may have been stemmed somewhat recently with the attraction of US high-end TV series Outlander (2014-) which has been based at Wardpark in Cumbernauld since 2013.Television, both high-end production and local broadcasting, appears crucial to the sustainability of screen production in Scotland. Outlander has been estimated to contribute to Scotland’s production spend figures reaching a historic high of £45.8 million in 2014 (Creative Scotland ”Creative Scotland Screen Strategy Update”). The arrival of the program has almost doubled production spend in Scotland, offering the chance for increased stability for screen industries workers. Qualifying for UK High-End Television Tax Relief, Outlander has engaged a crew of approximately 300 across props, filming and set build, and cast over 2,000 supporting artist roles from within Scotland and the UK.Long running drama, in particular, offers key opportunities for both those cutting their teeth in the screen industries and also by providing more consistent and longer-term employment to existing workers. BBC television soap River City (2002-) has been identified as a key example of such an opportunity and the programme has been credited with providing a springboard for developing the skills of local actors, writers and production crew (Hibberd). This kind of pipeline of production is critical given the work patterns of the sector. According to Creative Skillset, of the 4,000 people in Scotland are employed in the film and television industries, 40% of television workers are freelance and 90% of film production work in freelance (EKOS).In an attempt to address skills gaps, the Outlander Trainee Placement Scheme has been devised in collaboration with Creative Scotland and Creative Skillset. During filming of Season One, thirty-eight trainees were supported across a range of production and craft roles, followed by a further twenty-five in Season Two. Encouragingly Outlander, and the books it is based on, is set in Scotland so the authenticity of place has played a strong component in the decision to locate production there. Producer David Brown began his career on Bill Forsyth films Gregory’s Girl (1981), Local Hero (1983) and Comfort and Joy (1984) and has a strong existing relationship to Scotland. He has been very vocal in his support for the trainee program, contending that “training is the future of our industry and we at Outlander see the growth of talent and opportunities as part of our mission here in Scotland” (“Outlander fast tracks next generation of skilled screen talent”).ConclusionsThis article has aimed to explore the relationship between place and the screen industries and, taking Scotland as its focus, has outlined a need to more closely examine the ways in which the sector can be supported. Despite the possible gains in terms of building a sustainable industry, the state-led funding of the global screen industries is contested. The use of tax breaks and incentives has been problematised and critiques range from use of public funding to attract footloose media industries to the increasingly zero sum game of competition between competing places (Morawetz; McDonald). In relation to broadcasting, there have been critiques of a ‘lift and shift’ approach to policy in the UK, with TV production companies moving to the nations and regions temporarily to meet the quota and leaving once a production has finished (House of Commons). Further to this, issues have been raised regarding how far such interventions can seed and develop a rich production ecology that offers opportunities for indigenous talent (Christopherson and Rightor).Nonetheless recent success for the screen industries in Scotland can, at least in part, be attributed to interventions including increased decentralisation of broadcasting and the high-end television tax incentives. This article has identified gaps in infrastructure which continue to stymie growth and have led to production drain to other centres. 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Introduction A snapshot, not unlike countless photographs likely to be found in any number of family albums, shows two figures sitting on a park bench: an elderly and amiable looking man grins beneath the rim of a golf cap; a young boy of twelve smiles wide for the camera — a rather banal scene, captured on film. And yet, this seemingly innocent and unexceptional photograph was the site of a remarkable and wide ranging discourse — encompassing American conservatism, celebrity politics, and the end of the Cold War — as the image circulated around the globe during the weeklong state funeral of Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United States. Taken in 1997 by the young boy’s grandfather, Ukrainian immigrant Yakov Ravin, during a chance encounter with the former president, the snapshot is believed to be the last public photograph of Ronald Reagan. Published on the occasion of the president’s death, the photograph made “instant celebrities” of the boy, now a twenty-year-old college student, Rostik Denenburg and his grand dad. Throughout the week of Reagan’s funeral, the two joined a chorus of dignitaries, politicians, pundits, and “ordinary” Americans praising Ronald Reagan: “The Great Communicator,” the man who defeated Communism, the popular president who restored America’s confidence, strength, and prosperity. Yes, it was mourning in America again. And the whole world was watching. Not since Princess Diana’s sudden (and unexpected) death, have we witnessed an electronic hagiography of such global proportions. Unlike Diana’s funeral, however, Reagan’s farewell played out in distinctly partisan terms. As James Ridgeway (2004) noted, the Reagan state funeral was “not only face-saving for the current administration, but also perhaps a mask for the American military debacle in Iraq. Not to mention a gesture of America’s might in the ‘war on terror.’” With non-stop media coverage, the weeklong ceremonies provided a sorely needed shot in the arm to the Bush re-election campaign. Still, whilst the funeral proceedings and the attendant media coverage were undeniably excessive in their deification of the former president, the historical white wash was not nearly so vulgar as the antiseptic send off Richard Nixon received back in 1994. That is to say, the piety of the Nixon funeral was at once startling and galling to many who reviled the man (Lapham). By contrast, given Ronald Reagan’s disarming public persona, his uniquely cordial relationship with the national press corps, and most notably, his handler’s mastery of media management techniques, the Reagan idolatry was neither surprising nor unexpected. In this brief essay, I want to consider Reagan’s funeral, and his legacy, in relation to what cultural critics, referring to the production of celebrity, have described as “fame games” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall). Specifically, I draw on the concept of “flashpoints” — moments of media excess surrounding a particular personage — in consideration of the Reagan funeral. Throughout, I demonstrate how Reagan’s death and the attendant media coverage epitomize this distinctive feature of contemporary culture. Furthermore, I observe Reagan’s innovative approaches to electoral politics in the age of television. Here, I suggest that Reagan’s appropriation of the strategies and techniques associated with advertising, marketing and public relations were decisive, not merely in terms of his electoral success, but also in securing his lasting fame. I conclude with some thoughts on the implications of Reagan’s legacy on historical memory, contemporary politics, and what neoconservatives, the heirs of the Reagan Revolution, gleefully describe as the New American Century. The Magic Hour On the morning of 12 June 2004, the last day of the state funeral, world leaders eulogized Reagan, the statesmen, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Among the A-List political stars invited to speak were Margaret Thatcher, former president George H. W. Bush and, to borrow Arundhati Roi’s useful phrase, “Bush the Lesser.” Reagan’s one-time Cold War adversary, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as former Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were also on hand, but did not have speaking parts. Former Reagan administration officials, Supreme Court justices, and congressional representatives from both sides of the aisle rounded out a guest list that read like a who’s who of the American political class. All told, Reagan’s weeklong sendoff was a state funeral at its most elaborate. It had it all—the flag draped coffin, the grieving widow, the riderless horse, and the procession of mourners winding their way through the Rotunda of the US Capitol. In this last regard, Reagan joined an elite group of seven presidents, including four who died by assassination — Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy — to be honored by having his remains lie in state in the Rotunda. But just as the deceased president was product of the studio system, so too, the script for the Gipper’s swan song come straight out of Hollywood. Later that day, the Reagan entourage made one last transcontinental flight back to the presidential library in Simi Valley, California for a private funeral service at sunset. In Hollywood parlance, the “magic hour” refers to the quality of light at dusk. It is an ideal, but ephemeral time favored by cinematographers, when the sunlight takes on a golden glow lending grandeur, nostalgia, and oftentimes, a sense of closure to a scene. This was Ronald Reagan’s final moment in the sun: a fitting end for an actor of the silver screen, as well as for the president who mastered televisual politics. In a culture so thoroughly saturated with the image, even the death of a minor celebrity is an occasion to replay film clips, interviews, paparazzi photos and the like. Moreover, these “flashpoints” grow in intensity and frequency as promotional culture, technological innovation, and the proliferation of new media outlets shape contemporary media culture. They are both cause and consequence of these moments of media excess. And, as Turner, Bonner and Marshall observe, “That is their point. It is their disproportionate nature that makes them so important: the scale of their visibility, their overwhelmingly excessive demonstration of the power of the relationship between mass-mediated celebrities and the consumers of popular culture” (3-4). B-Movie actor, corporate spokesman, state governor and, finally, US president, Ronald Reagan left an extraordinary photographic record. Small wonder, then, that Reagan’s death was a “flashpoint” of the highest order: an orgy of images, a media spectacle waiting to happen. After all, Reagan appeared in over 50 films during his career in Hollywood. Publicity stills and clips from Reagan’s film career, including Knute Rockne, All American, the biopic that earned Reagan his nickname “the Gipper”, King’s Row, and Bedtime for Bonzo provided a surreal, yet welcome respite from television’s obsessive (some might say morbidly so) live coverage of Reagan’s remains making their way across country. Likewise, archival footage of Reagan’s political career — most notably, images of the 1981 assassination attempt; his quip “not to make age an issue” during the 1984 presidential debate; and his 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate demanding that Soviet President Gorbachev, “tear down this wall” — provided the raw materials for press coverage that thoroughly dominated the global mediascape. None of which is to suggest, however, that the sheer volume of Reagan’s photographic record is sufficient to account for the endless replay and reinterpretation of Reagan’s life story. If we are to fully comprehend Reagan’s fame, we must acknowledge his seminal engagement with promotional culture, “a professional articulation between the news and entertainment media and the sources of publicity and promotion” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall 5) in advancing an extraordinary political career. Hitting His Mark In a televised address supporting Barry Goldwater’s nomination for the presidency delivered at the 1964 Republican Convention, Ronald Reagan firmly established his conservative credentials and, in so doing, launched one of the most remarkable and influential careers in American politics. Political scientist Gerard J. De Groot makes a compelling case that the strategy Reagan and his handlers developed in the 1966 California gubernatorial campaign would eventually win him the presidency. The centerpiece of this strategy was to depict the former actor as a political outsider. Crafting a persona he described as “citizen politician,” Reagan’s great appeal and enormous success lie in his uncanny ability to project an image founded on traditional American values of hard work, common sense and self-determination. Over the course of his political career, Reagan’s studied optimism and “no-nonsense” approach to public policy would resonate with an electorate weary of career politicians. Charming, persuasive, and seemingly “authentic,” Reagan ran gubernatorial and subsequent presidential campaigns that were distinctive in that they employed sophisticated public relations and marketing techniques heretofore unknown in the realm of electoral politics. The 1966 Reagan gubernatorial campaign took the then unprecedented step of employing an advertising firm, Los Angeles-based Spencer-Roberts, in shaping the candidate’s image. Leveraging their candidate’s ease before the camera, the Reagan team crafted a campaign founded upon a sophisticated grasp of the television industry, TV news routines, and the medium’s growing importance to electoral politics. For instance, in the days before the 1966 Republican primary, the Reagan team produced a five-minute film using images culled from his campaign appearances. Unlike his opponent, whose television spots were long-winded, amateurish and poorly scheduled pieces that interrupted popular programs, like Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Reagan’s short film aired in the early evening, between program segments (De Groot). Thus, while his opponent’s television spot alienated viewers, the Reagan team demonstrated a formidable appreciation not only for televisual style, but also, crucially, a sophisticated understanding of the nuances of television scheduling, audience preferences and viewing habits. Over the course of his political career, Reagan refined his media driven, media directed campaign strategy. An analysis of his 1980 presidential campaign reveals three dimensions of Reagan’s increasingly sophisticated media management strategy (Covington et al.). First, the Reagan campaign carefully controlled their candidate’s accessibility to the press. Reagan’s penchant for potentially damaging off-the-cuff remarks and factual errors led his advisors to limit journalists’ interactions with the candidate. Second, the character of Reagan’s public appearances, including photo opportunities and especially press conferences, grew more formal. Reagan’s interactions with the press corps were highly structured affairs designed to control which reporters were permitted to ask questions and to help the candidate anticipate questions and prepare responses in advance. Finally, the Reagan campaign sought to keep the candidate “on message.” That is to say, press releases, photo opportunities and campaign appearances focused on a single, consistent message. This approach, known as the Issue of the Day (IOD) media management strategy proved indispensable to advancing the administration’s goals and achieving its objectives. Not only was the IOD strategy remarkably effective in influencing press coverage of the Reagan White House, this coverage promoted an overwhelmingly positive image of the president. As the weeklong funeral amply demonstrated, Reagan was, and remains, one of the most popular presidents in modern American history. Reagan’s popular (and populist) appeal is instructive inasmuch as it illuminates the crucial distinction between “celebrity and its premodern antecedent, fame” observed by historian Charles L. Ponce de Leone (13). Whereas fame was traditionally bestowed upon those whose heroism and extraordinary achievements distinguished them from common people, celebrity is a defining feature of modernity, inasmuch as celebrity is “a direct outgrowth of developments that most of us regard as progressive: the spread of the market economy and the rise of democratic, individualistic values” (Ponce de Leone 14). On one hand, then, Reagan’s celebrity reflects his individualism, his resolute faith in the primacy of the market, and his defense of “traditional” (i.e. democratic) American values. On the other hand, by emphasizing his heroic, almost supernatural achievements, most notably his vanquishing of the “Evil Empire,” the Reagan mythology serves to lift him “far above the common rung of humanity” raising him to “the realm of the divine” (Ponce de Leone 14). Indeed, prior to his death, the Reagan faithful successfully lobbied Congress to create secular shrines to the standard bearer of American conservatism. For instance, in 1998, President Clinton signed a bill that officially rechristened one of the US capitol’s airports to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. More recently, conservatives working under the aegis of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project have called for the creation of even more visible totems to the Reagan Revolution, including replacing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s profile on the dime with Reagan’s image and, more dramatically, inscribing Reagan in stone, alongside Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt at Mount Rushmore (Gordon). Therefore, Reagan’s enduring fame rests not only on the considerable symbolic capital associated with his visual record, but also, increasingly, upon material manifestations of American political culture. The High Stakes of Media Politics What are we to make of Reagan’s fame and its implications for America? To begin with, we must acknowledge Reagan’s enduring influence on modern electoral politics. Clearly, Reagan’s “citizen politician” was a media construct — the masterful orchestration of ideological content across the institutional structures of news, public relations and marketing. While some may suggest that Reagan’s success was an anomaly, a historical aberration, a host of politicians, and not a few celebrities — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger among them — emulate Reagan’s style and employ the media management strategies he pioneered. Furthermore, we need to recognize that the Reagan mythology that is so thoroughly bound up in his approach to media/politics does more to obscure, rather than illuminate the historical record. For instance, in her (video taped) remarks at the funeral service, Margaret Thatcher made the extraordinary claim — a central tenet of the Reagan Revolution — that Ronnie won the cold war “without firing a shot.” Such claims went unchallenged, at least in the establishment press, despite Reagan’s well-documented penchant for waging costly and protracted proxy wars in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America. Similarly, the Reagan hagiography failed to acknowledge the decisive role Gorbachev and his policies of “reform” and “openness” — Perestroika and Glasnost — played in the ending of the Cold War. Indeed, Reagan’s media managed populism flies in the face of what radical historian Howard Zinn might describe as a “people’s history” of the 1980s. That is to say, a broad cross-section of America — labor, racial and ethnic minorities, environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists among them — rallied in vehement opposition to Reagan’s foreign and domestic policies. And yet, throughout the weeklong funeral, the divisiveness of the Reagan era went largely unnoted. In the Reagan mythology, then, popular demonstrations against an unprecedented military build up, the administration’s failure to acknowledge, let alone intervene in the AIDS epidemic, and the growing disparity between rich and poor that marked his tenure in office were, to borrow a phrase, relegated to the dustbin of history. In light of the upcoming US presidential election, we ought to weigh how Reagan’s celebrity squares with the historical record; and, equally important, how his legacy both shapes and reflects the realities we confront today. Whether we consider economic and tax policy, social services, electoral politics, international relations or the domestic culture wars, Reagan’s policies and practices continue to determine the state of the union and inform the content and character of American political discourse. Increasingly, American electoral politics turns on the pithy soundbite, the carefully orchestrated pseudo-event, and a campaign team’s unwavering ability to stay on message. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ronald Reagan’s unmistakable influence upon the current (and illegitimate) occupant of the White House. References Covington, Cary R., Kroeger, K., Richardson, G., and J. David Woodward. “Shaping a Candidate’s Image in the Press: Ronald Reagan and the 1980 Presidential Election.” Political Research Quarterly 46.4 (1993): 783-98. De Groot, Gerard J. “‘A Goddamed Electable Person’: The 1966 California Gubernatorial Campaign of Ronald Reagan.” History 82.267 (1997): 429-48. Gordon, Colin. “Replace FDR on the Dime with Reagan?” History News Network 15 December, 2003. http://hnn.us/articles/1853.html>. Lapham, Lewis H. “Morte de Nixon – Death of Richard Nixon – Editorial.” Harper’s Magazine (July 1994). http://www.harpers.org/MorteDeNixon.html>. Ponce de Leon, Charles L. Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Ridgeway, James. “Bush Takes a Ride in Reagan’s Wake.” Village Voice (10 June 2004). http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0423/mondo5.php>. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Zinn, Howard. The Peoples’ History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Howley, Kevin. "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>. APA Style Howley, K. (Nov. 2004) "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>.

IntroductionCirque du Soleil, the largest live entertainment company in the world, has eight standing shows in Las Vegas alone, KÀ, Love, Mystère, Zumanity, Believe, Michael Jackson ONE, Zarkana and O. Close to 150 million spectators have seen Cirque du Soleil shows since the company’s beginnings in 1984 and it is estimated that over 15 million spectators will see a Cirque du Soleil show in 2014 (Cirque du Soleil). The Cirque du Soleil concept of circus as a form of theatre, with simple, often archetypal, narrative arcs conveyed without words, virtuoso physicality with the circus artists presented as characters in a fictional world, cutting-edge lighting and visuals, extraordinary innovative staging, and the uptake of new technology for special effects can all be linked back to an early form of circus which is sometimes termed illegitimate circus. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, in the age of Romanticism, only two theatres in London, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, plus the summer theatre in the Haymarket, had royal patents allowing them to produce plays or text-based productions, and these were considered legitimate theatres. (These theatres retained this monopoly until the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843; Saxon 301.) Other circuses and theatres such as Astley’s Amphitheatre, which were precluded from performing text-based works by the terms of their licenses, have been termed illegitimate (Moody 1). Perversely, the effect of licensing venues in this way, instead of having the desired effect of enshrining some particular forms of expression and “casting all others beyond the cultural pale,” served instead to help to cultivate a different kind of theatrical landscape, “a theatrical terrain with a new, rich and varied dramatic ecology” (Reed 255). A fundamental change to the theatrical culture of London took place, and pivotal to “that transformation was the emergence of an illegitimate theatrical culture” (Moody 1) with circus at its heart. An innovative and different form of performance, a theatre of the body, featuring spectacle and athleticism emerged, with “a sensuous, spectacular aesthetic largely wordless except for the lyrics of songs” (Bratton 117).This writing sets out to explore some of the strong parallels between the aesthetic that emerged in this early illegitimate circus and the aesthetic of the Montreal-based, multi-billion dollar entertainment empire of Cirque du Soleil. Although it is not fighting against legal restrictions and can in no way be considered illegitimate, the circus of Cirque du Soleil can be seen to be the descendant of the early circus entrepreneurs and their illegitimate aesthetic which arose out of the desire to find ways to continue to attract audiences to their shows in spite of the restrictions of the licenses granted to them. BackgroundCircus has served as an inspiration for many innovatory theatre productions including Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970) and Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers (1972) as well as the earlier experiments of Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Mayakovsky and other Soviet directors of the 1920’s (Saxon 299). A. H. Saxon points out, however, that the relationship between circus and theatre is a long-standing one that begins in the late 18th century and the early 19th century, when circus itself was theatre (Saxon 299).Modern circus was founded in London in 1768 by an ex-cavalryman and his wife, Philip and Patty Astley, and consisted of spectacular stunt horse riding taking place in a ring, with acts from traditional fairs such as juggling, acrobatics, clowning and wire-walking inserted to cover the changeovers between riding acts. From the very first shows entry was by paid ticket only and the early history of circus was driven by innovative, risk-taking entrepreneurs such as Philip Astley, who indeed built so many new amphitheatres for his productions that he became known as Amphi-Philip (Jando). After years of legal tussles with the authorities concerning the legal status of this new entertainment, a limited license was finally granted in 1783 for Astley’s Amphitheatre. This license precluded the performing of plays, anything text-based, or anything which had a script that resembled a play. Instead the annual license granted allowed only for “public dancing and music” and “other public entertainments of like kind” (St. Leon 9).Corporeal Dramaturgy and TextIn the face of the ban on scripted text, illegitimate circus turned to the human body and privileged it as a means of dramatic expression. A resultant dramaturgy focusing on the expressive capabilities of the performers’ bodies emerged. “The primacy of rhetoric and the spoken word in legitimate drama gave way […] to a corporeal dramaturgy which privileged the galvanic, affective capacity of the human body as a vehicle of dramatic expression” (Moody 83). Moody proposes that the “iconography of illegitimacy participated in a broader cultural and scientific transformation in which the human body began to be understood as an eloquent compendium of visible signs” (83). Even though the company has the use of text and dramatic dialogue freely available to it, Cirque du Soleil, shares this investment in the bodies of the performers and their “galvanic, affective capacity” (83) to communicate with the audience directly without the use of a scripted text, and this remains a constant between the two forms of circus. Robert Lepage, the director of two Cirque du Soleil shows, KÀ (2004) and more recently Totem (2010), speaking about KÀ in 2004, said, “We wanted it to be an epic story told not with the use of words, but with the universal language of body movement” (Lepage cited in Fink).In accordance with David Graver’s system of classifying performers’ bodies, Cirque du Soleil’s productions most usually present performers’ ‘character bodies’ in which the performers are understood by spectators to be playing fictional roles or characters (Hurley n/p) and this was also the case with illegitimate circus which right from its very beginnings presented its performers within narratives in which the performers are understood to be playing characters. In Cirque du Soleil’s shows, as with illegitimate circus, this presentation of the performers’ character bodies is interspersed with acts “that emphasize the extraordinary training and physical skill of the performers, that is which draw attention to the ‘performer body’ but always within the context of an overall narrative” (Fricker n.p.).Insertion of Vital TextAfter audience feedback, text was eventually added into KÀ (2004) in the form of a pre-recorded prologue inserted to enable people to follow the narrative arc, and in the show Wintuk (2007) there are tales that are sung by Jim Comcoran (Leroux 126). Interestingly early illegitimate circus creators, in their efforts to circumvent the ban on using dramatic dialogue, often inserted text into their performances in similar ways to the methods Cirque du Soleil chose for KÀ and Wintuk. Illegitimate circus included dramatic recitatives accompanied by music to facilitate the following of the storyline (Moody 28) in the same way that Cirque du Soleil inserted a pre-recorded prologue to KÀ to enable audience members to understand the narrative. Performers in illegitimate circus often conveyed essential information to the audience as lyrics of songs (Bratton 117) in the same way that Jim Comcoran does in Wintuk. Dramaturgical StructuresAstley from his very first circus show in 1768 began to set his equestrian stunts within a narrative. Billy Button’s Ride to Brentford (1768), showed a tailor, a novice rider, mounting backwards, losing his belongings and being thrown off the horse when it bucks. The act ends with the tailor being chased around the ring by his horse (Schlicke 161). Early circus innovators, searching for dramaturgy for their shows drew on contemporary warfare, creating vivid physical enactments of contemporary battles. They also created a new dramatic form known as Hippodramas (literally ‘horse dramas’ from hippos the Attic Greek for Horse), a hybridization of melodrama and circus featuring the trick riding skills of the early circus pioneers. The narrative arcs chosen were often archetypal or sourced from well-known contemporary books or poems. As Moody writes, at the heart of many of these shows “lay an archetypal narrative of the villainous usurper finally defeated” (Moody 30).One of the first hippodramas, The Blood Red Knight, opened at Astley’s Amphitheatre in 1810.Presented in dumbshow, and interspersed with grand chivalric processions, the show featured Alphonso’s rescue of his wife Isabella from her imprisonment and forced marriage to the evil knight Sir Rowland and concluded with the spectacular, fiery destruction of the castle and Sir Rowland’s death. (Moody 69)Another later hippodrama, The Spectre Monarch and his Phantom Steed, or the Genii Horseman of the Air (1830) was set in China where the rightful prince was ousted by a Tartar usurper who entered into a pact with the Spectre Monarch and received,a magic ring, by aid of which his unlawful desires were instantly gratified. Virtue, predictably won out in the end, and the discomforted villain, in a final settling of accounts with his dread master was borne off through the air in a car of fire pursued by Daemon Horsemen above THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA. (Saxon 303)Karen Fricker writes of early Cirque du Soleil shows that “while plot is doubtless too strong a word, each of Cirque’s recent shows has a distinct concept or theme, that is urbanity for Saltimbanco; nomadism in Varekai (2002) and humanity’s clownish spirit for Corteo (2005), and tend to follow the same very basic storyline, which is not narrated in words but suggested by the staging that connects the individual acts” (Fricker n/p). Leroux describes the early Cirque du Soleil shows as following a “proverbial and well-worn ‘collective transformation trope’” (Leroux 122) whilst Peta Tait points out that the narrative arc of Cirque du Soleil “ might be summarized as an innocent protagonist, often female, helped by an older identity, seemingly male, to face a challenging journey or search for identity; more generally, old versus young” (Tait 128). However Leroux discerns an increasing interest in narrative devices such as action and plot in Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas productions (Leroux 122). Fricker points out that “with KÀ, what Cirque sought – and indeed found in Lepage’s staging – was to push this storytelling tendency further into full-fledged plot and character” (Fricker n/p). Telling a story without words, apart from the inserted prologue, means that the narrative arc of Kà is, however, very simple. A young prince and princess, twins in a mythical Far Eastern kingdom, are separated when a ceremonial occasion is interrupted by an attack by a tribe of enemy warriors. A variety of adventures follow, most involving perilous escapes from bad guys with flaming arrows and fierce-looking body tattoos. After many trials, a happy reunion arrives. (Isherwood)This increasing emphasis on developing a plot and a narrative arc positions Cirque as moving closer in dramaturgical aesthetic to illegitimate circus.Visual TechnologiesTo increase the visual excitement of its shows and compensate for the absence of spoken dialogue, illegitimate circus in the late 18th and early 19th century drew on contemporaneous and emerging visual technologies. Some of the new visual technologies that Astley’s used have been termed pre-cinematic, including the panorama (or diorama as it is sometimes called) and “the phantasmagoria and other visual machines… [which] expanded the means through which an audience could be addressed” (O’Quinn, Governance 312). The panorama or diorama ran in the same way that a film runs in an analogue camera, rolling between vertical rollers on either side of the stage. In Astley’s production The Siege and Storming of Seringapatam (1800) he used another effect almost equivalent to a modern day camera zoom-in by showing scenic back drops which, as they moved through time, progressively moved geographically closer to the battle. This meant that “the increasing enlargement of scale-each successive scene has a smaller geographic space-has a telescopic event. Although the size of the performance space remains constant, the spatial parameters of the spectacle become increasingly magnified” (O’Quinn, Governance 345). In KÀ, Robert Lepage experiments with “cinematographic stage storytelling on a very grand scale” (Fricker n.p.). A KÀ press release (2005) from Cirque du Soleil describes the show “as a cinematic journey of aerial adventure” (Cirque du Soleil). Cirque du Soleil worked with ground-breaking visual technologies in KÀ, developing an interactive projected set. This involves the performers controlling what happens to the projected environment in real time, with the projected scenery responding to their movements. The performers’ movements are tracked by an infra-red sensitive camera above the stage, and by computer software written by Interactive Production Designer Olger Förterer. “In essence, what we have is an intelligent set,” says Förterer. “And everything the audience sees is created by the computer” (Cirque du Soleil).Contemporary Technology Cutting edge technologies, many of which came directly from contemporaneous warfare, were introduced into the illegitimate circus performance space by Astley and his competitors. These included explosions using redfire, a new military explosive that combined “strontia, shellac and chlorate of potash, [which] produced […] spectacular flame effects” (Moody 28). Redfire was used for ‘blow-ups,’ the spectacular explosions often occurring at the end of the performance when the villain’s castle or hideout was destroyed. Cirque du Soleil is also drawing on contemporary military technology for performance projects. Sparked: A Live interaction between Humans and Quadcopters (2014) is a recent short film released by Cirque du Soleil, which features the theatrical use of drones. The new collaboration between Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich and Verity Studios uses 10 quadcopters disguised as animated lampshades which take to the air, “carrying out the kinds of complex synchronized dance manoeuvres we usually see from the circus' famed acrobats” (Huffington Post). This shows, as with early illegitimate circus, the quick theatrical uptake of contemporary technology originally developed for use in warfare.Innovative StagingArrighi writes that the performance space that Astley developed was a “completely new theatrical configuration that had not been seen in Western culture before… [and] included a circular ring (primarily for equestrian performance) and a raised theatre stage (for pantomime and burletta)” (177) joined together by ramps that were large enough and strong enough to allow horses to be ridden over them during performances. The stage at Astley’s Amphitheatre was said to be the largest in Europe measuring over 130 feet across. A proscenium arch was installed in 1818 which could be adjusted in full view of the audience with the stage opening changing anywhere in size from forty to sixty feet (Saxon 300). The staging evolved so that it had the capacity to be multi-level, involving “immense [moveable] platforms or floors, rising above each other, and extending the whole width of the stage” (Meisel 214). The ability to transform the stage by the use of draped and masked platforms which could be moved mechanically, proved central to the creation of the “new hybrid genre of swashbuckling melodramas on horseback, or ‘hippodramas’” (Kwint, Leisure 46). Foot soldiers and mounted cavalry would fight their way across the elaborate sets and the production would culminate with a big finale that usually featured a burning castle (Kwint, Legitimization 95). Cirque du Soleil’s investment in high-tech staging can be clearly seen in KÀ. Mark Swed writes that KÀ is, “the most lavish production in the history of Western theatre. It is surely the most technologically advanced” (Swed). With a production budget of $165 million (Swed), theatre designer Michael Fisher has replaced the conventional stage floor with two huge moveable performance platforms and five smaller platforms that appear to float above a gigantic pit descending 51 feet below floor level. One of the larger platforms is a tatami floor that moves backwards and forwards, the other platform is described by the New York Times as being the most thrilling performer in the show.The most consistently thrilling performer, perhaps appropriately, isn't even human: It's the giant slab of machinery that serves as one of the two stages designed by Mark Fisher. Here Mr. Lepage's ability to use a single emblem or image for a variety of dramatic purposes is magnified to epic proportions. Rising and falling with amazing speed and ease, spinning and tilting to a full vertical position, this huge, hydraulically powered game board is a sandy beach in one segment, a sheer cliff wall in another and a battleground, viewed from above, for the evening's exuberantly cinematic climax. (Isherwood)In the climax a vertical battle is fought by aerialists fighting up and down the surface of the sand stone cliff with defeated fighters portrayed as tumbling down the surface of the cliff into the depths of the pit below. Cirque du Soleil’s production entitled O, which phonetically is the French word eau meaning water, is a collaboration with director Franco Dragone that has been running at Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel since 1998. O has grossed over a billion dollars since it opened in 1998 (Sylt and Reid). It is an aquatic circus or an aquadrama. In 1804, Charles Dibdin, one of Astley’s rivals, taking advantage of the nearby New River, “added to the accoutrements of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre a tank three feet deep, ninety feet long and as wide as twenty-four feet which could be filled with water from the New River” (Hays and Nickolopoulou 171) Sadler’s Wells presented aquadramas depicting many reconstructions of famous naval battles. One of the first of these was The Siege of Gibraltar (1804) that used “117 ships designed by the Woolwich Dockyard shipwrights and capable of firing their guns” (Hays and Nickolopoulou 5). To represent the drowning Spanish sailors saved by the British, “Dibdin used children, ‘who were seen swimming and affecting to struggle with the waves’”(5).O (1998) is the first Cirque production to be performed in a proscenium arch theatre, with the pool installed behind the proscenium arch. “To light the water in the pool, a majority of the front lighting comes from a subterranean light tunnel (at the same level as the pool) which has eleven 4" thick Plexiglas windows that open along the downstage perimeter of the pool” (Lampert-Greaux). Accompanied by a live orchestra, performers dive into the 53 x 90 foot pool from on high, they swim underwater lit by lights installed in the subterranean light tunnel and they also perform on perforated platforms that rise up out of the water and turn the pool into a solid stage floor. In many respects, Cirque du Soleil can be seen to be the inheritors of the spectacular illegitimate circus of the 18th and 19th Century. The inheritance can be seen in Cirque du Soleil’s entrepreneurial daring, the corporeal dramaturgy privileging the affective power of the body over the use of words, in the performers presented primarily as character bodies, and in the delivering of essential text either as a prologue or as lyrics to songs. It can also be seen in Cirque du Soleil’s innovative staging design, the uptake of military based technology and the experimentation with cutting edge visual effects. Although re-invigorating the tradition and creating spectacular shows that in many respects are entirely of the moment, Cirque du Soleil’s aesthetic roots can be clearly seen to draw deeply on the inheritance of illegitimate circus.ReferencesBratton, Jacky. “Romantic Melodrama.” The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730-1830. Eds. Jane Moody and Daniel O'Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007. 115-27. Bratton, Jacky. “What Is a Play? Drama and the Victorian Circus in the Performing Century.” Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History. Eds. Tracey C. Davis and Peter Holland. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 250-62.Cavendish, Richard. “Death of Madame Tussaud.” History Today 50.4 (2000). 15 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/death-madame-tussaud›.Cirque du Soleil. 2014. 10 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/home/about-us/at-a-glance.aspx›.Davis, Janet M. The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Hays, Michael, and Anastasia Nikolopoulou. Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.House of Dancing Water. 2014. 17 Aug. 2014 ‹http://thehouseofdancingwater.com/en/›.Isherwood, Charles. “Fire, Acrobatics and Most of All Hydraulics.” New York Times 5 Feb. 2005. 12 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/05/theater/reviews/05cirq.html?_r=0›.Fink, Jerry. “Cirque du Soleil Spares No Cost with Kà.” Las Vegas Sun 2004. 17 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2004/sep/16/cirque-du-soleil-spares-no-cost-with-ka/›.Fricker, Karen. “Le Goût du Risque: Kà de Robert Lepage et du Cirque du Soleil.” (“Risky Business: Robert Lepage and the Cirque du Soleil’s Kà.”) L’Annuaire théâtral 45 (2010) 45-68. Trans. Isabelle Savoie. (Original English Version not paginated.)Hurley, Erin. "Les Corps Multiples du Cirque du Soleil." Globe: Revue Internationale d’Études Quebecoise. Les Arts de la Scene au Quebec, 11.2 (2008). (Original English n.p.)Jacob, Pascal. The Circus Artist Today: Analysis of the Key Competences. Brussels: FEDEC: European Federation of Professional Circus Schools, 2008. 5 June 2010 ‹http://sideshow-circusmagazine.com/research/downloads/circus-artist-today-analysis-key-competencies›.Jando, Dominique. “Philip Astley, Circus Owner, Equestrian.” Circopedia. 15 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.circopedia.org/Philip_Astley›.Kwint, Marius. “The Legitimization of Circus in Late Georgian England.” Past and Present 174 (2002): 72-115.---. “The Circus and Nature in Late Georgian England.” Histories of Leisure. Ed. Rudy Koshar. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002. 45-60. ---. “The Theatre of War.” History Today 53.6 (2003). 28 Mar. 2012 ‹http://www.historytoday.com/marius-kwint/theatre-war›.Lampert-Greaux, Ellen. “The Wizardry of O: Cirque du Soleil Takes the Plunge into an Underwater World.” livedesignonline 1999. 17 Aug. 2014 ‹http://livedesignonline.com/mag/wizardry-o-cirque-du-soleil-takes-plunge-underwater-world›.Lavers, Katie. “Sighting Circus: Perceptions of Circus Phenomena Investigated through Diverse Bodies.” Doctoral Thesis. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Leroux, Patrick Louis. “The Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas: An American Striptease.” Revista Mexicana de Estudio Canadiens (Nueva Época) 16 (2008): 121-126.Mazza, Ed. “Cirque du Soleil’s Drone Video ‘Sparked’ is Pure Magic.” Huffington Post 22 Sep. 2014. 23 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/22/cirque-du-soleil-sparked-drone-video_n_5865668.html›.Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.Moody, Jane. Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. O'Quinn, Daniel. Staging Governance: Teatrical Imperialism in London 1770-1800. Baltimore, Maryland, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. O'Quinn, Daniel. “Theatre and Empire.” The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730-1830. Eds. Jane Moody and Daniel O'Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 233-46. Reed, Peter P. “Interrogating Legitimacy in Britain and America.” The Oxford Handbook of Georgian Theatre. Eds. Julia Swindells and Francis David. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 247-264.Saxon, A.H. “The Circus as Theatre: Astley’s and Its Actors in the Age of Romanticism.” Educational Theatre Journal 27.3 (1975): 299-312.Schlicke, P. Dickens and Popular Entertainment. London: Unwin Hyman, 1985.St. Leon, Mark. Circus: The Australian Story. Melbourne: Melbourne Books, 2011. Stoddart, Helen. Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Swed, Mark. “Epic, Extravagant: In Ka the Acrobatics and Dazzling Special Effects Are Stunning and Enchanting.” Los Angeles Times 5 Feb. 2005. 22 Aug. 2014 ‹http://articles.latimes.com/2005/feb/05/entertainment/et-ka5›.Sylt, Cristian, and Caroline Reid. “Cirque du Soleil Swings to $1bn Revenue as It Mulls Shows at O2.” The Independent Oct. 2011. 14 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/cirque-du-soleil-swings-to-1bn-revenue-as-it-mulls-shows-at-o2-2191850.html›.Tait, Peta. Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance. London: Routledge, 2005.Terdiman, Daniel. “Flying Lampshades: Cirque du Soleil Plays with Drones.” CNet 2014. 22 Sept 2014 ‹http://www.cnet.com/news/flying-lampshades-the-cirque-du-soleil-plays-with-drones/›.Venables, Michael. “The Technology Behind the Las Vegas Magic of Cirque du Soleil.” Forbes Magazine 30 Aug. 2013. 16 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelvenables/2013/08/30/technology-behind-the-magical-universe-of-cirque-du-soleil-part-one/›.

Introduction: Brutal?The word “brutal” has associations with cruelty, inhumanity, and aggression. Within the field of architecture, however, the term “Brutalism” refers to a post-World War II Modernist style, deriving from the French phrase betón brut, which means raw concrete (Clement 18). Core traits of Brutalism include functionalist design, daring geometry, overbearing scale, and the blatant exposure of structural materials, chiefly concrete and steel (Meades 1).The emergence of Brutalism coincided with chronic housing shortages in European countries ravaged by World War II (Power 5) and government-sponsored slum clearance in the UK (Power 190; Baker). Brutalism’s promise to accommodate an astonishing number of civilians within a minimal area through high-rise configurations and elevated walkways was alluring to architects and city planners (High Rise Dreams). Concrete was the material of choice due to its affordability, durability, and versatility; it also allowed buildings to be erected quickly (Allen and Iano 622).The Brutalist style was used for cultural centres, such as the Perth Concert Hall in Western Australia, educational institutions such as the Yale School of Architecture, and government buildings such as the Secretariat Building in Chandigarh, India. However, as pioneering Brutalist architect Alison Smithson explained, the style achieved full expression by “thinking on a much bigger scale somehow than if you only got [sic] one house to do” (Smithson and Smithson, Conversation 40). Brutalism, therefore, lent itself to the design of large residential complexes. It was consequently used worldwide for public housing developments, that is, residences built by a government authority with the aim of providing affordable housing. Notable examples include the Western City Gate in Belgrade, Serbia, and Habitat 67 in Montreal, Canada.Brutalist architecture polarised opinion and continues to do so to this day. On the one hand, protected cultural heritage status has been awarded to some Brutalist buildings (Carter; Glancey) and the style remains extremely influential, for example in the recent award-winning work of architect Zaha Hadid (Niesewand). On the other hand, the public housing projects associated with Brutalism are widely perceived as failures (The Great British Housing Disaster). Many Brutalist objects currently at risk of demolition are social housing estates, such as the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens in London, UK. Whether the blame for the demise of such housing developments lies with architects, inhabitants, or local government has been widely debated. In the UK and USA, local authorities had relocated families of predominantly lower socio-economic status into the newly completed developments, but were unable or unwilling to finance subsequent maintenance and security costs (Hanley 115; R. Carroll; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth). Consequently, the residents became fearful of criminal activity in staircases and corridors that lacked “defensible space” (Newman 9), which undermined a vision of “streets in the sky” (Moran 615).In spite of its later problems, Brutalism’s architects had intended to develop a style that expressed 1950s contemporary living in an authentic manner. To them, this meant exposing building materials in their “raw” state and creating an aesthetic for an age of science, machine mass production, and consumerism (Stadler 264; 267; Smithson and Smithson, But Today 44). Corporeal sensations did not feature in this “machine” aesthetic (Dalrymple). Exceptionally, acclaimed Brutalist architect Ernö Goldfinger discussed how “visual sensation,” “sound and touch with smell,” and “the physical touch of the walls of a narrow passage” contributed to “sensations of space” within architecture (Goldfinger 48). However, the effects of residing within Brutalist objects may not have quite conformed to predictions, since Goldfinger moved out of his Brutalist construction, Balfron Tower, after two months, to live in a terraced house (Hanley 112).An abstract perspective that favours theorisation over subjective experiences characterises discourse on Brutalist social housing developments to this day (Singh). There are limited data on the everyday lived experience of residents of Brutalist social housing estates, both then and now (for exceptions, see Hanley; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth; Cooper et al.).Yet, our bodily interaction with the objects around us shapes our lived experience. On a broader physical scale, this includes the structures within which we live and work. The importance of the interaction between architecture and embodied being is increasingly recognised. Today, architecture is described in corporeal terms—for example, as a “skin” that surrounds and protects its human inhabitants (Manan and Smith 37; Armstrong 77). Biological processes are also inspiring new architectural approaches, such as synthetic building materials with life-like biochemical properties (Armstrong 79), and structures that exhibit emergent behaviour in response to human presence, like a living system (Biloria 76).In this article, we employ an autoethnographic perspective to explore the corporeal effects of Brutalist buildings, thereby revealing a new dimension to the anthropological significance of these controversial structures. We trace how they shape the physicality of the bodies interacting within them. Our approach is one step towards considering the historically under-appreciated subjective, corporeal experience elicited in interaction with Brutalist objects.Method: An Autoethnographic ApproachAutoethnography is a form of self-narrative research that connects the researcher’s personal experience to wider cultural understandings (Ellis 31; Johnson). It can be analytical (Anderson 374) or emotionally evocative (Denzin 426).We investigated two Brutalist residential estates in London, UK:(i) The Barbican Estate: This was devised to redevelop London’s severely bombed post-WWII Cripplegate area, combining private residences for middle class professionals with an assortment of amenities including a concert hall, library, conservatory, and school. It was designed by architects Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon. Opened in 1982, the Estate polarised opinion on its aesthetic qualities but has enjoyed success with residents and visitors. The development now comprises extremely expensive housing (Brophy). It was Grade II-listed in 2001 (Glancey), indicating a status of architectural preservation that restricts alterations to significant buildings.(ii) Trellick Tower: This was built to replace dilapidated 19th-century housing in the North Kensington area. It was designed by Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger to be a social housing development and was completed in 1972. During the 1980s and 1990s, it became known as the “Tower of Terror” due to its high level of crime (Hanley 113). Nevertheless, Trellick Tower was granted Grade II listed status in 1998 (Carter), and subsequent improvements have increased its desirability as a residence (R. Carroll).We explored the grounds, communal spaces, and one dwelling within each structure, independently recording our corporeal impressions and sensations in detailed notes, which formed the basis of longhand journals written afterwards. Our analysis was developed through co-constructed autoethnographic reflection (emerald and Carpenter 748).For reasons of space, one full journal entry is presented for each Brutalist structure, with an excerpt from each remaining journal presented in the subsequent analysis. To identify quotations from our journals, we use the codes R- and N- to refer to RB’s and NC’s journals, respectively; we use -B and -T to refer to the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower, respectively.The Barbican Estate: Autoethnographic JournalAn intricate concrete world emerges almost without warning from the throng of glass office blocks and commercial buildings that make up the City of London's Square Mile. The Barbican Estate comprises a multitude of low-rise buildings, a glass conservatory, and three enormous high-rise towers. Each modular building component is finished in the same coarse concrete with burnished brick underfoot, whilst the entire structure is elevated above ground level by enormous concrete stilts. Plants hang from residential balconies over glimmering pools in a manner evocative of concrete Hanging Gardens of Babylon.Figure 1. Barbican Estate Figure 2. Cromwell Tower from below, Barbican Estate. Figure 3: The stairwell, Cromwell Tower, Barbican Estate. Figure 4. Lift button pods, Cromwell Tower, Barbican Estate.R’s journalMy first footsteps upon the Barbican Estate are elevated two storeys above the street below, and already an eerie calm settles on me. The noise of traffic and the bustle of pedestrians have seemingly been left far behind, and a path of polished brown brick has replaced the paving slabs of the city's pavement. I am made more aware of the sound of my shoes upon the ground as I take each step through the serenity.Running my hands along the walkway's concrete sides as we proceed further into the estate I feel its coarseness, and look up to imagine the same sensation touching the uppermost balcony of the towers. As we travel, the cold nature and relentless employ of concrete takes over and quickly becomes the norm.Our route takes us through the Barbican's central Arts building and into the Conservatory, a space full of plant-life and water features. The noise of rushing water comes as a shock, and I'm reminded just how hauntingly peaceful the atmosphere of the outside estate has been. As we leave the conservatory, the hush returns and we follow another walkway, this time allowing a balcony-like view over the edge of the estate. I'm quickly absorbed by a sensation I can liken only to peering down at the ground from a concrete cloud as we observe the pedestrians and traffic below.Turning back, we follow the walkways and begin our approach to Cromwell Tower, a jagged structure scraping the sky ahead of us and growing menacingly larger with every step. The estate has up till now seemed devoid of wind, but even so a cold begins to prickle my neck and I increase my speed toward the door.A high-ceilinged foyer greets us as we enter and continue to the lifts. As we push the button and wait, I am suddenly aware that carpet has replaced bricks beneath my feet. A homely sensation spreads, my breathing slows, and for a brief moment I begin to relax.We travel at heart-racing speed upwards to the 32nd floor to observe the view from the Tower's fire escape stairwell. A brief glance over the stair's railing as we enter reveals over 30 storeys of stair casing in a hard-edged, triangular configuration. My mind reels, I take a second glance and fail once again to achieve focus on the speck of ground at the bottom far below. After appreciating the eastward view from the adjacent window that encompasses almost the entirety of Central London, we make our way to a 23rd floor apartment.Entering the dwelling, we explore from room to room before reaching the balcony of the apartment's main living space. Looking sheepishly from the ledge, nothing short of a genuine concrete fortress stretches out beneath us in all directions. The spirit and commotion of London as I know it seems yet more distant as we gaze at the now miniaturized buildings. An impression of self-satisfied confidence dawns on me. The fortress where we stand offers security, elevation, sanctuary and I'm furnished with the power to view London's chaos at such a distance that it's almost silent.As we leave the apartment, I am shadowed by the same inherent air of tranquillity, pressing yet another futuristic lift access button, plummeting silently back towards the ground, and padding across the foyer's soft carpet to pursue our exit route through the estate's sky-suspended walkways, back to the bustle of regular London civilization.Trellick Tower: Autoethnographic JournalThe concrete majesty of Trellick Tower is visible from Westbourne Park, the nearest Tube station. The Tower dominates the skyline, soaring above its neighbouring estate, cafes, and shops. As one nears the Tower, the south face becomes visible, revealing the suspended corridors that join the service tower to the main body of flats. Light of all shades and colours pours from its tightly stacked dwellings, which stretch up into the sky. Figure 5. Trellick Tower, South face. Figure 6. Balcony in a 27th-floor flat, Trellick Tower.N’s journalOutside the tower, I sense danger and experience a heightened sense of awareness. A thorny frame of metal poles holds up the tower’s facade, each pole poised as if to slip down and impale me as I enter the building.At first, the tower is too big for comprehension; the scale is unnatural, gigantic. I feel small and quite squashable in comparison. Swathes of unmarked concrete surround the tower, walls that are just too high to see over. Who or what are they hiding? I feel uncertain about what is around me.It takes some time to reach the 27th floor, even though the lift only stops on every 3rd floor. I feel the forces of acceleration exert their pressure on me as we rise. The lift is very quiet.Looking through the windows on the 27th-floor walkway that connects the lift tower to the main building, I realise how high up I am. I can see fog. The city moves and modulates beneath me. It is so far away, and I can’t reach it. I’m suspended, isolated, cut off in the air, as if floating in space.The buildings underneath appear tiny in comparison to me, but I know I’m tiny compared to this building. It’s a dichotomy, an internal tension, and feels quite unreal.The sound of the wind in the corridors is a constant whine.In the flat, the large kitchen window above the sink opens directly onto the narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, on the other side of which, through a second window, I again see London far beneath. People pass by here to reach their front doors, moving so close to the kitchen window that you could touch them while you’re washing up, if it weren’t for the glass. Eye contact is possible with a neighbour, or a stranger. I am close to that which I’m normally separated from, but at the same time I’m far from what I could normally access.On the balcony, I have a strong sensation of vertigo. We are so high up that we cannot be seen by the city and we cannot see others. I feel physically cut off from the world and realise that I’m dependent on the lift or endlessly spiralling stairs to reach it again.Materials: sharp edges, rough concrete, is abrasive to my skin, not warm or welcoming. Sharp little stones are embedded in some places. I mind not to brush close against them.Behind the tower is a mysterious dark maze of sharp turns that I can’t see around, and dark, narrow walkways that confine me to straight movements on sloping ramps.“Relentless Employ of Concrete:” Body versus Stone and HeightThe “relentless employ of concrete” (R-B) in the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower determined our physical interactions with these Brutalist objects. Our attention was first directed towards texture: rough, abrasive, sharp, frictive. Raw concrete’s potential to damage skin, should one fall or brush too hard against it, made our bodies vulnerable. Simultaneously, the ubiquitous grey colour and the constant cold anaesthetised our senses.As we continued to explore, the constant presence of concrete, metal gratings, wire, and reinforced glass affected our real and imagined corporeal potentialities. Bodies are powerless against these materials, such that, in these buildings, you can only go where you are allowed to go by design, and there are no other options.Conversely, the strength of concrete also has a corporeal manifestation through a sense of increased physical security. To R, standing within the “concrete fortress” of the Barbican Estate, the object offered “security, elevation, sanctuary,” and even “power” (R-B).The heights of the Barbican’s towers (123 metres) and Trellick Tower (93 metres) were physically overwhelming when first encountered. We both felt that these menacing, jagged towers dominated our bodies.Excerpt from R’s journal (Trellick Tower)Gaining access to the apartment, we begin to explore from room to room. As we proceed through to the main living area we spot the balcony and I am suddenly aware that, in a short space of time, I had abandoned the knowledge that some 26 floors lay below me. My balance is again shaken and I dig my heels into the laminate flooring, as if to achieve some imaginary extra purchase.What are the consequences of extreme height on the body? Certainly, there is the possibility of a lethal fall and those with vertigo or who fear heights would feel uncomfortable. We discovered that height also affects physical instantiation in many other ways, both empowering and destabilising.Distance from ground-level bustle contributed to a profound silence and sense of calm. Areas of intermediate height, such as elevated communal walkways, enhanced our sensory abilities by granting the advantage of observation from above.Extreme heights, however, limited our ability to sense the outside world, placing objects beyond our range of visual focus, and setting up a “bizarre segregation” (R-T) between our physical presence and that of the rest of the world. Height also limited potentialities of movement: no longer self-sufficient, we depended on a working lift to regain access to the ground and the rest of the city. In the lift itself, our bodies passively endured a cycle of opposing forces as we plummeted up or down numerous storeys in mere seconds.At both locations, N noticed how extreme height altered her relative body size: for example, “London looks really small. I have become huge compared to the tiny city” (N-B). As such, the building’s lift could be likened to a cake or potion from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This illustrates how the heuristics that we use to discern visual perspective and object size, which are determined by the environment in which we live (Segall et al.), can be undermined by the unusual scales and distances found in Brutalist structures.Excerpt from N’s journal (Barbican Estate)Warning: These buildings give you AFTER-EFFECTS. On the way home, the size of other buildings seems tiny, perspectives feel strange; all the scales seem to have been re-scaled. I had to become re-used to the sensation of travelling on public trains, after travelling in the tower lifts.We both experienced perceptual after-effects from the disproportional perspectives of Brutalist spaces. Brutalist structures thus have the power to affect physical sensations even when the body is no longer in direct interaction with them!“Challenge to Privacy:” Intersubjective Ideals in Brutalist DesignAs embodied beings, our corporeal manifestations are the primary transducers of our interactions with other people, who in turn contribute to our own body schema construction (Joas). Architects of Brutalist habitats aimed to create residential utopias, but we found that the impact of their designs on intersubjective corporeality were often incoherent and contradictory. Brutalist structures positioned us at two extremes in relation to the bodies of others, forcing either an uncomfortable intersection of personal space or, conversely, excessive separation.The confined spaces of the lifts, and ubiquitous narrow, low-ceilinged corridors produced uncomfortable overlaps in the personal space of the individuals present. We were fascinated by the design of the flat in Trellick Tower, where the large kitchen window opened out directly onto the narrow 27th-floor corridor, as described in N’s journal. This enforced a physical “challenge to privacy” (R-T), although the original aim may have been to promote a sense of community in the “streets in the sky” (Moran 615). The inter-slotting of hundreds of flats in Trellick Tower led to “a multitude of different cooking aromas from neighbouring flats” (R-T) and hence a direct sensing of the closeness of other people’s corporeal activities, such as eating.By contrast, enormous heights and scales constantly placed other people out of sight, out of hearing, and out of reach. Sharp-angled walkways and blind alleys rendered other bodies invisible even when they were near. In the Barbican Estate, huge concrete columns, behind which one could hide, instilled a sense of unease.We also considered the intersubjective interaction between the Brutalist architect-designer and the inhabitant. The elements of futuristic design—such as the “spaceship”-like pods for lift buttons in Cromwell Tower (N-B)—reconstruct the inhabitant’s physicality as alien relative to the Brutalist building, and by extension, to the city that commissioned it.ReflectionsThe strength of the autoethnographic approach is also its limitation (Chang 54); it is an individual’s subjective perspective, and as such we cannot experience or represent the full range of corporeal effects of Brutalist designs. Corporeal experience is informed by myriad factors, including age, body size, and ability or disability. Since we only visited these structures, rather than lived in them, we could have experienced heightened sensations that would become normalised through familiarity over time. Class dynamics, including previous residences and, importantly, the amount of choice that one has over where one lives, would also affect this experience. For a full perspective, further data on the everyday lived experiences of residents from a range of different backgrounds are necessary.R’s reflectionDespite researching Brutalist architecture for years, I was unprepared for the true corporeal experience of exploring these buildings. Reading back through my journals, I'm struck by an evident conflict between stylistic admiration and physical uneasiness. I feel I have gained a sympathetic perspective on the notion of residing in the structures day-to-day.Nevertheless, analysing Brutalist objects through a corporeal perspective helped to further our understanding of the experience of living within them in a way that abstract thought could never have done. Our reflections also emphasise the tension between the physical and the psychological, whereby corporeal struggle intertwines with an abstract, aesthetic admiration of the Brutalist objects.N’s reflectionIt was a wonderful experience to explore these extraordinary buildings with an inward focus on my own physical sensations and an outward focus on my body’s interaction with others. On re-reading my journals, I was surprised by the negativity that pervaded my descriptions. How does physical discomfort and alienation translate into cognitive pleasure, or delight?ConclusionBrutalist objects shape corporeality in fundamental and sometimes contradictory ways. The range of visual and somatosensory experiences is narrowed by the ubiquitous use of raw concrete and metal. Materials that damage skin combine with lethal heights to emphasise corporeal vulnerability. The body’s movements and sensations of the external world are alternately limited or extended by extreme heights and scales, which also dominate the human frame and undermine normal heuristics of perception. Simultaneously, the structures endow a sense of physical stability, security, and even power. By positioning multiple corporealities in extremes of overlap or segregation, Brutalist objects constitute a unique challenge to both physical privacy and intersubjective potentiality.Recognising these effects on embodied being enhances our current understanding of the impact of Brutalist residences on corporeal sensation. This can inform the future design of residential estates. Our autoethnographic findings are also in line with the suggestion that Brutalist structures can be “appreciated as challenging, enlivening environments” exactly because they demand “physical and perceptual exertion” (Sroat). 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