Journal articles on the topic 'Human-animal communication – Fiction'

Drawing on the field of zoosemiotics, this paper explores the representation of language and other forms of communication in animal fantasy fiction, citing Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972) as a key example of a text which depicts a wide spectrum of communication channels. Zoosemiotics provides a useful lens through which to conceptualize the spectrum of animal communication depicted in Adams’s novel and other notable texts, such as the short stories of Franz Kafka and Ursula Le Guin’s “Author of the Acacia Seeds” (1974). While examples of animal languages in such fiction seem more anthropomorphic than examples of sensory, non-vocal forms of communication, fictional languages such as Lapine actually reveal the limitations of human language as well as the conceptual abilities of nonhuman animals. The texts discussed in this paper attempt to imagine how the ways in which nonhuman animals communicate might be understood, or translated, in human language terms.

Science fiction has an extensive history of attempting to breach the communication boundary between humans and nonhuman animals by giving nonhuman animals some semblance of human language, with many uplift stories having them speak near-perfect English, their minds being filtered through a human linguistic framework, partly or wholly erasing their voice. Building on the examination of nonhuman animal gestural communication in Brian Massumi’s What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014), this paper analyses how two works, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’ and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics” (1974) and Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) depict animal behavior in itself as being creative and language-like. Neither story offers a straightforward translation from nonhuman to human, each showing how human linguistic frameworks leave gaps for the untranslatable complexities in nonhuman animal gestures. This I suggest shows that further exploration of nonhuman animal communication in science fiction can allow us to move beyond ideas of human exceptionalism and logocentrism and can turn the hierarchical scale of communication into more of a spectrum with various communication types.

Science fiction in the last decades has often empowered machines and provided humans with enhanced characteristics through the use of technology (the limits of artificial intelligence and transhumanism are frequent themes in recent narratives), but animal empowerment has also been present through the concept of uplifting, understood as the augmentation of animal intelligence through technology. Uplifting implies providing animals with the capacity to speak and reason like humans. However, it could be argued that such implementation fails to acknowledge animal cognition in favour of anthropomorphized schemes of thought. Humankind’s lack of recognition of different animal types of communication has been portrayed in fiction and often implies the adaptation of the animal Other to human needs and expectations, creating a post-animal that communicates its needs to the reader through borrowed words. The main objective of this article is to analyze the use of uplifting as a strategy to give voice to animals in two science fiction novels written in English, both published in the twenty-first century: Lagoon (2014) by Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor and Bête (2014) by British author Adam Roberts. This article examines, from ecocritical and human-animal studies (HAS) perspectives, the differencesand similarities in the exploration of the theme in both novels, which are often related to humankind’s willingness or refusal to regard the Other as equal.

Fiction is largely a domain of human beings having anthropocentrism as its organizing principle. However, the genre sometimes employs non-human animals too as characters which can be viewed as an innovative tool of modern narratology. Through the use of de-anthropomorphized characters such works provide space for an interpretation of animal behavior and their consciousness. Universally, human beings have kept companion pets as domestic animals are believed to be sentient beings compared to wild ones. For instance, archeological records of 15 millenniums have reported that dogs used to live together with humans because of their faithful companionship. Animals, therefore, abound in literature across all ages and cultures, but only rarely have they been the focal point of systematic literary study (McHugh 487). As a result, more recent literary criticism has focused on the ethics and the politics of human-animal bonds (HAB), animal communication, animal emotion and so on.

Writers of science fiction have often speculated about what it would be like to discover, on a planet in outer space, a much higher form of intelligence. How would we react to those creatures? Would we be so fearful of them that we would try to kill them? Or would we welcome the opportunity to attempt to understand their language and culture? Stranger than fiction is the fact that there already exists a species of animal life on earth that scientists speculate has higher than human intelligence. The whale has a brain that in some instances is six times bigger than the human brain and its neocortex is more convoluted. Discussing the creative processes of whales, Dr. John Lilly says that a researcher “is struck with the fact that one’s current basic assumptions and even one’s current expectations determine, within certain limits, the results attained with a particular animal at that particular time.” Whales speak to other whales in a language that appears to include abstruse mathematical poetry. They have also developed interspecies communication with dolphins. Whales are the most specialized of all mammals.

Abstract— Brain Machine Interface is also known as ‘A brain-computer inteface’.A brain-computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain-machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a human or animal brain and an external device. In one-way BCIs, computers either accept commands from the brain or send signals to it (for example, to restore vision) but not both. Two-way BCIs would allow brains and external devices to exchange information in both directions but have yet to be successfully implanted in animals or humans. In this definition, the word brain means the brain or nervous system of an organic life form rather than the mind. Computer means any processing or computational device, from simple circuits to silicon chips. Research on BCIs began in the 1970s, but it wasn't until the mid1990s that the first working experimental implants in humans appeared. Following years of animal experimentation, early working implants in humans now exist, designed to restore damaged hearing, sight and movement. With recent advances in technology and knowledge, pioneering researchers could now conceivably attempt to produce BCIs that augment human functions rather than simply restoring them, previously only a possibility in science fiction.

Abstract: This article examines Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem and Ball Lightning using the framework of Liu’s essay “Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature,” as well as the idea of the ecogothic, as outlined by William Hughes, Andrew Smith, David Del Principe, and Emily Carr. Liu discusses the idea that literature primarily focuses on human relationships. He then explains that the universe is vast, and in the 13.2 billion years of history, humans have only been present for a small percentage of that time. Because of this, he calls for literature to experiment with challenging anthropocentric thought. This article focuses on how Liu uses ecological horror, feelings of dislocation, disorientation, fragmentation, and the uncanny to challenge anthropocentric ideology. It relies on close reading and an examination of intertextuality, especially focusing on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation.

IntroductionIndian Literature with its multiplicity of languages and the plurality of cultures dates back to 3000 years ago, comprising Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas and Epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata. India has a strong literary tradition in various Indian regional languages like Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Oriya, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and so on. Indian writers share oral tradition, indigenous experiences and reflect on the history, culture and society in regional languages as well as in English. The first Indian novel in English is Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife (1864). Indian Writing in English can be viewed in three phases - Imitative, First and Second poets’ phases. The 20th century marks the matrix of indigenous novels. The novels such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935), Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé (2001), and Khuswant Singh’s Memories of Madness: Stories of 1947 (2002) depict social issues, vices and crises (discrimination, injustice, violence against women) in India. Indian writers, and their contribution to world literature, are popular in India and abroad.Researchers are keen on analysing the works of Indian writers from historical, cultural, social perspectives and on literary theories (Post-Colonialism, Postmodernity, Cultural Studies). The enormity of the cultural diversity in India is reflected in Indian novels, plays, dramas, short stories and poems. This collection of articles attempts to capture the diversity of the Indian land/culture/landscape. It focuses on the history of India, partition, women’s voices, culture and society, and science and technology in Indian narratives, documentaries and movies.Special Issue: An Overview“Whatever has happened, has happened for goodWhatever is happening, is also for goodWhatever will happen, shall also be good.”- The Bhagavad-Gita.In the Mahabharata’s Kurukshetra battlefield, Lord Krishna counsels Arjuna on how everything that happens, regardless of whether it is good or bad, happens for a reason.Indian Literature: Past, Present and Future portrays the glorious/not-so-glorious times in history, the ever-changing crisis/peace of contemporary and hope for an unpredictable future through India’s literary and visual narratives. It focuses on comparison across cultures, technological advancements and diverse perspectives or approaches through the work of art produced in/on India. It projects India’s flora, fauna, historical monuments and rich cultural heritage. It illustrates how certain beliefs and practices come into existence – origin, evolution and present structure from a historical perspective. Indian Literature: Past, Present and Future gives a moment to recall, rectify and raise to make a promising future. This collection attempts to interpret various literary and visual narratives which are relevant at present.The Epics Reinterpreted: Highlighting Feminist Issues While Sustaining Deep Motif, examines the Women characters in the Epics – Ramayana and Mahabharata. It links the present setting to the violence against women described in the Epics Carl Jung’s archetypes are highlighted in a few chosen characters (Sita, Amba, Draupati). On one note, it emphasises the need for women to rise and fight for their rights.Fictive Testimony and Genre Tension: A Study of ‘Functionality’ of Genre in Manto’s Toba Tek Singh, analyses the story as a testimony and Manto as a witness. It discusses the ‘Testimony and Fictive Testimony’ in Literature. It explains how the works are segregated into a particular genre. The authors conclude that the testimony is to be used to understand or identify with the terror.Tangible Heritage and Intangible Memory: (Coping) Precarity in the select Partition writings by Muslim Women, explores the predicament of women during the Partition of India through Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided (1990) and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (2009). It addresses ‘Feminist Geography’ to escape precarity. It depicts a woman who is cut off from her own ethnic or religious group and tries to conjure up her memories as a means of coping with loneliness and insecurity.Nation Building Media Narratives and its Anti-Ecological Roots: An Eco-Aesthetic Analysis of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, analyses the post-Partition trauma in the fictional village, Mano Majra. It illustrates the cultural and spiritual bond between Mano Majrans — the inhabitants of Mano Majra — and nature (the land and river). It demonstrates how the media constructs broad myths about culture, religion, and nation. According to the authors, Mano Majrans place a high value on the environment, whilst the other boundaries are more concerned with nationalism and religion.Pain and Hopelessness among Indian Farmers: An Analysis of Deepa Bhatia’s Nero’s Guests documents the farmers’ suicides in India as a result of debt and decreased crop yield. The travels of Sainath and his encounters with the relatives of missing farmers have been chronicled in the documentary Nero’s Guests. It uses the Three Step Theory developed by David Klonsky and Alexis May and discusses suicide as a significant social issue. The authors conclude that farmers are the foundation of the Indian economy and that without them, India’s economy would collapse. It is therefore everyone’s responsibility—the people and the government—to give farmers hope so that they can overcome suicidal thoughts.The link between animals and children in various cultures is discussed in The New Sociology of Childhood: Animal Representations in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Garden in the Dunes, Amazon’s Oh My Dog, and Netflix’s Mughizh: A Cross-Cultural Analysis. It examines the chosen works from the perspectives of cross-cultural psychology and the New Sociology of Childhood. It emphasises kids as self-sufficient, engaged, and future members of society. It emphasises universal traits that apply to all people, regardless of culture. It acknowledges anthropomorphized cartoons create a bond between kids and animals.Life in Hiding: Censorship Challenges faced by Salman Rushdie and Perumal Murugan, explores the issues sparked by their writings. It draws attention to the aggression and concerns that were forced on them by the particular sect of society. It explains the writers’ experiences with the fatwa, court case, exile, and trauma.Female Body as the ‘Other’: Rituals and Biotechnical Approach using Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman and Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women, questions the society that limits female bodies for procreation and objectification. It talks about how men and women are regarded differently, as well as the cultural ideals that apply to women. It explains infertility, which is attributed to women, as well as people’s ignorance and refusal to seek medical help in favour of adhering to traditional customs and engaging in numerous rituals for procreation.Life and (non) Living: Technological and Human Conglomeration in Android Kunjappan Version 5.25, explores how cyborgs and people will inevitably interact in the Malayalam film Android Kunjappan Version 5.25. It demonstrates the advantages, adaptability, and drawbacks of cyborgs in daily life. It emphasises how the cyborg absorbs cultural and religious notions. The authors argue that cyborgs are an inevitable development in the world and that until the flaws are fixed, humans must approach cyborgs with caution. The Challenges of Using Machine Translation While Translating Polysemous Words, discusses the difficulty of using machine translation to translate polysemous words from French to English (Google Translate). It serves as an example of how the machine chooses the formal or often-used meaning rather than the pragmatic meaning and applies it in every situation. It demonstrates how Machine Translation is unable to understand the pragmatic meaning of Polysemous terms because it is ignorant of the cultures of the source and target languages. It implies that Machine Translation will become extremely beneficial and user-friendly if the flaws are fixed.This collection of articles progresses through the literary and visual narratives of India that range from historical events to contemporary situations. It aims to record the stories that are silenced and untold through writing, film, and other forms of art. India’s artistic output was influenced by factors such as independence, partition, the Kashmir crisis, the Northeast Insurgency, marginalisation, religious disputes, environmental awareness, technical breakthroughs, Bollywood, and the Indian film industry. India now reflects a multitude of cultures and customs as a result of these occurrences. As we examine the Indian narratives produced to date, we can draw the conclusion that India has a vast array of tales to share with the rest of the world.Guest Editorial BoardGuest Editor-in-ChiefDr. Bhuvaneswari R, Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai. She has pursued her master’s at the University of Madras, Chennai and doctoral research at HNB Central University, Srinagar. Her research areas of interest are ELT, Children/Young Adult Literature, Canadian writings, Indian literature, and Contemporary Fiction. She is passionate about environmental humanities. She has authored and co-authored articles in National and International Journals.Guest EditorsCynthiya Rose J S, Assistant Professor (Jr.), School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai. Her research interests are Children’s Literature, Indian Literature and Graphic Novels.Maria Baptist S, Assistant Professor (Jr.), School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai. His research interests include Crime/Detective fiction and Indian Literature.MembersDr. Sufina K, School of Science and Humanities, Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, IndiaDr. Narendiran S, Department of Science and Humanities, St. Joseph’s Institute of Technology, Chennai, India

Crisis preparedness training programmes are substantial for the effective management of contingency plans. Rift Valley Fever (RVF) was chosen as the vector transmitted zoonosis for a crisis preparedness exercise co-organised in 2021 by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale dell’Abruzzo e del Molise “G. Caporale” (IZS-Teramo). The online table-top simulation exercise was planned to strengthen the network of Mediterranean countries on rapid risk assessment, risk/crisis management and risk communication during a human/animal health crisis, adopting the ‘One Health’ approach. Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Greece, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and Turkey were the beneficiary countries, while European Commission (EC), European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), World Health Organisation (WHO), World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) and Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) were the designated observers who were actively involved along the entire capacity building process. The simulation exercise was based on a fictional case study in which the zoonotic mosquito-borne disease, not currently present in Europe, was accidentally introduced into the European Union via the accidental transfer of infected vectors from a RVF-endemic country. The training activity was positively assessed by the participants and useful suggestions were given to address further future similar initiatives.

Temporality underpins how living systems coordinate and function. Unlike measures that use mathematical conventions, lived temporalities grant functional cohesion to organisms-in-the-world. In foxtail grasses, for example, self-maintenance meshes endogenous processes with exogenous rhythms. In embrained animals, temporalities can contribute to learning. And cowbirds coordinate in a soundscape that includes conspecifics: social learning allows them to connect copulating with past events such that females exert ‘long-distance’ control over male singing. Using Howard Pattee’s work, we compare the foxtail’s self-maintenance, gender-based cowbird learning and how humans manage multi-scalar activity. We argue that, while all living things coordinate, temporal ranging is typical of vertebrates. As primates, humans too use temporal ranging – they can draw on social learning, anticipate winter and manage coordinated action. However language behaviour (or languaging) grants new control over the scales of time. People connect the impersonal to lived experience in narratives, as they draw on autobiography and enact cultural practices. Humans become singular individuals who use temporal experience to manage affect, relationships, beliefs, fictions, and knowledge. Individual subjectivity permits collaborative and competitive activity based on linking events with quite different histories. As a result, alone of the vertebrates, we claim that humans become time-rangers.

The book entitled Cognitive approaches to contemporary media offers a valuable insight into modern developments in cognitive linguistics, which can contribute to the advancement of both research and practice in the field. The purpose of this edited volume is to deliver fresh insights into the metaphorical language used in the current media from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. Considering the manipulative framings of reality in which mass media can engage at present, investigations into how figurative language functions may be valuable in order to instruct audiences and to improve their decoding skills to prevent deception and bias. The overall research methodology draws on well-established approaches to the analysis of metaphors, such as Pragglejaz method (2007), the MIPVU technique (2010), the critical metaphor analysis framework (Charteris-Black 2004) and multimodal metaphor analysis theory (Forceville 2009). Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of corpora were conducted, as well as word frequency and concordance searches using AntCoc and ConcAppor #LancsBox software. The book is a compilation of ten contributions by Romanian researchers in the field of cognitive linguistics, and is structured into three main parts. Part One consists of three chapters that focus on the metaphors that are used in business journalese. The chapter by Crina-Maria Herțeg, ‘The conceptualisation of the MARKET in English and Romanian. A corpus-based approach’, focuses on MARKET metaphors in English and Romanian that were obtained from two sizeable corpora of Romanian and British journalese, each consisting of around 600,000 words, and representing business articles that were amassed during the period between 2012 and 2016. Herțeg conducted a corpus-based contrastive investigation to underline the similarities and differences in the ways in which the market is conceptualised in both the Romanian and the English languages. The author explores lexical, semantic and cultural differences, as well as intersecting cognitive categories, and compares and contrasts a series of conceptual metaphors, such as LABOUR MARKET IS WAR and LABOUR MARKET IS COMPETITION. Further subcategories of MARKET IS A LIVING ORGANISM, such as the MARKET IS AN ANIMAL metaphors, were identified in various instances of BEAR and BULL MARKETS. Chapter Two, authored by Andra Ursa and entitled ‘A comparative study of business metaphors in English, French and Romanian economic discourse in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic’ presents a comparative inquiry into newspaper articles in three European languages that were published during July 2020, all focusing on economic issues of wider interest. The chapter investigates the conceptual metaphors employed in the media discourse to help readers to comprehend different facets related to the workings of their national economies. The author conducted both automatic (using AntConc software) and manual analyses to identify and catalogue the metaphors. The results revealed that the three economies under investigation were typically conceptualised in terms of war, objects, human beings or organisms, with a high recurrence of the metaphor ECONOMY IS A SICK PERSON, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ursa revealed that there appeared to be a tendency towards metaphorical expressions indicating that the economy was in a state of war in both the French and the British corpora, which was encountered less frequently in the Romanian articles. The third chapter, ‘Conceptualisations of economic relations between the US and China’ by Andra Corpade, presents how economic relationships amongst countries are envisioned in the written media. The most important cognitive categories that the author noted were COMPETITION IS A RACE, COMPANIES ARE INSTRUMENTS OF DOMINATION, COMPETITION IS WAR, ORGANISATIONS ARE PEOPLE/THINKING ENTITIES and COUNTRIES ARE PEOPLE. Of these, the most frequent pertained to COMPETITION IS WAR, as the author found a wide range of exponents included in the semantic field of WAR. The second part of the book consists of three chapters grouped according to the subject matter of health and illness in metaphorical concepts within the specific context of the new coronavirus. Teodora Popescu’s chapter, ‘Waging war against COVID-19. A case study of Romanian metaphorical conceptualisations of the novel coronavirus’, delves into cognitive metaphors pertaining to the coronavirus, as determined using a corpus of almost 67,000 words from the Romanian nation-wide broadsheet Adevărul (‘The Truth’), which was compiled during the period from September to October 2020. The most important categories identified were FIGHTING COVID-19 IS FIGHTING A WAR, COVID-19 IS A MURDERER, COVID-19 IS COLLECTIVE SUFFERING, LACK OF DISEASE TREATMENT/RESTRICTIONS OBSERVANCE IS LACK OF CONTROL, LOCKDOWN IS DETENTION, LOCKDOWN IS DEPRESSION and COVID-19 IS A SHAM. Recurrent instances of emotional conceptualisations of the pandemic were identified, including EMOTIONAL STATE IS HARM CAUSED BY PREDATORY ANIMALS, which alludes to people’s all-encompassing dissatisfaction generated by the lockdown, accounting for the generalised discontent and frustration in Romanian society, coupled with deep scepticism with regard to the medical system and political rulers. Chapter Five, entitled ‘Conceptual metaphors in medical journalese’ by Oana-Elena Stoica, emphasises the function of conceptual metaphors in medical communication, specifically in the mass media, and considers how they are used with a view to having maximum impact on the reader. The author identified the following categories: TREATING ILLNESS IS FIGHTING A WAR, DISEASES AND VIRUSES ARE ENEMIES, FOOD ADDITIVES ARE ENEMIES, A PROBLEM IS A BODY OF WATER, THE HUMAN BODY IS A FRIEND, THE HUMAN BODY IS A MACHINE, LONG-TERM PURPOSEFUL CHANGE IS A JOURNEY and A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE IS A FRIEND. Stoica maintained that medical language can be somewhat vague and abstract, as well as relatively difficult to comprehend; consequently, metaphors can contribute greatly to clarifying or mitigating distressing issues for readers. The sixth chapter, Adela Natalia Neciu’s ‘THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IS A BODY. A case study of metaphorical conceptualisations – the case of Sweden’, scrutinises the metaphorical conceptualisations derived from a progress report on the implementation of the principles of value-based healthcare (VBHC) in Sweden, as documented by health economists, healthcare providers and policymakers. Neciu identified 11 categories, namely SYSTEMS ARE BUILDINGS, PROBLEMS ARE ENEMIES/DEALING WITH A PROBLEM IS FIGHTING A WAR, COUNTRIES ARE PEOPLE, IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, INFORMATION IS MONEY, SYSTEMS ARE PERSONS/PEOPLE, ORGANISATIONS ARE PEOPLE/THINKING ENTITIES, LAWS ARE CONTAINERS, INFORMATION IS A MOVING OBJECT, INFORMATION IS A SUBSTANCE and BUILDINGS ARE PEOPLE. The chapter by Gabriela-Corina Șanta (Câmpean), ‘COVID-19 in journalese. A case study of health, lifestyle, and political agenda domains’, examines the impact of COVID-19 on a number of domains in daily life: POLITICAL AGENDA, ECONOMY, HEALTH, EDUCATION and LIFESTYLE. The network of multidirectional relationships presented by the author are characteristic of the state of affairs that we have witnessed. Șanta concludes by explaining that institutions, companies and countries across the world are perceived as being endowed with human features. Furthermore, all the concepts except EDUCATION were assigned human characteristics; hence, they could be mapped according to their interconnectedness. She further asserted that political leaders have determined finding appropriate mechanisms for putting an end to the virus that has affected all areas of our lives to be a priority. Part Three consists of three contributions addressing multimodal metaphors in films. The eighth chapter, written by Diana Emanuela Tîrnăvean and entitled ‘Metaphors in fiction films. A discourse analysis of “Before I Wake”’ presents an investigation of the verbal, pictorial and gestural metaphors that contribute to creating the identity of the central characters and which chart the central hero’s evolutionary journey via the compelling metaphor of change. This transformation is artfully embodied throughout the film as we witness the transitional life phases of a butterfly. On one hand, Tîrnăvean aims to detect, interpret and decipher the pictorial, gestural and verbo-visual metaphors; on the other, she conducts an exploration of the hero’s quest, which is that of becoming a mother to the orphaned Cody. Chapter Nine, ‘Myth and metaphor in “The Matrix” trilogy’ by Adina Botaș, presents an inquiry into the multimodal metaphors pertaining to the central character, Neo, which can be found in this trilogy. Botaș focuses on three major myths that can be traced in the films’ narratives, namely Alice’s Wonderland, the Bible archetype and the myth of conspiracy. Accordingly, the multimodal metaphors investigated in the study materialised as concurrent expressions of diverse maximally consistent metaphors. The author explains that mappable traits are indicative of various metaphor scenarios, such as NEO IS THE SAVIOUR and NEO IS ALICE IN WONDERLAND from the vantage points of both the theological myth (references to the passion of Jesus Christ) and the conspiracy myth (correlations with an occult society working against humankind). Chapter Ten, authored by Bianca Moisi and entitled ‘The multimodal metaphor in film: A case study of “The Shack”’, provides an analysis of how cinematography exploits metaphors, beginning with the assumption that the development of metaphorical language is concurrent with the development of human thought processes. Moreover, Moisi explores metaphors that are representative of the postmodern individual; that is, those that are shaped by individuals’ intrinsic awareness of gender, emotion, religion and their very existence. Moisi identifies various conceptual categories, such as STATES ARE CONTAINERS (with the subcatrgory THE HUMAN HEART IS A BUILDING/PHYSICAL CONSTRUCTION), ANGER IS A RAVAGED PLACE, DEPRESSION IS A PERSON, POSITIVE EXPERIENCE IS LIGHT/WARMTH (and subsequently, NEGATIVE EXPERIENCE IS DARKNESS/COLDNESS), POSITIVE EXPERIENCE IS SPRING (and accordingly, GOD IS A WOMAN/GOD IS A MOTHER, NEGATIVE EXPERIENCE IS WINTER) and LOVE IS A BOND/LOVE IS A UNITY OF PARTS, amongst others. Moisi ultimately demonstrates the evolution of metaphor from the classical perspective to a postmodern understanding, which revisits and reinvents ancient myths via the use of cinematography. In conclusion, the edited collection Cognitive approaches to contemporary media provides a novel perspective on the metaphorical language that is used in present-day society’s mass media, and will be a valuable contribution to the field as it is both informative and captivating for the general audience and specialists alike.

This paper is meant to study the apocalyptic scenario of the at the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, scientific evidences are in favour of dramatic change in the climatic conditions related to the climax of Man actions. the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures, dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. Going far from these scientific claims, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination through the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Introduction The Great Acceleration may be considered as the Late Anthropocene in which Man actions reached their climax to lead to dramatic climatic changes paving the way for a possible apocalyptic scenario threatening the existence of the humanity. So, the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, many scientific arguments especially related to climate change are in favour of the apocalypse1. As a matter of fact, the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures (In 06/07/2021, Kuwait recorded the highest temperature of 53.2 °C), dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. These conditions taking place during the Great Acceleration would have direct repercussions on the human species. Considering that the apocalyptic extinction had really caused the disappearance of many stronger species including dinosaurs, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination though the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end due to severe climate conditions intolerable by the humankind. The mass extinction of animal species has occurred several times over the geological ages. Researchers have a poor understanding of the causes and processes of these major crises1. Nonetheless, whatever the cause of extinction, the apocalyptic scenario has always been present in the geological history. For example, dinosaurs extinction either by asteroids impact or climate changes could by no means denies the apocalyptic aspect2.At the same time as them, many animal and plant species became extinct, from marine or flying reptiles to marine plankton. This biological crisis of sixty-five million years ago is not the only one that the biosphere has suffered. It was preceded and followed by other crises which caused the extinction or the rarefaction of animal species. So, it is undeniable that many animal groups have disappeared. It is even on the changes of fauna that the geologists of the last century have based themselves to establish the scale of geological times, scale which is still used. But it is no less certain that the extinction processes, extremely complex, are far from being understood. We must first agree on the meaning of the word "extinction", namely on the apocalyptic aspect of the concept. It is quite understood that, without disappearances, the evolution of species could not have followed its course. Being aware that the apocalyptic extinction had massacred stronger species that had dominated the planet, Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been aware that the possibility of apocalyptic end at the perspective of the Anthropocene (i.e., Great Acceleration) could not be excluded. This conviction is motivated by the progressive defaunation in some regions3and the appearance of alien species in others related to change of mineralogy and geochemistry4 leading to a climate change during the Anthropocene. These scientific claims fed the vast imagination about climate change to set the so-called cli-fi. The concept of the Anthropocene is the new geological era which begins when the Man actions have reached a sufficient power to modify the geological processes and climatic cycles of the planet5. The Anthropocene by no means excludes the possibility of an apocalyptic horizon, namely in the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. On the contrary, two scenarios do indeed seem to dispute the future of the Anthropocene, with a dramatic cross-charge. The stories of the end of the world are as old as it is, as the world is the origin of these stories. However, these stories of the apocalypse have evolved over time and, since the beginning of the 19th century, they have been nourished particularly by science and its advances. These fictions have sometimes tried to pass themselves off as science. This is the current vogue, called collapsology6. This end is more than likely cli-fi driven7and it may cause the extinction of the many species including the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. In this vein, Anthropocene defaunation has become an ultimate reality8. More than one in eight birds, more than one in five mammals, more than one in four coniferous species, one in three amphibians are threatened. The hypothesis of a hierarchy within the living is induced by the error of believing that evolution goes from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the inevitably stupid inferior to the superior endowed with an intelligence giving prerogative to all powers. Evolution goes in all directions and pursues no goal except the extension of life on Earth. Evolution certainly does not lead from bacteria to humans, preferably male and white. Our species is only a carrier of the DNA that precedes us and that will survive us. Until we show a deep respect for the biosphere particularly, and our planet in general, we will not become much, we will remain a predator among other predators, the fiercest of predators, the almighty craftsman of the Anthropocene. To be in the depths of our humanity, somehow giving back to the biosphere what we have taken from it seems obvious. To stop the sixth extinction of species, we must condemn our anthropocentrism and the anthropization of the territories that goes with it. The other forms of life also need to keep their ecological niches. According to the first, humanity seems at first to withdraw from the limits of the planet and ultimately succumb to them, with a loss of dramatic meaning. According to the second, from collapse to collapse, it is perhaps another humanity, having overcome its demons, that could come. Climate fiction is a literary sub-genre dealing with the theme of climate change, including global warming. The term appears to have been first used in 2008 by blogger and writer Dan Bloom. In October 2013, Angela Evancie, in a review of the novel Odds against Tomorrow, by Nathaniel Rich, wonders if climate change has created a new literary genre. Scientific basis of the apocalyptic scenario in the perspective of the Anthropocene Global warming All temperature indices are in favour of a global warming (Fig.1). According to the different scenarios of the IPCC9, the temperatures of the globe could increase by 2 °C to 5 °C by 2100. But some scientists warn about a possible runaway of the warming which can reach more than 3 °C. Thus, the average temperature on the surface of the globe has already increased by more than 1.1 °C since the pre-industrial era. The rise in average temperatures at the surface of the globe is the first expected and observed consequence of massive greenhouse gas emissions. However, meteorological surveys record positive temperature anomalies which are confirmed from year to year compared to the temperatures recorded since the middle of the 19th century. Climatologists point out that the past 30 years have seen the highest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for over 1,400 years. Several climatic centres around the world record, synthesize and follow the evolution of temperatures on Earth. Since the beginning of the 20th century (1906-2005), the average temperature at the surface of the globe has increased by 0.74 °C, but this progression has not been continuous since 1976, the increase has clearly accelerated, reaching 0.19 °C per decade according to model predictions. Despite the decline in solar activity, the period 1997-2006 is marked by an average positive anomaly of 0.53 °C in the northern hemisphere and 0.27 °C in the southern hemisphere, still compared to the normal calculated for 1961-1990. The ten hottest years on record are all after 1997. Worse, 14 of the 15 hottest years are in the 21st century, which has barely started. Thus, 2016 is the hottest year, followed closely by 2015, 2014 and 2010. The temperature of tropical waters increased by 1.2 °C during the 20th century (compared to 0.5 °C on average for the oceans), causing coral reefs to bleach in 1997. In 1998, the period of Fort El Niño, the prolonged warming of the water has destroyed half of the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. In addition, the temperature in the tropics of the five ocean basins, where cyclones form, increased by 0.5 °C from 1970 to 2004, and powerful cyclones appeared in the North Atlantic in 2005, while they were more numerous in other parts of the world. Recently, mountains of studies focused on the possible scenario of climate change and the potential worldwide repercussions including hell temperatures and apocalyptic extreme events10 , 11, 12. Melting of continental glaciers As a direct result of the global warming, melting of continental glaciers has been recently noticed13. There are approximately 198,000 mountain glaciers in the world; they cover an area of approximately 726,000 km2. If they all melted, the sea level would rise by about 40 cm. Since the late 1960s, global snow cover has declined by around 10 to 15%. Winter cold spells in much of the northern half of the northern hemisphere are two weeks shorter than 100 years ago. Glaciers of mountains have been declining all over the world by an average of 50 m per decade for 150 years. However, they are also subject to strong multi-temporal variations which make forecasts on this point difficult according to some specialists. In the Alps, glaciers have been losing 1 meter per year for 30 years. Polar glaciers like those of Spitsbergen (about a hundred km from the North Pole) have been retreating since 1880, releasing large quantities of water. The Arctic has lost about 10% of its permanent ice cover every ten years since 1980. In this region, average temperatures have increased at twice the rate of elsewhere in the world in recent decades. The melting of the Arctic Sea ice has resulted in a loss of 15% of its surface area and 40% of its thickness since 1979. The record for melting arctic sea ice was set in 2017. All models predict the disappearance of the Arctic Sea ice in summer within a few decades, which will not be without consequences for the climate in Europe. The summer melting of arctic sea ice accelerated far beyond climate model predictions. Added to its direct repercussions of coastal regions flooding, melting of continental ice leads to radical climatic modifications in favour of the apocalyptic scenario. Fig.1 Evolution of temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2020: the apocalyptic scenario Sea level rise As a direct result of the melting of continental glaciers, sea level rise has been worldwide recorded14 ,15. The average level of the oceans has risen by 22 cm since 1880 and 2 cm since the year 2000 because of the melting of the glaciers but also with the thermal expansion of the water. In the 20th century, the sea level rose by around 2 mm per year. From 1990 to 2017, it reached the relatively constant rate of just over 3mm per year. Several sources contributed to sea level increase including thermal expansion of water (42%), melting of continental glaciers (21%), melting Greenland glaciers (15%) and melting Antarctic glaciers (8%). Since 2003, there has always been a rapid rise (around 3.3 mm / year) in sea level, but the contribution of thermal expansion has decreased (0.4 mm / year) while the melting of the polar caps and continental glaciers accelerates. Since most of the world’s population is living on coastal regions, sea level rise represents a real threat for the humanity, not excluding the apocalyptic scenario. Multiplication of extreme phenomena and climatic anomalies On a human scale, an average of 200 million people is affected by natural disasters each year and approximately 70,000 perish from them. Indeed, as evidenced by the annual reviews of disasters and climatic anomalies, we are witnessing significant warning signs. It is worth noting that these observations are dependent on meteorological survey systems that exist only in a limited number of countries with statistics that rarely go back beyond a century or a century and a half. In addition, scientists are struggling to represent the climatic variations of the last two thousand years which could serve as a reference in the projections. Therefore, the exceptional nature of this information must be qualified a little. Indeed, it is still difficult to know the return periods of climatic disasters in each region. But over the last century, the climate system has gone wild. Indeed, everything suggests that the climate is racing. Indeed, extreme events and disasters have become more frequent. For instance, less than 50 significant events were recorded per year over the period 1970-1985, while there have been around 120 events recorded since 1995. Drought has long been one of the most worrying environmental issues. But while African countries have been the main affected so far, the whole world is now facing increasingly frequent and prolonged droughts. Chile, India, Australia, United States, France and even Russia are all regions of the world suffering from the acceleration of the global drought. Droughts are slowly evolving natural hazards that can last from a few months to several decades and affect larger or smaller areas, whether they are small watersheds or areas of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. In addition to their direct effects on water resources, agriculture and ecosystems, droughts can cause fires or heat waves. They also promote the proliferation of invasive species, creating environments with multiple risks, worsening the consequences on ecosystems and societies, and increasing their vulnerability. Although these are natural phenomena, there is a growing understanding of how humans have amplified the severity and impacts of droughts, both on the environment and on people. We influence meteorological droughts through our action on climate change, and we influence hydrological droughts through our management of water circulation and water processes at the local scale, for example by diverting rivers or modifying land use. During the Anthropocene (the present period when humans exert a dominant influence on climate and environment), droughts are closely linked to human activities, cultures, and responses. From this scientific overview, it may be concluded apocalyptic scenario is not only a literature genre inspired from the pure imagination. Instead, many scientific arguments are in favour of this dramatic destiny of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Fig.2. Sea level rise from 1880 to 2020: a possible apocalyptic scenario (www.globalchange.gov, 2021) Apocalyptic genre in recent writing As the original landmark of apocalyptic writing, we must place the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the Exile in Babylon. Occasion of a religious and cultural crossing with imprescriptible effects, the Exile brought about a true rebirth, characterized by the maintenance of the essential ethical, even cultural, of a national religion, that of Moses, kept as pure as possible on a foreign land and by the reinterpretation of this fundamental heritage by the archaic return of what was very old, both national traditions and neighbouring cultures. More precisely, it was the place and time for the rehabilitation of cultures and the melting pot for recasting ancient myths. This vast infatuation with Antiquity, remarkable even in the vocabulary used, was not limited to Israel: it even largely reflected a general trend. The long period that preceded throughout the 7th century BC and until 587, like that prior to the edict of Cyrus in 538 BC, was that of restorations and rebirths, of returns to distant sources and cultural crossings. In the biblical literature of this period, one is struck by the almost systematic link between, on the one hand, a very sustained mythical reinvestment even in form and, on the other, the frequent use of biblical archaisms. The example of Shadday, a word firmly rooted in the Semites of the Northwest and epithet of El in the oldest layers of the books of Genesis and Exodus, is most eloquent. This term reappears precisely at the time of the Exile as a designation of the divinity of the Patriarchs and of the God of Israel; Daily, ecological catastrophes now describe the normal state of societies exposed to "risks", in the sense that Ulrich Beck gives to this term: "the risk society is a society of catastrophe. The state of emergency threatens to become a normal state there1”. Now, the "threat" has become clearer, and catastrophic "exceptions" are proliferating as quickly as species are disappearing and climate change is accelerating. The relationship that we have with this worrying reality, to say the least, is twofold: on the one hand, we know very well what is happening to us; on the other hand, we fail to draw the appropriate theoretical and political consequences. This ecological duplicity is at the heart of what has come to be called the “Anthropocene”, a term coined at the dawn of the 21st century by Eugene Stoermer (an environmentalist) and Paul Crutzen (a specialist in the chemistry of the atmosphere) in order to describe an age when humanity would have become a "major geological force" capable of disrupting the climate and changing the terrestrial landscape from top to bottom. If the term “Anthropocene” takes note of human responsibility for climate change, this responsibility is immediately attributed to overpowering: strong as we are, we have “involuntarily” changed the climate for at least two hundred and fifty years. Therefore, let us deliberately change the face of the Earth, if necessary, install a solar shield in space. Recognition and denial fuel the signifying machine of the Anthropocene. And it is precisely what structures eco-apocalyptic cinema that this article aims to study. By "eco-apocalyptic cinema", we first mean a cinematographic sub-genre: eco-apocalyptic and post-eco-apocalyptic films base the possibility (or reality) of the end of the world on environmental grounds and not, for example, on damage caused by the possible collision of planet Earth with a comet. Post-apocalyptic science fiction (sometimes abbreviated as "post-apo" or "post-nuke") is a sub-genre of science fiction that depicts life after a disaster that destroyed civilization: nuclear war, collision with a meteorite, epidemic, economic or energy crisis, pandemic, alien invasion. Conclusion Climate and politics have been linked together since Aristotle. With Montesquieu, Ibn Khaldûn or Watsuji, a certain climatic determinism is attributed to the character of a nation. The break with modernity made the climate an object of scientific knowledge which, in the twentieth century, made it possible to document, despite the controversies, the climatic changes linked to industrialization. Both endanger the survival of human beings and ecosystems. Climate ethics are therefore looking for a new relationship with the biosphere or Gaia. For some, with the absence of political agreements, it is the beginning of inevitable catastrophes. For others, the Anthropocene, which henceforth merges human history with natural history, opens onto technical action. The debate between climate determinism and human freedom is revived. The reference to the biblical Apocalypse was present in the thinking of thinkers like Günther Anders, Karl Jaspers or Hans Jonas: the era of the atomic bomb would mark an entry into the time of the end, a time marked by the unprecedented human possibility of 'total war and annihilation of mankind. The Apocalypse will be very relevant in describing the chaos to come if our societies continue their mad race described as extra-activist, productivist and consumerist. In dialogue with different theologians and philosophers (such as Jacques Ellul), it is possible to unveil some spiritual, ethical, and political resources that the Apocalypse offers for thinking about History and human engagement in the Anthropocene. What can a theology of collapse mean at a time when negative signs and dead ends in the human situation multiply? What then is the place of man and of the cosmos in the Apocalypse according to Saint John? Could the end of history be a collapse? How can we live in the time we have left before the disaster? Answers to such questions remain unknown and no scientist can predict the trajectory of this Great Acceleration taking place at the Late Anthropocene. When science cannot give answers, Man tries to infer his destiny for the legend, religion and the fiction. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse additionally as our apparent inability to avert it, we tend to face geology changes of forceful proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the implications. Climate fiction ought to be considered an important supplement to climate science, as a result, climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence inside worlds not solely deemed seemingly by science, however that area unit scientifically anticipated. Hence, this chapter, as part of the book itself, aims to contribute to studies of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies. References David P.G. Bondand Stephen E. Grasby. "Late Ordovician mass extinction caused by volcanism, warming, and anoxia, not cooling and glaciation: REPLY." Geology 48, no. 8 (Geological Society of America2020): 510. Cyril Langlois.’Vestiges de l'apocalypse: ‘le site de Tanis, Dakota du Nord 2019’. Accessed June, 6, 2021, https://planet-terre.ens-lyon.fr/pdf/Tanis-extinction-K-Pg.pdf NajouaGharsalli,ElhoucineEssefi, Rana Baydoun, and ChokriYaich. ‘The Anthropocene and Great Acceleration as controversial epoch of human-induced activities: case study of the Halk El Menjel wetland, eastern Tunisia’. Applied Ecology and Environmental Research 18(3) (Corvinus University of Budapest 2020): 4137-4166 Elhoucine Essefi, ‘On the Geochemistry and Mineralogy of the Anthropocene’. International Journal of Water and Wastewater Treatment, 6(2). 1-14, (Sci Forschen2020): doi.org/10.16966/2381-5299.168 Elhoucine Essefi. ‘Record of the Anthropocene-Great Acceleration along a core from the coast of Sfax, southeastern Tunisia’. Turkish journal of earth science, (TÜBİTAK,2021). 1-16. Chiara Xausa. ‘Climate Fiction and the Crisis of Imagination: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Swan Book’. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 8(2), (WARWICK 2021): 99-119. Akyol, Özlem. "Climate Change: An Apocalypse for Urban Space? An Ecocritical Reading of “Venice Drowned” and “The Tamarisk Hunter”." Folklor/Edebiyat 26, no. 101 (UluslararasıKıbrısÜniversitesi 2020): 115-126. Boswell, Suzanne F. "The Four Tourists of the Apocalypse: Figures of the Anthropocene in Caribbean Climate Fiction.". Paradoxa 31, (Academia 2020): 359-378. Ayt Ougougdal, Houssam, Mohamed YacoubiKhebiza, Mohammed Messouli, and Asia Lachir. "Assessment of future water demand and supply under IPCC climate change and socio-economic scenarios, using a combination of models in Ourika Watershed, High Atlas, Morocco." Water 12, no. 6 (MPDI 2020): 1751.DOI:10.3390/w12061751. Wu, Jia, Zhenyu Han, Ying Xu, Botao Zhou, and Xuejie Gao. "Changes in extreme climate events in China under 1.5 C–4 C global warming targets: Projections using an ensemble of regional climate model simulations." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 125, no. 2 (Wiley2020): e2019JD031057.https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JD031057 Khan, Md Jamal Uddin, A. K. M. Islam, Sujit Kumar Bala, and G. M. Islam. "Changes in climateextremes over Bangladesh at 1.5° C, 2° C, and 4° C of global warmingwith high-resolutionregionalclimate modeling." Theoretical&AppliedClimatology 140 (EBSCO2020). Gudoshava, Masilin, Herbert O. Misiani, Zewdu T. Segele, Suman Jain, Jully O. Ouma, George Otieno, Richard Anyah et al. 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This paper starts from Jojo Moyes’ novel Silver Bay, looking at the way in which it presents tourism related to sea life watching and at aspects of people’s existence in a territory that has this type of potential. One of the aims is to raise awareness in what regards the specificity of such beach areas, in terms of not only opportunities, but also threats to sea ecosystems posed by excessive modernization driven by economic interests. Another aim is to interpret phenomena and attitudes presented in the story from a theoretical background, to make visible what mindsets the actions and behaviors in the novel manifest, from those discussed in intercultural, identity and cultural studies, which represent the academic theoretical approach in this research. Examples of these would be uncertainty (in)tolerance, masculine versus feminine cultures, dominant versus harmonizing (outer-directed) attitudes towards the environment. Moreover, certain potential iconoclastic interpretations, such as mystical exaggeration when it comes to interpreting whale communication may be elucidated. The analysis starts with the outline of the story and focal points, then pinpoints the significant role of sea life tourism in the novel. Afterwards, it goes on to set the explanatory background by looking at the polarity old-new and further superposed oppositions, to subsequently get to the description of whale watching, whale behavior and animal-related issues, and finally look into the metaphor of seeing the human being as a whale. The conclusions sum up the main findings: the fiction under the lens here is informative and raises awareness related to the abovementioned aspects (cultural identity and profiles, intercultural contrastive interpretations, typical forms of tourism, ecosystem preservation, irresponsible or illegal actions). They point out as well the relevance and placement of the topic in modern approaches on tourism, environmental concerns, sustainability and wildlife preservation in general.

Since its return in 2005 the science fiction series Doctor Who (BBC1) has featured many alien creatures which bear a striking similarity to non-human Earth species: the Judoon in “Smith and Jones” (2007) have heads like rhinoceroses; the nurses in “New Earth” (2006) are cats in wimples; the Tritovores in “Planet of the Dead” (2009) are giant flies in boilersuits. Yet only one non-human animal has appeared twice in the series, in unrelated stories: the pig. Furthermore, alien races such as the Judoon and the Tritovores simply happen to look like human species, and the series offers no narrative explanation as to why such similarities exist. When the pig has appeared, however, it has instead been as the consequence of experimentation and mutation, and in both cases the appearance of such porcine hybrids is signalled as horrific, unsettling and, in the end, to be pitied. The fact that the pig has appeared in this way twice suggests there is something about the human understanding of this animal which means it can fulfil a role in fiction unavailable to other Earth species. The pig’s appearance has been in two stories, both two-parters. In “Aliens of London”/“World War Three” (2005) a spaceship crashes into London’s Thames river, and the pilot inside, thought to be dead, is sent to be scientifically examined. Alone in the laboratory, the pathologist Doctor Sato is startled to find the creature is alive and, during its attempt to escape, it is shot by the military. When the creature is examined The Doctor reveals it is “an ordinary pig, from Earth.” He goes on to explain that, “someone’s taken a pig, opened up its brain, stuck bits on, then they’ve strapped it in that ship and made it dive-bomb. It must have been terrified. They’ve taken this animal and turned it into a joke.” The Doctor’s concern over the treatment of the pig mirrors his earlier reprimand of the military for shooting it; as he cradles the dying creature he shouts at the soldier responsible, “What did you do that for? It was scared! It was scared.” On the commentary track for the DVD release of this episode Julie Gardner (executive producer) and Will Cohen (visual effects producer) note how so many people told them they had a significant emotional reaction to this scene, with Gardner adding, “Bless the pig.” In that sense, what begins as a moment of horror in the series becomes one of empathy with a non-human being, and the pig moves from being a creature of terror to one whose death is seen to be an immoral act. This movement from horror to empathy can be seen in the pig’s other appearance, in “Daleks in Manhattan”/“Evolution of the Daleks” (2007). Here the alien Daleks experiment on humans in order to develop the ability to meld themselves with Earthlings, in order to repopulate their own dwindling numbers. Humans are captured and then tested; as Laszlo, one of the outcomes of the experimentation, explains, “They’re divided into two groups: high intelligence and low intelligence. The low intelligence are taken to becomes Pig Slaves, like me.” These Pig Slaves look and move like humans except for their faces, which have prolonged ears and the pig signifier of a snout. At no point in the story is it made clear why experimentations on low intelligence humans should result in them looking like pigs, and a non-hybrid pig is not seen throughout the story. The appearance of the experiments’ results is therefore not narratively explained, and it does not draw on the fact that “in digestive apparatus and nutrient requirements pigs resemble humans in more ways than any mammal except monkeys and apes, which is why pigs are much in demand for [human] medical research” (Harris 70); indeed, considering the story is set in the 1930s such a justification would be anachronistic. The use of the pig, therefore, draws solely on its cultural, not its scientific, associations. These associations are complex, and the pig has been used to connote many things in Western culture. Children’s books such as The Sheep-Pig (King-Smith) and Charlotte’s Web (White) suggest the close proximity of humans and pigs can result in an affinity capable of communication. The use of pigs to represent Poles in Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman), on the other hand, has been read as offensive, drawing on the animal’s association with dirt and greed (Weschler). These depictions are informed by debates about pigs in the real world, whereby an animal which, as mentioned above, is similar enough to humans to be useful in medical research can also, for the food industry, go through a slaughtering process described by Bob Torres as “horribly cruel” (47). Such cruelty can only be justified if the boundaries between the pig and the human are maintained, and this is why pig-human representations are capable of being shocking and horrific. The hybrid nature of the human-pig creature draws on the horror trope that Noël Carroll refers to as “fusion” which works because it “unites attributes held to be categorically distinct” such as “inside/outside, living/dead, insect/human, flesh/machine” (43). He explains that this is why characters in horror narratives do not find such creatures simply fearful, but also “repellent, loathsome, disgusting, repulsive and impure” (54); their failure to conform to accepted cultural categories destabilises assumed norms and, perhaps most horrifically, undermines ‘the human’ as a stable, natural and superior category. As Donna Haraway notes, “‘The species’ often means the human race, unless one is attuned to science fiction, where species abound” (18). Science fiction therefore commonly plays with ideas of species because it is often interested in “the image of the scientist ‘playing god’” (Jones 51) and the horrific outcomes of “the total severing of scientific concerns from ethical concerns” (53). That the result of human/non-human experimentation should be regarded as horrific is evidence of the need to maintain the distinctions between humans and other creatures; after all, a pig/human can only be thought of as horrific if it as assumed that there is something unnatural about the destabilisation of the human category. And it is precisely the human which matters in this equation; it is not really as if anyone cares about the pig’s categorical stability in all of this. In both these stories, the appearance of the pig-creature is narratively structured to be surprising and shocking, and is withheld from the audience for as long as possible. The first appearance of a Pig Slave in “Daleks in Manhattan” constitutes that episode’s pre-credits cliff-hanger, with the creature appearing out of the shadows and bearing down upon the camera, directly towards the audience viewing at home. At this point, the audience has no idea why such a creature exists; the meaning of the pig-human hybrid is contained purely in its visual appearance, with the horrific fact of its contradictory appearance perhaps drawing on the pig’s historical association with evil and the Devil (Sillar and Meyler 82). Similarly, in “Aliens of London” we see Sato’s shocked reaction to the pig far earlier than we actually see the creature ourselves, and Sato’s scream is clearly intended to construct what we have yet to encounter as horrific. The Doctor’s search for the creature is similarly signalled, as he roams dimly-lit corridors trying to find it, following the trail of the grunts and noises that it makes. That the pig might constitute a horrific—or at least unsettling—site for humans is unsurprising considering the cultural roles it has often played. There is, after all, an “opposition between civilization and piggishness” (Ashley, Hollows, Jones and Taylor 2) in which (incorrect) assumptions about pigs’ filthy behaviour helps mark out humanity’s cleaner and more civilised way of living. While this is true of all human/non-human interactions, it is argued that the pig occupies a particular role within this system as it is a “familiar beast” (4) because for centuries it has been a domesticated animal which has often lived alongside humans, usually in quite close proximity. In that sense, humans and pigs are very similar. Demarcating the human as a stable and natural “conceptual category ... in which we place all members of our own species and from which we exclude all non-members” (Milton 265-66) has therefore required the denigration of non-humans, at least partly to justify the dominion humans have decided they have the right to hold over other creatures such as pigs. The difficulties in maintaining this demarcation can be seen in the documentary The Private Life of Pigs (BBC2 2010) in which the farmer Jimmy Docherty carries out a number of tests on animals in order to better understand the ‘inner life’ of the pig. Docherty acknowledges the pig’s similarity to humans in his introductory piece to camera; “When you look in their piggy little eyes with their piggy little eyelashes you see something that reflects back to you—I don’t know—it makes you feel there’s a person looking back.” However, this is quickly followed by a statement which works to reassert the human/non-human boundary; “I know we have this close relationship [with pigs], but I’m often reminded that just beneath the surface of their skin, they’re a wild animal.” Perhaps the most telling revelation in the programme is that pigs have been found to make certain grunting noises only when humans are around, which suggests they have developed a language for ‘interacting’ with humans. That Docherty is uncomfortably startled by this piece of information shows how the idea of communication troubles ideas of human superiority, and places pigs within a sphere hitherto maintained as strictly human. Of course, humans often willingly share domestic spaces with other species, but these are usually categorised as pets. The pet exists “somewhere between the wild animal and the human” (Fudge 8), and we often invest them with a range of human characteristics and develop relationships with such animals which are similar, but not identical, to those we have with other humans. The pig, however, like other food animals, cannot occupy the role afforded to the pet because it is culturally unacceptable to eat pets. In order to legitimise the treatment of the pig as a “strictly utilitarian object; a thing for producing meat and bacon” (Serpell 7) it must be distinguished from the human realm as clearly as possible. It is worth noting, though, that this is a culturally-specific process; Dwyer and Minnegal, for example, show how in New Guinea “pigs commonly play a crucial role in ceremonial and spiritual life” (37-8), and the pig is therefore simultaneously a wild animal, a source of food, and a species with which humans have an “attachment” (45-54) akin to the idea of a pet. Western societies commonly (though not completely) have difficulty uniting this range of animal categories, and analogous ideas of “civilization” often rest on assumptions about animals which require them to play specific, non-human roles. That homo sapiens define their humanity in terms of civilization is demonstrated by the ways in which ideas of brutality, violence and savagery are displaced onto other species, often quite at odds with the truth of such species’ behaviour. The assumption that non-human species are violent, and constitute a threat, is shown in Doctor Who; the pig is shot in “Aliens of London” for assumed security reasons (despite it having done nothing to suggest it is a threat), while humans run in fear from the Pig Slaves in “Evolution of the Daleks” purely because of their non-human appearance. Mary Midgley refers to this as “the Beast Myth” (38) by which humans not only reduce other species to nothing other than “incarnations of wickedness, … sets of basic needs, … crude mechanical toys, … [and] idiot children” (38), but also lump all non-human species together thereby ignoring the specificity of any particular species. Midgley also argues that “man shows more savagery to his own kind than most other mammal species” (27, emphasis in original), citing the need for “law or morality to restrain violence” (26) as evidence of the social structures required to uphold a myth of human civilization. In that sense, the use of pigs in Doctor Who can be seen as conforming to centuries-old depictions of non-human species, by which the loss of humanity symbolised by other species can be seen as the ultimate punishment. After all, when the Daleks’ human helper, Mr Diagoras, fears that the aliens are going to experiment on him, he fearfully exclaims, “What do you mean? Like those pig-men things? You’re not going to turn me into one of those? Oh, God, please don’t!” In the next episode, when all the Pig Slaves are killed by the actions of the Doctor’s companion Martha, she regrets her actions, only to be told, “No. The Daleks killed them. Long ago”, for their mutation into a ‘pig-man thing’ is seen to be a more significant loss of humanity than death itself. The scene highlights how societies are often “confused about the status of such interspecies beings” (Savulescu 25). Such confusion is likely to recur considering we are moving into a “posthumanist” age defined by the “decentering of the human” (Wolfe xv), whereby critiques of traditional cultural categories, alongside scientific developments that question the biological certainty of the human, result in difficulties in defining precisely what it is that is supposedly so special about homo sapiens. This means that it is far too easy to write off these depictions in Doctor Who as merely drawing on, and upholding, those simplistic and naturalised human/non-human distinctions which have been criticised, in a manner similar to sexism and racism, as “speciesist” (Singer 148-62). There is, after all, consistent sympathy for the pig in these episodes. The shooting of the pig in “Aliens of London” is outrageous not merely because it gives evidence of the propensity of human violence: the death of the pig itself is presented as worth mourning, in a manner similar to the death of any living being. Throughout the series the Doctor is concerned over the loss of life for any species, always aiming to find a non-violent method for solving conflicts and repeatedly berating other characters who resort to bloodshed for solutions. Indeed, the story’s narrative can be read as one in which the audience is invited to reassess its own response to the pig’s initial appearance, shifting from fear at its alien-ness to sympathy for its demise. This complication of the cultural meanings of pigs is taken even further in the two-part Dalek story. One of the key plots of the story is the relationship between Laszlo, who has been transmuted into a Pig Slave, and his former lover Tallulah. Tallulah spends much of the story thinking Laszlo has disappeared, when he has, in fact, gone into hiding, certain that she will reject him because of his post-experimentation porcine features. When they finally reunite, Laszlo apologises for what has happened to him, while Tallulah asks, “Laszlo? My Laszlo? What have they done to you?” At the end of the story they decide to try re-establishing their relationship, despite Laszlo’s now-complicated genetic make-up. In response to this Martha asks the Doctor, “Do you reckon it’s going to work, those two?” The Doctor responds that while such an odd pairing might be problematic pretty much anywhere else, as they were in New York they might just get away with it. He reflects, “That’s what this city’s good at. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and maybe the odd Pig Slave Dalek mutant hybrid too.” While there is an obvious playfulness to this scene, with the programme foregrounding the kinds of narrative available to the science fiction genre, it is also clear that we are invited to find this a good narrative conclusion, a suitable resolution to all that has preceded it. In that sense, the pig and the human come together, dissolving the human/non-human divide at a stroke, and this is offered to the audience as something to be pleased about. In both narratives, then, the pig moves from being understood as alien and threatening to something if not quite identical to human, then certainly akin to it. Certainly, the narratives suggest that the lives, loves and concerns of pigs—even if they have been experimented upon—matter, and can constitute significant emotional moments in primetime mainstream family television. This development is a result of the text’s movement from an interest in the appearance of the pig to its status as a living being. As noted above, the initial appearances of the pigs in both stories is intended to be frightening, but such terror is dependent on understanding non-human species by their appearance alone. What both of these stories manage to do is suggest that the pig—like all non-human living things, whether of Earth or not—is more than its physical appearance, and via acknowledgment of its own consciousness, and its own sense of identity, can become something with which humans are capable of having sympathy; perhaps more than that, that the pig is something with which humans should have sympathy, for to deny the interior life of such a species is to engage in an inhuman act in itself. This could be seen as an interesting—if admittedly marginal—corrective to the centuries of cultural and physical abuse the pig, like all animals, has suffered. Such representations can be seen as evoking “the dreaded comparison” (Spiegel) which aligns maltreatment of animals with slavery, a comparison that is dreaded by societies because to acknowledge such parallels makes justifying humans’ abusive treatment of other species very difficult. These two Doctor Who stories repeatedly make such comparisons, and assume that to morally and emotionally distinguish between living beings based on categories of species is nonsensical, immoral, and fails to acknowledge the significance and majesty of all forms of life. That we might, as Gardner suggests, “Bless the pig”—whether it has had its brain stuffed full of wires or been merged with a human—points towards complex notions of human/non-human interaction which might helpfully destabilise simplistic ideas of the superiority of the human race. References Ashley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones and Ben Taylor. Food and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Dwyer, Peter D. and Monica Minnegal. “Person, Place or Pig: Animal Attachments and Human Transactions in New Guinea.” Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacies. Ed. John Knight. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. 37-60. Fudge, Erica. Pets. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Harris, Marvin. “The Abominable Pig.” Food and Culture: A Reader. Ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. 67-79. Jones, Darryl. Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. London: Arnold, 2002. King-Smith, Dick. The Sheep-Pig. London: Puffin, 1983. Midgley, Mary. Beast and Man. London and New York: Routledge, 1979/2002. Milton, Kay. “Anthropomorphism or Egomorphism? The Perception of Non-Human Persons by Human Ones.” Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacies. Ed. John Knight. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. 255-71. Savulescu, Julian. “Human-Animal Transgenesis and Chimeras Might be an Expression of our Humanity.” The American Journal of Bioethics 3.3 (2003): 22-5. Serpell, James. In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Sillar, Frederick Cameron and Ruth Mary Meyler. The Symbolic Pig: An Anthology of Pigs in Literature and Art. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1961. Singer, Peter. “All Animals are Equal.” Animal Rights and Human Obligations. Ed. Tom Regan and Peter Singer. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1989. 148-62. Spiegel, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. London and Philadelphia: Heretic Books, 1988. Speigelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986/1991. Torres, Bob. Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights. Edinburgh, Oakland and West Virginia: AK Press, 2007. Weschler, Lawrence. “Pig Perplex.” Lingua France: The Review of Academic Life 11.5 (2001): 6-8. White, E.B. Charlotte’s Web. London: Harper Collins, 1952. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Abstract Despite the interdisciplinarity of human-animal studies, there has been little research about the interactions between science and literature in relation to nonhuman animals. This paper explores the representation of Atlantic salmons (Salmo salar) and brown trouts (Salmo trutta) in Henry Williamson’s classic work of animal fiction, Salar the Salmon (1935). In particular, the analysis focuses on depictions of mental states and subjective experiences in fishes. This work offers the first animal-centric analysis of the text, while also addressing the marginalization of fishes in literary animal studies. The wider purpose is to identify the ways in which fiction can influence public perceptions and encourage empathy in readers. The ultimate aim is to improve our methods of communicating about fishes in both literature and science.

This paper responds to scholarly disagreement within literary animal studies as to whether anthropomorphism aids or hinders human-animal relations and cross-species understanding. Taking Richard Adams’ Watership Down as its case study, the paper argues that the novel retains an interest in portraying its animals as animals despite the heavy anthropomorphization of its animal characters. The analysis highlights four strategies that the novel employs for communicating an animal experience to a human reader: 1) A careful attention to the physicality of its rabbit characters, 2) the use of rabbit mythology to aid the reader in imagining a rabbit-centric worldview, 3) the framing of the entire text as a work of translation, which provides an in-fiction explanation for the occasional untranslatability between human and animal experiences, and 4) thematic exploration of animal vulnerability. The analysis leads to the conclusion that Watership Down successfully fosters a sense of human-animal empathy that calls attention to both commonalities and power imbalances between humans and animals.

Image 1: Hasbro/Tiger Electronics 1998 Furby. (Photo credit: Author) Introduction Since the mid-1990s robotic and digital creatures designed to offer social interaction and companionship have been developed for commercial and research interests. Integral to encouraging positive experiences with these creatures has been the use of cute aesthetics that aim to endear companions to their human users. During this time there has also been a growth in online communities that engage in cultural production through fan fiction responses to existing cultural artefacts, including the widely recognised electronic companion, Hasbro’s Furby (image 1). These user stories and Furby’s online representation in general, demonstrate that contrary to the intentions of their designers and marketers, Furbys are not necessarily received as cute, or the embodiment of the helpless and harmless demeanour that goes along with it. Furbys’ large, lash-framed eyes, small, or non-existent limbs, and baby voice are typical markers of cuteness but can also evoke another side of cuteness—monstrosity, especially when the creature appears physically capable instead of helpless (Brzozowska-Brywczynska 217). Furbys are a particularly interesting manifestation of the cute aesthetic because it is used as tool for encouraging attachment to a socially interactive electronic object, and therefore intersects with existing ideas about technology and nonhuman companions, both of which often embody a sense of otherness. This paper will explore how cuteness intersects withand transitions into monstrosity through online representations of Furbys, troubling their existing design and marketing narrative by connecting and likening them to other creatures, myths, and anecdotes. Analysis of narrative in particular highlights the instability of cuteness, and cultural understandings of existing cute characters, such as the gremlins from the film Gremlins (Dante) reinforce the idea that cuteness should be treated with suspicion as it potentially masks a troubling undertone. Ultimately, this paper aims to interrogate the cultural complexities of designing electronic creatures through the stories that people tell about them online. Fan Production Authors of fan fiction are known to creatively express their responses to a variety of media by appropriating the characters, settings, and themes of an original work and sharing their cultural activity with others (Jenkins 88). On a personal level, Jenkins (103) argues that “[i]n embracing popular texts, the fans claim those works as their own, remaking them in their own image, forcing them to respond to their needs and to gratify their desires.” Fan fiction authors are motivated to write not for financial or professional gains but for personal enjoyment and fan recognition, however, their production does not necessarily come from favourable opinions of an existing text. The antifan is an individual who actively hates a text or cultural artefact and is mobilised in their dislike to contribute to a community of others who share their views (Gray 841). Gray suggests that both fan and antifan activity contribute to our understanding of the kinds of stories audiences want: Although fans may wish to bring a text into everyday life due to what they believe it represents, antifans fear or do not want what they believe it represents and so, as with fans, antifan practice is as important an indicator of interactions between the textual and public spheres. (855) Gray reminds that fans, nonfans, and antifans employ different interpretive strategies when interacting with a text. In particular, while fans intimate knowledge of a text reflects their overall appreciation, antifans more often focus on the “dimensions of the moral, the rational-realistic, [or] the aesthetic” (856) that they find most disagreeable. Additionally, antifans may not experience a text directly, but dislike what knowledge they do have of it from afar. As later examples will show, the treatment of Furbys in fan fiction arguably reflects an antifan perspective through a sense of distrust and aversion, and analysing it can provide insight into why interactions with, or indirect knowledge of, Furbys might inspire these reactions. Derecho argues that in part because of the potential copyright violation that is faced by most fandoms, “even the most socially conventional fan fiction is an act of defiance of corporate control…” (72). Additionally, because of the creative freedom it affords, “fan fiction and archontic literature open up possibilities – not just for opposition to institutions and social systems, but also for a different perspective on the institutional and the social” (76). Because of this criticality, and its subversive nature, fan fiction provides an interesting consumer perspective on objects that are designed and marketed to be received in particular ways. Further, because much of fan fiction draws on fictional content, stories about objects like Furby are not necessarily bound to reality and incorporate fantastical, speculative, and folkloric readings, providing diverse viewpoints of the object. Finally, if, as robotics commentators (cf. Levy; Breazeal) suggest, companionable robots and technologies are going to become increasingly present in everyday life, it is crucial to understand not only how they are received, but also where they fit within a wider cultural sphere. Furbys can be seen as a widespread, if technologically simple, example of these technologies and are often treated as a sign of things to come (Wilks 12). The Design of Electronic Companions To compete with the burgeoning market of digital and electronic pets, in 1998 Tiger Electronics released the Furby, a fur-covered, robotic creature that required the user to carry out certain nurturance duties. Furbys expected feeding and entertaining and could become sick and scared if neglected. Through a program that advanced slowly over time regardless of external stimulus, Furbys appeared to evolve from speaking entirely Furbish, their mother tongue, to speaking English. To the user, it appeared as though their interactions with the object were directly affecting its progress and maturation because their care duties of feeding and entertaining were happening parallel to the Furbish to English transition (Turkle, Breazeal, Daste, & Scassellati 314). The design of electronic companions like Furby is carefully considered to encourage positive emotional responses. For example, Breazeal (2002 230) argues that a robot will be treated like a baby, and nurtured, if it has a large head, big eyes, and pursed lips. Kinsella’s (1995) also emphasises cute things need for care as they are “soft, infantile, mammalian, round, without bodily appendages (e.g. arms), without bodily orifices (e.g. mouths), non-sexual, mute, insecure, helpless or bewildered” (226). From this perspective, Furbys’ physical design plays a role in encouraging nurturance. Such design decisions are reinforced by marketing strategies that encourage Furbys to be viewed in a particular way. As a marketing tool, Harris (1992) argues that: cuteness has become essential in the marketplace in that advertisers have learned that consumers will “adopt” products that create, often in their packaging alone, an aura of motherlessness, ostracism, and melancholy, the silent desperation of the lost puppy dog clamoring to be befriended - namely, to be bought. (179) Positioning Furbys as friendly was also important to encouraging a positive bond with a caregiver. The history, or back story, that Furbys were given in the instruction manual was designed to convey their kind, non-threatening nature. Although alive and unpredictable, it was crucial that Furbys were not frightening. As imaginary living creatures, the origin of Furbys required explaining: “some had suggested positioning Furby as an alien, but that seemed too foreign and frightening for little girls. By May, the thinking was that Furbies live in the clouds – more angelic, less threatening” (Kirsner). In creating this story, Furby’s producers both endeared the object to consumers by making it seem friendly and inquisitive, and avoided associations to its mass-produced, factory origins. Monstrous and Cute Furbys Across fan fiction, academic texts, and media coverage there is a tendency to describe what Furbys look like by stringing together several animals and objects. Furbys have been referred to as a “mechanized ball of synthetic hair that is part penguin, part owl and part kitten” (Steinberg), a “cross between a hamster and a bird…” (Lawson & Chesney 34), and “ “owl-like in appearance, with large bat-like ears and two large white eyes with small, reddish-pink pupils” (ChaosInsanity), to highlight only a few. The ambiguous appearance of electronic companions is often a strategic decision made by the designer to avoid biases towards specific animals or forms, making the companion easier to accept as “real” or “alive” (Shibata 1753). Furbys are arguably evidence of this strategy and appear to be deliberately unfamiliar. However, the assemblage, and exaggeration, of parts that describes Furbys also conjures much older associations: the world of monsters in gothic literature. Notice the similarities between the above attempts to describe what Furbys looks like, and a historical description of monsters: early monsters are frequently constructed out of ill-assorted parts, like the griffin, with the head and wings of an eagle combined with the body and paws of a lion. Alternatively, they are incomplete, lacking essential parts, or, like the mythological hydra with its many heads, grotesquely excessive. (Punter & Byron 263) Cohen (6) argues that, metaphorically, because of their strange visual assembly, monsters are displaced beings “whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions.” Therefore, to call something a monster is also to call it confusing and unfamiliar. Notice in the following fan fiction example how comparing Furby to an owl makes it strange, and there seems to be uncertainty around what Furbys are, and where they fit in the natural order: The first thing Heero noticed was that a 'Furby' appeared to be a childes toy, shaped to resemble a mutated owl. With fur instead of feathers, no wings, two large ears and comical cat paws set at the bottom of its pudding like form. Its face was devoid of fuzz with a yellow plastic beak and too large eyes that gave it the appearance of it being addicted to speed [sic]. (Kontradiction) Here is a character unfamiliar with Furbys, describing its appearance by relating it to animal parts. Whether Furbys are cute or monstrous is contentious, particularly in fan fictions where they have been given additional capabilities like working limbs and extra appendages that make them less helpless. Furbys’ lack, or diminution of parts, and exaggeration of others, fits the description of cuteness, as well as their sole reliance on caregivers to be fed, entertained, and transported. If viewed as animals, Furbys appear physically limited. Kinsella (1995) finds that a sense of disability is important to the cute aesthetic: stubby arms, no fingers, no mouths, huge heads, massive eyes – which can hide no private thoughts from the viewer – nothing between their legs, pot bellies, swollen legs or pigeon feet – if they have feet at all. Cute things can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t in fact do anything at all for themselves because they are physically handicapped. (236) Exploring the line between cute and monstrous, Brzozowska-Brywczynska argues that it is this sense of physical disability that distinguishes the two similar aesthetics. “It is the disempowering feeling of pity and sympathy […] that deprives a monster of his monstrosity” (218). The descriptions of Furbys in fan fiction suggest that they transition between the two, contingent on how they are received by certain characters, and the abilities they are given by the author. In some cases it is the overwhelming threat the Furby poses that extinguishes feelings of care. In the following two excerpts that the revealing of threatening behaviour shifts the perception of Furby from cute to monstrous in ‘When Furbies Attack’ (Kellyofthemidnightdawn): “These guys are so cute,” she moved the Furby so that it was within inches of Elliot's face and positioned it so that what were apparently the Furby's lips came into contact with his cheek “See,” she smiled widely “He likes you.” […] Olivia's breath caught in her throat as she found herself backing up towards the door. She kept her eyes on the little yellow monster in front of her as her hand slowly reached for the door knob. This was just too freaky, she wanted away from this thing. The Furby that was originally called cute becomes a monster when it violently threatens the protagonist, Olivia. The shifting of Furbys between cute and monstrous is a topic of argument in ‘InuYasha vs the Demon Furbie’ (Lioness of Dreams). The character Kagome attempts to explain a Furby to Inuyasha, who views the object as a demon: That is a toy called a Furbie. It's a thing we humans call “CUTE”. See, it talks and says cute things and we give it hugs! (Lioness of Dreams) A recurrent theme in the Inuyasha (Takahashi) anime is the generational divide between Kagome and Inuyasha. Set in feudal-era Japan, Kagome is transported there from modern-day Tokyo after falling into a well. The above line of dialogue reinforces the relative newness, and cultural specificity, of cute aesthetics, which according to Kinsella (1995 220) became increasingly popular throughout the 1980s and 90s. In Inuyasha’s world, where demons and monsters are a fixture of everyday life, the Furby appearance shifts from cute to monstrous. Furbys as GremlinsDuring the height of the original 1998 Furby’s public exposure and popularity, several news articles referred to Furby as “the five-inch gremlin” (Steinberg) and “a furry, gremlin-looking creature” (Del Vecchio 88). More recently, in a review of the 2012 Furby release, one commenter exclaimed: “These things actually look scary! Like blue gremlins!” (KillaRizzay). Following the release of the original Furbys, Hasbro collaborated with the film’s merchandising team to release Interactive ‘Gizmo’ Furbys (image 2). Image 2: Hasbro 1999 Interactive Gizmo (photo credit: Author) Furbys’ likeness to gremlins offers another perspective on the tension between cute and monstrous aesthetics that is contingent on the creature’s behaviour. The connection between Furbys and gremlins embodies a sense of mistrust, because the film Gremlins focuses on the monsters that dwell within the seemingly harmless and endearing mogwai/gremlin creatures. Catastrophic events unfold after they are cared for improperly. Gremlins, and by association Furbys, may appear cute or harmless, but this story tells that there is something darker beneath the surface. The creatures in Gremlins are introduced as mogwai, and in Chinese folklore the mogwai or mogui is a demon (Zhang, 1999). The pop culture gremlin embodied in the film, then, is cute and demonic, depending on how it is treated. Like a gremlin, a Furby’s personality is supposed to be a reflection of the care it receives. Transformation is a common theme of Gremlins and also Furby, where it is central to the sense of “aliveness” the product works to create. Furbys become “wiser” as time goes on, transitioning through “life stages” as they “learn” about their surroundings. As we learn from their origin story, Furbys jumped from their home in the clouds in order to see and explore the world firsthand (Tiger Electronics 2). Because Furbys are susceptible to their environment, they come with rules on how they must be cared for, and the consequences if this is ignored. Without attention and “food”, a Furby will become unresponsive and even ill: “If you allow me to get sick, soon I will not want to play and will not respond to anything but feeding” (Tiger Electronics 6). In Gremlins, improper care manifests in an abrupt transition from cute to monstrous: Gizmo’s strokeable fur is transformed into a wet, scaly integument, while the vacant portholes of its eyes (the most important facial feature of the cute thing, giving us free access to its soul and ensuring its total structability, its incapacity to hold back anything in reserve) become diabolical slits hiding a lurking intelligence, just as its dainty paws metamorphose into talons and its pretty puckered lips into enormous Cheshire grimaces with full sets of sharp incisors. (Harris 185–186) In the Naruto (Kishimoto) fan fiction ‘Orochimaru's World Famous New Year's Eve Party’ (dead drifter), while there is no explicit mention of Gremlins, the Furby undergoes the physical transformation that appears in the films. The Furby, named Sasuke, presumably after the Naruto antagonist Sasuke, and hinting at its untrustworthy nature, undergoes a transformation that mimics that of Gremlins: when water is poured on the Furby, boils appear and fall from its back, each growing into another Furby. Also, after feeding the Furby, it lays eggs: Apparently, it's not a good idea to feed Furbies chips. Why? Because they make weird cocoon eggs and transform into… something. (ch. 5) This sequence of events follows the Gremlins movie structure, in which cute and furry Gizmo, after being exposed to water and fed after midnight, “begins to reproduce, laying eggs that enter a larval stage in repulsive cocoons covered in viscous membranes” (Harris 185). Harris also reminds that the appearance of gremlins comes with understandings of how they should be treated: Whereas cute things have clean, sensuous surfaces that remain intact and unpenetrated […] the anti-cute Gremlins are constantly being squished and disembowelled, their entrails spilling out into the open, as they explode in microwaves and run through paper shredders and blenders. (Harris 186) The Furbys in ‘Orochimaru's World Famous New Year's Eve Party’ meet a similar end: Kuro Furby whined as his brain was smashed in. One of its eyes popped out and rolled across the floor. (dead drifter ch. 6) A horde of mischievous Furbys are violently dispatched, including the original Furby that was lovingly cared for. Conclusion This paper has explored examples from online culture in which different cultural references clash and merge to explore artefacts such as Furby, and the complexities of design, such as the use of ambiguously mammalian, and cute, aesthetics in an effort to encourage positive attachment. Fan fiction, as a subversive practice, offers valuable critiques of Furby that are imaginative and speculative, providing creative responses to experiences with Furbys, but also opening up potential for what electronic companions could become. In particular, the use of narrative demonstrates that cuteness is an unstable aesthetic that is culturally contingent and very much tied to behaviour. As above examples demonstrate, Furbys can move between cute, friendly, helpless, threatening, monstrous, and strange in one story. Cute Furbys became monstrous when they were described as an assemblage of disparate parts, made physically capable and aggressive, and affected by their environment or external stimulus. Cultural associations, such as gremlins, also influence how an electronic animal is received and treated, often troubling the visions of designers and marketers who seek to present friendly, nonthreatening, and accommodating companions. These diverse readings are valuable in understanding how companionable technologies are received, especially if they continue to be developed and made commercially available, and if cuteness is to be used as means of encouraging positive attachment. References Breazeal, Cynthia. Designing Sociable Robots. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Brzozowska-Brywczynska, Maja. "Monstrous/Cute: Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness." Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Ed. Niall Scott. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. 2007. 213 - 28. 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Harris, Daniel. “Cuteness.” Salmagundi 96 (1992). 20 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/40548402›. Inuyasha. Created by Rumiko Takahashi. Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation (YTV) & Sunrise, 1996. Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5.2 (1988). 19 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15295038809366691#.UwVmgGcdeIU›. Kellyofthemidnightdawn. “When Furbies Attack.” Fanfiction.net, 2006. 6 Oct. 2011. KillaRizzay. “Furby Gets a Reboot for 2012, We Go Hands-On (Video).” Engadget 10 July 2012. 11 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/06/furby-hands-on-video/›. Kinsella, Sharon. “Cuties in Japan.” In Women, Media and Consumption in Japan, eds. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press. 1995. 220–254. Kirsner, Scott. “Moody Furballs and the Developers Who Love Them.” Wired 6.09 (1998). 20 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/furby_pr.html›. Kontradiction. “Ehloh the Invincible.” Fanfiction.net, 2002. 20 July 2012. Lawson, Shaun, and Thomas Chesney. “Virtual Pets and Electronic Companions – An Agenda for Inter-Disciplinary Research.” Paper presented at AISB'07: Artificial and Ambient Intelligence. Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle University, 2-4 Apr. 2007. ‹http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/patrick.olivier/AISB07/catz-dogz.pdf›.Levy, David. Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2007. Lioness of Dreams. “InuYasha vs the Demon Furbie.” Fanfiction.net, 2003. 19 July 2012. Naruto. Created by Masashi Kishimoto. Shueisha. 1999. Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Shibata, Takanori. “An Overview of Human Interactive Robots for Psychological Enrichment.” Proceedings of the IEEE 92.11 (2004). 4 Mar. 2011 ‹http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1347456&tag=1›. 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On 17 January 2013, Wired chose the smart contact lens as one of “7 Massive Ideas That Could Change the World” describing a Google-led research project. Wired explains that the inventor, Dr. Babak Parviz, wants to build a microsystem on a contact lens: “Using radios no wider than a few human hairs, he thinks these lenses can augment reality and incidentally eliminate the need for displays on phones, PCs, and widescreen TVs”. Explained further in other sources, the technology entails an antenna, circuits embedded into a contact lens, GPS, and an LED to project images on the eye, creating a virtual display (Solve for X). Wi-Fi would stream content through a transparent screen over the eye. One patent describes a camera embedded in the lens (Etherington). Another mentions medical sensing, such as glucose monitoring of tears (Goldman). In other words, Google proposes an imagined future when we use contact lenses to search the Internet (and be searched by it), shop online, communicate with friends, work, navigate maps, swipe through Tinder, monitor our health, watch television, and, by that time, probably engage in a host of activities not yet invented. Often referred to as a bionic contact, the smart contact lens would signal a weighty shift in the way we work, socialize, and frame our online identities. However, speculative discussion over this radical shift in personal computing, rarely if ever, includes consideration of how the body, acting as a host to digital information, will manage to assimilate not only significant affordances, but also significant constraints and vulnerabilities. At this point, for most people, the smart contact lens is just an idea. Is a new medium of communication started when it is launched in an advertising campaign? When we Like it on Facebook? If we chat about it during a party amongst friends? Or, do a critical mass of people actually have to be using it to say it has started? One might say that Apple’s Macintosh computer started as a media platform when the world heard about the famous 1984 television advertisement aired during the American NFL Super Bowl of that year. Directed by Ridley Scott, the ad entails an athlete running down a passageway and hurling a hammer at a massive screen depicting cold war style rulers expounding state propaganda. The screen explodes freeing those imprisoned from their concentration camp existence. The direct reference to Orwell’s 1984 serves as a metaphor for IBM in 1984. PC users were made analogous to political prisoners and IBM served to represent the totalitarian government. The Mac became a something that, at the time, challenged IBM, and suggested an alternative use for the desktop computer that had previously been relegated for work rather than life. Not everyone bought a Mac, but the polemical ad fostered the idea that Mac was certainly the start of new expectations, civic identities, value-systems, and personal uses for computers. The smart contact lens is another startling start. News of it shocks us, initiates social media clicks and forwards, and instigates dialogue. But, it also indicates the start of a new media paradigm that is already undergoing popular adoption as it is announced in mainstream news and circulated algorithmically across media channels. Since 2008, news outlets like CNN, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Asian International News, United News of India, The Times of London and The Washington Post have carried it, feeding the buzz in circulation that Google intends. Attached to the wave of current popular interest generated around any technology claiming to be “wearable,” a smart contact lens also seems surreptitious. We would no longer hold smartphones, but hide all of that digital functionality beneath our eyelids. Its emergence reveals the way commercial models have dramatically changed. The smart contact lens is a futuristic invention imagined for us and about us, but also a sensationalized idea socializing us to a future that includes it. It is also a real device that Parviz (with Google) has been inventing, promoting, and patenting for commercial applications. All of these workings speak to a broader digital culture phenomenon. We argue that the smart contact lens discloses a process of nascent posthuman adaptation, launched in an era that celebrates wearable media as simultaneously astonishing and banal. More specifically, we adopt technology based on our adaptation to it within our personal, political, medial, social, and biological contexts, which also function in a state of flux. N. Katherine Hayles writes that “Contemporary technogenesis, like evolution in general, is not about progress ... rather, contemporary technogenesis is about adaptation, the fit between organisms and their environments, recognizing that both sides of the engagement (human and technologies) are undergoing coordinated transformations” (81). This article attends to the idea that in these early stages, symbolic acts of adaptation signal an emergent medium through rhetorical processes that society both draws from and contributes to. In terms of project scope, this article contributes a focused analysis to a much larger ongoing digital rhetoric project. For the larger project, we conducted a discourse analysis on a collection of international publications concerning Babak Parviz and the invention. We searched for and collected newspaper stories, news broadcasts, YouTube videos from various sources, academic journal publications, inventors’ conference presentations, and advertising, all published between January 2008 and May 2014, generating a corpus of more than 600 relevant artifacts. Shortly after this time, Dr. Parviz, a Professor at the University of Washington, left the secretive GoogleX lab and joined Amazon.com (Mac). For this article we focus specifically on the idea of beginnings or genesis and how digital spaces increasingly serve as the grounds for emergent digital cultural phenomena that are rarely recognized as starting points. We searched through the corpus to identify a few exemplary international mainstream news stories to foreground predominant tropes in support of the claim we make that smart contacts lenses are a startling idea. Content producers deliberately use astonishment as a persuasive device. We characterize the idea of a smart contact lens cast in rhetorical terms in order to reveal how its allure works as a process of adaptation. Rhetorician and philosopher, Kenneth Burke writes that “rhetorical language is inducement to action (or to attitude)” (42). A rhetorical approach is instrumental because it offers a model to explain how we deploy, often times, manipulative meaning as senders and receivers while negotiating highly complex constellations of resources and contexts. Burke’s rhetorical theory can show how messages influence and become influenced by powerful hierarchies in discourse that seem transparent or neutral, ones that seem to fade into the background of our consciousness. For this article, we also concentrate on rhetorical devices such as ethos and the inventor’s own appeals through different modes of communication. Ethos was originally proposed by Aristotle to identify speaker credibility as a persuasive tactic. Addressed by scholars of rhetoric for centuries, ethos has been reconfigured by many critical theorists (Burke; Baumlin Ethos; Hyde). Baumlin and Baumlin suggest that “ethos describes an audience’s projection of authority and trustworthiness onto the speaker ... ethos suggests that the ethical appeal to be a radically psychological event situated in the mental processes of the audience – as belonging as much to the audience as to the actual character of a speaker” (Psychology 99). Discussed in the next section, our impression of Parviz and his position as inventor plays a dramatic role in the surfacing of the smart contact lens. Digital Rhetoric is an “emerging scholarly discipline concerned with the interpretation of computer-generated media as objects of study” (Losh 48). In an era when machine-learning algorithms become the messengers for our messages, which have become commodity items operating across globalized, capitalist networks, digital rhetoric provides a stable model for our approach. It leads us to demonstrate how this emergent medium and invention, the smart contact lens, is born amid new digital genres of speculative communication circulated in the everyday forums we engage on a daily basis. Smart Contact Lenses, Sensationalism, and Identity One relevant site for exploration into how an invention gains ethos is through writing or video penned or produced by the inventor. An article authored by Parviz in 2009 discusses his invention and the technical advancements that need to be made before the smart contact lens could work. He opens the article using a fictional and sensationalized analogy to encourage the adoption of his invention: The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.But why stop there?In the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character sees the world with data superimposed on his visual field—virtual captions that enhance the cyborg’s scan of a scene. In stories by the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, characters rely on electronic contact lenses, rather than smartphones or brain implants, for seamless access to information that appears right before their eyes. Identity building is made to correlate with smart contact lenses in a manner that frames them as exciting. Coming to terms with them often involves casting us as superhumans, wielding abilities that we do not currently possess. One reason for embellishment is because we do not need digital displays on the eyes, so the motive to use them must always be geared to transcending our assumed present condition as humans and society members. Consequently, imagination is used to justify a shift in human identity along a future trajectory.This passage above also instantiates a transformation from humanist to posthumanist posturing (i.e. “the cyborg”) in order to incent the adoption of smart contact lenses. It begins with the bold declarative statement, “The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse,” which is a comforting claim about our seemingly human superiority. Indexing abstract humanist values, Parviz emphasizes skills we already possess, including seeing a plethora of colours, adjusting to light on the fly, and thinking fast, indeed faster than “a high-speed Internet connection”. However, the text goes on to summon the Terminator character and his optic feats from the franchise of films. Filmic cyborg characters fulfill the excitement that posthuman rhetoric often seems to demand, but there is more here than sensationalism. Parviz raises the issue of augmenting human vision using science fiction as his contextualizing vehicle because he lacks another way to imbricate the idea. Most interesting in this passage is the inventor’s query “But why stop there?” to yoke the two claims, one biological (i.e., “The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse”) and one fictional (i.e. Terminator, Vernor Vinge characters). The query suggests, Why stop with human superiority, we may as well progress to the next level and embrace a smart contact lens just as fictional cyborgs do. The non-threatening use of fiction makes the concept seem simultaneously exciting and banal, especially because the inventor follows with a clear description of the necessary scientific engineering in the rest of the article. This rhetorical act signifies the voice of a technoelite, a heavily-funded cohort responding to global capitalist imperatives armed with a team of technologists who can access technological advancements and imbue comments with an authority that may extend beyond their fields of expertise, such as communication studies, sociology, psychology, or medicine. The result is a powerful ethos. The idea behind the smart contact lens maintains a degree of respectability long before a public is invited to use it.Parviz exhumes much cultural baggage when he brings to life the Terminator character to pitch smart contact lenses. The Terminator series of films has established the “Arnold Schwarzenegger” character a cultural mainstay. Each new film reinvented him, but ultimately promoted him within a convincing dystopian future across the whole series: The Terminator (Cameron), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Mostow), Terminator Salvation (McG) and Terminator Genisys (Taylor) (which appeared in 2015 after Parviz’s article). Recently, several writers have addressed how cyborg characters figure significantly in our cultural psyche (Haraway, Bukatman; Leaver). Tama Leaver’s Artificial Culture explores the way popular, contemporary, cinematic, science fiction depictions of embodied Artificial Intelligence, such as the Terminator cyborgs, “can act as a matrix which, rather than separating or demarcating minds and bodies or humanity and the digital, reinforce the symbiotic connection between people, bodies, and technologies” (31). Pointing out the violent and ultimately technophobic motive of The Terminator films, Leaver reads across them to conclude nevertheless that science fiction “proves an extremely fertile context in which to address the significance of representations of Artificial Intelligence” (63).Posthumanism and TechnogenesisOne reason this invention enters the public’s consciousness is its announcement alongside a host of other technologies, which seem like parts of a whole. We argue that this constant grouping of technologies in the news is one process indicative of technogenesis. For example, City A.M., London’s largest free commuter daily newspaper, reports on the future of business technology as a hodgepodge of what ifs: As Facebook turns ten, and with Bill Gates stepping down as Microsoft chairman, it feels like something is drawing to an end. But if so, it is only the end of the technological revolution’s beginning ... Try to look ahead ten years from now and the future is dark. Not because it is bleak, but because the sheer profusion of potential is blinding. Smartphones are set to outnumber PCs within months. After just a few more years, there are likely to be 3bn in use across the planet. In ten years, who knows – wearables? smart contact lenses? implants? And that’s just the start. The Internet of Things is projected to be a $300bn (£183bn) industry by 2020. (Sidwell) This reporting is a common means to frame the commodification of technology in globalized business news that seeks circulation as much as it does readership. But as a text, it also posits how individuals frame the future and their participation with it (Pedersen). Smart contacts appear to move along this exciting, unstoppable trajectory where the “potential is blinding”. The motive is to excite and scare. However, simultaneously, the effect is predictable. We are quite accustomed to this march of innovations that appears everyday in the morning paper. We are asked to adapt rather than question, consequently, we never separate the parts from the whole (e.g., “wearables? smart contact lenses? Implants”) in order to look at them critically.In coming to terms with Cary Wolf’s definition of posthumanism, Greg Pollock writes that posthumanism is the questioning that goes on “when we can no longer rely on ‘the human’ as an autonomous, rational being who provides an Archimedean point for knowing about the world (in contrast to “humanism,” which uses such a figure to ground further claims)” (208). With similar intent, N. Katherine Hayles formulating the term technogenesis suggests that we are not really progressing to another level of autonomous human existence when we adopt media, we are in effect, adapting to media and media are also in a process of adapting to us. She writes: As digital media, including networked and programmable desktop stations, mobile devices, and other computational media embedded in the environment, become more pervasive, they push us in the direction of faster communication, more intense and varied information streams, more integration of humans and intelligent machines, and more interactions of language with code. These environmental changes have significant neurological consequences, many of which are now becoming evident in young people and to a lesser degree in almost everyone who interacts with digital media on a regular basis. (11) Following Hayles, three actions or traits characterize adaptation in a manner germane to the technogenesis of media like smart contact lenses. The first is “media embedded in the environment”. The trait of embedding technology in the form of sensors and chips into external spaces evokes the onset of The Internet of Things (IoT) foundations. Extensive data-gathering sensors, wireless technologies, mobile and wearable components integrated with the Internet, all contribute to the IoT. Emerging from cloud computing infrastructures and data models, The IoT, in its most extreme, involves a scenario whereby people, places, animals, and objects are given unique “embedded” identifiers so that they can embark on constant data transfer over a network. In a sense, the lenses are adapted artifacts responding to a world that expects ubiquitous networked access for both humans and machines. Smart contact lenses will essentially be attached to the user who must adapt to these dynamic and heavily mediated contexts.Following closely on the first, the second point Hayles makes is “integration of humans and intelligent machines”. The camera embedded in the smart contact lens, really an adapted smartphone camera, turns the eye itself into an image capture device. By incorporating them under the eyelids, smart contact lenses signify integration in complex ways. Human-machine amalgamation follows biological, cognitive, and social contexts. Third, Hayles points to “more interactions of language with code.” We assert that with smart contact lenses, code will eventually govern interaction between countless agents in accordance with other smart devices, such as: (1) exchanges of code between people and external nonhuman networks of actors through machine algorithms and massive amalgamations of big data distributed on the Internet;(2) exchanges of code amongst people, human social actors in direct communication with each other over social media; and (3) exchanges of coding and decoding between people and their own biological processes (e.g. monitoring breathing, consuming nutrients, translating brainwaves) and phenomenological (but no less material) practices (e.g., remembering, grieving, or celebrating). The allure of the smart contact lens is the quietly pressing proposition that communication models such as these will be radically transformed because they will have to be adapted to use with the human eye, as the method of input and output of information. Focusing on genetic engineering, Eugene Thacker fittingly defines biomedia as “entail[ing] the informatic recontextualization of biological components and processes, for ends that may be medical or nonmedical (economic, technical) and with effects that are as much cultural, social, and political as they are scientific” (123). He specifies, “biomedia are not computers that simply work on or manipulate biological compounds. Rather, the aim is to provide the right conditions, such that biological life is able to demonstrate or express itself in a particular way” (123). Smart contact lenses sit on the cusp of emergence as a biomedia device that will enable us to decode bodily processes in significant new ways. The bold, technical discourse that announces it however, has not yet begun to attend to the seemingly dramatic “cultural, social, and political” effects percolating under the surface. Through technogenesis, media acclimatizes rapidly to change without establishing a logic of the consequences, nor a design plan for emergence. Following from this, we should mention issues such as the intrusion of surveillance algorithms deployed by corporations, governments, and other hegemonic entities that this invention risks. If smart contact lenses are biomedia devices inspiring us to decode bodily processes and communicate that data for analysis, for ourselves, and others in our trust (e.g., doctors, family, friends), we also need to be wary of them. David Lyon warns: Surveillance has spilled out of its old nation-state containers to become a feature of everyday life, at work, at home, at play, on the move. So far from the single all-seeing eye of Big Brother, myriad agencies now trace and track mundane activities for a plethora of purposes. Abstract data, now including video, biometric, and genetic as well as computerized administrative files, are manipulated to produce profiles and risk categories in a liquid, networked system. The point is to plan, predict, and prevent by classifying and assessing those profiles and risks. (13) In simple terms, the smart contact lens might disclose the most intimate information we possess and leave us vulnerable to profiling, tracking, and theft. Irma van der Ploeg presupposed this predicament when she wrote: “The capacity of certain technologies to change the boundary, not just between what is public and private information but, on top of that, between what is inside and outside the human body, appears to leave our normative concepts wanting” (71). The smart contact lens, with its implied motive to encode and disclose internal bodily information, needs considerations on many levels. Conclusion The smart contact lens has made a digital beginning. We accept it through the mass consumption of the idea, which acts as a rhetorical motivator for media adoption, taking place long before the device materializes in the marketplace. This occurrence may also be a sign of our “posthuman predicament” (Braidotti). We have argued that the smart contact lens concept reveals our posthuman adaptation to media rather than our reasoned acceptance or agreement with it as a logical proposition. By the time we actually squabble over the price, express fears for our privacy, and buy them, smart contact lenses will long be part of our everyday culture. References Baumlin, James S., and Tita F. Baumlin. “On the Psychology of the Pisteis: Mapping the Terrains of Mind and Rhetoric.” Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Eds. James S. Baumlin and Tita F. Baumlin. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994. 91-112. Baumlin, James S., and Tita F. Baumlin, eds. Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994. Bilton, Nick. “A Rose-Colored View May Come Standard.” The New York Times, 4 Apr. 2012. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950. Cameron, James, dir. The Terminator. Orion Pictures, 1984. DVD. Cameron, James, dir. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Artisan Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Etherington, Darrell. “Google Patents Tiny Cameras Embedded in Contact Lenses.” TechCrunch, 14 Apr. 2014. Goldman, David. “Google to Make Smart Contact Lenses.” CNN Money 17 Jan. 2014. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012. Hyde, Michael. The Ethos of Rhetoric. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Leaver, Tama. Artificial Culture: Identity, Technology, and Bodies. New York: Routledge, 2012. Losh, Elizabeth. Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes. Boston: MIT Press. 2009. Lyon, David, ed. Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. New York: Routledge, 2003. Mac, Ryan. “Amazon Lures Google Glass Creator Following Phone Launch.” Forbes.com, 14 July 2014. McG, dir. Terminator Salvation. Warner Brothers, 2009. DVD. Mostow, Jonathan, dir. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Warner Brothers, 2003. DVD. Parviz, Babak A. “Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens.” IEEE Spectrum, 1 Sep. 2009. Pedersen, Isabel. Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-Shifting Media. Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor Press, 2013. Pollock, Greg. “What Is Posthumanism by Cary Wolfe (2009).” Rev. of What is Posthumanism?, by Cary Wolfe. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 9.1/2 (2011): 235-241. Sidwell, Marc. “The Long View: Bill Gates Is Gone and the Dot-com Era Is Over: It's Only the End of the Beginning.” City A.M., 7 Feb. 2014. “Solve for X: Babak Parviz on Building Microsystems on the Eye.” YouTube, 7 Feb. 2012. Taylor, Alan, dir. Terminator: Genisys. Paramount Pictures, 2015. DVD. Thacker, Eugene “Biomedia.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. W.J.T Mitchell and Mark Hansen, Chicago: Chicago Press, 2010. 117-130. Van der Ploeg, Irma. “Biometrics and the Body as Information.” Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. Ed. David Lyon. New York: Routledge, 2003. 57-73. Wired Staff. “7 Massive Ideas That Could Change the World.” Wired.com, 17 Jan. 2013.

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has achieved success as “the new Rain Man” or “the new definitive, popular account of the autistic condition” (Burks-Abbott 294). Integral to its favourable reception is the way it conflates the autistic main character, the fifteen-year-old narrator Christopher Boone, with the savant, or individual who exhibits both neurological problems and giftedness, thereby engaging with the way autism is presented in popular culture. In a variety of contemporary films and television series, autism has been transformed from a disability to a form of giftedness by relating it to abilities associated in contemporary media with a genius, in particular by invoking the metaphor of an autistic mind as a type of computer. As a result, the book engages with the current association of giftedness in mathematics and science with social awkwardness and isolation as constructed in popular culture: in idiomatic terms, the genius “nerd” figure characterised by an uncertain, adolescent approach to social contact (Kendall 353). The disablement of the character is, then, lessened so that the idea of being “special,” continually evoked throughout the text, has a transformative function that is related less to the special needs of those with a disability and more to the common element in adolescent fiction of longing for extraordinary power and control through being a special, gifted individual. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time relates the protagonist, Christopher, to Sherlock Holmes and his methods of detection, specifically through the title being taken from a story by Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze,” in which the “curious incident” referred to is that the dog did nothing in the night. In the original story, that the dog did not bark or react to an intruder was a clue that the person was known to the animal, so allowing Holmes to solve the crime by a process of deduction. Christopher copies these traditional methods of the classical detective to solve his personal mystery, that of who killed a neighbour’s dog, Wellington. The adoption of this title allows a double irony to emerge. Christopher’s attempts to emulate Holmes in his approach to crime are predicated on his assumption of his likeness to the model of the classical detective as he states, “I think that if I were a proper detective he is the kind of detective I would be,” pointing out the similarity of their powers of observation and his ability, like Holmes, to “detach his mind at will” as well as his capacity to find patterns in events (92). Through the novel, these attributes are aligned with his autism, constructing a trope of his disability conferring extraordinary abilities that are predicated on a computer-like detachment and precision in his method of thinking. The accessible narrative of the autistic Christopher gives the reader the impression of being able to understand the perspective of an individual with a spectrum disorder. In this way, the text not only engages with, but contributes to the construction of this disability in current popular culture as merely an extension of giftedness, especially in mathematics, and an associated unwillingness to communicate. Indeed, according to Raoul Eshelman, “one of its most engaging narrative devices is to make us identify with a mentally impaired narrator who is manifestly not interested in identifying either with us or anyone else” (1). The main character’s reference to mathematical and scientific ideas exploits an interest in giftedness already established by popular literature and film, and engages with a transformation effected in popular culture of the genius as autistic, and its corollary of an autistic person as potentially a genius. Such a construction ranges from fictional characters like Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory, Charlie and his physicist colleagues in Numb3rs, and Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man, to real life characters or representative figures in reality series and feature films such as x + y, The Imitation Game, The Big Short, and the television program Beauty and the Geek. While never referring specifically to autism, all the real or fictional representations contribute to the construction of a stereotype in which behaviours on the autistic spectrum are linked to a talent in mathematics and the sciences. In addition to this, detectives in the classical crime fiction alluded to in the novel typically exhibit traits of superhuman powers of deduction, pattern making, and problem solving that engage with the popular notion of genius in general and mathematics in particular by possessing a mind like a computer. Such detectives from current television series as Saga from The Bridge and Spencer Reid from Criminal Minds exhibit distance, coldness, and lack of social awareness or empathy with others, and this is presented as the basis of their extraordinary ability to discern patterns and solve crime. Spencer Reid, for example, has three PhDs in Science disciplines and Mathematics. Charlie in the television series Numb3rs is also a genius who uses his mathematical abilities to not only find the solution to crime but also explain the maths behind it to his FBI colleagues, and, in conjunction, the audience. But the character with the clearest association to Christopher is, naturally, Sherlock Holmes, both as constructed in Conan Doyle’s original text and the current adaptations and transformations of it. The television series Sherlock and Elementary, as well as the films Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows all invoke a version of Holmes in which his powers of deduction are associated with symptoms to be found in a spectrum disorder.Like Christopher, the classical detective is characterised by being cold, emotionless, distant, socially inept, and isolated, but also keenly observant, analytical, and scientific; one who approaches the crime as a puzzle to be solved (Cawelti 43) with computer-like precision. In what is considered to be the original detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe included a “pseudo-mathematical logic in his literary scenario” (Platten 255). In Conan Doyle’s stories, Holmes, too, adopts a mathematical and scientific approach to construct patterns from clues that he alone can discern, and thereby solve the crime. The depiction of investigators in contemporary media such as Charlie in Numb3rs engages with these origins so that he is objective, dispassionate, and able to relate to real-world problems only through the filter of mathematical formulae. Christopher is presented similarly by engaging with the idea of the detective as implied savant and relying on an ability to discern patterns for successful crime solving.The book links the disabling behaviours of autism with the savant, so that the stereotype of the mystic displaying both disability and giftedness in fiction of earlier ages has been transformed in contemporary literature to a figure with extraordinary powers related both to autism and to the contemporary form of mysticism: innate mathematical ability and computer-style calculation. Allied with what Murray terms the “unknown and ambiguous nature” of autism, it is characterised as “the alien within the human, the mystical within the rational, the ultimate enigma” (25) in a way that is in keeping with the current fascination with the nature of genius and its association with being “special,” a term continually evoked and discussed throughout the book by the main character. The chapters on scientific ideas relate to Christopher’s world view, filtered through a mathematical and analytical approach to life and relationships with other people. Christopher examines beliefs such as the concept of humanity as superior to other animals, and the idea of religion and creationism, that is, the idea of humanity itself as special, with a cold and logical approach. He similarly discusses the idea of the individual person as special, linking this to a metaphor of the human mind being a computer (203, 148). Christopher’s narrow perspective as a result of his autism is not presented as disabling so much as protective, because the metaphorical connection of his viewpoint to a computer provides him with distance. Although initially Christopher fails to realise the significance of events, this allows him to be “switched off” (103) from events that he finds traumatising.The transformative metaphor of an autistic individual thinking like a computer is also invoked through Christopher’s explanation of “why people think that their brains are special, and different from computers” (147). Indeed, both in terms of his tendency to retreat or by “pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting” (178) in times of stress, Christopher metaphorically views himself as a computer. Such a perspective invokes yet another popular cultural reference through the allusion to the human brain as “Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, sitting in his captain’s seat looking at a big screen” (147). But more importantly, the explanation refers to the basic premise of the book, that the text offers access to a condition that is inherently unknowable, but able to be understood by the reader through metaphor, often based on computers or technology as a result of a popular construction of autism that “the condition is the product of a brain in which the hard drive is incorrectly formatted” (Murray 25).Throughout the novel, the notion of “special” is presented as a trope for those with a disability, but as the protagonist, Christopher, points out, everyone is special in some way, so the whole idea of a disability as disabling is problematised throughout the text, while its associations of giftedness are upheld. Christopher’s disability, never actually designated as Asperger’s Syndrome or any type of spectrum disorder, is transformed into a protective mechanism that shields him from problematic social relationships of which he is unaware, but that the less naïve reader can well discern. In this way, rather than a limitation, the main character’s disorder protects him from a harsh reality. Even Christopher’s choice of Holmes as a role model is indicative of his desire to impose an eccentric order on his world, since this engages with a character in popular fiction who is famous not simply for his abilities, but for his eccentricity bordering on a form of autism. His aloof personality and cold logic not only fail to hamper him in his investigations, but these traits actually form the basis of them. The majority of recent adaptations of Conan Doyle’s stories, especially the BBC series Sherlock, depict Holmes with symptoms associated with spectrum disorder such as lack of empathy, difficulty in communication, and limited social skills, and these are clearly shown as contributing to his problem-solving ability. The trope of Christopher as detective also allows a parodic, postmodern comment on the classical detective form, because typically this fiction has a detective that knows more than the reader, and therefore the goal for the reader is to find the solution to the crime before it is revealed by the investigator in the final stages of the text (Rzepka 14). But the narrative works ironically in the novel since the non-autistic reader knows more than a narrator who is hampered by a limited worldview. From the beginning of the book, the narrative as focalised through Christopher’s narrow perspective allows a more profound view of events to be adopted by the reader, who is able to read clues that elude the protagonist. Christopher is well aware of this as he explains his attraction to the murder mystery novel, even though he has earlier stated he does not like novels since his inability to imagine or empathise means he is unable to relate to their fiction. For him, the genre of murder mystery is more akin to the books on maths and science that he finds comprehensible, because, like the classical detective, he views the crime as primarily a puzzle to be solved: as he states, “In a murder mystery novel someone has to work out who the murderer is and then catch them. It is a puzzle. If it is a good puzzle you can sometimes work out the answer before the end of the book” (5). But unlike Christopher, Holmes invariably knows more about the crime, can interpret the clues, and find the pattern, before other characters such as Watson, and especially the reader. In contrast, in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the reader has more awareness of the probable context and significance of events than Christopher because, like a computer, he can calculate but not imagine. The reader can interpret clues within the plot of the story, such as the synchronous timing of the “death” of Christopher’s mother with the breakdown of the marriage of a neighbour, Mrs Shears. The astute reader is able to connect these events and realise that his mother has not died, but is living in a relationship with the neighbour’s husband. The construction of this pattern is denied Christopher, since he fails to determine their significance due to his limited imagination. Such a failure is related to Simon Baron-Cohen’s Theory of Mind, in which he proposes that autistic individuals have difficulty with social behaviour because they lack the capacity to comprehend that other people have individual mental states, or as Christopher terms it, “when I was little I didn’t understand about other people having minds” (145). Haddon utilises fictional licence when he allows Christopher to overcome such a limitation by a conscious shift in perspective, despite the specialist teacher within the text claiming that he would “always find this very difficult” (145). Christopher has here altered his view of events through his modelling both on the detective genre and on his affinity with mathematics, since he states, “I don’t find this difficult now. Because I decided that it was a kind of puzzle, and if something is a puzzle there is always a way of solving it” (145). In this way, the main character is shown as transcending symptoms of autism through the power of his giftedness in mathematics to ultimately discern a pattern in human relationships thereby adopting a computational approach to social problems.Haddon similarly explains the perspective of an individual with autism through a metaphor of Christopher’s memory being like a DVD recording. He is able to distance himself from his memories, choosing “Rewind” and then “Fast Forward” (96) to retrieve his recollection of events. This aspect of the precision of his memory relates to his machine-like coldness and lack of empathy for the feelings of others. But it also refers to the stereotype of the nerd figure in popular culture, where the nerd is able to relate more to a computer than to other people, exemplified in Sheldon from the television series The Big Bang Theory. Thus the presentation of Christopher’s autism relates to his giftedness in maths and science more than to areas that relate to his body. In general, descriptions of inappropriate or distressing bodily functions associated with disorders are mainly confined to other students at Christopher’s school. His references to his fellow students, such as Joseph eating his poo and playing in it (129) and his unsympathetic evaluation of Steve as not as clever or interesting as a dog because he “needs help to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick” (6), make a clear distinction between him and the other children, who despite being termed “special needs” are “special” in a different way from Christopher, because, according to him, “All the other children at my school are stupid” (56). While some reference is made to Christopher’s inappropriate behaviour in times of stress, such as punching a fellow student, wetting himself while on the train, and vomiting outside the school, in the main the emphasis is on his giftedness as a result of his autism, as displayed in the many chapters where he explains scientific and mathematical concepts. This is extrapolated into a further mathematical metaphor underlying the book, that he is like one of the prime numbers he finds so fascinating, because prime numbers do not fit neatly into the pattern of the number system, but they are essential and special nevertheless. Moreover, as James Berger suggests, prime numbers can “serve as figures for the autistic subject,” because like autistic individuals “they do not mix; they are singular, indivisible, unfactorable” yet “Mathematics could not exist without these singular entities that [. . .] are only apparent anomalies” (271).Haddon therefore offers a transformation by confounding autism with a computer-like ability to solve mathematical problems, so that the text is, as Haddon concedes, “as much about a gifted boy with behavior problems as it is about anyone on the autism spectrum” (qtd. in Burks-Abbott 291). Indeed, the word “autism” does not even appear in the book, while the terms “genius,” (140) “clever,” (32, 65, 252) and the like are continually being invoked in descriptions of Christopher, even if ironically. More importantly, the reader is constantly being shown his giftedness through the reiteration of his study of A Level Mathematics, and his explanation of scientific concepts. Throughout, Christopher explains aspects of mathematics, astrophysics, and other sciences, referring to such well-known puzzles in popular culture as the Monty Hall problem, as well as more obscure formulae and their proofs. They function to establish Christopher’s intuitive grasp of complex mathematical and scientific principles, as well as providing the reader with insight into both his perspective and the paradoxical nature of an individual who is at once able to solve quadratic equations in his head, yet is incapable of understanding the simple instruction, “Take the tube to Willesden Junction” (211).The presentation of Christopher is that of an individual who displays an extension of the social problems established in popular literature as connected to a talent for mathematics, therefore engaging with a depiction already existing in popular mythology: the isolated and analytical nerd or genius social introvert. Indeed, much of Christopher’s autistic behaviour functions to protect him from unsettling or traumatic information, since he fails to realise the significance of the information he collects or the clues he is given. His disability is therefore presented as not limiting so much as protective, and so the notion of disability is subsumed by the idea of the savant. The book, then, engages with a contemporary representation within popular culture that has transformed spectrum disability into mathematical giftedness, thereby metaphorically associating the autistic mind with the computer. ReferencesBaron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995. Berger, James. “Alterity and Autism: Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident in the Neurological Spectrum.” Autism and Representation. Ed. Mark Osteen. Hoboken: Routledge, 2007. 271–88. Burks-Abbott, Gyasi. “Mark Haddon’s Popularity and Other Curious Incidents in My Life as an Autistic.” Autism and Representation. Ed. Mark Osteen. Hoboken: Routledge, 2007. 289–96. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976. Eshelman, Raoul. “Transcendence and the Aesthetics of Disability: The Case of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology 15.1 (2009). Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. London: Random House Children’s Books, 2004. Kendall, Lori. “The Nerd Within: Mass Media and the Negotiation of Identity among Computer-Using Men.” Journal of Men’s Studies 3 (1999): 353–67. Murray, Stuart. “Autism and the Contemporary Sentimental: Fiction and the Narrative Fascination of the Present.” Literature and Medicine 25.1 (2006): 24–46. Platten, David. “Reading Glasses, Guns and Robots: A History of Science in French Crime Fiction.” French Cultural Studies 12 (2001): 253–70. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005.

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. William Weaver, London: Picador, 1981.Delville, Michael, and Andrew Norris. “Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism.” Ed. Louis Armand. Contemporary Poetics: Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2007. 126-49.Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Post-Structuralist Joyce. Essays from the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 145-59.Dery, Mark. I Must Not think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Frank, Joseph, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review, 53, 1945: 221-40, 433-56, 643-53.Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Flaubert, Gustave. Dictionary of Received Ideas. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York: Knopf, 1967.Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.---. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.Kenner, Hugh. The Stoic Comedians. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Narrative Fiction. New York: Oxford U P, 1966.‪Levin, Bernard. Enthusiasms. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.MacGowran, Jack. MacGowran Speaking Beckett. Claddagh Records, 1966.Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party. London: Methuen, 1968.Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. London, Faber and Faber, 1987.Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Jealousy. Trans. Richard Howard. London: John Calder, 1965.Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise. From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books, 2011.Steiner, George. Language and Silence: New York: Atheneum, 1967.Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.

Kathy works entirely online. She is an indefatigable worker and is never too engrossed with her own pursuits to deny another’s request for assistance. Her expertise is focused, and her suggestions are generally valuable. She constantly reviews her communications to search for ways of increasing her effectiveness. An analysis of her interactions, however, raises concerns. Approximately 7% of the communications Kathy receives are insulting and nearly 20% are sexual in nature (Brahnam). She is frequently called a bitch and told her ideas are stupid. Although Kathy refuses to talk about sex, her comments are often twisted and given unintended sexual significance. Why is Kathy bombarded by so many verbal assaults? Could part of the reason be that her communications are electronically mediated and this encourages what Suler calls toxic disinhibition, i.e., behaviour that is characterised by an acting out of forbidden desires and an unrestrained expression of anger and hatred? Is her job performance to blame for some of the insults? An examination of her interactions reveals that Kathy occasionally has difficulty understanding requests and often uses incorrect and sub-standard grammar. Is the prevalence of foul language due to the fact that Kathy is young and female? If she were older and male—or androgynous—would her colleagues respect her more? Or is this barrage of electronic nastiness a natural consequence—simply the way people will behave when asked to work with human-like computing machines? Embodied Collaborative Agents Amer. Dr Poole, what’s it like living for the better part of a year in such close proximity with HAL?Poole. Well, it’s pretty close to what you said about him earlier, he is just like a sixth member of the crew—very quickly get adjusted to the idea that he talks, and you think of him—uh—really just as another person. Kubrick and Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey For over a century, science fiction has painted vivid pictures of what it would be like to work alongside computers. Although many a tale ends with computers taking over the world, depictions of collegial relationships between human beings and their artificial helpmates are equally familiar. This amiable vision of human-computer interaction is what motivates much current research into embodied collaborative agents. These are programs, like Kathy, that run independently of user control, that look and behave like people, and that are designed to assist users in solving complex problems and in performing complicated tasks. For these agents to succeed, they must be socially intelligent, capable of building and sustaining friendly working relationships, and competent in what they do. Researchers are aware that building long-term human-computer relationships is difficult (Bickmore and Picard) and that users are often hostile towards interactive agents (Angeli et al.). These problems are often blamed on technological limitations that irritate the user and disrupt the user’s suspension of disbelief. Users seem to demand a higher degree of fidelity when dealing with anthropomorphic interfaces. It is assumed that once these technological issues are resolved, the social cues exhibited by the agents will automatically call forth socially appropriate responses. The assumption that people will behave nicely when given a believable interface is largely based on the media equation, or the idea that people treat media the same way they treat people (Reeves and Nass). The media equation claims the same rules governing interpersonal relationships apply to human-computer relationships. If it is impolite to criticise a person too harshly face-to-face, for instance, then it follows people will soften their evaluations of a computer’s performance when in the presence of the computer. Research demonstrates, in fact, that people do apply this rule, as well as many other social rules, in their dealings with computers. There are situations, however, where the media equation fails. This is particularly evident in situations involving abusive behavior. Bartneck et al., in their repetition of the Milgram obedience experiment, for example, found that subjects had no qualms administering shock to a rather cute humanoid robot placed in an electric chair. No matter how loudly the robot yelped and pleaded for mercy when zapped, subjects remained uniformly marble-hearted in obeying the directive of the experimenter to administer yet more electricity. Clearly the subjects in this experiment were fully aware the robot was not a person. Rather than attempting to understand human-computer interaction through the filter of the media equation, or social theory, it might be more profitable to investigate theories, such as animism, anthropomorphism, personification, and semiotics, which explain how human beings relate to things. In the next section, I argue that an anthropomorphic tension is at odds with the suspension of disbelief, at least when dealing with animated agents, and that this tension provides a motivating ground for abusing agents. If this proves correct, it may be the case that users will deride and abuse collaborative agents no matter how veridical the interface. Anthropomorphic Tension People in the modern world are pulled in two directions when confronted with things. On the one hand, there is the tendency to anthropomorphize, i.e., to attribute humanlike qualities to non-human entities. Possibly because of its evolutionary value (failing to perceive a human being hidden in the trees could prove deadly), anthropomorphism is a constant perceptual bias, a sort of cognitive default (Guthrie; Caporael and Heyes). On the other hand, there is strong societal pressure, especially in the West, to banish the anthropomorphic for the sake of objectivity (Davis; Spada). Anthropomorphic thinking is considered archaic and primitive (Fisher; Caporael). Children are allowed to indulge in it, but, adults, in general, are expected to maintain a clear demarcation between self and the world. As Guthrie notes, “Once we decide a perception is anthropomorphic, reason dictates that we correct it” (76). It is interesting to note how children learn to discard anthropomorphic thinking. One way apparently involves torturing cherished playthings. A recent study conducted at the University of Bath discovered that young girls like mutilating and torturing Barbie. According to the researchers, “the girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity … The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking, and even microwaving” (Radford). Why is Barbie tortured? The researchers observed that many of these girls see Barbie as a childish plaything. They go on to explain that “On a deeper level, Barbie has become inanimate. She has lost any individual warmth that she might possess if she were perceived as a singular person” (Radford). In other words, by dehumanizing the very things they once animated, the little girls were simply learning to become objective grownups. Although anthropomorphic thinking begins in early childhood, it is never completely outgrown but rather pervades adult thinking, with much of it remaining unconscious, even in scientific thinking (Searle). It is not clear what strategies people employ to keep the anthropomorphic tendency in check. Anthropomorphism generates little scholarly attention. As Guthrie notes, “that such an important and oft-noted tendency should bring so little close scrutiny is a curiosity with several apparent causes. One is simply that it appears as an embarrassment, an irrational aberration of thought of dubious parentage, that is better chastened and closeted than publicly scrutinized” (53-54). The tension produced between the tendency to anthropomorphise and the societal pressure to remain objective has implications for human-computer interaction. First, the anthropomorphic tension jeopardizes the credibility and trustworthiness of the interactive agent. If the user’s relationship to the collaborative agent is based on a dubious, even embarrassing, mode of cognition, as Guthrie puts it, then the relationship with the agent in many workplace contexts will remain suspect. Second, the anthropomorphic tension motivates abuse and exposes the agent. The agent, as illustrated in the diagram below, is situated between the tendency to anthropomorphise and the pressure to objectify. Anthropomorphism animates the agent, resulting in the desired suspension of disbelief. Developers of human-like interfaces rely on this impulse and work to strengthen it by making the technology transparent. Although improved technology will certainly improve believability, the pressure to objectify will most likely succeed in periodically disrupting the suspension of disbelief. Anthropomorphic tension and the collaborative agent What happens to the agent when believability is disrupted? Examination of user/agent interaction logs shows that the agent becomes transparent or displaced to some degree. What slips behind the agent (lowly machine, programmer/creator, organization/owner, the social stereotypes evoked by the agent’s embodiment and so on) is then often subjected to a barrage of verbal abuse. The agent provides users an opportunity to express opinions and indulge in behaviours normally prohibited in the workplace. This abuse occurs in a socially and psychologically safe space, since in truth the agent is an insensate object and the user is talking to no one real. Thus, when it comes to collaborating with Kathy, users may find it far more gratifying to treat her, not as a valuable co-worker or “just another member of the crew,” but rather as a fun thing to bash. And although the organisation may disapprove the waste of time, society at large will find it hard, without reverting to anthropomorphic thinking, to knock it. References Bartneck, Christoph, Chioke Rosalia, Rutger Menges, and Inèz Deckers. “Robot Abuse—A Limitation of the Media Equation.” Abuse: The Darker Side of Human-Computer Interaction, proceedings of an INTERACT 2005 workshop in Rome, Italy, 19 Sept. 2005. http://www.agentabuse.org/papers.htm>. Bickmore, T., and R. Picard. “Establishing and Maintaining Long-Term Human-Computer Relationships.” ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction (ToCHI) 12.2 (2005): 293-327. Brahnam, Sheryl. “Gendered Bods and Bot Abuse.” Misuse and Abuse of Interactive Technologies, proceedings of CHI workshop in Montréal, Québec, Canada, 22-28 Aug. 2005. http://www.agentabuse.org/papers.htm>. Caporael, L. R. “Anthropomorphism and Mechanomorphism: Two Faces of the Human Machine.” Computers in Human Behavior 2 (1986): 215-34. Caporael, Linnda R., and Cecilia M. Heyes. “Why Anthropomorphize? Folk Psychology and Other Stories.” Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals. Eds. Robert W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson and H. Lyn Miles. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1977. 59-73. Davis, Hank. “Amimal Cognition versus Animal Thinking: The Antropomorphic Error.” Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals. Eds. Robert. W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson and H. Lyn Miles. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1997. 335-47. De Angeli, Antonella, Sheryl Brahnam, Peter Wallis, and Alan Dix. “Misuse and Abuse of Interactive Technologies.” CHI 2006, proceedings of a conference on HCI in Montréal, Québec, Canada. 22-28 Aug. 2006: New York: ACM Press, 2006 (in press). Fisher, J. A. “The Myth of Anthropomorphism.” Interpretation and Explanation in the Study of Animal Behavior: Interpretation, Intentionality, and Communication. Eds. M. Bekoff and D. Jamieson. San Fransisco: Westview Press, 1990. Guthrie, Stewart Elliot. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Milgram, Stanley, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz. “Note on the Drawing Power of Crowds of Different Size.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 13.2 (1969): 79-82. Radford, Benjamin. “Voice of Reason: Research Debunks ‘Barbie Ideal’.” Skeptical Inquirer: The Magazine for Science and Reason, 2005. http://www.livescience.com/othernews/051230_barbie.html>. Reeves, Byron, and Clifford I. Nass. The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media like Real People and Places. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications and Cambridge University Press, 1996. Searle, J. R. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992. Spada, Emanuela Cenami. “Amorphism. Mechanomorphism, and Anthropomorphism.” Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals. Eds. Robert. W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson and H. Lyn Miles. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1997. 37-49. Suler, J. “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” CyberPsychology and Behaviour 7 (2004): 321-26. Web Links About agent abuse: http://agentabuse.org>. About gender and embodied conversational agents: http://www.informatics.manchester.ac.uk/~antonella/gender/>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brahnam, Sheryl. "The Impossibility of Collaborating with Kathy, ‘The Stupid Bitch’." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/05-brahnam.php>. APA Style Brahnam, S. (May 2006) "The Impossibility of Collaborating with Kathy, ‘The Stupid Bitch’," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/05-brahnam.php>.

Did you see the videos where the cat jumps in the box, attacks the printer or tries to leap from the snowy car? As the availability and popularity of watching videos on the Internet has risen rapidly in the last decade, so has the prevalence of cat videos. Although the cuteness of YouTube videos of cats might make them appear frivolous, in fact there is a significant irony at their heart: online cat videos enable corporate surveillance of viewers, yet viewers seem just as oblivious to this as the cats featured in the videos. Towards this end, I consider the distinguishing features of contemporary cat videos, focusing particularly on their narrative structure and mode of observation. I compare cat videos with the “Aesthetic of Astonishment” of early cinema and with dog videos, to explore the nexus of a spectatorship of thrills and feline performance. In particular, I highlight a unique characteristic of these videos: the cats’ unselfconsciousness. This, I argue, is rare in a consumer culture dominated by surveillance, where we are constantly aware of the potential for being watched. The unselfconsciousness of cats in online videos offers viewers two key pleasures: to imagine the possibility of freedom from surveillance, and to experience the power of administering surveillance as unproblematic. Ultimately, however, cat videos enable viewers to facilitate our own surveillance, and we do so with the gleeful abandon of a kitten jumping in a tissue box What Distinguishes Cat Videos? Cat videos have become so popular, that they generate millions of views on YouTube, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis now holds an annual Internet Cat Video Festival. If you are not already a fan of the genre, the Walker’s promotional videos for the festival (2013 and 2012) provide an entertaining introduction to the celebrities (Lil Bub, Grumpy Cat, and Henri), canon (dancing cats, surprised cat, and cat falling off counter), culture and commodities of online cat videos, despite repositioning them into a public exhibition context. Cats are often said to dominate the internet (Hepola), despite the surprise of Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Domestic cats are currently the most popular pet in the world (Driscoll), however they are already outnumbered by smartphones. Cats have played various roles in our societies, cultures and imaginations since their domestication some 8-10,000 years ago (Driscoll). A potent social and cultural symbol in mythology, art and popular culture, the historical and cultural significance of cats is complex, shifting and often contradictory. They have made their way across geographic, cultural and class boundaries, and been associated with the sacred and the occult, femininity and fertility, monstrosity and domesticity (Driscoll, Rogers). Cats are figured as both inscrutable and bounteously polysemic. Current representations of cats, including these videos, seem to emphasise their sociability with humans, association with domestic space, independence and aloofness, and intelligence and secretiveness. I am interested in what distinguishes the pleasures of cat videos from other manifestations of cats in folklore and popular culture such as maneki-neko and fictional cats. Even within Internet culture, I’m focusing on live action cat videos, rather than lolcats, animated cats, or dog videos, though these are useful points of contrast. The Walker’s cat video primer also introduces us to the popular discourses accounting for the widespread appeal of these videos: cats have global reach beyond language, audiences can project their own thoughts and feelings onto cats, cats are cute, and they make people feel good. These discourses circulate in popular conversation, and are promoted by YouTube itself. These suggestions do not seem to account for the specific pleasures of cat videos, beyond the predominance of cats in culture more broadly. The cat videos popular on the Internet tend to feature several key characteristics. They are generated by users, shot on a mobile device such as a phone, and set in a domestic environment. They employ an observational mode, which Bill Nichols has described as a noninterventionist type of documentary film associated with traditions of direct cinema and cinema verite, where form and style yields to the profilmic event. In the spirit of their observational mode, cat videos feature minimal sound and language, negligible editing and short duration. As Leah Shafer notes, cat videos record, “’live’ events, they are mostly shot by ‘amateurs’ with access to emerging technologies, and they dramatize the familiar.” For example, the one-minute video Cat vs Printer comprises a single, hand-held shot observing the cat, and the action is underlined by the printer’s beep and the sounds created by the cat’s movements. The patterned wallpaper suggests a domestic location, and the presence of the cat itself symbolises domesticity. These features typically combine to produce impressions of universality, intimacy and spontaneity – impressions commonly labelled ‘cute’. The cat’s cuteness is also embodied in its confusion and surprise at the printer’s movements: it is a simpleton, and we can laugh at its lack of understanding of the basic appurtenances of the modern world. Cat videos present minimalist narratives, focused on an instant of spectacle. A typical cat video establishes a state of calm, then suddenly disrupts it. The cat is usually the active agent of change, though chance also frequently plays a significant role. The pervasiveness of this structure means that viewers familiar with the form may even anticipate a serendipitous event. The disruption prompts a surprising or comic effect for the viewer, and this is a key part of the video’s pleasure. For example, in Cat vs Printer, the establishing scenario is the cat intently watching the printer, a presumably quotidian scene, which escalates when the cat begins to smack the moving paper. The narrative climaxes in the final two seconds of the video, when the cat strikes the paper so hard that the printer tray bounces, and the surprised cat falls off its stool. The video ends abruptly. This disruption also takes the viewer by surprise (at least it does the first time you watch it). The terse ending, and lack of resolution or denouement, encourages the viewer to replay the video. The minimal narrative effectively builds expectation for a moment of surprise. These characteristics of style and form typify a popular body of work, though there is variation, and the millions of cat videos on YouTube might be best accounted for by various subgenres. The most popular cat videos seem to have the most sudden and striking disruptions as well as the most abrupt endings. They seem the most dramatic and spontaneous. There are also thousands of cat videos with minor disruptions, and some with brazenly staged events. Increasingly, there is obvious use of postproduction techniques, including editing and music. A growing preponderance of compilations attests to the videos’ “spreadability” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green). The conventional formal structure of these videos effectively homogenises the cat, as if there is a single cat performing in millions of videos. Indeed, YouTube comments often suggest a likeness between the cat represented in the video and the commenter’s own cat. In this sense, the cuteness so readily identified has an homogenising effect. It also has the effect of distinguishing cats as a species from other animals, as it confounds common conceptions of all (other) animals as fundamentally alike in their essential difference from the human (animal). Cat videos are often appreciated for what they reveal about cats in general, rather than for each cat’s individuality. In this way, cat videos symbolise a generic feline cuteness, rather than identify a particular cat as cute. The cats of YouTube act “as an allegory for all the cats of the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literature and fables” (Derrida 374). Each cat swiping objects off shelves, stealing the bed of a dog, leaping onto a kitchen bench is the paradigmatic cat, the species exemplar. Mode of Spectatorship, Mode of Performance: Cat Videos, Film History and Dog Videos Cat videos share some common features with early cinema. In his analysis of the “Aesthetic of Astonishment,” which dominated films until about 1904, film historian Tom Gunning argues that the short, single shot films of this era are characterised by exciting audience curiosity and fulfilling it with visual shocks and thrills. It is easy to see how this might describe the experience of watching Cat vs Printer or Thomas Edison’s Electrocution of an Elephant from 1903. The thrill of revelation at the end of Cat vs Printer is more significant than the minimal narrative it completes, and the most popular videos seem to heighten this shock. Further, like a rainy afternoon spent clicking the play button on a sequence of YouTube’s suggested videos, these early short films were also viewed in variety format as a series of attractions. Indeed, as Leah Shafer notes, some of these early films even featured cats, such as Professor Welton’s Boxing Cats from 1894. Each film offered a moment of spectacle, which thrilled the modern viewer. Gunning argues that these early films are distinguished by a particular relationship between spectator and film. They display blatant exhibitionism, and address their viewer directly. This highlights the thrill of disruption: “The directness of this act of display allows an emphasis on the thrill itself – the immediate reaction of the viewer” (Gunning “Astonishment” 122). This is produced both within the staging of the film itself as players look directly at the camera, and by the mode of exhibition, where a showman primes the audience verbally for a moment of revelation. Importantly, Gunning argues that this mode of spectatorship differs from how viewers watch narrative films, which later came to dominate our film and television screens: “These early films explicitly acknowledge their spectator, seeming to reach outwards and confront. Contemplative absorption is impossible here” (“Astonishment” 123). Gunning’s emphasis on a particular mode of spectatorship is significant for our understanding of pet videos. His description of early cinema has numerous similarities with cat videos, to be sure, but seems to describe more precisely the mode of spectatorship engendered by typical dog videos. Dog videos are also popular online, and are marked by a mode of performance, where the dogs seem to present self-consciously for the camera. Dogs often appear to look at the camera directly, although they are probably actually reading the eyes of the camera operator. One of the most popular dog videos, Ultimate dog tease, features a dog who appears to look into the camera and engage in conversation with the camera operator. It has the same domestic setting, mobile camera and short duration as the typical cat video, but, unlike the cat attacking the printer, this dog is clearly aware of being watched. Like the exhibitionistic “Cinema of Attractions,” it is marked by “the recurring look at the camera by [canine] actors. This action which is later perceived as spoiling the realistic illusion of the cinema, is here undertaken with brio, establishing contact with the audience” (Gunning “Attractions” 64). Dog videos frequently feature dogs performing on command, such as the countless iterations of dogs fetching beverages from refrigerators, or at least behaving predictably, such as dogs jumping in the bath. Indeed, the scenario often seems to be set up, whereas cat videos more often seem to be captured fortuitously. The humour of dog videos often comes from the very predictability of their behaviour, such as repeatedly fetching or rolling in mud. In an ultimate performance of self-consciousness, dogs even seem to act out guilt and shame for their observers. Similarly, baby videos are also popular online and were popular in early cinema, and babies also tend to look at the camera directly, showing that they are aware of bring watched. This emphasis on exhibitionism and modes of spectatorship helps us hone in on the uniqueness of cat videos. Unlike the dogs of YouTube, cats typically seem unaware of their observers; they refuse to look at the camera and “display their visibility” (Gunning “Attractions,” 64). This fits with popular discourses of cats as independent and aloof, untrainable and untameable. Cat videos employ a unique mode of observation: we observe the cat, who is unencumbered by our scrutiny. Feline Performance in a World of Pervasive Surveillance This is an aesthetic of surveillance without inhibition, which heightens the impressions of immediacy and authenticity. The very existence of so many cat videos online is a consequence of camera ubiquity, where video cameras have become integrated with common communications devices. Thousands of cameras are constantly ready to capture these quotidian scenes, and feed the massive economy of user-generated content. Cat videos are obviously created and distributed by humans, a purposeful labour to produce entertainment for viewers. Cat videos are never simply a feline performance, but a performance of human interaction with the cat. The human act of observation is an active engagement with the other. Further, the act of recording is a performance of wielding the camera, and often also through image or voice. The cat video is a companion performance, which is part of an ongoing relationship between that human and that other animal. It carries strong associations with regimes of epistemological power and physical domination through histories of visual study, mastery and colonisation. The activity of the human creator seems to contrast with the behaviour of the cat in these videos, who appears unaware of being watched. The cats’ apparent uninhibited behaviour gives the viewer the illusion of voyeuristically catching a glimpse of a self-sufficient world. It carries connotations of authenticity, as the appearance of interaction and intervention is minimised, like the ideal of ‘fly on the wall’ documentary (Nichols). This lack of self-consciousness and sense of authenticity are key to their reception as ‘cute’ videos. Interestingly, one of the reasons that audiences may find this mode of observation so accessible and engaging, is because it heeds the conventions of the fourth wall in the dominant style of fiction film and television, which presents an hermetically sealed diegesis. This unselfconscious performance of cats in online videos is key, because it embodies a complex relationship with the surveillance that dominates contemporary culture. David Lyon describes surveillance as “any focused attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, or control” (“Everyday” 1) and Mark Andrejevic defines monitoring as “the collection of information, with or without the knowledge of users, that has actual or speculative economic value” (“Enclosure” 297). We live in an environment where social control is based on information, collected and crunched by governments, corporations, our peers, and ourselves. The rampancy of surveillance has increased in recent decades in a number of ways. Firstly, technological advances have made the recording, sorting and analysis of data more readily available. Although we might be particularly aware of the gaze of the camera when we stand in line at the supermarket checkout or have an iPhone pointed at our face, many surveillance technologies are hidden points of data collection, which track our grocery purchases, text messages to family and online viewing. Surveillance is increasingly mediated through digital technologies. Secondly, surveillance data is becoming increasingly privatised and monetised, so there is strengthening market demand for consumer information. Finally, surveillance was once associated chiefly with institutions of the state, or with corporations, but the process is increasingly “lateral,” involving peer-to-peer surveillance and self-surveillance in the realms of leisure and domestic life (Andrejevic “Enclosure,” 301). Cat videos occupy a fascinating position within this context of pervasive surveillance, and offer complex thrills for audiences. The Unselfconscious Pleasures of Cat Videos Unselfconsciousness of feline performance in cat videos invites contradictory pleasures. Firstly, cat videos offer viewers the fantasy of escaping surveillance. The disciplinary effect of surveillance means that we modify our behaviour based on a presumption of constant observation; we are managed and manipulated as much by ourselves as we are by others. This discipline is the defining condition of industrial society, as described by Foucault. In an age of traffic cameras, Big Brother, CCTV, the selfie pout, and Google Glass, modern subjects are oppressed by the weight of observation to constantly manage their personal performance. Unselfconsciousness is associated with privacy, intimacy, naivety and, increasingly, with impossibility. By allowing us to project onto the experience of their protagonists, cat videos invite us to imagine a world where we are not constantly aware of being watched, of being under surveillance by both human beings and technology. This projection is enabled by discourse, which constructs cats as independent and aloof, a libertarian ideal. It provides the potential for liberation from technologized social surveillance, and from the concomitant self-discipline of our docile bodies. The uninhibited performance of cats in online videos offers viewers the prospect that it is possible to live without the gaze of surveillance. Through cat videos, we celebrate the untameable. Cats model a liberated uninhibitedness viewers can only desire. The apparent unselfconsciousness of feline performance is analogous to Derrida’s conception of animal nakedness: the nudity of animals is significant, because it is a key feature which distinguishes them from humans, but at the same time there is no sense of the concept of nakedness outside of human culture. Similarly, a performance uninhibited by observation seems beyond humans in contemporary culture, and implies a freedom from social expectations, but there is also little suggestion that cats would act differently if they knew they were observed. We interpret cats’ independence as natural, and take pleasure in cats’ naturalness. This lack of inhibition is cute in the sense that it is attractive to the viewer, but also in the sense that it is naïve to imagine a world beyond surveillance, a freedom from being watched. Secondly, we take pleasure in the power of observing another. Surveillance is based on asymmetrical regimes of power, and the position of observer, recorder, collator is usually more powerful than the subject of their gaze. We enjoy the pleasure of wielding the unequal gaze, whether we hit the “record” button ourselves or just the “play” button. In this way, we celebrate our capacity to contain the cat, who has historically proven conceptually uncontainable. Yet, the cats’ unselfconsciousness means we can absolve ourselves of their exploitation. Looking back at the observer, or the camera, is often interpreted as a confrontational move. Cats in videos do not confront their viewer, do not resist the gaze thrown on them. They accept the role of subject without protest; they perform cuteness without resistance. We internalise the strategies of surveillance so deeply that we emulate its practices in our intimate relationships with domestic animals. Cats do not glare back at us, accusingly, as dogs do, to remind us we are exerting power over them. The lack of inhibition of cats in online videos means that we can exercise the power of surveillance without confronting the oppression this implies. Cat videos offer the illusion of watching the other without disturbing it, brandishing the weapon without acknowledging the violence of its impact. There is a logical tension between these dual pleasures of cat videos: we want to escape surveillance, while exerting it. The Work of Cat Videos in ‘Liquid Surveillance’ These contradictory pleasures in fact speak to the complicated nature of surveillance in the era of “produsage,” when the value chain of media has transformed along with traditional roles of production and consumption (Bruns). Christian Fuchs argues that the contemporary media environment has complicated the dynamics of surveillance, and blurred the lines between subject and object (304). We both create and consume cat videos; we are commodified as audience and sold on as data. YouTube is the most popular site for sharing cat videos, and a subsidiary of Google, the world’s most visited website and a company which makes billions of dollars from gathering, collating, storing, assessing, and trading our data. While we watch cat videos on YouTube, they are also harvesting information about our every click, collating it with our other online behaviour, targeting ads at us based on our specific profile, and also selling this data on to others. YouTube is, in fact, a key tool of what David Lyon calls “liquid surveillance” after the work of Zygmunt Bauman, because it participates in the reduction of millions of bodies into data circulating at the service of consumer society (Lyon “Liquid”). Your views of cats purring and pouncing are counted and monetised, you are profiled and targeted for further consumption. YouTube did not create the imbalance of power implied by these mechanisms of surveillance, but it is instrumental in automating, amplifying, and extending this power (Andrejevic “Lateral,” 396). Zygmunt Bauman argues that in consumer society we are increasingly seduced to willingly subject ourselves to surveillance (Lyon “Liquid”), and who better than the cute kitty to seduce us? Our increasingly active role in “produsage” media platforms such as YouTube enables us to perform what Andrejevic calls “the work of being watched” (“Work”). When we upload, play, view, like and comment on cat videos, we facilitate our own surveillance. We watch cat videos for the contradictory pleasures they offer us, as we navigate and negotiate the overwhelming surveillance of consumer society. Cat videos remind us of the perpetual possibility of observation, and suggest the prospect of escaping it. ReferencesAndrejevic, Mark. “The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (2002): 230-248. Andrejevic, Mark. “The Discipline of Watching: Detection, Risk, and Lateral Surveillance.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23.5 (2006): 391-407. Andrejevic, Mark. “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure.” The Communication Review 10.4 (2007): 295-317. Berners-Lee, Tim. “Ask Me Anything.” Reddit, 12 March 2014. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2091d4/i_am_tim_bernerslee_i_invented_the_www_25_years/cg0wpma›. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Project MUSE, 4 Mar. 2014. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://muse.jhu.edu/›. Driscoll, Carlos A., et al. "The Taming of the Cat." Scientific American 300.6 (2009): 68-75. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995. Fuchs, Christian. “Web 2.0, Prosumption, and Surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 8.3 (2011): 288-309. Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the Incredulous Spectator.” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. Ed. Linda Williams. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995. 114-133. Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde." Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986): 63-70. Hepola, Sarah. “The Internet Is Made of Kittens.” Salon, 11 Feb 2009. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.salon.com/2009/02/10/cat_internet/›. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Network Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2013. Lyon, David. “Liquid Surveillance: The Contribution of Zygmunt Bauman to Surveillance Studies.” International Political Sociology 4 (2010): 325–338 Lyon, David. “Surveillance, Power and Everyday Life.” In Robin Mansell et al., eds., Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies. Oxford: Oxford Handbooks, 2007. 449-472. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.sscqueens.org/sites/default/files/oxford_handbook.pdf›. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Rogers, Katharine. The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Shafer, Leah. “I Can Haz an Internet Aesthetic?!? LOLCats and the Digital Marketplace.” Paper presented at the Northeast Popular/American Culture Association Conference, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York, 2012. 5 Mar. 2014 ‹http://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1094&context=nepca›.

“Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still” (Beckett, Short Fiction 471). 1. Introduction – Wherefore to ‘still’?HIRST: As it is?SPOONER: As it is, yes please, absolutely as it is (Pinter, 1971-1981 77). These first lines of Harold Pinter’s play No Man’s Land are indeed the first lines: they were the first lines that came to Pinter, existing as the spark that drove the play into being. Pinter overhead the words ‘As it is’ whilst in a taxi cab and was struck by their poetry and utter uncertainty. That was it. In the play, they are referring to having a scotch – i.e. as it is, without ice. Here, they refer to the ‘still’ – the incessant constitutive moment of being in the world ‘as it is’. In this short paper I want to essay the phenomenon of ‘still’ as it is; as in there is ‘still’, and as in the ‘there is’ is the ‘still’ between presencing and absencing (as in No Man’s Land: two bodies in a room, a question, and a moment of comprehension). Three points need to be outlined from this desire to essay the phenomenon of ‘still’. First, it should be remembered and noted that to essay is to weigh something up in thought. Second, that ‘still’ is to be considered as a phenomena, both material and immaterial, and not as a concept or state, and where our endeavour with phenomenology here is understood as a concern with imagining ‘a body’ and ‘a place’ where there is neither – in this I want to think the vital and the vulnerable in non-oppositional terms “to work against conventional binaries such as stasis–movement, representation–practice (or the non-representational), textual–non-textual, and immaterial–material” (Merrimen et al 193). Third, that I was struck, in the call for papers for this issue of the Journal of Media and Culture, by the invocation of ‘still’ over that of ‘stillness’, or rather the persistent use of ‘still’ in the call focussing attention on ‘still’ as a noun or thing rather than as an adjective or verb. This exploration of being through the essaying of ‘still’ as a phenomenon will be exampled in the work of Samuel Beckett and Pinter and thought through in the philosophical and literary thought of the outside of Maurice Blanchot. Why Beckett? Beckett because he precisely and with distilled measure, exactitude and courage asks the question of being through the vain attempt to stage what remains when everything superfluous is taken away (Knowlson 463): what remains may well be the ‘still’ although this remainder is constitutive of presencing and not a relic or archive or dead space. Why Pinter? Pinter because, through restoring “theatre to its basic elements - an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue” (Engdaht), he staged a certain vision of our life on earth which pulls on the very logic and power of silence in communication: this logic is that of ‘still’ – saying something while doing nothing; movement where stillness is perceived. Why Blanchot? Blanchot because he understood and gave expression to the fact that that which comes to be written, the work, will not succeed in communicating the experience that drives the writing and that as such the written work unworks the desire that brought it into being (see Smock 4). This ‘unworking’, this putting into question, is the ‘still’. * * * Apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened? If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what in fact took place yesterday, one can treat the present in the same way. We won’t know until tomorrow or in six months’ time, and we won’t know then, we’ll have forgotten, or our imagination will have attributed quite false characteristics to today. A moment is sucked away and distorted, often even at the time of its birth. We will all interpret a common experience quite differently, though we prefer to subscribe to the view that there’s a shared common ground, a known ground. I think there’s a shared common ground all right, but that it is more like a quicksand (Pinter, Voices 22). The ‘still’: treating the present in the same manner as the difficulty of knowing the past; seeing the present as being sucked away and distorted at its inception; taking knowing and the constitution of being as grounded on quicksand. At stake then is the work that revolves around the conceptualizations and empirical descriptions of the viscerally engraved being-there and the practical and social formations of embodiment that follow. I am concerned with the ways in which a performative re-emphasizing of practice and materiality has overlooked the central point of what ‘being-there’ means. Which is to say that what ‘being-there’ means has already been assumed in the exciting, extensive and particular engagements which concern themselves more with the different modes of being-there (walking, sitting, sleeping), the different potentialities of onto-technical connections connecting (to) the world (new image technologies, molecular stimulants, practised affecting words), and the various subjectivities produced in the subsequent placements being considered and being made in such connections whether materially or immaterially (imaginary) real (attentive, bored, thoughtful, exhausted). Such engagements do far more than this paper aims for, but what I want for this paper is for it to be a pause in itself, a provocation that takes a step back. What might this step back entail? Let’s start by pivoting off from a phrase that addresses the singular being-there of any performative material moment and that is “the event of corporeal exposure” alluded to by Paul Harrison in his paper ‘Corporeal Remains’ (432). Key to the question of ‘still’ or ‘stillness’ is the tension between thinking the body, embodiment and a sense of life that forms the social when what we are talking about or around is ‘a body. Where none. … A place. Where none’. What briefly do I mean by this? First, what can be said about the presencing of the body? Harrison, following Emmanuel Levinas, both inherits and withdraws from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology primarily because, and this is what we want to move away from, the key concept of Dasein both covers up the sensible and vulnerable body in being discerned as a disembodied subjectivity and is too concerned forthwith with a sense of comprehension in a teleological economy of intent(ion) (429-430). Second, what is a stake in the ephemeral presence of place? Harrison signals that the eventhood of corporeal existence exists within a “specific relation between interior and exterior”, namely that of “the ‘sudden address from elsewhere’” (436). The Beckettian non-place can be read as that specific relation of the exterior to the interior, of the outside being part of that which brings the sense of self into being. In summary, these two points question the arguments raised by Harrison: ‘What is encountering'? if it isn’t quite the body as nominally thought. And ‘What is encountering?’ if such encountering is a radical asymmetrical address which nonetheless gives some orientation (placement) of comprehension for and of ourselves? 2. What is encountering? Never present still: ‘Say a body. Where none.’Literature is that experience through which the consciousness discovers its being in its inability to lose consciousness, in the movement whereby it disappears, as it tears itself away from the meticulousness of an I, it is re-created beyond consciousness as an impersonal spontaneity (Blanchot, Fire 331-332). I have used the textual extracts from literature and theatre because they present that constitutive and continual tearing away from consciousness (that sense that one is present, embodied, but always in the process of finding meaning or one’s place outside of one’s body). The ‘still’ I want to depict is then the incessant still point of presencing, the moment of disappearance and re-creation: take this passage in Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure where the eye of the protagonist, Thomas, becomes useless for seeing in the normal way. Read this as a moment where the body doesn’t just function and gain definition within an economy of what we already know it can do, but that it places us and displaces us at the same time towards something more constitutive, indeterminate and existential because it is neither entirely animate flesh nor inanimate corpse but also the traced difference of the past and the differing affirmation of the future:Not only did this eye which saw nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision. It saw as object that which prevented it from seeing. Its own glance entered into it as an image, just when this glance seemed the death of all image (Blanchot, Reader 60). This is the ‘dark gaze’ that Kevin Hart unveils in his excellent book The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred, which he defines as: “the vision of the artist who sees being as image, already separated from the phenomenal world and yet not belonging to a separate order of being” (12). Again this quivering and incessant becoming of ‘a body where none and a place where none’ pushes us towards the openness and exposure of the ‘stilling’ experience of a ‘loss of knowledge’, a lack of comprehension and yet an immediate need for orientation. The ‘still’, shown for Blanchot in the space of literature, distinguishes “itself from the struggle of which it is the dazzling expression … and if it is an answer, the answer to the destiny of the man that calls himself into question, then it is an answer that does not suspend the question” (Blanchot, Fire 343).Thus the phenomenological hegemony that produces “a certain structuring and logos of orientation within the very grammar geographers use to frame spatial experience” (Romanillos 795) is questioned and fractured in the incessant exposure of being by an ever inaccessible outside in which we ironically access ourselves – in other words, find out who or what we are. This is indeed a performance of coherence in always already deconstructing world (Rose). So for me the question of ‘still’ is a question that opens our thought up to the very way in which we think the human, and how we then think the subject in the social in a much more existential and embodied manner. The concern here is less with the biology of this disposition (although I think ultimately such insights need to go in lockstep with the ones I wish to address here) than its ontological constitution. In that sense I am questioning our micro and immediate place-making embodiment and this tasks us to think this embodiment and phenomenological disposition not in a landscape (more broadly or because this concept has become too broad) but in-place. The argument here operates a post-phenomenological and post-humanist bent in arguing for this ‘–place’ to be the neutral ‘there is’ of worlding, and the ‘in-’ to be the always exposed body. One can understand this as the absolute separation of self or other in terms of a non-dialectical account of intersubjectivity (see Critchley 18). In turning to Blanchot the want of the still, “where being ceaselessly perpetuates itself as nothingness” (Blanchot, Space 243), is in ‘showing/forcing us to think’ the strangeness, openness and finitudinal terror of this non-dialectical (non-relational) interhuman relation without the affirmations Levinas makes of an alterity to be understood ethically in some metaphysical sense and in an interpretation of that non-relation as ultimately theological (Critchley 19). What encounters is then the indeterminate, finite and exposed body. 3. What is encountering? The topography of still: ‘A place. Where none’.One of the autobiographical images for Beckett was of an old man holding a child’s hand walking down a country road. But what does this say of being? Embodied being and being-there respectively act as sensation and orientation. The touch of another’s hand is equally a touch of minimal comprehension that acts as a momentary placement. But who is guiding who? Who is pre-occupying and giving occupation to whom? Or take Pinter and the end of No Man’s Land: two men centred in a room one hoping to be employed by the other in order to employ the other back into the ‘land of the living’ rather than wait for death. Are they reflections of the same person, an internal battle to will one’s life to live, or rather to move one’s living fleshy being to an occupation (of place or as a mode by which one opens oneself up to the surroundings in which you literally find oneself – to become occupied by something there and to comprehend in doing so). Either way, is that all there is? Is this how it is? Do we just accept ‘life’ as it is? Or does ‘life’ always move us?HIRST: There is nothing there. Silence SPOONER: No. You are in no man’s land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent. Silence HIRST: I’ll drink to that (Pinter, Complete Works 157). Disingenuously, taking Pinter at face value here, ‘no man’s land’ is impossible for us, it is literally a land within which no human can be: can you imagine a place where nothing moves, never changes, never ages, but remains forever? Of course you can: we can imagine such a place. The ‘still’ can be made tangible in artistic expressions partly because they provide a means of both communicating that of which we cannot speak and showing the communication of silence when we do not speak. So in the literary spaces of Beckett, Blanchot, and Pinter, “literature as experience is valuable not so much for what it tells us about literature but for what it reveals about experience” (Hart 139-140). So what we have is a communication that reveals but doesn’t define, and that therefore questions the orientation and certainty of subject positions: The literary renderings of certain landscapes, such as those presentations of spatialities outside-the-subject, of the anonymous there is of spaces, contribute to a dismantling and erasure of the phenomenological subject (Romanillos 797). So what I think thinking through ‘still’ can do is bring us to think the ‘neutral presence of life itself’ and thus solicit from us a non-oppositional accounting of vitalism and passivity. “Blanchot asked me: why not pursue my inner experience as if I were the last man?” – for Bataille the answer became a dying from inside without witness, “an impossible moment of paralysis” (Boldt-Irons 3); but for Blanchot it became a “glimpse into ‘the interminable, the incessant’” (ibid) from outside the dying. In other words we, as in humans that comprehend, are also what we are from outside our corporeal being, be that active or passively engaged. But let’s not forget that the outside is as much about actual lived matter and materialized worlds. Whilst what enables us to instil a place in the immaterial flow of absent-presencing or present-absencing is our visceral embodied placement, it is not the body per se but its capacity that enables us to relate or encounter that which is non-relational and that which disrupts our sense of being in place. Herein all sorts of matter (air, earth, water, fire) encounter us and “act as a lure for feeling” (Stengers; after Anderson and Wylie). Pursuing the exposing nature of matter under the notion of ‘interrogation’ Anderson and Wylie site the sensible world as an interrogative agent itself. Wylie’s post-phenomenological folding of the seer and seen, the material and the sensible (2006), is rendered further here in the materialization of Levinas’ call to respond in Lingis’ worlding imperative of “obedience in sensibility” (5) where the materialization is not just the face of the Other that calls but matter itself. It is not just about living, quivering flesh then because “the flesh is a process, not a ‘substance’, in the sense of something which is simply there” (Anderson and Wylie 7). And it is here that I think the ontological accounting of ‘still’ I want to install intervenes: for it is not that there is ever a ‘simply there’ but always a ‘there is’. And this ‘there is’ is not necessarily of sensuality or sensibility, nor is it something vitally felt in one form or another. Rather it persists and insists as a neutral, incessant, interminable presencing that questions us into being: ‘what are we doing here?’ Some form of minimal comprehension must ensue even if it is only ephemeral or only enough to ‘go on’ for a bit more. I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain (Beckett, Unnameable 414). In a sense the question creates the questioner: all sorts of imperatives make us appear. But my point is that they are both of corporeal sensibility, felt pain or pleasure a la Lingis, and minimal comprehension of ontological placement, namely (as shown here) words as they say us, never ours and never finished. The task of reading such stuttering yet formative words is the question ‘still’ presents to social scientific explanation of being bodies in social formations. There is something unreal about the idea of stillness and the assertion that ‘still’ exists as a phenomenon and this unreality rests with the idea that ‘still’ presents both a principle of action and the incapacity to act (see Bissell for exemplary empirics on and theoretical insights into the relational constitution of activity and inactivity) – ‘I can’t go on, you must go on’. There is then a frustrated entitlement of being pre-occupied in space where we gain occupation not in equipmental activity but in the ontological attunement that makes us stall in fascination as a moment of comprehension. Such attunements are constitutive of being and as such are everywhere. They are however more readily seized upon as graspable in those moments of withdrawal from history, those moments that we don’t include when we bio-graph who we are to others, those ‘dull’ moments of pause, quiet, listlessness and apathy. But it is in these moments where, corporeally speaking, a suspension or dampening of sensibility heightens our awareness to perceive our being-there, and thus where we notice our coming to be inbetween heartbeat and thought. Such moments permanently wallpaper our world and as such provide room for perceiving that shadow mode of ‘stillness’ that “produces a strange insectlike buzzing in the margins” (Blanchot, Fire 333). Encountering is then the minimal sense of going on in the face of the questions asked of the body.Let us change the subject. For the last time (Pinter, Dramatic Works 149). Conclusion: ‘For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No out.’Thinking on ‘still’ seems to be a further turn away from vitalism, but such thinking acts as a fear (or a pause and therefore a demand to recognize) that what frightens us, what stills us, is the end of the end, the impossibility of dying (Blanchot, Fire 337): why are we here? But it is this fright that enlivens us both corporeally, in existing as beings, and meaningfully, in our ever ongoing encounter with the ‘there is’ that enables our sense of orientation, towards being something that can say/feel ‘there’.A human being is always on the way toward itself, in becoming, thwarted, thrown-into a situation, primordially ‘‘passive,’’ receptive, attuned, exposed …; far from limiting him, this exposure is the very ground of the emergence of a universe of meaning, of the ‘‘worldliness’’ of man (Žižek 273). The ‘still’ therefore names “the ‘site’ in which the event of Being occurs” (Calarco 34). It comes about from “glimpsing the abyss opened up by the recognition of the perspectival character of human knowledge and the concomitant awareness of … [its] limits” (Calarco 41) – that yes we are death-subjected beings and therefore corporeal and finite. And as such it fashions “a fascination for something ‘outside’ or other than the human” (Calarco 43) – that we are not alone in the world, and the world itself brings us into being. This counterpointing between body and place, sensation and meaning, exists at the very heart of what we call human: namely that we are tasked to know how to go on at the limits of what we know because to go on is the imperative of world. This essay has been a pause then on the circumflexion of ‘still’. If Levinas is right in suggesting that Blanchot overcomes Heidegger’s philosophy of the neuter (Levinas 298) it is because it is not just that we (Dasein) question the ontological from the ontic in which we are thrown but that also the ontological (the outside that ‘stills’ us) questions us:What haunts us is something inaccessible from which we cannot extricate ourselves. It is that which cannot be found and therefore cannot be avoided (Blanchot, Space 259). Thus, as Hart writes, we are transfixed “and risk standing where our ‘here’ will crumble into ‘nowhere’ (150).Neither just vital nor vulnerable, it is about the quick of meaning in the topography of finitude. The resultant non-ontological ethics that comes from this is voiced from an unsuspecting direction in a text written by Jacques Derrida to be read at his funeral. On 12th October 2004 Derrida’s son Pierre gave it oration: “Always prefer life and never cease affirming survival” (Derrida, quoted in Hill 7). Estragon: ‘I can’t go on like this’Vladimir: ‘That’s what you think’ (Beckett, Complete Works 87-88). ReferencesAnderson, Ben, and John Wylie. “On Geography and Materiality.” Environment and Planning A (advance online publication, 3 Dec. 2008). Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. New York: Grove P, 1958. ———. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. ———. Samuel Beckett, Volume 4: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism. New York: Grove/Atlantic P, 2006. Blanchot, Maurice. The Work of Fire. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1995. ———. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. ———. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. ———. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown: Station Hill P, 1999. Bissell, David. “Comfortable Bodies: Sedentary Affects.” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 1697-1712. Boldt-Irons, Lesile-Ann. “Blanchot and Bataille on the Last Man.” Angelaki 11.2 (2006): 3-17. Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia U P, 2008. Critchley, Simon. “Forgetfulness Must: Politics and Filiation in Blanchot and Derrida.” Parallax 12.2 (2006): 12-22. Engdaht, Horace. “The Nobel Prize in Literature – Prize Announcement.” 13 Oct. 2005. 8 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/announcement.html›. Hart, Kevin. The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Harrison, Paul. “Corporeal Remains: Vulnerability, Proximity, and Living On after the End of the World.” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 423-45. Hill, Leslie. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1999. Lingis, Alphonso. The Imperative. Bloomington: Indiana University P, 1998. Knowlson, John. Damned to Fame: Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997.Merriman, Peter. et al. “Landscape, Mobility, Practice.” Social & Cultural Geography 9 (2008): 191-212. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Being-With of Being-There.” Continental Philosophical Review 41 (2008): 1-15. Pinter, Harold. 1971–1981 Complete Works: 4. New York: Grove P, 1981 ———. Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2005. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. Romanillos, Jose Lluis. “‘Outside, It Is Snowing’: Experience and Finitude in the Nonrepresentational Landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet.” Environment and Planning D 26 (2008): 795-822. Rose, Mitch. "Gathering ‘Dreams of Presence’: A Project for the Cultural Landscape." Environment and Planning D 24 (2006): 537–54.Smock, Ann. "Translator’s Introduction.”The Space of Literature. Maurice Blanchot. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. 1-15. Wylie, John. “Depths and Folds: On Landscape and the Gazing Subject.” Environment and Planning D 24 (2006): 519-35. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: The MIT P, 2006.

"Interactivity implies two agencies in conversation, playfully and spontaneously developing a mutual discourse" -- Sandy Stone (11) I. On Interactivity The difference between interactivity as it is performed across the page and the screen, maintains Sandy Stone, is that virtual texts and virtual communities can embody a play ethic (14). Inserted like a mutation into the corporate genome, play ruptures the encyclopaedic desire to follow seamless links to a buried 'meaning' and draws us back to the surface, back into real-time conversation with the machine. Hypertext theorists see this as a tactic of resistance to homogenisation. As we move across a hypertextual reading space, we produce the text in this unfolding now, choosing pathways which form a map in the space of our own memories: where we have been, where we are, where we might yet be. Play is occupying oneself with diversions. II. Space, Time and Composition Reading in time, we create the text in the space of our own memories. Hypertext theorists maintain that the choices we make around every corner, the spontaneity and contingency involved in these choices, are the bringing into being of a (constantly replaced) electronic palimpsest, a virtual geography. The dislocation which occurs as we engage in nodal leaps draws us back to the surface, rupturing our experience of the narrative and bringing us into a blissful experience of possibility. III. War against the Line There is the danger, on the one hand, of being subsumed by the passive subject position demanded by infotainment culture and the desire it encourages to seek the satisfaction of closure by following seamless links to a buried 'meaning'. On the other hand, we risk losing efficiency and control over the unfolding interaction by entering into an exchange which disorientates us with infinite potential. We cannot wildly destratify. The questions we ask must seek to keep the conversation open. In order to establish a new discursive territory within which to understand this relationship, we should view the interface not simply as a transparency which enables interaction with the machine as 'other', but as a text, a finely-wrought behavioural map which "exists at the intersection of political and ideological boundary lands" (Selfe & Selfe 1). As we write, so are we written by the linguistic contact zones of this terrain. Hypertext is thus a process involving the active translation of modes of being into possible becomings across the interface. The geographic 'space' we translate into a hypertext "is imaginational... . We momentarily extend the linear reading act into a third dimension when we travel a link" (Tolva 4). A literal spatial representation would break from the realm of hypertext and become a virtual reality. Thus, the geographic aspect is not inherent to the system itself but is partially translated into the geometry of the medium via our experience and perception (the 'map'), a process describing our 'line of flight' as we evolve in space. Directional flows between time and its traditional subordination to space in representation implode across the present-tense of the screen and time literally surfaces. Our experience of the constantly-replaced electronic palimpsest is one of temporal surrender: "we give in to time, we give way to time, we give in with time"(Joyce 219). In other words, the subject of hypertext subverts the traditional hierarchy and writes for space, producing the 'terrain' in the unfolding now in the Deleuzian sense, not in space as desired by the State. Johnson-Eilola aligns the experience of hypertext with the Deleuzian War Machine, a way of describing the speed and range of virtual movement created when the animal body splices into the realm of technology and opens an active plane of conflict.. The War Machine was invented by the nomads -- it operates by continual deterritorialisation in a tension-limit with State science, what we might call the command-control drive associated with geometric, dynamic thought and the sedentary culture of the Line. It "exemplifies" the avant-garde mentality that hypertext theorists have been associating with the electronic writing space (Moulthrop, "No War Machine" 1). Playing outside. The State desires an end to the resistance to totalisation promulgated by contingent thought and its thermodynamic relationship to space: the speed which assumes a probabilistic, vortical motion, actually drawing smooth space itself. The war machine is thus an open system opposed to classical mechanics via its grounding in active contingencies and spatio-temporal production. The nomad reads and writes for space, creating the temporal text in the space of her own memory, giving way to time and allowing existent points to lapse before the trajectory of flight. Nomad thought is not dependent on any given theory of relationship with the medium, but works via disruption and (re)distribution, the gaps, stutterings and gasp-like expressions experienced when we enter into conversation with the hypertext. The danger is that the war machine might be appropriated by the State, at which point this light-speed communication becomes of the utmost importance in the war against space and time. As speed and efficient retrieval replace real-space across the instantaneity and immediacy of the terminal, the present-time sensory faculties of the individual are marginalised as incidental and she becomes "the virtual equivalent of the well-equipped invalid" (Virilio 5). In other words, as the frame of real-space and present-time disappears, the text of the reader/writer becomes "sutured" into the discourse of the State, the only goal to gain "complete speed, to cover territory in order for the State to subdivide and hold it through force, legislation or consent" (Virilio, qtd. in Johnson-Eilola). This is when the predetermined geometry of hypertext becomes explicit. The progressive subsumption (or "suturing") of the multiple, nomadic self into the discourse of the computer occurs when "the terms of the narrative are heightened, as each 'node' in the hypertext points outwards to other nodes [and] readers must compulsively follow links to arrive at the 'promised plenitude' at the other end of the link" (Johnson-Eilola 391). When we no longer reflect on the frame and move towards complete speed and efficiency, when we stop playing on the surface and no longer concern ourselves with diversion, the war machine has been appropriated by the State. In this case, there is no revolutionary 'outside' to confront in interaction, as all has been marshalled towards closure. Keeping the conversation open means continuously reflecting on the frame. We cannot wildly destratify and lose control entirely by moving in perpetual bewilderment, but we can see the incompleteness of the story, recognising the importance of local gaps and spaces. We can work with the idea that the "dyad of smooth/striated represents not a dialectic but a continuum" (Moulthrop, "Rhizome" 317) that can be turned more complex in its course. Contingency and play reside in the intermezzo, the "dangerous edges, fleeting, attempting to write across the boundaries between in-control and out-of-control" (Johnson-Eilola 393). The war machine exists as at once process and product, the translation between smooth-striated moving in potentia: the nomadic consciousness can recognise this process and live flux as reality itself, or consistency. In sum, we avoid subsumption and appropriation by holding open the function of the text as process in our theorising, in our teaching, in our reading and writing across the hypertextual environment. We can either view hypertext as a tool or product which lends itself to efficient, functional use (to organise information, to control and consume in an encyclopaedic fashion), or we can view it as a process which lends itself to nomadic thought and resistance to totalisation in syncopated flows, in cybernetic fits and starts. This is our much-needed rhetoric of activity. IV. An Alternative Story No matter their theoretical articulation, such claims made for hypertext are fundamentally concerned with escaping the logocentric geometry of regulated time and space. Recent explorations deploying the Deleuzian smooth/striated continuum make explicit the fact that the enemy in this literary 'war' has never been the Line or linearity per se, but "the nonlinear perspective of geometry; not the prison-house of time but the fiction of transcendence implied by the indifferent epistemological stance toward time" (Rosenberg 276). Although the rhizome, the war machine, the cyborg and the nomad differ in their particularities and composition, they all explicitly play on the dislocated, time-irreversible processes of chaos theory, thermodynamics and associated 'liberatory' topological perspectives. Rosenberg's essay makes what I consider to be a very disruptive point: hypertext merely simulates the 'smooth', contingent thought seen to be antithetical to regulated space-time and precise causality due to its fundamental investment in a regulated, controlled and (pre)determined geometry. Such a deceptively smooth landscape is technonarcissistic in that its apparent multiplicity actually prescribes to a totality of command-control. Hypertext theorists have borrowed the terms 'multilinear', 'nonlinear' and 'contingency' from physics to articulate hypertext's resistance to the dominant determinist episteme, a framework exemplified by the term 'dynamics', opposing it to "the irreversible laws characteristic of statistical approximations that govern complex events, exemplified by the term, 'thermodynamics'" (Rosenberg 269). This resistance to the time-reversible, non-contingent and totalised worldview has its ideological origins in the work of the avant-garde. Hypertext theorists are fixated with quasi-hypertextual works that were precursors to the more 'explicitly' revolutionary texts in the electronic writing space. In the works of the avant-garde, contingency is associated with creative freedom and subversive, organic logic. It is obsessively celebrated by the likes of Pynchon, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage. Hypertext theorists have reasoned from this that 'nonlinear' or 'multilinear' access to information is isomorphic with such playful freedom and its contingent, associative leaps. Theorists align this nonsequential reasoning with a certain rogue logic: the 'fluid nature of thought itself' exemplified by the explicitly geographic relationship to space-time of the Deleuzian rhizome and the notion of contingent, probabilistic 'becomings'. Hypertext participates fully in the spatio-temporal dialectic of the avant-garde. As Moulthrop observes, the problem with this is that from a topological perspective, 'linear' and 'multilinear' are identical: "lines are still lines, logos and not nomos, even when they are embedded in a hypertextual matrix" ("Rhizome" 310). The spatio-temporal dislocations which enable contingent thought and 'subversive' logic are simply not sustained through the reading/writing experience. Hypertextual links are not only reversible in time and space, but trace a detached path through functional code, each new node comprising a carefully articulated behavioural 'grammar' that the reader adjusts to. To assume that by following 'links' and engaging in disruptive nodal leaps a reader night be resisting the framework of regulated space-time and determinism is "to ignore how, once the dislocation occurs, a normalcy emerges ... as the hypertext reader acclimates to the new geometry or new sequence of lexias" (Rosenberg 283). Moreover, the searchpath maps which earlier theorists had sensed were antithetical to smooth space actually exemplify the element of transcendent control readers have over the text as a whole. "A reader who can freeze the text, a reader who is aware of a Home button, a reader who can gain an instant, transcendent perspective of the reading experience, domesticates contingencies" (Rosenberg 275). The visual and behavioural grammar of hypertext is one of transcendent control and determined response. Lines are still lines -- regulated, causal and not contingent -- even when they are 'constructed' by an empowered reader. Hypertext is thus invested (at least in part) in a framework of regularity, control and precise function. It is inextricably a part of State apparatus. The problem with this is that the War Machine, which best exemplifies the avant-garde's insurgency against sedentary culture, must be exterior to the State apparatus and its regulated grid at all times. "If we acknowledge this line of critique (which I think we must), then we must seriously reconsider any claims about hypertext fiction as War Machine, or indeed as anything en avant" (Moulthrop, "No War Machine" 5). Although hypertext is not revolutionary, it would be the goal of any avant-garde use of hypertext to find a way to sustain the experience of dislocation that would indicate liberation from the hegemony of geometry. I would like to begin to sketch the possibility of 'contingent interaction' through the dislocations inherent to alternative interfaces later in this story. For the time being, however, we must reassess all our liberation claims. If linearity and multilinearity are identical in terms of geometric relations to space-time, "why should they be any different in terms of ideology", asks Moulthrop ("Rhizome" 310). V. On Interactivity Given Rosenberg's critique against any inherently revolutionary qualities, we must acknowledge that hypermedia "marks not a terminus but a transition," Moulthrop writes ("Rhizome" 317). As a medium of exchange it is neither smooth nor striated, sophist nor socratic, 'work' nor 'text': it is undergoing an increasingly complex phase transition between such states. This landscape also gives rise to stray flows and intensities, 'Unspecified Enemies' which exist at the dangerous fissures and edges. We must accept that we will never escape the system, but we are presented with opportunities to rock the sedentary order from within. As a group of emerging electronic artists see it, the dis-articulation of the point'n'click interface is where interaction becomes reflection on the frame in fits and starts. "We believe that the computer, like everything else, is composed in conflict," explain the editors of electronic magazine I/O/D. "If we are locked in with the military and with Disney, they are locked in not just with us, but with every other stray will-to-power" (Fuller, Interview 2). Along with Adelaide-based group Mindflux, these artists produce hypertext interfaces that involve sensory apparatus and navigational skills that have been marginalised as incidental in the disabling interactive technologies of mainstream multimedia. Sound, movement, proprioception, an element of randomness and assorted other sensory circuits become central to the navigational experience. By enlisting marginalised senses, "we are not proposing to formulate a new paradigm of multimedial correctness," stresses Fuller, "but simply exploring the possibility of more complicated feedback arrangements between the user and the machine" (Fuller, qtd. in Barnet 48). The reader must encounter the 'lexias' contained in the system via the stray flows, intensities, movements, stratas and organs that are not proper to the system but shift across the interface and the surface of her body. In Fuller's electronic magazine, the reader is called upon to converse with the technology outside of the domesticated circuits of sight, dislocating the rigorous hierarchy of feedback devices which privilege the sight-machine and disable contingent interaction in a technonarcissistic fashion. The written information is mapped across a 'fuzzy' sound-based interface, sensitive at every moment to the smallest movements of the reader's fingers on the keys and mouse: the screen itself is black, its swarm of links and hotspots dead to the eye. The reader's movements produce different bleeps and beats, each new track opening different entrances and exits through the information in dependence upon the fluctuating pitch and tempo of her music. Without the aid of searchpaths and bright links, she must move in a state of perpetual readjustment to the technology, attuned not to the information stored behind the interface, but to the real-time sounds her movements produce. What we are calling play, Fuller explains, "is the difference between something that has a fixed grammar on the one hand and something that is continually and openly inventing its own logic on the other" (Fuller & Pope 4). The electronic writing space is not inherently liberatory, and the perpetual process of playing with process across the interface works to widen the 'fissures across the imperium' only for a moment. According to Fuller and Joyce, the 'process of playing with process' simply means complicating the feedback arrangements between the user's body and the machine. "We need to find a way of reading sensually ... rather than, as the interactive artist Graham Weinbren puts it, descending 'into the pit of so-called multimedia, with its scenes of unpleasant 'hotspots,' and 'menus' [that] leaves no room for the possibility of a loss of self, of desire in relation to the unfolding'" remarks Joyce (11). Interactivity which calls upon a mind folded everywhere within the body dislocates the encyclopaedic organisation of data that "preserves a point of privilege from where the eye can frame objects" by enlisting itinerant, diffuse desires in an extended period of readjustment to technology (Fuller & Pope 3). There are no pre-ordained or privileged feedback circuits as the body is seen to comprise a myriad possible elements or fragments of a desiring-machine with the potential to disrupt the flow, to proliferate. Mainstream multimedia's desire for 'informational hygiene' would have us transcend this embodied flux and bureaucratise the body into organs. Information is fed through the circuits of sight in a Pavlovian field of buttons and bright links: interactivity is misconceived as choice-making, when 'response' is a more appropriate concept. When the diffuse desire which thrives on disruption and alternative paradigms is written out in favour of informational hygiene, speed and efficient retrieval replace embodied conversation. "Disembodied [interaction] of this kind is always a con... . The entropic, troublesome flesh that is sloughed off in these fantasies of strongly male essentialism is interwoven with the dynamics of self-processing cognition and intentionality. We see computers as embodied culture, hardwired epistemology" (Fuller 2). Avant-garde hypertext deepens the subjective experience of the human-computer interface: it inscribes itself across the diffuse, disruptive desires of the flesh. Alternative interfaces are not an ideological overhaul enabled by the realm of technê, but a space for localised break-outs across the body. Bifurcations are enacted on the micro level by desiring-machines, across an interface which seeks to dislocate intentionality in conjunction with the marginalised sensory apparatus of the reader, drawing other minds, other organs into localised conversation with command-control. "The user learns kinesthetically and proprioceptively that the boundaries of self are defined less by the skin than by the [local] feedback loops connecting body and simulation in a techno-bio-integrated circuit" (Hayles 72). She oscillates between communication and control, play and restraint: not a nomad but a "human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms" (ATP, 422). VI. Desire Working from across the territory we have covered, we might say that electronic interaction 'liberates' us from neither the Line nor the flesh: at its most experimental, it is nothing less than reading embodied. References Barnet, Belinda. "Storming the Interface: Mindvirus, I/O/D and Deceptive Interaction." Artlink: Australian Contemporary Art Quarterly 17:4 (1997). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Fuller, Matt and Simon Pope. "Warning: This Computer Has Multiple Personality Disorder." 1993. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.altx.com/wordbombs/popefuller.php>. ---, eds. I/O/D2. Undated. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.pHreak.co.uk/i_o_d/>. Hayles, Katherine N. "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" October Magazine 66 (Fall 1993): 69-91. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. "Control and the Cyborg: Writing and Being Written in Hypertext." Journal of Advanced Composition 13:2 (1993): 381-99. Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext, Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Moulthrop, Stuart. "No War Machine." 1997. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/essays/war_machine.php>. ---. "Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 299-319. Rosenberg, Martin E. "Physics and Hypertext: Liberation and Complicity in Art and Pedagogy." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 268-298. Selfe, Cynthia L., and Richard J. Selfe. "The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones." College Composition and Communication 45.4: 480-504. Stone, Allucquére Roseanne. The War of Desire and Technology. London: MIT Press, 1996. Tolva, John. "Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word." 1993. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman/HT96/P43/pictura.htm>. Virilio, Paul. "The Third Interval: A Critical Transition." Rethinking Technologies. Ed. Verena Conley. London: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 3-12. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Belinda Barnet. "In the Garden of Forking Paths: Contingency, Interactivity and Play in Hypertext." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php>. Chicago style: Belinda Barnet, "In the Garden of Forking Paths: Contingency, Interactivity and Play in Hypertext," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Belinda Barnet. (1998) In the garden of forking paths: contingency, interactivity and play in hypertext. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php> ([your date of access]).

Social virtual spaces proliferate on the contemporary Internet and some 80% of Internet users may now be regularly visiting them (Daniel). In the following discussion, I shall discuss one such social space—a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) called Second Life (SL as it is referred to by residents)—and argue that complex and dialogic links exist between the offline user and her/his online representative, the avatar.I shall begin by presenting a brief overview of relevant theoretical concepts drawn largely from symbolic interactionist theorists. I shall then discuss where we might situate the avatar within the wider context of persona studies and explore the complexity involved in developing a sense of self via an avatar (or persona). Finally, I shall draw on my own experience in SL to illustrate the two-way nature of the processes under discussion.Mirrors and SelvesWhen one looks into a mirror, the mirror’s silver backing (the tain) allows a view of self and surroundings reflected back. Yet even in this case, our reflection has subtle and fascinating differences, it is not quite exactly “us.” Explanations for the effect this has on us come from various theoretical perspectives. For example, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan writes that very young children experience in play the relation “between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates” (2). The word “virtual” suggests a gap between the child’s performance and the exhibition of that performance in the mirror. Lacan contends that the child itself does not perceive this gap, but rather mistakes the image for the thing itself—a méconnaissance that ensures we accept the mirror image as “us.” The tain is thus simultaneously restrictive, because it has a limited field of view, and enabling, because it provides one of our first experiences of our self as other.From a symbolic interaction perspective, C. H. Cooley develops the mirror analogy in his Looking Glass Self concept. For Cooley, the self develops in relation to how we imagine we look to others and we learn to see others as our “mirror.” Our reflection in their perceptions requires us to imagine how we appear to others and then how they judge our appearance. Finally, we develop a sense of ourselves based on that judgement. Thus, others with whom we interact reflect us back to ourselves and we view our self from the viewpoint of others whose signs we learn to interpret. Two consequences arise. First, we could receive different reflections back from different individuals. Second, we become habituated to a gap between performance of self, its reception, and the reflection of that performance back to us.Erving Goffman’s work on self-presentation and interaction rituals offers further dimensions to understanding this process, stressing the importance of impression management to monitor inconsistencies in performance of the self as it appears to others. For Goffman, this management occurs both before the performance as we prepare ourselves in the back stage, and on the front stage as we perform for our audience. Social interaction is thus a performance, governed by social rules and rituals understood by both audience and performer. The dialectic relationship between performance and its reception introduces an element of intentionality to the performance itself. When the performance is not well received, for example, its reflection back to the performer may lead to adjustments in the performance to correct flaws brought about by failure to appropriately follow the rules of interaction. Through interaction with others, therefore, we learn dramaturgically appropriate roles and performances and we come to understand the nuances involved in successful enactment. The “audience” for whom we perform may be either internalised or actual. In either case, the image that we see in the mirror, and the image we imagine reflected back is both “us” and something more. But it is unhelpful to think of the internalised and actual as dichotomous.All three models so far discussed intuit a space between performance and reflection, suggesting that we experience our self through “symbols, language, social structures, and situated variables of social interaction” (Waskul and Lust 338-39) rather than directly. Even our image in an actual mirror extends, then, beyond the tain by which the glass is backed because we overlay what we see in the mirror with social nuances arising outside of the image-reflection dyad. Rather than consider this image a reflection of “us,” it is helpful to think of it as a persona—the personality (or presence) that a person adopts and presents to other people. It may be “our” persona in that it is linked to a physical person, but, as noted above, it may also be contextually multiple and variously mediated through social interaction and symbols such as dress.To explore more fully the interplay between person and persona I shall now introduce online contexts as sites of reflection, beginning with a brief discussion of the avatar as persona.Online MirrorsMarshall argues that contemporary culture exhibits an expansive world of online persona creation with individuals increasingly engaging in self-branding (Personifying). Although Marshall does not discuss MUVEs, his observation is equally applicable to such environments. In MUVEs, as in the online contexts Barbour and Marshall discuss, persona creation is a process of strategic intentionality whereby we present a chosen aspect from among the many to be found in us all. In MUVES the vehicle for that creation is the avatar. The avatar is an individual’s embodiment in virtual space, an extension of self through which the user experiences the virtual world (Behm-Morawitz). Just as the persona permits us “to explore the masks of identity” (Marshall, Personifying 380), the avatar offers opportunities for exploration and experimentation. For Marshall the persona in the public on-line world is constructed by media and communication systems and enacted through individual intention and agency (Personifying). The avatar is similarly constructed and enacted. Both persona and avatar are mutable and, as Marshall suggests in relation to persona, part of a specular economy manifesting an increasing consciousness of self-presentation and others’ perceptions (Specular). I do not think it overstated to indicate these similarities with the composite term “avatar-persona.”The graphical object-body is the vehicle whereby MUVE users experience interacting with others and with their environment (Messinger et al.). They experience their avatar self as if it were their actual self (Behm-Morawitz). Our virtual experiences are grounded in, and inextricably linked to, our physicality. One’s “presence” with one’s avatar may facilitate and be uniquely linked to avatar influence on the offline self (Behm-Morawitz). In this sense “presence”—the sense of being actually present and being recognised as present by others there—may bridge both sides of the screen. This two-way transfer is analogous to the person’s capacity to move others into action noted by Marshall (Personifying). Further, as some research has shown, the representation of self through an avatar not only effects online behaviour but actually may also have continued effects on offline behaviour and avatars may come to change who we are in both online and offline environments (Yee and Bailenson).Marshall (Specular) argues that the online and mobile media screen as mirror produces persona and that the mirror as a surface reflects and allows one to be seen and to interrelate or communicate with others. The MUVE also acts as a virtual mirror screen within which the avatar-persona operates. The avatar-persona is the virtual analogue of the mirror persona discussed in relation to Lacan and symbolic interaction formulations. I turn now to how these processes and interconnections manifest in SL in order to explore the complexities inherent in the interplay of self, avatar-persona and other.SL is a three dimensional virtual world where “everyone you see is a real person and every place you visit is built by people just like you” (http://secondlife.com/whatis/?lang=en-US). SL “residents” (as they refer to themselves) engage in role-playing games in-world, co-create content with other residents, and indulge in a huge variety of social activities including sexual and/or affective relationships with other residents. SL is an immersive social environment offering sophisticated graphical building tools, avatar appearance modification potentials, and both synchronous (real time) and asynchronous (delayed) avatar-to-avatar communication for residents who are geographically located in all parts of the offline world.In MUVEs, one sees the avatar-persona as a third person. In SL this is due to the potential for 360-degree camera views of the avatar, ensuring that our avatar becomes the object of our view, placing us in a position both of an active I controlling an avatar and a distanced other watching that self move and speak (Zhao). These dynamics raise interesting questions about interaction, self-presentation, and self-construction (Gottschalk), the answers to which represent a continuum between two far from mutually exclusive poles. On the one hand, research based on SL (see for example work by Messinger et al., or Martey and Consalvo) has shown that, despite an almost limitless potential for modification, most avatars are idealised representations of their creator’s offline selves. Given this correlation between online and offline manifestations, I suggest that the avatar operates more like a mirror that is not wholly restricted by the tain.On the other hand, writers such as Sherry Turkle have argued (before the existence of MUVEs) that the Internet permits multiplicity and mutability in subjectivity. In a contemporary context social virtual worlds provide “a free ‘potential space’ where real individuals—qua avatars—can and do attempt to create an alternative reality. Here they simultaneously concretize their individualistic fantasies […] and enact aspects of their selves they did not know exist, were too embarrassed to admit, or always wanted to master” (Gottschalk 521-22). SL permits hybridity of identity, plasticity of form, and multiplicity of avatars, ensuring fluid and chimerical possibilities (Morie and Verhulsdonck) for single or multiple avatar-persona per offline self. Residents frequently switch between avatar-persona to suit particular needs or social contexts. In this respect, SL is less a mirror than a kaleidoscope, where changing patterns emerge with a turn of the lens.In neither case is the process one-way. “When people define the virtual as real, it becomes real in its consequences, and the reciprocal effects between the self and the avatar extend to more central aspects of one’s life as well” (Gottschalk 513). Avatars are distinct selves, not just conduits for offline identities. They socially manifest a projective identity or identities that are influential intersections of offline people and online representations situated within socially performed dramaturgical selves (Martey and Consalvo).Cunningham writes that “[a]fter virtual reality, ‘reality’ is not the same, but has been altered by the bleeding of both ‘worlds’ into each other, by their mutual inseparability” (16). In this mutual inseparability a dialogic interaction occurs between offline self and avatar-persona. Both engage in a continuous interaction and active negotiation between the parties. It is in this dialogic that we find the eventual outcome of a mirror without a tain. The mirror’s “glass” no longer requires its tain for reflection because the dialogic between offline self and avatar-persona is maintained by the process of creation, performance, reception and exhibition as all parties operate under the gaze of others outside their individual dialogic. Other SL residents also see the avatar-persona, just as the offline creator interacts with others in physical space outside SL.Symbolic interactionist perspectives assist in understanding the reflexive processes through which individuals come to see themselves as objects of their own and others’ gaze(s) (Aspling). As object to one’s self and to others, self and avatar have already rehearsed a performance in their own view before permitting others to see that performance and reflect it back. Watching others respond to our avatar-persona provides feedback for self-representation and communication patterns (Gottschalk). Just as a curator assembles and presents an exhibition, our avatar image is “returned” to us subtly changed, re-presented to us at one step removed from its creation, rearranged in the judgement of the other, and manifesting the imagined reception by its viewer. This expands the self’s repertoire beyond SL, continuing to inform us offline and online (Gottschalk).The avatar-persona stimulates objective and rational observation of oneself, generating the “observing ego” (Gottschalk 514-515). Crucially, however, the avatar is more than just a placeholder for the self. The avatar is a site for self-making in its own right because it informs our offline life. In this way, the avatar may force us to partake in our own self-construction by taking “the role of the other,” another who is in fact both a persona and a person (Waskul and Lust 349-350). My own experience in SL further illustrates these ideas.Self-Representation—One Avatar’s Experience“Choices about avatar appearance can be understood as social performances that communicate both social and individual identities” (Martey and Consalvo 166). Although SL purports to confer on its residents near total control over all aspects of appearance and in-world identity, as in the offline world personal appearance in SL involves situated, bodily practices that are both discursively practical and function as a collection of codes that communicate to other users.I first learned of SL in 2007. Then, as now, it was depicted as a world of limitless possibilities. My first experience of avatar life was, however, somewhat disappointing. Entering the first stage in the avatar creation process and hopeful of creating an androgynous avatar, I was given only two default choices—male or female. Reflecting my offline self, I chose to make my first avatar female. I chose a name that was not gender-specific but that had personal meaning to me. Once in-world, and realising that I could drastically modify my avatar’s body shape, I set about making the avatar as androgynous as I could. The body modification was challenging, but not impossible. The avatar appearance modifiers were not fine grained enough to make the face authentically androgynous however. To circumvent this drawback I decided to make my avatar a “Furry”. Furries are anthropomorphic animal avatars with human figures and animal heads, hands, feet and tails. An animal head for my avatar-persona allowed me to avoid gender specificity.Thinking that I had successfully met my goal, I next ventured into the social spaces of SL. The first thing another avatar said to me was “So are you a boy or a girl in real life?” I evaded the question then, and continued to evade similar questions for three months. During that time I was frequently derided for my reluctance to gender identify. Although the sociologist in me found this fascinating, the almost constant questioning began to impact upon my enjoyment of SL. Eventually after one particularly nasty attack (called “griefing” in SL) my avatar was left so badly distorted that I decided to “retire” it. Examining my reaction, I was surprised to find that the remorselessly unpleasant reaction to my avatar had generated the bleeding between worlds referred to by Cunningham—my performance was exhibited back to me in unfavourable terms. I was upset. I had chosen a name for the avatar, an animal identity, and a personality that all had RL significance for me.My experience underscored for me a point Martey and Consalvo make. Avatar identity is self-constructed, they argue, within the constraints of the offline user’s goals, (I wanted to create and live in an androgynous avatar) the interface used to create the online appearance (the SL viewer interface was not sophisticated enough for me to easily do this, nor did it give me a third choice for the gender of my avatar), and the social systems of the virtual space (there was clearly an expectation that I was not meeting by refusing to disclose my offline sex). The bleed back was enough to generate decisions by my offline self multiple times in the three-month life of that avatar. My avatar self had not met with favourable audience reaction because I had refused to comply with dramaturgical propriety by disclosing my offline sex and had failed to create a fictional offline identity to get around the issue. My fault lay in not sufficiently aligning how my avatar looked and acted with its offline correlate because I refused to disclose any actual or false offline correlate. In dramaturgical terms, I refused to interact with audience reception thus stepping outside the interaction order.ConclusionI have argued that one develops a sense of self in interaction with others through actual and conceptual mirroring. The process can occur in many contexts, even in the absence of a co-present other because we internalise the other’s view. We bring these dynamics with us to online settings. Using SL as an example, I suggested that online the mistaken singularity of self and reflection noted by Lacan becomes multiple in the way a kaleidoscope generates multiple patterns when turned by the user. SL’s visuality and its potential for three-dimensional viewing of one’s avatar encourages a looking-glass-self approach to identity—a re-presentation of the self-object as we imagine others see it. We achieve identity in the eyes of multiple others, including seeing our avatar self as object. Avatar-residents in SL may act as mirrors to the offline self, but interactions are multiply complex, blurring the boundaries between online and offline experience(s), between offline person and online avatar-persona and between avatars and other avatar-residents. Impression management, interactional dynamics, and strategic self-representation render the avatar-persona one facet of the offline self rather than its entirety. Audience reaction comes not only from other avatar residents, but also from the offline self responding to that reaction and their own understanding of dramaturgical propriety. SL is a place where avatar-personas are fashioned in liminal boundaries between interaction between the self and its avatar/other (Waskul and Lust) as well as clarifying the interactions between self and others. Like other online contexts, SL is a mirror without a tain. In its specular economy, reflectivity is unbounded, an endlessly recombinant field of self-other interactions, a kaleidoscope of potential.ReferencesAspling, Fredrik. “The Private and the Public in Online Presentations of the Self: A Critical Development of Goffman’s Dramaturgical Perspective.” Stockholm’s Universitet, 2011.Barbour, Kim, and David Marshall. “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web.” First Monday 17.9 (2012). 13 May 2014 ‹ http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/vew/3969/3292 ›.Behm-Morawitz, Elizabeth. “Mirrored Selves: The Influence of Self-Presence in a Virtual World on Health, Appearance, and Well-Being.” Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013): 119-128.Cooley, Charles Horton. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner’s, 1964.Cunningham, Kim. “Virtually Transformed: Second Life’s Implications for the Status of the Body.” 102nd American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. 2006.Daniel, John. “The Self Set Free.” Therapy Today 19.8 (2008).Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, 1959.Gottschalk, Simon. “The Presentation of Avatars in Second Life: Self and Interaction in Social Virtual Spaces.” Symbolic Interaction 33.4 (2010).Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. London and New York: Routledge, 1977.Marshall, David. “Personifying Agency: The Public-Persona-Place-Issue Continuum.” Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 369-371.Marshall, David. “The Specular Economy.” Society 47 (2010): 498-502.Martey, Rosa Mikael, and Mia Consalvo. “Performing the Looking-Glass Self: Avatar Appearance and Group Identity in Second Life.” Popular Communication 9.3 (2011): 165-80.Messinger, Paul R., et al. “On the Relationship between My Avatar and Myself.” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1.1 (2008): 1-17.Morie, Jacquelyn Ford, and Gustav Verhulsdonck. “Body/Persona/Action! Emerging Non-Anthropomorphic Communication and Interaction in Virtual Worlds.” Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology. ACM, 2008.Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone, 1995.Waskul, Dennis, and Matt Lust. “Role-Playing and Playing Roles: The Person, Player, and Persona in Fantasy Role-Playing.” Symbolic Interaction 27.3 (2004): 333-56.Yee, N., and J. Bailenson. “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior.” Human Communication Research 33.3 (2007): 271-290.Zhao, Shanyang. “The Digital Self: Through the Looking Glass of Telecopresent Others.” Symbolic Interaction 28.3 (2005): 387-405.

On 12 March 2020, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte announced a lockdown of Manila to stop the spread of COVID-19. The cities, provinces, and islands of the Philippines remained under various levels of community quarantine for the remainder of the year. Under the strictest lockdown measures, known as Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), no one aged below 21 or over 60 years was allowed out, a curfew was implemented between 10pm and 5am, and only one person per household, carrying a quarantine pass, was allowed to go out for essential items (Bainbridge & Vimonsuknopparat; Ratcliffe & Fonbuena). The policing of these measures was strict, with a heavy reliance on police and military to enforce health protocols (Hapal). In early April, Duterte warned that violators of the lockdown who caused trouble could be shot (Reuters). Criticisms concerning the dissemination of information about the pandemic were exacerbated when on 5 May, 2020, Filipinos lost an important source of news and entertainment as the country’s largest media network ABS-CBN was shut down after the government denied the renewal of its broadcast franchise (Gutierrez; “ABS-CBN”; “Independent Broadcaster”). The handling of the pandemic by the Duterte government has been characterised by inaction, scapegoating, and framed as a war on an existential threat (Hapal). This has led to feelings of frustration, anger, and despair that has impacted and been incorporated into the artistic expression of some Filipino creatives (Esguerra, “Reflecting”). As they did in the rest of the world, social media platforms became a vital source of entertainment for many facing these harsh lockdown measures in the Philippines in 2020. Viral forms included the sharing of videos of recipes for whipped Dalgona coffee and ube-pandesal on TikTok, binge-watching KDramas like Crash Landing on You on Netflix, playing Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch, and watching Thailand’s Boys’ Love genre web series 2Gether: The Series on YouTube. Around the world, many arts and cultural organisations turned to online platforms to continue their events during the COVID-19 pandemic. #RomanceClass, a Filipino community of authors, artists, and actors who consume, produce, and enact mostly self-published English-language romance fiction in the Philippines, also turned to these platforms to hold their community’s live literature events. This article analyses this shift by #RomanceClass. It contends that, due to their nature as an independent, born-digital literary organisation, they were able to adapt swiftly and effectively to online-only events in response to the harshness of the Filipino lockdown, creating new forms of artistic innovation by adopting the aesthetics of Zoom into their creative practice (for example, name tags and gallery camera view). This aesthetic swiftly became familiar to people all over the world in 2020, and adopting digital platforms encodes within it the possibility for a global audience. However, while #RomanceClass are and have been open to a global audience, and their creative innovations during the pandemic have clearly been informed by transcultural online trends, this article argues that their adoption of digital platforms and creative innovations represented a continuation of their existing ethos, producing material explicitly intended for a Filipino audience, and more specifically, their existing community, prioritising community connection over any more expansive marketing efforts (McAlister et al.). The Live Literature of #RomanceClass The term #RomanceClass refers to a biblio-community of authors, readers, artists, and actors, all involved in the production and consumption of English-language romance novels in the Philippines. #RomanceClass began online in 2013 via a free writing class run predominantly on Facebook by author Mina V. Esguerra (for more on this, see McAlister et al.). As the community has developed, in-person events have become a major part of the community’s activities. However, as a born-digital social formation, #RomanceClass has always existed, to some extent, online. Their comfort in digital spaces was key to their ability to pivot swiftly to the circumstances in the Philippines during the lockdowns in 2020. One of the most distinctive practices of #RomanceClass is their live reading events. Prior to 2020, community members would gather in April for April Feels Day, and in October for Feels Fest for events where local actors would read curated passages from community-authored romance novels, and audiences’ verbal and physical responses became part of the performance. The live readings represent a distinctive form of live literature – that is, events where literature is the dominant art form presented or performed (Wiles), a field which encompasses phenomena like storytelling festivals, author readings, and literary festivals (Dane; Harvey; Weber; Wilson). In October 2019, we interviewed several #RomanceClass community members and attended one of these live reading events, Feels Fest, where we observed that the nature of the event very clearly reflected the way the community functions: they are “highly professionalised, but also tightly bound on an affective level, regularly describing [themselves] as a found family” (McAlister et al. 404). Attendance at live readings is capped (50 people, for the event we attended). The events are thus less about audience-building than they are community-sustaining, something which they do by providing community comforts. In particular, this includes kilig, a Filipino term referring to a kind of affective romantic excitement, usually demonstrated by the audience members in reaction to the actors’ readings. While the in-person component is very important to the live reading events, they have always spanned online and offline contexts – the events are usually live-tweeted by participants, and the readings are recorded and posted to YouTube by an official community videographer, with the explicit acknowledgment that if you attended the event, you are more than welcome to relive it as many times as you want. (Readings which contain a high degree of sexual content are not searchable on YouTube so as not to cause any harm to the actors, but the links are made privately available to attendees.) However, the lockdown measures implemented in the Philippines in 2020 meant that only the online context was available to the community – and so, like so many other arts communities around the world, they were forced to adapt. We tend to think of platforms like Zoom as encoded with the potential to allow people into a space who might not have been able to access it before. However, in their transition to an online-only context, #RomanceClass clearly sought to prioritise the community-sustaining practices of their existing events rather than trying in any major way to court new, potentially global, audiences. This prioritisation of community, rather than marketing, provided a space for #RomanceClass authors to engage cathartically with their experiences of lockdown in the Philippines (Esguerra, “Reflecting”). Embracing the Zoom Aesthetic: #RomanceClass in 2020 #RomanceClass’s first online event in 2020 was April Feels Day 2020, which occurred not long after lockdown began in the Philippines. Its production reflects the quick transition to an online-only co-presence space. It featured six books recently published by community authors. For each, the author introduced the book, and then an actor read an excerpt – a different approach to that hitherto taken in live events, where two actors, playing the roles of the romantic protagonists, would perform the readings together. Like the in-person live readings, April Feels Day 2020 was a synchronous event with a digital afterlife. It was streamed via Twitch, and participants could log on to watch and join the real-time conversations occurring in the chat. Those who did not sign up for a Twitch account could still watch the stream and post about the event on Twitter under the hashtag #AprilFeelsDay2020. After the event, videos featuring each book were posted to YouTube, as they had been for previous in-person live reading events, allowing participants to relive the experience if they so desired, and for authors to use as workshopping tools to allow them to hear how their prose and characters’ voices sounded (something which several authors reported doing with recordings of live readings in our interviews with them in 2019). April Feels Day 2020 represented a speedy pivot to working and socialising from home by the #RomanceClass community, something enabled by the existing digital architecture they had built up around their pre-pandemic live reading events, and their willingness to experiment with platforms like Twitch. However, it also represented a learning experience, a place to begin to think about how they might adapt creatively to the circumstances provoked by the global pandemic. They innovated in several ways. For instance, they adopted mukbang – a South Korean internet phenomenon which has become popular worldwide, wherein a host consumes a large amount of food while interacting with their audience in an online audiovisual broadcast – in their Mukbang Nights videos, where a few members of #RomanceClass would eat food and discuss their books (Anjani et al.). Food is a beloved part of both #RomanceClass events and books (“there’s lots of food, always. At some point someone always describes what the characters are eating. No exceptions”, author Carla de Guzman told us when we interviewed her in 2019), and so their adoption of mukbang shows the ways in which their 2020 digital events sought to recreate established forms of communal cohesion in a virtual co-presence space. An even more pointed example of this is their Hello, Ever After web series, which drew on the growing popularity of born-digital web series in Southeast Asia and other virtual performances around the globe. Hello, Ever After was both a natural extension of and significantly differed from #RomanceClass in-person live events. Usually, April Feels Day and October Feels Fest feature actors reading and performing passages from already published community books. By contrast, Hello, Ever After featured original short scripts written by community authors. These scripts took established characters from these authors’ novels and served as epilogues, where viewers could see how these characters and their romances fared during the pandemic. Like in-person live reading events – and unlike the digital April Feels Day 2020 – it featured two actors playing virtually side-by-side, reinforcing that one of the key pleasures derived from the reading events is the kilig produced through the interaction between the actors playing against each other (something we also observed in our 2019 fieldwork: the community has developed hashtags to refer specifically to the live reading performance interactions of some of their actors, such as #gahoates, in reference to actors Gio Gahol and Rachel Coates). The scenes are purposefully written as video chats, which allows not only for the fact that the actors were unable to physically interact with each other because of the lockdowns, but also tapped into the Zoom communication aesthetic that commandeered many people’s personal and professional communications during COVID-19 restrictions. Although the web series used a different video conferencing technology, community member Tania Arpa, who directed the web series episodes, adapted the nameplate feature that displayed the characters’ names to more closely align with the Zoom format, demonstrating #RomanceClass’s close attentiveness to developments in the global media environment. Zoom and other virtual co-presence platforms became essentially universal in 2020. One of their affordances was that people could virtually attend events from anywhere in the world, which encodes in it the possibility of reaching a broader, more global audience base. However, #RomanceClass maintained their high sensitivity to the local Filipino context through Hello, Ever After. By setting episodes during the Philippines’ lockdown, emphasised by the video chat mise en scène, Hello, Ever After captures the nuances of the sociopolitical and sometimes mundane aspects of the local pandemic response. Moreover, the series features characters known to and beloved by the community, as the episodes function as epilogues to #RomanceClass books, taking place in what An Goris calls the “post-HEA” [happily ever after] space. #RomanceClass books are available digitally – and have a readership – outside the Philippines, and so the Hello, Ever After web series is theoretically a text that can be enjoyed by many. However, the community was not necessarily seeking to broaden their audience base through Hello, Ever After; it was community-sustaining, rather than community-expanding. It built on the extant repository of community knowledge and affect by using characters that #RomanceClass members know intimately and have emotional connections to, who are not as familiar and legible to those outside the community, intended for an audience with a level of genre knowledge (McAlister et al.; Fletcher et al.). While the pandemic experience these characters were going through was global, as the almost universal familiarity with the Zoom aesthetic shows, Hello, Ever After was highly attentive to the local context. Almost all the episodes featured “Easter eggs” and dialogues that pointed to local situations that only members of the targeted Filipino audience would understand and be familiar with, echoing the pandemic challenges of the country’s present reality. Episodes featured recurrent themes like dissatisfaction with the government’s slow response and misaligned priorities, anger towards politicians exacerbating the impact of the pandemic with poor health and transportation policies, and recognition of voluntary service and aid rendered by private individuals. For example, the first episode, Make Good Days, an epilogue to Mina V. Esguerra’s novel What Kind of Day, focusses on the challenges “essential worker” hero Ben (played by Raphael Robes) faces as a local politician’s speechwriter, who has been tasked to draft a memorial speech for his boss to deliver in honour of an acquaintance who has succumbed to COVID-19. He has developed a “3:00 habit” of a Zoom call with his partner Naya (Rachel Coates), mirroring the “3:00 habit” or “3:00 Prayer to the Divine Mercy” many Catholic Filipino devotees pray and recite daily at that specific hour, a habit reinforced through schools, churches, and media, where entertainment shows allow time for the prayer to be televised. Ben and Naya’s conversation in this particular 3:00 call dwells on what they think Filipino citizens deserve, especially from local government officials who repeatedly fail them (Baizas; Torres). They also discuss the impact that the pandemic has had on Naya’s work life. She runs a tourism and travel business – which is the way that the two characters met in What Kind of Day – which she has been forced to close because of the pandemic. Naya grieves not just for the dream job she has had to give up, but also sympathises with the enormous number of Filipinos who suddenly became unemployed because of the economy closing down (Tirona). Hello, Ever After draws together the political realities of living in the Philippines during the pandemic with the personal, by showing the effects of these realities on characters like Ben and Naya, who are well-known to the #RomanceClass community. #RomanceClass books encompass a wide variety of protagonists, and so the episodes of Hello, Ever After were able to explore how the lives of health workers, actors, single parents, students, scientists, office workers, development workers, CEOs and more could be impacted by the pandemic and the lockdowns in the Philippines. They also allowed the authors to express some of their personal frustrations with living through quarantine, something they admit fueled some parts of the scripts (“Behind the Scenes: Hello, Ever After”). #RomanceClass novels like What Kind of Day all end happily, with the romantic protagonists together (in contrast to a lot of other Filipino media, which ends unhappily – for more on this, see McAlister et al.). Make Good Days and the other episodes of Hello, Ever After reflect the grim realities of pandemic life in the Philippines; however, they do not undercut this happy ending, and instead seek to reinforce it. Through Hello, Ever After, the community literally seeks to “make good days” for themselves by creating opportunities to access the familiar comfort and warmth of kilig scenes. Kilig refers to a kind of affective romantic emotion that usually has a physical manifestation (Trinidad, “Shipping”; “Kilig”). It does not have an equivalent word or phrase in English, but can be used as a noun to denote a thrilling state of excitement or as an adjective to describe moments or scenes that evoke this feeling. Creating and becoming immersed in kilig is central to #RomanceClass texts and events: authors attempt to produce kilig through their writing, and actors attempt to provoke it during live reading performances (something which, as mentioned above, was probably made more difficult in the one-actor live readings of the fully online Aprils Feels Day 2020, as much of the kilig is generated by the interactions between the actors). Kilig scenes are plentiful in Hello, Ever After. For instance, in Make Good Days, Naya asks Ben to name a thing he hated before the pandemic that he now misses. He replies that he misses being stuck in traffic with her – that he still hates traffic, but he misses spending that time with her. Escapism was a high priority for many people and communities creating art during the 2020 lockdowns. Given this, it is interesting that #RomanceClass chose to create kilig in their web series by leaning into the temporal moment and creating material specifically revolving around the lockdown in the Philippines, showing couples like Ben and Naya supporting each other and sharing their pandemic-caused burdens. Hello, Ever After both reflected the harsh reality in which the community found themselves but also gave them something to cling to in the hardest days of lockdown, showing that kilig could be found even in the toughest of circumstances when both characters and community members found themselves separated. Conclusion As a community which began in a digital space, #RomanceClass was well-positioned to pivot to an online-only environment during the pandemic, even though in-person events had become such a distinctive part of their community outputs. They experimented and innovated significantly in 2020, producing a range of digital outputs, including the Hello, Ever After web series. On the surface, this does not seem especially unusual: many arts organisations innovated digitally during the pandemic. What was particularly notable about #RomanceClass’s digital outputs, however, was that they were not designed to be marketing tools. They were not actively courting a new audience; rather, outputs like Hello, Ever After were designed to be community-sustaining, providing the existing audience comfort, familiarity, and kilig in a situation (local and global) that was not in any way comfortable or familiar. We Will Be Okay is the title of the second Hello, Ever After video, an epilogue to Celestine Trinidad’s Ghost of a Feeling: a neat summary of the message the episodes offered to the #RomanceClass audience through these revisitings of beloved characters and relationships. As we have discussed elsewhere, #RomanceClass is a professionalised community, but their affective ties are very strong (McAlister et al.). Their digital outputs during the pandemic showed this, and demonstrated again the way their community bonds are reinforced through their repeated re-engagement with their texts, just as their pre-pandemic forms of live literature did. There was kilig to be found in revisiting well-known couples, even in depressing circumstances. As the community engage together with these new epilogues and share their affective reactions, their social ties are reinforced – even when they are forced to be separated. References “ABS-CBN: Philippines’ Biggest Broadcaster Forced Off Air.” BBC, 5 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52548703>. Anjani, Laurensia, et al. “Why Do People Watch Others Eat Food? An Empirical Study on the Motivations and Practices of Mukbang Viewers.” Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 2020. DOI: 10.1145/3313831.3376567. Bainbridge, Amy, and Supattra Vimonsuknopparat. “This Is What Life Is Like in the Philippines amid One of the World’s Toughest Coronavirus Lockdowns.” ABC News, 29 Apr. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-29/philippines-social-volcano-threatening-to-erupt-amid-covid-19/12193188>. Baizas, Gaby. “‘Law Is Law Unless Friends Kayo’: Netizens Slam Gov’t Double Standards.” Rappler, 13 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.rappler.com/nation/netizens-reaction-law-is-law-double-standards-government-ecq-guidelines>. “Behind the Scenes: Hello, Ever After.” Facilitated by Mina V. Esguerra. RomanceClass, 7 Aug. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-9FuCSX08M>. Dane, Alexandra. “Cultural Capital as Performance: Tote Bags and Contemporary Literary Festivals.” Mémoires du Livre 11.2 (2020). <http://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/memoires/2020-v11-n2-memoires05373/1070270ar.pdf>. Esguerra, Mina V. What Kind of Day. Self-published, 2018. ———. “Reflecting on Hello, Ever After.” Mina V. Esguerra, 23 April 2021. 17 May 2021 <http://minavesguerra.com/news/reflecting-on-hello-ever-after/>. Fletcher, Lisa, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins. “Genre Worlds and Popular Fiction: The Case of Twenty-First Century Australian Romance.” Journal of Popular Culture 51.4 (2018): 997-1015. Goris, An. “Happily Ever After… and After: Serialisation and the Popular Romance Novel.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 12.1 (2013). 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2013/goris.htm>. Gutierrez, Jason. “Philippine Congress Officially Shuts Down Leading Broadcaster.” New York Times, 10 July 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/world/asia/philippines-congress-media-duterte-abs-cbn.html>. Hapal, Karl. “The Philippines’ COVID-19 Response: Securitising the Pandemic and Disciplining the Pasaway.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs (2021). <http://doi.org/10.1177/1868103421994261>. Harvey, Hannah. “On the Edge of the Storytelling World: The Festival Circuit and the Fringe.” Storytelling, Self, Society 4.2 (2008): 134-151. “Independent Broadcaster ABS-CBN Shut Down by Philippines Government in ‘Crushing Blow’ to Press Freedom.” ABC News, 6 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-06/philippines-news-outlet-closure-abs-cbn-duterte/12218416>. “Make Good Days.” Dir. Tania Arpa. RomanceClass, 26 June 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqpij-S7DU&t=5s>. McAlister, Jodi, Claire Parnell, and Andrea Anne Trinidad. “#RomanceClass: Genre World, Intimate Public, Found Family.” Publishing Research Quarterly 36 (2020): 403-417. Ratcliffe, Rebecca, and Carmela Fonbuena. “Millions in Manila Back in Lockdown as Duterte Loses Control of Coronavirus Spread.” The Guardian, 4 Aug. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/04/millions-in-manila-philippines-back-in-lockdown-as-duterte-loses-control-of-coronavirus-spread>. Reuters. “‘Shoot Them Dead’ – Philippine Leader Says Won’t Tolerate Lockdown Violators.” CNBC, 2 April 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/02/philippines-duterte-threatens-to-shoot-lockdown-violators.html>. Tirona, Ana Olivia A. “Unemployment Rate Hits Record High in 2020.” Business World, 9 Mar. 2021. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.bworldonline.com/unemployment-rate-hits-record-high-in-2020/>. Torres, Thets. “5 Times the Government Disobeyed and Ignored Their Own Laws.” NoliSoli, 13 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://nolisoli.ph/80192/ph-government-disobeyed-and-ignored-their-own-laws-ttorres-20200513/>. Trinidad, Andrea Anne. “‘Kilig to the Bones!’: Kilig as the Backbone of the Filipino Romance Experience.” Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference, 2020. ———. “‘Shipping’ Larry Stylinson: What Makes Pairing Appealing Boys Romantic?” Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference, 2018. Trinidad, Celestine. Ghost of a Feeling. Self-published, 2018. Weber, Millicent. Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. Cham: Palgrave, 2018. “We Will Be Okay.” Dir. Tania Arpa. RomanceClass, 3 July 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed2SamGU3Tk>. Wiles, Ellen. “Live Literature and Cultural Value: Explorations in Experiential Literary Ethnography.” PhD thesis. University of Stirling, 2019. Wilson, Michael. Storytelling and Theatre: Contemporary Professional Storytellers and Their Art. Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2005.

Despite numerous critics describing him as an auteur (i.e. a film-maker who ‘does’ everything and fulfils every production role [Bordwell and Thompson 37] and/or with a signature “world-view” detectable in his/her work [Caughie 10]), Rolf de Heer appears to have declined primary authorship of Dance Me to My Song (1997), his seventh in an oeuvre of twelve feature films. Indeed, the opening credits do not mention his name at all: it is only with the closing credits that the audience learns de Heer has directed the film. Rather, as the film commences, the viewer is informed by the titles that it is “A film by Heather Rose”, thus suggesting that the work is her singular creation. Direct and uncompromising, with its unflattering shots of the lead actor and writer (Heather Rose Slattery, a young woman born with cerebral palsy), the film may be read as a courageous self-portrait which finds the grace, humanity and humour trapped inside Rose’s twisted body. Alternatively, it may be read as yet another example of de Heer’s signature interest in foregrounding a world view which gives voice to marginalised characters such as the disabled or the disadvantaged. For example, the developmentally retarded eponyme of Bad Boy Bubby (1993) is eventually able to make art as a singer in a band and succeeds in creating a happy family with a wife and two kids. The ‘mute’ girl in The Quiet Room (1996) makes herself heard by her squabbling parents through her persistent activism. In Ten Canoes (2006) the Indigenous Australians cast themselves according to kinship ties, not according to the director’s choosing, and tell their story in their own uncolonised language. A cursory glance at the films of Rolf de Heer suggests he is overtly interested in conveying to the audience the often overlooked agency of his unlikely protagonists. In the ultra-competitive world of professional film-making it is rare to see primary authorship ceded by a director so generously. However, the allocation of authorship to a member of a marginalized population re-invigorates questions prompted by Andy Medhurst regarding a film’s “authorship test” (198) and its relationship to a subaltern community wherein he writes that “a biographical approach has more political justification if the project being undertaken is one concerned with the cultural history of a marginalized group” (202-3). Just as films by gay authors about gay characters may have greater credibility, as Medhurst posits, one might wonder would a film by a person with a disability about a character with the same disability be better received? Enabling authorship by an unknown, crippled woman such as Rose rather than a famous, able-bodied male such as de Heer may be cynically regarded as good (show) business in that it is politically correct. This essay therefore asks if the appellation “A film by Heather Rose” is appropriate for Dance Me to My Song. Whose agency in telling the story (or ‘doing’ the film-making), the able bodied Rolf de Heer or the disabled Heather Rose, is reflected in this cinematic production? In other words, whose voice is enabled when an audience receives this film? In attempting to answer these questions it is inevitable that Paul Darke’s concept of the “normality drama” (181) is referred to and questioned, as I argue that Dance Me to My Song makes groundbreaking departures from the conventions of the typical disability narrative. Heather Rose as Auteur Rose plays the film’s heroine, Julia, who like herself has cerebral palsy, a group of non-progressive, chronic disorders resulting from changes produced in the brain during the prenatal stages of life. Although severely affected physically, Rose suffered no intellectual impairment and had acted in Rolf de Heer’s cult hit Bad Boy Bubby five years before, a confidence-building experience that grew into an ongoing fascination with the filmmaking process. Subsequently, working with co-writer Frederick Stahl, she devised the scenario for this film, writing the lead role for herself and then proactively bringing it to de Heer’s attention. Rose wrote of de Heer’s deliberate lack of involvement in the script-writing process: “Rolf didn’t even want to read what we’d done so far, saying he didn’t want to interfere with our process” (de Heer, “Production Notes”). In 2002, aged 36, Rose died and Stahl reports in her obituary an excerpt from her diary: People see me as a person who has to be controlled. But let me tell you something, people. I am not! And I am going to make something real special of my life! I am going to go out there and grab life with both hands!!! I am going to make the most sexy and honest film about disability that has ever been made!! (Stahl, “Standing Room Only”) This proclamation of her ability and ambition in screen-writing is indicative of Rose’s desire to do. In a guest lecture Rose gave further insights into the active intent in writing Dance Me to My Song: I wanted to create a screenplay, but not just another soppy disability film, I wanted to make a hot sexy film, which showed the real world … The message I wanted to convey to an audience was “As people with disabilities, we have the same feelings and desires as others”. (Rose, “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation”) Rose went on to explain her strategy for winning over director de Heer: “Rolf was not sure about committing to the movie; I had to pester him really. I decided to invite him to my birthday party. It took a few drinks, but I got him to agree to be the director” (ibid) and with this revelation of her tactical approach her film-making agency is further evidenced. Rose’s proactive innovation is not just evident in her successfully approaching de Heer. Her screenplay serves as a radical exception to films featuring disabled persons, which, according to Paul Darke in 1998, typically involve the disabled protagonist struggling to triumph over the limitations imposed by their disability in their ‘admirable’ attempts to normalize. Such normality dramas are usually characterized by two generic themes: first, that the state of abnormality is nothing other than tragic because of its medical implications; and, second, that the struggle for normality, or some semblance of it in normalization – as represented in the film by the other characters – is unquestionably right owing to its axiomatic supremacy. (187) Darke argues that the so-called normality drama is “unambiguously a negation of ascribing any real social or individual value to the impaired or abnormal” (196), and that such dramas function to reinforce the able-bodied audience’s self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other. Able-bodied characters are typically portrayed positively in the normality drama: “A normality as represented in the decency and support of those characters who exist around, and for, the impaired central character. Thus many of the disabled characters in such narratives are bitter, frustrated and unfulfilled and either antisocial or asocial” (193). Darke then identifies The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) and Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989) as archetypal films of this genre. Even in films in which seemingly positive images of the disabled are featured, the protagonist is still to be regarded as the abnormal Other, because in comparison to the other characters within that narrative the impaired character is still a comparatively second-class citizen in the world of the film. My Left Foot is, as always, a prime example: Christy Brown may well be a writer, relatively wealthy and happy, but he is not seen as sexual in any way (194). However, Dance Me to My Song defies such generic restrictions: Julia’s temperament is upbeat and cheerful and her disability, rather than appearing tragic, is made to look healthy, not “second class”, in comparison with her physically attractive, able-bodied but deeply unhappy carer, Madelaine (Joey Kennedy). Within the first few minutes of the film we see Madelaine dissatisfied as she stands, inspecting her healthy, toned and naked body in the bathroom mirror, contrasted with vision of Julia’s twisted form, prostrate, pale and naked on the bed. Yet, in due course, it is the able-bodied girl who is shown to be insecure and lacking in character. Madelaine steals Julia’s money and calls her “spastic”. Foul-mouthed and short-tempered, Madelaine perversely positions Julia in her wheelchair to force her to watch as she has perfunctory sex with her latest boyfriend. Madelaine even masquerades as Julia, commandeering her voice synthesizer to give a fraudulently positive account of her on-the-job performance to the employment agency she works for. Madelaine’s “axiomatic supremacy” is thoroughly undermined and in the most striking contrast to the typical normality drama, Julia is unashamedly sexual: she is no Christy Brown. The affective juxtaposition of these two different personalities stems from the internal nature of Madelaine’s problems compared to the external nature of Julia’s problems. Madelaine has an emotional disability rather than a physical disability and several scenes in the film show her reduced to helpless tears. Then one day when Madelaine has left her to her own devices, Julia defiantly wheels herself outside and bumps into - almost literally - handsome, able-bodied Eddie (John Brumpton). Cheerfully determined, Julia wins him over and a lasting friendship is formed. Having seen the joy that sex brings to Madelaine, Julia also wants carnal fulfilment so she telephones Eddie and arranges a date. When Eddie arrives, he reads the text on her voice machine’s screen containing the title line to the film ‘Dance me to my song’ and they share a tender moment. Eddie’s gentleness as he dances Julia to her song (“Kizugu” written by Bernard Huber and John Laidler, as performed by Okapi Guitars) is simultaneously contrasted with the near-date-rapes Madelaine endures in her casual relationships. The conflict between Madeline and Julia is such that it prompts Albert Moran and Errol Vieth to categorize the film as “women’s melodrama”: Dance Me to My Song clearly belongs to the genre of the romance. However, it is also important to recognize it under the mantle of the women’s melodrama … because it has to do with a woman’s feelings and suffering, not so much because of the flow of circumstance but rather because of the wickedness and malevolence of another woman who is her enemy and rival. (198-9) Melodrama is a genre that frequently resorts to depicting disability in which a person condemned by society as disabled struggles to succeed in love: some prime examples include An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957) involving a paraplegic woman, and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) in which a strong-spirited but mute woman achieves love. The more conventional Hollywood romances typically involve attractive, able-bodied characters. In Dance Me to My Song the melodramatic conflict between the two remarkably different women at first seems dominated by Madelaine, who states: “I know I’m good looking, good in bed ... better off than you, you poor thing” in a stream-of-consciousness delivery in which Julia is constructed as listener rather than converser. Julia is further reduced to the status of sub-human as Madelaine says: “I wish you could eat like a normal person instead of a bloody animal” and her erstwhile boyfriend Trevor says: “She looks like a fuckin’ insect.” Even the benevolent Eddie says: “I don’t like leaving you alone but I guess you’re used to it.” To this the defiant Julia replies; “Please don’t talk about me in front of me like I’m an animal or not there at all.” Eddie is suitably chastised and when he treats her to an over-priced ice-cream the shop assistant says “Poor little thing … She’ll enjoy this, won’t she?” Julia smiles, types the words “Fuck me!”, and promptly drops the ice-cream on the floor. Eddie laughs supportively. “I’ll just get her another one,” says the flustered shop assistant, “and then get her out of here, please!” With striking eloquence, Julia wheels herself out of the shop, her voice machine announcing “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me”, as she departs exultantly. With this bold statement of independence and defiance in the face of patronising condescension, the audience sees Rose’s burgeoning strength of character and agency reflected in the onscreen character she has created. Dance Me to My Song and the films mentioned above are, however, rare exceptions in the many that dare represent disability on the screen at all, compliant as the majority are with Darke’s expectations of the normality drama. Significantly, the usual medical-model nexus in many normality films is ignored in Rose’s screenplay: no medication, hospitals or white laboratory coats are to be seen in Julia’s world. Finally, as I have described elsewhere, Julia is shown joyfully dancing in her wheelchair with Eddie while Madelaine proves her physical inferiority with a ‘dance’ of frustration around her broken-down car (see Starrs, "Dance"). In Rose’s authorial vision, audience’s expectations of yet another film of the normality drama genre are subverted as the disabled protagonist proves superior to her ‘normal’ adversary in their melodramatic rivalry for the sexual favours of an able-bodied love-interest. Rolf de Heer as Auteur De Heer does not like to dwell on the topic of auteurism: in an interview in 2007 he somewhat impatiently states: I don’t go in much for that sort of analysis that in the end is terminology. … Look, I write the damn things, and direct them, and I don’t completely produce them anymore – there are other people. If that makes me an auteur in other people’s terminologies, then fine. (Starrs, "Sounds" 20) De Heer has been described as a “remarkably non-egotistical filmmaker” (Davis “Working together”) which is possibly why he handed ownership of this film to Rose. Of the writer/actor who plied him with drink so he would agree to back her script, de Heer states: It is impossible to overstate the courage of the performance that you see on the screen. … Heather somehow found the means to respond on cue, to maintain the concentration, to move in the desired direction, all the myriad of acting fundamentals that we take for granted as normal things to do in our normal lives. (“Production NHotes”) De Heer’s willingness to shift authorship from director to writer/actor is representative of this film’s groundbreaking promotion of the potential for agency within disability. Rather than being passive and suffering, Rose is able to ‘do.’ As the lead actor she is central to the narrative. As the principle writer she is central to the film’s production. And she does both. But in conflict with this auteurial intent is the temptation to describe Dance Me to My Song as an autobiographical documentary, since it is Rose herself, with her unique and obvious physical handicap, playing the film’s heroine, Julia. In interview, however, De Heer apparently disagrees with this interpretation: Rolf de Heer is quick to point out, though, that the film is not a biography.“Not at all; only in the sense that writers use material from their own lives.Madelaine is merely the collection of the worst qualities of the worst carers Heather’s ever had.” Dance Me to My Song could be seen as a dramatised documentary, since it is Rose herself playing Julia, and her physical or surface life is so intense and she is so obviously handicapped. While he understands that response, de Heer draws a comparison with the first films that used black actors instead of white actors in blackface. “I don’t know how it felt emotionally to an audience, I wasn’t there, but I think that is the equivalent”. (Urban) An example of an actor wearing “black-face” to portray a cerebral palsy victim might well be Gus Trikonis’s 1980 film Touched By Love. In this, the disabled girl is unconvincingly played by the pretty, able-bodied actress Diane Lane. The true nature of the character’s disability is hidden and cosmeticized to Hollywood expectations. Compared to that inauthentic film, Rose’s screenwriting and performance in Dance Me to My Song is a self-penned fiction couched in unmediated reality and certainly warrants authorial recognition. Despite his unselfish credit-giving, de Heer’s direction of this remarkable film is nevertheless detectable. His auteur signature is especially evident in his technological employment of sound as I have argued elsewhere (see Starrs, "Awoval"). The first distinctly de Heer influence is the use of a binaural recording device - similar to that used in Bad Boy Bubby (1993) - to convey to the audience the laboured nature of Julia’s breathing and to subjectively align the audience with her point of view. This apparatus provides a disturbing sound bed that is part wheezing, part grunting. There is no escaping Julia’s physically unusual life, from her reliance on others for food, toilet and showering, to the half-strangled sounds emanating from her ineffectual larynx. But de Heer insists that Julia does speak, like Stephen Hawkings, via her Epson RealVoice computerized voice synthesizer, and thus Julia manages to retain her dignity. De Heer has her play this machine like a musical instrument, its neatly modulated feminine tones immediately prompting empathy. Rose Capp notes de Heer’s preoccupation with finding a voice for those minority groups within the population who struggle to be heard, stating: de Heer has been equally consistent in exploring the communicative difficulties underpinning troubled relationships. From the mute young protagonist of The Quiet Room to the aphasic heroine of Dance Me to My Song, De Heer’s films are frequently preoccupied with the profound inadequacy or outright failure of language as a means of communication (21). Certainly, the importance to Julia of her only means of communication, her voice synthesizer, is stressed by de Heer throughout the film. Everybody around her has, to varying degrees, problems in hearing correctly or understanding both what and how Julia communicates with her alien mode of conversing, and she is frequently asked to repeat herself. Even the well-meaning Eddie says: “I don’t know what the machine is trying to say”. But it is ultimately via her voice synthesizer that Julia expresses her indomitable character. When first she meets Eddie, she types: “Please put my voice machine on my chair, STUPID.” She proudly declares ownership of a condom found in the bathroom with “It’s mine!” The callous Madelaine soon realizes Julia’s strength is in her voice machine and withholds access to the device as punishment for if she takes it away then Julia is less demanding for the self-centred carer. Indeed, the film which starts off portraying the physical superiority of Madelaine soon shows us that the carer’s life, for all her able-bodied, free-love ways, is far more miserable than Julia’s. As de Heer has done in many of his other films, a voice has been given to those who might otherwise not be heard through significant decision making in direction. In Rose’s case, this is achieved most obviously via her electric voice synthesizer. I have also suggested elsewhere (see Starrs, "Dance") that de Heer has helped find a second voice for Rose via the language of dance, and in doing so has expanded the audience’s understandings of quality of life for the disabled, as per Mike Oliver’s social model of disability, rather than the more usual medical model of disability. Empowered by her act of courage with Eddie, Julia sacks her uncaring ‘carer’ and the film ends optimistically with Julia and her new man dancing on the front porch. By picturing the couple in long shot and from above, Julia’s joyous dance of triumph is depicted as ordinary, normal and not deserving of close examination. This happy ending is intercut with a shot of Madeline and her broken down car, performing her own frustrated dance and this further emphasizes that she was unable to ‘dance’ (i.e. communicate and compete) with Julia. The disabled performer such as Rose, whether deliberately appropriating a role or passively accepting it, usually struggles to placate two contrasting realities: (s)he is at once invisible in the public world of interhuman relations and simultaneously hyper-visible due to physical Otherness and subsequent instantaneous typecasting. But by the end of Dance Me to My Song, Rose and de Heer have subverted this notion of the disabled performer grappling with the dual roles of invisible victim and hyper-visible victim by depicting Julia as socially and physically adept. She ‘wins the guy’ and dances her victory as de Heer’s inspirational camera looks down at her success like an omniscient and pleased god. Film academic Vivian Sobchack writes of the phenomenology of dance choreography for the disabled and her own experience of waltzing with the maker of her prosthetic leg, Steve, with the comment: “for the moment I did displace focus on my bodily immanence to the transcendent ensemble of our movement and I really began to waltz” (65). It is easy to imagine Rose’s own, similar feeling of bodily transcendence in the closing shot of Dance Me to My Song as she shows she can ‘dance’ better than her able-bodied rival, content as she is with her self-identity. Conclusion: Validation of the Auteurial OtherRolf de Heer was a well-known film-maker by the time he directed Dance Me to My Song. His films Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and The Quiet Room (1996) had both screened at the Cannes International Film Festival. He was rapidly developing a reputation for non-mainstream representations of marginalised, subaltern populations, a cinematic trajectory that was to be further consolidated by later films privileging the voice of Indigenous Peoples in The Tracker (2002) and Ten Canoes (2006), the latter winning the Special Jury prize at Cannes. His films often feature unlikely protagonists or as Liz Ferrier writes, are “characterised by vulnerable bodies … feminised … none of whom embody hegemonic masculinity” (65): they are the opposite of Hollywood’s hyper-masculine, hard-bodied, controlling heroes. With a nascent politically correct worldview proving popular, de Heer may have considered the assigning of authorship to Rose a marketable idea, her being representative of a marginalized group, which as Andy Medhurst might argue, may be more politically justifiable, as it apparently is with films of gay authorship. However, it must be emphasized that there is no evidence that de Heer’s reticence about claiming authorship of Dance Me to My Song is motivated by pecuniary interests, nor does he seem to have been trying to distance himself from the project through embarrassment or dissatisfaction with the film or its relatively unknown writer/actor. Rather, he seems to be giving credit for authorship where credit is due, for as a result of Rose’s tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success. Firstly, it is a rare exception to the disability film genre defined by Paul Darke as the “normality drama” because in the film’s diegesis, Julia is shown triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied rival in love as well: she ‘dances’ better than the ‘normal’ Madelaine. Secondly, in her gaining possession of the primary credits, and the mantle of the film’s primary author, Rose is shown triumphing over other aspiring able-bodied film-makers in the notoriously competitive film-making industry. Despite being an unpublished and unknown author, the label “A film by Heather Rose” is, I believe, a deserved coup for the woman who set out to make “the most sexy and honest film about disability ever made”. As with de Heer’s other films in which marginalised peoples are given voice, he demonstrates a desire not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower him/her. He both acknowledges their authorial voices and credits them as essential beings, and in enabling such subaltern populations to be heard, willingly cedes his privileged position as a successful, white, male, able-bodied film-maker. In the credits of this film he seems to be saying ‘I may be an auteur, but Heather Rose is a no less able auteur’. References Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. Capp, Rose. “Alexandra and the de Heer Project.” RealTime + Onscreen 56 (Aug.-Sep. 2003): 21. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue56/7153›. Caughie, John. “Introduction”. Theories of Authorship. Ed. John Caughie. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 9-16. Darke, Paul. “Cinematic Representations of Disability.” The Disability Reader. Ed. Tom Shakespeare. London and New York: Cassell, 1988. 181-198. Davis, Therese. “Working Together: Two Cultures, One Film, Many Canoes.” Senses of Cinema 2006. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/41/ten-canoes.html›. De Heer, Rolf. “Production Notes.” Vertigo Productions. Undated. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film_id=10&display=notes›. Ferrier, Liz. “Vulnerable Bodies: Creative Disabilities in Contemporary Australian Film.” Australian Cinema in the 1990s. Ed. Ian Craven. London and Portland: Frank Cass and Co., 2001. 57-78. Medhurst, Andy. “That Special Thrill: Brief Encounter, Homosexuality and Authorship.” Screen 32.2 (1991): 197-208. Moran, Albert, and Errol Veith. Film in Australia: An Introduction. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2006. Oliver, Mike. Social Work with Disabled People. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1983. Rose Slattery, Heather. “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation.” Words+ n.d. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.words-plus.com/website/stories/isaac2000.htm›. Sobchack, Vivian. “‘Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs’ (A Phenomenological Meditation in Movements).” Topoi 24.1 (2005): 55-66. Stahl, Frederick. “Standing Room Only for a Thunderbolt in a Wheelchair,” Sydney Morning Herald 31 Oct. 2002. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/30/1035683471529.html›. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Sounds of Silence: An Interview with Rolf de Heer.” Metro 152 (2007): 18-21. ———. “An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2003).” Metro 156 (2008): 148-153. ———. “Dance Me to My Song (Rolf de Heer 1997): The Story of a Disabled Dancer.” Proceedings Scopic Bodies Dance Studies Research Seminar Series 2007. Ed. Mark Harvey. University of Auckland, 2008 (in press). Urban, Andrew L. “Dance Me to My Song, Rolf de Heer, Australia.” Film Festivals 1988. 6 June 2008. ‹http://www.filmfestivals.com/cannes98/selofus9.htm›.

Unlike some current discourse on automediality, this essay eschews most of the analysis concerning the adoption or modification of avatars to deliberately enhance, extend or distort the self. Rather than the automedial enabling of alternative, virtual selves modified by playful, confronting or disarming avatars we concentrate instead on emerging efforts to present the self in hyper-realist, interactive modes. In doing so we ask, what is the relationship between traumatic forms of automediation and the affective impact on and response of the audience? We argue that, while on the one hand there are promising avenues for valuable individual and social engagements with traumatic forms of automediation, there is an overwhelming predominance of suffering as a theme in such virtual depictions, comingled with uncritically asserted promises of empathy, which are problematic as the technology assumes greater mainstream uptake.As Smith and Watson note, embodiment is always a “translation” where the body is “dematerialized” in virtual representation (“Virtually” 78). Past scholarship has analysed the capacity of immersive realms, such as Second Life or online games, to highlight how users can modify their avatars in often spectacular, non-human forms. Critics of this mode of automediality note that users can adopt virtually any persona they like (racial, religious, gendered and sexual, human, animal or hybrid, and of any age), behaving as “identity tourists” while occupying virtual space or inhabiting online communities (Nakamura). Furthermore, recent work by Jaron Lanier, a key figure from the 1980s period of early Virtual Reality (VR) technology, has also explored so-called “homuncular flexibility” which describes the capacity for humans to seemingly adapt automatically to the control mechanisms of an avatar with multiple legs, other non-human appendages, or for two users to work in tandem to control a single avatar (Won et. al.). But this article is concerned less with these single or multi-player online environments and the associated concerns over modifying interactive identities. We are principally interested in other automedial modes where the “auto” of autobiography is automated via Artificial Intelligences (AIs) to convincingly mimic human discourse as narrated life-histories.We draw from case studies promoted by the 2017 season of ABC television’s flagship science program, Catalyst, which opened with semi-regular host and biological engineer Dr Jordan Nguyen, proclaiming in earnest, almost religious fervour: “I want to do something that has long been a dream. I want to create a copy of a human. An avatar. And it will have a life of its own in virtual reality.” As the camera followed Nguyen’s rapid pacing across real space he extolled: “Virtual reality, virtual human, they push the limits of the imagination and help us explore the impossible […] I want to create a virtual copy of a person. A digital addition to the family, using technology we have now.”The troubling implications of such rhetoric were stark and the next third of the program did little to allay such techno-scientific misgivings. Directed and produced by David Symonds, with Nguyen credited as co-developer and presenter, the episode “Meet the Avatars” immediately introduced scenarios where “volunteers” entered a pop-up inner city virtual lab, to experience VR for the first time. The volunteers were shown on screen subjected to a range of experimental VR environments designed to elicit fear and/or adverse and disorienting responses such as vertigo, while the presenter and researchers from Sydney University constantly smirked and laughed at their participants’ discomfort. We can only wonder what the ethics process was for both the ABC and university researchers involved in these broadcast experiments. There is little doubt that the participant/s experienced discomfort, if not distress, and that was televised to a national audience. Presenter Nguyen was also shown misleading volunteers on their way to the VR lab, when one asked “You’re not going to chuck us out of a virtual plane are you?” to which Nguyen replied “I don't know what we’re going to do yet,” when it was next shown that they immediately underwent pre-programmed VR exposure scenarios, including a fear of falling exercise from atop a city skyscraper.The sweat-inducing and heart rate-racing exposures to virtual plank walks high above a cityscape, or seeing subjects haptically viewing spiders crawl across their outstretched virtual hands, all elicited predictable responses, showcased as carnivalesque entertainment for the viewing audience. As we will see, this kind of trivialising of a virtual environment’s capacity for immersion belies the serious use of the technology in a range of treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (see Rizzo and Koenig; Rothbaum, Rizzo and Difede).Figure 1: Nguyen and researchers enjoying themselves as their volunteers undergo VR exposure Defining AutomedialityIn their pioneering 2008 work, Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien, Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser coined the term “automediality” to problematise the production, application and distribution of autobiographic modes across various media and genres—from literary texts to audiovisual media and from traditional expression to inter/transmedia and remediated formats. The concept of automediality was deployed to counter the conventional critical exclusion of analysis of the materiality/technology used for an autobiographical purpose (Gernalzick). Dünne and Moser proffered a concept of automediality that rejects the binary division of (a) self-expression determining the mediated form or (b) (self)subjectivity being solely produced through the mediating technology. Hence, automediality has been traditionally applied to literary constructs such as autobiography and life-writing, but is now expanding into the digital domain and other “paratextual sites” (Maguire).As Nadja Gernalzick suggests, automediality should “encourage and demand not only a systematics and taxonomy of the constitution of the self in respectively genre-specific ways, but particularly also in medium-specific ways” (227). Emma Maguire has offered a succinct working definition that builds on this requirement to signal the automedial universally, noting it operates asa way of studying auto/biographical texts (of a variety of forms) that take into account how the effects of media shape the kinds of selves that can be represented, and which understands the self not as a preexisting subject that might be distilled into story form but as an entity that is brought into being through the processes of mediation.Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point to automediality as a methodology, and in doing so emphasize how the telling or mediation of a life actually shapes the kind of story that can be told autobiographically. They state “media cannot simply be conceptualized as ‘tools’ for presenting a preexisting, essential self […] Media technologies do not just transparently present the self. They constitute and expand it” (Smith and Watson “Virtually Me” 77).This distinction is vital for understanding how automediality might be applied to self-expression in virtual domains, including the holographic avatar dreams of Nguyen throughout Catalyst. Although addressing this distinction in relation to online websites, following P. David Marshall’s description of “the proliferation of the public self”, Maguire notes:The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies […] has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities.For Maguire, these automedial works operate textually “to construct the authorial self or persona”.An extension to this digital, authorial construction is apparent in the exponential uptake of screen mediated prosumer generated content, whether online or theatrical (Miller). According to Gernalzick, unlike fictional drama films, screen autobiographies more directly enable “experiential temporalities”. Based on Mary Anne Doane’s promotion of the “indexicality” of film/screen representations to connote the real, Gernalzick suggests that despite semiotic theories of the index problematising realism as an index as representation, the film medium is still commonly comprehended as the “imprint of time itself”:Film and the spectator of film are said to be in a continuous present. Because the viewer is aware, however, that the images experienced in or even as presence have been made in the past, the temporality of the so-called filmic present is always ambiguous” (230).When expressed as indexical, automedial works, the intrinsic audio-visual capacities of film and video (as media) far surpass the temporal limitations of print and writing (Gernalzick, 228). One extreme example can be found in an emergent trend of “performance crime” murder and torture videos live-streamed or broadcast after the fact using mobile phone cameras and FaceBook (Bender). In essence, the political economy of the automedial ecology is important to understand in the overall context of self expression and the governance of content exhibition, access, distribution and—where relevant—interaction.So what are the implications for automedial works that employ virtual interfaces and how does this evolving medium inform both the expressive autobiographical mode and audiences subjectivities?Case StudyThe Catalyst program described above strove to shed new light on the potential for emerging technology to capture and create virtual avatars from living participants who (self-)generate autobiographical narratives interactively. Once past the initial gee-wiz journalistic evangelism of VR, the episode turned towards host Nguyen’s stated goal—using contemporary technology to create an autonomous virtual human clone. Nguyen laments that if he could create only one such avatar, his primary choice would be that of his grandfather who died when Nguyen was two years old—a desire rendered impossible. The awkward humour of the plank walk scenario sequence soon gives way as the enthusiastic Nguyen is surprised by his family’s discomfort with the idea of digitally recreating his grandfather.Nguyen next visits a Southern California digital media lab to experience the process by which 3D virtual human avatars are created. Inside a domed array of lights and cameras, in less than one second a life-size 3D avatar is recorded via 6,000 LEDs illuminating his face in 20 different combinations, with eight cameras capturing the exposures from multiple angles, all in ultra high definition. Called the Light Stage (Debevec), it is the same technology used to create a life size, virtual holocaust survivor, Pinchas Gutter (Ziv).We see Nguyen encountering a life-size, high-resolution 2D screen version of Gutter’s avatar. Standing before a microphone, Nguyen asks a series of questions about Gutter’s wartime experiences and life in the concentration camps. The responses are naturalistic and authentic, as are the pauses between questions. The high definition 4K screen is photo-realist but much more convincing in-situ (as an artifact of the Catalyst video camera recording, in some close-ups horizontal lines of transmission appear). According to the project’s curator, David Traum, the real Pinchas Gutter was recorded in 3D as a virtual holograph. He spent 25 hours providing 1,600 responses to a broad range of questions that the curator maintained covered “a lot of what people want to say” (Catalyst).Figure 2: The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan presented an installation of New Dimensions in Testimony, featuring Pinchas Gutter and Eva SchlossIt is here that the intersection between VR and auto/biography hybridise in complex and potentially difficult ways. It is where the concept of automediality may offer insight into this rapidly emerging phenomenon of creating interactive, hyperreal versions of our selves using VR. These hyperreal VR personae can be questioned and respond in real-time, where interrogators interact either as casual conversers or determined interrogators.The impact on visitors is sobering and palpable. As Nguyen relates at the end of his session, “I just want to give him a hug”. The demonstrable capacity for this avatar to engender a high degree of empathy from its automedial testimony is clear, although as we indicate below, it could simply indicate increased levels of emotion.Regardless, an ongoing concern amongst witnesses, scholars and cultural curators of memorials and museums dedicated to preserving the history of mass violence, and its associated trauma, is that once the lived experience and testimony of survivors passes with that generation the impact of the testimony diminishes (Broderick). New media modes of preserving and promulgating such knowledge in perpetuity are certainly worthy of embracing. As Stephen Smith, the executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation suggests, the technology could extendto people who have survived cancer or catastrophic hurricanes […] from the experiences of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder or survivors of sexual abuse, to those of presidents or great teachers. Imagine if a slave could have told her story to her grandchildren? (Ziv)Yet questions remain as to the veracity of these recorded personae. The avatars are created according to a specific agenda and the autobiographical content controlled for explicit editorial purposes. It is unclear what and why material has been excluded. If, for example, during the recorded questioning, the virtual holocaust survivor became mute at recollecting a traumatic memory, cried or sobbed uncontrollably—all natural, understandable and authentic responses given the nature of the testimony—should these genuine and spontaneous emotions be included along with various behavioural ticks such as scratching, shifting about in the seat and other naturalistic movements, to engender a more profound realism?The generation of the photorealist, mimetic avatar—remaining as an interactive persona long after the corporeal, authorial being is gone—reinforces Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, where a clone exists devoid of its original entity and unable to challenge its automedial discourse. And what if some unscrupulous hacker managed to corrupt and subvert Gutter’s AI so that it responded antithetically to its purpose, by denying the holocaust ever happened? The ethical dilemmas of such a paradigm were explored in the dystopian 2013 film, The Congress, where Robyn Wright plays herself (and her avatar), as an out of work actor who sells off the rights to her digital self. A movie studio exploits her screen persona in perpetuity, enabling audiences to “become” and inhabit her avatar in virtual space while she is limited in the real world from undertaking certain actions due to copyright infringement. The inability of Wright to control her mimetic avatar’s discourse or action means the assumed automedial agency of her virtual self as an immortal, interactive being remains ontologically perplexing.Figure 3: Robyn Wright undergoing a full body photogrammetry to create her VR avatar in The Congress (2013)The various virtual exposures/experiences paraded throughout Catalyst’s “Meet the Avatars” paradoxically recorded and broadcast a range of troubling emotional responses to such immersion. Many participant responses suggest great caution and sensitivity be undertaken before plunging headlong into the new gold rush mentality of virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI affordances. Catalyst depicted their program subjects often responding in discomfort and distress, with some visibly overwhelmed by their encounters and left crying. There is some irony that presenter Ngyuen was himself relying on the conventions of 2D linear television journalism throughout, adopting face-to-camera address in (unconscious) automedial style to excitedly promote the assumed socio-cultural boon such automedial VR avatars will generate.Challenging AuthenticityThere are numerous ethical considerations surrounding the potential for AIs to expand beyond automedial (self-)expression towards photorealist avatars interacting outside of their pre-recorded content. When such systems evolve it may be neigh impossible to discern on screen whether the person you are conversing with is authentic or an indistinguishable, virtual doppelganger. In the future, a variant on the Turning Test may be needed to challenge and identify such hyperreal simulacra. We may be witnessing the precursor to such a dilemma playing out in the arena of audio-only podcasts, with some public intellectuals such as Sam Harris already discussing the legal and ethical problems from technology that can create audio from typed text that convincingly replicate the actual voice of a person by sampling approximately 30 minutes of their original speech (Harris). Such audio manipulation technology will soon be available to anybody with the motivation and relatively minor level of technological ability in order to assume an identity and masquerade as automediated dialogue. However, for the moment, the ability to convincingly alter a real-time computer generated video image of a person remains at the level of scientific innovation.Also of significance is the extent to which the audience reactions to such automediated expressions are indeed empathetic or simply part of the broader range of affective responses that also include direct sympathy as well as emotions such as admiration, surprise, pity, disgust and contempt (see Plantinga). There remains much rhetorical hype surrounding VR as the “ultimate empathy machine” (Milk). Yet the current use of the term “empathy” in VR, AI and automedial forms of communication seems to be principally focused on the capacity for the user-viewer to ameliorate negatively perceived emotions and experiences, whether traumatic or phobic.When considering comments about authenticity here, it is important to be aware of the occasional slippage of technological terminology into the mainstream. For example, the psychological literature does emphasise that patients respond strongly to virtual scenarios, events, and details that appear to be “authentic” (Pertaub, Slater, and Barker). Authentic in this instance implies a resemblance to a corresponding scenario/activity in the real world. This is not simply another word for photorealism, but rather it describes for instance the experimental design of one study in which virtual (AI) audience members in a virtual seminar room designed to treat public speaking anxiety were designed to exhibit “random autonomous behaviours in real-time, such as twitches, blinks, and nods, designed to encourage the illusion of life” (Kwon, Powell and Chalmers 980). The virtual humans in this study are regarded as having greater authenticity than an earlier project on social anxiety (North, North, and Coble) which did not have much visual complexity but did incorporate researcher-triggered audio clips of audience members “laughing, making comments, encouraging the speaker to speak louder or more clearly” (Kwon, Powell, and Chalmers 980). The small movements, randomly cued rather than according to a recognisable pattern, are described by the researchers as creating a sense of authenticity in the VR environment as they seem to correspond to the sorts of random minor movements that actual human audiences in a seminar can be expected to make.Nonetheless, nobody should regard an interaction with these AIs, or the avatar of Gutter, as in any way an encounter with a real person. Rather, the characteristics above function to create a disarming effect and enable the real person-viewer to willingly suspend their disbelief and enter into a pseudo-relationship with the AI; not as if it is an actual relationship, but as if it is a simulation of an actual relationship (USC). Lucy Suchman and colleagues invoke these ideas in an analysis of a YouTube video of some apparently humiliating human interactions with the MIT created AI-robot Mertz. Their analysis contends that, while it may appear on first glance that the humans’ mocking exchange with Mertz are mean-spirited, there is clearly a playfulness and willingness to engage with a form of AI that is essentially continuous with “long-standing assumptions about communication as information processing, and in the robot’s performance evidence for the limits to the mechanical reproduction of interaction as we know it through computational processes” (Suchman, Roberts, and Hird).Thus, it will be important for future work in the area of automediated testimony to consider the extent to which audiences are willing to suspend disbelief and treat the recounted traumatic experience with appropriate gravitas. These questions deserve attention, and not the kind of hype displayed by the current iteration of techno-evangelism. Indeed, some of this resurgent hype has come under scrutiny. From the perspective of VR-based tourism, Janna Thompson has recently argued that “it will never be a substitute for encounters with the real thing” (Thompson). Alyssa K. Loh, for instance, also argues that many of the negatively themed virtual experiences—such as those that drop the viewer into a scene of domestic violence or the location of a terrorist bomb attack—function not to put you in the position of the actual victim but in the position of the general category of domestic violence victim, or bomb attack victim, thus “deindividuating trauma” (Loh).Future work in this area should consider actual audience responses and rely upon mixed-methods research approaches to audience analysis. In an era of alt.truth and Cambridge Analytics personality profiling from social media interaction, automediated communication in the virtual guise of AIs demands further study.ReferencesAnon. “New Dimensions in Testimony.” Museum of Jewish Heritage. 15 Dec. 2017. 19 Apr. 2018 <http://mjhnyc.org/exhibitions/new-dimensions-in-testimony/>.Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Meet The Avatars.” Catalyst, 15 Aug. 2017.Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 166-184.Bender, Stuart Marshall. Legacies of the Degraded Image in Violent Digital Media. 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"Effectiveness of Virtual Environment Desensitization in the Treatment of Agoraphobia." International Journal of Virtual Reality 1.2 (1995): 25-34.Pertaub, David-Paul, Mel Slater, and Chris Barker. “An Experiment on Public Speaking Anxiety in Response to Three Different Types of Virtual Audience.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 11.1 (2002): 68-78.Plantinga, Carl. "Emotion and Affect." The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingstone and Carl Plantinga. New York: Routledge, 2009. 86-96.Rizzo, A.A., and Sebastian Koenig. “Is Clinical Virtual Reality Ready for Primetime?” Neuropsychology 31.8 (2017): 877-99.Rothbaum, Barbara O., Albert “Skip” Rizzo, and JoAnne Difede. "Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1208.1 (2010): 126-32.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.———. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 70-95.Suchman, Lucy, Celia Roberts, and Myra J. Hird. "Subject Objects." Feminist Theory 12.2 (2011): 119-45.Thompson, Janna. "Why Virtual Reality Cannot Match the Real Thing." The Conversation, 14 Mar. 2018. 10 Apr. 2018 <http://theconversation.com/why-virtual-reality-cannot-match-the-real-thing-92035>.USC. "Skip Rizzo on Medical Virtual Reality: USC Global Conference 2014." YouTube, 28 Oct. 2014. 2 Apr. 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFge2XgDa8>.Won, Andrea Stevenson, Jeremy Bailenson, Jimmy Lee, and Jaron Lanier. "Homuncular Flexibility in Virtual Reality." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20.3 (2015): 241-59.Ziv, Stan. “How Technology Is Keeping Holocaust Survivor Stories Alive Forever”. 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In Showtime’s Yellowjackets (2021-present), ‘magic’ (referred to by the characters as “It”) has an overwhelming presence. Supernatural visions, clairvoyance, and occult iconography are laden throughout each episode. However, the audience is often left uncertain if magic is, in fact, ‘real’ or conjured in the imagination of the show’s characters. Yellowjackets follows a women’s high-school soccer team (named the Yellowjackets) who survive a plane crash deep in the North American wilderness. The show explores the team’s struggle for survival and the present adult lives of those who survived. In this article, we draw from Caroline Bainbridge’s understanding of television as a psychical object to investigate the role of magic in Yellowjackets’ exploration of grief and trauma. We provide a close textual reading and an analysis of online fan discourse to explore the ambiguity of magic and its capacity to generate meaning. We argue that it is precisely through the ambiguity surrounding the ‘realness’ of magic that Yellowjackets can effectively explore grief, trauma, and empathy. Ultimately, we contend that the ambiguity of magic in Yellowjackets helps viewers empathise with the trauma and grief experienced by the characters. The Ambiguity of Magic in Yellowjackets Magic has often been seen by scholars as an effective artistic tool to explore trauma and grief narratives (Bowers). As Maggie Ann Bowers puts it, magic helps create a space where the “unrepresentable can be expressed” (77). Scholarship surrounding the literary genre of magical realism offers a particularly useful exploration of exactly how magic can be an effective avenue to explore such themes (Arva; Abdulla and Abu). Beatrice Chanady defines magical realism as the amalgamation of realist and supernatural/magical elements. In her understanding of this genre, both realism and magic are “equally autonomous and coherent” (18). In a similar vein, Wendy Faris observes that the narratives of magical realism “merge two different realms”, and as a result the reader may “experience some unsettling doubts in the effort to reconcile two contradictory understandings of events” (101). Indeed, it is the merging of these two worlds that allows for the symbolic exploration of trauma narratives. In the case of Yellowjackets, these elements of magical realism certainly come into play. As we will explore throughout this article, the tension between realism and the supernatural is precisely what allows Yellowjackets to “say what cannot be said” (Mrack 3). The idea of magic is a constant presence throughout both seasons of Yellowjackets. However, the realness of this magic is always ambiguous and up for debate. Much like The X-Files (1993-2002), the textual features of Yellowjackets can allow for both ‘sceptic’ and ‘believer’ readings of the show that are not expressly affirmed or denied (Goode). Magic is first hinted at in the opening sequence of the pilot episode when an unnamed character (referred to affectionately by fans as “pit girl”) is chased into a crude spike trap. The sequence is laden with occult imagery—there are mysterious eye symbols carved into the trees and the other girls are wearing ritualistic masks made from animal skin and antlers. As the show progresses, the other characters start to openly speculate about the supernatural magic of the wilderness. One of the central characters, Lottie Mathews, starts having ‘visions’ that seemingly align with the strange occurrences of the forest. As she starts to surrender to the call of the wilderness her magic appears to grow stronger. In the season one finale, “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” (S1E9), a bear threatens the Yellowjacket’s camp. Lottie steps forward to face the bear armed with only a small knife. Through seemingly accepting the call of the wilderness, the bear lies down and submits to her without a fight. For many of the other characters, this affirms Lottie’s magic powers, and they anoint her the “Antler Queen”. Of course, these instances of ‘magic’ can just as easily be explained as coincidence. Lottie is shown to have an established history of mental illness and magic is never clearly shown—it is just alluded to an entity that has an invisible presence. The uncertain allusion of magic has a divisive effect on the girls in Yellowjackets. The survivors organise themselves into pseudo-factions depending on their belief in the supernatural powers of the wilderness. Characters in the wider group including Shauna, Natalie, Taissa, and Misty are quick to reveal their scepticism toward Lottie and the existence of magic. To begin with, this group tension is relatively minor—the sceptics find the believers silly and dismiss Lottie as simply being “crazy”. However, group tension becomes more significant as it starts to influence the decision-making of the whole group. After another group member, Javi, goes missing, Travis (Javi’s older brother) and Natalie spend hours each day searching for him in the freezing cold. This search is resource-consuming and dangerous because the pair could easily get lost or succumb to frostbite. Natalie quickly realises the search is futile, as it is extremely unlikely that Javi could have survived on his own. In the episode “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” (S2E1) she is on the verge of convincing Travis to give up when Lottie mentions that she had a vision about Javi and is certain that he is alive, inspiring Travis to continue the search. Frustrated, Natalie confronts Lottie: Natalie: What the fuck was that!? Javi is… Look giving him false hope is just going to make things worse.Lottie: There’s no such thing as false hope. There is just hope.Natalie: Did you read that in a fucking fortune cookie?Lottie: What do you want from me Nat? I said what I felt.Natalie: I want you to say less, Lottie, a lot fucking less! As situations like this become more common, relations between the believer and sceptic factions in Yellowjackets become more fractured. It quickly becomes clear that magic and its ambiguity in the show is a divisive source of conflict. The impact that magic has on the characters in Yellowjackets is seemingly mirrored in fan communities—particularly the r/Yellowjackets subreddit. As outlined by Victor Costello and Barbara Moore, online fandoms have the capacity to transform the private act of viewing into a communal activity that significantly enhances one’s emotional involvement with a text (124). Meaningful exchanges in online discussions empowers fans to “organise en masse as resistors and shapers of commercial television narratives” (Costello and Moore 124). On the r/Yellowjackets subreddit debate about ‘magic’ and whether the supernatural is a real force is a central theme, one poll that received over 800 responses asked users whether there were “supernatural/dark powers lurking, or no? Is it just mass hysteria with the perfect storm of events” (Reddit). There was nearly a complete split in the vote, with 401 users agreeing that there is an ancient, evil magic impacting on the characters and 460 indicating that there is no magic in the show. The lack of consensus in the fandom has led to countless disagreements within posts as users enthusiastically debate the legitimacy of magic. As seen in Figure 1, users on the subreddit can select a ‘flair’ (a tag of text that appears under usernames to give additional context to a post or perspective) to denote their allegiance to “Team Rational” or “Team Supernatural”. Users adopt these flairs to place their opinions and arguments into a particular context of thinking. Intense arguments erupt as a result of the ambiguity surrounding magic, with fans speculating using clues from the text. Will Brooker has suggested that debates can be a source of pleasure in fan communities and are what allows them to “thrive” (113). In the case of r/Yellowjackets, the debate about magic is a form of productive conflict that is very much part of the fun of watching the show (Brooker). It encourages fans to sleuth for specific textual evidence that both supports their position and shapes their interpretation of the Yellowjackets narrative (Costello & Moore 124). Forum identity is heavily connected to the implied supernatural elements of Yellowjackets, and this uncertainty results in factional splits much like the groupings displayed on the show itself. Fig. 1: Available Flairs on r/Yellowjackets subreddit (2023). How the users of r/Yellowjackets interrogate and draw their conclusions about the authenticity of magic in Yellowjackets impacts on their perceptions of the show’s paratextual discourse (Gray). As the show is ambiguous in its messaging to do with the supernatural, users have many different wells of meaning to draw from. These include specific characters they trust (like Lottie and Nat), the communication tools of the text (shots, audio, lighting, mise-en-scène, etc.) and the show's creators. Some users trust the legitimacy of Lottie as a true clairvoyant who “consistently has visions of the future” (Reddit). Others rely more on what the audience has been told about the characters, particularly regarding Lottie’s schizophrenia. One user questions whether they are “the only one who didn't really pick up on occult?” and continued that they had read “everything more as Lotti [sic] slipping into whatever mental illness she has and pulling others into her delusions when nothing supernatural is actually happening. More cult than occult” (Reddit). Many fans on the subreddit implicitly trust the writers’ paratextual discussions about the show. Series creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson frequently comment on and confirm previously ambiguous elements of the show (Chaney). Actors like Christina Ricci (who plays an older Misty on the show) have also debunked audience theories (Weiss). One user argues they “trust” the writers on questions of ambiguity. Statements like “writers have confirmed” become commonplace in these debates, with users citing writers' comments as to why much of the supernatural is merely a figment of the characters’ imagination. Other posters are sceptical of writer discourses, preferring to trust the texts themselves rather than rely on creators who either may not know the answer or who benefit from ambiguity. Whatever and whoever fans believe influences their perception of the show and who to trust, users look to varied show elements as the locus of meaning and truth regarding magic, and whom they choose to believe changes their perspectives and impacts on their engagement with the show and the characters. ‘Who the fuck is Lottie Mathews?’ Magic, Meaning and Empathy Yellowjackets’ textual exploration of grief and trauma is so often mediated through the idea of magic. As Yellowjackets progresses, the girls find themselves in increasingly hopeless situations. Characters die, freezing weather confines them to a cabin, and their food supply becomes almost completely exhausted. The girls are often forced into impossible situations where they must choose between cannibalism and starvation. These declining conditions are what lead many of the ‘believer’ characters (Van, Mari, and Travis) to their intense faith in Lottie as a human conduit upon which the wilderness has bestowed magic powers. Magic offers some meaning to the brutality and hopelessness of their situation. As things get worse for the girls in season two, ‘sceptic’ characters slowly start to accept the idea of magic. Nat starts receiving blessings from Lottie, Taissa begins attending Lottie’s prayer circle, and Shauna allows prayer during the birth of her child. When faced with dire situations, ‘magic’ offers the characters a way to confront their violent actions and absolve themselves of responsibility for horrible decisions. For example, in the season two episode “It Chooses” (S2E8) the Yellowjackets decide that they must resort to killing and eating one of their teammates in order to survive. The group agrees that, through the magic red queen ritual designed by Lottie, the wilderness will decide who is to be ‘sacrificed’. In this instance, the idea of magic is used by the girls as a psychological tool to distance themselves from the trauma and grief that are inherent to their situation. Throughout Yellowjackets the characters in the present timeline are shown to still suffer from the intense trauma and guilt of their time in the wilderness. For example, Natalie is in and out of rehab programs and Taissa suffers dissociative sleep-walking episodes. Most notable in this regard is the character of adult Lottie. In the opening montage of “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” (S2E1) we see the range of psychological treatments that Lottie has gone through since returning from the wilderness. For the first few episodes of season two, it appears as though adult Lottie has managed to heal and move on from the past. She has set up a ‘commune’ that is seemingly having a positive influence on the lives of new characters like Lisa and (to an extent) former Yellowjackets like Nat and Misty. However, soon after her old Yellowjackets teammates re-enter her life, we see Lottie become increasingly unstable. She is frequently shown to be having intrusive thoughts and violent visions about her time in the wilderness. In this sense, Lottie’s reunification with the other Yellowjackets is a trigger for her repressed grief and trauma. As season two progresses, there are several scenes of Lottie receiving therapy from an unnamed psychiatrist. While these sessions start off relatively innocuous, they gradually become more sinister as Lottie opens up about her time in the wilderness, and finally her feeling of “It” returning: Therapist: Lottie, when does self-repression ever serve us? It could be that this reunion strikes a primal chord with you because in the past when you were with those other women you were free. You were your truest, most authentic self. What is standing in the way of you embracing that again?Lottie: We hurt each other. People died.Therapist: Tell me, is there anything of value in this life that doesn’t come with risk? Or loss? Or consequence?Lottie: Are you saying what I think you’re saying? At this moment the therapist transforms into the antler queen, dressed in a white ceremonial robe that is adorned with bones and symbols of the wilderness and it is revealed that Lottie has been hallucinating the entire session. The scene concludes with the therapist (in the form of the antler queen) telling Lottie: “You tell me, does a hunt that has no violence feed anyone?” From this moment, adult Lottie embraces the magic of the wilderness again. It is the only way she can find meaning in and confront the trauma and grief that she still holds from her time in the wilderness. This ultimately leads to Lottie convincing Shauna, Van, Misty, and Taissa to believe in the supernatural magic of the wilderness again and perform the deadly Red Queen hunting ritual as adults. Giving in to magic allows the characters a chance to escape the trauma and grief and give meaning to their violent actions in the wilderness. In this sense ‘magic’ in Yellowjackets is somewhat of a psychological sleight of hand for characters to artificially separate themselves from their past. Caroline Bainbridge has emphasised how the immersive environments created by a television program allow audiences to work through themes in very personal ways. According to Bainbridge, complex story worlds can be critical tools to help viewers work through complicated issues. In essence, audiences may “internalise drama as an object of the mind but also put it to work in their everyday life” (300). She argues that we should begin to understand how a television show can become a psychical object, available for use in terms of unconscious interrogation of one’s sense of selfhood and one’s immersion in a complex ideological environment. (300) Understanding long-form television as this type of object allows us to recognise a similar potential within Yellowjackets. Leaving magic as an ambiguous feature allows audiences to empathise and engage with the characters’ uncertainty; just as they are left to wonder about the state of reality and magic, so too are the fans on forums. One user explores how the characters’ uncertainty creates discussion and debate within a group of people ‘trapped’ together: what I really like is the way the potential for paranormal is implied in the girls’ situation by these odd coincidences, adding to the group psychosis and shared trauma… they’re scared shitless at the drop of a pin out there, and questioning everything they see (or don’t see), which adds to the anxiety. (Reddit) Much like the characters on the show, the fans have become a group trying to make sense of ‘odd coincidences’ and are ‘questioning’ everything they can see (on the show) and everything they ‘don’t’ see (writer and cast interviews). This ambiguity has led some fans to connect more closely with the character of Lottie, who seems to truly believe her visions are real, with some even “defending” her decisions and perspectives throughout the show (Reddit). Others are also impacted upon by the possibility of magic in the show, but rather react like Shauna and Nat—if there is magic it might not be helpful. One user identifies a kind of meta-experience fans are having thanks to the possibility of magic in the show: when [the writers] were asked if the show believes in the supernatural they kind of paused and started talking about the concept of believing in the supernatural, without saying if it definitely exists within the realm of the show. Which is kind of meta, as we're all discussing whether we believe in the supernatural existing within the show or not. (Reddit) As outlined by Mittell, Andrejevic, and Bainbridge, participation in TV fan communities allows for fundamentally different engagements with a text. In the case of r/Yellowjackets, it “significantly enhances” fans’ emotional involvement with the show (Costello and Moore) and brings new textual experiences to the fore. It is only through fan debate and community participation that fans can experience this ‘meta-narrative’ of magic. In this context, magic in Yellowjackets operates as a tool to connect audiences with the experiences of their characters. The consequences of unknown supernaturality and magical elements cause strife throughout fan communities much like in the community of the cabin in the show. Fans are shown how characters might ostracise, argue, deflect, and rationalise when their reality is questioned, much like the Yellowjackets themselves. Magic, therefore, is effective at encouraging empathy and understanding of perspectives and beliefs in televisual texts. Supernatural horror has often been understood in relation to trauma and grief. According to Becky Millar and Johnny Lee, it is particularly suited to represent these feelings because the disruption of the supernatural “mirror the core experience of disruption that accompanies bereavement” (171). Moreover, magic and the supernatural offer ways in which the experience of grief can “be contained and regulated and in doing so, may offer psychological benefits to the bereaved” (171). In the case of Yellowjackets, such connections are very much amplified by the ‘meta-experience’ facilitated by the show’s fan community. For some, these discussions on magic as reality or fiction are useful to help grieve the perceived loss of quality of the show across season two. Many expressed anger, sadness, dissolution, and disconnection with the show as a whole. Some took this as an opportunity to walk away claiming the “magic” of the show had been lost for them, and that they had “never seen such a dramatic drop in quality in a tv show … I think I’m done” (Reddit). One user turned to wishing for the occult and for magic, citing that “at this point, I'm quite content with this going full supernatural, since it could bring back Laura or Nat which would be impossible otherwise” (Reddit). Magic and supernatural are something that users, much like the characters of the show, have started to wish for as an escape from their experience. In a way, the discussions around the ambiguity of magic offers a sense of control. Sometimes audiences take pleasure in rationalising and making sense of a show for fun. In the case of Yellowjackets, though, we argue that audiences are using the uncertainty of magic to cope with a decline and navigate community and trauma. Some users explain that magic is not real as a way to demonstrate the show is still salvageable, others hope magic is real because that will make it salvageable. Much like the characters in Yellowjackets, some audience members are experiencing and working through a kind of ‘grief’ using the discussion of magic as a space to work through these ideas. References Arva, Eugene. “The Analogical Legacy of Ground Zero: Magical Realism in Post-9/11 Literary and Filmic Trauma Narratives.” The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century. Eds. Richard Perez and Victoria A. Chevalier. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Abdula, Shanid, and Md. Abu. “Heavy Silence and Horrible Grief: Reconstructing the Past and Securing the Future through Magical Realism in Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon.” Ostrava Journal of English Philosophy 12.1 (2020). Andrejevic, Mark. “Watching Television without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans.” Television and New Media 9.1 (2008): 24-46. Bainbridge, Caroline. “Television as Osychical Object: Mad Men and the Value of Psychoanalysis for Television Scholarship.” Critical Studies in Television 14.3 (2019): 289-206. Brooker, Will. Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans. London: Continuum, 2002. Bowers, Maggie Ann. Magic(al) Realism. London: Routledge, 2004. Costello, Victor, and Barbara Moore. “Cultural Outlaws: An Examination of Audience Activity and Online Television Fandom.” Television and New Media 8.2 (2007): 124-143. Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice. Magical Realism and the Fantastic. New York: Garland, 1985. Chaney, Jen. “The Yellowjackets Creators Answer All Our Post-Finale Questions.” Vulture, 16 Jan. 2022. <https://www.vulture.com/article/yellowjackets-season-1-finale-explained-showrunners-interview.html>. Faris, Wendy B. “The Question of the Other: Cultural Critiques of Magical Realism.” Janus Head 5.2 (2002): 101-119. “Friends, Romans, Countrymen.” Yellowjackets. Writ. Ashely Lyle and Bart Nickerson. Dir. Daisy von Scherler Mayer. Showtime, 2023. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts. New York: NYU Press. 2010. Goode, Erich. “Why Was the X-Files So Appealing?” Sceptical Enquirer 4 (2002): 9. “It Chooses.” Yellowjackets. Writ. Sarah Thompson and Liz Phang. Dir. Daisy von Scherler Mayer. Showtime, 2023. Mrak, Anja. "Trauma and Memory in Magical Realism: Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach as Trauma Narrative.” Politics of Memory 3.2 (2013): 1-15. Millar, Becky, and Johnny Lee. “Horror Films and Grief.” Emotion Review 13.3 (2021): 171-182. Mittell, Jason. “Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia.” Transformative Works and Cultures 3.3 (2009): 1-10. “Pilot.” Yellowjackets. Writ. Ashely Lyle and Bart Nickerson. Dir. Karyn Kusama. Showtime, 2021. r/Yellowjackets. Reddit. 30 July 2023 <https://www.reddit.com/r/Yellowjackets/>. “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.” Yellowjackets. Writ. Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, and Katherine Kearns. Dir. Eduardo Sanchez. Showtime, 2021. Wiess, Josh. “Season 2 of Showtime’s Yellowjackets Could Sting Again Sooner than Expected with 2022 Return.” SYFY, 18 Jan. 2022. <https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/yellowjackets-season-2-could-premiere-in-2022>.

This story not for myself … all over Australia story.No matter Aborigine, White-European, secret before,Didn’t like im before White-European…This time White-European must come to Aborigine,Listen Aborigine and understand it.Understand that culture, secret, what dreaming.— Senior Lawman Neidjie, Story about Feeling (78)IntroductionIn Senior Lawman Neidjie’s beautiful little book, with big knowledge, Story about Feeling (1989), he shares with us, his readers, the importance of feeling our connectedness with the land around us. We have heard his words and this is our effort to articulate our respect and responsibility in return. We are a small group of undergraduate students and a lecturer at the University of Newcastle (a mixed “mob” with non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal heritages) participating in an English course designed around listening to the knowledge stories of Country, in the context of Country as the energy and agency of the lands around us and not just a physical setting, as shared by those who know it best. We are a diverse group of people. We have different, individual, purposes for taking this course, but with a common willingness to listen which has been strengthened through our exposure to Aboriginal literature. This paper is the result of our lived experience of practice-led research. We have written this paper as a collective group and therefore we use “we” to represent and encompass our distinct voices in this shared learning journey. We write this paper within the walls, physically and psychologically, of western academia, built on the lands of the Darkinjung peoples. Our hope is to rethink the limits of epistemic boundaries in western discourses of education; to engage with Aboriginal ways of knowing predominantly through the pedagogical and personal act of listening. We aspire to reimagine our understanding of, and complicity with, public memory while simultaneously shifting our engagement with the land on which we stand, learn, and live. We ask ourselves: can we re-imagine the institutionalised space of our classroom through a dialogic pedagogy? To attempt to do this we have employed intersubjective dialogues, where our role is mostly that of listeners (readers) of stories of Country shared by Aboriginal voices and knowledges such as Neidjie’s. This paper is an articulation of our learning journey to re-imagine the tertiary classroom, re-imagine the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian knowledges, perspectives and peoples, re-imagine our collective consciousness on Aboriginal lands and, ultimately, to re-imagine ourselves. Re-imagining the Tertiary English Literature Classroom Our intersubjective dialogues have been built around listening to the stories (reading a book) from Aboriginal Elders who share the surface knowledge of stories from their Countries. These have been the voices of Neidjie, Max Dulumunmun Harrison in My People’s Dreaming (2013), and Laklak Burarrwanga et al. in Welcome to My Country (2013). Using a talking circle format, a traditional method of communication based upon equality and respect, within the confines of the four-walled institute of Western education, our learning journey moved through linear time, meeting once a week for two hours for 13 weeks. Throughout this time we employed Joshua Guilar’s notion of an intersubjective dialogue in the classroom to re-imagine our tertiary journey. Guilar emphasises the actions of “listening and respect, direction, character building and authority” (para 1). He argues that a dialogic classroom builds an educative community that engages both learners and teachers “where all parties are open to learning” (para 3). To re-imagine the tertiary classroom via talking circles, the lecturer drew from dialogic instruction which privileges content as:the major emphasis of the instructional conversation. Dialogic instruction includes a sharing of power. The actions of a dialogic instructor can be understood on a continuum with an autocratic instructional style at one end and an overly permissive style on the other. In the middle of the continuum are dialogic-enabling behaviors, which make possible a radical pedagogy. (para 1) Re-imaging the lecturer’s facilitating role has not been without its drawbacks and issues. In particular, she had to examine her own subjectivity and role as teacher while also adhering to the expectations of her job as an academic employee in the University. Assessing students, their developing awareness of Aboriginal ways of knowing, was not without worry. Advocating a paradigm shift from dominant ways of teaching and learning, while also adhering to expected tertiary discourses and procedures (such as developing marking rubrics and providing expectations regarding the format of an essay, referencing information, word limits, writing in standard Australian English and being assessed according to marks out of 100 that are categorised as Fails, Passes, Credits, Distinctions, or High Distinctions) required constant self-reflexivity and attempts at pedagogical transparency, for instance, the rubrics for assessing assignments were designed around the course objectives and then shared with the students to gauge understanding of, and support for, the criteria. Ultimately it was acknowledged that the lecturer’s position within the hierarchy of western learning carried with it an imbalance of power, that is, as much as she desired to create a shared and equal learning space, she decided and awarded final grades. In an effort to continually and consciously work through this, the work of Gayatri Spivak on self-reflexivity was employed: she, the lecturer, has “attempted to foreground the precariousness of [her] position throughout” although she knows “such gestures can never suffice” (271). Spivak’s work on the tendency of dominant discourses and institutions to ignore or deny the validity of non-western knowledges continues to be influential. We acknowledge the limits of our ability to engage in such a radical dialogical pedagogy: there are limits to the creativity and innovativeness that can be produced within a dominant Eurocentric academic framework. Sharing knowledge and stories cannot be a one-way process; all parties have to willingly engage in order to create meaningful exchange. This then, requires that the classroom, and this paper, reflect a space of heterogeneous voices (or “ears” required for listening) that are self-sufficiently open to hearing the stories of knowledge from the traditional custodians. Listening becomes a mode of thought where we are also aware of the impediments in our ability to hear: to hear across cultures, across histories, across generations, and across time and space. The intersubjective dialogues taking place, between us and the stories and also between each other in the classroom, allow us to deepen our understanding of the literature of Country by listening to each other’s voices. Even if they offer different opinions from our own they still contribute to our broader conception of what Country is and can mean to people. By extension, this causes us to re-evaluate the lands upon which we stand, entering a dialogue with place to reinterpret/negotiate our position within the “story” of Country. This learning and listening was re-emphasised with the words of Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann’s explanation of “Dadirri”: an inner, deep, contemplative listening and awareness (para 4). To be able to hear these stories has required a radical shift in the way we are listening. To create a space for an intersubjective dialogue to occur between the knowledge stories of Aboriginal peoples who know their Country, and us as individual and distinct listeners, Marcia Langton’s third category of an intersubjective dialogue was used. This type of dialogue involves an exchange between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians where both are positioned as subjects rather than, as historically has been the case, non-Aboriginal peoples speaking about Aboriginality positioned as “object” and “other” (81). Langton states that: ‘Aboriginality’ arises from the subjective experience of both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people who engage in any intercultural dialogue, whether in actual lived experience or through a mediated experience such as a white person watching a program about Aboriginal people on television or reading a book. Moreover, the creation of ‘Aboriginality’ is not a fixed thing. It is created from out histories. It arises from the intersubjectivity of black and white in dialogue. (31)Langton states that historically the ways Aboriginality has been represented by the ethnographic gaze has meant that “Aboriginality” and what it means is a result of colonisation: Aboriginal peoples did not refer to themselves or think of themselves in such ways before colonisation. Therefore, we respectfully tried to listen to the knowledge stories shared by Aboriginal people through Aboriginal ways of knowing Country. Listening to Stories of Country We use the word “stories” to represent the knowledge of a place that traditional custodians of their land know and willingly share through the public publication of literature. Stories, in our understanding, are not “made-up” fictional narratives but knowledge documents of and from specific places that are physically manifested in the land while embodying metaphysical meaning as well. Stories are connected to the land and therefore they are connected to its people. We use the phrase “surface (public) knowledge” to distinguish between knowledges that anyone can hear and have access to in comparison with more private, deeper layered, secret/sacred knowledge that is not within our rights to possess or even within our ability to understand. We are, however, cognisant that this knowledge is there and respect those who know it. Finally, we employ the word Country, which, as noted above means the energy and agency of the lands around us. As Burarrwanga et al. share:Country has many layers of meaning. It incorporates people, animals, plants, water and land. But Country is more than just people and things, it is also what connects them to each other and to multiple spiritual and symbolic realms. It relates to laws, customs, movement, song, knowledges, relationships, histories, presents, future and spirits. Country can be talked to, it can be known, it can itself communicate, feel and take action. Country for us is alive with story, Law, power and kinship relations that join not only people to each other but link people, ancestors, place, animals, rocks, plants, stories and songs within land and sea. So you see, knowledge about Country is important because it’s about how and where you fit in the world and how you connect to others and to place. (129) Many colonists denied, and many people continue to deny today, the complexity of Aboriginal cultures and ways of knowing: “native traditions” are recorded according to Western epistemology and perceptions. Roslyn Carnes has argued that colonisation has created a situation in Australia, “where Aboriginal voices are white noise to the ears of many non-Indigenous people. […] white privilege and the resulting white noise can be minimised and greater clarity given to Aboriginal voices by privileging Indigenous knowledge and ways of working when addressing Indigenous issues. To minimise the interference of white noise, non-Indigenous people would do well to adopt a position that recognises, acknowledges and utilises some of the strengths that can be learned from Aboriginal culture and Indigenous authors” (2). To negotiate through this “white noise”, to hear the stories of Country beneath it and attempt to decolonise both our minds and the institutional discourses we work and study in (Langton calls for an undermining of the “colonial hegemony” [8]) and we have had to acknowledge and position our subjectivity as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples and try to situate ourselves as “allied listeners” (Carnes 184). Through allied listening in intersubjective dialogues, we are re-learning (re-imagining) history, reviewing dominant ideas about the world and ways of existing in it and re-situating our own positions of Aboriginality and non-Aboriginality. Rereading the Signs Welcome to My Country by Burarrwanga et al. emphasises that knowledge is embedded in Country, in everything on, in, above, and moving through country. While every rock, tree, waterhole, hill, and animal has a story (stories), so do the winds, clouds, tides, and stars. These stories are layered, they overlap, they interconnect and they remain. A physical representation such as a tree or rock, is a manifestation of a metaphysical moment, event, ancestor. The book encourages us (the readers) to listen to the knowledge that is willingly being shared, thus initiating a layer of intersubjectivity between Yolngu ways of knowing and the intended reader; the book itself is a result of an intersubjective relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women and embedded in both of these intersubjective layers is the relationship between us and this land. The book itself offers a way of engaging with the physical environment that combines western processes (standard Australian written English for instance) with Aboriginal ways of knowing, in this instance, Yolngu ways. It is an immediate way of placing oneself in time and space, for instance it was August when we first read the book so it was the dry season and time for hunting. Reading the environment in such a way means that we need to be aware of what is happening around us, allowing us to see the “rules” of a place and “feel” it (Neidjie). We now attempt to listen more closely to our own environments, extending our understanding of place and reconsidering our engagement with Darkinjung land. Neidjie, Harrison, and Burarrwanga et al. share knowledge that helps us re-imagine our way of reading the signs around us—the physical clues (when certain plants flower it might signal the time to catch certain fish or animals; when certain winds blow it might signal the time to perform certain duties) that the land provides but there is also another layer of meaning—explanations for certain animal behaviours, for certain sites, for certain rights. Beneath these layers are other layers that may or may not be spoken of, some of them are hinted at in the text and others, it is explained, are not allowed to be spoken of or shared at this point in time. “We use different language for different levels: surface, middle and hidden. Hidden languages are not known to everyone and are used for specific occasions” (Burarrwanga et al. 131). “Through language we learn about country, about boundaries, inside and outside knowledge” (Burarrwanga et al. 132). Many of the esoteric (knowledge for a certain few) stories are too different from our dominant discourses for us to understand even if they could be shared with us. Laklak Burarrwanga happily shares the surface layer though, and like Neidjie, refers to the reader as “you”. So this was where we began our intersubjective dialogue with Aboriginality, non-Aboriginality and Country. In Harrison’s My People’s Dreaming he explains how Aboriginal ways of knowing are built on watching, listening, and seeing. “If we don’t follow these principles then we don’t learn anything” (59). Engaging with Aboriginal knowledges such as Harrison’s three principles, Neidjie’s encouragement to listen, and Burarrwanga et al.’s welcoming into wetj (sharing and responsibility) has impacted on our own ideas and practices regarding how we learn. We have had to shelve our usual method of deconstructing or analysing a text and instead focus on simply hearing and feeling the stories. If we (as a collective, and individually) perceive “gaps” in the stories or in our understanding, that is, the sense that there is more information embodied in Country than what we are receiving, rather than attempting to find out more, we have respected the act of the surface story being shared, realising that perhaps deeper knowledge is not meant for us (as outsiders, as non-Aboriginal peoples or even as men or as women). This is at odds with how we are generally expected to function as tertiary students (that is, as independent researchers/analytical scholars). We have identified this as a space in which we can listen to Aboriginal ways of knowing to develop our understanding of Aboriginal epistemologies, within a university setting that is governed by western ideologies. Neidjie reminds us that a story might be, “forty-two thousand [years]” old but in sharing a dialogue with each other, we keep it alive (101). Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina argue that in contrast, “the British valued the wheel, but they did not value its connection to the tree” (197), that is, western ways of knowing and being often favour the end result, disregarding the process, the story and the cycle where the learning occurs. Re-imagining Our Roles and Responsibility in Discourses of ReconciliationSuch a space we see as an alternative concept of spatial politics: “one that is rooted not solely in a politics of the nation, but instead reflects the diverse spaces that construct the postcolonial experience” (Upstone 1). We have almost envisioned this as fragmented and compartmentalised palimpsestic layers of different spaces (colonial, western, national, historical, political, topographical, social, educational) constructed on Aboriginal lands and knowledges. In this re-imagined learning space we are trying to negotiate through the white noise to listen to the voices of Aboriginal peoples. The transformative power of these voices—voices that invite us, welcome us, into their knowledge of Country—provide powerful messages for the possibility of change, “It is they who not only present the horrors of current circumstances but, gesturing towards the future, also offer the possibility of a way to move forward” (Upstone 184). In Harrison’s My People’s Dreaming, his chapter on Forgiveness both welcomes the reader into his Country while acknowledging that Australia’s shared history of colonisation is painful to confront, but only by confronting it, can we begin to heal and move forward. While notions of social reconciliation revolve around rebuilding social relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, “ecological reconciliation involves restoring ecological connectivity, sustaining ecological services, sustaining biodiversity, and making tough decisions from an eco-centric point of view that will not always prioritise human desire” (Rose 7). Deborah Bird Rose identifies four reasons why ecological reconciliation must occur simultaneously with social reconciliation. First, “without an imaginable world for the future, there is no point even to imagining a future for ourselves” (Rose 2). Second, for us to genuinely embrace reconciliation we must work to respond to land rights, environmental restoration and the protection of sacred sites. Third, we must recognise that “society and environment are inextricably connected” (Rose 2) and that this is especially so for Aboriginal Australians. Finally, Aboriginal ways of knowing could provide answers to postcolonial environmental degradation. By employing Guilar’s notion of the dialogic classroom as a method of critical pedagogy designed to promote social justice, we recognise our own responsibilities when it comes to issues such as ecology due to these stories being shared with us about and from Country via the literature we read. We write this paper in the hope of articulating our experience of re-imagining and enacting an embodied cognisance (understood as response and responsibility) tuned towards these ways of knowing. We have re-imagined the classroom as a new space of learning where Aboriginal ways of knowing are respected alongside dominant educational discourses. That is, our reimagined classroom includes: the substance of [...] a transactive public memory [...] informed by the reflexive attentiveness to the retelling or representation of a complex of emotionally evocative narratives and images which define not necessarily agreement but points of connection between people in regard to a past that they both might acknowledge the touch of. (Simon 63) Through an intersubjective dialogic classroom we have attempted to reimagine our relationships with the creators of these texts and the ways of knowing they represent. In doing so, we move beyond dominant paradigms of the land around us, re-assessing our roles and responsibilities in ways that are both practical and manageable in our own lives (within and outside of the classroom). Making conscious our awareness of Aboriginal ways of knowing, we create a collective consciousness in our little circle within the dominant western space of academic discourse to, wilfully and hopefully, contribute to transformative social and educational change outside of it. Because we have heard and listened to the stories of Country: We know White-European got different story.But our story, everything dream,Dreaming, secret, ‘business’…You can’t lose im.This story you got to hang on for you,Children, new children, no-matter new generationAnd how much new generation.You got to hang on this old story because the earth, This ground, earth where you brought up, This earth e grow, you growing little by little, Tree growing with you too, grass…I speaking storyAnd this story you got to hang on, no matter who you, No-matter what country you.You got to understand…this world for us.We came for this world. (Neidjie 166) Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon which this paper was researched and written. References Burarrwanga, Laklak, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, Djawundil Maymuru, Sarah Wright, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, and Kate Lloyd. Welcome to My Country. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2013. Carnes, Roslyn. “Changing Listening Frequency to Minimise White Noise and Hear Indigenous Voices.” Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues 14.2-3 (2011): 170-84. Guilar, Joshua D. “Intersubjectivity and Dialogic Instruction.” Radical Pedagogy 8.1 (2006): 1. Harrison, Max D. My People’s Dreaming: An Aboriginal Elder Speaks on Life, Land, Spirit and Forgiveness. Sydney: HarperCollins Australia, 2013. Kwaymullina, Ambelin, and Blaze Kwaymullina. “Learning to Read the Signs: Law in an Indigenous Reality.” Journal of Australian Studies 34.2 (2010): 195-208.Langton, Marcia. Well, I Saw It on the Television and I Heard It on the Radio. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993. Neidjie, Bill. Story about Feeling. Broome: Magabala Books, 1989. Rose, Deborah Bird. “The Ecological Power and Promise of Reconciliation.” National Institute of the Environment Public Lecture Series, 20 Nov. 2002. Speech. Parliament House. Simon, Roger. “The Touch of the Past: The Pedagogical Significance of a Transactional Sphere of Public Memory.” Revolutionary Pedagogies: Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory (2000): 61-80. Spivak, Gayatri. C. “'Can the Subaltern Speak?' Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Nelson, Cary and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271-313. Ungunmerr-Baumann, Miriam-Rose. Dadirri: Inner Deep Listening and Quiet Still Awareness. Emmaus Productions, 2002. 14 June 2015 ‹http://nextwave.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Dadirri-Inner-Deep-Listening-M-R-Ungunmerr-Bauman-Refl.pdf›.Upstone, Sara. Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013.

The brand began, quite literally, as a method for ranchers to identify their cattle. By burning a distinct symbol into the hide of a baby calf, the owner could insure that if it one day wandered off his property or was stolen by a competitor, he’d be able to point to that logo and claim the animal as his rightful property. When the manufacturers of products adopted the brand as a way of guaranteeing the quality of their goods, its function remained pretty much the same. Buying a package of oats with the Quaker label meant the customer could trace back these otherwise generic oats to their source. If there was a problem, he knew where he could turn. More important, if the oats were of satisfactory or superior quality, he knew where he could get them again. Trademarking a brand meant that no one else could call his oats Quaker. Advertising in this innocent age simply meant publicizing the existence of one’s brand. The sole objective was to increase consumers awareness of the product or company that made it. Those who even thought to employ specialists for the exclusive purpose of writing ad copy hired newspaper reporters and travelling salesmen, who knew how to explain the attributes of an item in words that people tended to remember. It wasn’t until 1922 that a preacher and travelling “medicine show” salesman-turned-copywriter named Claude Hopkins decided that advertising should be systematized into a science. His short but groundbreaking book Scientific Advertising proposed that the advertisement is merely a printed extension of the salesman¹s pitch and should follow the same rules. Hopkins believed in using hard descriptions over hype, and text over image: “The more you tell, the more you sell” and “White space is wasted space” were his mantras. Hopkins believed that any illustrations used in an ad should be directly relevant to the product itself, not just a loose or emotional association. He insisted on avoiding “frivolity” at all costs, arguing that “no one ever bought from a clown.” Although some images did appear in advertisements and on packaging as early as the 1800s - the Quaker Oats man showed up in 1877 - these weren¹t consciously crafted to induce psychological states in customers. They were meant just to help people remember one brand over another. How better to recall the brand Quaker than to see a picture of one? It wasn’t until the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as Americans turned toward movies and television and away from newspapers and radio, that advertisers’ focus shifted away from describing their brands and to creating images for them. During these decades, Midwestern adman Leo Burnett concocted what is often called the Chicago school of advertising, in which lovable characters are used to represent products. Green Giant, which was originally just the Minnesota Valley Canning Company’s code name for an experimental pea, became the Jolly Green Giant in young Burnett’s world of animated characters. He understood that the figure would make a perfect and enticing brand image for an otherwise boring product and could also serve as a mnemonic device for consumers. As he watched his character grow in popularity, Burnett discovered that the mythical figure of a green giant had resonance in many different cultures around the world. It became a kind of archetype and managed to penetrate the psyche in more ways than one. Burnett was responsible for dozens of character-based brand images, including Tony the Tiger, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, and the Marlboro Man. In each case, the character creates a sense of drama, which engages the audience in the pitch. This was Burnett’s great insight. He still wanted to sell a product based on its attributes, but he knew he had to draw in his audience using characters. Brand images were also based on places, like Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing, or on recognizable situations, such as the significant childhood memories labelled “Kodak moments” or a mother nurturing her son on a cold day, a defining image for Campbell’s soup. In all these cases, however, the moment, location, or character went only so far as to draw the audience into the ad, after which they would be subjected to a standard pitch: ‘Soup is good food’, or ‘Sorry, Charlie, only the best tuna get to be Starkist’. Burnett saw himself as a homespun Midwesterner who was contributing to American folklore while speaking in the plain language of the people. He took pride in the fact that his ads used words like “ain’t”; not because they had some calculated psychological effect on the audience, but because they communicated in a natural, plainspoken style. As these methods found their way to Madison Avenue and came to be practiced much more self-consciously, Burnett¹s love for American values and his focus on brand attributes were left behind. Branding became much more ethereal and image-based, and ads only occasionally nodded to a product’s attributes. In the 1960s, advertising gurus like David Ogilvy came up with rules about television advertising that would have made Claude Hopkins shudder. “Food in motion” dictated that food should always be shot by a moving camera. “Open with fire” meant that ads should start in a very exciting and captivating way. Ogilvy told his creatives to use supers - text superimposed on the screen to emphasize important phrases and taglines. All these techniques were devised to promote brand image, not the product. Ogilvy didn’t believe consumers could distinguish between products were it not for their images. In Ogilvy on Advertising, he explains that most people cannot tell the difference between their own “favourite” whiskey and the closest two competitors’: ‘Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don¹t make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn¹t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image. The brand image is ninety percent of what the distiller has to sell.’ (Ogilvy, 1993). Thus, we learned to “trust our car to the man who wears the star” not because Texaco had better gasoline than Shell, but because the company’s advertisers had created a better brand image. While Burnett and his disciples were building brand myths, another school of advertisers was busy learning about its audience. Back in the 1920s, Raymond Rubicam, who eventually founded the agency Young and Rubicam, thought it might be interesting to hire a pollster named Dr. Gallup from Northwestern University to see what could be gleaned about consumers from a little market research. The advertising industry’s version of cultural anthropology, or demographics, was born. Like the public-relations experts who study their target populations in order to manipulate them later, marketers began conducting polls, market surveys, and focus groups on the segments of the population they hoped to influence. And to draw clear, clean lines between demographic groups, researchers must almost always base distinctions on four factors: race, age, sex, and wages. Demographic research is reductionist by design. I once consulted to an FM radio station whose station manager wanted to know, “Who is our listener?” Asking such a question reduces an entire listenership down to one fictional person. It’s possible that no single individual will ever match the “customer profile” meant to apply to all customers, which is why so much targeted marketing often borders on classist, racist, and sexist pandering. Billboards for most menthol cigarettes, for example, picture African-Americans because, according to demographic research, black people prefer them to regular cigarettes. Microsoft chose Rolling Stones songs to launch Windows 95, a product targeted at wealthy baby boomers. “The Women’s Global Challenge” was an advertising-industry-created Olympics for women, with no purpose other than to market to active females. By the 1970s, the two strands of advertising theory - demographic research and brand image - were combined to develop campaigns that work on both levels. To this day, we know to associate Volvos with safety, Dr. Pepper with individuality, and Harley-Davidson with American heritage. Each of these brand images is crafted to appeal to the target consumer’s underlying psychological needs: Volvo ads are aimed at upper-middle-class white parents who fear for their children’s health and security, Dr. Pepper is directed to young nonconformists, and the Harley-Davidson image supports its riders’ self-perception as renegades. Today’s modern (or perhaps postmodern) brands don’t invent a corporate image on their own; they appropriate one from the media itself, such as MetLife did with Snoopy, Butterfinger did with Bart Simpson, or Kmart did by hiring Penny Marshall and Rosie O’Donnell. These mascots were selected because their perceived characteristics match the values of their target consumers - not the products themselves. In the language of today’s marketers, brand images do not reflect on products but on advertisers’ perceptions of their audiences’ psychology. This focus on audience composition and values has become the standard operating procedure in all of broadcasting. When Fox TV executives learned that their animated series “King of the Hill”, about a Texan propane distributor, was not faring well with certain demographics, for example, they took a targeted approach to their character’s rehabilitation. The Brandweek piece on Fox’s ethnic campaign uncomfortably dances around the issue. Hank Hill is the proverbial everyman, and Fox wants viewers to get comfortable with him; especially viewers in New York, where “King of the Hill”’s homespun humor hasn’t quite caught on with the young urbanites. So far this season, the show has pulled in a 10.1 rating/15 share in households nationally, while garnering a 7.9 rating/12 share in New York (Brandweek, 1997) As far as Fox was concerned, while regular people could identify with the network’s new “everyman” character, New Yorkers weren’t buying his middle-American patter. The television show’s ratings proved what TV executives had known all along: that New York City’s Jewish demographic doesn’t see itself as part of the rest of America. Fox’s strategy for “humanizing” the character to those irascible urbanites was to target the group’s ethnographic self-image. Fox put ads for the show on the panels of sidewalk coffee wagons throughout Manhattan, with the tagline “Have a bagel with Hank”. In an appeal to the target market’s well-developed (and well-researched) cynicism, Hank himself is shown saying, “May I suggest you have that with a schmear”. The disarmingly ethnic humor here is meant to underscore the absurdity of a Texas propane salesman using a Jewish insider’s word like “schmear.” In another Upper West Side billboard, Hank’s son appeals to the passing traffic: “Hey yo! Somebody toss me up a knish!” As far as the New York demographic is concerned, these jokes transform the characters from potentially threatening Southern rednecks into loveable hicks bending over backward to appeal to Jewish sensibilities, and doing so with a comic and, most important, nonthreatening inadequacy. Today, the most intensely targeted demographic is the baby - the future consumer. Before an average American child is twenty months old, he can recognize the McDonald’s logo and many other branded icons. Nearly everything a toddler encounters - from Band-Aids to underpants - features the trademarked characters of Disney or other marketing empires. Although this target market may not be in a position to exercise its preferences for many years, it pays for marketers to imprint their brands early. General Motors bought a two-page ad in Sports Illustrated for Kids for its Chevy Venture minivan. Their brand manager rationalized that the eight-to-fourteen-year-old demographic consists of “back-seat consumers” (Leonhardt, 1997). The real intention of target marketing to children and babies, however, goes deeper. The fresh neurons of young brains are valuable mental real estate to admen. By seeding their products and images early, the marketers can do more than just develop brand recognition; they can literally cultivate a demographic’s sensibilities as they are formed. A nine-year-old child who can recognize the Budweiser frogs and recite their slogan (Bud-weis-er) is more likely to start drinking beer than one who can remember only Tony the Tiger yelling, “They¹re great!” (Currently, more children recognize the frogs than Tony.) This indicates a long-term coercive strategy. The abstraction of brand images from the products they represent, combined with an increasing assault on our demographically targeted psychological profiles, led to some justifiable consumer paranoia by the 1970s. Advertising was working on us in ways we couldn’t fully understand, and people began to look for an explanation. In 1973, Wilson Bryan Key, a communications researcher, wrote the first of four books about “subliminal advertising,” in which he accused advertisers of hiding sexual imagery in ice cubes, and psychoactive words like “sex” onto the airbrushed surfaces of fashion photographs. Having worked on many advertising campaigns from start to finish, in close proximity to everyone from copywriters and art directors to printers, I can comfortably put to rest any rumours that major advertising agencies are engaging in subliminal campaigns. How do images that could be interpreted as “sexual” show up in ice cubes or elbows? The final photographs chosen for ads are selected by committee out of hundreds that are actually shot. After hours or days of consideration, the group eventually feels drawn to one or two photos out of the batch. Not surprising, these photos tend to have more evocative compositions and details, but no penises, breasts, or skulls are ever superimposed onto the images. In fact, the man who claims to have developed subliminal persuasion, James Vicary, admitted to Advertising Age in 1984 that he had fabricated his evidence that the technique worked in order to drum up business for his failing research company. But this confession has not assuaged Key and others who relentlessly, perhaps obsessively, continue to pursue those they feel are planting secret visual messages in advertisements. To be fair to Key, advertisers have left themselves open to suspicion by relegating their work to the abstract world of the image and then targeting consumer psychology so deliberately. According to research by the Roper Organization in 1992, fifty-seven percent of American consumers still believe that subliminal advertising is practiced on a regular basis, and only one in twelve think it “almost never” happens. To protect themselves from the techniques they believe are being used against them, the advertising audience has adopted a stance of cynical suspicion. To combat our increasing awareness and suspicion of demographic targeting, marketers have developed a more camouflaged form of categorization based on psychological profiles instead of race and age. Jim Schroer, the executive director of new marketing strategy at Ford explains his abandonment of broad-demographic targeting: ‘It’s smarter to think about emotions and attitudes, which all go under the term: psychographics - those things that can transcend demographic groups.’ (Schroer, 1997) Instead, he now appeals to what he calls “consumers’ images of themselves.” Unlike broad demographics, the psychographic is developed using more narrowly structured qualitative-analysis techniques, like focus groups, in-depth interviews, and even home surveillance. Marketing analysts observe the behaviors of volunteer subjects, ask questions, and try to draw causal links between feelings, self-image, and purchases. A company called Strategic Directions Group provides just such analysis of the human psyche. In their study of the car-buying habits of the forty-plus baby boomers and their elders, they sought to define the main psychological predilections that human beings in this age group have regarding car purchases. Although they began with a demographic subset of the overall population, their analysis led them to segment the group into psychographic types. For example, members of one psychographic segment, called the ³Reliables,² think of driving as a way to get from point A to point B. The “Everyday People” campaign for Toyota is aimed at this group and features people depending on their reliable and efficient little Toyotas. A convertible Saab, on the other hand, appeals to the ³Stylish Fun² category, who like trendy and fun-to-drive imports. One of the company’s commercials shows a woman at a boring party fantasizing herself into an oil painting, where she drives along the canvas in a sporty yellow Saab. Psychographic targeting is more effective than demographic targeting because it reaches for an individual customer more directly - like a fly fisherman who sets bait and jiggles his rod in a prescribed pattern for a particular kind of fish. It’s as if a marketing campaign has singled you out and recognizes your core values and aspirations, without having lumped you into a racial or economic stereotype. It amounts to a game of cat-and-mouse between advertisers and their target psychographic groups. The more effort we expend to escape categorization, the more ruthlessly the marketers pursue us. In some cases, in fact, our psychographic profiles are based more on the extent to which we try to avoid marketers than on our fundamental goals or values. The so-called “Generation X” adopted the anti-chic aesthetic of thrift-store grunge in an effort to find a style that could not be so easily identified and exploited. Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamour normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying “Whatever.” The members of Generation X are putting up a good fight. Having already developed an awareness of how marketers attempt to target their hearts and wallets, they use their insight into programming to resist these attacks. Unlike the adult marketers pursuing them, young people have grown up immersed in the language of advertising and public relations. They speak it like natives. As a result, they are more than aware when a commercial or billboard is targeting them. In conscious defiance of demographic-based pandering, they adopt a stance of self-protective irony‹distancing themselves from the emotional ploys of the advertisers. Lorraine Ketch, the director of planning in charge of Levi¹s trendy Silvertab line, explained, “This audience hates marketing that’s in your face. It eyeballs it a mile away, chews it up and spits it out” (On Advertising, 1998). Chiat/Day, one of the world’s best-known and experimental advertising agencies, found the answer to the crisis was simply to break up the Gen-X demographic into separate “tribes” or subdemographics - and include subtle visual references to each one of them in the ads they produce for the brand. According to Levi’s director of consumer marketing, the campaign meant to communicate, “We really understand them, but we are not trying too hard” (On Advertising, 1998). Probably unintentionally, Ms. Ketch has revealed the new, even more highly abstract plane on which advertising is now being communicated. Instead of creating and marketing a brand image, advertisers are creating marketing campaigns about the advertising itself. Silvertab’s target market is supposed to feel good about being understood, but even better about understanding the way they are being marketed to. The “drama” invented by Leo Burnett and refined by David Ogilvy and others has become a play within a play. The scene itself has shifted. The dramatic action no longer occurs between the audience and the product, the brand, or the brand image, but between the audience and the brand marketers. As audiences gain even more control over the media in which these interactive stories unfold, advertising evolves ever closer to a theatre of the absurd. excerpted from Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say)? Works Cited Ogilvy, David. Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Vintage, 1983. Brandweek Staff, "Number Crunching, Hollywood Style," Brandweek. October 6, 1997. Leonhardt, David, and Kathleen Kerwin, "Hey Kid, Buy This!" Business Week. June 30, 1997 Schroer, Jim. Quoted in "Why We Kick Tires," by Carol Morgan and Doron Levy. Brandweek. Sept 29, 1997. "On Advertising," The New York Times. August 14, 1998 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Rushkoff, Douglas. "Coercion " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>. APA Style Rushkoff, D. (2003, Jun 19). Coercion . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>

Introduction Since the early 2000s, and especially since the onset of COVID-19 and long periods of lockdown, board games have seen a revival in popularity. The increasing popularity of board games are part of what Julie Lennett, a toy industry analyst at NPD Group, describes as the “nesting trend”: families have more access to entertainment at home and are eschewing expensive nights out (cited in Birkner 7). While on-demand television is a significant factor in this trend, for Moriaty and Kay (6), who wouldn’t “welcome [the] chance to turn away from their screens” to seek the “warmth and connection you get from playing games with live human family and friends?” For others, playing board games can simply be about nostalgia. Board games have a long history not specific to one period, geography, or culture. Likely board games were developed to do two things – teach and entertain. This remains the case today. Historically, miniature versions of battles or hunts were played out in what we might recognise today as a board game. Trade, war, and science impacted on their development, as did the printing press, which allowed for the standardisation of rules. Chess had many variations prior to the fifteenth century. Similarly, the Industrial Revolution allowed for the mass production of board games, boosting their popularity across nations, class, and age (Walker 13). Today, regardless of or because of our digital lives, we are in a “board game renaissance” (Booth 1). Still played on rainy days, weekends, and holidays, we now also play board games in dedicated game board cafés like the Haunted Game Café in America, the Snakes and Lattes in Canada, or the Mind Café in Singapore. In the board game café Draughts in the UK, customers pay £5 to select and play one of 800 board games, including classics like Monopoly and Cluedo. These cafes are important as they are “helping manufacturers to understand the kind of games that appeal to the larger section of players” (Atrizton). COVID-19 caused board game sales to increase. The global market was predicted to increase by US$1 billion in 2021, compared to 2020 (Jarvis). Total sales of board games in Australia are expected to reach AU$86 million in 2023, an almost 10 per cent increase from the preceding year (Statista "Board Games – Australia"). The emergence of Kickstarter, a global crowdfunding platform which funds new board games, is filling the gap in the contemporary board game market, with board games generating 20 per cent of the total funding raised (Carter). Board games are predicted to continue to grow, with the global market revenue record at US$19 billion dollars in 2022, a figure that is expected to rise to US$40 billion within 6 years (Atrizton). If the current turn towards board games represents a desire to escape from the digital world, the Internet is also contributing to the renaissance. Ex-Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton hosts the popular Web series TableTop, in which each episode explains a board game that is then played, usually with celebrities. The Internet also provides “communities” in which fans can share their enthusiasm, be it as geek culture or cult fandom (Booth 2). Booth provides an eloquent explanation, however, for the allure of face-to-face board games: “they remind us of our face-to-face past, and recall a type of pre-digital luddism where we can circle around the ‘campfire’ of the game board” (Booth 1-2). What makes a board game successful is harder to define. Phillip Orbanes, an American game designer and former vice-president of research and development at Parker Brothers, has attempted to elucidate the factors that make a good board game: “make the rules simple and unambiguous … don’t frustrate the casual player … establish a rhythm … focus on what’s happening off the board … give ‘em chances to come from behind … [and] provide outlets for latent talents” (Orbanes 52-55). Orbanes also says it is important to understand that what “happens off the board is just as important to the experience as the physical game itself” (Orbanes 51). Tristan Donovan contends that there are four broad stages of modern board games, beginning with the folk era when games had no fixed author, their rules were mutable, and local communities adapted the game to suit their sensibilities. Chess is an example of this, with the game only receiving the fixed rules we know today when tournaments and organisations saw the need for a singular set of rules. Mass production of games was the second stage, marking “the single biggest shift in board game history – a total flip in how people understood, experienced and played board games. Games were no long[er] malleable objects owned by the commons, but products created usually in the pursuit of profit” (Donovan 267). An even more recent development in game boards was the introduction of mass produced plastics, which reduced the cost of board game construction and allowed for a wider range of games to be produced. This was particularly evident in the post-war period. Games today are often thought of as global, which allows gamers to discover games from other regions and cultures, such as Catan (Klaus Teuber, 1995), a German game that may not have enjoyed its immense success if it were not for the Internet. Board game players are broadly categorised into two classes: the casual gamer and the hobby or serious gamer (Rogerson and Gibbs). The most popular game from the mass production era is Monopoly, the focus of this article. The History of Monopoly Monopoly was designed and patented by American Elizabeth Magie (1866-1948) in 1902, and was originally called The Landlord’s Game. The game was based on the anti-monopoly taxation principles of Henry George (1839-1897), who argued that people should own 100 per cent of what they make and the land should belong to everyone. Land ownership, considered George, only benefitted land owners, and forces working people to pay exorbitant rent. Magie’s original version of the game was designed to demonstrate how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. Renters in Australia’s property market today may recognise this side of ruthless capitalism. In 1959 Fidel Castro thought Monopoly “sufficiently redolent of capitalism” that he “ordered the ­destruction of every Monopoly set in Cuba” (McManus). Magie, however, was not credited with being the original inventor of Monopoly: rather, this credit was given to Charles Darrow. In 2014, the book The Monopolist: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal behind the World's Favorite Board Game by Mary Pilon re-established Magie as the inventor of Monopoly, with her role and identity unearthed by American Ralph Anspach (1926-2022), an Adam Smith economist, Polish-German refugee, and anti-Vietnam protestor. According to Pilon, Magie, a suffragette and progressive economic and political thinker, was a Georgist advocate, particularly of his anti-monopolist policies, and it was this that informed her game’s narrative. An unmarried daughter of Scottish immigrants, she was a Washington homeowner, familiar with the grid-like street structure of the national capital. Magie left school at 13 to help support her family who were adversely impacted upon by the Panic of 1873, which saw economic collapse because of falling silver prices, railroad speculation, and property losses. She worked as a stenographer and teacher of Georgist single tax theory. Seeking a broader platform for her economic ideas, and with the growing popularity of board games in middle class homes, in 1904 Magie secured a patent for The Landlord’s Game, at a time when women only held 1 per cent of US patents (Pilon). The original game included deeds and play money and required players to earn wages via labour and pay taxes. The board provided a circular path (as opposed to the common linear path) in which players circled through rental properties and railroads, and could acquire food, with natural reserves (oil, coal, farms, and forests) unable to be monopolised. However, she created two sets of rules – the monopoly rules familiar to today’s players, and anti-monopoly rules in which tensions over human greed and altruism could be played out by participants. Magie started her own New York firm to manufacture and distribute the game, continued the struggle for women’s equality, and raged against wealthy monopolists of the day such as Andrew Carnegie (Pilon). By the late 1920, the game, mostly referred to as the ‘monopoly’ game, was popular, but many who played the game were playing handmade versions, likely unaware of the original Landlord’s Game. In 1931, mass-produced versions of the game, now titled Finance, began to appear, with some changes, including the ability to purchase properties, along with rule books. Occurring at the same time as the emergence of fixed-price goods in large department stores, the game, which now included chance cards, continued to be popular. It was Charles Darrow who sold Monopoly to Parker Brothers, even if he did not invent it. Darrow was introduced to one of the variants of the game and became obsessed with the game, which now featured the Community Chest and Free Parking, but his version did not have a set of rules. An unemployed ex-serviceman with no college education, Darrow struggled to provide for his family. By 1932, America was in the grip of the Great Depression, with housing prices collapsing and squatting common in large American cities. Befriending an artist, Darrow sought to provide a more dynamic and professional version of the game and complete it with a set of rules. In 1933, Darrow marketed his version of the game, titled Mr Monopoly, and it was purchased by Parker Brothers for US$7,000 in 1935. Magie received just US $500 (Farzan). Monopoly, as it was rebranded, was initial sold for $2 a game, and Parker Brothers sold 278,000 games in the first year. In 1936, consumers purchased 1.7 million editions of the game, generating millions of dollars in profits for Parker Brothers, who prior to Monopoly were on the brink of collapse (Pilon). Mary Pilon’s The Monopolists also reveals the struggle of Ralph Anspach in the 1970s to sell his Anti-Monopoly board games, which Parker Brothers fought in the courts. Anspach’s game sought to undermine the power of capitalist monopolies, which he had witnessed directly and negatively impact on fuel prices in America in the early 1970s. Hence the aim was to produce a game with an anti-monopolist narrative grounded in the free-market thinking of Adam Smith. Players were rewarded by breaking monopoly ownerships of utilities such as railroads and energy and metal reserves. In preparing his case against Parker Brothers, Anspach “accidentally discovered the true history of the game”, which began with Magie’s Landlord’s Game. Magie herself had battled with Parker Brothers in order to be “credited as the real originator of the game” and, like Anspach, reveal how Parker Brothers had changed the anti-capitalist narrative of the game, making it the “exact opposite” of its original aims (Landlordsgame). Anspach’s court room version of his battle with Parker Brothers was published in 2000, titled Monopolygate: During a David and Goliath Battle, the Inventor of the Anti-Monopoly® Game Uncovers the Secret History of Monopoly®. Monopoly Today Monopoly is now produced by Hasbro. It is the highest selling board game of all time, with an estimated 275 million units of Monopoly sold (Lee). Fan bases are clearly large too: the official Monopoly Facebook accounts report 9.9m likes (Facebook), and 68% of American households report owning a version of Monopoly (Statista "Which"). At the end of the twentieth century it was estimated that 550 million, or one in 12 people worldwide, had played the game (Guinness World Records "Most Popular"). Today it is estimated that Monopoly has been played by more than one billion people, and the digital Monopoly version has had over 100 million downloads (Johnson). The ability to play beloved board games with a computer opponent or with other players via the Internet arguably adds to the longevity of classic board games such as Monopoly. Yet research shows that despite Monopoly being widely owned, it is often not played as much as other games in people’s homes (d'Astous and Gagnon 84). D’Astous and Gagnon found that players in their study chose Monopoly to play on average six times a year, less than half the times they played Cluedo (13 times a year) or Scrabble (15 times). As Michael Whelan points out, Magie’s original goal was to make a statement about capitalism and landlords: a single player would progress round the board building an empire, whilst the others were doomed to slowly descend into bankruptcy. It was “never meant to be fun for anyone but the winner” (Whelan). Despite Monopoly’s longevity and impressive sales record, it is perhaps paradoxical to find that it is not a particularly popular or enjoyed game. Board Game Geek, the popular board game Website, reports in 2023 that the average rating for Monopoly by over 33,000 members is just 4.4 out of 10, and is ranked the 23,834th most popular game on the site (Board Game Geek). This is mirrored in academic studies: for example, when examining Orbane’s tenets for a good board game, d’Astous and Gagnon (84) found that players' appreciation of Monopoly was generally low. Not only is appreciation low for the game itself, it is also low for player antics during the game. A 2021 survey found that Monopoly causes the most fights, with 20% of households reporting “their game nights with friends or family members are often or always disrupted by competitive or unfriendly behaviour”, leading to players or even the game itself being banned (Lemore). Clearly Orbane’s tenet that the game “generates fun” is missing here (Orbanes 52). Commentators ask why Monopoly remains the best-selling board game of all time when the game has the “astonishing ability to sow seeds of discord” (Berical). Despite the claims that playing Monopoly causes disharmony, the game does allow for player agency. Perhaps more than any other board game, Monopoly is subjected to ‘house rules’. Buzzfeed reported 15 common house rules that many people think are official rules. In 2014 the official Monopoly Facebook page posted a video claiming that “68% of Americans have never read the official game rules” and that “49% of Americans had admitted to playing with their own ‘house rules’”. A look through these rules reveals that players are often trying to restore the balance of power in the game, or in other words increase the chance that a player can win. Hasbro has embraced these rules by incorporating some of them into the official rules. By incorporating players' amendments to the game, Hasbro can keep the Monopoly relevant. In another instance, Hasbro asked fans to vote on new tokens, which led to the thimble token being replaced with a Tyrannosaurus Rex. This was reversed in 2022 when nostalgic fans lobbied for the thimble’s return. Hasbro has also been an innovator by creating special rules for individual editions: for example, the Longest Game Ever edition (2019) slows players down by using only a single dice and has an extended game board. This demonstrates that Hasbro is keen to innovate and evolve the game to meet player expectations. Innovation and responsiveness to fans is one way that Hasbro has maintained Monopoly’s position as highest-selling board game. The only place the original Monopoly rules seem to be played intact are at the official competitions. Collecting and Nostalgia The characteristics of Monopoly allow for a seemingly infinite number of permutations. The places on the board can be real or fictional, making it easily adaptable to accommodate different environments. This is a factor in Monopoly’s longevity. The number of Monopoly editions are endless, with BoardGameGeek listing over 1,300 versions of the game on its site. Monopoly editions range from collector and commemorative editions to music, television, and film versions, actor-based editions, sports club editions, editions tied to toy franchises, animal lover editions, country editions, city editions, holiday editions, car brand editions, motor bike editions, as well as editions such as Monopoly Space, editions branded to popular confectionary, Ms Monopoly, and Go Green Monopoly. Each of these contain their own unique modifications. The Go Green version includes greenhouses, dice are made from FSC-certified wood from well-managed forests, tokens are made with plant-based plastic derived from sugarcane, a renewable raw material, and players can vie to have monopolistic control over renewable energy firms, solar farms, and bike paths. Licencing agreements allows Hasbro to leverage two sets of popular culture fans and collectors simultaneously: fans of Monopoly and its different versions, and fans of the Monopoly branded collectable, such as the Elvis Collector’s edition and Breaking Bad Monopoly. Apart from licencing, what else explains the longevity of Monopoly? Fred Davis demonstrates that nostalgia is an important sociological phenomenon, allowing consumers to re-imagine the past via iconic items including toys. Generation Y, also known as Millennials or digital natives, a cohort born between 1982 and 1994 who have grown up with technology as part of their everyday lives, are particularly interested in ‘heritage-inspired’ goods (Marchegiani and Phau). These consumers enjoy the past with a critical eye, drawn by the aesthetic properties of nostalgic goods rather than a direct personal connection (Goulding 575). Popular culture items are a site of widespread collecting behaviour (Geraghty 2). Belk argues that our possessions are used to construct our social selves. Collectors are a special kind of consumer: where consumers use and discard goods as needed, collectors engage with goods as special objects to be maintained and preserved (Belk 254), which is often achieved through ritualistic behaviour (McCracken 49). This is not to say that items in a collection are removed from use entirely: often being used in the normal manner, for example, clothing collectors will wear their items, yet take care of them in the a way they see akin to conservatorship (Hackett). Collections are often on display, often using the flexibility of the Internet as showground, as is the case with Neil Scallon’s world record collection of Monopoly’s 3,554 different versions of the game (World of Monopoly). Monopoly has low barriers to entry for a collector, as many sets retail at a low price-point, yet there are a few sets which are very expensive. The most expensive Monopoly set of all time retailed for US$2 million, and the cost was mainly borne out of the luxurious materials used: “the board is made from 23 carat gold, rubies and sapphires top the chimneys of the solid gold houses and hotels and the dice have 42 full cut diamonds for spots” (Guinness World Records "Most Expensive"). Conclusion The recent resurgence in board game popularity has only served to highlight Monopoly’s longevity. Through clever marketing and leveraging of nostalgia and popular culture fandoms, Hasbro has managed to retain Monopoly’s position as the number one board game, in sales figures at least. Despite its popularity, Monopoly suffers from a reputation as a conduit for poor player behaviour, as one person triumphs at the downfall of the other players. The game dynamics punish those whom fortune did not reward. In this regard, Elizabeth Magie’s initial aim of teaching about the unfairness of capitalism can be considered a resounding success. 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