Journal articles on the topic 'I am legend (Motion picture)'

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, a popular motion picture, offers a modem version of a Quest for the Holy Grail. Although this grail legend is new, a survey of medieval through nineteenth-century stories of heroic quests for a grail reveals that grail legends have always differed from each other in significant ways. The grail itself has been identified in some legends as a cup or chalice, and in others as a dish, platter, book, stone, or, possibly, a reliquary. Also profoundly different are the ways in which legends describe the purposes effects of a quest for the grail. What these diverse legends have in common, however, is their association of a quest for the grail with a hero's attempt to reverse the evils that endanger a particular society. This essay traces various grail legends to determine how these popular tales, including the film version, present man's quest for transcendence, and moral and spiritual renewal.

Abstract: The urge to find the authentic original of a story seems to be a universal longing. Recently, narratologists like Barbara Herrnstein Smith, as well as experts for East Asian literatures like Michael Emmerich or Lena Henningsen, draw our attention away from the original—which is often unknowable—and instead towards the variants of a story. While this suggestion brings a breath of fresh air to the field of narrative studies, it also poses a fundamental problem. If a story does not necessarily exist as a static original, but is comprised of many variants, how should we then imagine the story itself? This paper proposes imagining the story not as a separate static unit, but rather as a story cloud that includes all variants and changes its form when new variants join, or old variants fall into oblivion. Just as it is much easier to take a picture of a static object than of a moving one, it is much easier to imagine a static text than a text in motion. The main aim of this paper is therefore to find ways to make story clouds more graspable through visualizations. Specifically, for this endeavor we will focus on one of the most popular story clouds in East Asia, The Journey to the West . Methodologically, we draw on the actant-relationship model that the computational folklorist Tim Tangherlini has developed in the article "Toward a Generative Model of Legend: Pizzas, Bridges, Vaccines, and Witches." We will apply Tangherlini's model to variants of The Journey to the West and use the data to visualize the story cloud, especially its actantial core.

Existing accounts of Myanmar’s film industry available to English speakers are more than twenty years out of date. Opening with a brief overview of cinema in Myanmar since 2000, this article is based on a recent visit to the Myanmar Motion Picture Development Department and the Yangon Film School, on conversations with staff, students and alumnae of these institutions and of the National University of Arts and Culture, and with local independent filmmakers. The purpose of my visit was to begin the groundwork needed to answer basic questions: Who are the women making films in Myanmar today? Where are they trained? What are the conditions in which they work? What kind of films they make? How do they fund production? How do their films circulate? And finally: Is there a women’s cinema in Myanmar? What follows thus outlines the context in which women in Myanmar make films today and introduces the work of a small number of them. I conclude with reflections on three short films: A Million Threads (2006, by Thu Thu Shein), Now I am 13 (2013, by Shin Daewe), and Seeds of Sadness (2018, by Thae Zar Chi Khaing), two of which can be found online (at http://yangonfilmschool.org/___-free-yfs-film / and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX0LUZQcMCQ ).

Usual Gaussian beams are particular scalar solutions to the paraxial Helmholtz equation, which neglect the vector nature of light. In order to overcome this inconvenience, Simon et al. (J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 1986, 3, 536–540) found a paraxial solution to Maxwell’s equation in vacuum, which includes polarization in a natural way, though still preserving the spatial Gaussianity of the beams. In this regard, it seems that these solutions, known as Gauss-Maxwell beams, are particularly appropriate and a natural tool in optical problems dealing with Gaussian beams acted or manipulated by polarizers. In this work, inspired in the Bohmian picture of quantum mechanics, a hydrodynamic-type extension of such a formulation is provided and discussed, complementing the notion of electromagnetic field with that of (electromagnetic) flow or streamline. In this regard, the method proposed has the advantage that the rays obtained from it render a bona fide description of the spatial distribution of electromagnetic energy, since they are in compliance with the local space changes undergone by the time-averaged Poynting vector. This feature confers the approach a potential interest in the analysis and description of single-photon experiments, because of the direct connection between these rays and the average flow exhibited by swarms of identical photons (regardless of the particular motion, if any, that these entities might have), at least in the case of Gaussian input beams. In order to illustrate the approach, here it is applied to two common scenarios, namely the diffraction undergone by a single Gauss-Maxwell beam and the interference produced by a coherent superposition of two of such beams.

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Beziehung zwischen transnationalen Medien und der Verbreitung des Englischen am Beispiel des traditionellen Mediums Kino in Deutschland, dem größten Land Europas, das zu Kachru’s (1990) „Expanding Circle“ der englischen Sprache gehört. Die Diskussion erstreckt sich auf die weltweite Geschichte des Kinos seit dem frühen 20. Jahrhundert einschließlich der Faktoren, die zum Aufstieg Hollywoods zur international dominierenden Macht beigetragen haben, auch in Deutschland. Hieran anschließend richtet sie sich auf den Sprachgebrauch, wo bei Einführung des Tonfilms die US-Studios bei aller Dominanz Hollywoods rasch auf den Bedarf reagierten, die Filme sprachlich an örtliche Gegebenheiten anzupassen. Diese langjährige Politik der Synchronisierung und Untertitelung von Filmen setzt sich bis heute fort. Dennoch findet bei all dem, wie die Praxis der Filmbetitelung in Deutschland erkennen lässt, auch die englische Sprache Anwendung. Die detaillierte Analyse der Betitelung der in Deutschland beliebtesten Filme über einen Zeitraum von 20 Jahren zeigt ein Kontinuum des Sprachgebrauchs zwischen den beiden Polen Deutsch und Englisch, indem die beiden Sprachen entweder alternativ verwendet werden, oder in kreativen und innovativen Kombinationen, bei denen der sonstige Gegensatz zwischen ihnen verschwimmt.

IntroductionThe perception of the archive as the warehouse of tradition is inflected with the notion that what it stores is also removed from the everyday, at once ancient but also irrelevant, standing still outside time. Yet, if the past is of any relevance, the archive cannot maintain a rigid fixity that does not intersect with the present. In the work of the Atlas Group, the fabrication of “archival material” reflects what Hal Foster has termed an “archival impulse” that is constructed of multiple temporalities. The Atlas Group archive interrogates forms that are at once still, excavated from life, while still being in the present. In the process, the reductive singularity of the archive as an immobile monument is opened up to the complexity of a radical stillness through which the past enters the present in a moment of recognition. What is still, and what is still there, intersect in the productivity of a stillness that cuts through an undifferentiated continuity. This juncture echoes the Benjaminian flash which heralds the arrival of past in the presentTo articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. (Benjamin, Theses)Klee’s Angelus Novus stands still between past and future as a momentary suspension of motion brings history and prophecy into the present. For “the historian of the dialectic at a standstill”, Walter Benjamin, historical materialism was not simply a means of accessing the past in the present, but of awakening the potential of the future (Tiedemann 944-945). This, Rolf Tiedemann suggests, was the revolution of historical perception that Benjamin wanted to bring about in his unfinished Arcades Project (941). By carrying the principle of montage into history, Benjamin indicates an intention “to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event” (Benjamin Arcades 461). This principle had already been alluded to in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” where he had written that a historical materialist cannot do without a present in which time stands still, and later, that it is in the arrest of thought that what has been and what will be “crystallizes into a monad” (Benjamin “Theses” 262-263).Everywhere in Benjamin’s writings on history, there is something of the irreducibility of the phrase “standing still”. Standing still: still as an active, ongoing form of survival and endurance, still as an absence of movement. The duality of stillness is amplified as semantic clarity vacillates between one possibility and another: to endure and to be motionless. Is it possible to reduce “standing still” to a singularity? Benjamin’s counsel to take hold of memory at the “moment of danger” might be an indication of this complexity. The “moment of danger” emerges as the flash of the past in the present, but also the instant at which the past could recede into the inertia of eternity, at once a plea against the reduction of the moment into a “dead time” and recognition of the productivity of stillness.Something of that “flash” surfaces in Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Michel Foucault: “a first light opens up things and brings forth visibilities as flashes and shimmerings, which are the ‘second light’” (Deleuze 50). The first flash makes “visibilities visible” and determines what can be seen in a given historical period, while the second makes “statements articulable” and defines what can be said (Deleuze 50). These visibilities and statements, however, are distributed into the stratum and constitute knowledge as “stratified, archivized, and endowed with a relatively rigid segmentarity” (Deleuze 61). Strata are historically determined, what they constitute of perceptions and discursive formations varies across time and results in the presence of thresholds between the stratum that come to behave as distinct layers subject to splits and changes in direction (Deleuze 44). Despite these temporal variations that account for differences across thresholds, the strata appear as fixed entities, they mimic rock formations shaped over thousands of years of sedimentation (Deleuze and Guattari 45). Reading Deleuze on Foucault in conjunction with his earlier collaborative work with Felix Guattari brings forth distant shadows of another “stratification”. A Thousand Plateaus is notably less interested in discursive formations and more concerned with “striation”, the organisation and arrangement of space by the diagrams of power. Striated space is state space. It is offset by moving in the opposite direction, effectively turning striated space into smooth space (Deleuze and Guattari 524).Whether on striation or stratification, Deleuze’s work exhibits more than a cautionary distrust of processes of classification, regulation, and organization. Despite the flash that brings visibilities and statements into being, stratification, as much as striation, remains a technique of knowledge shaped by the strategies of power. It is interesting however, that Deleuze sees something as indeterminate as a flash, creating structures that are as determined as stratum. Yet perhaps this is a deceptive conjecture since while the strata appear relatively rigid they are also “extremely mobile” (Deleuze and Guattari 553). Foucault had already given an indication that what the archaeological method uncovers is not necessarily suspended, but rather that it suspends the notion of an absolute continuity (Archaeology 169). He suggests that “history is that which transforms documents into monuments” (7). The task of archaeology, it would seem, is to recover documents from monuments by demonstrating rather than reversing the process of sedimentation and without necessarily relying on a motionless past. While there is a relative, albeit interstratically tentative, stillness in the strata, absolute destratification proceeds towards deterritorialisation through incessant movement (Deleuze and Guattari 62-63).If A Thousand Plateaus is any indication, the imperative for the creative thinker today seems to be stirring in this direction: movement, motion, animation. Whatever forms of resistance are to be envisioned, it is motion, rather than stillness, that emerges as a radical form of action (Deleuze and Guattari 561). The question raised by these theoretical interventions is not so much whether such processes are indeed valuable forms of opposition, but rather, whether movement is always the only means, or the most effective means, of resistance? To imagine resistance as “staying in place” seems antithetical to nomadic thinking but is it not possible to imagine moments when the nomad resists not by travelling, but by dwelling? What of all those living a life of forced nomadism, or dying nomadic deaths, those for whom movement is merely displacement and loss? In Metamorphoses Rosi Braidotti reflects upon forced displacement and loss, yet her emphasis nonetheless remains on “figurations”, mappings of identity through time and space, mappings of movement (2-3). Braidotti certainly does not neglect the victims of motion, those who are forced to move, yet she remains committed to nomadism as a form of becoming. Braidotti’s notion of “figurations” finds a deeply poignant expression in Joseph Pugliese’s textual maps of some of these technically “nomadic” bodies and their movement from the North African littoral into the waters of the Mediterranean where they eventually surface on southern European shores as corpses (Pugliese 15). While Braidotti recognizes the tragedy of these involuntary nomads, it is in Pugliese’s work that this tragedy is starkly exposed and given concrete form in the figures of Europe’s refugees. This is movement as death, something akin to what Paul Virilio calls inertia, the product of excessive speed, the uncanny notion of running to stand still (Virilio 16).This tension between motion and stillness surfaces again in Laura Marks’ essay “Asphalt Nomadism.” Despite wanting to embrace the desert as a smooth space Marks retorts that “smooth space seems always to be elsewhere” (Marks 126). She notes the stability of the acacia trees and thorny shrubs in the desert and the way that nomadic people are constantly beset with invitations from the “civilising forces of religion and the soporific of a daily wage” (Marks 126). Emphatically she concludes that “the desert is never really ‘smooth’, for that is death” (Marks 126). On this deviation from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the desert as smooth space she concludes: “we who inherit their thinking need to stay on the ground: both in thought, moving close to the surface of concepts, and literally, remaining alert to signs of life in the sand and the scrub of the desert” (Marks 126). In Marks’ appeal for groundedness the tension between motion and stillness is maintained rather than being resolved through recourse to smoothness or in favour of perpetual movement. The sedentary and still structures that pervade the desert remain: the desert could not exist without them. In turn we might ask whether even the most rigorous abstraction can convince us that the ground between radical nomadism and perpetual displacement does not also need to be rethought. Perhaps this complexity is starkest when we begin to think about war, not only the potentiality of the war-machine to destabilize the state (Deleuze and Guattari 391), but war as the deterritorialisation of bodies, lives and livelihoods. Is the war of nomadism against the state not somehow akin to war as the violence that produces nomadic bodies through forced displacement? One of the questions that strikes me about the work of the Atlas Group, “an imaginary non-profit research foundation established in Beirut to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon” (Raad 68) through the production and exhibition of “archival” material, is whether their propensity towards still forms in the creation of documentary evidence cannot be directly attributed to war as perpetual movement and territorial flexibility, as the flattening of structure and the creation of “smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari 389). One need only think of the reigns of terror that begin with destratification – abolishing libraries, destroying documents, burning books. On the work of the Atlas Group, Andre Lepecki offers a very thorough introduction:The Atlas Group is an ongoing visual and performative archival project initiated by Walid Raad …whose main topic and driving force are the multiple and disparate events that history and habit have clustered into one singularity named “The Lebanese Civil Wars of 1975-1991”. (Lepecki 61).While the “inventedness” of the Atlas Group’s archive, its “post-event” status as manufactured evidence, raises a myriad of questions about how to document the trauma of war, its insistence on an “archival” existence, rather than say a purely artistic one, also challenges the presumption that the process of becoming, indeed of producing or even creating, is necessarily akin to movement or animation by insisting on the materiality of producing “documents” as opposed to the abstraction of producing “art”. The Atlas Group archive does not contribute directly to the transformation of visibilities into statements so much as statements into visibilities. Indeed, the “archival impulse” that seems to be present here works against the constitution of discursive formations precisely by making visible those aspects of culture which continue to circulate discursively while not necessarily existing. In other words, if one reads the sedimentary process of stratification as forming knowledge by allowing the relationships between “words” and “things” to settle or to solidify into historical strata, then the Atlas Group project seems to tap into the stillness of these stratified forms in order to reverse the signification of “things” and “words”. Hal Foster’s diagnosis of an “archival impulse” is located in a moment where, as he says, “almost anything goes and almost nothing sticks” in reference to the current obliviousness of contemporary artistic practices to political culture (Foster 2-3). Foster’s observation endows this paper with more than just an appropriate title since what Foster seems to identify are the limitations of the current obsession with speed. What one senses in the Atlas Group’s “archival impulse” and Foster’s detection of an “archival impulse” at play in contemporary cultural practices is a war against the war on form, a war against erasure through speed, and an inclination to dwell once more in the dusty matter of the past, rather than to pass through it. Yet the archive, in the view of nomadology, might simply be what Benjamin Hutchens terms “the dead-letter office of lived memory” (38). Indeed Hutchens’s critical review of the archive is both timely and relevant pointing out that “the preservation of cultural memories eradicated from culture itself” simply establishes the authority of the archive by erasing “the incessant historical violence” through which the archive establishes itself (Hutchens 38). In working his critique through Derrida’s Archive Fever, Hutchens revisits the concealed etymology of the word “archive” which “names at once the commencement and the commandment” (Derrida 1). Derrida’s suggestion that the concept of the archive shelters both the memory of this dual meaning while also sheltering itself from remembering that it shelters such a memory (Derrida 2) leads Hutchens to assert that “the archival ‘act’ opens history to the archive, but it closes politics to its own archivization” (Hutchens 44). The danger that “memory cultures”, archives among them, pose to memory itself has also been explored elsewhere by Andreas Huyssen. Although Huyssen does not necessary hold memory up as something to be protected from memory cultures, he is critical of the excessive saturation of contemporary societies with both (Huyssen 3). Huyssen refers to this as the “hypertrophy of memory” following Nietzsche’s “hypertrophy of history” (Huyssen 2-3). Although Hutchens and Huyssen differ radically in direction, they seem to concur nonetheless that what could be diagnosed as an “archival impulse” in contemporary societies might describe only the stagnation and stiltedness of the remainders of lived experience.To return once more to Foster’s notion of an “archival impulse” in contemporary art practices, rather than the reinstitution of the archive as the warehouse of tradition, what seems to be at stake is not necessarily the agglutination of forms, but the interrogation of formations (Foster 3). One could say that this is the archive interrogated through the eyes of art, art interrogated through the eyes of the archive. Perhaps this is precisely what the Atlas Group does by insisting on manufacturing documents in the form of documentary evidence. “Missing Lebanese Wars”, an Atlas Group project produced in 1998, takes as its point of departure the hypothesisthat the Lebanese civil war is not a self-evident episode, an inert fact of nature. The war is not constituted by unified and coherent objects situated in the world; on the contrary, the Lebanese civil war is constituted by and through various actions, situations, people, and accounts. (Raad 17-18)The project consists of a series of plates made up of pages taken from the notebook of a certain Dr Fadl Fakhouri, “the foremost historian of the civil war in Lebanon” until his death in 1993 (Raad 17). The story goes that Dr Fakhouri belonged to a gathering of “major historians” who were also “avid gamblers” that met at the race track every Sunday – the Marxists and the Islamists bet on the first seven races, while the Maronite nationalists and the socialists bet on the last eight (Raad 17). It was alleged that the historians would bribe the race photographer to take only one shot as the winning horse reached the post. Each historian would bet on exactly “how many fractions of a second before or after the horse crossed the line – the photographer would expose his frame” (Raad 17). The pages from Dr Fakhouri’s notebook are comprised of these precise exposures of film as the winning horse crossed the line – stills, as well as measurements of the distance between the horse and the finish line amid various other calculations, the bets that the historians wagered, and short descriptions of the winning historians given by Dr Fakhouri. The notebook pages, with photographs in the form of newspaper clippings, calculations and descriptions of the winning historians in English, are reproduced one per plate. In producing these documents as archival evidence, the Atlas Group is able to manufacture the “unified and coherent objects” that do not constitute the war as things that are at once irrelevant, incongruous and non-sensical. In other words, presenting material that is, while clearly fictitious, reflective of individual “actions, situations, people, and accounts” as archival material, the Atlas Group opens up discourses about the sanctity of historical evidence to interrogation by producing documentary evidence for circulating cultural discourses.While giving an ironic shape to this singular and complete picture of the war that continues to pervade popular cultural discourses in Lebanon through the media with politicians still calling for a “unified history”, the Atlas Group simultaneously constitute these historical materials as the work of a single person, Dr Fakhouri. Yet it seems that our trustworthy archivist also chooses not to write about the race, but about the winning historian – echoing the refusal to conceive of the war as a self-evident fact (to talk about the race as a race) and to see it rather as an interplay of individuals, actions and narratives (to view the race through the description of the winning historian). Indeed Dr Fakhouri’s descriptions of the winning historians are almost comical for their affinity with descriptions of Lebanon’s various past and present political leaders. A potent shadow, and a legend that has grown into an officially sanctioned cult (Plate 1).Avuncular rather than domineering, he was adept at the well-timed humorous aside to cut tension. (Plate 3).He is 71. But for 6 years he was in prison and for 10 years he was under house arrest and in exile, so those 16 years should be deducted – then he’s 55 (Plate 5). (Raad 20-29)Through these descriptions of the historians, Lebanon’s “missing” wars begin to play themselves out between one race and the next. While all we have are supposed “facts” with neither narrative, movement, nor anything else that could connect one fact to another that is not arbitrary, we are also in the midst of an archive that is as random as these “facts.” This is the archive of the “missing” wars, wars that are not documented and victims that are not known, wars that are “missing” for no good reason.What is different about this archive may not be the way in which order is manufactured and produced, but rather the background against which it is set. In his introduction to The Order of Things Michel Foucault makes reference to “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in a passage by Borges whereanimals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable… (xvi)“The uneasiness that makes us laugh when we read Borges”, writes Foucault, is the sense of loss of a “common” name and place (Order, xx). Whereas in Eusethenes, (“I am no longer hungry. Until the morrow, safe from my saliva all the following shall be: Aspics, Acalephs, Acanathocephalates […]”) the randomness of the enumerated species is ordered by their non-location in Eusthenes’ mouth (Foucault, Order xvii), in Borges there is no means through which the enumerated species can belong in a common place except in language (Foucault, Order, xviii). In the same way, the work of the Atlas Group is filtered through the processes of archival classification without belonging to the archives of any real war. There is no common ground against which they can be read except the purported stillness of the archive itself, its ability to put things in place and to keep them there.If the Atlas Group’s archives of Lebanon’s wars are indeed to work against the fluidity of war and its ability to enter and reshape all spaces, then the archival impulse they evoke must be one in which the processes of sedimentation that create archival documents are worked through a radical stillness, tapping into the suspended motion of the singular moment – its stillness, in order to uncover stillness as presence, survival, endurance, to be there still. Indeed, if archives turn “documents into monuments” (Enwezor 23), then the “theatre of statements” that Foucault unearths (Deleuze 47) are not those recovered in the work of the Atlas Group since is not monuments, but documents, that the Atlas Group archive uncovers.It is true that Benjamin urges us to seize hold of memory at the moment of danger, but he does not instruct us as to what to do with it once we have it, yet, what if we were to read this statement in conjunction with another, “for every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Benjamin, “Theses” 255). By turning monuments into documents it is possible that the Atlas Group reconfigure the formations that make up the archive, indeed any archive, by recognizing images of the past as being still in the present. Not still as a past tense, motionless, but still as enduring, remaining. In the work of the Atlas Group the archival impulse is closely aligned to a radical stillness, letting the dust of things settle after its incitation by the madness of war, putting things in place that insist on having a place in language. Against such a background Benjamin’s “moment of danger” is more than the instant of sedimentation, it is the productivity of a radical stillness in which the past opens onto the present, it is this moment that makes possible a radical reconfiguration of the archival impulse.ReferencesBenjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard U Press, 2002.———. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. New York: Continuum, 1999.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum, 2004.Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. Göttingen: Steidl Publishers, 2008.Foster, Hal. “An Archival Impulse.” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3-22.Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1992.———. The Order of Things. London: Routledge, 2002.Hutchens, Benjamin. “Techniques of Forgetting? Hypo-Amnesic History and the An-Archive.” SubStance 36.3 (2007): 37-55.Huyssen, Andreas. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2003.Lepecki, Andre. “In the Mist of the Event: Performance and the Activation of Memory in the Atlas Group Archive.” Scratching on the Things I Could Disavow. Ed.Walid Raad. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007.Marks, Laura. “Asphalt Nomadism: The New Desert in Arab Independent Cinema.” Landscape and Film. Ed. Martin Lefebvre. New York: Routledge, 2006.Pugliese, Joseph. “Bodies of Water.” Heat 12 (2006): 12-20. Raad, Walid. Scratching on the Things I Could Disavow. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007.Schmitz, Britta, and Kassandra Nakas. The Atlas Group (1989-2004). Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2006.Tiedemann, Rolf. “Dialectics at a Standstill.” The Arcades Project. Walter Benjamin. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard U P, 2002.Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Trans. Julie Rose. London: Verso, 1997.

It seems not insignificant that the cult film Donnie Darko is set in the final stages of the Bush-Dukakis election campaign, which had the twin effects of inaugurating the Bush presidential dynasty and making “liberal” an insurmountably derogatory term in American politics. Donnie’s gift of seeing into the future is, at least superficially, a reaction to his medication for “emotional problems”. But the count-down to his apocalyptic date with a giant bunny-rabbit also coincides with the demise of any remaining hope for a certain kind of progressive Left politics. With the options for escaping a conservative small town life fast disappearing, an impenetrable theory of time-travel appears to offer a plausible reprieve from Donnie’s destiny. As we learn very early in the movie, however, even time-travel cannot offer salvation: Donnie, like a particular idea of America, is doomed. Strangely representative of cultural studies’ theoretical preoccupations, Donnie’s character is unavoidably implicated in an omnipresent therapeutic culture while also demonstrating good taste in 80s music, an attraction to mischief and a fitful enthusiasm for saving the world. In the context of this editorial, the film acts as a useful retrospective archive of the moment when “affect” came to wide attention as the key site for politics in the United States. Donnie Darko documents the rise and spectacular fall of Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), a charismatic motivational speaker and incidental kiddy-porn ringleader who makes a fortune with his book, Attitudinal Beliefs. Cunningham’s converts find liberation by freeing themselves from their own fears, for according to his paradigm, there are only two features of the “energy spectrum”: fear and love. The trick to a successful life – and good grades – is to choose the “Right-eous” path of the latter (Gregg and Fuller). But as the film develops, the audience slowly comes to realise that no one will avoid the truly terrifying fate that is Grandma Death’s secret: everyone dies alone. Donnie Darko encapsulates the overwhelming nature of adolescent angst which gravitates between the “indifference of terror and boredom” and which Lawrence Grossberg has claimed to be “the most powerful and pervasive affective relations in everyday life” (184). Donnie and his peers aren’t just subject to the petty tyrannies of high-school; the film’s plot allegorises a much wider cultural shift. As Grossberg argued extensively throughout the 1990s, the strategy of new conservatives has been to conduct a political agenda at the level of affect, or what today we might recognise as “the battle for hearts and minds”. It succeeds by colonising the very mood, imagination and hope of a citizenry. When Karen Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore) is fired as English teacher at Donnie’s school – the result of a moral values campaign against a prescribed textbook – she says of the students: “We are losing them to apathy. They are slipping away”. Karen conveys despair and anger at this prospect, only to be met with the headmaster’s rebuke: “I am sorry that you have failed”. Here the apparently naïve optimism of a brilliant teacher is subject to the same indignant script her students face: individualised torment for a structurally ingrained lack of hope. Grossberg has consistently urged that cultural studies intellectuals recognise scenarios like these as the perniciously mundane locations where the fight for the future is waged: When the very possibility of political struggle is being erased – not because the scene of politics (or the public sphere) has disappeared in some postmodern apocalypse, but because there is an active attempt to use popular discourses to restructure the possibilities of everyday life – the political intellectual has no choice but to enter into the struggle over affect in order to articulate new ways of caring. (23) This issue of M/C Journal reveals some of the many ways this objective continues to be thwarted in the current political climate and in contexts which veer to varying degrees from the mainstream political situation in the United States. In the lead article for the issue, Shane McGrath makes the point that the politics of compassion are far from straightforward in an era of “compassionate conservatism” but that they are noticeably straight (see also Berlant). One of the most important distinctions he asks us to make is to “recognise and affirm feelings of compassion while questioning the politics that seem to emanate from those feelings”. The essay that follows is a helpful explanation of the theoretical legacies behind “Feeling, Emotion and Affect”. Eric Shouse provides an introduction to the vocabulary that many writers for this issue share and in some cases challenge. “The importance of affect”, Shouse claims, is that “in many cases the message consciously received may be of less import to the receiver of that message than his or her non-conscious affective resonance with the source of the message”. This is precisely the difficulty of forming any rational model of political opposition to apparently personable leaders like Bush, or concertedly “ordinary” leaders like John Howard: a diverse population will often interpret a manifest message through a quite different set of unconscious criteria. Anne Aly and Mark Balnaves offer an example of this kind of affective resonance in their article, “The Atmosfear of Terror”. Chilling riots around Sydney’s southern beaches in the week of this issue’s production lend added pertinence to their reading which argues that attitudes towards Muslims in Australia are “less to do with the actual threat of a terrorist attack on Australian soil and more to do with….reprisal for the terrorist attacks” that have already occurred elsewhere. Describing a quite different and highly intimate experience of fear is Lessa Bonniface, Lelia Green and Maurice Swanson’s essay documenting their work developing HeartNET, a Website devoted to discussion amongst heart patients. This collaborative project is part of an Australian Research Council linkage grant and illustrates how cultural theory can be tested and extended in productive partnerships with the wider community. Megan Watkins’s eloquent essay on the affects of classroom practice shares a similar attention to corporeality in the way that it highlights the neglected bodily dimensions of learning and motivation, while Glen Fuller’s “The Getaway” offers a quite different example of the ways that our bodies can surprise us by betraying disciplines we may not have consciously registered. Two further essays by Beth Seaton and Margaret Hair have the specific purpose of drawing attention to affective relations otherwise suppressed in the landscapes around us, reflecting upon the ethics of acknowledging past and present trauma. The issue then embarks on a series of exciting new approaches to popular media, in Anna Gibbs’s article on the hypnotic properties of television, Leanne Downing’s introduction to the politics of “eater-tainment” accompanying block-buster films, and finally, Gregory Seigworth’s affirming reading of indie darling, Sufjan Stevens. In a fitting gesture given the imperatives Grossberg sets out, Seigworth considers the significance of Stevens’ live show in terms of an “affect of corn” that he submits as one humble exercise that might help to “redeem a future for the present”. In the amount of time since the issue’s conception “affect” has moved from being regarded as something that “cultural studies has always been crap at” (Noble) to “the new cutting edge” (Hemmings) while for some it has become “that word I never want to hear again” (Sofoulis). As Elspeth Probyn notes in the contribution that closes the issue, witnessing a cherished theoretical interest become fashionable can be bemusing and disabling – what I hope these essays demonstrate is that fashion need not relinquish usefulness. This issue of M/C Journal involved some tough editorial decisions due to a remarkably high number of submissions. I thank all of the writers who offered work for consideration as well as those who responded so enthusiastically to my invitation. Thanks also to the referees who gave their time and expertise and the correspondents whose patience was doubtlessly tested in the finishing stages. I am particularly indebted to Laura Marshall and Neysa Ellison-Stone for their excellent and speedy copy-editing. Finally, the stunning cover image for this M/C Journal is “Collage” by Jane Simon with stills from Undiegate, a Super-8 film by Marian Prickett and Jane Simon (Melbourne, 2002). Its rich texture, exciting juxtaposition and overriding implication of possibility couldn’t have been more fitting my hopes for this issue. References Berlant, Lauren. “Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding).” Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. Ed. Lauren Berlant. Essays from the English Institute. London: New York, 2004. Donnie Darko. [motion picture] Directed by R. Kelly, 2001. Gregg, Melissa and Glen Fuller. “Where Is the Law in ‘Unlawful Combatant’? Resisting the Refrain of the Right-eous.” Cultural Studies Review 11.2 (2005): 147-59. Grossberg, Lawrence. Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Hemmings, Clare. “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn.” Cultural Studies 19.5 (2005): 548-67. Noble, Greg. “What Cultural Studies Is Crap At.” Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Newsletter October, 2004. Sofoulis, Zoe. Comment at Culture Fix: The Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Annual Conference, University of Technology, Sydney, November 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gregg, Melissa. "Affect." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Gregg, M. (Dec. 2005) "Affect," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/01-editorial.php>.

I want to argue here that the use of terms like “disabled” has very concrete and practical consequences; such language choices are significant and constitutive, not simply the abstract subject of a theoretical debate or a “politically correct” storm in a teacup. In this paper I want to examine some significant moments of conflict over and resistance to definitions of “disability” in an arts project, “In the Picture”, run by one of the UK’s largest disability charities, Scope. In the words of its webpages, this project “aims to encourage publishers, illustrators and writers to embrace diversity - so that disabled children are included alongside others in illustrations and story lines in books for young readers” (http://www.childreninthepicture.org.uk/aboutus.htm). It sought to raise awareness of “ableism” in the book world and through its webpage, offer practical advice and examples of how to include disabled children in illustrated children’s books. From 2005 to 2007, I tracked the progress of the project’s Stories strand, which sought to generate exemplary inclusive narratives by drawing on the experiences of disabled people and families of disabled children. My research drew on participant observation and interviews, but also creative audience research — a process where, in the words of David Gauntlett, “participants are asked to create media or artistic artefacts themselves.” Consequently, when I’m talking here about definitions of “disability’, I am discussing not just the ways people talk about what the word “disabled” might mean, but also the ways in which such identities might appear in images. These definitions made a real difference to those participating in various parts of the project and the types of inclusive stories they produced. Scope has been subject to substantial critique from the disability movement in the past (Benjamin; Carvel; Shakespeare, "Sweet Charity"). “In the Picture” was part of an attempt to resituate the charity as a campaigning organization (Benjamin; O’Hara), with the campaign’s new slogan “Time to get Equal” appearing prominently at the top of each page of the project’s website. As a consequence the project espoused the social model of disability, with its shift in focus from individual peoples’ bodily differences, towards the exclusionary and unequal society that systematically makes those differences meaningful. This shift in focus generates, some have argued, a performative account of disability as an identity (Sandhal; Breivik). It’s not simply that non-normative embodiment or impairment can be (and often is) acquired later in life, meaning that non-disabled people are perhaps best referred to as TABs — the “temporarily able bodied” (Duncan, Goggin and Newell). More significantly, what counts as a “disabled person” is constituted in particular social, physical and economic environments. Changing that environment can, in essence, create a disabled person, or make a person cease to be dis-abled. I will argue that, within the “In the Picture” project, this radically constructionist vision of disablement often rubbed against more conventional understandings of the term “disabled people”. In the US, the term “people with disabilities” is favoured as a label, because of its “people first” emphasis, as well as its identification of an oppressed minority group (Haller, Dorries and Rahn, 63; Shakespeare, Disability Rights). In contrast, those espousing the social model of disability in the UK tend to use the phrase “disabled people”. This latter term can flag the fact that disability is not something emanating from individuals’ bodily differences, but a social process by which inaccessible environments disable particular people (Oliver, Politics). From this point of view the phrase “people with disabilities” might appear to ascribe the disability to the individual rather than the society — it suggests that it is the people who “have” the disability, not the society which disables. As Helen Meekosha has pointed out, Australian disability studies draws on both US civil rights languages and the social model as understood in the UK. While I’ve chosen to adopt the British turn of phrase here, the broader concept from an Australian point of view, is that the use of particular sets of languages is no simple key to the perspectives adopted by individual speakers. My observations suggest that the key phrase used in the project — “ disabled people” — is one that, we might say, “passes”. To someone informed by the social model it clearly highlights a disabling society. However, it is a phrase that can be used without obvious miscommunication to talk to people who have not been exposed to the social model. Someone who subscribes to a view of “disability” as impairment, as a medical condition belonging to an individual, might readily use the term “disabled people”. The potentially radical implications of this phrase are in some ways hidden, unlike rival terms like “differently abled”, which might be greeted with mockery in some quarters (eg. Purvis; Parris). This “passing” phrase did important work for the “In the Picture” project. As many disability activists have pointed out, “charity” and “concern” for disabled people is a widely espoused value, playing a range of important psychic roles in an ableist society (eg. Longmore; Hevey). All the more evocative is a call to support disabled children, a favoured object of the kinds of telethons and other charitable events which Longmore discusses. In the words of Rosemarie Garland Thomson, the sentimentality often used in charity advertising featuring children “contains disability’s threat in the sympathetic, helpless child for whom the viewer is empowered to act” (Garland Thomson, 63). In calling for publishers to produce picture books which included disabled children, the project had invested in this broad appeal — who could argue against such an agenda? The project has been successful, for example, in recruiting support from many well known children’s authors and illustrators, including Quentin Blake and Dame Jackie Wilson. The phrase “disabled children”, I would argue, smoothed the way for such successes by enabling the project to graft progressive ideas —about the need for adequate representation of a marginalized group — onto existing conceptions of an imagined recipient needing help from an already constituted group of willing givers. So what were the implications of using the phrase “disabled children” for the way the project unfolded? The capacity of this phrase to refer to both a social model account of disability and more conventional understandings had an impact on the recruitment of participants for writing workshops. Participants were solicited via a range of routes. Some were contacted through the charity’s integrated pre-school and the networks of the social workers working beside it. The workshops were also advertised via a local radio show, through events run by the charity for families of disabled people, through a notice in the Disabled Parents site, and announcements on the local disability arts e- newsletter. I am interested in the way that those who heard about the workshops might have been hailed by —or resisted the lure of — those labels “disabled person” or “parent of a disabled child” or at least the meaning of those labels when used by a large disability charity. For example, despite a workshop appearing on the programme of Northwest Disability Arts’ Deaf and Disability Arts Festival, no Deaf participants became involved in the writing workshops. Some politicised Deaf communities frame their identities as an oppressed linguistic minority of sign language users, rather than as disabled people (Corker; Ladd). As such, I would suggest that they are not hailed by the call to “disabled people” with which the project was framed, despite the real absence of children’s books drawing on Deaf culture and its rich tradition of visual communication (Saunders; Conlon and Napier). Most of those who attended were (non-disabled) parents or grandparents of disabled children, rather than disabled people, a fact critiqued by some participants. It’s only possible to speculate about the reasons for this imbalance. Was it the reputation of this charity or charities in general (see Shakespeare, "Sweet Charity") amongst politicised disabled people that discouraged attendance? A shared perspective with those within the British disabled peoples’ movement who emphasise the overwhelming importance of material changes in employment, education, transport rather than change in the realm of “attitudes” (eg Oliver, Politics)? Or was it the association of disabled people undertaking creative activities with a patronising therapeutic agenda (eg Hevey, 26)? The “pulling power” of a term even favoured by the British disability movement, it seems, might be heavily dependent on who was using it. Nonetheless, this term did clearly speak to some people. In conversation it emerged that most of those who attended the workshops either had young family members who were disabled or were imbricated in educational and social welfare networks that identified them as “disabled” — for example, by having access to Disability Living Allowance. While most of the disabled children in participants’ families were in mainstream education, most also had an educational “statement” enabling them to access extra resources, or were a part of early intervention programmes. These social and educational institutions had thus already hailed them as “families of disabled children” and as such they recognised themselves in the project’s invitation. Here we can see the social and institutional shaping of what counts as “disabled children” in action. One participant who came via an unusual route into the workshops provides an interesting reflection of the impact of an address to “disabled people”. This man had heard about the workshop because the local charity he ran had offices adjacent to the venue of one of the workshops. He started talking to the workshop facilitator, and as he said in an interview, became interested because “well … she mentioned that it was about disabilities and I’m interested in people’s disabilities – I want to improve conditions for them obviously”. I probed him about the relationship between his interest and his own experiences as a person with dyslexia. While he taught himself to read in his thirties, he described his reading difficulties as having ongoing impacts on his working life. He responded: first of all it wasn’t because I have dyslexia, it was because I’m interested in improving people’s lives in general. So, I mean particularly people who are disabled need more care than most of us don’t they? …. and I’d always help whenever I can, you know what I mean. And then thinking that I had a disability myself! The dramatic double-take at the end of this comment points to the way this respondent positions himself throughout as outside of the category of “disabled”. This self- identification points towards the stigma often attached to the category “disabled”. It also indicates the way in which this category is, at least in part, socially organised, such that people can be in various circumstances located both inside and outside it. In this writer’s account “people who are disabled” are “them” needing “more care than most of us”. Here, rather than identifying as a disabled person, imagined as a recipient of support, he draws upon the powerful discourses of charity in a way that positions him giving to and supporting others. The project appealed to him as a charity worker and as a campaigner, and indeed a number of other participants (both “disabled” and “non-disabled”) framed themselves in this way, looking to use their writing as a fundraising tool, for example, or as a means of promoting more effective inclusive education. The permeability of the category of “disabled” presented some challenges in the attempt to solicit “disabled peoples’” voices within the project. This was evident when completed stories came to be illustrated by design, illustration and multimedia students at four British universities: Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Wolverhampton, the University of Teeside and the North East Wales Institute. Students attending an initial briefing on the project completed a questionnaire which included an item asking whether they considered themselves to be disabled. While around eight of the eighty respondents answered “yes” to this question, the answers of these students and some others were by no means clear cut. A number of students identified themselves as dyslexic, but contested the idea that this diagnosis meant that they were disabled. One respondent commented along similar lines: “My boyfriend was very upset that the university considers him to be disabled because he is dyslexic”. How can we make sense of these responses? We could note again that the identity of “disabled” is highly stigmatised. Many disabled students believe that they are seen as lazy, demanding excessive resources, or even in the case of some students with non- visible impairments, lying (Kleege; Olney and Brockman). So we could view such responses as identity management work. From this point of view, an indicator of the success of the project in shifting some of the stigma attached to the label of “disabled” might be the fact that at least one of the students participants “came out” as dyslexic to her tutors in the course of her participation in the project. The pattern of answers on questionnaire returns suggests that particular teaching strategies and administrative languages shape how students imagine and describe themselves. Liverpool John Moores University, one of the four art schools participating in the project, had a high profile programme seeking to make dyslexic students aware of the technical and writing support available to them if they could present appropriate medical certification (Lowy). Questionnaires from LJMU included the largest number of respondents identifying themselves as both disabled and dyslexic, and featured no comment on any mismatch between these labels. In the interests of obtaining appropriate academic support and drawing on a view of dyslexia not as a deficit but as a learning style offering significant advantages, it might be argued, students with dyslexia at this institution had been taught to recognise themselves through the label “disabled”. This acknowledgement that people sharing some similar experiences might describe themselves in very different ways depending on their context suggests another way of interpreting some students’ equivocal relationship to labels like “dyslexia” and “disabled”. The university as an environment demanding the production of very formal styles of writing and rapid assimilation of a high volume of written texts, is one where particular learning strategies of people with dyslexia come to be disabling. In many peoples’ day to day lives – and perhaps particularly in the day to day lives of visual artists – less conventional ways of processing written information simply may not be disabling. As such, students’ responses might be seen less as resistance to a stigmatised identity and more an acknowledgement of the contingent nature of disablement. Or perhaps we might understand these student responses as a complex mix of both of these perspectives. Disability studies has pointed to the coexistence of contradictory discourses around disability within popular culture (eg, Garland-Thomson; Haller, Dorries and Rahn). Similarly, the friezes, interactive games, animations, illustrated books and stand-alone images which came out of this arts project sometimes incorporate rival conceptions of disability side by side. A number of narratives, for example, include pairs of characters, one of which embodies conventional narratives of disability (for example, being diagnostically labelled or ‘cured’), while the other articulates alternative accounts (celebrating diversity and enabling environments). Both students and staff reported that participation in the project prompted critical thinking about accessible design and inclusive representation. Some commented in interviews that their work on the project had changed their professional practice in ways they thought might have longer term impact on the visual arts. However, it is clear that in student work, just as in the project itself, alternative conceptions of what “disability” might mean were at play, even as reframing such conceptions are explicitly the aim of the enterprise. Such contradictions point towards the difficulties of easily labelling individual stories or indeed the wider project “progressive” or otherwise. Some illustrated narratives and animations created by students were understood by the project management to embody the definitions of “disabled children” within the project’s ten principles. This work was mounted on the website to serve as exemplars for the publishing industry (http://www.childreninthepicture.org.uk/stories.htm). Such decisions were not unreflective, however. There was a good deal of discussion by students and project management about how to make “disabled children” visible without labelling or pathologising. For example, one of the project’s principles is that “images of disabled children should be used casually or incidentally, so that disabled children are portrayed playing and doing things alongside their non- disabled peers” (see also Bookmark). Illustrator Jane Ray commented wryly in an article on the website on her experience of including disabled characters in a such a casual way in her published work that no-one notices it! (Ray). As I’ve discussed in more detail elsewhere (Matthews, forthcoming), the social model, espoused by the project, with its primary focus on barriers to equality rather than individual impaired bodies, presented some challenges to such aims. While both fairytales and, increasingly, contemporary books for young people, do sometimes engage with violence, marginalisation and social conflict (Saunders), there is a powerful imperative to avoid such themes in books for very young children. In trying to re-narrativise disabled children outside conventional paradigms of “bravery overcoming adversity”, the project may have also pushed writers and illustrators away from engaging with barriers to equality. The project manager commented in an interview: “probably in the purest form the social model would show in stories the barriers facing disabled children, whereas we want to show what barriers have been knocked down and turn it round into a more positive thing”. While a handful of the 23 stories emerging from the writing workshops included narratives around bullying and or barriers to equal access, many of the stories chose to envisage more utopian, integrated environments. If it is barriers to inequality that, at least in part, create “disabled people”, then how is it possible to identify disabled children with little reference to such barriers? The shorthand used by many student illustrators, and frequently too in the “images for inspiration” part of the project’s website, has been the inclusion of enabling technologies. A white cane, a wheelchair or assistive and augmentative communication technologies can be included in an image without making a “special” point of these technologies in the written text. The downside to this shorthand, however, is the way that the presence of these technologies can serve to naturalise the category of “disabled children”. Rather than being seen as a group identity constituted by shared experiences of discrimination and exclusion, the use of such “clues” to which characters “are disabled” might suggest that disabled people are a known group, independent of particular social and environmental settings. Using this arts project as a case study, I have traced here some of the ways people are recognised or recognise themselves as “disabled”. I’ve also suggested that within this project other conceptions of what “disabled” might mean existed in the shadows of the social constructionist account to which it declared its allegiances. Given the critiques of the social model which have emerged within disability studies over the last fifteen years (e.g. Crowe; Shakespeare, Disability Rights), this need not be a damning observation. The manager of this arts project, along with writer Mike Oliver ("If I Had"), has suggested that the social model might be used strategically as a means of social transformation rather than a complete account of disabled peoples’ lives. However, my analysis here has suggested that we can not only imagine different ways that “disabled people” might be conceptualised in the future. Rather we can see significant consequences of the different ways that the label “disabled” is mobilised here and now. Its inclusion and exclusions, what it makes it easy to say or difficult to imagine needs careful thinking through. References Benjamin, Alison. “Going Undercover.” The Guardian, Society, April 2004: 8. Bookmark. Quentin Blake Award Project Report: Making Exclusion a Thing of the Past. The Roald Dahl Foundation, 2006. Breivik, Jan Kare. “Deaf Identities: Visible Culture, Hidden Dilemmas and Scattered Belonging.” In H.G. Sicakkan and Y.G. Lithman, eds. What Happens When a Society Is Diverse: Exploring Multidimensional Identities. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. 75-104. Carvel, John. “Demonstrators Rattle Scope.” The Guardian, Society section, 6 Oct. 2004: 4. Conlon, Caroline, and Jemina Napier. “Developing Auslan Educational Resources: A Process of Effective Translation of Children’s Books.” Deaf Worlds 20.2. (2004): 141-161. Corker, Mairian. Deaf and Disabled or Deafness Disabled. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998. Crow, Liz. “Including All of Our Lives: Renewing the Social Model of Disability.” In Jenny Morris, ed. Encounters with Strangers: Feminism and Disability. Women’s Press, 1996. 206-227. Davis, John, and Nick Watson. “Countering Stereotypes of Disability: Disabled Children and Resistance.” In Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, eds. Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. London: Continuum, 2002. 159-174. Duncan, Kath, Gerard Goggin, and Christopher Newell. “Don’t Talk about Me… like I’m Not Here: Disability in Australian National Cinema.” Metro Magazine 146-147 (2005): 152-159. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” In Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Bruggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, eds. Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: MLAA, 2002. 56-75. Gauntlett, David. “Using Creative Visual Research Methods to Understand Media Audiences.” MedienPädagogik 4.1 (2005). Haller, Beth, Bruce Dorries, and Jessica Rahn. “Media Labeling versus the US Disability Community Identity: A Study of Shifting Cultural Language.” In Disability & Society 21.1 (2006): 61-75. Hevey, David. The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery. London: Routledge, 1992. Kleege, Georgia. “Disabled Students Come Out: Questions without Answers.” In Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggeman, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, eds. Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. 308-316. Ladd, Paddy. Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2003. Longmore, Paul. “Conspicuous Contribution and American Cultural Dilemma: Telethon Rituals of Cleansing and Renewal.” In David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, eds. The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. 134-158. Lowy, Adrienne. “Dyslexia: A Different Approach to Learning?” JMU Learning and Teaching Press 2.2 (2002). Matthews, Nicole. “Contesting Representations of Disabled Children in Picture Books: Visibility, the Body and the Social Model of Disability.” Children’s Geographies (forthcoming). Meekosha, Helen. “Drifting Down the Gulf Stream: Navigating the Cultures of Disability Studies.” Disability & Society 19.7 (2004): 720-733. O’Hara, Mary. “Closure Motion.” The Guardian, Society section, 30 March 2005: 10. Oliver, Mike. The politics of Disablement. London: Macmillan, 1990. ———. “If I Had a Hammer: The Social Model in Action.” In John Swain, Sally French, Colin Barnes, and Carol Thomas, eds. Disabling Barriers – Enabling Environments. London: Sage, 2002. 7-12. Olney, Marjorie F., and Karin F. Brockelman. "Out of the Disability Closet: Strategic Use of Perception Management by Select University Students with Disabilities." Disability & Society 18.1 (2003): 35-50. Parris, Matthew. “Choose Your Words Carefully If You Want to Be Misunderstood.” The Times 10 July 2004. Purves, Libby. “Handicap, What Handicap?” The Times 9 Aug. 2003. Ray, Jane. “An Illustrator’s View: Still Invisible.” In the Picture. < http://www.childreninthepicture.org.uk/au_illustrateview.htm >.Sandhal, Carrie. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9.1-2 (2003): 25-56. Saunders, Kathy. Happy Ever Afters: A Storybook Guide to Teaching Children about Disability. London: Trenton Books, 2000. Shakespeare, Tom. “Sweet Charity?” 2 May 2003. Ouch! < (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/features/charity.shtml >. Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs. London: Routledge, 2006.

Does the arrival of the network society mean we are now a culture of collectors, a society of sharers? We mused about these questions while assembling this M/C Journal issue, which has its genesis in a past event of ‘shared’ confusion. Alex Burns booked into Axel Bruns’s hotel room at the 1998 National Young Writer’s Festival (NYWF) in Newcastle. This ‘identity theft’ soon extended to discussion panels and sessions, where some audience members wondered if the NYWF program had typographical errors. We planned, over café latte at Haddon’s Café, to do a co-session at next year’s festival. By then the ‘identity theft’ had spread to online media. We both shared some common interests: the music of Robert Fripp and King Crimson, underground electronica and experimental turntablism, the Internet sites Slashdot and MediaChannel.org, and the creative possibilities of Open Publishing. “If you’re going to use a pseudonym,” a prominent publisher wrote to Alex Burns in 2001, “you could have created a better one than Axel Bruns.” We haven’t yet done our doppelgänger double-act at NYWF but this online collaboration is a beginning. What became clear during the editorial process was that some people and communities were better at sharing than others. Is sharing the answer or the problem: does it open new possibilities for a better, fairer future, or does it destroy existing structures to leave nothing but an uncontrollable mess? The feature article by Graham Meikle elaborates on several themes explored in his insightful book Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (New York: Routledge, London: Pluto Press, 2002). Meikle’s study of the influential IndyMedia network dissects three ‘compelling founder’s stories’: the Sydney-based Active software team, the tradition of alternative media, and the frenetic energy of ‘DiY culture’. Meikle remarks that each of these ur-myths “highlights an emphasis on access and participation; each stresses new avenues and methods for new people to create news; each shifts the boundary of who gets to speak.” As the IndyMedia movement goes truly global, its autonomous teams are confronting how to be an international brand for Open Publishing, underpinned by a viable Open Source platform. IndyMedia’s encounter with the Founder’s Trap may have its roots in paradigms of intellectual property. What drives Open Source platforms like IndyMedia and Linux, Tom Graves proposes, are collaborative synergies and ‘win-win’ outcomes on a vast and unpredictable scale. Graves outlines how projects like Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation’s ‘GNU Public License’ challenge the Western paradigm of property rights. He believes that Open Source platforms are “a more equitable and sustainable means to manage the tangible and intangible resources of this world we share.” The ‘clash’ between the Western paradigm of property rights and emerging Open Source platforms became manifest in the 1990s through a series of file-sharing wars. Andy Deck surveys how the ‘browser war’ between Microsoft and Netscape escalated into a long-running Department of Justice anti-trust lawsuit. The Motion Picture Association of America targeted DVD hackers, Napster’s attempt to make the ‘Digital Jukebox in the Sky’ a reality was soon derailed by malicious lawsuits, and Time-Warner CEO Gerald Levin depicted pre-merger broadband as ‘the final battleground’ for global media. Whilst Linux and Mozilla hold out promise for a more altruistic future, Deck contemplates, with a reference to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), that Internet producers “must conform to the distribution technologies and content formats favoured by the entertainment and marketing sectors, or else resign themselves to occupying the margins of media activity.” File-sharing, as an innovative way of sharing access to new media, has had social repercussions. Marjorie Kibby reports that “global music sales fell from $41.5 billion in 1995 to $38.5 billion in 1999.” Peer-to-Peer networks like KaZaA, Grokster and Morpheus have surged in consumer popularity while commercial music file subscription services have largely fallen by the wayside. File-sharing has forever changed the norms of music consumption, Kibby argues: it offers consumers “cheap or free, flexibility of formats, immediacy, breadth of choice, connections with artists and other fans, and access to related commodities.” The fragmentation of Australian families into new diversities has co-evolved with the proliferation of digital media. Donell Holloway suggests that the arrival of pay television in Australia has resurrected the ‘house and hearth’ tradition of 1940s radio broadcasts. Internet-based media and games shifted the access of media to individual bedrooms, and changed their spatial and temporal natures. However pay television’s artificial limit of one television set per household reinstated the living room as a family space. It remains to be seen whether or not this ‘bounded’ control will revive family battles, dominance hierarchies and power games. This issue closes with a series of reflections on how the September 11 terrorist attacks transfixed our collective gaze: the ‘sharing’ of media connects to shared responses to media coverage. For Tara Brabazon the intrusive media coverage of September 11 had its precursor in how Great Britain’s media documented the Welsh mining disaster at Aberfan on 20 October 1966. “In the stark grey iconography of September 11,” Brabazon writes, “there was an odd photocopy of Aberfan, but in the negative.” By capturing the death and grief at Aberfan, Brabazon observes, the cameras mounted a scathing critique of industrialisation and the searing legacy of preventable accidents. This verité coverage forces the audience to actively engage with the trauma unfolding on the television screen, and to connect with their own emotions. Or at least that was the promise never explored, because the “Welsh working class community seemed out of time and space in 1960s Britain,” and because political pundits quickly harnessed the disaster for their own electioneering purposes. In the early 1990s a series of ‘humanitarian’ interventions and televised conflicts popularized the ‘CNN Effect’ in media studies circles as a model of how captivated audiences and global media vectors could influence government policies. However the U.S. Government, echoing the coverage of Aberfan, used the ‘CNN Effect’ for counterintelligence and consensus-making purposes. Alex Burns reviews three books on how media coverage of the September 11 carnage re-mapped our ‘virtual geographies’ with disturbing consequences, and how editors and news values were instrumental in this process. U.S. President George W. Bush’s post-September 11 speeches used ‘shared’ meanings and symbols, news values morphed into the language of strategic geography, and risk reportage obliterated the ideal of journalistic objectivity. The deployment of ‘embedded’ journalists during the Second Gulf War (March-April 2003) is the latest development of this unfolding trend. September 11 imagery also revitalized the Holocaust aesthetic and portrayal of J.G. Ballard-style ‘institutionalised disaster areas’. Royce Smith examines why, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, macabre photo-manipulations of the last moments became the latest Internet urban legend. Drawing upon the theoretical contributions of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes and others, Smith suggests that these photo-manipulations were a kitsch form of post-traumatic visualisation for some viewers. Others seized on Associated Press wire photos, whose visuals suggested the ‘face of Satan’ in the smoke of the World Trade Center (WTC) ruins, as moral explanations of disruptive events. Imagery of people jumping from the WTC’s North Tower, mostly censored in North America’s press, restored the humanness of the catastrophe and the reality of the viewer’s own mortality. The discovery of surviving artwork in the WTC ruins, notably Rodin’s The Thinker and Fritz Koenig’s The Sphere, have prompted art scholars to resurrect this ‘dead art’ as a memorial to September 11’s victims. Perhaps art has always best outlined the contradictions that are inherent in the sharing of cultural artefacts. Art is part of our, of humanity’s, shared cultural heritage, and is celebrated as speaking to the most fundamental of human qualities, connecting us regardless of the markers of individual identity that may divide us – yet art is also itself dividing us along lines of skill and talent, on the side of art production, and of tastes and interests, on the side of art consumption. Though perhaps intending to share the artist’s vision, some art also commands exorbitant sums of money which buy the privilege of not having to share that vision with others, or (in the case of museums and galleries) to set the parameters – and entry fees – for that sharing. Digital networks have long been promoted as providing the environment for unlimited sharing of art and other content, and for shared, collaborative approaches to the production of that content. It is no surprise that the Internet features prominently in almost all of the articles in this ‘share’ issue of M/C Journal. It has disrupted the existing systems of exchange, but how the pieces will fall remains to be seen. For now, we share with you these reports from the many nodes of the network society – no doubt, more connections will continue to emerge. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Burns, Alex and Bruns, Axel. ""Share" Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Burns, A. & Bruns, A. (2003, Apr 23). "Share" Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/01-editorial.php>

It all started with a tweet. On the afternoon of 2 June 2013, Professor Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and visiting instructor at New York University (NYU), tweeted out a message that would go on to generate a significant social media controversy. Addressing aspiring doctoral program applicants, Miller wrote:Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation #truthThe response to Miller’s tweet was swift and fiery. Social media users began engaging with him on Twitter, and in the early hours of the controversy Miller defended the tweet. When one critic described his message as “judgmental,” Miller replied that doing a dissertation is “about willpower/conscientiousness, not just smarts” (Trotter). The tweet above, now screen captured, was shared widely and debated by journalists, Fat Acceptance activists, and academic social media users. Within hours Miller had deleted the tweet and replaced it with two new ones:My sincere apologies to all for that idiotic, impulsive, and badly judged tweet. It does not reflect my true views, values, or standards andObviously my previous tweet does not represent the selection policies of any university, or my own selection criteriaHe then made his Twitter account private. The captured image, however, continued to spread. Across social media, users began to circulate a campaign that called for Miller to be formally disciplined (Trotter). There was also widespread talk about potential lawsuits from prospective students who were not selected for admission at UNM (Kirby). Indeed, the Fat Chick Sings blogger Jeanette DePatie offered her own advice to Miller: #findagoodlawyer.Soon after the controversy emerged a response appeared on UNM’s website in the form of a video statement by Professor Jane Ellen Smith, the Chair of the UNM Psychology Department. Smith reiterated that Miller’s statements did not reflect the “policies and admissions standards of UNM”. She also stated that Miller had defended his actions by claiming the tweet was part of a “research project” where he would deliberately send out provocative messages in order to measure the public response to them. This claim was met with incredulity by a number of bloggers and columnists, and was later determined to be incorrect in an Institutional Review Board inquiry at UNM, which concluded Miller’s tweets were “self-promotional” in nature. Following a formal investigation, the UNM committee found no evidence that Miller had discriminated against overweight students. It did however pass a motion of censure that included a number of restrictions, including prohibiting Miller from sitting on any graduate admission committee at UNM.The #truth about Fat PhDs?Readers may be wondering why Miller’s tweet continues to matter as I write this article in 2015. It is my belief that the tweet is important insofar as it affords an insight into the cultural scene that surrounds the fat body in higher education. The vigorous debate generated by Miller’s tweet offers researchers a diverse array of media texts that are available to help build a more comprehensive picture of fat embodiment within higher education.Looking at the tweet in the cold light of day it is difficult to imagine any logical links one might infer between a person’s carbohydrate consumption and their ability to excel in doctoral education. And there’s the rub. Of course Miller’s tweet does not represent a careful evaluation of the properties of doctoral willpower. In order to make sense of the tweet we need to understand the ways cultural assumptions about fatness operate. For decades now, researchers have documented the existence of anti-fat attitudes (Crandall & Martinez). Increasingly, scholars and Fat Acceptance activists have described a “thinness norm” that is reproduced across contemporary Western cultures, which discerns normatively slender bodies as “both healthy and beautiful” (Eller 220) and those whose bodies depart from this norm, as “socially acceptable targets for shaming and hate speech” (Eller 220). In order to be intelligible Miller’s tweet relies on a number of deeply entrenched cultural meanings attributed to fatness and fat people.The first is that body-size is primarily a matter of self-control. Although Critical Fat Studies researchers have argued for some time that body weight is determined by complex interactions between the biological and environmental, the belief that a large body size is caused by limited self-control remains prevalent. This in turn supports a host of cultural connotations, which tend to constitute fat people as “lazy, gluttonous, greedy, immoral, uncontrolled, stupid, ugly and lacking in willpower” (Farrell 4).In light of the above, Miller’s message ought to be read as a moral one. I have paraphrased its logic as such: if you [the fat doctoral student] lack the willpower to discipline your body into normatively desired slimness, you will also likely lack the strength of character required to discipline your body-mind into producing a doctoral dissertation. The sad irony here is that, if anything, the attitudes that might hamper fat students from pursuing a doctoral education would be those espoused in Miller’s own tweet. As Critical Fat Studies researchers have illuminated, the anti-fat attitudes the tweet reproduces generate challenging higher education climates for fat people to navigate (Pausé, Express Yourself 6).Indeed, while Miller’s tweet is one case that arose to media prominence, there is evidence that it sits inside a wider pattern of weight discrimination within higher education. For example, Caning and Mayer (“Obesity: Its Possible”, “Obesity: An Influence”) found that despite similar high school performances, ‘obese’ students were less likely to be accepted to elite universities, than their non-obese peers. In a more recent US-based study, Burmeister and colleagues found evidence of weight bias in graduate school admissions. In particular, they found that higher body mass index (BMI) applicants received fewer post-interview offers into psychology graduate programs than other students (920), and this relationship appeared to be stronger for female applicants (920). This picture is supported by a study by Swami and Monk, who examined weight bias against women in a hypothetical scenario about university acceptance. In this study, 198 volunteers in the UK were asked to identify the women they were most and least likely to select for a place at university. Swami and Monk found that participants were biased against fat women, a finding which the authors interpreted as evidence of broader public beliefs about body size and access to higher education.In my examination of the media scene surrounding the Miller case I observed that most commentators associated the tweet with a particular affective formation – shame. Miller’s actions were widely described as “fat-shaming” (Bennet-Smith; Ingeno; Martin; Trotter; Walsh) with Miller himself often referred to simply as the “fat-shaming professor” (King; ThinkTank). In this article I wish to consider the affective-political dimensions of Miller’s tweet, by focusing on one digital community’s response to it: Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs. In following this path I am building on the work of other researchers who have considered fat activisms and Web 2.0 (Pausé, Express Yourself); fat visual activism (Gurrieri); and the emotional politics of fat acceptance blogging (Kargbo; Bronstein).Imaging Alternatives: Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDsBy 3 June 2013 – just one day after Miller’s tweet was published – New Zealand-based academic Cat Pausé had created the Tumblr Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs. This was billed as a photo-blog about “being fatlicious in academia”. Writing on her Friend of Marilyn blog, Pausé explained the rationale behind the Tumblr:I decided that what I wanted to do was to highlight all the amazing fat individuals who are in graduate school, or have completed graduate school – to provide a visual repository … and to celebrate the amazing work being done by these rad fatties!Pausé sent out calls for participants on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, and emailed a Fat Studies listserv. She asked submitters to send “a photo, along with their name, degree, and awarding institution” (Pausé Express Yourself, 6). Images were submitted thick and fast. Twenty-three were published in the first day of the project, and twenty in the second. At the time of writing, just over 150 images had been submitted, the most recent being November 2013.The Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs project ought to be understood as part the turn away from the textual toward the digital in fat activist movements (Kargbo). This has seen a growth in online communities that are interested in developing “counter-images in response to the fat body’s position as the abject, excluded Other of the socially acceptable body” (Kargbo 162). Examples include a multitude of Fatshion photo-blogs, Tumblrs like Exciting Fat People or the Stocky Bodies image library, which responds to the limited diversity of visual representations of fat people in the mainstream media (Gurrieri).For this article, I have read the images on the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs Tumblr in order to gain an impression about the affective-political work accomplished by this collective of self-identified fat academic bodies. As I indicated earlier, much of the commentary following Miller’s tweet characterised it as an attempt to ‘shame’ fat doctoral students. As Elspeth Probyn has identified, shame frequently manifests itself on the body “most experiences of shame make you want to disappear, to hide away and to cover yourself” (Probyn 329). I suggest that the core work of the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs Tumblr is to address the spectre of shame Miller’s tweet projects with visibility, rather than it’s opposite. This visibility also enables the project to proliferate a host of different ways of (feeling about) being fat and doctoral.The first image posted on the Tumblr is Pausé’s own. She is pictured smiling at the 2007 graduation ceremony where she received her own PhD, surrounded by fellow graduates in academic regalia. Her image is followed by many others, mostly white women, who attest to the academic attainments of fat individuals. My first impression as I scrolled through the Tumblr was to note that many of the images (51) referenced scenes of graduation, where subjects wore robes, caps or posed with higher degree certificates. Many more were the kinds of photographs that one might expect to be taken at an academic event. Together, these images attest to the viability of the living, breathing doctoral body - a particularly relevant response given Miller’s tweet. This work to legitimate the fat doctoral body was also accomplished through the submission of two historical photographs of Albert Einstein, a figure who is neither living nor breathing, but highly unlikely to be described as lacking academic ability or willpower.As I read through the Tumblr subsequent times, I noticed that many of the submitters offered images that challenge stereotypical representations of the fat body. As a number of writers have noted, fat people tend to be visually represented as “solitary, lonely figures whose expressions are downcast and dejected” (Gurrieri 202). That is if they aren’t already decapitated in the visual convention of the “headless fatty” used across news media (Kargbo 160). Like the Stocky Bodies project, the Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs Tumblr facilitated a more diverse and less pathologising representation of fat (doctoral) embodiment.Across the images there is little evidence of the downcast eyes of shame and dejection that Miller’s tweet seems to invite of aspiring fat doctoral candidates. Scrolling through the Tumblr one encounters images of fat people singing, swimming, creating art, playing sport, smoking, smiling, dressing up, and making music. A number of images (12) emphasise the social nature of fat doctoral life, by picturing multiple subjects at once, some holding hands, others posing with colleagues, loved ones, and a puppy. Another category of submissions took a playful stance vis-à-vis some representational conventions of imaging fatness. Where portrayals of the fat body from side or rear angles, or images of fat people eating and drinking typically code an affective scene of disgust (Gurrieri), a number of images on the Tumblr appear to reinscribe these scenes with new meaning. Viewers are offered pictures of smiling and contented fat graduates unashamed to eat and drink, or be represented from ‘unflattering’ angles.Furthermore, a number of images offered alternatives to the conventional representation of the fat subject as ugly and sexually unattractive by posing in glamorous shots bubbling with allure and desire. In one memorable picture, blogger and educator Virgie Tovar is snapped wearing a “sex instructor” badge and laughs while holding two sex toys.Reading across the images it becomes clear that the Tumblr offers a powerful response to the visual convention of representing the solitary, lonely fat person. Rather than presenting isolated fat doctoral students the act of holding the images together generates a sense of fat higher education community, as Kargbo notes:A single image posted online amidst vast Internet ephemera is just a fleeting document of a moment in a stranger’s life. But in the plural, as one scrolls through hundreds of images eager to hit the ‘next’ button for what will be a repetition of the same, the image takes on a new function: it becomes an insistent testament to the liveness of fat embodiment in the present. (164)Obesity Timebomb blogger Charlotte Cooper (2013) commented on the significance of the project: “It is pretty amazing to see the names and faces as I scroll through Fuck yeah! Fat PhDs. Many of us are friends and collaborators and the site represents a new community of power.”Concluding Thoughts: Fat Embodiment and Higher Education CulturesThis article has examined a cultural event that that saw the figure of the fat doctoral student rise to international media prominence in 2013. I have argued that while Miller’s tweet can be read as illustrative of the affective scene of shame that surrounds the fat body in higher education, the images offered by the Fuck Yeah! photo submitters work to re-negotiate implication in social discourses of abjection. Indeed, the images assert that alternative ways of feeling about being fat and doctoral remain viable. Fat students can be contented, ambivalent, sultry, pissed off, passionate and proud – and Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs provides submitters with a platform to perform a wide array of these affects. This is not to say that shame is shut out of the project, or the lives of submitters’ altogether. Instead, I am suggesting that the Tumblr generates a more open field of possibilities, providing “a space for re-imagining new forms of attachments and identifications.” (Kargbo 171). Critics might argue that this Tumblr is not particularly novel when set in the context of a range of fat photo-blogs that have sprung up across the Internet in recent years. I would argue, however, that when we consider the kinds of questions Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs might ask of university cultures, and the prompts it offers to higher education researchers, the Tumblr can be seen to make an important contribution. I am in agreement with Kargbo (2013) when she argues that fat photo-blogs “have the potential to alter the conditions of visual reception and perception”. That is, through their “codes and conventions, styles of lighting and modes of address, photographs literally show us how to relate to another person” (Singer 602). When read together, the Fuck Yeah! images insist that a different kind of relationship to fat PhDs is possible, one that exceeds the shaming visible in Miller’s tweet. Ultimately then, the Tumblr is a call to take fat doctoral students seriously, not as problems in need of fixing, but as a diverse group of scholars who make important contributions to the academy and beyond.I would like to use the occasion of concluding this article to call for further conversations about fat embodiment and higher education cultures. The area is significantly under-researched, with higher education scholars largely failing to engage with the material and affective experiences of fat embodiment. Indeed, I would argue that if nothing else, this paper has demonstrated that public scenes of knowledge creation have done a much more comprehensive job of analysing the intersection of ‘fat + university’ than academic books and articles to date. While not offering an exhaustive sketch, I would like to gesture toward some areas that might contribute to a future research agenda. For example, researchers might begin to approach the experience of living, working and studying as a fat person in the contemporary university. Such research might examine whose body the university is imagined and designed for, as well as the campus climate experienced by fat individuals. Researchers might consider how body size could become a part of broader conversations about embodiment and privilege in higher education, alongside race, ability, gender identity, and other categories of social difference.Thinking about the intersection of ‘fat + university’ would also involve tracing possibilities. For example, what role do university campuses play as spaces of fat activism and solidarity? And, what is the contribution made by Critical Fat Studies as a newly established interdisciplinary field of inquiry?Taken together, I hope the questions I have raised in this article demonstrate that the intersection of ‘fat’ and higher education cultures represents a rich and valuable area that warrants further inquiry.ReferencesBennet-Smith, Meredith. “Geoffrey Miller, Visiting NYU Professor, Slammed for Fat-Shaming Obese PhD Candidates.” 6 Apr. 2013. The Huffington Post. ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/04/geoffrey-miller-fat-shaming-nyu-phd_n_3385641.html›.Bronstein, Carolyn. “Fat Acceptance Blogging, Female Bodies and the Politics of Emotion.” Feral Feminisms 3 (2015): 106-118. Burmeister, Jacob, Allison Kiefner, Robert Carels, and Dara Mushner-Eizenman. “Weight Bias in Graduate School Admissions.” Obesity 21 (2013): 918-920.Canning, Helen, and Jean Mayer. “Obesity: Its Possible Effect on College Acceptance.” The New England Journal of Medicine 275 (1966): 1172-1174. Canning, Helen, and Jean Mayer. “Obesity: An Influence on High School Performance.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 20 (1967): 352-354. Cooper, Charlotte. “The Curious Case of Dr. Miller and His Tweet.” Obesity Timebomb 4 June 2013. ‹http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-curious-case-of-dr-miller-and-his.html›.Crandall, Christian, and Rebecca Martinez. “Culture, Ideology, and Antifat Attitudes.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22 (1996): 1165-1176.DePatie, Jeanette. “Dear Dr. Terrible Your Bigotry Is Showing...” The Fat Chick Sings 2 June 2013. ‹http://fatchicksings.com/2013/06/02/dear-dr-terrible-your-bigotry-is-showing/›.Eller, G.M. “On Fat Oppression.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 24 (2014): 219-245. Farrell, Amy. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2011. Gurrieri, Lauren. “Stocky Bodies: Fat Visual Activism.” Fat Studies 2 (2013): 197-209. Ingeno, Lauren. “Fat-Shaming in Academe.” Inside Higher Ed 4 June 2013. Kargbo, Majida. “Toward a New Relationality: Digital Photography, Shame, and the Fat Subject.” Fat Studies 2 (2013): 160-172.King, Barbara. “The Fat-Shaming Professor: A Twitter-Fueled Firestorm.” Cosmos & Culture 13.7 (2013) Kirby, Marianne. “How Not to Twitter: Dr. Geoffrey Miller's 140 Fat-Hating Characters of Infamy.” XoJane 5 June 2013. ‹http://www.xojane.com/issues/professor-geoffrey-miller›.Martin, Adam. “NYU Professor Immediately Regrets Fat-Shaming Potential Students.” New York Magazine June 2013. ‹http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/nyu-professor-immediately-regrets-fat-shaming.html›.Pausé, Cat. “On That Tweet – Fat Discrimination in the Education Sector.” Friend of Marilyn 5 June 2013. ‹http://friendofmarilyn.com/2013/06/05/on-that-tweet-fat-discrimination-in-the-education-sector/›.Pausé, Cat. “Express Yourself: Fat Activism in the Web 2.0 Age.” The Politics of Size: Perspectives from the Fat-Acceptance Movement. Ed. Ragen Chastain. New York: ABC-CLIO, 2015. 1-8. Probyn, Elspeth. “Everyday Shame.” Cultural Studies 18.2-3 (2004): 328-349. Singer, T. Benjamin. “From the Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations: The Ethics of (Re)viewing Non-Normative Body Images.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 2013. 601-620. Swami, Viren, and Rachael Monk. “Weight Bias against Women in a University Acceptance Scenario.” Journal of General Psychology 140.1 (2013): 45-56.Sword, Helen. “The Writer’s Diet.” ‹http://writersdiet.com/WT.php?home›.ThinkTank. “'Fat Shaming Professor' Gives RIDICULOUS Excuse – Check This Out (Update).” ThinkTank 8 July 2013. ‹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ey9TkG18-o›.Trotter, J.K. “How Twitter Schooled an NYU Professor about Fat-Shaming.” The Atlantic Wire 2013. ‹http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/06/how-twitter-schooled-nyu-professor-about-fat-shaming/65833/›.Walsh, Michael. “NYU Visiting Professor Insults the Obese Ph.D.s with ‘Impulsive’ Tweet.” New York Daily News 2013.

The two companions scurry off when they hear a noise at the door. It was only a noise, but it was also a message, a bit of information producing panic: an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of communication. Was the noise really a message? Wasn’t it, rather, static, a parasite? Michael Serres, 1982. Since, ordinarily, channels have a certain amount of noise, and therefore a finite capacity, exact transmission is impossible. Claude Shannon, 1948. Reading Information At their most simplistic, there are two means for shifting information around – analogue and digital. Analogue movement depends on analogy to perform computations; it is continuous and the relationships between numbers are keyed as a continuous ordinal set. The digital set is discrete; moving one finger at a time results in a one-to-one correspondence. Nevertheless, analogue and digital are like the two companions in Serres’ tale. Each suffers the relationship of noise to information as internal rupture and external interference. In their examination of historical constructions of information, Hobart and Schiffman locate the noise of the analogue within its physical materials; they write, “All analogue machines harbour a certain amount of vagueness, known technically as ‘noise’. Which describes the disturbing influences of the machine’s physical materials on its calculations” (208). These “certain amounts of vagueness” are essential to Claude Shannon’s articulation of a theory for information transfer that forms the basis for this paper. In transforming the structures and materials through which it travels, information has left its traces in digital art installation. These traces are located in installation’s systems, structures and materials. The usefulness of information theory as a tool to understand these relationships has until recently been overlooked by a tradition of media art history that has grouped artworks according to the properties of the artwork and/or tied them into the histories of representation and perception in art theory. Throughout this essay I use the productive dual positioning of noise and information to address the errors and impurity inherent within the viewing experiences of digital installation. Information and Noise It is not hard to see why the fractured spaces of digital installation are haunted by histories of information science. In his 1948 essay “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” Claude Shannon developed a new model for communications technologies that articulated informational feedback processes. Discussions of information transmission through phone lines were occurring alongside the development of technology capable of computing multiple discrete and variable packets of information: that is, the digital computer. And, like art, information science remains concerned with the material spaces of transmission – whether conceptual, social or critical. In the context of art something is made to be seen, understood, viewed, or presented as a series of relationships that might be established between individuals, groups, environments, and sensations. Understood this way art is an aesthetic relationship between differing material bodies, images, representations, and spaces. It is an event. Shannon was adamant that information must not be confused with meaning. To increase efficiency he insisted that the message be separated from its components; in particular, those aspects that were predictable were not to be considered information (Hansen 79). The problem that Shannon had to contend with was noise. Unwanted and disruptive, noise became symbolic of the struggle to control the growth of systems. The more complex the system, the more noise needed to be addressed. Noise is both the material from which information is constructed, as well as being the matter which information resists. Weaver (Shannon’s first commentator) writes: In the process of being transmitted, it is unfortunately characteristic that certain things are added to the signal which were not intended by the information source. These unwanted additions may be distortions of sound (in telephony, for example) or static (in radio), or distortions in shape or shading of picture (television), or errors in transmission (telegraphy or facsimile), etc. All of these changes in the transmitted signal are called noise. (4). To enable more efficient message transmission, Shannon designed systems that repressed as much noise as possible, while also acknowledging that without some noise information could not be transmitted. Shannon’s conception of information meant that information would not change if the context changed. This was crucial if a general theory of information transmission was to be plausible and meant that a methodology for noise management could be foregrounded (Pask 123). Without meaning, information became a quantity, a yes or no decision, that Shannon called a “bit” (1). Shannon’s emphasis on separating signal or message from both predicability and external noise appeared to give information an identity where it could float free of a material substance and be treated independently of context. However, for this to occur information would have to become fixed and understood as an entity. Shannon went to pains to demonstrate that the separation of meaning and information was actually to enable the reverse. A fluidity of information and the possibilities for encoding it would mean that information, although measurable, did not have a finite form. Tied into the paradox of this equation is the crucial role of noise or error. In Shannon’s communication model information is not only complicit with noise; it is totally dependant upon it for understanding. Without noise, either encoded within the original message or present from sources outside the channel, information cannot get through. The model of sender-encoder-channel-signal (message)-decoder-receiver that Shannon constructed has an arrow inserting noise. Visually and schematically this noise is a disruption pointing up and inserting itself in the nice clean lines of the message. This does not mean that noise was a last minute consideration; rather noise was the very thing Shannon was working with (and against). It is present in every image we have of information. A source, message, transmitter, receiver and their attendant noises are all material infrastructures that serve to contextualise the information they transmit, receive, and disrupt. Figure 1. Claude Shannon “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” 1948. In his analytical discussion of the diagram, Shannon actually locates noise in two crucial places. The first position accorded noise is external, marked by the arrow that demonstrates how noise is introduced to the message channel whilst in transit. External noise confuses the purity of the message whilst equivocally adding new information. External noise has a particular materiality and enters the equation as unexplained variation and random error. This is disruptive presence rather than entropic coded pattern. Shannon offers this equivocal definition of noise to be everything that is outside the linear model of sender-channel-receiver; hence, anything can be noise if it enters a channel where it is unwelcome. Secondly, noise was defined as unpredictability or entropy found and encoded within the message itself. This for Shannon was an essential and, in some ways, positive role. Entropic forces invited continual reorganisation and (when engaging the laws of redundancy) assisted with the removal of repetition enabling faster message transmission (Shannon 48). Weaver calls this shifting relationship between entropy and message “equivocation” (11). Weaver identified equivocation as central to the manner in which noise and information operated. A process of equivocation identified the receiver’s knowledge. For Shannon, a process of equivocation mediated between useful information and noise, as both were “measured in the same units” (Hayles, Chaos 55). To eliminate noise completely is to sacrifice information. Information understood in this way is also about relationships between differing material bodies, representations, and spaces, connected together for the purposes of transmission. It, like the artwork, is an event. This would appear to suggest a correlation between information transmission and viewing in galleries. Far from it. Although, the contemporary information channel is essentially a tube with fixed walls, (it is still constrained by physical properties, bandwidth and so on) and despite the implicit spatialisation of information models, I am not proposing a direct correlation between information channels and installation spaces. This is because I am not interested in ‘reading’ the information of either environment. What I am suggesting is that both environments share this material of noise. Noise is present in four places. Firstly noise is within the media errors of transmission, and secondly, it is within the media of the installation, (neither of which are one way flows). Thirdly, the viewer or listener introduces noise as interference, and lastly, it is present in the very materials thorough which it travels. Noise layered on noise. Redundancy and Modulation So far in this paper I have discussed the relationship of information to noise. For the remainder, I want to address some particular processes or manifestations of noise in New Zealand artists’ collective, et al.’s maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 (2006, exhibited as part of the SCAPE Biennal of Art in Public Space, Christchurch Art Gallery). The installation occupies a small alcove that is partially blocked by a military-style portable table stacked with newspapers. Inside the space are three grey wooden chairs, some headphones, and a modified data projection of Google Earth. It is not immediately clear if the viewer is allowed within the spaces of the alcove to listen to the headphones as monotonous voices fill the whole space intoning political, social, and religious platitudes. The headphones might be a tool to block out the noise. In the installation it is as if multiple messages have been sent but their source, channel, and transmitter are unintelligible to the receiver. All that is left is information divorced from meaning. As other works by et al. have demonstrated, social solidarity is not a fundamentalism with directed positions and singular leaders. For example, in rapture (2004) noise disrupts all presence as a portable shed quivers in response to underground nuclear explosions 40,000km away. In the fundamental practice (2005) the viewer is left attempting to decode the un-encoded, as again sound and large steel barriers control and determine only certain movements (see http://www.etal.name/ for some documentation of these projects) . maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 is a development of the fundamental practice. To enter its spaces viewers slip around the table and find themselves extremely close to the projection screen. Despite the provision of copious media the viewer cannot control any aspect of the environment. On screen, and apparently integral to the Google Earth imagery, are five animated and imposing dark grey monolith forms. Because of their connection to the monotonous voices in the headphones, the monoliths seem to map the imposition of narrative, power, and force in various disputed territories. Like their sudden arrival in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) it is the contradiction of the visibility and improbability of the monoliths that renders them believable. On the video landscape the five monoliths apparently house the dispassionate voices of many different media and political authorities. Their presence is both redundant and essential as they modulate the layering of media forces – and in between, error slips in. In a broad discussion of information Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari highlight the necessary role of redundancy commenting that: redundancy has two forms, frequency and resonance; the first concerns the significance of information, the second (I=I) concerns the subjectivity of communication. It becomes apparent that information and communication, and even significance and subjectification, are subordinate to redundancy (79). In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 patterns of frequency highlight the necessary role of entropy where it is coded into gaps in the vocal transmission. Frequency is a structuring of information tied to meaningful communication. Resonance, like the stack of un-decodable newspapers on the portable table, is the carrier of redundancy. It is in the gaps between the recorded voices that connections between the monoliths and the texts are made, and these two forms of redundancy emerge. As Shannon says, redundancy is a problem of language. This is because redundancy and modulation do not equate with relationship of signal to noise. Signal to noise is a representational relationship; frequency and resonance are not representational but relational. This means that an image that might be “real-time” interrupts our understanding that the real comes first with representation always trailing second (Virilio 65). In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 the monoliths occupy a fixed spatial ground, imposed over the shifting navigation of Google Earth (this is not to mistake Google Earth with the ‘real’ earth). Together they form a visual counterpoint to the texts reciting in the viewer’s ears, which themselves might present as real but again, they aren’t. As Shannon contended, information cannot be tied to meaning. Instead, in the race for authority and thus authenticity we find interlopers, noisy digital images that suggest the presence of real-time perception. The spaces of maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 meld representation and information together through the materiality of noise. And across all the different modalities employed, the appearance of noise is not through formation, but through error, accident, or surprise. This is the last step in a movement away from the mimetic obedience of information and its adherence to meaning-making or representational systems. In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 we are forced to align real time with virtual spaces and suspend our disbelief in the temporal truths that we see on the screen before us. This brief introduction to the work has returned us to the relationship between analogue and digital materials. Signal to noise is an analogue relationship of presence and absence. No signal equals a break in transmission. On the other hand, a digital system, due to its basis in discrete bits, transmits through probability (that is, the transmission occurs through pattern and randomness, rather than presence and absence (Hayles, How We Became 25). In his use of Shannon’s theory for the study of information transmission, Schwartz comments that the shift in information theory from analogue to digital is a shift from an analogue relationship of signal to noise to one of the probability of error (318). As I have argued in this paper, if it is measured as a quantity, noise is productive; it adds information. In both digital and analogue systems it is predictability and repetition that do not contribute information. Von Neumann makes the distinction clear saying that to some extent the “precision” of the digital machine “is absolute.” Even though, error as a matter of normal operation and not solely … as an accident attributable to some definite breakdown, nevertheless creeps in (294). Error creeps in. In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5, et al. disrupts signal transmission by layering ambiguities into the installation. Gaps are left for viewers to introduce misreadings of scale, space, and apprehension. Rather than selecting meaning out of information within nontechnical contexts, a viewer finds herself in the same sphere as information. Noise imbricates both information and viewer within a larger open system. When asked about the relationship with the viewer in her work, et al. collaborator p.mule writes: To answer the 1st question, communication is important, clarity of concept. To answer the 2nd question, we are all receivers of information, how we process is individual. To answer the 3rd question, the work is accessible if you receive the information. But the question remains: how do we receive the information? In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 the system dominates. Despite the use of sound engineering and sophisticated Google Earth mapping technologies, the work appears to be constructed from discarded technologies both analogue and digital. The ominous hovering monoliths suggest answers: that somewhere within this work are methodologies to confront the materialising forces of digital error. To don the headphones is to invite a position that operates as a filtering of power. The parameters for this power are in a constant state of flux. This means that whilst mapping these forces the work does not locate them. Sound is encountered and constructed. Furthermore, the work does not oppose digital and analogue, for as von Neumann comments “the real importance of the digital procedure lies in its ability to reduce the computational noise level to an extent which is completely unobtainable by any other (analogy) procedure” (295). maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 shows how digital and analogue come together through the productive errors of modulation and redundancy. et al.’s research constantly turns to representational and meaning making systems. As one instance, maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 demonstrates how the digital has challenged the logics of the binary in the traditions of information theory. Digital logics are modulated by redundancies and accidents. In maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 it is not possible to have information without noise. If, as I have argued here, digital installation operates between noise and information, then, in a constant disruption of the legacies of representation, immersion, and interaction, it is possible to open up material languages for the digital. Furthermore, an engagement with noise and error results in a blurring of the structures of information, generating a position from which we can discuss the viewer as immersed within the system – not as receiver or meaning making actant, but as an essential material within the open system of the artwork. References Barr, Jim, and Mary Barr. “L. Budd et al.” Toi Toi Toi: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand. Ed. Rene Block. Kassel: Museum Fridericianum, 1999. 123. Burke, Gregory, and Natasha Conland, eds. et al. the fundamental practice. Wellington: Creative New Zealand, 2005. Burke, Gregory, and Natasha Conland, eds. Venice Document. et al. the fundamental practice. Wellington: Creative New Zealand, 2006. Daly-Peoples, John. Urban Myths and the et al. Legend. 21 Aug. 2004. The Big Idea (reprint) http://www.thebigidea.co.nz/print.php?sid=2234>. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone Press, 1996. Hansen, Mark. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999. Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1990. Hobart, Michael, and Zachary Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. p.mule, et al. 2007. 2 Jul. 2007 http://www.etal.name/index.htm>. Pask, Gordon. An Approach to Cybernetics. London: Hutchinson, 1961. Paulson, William. The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information. Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1988. Schwartz, Mischa. Information Transmission, Modulation, and Noise: A Unified Approach to Communication Systems. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1982. Shannon, Claude. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. July, October 1948. Online PDF. 27: 379-423, 623-656 (reprinted with corrections). 13 Jul. 2004 http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html>. Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Trans. Julie Rose. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, British Film Institute, 1994. Von Neumann, John. “The General and Logical Theory of Automata.” Collected Works. Ed. A. H. Taub. Vol. 5. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1963. Weaver, Warren. “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Mathematical Theory of Commnunication. Eds. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. paperback, 1963 ed. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1949. 1-16. Work Discussed et al. maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 2006. Installation, Google Earth feed, newspapers, sound. Exhibited in SCAPE 2006 Biennial of Art in Public Space Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, September 30-November 12. Images reproduced with the permission of et al. Photographs by Lee Cunliffe. Acknowledgments Research for this paper was conducted with the support of an Otago Polytechnic Resaerch Grant. Photographs of et al. maintenance of social solidarity–instance 5 by Lee Cunliffe. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ballard, Su. "Information, Noise and et al." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/02-ballard.php>. APA Style Ballard, S. (Oct. 2007) "Information, Noise and et al.," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/02-ballard.php>.

Samurai and Chinese martial arts themes inspire and permeate the uniquely philosophical lyrics and beats of Wu-Tang Clan, a New York-based hip-hop collective made popular in the mid-nineties with their debut album Enter the Wu-Tang: Return of the 36 Chambers. Original founder RZA (“Rizza”) scored his first full-length motion-picture soundtrack and made his feature film debut with Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 2000). Through a critical exploration of the film’s musical filter, it will be argued that RZA’s aesthetic vision effectively deterritorialises the figure of the samurai, according to which the samurai “change[s] in nature and connect[s] with other multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari, 9). The soundtrack consequently emancipates and redistributes the idea of the samurai from within the dynamic context of a fundamentally different aesthetic intensity, which the Wu-Tang has always hoped to communicate, that is to say, an aesthetics of adaptation or of what is called in hip-hop music more generally: an aesthetics of flow. At the center of Jarmusch’s film is a fundamental opposition between the sober asceticism and deeply coded lifestyle of Ghost Dog and the supple, revolutionary, itinerant hip-hop beats that flow behind it and beneath it, and which serve at once as philosophical foil and as alternate foundation to the film’s themes and message. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai tells the story of Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), a deadly and flawlessly precise contract killer for a small-time contemporary New York organised crime family. He lives his life in a late 20th-century urban America according to the strict tenets of the 18th century text Hagakure, which relates the principles of the Japanese Bushido (literally, the “way of the warrior,” but more often defined and translated as the “code of the samurai”). Others have noted the way in which Ghost Dog not only fails as an adaptation of the samurai genre but thematises this very failure insofar as the film depicts a samurai’s unsuccessful struggle to adapt in a corrupt and fractured postmodern, post-industrial reality (Lanzagorta, par. 4, 9; Otomo, 35-8). If there is any hope at all for these adaptations (Ghost Dog is himself an example), it lies, according to some, in the singular, outmoded integrity of his nostalgia, which despite the abstract jouissance or satisfaction it makes available, is nevertheless blank and empty (Otomo, 36-7). Interestingly, in his groundbreaking book Spectacular Vernaculars, and with specific reference to hip-hop, Russell Potter suggests that where a Eurocentric postmodernism posits a lack of meaning and collapse of value and authority, a black postmodernism that is neither singular nor nostalgic is prepared to emerge (6-9). And as I will argue there are more concrete adaptive strategies at work in the film, strategies that point well beyond the film to popular culture more generally. These are anti-nostalgic strategies of possibility and escape that have everything to do with the way in which hip-hop as soundtrack enables Ghost Dog in his becoming-samurai, a process by which a deterritorialised subject and musical flow fuse to produce a hybrid adaptation and identity. But hip-hip not only makes possible such a becoming, it also constitutes a potentially liberating adaptation of the past and of otherness that infuses the film with a very different but still concrete jouissance. At the root of Ghost Dog is a conflict between what Deleuze and Guattari call state and nomad authority, between the code that prohibits adaptation and its willful betrayer. The state apparatus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the quintessential form of interiority. The state nourishes itself through the appropriation, the bringing into its interior, of all that over which it exerts its control, and especially over those nomadic elements that constantly threaten to escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 380-7). In Ghost Dog, the code or state-form functions throughout the film as an omnipresent source of centralisation, authorisation and organisation. It is attested to in the intensely stratified urban environment in which Ghost Dog lives, a complicated and forbidding network of streets, tracks, rails, alleys, cemeteries, tenement blocks, freeways, and shipping yards, all of which serve to hem Ghost Dog in. And as race is highlighted in the film, it, too, must be included among the many ways in which characters are always already contained. What encounters with racism in the film suggest is the operative presence of a plurality of racial and cultural codes; the strict segregation of races and cultures in the film and the animosity which binds them in opposition reflect a racial stratification that mirrors the stratified topography of the cityscape. Most important, perhaps, is the way in which Bushido itself functions, at least in part, as code, as well as the way in which the form of the historical samurai in legend and reality circumscribes not only Ghost Dog’s existence but the very possibility of the samurai and the samurai film as such. On the one hand, Bushido attests to the absolute of religion, or as Deleuze and Guattari describe it: “a center that repels the obscure … essentially a horizon that encompasses” and which forms a “bond”, “pact”, or “alliance” between subject/culture and the all-encompassing embrace of its deity: in this case, the state-form which sanctions samurai existence (382-3). On the other hand, but in the same vein, the advent of Bushido, and in particular the Hagakure text to which Ghost Dog turns for meaning and guidance, coincides historically with the emergence of the modern Japanese state, or put another way, with the eclipse of the very culture it sponsors. In fact, samurai history as a whole can be viewed to some extent as a process of historical containment by which the state-form gradually encompassed those nomadic warring elements at the heart of early samurai existence. This is the socio-historical context of Bushido, insofar as it represents the codification of the samurai subject and the stratification of samurai culture under the pressures of modernisation and the spread of global capitalism. It is a social and historical context marked by the power of a bourgeoning military, political and economic organisation, and by policies of restraint, centralisation and sedentariness. Moreover, the local and contemporary manifestations of this social and historical context are revealed in many of the elements that permeate not only the traditional samurai films of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi or Kobayashi, but modern adaptations of the genre as well, which tend to convey a nostalgic mourning for this loss, or more precisely, for this failure to adapt. Thus the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog is dominated by the negative qualities of inaction, nonviolence and sobriety, and whether these are taken to express the sterility and impotence of postmodern existence or the emptiness of a nostalgia for an unbroken and heroic past, these qualities point squarely towards the transience of culture and towards the impossibility of adaptation and survival. Ghost Dog is a reluctant assassin, and the inherently violent nature of his task is always deflected. In the same way, most of Ghost Dog’s speech in the film is delivered through his soundless readings of the Hagakure, silent and austere moments that mirror as well the creeping, sterile atmosphere in which most of the film’s action takes place. It is an atmosphere of interiority that points not only towards the stratified environment which restricts possibility and expressivity but also squarely towards the meaning of Bushido as code. But this atmosphere meets resistance. For the samurai is above all a man of war, and, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the man of war [that is to say, the nomad] is always committing an offence against” the State (383). In Ghost Dog, for all the ways in which Ghost Dog’s experience is stratified by the Bushido as code and by the post-industrial urban reality in which he lives and moves, the film shows equally the extent to which these strata or codes are undermined by nomadic forces that trace “lines of flight” and escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 423). Clearly it is the film’s soundtrack, and thus, too, the aesthetic intensities of the flow in hip-hop music, which both constitute and facilitate this escape: We have an APB on an MC killer Looks like the work of a master … Merciless like a terrorist Hard to capture the flow Changes like a chameleon (“Da Mystery of Chessboxin,” Enter) Herein lies the significance of (and difference between) the meaning of Bushido as code and as way, a problem of adaptation and translation which clearly reflects the central conflict of the film. A way is always a way out, the very essence of escape, and it always facilitates the breaking away from a code. Deleuze and Guattari describe the nomad as problematic, hydraulic, inseparable from flow and heterogeneity; nomad elements, as those elements which the State is incapable of drawing into its interior, are said to remain exterior and excessive to it (361-2). It is thus significant that the interiority of Ghost Dog’s readings from the Hagakure and the ferocious exteriority of the soundtrack, which along with the Japanese text helps narrate the tale, reflect the same relationship that frames the state and nomad models. The Hagakure is not only read in silence by the protagonist throughout the film, but the Hagakure also figures prominently inside the diegetic world of the film as a visual element, whereas the soundtrack, whether it is functioning diegetically or non-diegetically, is by its very nature outside the narrative space of the film, effectively escaping it. For Deleuze and Guattari, musical expression is inseparable from a process of becoming, and, in fact, it is fair to say that the jouissance of the film is supplied wholly by the soundtrack insofar as it deterritorialises the conventional language of the genre, takes it outside of itself, and then reinvests it through updated musical flows that facilitate Ghost Dog’s becoming-samurai. In this way, too, the soundtrack expresses the violence and action that the plot carefully avoids and thus intimately relates the extreme interiority of the protagonist to an outside, a nomadic exterior that forecloses any possibility of nostalgia but which suggests rather a tactics of metamorphosis and immediacy, a sublime deterritorialisation that involves music becoming-world and world becoming-music. Throughout the film, the appearance of the nomad is accompanied, even announced, by the onset of a hip-hop musical flow, always cinematically represented by Ghost Dog’s traversing the city streets or by lengthy tracking shots of a passenger pigeon in flight, both of which, to take just two examples, testify to purely nomadic concepts: not only to the sheer smoothness of open sky-space and flight with its techno-spiritual connotations, but also to invisible, inherited pathways that cross the stratified heart of the city undetected and untraceable. Embodied as it is in the Ghost Dog soundtrack, and grounded in what I have chosen to call an aesthetics of flow, hip-hop is no arbitrary force in the film; it is rather both the adaptive medium through which Ghost Dog and the samurai genre are redeemed and the very expression of this adaptation. Deleuze and Guattari write: The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world.’ Such is the form of exteriority … that forms a war machine. (378) Nowhere else do Deleuze and Guattari more clearly outline the affinities that bind their notion of the nomad and the form of exteriority that is essential to it with the politics of language, cultural difference and authenticity which so color theories of race and critical analyses of hip-hop music and culture. And thus the key to hip-hop’s adaptive power lies in its spontaneity and in its bringing into the world of something incomprehensible and unanticipated. If the code in Ghost Dog is depicted as nonviolent, striated, interior, singular, austere and measured, then the flow in hip-hop and in the music of the Wu-Tang that informs Ghost Dog’s soundtrack is violent, fluid, exterior, variable, plural, playful and incalculable. The flow in hip-hop, as well as in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, is grounded in a kinetic linguistic spontaneity, variation and multiplicity. Its lyrical flow is a cascade of accelerating rhymes, the very speed and implausibility of which often creates a sort of catharsis in performers and spectators: I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses can’t define how I be droppin’ these mockeries, lyrically perform armed robberies Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me Battle-scarred shogun, explosion. … (“Triumph”, Forever) Over and against the paradigm of the samurai, which as I have shown is connected with relations of content and interiority, the flow is attested to even more explicitly in the Wu-Tang’s embrace of the martial arts, kung-fu and Chinese cinematic traditions. And any understanding of the figure of the samurai in the contemporary hip-hop imagination must contend with the relationship of this figure to both the kung-fu fighting traditions and to kung-fu cinema, despite the fact that they constitute very different cultural and historical forms. I would, of course, argue that it is precisely this playful adaptation or literal deterritorialisation of otherwise geographically and culturally distinct realities that comprises the adaptive potential of hip-hop. Kung-fu, like hip-hop, is predicated on the exteriority of style. It is also a form of action based on precision and immediacy, on the fluid movements of the body itself deterritorialised as weapon, and thus it reiterates that blend of violence, speed and fluidity that grounds the hip-hop aesthetic: “I’ll defeat your rhyme in just four lines / Yeh, I’ll wax you and tax you and plus save time” (RZA and Norris, 211). Kung-fu lends itself to improvisation and to adaptability, essential qualities of combat and of lyrical flows in hip-hop music. For example, just as in kung-fu combat a fighter’s success is fundamentally determined by his ability to intuit and adapt to the style and skill and detailed movements of his adversary, the victory of a hip-hop MC engaged in, say, a freestyle battle will be determined by his capacity for improvising and adapting his own lyrical flow to counter and overcome his opponent’s. David Bordwell not only draws critical lines of difference between the Hong Kong and Hollywood action film but also hints at the striking differences between the “delirious kinetic exhilaration” of Hong Kong cinema and the “sober, attenuated, and grotesque expressivity” of the traditional Japanese samurai film (91-2). Moreover, Bordwell emphasises what the Wu-Tang Clan has always known and demonstrated: the sympathetic bond between kung-fu action or hand-to-hand martial arts combat and the flow in hip-hop music. Bordwell calls his kung-fu aesthetic “expressive amplification”, which communicates with the viewer through both a visual and physical intelligibility and which is described by Bordwell in terms of beats, exaggerations, and the “exchange and rhyming of gestures” (87). What is pointed to here are precisely those aspects of Hong Kong cinema that share essential similarities with hip-hop music as such and which permeate the Wu-Tang aesthetic and thus, too, challenge or redistribute the codified stillness and negativity that define the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog. Bordwell argues that Hong Kong cinema constitutes an aesthetics in action that “pushes beyond Western norms of restraint and plausibility,” and in light of my thesis, I would argue that it pushes beyond these same conventions in traditional Japanese cinema as well (86). Bruce Lee, too, in describing the difference between Chinese kung-fu and Japanese fighting forms in A Warrior’s Journey (Bruce Little, 2000) points to the latter’s regulatory principles of hesitation and segmentarity and to the former’s formlessness and shapelessness, describing kung-fu when properly practiced as “like water, it can flow or it can crash,” qualities which echo not only Bordwell’s description of the pause-burst-pause pattern of kung-fu cinema’s combat sequences but also the Wu-Tang Clan’s own self-conception as described by GZA (“Jizza”), a close relative of RZA and co-founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, when he is asked to explain the inspiration for the title of his album Liquid Swords: Actually, ‘Liquid Swords’ comes from a kung-fu flick. … But the title was just … perfect. I was like, ‘Legend of a Liquid Sword.’ Damn, this is my rhymes. This is how I’m spittin’ it. We say the tongue is symbolic of the sword anyway, you know, and when in motion it produces wind. That’s how you hear ‘wu’. … That’s the wind swinging from the sword. The ‘Tang’, that’s when it hits an object. Tang! That’s how it is with words. (RZA and Norris, 67) Thus do two competing styles animate the aesthetic dynamics of the film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: an aesthetic of codified arrest and restraint versus an aesthetic of nomadic resistance and escape. The former finds expression in the film in the form of the cultural and historical meanings of the samurai tradition, defined by negation and attenuated sobriety, and in the “blank parody” (Otomo, 35) of a postmodern nostalgia for an empty historical past exemplified in the appropriation of the Samurai theme and in the post-industrial prohibitions and stratifications of contemporary life and experience; the latter is attested to in the affirmative kinetic exhilaration of kung-fu style, immediacy and expressivity, and in the corresponding adaptive potential of a hip-hop musical flow, a distributive, productive, and anti-nostalgic becoming, the nomadic essence of which redeems the rhetoric of postmodern loss described by the film. References Bordwell, David. “Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Ed. and Trans. Esther Yau. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2004. Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey. Dir./Filmmaker John Little. Netflix DVD. Warner Home Video, 2000. Daidjo, Yuzan. Code of the Samurai. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Tuttle Martial Arts. Boston: Tuttle, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP,1987. Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Netflix DVD. Artisan, 2000. Hurst, G. Cameron III. Armed Martial Arts of Japan. New Haven: Yale UP,1998. Ikegami, Eiko. The Taming of the Samurai. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Jansen, Marius, ed. Warrior Rule in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Kurosawa, Akira. Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays. Trans. Donald Richie. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Lanzagorta, Marco. “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” Senses of Cinema. Sept-Oct 2002. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/02/22/ghost_dog.htm>. Mol, Serge. Classical Fighting Arts of Japan. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha Int., 2001. Otomo, Ryoko. “‘The Way of the Samurai’: Ghost Dog, Mishima, and Modernity’s Other.” Japanese Studies 21.1 (May 2001) 31-43. Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. RZA, The, and Chris Norris. The Wu-Tang Manual. New York: Penguin, 2005. Silver, Alain. The Samurai Film. Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 1983. Smith, Christopher Holmes. “Method in the Madness: Exploring the Boundaries of Identity in Hip-Hop Performativity.” Social Identities 3.3 (Oct 1997): 345-75. Watkins, Craig S. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1993. ———. Wu-Tang Forever. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1997. Xing, Yan, ed. Shaolin Kungfu. Trans. Zhang Zongzhi and Zhu Chengyao. Beijing: China Pictorial, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Eubanks, Kevin P. "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>. APA Style Eubanks, K. (May 2007) "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>.

When deaf people work in professional environments and participate in public events, we are often accompanied by sign language interpreters. This usually means wonderfully enhanced access – we can learn, participate and network in ways which are difficult if not impossible on our own. But while we often try to insist that our interpreters are ‘invisible’, that we are the ones learning, engaging in dialogue and consuming services, we are regularly bemused by the public fascination and focus on our interpreters – sometimes at the expense of their attention to us. When interpreters are in our midst, it seems it is not always clear whose interests they are representing. After years of experience and observation, certain attitudes and responses no longer surprise us. We become familiar with the strange behaviour of hearing people. After an interpreter has worked at a public event, perhaps standing on a stage and interpreting a presentation or performance, there is bound to be a wild-eyed member of the public rushing up to say, “That was fantastic!” Or if they are particularly suggestive, they might gush, “That was beautiful!”. How would they know if it was good interpreting, we wonder. And why don’t they come up to us and say, “Your interpreter looks good, where did you find him/her?” Other people ask the interpreter questions about themselves and their use of sign language – “How long did it take you to learn that?”, “I’ve always wanted to learn sign language, where can I find a class?” Experienced interpreters joke wryly about carrying a tape or printout of answers to these predictable questions. But the most predictable thing of all is that people will ask the interpreter, not us. But of course most people aren’t comfortable talking to deaf people, at least when they first encounter them. We perceive that the interpreter is used as a kind of shield by some people, as a way of keeping the unfamiliar and possibly confronting reality of deafness at arm’s length. Indeed we often do the same thing ourselves, keeping tiresome hearing people at bay by making conversation with our interpreter. The interpreter represents facility not only with two languages, but also with two cultures. In a situation of potential cultural conflict, we each displace our awkwardness and discomfort with the other onto the interpreter. As a repository of bilingual and bicultural knowledge, they will simultaneously understand us and render us less strange to the other. Another dimension of people’s fascination with interpreters is that they can potentially represent us in new ways, or know things about us that they’re not telling. Just as we are fascinated by a photograph of ourselves that shows how we appear to others, we are drawn to the idea that what we have said may be presented to others in a different form, that we might appear or sound different from the way we projected ourselves. And conversely, we are aware of the interpreter’s power to misrepresent, edit or obfuscate, even though we know they are ethically bound not to do so. For some people these possibilities are intriguing, for others they arouse unease or suspicion. Indeed, for some people, interpreters appear as custodians of obscure and mysterious knowledge, with the potential—almost never realised but alarming nonetheless—to use or withhold this knowledge in unpredictable ways. Interpreters are, for the most part, highly trained professionals working with a Code of Ethics which requires them to ‘render faithfully’ a message from one language to another. There is an academic discipline, Interpreting and Translation Studies, with an extensive literature about their practice and the social contexts of their work. Interpreters work in all kinds of situations, from boardrooms to doctors’ offices, from international conferences to workplace staff meetings. The common denominator to almost all of these settings is people’s misconceptions about their role and skills. Where do these misconceptions spring from? I suspect that representations of interpreting in our popular culture help to feed some of the confusion. It seems that the world is most interested in interpreters when they are working in fraught situations, confronting ethical dilemmas, and especially when they are breaking the rules. This seems to apply to interpreters in any language, not only sign language interpreters. Many of us remember the news story in 2005 about the Ukrainian sign language interpreter, Natalia Dmytruk. A TV news interpreter in Ukrainian Sign Language, she broke with protocol and informed viewers that the election results were fraudulent. It grabbed international headlines and Dmytruk became a hero, with her “courageous action” winning awards and earning her speaking engagements around the world. It was hard not to join in the acclaim, but it was also hard to reconcile this with the way we expect interpreters to behave and to be perceived by the public. One of Nicole Kidman’s films a few years ago was “The Interpreter”, about a woman working for the United Nations as an interpreter in an obscure African language. She inadvertently eavesdrops on a plot to assassinate an African leader, feels obliged to reveal this, and immediately becomes an object of intense interest for rival politicians and minders. This film highlighted the way interpreters can be perceived as repositories of great and often mysterious knowledge, and objects of ambivalence because they have choices about what to do with that knowledge. What happens when their ethical obligations conflict with international security and diplomatic relations? And how is this different from interpreters who face ethical dilemmas every day, but whose situations don’t threaten to start World War III or warrant the attentions of Sean Penn – are their ethical dilemmas any less important and perplexing? John Le Carré, the wonderful novelist who specialises in stories of spying and intrigue, used a similar dilemma in his 2006 novel The Mission Song, about an interpreter of mixed Irish/Congolese descent, Bruno Salvador (known as Salvo). Salvo is brought in to interpret some delicate political negotiations between warring clans from his own country, and international agents who have an interest in the country. Before long, he is caught between his professional obligations and his own loyalties, and becomes entangled in a dangerous web of intrigue and corruption. Le Carré, the master of the spy genre, presents the interpreter as a “double-agent” by default. At the beginning of the meeting, one of the negotiators summons Salvo to the top of the table and demands of him, “So which are you, my boy? Are you one of us or one of them?” He replies, “Mwangaza, I am one of both of you!” But as modern interpreters might agree, it isn’t always so easy to resolve divided loyalties or to stay impartial. As Salvo remarks elsewhere, “top interpreters must always be prepared to act as diplomats when called upon.” While working on a recent research project with a colleague (who is also, coincidentally, an interpreter) we were intrigued by the tale of a 17th-century Native American man known as Squanto, who served as an interpreter between the first English settlers in New England – the Pilgrims – and the Native Americans of the area. Squanto’s story is fascinating not only as an example of how interpreters have been present throughout history, but also because he took advantage of his access to both groups in order to seek political power for himself and his relatives. The only person who was able to expose his machinations was, of course, another interpreter. But Squanto had developed such close relationships with the Pilgrims that the English Governor could not bear to hand him over to be punished even when confronted with evidence of his duplicity. And when Squanto was dying (probably poisoned by his fellow tribesmen), he asked the Governor to “pray … that he might go to the Englishmen’s God in Heaven.” The story is an intriguing historical example of an interpreter exploiting his access to two languages, and it also illustrates the bi-cultural affiliations and even the co-dependency that can arise from the interpreting relationship. Squanto has remained well-known for hundreds of years. Had he operated just as a disinterested translator, without his extra-curricular activities, his story would probably not have endured as long as it has. These are just a few examples of the fascination and ambivalence with which popular culture can view interpreters. But in each case, what brings the interpreter into the foreground is that they are confronting the possibilities of crossing the line of confidentiality, though it is rarely given that name in these stories. And – in all of these examples – they do cross it. The conflicted, flawed interpreter is becoming a handy plot device… just as the isolated, silent deaf person has been for centuries. Where are the news stories, movies, novels and historical sagas about the interpreters who do their job with care and attention, who work to make their ethical obligations clear and manageable, who successfully stay in the background and let their clients emerge as agents? There aren’t any of course, because people like that don’t make good copy or memorable fictional characters. And because these thousands of professional interpreters don’t get celebrated in popular culture, the average person doesn’t know how they work, and they still need to keep explaining their role to people. Sometimes we speculate about futuristic interpreters. It’s already possible to have a ‘remote’ interpreter working via video-conference. This can result in strangely stilted interactions, since we don’t have that live human buffer in the room to deflect – or absorb – deaf and hearing people’s uncertainty with each other. Will holograms or avatars be part of the interpreting scene in the future, as some have suggested? I hope not – the complex interplay of uneasiness, curiosity and communication in live interpreting experiences is just too interesting. Note An earlier version of this article was published as "Interpreters Behaving Badly" in Across the Board, the magazine of ASLIA (Vic.). Used with permission of the editor. References Australian Sign Language Interpreters Association. "Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Professional Conduct. 2007. 3 May 2010 < http://aslia.com.au/images/stories/ASLIA_Documents/ASLIA_Code_of_Ethics.pdf >. The Interpreter. Motion picture. Prod. G.M. Brown, A. Minghella, and S. Pollack. Dir. S. Pollack. Universal Pictures, 2005. Le Carré, J. The Mission Song. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2006. Napier, J., R. McKee, and D. Goswell. Sign Language Interpreting: Theory and Practice in Australia and New Zealand. 2nd ed. Sydney: Federation Press, 2010. Philbrick, N. Mayflower: A Voyage to War. London: HarperPress, 2006. Washington Post. “As Ukraine Watched the Party Line, She Took the Truth into Her Hands.” 29 Apr. 2005. 25 Nov. 2008 < http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/28/AR2005042801696.html >.

Introduction The Disney brand has become synonymous with magic through its numerous depictions of spells, curses, prophecies, and pixie dust. Thus, it is ironic that in 2023, the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Studio’s founding (“Disney History”), the final film released during Walt Disney’s life, The Sword in the Stone (celebrating its 60th anniversary) remains stuck in obscurity (Aronstein 129) despite being steeped in magic and wizardry. The Sword in the Stone is regarded as “one of the most obscure [films] in the Disney animated canon” (Booker 38). Although it performed moderately well during its debut in 1963, its 1983 re-release and home video sales failed to renew public interest. To date, The Sword in the Stone has no games, comic series, or even Disneyland merchandise (Aronstein 129). The film is hardly a technical marvel; its sketchy animation style and blue-slate backgrounds create a dingy, unfinished look (Beck 272), while its simplistic storyline and anachronistic humour have been criticised for being ill-matched with its Arthurian subject matter (Gossedge 115). Despite these flaws, The Sword in the Stone offers the studio’s most fully rendered representation of Disney magic as benevolent forces sourced in learning and discipline that enable good-hearted protagonists to prepare for future leadership roles. By approaching the film as a didactic text separate from its Arthurian origins, I will demonstrate how The Sword in the Stone defines magic, not by nebulous spells or hexes, but by its facilitation of societal advancement and transformative powers via the educated mind. Young Arthur’s Humble Beginnings Based loosely on T.H. White’s 1938 novel of the same name (Valle 224), The Sword in the Stone takes place in medieval Europe, with most of its action occurring in a rotting castle and surrounding wolf-infested forests. In this threatening world, magic takes many forms, from powerful acts of “sorcery” to comical displays of “Latin business”. The first allusion to magic occurs during the film’s opening song, which establishes its setting (“when England was young”) and primary conflict (“the good king had died, and no one could decide who was rightful heir”). Without a ruler, England will be destroyed by civil war unless miraculous forces intervene on its behalf. This ‘miracle’ is the eponymous sword in the stone that the rightful ruler of England will free. The sword is destined for King Arthur, but as he is only an orphaned child living in obscurity at the film’s beginning, no one manages to retrieve the sword in his stead, and so the ‘miracle’ seemingly fails. The film’s off-screen narrator describes this leaderless period as “a dark age … where the strong preyed upon the weak”. As a force that trumps brute strength, magic is prized by those who can wield it, particularly the wizard Merlin. Magic is regarded with suspicion by the majority who cannot practice it (Valle 234), though they still recognise its legitimacy. Even Arthur’s practical stepfather, Sir Ector, begs Merlin not to practice any “black magic” on his family after Merlin creates an indoor “wizard blizzard” to prove his seriousness in tutoring Arthur. Merlin is a far cry from the mysterious soothsayer of Arthurian legend. He has been Disneyfied into a caricature of the famed wizard, appearing more like an eccentric academic than an all-seeing mystic (Beck 272). Susan Aronstein describes him as “the reification of Disney’s post-World War II rebranding of itself as a leader in education in the wake of a postwar shift in American child rearing” (130)—a playful pedagogue who makes learning fun for Arthur and audiences. After meeting Arthur in the woods near his home, Merlin becomes determined to rectify the boy’s educational deficiencies. It is not yet clear whether Merlin knows who Arthur is or will become; Merlin merely repeats to his owl companion, Archimedes, that the boy needs an education—specifically, a modern education. In addition to presenting Arthur with evidence of his travels to the future, such as helicopter models, Merlin rattles off a litany of subjects common to twentieth-century American curricula (English, science, mathematics) but hardly the sort of fare pages of Arthur’s status would study in fifth-century England. Because Arthur’s royal lineage is unknown to him, he aspires to be a squire for his soon-to-be-knighted stepbrother and so must learn the rules of jousting and horsemanship when not otherwise preoccupied with page duties. These include scrubbing pots and pans, cleaning floors, and fetching anything his stepfather requests. While Arthur is not resistant to Merlin’s attempts to teach him, he struggles to balance Merlin’s demands on his time with Sir Ector’s (Pinsky 85). Young Arthur’s gangly stature conveys how stretched the boy is between his indentured servitude to Ector and Merlin’s insistence upon his liberation through education. Arthur is constantly in motion, scurrying from one task to the next to please all parties involved and often failing to do so. Each time Merlin’s instruction causes the boy to miss Sir Ector’s call, Arthur is punished with additional duties (Holcomb et al.). Merlin’s Instructive Magic Merlin uses magic to bridge the gap between Arthur’s responsibilities to his present and his future. The word “magic” is spoken fifteen times in the film, six by Merlin himself. The wizard first utters the word after packing his entire house (furniture and all) into a carpet bag. Arthur is impressed, but Merlin warns him that magic is no panacea: “don’t you get any foolish ideas that magic will solve all your problems”. Even Merlin struggles to convince Sir Ector to let him tutor Arthur and to prevent predatory animals from killing the boy during their adventures together. Magic has limits. It cannot penetrate the minds of humans nor quell the instincts of wild animals. Its impact seems restricted to the physical world. Merlin primarily uses magic for physical transformation; his lessons centre on changing Arthur into different animals to enable the future king to experience life from others’ perspectives. Merlin turns Arthur into a fish, a squirrel, and a bird, with each animal’s situation representing increasingly complex problems that Arthur must overcome. Each lesson also corresponds with one or more levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: (1) safety and survival, (2) love and belonging, and (3) self-esteem and self-actualisation (Lester 15). As a perch swimming around the castle moat, Arthur learns to use his intellect to evade a toothy pike that nearly eats him alive. As a squirrel, Arthur observes the heartbreak of unrequited love, foreshadowing his complicated love triangle with Guinevere and Lancelot (Grellner 125). In avian form, Arthur experiences a much-needed boost in his self-worth after Sir Ector strips him of his squire-in-training status. In flight, Arthur seems most in his element. After struggling with the logistics of swimming as a fish and navigating trees as a squirrel, Arthur soars over the countryside, even showing off his acrobatics to Archimedes flying alongside him. Although Arthur relishes these experiences, he does not seem to grasp their broader implications. He describes his first magical lesson as “so much fun” (despite having nearly died) and pauses only momentarily at the end of his second lesson to reflect on the emotional damage he causes a heartbroken female squirrel who falls madly in love with him. Still, Arthur faces mortal danger with each lesson, so one could argue that by transforming the young boy into different animals, Merlin is honing Arthur’s problem-solving skills (Holcomb et al.). Madam Mim’s Destructive Magic When Arthur is turned into a bird, his third lesson takes an unexpected turn. After narrowly escaping a hawk, Arthur flies into the forest and falls down the chimney of a rival magician named Mad Madam Mim. After introducing herself, Mim insists to Arthur that she has far more magic “in one little finger” than Merlin possesses in his entire repertoire. She displays her powers by killing plants, changing sizes, and making herself monstrous or lovely according to her whims. Mim’s demonstrations suggest a breezy familiarity with magic that Merlin lacks. Whereas Merlin sometimes forgets the “Latin business” needed to invoke spells, Mim effortlessly transitions from one transformation to another without any spell use. The source of her power soon becomes apparent. “Black sorcery is my dish of tea”, she croons to Arthur. Compared to Merlin’s Latin-based magic, Mim’s “black sorcery” is easier to master and well-suited to her undisciplined lifestyle. Mim’s cottage is filthy and in disrepair, yet she is playing solitaire (and cheating) when Arthur stumbles into her fireplace. This anachronism (since playing cards would not be introduced to Europeans until the fourteenth century; DeBold) characterises, through visual shorthand, Mim’s idle hands as the Devil’s workshop; she also possesses a modern dartboard that she throws Arthur against. Unlike Merlin’s domicile, Mim’s cottage contains no books, scientific instruments, or other props of study, indicating that there is no deeper understanding behind her magic. As Latin is the root language of science and law, it seems fitting that Latin is not part of Mim’s repertoire. She simply points a finger at an unfortunate subject, and it bends to her will—or dies. Efficient though Mim’s magic may be, its power is fleeting. Mim briefly changes herself into a beautiful young woman. But she concedes that her magic is “only skin deep” and turns herself back into “an ugly old creep”. Evidently, her magic’s potency does not last long, nor is it capable of improving her situation, as she continues living in her broken-down cottage as a bored, friendless hermit. Her black magic may be easy to master but cannot impart meaningful change. And so, while Merlin can use his magic to improve Arthur’s life, Mim’s magic can only serve the status quo described at the film’s beginning: the strong preying upon the weak. Although Mim lives outside the feudal social hierarchy, she uses her magic to terrorise any unfortunate creatures who wander into her clutches, including Arthur. When Arthur (still in bird form) states that he prefers the benevolence and usefulness of Merlin’s magic, an infuriated Mim transforms herself into a hungry cat and chases Arthur around the cottage until Merlin arrives to save the boy. Merlin then challenges Mim to a wizard’s duel, during which he and Mim attack each other in animal forms ranging from foxes and caterpillars to tigers, goats, and elephants. Each time Mim transforms, she does so seamlessly, requiring no momentary pause to recall a spell, unlike Merlin, who stumbles across the Latin phrases necessary to change himself into something faster or bigger. But after Merlin transforms into a walrus and squashes a clucking chicken Mim, the momentum shifts in his favour. Her magic becomes tinged with rage that causes her to make mistakes, including biting herself as a snake and ramming herself into a tree in rhinoceros form. Merlin’s disciplined playing style is nearly errorless. Although he becomes frightened when Mim transforms into a fire-breathing dragon, Merlin continues to play sensibly and courageously. His final winning move is to transform himself into a measle-like germ that incapacitates Mim with violent sneezing and cold flashes (Perciaccante and Coralli 1171). Arthur is astonished by the brilliant manoeuvring of his mentor, who manages to win the duel fairly “by dint of his knowledge and study” (Pinsky 86). After stating the lesson’s summative point for Merlin—“knowledge and wisdom is the real power”—Arthur vows to redouble his efforts to complete his education. Education: The Film’s Real Magic The lesson for viewers is simple enough: an education has a magical impact on one’s life. Put more succinctly, education is magic. Merlin defeats Mim because of his greater knowledge and cleverer use of spells. Arthur will overcome his low social status and ascend to the throne by becoming literate and sharpening his intellect. But as with Merlin’s acquisition of magical knowledge through intense study, Arthur’s royal ascension must be earned. He must learn the literal ABCs of language acquisition to gain others’ shared knowledge, as illustrated by a scene in which Archimedes painstakingly teaches Arthur how to write the alphabet in preparation for reading an enormous stack of books. Merlin cannot magically impart such knowledge to the future king; Arthur must learn it through sustained effort. He also must learn to make informed decisions rather than respond to panic or anger as Mim does during her duel with Merlin. Herein lies the distinction between Mim’s and Merlin’s magic: transformative impact. Mim’s black magic has locked her into her chosen fate. By using her powers to amuse herself or cause others harm, Mim perpetuates her outcast status as the stereotypical witch to be feared (Valle 234). While her cottage contains anachronistic elements such as playing cards (suggesting that she, like Merlin, has time-travelled), it contains no evidence of the modern advances that Merlin shares with Arthur, like aeroplane models, nor anything that might improve their feudal society. Merlin’s magic, by contrast, facilitates immediate changes to Arthur’s world and offers the promise of technological advancements in the centuries to come. To reduce the boy’s workload, for instance, Merlin magically conjures up a factory-style assembly line of brushes, tubs, and mops to wash dishes and scrub kitchen floors. Merlin also shares his knowledge of humankind’s future achievements with Arthur to advance his education, providing him with models, maps, globes, and hundreds of books. To become a proper king, Arthur must learn how to use such information to others’ advantage, not just his own. As Caroline Buts and Jose Luis Buendia Sierra observe of magic’s paradox, “using the wand without knowing properly the rules may sometimes lead to catastrophic situations” (509). This point is reaffirmed in the film’s final sequence, which takes place in London on New Year’s Day at a jousting tournament, the winner of which will be crowned king of England. Arthur, now a squire to his recently knighted stepbrother, forgets to bring his stepbrother’s sword to the tournament grounds. He attempts to replace the missing weapon with the sword in the stone when he spots the aging relic in a nearby churchyard. As Arthur pulls out the sword, angelic choral music swells, signalling that the rightful ruler of England has fulfilled the prophecy. After some scepticism from the assembled masses, Sir Ector and the other knights and spectators bow to the befuddled twelve-year-old. The film’s final scene shows a panic-stricken Arthur conceding that he does not know how to rule England and crying out for Merlin. When the wizard blows in from his most recent trip to the twentieth century, he confirms that he has known all along who Arthur is and assures the boy that he will become a great king. Arthur seems ready to put in the work, recognising that his knowledge and wisdom will improve the lives of England’s inhabitants. Conclusion Magic is thus portrayed as an intervening force that either facilitates or stymies societal progress. Good magic ensures that intelligent, educated individuals such as Arthur become great leaders, while those who would attain positions of power through brute force are thwarted from doing so. At the film’s conclusion, Arthur has not been fully transformed into a great leader because his education is far from finished; he has only learned enough to realise that he knows too little to rule effectively. Yet, from the Socratic perspective, such self-awareness is the germination for attaining true wisdom (Tarrant 263). Arthur also already knows that he will not be able to learn how to rule well through trickery or shortcuts, even with a powerful magician by his side. But the film’s closing scene reiterates this point with Merlin promising Arthur that he will succeed. “Why, they might even make a motion picture about you!” he exclaims in a clever fourth-wall joke (Gellner 120). The Sword in the Stone’s mere existence proves that Arthur will acquire the knowledge and wisdom necessary to become a truly great monarch. The fledgling pupil will live long and rule well, not because of pixie dust or magic spells, but because of his willingness to learn and to be transformed by his education into a wise and fair ruler. References Aronstein, Susan. “‘Higitus Figitus!’ Of Merlin and Disney Magic.” It’s the Disney Version! Popular Cinema and Literary Classics. Eds. Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 129-139. Beck, Jerry. The Animated Movie Guide. Chicago: A Capella, 2005. Booker, M. Keith. Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Buts, Caroline, and Jose Luis Buendia Sierra. “The Sword in the Stone.” European State Aid Law Quarterly 16.4 (2017): 509-511. 10 June 2023 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26694185>. DeBold, Elizabeth. “Fortune’s Fools: Early Tarot Cards.” The Collation: Folger Shakespeare Library 2 Feb. 2021. 5 June 2023 <https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/fortunes-fools-early-tarot-cards/>. “Disney History.” D23, 2023. <https://d23.com/disney-history/>. Gossedge, Rob. “The Sword in the Stone: American Translatio and Disney’s Antimedievalism.” The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past. Eds. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein. Palgrave Macmillan: 2012. 115–131. Grellner, Alice. “Two Films That Sparkle: The Sword in the Stone and Camelot.” Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays. Rev. ed. Ed. Kevin J. Harty. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 118-126. Holcomb, Jeanne, Kenzie Latham, and Daniel Fernandez-Baca. “Who Cares for the Kids? Caregiving and Parenting in Disney Films.” Journal of Family Issues 36.14 (2015): 1957–81. DOI: 10.1177/0192513X13511250. Lester, David. “Measuring Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” Psychological Reports: Mental & Physical Health 113.1 (2013): 15-17. 20 May 2023 <https://doi.org/10.2466/02.20.PR0.113x16z1>. Perciaccante, Antonio, and Alessia Coralli. “The Virus Defeating Madam Mim.” American Journal of Infection Control 45.10 (2017): 1171. 1 June 2023 <http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2017.07.017>. Pinsky, Mark I. The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. The Sword in the Stone. Dir. Wolfgang Reitherman. Perf. Karl Swenson and Rickie Sorensen. Buena Vista, 1963. Tarrant, Harold. “Socratic Method and Socratic Truth.” A Companion to Socrates. Eds. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. 254-272. Valle, Maria Luiza Cyrino. "The New Matter of Britain: T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone." Estudos Germânicos 5.1 (1984): 224-265.

Exhibiting Procedural Generation Generative art toys are software applications that create aesthetically pleasing visual patterns in response to the users toying with various input devices, from keyboard and mouse to more intuitive and tactile devices for motion tracking. The “art” part of these toy objects might relate to the fact that they are often installed in art galleries or festivals as a spectacle for non-players that exhibits the unlimited generation of new patterns from a limited source code. However, the features that used to characterise generative arts as a new meditative genre, such as the autonomy of the algorithmic system and its self-organisation (Galanter 151), do not explain the pleasure of fiddling with these playthings, which feel sticky like their toy relatives, slime, rather than meditative, like mathematical sublime. Generative algorithms are more than software tools to serve human purposes now. While humans are still responsible for the algorithmically generated content, this is either to the extent of the simple generation rules the artists design for their artworks or only to the extent that our everyday conversations and behaviours serve as raw material to train machine learning-powered generation algorithms, such as ChatGPT, to interpret the world they explore stochastically, extrapolating it in an equivalently statistical way. Yet, as the algorithms become more responsive to the contingency of human behaviours, and so the trained generation rules become too complex, it becomes almost impossible for humans to understand how they translate all contingencies in the real world into machine-learnable correlations. In turn, the way we are entangled with the generated content comes to far exceed our responsibility. One disturbing future scenario of this hyper-responsiveness of the algorithms, for which we could never be fully responsible, is when machine-generated content replaces the ground truth sampled from the real world, leading to the other machine learning-powered software tools that govern human behaviour being trained on these “synthetic data” (Steinhoff). The multiplicities of human worlds are substituted for their algorithmically generated proxies, and the AIs trained instead on the proxies’ stochastic complexities would tell us how to design our future behaviours. As one aesthetic way to demonstrate the creativity of the machines, generative arts have exhibited generative algorithms in a somewhat decontextualised and thus less threatening manner by “emphasizing the circularity of autopoietic processes” of content generation (Hayles 156). Their current toy conversion playfully re-contextualises how these algorithms in real life, incarnated into toy-like gadgets, both enact and are enacted by human users. These interactions not only form random seeds for content generation but also constantly re-entangle generated contents with contingent human behaviors. The toy-being of generative algorithms I conceptualise here is illustrative of this changed mode of their exhibition. They move from displaying generative algorithms as speculative objects at a distance to sticky toy objects up close and personal: from emphasising their autopoietic closure to “more open-ended and transformative” engagement with their surroundings (Hayles 156). (Katherine Hayles says this changed focus in the research of artificial life/intelligence from the systems’ auto-poietic self-closure to their active engagement with environments characterises “the transition from the second to the third wave” of cybernetics; 17.) Their toy-being also reflects how the current software industry repurposes these algorithms, once developed for automation of content creation with no human intervention, as machines that enact commercially promising entanglements between contingent human behaviors and a mixed-reality that is algorithmically generated. Tool-Being and Toy-Being of Generative Algorithms What I mean by toy-being is a certain mode of existence in which a thing appears when our habitual sensorimotor relations with it are temporarily suspended. It is comparable to what Graham Harman calls a thing’s tool-being in his object-oriented rereading of Heidegger’s tool analysis. In that case, this thing’s becoming either a toy or tool pertains to how our hands are entangled with its ungraspable aspects. According to Heidegger a hammer, for instance, is ready-to-hand when its reactions to our grip, and swinging, and to the response from the nail, are fully integrated into our habitual action of hammering to the extent that its stand-alone existence is almost unnoticeable (Tool-Being). On the other hand, it is when the hammer breaks down, or slips out of our grasp, that it begins to feel present-at-hand. For Harman, this is the moment the hammer reveals its own way to be in the world, outside of our instrumentalist concern. It is the hint of the hammer’s “subterranean reality”, which is inexhaustible by any practical and theoretical concerns we have of it (“Well-Wrought” 186). It is unconstrained by the pragmatic maxim that any conception of an object should be grounded in the consequences of what it does or what can be done with it (Peirce). In Harman’s object-oriented ontology, neither the hammer’s being ready to serve any purpose of human and nonhuman others – nor its being present as an object with its own social, economic, and material histories – explicate its tool-being exhaustively. Instead, it always preserves more than the sum of the relations it has ever built with others throughout its lifetime. So, the mode of existence that describes best this elusive tool-being for him is withdrawing-from-hand. Generative art toys are noteworthy regarding this ever-switching and withdrawing mode of things on which Harman and other speculative realists focus. In the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) community, the current epicentre of generative art toys, which consists of videogame developers and researchers, these software applications are repurposed from the development tools they aim to popularise through this toy conversion. More importantly, procedural algorithms are not ordinary tools ready to be an extension of a developer’s hands, just as traditional level design tools follow Ivan Suntherland’s 1963 Sketchpad archetype. Rather, procedural generation is an autopoietic process through which the algorithm organises its own representation of the world from recursively generated geographies, characters, events, and other stuff. And this representation does not need to be a truthful interpretation of its environments, which are no other than generation parameters and other input data from the developer. Indeed, they “have only a triggering role in the release of the internally-determined activity” of content generation. The representation it generates suffices to be just “structurally coupled” with these developer-generated data (Hayles 136, 138). In other words, procedural algorithms do not break down to be felt present-at-hand because they always feel as though their operations are closed against their environments-developers. Furthermore, considered as the solution to the ever-increasing demand for the more expansive and interactive sandbox design of videogames, they not only promise developers unlimited regeneration of content for another project but promise players a virtual reality, which constantly changes its shape while always appearing perfectly coupled with different decisions made by avatars, and thus promise unlimited replayability of the videogame. So, it is a common feeling of playing a videogame with procedurally generated content or a story that evolves in real time that something is constantly withdrawing from the things the player just grasped. (The most vicious way to exploit this gamer feeling would be the in-game sale of procedurally generated items, such as weapons with many re-combinable parts, instead of the notorious loot-box that sells a random item from the box, but with the same effect of leading gamers to a gambling addiction by letting them believe there is still something more.) In this respect, it is not surprising that Harman terms his object-oriented ontology after object-oriented programming in computer science. Both look for an inexhaustible resource for the creative generation of the universe and algorithmic systems from the objects infinitely relatable to one another thanks ironically to the secret inner realities they enclose against each other. Fig. 1: Kate Compton, Idle Hands. http://galaxykate.com/apps/idlehands/ However, the toy-being of the algorithms, which I rediscover from the PCG community’s playful conversion of their development tools and which Harman could not pay due attention to while holding on to the self-identical tool-being, is another mode of existence that all tools, or all things before they were instrumentalised, including even the hammer, had used to be in children’s hands. For instance, in Kate Compton’s generative art toy Idle Hands (fig. 1), what a player experiences is her hand avatar, every finger and joint of which is infinitely extended into the space, even as they also serve as lines into which the space is infinitely folded. So, as the player clenches and unclenches her physical hands, scanned in real-time by the motion tracking device Leapmotion, and interpreted into linear input for the generation algorithm, the space is constantly folded and refolded everywhere even by the tiniest movement of a single joint. There is nothing for her hands to grasp onto because nothing is ready to respond consistently to her repeated hand gestures. It is almost impossible to replicate the exact same gesture but, even if she does, the way the surrounding area is folded by this would be always unpredictable. Put differently, in this generative art toy, the player cannot functionally close her sensorimotor activity. This is not so much because of the lack of response, but because it is Compton’s intention to render the whole “fields of the performer” as hyperresponsive to “a body in motion” as if “the dancer wades through water or smoke or tall grass, if they disturb [the] curtain as they move” (Compton and Mateas). At the same time, the constant re-generation of the space as a manifold is no longer felt like an autonomous self-creation of the machine but arouses the feeling that “all of these phenomena ‘listen’ to the movement of the [hands] and respond in some way” (Compton and Mateas). Let me call this fourth mode of things, neither ready-to-hand nor present-at-hand, nor withdrawing-from-hand, but sticky-to-hand: describing a thing’s toy-being. This is so entangled with the hands that its response to our grasp is felt immediately, on every surface and joint, so that it is impossible to anticipate exactly how it would respond to further grasping or releasing. It is a typical feeling of the hand toying with a chunk of clay or slime. It characterises the hypersensitivity of the autistic perception that some neurodiverse people may have, even to ordinary tools, not because they have closed their minds against the world as the common misunderstanding says, but because even the tiniest pulsations that things exert to their moving bodies are too overwhelming to be functionally integrated into their habitual sensorimotor activities let alone to be unentangled as present-at-hand (Manning). In other words, whereas Heideggerian tool-being, for Harman, draws our attention to the things outside of our instrumentalist concern, their toyfication puts the things that were once under our grip back into our somewhat animistic interests of childhood. If our agency as tool-users presupposes our body’s optimal grip on the world that Hubert Dreyfus defines as “the body’s tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt” (367), our becoming toy-players is when we feel everything is responsive to each other until that responsiveness is trivialised as the functional inputs for habitual activities. We all once felt things like these animistic others, before we were trained to be tool-users, and we may consequently recall a forgotten genealogy of toy-being in the humanities. This genealogy may begin with a cotton reel in Freud’s fort-da game, while also including such things as jubilant mirror doubles and their toy projections in Lacanian psychoanalysis, various playthings in Piaget’s development theory, and all non-tool-beings in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. To trace this genealogy is not this article’s goal but the family resemblance that groups these things under the term toy-being is noteworthy. First, they all pertain to a person’s individuation processes at different stages, whether it be for the symbolic and tactile re-staging of a baby’s separation from her mother, her formation of a unified self-image from the movements of different body parts, the child’s organisation of object concepts from tactile and visual feedbacks of touching and manipulating hands, the subsequent “projection of such ‘symbolic schemas’” as social norms, as Barbie’s and Ken’s, onto these objects (Piaget 165-166), or a re-doing of all these developmental processes through aesthetic assimilation of objects as the flesh of the worlds (Merleau-Ponty). And these individuations through toys seem to approach the zero-degree of human cognition in which a body (either human or nonhuman) is no other than a set of loosely interconnected sensors and motors. In this zero-degree, the body’s perception or optimal grip on things is achieved as the ways each thing responds to the body’s motor activities are registered on its sensors as something retraceable, repeatable, and thus graspable. In other words, there is no predefined subject/object boundary here but just multiplicities of actions and sensations until a group of sensors and motors are folded together to assemble a reflex arc, or what Merleau-Ponty calls intention arc (Dreyfus), or what I term sensor-actuator arc in current smart spaces (Ahn). And it is when some groups of sensations are distinguished as those consistently correlated with and thus retraceable by certain operations of the body that this fold creates an optimal grip on the rest of the field. Let me call this enfolding of the multiplicities whereby “the marking of the ‘measuring agencies’ by the ‘measured object’” emerges prior to the interaction between two, following Karen Barad, intra-action (177). Contrary to the experience of tool-being present-at-hand as no longer consistently contributing to our habitually formed reflex arc of hammering or to any socially constructed measuring agencies for normative behaviors of things, what we experience with this toy-being sticky-to-hand is our bodies’ folding into the multiplicities of actions and sensations, to discover yet unexplored boundaries and grasping between our bodies and the flesh of the world. Generative Art Toys as the Machine Learning’s Daydream Then, can I say even the feeling I have on my hands while I am folding and refolding the slime is intra-action? I truly think so, but the multiplicities in this case are so sticky. They join to every surface of my hands whereas the motility under my conscious control is restricted only to several joints of my fingers. The real-life multiplicities unfolded from toying with the slime are too overwhelming to be relatable to my actions with the restricted degree of freedom. On the other hand, in Compton’s Idle Hands, thanks to the manifold generated procedurally in virtual reality, a player experiences these multiplicities so neatly entangled with all the joints on the avatar hands. Rather than simulating a meaty body enfolded within “water or smoke or tall grass,” or the flesh of the world, the physical hands scanned by Leapmotion and abstracted into “3D vector positions for all finger joints” are embedded in the paper-like virtual space of Idle Hands (Compton and Mateas). And rather than delineating a boundary of the controlling hands, they are just the joints on this immanent plane, through which it is folded into itself in so many fantastic ways impossible on a sheet of paper in Euclidean geometry. Another toy relative which Idle Hands reminds us of is, in this respect, Cat’s Cradle (fig. 2). This play of folding a string entangled around the fingers into itself over and over again to unfold each new pattern is, for Donna Haraway, a metaphor for our creative cohabitation of the world with nonhuman others. Feeling the tension the fingers exchange with each other across the string is thus, for her, compared to “our task” in the Anthropocene “to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” (Haraway 1). Fig. 2: Nasser Mufti, Multispecies Cat's Cradle, 2011. https://www.kit.ntnu.no/sites/www.kit.ntnu.no/files/39a8af529d52b3c35ded2aa1b5b0cb0013806720.jpg In the alternative, in Idle Hands, each new pattern is easily unfolded even from idle and careless finger movements without any troubled feeling, because its procedural generation is to guarantee that every second of the player’s engagement is productive and wasteless relation-making. In Compton’s terms, the pleasure of generative art toys is relevant to the players’ decision to trade the control they once enjoyed as tool users for power. And this tricky kind of power that the players are supposed to experience is not because of their strong grip, but because they give up this strong grip. It is explicable as the experience of being re-embedded as a fold within this intra-active field of procedural generation: the feeling that even seemingly purposeless activities can make new agential cuts as the triggers for some artistic creations (“Generative Art Toys” 164-165), even though none of these creations are graspable or traceable by the players. The procedural algorithm as the new toy-being is, therefore, distinguishable from its non-digital toy relatives by this easy feeling of engagement that all generated patterns are wastelessly correlated with the players’ sensorimotor activities in some ungraspable ways. And given the machine learning community’s current interest in procedural generation as the method to “create more training data or training situations” and “to facilitate the transfer of policies trained in a simulator to the real world” (Risi and Togelius 428, 430), the pleasure of generative art toys can be interpreted as revealing the ideal picture of the mixed-reality dreamed of by machine learning algorithms. As the solution to circumvent the issue of data privacy in surveillance capitalism, and to augment the lack of diversity in existing training data, the procedurally generated synthetic data are now considered as the new benchmarks for machine learning instead of those sampled from the real world. This is not just about a game-like object for a robot to handle, or geographies of fictional terrains for a smart vehicle to navigate (Risi and Togelius), but is more about “little procedural people” (“Little Procedural People”), “synthetic data for banking, insurance, and telecommunications companies” (Steinhoff 8). In the near future, as the AIs trained solely on these synthetic data begin to guide our everyday decision-making, the mixed-reality will thus be more than just a virtual layer of the Internet superimposed on the real world but haunted by so many procedurally generated places, things, and people. Compared to the real world, still too sticky like slime, machine learning could achieve an optimal grip on this virtual layer because things are already generated there under the assumption that they are all entangled with one another by some as yet unknown correlations that machine learning is supposed to unfold. Then the question recalled by this future scenario of machine learning would be again Philip K. Dick’s: Do the machines dream of (procedurally generated) electronic sheep? Do they rather dream of this easy wish fulfillment in place of playing an arduous Cat’s Cradle with humans to discover more patterns to commodify between what our eyes attend to and what our fingers drag and click? Incarnated into toy-like gadgets on mobile devices, machine learning algorithms relocate their users to the zero-degree of social profiles, which is no other than yet-unstructured personal data supposedly responsive to (and responsible for regenerating) invisible arcs, or correlations, between things they watch and things they click. In the meanwhile, what the generative art toys really generate might be the self-fulfilling hope of the software industry that machines could generate their mixed-reality, so neatly and wastelessly engaged with the idle hands of human users, the dream of electronic sheep under the maximal grip of Android (as well as iOS). References Ahn, Sungyong. “Stream Your Brain! Speculative Economy of the IoT and Its Pan-Kinetic Dataveillance.” Big Data & Society 8.2 (2021). Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Compton, Kate. “Generative Art Toys.” Procedural Generation in Game Design, eds. Tanya Short and Tarn Adams. New York: CRC Press, 2017. 161-173. Compton, Kate. “Little Procedural People: Playing Politics with Generators.” Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, eds. Alessandro Canossa, Casper Harteveld, Jichen Zhu, Miguel Sicart, and Sebastian Deterding. New York: ACM, 2017. Compton, Kate, and Michael Mateas. “Freedom of Movement: Generative Responses to Motion Control.” CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2282, ed. Jichen Zhu. Aachen: CEUR-WS, 2018. Dreyfus, Hubert L. “Intelligence without Representation: Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Mental Representation.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2002): 367-383. Galanter, Philip. “Generative Art Theory.” A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. 146-180. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Harman, Graham. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court, 2002. ———. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 43 (2012): 183-203. Hayles, Katherine N. How We Become Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literatures, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1968. Peirce, Charles S. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” Popular Science Monthly 12 (1878): 286-302. Piaget, Jean. Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. Trans. C. Gattegno and F.M. Hodgson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962. Risi, Sebastian, and Julian Togelius. “Increasing Generality in Machine Learning through Procedural Content Generation.” Nature Machine Intelligence 2 (2020): 428-436. Steinhoff, James. “Toward a Political Economy of Synthetic Data: A Data-Intensive Capitalism That Is Not a Surveillance Capitalism?” New Media and Society, 2022.

Literary critics have mainly read Herman Melville’s short story “I and My Chimney” (1856) as allegory. This article elaborates on the tradition of interpreting Melville’s text allegorically by relating it to Fredric Jameson’s post-structural reinterpretation of allegory. In doing so, it argues that the story is not a simple example of allegory but rather an auto-reflexive engagement with allegory that reflects the cultural and historical ambivalences of the time in which Melville was writing. The suggestion is that Melville deliberately used signifiers (or the lack thereof) of directionality and place to reframe the overt context of his allegory (Civil War divisions of North and South) through teasing reference to the contemporaneous emergence of Manifest Destiny as an East-West historical spatialization. To this extent, from a literary-historical perspective, Melville’s text presents as an enquiry into the relationship between the obvious allegorical elements of a text and the literal or material elements that may either support or, as in this case, problematize traditional allegorical modes. In some ways, Melville’s story faintly anticipates Jameson’s post-structural theory of allegory as produced over a century later. “I and My Chimney” may also be linked to later texts, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which shift the directionality of American Literary History, in a definite way, from a North-South to an East-West axis. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books may also be mentioned here. While, in recent years, some literary critics have produced readings of Melville’s story that depart from the traditional emphasis on its allegorical nature, this article claims to be the first to engage with “I and My Chimney” from within an allegorical perspective also informed by post-structural thinking. To do this, it focuses on the setting or directionality of the story, and on the orientating details of the titular chimney.Written and published shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861-1865), which pitted North against South, Melville’s story is told in the first person by a narrator with overweening affection for the chimney he sees as an image of himself: “I and my chimney, two gray-headed old smokers, reside in the country. We are, I may say, old settlers here; particularly my old chimney, which settles more and more every day” (327). Within the merged identity of narrator and chimney, however, the latter takes precedence, almost completely, over the former: “though I always say, I and my chimney, as Cardinal Wolsey used to say, I and my King, yet this egotistic way of speaking, wherein I take precedence of my chimney, is hardly borne out by the facts; in everything, except the above phrase, my chimney taking precedence of me” (327). Immediately, this sentence underscores a disjunction between words (“the above phrase”) and material circumstances (“the facts”) that will become crucial in my later consideration of Melville’s story as post-structural allegory.Detailed architectural and architectonic descriptions manifesting the chimney as “the one great domineering object” of the narrator’s house characterize the opening pages of the story (328). Intermingled with these descriptions, the narrator recounts the various interpersonal and business-related stratagems he has been forced to adopt in order to protect his chimney from the “Northern influences” that would threaten it. Numbered in this company are his mortgagee, the narrator’s own wife and daughters, and Mr. Hiram Scribe—“a rough sort of architect” (341). The key subplot implicated with the narrator’s fears for his chimney concerns its provenance. The narrator’s “late kinsman, Captain Julian Dacres” built the house, along with its stupendous chimney, and upon his death a rumour developed concerning supposed “concealed treasure” in the chimney (346). Once the architect Scribe insinuates, in correspondence to the chimney’s alter ego (the narrator), “that there is architectural cause to conjecture that somewhere concealed in your chimney is a reserved space, hermetically closed, in short, a secret chamber, or rather closet” the narrator’s wife and daughter use Scribe’s suggestion of a possible connection to Dacres’s alleged hidden treasure to reiterate their calls for the chimney’s destruction (345):Although they had never before dreamed of such a revelation as Mr. Scribe’s, yet upon the first suggestion they instinctively saw the extreme likelihood of it. In corroboration, they cited first my kinsman, and second, my chimney; alleging that the profound mystery involving the former, and the equally profound masonry involving the latter, though both acknowledged facts, were alike preposterous on any other supposition than the secret closet. (347)To protect his chimney, the narrator bribes Mr. Scribe, inviting him to produce a “‘little certificate—something, say, like a steam-boat certificate, certifying that you, a competent surveyor, have surveyed my chimney, and found no reason to believe any unsoundness; in short, any—any secret closet in it’” (351). Having enticed Scribe to scribe words against himself, the narrator concludes his tale triumphantly: “I am simply standing guard over my mossy old chimney; for it is resolved between me and my chimney, that I and my chimney will never surrender” (354).Despite its inherent interest, literary critics have largely overlooked “I and My Chimney”. Katja Kanzler observes that “together with much of [Melville’s] other short fiction, and his uncollected magazine pieces in particular, it has never really come out of the shadow of the more epic texts long considered his masterpieces” (583). To the extent that critics have engaged the story, they have mainly read it as traditional allegory (Chatfield; Emery; Sealts; Sowder). Further, the allegorical trend in the reception of Melville’s text clusters within the period from the early 1940s to the early 1980s. More recently, other critics have explored new ways of reading Melville’s story, but none, to my knowledge, have re-investigated its dominant allegorical mode of reception in the light of the post-structural engagements with allegory captured succinctly in Fredric Jameson’s work (Allison; Kanzler; Wilson). This article acknowledges the perspicacity of the mid-twentieth-century tradition of the allegorical interpretation of Melville’s story, while nuancing its insights through greater attention to the spatialized materiality of the text, its “geomorphic” nature, and its broader historical contexts.E. Hale Chatfield argues that “I and My Chimney” evidences one broad allegorical polarity of “Aristocratic Tradition vs. Innovation and Destruction” (164). This umbrella category is parsed by Sealts as an individualized allegory of besieged patriarchal identity and by Sowder as a national-level allegory of anxieties linked to the antebellum North-South relationship. Chatfield’s opposition works equally well for an individual or for communities of individuals. Thus, in this view, even as it structures our reception of Melville’s story, allegory remains unproblematized in itself through its internal interlocking. In turn, “I and My Chimney” provides fertile soil for critics to harvest an allegorical crop. Its very title inveigles the reader towards an allegorical attitude: the upstanding “I” of the title is associated with the architecture of the chimney, itself also upstanding. What is of the chimney is also, allegorically, of the “I”, and the vertical chimney, like the letter “I”, argues, as it were, a north-south axis, being “swung vertical to hit the meridian moon,” as Melville writes on his story’s first page (327). The narrator, or “I”, is as north-south as is his narrated allegory.Herman Melville was a Northern resident with Southern predilections, at least to the extent that he co-opted “Southern-ness” to, in Katja Kanzler’s words, “articulate the anxiety of mid-nineteenth-century cultural elites about what they perceive as a cultural decline” (583). As Chatfield notes, the South stood for “Aristocratic Tradition”; the North, for “Innovation and Destruction” (164). Reflecting the conventional mid-twentieth-century view that “I and My Chimney” is a guileless allegory of North-South relations, William J. Sowder argues that itreveals allegorically an accurate history of Southern slavery from the latter part of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth—that critical period when the South spent most of its time and energy apologizing for the existence of slavery. It discloses the split which Northern liberals so ably effected between liberal and conservative forces in the South, and it lays bare the intransigence of the traditional South on the Negro question. Above everything, the story reveals that the South had little in common with the rest of the Union: the War between the States was inevitable. (129-30)Sowder goes into painstaking detail prosecuting his North-South allegorical reading of Melville’s text, to the extent of finding multiple correspondences between what is allegorizing and what is being allegorized within a single sentence. One example, with Sowder’s allegorical interpolations in square brackets, comes from a passage where Melville is writing about his narrator’s replaced “gable roof” (Melville 331): “‘it was replaced with a modern roof [the cotton gin], more fit for a railway woodhouse [an industrial society] than an old country gentleman’s abode’” (Sowder 137).Sowder’s argument is historically erudite, and utterly convincing overall, except in one crucial detail. That is, for a text supposedly so much about the South, and written so much from its perspective—Sowder labels the narrator a “bitter Old Southerner”—it is remarkable how the story is only very ambiguously set in the South (145). Sowder distances himself from an earlier generation of commentators who “generally assumed that the old man is Melville and that the country is the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshires, where Melville lived from 1850 to 1863,” concluding, “in fact, I find it hard to picture the narrator as a Northerner at all: the country which he describes sounds too much like the Land of Cotton” (130).Quite obviously, the narrator of any literary text does not necessarily represent its author, and in the case of “I and My Chimney”, if the narrator is not inevitably coincident with the author, then it follows that the setting of the story is not necessarily coincident with “the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshires.” That said, the position of critics prior to Sowder that the setting is Massachusetts, and by extension that the narrator is Melville (a Southern sympathizer displaced to the North), hints at an oversight in the traditional allegorical reading of Melville’s text—related to its spatializations—the implications of which Sowder misses.Think about it: “too much like the Land of Cotton” is an exceedingly odd phrase; “too much like” the South, but not conclusively like the South (Sowder 130)! A key characteristic of Melville’s story is the ambiguity of its setting and, by extension, of its directionality. For the text to operate (following Chatfield, Emery, Sealts and Sowder) as a straightforward allegory of the American North-South relationship, the terms “north” and “south” cannot afford to be problematized. Even so, whereas so much in the story reads as related to either the South or the North, as cultural locations, the notions of “south-ness” and “north-ness” themselves are made friable (in this article, the lower case broadly indicates the material domain, the upper case, the cultural). At its most fundamental allegorical level, the story undoes its own allegorical expressions; as I will be arguing, the materiality of its directionality deconstructs what everything else in the text strives (allegorically) to maintain.Remarkably, for a text purporting to allegorize the North as the South’s polar opposite, nowhere does the story definitively indicate where it is set. The absence of place names or other textual features which might place “I and My Chimney” in the South, is over-compensated for by an abundance of geographically distracting signifiers of “place-ness” that negatively emphasize the circumstance that the story is not set definitively where it is set suggestively. The narrator muses at one point that “in fact, I’ve often thought that the proper place for my old chimney is ivied old England” (332). Elsewhere, further destabilizing the geographical coordinates of the text, reference is made to “the garden of Versailles” (329). Again, the architect Hiram Scribe’s house is named New Petra. Rich as it is with cultural resonances, at base, Petra denominates a city in Jordan; New Petra, by contrast, is place-less.It would appear that something strange is going on with allegory in this deceptively straightforward allegory, and that this strangeness is linked to equally strange goings on with the geographical and directional relations of north and south, as sites of the historical and cultural American North and South that the story allegorizes so assiduously. As tensions between North and South would shortly lead to the Civil War, Melville writes an allegorical text clearly about these tensions, while simultaneously deconstructing the allegorical index of geographical north to cultural North and of geographical south to cultural South.Fredric Jameson’s work on allegory scaffolds the historically and materially nuanced reading I am proposing of “I and My Chimney”. Jameson writes:Our traditional conception of allegory—based, for instance, on stereotypes of Bunyan—is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences: this is, so to speak, a one-dimensional view of this signifying process, which might only be set in motion and complexified were we willing to entertain the more alarming notion that such equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text. (73)As American history undergoes transformation, Melville foreshadows Jameson’s transformation of allegory through his (Melville’s) own transformations of directionality and place. In a story about North and South, are we in the south or the north? Allegorical “equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text” (Jameson 73). North-north equivalences falter; South-south equivalences falter.As noted above, the chimney of Melville’s story—“swung vertical to hit the meridian moon”—insists upon a north-south axis, much as, in an allegorical mode, the vertical “I” of the narrator structures a polarity of north and south (327). However, a closer reading shows that the chimney is no less complicit in the confusion of north and south than the environs of the house it occupies:In those houses which are strictly double houses—that is, where the hall is in the middle—the fire-places usually are on opposite sides; so that while one member of the household is warming himself at a fire built into a recess of the north wall, say another member, the former’s own brother, perhaps, may be holding his feet to the blaze before a hearth in the south wall—the two thus fairly sitting back to back. Is this well? (328)Here, Melville is directly allegorizing the “sulky” state of the American nation; the brothers are, as it were, North and South (328). However, just as the text’s signifiers of place problematize the notions of north and south (and thus the associated cultural resonances of capitalized North and South), this passage, in queering the axes of the chimneys, further upsets the primary allegory. The same chimney that structures Melville’s text along a north-south or up-down orientation, now defers to an east-west axis, for the back-to-back and (in cultural and allegorical terms) North-South brothers, sit at a 90-degree angle to their house’s chimneys, which thus logically manifest a cross-wise orientation of east-west (in cultural and allegorical terms, East-West). To this extent, there is something of an exquisite crossover and confusion of cultural North and South, as represented by the two brothers, and geographical/architectural/architectonic north and south (now vacillating between an east-west and a north-south orientation). The North-South cultural relationship of the brothers distorts the allegorical force of the narrator’s spine-like chimney (not to mention of the brother’s respective chimneys), thus enflaming Jameson’s allegorical equivalences. The promiscuous literality of the smokestack—Katja Kanzler notes the “astonishing materiality” of the chimney—subverts its main allegorical function; directionality both supports and disrupts allegory (591). Simply put, there is a disjunction between words and material circumstances; the “way of speaking… is hardly borne out by the facts” (Melville 327).The not unjustified critical focus on “I and My Chimney” as an allegory of North-South cultural (and shortly wartime) tensions, has not kept up with post-structural developments in allegorical theory as represented in Fredric Jameson’s work. In part, I suggest, this is because critics to date have missed the importance to Melville’s allegory of its extra-textual context. According to William J. Sowder, “Melville showed a lively interest in such contemporary social events as the gold rush, the French Revolution of 1848, and the activities of the English Chartists” (129). The pity is that readings of “I and My Chimney” have limited this “lively interest” to the Civil War. Melville’s attentiveness to “contemporary social events” should also encompass, I suggest, the East-West (east-west) dynamic of mid-nineteenth century American history, as much as the North-South (north-south) dynamic.The redialing of Melville’s allegory along another directional axis is thus accounted for. When “I and My Chimney” was published in 1856, there was, of course, at least one other major historical development in play besides the prospect of the Civil War, and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny ran, not to put it too finely, along an East-West (east-west) axis. Indeed, Manifest Destiny is at least as replete with a directional emphasis as the discourse of Civil War North-South opposition. As quoted in Frederick Merk’s Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, Senator Daniel S. Dickinson states to the Senate, in 1848, “but the tide of emigration and the course of empire have since been westward” (Merk 29). Allied to this tradition, of course, is the well-known contemporaneous saying, “go West, young man, go West” (“Go West, Young Man”).To the extent that Melville’s text appears to anticipate Jameson’s post-structural theory of allegory, it may be linked, I suggest, to Melville’s sense of being at an intersection of American history. The meta-narrative of national history when “I and My Chimney” was produced had a spatial dimension to it: north-south directionality (culturally, North-South) was giving way to east-west directionality (culturally, East-West). Civil War would soon give way to Manifest Destiny; just as Melville’s texts themselves would, much later admittedly, give way to texts of Manifest Destiny in all its forms, including Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. Equivalently, as much as the narrator’s wife represents Northern “progress” she might also be taken to signify Western “ambition”.However, it is not only that “I and My Chimney” is a switching-point text of geo-history (mediating relations, most obviously, between the tendencies of Southern Exceptionalism and of Western National Ambition) but that it operates as a potentially generalizable test case of the limits of allegory by setting up an all-too-simple allegory of North-South/north-south relations which is subsequently subtly problematized along the lines of East-West/east-west directionality. As I have argued, Melville’s “experimental allegory” continually diverts words (that is, the symbols allegory relies upon) through the turbulence of material circumstances.North, or north, is simultaneously a cultural and a geographical or directional coordinate of Melville’s text, and the chimney of “I and My Chimney” is both a signifier of the difference between N/north and S/south and also a portal to a 360-degrees all-encompassing engagement of (allegorical) writing with history in all its (spatialized) manifestations.ReferencesAllison, J. “Conservative Architecture: Hawthorne in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” South Central Review 13.1 (1996): 17-25.Chatfield, E.H. “Levels of Meaning in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Imago 19.2 (1962): 163-69.Emery, A.M. “The Political Significance of Melville’s Chimney.” The New England Quarterly 55.2 (1982): 201-28.“Go West, Young Man.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 29 Sep. 2017. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_young_man>.Jameson, F. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88.Kanzler, K. “Architecture, Writing, and Vulnerable Signification in Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Studies 54.4 (2009): 583-601.Kerouac, J. On the Road. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Melville, H. “I and My Chimney.” Great Short Works of Herman Melville. New York: Perennial-HarperCollins, 2004: 327-54.Merk, F. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.Sealts, M.M. “Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Literature 13 (May 1941): 142-54.Sowder, W.J. “Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney:’ A Southern Exposure.” Mississippi Quarterly 16.3 (1963): 128-45.Wilder, L.I. Little House on the Prairie Series.Wilson, S. “Melville and the Architecture of Antebellum Masculinity.” American Literature 76.1 (2004): 59-87.

Technique and creativity Having been called upon to provide a contribution to a publication dedicated to “Techne”, I feel it is fitting to start from the theme of technique, given that for too many years now, we have fruitlessly attempted to understand the inner workings of cinema whilst disregarding the element of technique. And this has posed a significant problem in our field of study, as it would be impossible to gain a true understanding of what cinema is without immersing ourselves in the technical and industrial culture of the 19th century. It was within this culture that a desire was born: to mould the imaginary through the new techniques of reproduction and transfiguration of reality through images. Studying the development of the so-called “pre-cinema” – i.e. the period up to the conventional birth of cinema on 28 December 1895 with the presentation of the Cinématographe Lumière – we discover that the technical history of cinema is not only almost more enthralling than its artistic and cultural history, but that it contains all the great theoretical, philosophical and scientific insights that we need to help us understand the social, economic and cultural impact that cinema had on the culture of the 20th century. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, when cinema had already existed in some form for a few years, when the first few short films of narrative fiction also already existed, the cinematograph was placed in the Pavilion of Technical Discoveries, to emphasise the fact that the first wonder, this element of unparalleled novelty and modernity, was still there, in technique, in this marvel of innovation and creativity. I would like to express my idea through the words of Franco Moretti, who claims in one of his most recent works that it is only possible to understand form through the forces that pulsate through it and press on it from beneath, finally allowing the form itself to come to the surface and make itself visible and comprehensible to our senses. As such, the cinematic form – that which appears on the screen, that which is now so familiar to us, that which each of us has now internalised, that has even somehow become capable of configuring our way of thinking, imagining, dreaming – that form is underpinned by forces that allow it to eventually make its way onto the screen and become artistic and narrative substance. And those forces are the forces of technique, the forces of industry, the economic, political and social forces without which we could never hope to understand cinema. One of the issues that I always make a point of addressing in the first few lessons with my students is that if they think that the history of cinema is made up of films, directors, narrative plots to be understood, perhaps even retold in some way, then they are entirely on the wrong track; if, on the other hand, they understand that it is the story of an institution with economic, political and social drivers within it that can, in some way, allow us to come to the great creators, the great titles, but that without a firm grasp of those drivers, there is no point in even attempting to explore it, then they are on the right track. As I see it, cinema in the twentieth century was a great democratic, interclassist laboratory such as no other art has ever been, and this occurred thanks to the fact that what underpinned it was an industrial reasoning: it had to respond to the capital invested in it, it had to make money, and as such, it had to reach the largest possible number of people, immersing it into a wholly unprecedented relational situation. The aim was to be as inclusive as possible, ultimately giving rise to the idea that cinema could not be autonomous, as other forms of art could be, but that it must instead be able to negotiate all the various forces acting upon it, pushing it in every direction. This concept of negotiation is one which has been explored in great detail by one of the greatest film theorists of our modern age, Francesco Casetti. In a 2005 book entitled “Eye of the Century”, which I consider to be a very important work, Casetti actually argues that cinema has proven itself to be the art form most capable of adhering to the complexity and fast pace of the short century, and that it is for this very reason that its golden age (in the broadest sense) can be contained within the span of just a hundred years. The fact that cinema was the true epistemological driving force of 20th-century modernity – a position now usurped by the Internet – is not, in my opinion, something that diminishes the strength of cinema, but rather an element of even greater interest. Casetti posits that cinema was the great negotiator of new cultural needs, of the need to look at art in a different way, of the willingness to adapt to technique and technology: indeed, the form of cinema has always changed according to the techniques and technologies that it has brought to the table or established a dialogue with on a number of occasions. Barry Salt, whose background is in physics, wrote an important book – publishing it at his own expense, as a mark of how difficult it is to work in certain fields – entitled “Film Style and Technology”, in which he calls upon us stop writing the history of cinema starting from the creators, from the spirit of the time, from the great cultural and historical questions, and instead to start afresh by following the techniques available over the course of its development. Throughout the history of cinema, the creation of certain films has been the result of a particular set of technical conditions: having a certain type of film, a certain type of camera, only being able to move in a certain way, needing a certain level of lighting, having an entire arsenal of equipment that was very difficult to move and handle; and as the equipment, medium and techniques changed and evolved over the years, so too did the type of cinema that we were able to make. This means framing the history of cinema and film theory in terms of the techniques that were available, and starting from there: of course, whilst Barry Salt’s somewhat provocative suggestion by no means cancels out the entire cultural, artistic and aesthetic discourse in cinema – which remains fundamental – it nonetheless raises an interesting point, as if we fail to consider the methods and techniques of production, we will probably never truly grasp what cinema is. These considerations also help us to understand just how vast the “construction site” of cinema is – the sort of “factory” that lies behind the production of any given film. Erwin Panofsky wrote a single essay on cinema in the 1930s entitled “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” – a very intelligent piece, as one would expect from Panofsky – in which at a certain point, he compares the construction site of the cinema to those of Gothic cathedrals, which were also under an immense amount of pressure from different forces, namely religious ones, but also socio-political and economic forces which ultimately shaped – in the case of the Gothic cathedral and its development – an idea of the relationship between the earth and the otherworldly. The same could be said for cinema, because it also involves starting with something very earthly, very grounded, which is then capable of unleashing an idea of imaginary metamorphosis. Some scholars, such as Edgar Morin, will say that cinema is increasingly becoming the new supernatural, the world of contemporary gods, as religion gradually gives way to other forms of deification. Panofsky’s image is a very focused one: by making film production into a construction site, which to all intents and purposes it is, he leads us to understand that there are different forces at work, represented by a producer, a scriptwriter, a director, but also a workforce, the simple labourers, as is always the case in large construction sites, calling into question the idea of who the “creator” truly is. So much so that cinema, now more than ever before, is reconsidering the question of authorship, moving towards a “history of cinema without names” in an attempt to combat the “policy of the author” which, in the 1950s, especially in France, identified the director as the de facto author of the film. Today, we are still in that position, with the director still considered the author of the film, but that was not always so: back in the 1910s, in the United States, the author of the film was the scriptwriter, the person who wrote it (as is now the case for TV series, where they have once again taken pride of place as the showrunner, the creator, the true author of the series, and nobody remembers the names of the directors of the individual episodes); or at times, it can be the producer, as was the case for a long time when the Oscar for Best Picture, for example, was accepted by the producer in their capacity as the commissioner, as the “owner” of the work. As such, the theme of authorship is a very controversial one indeed, but one which helps us to understand the great meeting of minds that goes into the production of a film, starting with the technicians, of course, but also including the actors. Occasionally, a film is even attributed to the name of a star, almost as if to declare that that film is theirs, in that it is their body and their talent as an actor lending it a signature that provides far more of a draw to audiences than the name of the director does. In light of this, the theme of authorship, which Panofsky raised in the 1930s through the example of the Gothic cathedral, which ultimately does not have a single creator, is one which uses the image of the construction site to also help us to better understand what kind of development a film production can go through and to what extent this affects its critical and historical reception; as such, grouping films together based on their director means doing something that, whilst certainly not incorrect in itself, precludes other avenues of interpretation and analysis which could have favoured or could still favour a different reading of the “cinematographic construction site”. Design and execution The great classic Hollywood film industry was a model that, although it no longer exists in the same form today, unquestionably made an indelible mark at a global level on the history not only of cinema, but more broadly, of the culture of the 20th century. The industry involved a very strong vertical system resembling an assembly line, revolving around producers, who had a high level of decision-making autonomy and a great deal of expertise, often inclined towards a certain genre of film and therefore capable of bringing together the exact kinds of skills and visions required to make that particular film. The history of classic American cinema is one that can also be reconstructed around the units that these producers would form. The “majors”, along with the so-called “minors”, were put together like football teams, with a chairman flanked by figures whom we would nowadays refer to as a sporting director and a managing director, who built the team based on specific ideas, “buying” directors, scriptwriters, scenographers, directors of photography, and even actors and actresses who generally worked almost exclusively for their major – although they could occasionally be “loaned out” to other studios. This system led to a very marked characterisation and allowed for the film to be designed in a highly consistent, recognisable way in an age when genres reigned supreme and there was the idea that in order to keep the audience coming back, it was important to provide certain reassurances about what they would see: anyone going to see a Western knew what sorts of characters and storylines to expect, with the same applying to a musical, a crime film, a comedy, a melodrama, and so on. The star system served to fuel this working method, with these major actors also representing both forces and materials in the hands of an approach to the filmmaking which had the ultimate objective of constructing the perfect film, in which everything had to function according to a rule rooted in both the aesthetic and the economic. Gore Vidal wrote that from 1939 onwards, Hollywood did not produce a single “wrong” film: indeed, whilst certainly hyperbolic, this claim confirms that that system produced films that were never wrong, never off-key, but instead always perfectly in tune with what the studios wished to achieve. Whilst this long-entrenched system of yesteryear ultimately imploded due to certain historical phenomena that determined it to be outdated, the way of thinking about production has not changed all that much, with film design remaining tied to a professional approach that is still rooted within it. The overwhelming majority of productions still start from a system which analyses the market and the possible economic impact of the film, before even starting to tackle the various steps that lead up to the creation of the film itself. Following production systems and the ways in which they have changed, in terms of both the technology and the cultural contexts, also involves taking stock of the still considerable differences that exist between approaches to filmmaking in different countries, or indeed the similarities linking highly disparate economic systems (consider, for example, India’s “Bollywood” or Nigeria’s “Nollywood”: two incredibly strong film industries that we are not generally familiar with as they lack global distribution, although they are built very solidly). In other words, any attempt to study Italian cinema and American cinema – to stay within this double field – with the same yardstick is unthinkable, precisely because the context of their production and design is completely different. Composition and innovation Studying the publications on cinema in the United States in the early 1900s – which, from about 1911 to 1923, offers us a revealing insight into the attempts made to garner an in-depth understanding of how this new storytelling machine worked and the development of the first real cultural industry of the modern age – casts light on the centrality of the issues of design and composition. I remain convinced that without reading and understanding that debate, it is very difficult to understand why cinema is as we have come to be familiar with it today. Many educational works investigated the inner workings of cinema, and some, having understood them, suggested that they were capable of teaching others to do so. These publications have almost never been translated into Italian and remain seldom studied even in the US, and yet they are absolutely crucial for understanding how cinema established itself on an industrial and aesthetic level. There are two key words that crop up time and time again in these books, the first being “action”, one of the first words uttered when a film starts rolling: “lights, camera, action”. This collection of terms is interesting in that “motore” highlights the presence of a machine that has to be started up, followed by “action”, which expresses that something must happen at that moment in front of that machine, otherwise the film will not exist. As such, “action” – a term to which I have devoted some of my studies – is a fundamental word here in that it represents a sort of moment of birth of the film that is very clear – tangible, even. The other word is “composition”, and this is an even more interesting word with a history that deserves a closer look: the first professor of cinema in history, Victor Oscar Freeburg (I edited the Italian translation of his textbook “The Art of Photoplay Making”, published in 1918), took up his position at Columbia University in 1915 and, in doing so, took on the task of teaching the first ever university course in cinema. Whilst Freeburg was, for his time, a very well-educated and highly-qualified person, having studied at Yale and then obtained his doctorate in theatre at Columbia, cinema was not entirely his field of expertise. He was asked to teach a course entitled “Photoplay Writing”. At the time, a film was known as a “photoplay”, in that it was a photographed play of sorts, and the fact that the central topic of the course was photoplay writing makes it clear that back then, the scriptwriter was considered the main author of the work. From this point of view, it made sense to entrust the teaching of cinema to an expert in theatre, based on the idea that it was useful to first and foremost teach a sort of photographable dramaturgy. However, upon arriving at Columbia, Freeburg soon realised whilst preparing his course that “photoplay writing” risked misleading the students, as it is not enough to simply write a story in order to make a film; as such, he decided to change the title of his course to “photoplay composition”. This apparently minor alteration, from “writing” to “composition”, in fact marked a decisive conceptual shift in that it highlighted that it was no longer enough to merely write: one had to “compose”. So it was that the author of a film became, according to Freeburg, not the scriptwriter or director, but the “cinema composer” (a term of his own coinage), thus directing and broadening the concept of composition towards music, on the one hand, and architecture, on the other. We are often inclined to think that cinema has inherited expressive modules that come partly from literature, partly from theatre and partly from painting, but in actual fact, what Freeburg helps us to understand is that there are strong elements of music and architecture in a film, emphasising the lofty theme of the project. In his book, he explores at great length the relationship between static and dynamic forms in cinema, a topic that few have ever addressed in that way and that again, does not immediately spring to mind as applicable to a film. I believe that those initial intuitions were the result of a reflection unhindered by all the prejudices and preconceived notions that subsequently began to condition film studies as a discipline, and I feel that they are of great use to use today because they guide us, on the one hand, towards a symphonic idea of filmmaking, and on the other, towards an idea that preserves the fairly clear imprint of architecture. Space-Time In cinema as in architecture, the relationship between space and time is a crucial theme: in every textbook, space and time are amongst the first chapters to be studied precisely because in cinema, they undergo a process of metamorphosis – as Edgar Morin would say – which is vital to constructing the intermediate world of film. Indeed, from both a temporal and a spatial point of view, cinema provides a kind of ubiquitous opportunity to overlap different temporalities and spatialities, to move freely from one space to another, but above all, to construct new systems of time. The rules of film editing – especially so-called “invisible editing”, i.e. classical editing that conceals its own presence – are rules built upon specific and precise connections that hold together different spaces – even distant ones – whilst nonetheless giving the impression of unity, of contiguity, of everything that cinema never is in reality, because cinema is constantly fragmented and interrupted, even though we very often perceive it in continuity. As such, from both a spatial and a temporal perspective, there are technical studies that explain the rules of how to edit so as to give the idea of spatial continuity, as well as theoretical studies that explain how cinema has transformed our sense of space and time. To mark the beginning of Parma’s run as Italy’s Capital of Culture, an exhibition was organised entitled “Time Machine. Seeing and Experiencing Time”, curated by Antonio Somaini, with the challenge of demonstrating how cinema, from its earliest experiments to the digital age, has managed to manipulate and transform time, profoundly affecting our way of engaging with it. The themes of time and space are vital to understanding cinema, including from a philosophical point of view: in two of Gilles Deleuze’s seminal volumes, “The Movement Image” and “The Time Image”, the issues of space and time become the two great paradigms not only for explaining cinema, but also – as Deleuze himself says – for explaining a certain 20th-century philosophy. Deleuze succeeds in a truly impressive endeavour, namely linking cinema to philosophical reflection – indeed, making cinema into an instrument of philosophical thought; this heteronomy of filmmaking is then also transferred to its ability to become an instrument that goes beyond its own existence to become a reflection on the century that saw it as a protagonist of sorts. Don Ihde argues that every era has a technical discovery that somehow becomes what he calls an “epistemological engine”: a tool that opens up a system of thought that would never have been possible without that discovery. One of the many examples of this over the centuries is the camera obscura, but we could also name cinema as the defining discovery for 20th-century thought: indeed, cinema is indispensable for understanding the 20th century, just as the Internet is for understanding our way of thinking in the 21st century. Real-virtual Nowadays, the film industry is facing the crisis of cinema closures, ultimately caused by ever-spreading media platforms and the power of the economic competition that they are exerting by aggressively entering the field of production and distribution, albeit with a different angle on the age-old desire to garner audiences. Just a few days ago, Martin Scorsese was lamenting the fact that on these platforms, the artistic project is in danger of foundering, as excellent projects are placed in a catalogue alongside a series of products of varying quality, thus confusing the viewer. A few years ago, during the opening ceremony of the academic year at the University of Southern California, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas expressed the same concept about the future of cinema in a different way. Lucas argued that cinemas would soon have to become incredibly high-tech places where people can have an experience that is impossible to reproduce elsewhere, with a ticket price that takes into account the expanded and increased experiential value on offer thanks to the new technologies used. Spielberg, meanwhile, observed that cinemas will manage to survive if they manage to transform the cinemagoer from a simple viewer into a player, an actor of sorts. The history of cinema has always been marked by continuous adaptation to technological evolutions. I do not believe that cinema will ever end. Jean-Luc Godard, one of the great masters of the Nouvelle Vague, once said in an interview: «I am very sorry not to have witnessed the birth of cinema, but I am sure that I will witness its death». Godard, who was born in 1930, is still alive. Since its origins, cinema has always transformed rather than dying. Raymond Bellour says that cinema is an art that never finishes finishing, a phrase that encapsulates the beauty and the secret of cinema: an art that never quite finishes finishing is an art that is always on the very edge of the precipice but never falls off, although it leans farther and farther over that edge. This is undoubtedly down to cinema’s ability to continually keep up with technique and technology, and in doing so to move – even to a different medium – to relocate, as contemporary theorists say, even finally moving out of cinemas themselves to shift onto platforms and tablets, yet all without ever ceasing to be cinema. That said, we should give everything we’ve got to ensure that cinemas survive.

Through my last lengthy writing project, it did not take long to I realise I had become obsessed with paths. The proof of it was there in my notebooks, and, most prominently, in the backlog of photographs cluttering the inner workings of my mobile phone. Most of the photographs I took had a couple of things in common: first, the astonishing greenness of the world they were describing; second, the way a road or path or corridor or pavement or trail led off into distance. The greenness was because I was in England, in summer, and mostly in a part of the country where green seems at times the only colour. I am not sure what it was about tailing perspective that caught me.Image 1: a) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford; b) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradfordc) Leeds Road, Otley; d) Shibden Park, Halifax Image 2: a) Runswick Bay; b) St. Mary's Churchyard, Habberleyc) The Habberley Road, to Pontesbury; d) Todmorden, path to Stoodley Pike I was working on a kind of family memoir, tied up in my grandmother’s last days, which were also days I spent marching through towns and countryside I once knew, looking for clues about a place and its past. I had left the north-west of England a decade or so before, and I was grappling with what James Wood calls “homelooseness”, a sensation of exile that even economic migrants like myself encounter. It is a particular kind of “secular homelessness” in which “the ties that might bind one to Home have been loosened” (105-106). Loosened irrevocably, I might add. The kind of wandering which I embarked on is not unique. Wood describes it in himself, and in the work of W.G. Sebald—a writer who, he says, “had an exquisite sense of the varieties of not-belonging” (106).I walked a lot, mostly on paths I used to know. And when, later, I counted up the photographs I had taken of that similar-but-different scene, there were almost 500 of them, none of which I can bring myself to delete. Some were repeated, or nearly so—I had often tried to make sure the path in the frame was centred in the middle of the screen. Most of the pictures were almost entirely miscellaneous, and if it were not for a feature on my phone I could not work out how to turn off (that feature which tracks where each photograph was taken) I would not have much idea of what each picture represented. What’s clear is that there was some lingering significance, some almost-tangible metaphor, in the way I was recording the walking I was doing. This same significance is there, too (in an almost quantifiable way), in the thesis I was working on while I was taking the photographs: I used the word “path” 63 times in the version I handed to examiners, not counting all the times I could have, but chose not to—all the “pavements”, “trails”, “roads”, and “holloways” of it would add up to a number even more substantial. For instance, the word “walk”, or derivatives of it, comes up 115 times. This article is designed to ask why. I aim to focus on that metaphor, on that significance, and unpack the way life writing can intersect with both the journey of a life being lived, and the process of writing down that life (by process of writing I sometimes mean anything but: I mean the process of working towards the writing. Of going, of doing, of talking, of spending, of working, of thinking, of walking). I came, in the thesis, to view certain kinds of prose as a way of imitating the rhythms of the mind, but I think there’s something about that rhythm which associates it with the feet as well. Rebecca Solnit thinks so too, or, at least, that the processes of thinking and walking can wrap around each other, helixed or concatenated. In Wanderlust she says that:the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. (5-6)The “odd consonance” Solnit speaks of is a kind of seamlessness between the internal and external; it is something which can be aped on the page. And, in this way, prose can imitate the mind thinking. This way of writing is evident in the digression-filled, wandering, sinuous sentences of W.G. Sebald, and of Marcel Proust as well. I don’t want to entangle myself in the question of whether Proust and Sebald count as life writers here. I used them as models, and, at the very least, I think their prose manipulates the conceits of the autobiographical pact. In fact, Sebald often refused to label his own work; once he called his writing “prose [...] of indefinite form” (Franklin 123). My definition of life writing is, thus, indefinite, and merely indicates the field in which I work and know best.Edmund White, when writing on Proust, suggested that every page of Remembrance of Things Past—while only occasionally being a literal page of Proust’s mind thinking—is, nevertheless, “a transcript of a mind thinking [...] the fully orchestrated, ceaseless, and disciplined ruminations of one mind, one voice” (138). Ceaselessness, seamlessness ... there’s also a viscosity to this kind of prose—Virginia Woolf called it “impassioned”, and spoke of the way some prosecan lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard. With all the suppleness of a tool which is in constant use it can follow the windings and record the changes which are typical of the modern mind. To this, with Proust and Dostoevsky behind us, we must agree. (20)When I read White and Woolf it seemed they could have been talking about Sebald, too: everything in Sebald’s oeuvre is funnelled through what White described in Remembrance as the cyclopean “I” at the centre of the Proustian consciousness (138). The same could be said about Sebald: as Lynne Schwartz says, “All Sebald’s characters sound like the narrator” (15). And that narrator has very particular qualities, encouraged by the sense of homelooseness Wood describes: the Sebald narrator is a wanderer, by train through Italian cities and New York Suburbs, on foot through the empty reaches of the English countryside, exploring the history of each settlement he passes through [...] Wherever he travels, he finds strangely vacant streets and roads, not a soul around [...] Sebald’s books are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy black-and-white photographs that call up the presence of the dead, of vanished places, and also serve as proofs of his passage. (Schwartz 14) I tried to resist the urge to take photographs, for the simple reason that I knew I could not include them all in the finished thesis—even including some would seem (perhaps) derivative. But this method of wandering—whether on the page or in the world—was formative for me. And the linkage between thinking and walking, and walking and writing, and writing and thinking is worth exploring, if only to identify some reason for that need to show proof of passage.Walking in Proust and Sebald either forms the shape of narrative, or one its cruxes. Both found ways to let walking affect the rhythm, movement, motivation, and even the aesthetic of their prose. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, for example, is plotless because of the way it follows its narrator on a walking tour of Suffolk. The effect is similar to something Murray Baumgarten noticed in one of Sebald’s other books, The Emigrants: “The [Sebaldian] narrator discovers in the course of his travels (and with him the reader) that he is constructing the text he is reading, a text at once being imagined and destroyed, a fragment of the past, and a ruin that haunts the present” (268). Proust’s opus is a meditation on the different ways we can walk. Remembrance is a book about momentum—a book about movement. It is a book which always forges forward, but which always faces backward, where time and place can still and footsteps be paused in motion, or tiptoed upstairs and across tables or be caught in flight over the body of an octogenarian lying on a beach. And it is the walks of the narrator’s past—his encounters with landscape—that give his present (and future) thoughts impetus: the rhythms of his long-past progress still affect the way he moves and acts and thinks, and will always do so:the “Méséglise way” and the “Guermantes way” remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind [...] [T]he two “ways” give to those [impressions of the mind] a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. (Swann’s Way 252-255)The two “ways”—walks in and around the town of Combray—are, for the narrator, frames through which he thinks about his childhood, and all the things which happened to him because of that childhood. I felt something similar through the process of writing my thesis: a need to allow the 3-mile-per-hour-connection between mind and body and place that Solnit speaks about seep into my work. I felt the stirrings of old ways; the places I once walked, which I photographed and paced, pulsed and pushed me forwards in the present and towards the future. I felt strangely attached to, and disconnected from, those pathways: lanes where I had rummaged for conkers; streets my grandparents had once lived and worked on; railways demolished because of roads which now existed, leaving only long, straight pathways through overgrown countryside suffused with time and memory. The oddness I felt might be an effect of what Wood describes as a “certain doubleness”, “where homesickness is a kind of longing for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and sickness of” (93-94). The model of seamless prose offered some way to articulate, at least, the particularities of this condition, and of the problem of connection—whether with place or the past. But it is in this shift away from conclusiveness, which occurs when the writer constructs-as-they-write, that Baumgarten sees seamlessness:rather than the defined edges, boundaries, and conventional perceptions promised by realism, and the efficient account of intention, action, causation, and conclusion implied by the stance of realistic prose, reader and narrator have to assimilate the past and present in a dream state in which they blend imperceptibly into each other. (277)It’s difficult to articulate the way in which the connection between walking, writing, and thinking works. Solnit draws one comparison, talking to the ways in which digression and association mix:as a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative [...] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop of style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. (21)I think the key, here, is the notion of association—in the making of connections, and, in my case, in the making of connections between present and past. When we walk we exist in a roving state, and with a dual purpose: Sophie Cunningham says that we walk to get from one place to the next, but also to insist that “what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present” (Cunningham). The slipperiness of homelooseness can be emphasised in the slipperiness of seamless prose, and walking—situating self in the present—is a rebuttal of slipperiness (if, as I will argue, a rebuttal which has at its heart a contradiction: it is both effective and ineffective. It feels as close as is possible to something impossible to attain). Solnit argues that walking and what she calls “personal, descriptive, and specific” writing are suited to each other:walking is itself a way of grounding one’s thoughts in a personal and embodied experience of the world that it lends itself to this kind of writing. This is why the meaning of walking is mostly discussed elsewhere than in philosophy: in poetry, novels, letters, diaries, travellers’ accounts, and first-person essays. (26)If a person is searching for some kind of possible-impossible grounding in the past, then walking pace is the pace at which to achieve that sensation (both in the world and on the page). It is at walking pace that connections can be made, even if they can be sensed slipping away: this is the Janus-faced problem of attempting to uncover anything which has been. The search, in fact, becomes facsimile for the past itself, or for the inconclusiveness of the past. In my own work—in preparing for that work—I walked and wrote about walking up the flank of the hill which hovered above the house in which I lived before I left England. To get to the top, and the great stone monument which sits there, I had to pass that house. The door was open, and that was enough to unsettle. Baumgarten, again on The Emigrants, articulates the effect: “unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed” (269).Sebald writes in his usual intense way about a Swiss writer, Robert Walser, who he calls le promeneur solitaire (“The Solitary Walker”). Walser was a prolific writer, but through the last years of his life wrote less and less until he ended up incapable of doing so: in the end, Sebald says, “the traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have almost been effaced altogether” (119).Sebald draws parallels between Walser and his own grandfather. Both have worked their way into Sebald’s prose, along with the author himself. Because of this cocktail, I’ve come to read Sebald’s thoughts on Walser as sideways thoughts on his own prose (perhaps due to that cyclopean quality described by White). The works of the two writers share, at the very least, a certain incandescent ephemerality—a quality which exists in Sebald’s work, crystallised in the form and formlessness of a wasps’ nest. The wasps’ nest is a symbol Sebald uses in his book Vertigo, and which he talks to in an interview with Sarah Kafatou:do you know what a wasp’s nest is like? It’s made of something much much thinner than airmail paper: grey and as thin as possible. This gets wrapped around and around like pastry, like a millefeuille, and can get as big as two feet across. It weighs nothing. For me the wasp’s nest is a kind of ideal vision: an object that is extremely complicated and intricate, made out of something that hardly exists. (32)It is in this ephemerality that the walker’s way of moving—if not their journey—can be felt. The ephemerality is necessary because of the way the world is: the way it always passes. A work which is made to seem to encompass everything, like Remembrance of Things Past, is made to do so because that is the nature of what walking offers: an ability to comprehend the world solidly, both minutely and vastly, but with a kind of forgetting attached to it. When a person walks through the world they are firmly embedded in it, yes, but they are also always enacting a process of forgetting where they have been. This continual interplay between presence and absence is evidenced in the way in which Sebald and Proust build the consciousnesses they shape on the page—consciousnessess accustomed to connectedness. According to Sebald, it was through the prose of Walser that he learned this—or, at least, through an engagement with Walser’s world, Sebald, “slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time” (149). Perhaps it can be seen in the way that the Méséglise and Guermantes ways resonate for the Proustian narrator even when they are gone. Proust’s narrator receives a letter from an old love, in the last volume of Remembrance, which describes the fate of the Méséglise way (Swann’s way, that is—the title of the first volume in the sequence). Gilberte tells him that the battlefields of World War I have overtaken the paths they used to walk:the little road you so loved, the one we called the stiff Hawthorn climb, where you professed to be in love with me when you were a child, when all the time I was in love with you, I cannot tell you how important that position is. The great wheatfield in which it ended is the famous “slope 307,” the name you have so often seen recorded in the communiqués. The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne which, you remember, did not bring back your childhood to you as much as you would have liked. The Germans threw others across; during a year and a half they held one half of Combray and the French the other. (Time Regained 69-70)Lia Purpura describes, and senses, a similar kind of connectedness. The way in which each moment builds into something—into the ephemeral, shifting self of a person walking through the world—is emphasised because that is the way the world works:I could walk for miles right now, fielding all that passes through, rubs off, lends a sense of being—that rush of moments, objects, sensations so much like a cloud of gnats, a cold patch in the ocean, dust motes in a ray of sun that roil, gather, settle around my head and make up the daily weather of a self. (x)This is what seamless prose can emulate: the rush of moments and the folds and shapes which dust turns and makes. And, well, I am aware that this may seem a grand kind of conclusion, and even a peculiarly nonspecific one. But nonspecificity is built by a culmination of details, of sentences—it is built deliberately, to evoke a sense of looseness in the world. And in the associations which result, through the mind of the writer, their narrator, and the reader, much more than is evident on the page—Sebald’s “everything”—is flung to the surface. Of course, this “everything” is split through with the melancholy evident in the destruction of the Méséglise way. Nonspecificity becomes the result of any attempt to capture the past—or, at least, the past becomes less tangible the longer, closer, and slower your attempt to grasp it. In both Sebald and Proust the task of representation is made to feel seamless in echo of the impossibility of resolution.In the unbroken track of a sentence lies a metaphor for the way in which life is spent: under threat, forever assaulted by the world and the senses, and forever separated from what came before. The walk-as-method is entangled with the mind thinking and the pen writing; each apes the other, and all work towards the same kind of end: an articulation of how the world is. At least, in the hands of Sebald and Proust and through their long and complex prosodies, it does. For both there is a kind of melancholy attached to this articulation—perhaps because the threads that bind sever as well. The Rings of Saturn offers a look at this. The book closes with a chapter on the weaving of silk, inflected, perhaps, with a knowledge of the ways in which Robert Walser—through attempts to ensnare some of life’s ephemerality—became a victim of it:That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. (283)Vladimir Nabokov, writing on Swann’s Way, gives a competing metaphor for thinking through the seamlessness afforded by walking and writing. It is, altogether, more optimistic: more in keeping with Purpura’s interpretation of connectedness: “Proust’s conversations and his descriptions merge into one another, creating a new unity where flower and leaf and insect belong to one and the same blossoming tree” (214). This is the purpose of long and complex books like The Rings of Saturn and Remembrance of Things Past: to draw the lines which link each and all together. To describe the shape of consciousness, to mimic the actions of a body experiencing its progress through the world. I think that is what the photographs I took when wandering attempt, in a failing way, to do. They all show a kind of relentlessness, but in that relentlessness is also, I think, the promise of connectedness—even if not connectedness itself. Each path aims forward, and articulates something of what came before and what might come next, whether trodden in the world or walked on the page.Author’s NoteI’d like to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewers who took time to improve this article. I’m grateful for their insights and engagement, and for the nuance they added to the final copy.References Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267-287. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2007.0000>.Cunningham, Sophie. “Staying with the Trouble.” Australian Book Review 371 (May 2015). 23 June 2016 <https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2015/2500-2015-calibre-prize-winner-staying-with-the-trouble>.Franklin, Ruth. “Rings of Smoke.” The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. 121-122.Kafatou, Sarah. “An Interview with W.G. Sebald.” Harvard Review 15 (1998): 31-35. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Marcel Proust: The Walk by Swann’s Place.” 1980. Lectures on Literature. London: Picador, 1983. 207-250.Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Part I. 1913. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960.———. Time Regained. 1927. Trans. Stephen Hudson. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.Purpura, Lia. “On Not Pivoting”. Diagram 12.1 (n.d.). 21 June 2018 <http://thediagram.com/12_1/purpura.html>.Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, ed. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse in 1998. London: Vintage, 2002.——. “Le Promeneur Solitaire.” A Place in the Country. Trans. Jo Catling. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. 117-154.Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. 2001. London: Granta Publications, 2014.White, Edmund. Proust. London: Phoenix, 1999.Wood, James. The Nearest Thing to Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015.Woolf, Virginia. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” Granite and Rainbow. USA: Harvest Books, 1975.

We (I, Robert Lawrence and, in a rare display of unity, all my online avatars and agents)hereby render and proclaim thisMANIFESTO OF PIECES AND BITS IN SERVICE OF CONTRADICTIONAL AESTHETICSWe start with the simple premise that art has the job of telling us who we are, and that through the modern age doing this job while KEEPING UP with accelerating cultural change has necessitated the invention of something we might call the avant-garde. Along the way there has been an on-again-off-again affair between said avant-garde and technology. We are now in a new phase of the new and the technology under consideration is the Internet.The recent hyperventilating about the term postInternet reflects the artworld’s overdue recognition of the effect of the Internet on the culture at large, and on art as a cultural practice, a market, and a historical process.I propose that we cannot fully understand what the Internet is doing to us through a consideration of what happens on the screen, nor by considering what happens in the physical space we occupy either before or behind the screen. Rather we must critically and creatively fathom the flow of cultural practice between and across these realms. This requires Hybrid art combining both physical and Internet forms.I do not mean to imply that single discipline-based art cannot communicate complexity, but I believe that Internet culture introduces complexities that can only be approached through hybrid practices. And this is especially critical for an art that, in doing the job of “telling us who we are”, wants to address the contradictory ways we now form and promote, or conceal and revise, our multiple identities through online social media profiles inconsistent with our fleshly selves.We need a different way of talking about identity. A history of identity:In the ancient world, individual identity as we understand it did not exist.The renaissance invented the individual.Modernism prioritized and alienated him (sic).Post-Modernism fragmented him/her.The Internet hyper-circulates and amplifies all these modalities, exploding the possibilities of identity.While reducing us to demographic market targets, the Web facilitates mass indulgence in perversely individual interests. The now common act of creating an “online profile” is a regular reiteration of the simple fact that identity is an open-ended hypothesis. We can now live double, or extravagantly multiple, virtual lives. The “me meme” is a ceaseless morph. This is a profound change in how identity was understood just a decade ago. Other historical transformations of identity happened over centuries. This latest and most radical change has occurred in the click of a mouse. Selfhood is now imbued with new complexity, fluidity and amplified contradictions.To fully understand what is actually happening to us, we need an art that engages the variant contracts of the physical and the virtual. We need a Hybrid art that addresses variant temporal and spatial modes of the physical and virtual. We need an art that offers articulations through the ubiquitous web in concert with the distinct perspectives that a physical gallery experience uniquely offers: engagement and removal, reflection and transference. Art that tells us who we are today calls for an aesthetics of contradiction. — Ro Lawrence (and all avatars) 2011, revised 2013, 2015, 2018. The manifesto above grew from an artistic practice beginning in 1998 as I started producing a website for every project that I made in traditional media. The Internet work does not just document or promote the project, nor is it “Netart” in the common sense of creative work restricted to a browser window. All of my efforts with the Internet are directly linked to my projects in traditional media and the web components offer parallel aesthetic voices that augment or overtly contradict the reading suggested by the traditional visual components of each project.This hybrid work grew out of a previous decade of transmedia work in video installation and sculpture, where I would create physical contexts for silent video as a way to remove the video image from the seamless flow of broadcast culture. A video image can signify very differently in a physical context that separates it from the flow of mass media and rather reconnects it to lived physical culture. A significant part of the aesthetic pleasure of this kind of work comes from nuances of dissonance arising from contradictory ways viewers had learned to read the object world and the ways we were then still learning to read the electronic image world. This video installation work was about “relocating” the electronic image, but I was also “locating” the electronic image in another sense, within the boundaries of geographic and cultural location. Linking all my projects to specific geographic locations set up contrasts with the spatial ubiquity of electronic media. In 1998 I amplified this contrast with my addition of extensive Internet components with each installation I made.The Way Things Grow (1998) began as an installation of sculptures combining video with segments of birch trees. Each piece in the gallery was linked to a specific geographic location within driving distance of the gallery exhibiting the work. In the years just before this piece I had moved from a practice of text-augmented video installations to the point where I had reduced the text to small printed handouts that featured absurd Scripts for Performance. These text handouts that viewers could take with them suggested that the work was to be completed by the viewer later outside the gallery. This to-be-continued dynamic was the genesis of a serial form in work going forward from then on. Thematic and narrative elements in the work were serialized via possible actions viewers would perform after leaving the gallery. In the installation for The Way Things Grow, there was no text in the gallery at all to suggest interpretations of this series of video sculptures. Even the titles offered no direct textual help. Rather than telling the viewers something about the work before them in the gallery, the title of each piece led the viewer away from the gallery toward serial actions in the specific geographic locations the works referred to. Each piece was titled with an Internet address.Figure 1: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, video Installation with web components at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/grow.html, 1998.When people went to the web site for each piece they found only a black page referencing a physical horizon with a long line of text that they could scroll to right for meters. Unlike the determinedly embodied work in the gallery, the web components were disembodied texts floating in a black void, but texts about very specific physical locations.Figure 2: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, partial view of webpage at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/growth_variant4.html, 1998.The texts began with the exact longitude and latitude of a geographical site in some way related to birch trees. ... A particularly old or large tree... a factory that turned birch trees into popsicle sticks and medical tongue depressors... etc. The website texts included directions to the site, and absurd scripts for performance. In this way the Internet component transformed the suite of sculptures in the gallery to a series of virtual, and possibly actual, events beyond the gallery. These potential narratives that viewers were invited into comprised an open-ended serial structure. The gallery work was formal, minimal, essentialist. On the web it was social, locative, deconstructive. In both locations, it was located. Here follows an excerpt from the website. GROWTH VARIANT #25: North 44:57:58 by West 93:15:56. On the south side of the Hennepin County Government Center is a park with 9 birch trees. These are urban birches, and they display random scratchings, as well as proclamations of affection expressed with pairs of initials and a “+” –both with and without encircling heart symbols. RECOMMENDED PERFORMANCE: Visit these urban birches once each month. Photograph all changes in their bark made by humans. After 20 years compile a document entitled, "Human Mark Making on Urban Birches, a Visual Study of Specific Universalities". Bring it into the Hennepin County Government Center and ask that it be placed in the archives.An Acre of Art (2000) was a collaborative project with sculptor Mark Knierim. Like The Way Things Grow, this new work, commissioned by the Minneapolis Art Institute, played out in the gallery, in a specific geographic location, and online. In the Art Institute was a gallery installation combining sculptures with absurd combinations of physical rural culture fitting contradictorily into an urban "high art" context. One of the pieces, entitled Landscape (2000), was an 18’ chicken coop faced with a gold picture frame. Inside were two bard rock hens and an iMac. The computer was programmed to stream to the Internet live video from the coop, the world’s first video chicken cam. As a work unfolding across a long stretch of time, the web cam video was a serial narrative without determined division into episodes. The gallery works also referenced a specific acre of agricultural land an hour from the Institute. Here we planted a row of dwarf corn at a diagonal to the mid-western American rural geometric grid of farmland. Visitors to the rural site could sit on “rural art furniture,” contemplate the corn growing, and occasionally witness absurd performances. The third stream of the piece was an extensive website, which playfully theorized the rural/urban/art trialectic. Each of the three locations of the work was exploited to provide a richer transmedia interpretation of the project’s themes than any one venue or medium could. Location Sequence is a serial installation begun in 1999. Each installation has completely different physical elements. The only consistent physical element is 72 segments of a 72” collapsible carpenter's ruler evenly spaced to wrap around the gallery walls. Each of the 72 segments of the ruler displays an Internet web address. Reversing the notion of the Internet as a place of rapid change compared to a more enduring physical world, in this case the Internet components do not change with each new episode of the work, while the physical components transform with each new installation. Thematically, all aspects of the work deal with various shades of meaning of the term "location." Beginning/Middle/End is a 30-year conceptual serial begun in 2002, presenting a series of site-specific actions, objects, or interventions combined with corresponding web pages that collectively negotiate concepts related to time, location, and narrative. Realizing a 30-year project via the web in this manner is a self-conscious contradiction of the culture of the instantaneous that the Internet manifests and propagates.The installation documented here was completed for a one-night event in 2002 with Szilage Gallery in St Petersburg, Florida. Bricks moulded with the URLs for three web sites were placed in a historic brick road with the intention that they would remain there through a historical time frame. The URLs were also projected in light on a creek parallel to the brick road and seen only for several hours. The corresponding web site components speculate on temporal/narrative structures crossing with geographic features, natural and manufactured.Figure 3: Lawrence, Robert, Beginning/Middle/End, site-specific installation with website in conjunction with 30-year series, http://www.h-e-r-e.com/beginning.html, 2002-32.The most recent instalment was done as part of Conflux Festival in 2014 in collaboration with painter Ld Lawrence. White shapes appeared in various public spaces in downtown Manhattan. Upon closer inspection people realized that they were not painted tags or stickers, but magnetic sheets that could be moved or removed. An optical scan tag hidden on the back of each shape directed to a website which encouraged people to move the objects to other locations and send a geo-located photo to the web site to trace the shape's motion through the world. The work online could trace the serial narrative of the physical installation components following the installation during Conflux Festival. Figure 4: Lawrence, Robert w/Lawrence, Ld, Gravity Ace on the Move, site-specific installation with geo-tracking website at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/gravityace/. Completed for Conflux Festival NYC, 2014, as part of Beginning/Middle/End.Dad's Boots (2003) was a multi-sited sculpture/performance. Three different physical manifestations of the work were installed at the same time in three locations: Shirakawa-go Art Festival in Japan; the Phipps Art Center in Hudson, Wisconsin; and at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. Physical components of the work included silent video projection, digital photography, computer key caps, and my father's boots. Each of these three different installations referred back to one web site. Because all these shows were up at the same time, the work was a distributed synchronous serial. In each installation space the title of the work was displayed as an Internet address. At the website was a series of popup texts suggesting performances focused, however absurdly, on reassessing paternal relationships.Figure 5: Lawrence, Robert, Dad’s Boots, simultaneous gallery installation in Florida, Wisconsin and Japan, with website, 2003. Coincidently, beginning the same time as my transmedia physical/Internet art practice, since 1998 I have had a secret other-life as a tango dancer. I came to this practice drawn by the music and the attraction of an after-dark subculture that ran by different rules than the rest of life. While my life as a tanguero was most certainly an escape strategy, I quickly began to see that although tango was different from the rest of the world, it was indeed a part of this world. It had a place and a time and a history. Further, it was a fascinating history about the interplays of power, class, wealth, race, and desire. Figure 6: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Intervention, site-specific dance interventions with extensive web components, 2007-12.As Marta Savigliano points out in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, “Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within. …Tango is a language of decolonization. So pick and choose. Improvise... let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango” (17). The realization that tango, my sensual escape from critical thought, was actually political came just about the time I was beginning to understand the essential dynamic of contradiction between the physical and Internet streams of my work. Tango Intervention began in 2007. I have now, as of 2018, done tango interventions in over 40 cities. Overall, the project can be seen as a serial performance of contradictions. In each case the physical dance interventions are manifestations of sensual fantasy in public space, and the Internet components recontextualize the public actions as site-specific performances with a political edge, revealing a hidden history or current social situation related to the political economy of tango. These themes are further developed in a series of related digital prints and videos shown here in various formats and contexts.In Tango Panopticon (2009), a “spin off” from the Tango Intervention series, the hidden social issue was the growing video surveillance of public space. The first Tango Panopticon production was Mayday 2009 with people dancing tango under public video surveillance in 15 cities. Mayday 2010 was Tango Panopticon 2.0, with tangointervention.org streaming live cell phone video from 16 simultaneous dance interventions on 4 continents. The public encountered the interventions as a sensual reclaiming of public space. Contradictorily, on the web Tango Panopticon 2.0 became a distributed worldwide action against the growing spectre of video surveillance and the increasing control of public commons. Each intervention team was automatically located on an online map when they started streaming video. Visitors to the website could choose an action from the list of cities or click on the map pins to choose which live video to load into the grid of 6 streaming signals. Visitors to the physical intervention sites could download our free open source software and stream their own videos to tangointervention.org.Figure 7: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0, worldwide synchronous dance intervention with live streaming video and extensive web components, 2010.Tango Panopticon also has a life as a serial installation, initially installed as part of the annual conference of “Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts” at Brunel University, London. All shots in the grid of videos are swish pans from close-ups of surveillance cameras to tango interveners dancing under their gaze. Each ongoing installation in the series physically adapts to the site, and with each installation more lines of video frames are added until the images become too small to read.Figure 8: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0 (For Osvaldo), video installation based on worldwide dance intervention series with live streaming video, 2011.My new work Equivalence (in development) is quite didactic in its contradictions between the online and gallery components. A series of square prints of clouds in a gallery are titled with web addresses that open with other cloud images and then fade into randomly loading excerpts from the CIA torture manual used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.Figure 9: Lawrence, Robert, Eauivalence, digital prints, excerpts from CIA Guantanamo Detention Center torture manual, work-in-progress.The gallery images recall Stieglitz’s Equivalents photographs from the early 20th century. Made in the 1920s to 30s, the Equivalents comprise a pivotal change in photographic history, from the early pictorial movement in which photography tried to imitate painting, and a new artistic approach that embraced features distinct to the photographic medium. Stieglitz’s Equivalents merged photographic realism with abstraction and symbolist undertones of transcendent spirituality. Many of the 20th century masters of photography, from Ansel Adams to Minor White, acknowledged the profound influence these photographs had on them. Several images from the Equivalents series were the first photographic art to be acquired by a major art museum in the US, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.My series Equivalence serves as the latest episode in a serial art history narrative. Since the “Pictures Generation” movement in the 1970s, photography has cannibalized its history, but perhaps no photographic body of work has been as quoted as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. A partial list includes: John Baldessari’s series Blowing Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That Are the Same(1973), William Eggleston’s series Wedgwood Blue (1979), John Pfahl’s smoke stack series (1982-89), George Legrady’s Equivalents II(1993), Vik Muniz’sEquivalents(1997), Lisa Oppenheim (2012), and most recently, Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus Series, begun in 2012. Over the course of more than four decades each of these series has presented a unique vision, but all rest on Stieglitz’s shoulders. From that position they make choices about how to operate relative the original Equivalents, ranging from Baldessari and Muniz’s phenomenological playfulness to Eggleston and Smilde’s neo-essentialist approach.My series Equivalence follows along in this serial modernist image franchise. What distinguishes it is that it does not take a single position relative to other Equivalents tribute works. Rather, it exploits its gallery/Internet transmediality to simultaneously assume two contradictory positions. The dissonance of this positioning is one of my main points with the work, and it is in some ways resonant with the contradictions concerning photographic abstraction and representation that Stieglitz engaged in the original Equivalents series almost a century ago.While hanging on the walls of a gallery, Equivalence suggests the same metaphysical intentions as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Simultaneously, in its manifestation on the Internet, my Equivalence series transcends its implied transcendence and claims a very specific time and place –a small brutal encampment on the island of Cuba where the United States abandoned any remaining claim to moral authority. In this illegal prison, forgotten lives drag on invisibly, outside of time, like untold serial narratives without resolution and without justice.Partially to balance the political insistence of Equivalence, I am also working on another series that operates with very different modalities. Following up on the live streaming technology that I developed for my Tango Panopticon public intervention series, I have started Horizon (In Development).Figure 10: Lawrence, Robert, Horizon, worldwide synchronous horizon interventions with live streaming video to Internet, work-in-progress.In Horizon I again use live cell phone video, this time streamed to an infinitely wide web page from live actions around the world done in direct engagement with the horizon line. The performances will begin and automatically come online live at noon in their respective time zone, each added to the growing horizontal line of moving images. As the actions complete, the streamed footage will begin endlessly looping. The project will also stream live during the event to galleries, and then HD footage from the events will be edited and incorporated into video installations. Leading up to this major event day, I will have a series of smaller instalments of the piece, with either live or recorded video. The first of these preliminary versions was completed during the Live Performers Workshop in Rome. Horizon continues to develop, leading to the worldwide synchronous event in 2020.Certainly, artists have always worked in series. However, exploiting the unique temporal dimensions of the Internet, a series of works can develop episodically as a serial work. If that work unfolds with contradictory thematics in its embodied and online forms, it reaches further toward an understanding of the complexities of postInternet culture and identity. ReferencesSaviligliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

IntroductionMusically-inclined people often speak about the soundtrack of their life, with certain songs indelibly linked to a specific moment. When hearing a particular song, it can “easily evoke a whole time and place, distant feelings and emotions, and memories of where we were, and with whom” (Lewis 135). Music has the ability to provide maps to real and imagined spaces, positioning people within a larger social environment where songs “are never just a song, but a connection, a ticket, a pass, an invitation, a node in a complex network” (Kun 3). When someone is lost in the music, they can find themselves transported somewhere else entirely without physically moving. This can be a blessing in some situations, for example, while living in a disaster zone, when almost any other time or place can seem better than the here and now. The city of Christchurch, New Zealand was hit by a succession of damaging earthquakes beginning with a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in the early hours of 4 September 2010. The magnitude 6.3 earthquake of 22 February 2011, although technically an aftershock of the September earthquake, was closer and shallower, with intense ground acceleration that caused much greater damage to the city and its people (“Scientists”). It was this February earthquake that caused the total or partial collapse of many inner city buildings, and claimed the lives of 185 people. Everybody in Christchurch lost someone or something that day: their house or job; family members, friends, or colleagues; the city as they knew it; or their normal way of life. The broken central city was quickly cordoned off behind fences, with the few entry points guarded by local and international police and armed military personnel.In the aftermath of a disaster, circumstances and personal attributes will influence how people react, think and feel about the experience. Surviving a disaster is more than not dying, “survival is to do with quality of life [and] involves progressing from the event and its aftermath, and transforming the experience” (Hodgkinson and Stewart 2). In these times of heightened stress, music can be a catalyst for sharing and expressing emotions, connecting people and communities, and helping them make sense of what has happened (Carr 38; Webb 437). This article looks at some of the ways that popular songs and musical memories helped residents of a broken city remember the past and come to terms with the present.BackgroundExisting songs can take on new significance after a catastrophic event, even without any alteration. Songs such as Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? and Prayer for New Orleans have been given new emotional layers by those who were displaced or affected by Hurricane Katrina (Cooper 265; Sullivan 15). A thirty year-old song by Randy Newman, Louisiana, 1927, became something of “a contemporary anthem, its chorus – ‘Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away’ – bearing new relevance” (Blumenfeld 166). Contemporary popular songs have also been re-mixed or revised after catastrophic events, either by the original artist or by others. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind and Beyonce’s Halo have each been revised twice by the artist after tragedy and disaster (Doyle; McAlister), while radio stations in the United States have produced commemorative versions of popular songs to mark tragedies and their anniversaries (Beaumont-Thomas; Cantrell). The use and appreciation of music after disaster is a reminder that popular music is fluid, in that it “refuses to provide a uniform or static text” (Connell and Gibson 3), and can simultaneously carry many different meanings.Music provides a soundtrack to daily life, creating a map of meaning to the world around us, or presenting a reminder of the world as it once was. Tia DeNora explains that when people hear a song that was once heard in, and remains associated with, a particular time and place, it “provides a device for unfolding, for replaying, the temporal structure of that moment, [which] is why, for so many people, the past ‘comes alive’ to its soundtrack” (67). When a community is frequently and collectively casting their minds back to a time before a catastrophic change, a sense of community identity can be seen in the use of, and reaction to, particular songs. Music allows people to “locate themselves in different imaginary geographics at one and the same time” (Cohen 93), creating spaces for people to retreat into, small ‘audiotopias’ that are “built, imagined, and sustained through sound, noise, and music” (Kun 21). The use of musical escape holes is prevalent after disaster, as many once-familiar spaces that have changed beyond recognition or are no longer able to be physically visited, can be easily imagined or remembered through music. There is a particular type of longing expressed by those who are still at home and yet cannot return to the home they knew. Whereas nostalgia is often experienced by people far from home who wish to return or those enjoying memories of a bygone era, people after disaster often encounter a similar nostalgic feeling but with no change in time or place: a loss without leaving. Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to represent “the form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home” (35). This sense of being unable to find solace in one’s home environment can be brought on by natural disasters such as fire, flood, earthquakes or hurricanes, or by other means like war, mining, climate change or gentrification. Solastalgia is often felt most keenly when people experience the change first-hand and then have to adjust to life in a totally changed environment. This can create “chronic distress of a solastalgic kind [that] would persist well after the acute phase of post-traumatic distress” (Albrecht 36). Just as the visible, physical effects of disaster last for years, so too do the emotional effects, but there have been many examples of how the nostalgia inherent in a shared popular music soundtrack has eased the pain of solastalgia for a community that is hurting.Pop Songs and Nostalgia in ChristchurchIn September 2011, one year after the initial earthquake, the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) announced a collaboration with Christchurch hip hop artist, Scribe, to remake his smash hit, Not Many, for charity. Back in 2003, Not Many debuted at number five on the New Zealand music charts, where it spent twelve weeks at number one and was crowned ‘Single of the Year’ (Sweetman, On Song 164). The punchy chorus heralded Scribe as a force to be reckoned with, and created a massive imprint on New Zealand popular culture with the line: “How many dudes you know roll like this? Not many, if any” (Scribe, Not Many). Music critic, Simon Sweetman, explains how “the hook line of the chorus [is now] a conversational aside that is practically unavoidable when discussing amounts… The words ‘not many’ are now truck-and-trailered with ‘if any’. If you do not say them, you are thinking them” (On Song 167). The strong links between artist and hometown – and the fact it is an enduringly catchy song – made it ideal for a charity remake. Reworded and reworked as Not Many Cities, the chorus now asks: “How many cities you know roll like this?” to which the answer is, of course, “not many, if any” (Scribe/BNZ, Not Many Cities). The remade song entered the New Zealand music charts at number 36 and the video was widely shared through social media but not all reception was positive. Parts of the video were shot in the city’s Red Zone, the central business district that was cordoned off from public access due to safety concerns. The granting of special access outraged some residents, with letters to the editor and online commentary expressing frustration that celebrities were allowed into the Red Zone to shoot a music video while those directly affected were not allowed in to retrieve essential items from residences and business premises. However, it is not just the Red Zone that features: the video switches between Scribe travelling around the broken inner city on the back of a small truck and lingering shots of carefully selected people, businesses, and groups – all with ties to the BNZ as either clients or beneficiaries of sponsorship. In some ways, Not Many Cities comes across like just another corporate promotional video for the BNZ, albeit with more emotion and a better soundtrack than usual. But what it has bequeathed is a snapshot of the city as it was in that liminal time: a landscape featuring familiar buildings, spaces and places which, although damaged, was still a recognisable version of the city that existed before the earthquakes.Before Scribe burst onto the music scene in the early 2000s, the best-known song about Christchurch was probably Christchurch (in Cashel St. I wait), an early hit from the Exponents (Mitchell 189). Initially known as the Dance Exponents, the group formed in Christchurch in the early 1980s and remained local and national favourites thanks to a string of hits Sweetman refers to as “the question-mark songs,” such as Who Loves Who the Most?, Why Does Love Do This to Me?, and What Ever Happened to Tracey? (Best Songwriter). Despite disbanding in 1999, the group re-formed to be the headline act of ‘Band Together’—a multi-artist, outdoor music event organised for the benefit of Christchurch residents by local musician, Jason Kerrison, formerly of the band OpShop. Attended by over 140,000 people (Anderson, Band Together), this nine-hour event brought joy and distraction to a shaken and stressed populace who, at that point in time (October 2010), probably thought the worst was over.The Exponents took the stage last, and chose Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait) as their final number. Every musician involved in the gig joined them on stage and the crowd rose to their feet, singing along with gusto. A local favourite since its release in 1985, the verses may have been a bit of a mumble for some, but the chorus rang out loud and clear across the park: Christchurch, In Cashel Street I wait,Together we will be,Together, together, together, One day, one day, one day,One day, one day, one daaaaaay! (Exponents, “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait)”; lyrics written as sung)At that moment, forming an impromptu community choir of over 100,000 people, the audience was filled with hope and faith that those words would come true. Life would go on and people would gather together in Cashel Street and wait for normality to return, one day. Later the following year, the opening of the Re:Start container mall added an extra layer of poignancy to the song lyrics. Denied access to most of the city’s CBD, that one small part of Cashel Street now populated with colourful shipping containers was almost the only place in central Christchurch where people could wait. There are many music videos that capture the central city of Christchurch as it was in decades past. There are some local classics, like The Bats’ Block of Wood and Claudine; The Shallows’ Suzanne Said; Moana and the Moahunters’ Rebel in Me; and All Fall Down’s Black Gratten, which were all filmed in the 1980s or early 1990s (Goodsort, Re-Live and More Music). These videos provide many flashback moments to the city as it was twenty or thirty years ago. However, one post-earthquake release became an accidental musical time capsule. The song, Space and Place, was released in February 2013, but both song and video had been recorded not long before the earthquakes occurred. The song was inspired by the feelings experienced when returning home after a long absence, and celebrates the importance of the home town as “a place that knows you as well as you know it” (Anderson, Letter). The chorus features the line, “streets of common ground, I remember, I remember” (Franklin, Mayes, and Roberts, Space and Place), but it is the video, showcasing many of the Christchurch places and spaces only recently lost to the earthquakes, that tugs at people’s heartstrings. The video for Space and Place sweeps through the central city at night, with key heritage buildings like the Christ Church Cathedral, and the Catholic Basilica lit up against the night sky (both are still damaged and inaccessible). Producer and engineer, Rob Mayes, describes the video as “a love letter to something we all lost [with] the song and its lyrics [becoming] even more potent, poignant, and unexpectedly prescient post quake” (“Songs in the Key”). The Arts Centre features prominently in the footage, including the back alleys and archways that hosted all manner of night-time activities – sanctioned or otherwise – as well as many people’s favourite hangout, the Dux de Lux (the Dux). Operating from the corner of the Arts Centre site since the 1970s, the Dux has been described as “the city’s common room” and “Christchurch’s beating heart” by musicians mourning its loss (Anderson, Musicians). While the repair and restoration of some parts of the Arts Centre is currently well advanced, the Student Union building that once housed this inner-city social institution is not slated for reopening until 2019 (“Rebuild and Restore”), and whether the Dux will be welcomed back remains to be seen. Empty Spaces, Missing PlacesA Facebook group, ‘Save Our Dux,’ was created in early March 2011, and quickly filled with messages and memories from around the world. People wandered down memory lane together as they reminisced about their favourite gigs and memorable occasions, like the ‘Big Snow’ of 1992 when the Dux served up mulled wine and looked more like a ski chalet. Memories were shared about the time when the music video for the Dance Exponents’ song, Victoria, was filmed at the Dux and the Art Deco-style apartment building across the street. The reminiscing continued, establishing and strengthening connections, with music providing a stepping stone to shared experience and a sense of community. Physically restricted from visiting a favourite social space, people were converging in virtual hangouts to relive moments and remember places now cut off by the passing of time, the falling of bricks, and the rise of barrier fences.While waiting to find out whether the original Dux site can be re-occupied, the business owners opened new venues that housed different parts of the Dux business (live music, vegetarian food, and the bars/brewery). Although the fit-out of the restaurant and bars capture a sense of the history and charm that people associate with the Dux brand, the empty wasteland and building sites that surround the new Dux Central quickly destroy any illusion of permanence or familiarity. Now that most of the quake-damaged buildings have been demolished, the freshly-scarred earth of the central city is like a child’s gap-toothed smile. Wandering around the city and forgetting what used to occupy an empty space, wanting to visit a shop or bar before remembering it is no longer there, being at the Dux but not at the Dux – these are the kind of things that contributed to a feeling that local music writer, Vicki Anderson, describes as “lost city syndrome” (“Lost City”). Although initially worried she might be alone in mourning places lost, other residents have shared similar experiences. In an online comment on the article, one local resident explained how there are two different cities fighting for dominance in their head: “the new keeps trying to overlay the old [but] when I’m not looking at pictures, or in seeing it as it is, it’s the old city that pushes its way to the front” (Juniper). Others expressed relief that they were not the only ones feeling strangely homesick in their own town, homesick for a place they never left but that had somehow left them.There are a variety of methods available to fill the gaps in both memories and cityscape. The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HITLab), produced a technological solution: interactive augmented reality software called CityViewAR, using GPS data and 3D models to show parts of the city as they were prior to the earthquakes (“CityViewAR”). However, not everybody needed computerised help to remember buildings and other details. Many people found that, just by listening to a certain song or remembering particular gigs, it was not just an image of a building that appeared but a multi-sensory event complete with sound, movement, smell, and emotion. In online spaces like the Save Our Dux group, memories of favourite bands and songs, crowded gigs, old friends, good times, great food, and long nights were shared and discussed, embroidering a rich and colourful tapestry about a favourite part of Christchurch’s social scene. ConclusionMusic is strongly interwoven with memory, and can recreate a particular moment in time and place through the associations carried in lyrics, melody, and imagery. Songs can spark vivid memories of what was happening – when, where, and with whom. A song shared is a connection made: between people; between moments; between good times and bad; between the past and the present. Music provides a soundtrack to people’s lives, and during times of stress it can also provide many benefits. The lyrics and video imagery of songs made in years gone by have been shown to take on new significance and meaning after disaster, offering snapshots of times, people and places that are no longer with us. Even without relying on the accompanying imagery of a video, music has the ability to recreate spaces or relocate the listener somewhere other than the physical location they currently occupy. This small act of musical magic can provide a great deal of comfort when suffering solastalgia, the feeling of homesickness one experiences when the familiar landscapes of home suddenly change or disappear, when one has not left home but that home has nonetheless gone from sight. The earthquakes (and the demolition crews that followed) have created a lot of empty land in Christchurch but the sound of popular music has filled many gaps – not just on the ground, but also in the hearts and lives of the city’s residents. ReferencesAlbrecht, Glenn. “Solastalgia.” Alternatives Journal 32.4/5 (2006): 34-36.Anderson, Vicki. “A Love Letter to Christchurch.” Stuff 22 Feb. 2013. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/christchurch-life/art-and-stage/christchurch-music/8335491/A-love-letter-to-Christchurch>.———. “Band Together.” Supplemental. The Press. 25 Oct. 2010: 1. ———. “Lost City Syndrome.” Stuff 19 Mar. 2012. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/blogs/rock-and-roll-mother/6600468/Lost-city-syndrome>.———. “Musicians Sing Praises in Call for ‘Vital Common Room’ to Reopen.” The Press 7 Jun. 2011: A8. Beaumont-Thomas, Ben. “Exploring Musical Responses to 9/11.” Guardian 9 Sep. 2011. <https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2011/sep/09/musical-responses-9-11>. Blumenfeld, Larry. “Since the Flood: Scenes from the Fight for New Orleans Jazz Culture.” Pop When the World Falls Apart. Ed. Eric Weisbard. 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