Journal articles on the topic 'Marxism in politics, economy and philosophy / Criticism'

The article comprehends Marxist views in the field of philosophy, political economy, socio-political sphere. It is shown that Marxism is not a monolith. Along with the undoubted advantages, the social doctrine of Marxism contains ideas and provisions that have not stood the test of time. But the costs of Marxism are not the supporting structures of this doctrine. The author is of the opinion that not confirmation of a number of provisions of authentic Marxism by socio - political practice of the XX-th and the passed years of the XXI-th century is connected with the fact that any social theory “works” in this way, as the implementation of such a theory takes place in line with the coherent concept of truth. Marxist doctrine was created in the era of early capitalism, which did not yet contain the necessary material for more accurate scientific positions and forecasts. In the article the author comes to the conclusion that a number of Marxist views, provided their authentic interpretation, remain relevant in our time. These include: unsurpassed by anyone criticism of capitalism; conclusion on the growth of inequality and income inequality between the strata of society; regulations on the adaptation of production relations to changing productive forces, on ensuring the basic needs of people with the help of new technologies, the development of social and industrial democracy; ideas about the dependence of material production on scientific knowledge, creative, spiritual activity of people, on the progress of technology; humanistic position of Marxism, expressed in the ideas of human liberation, social equality, justice, solidarity. The author believes that the urgent task of the intelligentsia is to preserve Marxism as an integral part of intellectual and political culture, as well as the development of Marxist doctrine in creative competition with other trends of social thought.

Rehabilitation of Marxist thought present in Althusser’s compilation of the articles titled by catching appeal “For Marx” is carried out in two directions: general – when theoretical line of understanding of the society and history is derived out of Marxism as political ideology; specific – when revealing the “ rational kernel” of Marxist philosophy of history or society, Althusser extracts dialectical contradiction rooted it his methodology of basis and superstructure. The subject of this research is the hermeneutic project of Althusser aimed at new interpretation of the Marxist philosophy of history, as well as elucidation of the “absence” of dialectical turn in Marx’s continuity of Hegel’s philosophy. The object of this article is the new methodology of social research oriented towards finding additional meanings of the principle of overdetermination, which allows Althusser to reconsider the Marxist method of basis and superstructure in a structuralistic way. The essence of its rehabilitation criticism (criticism of elimination of false understanding of Marxist philosophy) consists in the fact that the latter contributed to neglecting the superstructure and led the research to acknowledgement of its nature as a nonexistent phantom, illusion, behind which lies the only true reality resembled by the determinant of economic formations.

In Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, MacIntyre argues that neo-Aristotelians have much to learn from Marx’s economic theory, not only for understanding the nature of capitalism, but also for thinking about alternative social and political institutions. This article outlines the arguments given by MacIntyre for embracing Marxian economic theory and argues that if Marxian economics is a tradition of enquiry, in the MacIntyrean sense of the term, we should take seriously the debates within this tradition in order to conclude whether it has been able to withstand internal and external criticism. I argue that Marxian economic theory, as a tradition of enquiry, has been defeated by its opponents and that a synthesis between Aristotelian moral philosophy and Marxian economics is an obstacle to the development of MacIntyre’s political philosophy.

The aim of the article is to examine the little-known in the Ukrainian historiography moments of the Hungarian-Soviet relations, which have been linked with a critical perception of the economic reform in Hungary in 1968 by the Soviet Union Communist Party. Following the crackdown on the Prague Spring, Hungary remained the only one among member countries of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, which continued to reform the economy for higher living standards in 1969–1972. It evokes a negative reaction of the SUCP leadership, which J. Kádár could not ignore. One of the indirect consequences of the Kremlin demands to stop the economic reform was the “philosophers’s process” 1973. The paper considers the Hungarian Socialist Worker’s Party’s response to ideological criticism of the Hungarian scientists conserning philosophical foundations of socialism in general and the political consequences of its implementation in particular. It provides the evaluation of HSWP analysts on key provisions of leading representatives of the Budapest school of philosophy: G. Márkus, A. Heller, M. Vajda, sociologist A. Hegedüs. In these papers argued that don’t exist authentic marxism, socialist revolution is not led to radical changes in the forms of social life, so there were no revolutions, revolutionary nature of the working class and the labor movement in socialist countries were questionable, socialism is not built, however modernization was implemented. This article demonstrates the nature of the personal position of J. Kádár, whish consists of balance between the demands of the Kremlin and the needs of Hungarian social development. It was found that the future leaders of the urban opposition group J. Kis and G. Bence were among philosophers, who were expelled from the HSWP or subjected to administrative pressure. It was their first conflict with the state power, which promoted awareness of the need of conversion into opposition activity. Article first time in Ukrainian historiography gives a complete picture of the conditions under which formed critical views of the scientific community in Hungary to socialism. The Hungarian archival materials unknown by this time were used.

This article outlines the limits of Marx’s critique of political economy by underscoring the grounding of economics in the nomos of the oikos—law of the household, or oikonomia. It traces the racial-gendered limits on concepts of equality and justice that have shaped neoliberalism, economic nationalism, and their contemporary criticism.

Rainis’s world outlook has been strongly influenced by the Marxist philosophy, yet his attitude towards this doctrine is rather complicated. On the one hand, the poet was attracted by the idea of changing the world, voiced by Marxism, and he was fascinated by the personality of Karl Marx, in whom he saw a brave and talented reformer of the society; yet, on the other hand, Rainis has severely criticised a number of ideas propagated by Marxism which have been proposed as the foundation of socialism. Firstly, the distinctly materialistic orientation of the Marxist doctrine and the social and political movements associated with it is incompatible with Rainis’s artistic endeavours and his conviction that the decisive role in the development of the society is played by the enhancement of the man’s spiritual world rather than by the economic conditions and their transformation. Secondly, Marxism is unable to solve the contradiction that occurs between the necessity to act in the name of the interests of the overwhelming majority and, simultaneously, to guarantee a free development of every individual. One could even assert that Marxism tries to bypass the potential conflict between the individual freedom and mass interests. On the other hand, Rainis, who had a high regard for the individuality and wanted to harmonise the collective potential for the development of the society with the free development of the personality, is particularly sensitive to the contradictions existing between the individual and the society and strives to address them in his literary works. The issues outlined above in relation to the treatment of the individual and the mass specific of Rainis’s literary works have been analysed in this article in the context of the working notes of Rainis’s unfinished play “Īliņš (Kurbads)”.

The article analyzes various projects of hybridization of materialism and political theory in one conceptual system. Special attention is paid to the critical analysis of the phenomenon of economic materialism of the nineteenth century, which for a long time remained the only example of a materialistic analysis of politics. The subsequent development of materialism that became a new limit of economic determinism, put new problems in the context of the capabilities of materialistic policy. The author proposes to follow the argument of the French philosopher Louis Althusser as a philosophy of aleatory materialism created by the thinker himself, including to substantiate the variations of materialistic understanding of the political. The article consistently disassembled the prerequisites for the crisis of the Marxist economic interpretation of history, which, at the original stage of its own formation, had extremely few common with philosophical materialism. The further struggle of new materialists with the idea of a universal explanatory principle ultimately allowed them to create a new type of philosophical knowledge that is not related to the idea of universal history. The focus in this case is chained to the political aspect of Althusser's Materialism regarding the theory of conjuncture as a genuine object of any materialistic politics. Finally, the author compares aleatory materialism with a number of other directions of post-modern materialistic ontology, whose representatives direct their own criticism towards the anthropological component of the political theory, which, however, leads to the denial of this discipline in principle. Thus, it is Althuserianism that in couple with Schmitterism, are the only examples of a successful project to create a materialistic theory of politics.

Abstract Natural history is a key concept in Adorno’s philosophy of history. In the second model of Negative Dialectics, he develops this concept following Marx’s critique of political economy, which, as a critique of ideology, criticises the appearance of natural necessity of social practices and relations. Starting from an irritation concerning a note by Adorno in which he reproaches Marx for “language mannerisms” and conceptual inability, this article argues that Adorno’s critique is based on a one-sided reading, preventing him from adequately considering the critical-emancipatory potential of the concept of natural history. This potential is not independent of linguistic and aesthetic mediation. Rather, Marx uses metaphors, caricatures, etc. in his depiction of social practices as natural history, enabling him to convey more than theoretical knowledge. His critical theory is emancipatory precisely in that it compels agents to self-criticism, which is a necessary condition for sustainably shattering the appearance of natural necessity.

This essay revisits Adorno’s relation to Marx through a reading of his recently translated seminar on Marx (1962) within the broader context of the two thinkers’ views on the dialectic. While Adorno’s critical comments in the seminar seem to be applicable to some of Marx’s bold assertions about Hegel’s dialectic, taken in isolation, they fail to challenge Marx’s more rigorous analysis of the dialectic, as presented in his introduction to the Grundrisse. Nevertheless, read alongside Adorno’s mature critique of identity, the text of the seminar could be interpreted as pointing to a much more serious criticism of Marx, that is, the criticism of the primacy of economy that animates Marx’s dialectic from within. The essay is concluded with a warning against reducing Adorno’s position on Marx to his criticism of the primacy of economy, followed by a brief reference to the fundamentally transitory character of critical theory.

Philosophical understanding of the economy and economics is not the main, but significant topic of the reflections of Russian religious philosophers. It is important to trace the specifics of the formation of the Russian view on the economy and economics, on the basic principles of the economic systems’ structure (among which we can single out capitalism and socialism), since the interpretation of Russian thinkers, including N. А. Berdyaev, cannot be included in the mainstream of Western economic thought. The article examines the criticism of capitalism and socialism in the post-revolutionary works of Nikolai Berdyaev, highlights the key contradictions of the two basic principles of economic organization with the post-revolutionary views of the thinker, which were significantly strengthened after the revolutionary events of 1917; these views can be conditionally called socialist-personalistic. Inheriting the tradition of Russian thought, Berdyaev unequivocally rejects the capitalist principles (in many respects this attitude was formed by the period of his legal Marxism), while he assesses socialist concepts ambiguously, with a certain amount of sympathy for the very socialist formulation of the problem of justice and the fight against “slavery”, exploitation of a man by a man. The article indicates the main line of criticism of Christian socialism by Berdyaev, and also describes his preferred variant of socialism, that he called “social personalism”.

The history and geography of intellectual neglect of Marxism are the history and geography of Marxism itself. Scholars of different political persuasions and from different regions of the world, including some ‘Marxists’, have pointed to its various deficiencies ever since its origin. But is Marxism really as bad as it is made out to be? In this short article, I argue that it absolutely is not. I discuss my view of Marxism, including Marxist geography. The latter examines economy, politics, culture and nature/body from the vantage-point of space, place, scale and human transformation of nature. I also discuss what difference Marxism has made to my own agenda of abstract and concrete research. For me, Marxism fundamentally comprises ideas of Marx and Engels, and revolutionary Marxist socialists of the 20th century (Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky), and those who have critically developed their thinking. I discuss four major areas of Marxism: philosophy (dialectical and materialist views of society and nature), social theory, or historical materialism, (geographical) political economy, and theory of communist practice. Marxism treats class, including in its capitalist form, as the causally most important social relation which explains how human beings live their lives. Class relations, and capitalism, structure gender and racial oppression which in turn influence class relations at a concrete level, and which are behind the geographical organization of society. The main goal of Marxism is not to produce ideas for the sake of ideas. It is rather to arm the exploited masses with adequate ideas that describe, explain and critique the world from their standpoint, so they can engage in the fight to produce an alternative social-spatial arrangement, i.e. a democratic and classless society which is ecologically healthier and which avoids geographically uneven development intra-nationally and internationally.

Work is an integral part of modern society. However, the question of the normative conditions that distinguish just from unjust work has been under-investigated in political theory. This article, by comparing the Lockean and Marxist views of just work, aims to show that a set of overlapping normative requirements of just work can be derived from them despite their polarized economic and political views. Locke has been appropriated by contemporary libertarians as the central figure of right-based libertarian market economy while Marx has been seen by the left as a central intellectual resource to criticize capitalism’s tendency for degrading work. Given this usual polarization, the article can shed light on a common set of normative requirements concerning just work between them. This overlapping set of normative requirements of just work invites reflections on possible common grounds of just work between the contemporary right and the left who have appropriated the two thinkers as their foundational theoretical building blocks.

Isabelle Garo’s study,Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser & Marx: La politique dans la philosophie, presents a historical approach to the French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s and its relationship to Marx and the Marxist tradition. In her view, these authors were captured by a largely mistaken understanding of the resources present in Marxist thought, and were overly affected by the prejudices instilled by the French Communist Party. Speaking from a perspective of practical commitment, she traces a path from early French Marxism to an anti-totalitarian consensus. Her study renders Louis Althusser’s innovations the most pivotal in introducing a whole series of themes, with ambivalent effects on theoretical production today. Most significantly, she discerns a replacement of politics and political economy by philosophy and epistemology. She attends first to the mobilisation of psychoanalysis against humanism, which gave way to a vehement critique of the normative aspects of psychoanalysis itself. Re-reading Foucault and Deleuze as post-Althusserians, Garo suggests that this led to a championing of Friedrich Nietzsche’s viewpoints against Marx. Garo’s study is immensely valuable in contextualising the apparent innovations of poststructuralist thought. However, we can discern greater relevance for the insights of these thinkers for contemporary Marxist thought than Garo concedes, and her attempt to read them as a complete deviation from Marxist principles ultimately fails to convince.

Resumo: A pergunta feita por Karl Marx, “como é possível que aquele que produz a riqueza seja pobre?”, evidenciou a existência de uma ética implícita em um discurso explicitamente econômico. Precisamente, Marx escolheu a economia como lugar mais pertinente para desenvolver seu estudo ético-crítico, mostrando que o momento material da economia é a produção, que só tem sentido quando gera produtos para as necessidades humanas. Analisando o capitalismo observa que a preocupação principal está em torno do capital e não do ser humano, o que o leva a desenvolver sua crítica ética a partir da exterioridade do trabalhador, apresentando a possibilidade de um novo projeto político, fazendo da questão social um dos maiores problemas filosóficos. Essa análise marxiana da realidade de opressão à qual está submetido o trabalhador e, sobretudo, a possibilidade de sua emancipação, é decisiva para a Filosofia da Libertação. Essa aproximação entre a reflexão marxiana e a Filosofia da Libertação permite compreender que é a exterioridade a categoria principal escolhida por Marx, enquanto ponto de partida de sua crítica teórica e condição para que possa levantar, a partir do trabalho, todo o edifício de seu discurso. Isso torna-se decisivo para a Filosofia da Libertação e sua propositura de uma política igualmente libertadora Palavras-chave: Marx. Exterioridade. Dussel. Filosofia da Libertação. Política. Abstract: The question asked by Karl Marx, "How is it possible that the one who produces the wealth is poor?", provided evidence for the existence of an ethics implicit in an explicitly economic discourse. Specifically, Marx chose economics as the most pertinent place to develop his ethical-critical study, showing that the material moment of economics is production, which only makes sense when it generates products for human needs. Analysing capitalism, he observes that the main concern is about the capital and not the human being, which leads him to develop his ethical criticism from the externality of the worker, presenting the possibility of a new political project, thus making the social question one of the major philosophical problems. This Marxian analysis of the reality of oppression, to which the worker is subjected, and especially the possibility of his emancipation, is decisive for the Philosophy of Liberation.This approximation between Marxian reflection and the Philosophy of Liberation allows us to understand that exteriority is the main category chosen by Marx as the starting point of his theoretical critique and the condition so that he can raise from the work the whole edifice of his discourse. This becomes decisive for the Philosophy of Liberation and its proposition of an equally liberating policy. Keywords: Marx. Exteriority. Dussel. Philosophy of Liberation. Politics. REFERÊNCIAS DUSSEL, Enrique. Filosofia da libertação - na América Latina. São Paulo: Loyola, 1977. DUSSEL, Enrique. Hacia un Marx desconocido: un comentario de los manuscritos del 61-63. México: Siglo XXI, 1988 DUSSEL, Enrique. Filosofia da libertação: crítica à ideologia da exclusão. São Paulo: Paulus, 1995. DUSSEL, Enrique. Ética da Libertação na idade da globalização e da exclusão. Petrópolis: Vozes. 2000. DUSSEL, Enrique. Hacia uma filosofia política crítica. Bilbao: Desclée, 2001. DUSSEL, Enrique. Vivemos uma primavera política. In: América Latina em Movimento. 18 dez. 2006. Disponível em: <https://www.alainet.org/pt/active/15053> Acesso em: 10 set. 2018. DUSSEL, Enrique. 20 teses de política. São Paulo: Expressão Popular, 2007. DUSSEL, Enrique. Política de la Liberación: Arquitectónica. Vol. 2. Madrid: Trotta, 2009. DUSSEL, Enrique. A produção teórica de Marx: um comentário aos Grundrisse. 1ª.ed – São Paulo: Expressão Popular, 2012. FORNET-BETANCOURT, Raul. O marxismo na América Latina. São Leopoldo: Unisinos, 1995. FREIRE, Paulo. Pedagogia do oprimido. 32.ed. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2002. MARX, Karl. Elementos fondamentales para la crítica de la economía política. México: Siglo XXI, 1976. MARX, Karl. Obras fondamentales. México: FCE, 1982. Vol. 1. MARX, Karl. O capital. v. 1. ed. São Paulo: Nova Cultural, 1988 MARX, Karl. Grundrisse: manuscritos econômicos de 1857-1858: esboços da crítica da economia política. São Paulo: Boitempo; Rio de Janeiro: Ed. UFRJ, 2011. SANTOS, Boaventura Souza. El milenio huérfano: ensayos para una nueva cultura política. Madrid: Trotta, 2005.

Professor Alex Callinicos is a renowned social theorist and scholar of international political economy. He conducts research on Marx and Marxism, European social and political theory, contemporary political philosophy, critical theory, historiography, and international political economy. His work provides invaluable insights on issues of race and racism, social justice, the Third Way, imperialism, austerity, and EU politics, among many other fascinating contemporary issues. Alex studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, and Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics before writing a DPhil on Marx's Capital, also at Balliol. He was a Junior Research Fellow in Contemporary Social Thought at St Peter's College, Oxford from 1979 to 1981, after which he taught social and political theory at the Department of Politics at the University of York until 2005, when he moved to King's College London. Alex is currently the Professor of European Studies at King's and editor of International Socialism. Alex has been an active contributor to the development of the movement for another globalization, participating in the World Social Forum and an animator of the European Social Forum. Among his best known books are The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (1983), Against Postmodernism (1990), Social Theory (1999), An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (2003), The Resources of Critique (2006), Imperialism and Global Political Economy (2009). His most recent book is entitled Deciphering Capital: Marx’s Capital and its Destiny (2014).

Our occasional series on early Marxist theatre criticism – which has already included Trotsky on Wedekind in NTQ28, Lunacharsky on Ibsen in NTQ39, and Mehring on Hauptmann in NTQ 42 – continues with two essays by the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, whose concepts of hegemony, the national-popular, and the organic intellectual have had a profound influence on twentieth-century western thought. From 1916 to 1920 Gramsci was also a theatre critic, writing a regular drama review column in the Piedmont edition of the socialist daily newspaper Avanti! in which he first explored ideas about the ideological function of theatre. His review of a 1917 Italian production of Ibsen's A Doll's House is a particularly strong example of his attempt to generate notions of the theatre as an arena of political struggle in which the cultural values of the bourgeoisie were expressed, but which also had the potential to subvert these values and provide the proletariat with the critical wherewithal to express its hegemony. He saw the function of the theatre critic as promoting social, cultural, and moral awareness in the spectator, and Ibsen's play as a particularly apt vehicle for critiquing the moral superficiality of Italian bourgeois women in its powerful portrayal of the oppressions of a patriarchal society. While Gramsci's review of A Doll's House can be seen as a forerunner to contemporary feminist ideas, he saw Pirandello's use of the ‘power of abstract thought’ as making him a potentially revolutionary playwright, whom he described as ‘a commando in the theatre’. His plays were ‘like grenades that explode inside inside the brains of spectators, demolishing their banalities and causing their feelings and thoughts to crumble’. After reviewing ten of Pirandello's early plays for Avanti! Gramsci later expressed his intention of writing a full-length study of the playwright's ‘transformation of theatrical taste’. All that came of these intentions were the rather fragmented notes he made in the Prison Notebooks, in which he expressed his views on Pirandello in the context of the politics of culture and the idea of a national popular literature. Gramsci saw Pirandello's metatheatre as subverting traditional dramatic principles, but failing to establish new ones or to subvert the social and economic aspects of tradition. Gramsci responds to the critical debates on Pirandello in the 1920s by Tigher and Croce about Pirandellism's combination of art and philosophy and its conflict between ‘life’ and ‘form’, but his final comments about his views being taken with a ‘pinch of salt’ indicate that they are not definitive.

AbstractWhen, in the early 1980s the ideas of post-structuralism seemed rampant within academic critical theory, the appearance of the flawed English translation of Mikhail Bakhtin's central essays on the novel seemed to offer a very promising alternative perspective.1 Bakhtin's model of discursive relations promised to guard the specificity of discourse from being obscured by a web of determinations, while allowing the development of an account of the operations of power and resistance in discourse that could avoid the nullity of Derrida's hors-texte and the irresponsible semiotic hedonism of the later Barthes. Marxist theorists such as Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Allon White immediately and effectively seized upon the translated work of the Bakhtin circle to bolster their arguments, but, as translations of the earlier and later philosophical material appeared, it became apparent that the relationship between work of the circle and the Marxist tradition was very problematic. With this, the American anti-Marxist Slavists – some of whom had been responsible for certain of these translations – moved onto the offensive, arguing that Bakhtin's work was fundamentally incompatible with, and in principle hostile to, Marxism. Occasionally, they went further, arguing that Bakhtin was quite unconcerned with politics and questions of power, being an ethical, or even a religious philosopher before all else. The Americans did have a point. Bakhtin certainly was not a Marxist and the Marxism of some of his early colleagues and collaborators was of a rather peculiar sort. Furthermore, the key problematic area was indeed Bakhtin's ethics which, it became ever more apparent, underlies his most critically astute and productive work and serves to blunt its political edge. Important points of contact between the work of the Bakhtin circle and Marxist theory do persist, however, as Ken Hirschkop and Michael Gardiner, among others, have continued to register. In this article, examining some of the sources of Bakhtin's philosophy, which have only just been revealed in the new Russian edition of his work, we shall analyse the features of Bakhtin's ethics that stifle the political potential of dialogic criticism, and we will suggest ways in which that potential may be liberated.

The non-philosophical conceptualisation of the self, and I am expanding the category to include the other forms of theoretical-methodological exit from philosophy’s sufficiency as its principle, thus also Marx, psychoanalysis, and linguistics, does not reduce the radical dyad of physicality/automaton to one of its constituents. It is determined by the radical dyad as its identity in the last instance and it is determined by the materiality or the real of the last instance. The real is that of the dyad, of its internal unilaterality and the interstice at the center of it. We have called this reality of selfhood the non-human: the interstice is insurmountable; the physical and the automaton are one under the identity in the last instance but a unification does not take place. It is the physical, the animal and nature, it is materiality of “use value” and the real production that needs to be delivered from exploitation, not the “workers” only, especially because many of the global labor force are bereft of the status (of workers). And the need to do so is not only moral but also political in the sense of political economy: capitalism is based on a flawed phantasm that the universe of pure value is self-sufficient on a sustainable basis, based on an abstracted materiality as endlessly mutable resource. A political economy detached from the material is untenable. Author(s): Katerina Kolozova Title (English): Marxism without Philosophy and Its Feminist Implications: The Problem of Subjectivity Centered Socialist Projects Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 40-46 Page Count: 7 Citation (English): Katerina Kolozova, “Marxism without Philosophy and Its Feminist Implications: The Problem of Subjectivity Centered Socialist Projects,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020): 40-46. Author Biography Katerina Kolozova, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Dr. Katerina Kolozova is senior researcher and full professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje. At the Institute, she teaches policy studies, political philosophy and gender studies. She is also a professor of philosophy of law at the doctoral school of the University American College, Skopje. At the Faculty of Media and Communication, Belgrade, she teaches contemporary political philosophy. She was a visiting scholar at the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkley in 2009, under the peer supervision of Prof. Judith Butler. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the New Centre for Research and Practice – Seattle, WA. Kolozova is the first co-director and founder of the Regional Network for Gender and Women’s Studies in Southeast Europe (2004). Her most recent monograph is Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy published by Bloomsbury Academic, UK in 2019, whereas Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy, published by Columbia University Press, NY in 2014, remains her most cited book

Abstract Dussel’s complex work calls into question the standard history of philosophy, reveals a counter-history at work beneath the official history that gives voice to the victims of capitalism and colonialism, and systematically develops a novel ‘material ethics’ grounded in an unqualified, universal affirmation of life as the foundation of liberatory values. The Ethics of Liberation brings together the major problems explored in Dussel’s prolific body of earlier work: the relationship between Western philosophy and the expansion of European society; the relationship between centre and periphery in global political economy, considered as both a philosophical and an ethical problem; the ethical interpretation of Marxism; the politics of liberation in the colonial context; the defence of universal foundations of ethical norms; and the (all-important) distinction between formal and critical ethics.

In my response, I initially defend my preference for classical Critical Theory, emphasizing its continued relevance in capitalist modernity, stressing that the epistemological approach does not imply dogmatism with regards to scientific theory or Historical Materialism, just as it does not imply closure with regards to political democracy. When it comes to the dialectics of the classics, I also defend an epistemological approach, arguing that the dialectics aiming for truth implies critique and negativity. However, confronted with the duality of transcendental ideas and historical relativity, I express my confidence in human intuition. Following Hegel, determinate negation must sublate the intuitively conceived universality to a new conception that contains the result of the negation. Finally, I do not see how the conceptual aporias of general economy can be solved by the current political degrowth project. Still, politics is what we need more of, namely social democracy.

Historians of economics rarely consider textbooks as more than passive receptacles of previously validated knowledge. Therefore, their active role in shaping the discipline and its image is seldom addressed. In this paper, I study the making of Paul Samuelson’s successive editions of Economics from 1967 to 1973 as an instance of how textbooks stand at the crossroads between disciplinary knowledge, pedagogy, and larger political and societal concerns. In the mid-1960s, Economics, now at its sixth edition, was at the height of its success. Considered one cornerstone of modern economics, it was also at the center of a number of criticisms dealing with the current state of the economic discipline and its teaching in the universities. While the profession expressed its concern over the lack of relevance of economics to address the pressing issues of the day and pleaded for a new “problem-solving” approach to economic education, the late 1960s witnessed the emergence of a new generation of “radical” economists criticizing the economics orthodoxy. Their contention that mainstream theory had neglected the issues of class struggle and capitalist exploitation found a favorable echo among an increasingly politicized population. Using archival materials, I show how Samuelson, helped by his editorial team at McGraw-Hill, attempted to take into account these changes in order to ensure the continuing success of subsequent editions of his text in an increasingly competitive market. This study emphasizes Samuelson’s ambiguous attitude toward his contenders, revealing, on the one hand, his apparent openness to discussion and outsiders’ suggestions, and, on the other hand, his firm attachment to mildly liberal politics and aversion to Marxism, unchanged through revisions. It also helps refine a notion that is often invoked but never fully expounded in textbook studies: that of the audience.

In strict texts, the general rhetoric of past and present can acquire certain spe­cific meanings. Their choice is determined by the historical size of events and time intervals. In our case, we can talk about the maximum distances, up to the ideologies of postmodernity and even the search for a way out of post­modernity into the hypothetical perspective of Supernovae. If in the great history of civilization Modern is considered the time of ideologies, then Russia has also turned out to be a globally chosen place for the practical and forceful implemen­tation of total megaprojects. These super-large and revealing works of the ideo­logical introduced Soviet Russia into the category, if not the leaders, of all the life-giving pathos of the New Age and the High Modern in particular. The Russian paradox is the unconditional triumph of Marxism as a state, institu­tionalized worldview, but based on absolute criticism of the ideological one. These features require a consistent distinction between ideology as a system of ideas and a system of institutions. Like the constitution of politics by Carl Schmitt through the binary opposition friend – enemy, ideology is constituted in the opposition faith – knowledge, in the spectrum between almost religion and near philosophy. If the task of philosophy is to reveal the non-obviousness of the allegedly obvious, then the mission of ideology is the manual or mass pro­duction of obviousness. Overcoming narrowly political reductionism opens up ideology in its ultimate expansion, distinguishes between systems of ideas and systems of institutions, as well as formats of shadow, latent, diffuse, penetrating, etc. ideology.

While the modernization movement has led to profound changes in politics, economy and culture around the world, human development is also facing unprecedented difficulties. The concern about modernization puts forward the value for modernization orientation of the times. Higher education must transcend the realistic culture with instrumental rationality as the core, and the most fundamental must be first. Only by transcending its own narrowness and constructing the educational philosophy view of the integration of science education and humanities education, can it give full play to its cultural criticism and literature. With the function of creation, it undertakes the historical mission of value orientation for modernization.

Being critical does not come easy, not even within Critical Theory. In this article I respond to criticism of my book from 2019, Capitalism, Alienation and Critique, arguing that contemporary Critical Theory has something to learn from the founding fathers. Firstly, for Adorno immanent critique has metaphysical implications beyond Honneth’s critique of bourgeois society as inconsistent in terms of its professed ideals. Secondly, immanent critique is not the same as ideology critique, and when it comes to Horkheimer and Habermas, they conducted the latter rather than the former. Thirdly, even though today nature must be our concern, answers are to be found in politics and metaphysics rather than science. Finally, critique of neoliberalism should be conducted as critique of political economy, that is, ideology critique, rather than sociological descriptions of the empirical details of globalized capitalism. Denaturalizing economics is a condition for economic democracy.

This article traces a history of the literary critic and theorist Raymond Williams’s idea of the “structure of feeling”, the formation of which is situated within debates about the place of artistic and moral values in democratic politics during the 1940s and 1950s. It demonstrates that the “structure of feeling” was intended to circumvent an equation of collective normative legislation with totalitarianism in the early cultural Cold War, by conceiving the definition of values as a process upon which all individuals in a society were always, necessarily, engaged. In articulating this quasi-democratic account of the production of artistic and moral standards, Williams also sought to escape the various theories of “minority culture” that dominated literary and cultural criticism in mid-century Britain. However, his concept of the “structure of feeling” required him to maintain a privileged role for artistic and intellectual arbiters, which constrained his vision of a properly democratic culture. In conclusion, the article argues that the problem of “democratic values” that Williams addressed in his work of the 1950s was a major factor in the marginalization or exclusion of moral criticism from political argument in Britain after 1945, and suggests that this passage of intellectual history may therefore be of considerable importance to contemporary debates about the lineages and reform of, in a broad sense, neoliberal political economy.

The French citrus industry in Algeria grew rapidly in terms of land area and fruit production from the 1930s until Algerian Independence in 1962. This article contends that technical expertise regarding citrus cultivation played a role in colonial control of Algeria’s territory, population, and economy. The French regime enrolled Algerian fruit in biopolitical interventions on rural ways of life in Algeria and urban standards of living in France. Technical manuals written by state-affiliated agronomists articulated racial distinctions between French settlers and Algerian peasants through attention to labor practices in the groves. A complex legal, technological, and administrative infrastructure facilitated the circulation of citrus fruit across the Mediterranean and into metropolitan France. This nexus of scientific research, economic profit, and racial hierarchy met criticism during the Algerian War for Independence. In the aftermath, expert discussions about citrus production reflected uncertainties and tensions regarding Algeria’s future. Citrus’ place in scientific, technological, and economic changes in twentieth-century Algeria illuminates the politics of technical expertise under colonialism and during decolonization.

Born in 1846, Franz Mehring as a young man was a follower of Ferdinand Lassalle, who in 1863 had organized Germany's first socialist party. As well as establishing a reputation as a journalist with his contributions to many liberal and democratic newspapers, Mehring was awarded his doctorate at Leipzig University in 1881 for his dissertation on the history and teachings of German social democracy. In his mid-forties he embraced Marxism and in 1891 joined the German Social Democratic Party, soon emerging as the intellectual leader of its left wing. He became editor of the Leipziger Volkszeitung and wrote prolifically for Die Neue Zeit and other radical journals on history, politics, philosophy, and literature. His book The Lessing Legend, published in 1893, is regarded as the first sustained attempt at Marxist literary criticism. His major biography of Karl Marx appeared in 1918, the year before his death. Completed in 1891, The Weavers was accepted for performance by the Deutsches Theater but was rejected by the Berlin censor as ‘a portrayal which specifically instils class hatred’. The first production of the play, discussed by Mehring below, was possible only because the Freie Bühne was a subscription society. In October 1893 a further private performance was given at the Neue Freie Volksbühne, followed by seven more in December at the Freie Volksbühne, where Franz Mehring was chairman. By now, the Prussian State censor had overruled his Berlin subordinate and The Weavers received its public premiere at the Deutsches Theater on 25 September 1894. On each occasion Hauptmann's play was greeted with great enthusiasm by the public, but found no favour with the Imperial family who indignantly cancelled their regular box at the Deutsches Theater. Subsequently The Weavers was banned from public performance in France, Austria, Italy, and Russia. Mehring's article appeared originally in Die Neue Zeit, XI, No. I (1893). Its translation in NTQ forms part of an occasional series on early Marxist dramatic criticism, which already includes Trotsky on Wedekind (NTQ28) and Lunacharsky on Ibsen (NTQ39). EDWARD BRAUN

Abstract Naitō Konan’s hypothesis on the “Tang-Song transition” was first expressed in lecture notes from his 1909 class on modern Chinese history at Kyoto University and, then, expounded in subsequent works such as “A General View of the Tang and Song Dynasties” and “Modern Chinese History.” The theory systematically outlines that an evolutionary medieval to modern transition occurred in Chinese society during the period between the Tang and the Song dynasties, focusing in particular on the areas of politics/government, the economy, and culture. Political change is regarded as the core metric, demonstrated in concentrated form by the government’s transformation from an aristocratic to a monarchical autocratic system alongside a rise in the status and position of the common people. The “Tang-Song transition theory,” underpinned theoretically by a cultural-historical perspective, advocates for a periodization of Chinese history based on the stages and characteristics of China’s cultural development, which is also attributed to cultural shifts, downward to the commoner class from a culture monopolized by the aristocracy during the period between the Tang and Song, with concomitant changes in society. For over a century since it was first proposed, the “Tang-Song transition theory” has had far-reaching influence in Chinese, Japanese, and Western academic circles, continuing to be lively and vigorous even now. We might be able to find the cause in its originality and liberality, which leave significant room for later thinkers’ continued adherence and development or criticism and falsification and continue to inspire new questions. Naitō’s proposal was also intimately connected to his observations of China’s circumstances in the late Qing dynasty and early Republican period, which also provided a “sample of the era” regarding realistic approaches to historical studies.

The issue of the journal opens with an article dedicated to the formation of metrology as government regulated activity in France. The article has discussed the historical process of development of metrological activity in France. It was revealed that the history of metrology is considered as an auxiliary historical and ethnographic discipline from a social and philosophical point of view as the evolution of scientific approaches to the definition of individual units of physical quantities and branches of metrology. However, in the scientific literature, the little attention is paid to the process of a development of a centralized institutional metrology system that is the organizational basis for ensuring the uniformity of measurements. The article by Irena Grebtsova and Maryna Kovalska is devoted to the of the development of the source criticism’s knowledge in the Imperial Novorossiya University which was founded in the second half of the XIX century in Odesa. Grounding on a large complex of general scientific methods, and a historical method and source criticism, the authors identified the stages of the formation of source criticism in the process of teaching historical disciplines at the university, what they based on an analysis of the teaching activities of professors and associate professors of the Faculty of History and Philology. In the article, the development of the foundations of source criticism is considered as a complex process, which in Western European and Russian science was the result of the development of the theory and practice of everyday dialogue between scientists and historical sources. This process had a great influence on the advancement of a historical education in university, which was one of the important factors in the formation of source studies as a scientific discipline. The article by Tetiana Malovichko is devoted to the study of what changes the course of the probability theory has undergone from the end of the 19th century to our time based on the analysis of The Theory of Probabilities textbook by Vasyl P. Ermakov published in 1878. The paper contains a comparative analysis of The Probability Theory textbook and modern educational literature. The birth of children after infertility treatment of married couples with the help of assisted reproductive technologies has become a reality after many years of basic research on the physiology of reproductive system, development of oocyte’s in vitro fertilization methods and cultivation of embryos at pre-implantation stages. Given the widespread use of assisted reproductive technologies in modern medical practice and the great interest of society to this problem, the aim of the study authors from the Institute for Problems of Cryobiology and Cryomedicine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine was to trace the main stages and key events of assisted reproductive technologies in the world and in Ukraine, as well as to highlight the activities of outstanding scientists of domestic and world science who were at the origins of the development of this area. As a result of the work, it has been shown that despite certain ethical and social biases, the discovery of individual predecessor scientists became the basis for the efforts of Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe to ensure birth of the world's first child, whose conception occurred outside the mother's body. There are also historical facts and unique photos from our own archive, which confirm the fact of the first successful oocyte in vitro fertilization and the birth of a child after the use of assisted reproductive technologies in Ukraine. In the next article, the authors tried to consider and structure the stages of development and creation of the “Yermak”, the world's first Arctic icebreaker, and analyzed the stages of preparation and the results of its first expeditions to explore the Arctic. Systematic analysis of historical sources and biographical material allowed to separate and comprehensively consider the conditions and prehistory for the development and creation of “Yermak” icebreaker. Also, the authors gave an assessment to the role of Vice Admiral Stepan Osypovych Makarov in those events, and analyzed the role of Sergei Yulyevich Witte, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev and Pyotr Petrovich Semenov-Tian-Shansky in the preparation and implementation of the first Arctic expeditions of the “Yermak”icebreaker. The authors of the following article considered the historical aspects of construction and operation of train ferry routes. The article deals with the analysis and systematization of the data on the historical development of train ferry routes and describes the background for the construction of train ferry routes and their advantages over other combined transport types. It also deals with the basic features of the train ferries operating on the main international train ferry routes. The study is concerned with both sea routes and routes across rivers and lakes. The article shows the role of train ferry routes in the improvement of a national economy, and in the provision of the military defense. An analysis of numerous artefacts of the first third of the 20th century suggests that the production of many varieties of art-and-industrial ceramics developed in Halychyna, in particular architectural ceramic plastics, a variety of functional ceramics, decorative tiles, ceramic tiles, facing tiles, etc. The artistic features of Halychyna art ceramics, the richness of methods for decorating and shaping it, stylistic features, as well as numerous art societies, scientific and professional associations, groups, plants and factories specializing in the production of ceramics reflect the general development of this industry in the first half of the century and represent the prerequisites the emergence of the school of professional ceramics in Halychyna at the beginning of the 20th century. The purpose of the next paper is to analyze the formation and development of scientific and professional schools of art-and-industrial ceramics of Halychyna in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. During the environmental crisis, electric transport (e-transport) is becoming a matter for scientific inquiry, a subject of discussion in politics and among public figures. In the program for developing the municipal services of Ukraine, priorities are given to the development of the infrastructure of ecological transport: trolleybuses, electric buses, electric cars. The increased attention to e-transport on the part of the scientific community, politicians, and the public actualizes the study of its history, development, features of operation, etc. The aim of the next study is to highlight little-known facts of the history of production and operation of MAN trolleybuses in Ukrainian cities, as well as to introduce their technical characteristics into scientific circulation. The types, specific design solutions of the first MAN trolleybus generation and the prerequisites for their appearance in Chernivtsi have been determined. Particular attention has been paid to trolleybuses that were in operation in Germany and other Western European countries from the first half of the 1930s to the early 1950s. The paper traces the stages of operation of the MAN trolleybuses in Chernivtsi, where they worked during 1939–1944 and after the end of the Second World War, they were transferred to Kyiv. After two years of operation in the Ukrainian capital, the trolleybuses entered the routes in Dnipropetrovsk during 1947–1951. The purpose of the article by authors from the State University of Infrastructure and Technologies of Ukraine is to thoroughly analyze unpaved roads of the late 18th – early 19th century, as well as the project of the first wooden trackway as the forerunner of the Bukovyna railways. To achieve this purpose, the authors first reviewed how railways were constructed in the Austrian Empire during 1830s – 1850s. Then, in contrast with the first railway networks that emerged and developed in the Austrian Empire, the authors made an analysis of the condition and characteristics of unpaved roads in Bukovyna. In addition, the authors considered the first attempt to create a wooden trackway as a prototype and predecessor of the Bukovyna railway.

The article is devoted to one aspect of the genealogy of Soviet governmentality. Michel Foucault, who elaborated the original theory of different types of governmentality, rejected the idea that socialism could arrive at its own practices of management. From his point of view, real socialism ties into the already existing police and liberal versions of governmentality. The “police-administrative” aspect of politics in socialist countries is well known, but its liberal component is only beginning to be systematically studied. In the theoretical canon, a revolutionary project nevertheless comes close to a liberal one: the Marxist criticism of bourgeois political economy shared the same epistemes with it. Some interpreters assume that this commonality also extends to concepts of history, that both Marxism and liberalism see economic rationality as a driving force in the historical process. Economic governmentality can be interpreted not only as a peculiar, historically determined disposition of power but also as a principle —both ontological and epistemological — that governs history itself. That interpretation was disputed by the most prominent Marxist philosophers. In particular, Walter Benjamin and Louis Althusser criticized social-democratic “economism” and “progressism” as they rehabilitated the key concepts of sovereign policy. “Intervention,” “state of exception,” “the exception becoming the rule” — all these concepts refer not to regulation by policing practices but precisely to the model of sovereign decision. Any such revival of sovereignty in liberation politics is certainly problematic, especially when both sovereignty and governmentality belong to the same “providential machine” of theological “oikonomia” as recent studies by Giorgio Agamben have made clear. The article points out the paradoxes in suspension of the “laws of history” by the sovereign using the example of the debate among Soviet historians (which was studied in depth by Andrey Yurganov) about the true nature of the Russian late medieval state. In conclusion, the author analyzes Antonio Negri’s concept of constituent power as a force that can suspend the operation of the providential machine.

The opinion of Karl Marx becomes the inspiration for the appearance of the critical philosophy in the field of economics, social, politic and law. The spirit is to criticize the capitalism system that assumed of negative effect for the human life. When those opinion is came into the law, it bring the criticism to attendance of law in capitalist society. In capitalist society, law is not a free value, it’s not neutral character and always related with the economic factor and also existing politics. Kata Kunci : teori marxis dan sistem kapitalisme

The article reveals the nature of the interpretation of Lenin's thought by Slavoj Zizek and the social and philosophical significance of the interpretation. It is demonstrated that the interpretation is based on the opposition of Lenin and Leninism. This opposition is carried out with the problematization of the relationship between economy and politics and the interpretation of being based on Zizek's analysis of criticism of Marxism by postmodern left thinkers. It is demonstrated that Zizeks’s interpretation of Leninism is a new stage in the polemic of Western Marxism against Soviet Marxism. The methodological foundations of this new challenge are revealed.

The following paper has as its object the political philosophy of K. Karatani, in particular its relationship with the work of Marx. Japanese philosopher, in fact, reinterprets some elements of Marxian theory in the light of Kantian categories, hybridizing the ethical and moral theory of the latter with the critique of the political economy of the former. The result of Karatani's project can be seen, in particular, in two works. With the first, Transcritique, Karatani moves into the realm of philosophy to construct a method that holds the two theoretical poles together. The concept of 'Transcritique', in fact, represents the junction between Kantian and Marxian insights. With the second work, 'The Structure of World History', the Japanese philosopher shifts the analytical focus from ethics to economics, proposing a different interpretation of capitalism and its historical cycles. The shift of the observation of the capitalist system from the sphere of production to that of exchange represents the analytical novelty. Carrying through to the end the methodology developed in the previous work, Karatani traces back to exchange all the productive, institutional and political dynamics produced over time. Cycles of accumulation thus become cycles of exchange. The author, in fact, determines a correspondence between the specific modes of exchange and the consequent political structures, highlighting the centrality that money occupies, both in the theoretical elaboration and in political reality. The prevailing mode of production, based on the exchange of commodities, relies on the absolute mobility of money and on the strength of the state political institution, which acts as a hinge between the global dimension of exchanges and the territorial need for the appropriation of surplus-value. Karatani's critique is embodied in a political proposal, articulated through two key figures: community and cosmopolitanism. With the first term, the philosopher opposes the materiality of human relationships based on reciprocity to the abstract equivalence of economic relationships. By the second term, he shows the need for an extended political practice in which the pursuit of local freedom goes hand in hand with the realization of global justice. The paper traces these themes both through direct exposure of Karatani's work and by offering critical comparisons with other authors who have addressed similar issues. Finally, the purpose of this paper is to emphasize the originality of the Japanese author's philosophical-historical work, suspended between utopia and pragmatism, also through criticism, in order to highlight its strengths and underline its potential weaknesses.

In recent years, a series of key social, political and economic events has placed the critique of capitalism very much on the theoretical agenda. Responding to these developments, many have begun to express the need for a rapprochement between social criticism and the critique of political economy. The present essay represents a contribution to the recovery of the project that was once synonymous with critical theory itself via a critical engagement with the early writings of Jürgen Habermas. Not only is Habermas’ explicit engagement with the critique of political economy among the most substantial to be found within the mainstream tradition of critical theory, his early social-theoretical insights into the emergent ‘primacy of the political’ in late capitalism can be taken as representative of a number of broader trends in late-20th-century thought which sought to go beyond the premises and categories of Marx’s economic works. Simply put, no reappraisal of the relationship between critical theory and the critique of political economy can succeed, I submit, without taking seriously Habermas’s path-breaking and wide-ranging innovations.

Contemporary democratic theorists have tended to assume that democracy is compatible with and even requires a capitalist economic system. Rosa Luxemburg offers a democratic criticism of this view, arguing that the dominating effects of a capitalist economy undermine the ability of liberal democracy to actualise its ideals of freedom and equality. Drawing on Luxemburg’s writings, this article theorises a model of socialist democracy which combines support for public ownership and control of the means of production with a plural multi-party electoral system and a defence of civil liberties. It recovers Luxemburg’s conceptualisation of a socialist democracy as the extension of democratic principles to major social and economic institutions currently governed by nondemocratic authority structures. It defends this version of socialist democracy from the liberal objection that it violates citizens’ property rights and the Marxist objection that it retains the dominating structures of the state and a coercive legal system.

Michael Heinrich, one of the leading Marx scholars, provides a general introduction into Das Kapital with emphasis on the latest interpretations of it. The circumstances surrounding its writing and publication are shown to have interfered with an adequate appreciation of it. The formal structure and organization of the first volume are obstacles to readers and demand much from their education and intellect. The article summarizes the basic trajectories of Marx’s criticisms of political economy, including the critique of naturalizing social forms arising under capitalism and Marx’s original monetary theory of value. The author disentangles Marx’s Das Kapital from views mistakenly ascribed to it, such as the idea that value is determined solely by labor and the prediction of pauperization of the masses. First, Marx’s theory of value goes well beyond explaining prices under capitalism. Second, his main prophecy concerned the inevitable growth of inequality between the masters of capital and the employed classes and did not forecast impoverishment. The paper also points out that the sequence of publication of different volumes of Das Kapital caused lacunae in interpreting Marx’s oeuvre. For instance Engels’ efforts made the third volume more accessible to readers but also obscured the overall pattern of Marx’s thinking. the article shows that Das Kapital was a dynamic and fluctuating project to such an extent that Marx himself several times revisited his views of the causes of economic crises and falling profits and also intended to deal extensively with ecological issues. Reaching an adequate understanding of the theory contained in Das Kapital cannot depend on the manuscripts of those volumes alone. Marx’s notebooks, which have only recently published, are an indispensable aid to understanding it.

This paper analyzed the themes of Jose Rizal’s critique of the Spanish colonization and religion. It works on the propositions that Rizal’s writings were intended to emancipate the Filipinos from the fetters of the Spanish colonization; as such, he provides an analysis on the effects of the Spanish colonial strategies and policies to the Filipino psyche, and exposes the illnesses that these caused the Filipino nation. His analysis of the nineteen century Philippine society and its social, economic and political situations under the Spanish colonial rule is similar to the ideas of Karl Marx on religion and the human person. Though it was never acknowledge in his writings that he read Marx’s works, Rizal’s criticisms of religion, education, and government showed resemblances with Marx’s ideas. References “Addendum to San Agustin’s Letter by Father Murillo,” in Documentary Sources of Philippine History. Gregorio F. Zaide, ed. vol. 5, Metro Manila: National Book Store, Inc., 1990. Bernard, Miguel A. The Christianization of the Philippines: Problems and Perspectives, Manila: The Filipiniana Book Guild, 1972. Blumentritt, Ferdinand. “Blumentritt’s Review of Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere,” in Jose Rizal Correspondence with Blumentritt, vol. II, Manila: National Historical Commission of the Philippines, 2011. “Chrino’s Account of the Pre-Spanish Filipinos and Their Civilization (1604),” in Documentary Sources of Philippines History. Gregorio F. Zaide, ed., vol.3, Manila: National Book Store, Inc., 1990. “Colin’s Account of the Filipinos and Their Pre-Spanish Civilization (1663)” in Documentary Sources of Philippines History, Gregorio F. Zaide, ed., vol. 5, Manila: National Book Store, Inc., 1990. Del Pilar, Marcelo H. “Noli Me Tangere: Before Monkish Hatred in the Philippines” in Rizal’s Correpondence with Fellow Reformists, Manila: National Historical Institute, 1992. Diokno, M. S. and R.N. Villegas, “Chapter Six: The Making of the Filipino” in Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People, vol. 4, Philippines: Asia Publishing Company Limited. “Father San Augustin Slanders the Filipino People (1720)” in Documentary Sources of Philippine History, Gregorio F. Zaide, ed., vol. 5, Metro Manila: National Book Store, Inc., 1990. Fromm, Erich, Beyond The Chains of Illusions: My Encounter with Marx and Freud, New York: Continuum, 2006. Lauer, Quentin, “Response Occasioned by McGovern’s ‘Atheism: Is It Essential to Marxism?” in The Journal of Ecumenical Studies, vol. XXII, no. 3, Summer 1985. Marx, Karl, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” in in K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957. Phelan, John Leddy, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, Madison: The University of Wisconsin. Rasmussen, David M., “Critical Theory and Philosophy” in Handbook of Critical Theory, D.M. Rasmussen, ed., Cambridge, Masschusetts: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1996. Rizal, Jose, “Message to the Young Women of Malolos” in Jose Rizal’s Political and Historical Writings, vol. VII, Encarnacion Alzona, trans., Manila: National Historical Institute, 2000. _________, “The Indolence of the Filipinos” in Jose Rizal’s Political and Historical Writings, vol. VII, Encarnacion Alzona, trans., Manila: National Historical Institute, 2000. _________, “The Philippines A Century Hence” in Jose Rizal’s Political and Historical Writings, vol. VII, Encarnacion Alzona, trans., Manila: National Historical Institute, 2000. _________, “To My Motherland” in Noli Me Tangere, trans. Ma. Soledad Lacson-Locsin, Philippines: The Bookmark, 2004. Tan, Samuel K., A History of the Philippines, Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2009.

The article discusses the concept of political Gnosticism, developed by the philosopher Eric Voegelin. This concept is one of the main elements of Voegelin’s political philosophy, in which he answers the question about the essence of modern politics. Voegelin believes that modernity is the result of the historical victory of the ideology of “Gnosticism”. The historical roots of Gnosticism, says Voegelin, should not be sought in late antiquity, but in the Middle Ages. Based on the ideas of Christian mystics, such as Joachim of Flore, an ideology of Gnosticism was formed, which spread in the Western world and became a powerful political force. This force accomplished the “great Gnostic revolution” and shaped modern society. Examples of modern Gnostic regimes are progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, National Socialism. Modern political science is not able to give a critical understanding of Gnosticism, since it itself is a product of Gnostic ideology. Therefore, modern political science needs to restore its fundamental principles, which were established by ancient philosophers, the founders of the philosophy of politics. Voegelin calls this the reteoretisation of political science. The author of the article analyzes the theoretical and historical grounds of Voegelin’s concept and concludes that one of the sources of his theory of political Gnosticism is Hegel’s doctrine of unhappy consciousness. The article also proves that Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism is not identical with historical Gnosticism. The author also analyzes the reasons why political science of the twentieth century did not accept this concept and did not draw conclusions from criticism of political science in the work “New Science of Politics” by Voegelin. The article concludes that the changes that are taking place in the modern world force us to reconsider and overestimate Voegelin’s concept, which, in our opinion, has great heuristic potential.

This article attempts to rethink the Marxist category of class in response to criticism of the progressivist conception of history. The Marxism of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries has typically run into a problem arising from the fact that accepting the proletariat as the subject of history makes any political action aimed at social transformation superfluous. From a political viewpoint, the concept of the subject of history either implies that the working class will spontaneously carry out its historical task without any intervention, or requires the dictate of the party to act as a revolutionary vanguard for the working class. Many theorists (Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Daniel Bensaïd, Massimiliano Tomba, et al.) have pointed out that emancipatory politics should abandon the idea that history is linear and that it has a particular subject. Does this then mean that the concept of class itself should be discarded? Althusser’s concept of the social whole as a weave of multiple temporalities allows us to take a new look at the problem of class in Marxist theory and political practice by understanding class as neither essence nor structure, but rather as a conflictual social relation and a political concept. Based on the works of Edward Thompson, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Étienne Balibar, Daniel Bensaïd, Cinzia Aruzza, etc., the author demonstrates that the multi-temporal structure of capital means that class contradiction cannot be confined to the matters of production because class struggle unfolds at all levels of surplus value creation — production, exchange, reproduction and circulation of capital taken as a whole. Moreover, other social movements — feminist, anti-racist, migrant, etc. — lead to a redefinition of key aspects of class subjectivity related to the concepts of productive labor and exploitation. With left-wing politics now in crisis, class struggle also entails a struggle for recognition that the problem of class is a political one.

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.

Ecology has emerged as one of the most important sites of political struggle today. This issue of M/C invited authors to engage with “ecology” not as a siloised field of scientific enquiry, but rather as a way of contemporary thinking and a conceptual mode that emphasizes connectivity, conviviality, and inter-dependence. Proposing a radical revision of anthropocentrism in When Species Meet, Donna Haraway emphasises the dynamism of ecology as an entangled mesh, observing that, “the world is a knot in motion.” The “infolding” of human bodies with what we call “the environment” has never been clearer than the present moment—a time where humans may have undermined the viability of their own and other organism’s life on Earth. This impending ecological crisis has forced awareness of humanity’s dependence on the nonhuman lives that surround and envelop us. Gregory Bateson reminds us of the gravity of this mutuality with his assertion that the unit of survival is the organism-and-its-environment in a relationship, and that an organism which destroys its environment commits suicide (Bateson). Our unstable ecological future has prompted the emergence of an array of inter-disciplines, and new political, intellectual and cultural alignments including; ecomedia, eco-Marxism, ecological humanities, political ecology and animal studies. These thriving areas of scholarship often attempt to situate, “humans in ecological terms and non-humans in ethical terms,” while highlighting, as Val Plumwood has in her landmark Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, how, “anthropocentric perspectives and culture […] make us insensitive to our ecological place in the world’ (2). Despite the growing popular concern for the more-than-human world, Western populations are “citizens of science-led modernity, and are still investing in the narratives of progress” (Myerson 61). Climate change and the contemporary ecological crisis have provided an impetus and opportunity for collaborative scholarship and alternative engagements across the science/humanities divide. Deborah Bird Rose and Libby Robin remind us that the driving forces behind crises are primarily social and cultural. It is therefore essential for media and cultural theorists to be part of the ecological conversation as it seeks to develop new knowledge practices in order to “engage with connectivity and commitment in a time of crisis and concern” (Rose and Robin). Since James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis in 1982, conceptualising the Earth as a self-regulating, evolving system, notions of equilibrium and harmony have pervaded ecological thinking. Gaia is “a powerfully productive scientific metaphor and has considerable value as a way to imagine the planet as at once vulnerable and vast, enduring and evolving” (Garrard 201). Because the study of ecology concerns life and the complex contingencies of all of its relationships, applying ecological thought to contemporary “matters of concern” (Latour) can alert us to the limitations of our knowledge, while simultaneously impelling us to act from our enmeshed position in a precariously balanced world. At the same time, as our Feature for this issue recognises, ecological metaphors can paradoxically damage ecologies. Evidently the theme of ecology has contemporary resonance as we were both excited and overwhelmed with the sheer number (over 20) of papers we received and their theoretical diversity, and we regret that we could not include more than those that follow. Our sincere gratitude goes to our generous referees—all 54 of them. And a special thanks to our colleagues (in Macquarie University’s Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, and Environment and Geography) who we relied upon when reviewers fell through. If we then include the efforts of all our contributors, as well as M/C editors Peta Mitchell and Axel Bruns, this issue is the culmination of the collaborative (and mostly invisible) labour of around 89 people. Thank you. Invisible labour is one focus of Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s feature article for this issue, “The Real Future of the Media.” It is both an eco-Marxist critique of the media industries and a call to action for all media, communications and cultural studies scholars to place ecological issues at the core of their work. Far from the “end of materiality” promised by virtual media’s technological utopia, Maxwell and Miller demonstrate the ways in which the media industries and technophiles alike, tend to obscure not only inequitable and dangerous labour conditions but also the media’s negative environmental impacts. With some staggering statistics around ICT/CE planned obsolescence, E-waste, exposure of workers to toxicity, they emphasise that ecological metaphors more often blind us to harsh environmental realities, rather than illuminate them. By focusing on the not-so-green outcomes of contemporary media practice, they remind us that while ecology can be a useful conceptual mode, it is important to avoid divorcing metaphor from materiality, lest we confuse the map with the territory (Alfred Korzybski). In a similar political vein, in “Gentrifying Climate Change: Ecological Modernisation and the Cultural Politics of Definition”, Ben Glasson remains sceptical that our current political and economic system can adequately address the challenges that climate change will bring. Focused on the shortcomings of the discourse of ecological modernisation (EM), Glasson argues that environmentalism, rather than being integrated into capitalism, has been co-opted, through a process of gentrification, without necessarily, any tangible environmental benefits. The next two articles explore filmic portrayals of ecological disaster. Described by one referee as a “breath of fresh air in the field of post-apocalyptic criticism,” Tim Matts’s and Aidan Tynan’s timely piece places Lars von Trier’s recent film Melancholia, in the broader context of humanity’s sense of impending annihilation. Instead of mourning for the loss of Earth, the authors suggest that Melancholia’s central character’s overwhelming melancholy enables a “radical form of ecological openness.” While in “Spectre of the Past, Vision of the Future,” Tamas Molnar celebrates filmmaker Arthus-Bertrand’s Home as a climate change communication text which uses ritual to influence audience’s environmental behaviour. Molnar argues that Home transforms anthropocentric hubris into ecological awareness, as the film’s spectators begin to reconcile the spectral haunting of human-induced environmental devastation with a future vision of personal responsibility and hope for the suffering body of the Earth. Anita Howarth focuses on another suffering body to explore the convergence of two ecologies which combine to form an “ecology of protest” in “A Hunger Strike-the Ecology of a Protest: The Case of Bahraini activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja.” Howarth argues that through an act of corporeal-environmental (self)destruction, the emaciated body of Bahraini hunger striker Abdulhadi al-Khawaja was transformed into a political spectacle by a global media ecology. Howarth explores how the interpenetration between the ecology of the organism-and-its-environment, and the ecology of a global media system, impacts on protest movements and social justice. The erasure of the rabbit’s suffering body becomes Katherine Wright’s focus in “Bunnies, Bilbies, and the Ethic of Ecological Remembrance” where she ponders the more sinister dimensions of substituting the Easter bunny with the Easter bilby. Analysing how stories impact on ecological thinking and attitudes, Wright critiques the problematic native/invasive dichotomy that sees the native bilby valued over the invasive rabbit; slaughtered in vast numbers in Australia. In place of this binary she proposes an ethic of “ecological remembrance,” which recognises the importance of memory in sustaining an ethics of more-than-human ecological care. The following two articles emphasise the importance of storytelling to develop Indigenous ecological understanding and a decolonising ethic. With a focus on Australian Aboriginal story ecology, “Growing up the Future: Children’s Stories and Aboriginal Ecology,” Blaze Kwaymullina et al. explore two works of children’s literature which emphasise the sentience of Country and the responsibilities of future generations to protect fragile ecologies. They argue that through story, children will learn to “enhance the pattern of life,” rather than destroy it. While in “Ecology, Ontology and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong,” Bindi MacGill et al. traverse another pedagogy of Indigenous storytelling which has developed at Camp Coorong: Race Relations and Cultural Education Centre 200km south of Adelaide. An initiative of Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority, Camp Coorong is a site of place-based education which passes on ethics of caring for country to students in the Murray-Darling Basin. Through the “gift of story” Camp Coorong has become a site of active decolonisation as non-Indigenous students and teachers are able to hear stories of Aboriginal dispossession, survival, and resilience. By creating a, “pedagogy of discomfort,” Camp Coorong encourages ecological responsibility and commitment, while engaging in the vital task of decolonising Australian culture and environments. Applying the ecological framework to a very different form of storytelling, Paul Makeham, Bree Hadley and Joon-Yee Kwok discuss what “ecological thinking” can offer studies of the performing arts sector in Brisbane, Australia. Through a case study of Aus-e-stage Mapping Service, an online application that maps data about performing arts practitioners, organisations and audiences, “A ‘Value Ecology’ Approach to the Performing Arts” demonstrates the benefits of ecologically grounded rhizomatic thinking in assessing a theatre industry’s “health” through relationships and flows. Grounded in the theory of French philosopher Michel Serres, Timothy Barker’s, “Information and Atmospheres: Exploring the Relationship between the Natural Environment and Information Aesthetics” is a thoughtful exploration of the way an array of artworks forges connections between “nature” and information. Through information visualisation and sonification, all three examples give a new sense of materiality to the atmosphere, with EcoArtTech appearing as our cover image for this issue. This journal edition is populated by papers which explore different niches in ecological thinking, that are perhaps best understood in Latourian terms as an assemblage. The broad scope covered in the following papers demonstrates that ecology is an unsettled concept, made fertile by instability and excess. This issue of M/C hovers in the borderlands of inter-disciplinarity, where creative verve thrives in contact zones. We hope you enjoy it! References Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Paladin, Granada Publishing, 1973. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2012. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2007. (Kindle edition) Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004). 27 June 2012 ‹http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Latour.html›. Lovelock, James. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Moreton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2007. Myerson, George. Ecology and the End of Postmodernity. London: Icon Books, 2002. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. Routledge; London and New York, 2002. Rose, Deborah Bird, and Libby Robin. “The Ecological Humanities in Action.” Australian Humanities Review 31-32. (April 2004). 27 June 2012

"Outwit, Outplay, Outlast" "All entertainment has hidden meanings, revealing the nature of the culture that created it" ( 6). This quotation has no greater relevance than for the most powerful entertainment medium of all: television. In fact, television has arguably become part of the "almost unnoticed working equipment of civilisations" (Cater 1). In other words, TV seriously affects our culture, our society, and our lives; it affects the way we perceive and approach reality (see Cantor and Cantor, 1992; Corcoran, 1984; Freedman, 1990; Novak, 1975). In this essay, I argue that the American television programme Survivor is an example of how entertainment (TV in particular) perpetuates capitalistic ideologies. In other words, Survivor is a symptom of American economic culture, which is masked as an "interpersonal game". I am operating under the assumption that television works "ideologically to promote and prefer certain meanings of the world, to circulate some meanings rather than others, and to serve some interests rather than others" (Fiske 20). I argue that Survivor promotes ideals on two levels: economic and social. On the economic level, it endorses the pursuit of money, fame, and successful careers. These values are prevalent in American society and have coalesced into the myth of the "American Dream", which stands for the opportunity for each individual to get ahead in life; someone can always become wealthy (see White, 1988; Cortes, 1982; Grambs, 1982; Rivlin, 1992). These values are an integral part of a capitalistic society, and, as I will illustrate later, Survivor is a symptom of these ideological values. On the second level, it purports preferred social strategies that are needed to "win" at the game of capitalism: forming alliances, lying, and deception. Ideology The discussion of ideology is critical if we are to better understand the function of Survivor in American culture. Ideologies are neither "ideal" nor "spiritual," but rather material. Ideologies appear in specific social institutions and practices, such as cultural artefacts (Althusser, For Marx 232). In that way, everyone "lives" in ideologies. Pryor suggests that ideology in cultural practices can operate as a "rhetoric of control" by structuring the way in which people view the world: Ideology `refracts' our social conditions of existence, structuring consciousness by defining for us what exists, what is legitimate and illegitimate, possible and impossible, thinkable and unthinkable. Entering praxis as a form of persuasion, ideology acts as a rhetoric of control by endorsing and legitimising certain economic, social and political arrangements at the expense of others and by specifying the proper role and position of the individual within those arrangements. (4) Similarly, Althusser suggests, "ideology is the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group" (Ideology 149). Thus, ideology, for Althusser, represents the way individuals "live" their relations to society (Eagleton 18). Grossberg suggests, "within such positions, textuality is a productive practice whose (imaginary) product is experience itself. Experience can no longer serve as a mediation between the cultural and the social since it is not merely within the cultural but is the product of cultural practices" (409). The "text" for study, then, becomes the cultural practices and structures, which determine humans. Althusser concludes that ideology reifies our affective, unconscious relations with the world, and determines how people are pre-reflectively bound up in social reality (Eagleton 18). Survivor as a Text In the United States, the "reality TV" genre of programming, such as The Real World, Road Rules, and Big Brother (also quite famous in Europe), are currently very popular. Debuting in May, 2000, Survivor is one of the newest additions to this "reality programming." Survivor is a game, and its theme is: "Outwit, Outplay, Outlast". The premise is the following: Sixteen strangers are "stranded" on a remote island in the South China Sea. They are divided into two "tribes" of eight, the "Pagong" and "Tagi." They have to build shelter, catch food, and establish a "new society". They must work together as a team to succeed, but ultimately, they are competitors. The tribes compete in games for "rewards" (luxury items such as food), and also for "immunity". Every third day, they attend a "tribal council" in which they vote one member off the island. Whoever won the "immunity challenge" (as a tribe early in the show, later, as an individual) cannot be voted off. After several episodes, the two tribes merge into one, "Rattana," as they try to "outwit, outlast, and outplay" the other contestants. The ultimate prize is $1,000,000. The Case of Survivor As Althusser (For Marx) and Pryor suggest, ideology exists in cultural artefacts and practices. In addition, Pryor argues that ideology defines for us what is "legitimate and illegitimate," and "thinkable and unthinkable" by "endorsing certain economic and social arrangements" (4). This is certainly true in the case of Survivor. The programme is definitely a cultural artefact that endorses certain practices. In fact, it defines for us the "preferred" economic and social arrangements. The show promotes for us the economic arrangement of "winning" money. It also defines the social arrangements that are legitimate, thinkable, and necessary to win the interpersonal and capitalistic game. First, let us discuss the economic arrangements that Survivor purports. The economic arrangements that Survivor perpetuates are in direct alignment with those of the "game" of capitalism: to "win" money, success, and/or fame (which will lead to money). While Richard, the $1,000,000 prize winner, is the personification of the capitalistic/American Dream come true, the other contestants certainly have had their share of money and fame. For example, after getting voted off the island, many of the former cast members appeared on the "talk show circuit" and have done many paid interviews. Joel Klug has done approximately 250 interviews (Abele, Alexander and Lasswell 62), and Stacey Stillman is charging $1200 for a "few quotes," and $1800 for a full-length interview (Millman et al. 16). Jenna Lewis has been busy with paid television engagements that require cross country trips (Abele, Alexander and Lasswell 63). In addition, some have made television commercials. Both B. B. Andersen and Stacey Stillman appeared in Reebok commercials that were aired during the remaining Survivor episodes. Others are making their way even farther into Hollywood. Most have their own talent agents who are getting them acting jobs. For example, Sean Kenniff is going to appear in a role on a soap opera, and Gervase Peterson is currently "sifting through offers" to act in television situation comedies and movies. Dirk Been has been auditioning for movie roles, and Joel Klug has moved to Los Angeles to "become a star". Even Sonja Christopher, the 63-year-old breast cancer survivor and the first contestant voted off, is making her acting debut in the television show, Diagnosis Murder (Abele, Alexander and Lasswell 57). Finally, two of the women contestants from Survivor were also tempted with a more "risky" offer. Both Colleen Haskell and Jenna Lewis were asked to pose for Playboy magazine. While these women are certainly attractive, they are not the "typical-looking" playboy model. It is obvious that their fame has put them in the mind of Hugh Heffner, the owner of Playboy. No one is revealing the exact amount of the offers, but rumours suggest that they are around $500,000. Thus, it is clear that even though these contestants did not win the $1,000,000, they are using their famous faces to "win" the capitalistic game anyway. Not only does Survivor purport the "preferred" economic arrangements, it also defines for us the social arrangements needed to win the capitalistic game: interpersonal strategy. The theme of the strategy needed to win the game is "nice guys don't last". This is demonstrated by the fact that Gretchen, a nice, strong, capable, and nurturing "soccer mother" was the seventh to be voted off the island. There were also many other "nice" contestants who were eventually voted off for one reason or another. However, on the other hand, Richard, the million-dollar winner, used "Machiavellian smarts" to scheme his way into winning. After the final episode, he said, "I really feel that I earned where I am. The first hour on the island I stepped into my strategy and thought, 'I'm going to focus on how to establish an alliance with four people early on.' I spend a lot of time thinking about who people are and why they interact the way they do, and I didn't want to just hurt people's feelings or do this and toss that one out. I wanted this to be planned and I wanted it to be based on what I needed to do to win the game. I don't regret anything I've done or said to them and I wouldn't change a thing" (Hatch, n.pag.). One strategy that worked to Richard's advantage was that upon arriving to the island, he formed an alliance with three other contestants: Susan, Rudy, and Kelly. They decided that they would all vote the same person off the island so that their chances of staying were maximised. Richard also "chipped in", did some "dirty work", and ingratiated himself by being the only person who could successfully catch fish. He also interacted with others strategically, and decided who to vote off based on who didn't like him, or who was more likeable than him (or the rest of the alliance). Thus, it is evident that being part of an alliance is definitely needed to win this capitalistic game, because the four people who were part of the only alliance on the island were the final contestants. In fact, in Rudy's (who came in third place) final comments were, "my advice for anybody who plays this game is form an alliance and stick with it" (Boesch, n.pag.). This is similar to corporate America, where many people form "cliques", "alliances", or "particular friendships" in order to "get ahead". Some people even betray others. We definitely saw this happen in the programme. This leads to another essential ingredient to the social arrangements: lying and deception. In fact, in episode nine, Richard (the winner) said to the camera, "outright lying is essential". He also revealed that part of his strategy was making a big deal of his fishing skills just to distract attention from his schemings. He further stated, "I'm not still on the island because I catch fish, I'm here because I'm smart" (qtd. in Damitol, n.pag.). For example, he once thought the others did not appreciate his fishing skills. Thus, he decided to stop fishing for a few days so that the group would appreciate him more. It was seemingly a "nasty plan", especially considering that at the time, the other tribe members were rationing their rice. However, it was this sort of behaviour that led him to win the game. Another example of the necessity for lying is illustrated in the fact that the alliance of Richard, Rudy, Sue, and Kelly (the only alliance) denied to the remaining competitors that they were scheming. Sue even blatantly lied to the Survivor host, Jeff Probst, when he asked her if there was an alliance. However, when talking to the cameras, they freely admitted to its existence. While the alliance strategy worked for most of the game, in the end, it was destined to dissolve when they had to start voting against each other. So, just as in a capitalistic society, it is ultimately, still "everyone for her/himself". The best illustration of this fact is the final quote that Kelly made, "I learned early on in the game [about trust and lying]. I had befriended her [Sue -- part of Kelly's alliance]; I trusted her and she betrayed me. She was lying to me, and was plotting against me from very early on. I realised that and I knew that. Therefore I decided not to trust her, not to be friends with her, not to be honest with her, for my own protection" (Wiglesworth, n.pag.). Therefore, even within the winning alliance, there was a fair amount of distrust and deception. Conclusion In conclusion, I have demonstrated how Survivor promotes ideals on two levels: economic and social. On the economic level, it endorses the pursuit of money, fame, and successful careers. On the social level, it purports preferred interpersonal strategies that are needed to "win" at the game of capitalism. In fact, it promotes the philosophy that "winning money at all costs is acceptable". We must win money. We must lie. We must scheme. We must deceive. We must win fame. Whether or not the audience interpreted the programme this way, what is obvious to everyone is the following: six months ago, the contestants on Survivor were ordinary American citizens; now they are famous and have endless opportunities for wealth. References Abele, R., M. Alexander and M. Lasswell. "They Will Survive." TV Guide 48.38 (2000): 56-63. Althusser, L. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Vintage Books, 1969, 1970. ---. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1971. ---. Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1990. Boesch, R. "Survivor Profiles: Rudy." CBS Survivors Website. 2000. 26 Sep. 2000 <http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor/survivors/rudy_f.shtml>. Cantor, M.G., and J. M. Cantor. Prime Time Television Content and Control. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1992. Cater, D. "Television and Thinking People." Television as a Social Force: New Approaches to TV Criticism. Ed. D. Cater and R. Adler. New York: Praeger Publications, 1975. 1-8. Corcoran, F. "Television as Ideological Apparatus: The Power and the Pleasure." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1 (1984): 131-45. Cortes, C. E. "Ethnic Groups and the American Dream(s)." Social Education 47.6 (1982): 401-3. Damitol. "Episode 9A -- 'Oh God! My Eyes! My Eyes!' or 'Richard Gets Nekkid'." Survivorsucks.com. 2000. 16 Oct. 2000 <http://www.survivorsucks.com/summaries.s1.9a.php>. Eagleton, T. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso, 1991. Ellis, K. "Queen for One Day at a Time." College English 38.8 (1977): 775-81. Freedman, C. "History, Fiction, Film, Television, Myth: The Ideology of M*A*S*H." The Southern Review 26.1 (1990): 89-106. Grambs, J. D. "Mom, Apple Pie, and the American Dream." Social Education 47.6 (1982): 405-9. Grossberg, L. "Strategies of Marxist Cultural Interpretation." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1 (1984): 392-421. Jones, G. Honey, I'm Home! Sitcoms Selling the American Dream. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992. Hatch, R. "Survivor Profiles: Richard." CBS Survivors Website. 2000. 26 Sep. 2000 <http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor/survivors/richard_f.shtml>. Hofeldt, R. L. "Cultural Bias in M*A*S*H." Society 15.5 (1978): 96-9. Lichter, S. R., L. S. Lichter, and S. Rothman. Watching America. New York: Prentice Hall, 1991. Millman, J., J. Stark, and B. Wyman. "'Survivor,' Complete." Salon Magazine 28 June 2000. 16 Oct. 2000 <http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/feature/2000/06/28/survivor_episodes/index.php>. Novak, M. "Television Shapes the Soul." Television as a Social Force: New Approaches to TV Criticism. Ed. D. Cater and R. Adler. New York: Praeger Publications, 1975. 9-20. Pryor, R. "Reading Ideology in Discourse: Charting a Rhetoric of Control." Unpublished Essay. Northern Illinois University, 1992. Rivlin, A. M. Reviving the American Dream. Washington, D. C.: The Brookings Institution, 1992. White, J. K. The New Politics of Old Values. Hanover: UP of New England, 1988. Wiglesworth, K. "Survivor Profiles: Kelly." CBS Survivors Website. 2000. 26 Sep. 2000 <http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor/survivors/kelly_f.shtml>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Carol Morgan. "Capitalistic Ideology as an 'Interpersonal Game': The Case of Survivor." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/survivor.php>. Chicago style: Carol Morgan, "Capitalistic Ideology as an 'Interpersonal Game': The Case of Survivor," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/survivor.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Carol Morgan. (2000) Capitalistic Ideology as an 'Interpersonal Game': The Case of Survivor. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/survivor.php> ([your date of access]).

In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism’s transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: “a work needs only to be interesting” (184).That art galleries could be sites of timely socio-political issues, rather than timeless intuitions undersigned by medium specificity, is one of the more familiar origin stories of postmodernism. Few artists symbolize this shift more than Hans Haacke, whose 2019 exhibition All Connected, at the New Museum, New York, examined the legacy of his outward-looking work. Born in Germany in 1936, and a New Yorker since 1965, Haacke has been linked to the term “institutional critique” since the mid 1980s, after Mel Ramsden’s coining in 1975, and the increased recognition of kindred spirits such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers. These artists have featured in books and essays by the likes of Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois, but they are also known for their own contributions to art discourse, producing hybrid conceptions of the intellectual postmodern artist as historian, critic and curator.Haacke was initially fascinated by kinetic sculpture in the early 1960s, taking inspiration from op art, systems art, and machine-oriented research collectives such as Zero (Germany), Gruppo N (Italy) and GRAV (France, an acronym of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel). Towards the end of the decade he started to produce more overtly socio-political work, creating what would become a classic piece from this period, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 (1969). Here, in a solo exhibition at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, the artist invited viewers to mark their birthplaces and places of residence on a map. Questioning the statistical demography of the Gallery’s avant-garde attendees, the exhibition anticipated the meticulous sociological character of much of his practice to come, grounding New York art – the centre of the art world – in local, social, and economic fabrics.In the forward to the catalogue of All Connected, New Museum Director Lisa Philips claims that Haacke’s survey exhibition provided a chance to reflect on the artist’s prescience, especially given the flourishing of art activism over the last five or so years. Philips pressed the issue of why no other American art institution had mounted a retrospective of his work in three decades, since his previous survey, Unfinished Business, at the New Museum in 1986, at its former, and much smaller, Soho digs (8). It suggests that other institutions have deemed Haacke’s work too risky, generating too much political heat for them to handle. It’s a reputation the artist has cultivated since the Guggenheim Museum famously cancelled his 1971 exhibition after learning his intended work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971) involved research into dubious New York real estate dealings. Guggenheim director Thomas Messer defended the censorship at the time, going so far as to describe it as an “alien substance that had entered the art museum organism” (Haacke, Framing 138). Exposé was this substance Messer dare not name: art that was too revealing, too journalistic, too partisan, and too politically viscid. (Three years later, Haacke got his own back with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974, exposing then Guggenheim board members’ connections to the copper industry in Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende had just been overthrown with US backing.) All Connected foregrounded these institutional reveals from time past, at a moment in 2019 when the moral accountability of the art institution was on the art world’s collective mind. The exhibition followed high-profile protests at New York’s Whitney Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Louvre, and the British Museum. These and other arts organisations have increasingly faced pressures, fostered by social media, to end ties with unethical donors, sponsors, and board members, with activist groups protesting institutional affiliations ranging from immigration detention centre management to opioid and teargas manufacturing. An awareness of the limits of individual agency and autonomy undoubtedly defines this era, with social media platforms intensifying the encumbrances of individual, group, and organisational identities. Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1, 1969 Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 2, 1969-71Unfinished BusinessUnderscoring Haacke’s activist credentials, Philips describes him as “a model of how to live ethically and empathetically in the world today”, and as a beacon of light amidst the “extreme political and economic uncertainty” of the present, Trump-presidency-calamity moment (7). This was markedly different to how Haacke’s previous New York retrospective, Unfinished Business, was received, which bore the weight of being the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York following the Guggenheim controversy. In the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, then New Museum director Marcia Tucker introduced his work as a challenge, cautiously claiming that he poses “trenchant questions” and that the institution accepts “the difficulties and contradictions” inherent to any museum staging of his work (6).Philips’s and Tucker’s distinct perspectives on Haacke’s practice – one as heroically ethical, the other as a sobering critical challenge – exemplify broader shifts in the perception of institutional critique (the art of the socio-political reveal) over this thirty-year period. In the words of Pamela M. Lee, between 1986 and 2019 the art world has undergone a “seismic transformation”, becoming “a sphere of influence at once more rapacious, acquisitive, and overweening but arguably more democratizing and ecumenical with respect to new audiences and artists involved” (87). Haacke’s reputation over this period has taken a similar shift, from him being a controversial opponent of art’s autonomy (an erudite postmodern conceptualist) to a figurehead for moral integrity and cohesive artistic experimentation.As Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out in the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, a potential trap of such a retrospective is that, through biographical positioning, Haacke might be seen as an “exemplary political artist” (210). With this, the specific political issues motivating his work would be overshadowed by the perception of the “great artist” – someone who brings single-issue politics into the narrative of postmodern art, but at the expense of the issues themselves. This is exactly what Douglas Crimp discovered in Unfinished Business. In a 1987 reflection on the show, Crimp argued that, when compared with an AIDS-themed display, Homo Video, staged at the New Museum at the same time, reviewers of Haacke’s exhibition tended to analyse his politics “within the context of the individual artist’s body of work … . Political issues became secondary to the aesthetic strategies of the producer” (34). Crimp, whose activism would be at the forefront of his career in subsequent years, was surprised at how Homo Video and Unfinished Business spawned different readings. Whereas works in the former exhibition tended to be addressed in terms of the artists personal and partisan politics, Haacke’s prompted reflection on the aesthetics-politics juxtaposition itself. For Crimp, the fact that “there was no mediation between these two shows”, spoke volumes about the divisions between political and activist art at the time.New York Times critic Michael Brenson, reiterating a comment made by Fredric Jameson in the catalogue for Unfinished Business, describes the timeless appearance of Haacke’s work in 1986, which is “surprising for an artist whose work is in some way about ideology and history” (Brenson). The implication is that the artist gives a surprisingly long aesthetic afterlife to the politically specific – to ordinarily short shelf-life issues. In this mode of critical postmodernism in which we are unable to distinguish clearly between intervening in and merely reproducing the logic of the system, Haacke is seen as an astute director of an albeit ambiguous push and pull between political specificity and aesthetic irreducibility, political externality and the internalist mode of art about art. Jameson, while granting that Haacke’s work highlights the need to reinvent the role of the “ruling class” in the complex, globalised socio-economic situation of postmodernism, claims that it does so as representative of the “new intellectual problematic” of postmodernism. Haacke, according Jameson, stages postmodernism’s “crisis of ‘mapping’” whereby capitalism’s totalizing, systemic forms are “handled” (note that he avoids “critiqued” or “challenged”) by focusing on their manifestation through particular (“micro-public”) institutional means (49, 50).We can think of the above examples as constituting the postmodern version of Haacke, who frames very specific political issues on the one hand, and the limitless incorporative power of appropriative practice on the other. To say this another way, Haacke, circa 1986, points to specific sites of power struggle at the same time as revealing their generic absorption by an art-world system grown accustomed to its “duplicate anything” parameters. For all of his political intent, the artistic realm, totalised in accordance with the postmodern image, is ultimately where many thought his gestures remained. The philosopher turned art critic Arthur Danto, in a negative review of Haacke’s exhibition, portrayed institutional critique as part of an age-old business of purifying art, maintaining that Haacke’s “crude” and “heavy-handed” practice is blind to how art institutions have always relied on some form of critique in order for them to continue being respected “brokers of spirit”. This perception – of Haacke’s “external” critiques merely serving to “internally” strengthen existing art structures – was reiterated by Leo Steinberg. Supportively misconstruing the artist in the exhibition catalogue, Steinberg writes that Haacke’s “political message, by dint of dissonance, becomes grating and shrill – but shrill within the art context. And while its political effectiveness is probably minimal, its effect on Minimal art may well be profound” (15). Hans Haacke, MOMA Poll, 1970 All ConnectedSo, what do we make of the transformed reception of Haacke’s work since the late 1980s: from a postmodern ouroboros of “politicizing aesthetics and aestheticizing politics” to a revelatory exemplar of art’s moral power? At a period in the late 1980s when the culture wars were in full swing and yet activist groups remained on the margins of what would become a “mainstream” art world, Unfinished Business was, perhaps, blindingly relevant to its times. Unusually for a retrospective, it provided little historical distance for its subject, with Haacke becoming a victim of the era’s propensity to “compartmentalize the interpretive registers of inside and outside and the terms corresponding to such spatial­izing coordinates” (Lee 83).If commentary surrounding this 2019 retrospective is anything to go by, politics no longer performs such a parasitic, oppositional or even dialectical relation to art; no longer is the political regarded as a real-world intrusion into the formal, discerning, longue-durée field of aesthetics. The fact that protests inside the museum have become more visible and vociferous in recent years testifies to this shift. For Jason Farrago, in his review of All Connected for the New York Times, “the fact that no person and no artwork stands alone, that all of us are enmeshed in systems of economic and social power, is for anyone under 40 a statement of the obvious”. For Alyssa Battistoni, in Frieze magazine, “if institutional critique is a practice, it is hard to see where it is better embodied than in organizing a union, strike or boycott”.Some responders to All Connected, such as Ben Lewis, acknowledge how difficult it is to extract a single critical or political strategy from Haacke’s body of work; however, we can say that, in general, earlier postmodern questions concerning the aestheticisation of the socio-political reveal no longer dominates the reception of his practice. Today, rather than treating art and politics are two separate but related entities, like form is to content, better ideas circulate, such as those espoused by Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, for whom what counts as political is not determined by a specific program, medium or forum, but by the capacity of any actor-network to disrupt and change a normative social fabric. Compare Jameson’s claim that Haacke’s corporate and museological tropes are “dead forms” – through which “no subject-position speaks, not even in protest” (38) – with Battistoni’s, who, seeing Haacke’s activism as implicit, asks the reader: “how can we take the relationship between art and politics as seriously as Haacke has insisted we must?”Crimp’s concern that Unfinished Business perpetuated an image of the artist as distant from the “political stakes” of his work did not carry through to All Connected, whose respondents were less vexed about the relation between art and politics, with many noting its timeliness. The New Museum was, ironically, undergoing its own equity crisis in the months leading up to the exhibition, with newly unionised staff fighting with the Museum over workers’ salaries and healthcare even as it organised to build a new $89-million Rem Koolhaas-designed extension. Battistoni addressed these disputes at-length, claiming the protests “crystallize perfectly the changes that have shaped the world over the half-century of Haacke’s career, and especially over the 33 years since his last New Museum exhibition”. Of note is how little attention Battistoni pays to Haacke’s artistic methods when recounting his assumed solidarity with these disputes, suggesting that works such as Creating Consent (1981), Helmosboro Country (1990), and Standortkultur (Corporate Culture) (1997) – which pivot on art’s public image versus its corporate umbilical cord – do not convey some special aesthetico-political insight into a totalizing capitalist system. Instead, “he has simply been an astute and honest observer long enough to remind us that our current state of affairs has been in formation for decades”.Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008 Hans Haacke, Wide White Flow, 1967/2008 Showing Systems Early on in the 1960s, Haacke was influenced by the American critic, artist, and curator Jack Burnham, who in a 1968 essay, “Systems Esthetics” for Artforum, inaugurated the loose conceptualist paradigm that would become known as “systems art”. Here, against Greenbergian formalism and what he saw as the “craft fetishism” of modernism, Burnham argues that “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” (30). Burnham thought that emergent contemporary artists were intuitively aware of the importance of the systems approach: the significant artist in 1968 “strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society”, and pays particular attention to relationships between organic and non-organic systems (31).As Michael Fried observed of minimalism in his now legendary 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, this shift in sixties art – signalled by the widespread interest in the systematic – entailed a turn towards the spatial, institutional, and societal contexts of receivership. For Burnham, art is not about “material entities” that beautify or modify the environment; rather, art exists “in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment” (31). At the forefront of his mind was land art, computer art, and research-driven conceptualist practice, which, against Fried, has “no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame” (32). In a 1969 lecture at the Guggenheim, Burnham confessed that his research concerned not just art as a distinct entity, but aesthetics in its broadest possible sense, declaring “as far as art is concerned, I’m not particularly interested in it. I believe that aesthetics exists in revelation” (Ragain).Working under the aegis of Burnham’s systems art, Haacke was shaken by the tumultuous and televised politics of late-1960s America – a time when, according to Joan Didion, a “demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community” (41). Haacke cites Martin Luther King’s assassination as an “incident that made me understand that, in addition to what I had called physical and biological systems, there are also social systems and that art is an integral part of the universe of social systems” (Haacke, Conversation 222). Haacke created News (1969) in response to this awareness, comprising a (pre-Twitter) telex machine that endlessly spits out live news updates from wire services, piling up rolls and rolls of paper on the floor of the exhibition space over the course of its display. Echoing Burnham’s idea of the artist as a programmer whose job is to “prepare new codes and analyze data”, News nonetheless presents the museum as anything but immune from politics, and technological systems as anything but impersonal (32).This intensification of social responsibility in Haacke’s work sets him apart from other, arguably more reductive techno-scientific systems artists such as Sonia Sheridan and Les Levine. The gradual transformation of his ecological and quasi-scientific sculptural experiments from 1968 onwards could almost be seen as making a mockery of the anthropocentrism described in Fried’s 1967 critique. Here, Fried claims not only that the literalness of minimalist work amounts to an emphasis on shape and spatial presence over pictorial composition, but also, in this “theatricality of objecthood” literalness paradoxically mirrors (153). At times in Fried’s essay the minimalist art object reads as a mute form of sociality, the spatial presence filled by the conscious experience of looking – the theatrical relationship itself put on view. Fried thought that viewers of minimalism were presented with themselves in relation to the entire world as object, to which they were asked not to respond in an engaged formalist sense but (generically) to react. Pre-empting the rise of conceptual art and the sociological experiments of post-conceptualist practice, Fried, unapprovingly, argues that minimalist artists unleash an anthropomorphism that “must somehow confront the beholder” (154).Haacke, who admits he has “always been sympathetic to so-called Minimal art” (Haacke, A Conversation 26) embraced the human subject around the same time that Fried’s essay was published. While Fried would have viewed this move as further illustrating the minimalist tendency towards anthropomorphic confrontation, it would be more accurate to describe Haacke’s subsequent works as social-environmental barometers. Haacke began staging interactions which, however dry or administrative, framed the interplays of culture and nature, inside and outside, private and public spheres, expanding art’s definition by looking to the social circulation and economy that supported it.Haacke’s approach – which seems largely driven to show, to reveal – anticipates the viewer in a way that Fried would disapprove, for whom absorbed viewers, and the irreduction of gestalt to shape, are the by-products of assessments of aesthetic quality. For Donald Judd, the promotion of interest over conviction signalled scepticism about Clement Greenberg’s quality standards; it was a way of acknowledging the limitations of qualitative judgement, and, perhaps, of knowledge more generally. In this way, minimalism’s aesthetic relations are not framed so much as allowed to “go on and on” – the artists’ doubt about aesthetic value producing this ongoing temporal quality, which conviction supposedly lacks.In contrast to Unfinished Business, the placing of Haacke’s early sixties works adjacent to his later, more political works in All Connected revealed something other than the tensions between postmodern socio-political reveal and modernist-formalist revelation. The question of whether to intervene in an operating system – whether to let such a system go on and on – was raised throughout the exhibition, literally and metaphorically. To be faced with the interactions of physical, biological, and social systems (in Condensation Cube, 1963-67, and Wide White Flow, 1967/2008, but also in later works like MetroMobiltan, 1985) is to be faced with the question of change and one’s place in it. Framing systems in full swing, at their best, Haacke’s kinetic and environmental works suggest two things: 1. That the systems on display will be ongoing if their component parts aren’t altered; and 2. Any alteration will alter the system as a whole, in minor or significant ways. Applied to his practice more generally, what Haacke’s work hinges on is whether or not one perceives oneself as part of its systemic relations. To see oneself implicated is to see beyond the work’s literal forms and representations. Here, systemic imbrication equates to moral realisation: one’s capacity to alter the system as the question of what to do. Unlike the phenomenology-oriented minimalists, the viewer’s participation is not always assumed in Haacke’s work, who follows a more hermeneutic model. In fact, Haacke’s systems are often circular, highlighting participation as a conscious disruption of flow rather than an obligation that emanates from a particular work (148).This is a theatrical scenario as Fried describes it, but it is far from an abandonment of the issue of profound value. In fact, if we accept that Haacke’s work foregrounds intervention as a moral choice, it is closer to Fried’s own rallying cry for conviction in aesthetic judgement. As Rex Butler has argued, Fried’s advocacy of conviction over sceptical interest can be understood as dialectical in the Hegelian sense: conviction is the overcoming of scepticism, in a similar way that Geist, or spirit, for Hegel, is “the very split between subject and object, in which each makes the other possible” (Butler). What is advanced for Fried is the idea of “a scepticism that can be remarked only from the position of conviction and a conviction that can speak of itself only as this scepticism” (for instance, in his attempt to overcome his scepticism of literalist art on the basis of its scepticism). Strong and unequivocal feelings in Fried’s writing are informed by weak and indeterminate feeling, just as moral conviction in Haacke – the feeling that I, the viewer, should do something – emerges from an awareness that the system will continue to function fine without me. In other words, before being read as “a barometer of the changing and charged atmosphere of the public sphere” (Sutton 16), the impact of Haacke’s work depends upon an initial revelation. It is the realisation not just that one is embroiled in a series of “invisible but fundamental” relations greater than oneself, but that, in responding to seemingly sovereign social systems, the question of our involvement is a moral one, a claim for determination founded through an overcoming of the systemic (Fry 31).Haacke’s at once open and closed works suit the logic of our algorithmic age, where viewers have to shift constantly from a position of being targeted to one of finding for oneself. Peculiarly, when Haacke’s online digital polls in All Connected were hacked by activists (who randomized statistical responses in order to compel the Museum “to redress their continuing complacency in capitalism”) the culprits claimed they did it in sympathy with his work, not in spite of it: “we see our work as extending and conversing with Haacke’s, an artist and thinker who has been a source of inspiration to us both” (Hakim). This response – undermining done with veneration – is indicative of the complicated legacy of his work today. Haacke’s influence on artists such as Tania Bruguera, Sam Durant, Forensic Architecture, Laura Poitras, Carsten Höller, and Andrea Fraser has less to do with a particular political ideal than with his unique promotion of journalistic suspicion and moral revelation in forms of systems mapping. It suggests a coda be added to the sentiment of All Connected: all might not be revealed, but how we respond matters. Hans Haacke, Large Condensation Cube, 1963–67ReferencesBattistoni, Alyssa. “After a Contract Fight with Its Workers, the New Museum Opens Hans Haacke’s ‘All Connected’.” Frieze 208 (2019).Bishara, Hakim. “Hans Haacke Gets Hacked by Activists at the New Museum.” Hyperallergic 21 Jan. 2010. <https://hyperallergic.com/538413/hans-haacke-gets-hacked-by-activists-at-the-new-museum/>.Brenson, Michael. “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke.” New York Times 19 Dec. 1988. <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/19/arts/artin-political-tone-worksby-hans-haacke.html>.Buchloh, Benjamin. “Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason.” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7.1 (1968).Butler, Rex. “Art and Objecthood: Fried against Fried.” Nonsite 22 (2017). <https://nonsite.org/feature/art-and-objecthood>.Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano Gioni (eds.). Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Crimp, Douglas. “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?” In Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1. Washington: Bay P, 1987.Danto, Arthur C. “Hans Haacke and the Industry of Art.” In Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (eds.), The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste. London: Routledge, 1987/1998.Didion, Joan. The White Album. London: 4th Estate, 2019.Farago, Jason. “Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners.” New York Times 31 Oct. 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/arts/design/hans-haacke-review-new-museum.html>.Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (June 1967).Fry, Edward. “Introduction to the Work of Hans Haacke.” In Hans Haacke 1967. Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011.Glueck, Grace. “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show.” New York Times 7 Apr. 1971.Gudel, Paul. “Michael Fried, Theatricality and the Threat of Skepticism.” Michael Fried and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2018.Haacke, Hans. Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-5. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1976.———. “Hans Haacke in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Haacke, Hans, et al. “A Conversation with Hans Haacke.” October 30 (1984).Haacke, Hans, and Brian Wallis (eds.). Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.“Haacke’s ‘All Connected.’” Frieze 25 Oct. 2019. <https://frieze.com/article/after-contract-fight-its-workers-new-museum-opens-hans-haackes-all-connected>.Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Complete Writings 1959–1975. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1965/1975.Lee, Pamela M. “Unfinished ‘Unfinished Business.’” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Ragain, Melissa. “Jack Burnham (1931–2019).” Artforum 19 Mar. 2019. <https://www.artforum.com/passages/melissa-ragain-on-jack-burnham-78935>.Sutton, Gloria. “Hans Haacke: Works of Art, 1963–72.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Tucker, Marcia. “Director’s Forward.” Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.

In the heady expansion of capital’s productive capacity during the post-war period, E.P. Thompson wondered optimistically at potentials accruing to humanity by accelerating automation. He asked, “If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the problem is not ‘how are men going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure?’ but ‘what will be the capacity for experience of the men who have this undirected time to live?’” (Thompson 36). Indeed, linear and economistic variants of Marxian materialism have long emphasised that the socialisation of production by the use of machinery will eventually free us from work. At the very least, the underemployment produced by the automation of pivotal labour roles is supposed to create a political subject capable of agitating successfully against bourgeois and capitalist hegemony. But contrary to these prognostications, the worker of 2019 is caught up in a process of generalising work far beyond what is considered necessary by tradition, or at least the convention of what David Harvey calls “embedded liberalism” (11). As Anne Helen Peterson wrote in a recent Buzzfeed article,even the trends millennials have popularized — like athleisure — speak to our self-optimization. Yoga pants might look sloppy to your mom, but they’re efficient: you can transition seamlessly from an exercise class to a Skype meeting to child pickup. We use Fresh Direct and Amazon because the time they save allows us to do more work. (Peterson)For the work-martyr, activity in its broadest Aristotelian sense is evaluated by and subordinated to the question of efficiency and productivity. Occupations of time that were once considered external to “work” as matters of “life” (to use Kathi Weeks’s vocabulary) are reconceived as waste when not deployed in the service of value-generation (Weeks 15).The point here, then, is to provide some answers for why the decrease in socially-necessary labour time in an age of automation has not coincided with the Thompsonian expansion of free time. The current dilemma of the neoliberal “work-martyr” is traceable to the political responses generated by crises in production during the depression and the stagflationary disaccumulation of the 1960s-70s, and the major victory in the “battle for ideas” was the transformation of the political subject into human capital. This “intensely constructed and governed” suite of possible values is tasked, according to Wendy Brown, “with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavours and ventures” (Brown 10). Connecting the creation of this subject in relation to personal or free time is important partly because of time’s longstanding importance to philosophies of subjectivity. But more to the point, the focus on time is important because it serves to demonstrate the economic foundations of the incursion of capitalist governance into the most private domains of existence. Against the criticism of Marx’s ‘abstract’ theory of value, one can see that the laws of capitalist accumulation make their mark in all parts of contemporary human being, including temporality. By tracing the emergence of afterwork as the unpaid continuation of the accumulation of value, one can show how each subject increasingly ‘lives’ capital. This marks a turning point in political economy. When work spills over a temporal limit, its relationship to reproduction is finally blurred to the point of indistinction. What this means for value-creation in 2019 is something in urgent need of critique.State ReproductionAccording to the Marxian theory, labour’s minimum cost is abstractly determined by the price of the labourer’s necessities. Once they have produced enough objects of value to cover these costs, the rest of their work is surplus value in the hands of the capitalist. The capitalist’s aim, then, is to extend the overall working-day for as long beyond the minimum as possible. Theoretically, the full 24 hours of the day may be used. The rise of machine production in the 19th century allowed the owners to make this theory a reality. The only thing that governed the extension of work-time was the physical minimum of labour-power’s reproduction (Marx 161). But this was on the provision that all the labourer’s “free” time was to be spent regrouping their energies. Anything in excess of this was a privilege: time wasted that could have been spent in the factory. “If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself”, says Marx, “he robs the capitalist” (162).This began to change with the socialisation of the work process and the increase in technical proficiency that labour demanded in early 20th-century industry. With the changes in the sophistication of the manufacture process, the labourer came to be factored in the production process less as an “appendage of the machine” and more as a collection of decisive skills. Fordism based itself around the recognition that capital itself was “dependent on a family-based reproduction” (Weeks 27). In Ford’s America, the sense that work’s intensity might supplant losses in the working day propelled owners of production to recognise the economic need of ensuring a robust culture of social reproduction. In capital’s original New Deal, Ford provided an increase in wages (the Five Dollar Day) in exchange for a rise in productivity (Dalla Costa v). To preserve the increased rhythm of industrial production required more than a robust wage, however. It required “the formation of a physically efficient and psychologically disciplined working class” (Dalla Costa 2). Companies began to hire sociologists to investigate how workers spent their spare time (Dalla Costa 8). They led the charge in a what we might call the first “anthropological revolution” of the American 20th century, whereby the improved wage of the worker was underpinned by the economisation of their reproduction. This was enabled by the cheapening of social necessities (and thus a reduction in socially-necessary labour time) in profound connection to the development of household economy on the backs of unpaid female labour (Weeks 25).This arrangement between capital and labour persisted until 1929. When the inevitable crisis came, however, wages faltered, and many workers joined the ranks of the unemployed. Unable to afford even the basics of their own reproduction, the working-class looked to the state. They created political and social pressure through marches, demonstrations, attacks on shops and the looting of supply trucks (Dalla Costa 40). The state held out against them, but the crisis in production eventually reached such a point of intensity that the government was forced to intervene. Hoover instituted the Emergency Relief Act and Financial Reconstruction Corporation in 1932. This was expanded the following year by FDR’s New Deal, transforming Emergency Relief into a federal institution and creating the Civil Works Association to stimulate the job market (Dalla Costa 63). The security of the working class was decisively linked to the state through the wage guarantees, welfare measures and even the legal guarantee of collective bargaining.For the most part, the state’s intervention in social reproduction took the pressure off industry by ensuring that the workforce would remain able to handle its burdens and that the unemployed would remain employable. It guaranteed a minimum wage for the employed to ensure that demand didn’t collapse, and provided care outside the workforce to women, children and the elderly.Once the state took responsibility for reproduction, however, it immediately became interested in how free time could be made efficient and cost effective. Abroad, they noted the example of European statist and corporativist approaches. Roosevelt sent a delegation to Europe to study the various measures taken by fascist and United Front governments to curb the effects of economic crisis (Dogliani 247). Among these was Mussolini’s OND (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro) which sought to accumulate the free time of workers to the ends of production. Part of this required the responsibilisation of the broader community not only for regeneration of labour-power but the formation of a truly fascist political subject.FDR’s social reform program was able to reproduce this at home by following the example of workers’ community organisation during the depression years. Throughout the early ‘30s, self-help cooperatives, complete with “their own systems of payment in goods or currency” emerged among the unemployed (Dalla Costa 61). Black markets in consumer goods and informal labour structures developed in all major cities (Dalla Costa 34). Subsistence goods were self-produced in a cottage industry of unpaid domestic labour by both men and women (Dalla Costa 71). The paragon of self-reproducing communities was urbanised black Americans, whose internal solidarity had saved lives throughout the depression. The state took notice of these informal economies of production and reproduction, and started to incorporate the possibility of community engineering into their national plan. Roosevelt convened the Civilian Conservation Corps to absorb underemployed elements of the American workforce and recover consumer demand through direct state sponsorship (wages) (Dogliani, 247). The Committee of Industrial Organisation was transformed into a “congress” linking workers directly to the state (Dalla Costa 74). Minium wages were secured in the supreme court in 1937, then hiked in 1938 (78). In all, the state emerged at this time as a truly corporativist entity- the guarantor of employment and of class stability. From Social Reproduction to Human Capital InvestmentSo how do we get from New Deal social engineering to yoga pants? The answer is deceptively simple. The state transformed social reproduction into a necessary part of the production process. But this also meant that it was instrumentalised. The state only had to fund its workforce’s reproduction so long as this guaranteed productivity. After the war, this was maintained by a form of “embedded liberalism” which sought to provide full employment, economic growth and welfare for its citizens while anchoring the international economy in the Dollar’s gold-value. However, by providing stable increases in “relative value” (wages), this form of state investment incentivised capital flight and its spectacular consequent: deindustrialisation. The “embedded liberalism” of the state-capital-labour compromise began to breakdown with a new crisis of accumulation (Harvey 11-12). The relocation of production to non-union states and decolonised globally-southern sites of hyper-exploitation led to an ‘urban crisis’ in the job market. But as capitalist expansion carried on abroad, inflation kept dangerous pace with the rate of unemployment. This “stagflation” put irresistible pressure on the post-war order. The Bretton-Woods policy of maintaining fixed interest rates while pinning the dollar to gold was abandoned in 1971 and exchange rates were floated all over the world (Harvey 12). The spectre of a new crisis loomed, but one which couldn’t be resolved by the simple state sponsorship of production and reproduction.While many solutions were offered in place of this, one political vision singled out the state’s intervention into reproduction as the cause of the crisis. The ‘neoliberal’ political revolution began at the level of individual groups of capitalist agitants seeking governmental influence in a crusade against communism. It was given its first run on the historical pitch in Chile as part of the CIA-sponsored Pinochet revanchism, and then imported to NYC to deal with the worsening urban crisis of the 1970s. Instead of focusing on production (which required state intervention to proceed without crisis), neoliberal theory promulgated a turn to monetisation and financialisation. The rule of the New York banks after they forced the City into near-bankruptcy in 1975 prescribed total austerity in order to make good on its debts. The government was forced by capital itself to withdraw from investment in the reproduction of its citizens and workers. This was generalised to a federal policy as Reagan sought to address the decades-long deficit during the early years of his presidential term. Facilitating the global flow of finance and the hegemony of supranational institutions like the IMF, the domestic labour force now became beholden to an international minimum of socially-necessary labour time. At the level of domestic labour, the reduction of labour’s possible cost to this minimum had dramatic consequences. International competition allowed the physical limitations of labour to, once again, vanish from sight. Removed from the discourse of reproduction rights, the capitalist edifice was able to focus on changing the ratio of socially necessary labour to surplus. The mechanism that enabled them to do so was competition among the workforce. With the opening of the world market, capital no longer had to worry about the maintenance of domestic demand.But competition was not sufficient to pull off so grand a feat. What was required was a broader “battle of ideas”; the second anthropological revolution of the American century. The protections that workers had relied upon since the Fordist compromise and the corporativist solution eroded as the new “class-power” of the bourgeoisie levelled neoliberal assaults against associated labour (Harvey 23). While unions were gradually disempowered to fight the inevitable tide of deindustrialisation and capital flight, individual workers were coddled by a stream of neoliberal propaganda promising “Freedom” to those who would leave the stifling atmosphere of collective association. The success of this double enervation crippled union power, and the capitalist could rely increasingly on internal workplace wage stratification to regulate labour at an enterprise level (Dalla Costa 25). Incentive structures transformed labour rights into privileges; imagining old entitlements as concessions from above. In the last thirty years, the foundation of worker protections at large has, according to Brown, become illegible (Brown 38).Time and ValueThe reduction of time needed to produce has not coincided with an expansion of free time. The neoliberal anthropological revolution has wormed its way into the depth of the individual subject’s temporalising through a dual assault on labour conditions and propaganda. The privatisation of reproduction means that its necessary minimum is once again the subject of class struggle. Time spent unproductively outside the workplace now not only robs the capitalist, but the worker. If an activity isn’t a means to increase one’s “experience” (the vector of employability), it is time poorly spent. The likelihood of being hired for a job, in professional industries especially, is dependent on your ability to outperform others not only in your talents and skills, but in your own exploitability. Brown points out that the groups traditionally defined by the “middle strata … works more hours for less pay, fewer benefits, less security, and less promise of retirement or upward mobility than at any time in the past century” (Brown 28-29).This is what is meant by the transformation of workers into ‘human capital’. As far as the worker is concerned, the capitalist no longer purchases their labour-power: they purchase the sum of their experiences and behaviours. A competitive market has emerged for these personality markers. As a piece of human capital, one must expend one’s time not only in reproduction, but the production of their own surplus value. Going to a play adds culture points to your brand; speaking a second language gives you a competitive edge; a robust Instagram following is the difference between getting or missing out on a job. For Jess Whyte, this means that the market is now able to govern in place of the state. It exercises a command over people’s lives in and out of the workplace “which many an old tyrannical state would have envied” (Whyte 20).There is a question here of change and continuity. A survey of the 20th century shows that the reduction of ‘socially necessary labour time’ does not necessarily mean a reduction in time spent at work. In fact, the minimum around which capitalist production circulates is not worktime but wages. It is only at the political level that the working class prevented capital from pursuing this minimum. With the political victory of neoliberalism as a “restoration of class power” to the bourgeoisie, however, this minimum becomes a factor at the heart of all negotiations between capital and labour. The individual labourer lying at the heart of the productive process is reduced to his most naked form: human capital. This capital must spend all its time productively for its own benefit. Mundane tasks are avoidable, as stipulated by the piece of human capital sometimes known as Anne Helen Peterson, if they “wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better”. People are never really after-work under neoliberalism; their spare time is structurally adjusted into auxiliary labour. Competition has achieved what the state could never have dreamed of: a total governance of spare hours. This governance unites journalists tweeting from bed with Amazon workers living where they work, not to mention early-career academics working over a weekend to publish an article in an online journal that is not even paying them. These are all ways in which the privatisation of social reproduction transforms afterwork into unpaid overtime.ReferencesBrown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.Dalla Costa, Maria. Family, Welfare, and the State: Between Progressivism and the New Deal. Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2015.Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Engels, Friedrich, and Karl Marx. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. R.C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978.Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Vol. 1 and 2. Trans. E. Aveling and E. Untermann. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 2013.Peterson, Anne Helen. “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” Buzzfeed. 10 Oct. 2019 <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work>.Postone, Moishe. Time, Labour and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” In Stanley Aronowitz and Michael J. Roberts, eds., Class: The Anthology. Hoboken: Wiley, 2018.Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018.Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.Whyte, Jessica. “The Invisible Hand of Friedrich Hayek: Submission and Spontaneous Order.” Political Theory (2017): 1-29.

IntroductionFor Gilles Deleuze, computational processes cannot yield the anomalous, or that which is unprecedented in form and content. He suggests that because computing functions are mechanically standardised, they always share the same ontic character. M. Beatrice Fazi claims that the premises of his critique are flawed. Her monograph Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics presents an integrative reading of thinkers including Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and Georg Cantor. From this eclectic basis, Fazi demonstrates that computers differ from humans in their modes of creation, yet still produce qualitative anomaly. This article applies her research to the cultural phenomenon of live-coded music. Live coding artists improvise music by writing audio computer functions which produce sound in real time. I draw from Fazi’s reading of Deleuze and Bergson to investigate the aesthetic mechanisms of live coding. In doing so, I give empirical traction to her argument for the generative properties of computers.Part I: Reconciling the Discrete and the Continuous In his book Difference and Repetition, Deleuze defines “the new” as that which radically differs from the known and familiar (136). Deleuzean novelty bears unpredictable creative potential; as he puts it, the “new” “calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition” (136). These forces issue from a space of alterity which he describes as a “terra incognita” and a “completely other model” (136). Fazi writes that Deleuze’s conception of novelty informs his aesthetic philosophy. She notes that Deleuze follows the etymological origins of the word “aesthetic”, which lie in the Ancient Greek term aisthēsis, or perception from senses and feelings (Fazi, “Digital Aesthetics” 5). Deleuze observes that senses, feelings, and cognition are interwoven, and suggests that creative processes beget new links between these faculties. In Fazi’s words, Deleuzean aesthetic research “opposes any existential modality that separates life, thought, and sensation” (5). Here, aesthetics does not denote a theory of art and is not concerned with such traditional topics as beauty, taste, and genre. Aesthetics-as-aisthēsis investigates the conditions which make it possible to sense, cognise, and create anomalous phenomena, or that which has no recognisable forebear.Fazi applies Deleuzean aesthetics towards an ontological account of computation. Towards this end, she challenges Deleuze’s precept that computers cannot produce the aesthetic “new”. As she explains, Deleuze denies this ability to computers on the grounds that computation operates on discrete variables, or data which possess a quantitatively finite array of possible values (6). Deleuze understands discreteness as both a quantitative and ontic condition, and implies that computation cannot surpass this originary state. In his view, only continuous phenomena are capable of aisthēsis as the function which yields ontic novelty (5). Moreover, he maintains that continuous entities cannot be represented, interpreted, symbolised, or codified. The codified discreteness of computation is therefore “problematic” within his aesthetic framework “inasmuch it exemplifies yet another development of the representational”. or a repetition of sameness (6). The Deleuzean act of aisthēsis does not compute, repeat, or iterate what has come before. It yields nothing less than absolute difference.Deleuze’s theory of creation as differentiation is prefigured by Bergson’s research on multiplicity, difference and time. Bergson holds that the state of being multiple is ultimately qualitative rather than quantitative, and that multiplicity is constituted by qualitative incommensurability, or difference in kind as opposed to degree (Deleuze, Bergsonism 42). Qualia are multiple when they cannot not withstand equivocation through a common substrate. Henceforth, entities that comprise discrete data, including all products and functions of digital computation, cannot aspire to true multiplicity or difference. In The Creative Mind, Bergson considers the concept of time from this vantage point. As he indicates, time is normally understood as numerable and measurable, especially by mathematicians and scientists (13). He sets out to show that this conception is an illusion, and that time is instead a process by which continuous qualia differentiate and self-actualise as unique instances of pure time, or what he calls “duration as duration”. As he puts it,the measuring of time never deals with duration as duration; what is counted is only a certain number of extremities of intervals, or moments, in short, virtual halts in time. To state that an incident will occur at the end of a certain time t, is simply to say that one will have counted, from now until then, a number t of simultaneities of a certain kind. In between these simultaneities anything you like may happen. (12-13)The in-between space where “anything you like may happen” inspired Deleuze’s notion of ontic continua, or entities whose quantitative limitlessness connects with their infinite aesthetic potentiality. For Bergson, those who believe that time is finite and measurable “cannot succeed in conceiving the radically new and unforeseeable”, a sentiment which also appears to have influenced Deleuze (The Creative Mind 17).The legacy of Bergson and Deleuze is traceable to the present era, where the alleged irreconcilability of the discrete and the continuous fuels debates in digital media studies. Deleuze is not the only thinker to explore this tension: scholars in the traditions of phenomenology, critical theory, and post-Marxism have positioned the continuousness of thought and feeling against the discreteness of computation (Fazi, “Digital Aesthetics” 7). Fazi contributes to this discourse by establishing that the ontic character of computation is not wholly predicated on quantitatively discrete elements. Drawing from Turing’s theory of computability, she claims that computing processes incorporate indeterminable and uncomputable forces in open-ended processes that “determine indeterminacy” (Fazi, Contingent Computation 1). She also marshals philosopher Stamatia Portanova, whose book Moving Without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughtsindicates that discrete and continuous components merge in processes that digitise bodily motion (Portanova 3). In a similar but more expansive maneuver, Fazi declares that the discrete and continuous coalesce in all computational operations. Although Fazi’s work applies to all forms of computing, it casts new light on specific devices, methodologies, and human-computer interfaces. In the next section, I use her reading of Bergsonian elements in Deleuze to explore the contemporary artistic practice of live coding. My reading situates live coding in the context of studies on improvisation and creative indeterminacy.Part II: Live Coding as Contingent Improvisational PracticeThe term “live coding” describes an approach to programming where computer functions immediately render as images and/or sound. Live coding interfaces typically feature two windows: one for writing source code and another which displays code outcomes, for example as graphic visualisations or audio. The practice supports the rapid evaluation, editing, and exhibition of code in progress (“A History of Live Programming”). Although it encompasses many different activities, the phrase “live coding” is most often used in the context of computer music. In live coding performances or “AlgoRaves,” musicians write programs on stage in front of audiences. The programming process might be likened to playing an instrument. Typically, the coding interface is projected on a large screen, allowing audiences to see the musical score as it develops (Magnusson, “Improvising with the Threnoscope” 19). Technologists, scholars, and educators have embraced live coding as both a creative method and an object of study. Because it provides immediate feedback, it is especially useful as a pedagogical aide. Sonic Pi, a user-friendly live coding language, was originally designed to teach programming basics to children. It has since been adopted by professional musicians across the world (Aaron). Despites its conspicuousness in educational and creative settings, scholars have rarely explored live coding in the context of improvisation studies. Programmers Gordan Kreković and Antonio Pošćic claim that this is a notable oversight, as improvisation is its “most distinctive feature”. In their view, live coding is most simply defined as an improvisational method, and its strong emphasis on chance sets it apart from other approaches to computer music (Kreković and Pošćić). My interest with respect to live coding lies in how its improvisational mechanisms blend computational discreteness and continuous “real time”. I do not mean to suggest that live coding is the only implement for improvising music with computers. Any digital instrument can be used to spontaneously play, produce, and record sound. What makes live coding unique is that it merges the act of playing with the process of writing notation: musicians play for audiences in the very moment that they produce a written score. The process fuses the separate functions of performing, playing, seeing, hearing, and writing music in a patently Deleuzean act of aisthēsis. Programmer Thor Magnusson writes that live coding is the “offspring” of two very different creative practices: first, “the formalization and encoding of music”; second, “open work resisting traditional forms of encoding” (“Algorithms as Scores” 21). By “traditional forms of encoding”, Magnusson refers to computer programs which function only insofar as source code files are static and immutable. By contrast, live coding relies on the real-time elaboration of new code. As an improvisational art, the process and product of live-coding does not exist without continuous interventions from external forces.My use of the phrase “real time” evokes Bergson’s concept of “pure time” or “duration as duration”. “Real time” phenomena are understood to occur instantaneously, that is, at no degree of temporal removal from those who produce and experience them. However, Bergson suggests that instantaneity is a myth. By his account, there always exists some degree of removal between events as they occur and as they are perceived, even if this gap is imperceptibly small. Regardless of size, the indelible space in time has important implications for theories of improvisation. For Deleuze and Bergson, each continuous particle of time is a germinal seed for the new. Fazi uses the word “contingent” to describe this ever-present, infinite potentiality (Contingent Computation, 1). Improvisation studies scholar Dan DiPiero claims that the concept of contingency not only qualifies future possibilities, but also describes past events that “could have been otherwise” (2). He explains his reasoning as follows:before the event, the outcome is contingent as in not-yet-known; after the event, the result is contingent as in could-have-been-otherwise. What appears at first blush a frustrating theoretical ambiguity actually points to a useful insight: at any given time in any given process, there is a particular constellation of openings and closures, of possibilities and impossibilities, that constitute a contingent situation. Thus, the contingent does not reference either the open or the already decided but both at once, and always. (2)Deleuze might argue that only continuous phenomena are contingent, and that because they are quantitatively finite, the structures of computational media — including the sound and notation of live coding scores — can never “be otherwise” or contingent as such. Fazi intervenes by indicating the role of quantitative continuousness in all computing functions. Moreover, she aligns her project with emerging theories of computing which “focus less on internal mechanisms and more on external interaction”, or interfaces with continuous, non-computational contexts (“Digital Aesthetics,” 19). She takes computational interactions with external environments, such as human programmers and observers, as “the continuous directionality of composite parts” (19).To this point, it matters that discrete objects always exist in relation to continuous environments, and that discrete objects make up continuous fluxes when mobilised as part of continuous temporal processes. It is for this reason that Portanova uses the medium of dance to explore the entanglement of discreteness and temporal contingency. As with music, the art of dance depends on the continuous unfolding of time. Fazi writes that Portanova’s study of choreography reveals “the unlimited potential that every numerical bit of a program, or every experiential bit of a dance (every gesture and step), has to change and be something else” (Contingent Computation, 39). As with the zeroes and ones of a binary computing system, the footfalls of a dance materialise as discrete parts which inhabit and constitute continuous vectors of time. Per Deleuzean aesthetics-as-aisthēsis, these parts yield new connections between sound, space, cognition, and feeling. DiPiero indicates that in the case of improvised artworks, the ontic nature of these links defies anticipation. In his words, improvisation forces artists and audiences to “think contingency”. “It is not that discrete, isolated entities connect themselves to form something greater”, he explains, “but rather that the distance between the musician as subject and the instrument as object is not clearly defined” (3). So, while live coder and code persist as separate phenomena, the coding/playing/performing process highlights the qualitative indeterminacy of the space between them. Each moment might beget the unrecognisable — and this ineluctable, ever-present surprise is essential to the practice.To be sure, there are elements of predetermination in live coding practices. For example, musicians often save and return to specific functions in the midst of performances. But as Kreković and Pošćić point out all modes of improvisation rely on patterning and standardisation, including analog and non-computational techniques. Here, they cite composer John Cage’s claim that there exists no “true” improvisation because artists “always find themselves in routines” (Kreković and Pošćić). In a slight twist on Cage, Kreković and Pošćić insist that repetition does not make improvisation “untrue”, but rather that it points to an expanded role for indeterminacy in all forms of composition. As they write,[improvisation] can both be viewed as spontaneous composition and, when distilled to its core processes, a part of each compositional approach. Continuous and repeated improvisation can become ingrained, classified, and formalised. Or, if we reverse the flow of information, we can consider composition to be built on top of quiet, non-performative improvisations in the mind of the composer. (Kreković and Pošćić)This commentary echoes Deleuze’s thoughts on creativity and ontic continuity. To paraphrase Kreković and Pošćić, the aisthēsis of sensing, feeling, and thinking yields quiet, non-performative improvisations that play continuously in each individual mind. Fazi’s reading of Deleuze endows computable phenomena with this capacity. She does not endorse a computational theory of cognition that would permit computers to think and feel in the same manner as humans. Instead, she proposes a Deleuzean aesthetic capacity proper to computation. Live coding exemplifies the creative potential of computers as articulated by Fazi in Contingent Computation. Her research has allowed me to indicate live coding as an embodiment of Deleuze and Bergson’s theories of difference and creativity. Importantly, live coding affirms their philosophical premises not in spite of its technologised discreteness — which they would have considered problematic — but because it leverages discreteness in service of the continuous aesthetic act. My essay might also serve as a prototype for studies on digitality which likewise aim to supersede the divide between discrete and continuous media. As I have hopefully demonstrated, Fazi’s framework allows scholars to apprehend all forms of computation with enhanced clarity and openness to new possibilities.Coda: From Aesthetics to PoliticsBy way of a coda, I will reflect on the relevance of Fazi’s work to contemporary political theory. In “Digital Aesthetics”, she makes reference to emerging “oppositions to the mechanization of life” from “post-structuralist, postmodernist and post-Marxist” perspectives (7). One such argument comes from philosopher Bernard Stiegler, whose theory of psychopower conceives “the capture of attention by technological means” as a political mechanism (“Biopower, Psychopower and the Logic of the Scapegoat”). Stiegler is chiefly concerned with the psychic impact of discrete technological devices. As he argues, the habitual use of these instruments advances “a proletarianization of the life of the mind” (For a New Critique of Political Economy 27). For Stiegler, human thought is vulnerable to discretisation processes, which effects the loss of knowledge and quality of life. He considers this process to be a form of political hegemony (34).Philosopher Antoinette Rouvroy proposes a related theory called “algorithmic governmentality” to describe the political effects of algorithmic prediction mechanisms. As she claims, predictive algorithms erode “the excess of the possible on the probable”, or all that cannot be accounted for in advance by statistical probabilities. In her words,all these events that can occur and that we cannot predict, it is the excess of the possible on the probable, that is everything that escapes it, for instance the actuarial reality with which we try precisely to make the world more manageable in reducing it to what is predictable … we have left this idea of the actuarial reality behind for what I would call a “post-actuarial reality” in which it is no longer about calculating probabilities but to account in advance for what escapes probability and thus the excess of the possible on the probable. (8)In the past five years, Stiegler and Rouvroy have collaborated on research into the politics of technological determinacy. The same issue concerned Deleuze almost three decades ago: his 1992 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control” warns that future subjugation will proceed as technological prediction and enclosure. He writes of a dystopian society which features a “numerical language of control … made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it” (5). The society of control reduces individuals to “dividuals”, or homogenised and interchangeable numeric fractions (5). These accounts of political power equate digital discreteness with ontic finitude, and suggest that ubiquitous digital computing threatens individual agency and societal diversity. Stiegler and Deleuze envision a sort of digital reification of human subjectivity; Rouvroy puts forth the idea that algorithmic development will reduce the possibilities inherent in social life to mere statistical likelihoods. While Fazi’s work does not completely discredit these notions, it might instead be used to scrutinise their assumptions. If computation is not ontically finite, then political allegations against it must consider its opposition to human life with greater nuance and rigor.ReferencesAaron, Sam. “Programming as Performance.” Tedx Talks. YouTube, 22 July 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK1mBqKvIyU&t=333s>.“A History of Live Programming.” Live Prog Blog. 13 Jan. 2013. <liveprogramming.github.io/liveblog/2013/01/a-history-of-live-programming/>.Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York City: Carol Publishing Group, 1992.———. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Trans. F.L. Pogson. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2001.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York City: Columbia UP, 1994.———. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7.———. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York City: Zone Books, 1991.DiPiero, Dan. “Improvisation as Contingent Encounter, Or: The Song of My Toothbrush.” Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études Critiques en Improvisation 12.2 (2018). <https://www.criticalimprov.com/index.php/csieci/article/view/4261>.Fazi, M. Beatrice. Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018.———. “Digital Aesthetics: The Discrete and the Continuous.” Theory, Culture & Society 36.1 (2018): 3-26.Fortune, Stephen. “What on Earth Is Livecoding?” Dazed Digital, 14 May 2013. <https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/16150/1/what-on-earth-is-livecoding>.Kreković, Gordan, and Antonio Pošćić. “Modalities of Improvisation in Live Coding.” Proceedings of xCoaX 2019, the 7th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X. Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, Italy, 5 July 2019.Magnusson, Thor. “Algorithms as Scores: Coding Live Music.” Leonardo Music Journal 21 (2011): 19-23. ———. “Improvising with the Threnoscope: Integrating Code, Hardware, GUI, Network, and Graphic Scores.” Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. Goldsmiths, University of London, London, England, 1 July 2014.Portanova, Stamatia. Moving without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 2013.Rouvroy, Antoinette.“The Digital Regime of Truth: From the Algorithmic Governmentality to a New Rule of Law.” Trans. Anaïs Nony and Benoît Dillet. La Deleuziana: Online Journal of Philosophy 3 (2016). <http://www.ladeleuziana.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Rouvroy-Stiegler_eng.pdf>Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Malden: Polity Press, 2012.———. “Biopower, Psychopower and the Logic of the Scapegoat.” Ars Industrialis (no date given). <www.arsindustrialis.org/node/2924>.

Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. Examples include the unconventional courtship narratives of blues singers Muddy Waters and Mississippi John Hurt, the ritualised storytelling tradition of country performers Doye O’Dell and Tommy Faile, and historicised accounts of the Civil Rights struggle provided by Ron Sexsmith and Tina Turner. References Argenti, Paul. “Collaborating With Activists: How Starbucks Works With NGOs.” California Management Review 47.1 (2004): 91–116. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Bridges, John, and R. Serge Denisoff. “Changing Courtship Patterns in the Popular Song: Horton and Carey revisited.” Popular Music and Society 10.3 (1986): 29–45. Carey, James. “Changing Courtship Patterns in the Popular Song.” The American Journal of Sociology 74.6 (1969): 720–31. Cashmere, Ellis. The Black Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 1997. “Coffee.” Theme Time Radio Hour hosted by Bob Dylan, XM Satellite Radio. 31 May 2006. Cooper, B. Lee, and William L. Schurk. “You’re the Cream in My Coffee: A Discography of Java Jive.” Popular Music and Society 23.2 (1999): 91–100. Crow, Sheryl. “Coffee Shop.” Beacon Theatre, New York City. 17 Mar. 1995. YouTube 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_-bDAjASQI ›. Curry, Andrew. “Drugs in Jazz and Rock Music.” Clinical Toxicology 1.2 (1968): 235–44. Dawson, Michael C. “A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s) and Black Politics.” Public Culture 7.1 (1994): 195–223. de Larios, Margaret. “Alone, Together: The Social Culture of Music and the Coffee Shop.” URC Student Scholarship Paper 604 (2011). 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://scholar.oxy.edu/urc_student/604›. Englis, Basil, Michael Solomon and Anna Olofsson. “Consumption Imagery in Music Television: A Bi-Cultural Perspective.” Journal of Advertising 22.4 (1993): 21–33. Fox, Aaron. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Fox, Aaron. “The Jukebox of History: Narratives of Loss and Desire in the Discourse of Country Music.” Popular Music 11.1 (1992): 53–72. Garofalo, Reebee. “Culture Versus Commerce: The Marketing of Black Popular Music.” Public Culture 7.1 (1994): 275–87. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Hamilton, Andy. Aesthetics and Music. London: Continuum, 2007. Harris, Craig. “Starbucks Opens Hear Music Shop in Bellevue.” Seattle Post Intelligencer 23 Nov. 2006. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Starbucks-opens-Hear-Music-shop-in-Bellevue-1220637.php›. Harris, John. “Lay Latte Lay.” The Guardian 1 Jul. 2005. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/jul/01/2?INTCMP=SRCH›. Holt, Douglas. “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding.” Journal of Consumer Research 29 (2002): 70–90. Horton, Donald. “The Dialogue of Courtship in Popular Songs.” American Journal of Sociology 62.6 (1957): 569–78. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Juliano, Laura, and Roland Griffiths. “A Critical Review of Caffeine Withdrawal: Empirical Validation of Symptoms and Signs, Incidence, Severity, and Associated Features.” Psychopharmacology 176 (2004): 1–29. Koller, Veronika. “‘The World’s Local Bank’: Glocalisation as a Strategy in Corporate Branding Discourse.” Social Semiotics 17.1 (2007): 111–31. Lawson, Rob A. Jim Crow’s Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945 (Making the Modern South). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2010. Love, Harold. “How Music Created A Public.” Criticism 46.2 (2004): 257–72. “Loxcel Starbucks Map”. Loxcel.com 1 Mar. 2012 ‹loxcel.com/sbux-faq.hmtl›. Lovett, Richard. “Coffee: The Demon Drink?” New Scientist 2518. 24 Sep. 2005. 1 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725181.700›. Lynskey, Dorian. “Stir It Up: Starbucks Has Changed the Music Industry with its Deals with Dylan and Alanis. What’s Next?”. The Guardian 6 Oct. 2005: 18. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/oct/06/popandrock.marketingandpr›. Lyttle, Thomas, and Michael Montagne. “Drugs, Music, and Ideology: A Social Pharmacological Interpretation of the Acid House Movement.” The International Journal of the Addictions 27.10 (1992): 1159–77. McCracken, Grant. “Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods.” Journal of Consumer Research 13.1 (1986): 71–84. McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. London: Abacus, 1997. “New Music News” 120 Minutes MTV 28 Sep. 1986. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnqjqXztc0o›. O’Neil, Valerie. “Starbucks Refines its Entertainment Strategy.” Starbucks Newsroom 24 Apr. 2008. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://news.starbucks.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=48›. Pincus, Steve. “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture.” The Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 807–34. Primack, Brian, Madeline Dalton, Mary Carroll, Aaron Agarwal, and Michael Fine. “Content Analysis of Tobacco, Alcohol, and Other Drugs in Popular Music.” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine 162.2 (2008): 169–75. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004676/›. Ramsey, Guthrie P. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Rojek, Chris. Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Polity P, 2007. Rosenbaum, Jill, and Lorraine Prinsky. “Sex, Violence and Rock ‘N’ Roll: Youths’ Perceptions of Popular Music.” Popular Music and Society 11.2 (1987): 79–89. Shapiro, Harry. Waiting for the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music. London: Quartet Books, 1988. Singer, Merrill, and Greg Mirhej. “High Notes: The Role of Drugs in the Making of Jazz.” Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse 5.4 (2006):1–38. Squires, Catherine R. “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres.” Communication Theory 12.4 (2002): 446–68. Thompson, Craig J., and Zeynep Arsel. “The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers’ (Anticorporate) Experiences of Glocalization.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004.): 631–42. Thompson, Erik. “Secret Stash Records Releases Forgotten Music in Stylish Packages: Meet Founders Cory Wong and Eric Foss.” CityPages 18 Jan. 2012. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.citypages.com/2012-01-18/music/secret-stash-records-releases-forgotten-music-in-stylish-packages/›.Tickle, Cindy. “Sheryl Crow Performs at Starbucks Annual Shareholders Meeting.” Examiner.com24 Mar. 2010. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.examiner.com/starbucks-in-national/sheryl-crow-performs-at-starbucks-annual-shareholders-meeting-photos›.Tolson, Gerald H., and Michael J. Cuyjet. “Jazz and Substance Abuse: Road to Creative Genius or Pathway to Premature Death?”. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 30 (2007): 530–38. Varma, Vivek, and Ben Packard. “Starbucks Global Responsibility Report Goals and Progress 2011”. Starbucks Corporation 1 Apr. 2012 ‹http://assets.starbucks.com/assets/goals-progress-report-2011.pdf›. Werder, Olaf. “Brewing Romance The Romantic Fantasy Theme of the Taster’s Choice ‘Couple’ Advertising Campaign.” Critical Thinking About Sex, Love, And Romance In The Mass Media: Media Literacy Applications. Eds. Mary-Lou Galician and Debra L. Merskin. New Jersey: Taylor & Francis, 2009. 35–48. Wilson, Jeremy “Desolation Row: Dylan Signs With Starbucks.” The Guardian 29 Jun. 2005. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jun/29/bobdylan.digitalmedia?INTCMP=SRCH›. Winick, Charles. “The Use of Drugs by Jazz Musicians.” Social Problems 7.3 (1959): 240–53.

A political minimalism? That would obviously go against the grain of our current political ideology → in fact, we are in an era of political maximalisation (Roland Barthes 200, arrow in original).Barthes’ comment is found in the ‘Annex’ to his 1978 lecture course The Neutral. Despite the three decade difference I don’t things have changed that much, certainly not insofar as academic debate about the cultural and social is concerned. At conferences I regularly hear the demand that the speaker or speakers account for the ‘political intent’, ‘worth’ or ‘utility’ of their work, or observe how speakers attempt to pre-empt and disarm such calls through judicious phrasing and citing. Following his diagnosis Barthes (201-206) proceeds to write under the title ‘To Give Leave’. Here he notes the incessant demand placed upon us, as citizens, as consumers, as representative cultural subjects and as biopolitical entities and, in this context, as academics to have and to communicate our allegiances, views and opinions. Echoing the acts, (or rather the ‘non-acts’), of Melville’s Bartleby, Barthes describes the scandalous nature of suspending the obligation of holding views; the apparent immorality of suspending the obligation of being interested, engaged, opinionated, committed – even if one only ever suspends provisionally, momentarily even. For the length of a five thousand word essay perhaps. In this short, unfortunately telegraphic and quite speculative essay I want pause to consider a few gestures or figures of ‘suspension’, ‘decline’ and ‘remaining aside’. What follows is in three parts. First a comment on the nature of the ‘demand to communicate’ identified by Barthes and its links to longer running moral and practical imperatives within Western understandings of the subject, the social and the political. Second, the most substantial section but still an all too brief account of the apparent ‘passivity’ of the narrator of Imre Kertész’s novel Fatelessness and the ways in which the novel may be read as a reflection on the nature of agency and determination. Third, a very brief conclusion, the question directly; what politics or what apprehension of politics, could a reflection on stillness and its ‘political minimalism’ offer? 1.For Barthes, (in 1978), one of the factors defining the contemporary intellectual scene was the way in which “politics invades all phenomena, economic, cultural, ethical” coupled with the “radicalization” of “political behaviors” (200), perhaps most notably in the arrogance of political discourse as it assumes the place of a master discourse. Writing in 1991 Bill Readings identified a similar phenomenon. For Readings the category of the political and politically inspired critique were operating by encircling their objects within a presupposed “universal language of political significance into which one might translate everything according to its effectivity”, an approach which has the effect of always making “the political […] the bottom line, the last instance where meaning can be definitively asserted” (quoted in Clark 3) or, we may add, realized. There is, of course, much that could be said here, not least concerning the significant differences in context, (between, for example, the various forms of revolutionary Marxism, Communism and Maoism which seem to preoccupy Barthes and the emancipatory identity and cultural politics which swept through literature departments in the US and beyond in the last two decades of the twentieth century). However it is also possible to suggest that a general grammar and, moreover, a general acceptance of a telos of the political persists.Barthes' (204-206) account of ‘political maximalisation’ is accompanied by a diagnosis of its productivist virility, (be it, in 1978, on the part of the increasingly reduced revolutionary left or the burgeoning neo-liberal right). The antithesis, or, rather, the outside of such an arrangement or frame would not be another political program but rather a certain stammering, a lassitude or dilatoriness. A flaccidness even; “a devirilized image” wherein from the point of view of the (political) actor or critic, “you are demoted to the contemptible mass of the undecided of those who don’t know who to vote for: old, lost ladies whom they brutalize: vote however you want, but vote” (Barthes 204). Hence Barthes is not suggesting a counter-move, a radical refusal, a ‘No’ shouted back to the information saturated market society. What is truly scandalous he suggests, is not opposition or refusal but the ‘non-reply’. What is truly scandalous, roughish even, is the decline or deferral and so the provisional suspension of the choice (and the blackmail) of the ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the ‘this’ or the ‘that’, the ‘with us’ or ‘against us’.In Literature and Evil Georges Bataille concludes his essay on Kafka with a comment on such a decline. According to Bataille, the reason why Kafka remains an ambivalent writer for critics, (and especially for those who would seek to enrol his work to political ends), lays precisely in his constant withdrawal; “There was nothing he [Kafka] could have asserted, or in the name of which he could have spoken. What he was, which was nothing, only existed to the extent in which effective activity condemned him” (167). ‘Effective activity’ refers, contextually, to a certain form of Communism but more broadly to the rationalization or systematization intrinsic to any political program, political programs (or ideologies) as such, be they communist, liberal or libertarian. At least insofar as, as implied above, the political is taken to coincide with a certain metaphysics and morality of action and the consequent linking of freedom to work, (a factor common to communist, fascist and liberal political programs), and so to the labour of the progressive self-realization and achievement of the self, the autos or ipse (see Derrida 6-18). Be it via, for example, Marx’s account of human’s intrinsic ‘capacity for work’ (Arbeitskraft), Heidegger’s account of necessary existential (and ultimately communal) struggle (Kampf), or Weber’s diagnoses of the (Protestant/bourgeois) liberal project to realize human potentiality (see also Agamben Man without Content; François 1-64). Hence what is ‘evil’ in Kafka is not any particular deed but the deferral of deeds; his ambivalence or immorality in the eyes of certain critics being due to the question his writing poses to “the ultimate authority of action” (Bataille 153) and so to the space beyond action onto which it opens. What could this space of ‘worklessness’ or ‘unwork’ look like? This non-virile, anti-heroic space? This would not be a space of ‘inaction’, (a term still too dependent, albeit negatively, on action), but of ‘non-action’; of ‘non-productive’ or non-disclosive action. That is to say, and as a first attempt at definition, ‘action’ or ‘praxis’, if we can still call it that, which does not generate or bring to light any specific positive content. As a way to highlight the difficulties and pitfalls, (at least with certain traditions), which stand in the way of thinking such a space, we may highlight Giorgio Agamben’s comments on the widespread coincidence of a metaphysics of action with the determination of both the subject, its teleology and its orientation in the world:According to current opinion, all of man’s [sic] doing – that of the artist and the craftsman as well as that of the workman and the politician – is praxis – manifestation of a will that produces a concrete effect. When we say that man has a productive status on earth, we mean, that the status of his dwelling on the earth is a practical one […] This productive doing now everywhere determines the status of man on earth – man understood as the living being (animal) that works (laborans), and, in work, produces himself (Man without Content 68; 70-71 original emphasis).Beyond or before practical being then, that is to say before and beyond the determination of the subject as essentially or intrinsically active and engaged, another space, another dwelling. Maybe nocturnal, certainly one with a different light to that of the day; one not gathered in and by the telos of the ipse or the turning of the autos, an interruption of labour, an unravelling. Remaining still, unravelling together (see Harrison In the absence).2.Kertész’s novel Sorstalanság was first published in his native Hungary in 1975. It has been translated into English twice, in 1992 as Fateless and in 2004 as Fatelessness. Fatelessness opens in Budapest on the day before György Köves’ – the novel’s fourteen year old narrator – father has to report for ‘labour service’. It goes on to recount Köves’ own detention and deportation and the year spent in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald and Zeitz. During this period Köves’ health declines, gradually at first and then rapidly to a moment of near death. He survives and the novel closes with his return to his home town. Köves is, as Kertész has put it in various interviews and as is made clear in the novel, a ‘non-Jewish Jew’; a non-practicing and non-believing Hungarian Jew from a largely assimilated family who neither reads nor speaks Hebrew or Yiddish. While Kertész has insisted that the novel is precisely that, a novel, a work of literature and not an autobiography, we should note that Kertész was himself imprisoned in Buchenwald and Zeitz when fourteen.Not without reservations but for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only one theme in the novel; determination and agency, or what Kertész calls ‘determinacy’. Writing in his journal Galley Boat-Log (Gályanapló) in May 1965 Kertész suggests ‘Novel of Fatelessness’ as a possible title for his work and then reflects on what he means by ‘fate’, the entry is worth quoting at length.The external determinacy, the stigma which constrains our life in a situation, an absurdity, in the given totalitarianism, thwarts us; thus, when we live out the determinacy which is doled out to us as a reality, instead of the necessity which stems from our own (relative) freedom – that is what I call fatelessness.What is essential is that our determinacy should always be in conflict with our natural views and inclinations; that is how fatelessness manifests itself in a chemically pure state. The two possible modes of protection: we transform into our determinacy (Kafka’s centipede), voluntarily so to say, and I that way attempt to assimilate our determinacy to our fate; or else we rebel against it, and so fall victim to our determinacy. Neither of these is a true solution, for in both cases we are obliged to perceive our determinacy […] as reality, whilst the determining force, that absurd power, in a way triumphs over us: it gives us a name and turns us into an object, even though we were born for other things.The dilemma of my ‘Muslim’ [Köves]: How can he construct a fate out of his own determinacy? (Galley Boat-Log 98 original emphasis).The dilemma of determinacy then; how can Köves, who is both determined by and superfluous to the Nazi regime, to wider Hungarian society, to his neighbours and to his family, gain some kind of control over his existence? Throughout Fatelessness people prove repeatedly unable to control their destinies, be it Köves himself, his father, his stepmother, his uncles, his friends from the oil refinery, or even Bandi Citrom, Köves’ mentor in the camps. The case of the ‘Expert’ provides a telescoped example. First appearing when Köves and his friends are arrested the ‘Expert’ is an imposing figure, well dressed, fluent in German and the director of a factory involved in the war effort (Fatelessness 50). Later at the brickworks, where the Jews who have been rounded up are being held prior to deportation, he appears more dishevelled and slightly less confident. Still, he takes the ‘audacious’ step of addressing a German officer directly (and receives some placatory ‘advice’ as his reward) (68-69). By the time the group arrives at the camp Köves has difficulty recognising him and without a word of protest, the ‘Expert’ does not pass the initial selection (88).Köves displays no such initiative with regard to his situation. He is reactive or passive, never active. For Köves events unfold as a series of situations and circumstances which are, he tells himself, essentially reasonable and to which he has to adapt and conform so that he may get on. Nothing more than “given situations with the new givens inherent in them” (259), as he explains near the end of the novel. As Köves' identity papers testify, his life and its continuation are the effect of arbitrary sets of circumstances which he is compelled to live through; “I am not alive on my own account but benefiting the war effort in the manufacturing industry” (29). In his Nobel lecture Kertész described Köves' situation:the hero of my novel does not live his own time in the concentration camps, for neither his time nor his language, not even his own person, is really his. He doesn’t remember; he exists. So he has to languish, poor boy, in the dreary trap of linearity, and cannot shake off the painful details. Instead of a spectacular series of great and tragic moments, he has to live through everything, which is oppressive and offers little variety, like life itself (Heureka! no pagination).Without any wilful or effective action on the part of the narrator and with only ‘the dreary trap of linearity’ where one would expect drama, plot, rationalization or stylization, Fatelessness can read as an arbitrarily punctuated series of waitings. Köves waiting for his father to leave, waiting in the customs shed, waiting at the brick works, waiting in train carriages, waiting on the ramp, waiting at roll call, waiting in the infirmary. Here is the first period of waiting described in the book, it is the day before his father’s departure and he is waiting for his father and stepmother as they go through the accounts at the family shop:I tried to be patient for a bit. Striving to think of Father, and more specifically the fact that he would be going tomorrow and, quite probably, I would not see him for a long time after that; but after a while I grew weary with that notion and then seeing as there was nothing else I could do for my father, I began to be bored. Even having to sit around became a drag, so simply for the sake of a change I stood up to take a drink of water from the tap. They said nothing. Later on, I also made my way to the back, between the planks, in order to pee. On returning I washed my hands at the rusty, tiled sink, then unpacked my morning snack from my school satchel, ate that, and finally took another drink from the tap. They still said nothing. I sat back in my place. After that, I got terribly bored for another absolute age (Fatelessness 9). It is interesting to consider exactly how this passage presages those that will come. Certainly this scene is an effect of the political context, his father and stepmother have to go through the books because of the summons to labour service and because of the racial laws on who may own and profit from a business. However, the specifically familial setting should not be overlooked, particularly when read alongside Kertész’s other novels where, as Madeleine Gustafsson writes, Communist dictatorship is “portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the camp – which in turn [...] is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of a joyless childhood” (no pagination, see, for example, Kertész Kaddish). Time to turn back to our question; does Fatelessness provide an answer to the ‘dilemma of determinacy’? We should think carefully before answering. As Julia Karolle suggests, the composition of the novel and our search for a logic within itreveal the abuses that reason must endure in order to create any story or history about the Holocaust […]. Ultimately Kertész challenges the reader not to make up for the lack of logic in Fatelessness, but rather to consider the nature of its absence (92 original emphasis).Still, with this point in mind, (and despite what has been said above), the novel does contain a scene in which Köves appears to affirm his existence.In many respects the scene is the culmination of the novel. The camps have been liberated and Köves has returned to Budapest. Finding his father and step-mother’s apartment occupied by strangers he calls on his Aunt and Uncle Fleischmann and Uncle Steiner. The discussion which follows would repay a slower reading, however again for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only a few short excerpts. Köves suggests that everyone took their ‘steps’ towards the events which have unfolded and that prediction and retrospection are false perspectives which give the illusion of order and inevitability whereas, in reality, “everything becomes clear only gradually, sequentially over time, step-by-step” (Fatelessness 249): “They [his Uncles] too had taken their own steps. They too […] had said farewell to my father as if we had already buried him, and even later has squabbled about whether I should take the train or the suburban bus to Auschwitz” (260). Fleischmann and Steiner react angrily, claiming that such an understanding makes the ‘victims’ the ‘guilty ones’. Köves responds by saying that they do not understand him and asks they see that:It was impossible, they must try to understand, impossible to take everything away from me, impossible for me to be neither winner nor loser, for me not to be right and not to be mistaken that I was neither the cause nor effect of anything; they should try to see, I almost pleaded, that I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness, that I should merely be innocent (260-261).Karolle (93-94) suggests that Köves' discussion with his uncles marks the moment where he accepts and affirms his existence and, from this point on begins to take control of and responsibility. Hence for Karolle the end of the novel depicts an ‘authentic’ moment of self-affirmation as Köves steps forward and refuses to participate in “the factual historical narrative of Auschwitz, to forget what he knows, and to be unequivocally categorized as a victim of history” (95). In distinction to Karolle, Adrienne Kertzer argues that Köves' moment of self-affirmation is, in fact, one of self-deception. Rather than acknowledging that it was “inexplicable luck” and a “series of random acts” (Kertzer 122) which saved his life or that his near death was due to an accident of birth, Köves asserts his personal freedom. Hence – and following István Deák – Kertzer suggests that we should read Fatelessness as a satire, ‘a modern Candide’. A satire on the hope of finding meaning, be it personal or metaphysical, in such experiences and events, the closing scenes of the novel being an ironic reflection on the “desperate desire to see […] life as meaningful” (Kertzer 122). So, while Köves convinces himself of his logic his uncles say to each other “‘Leave him be! Can’t you see he only wants to talk? Let him talk! Leave him be!’ And talk I did, albeit possibly to no avail and even a little incoherently” (Fatelessness 259). Which are we to choose then? The affirmation of agency (with Karolle) or the diagnosis of determination (with Kertzer)? Karolle and Kertzer give insightful analyses, (and ones which are certainly not limited to the passages quoted above), however it seems to me that they move too quickly to resolve the ‘dilemma’ presented by Köves, if not of Fatelessness as a whole. Still, we have a little time before having to name and decide Köves’ fate. Kertész’s use of the word ‘hero’ to describe Köves above – ‘the hero of my novel…’ – is, perhaps, more than a little ironic. As Kertész asks (in 1966), how can there be a hero, how can one be heroic, when one is one’s ‘determinacies’? What sense does it make to speak of heroic actions if “man [sic] is no more than his situation”? (Galley Boat-Log 99). Köves’ time, his language, his identity, none are his. There is no place, no hidden reservoir of freedom, from which way he set in motion any efficacious action. All resources have already been corrupted. From Kertész’s journal (in 1975): “The masters of thought and ideologies have ruined my thought processes” (Galley Boat-Log 104). As Lawrence Langer has argued, the grammar of heroics, along with the linked terms ‘virtue’, ‘dignity’, ‘resistance’ ‘survival’ and ‘liberation’, (and the wider narrative and moral economies which these terms indicate and activate), do not survive the events being described. Here the ‘dilemma of determinacy’ becomes the dilemma of how to think and value the human outside or after such a grammar. How to think and value the human beyond a grammar of action and so beyond, as Lars Iyer puts it, “the equation of work and freedom that characterizes the great discourses of political modernity” (155). If this is possible. If such a grammar and equation isn’t too all pervasive, if something of the human still remains outside their economy. It may well be that our ability to read Fatelessness depends in large part on what we are prepared to forsake (see Langar 195). How to think the subject and a politics in contretemps, beyond or after the choice between determination or autonomy, passive or active, inaction or action, immoral or virtuous – if only for a moment? Kertész wonders, (in 1966), ”perhaps there is something to be savaged all the same, a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail that may be a sign of the will to live and still awakens sympathy” (Galley Boat-Log 99). Something, perhaps, which remains to be salvaged from the grammar of humanism, something that would not be reducible to context, to ‘determinacies’, and that, at the same time, does not add up to a (resurrected) agent. ‘A tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail’. The press release announcing that Kertész had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature states that “For Kertész the spiritual dimension of man lies in his inability to adapt to life” (The Swedish Academy no pagination). Despite the difficulties presented by the somewhat over-determined term ‘spiritual’, this line strikes me as remarkably perspicuous. Like Melville’s Bartleby and Bataille’s Kafka before him, Kertész’s Köves’ existence, insofar as he exists, is made up by his non-action. That is to say, his existence is defined not by his actions or his inaction, (both of which are purely reactive and functional), but rather by his irreducibility to either. As commentators and critics have remarked, (and as the quotes given from the text above hopefully illustrate), Köves has an oddly formal and neutral ‘voice’. Köves’ blank, frequently equivocal tone may be read as a sign of his immaturity, his lack of understanding and his naivety. However I would suggest that before such factors, what characterizes Köves’ mode of address is its reticence to assert or disclose. Köves speaks, he speaks endlessly, but he says nothing or almost nothing - ‘to no avail and even a little incoherently’. Hence where Karolle seeks to recover an ‘intoned self-consciousness’ and Kertzer the repressed determining context, we may find Köves' address. Where Karolle’s and Kertzer’s approaches seek in some way to repair Köves words, to supplement them with either an agency to-come or an awareness of a context and, in doing so, pull his words fully into the light, Köves, it seems to me, remains elusive. His existence, insofar as we may speak of it, lies in his ‘inability to adapt to life’. His reserves are not composed of hidden or recoverable sources of agency but in his equivocality, in the way he takes leave of and remains aside from the very terms of the dilemma. It is as if with no resources of his own, he has an echo existence. As if still remaining itself where a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail.3.Is this it? Is this what we are to be left with in a ‘political minimalism’? It would seem more resignation or failure, turning away or quietism, the conceit of a beautiful soul, than any type of recognisable politics. On one level this is correct, however any such suspension or withdrawal, this moment of stillness where we are, is only ever a moment. However it is a moment which indicates a certain irreducibility and as such is, I believe, of great significance. Great significance, (or better ‘signifyingness’), even though – and precisely because – it is in itself without value. Being outside efficacy, labour or production, being outside economisation as such, it resides only in its inability to be integrated. What purpose does it serve? None. Or, perhaps, none other than demonstrating the irreducibility of a life, of a singular existence, to any discourse, narrative, identity or ideology, insofar as such structures, in their attempt to comprehend (or apprehend) the existent and put it to use always and violently fall short. As Theodor Adorno wrote;It is this passing-on and being unable to linger, this tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular, which constitutes not only the deception of idealism in hypostasizing concepts, but also its inhumanity, that has no sooner grasped the particular than it reduces it to a thought-station, and finally comes all too quickly to terms with suffering and death (74 emphasis added).This moment of stillness then, of declining and remaining aside, represents, for me, the anarchical and all but silent condition of possibility for all political strategy as such (see Harrison, Corporeal Remains). A condition of possibility which all political strategy carries within itself, more or less well, more or less consciously, as a memory of the finite and corporeal nature of existence. A memory which may always and eventually come to protest against the strategy itself. Strategy itself as strategy; as command, as a calculated and calculating order. And so, and we should be clear about this, such a remaining still is a demonstration.A demonstration not unlike, for example, that of the general anonymous population in José Saramago’s remarkable novel Seeing, who ‘act’ more forcefully through non-action than any through any ends-directed action. A demonstration of the kind which Agamben writes about after those in Tiananmen Square in 1989:The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be the struggle for control of the state, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity) […] [who] cannot form a societas because they do not poses any identity to vindicate or bond of belonging for which to seek recognition (Coming Community 85-67; original emphasis).A demonstration like that which sounds through Köves when his health fails in the camps and he finds himself being wheeled on a handcart taken for dead;a snatch of speech that I was barely able to make out came to my attention, and in that hoarse whispering I recognized even less readily the voice that has once – I could not help recollecting – been so strident: ‘I p … pro … test,’ it muttered” (Fatelessness 187 ellipses in original).The inmate pushing the cart stops and pulls him up by the shoulders, asking with astonishment “Was? Du willst noch leben? [What? You still want to live?] […] and right then I found it odd, since it could not have been warranted and, on the whole, was fairly irrational (187).AcknowledgmentsMy sincere thanks to the editors of this special issue, David Bissell and Gillian Fuller, for their interest, encouragement and patience. Thanks also to Sadie, especially for her comments on the final section. ReferencesAdorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso, 1974.Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.———. The Man without Content. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1999.Barthes, Roland. The Neutral. New York: Columbia U P, 2005.Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. London: Marion Boyars, 1985.Clarke, Timothy. The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Late Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2005.Deák, István. "Stranger in Hell." New York Review of Books 23 Sep. 2003: 65-68.Derrida, Jacques. Rogues. Two Essays on Reason. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2005.François, Anne-Lise. Open Secrets. The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2008.Gustafsson, Madeleine. 2003 “Imre Kertész: A Medium for the Spirit of Auschwitz.” 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/articles/gustafsson/index.html›.Harrison, Paul. “Corporeal Remains: Vulnerability, Proximity, and Living On after the End of the World.” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 423-445.———.“In the Absence of Practice.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space forthcoming.Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. London: Yale U P, 2000.Iyer, Lars. Blanchot’s Communism: Art, Philosophy and the Political. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.Karolle, Julia. “Imre Kertész Fatelessness as Historical Fiction.” Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. Ed Louise O. Vasvári and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue U P, 2005. 89-96.Kertész, Imre. 2002 “Heureka!” Nobel lecture. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2002/kertesz-lecture-e.html›.———. Fatelessness. London: Vintage, 2004.———. Kaddish for an Unborn Child. London: Vintage International, 2004.———.“Galley Boat-Log (Gályanapló): Excerpts.” Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. Ed Louise O. Vasvári and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2005. 97-110.Kertzer, Adrienne. “Reading Imre Kertesz in English.” Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. Ed Louise O. Vasvári, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue U P, 2005. 111-124.Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. London: Yale U P, 1991.Melville, Herman. Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. New Jersey: Melville House, 2004.Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1. London: Penguin Books, 1976.Readings, Bill. “The Deconstruction of Politics.” In Deconstruction: A Reader. Ed Martin McQuillan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2000. 388-396.Saramago, José. Seeing. London: Vintage, 2007. The Swedish Academy. "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2002: Imre Kertész." 2002. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2002/press.html›.Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge, 1992.

The academic journal is obsolete. In a world where there are more titles than ever, this is a comment on their form – especially the print journal – rather than their quantity. Now that you can get everything online, it doesn’t really matter what journal a paper appears in; certainly it doesn’t matter what’s in the same issue. The experience of a journal is rapidly obsolescing, for both editors and readers. I’m obviously not the first person to notice this (see, for instance, "Scholarly Communication"; "Transforming Scholarly Communication"; Houghton; Policy Perspectives; Teute), but I do have a personal stake in the process. For if the journal is obsolete then it follows that the editor is obsolete, and I am the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. I founded the IJCS and have been sole editor ever since. Next year will see the fiftieth issue. So far, I have been responsible for over 280 published articles – over 2.25 million words of other people’s scholarship … and counting. We won’t say anything about the words that did not get published, except that the IJCS rejection rate is currently 87 per cent. Perhaps the first point that needs to be made, then, is that obsolescence does not imply lack of success. By any standard the IJCS is a successful journal, and getting more so. It has recently been assessed as a top-rating A* journal in the Australian Research Council’s journal rankings for ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), the newly activated research assessment exercise. (In case you’re wondering, M/C Journal is rated B.) The ARC says of the ranking exercise: ‘The lists are a result of consultations with the sector and rigorous review by leading researchers and the ARC.’ The ARC definition of an A* journal is given as: Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/ subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted.Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions. (Appendix I, p. 21; and see p. 4.)Talking of boasting, I love to prate about the excellent people we’ve published in the IJCS. We have introduced new talent to the field, and we have published new work by some of its pioneers – including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. We’ve also published – among many others – Sara Ahmed, Mohammad Amouzadeh, Tony Bennett, Goran Bolin, Charlotte Brunsdon, William Boddy, Nico Carpentier, Stephen Coleman, Nick Couldry, Sean Cubitt, Michael Curtin, Daniel Dayan, Ben Dibley, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, John Frow, Elfriede Fursich, Christine Geraghty, Mark Gibson, Paul Gilroy, Faye Ginsberg, Jonathan Gray, Lawrence Grossberg, Judith Halberstam, Hanno Hardt, Gay Hawkins, Joke Hermes, Su Holmes, Desmond Hui, Fred Inglis, Henry Jenkins, Deborah Jermyn, Ariel Heryanto, Elihu Katz, Senator Rod Kemp (Australian government minister), Youna Kim, Agnes Ku, Richard E. Lee, Jeff Lewis, David Lodge (the novelist), Knut Lundby, Eric Ma, Anna McCarthy, Divya McMillin, Antonio Menendez-Alarcon, Toby Miller, Joe Moran, Chris Norris, John Quiggin, Chris Rojek, Jane Roscoe, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, John Storey, Su Tong, the late Sako Takeshi, Sue Turnbull, Graeme Turner, William Uricchio, José van Dijck, Georgette Wang, Jing Wang, Elizabeth Wilson, Janice Winship, Handel Wright, Wu Jing, Wu Qidi (Chinese Vice-Minister of Education), Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, Robert Young and Zhao Bin. As this partial list makes clear, as well as publishing the top ‘hegemons’ we also publish work pointing in new directions, including papers from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, area studies, economics, education, feminism, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. We have sought to represent neglected regions, especially Chinese cultural studies, which has grown strongly during the past decade. And for quite a few up-and-coming scholars we’ve been the proud host of their first international publication. The IJCS was first published in 1998, already well into the internet era, but it was print-only at that time. Since then, all content, from volume 1:1 onwards, has been digitised and is available online (although vol 1:2 is unaccountably missing). The publishers, Sage Publications Ltd, London, have steadily added online functionality, so that now libraries can get the journal in various packages, including offering this title among many others in online-only bundles, and individuals can purchase single articles online. Thus, in addition to institutional and individual subscriptions, which remain the core business of the journal, income is derived by the publisher from multi-site licensing, incremental consortial sales income, single- and back-issue sales (print), pay-per-view, and deep back file sales (electronic). So what’s obsolete about it? In that boasting paragraph of mine (above), about what wonderful authors we’ve published, lies one of the seeds of obsolescence. For now that it is available online, ‘users’ (no longer ‘readers’!) can search for what they want and ignore the journal as such altogether. This is presumably how most active researchers experience any journal – they are looking for articles (or less: quotations; data; references) relevant to a given topic, literature review, thesis etc. They encounter a journal online through its ‘content’ rather than its ‘form.’ The latter is irrelevant to them, and may as well not exist. The Cover Some losses are associated with this change. First is the loss of the front cover. Now you, dear reader, scrolling through this article online, might well complain, why all the fuss about covers? Internet-generation journals don’t have covers, so all of the work that goes into them to establish the brand, the identity and even the ‘affect’ of a journal is now, well, obsolete. So let me just remind you of what’s at stake. Editors, designers and publishers all take a good deal of trouble over covers, since they are the point of intersection of editorial, design and marketing priorities. Thus, the IJCS cover contains the only ‘content’ of the journal for which we pay a fee to designers and photographers (usually the publisher pays, but in one case I did). Like any other cover, ours has three main elements: title, colour and image. Thought goes into every detail. Title I won’t say anything about the journal’s title as such, except that it was the result of protracted discussions (I suggested Terra Nullius at one point, but Sage weren’t having any of that). The present concern is with how a title looks on a cover. Our title-typeface is Frutiger. Originally designed by Adrian Frutiger for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is suitably international, being used for the corporate identity of the UK National Health Service, Telefónica O2, the Royal Navy, the London School of Economics , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Conservative Party of Canada, Banco Bradesco of Brazil, the Finnish Defence Forces and on road signs in Switzerland (Wikipedia, "Frutiger"). Frutiger is legible, informal, and reads well in small copy. Sage’s designer and I corresponded on which of the words in our cumbersome name were most important, agreeing that ‘international’ combined with ‘cultural’ is the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the journal, so they should be picked out (in bold small-caps) from the rest of the title, which the designer presented in a variety of Frutiger fonts (regular, italic, and reversed – white on black), presumably to signify the dynamism and diversity of our content. The word ‘studies’ appears on a lozenge-shaped cartouche that is also used as a design element throughout the journal, for bullet points, titles and keywords. Colour We used to change this every two years, but since volume 7 it has stabilised with the distinctive Pantone 247, ‘new fuchsia.’ This colour arose from my own environment at QUT, where it was chosen (by me) for the new Creative Industries Faculty’s academic gowns and hoods, and thence as a detailing colour for the otherwise monochrome Creative Industries Precinct buildings. There’s a lot of it around my office, including on the wall and the furniture. New Fuchsia is – we are frequently told – a somewhat ‘girly’ colour, especially when contrasted with the Business Faculty’s blue or Law’s silver; its similarity to the Girlfriend/Dolly palette does introduce a mild ‘politics of prestige’ element, since it is determinedly pop culture, feminised, and non-canonical. Image Right at the start, the IJCS set out to signal its difference from other journals. At that time, all Sage journals had calligraphic colours – but I was insistent that we needed a photograph (I have ‘form’ in this respect: in 1985 I changed the cover of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies from a line drawing (albeit by Sydney Nolan) to a photograph; and I co-designed the photo-cover of Cultural Studies in 1987). For IJCS I knew which photo I wanted, and Sage went along with the choice. I explained it in the launch issue’s editorial (Hartley, "Editorial"). That original picture, a goanna on a cattle grid in the outback, by Australian photographer Grant Hobson, lasted ten years. Since volume 11 – in time for our second decade – the goanna has been replaced with a picture by Italian-based photographer Patrick Nicholas, called ‘Reality’ (Hartley, "Cover Narrative"). We have also used two other photos as cover images, once each. They are: Daniel Meadows’s 1974 ‘Karen & Barbara’ (Hartley, "Who"); and a 1962 portrait of Richard Hoggart from the National Portrait Gallery in London (Owen & Hartley 2007). The choice of picture has involved intense – sometimes very tense – negotiations with Sage. Most recently, they were adamant the Daniel Meadows picture, which I wanted to use as the long-term replacement of the goanna, was too ‘English’ and they would not accept it. We exchanged rather sharp words before compromising. There’s no need to rehearse the dispute here; the point is that both sides, publisher and editor, felt that vital interests were at stake in the choice of a cover-image. Was it too obscure; too Australian; too English; too provocative (the current cover features, albeit in the deep background, a TV screen-shot of a topless Italian game-show contestant)? Running Order Beyond the cover, the next obsolete feature of a journal is the running order of articles. Obviously what goes in the journal is contingent upon what has been submitted and what is ready at a given time, so this is a creative role within a very limited context, which is what makes it pleasurable. Out of a limited number of available papers, a choice must be made about which one goes first, what order the other papers should follow, and which ones must be held over to the next issue. The first priority is to choose the lead article: like the ‘first face’ in a fashion show (if you don’t know what I mean by that, see FTV.com. It sets the look, the tone, and the standard for the issue. I always choose articles I like for this slot. It sends a message to the field – look at this! Next comes the running order. We have about six articles per issue. It is important to maintain the IJCS’s international mix, so I check for the country of origin, or failing that (since so many articles come from Anglosphere countries like the USA, UK and Australia), the location of the analysis. Attention also has to be paid to the gender balance among authors, and to the mix of senior and emergent scholars. Sometimes a weak article needs to be ‘hammocked’ between two good ones (these are relative terms – everything published in the IJCS is of a high scholarly standard). And we need to think about disciplinary mix, so as not to let the journal stray too far towards one particular methodological domain. Running order is thus a statement about the field – the disciplinary domain – rather than about an individual paper. It is a proposition about how different voices connect together in some sort of disciplinary syntax. One might even claim that the combination of cover and running order is a last vestige of collegiate collectivism in an era of competitive academic individualism. Now all that matters is the individual paper and author; the ‘currency’ is tenure, promotion and research metrics, not relations among peers. The running order is obsolete. Special Issues An extreme version of running order is the special issue. The IJCS has regularly published these; they are devoted to field-shaping initiatives, as follows: Title Editor(s) Issue Date Radiocracy: Radio, Development and Democracy Amanda Hopkinson, Jo Tacchi 3.2 2000 Television and Cultural Studies Graeme Turner 4.4 2001 Cultural Studies and Education Karl Maton, Handel Wright 5.4 2002 Re-Imagining Communities Sara Ahmed, Anne-Marie Fortier 6.3 2003 The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption John Hartley 7.1 2004 Creative Industries and Innovation in China Michael Keane, John Hartley 9.3 2006 The Uses of Richard Hoggart Sue Owen, John Hartley 10.1 2007 A Cultural History of Celebrity Liz Barry 11.3 2008 Caribbean Media Worlds Anna Pertierra, Heather Horst 12.2 2009 Co-Creative Labour Mark Deuze, John Banks 12.5 2009 It’s obvious that special issues have a place in disciplinary innovation – they can draw attention in a timely manner to new problems, neglected regions, or innovative approaches, and thus they advance the field. They are indispensible. But because of online publication, readers are not held to the ‘project’ of a special issue and can pick and choose whatever they want. And because of the peculiarities of research assessment exercises, editing special issues doesn’t count as research output. The incentive to do them is to that extent reduced, and some universities are quite heavy-handed about letting academics ‘waste’ time on activities that don’t produce ‘metrics.’ The special issue is therefore threatened with obsolescence too. Refereeing In many top-rating journals, the human side of refereeing is becoming obsolete. Increasingly this labour-intensive chore is automated and the labour is technologically outsourced from editors and publishers to authors and referees. You have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal. At the IJCS the process is still handled by humans – namely, journal administrator Tina Horton and me. We spend a lot of time checking how papers are faring, from trying to find the right referees through to getting the comments and then the author’s revisions completed in time for a paper to be scheduled into an issue. The volume of email correspondence is considerable. We get to know authors and referees. So we maintain a sense of an interactive and conversational community, albeit by correspondence rather than face to face. Doubtless, sooner or later, there will be a depersonalised Text Management System. But in the meantime we cling to the romantic notion that we are involved in refereeing for the sake of the field, for raising the standard of scholarship, for building a globally dispersed virtual college of cultural studies, and for giving everyone – from unfavoured countries and neglected regions to famous professors in old-money universities – the same chance to get their research published. In fact, these are largely delusional ideals, for as everyone knows, refereeing is part of the political economy of publicly-funded research. It’s about academic credentials, tenure and promotion for the individual, and about measurable research metrics for the academic organisation or funding agency (Hartley, "Death"). The IJCS has no choice but to participate: we do what is required to qualify as a ‘double-blind refereed journal’ because that is the only way to maintain repute, and thence the flow of submissions, not to mention subscriptions, without which there would be no journal. As with journals themselves, which proliferate even as the print form becomes obsolete, so refereeing is burgeoning as a practice. It’s almost an industry, even though the currency is not money but time: part gift-economy; part attention-economy; partly the payment of dues to the suzerain funding agencies. But refereeing is becoming obsolete in the sense of gathering an ‘imagined community’ of people one might expect to know personally around a particular enterprise. The process of dispersal and anonymisation of the field is exacerbated by blind refereeing, which we do because we must. This is suited to a scientific domain of objective knowledge, but everyone knows it’s not quite like that in the ‘new humanities’. The agency and identity of the researcher is often a salient fact in the research. The embedded positionality of the author, their reflexiveness about their own context and room-for-manoeuvre, and the radical contextuality of knowledge itself – these are all more or less axiomatic in cultural studies, but they’re not easily served by ‘double-blind’ refereeing. When refereeing is depersonalised to the extent that is now rife (especially in journals owned by international commercial publishers), it is hard to maintain a sense of contextualised productivity in the knowledge domain, much less a ‘common cause’ to which both author and referee wish to contribute. Even though refereeing can still be seen as altruistic, it is in the service of something much more general (‘scholarship’) and much more particular (‘my career’) than the kind of reviewing that wants to share and improve a particular intellectual enterprise. It is this mid-range altruism – something that might once have been identified as a politics of knowledge – that’s becoming obsolete, along with the printed journals that were the banner and rallying point for the cause. If I were to start a new journal (such as cultural-science.org), I would prefer ‘open refereeing’: uploading papers on an open site, subjecting them to peer-review and criticism, and archiving revised versions once they have received enough votes and comments. In other words I’d like to see refereeing shifted from the ‘supply’ or production side of a journal to the ‘demand’ or readership side. But of course, ‘demand’ for ‘blind’ refereeing doesn’t come from readers; it comes from the funding agencies. The Reading Experience Finally, the experience of reading a journal is obsolete. Two aspects of this seem worthy of note. First, reading is ‘out of time’ – it no longer needs to conform to the rhythms of scholarly publication, which are in any case speeding up. Scholarship is no longer seasonal, as it has been since the Middle Ages (with university terms organised around agricultural and ecclesiastical rhythms). Once you have a paper’s DOI number, you can read it any time, 24/7. It is no longer necessary even to wait for publication. With some journals in our field (e.g. Journalism Studies), assuming your Library subscribes, you can access papers as soon as they’re uploaded on the journal’s website, before the published edition is printed. Soon this will be the norm, just as it is for the top science journals, where timely publication, and thereby the ability to claim first discovery, is the basis of intellectual property rights. The IJCS doesn’t (yet) offer this service, but its frequency is speeding up. It was launched in 1998 with three issues a year. It went quarterly in 2001 and remained a quarterly for eight years. It has recently increased to six issues a year. That too causes changes in the reading experience. The excited ripping open of the package is less of a thrill the more often it arrives. Indeed, how many subscribers will admit that sometimes they don’t even open the envelope? Second, reading is ‘out of place’ – you never have to see the journal in which a paper appears, so you can avoid contact with anything that you haven’t already decided to read. This is more significant than might first appear, because it is affecting journalism in general, not just academic journals. As we move from the broadcast to the broadband era, communicative usage is shifting too, from ‘mass’ communication to customisation. This is a mixed blessing. One of the pleasures of old-style newspapers and the TV news was that you’d come across stories you did not expect to find. Indeed, an important attribute of the industrial form of journalism is its success in getting whole populations to read or watch stories about things they aren’t interested in, or things like wars and crises that they’d rather not know about at all. That historic textual achievement is in jeopardy in the broadband era, because ‘the public’ no longer needs to gather around any particular masthead or bulletin to get their news. With Web 2.0 affordances, you can exercise much more choice over what you attend to. This is great from the point of view of maximising individual choice, but sub-optimal in relation to what I’ve called ‘population-gathering’, especially the gathering of communities of interest around ‘tales of the unexpected’ – novelty or anomalies. Obsolete: Collegiality, Trust and Innovation? The individuation of reading choices may stimulate prejudice, because prejudice (literally, ‘pre-judging’) is built in when you decide only to access news feeds about familiar topics, stories or people in which you’re already interested. That sort of thing may encourage narrow-mindedness. It is certainly an impediment to chance discovery, unplanned juxtaposition, unstructured curiosity and thence, perhaps, to innovation itself. This is a worry for citizenship in general, but it is also an issue for academic ‘knowledge professionals,’ in our ever-narrower disciplinary silos. An in-close specialist focus on one’s own area of expertise need no longer be troubled by the concerns of the person in the next office, never mind the next department. Now, we don’t even have to meet on the page. One of the advantages of whole journals, then, is that each issue encourages ‘macro’ as well as ‘micro’ perspectives, and opens reading up to surprises. This willingness to ‘take things on trust’ describes a ‘we’ community – a community of trust. Trust too is obsolete in these days of performance evaluation. We’re assessed by an anonymous system that’s managed by people we’ll never meet. If the ‘population-gathering’ aspects of print journals are indeed obsolete, this may reduce collegiate trust and fellow-feeling, increase individualist competitiveness, and inhibit innovation. In the face of that prospect, I’m going to keep on thinking about covers, running orders, referees and reading until the role of editor is obsolete too. ReferencesHartley, John. "'Cover Narrative': From Nightmare to Reality." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.2 (2005): 131-137. ———. "Death of the Book?" Symposium of the National Scholarly Communication Forum & Australian Academy of the Humanities, Sydney Maritime Museum, 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.humanities.org.au/Resources/Downloads/NSCF/RoundTables1-17/PDF/Hartley.pdf›. ———. "Editorial: With Goanna." International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.1 (1998): 5-10. ———. "'Who Are You Going to Believe – Me or Your Own Eyes?' New Decade; New Directions." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 5-14. Houghton, John. "Economics of Scholarly Communication: A Discussion Paper." Center for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, 2000. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.caul.edu.au/cisc/EconomicsScholarlyCommunication.pdf›. Owen, Sue, and John Hartley, eds. The Uses of Richard Hoggart. International Journal of Cultural Studies (special issue), 10.1 (2007). Policy Perspectives: To Publish and Perish. (Special issue cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Association of American Universities and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable) 7.4 (1998). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html›. "Scholarly Communication: Crisis and Revolution." University of California Berkeley Library. N.d. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Collections/crisis.html›. Teute, F. J. "To Publish or Perish: Who Are the Dinosaurs in Scholarly Publishing?" Journal of Scholarly Publishing 32.2 (2001). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/322/perish5.html›."Transforming Scholarly Communication." University of Houston Library. 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://info.lib.uh.edu/scomm/transforming.htm›.

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

Introduction Negative stereotyping of alternative diets such as veganism and other plant-based diets has been common in Australia, conventionally a meat-eating culture (OECD qtd. in Ting). Indeed, meat consumption in Australia is sanctioned by the ubiquity of advertising linking meat-eating to health, vitality and nation-building, and public challenges to such plant-based diets as veganism. In addition, state, commercial enterprises, and various community groups overtly resist challenges to Australian meat-eating norms and to the intensive animal husbandry practices that underpin it. Hence activists, who may contest not simply this norm but many of the customary industry practices that comprise Australia’s meat production, have been accused of promoting a vegan agenda and even of undermining the “Australian way of life”.If veganism meansa philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals. (Vegan Society)then our interest in this article lies in how a stereotyped label of veganism (and other associated attributes) is being used across Australian public spheres to challenge the work of animal activists as they call out factory farming for entrenched animal cruelty. This is carried out in three main parts. First, following an outline of our research approach, we examine the processes of stereotyping and the key dimensions of vegan stereotyping. Second, in the main part of the article, we reveal how opponents to such animal activist organisations as Animals Australia attempt to undermine activist calls for change by framing them as promoting an un-Australian vegan agenda. Finally, we consider how, despite such framing, that organisation is generating productive public debate around animal welfare, and, further, facilitating the creation of new activist identifications and identities.Research ApproachData collection involved searching for articles where Animals Australia and animal activism were yoked with veg*n (vegan and vegetarian), across the period May 2011 to 2016 (discussion peaked between May and June 2013). This period was of interest because it exposed a flare point with public discord being expressed between communities—namely between rural and urban consumers, farmers and animal activists, Coles Supermarkets (identified by The Australian Government the Treasury as one of two major supermarkets holding over 65% share of Australian food retail market) and their producers—and a consequent voicing of disquiet around Australian identity. We used purposive sampling (Waller, Farquharson, and Dempsey 67) to identify relevant materials as we knew in advance the case was “information-rich” (Patton 181) and would provide insightful information about a “troublesome” phenomenon (Emmel 6). Materials were collected from online news articles (30) and readers’ comments (167), online magazines (2) and websites (2) and readers’ comments (3), news items (Factiva 13), Australian Broadcasting Commission television (1) and radio (1), public blogs (2), and Facebook pages from involved organisations, specifically Australia’s National Farmers’ Federation (NFF, 155 posts) and Coles Supermarkets (29 posts). Many of these materials were explicitly responsive to a) Animals Australia’s Make It Possible campaign against Australian factory farming (launched and highly debated during this period), and b) Coles Supermarket’s short-lived partnership with Animals Australia in 2013. We utilised content analysis so as to make visible the most prominent and consistent stereotypes utilised in these various materials during the identified period. The approach allowed us to code and categorise materials so as to determine trends and patterns of words used, their relationships, and key structures and ways of speaking (Weerakkody). In addition, discourse analysis (Gee) was used in order to identify and track “language-in-use” so as to make visible the stereotyping deployed during the public reception of both the campaign and Animals Australia’s associated partnership with Coles. These methods enabled a “nuanced approach” (Coleman and Moss 12) with which to spot putdowns, innuendos, and stereotypical attitudes.Vegan StereotypingStereotypes creep into everyday language and are circulated and amplified through mainstream media, speeches by public figures, and social media. Stereotypes maintain their force through being reused and repurposed, making them difficult to eradicate due to their “cumulative effects” and influence (Harris and Sanborn 38; Inzlicht, Tullett, Legault, and Kang; Pickering). Over time stereotypes can become the lens through which we view “the world and social reality” (Harris and Sanborn 38; Inzlicht et al.). In summation, stereotyping:reduces identity categories to particular sets of deeds, attributes and attitudes (Whitley and Kite);informs individuals’ “cognitive investments” (Blum 267) by associating certain characteristics with particular groups;comprises symbolic and connotative codes that carry sets of traits, deeds, or beliefs (Cover; Rosello), and;becomes increasingly persuasive through regulating language and image use as well as identity categories (Cover; Pickering; Rosello).Not only is the “iterative force” (Rosello 35) of such associative stereotyping compounded due to its dissemination across digital media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, websites, and online news, but attempts to denounce it tend to increase its “persuasive power” (29). Indeed, stereotypes seem to refuse “to die” (23), remaining rooted in social and cultural memory (Whitley and Kite 10).As such, despite the fact that there is increasing interest in Australia and elsewhere in new food norms and plant-based diets (see, e.g., KPMG), as well as in vegan lifestyle options (Wright), studies still show that vegans remain a negatively stereotyped group. Previous studies have suggested that vegans mark a “symbolic threat” to Western, conventionally meat-eating cultures (MacInnis and Hodson 722; Stephens Griffin; Cole and Morgan). One key UK study of national newspapers, for instance, showed vegans continuing to be discredited in multiple ways as: 1) “self-evidently ridiculous”; 2) “ascetics”; 3) having a lifestyle difficult and impossible to maintain; 4) “faddist”; 5) “oversensitive”; and 6) “hostile extremists” (Cole and Morgan 140–47).For many Australians, veganism also appears anathema to their preferred culture and lifestyle of meat-eating. For instance, the NFF, Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), and other farming bodies continue to frame veganism as marking an extreme form of lifestyle, as anti-farming and un-Australian. Such perspectives are also circulated through online rural news and readers’ comments, as will be discussed later in the article. Such representations are further exemplified by the MLA’s (Lamb, Australia Day, Celebrate Australia) Australia Day lamb advertising campaigns (Bembridge; Canning). For multiple consecutive years, the campaign presented vegans (and vegetarians) as being self-evidently ridiculous and faddish, representing them as mentally unhinged and fringe dwellers. Such stereotyping not only invokes “affective reactions” (Whitley and Kite 8)—including feelings of disgust towards individuals living such lifestyles or holding such values—but operates as “political baits” (Rosello 18) to shore-up or challenge certain social or political positions.Although such advertisements are arguably satirical, their repeated screening towards and on Australia Day highlights deeply held views about the normalcy of animal agriculture and meat-eating, “homogenizing” (Blum 276; Pickering) both meat-eaters and non-meat-eaters alike. Cultural stereotyping of this kind amplifies “social” as well as political schisms (Blum 276), and arguably discourages consumers—whether meat-eaters or non-meat-eaters—from advocating together around shared goals such as animal welfare and food safety. Additionally, given the rise of new food practices in Australia—including flexitarian, reducetarian, pescatarian, kangatarian (a niche form of ethical eating), vegivores, semi-vegetarian, vegetarian, veganism—alongside broader commitments to ethical consumption, such stereotyping suggests that consumers’ actual values and preferences are being disregarded in order to shore-up the normalcy of meat-eating.Animals Australia and the (So-Called) Vegan Agenda of Animal ActivismGiven these points, it is no surprise that there is a tacit belief in Australia that anyone labelled an animal activist must also be vegan. Within this context, we have chosen to primarily focus on the attitudes towards the campaigning work of Animals Australia—a not-for-profit organisation representing some 30 member groups and over 2 million individual supporters (Animals Australia, “Who Is”)—as this organisation has been charged as promoting a vegan agenda. Along with the RSPCA and Voiceless, Animals Australia represents one of the largest animal protection organisations within Australia (Chen). Its mission is to:Investigate, expose and raise community awareness of animal cruelty;Provide animals with the strongest representation possible to Government and other decision-makers;Educate, inspire, empower and enlist the support of the community to prevent and prohibit animal cruelty;Strengthen the animal protection movement. (Animals Australia, “Who Is”)In delivery of this mission, the organisation curates public rallies and protests, makes government and industry submissions, and utilises corporate outreach. Campaigning engages the Web, multiple forms of print and broadcast media, and social media.With regards to Animals Australia’s campaigns regarding factory farming—including the Make It Possible campaign (see fig. 1), launched in 2013 and key to the period we are investigating—the main message is that: the animals kept in these barren and constrictive conditions are “no different to our pets at home”; they are “highly intelligent creatures who feel pain, and who will respond to kindness and affection – if given the chance”; they are “someone, not something” (see the Make It Possible transcript). Campaigns deliberately strive to engender feelings of empathy and produce affect in viewers (see, e.g., van Gurp). Specifically they strive to produce mainstream recognition of the cruelties entrenched in factory farming practices and build community outrage against these practices so as to initiate industry change. Campaigns thus expressly challenge Australians to no longer support factory farmed animal products, and to identify with what we have elsewhere called everyday activist positions (Rodan and Mummery, “Animal Welfare”; “Make It Possible”). They do not, however, explicitly endorse a vegan position. Figure 1: Make It Possible (Animals Australia, campaign poster)Nonetheless, as has been noted, a common counter-tactic used within Australia by the industries targeted by such campaigns, has been to use well-known negative stereotypes to discredit not only the charges of systemic animal cruelty but the associated organisations. In our analysis, we found four prominent interconnected stereotypes utilised in both digital and print media to discredit the animal welfare objectives of Animals Australia. Together these cast the organisation as: 1) anti-meat-eating; 2) anti-farming; 3) promoting a vegan agenda; and 4) hostile extremists. These stereotypes are examined below.Anti-Meat-EatingThe most common stereotype attributed to Animals Australia from its campaigning is of being anti-meat-eating. This charge, with its associations with veganism, is clearly problematic for industries that facilitate meat-eating and within a culture that normalises meat-eating, as the following example expresses:They’re [Animals Australia] all about stopping things. They want to stop factory farming – whatever factory farming is – or they want to stop live exports. And in fact they’re not necessarily about: how do I improve animal welfare in the pig industry? Or how do I improve animal welfare in the live export industry? Because ultimately they are about a meat-free future world and we’re about a meat producing industry, so there’s not a lot of overlap, really between what we’re doing. (Andrew Spencer, Australian Pork Ltd., qtd. in Clark)Respondents engaging this stereotype also express their “outrage at Coles” (McCarthy) and Animals Australia for “pedalling [sic]” a pro-vegan agenda (Nash), their sense that Animals Australia is operating with ulterior motives (Flint) and criminal intent (Brown). They see cultural refocus as unnecessary and “an exercise in futility” (Harris).Anti-FarmingTo be anti-farming in Australia is generally considered to be un-Australian, with Glasgow suggesting that any criticism of “farming practices” in Australian society can be “interpreted as an attack on the moral integrity of farmers, amounting to cultural blasphemy” (200). Given its objectives, it is unsurprising that Animals Australia has been stereotyped as being “anti-farming”, a phrase additionally often used in conjunction with the charge of veganism. Although this comprises a misreading of veganism—given its focus on challenging animal exploitation in farming rather than entailing opposition to all farming—the NFF accused Animals Australia of being “blatantly anti-farming and proveganism” (Linegar qtd. in Nason) and as wanting “to see animal agriculture phased out” (National Farmers’ Federation). As expressed in more detail:One of the main factors for VFF and other farmers being offended is because of AA’s opinion and stand on ALL farming. AA wants all farming banned and us all become vegans. Is it any wonder a lot of people were upset? Add to that the proceeds going to AA which may have been used for their next criminal activity washed against the grain. If people want to stand against factory farming they have the opportunity not to purchase them. Surely not buying a product will have a far greater impact on factory farmed produce. Maybe the money could have been given to farmers? (Hunter)Such stereotyping reveals how strongly normalised animal agriculture is in Australia, as well as a tendency on the part of respondents to reframe the challenge of animal cruelty in some farming practices into a position supposedly challenging all farming practices.Promoting a Vegan AgendaAs is already clear, Animals Australia is often reproached for promoting a vegan agenda, which, it is further suggested, it keeps hidden from the Australian public. This viewpoint was evident in two key examples: a) the Australian public and organisations such as the NFF are presented as being “defenceless” against the “myopic vitriol of the vegan abolitionists” (Jonas); and b) Animals Australia is accused of accepting “loans from liberation groups” and being “supported by an army of animal rights lawyers” to promote a “hard core” veganism message (Bourke).Nobody likes to see any animals hurt, but pushing a vegan agenda and pushing bad attitudes by group members is not helping any animals and just serves to slow any progress both sides are trying to resolve. (V.c. Deb Ford)Along with undermining farmers’ “legitimate business” (Jooste), veganism was also considered to undermine Australia’s rural communities (Park qtd. in Malone).Hostile ExtremistsThe final stereotype linking veganism with Animals Australia was of hostile extremism (cf. Cole and Morgan). This means, for users, being inimical to Australian national values but, also, being akin to terrorists who engage in criminal activities antagonistic to Australia’s democratic society and economic livelihood (see, e.g., Greer; ABC News). It is the broad symbolic threat that “extremism” invokes that makes this stereotype particularly “infectious” (Rosello 19).The latest tag team attacks on our pork industry saw AL giving crash courses in how to become a career criminal for the severely impressionable, after attacks on the RSPCA against the teachings of Peter Singer and trying to bully the RSPCA into vegan functions menu. (Cattle Advocate)The “extremists” want that extended to dairy products, as well. The fact that this will cause the total annihilation of practically all animals, wild and domestic, doesn’t bother them in the least. (Brown)What is interesting about these last two dimensions of stereotyping is their displacement of violence. That is, rather than responding to the charge of animal cruelty, violence and extremism is attributed to those making the charge.Stereotypes and Symbolic Boundary ShiftingWhat is evident throughout these instances is how stereotyping as a “cognitive mechanism” is being used to build boundaries (Cherry 460): in the first instance, between “us” (the meat-eating majority) and “them” (the vegan minority aka animal activists); and secondly between human interest and livestock. This point is that animals may hold instrumental value and receive some protection through such, but any more stringent arguments for their protection at the expense of perceived human interests tend to be seen as wrong-headed (Sorenson; Munro).These boundaries are deeply entrenched in Western culture (Wimmer). They are also deeply problematic in the context of animal activism because they fragment publics, promote restrictive identities, and close down public debate (Lamont and Molnár). Boundary entrenching is clearly evident in the stereotyping work carried out by industry stakeholders where meat-eating and practices of industrialised animal agriculture are valorised and normalised. Challenging Australia’s meat production practices—irrespective of the reason given—is framed and belittled as entailing a vegan agenda, and further as contributing to the demise of farming and rural communities in Australia.More broadly, industry stakeholders are explicitly targeting the activist work by such organisations as Animals Australia as undermining the ‘Australian way of life’. In their reading, there is an irreconcilable boundary between human and animal interests and between an activist minority which is vegan, unreasonable, extremist and hostile to farming and the meat-eating majority which is representative of the Australian community and sustains the Australian economy. As discussed so far, such stereotyping and boundary making—even in their inaccuracies—can be pernicious in the way they entrench identities and divisions, and close the possibility for public debate.Rather than directly contesting the presuppositions and inaccuracies of such stereotyping, however, Animals Australia can be read as cultivating a process of symbolic boundary shifting. That is, rather than responding by simply underlining its own moderate position of challenging only intensive animal agriculture for systemic animal cruelty, Animals Australia uses its campaigns to develop “boundary blurring and crossing” tactics (Cherry 451, 459), specifically to dismantle and shift the symbolic boundaries conventionally in place between humans and non-human animals in the first instance, and between those non-human animals used for companionship and those used for food in the second (see fig. 2). Figure 2: That Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady (Animals Australia, campaign image on back of taxi)Indeed, the symbolic boundaries between humans and animals left unquestioned in the preceding stereotyping are being profoundly shaken by Animals Australia with campaigns such as Make It Possible making morally relevant likenesses between humans and animals highly visible to mainstream Australians. Namely, the organisation works to interpellate viewers to exercise their own capacities for emotional identification and moral imagination, to identify with animals’ experiences and lives, and to act upon that identification to demand change.So, rather than reactively striving to refute the aforementioned stereotypes, organisations such as Animals Australia are modelling and facilitating symbolic boundary shifting by building broad, emotionally motivated, pathways through which Australians are being encouraged to refocus their own assumptions, practices and identities regarding animal experience, welfare and animal-human relations. Indeed the organisation has explicitly framed itself as speaking on behalf of not only animals but all caring Australians, suggesting thereby the possibility of a reframing of Australian national identity. Although such a tactic does not directly contest this negative stereotyping—direct contestation being, as noted, ineffective given the perniciousness of stereotyping—such work nonetheless dismantles the oppositional charge of such stereotyping in calling for all Australians to proudly be a little bit anti-meat-eating (when that meat is from factory farmed animals), a little bit anti-factory farming, a little bit pro-veg*n, and a little bit proud to consider themselves as caring about animal welfare.For Animals Australia, in other words, appealing to Australians to care about animal welfare and to act in support of that care, not only defuses the stereotypes targeting them but encourages the work of symbolic boundary shifting that is really at the heart of this dispute. Further research into the reception of the debate would give a sense of the extent to which such an approach is making a difference.ReferencesABC News. “Animal Rights Activists ‘Akin to Terrorists’, Says NSW Minister Katrina Hodgkinson.” ABC News 18 Jul. 2013. 21 Feb. 2019 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-18/animal-rights-activists-27terrorists272c-says-nsw-minister/4828556>.Animals Australia. “Who Is Animals Australia?” 20 Feb. 2019 <http://www.animalsaustralia.org/about>.———. Make It Possible. Video and transcript. 21 Oct. 2012. 20 Feb. 2019 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM6V6lq_p0o>.The Australian Government the Treasury. Independent Review of the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct: Final Report. Commonwealth of Australia, 2018. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-03/Independent-review-of-the-Food-and-Grocery-Code-of-Conduct-Final-Report.pdf>.Bembridge, Courtney. “Australia Day Lamb Ad, Starring Lee Lin Chin, Attracts Dozens of Complaints from Vegans.” ABC News 20 Jan. 2016. 21 Feb. 2019 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-11/vegans-lodge-complaints-over-lamb-ad/7081706>.Blum, Lawrence. “Stereotypes and Stereotyping: A Moral Analysis.” Philosophical Papers 33.3 (2004): 251–89.Bourke, John. “Coles Undermines Our Way of Life.” Weekly Times Now 5 Jun. 2013. 19 Jun. 2013 <http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/article/2013/06/05/572335_opinion-news.html>.Brown, Frank. “Letter to the Editor.” Northern Miner 9 Dec. 2014. 18 Nov. 2017 <http://www.newscorpaustralia.com/brand/northern-miner>.Canning, Simon. “MLA’s Australia Day Vegan Flaming Lamb Ad Cleared by Advertising Watchdog.” Mumbrella News 19 Jan. 2016. 18 Nov. 2017 <https://mumbrella.com.au/mlas-australia-day-vegan-flaming-lamb-ad-cleared-by-advertising-watchdog-340779>.Cattle Advocate. “Coles Bags a Boost for NFF.” Farm Weekly 3 Jul. 2013. 20 Feb. 2018 <http://www.farmweekly.com.au/news/agriculture/agribusiness/general-news/coles-bags-a-boost-for-nff/2660179.aspx>.Chen, Peter John. Animal Welfare in Australia: Politics and Policy. Sydney: U of Sydney Press, 2016.Cherry, Elizabeth. “Shifting Symbolic Boundaries: Cultural Strategies of the Animal Rights Movement.” Sociological Forum 25.3 (2010): 450–75.Clark, Chris. “Animals Australia under the Microscope.” ABC Landline 16 Jun. 2013. 24 Jun. 2013 <http://www.abc.net.au/landline/ content/2013/s3782456.htm>.Cole, Matthew, and Karen Morgan. “Vegaphobia: Derogatory Discourses of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspapers.” The British Journal of Sociology 62.1 (2011): 134–53.Coleman, Stephen, and Giles Moss. “Under Construction: The Field of Online Deliberation Research.” Journal of Information Technology and Politics 9.1 (2012): 1–15.Cover, Rob. “Digital Difference: Theorizing Frameworks of Bodies, Representation and Stereotypes in Digital Games.” Asia Pacific Media Educator 26.1 (2016): 4–16.Emmel, Nick. “Purposeful Sampling.” Sampling and Choosing Cases in Qualitative Research: A Realist Approach. London: Sage Publications, 2013. 2–12. 28 Feb. 2019 <http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.ecu.edu.au/10.4135/9781473913882>.Flint, Nicole. “The ABC Continues to Broadcast Animals Australia Footage while Failing to Probe the Group’s Motivations.” The Advertiser 28 Oct. 2014. 18 Nov. 2017 <http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/>.Gee, James Paul. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2010.Glasgow, David. “The Law of the Jungle: Advocating for Animals in Australia.” Deakin Law Review 13.1 (2008): 181–210.Greer, Anna. “‘Akin to Terrorism’: The War on Animal Activists.” Overland 9 Aug. 2013. 21 Feb. 2019 <https://overland.org.au/2013/08/akin-to-terrorism-the-war-on-animal-activists/>Harris, Janeen. “Coles Are the Piggy in the Middle of Animal Welfare Confrontation.” The Conversation 13 Jun. 2013. 21 Feb. 2019 <https://theconversation.com/coles-are-the-piggy-in-the-middle-of-animal-welfare-confrontation-15078>.Harris, Richard Jackson, and Fred W. Sanborn. A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication. 6th ed. New York: Routledge, 2014.Hunter, Jim. “Animals Australia Bags Hot Property.” Weekly Times Now 10 Jun. 2013. 19 Jun. 2013 <http://tools.weeklytimesnow.com.au/yoursay/comment_all.php>.Inzlicht, Michael, Alexa M. Tullett, Lisa Legault, and Sonia K Kang. “Lingering Effects: Stereotype Threat Hurts More than You Think.” Social Issues and Policy Review 5.1 (2011): 227–56.Jonas, Tammi. “Coles & Animals Australia: Unlikely Bedfellows?” Blog post. 6 Jun. 2013. 24 Jun. 2013 <http://www.tammijonas.com/2013/06/06/coles-animals-australia-unlikely-bedfellows/>.Jooste, James. “Animals Australia Ready to Launch New Advertisements Calling for Ban on Live Exports, after Complaints about Previous Campaign Dismissed.” ABC News 16 Feb. 2016. 21 Feb. 2019 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2016-02-15/live-export-animals-australia-advertising-complaint-dismissed/7168534>.KPMG. Talking 2030: Growing Agriculture into a $100 Billion Industry. KPMG, 2018. 21 Feb. 2019 <https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/f0cfd1_26dbb49eea91458d8b1606a0006ec20e.pdf>.Lamont, Michèle, and Virág Molnár. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 167–95.MacInnis, Cara C., and Gordon Hodson. “It Ain’t Easy Eating Greens: Evidence of Bias towards Vegetarians and Vegans from Both Source and Target.” Group Process and Intergroup Relations 20.6 (2017): 721–44.Malone, Paul. “Farmers Face Changing World.” The Canberra Times 9 Jun. 2013. 22 Nov. 2013 <https://www.canberratimes.com.au/>.McCarthy, John. “Farmers Angered by Coles Campaign.” The Courier-Mail 4 Jun. 2013. 24 Jun. 2013 <http://www.couriermail.com.au/>.Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA). Australia Day Lamb 2016: Commence Operation Boomerang. Video. 9 Jan. 2016. 8 Nov. 2017 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i15OPuFvmA>.———. Celebrate Australia with a Lamb BBQ. Video. 11 Jan. 2017. 8 Nov. 2017 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX__i-zeaWs>.———. “Lamb Campaigns.” No date. 8 Nov. 2017 <https://www.mla.com.au/marketing-beef-and-lamb/domestic-marketing/lamb-campaigns/>.Munro, Lyle. “Animals, ‘Nature’ and Human Interests.” Controversies in Environmental Sociology. Ed. Rob White. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 61–76.Nash, Fiona. “Nationals Senator Congratulating Animals Australia’s Damaging …. .” The Nationals for Regional Australia 6 Jun. 2013. 21 Jun. 2013 <http://nationals.org.au/>.Nason, James. “Coles Bagged over Animals Australia Campaign.” Beef Central. 4 Jun. 2013. 22 Nov. 2013 <http://www.beefcentral.com/news/coles-bagged-over-animals-australia-campaign/>.National Farmers’ Federation. Facebook post. 30 May 2013. 26 Nov. 2013 <http://www.facebook.com/NationalFarmers>.Patton, Michael Quinn. Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 1990. Pickering, Michael. Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.Rodan, Debbie, and Jane Mummery. “The ‘Make It Possible’ Multi-Media Campaign: Generating a New ‘Everyday’ in Animal Welfare.” Media International Australia, 153 (2014): 78–87.———. “Doing Animal Welfare Activism Everyday: Questions of Identity.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 30.4 (2016): 381–96.Rosello, Mireille. Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in French Culture. Hanover: U of New England, 1998.Sorenson John. “Constructing Terrorists: Propaganda about Animal Rights.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 2.2 (2009): 237-56.Stephens Griffin, Nathan. Understanding Veganism: Biography and Identity. Cham: Springer International, 2017.Ting, Inga. “Australia is the Meat-Eating Capital of the World.” The Sydney Morning Herald 27 Oct. 2015. 20 Feb. 2019 <http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/australia-is-the-meateating-capital-of-the-world-20151027-gkjhp4.html>.V.c. Deb Ford. “National Farmers Federation.” Facebook post. 30 May 2013. 26 Nov. 2013 <http://www.facebook.com/NationalFarmers>.Van Gurp, Marc. “Factory Farming the Musical.” Osocio 4 Nov. 2012. 21 Feb. 2019 <https://osocio.org/message/factory-farming-the-musical/>.Vegan Society. “History.” 20 Feb. 2019 <https://www.vegansociety.com/about-us/history>.Waller, Vivienne, Karen Farquharson, and Deborah Dempsey. Qualitative Social Research: Contemporary Methods for the Digital Age. London: Sage, 2016Weerakkody, Niranjala. Research Methods for Media and Communication. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2009.Whitley, Bernard E., and Mary E. Kite. The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination. Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006.Wimmer, Andreas. “The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries: A Multilevel Process Theory.” American Journal of Sociology 113.4 (2008): 970–1022.Wright, Laura. The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror. Georgia: U of Georgia Press, 2015.