Journal articles on the topic 'Political ballads and songs – Germany'

Social movement scholarship has recently focused on “popular” media of protest; reading and singing provided a forceful communicative structure in semi-literate urban society, especially in Augsburg, the largest city of Reformation Germany. The case of Jakob Herbrot (1490/95–1564) combines the antagonisms of political, social, and religious movements; a rich Calvinist, he climbed the social ladder from a lowly regarded profession to the highest office of the imperial city in a precarious time of confessional armed conflict. Herbrot's conduct triggered a life-long series of accusations, polemics, satires, humorous ballads, and songs, material that allows a reassessment of the early modern discourse of Öffentlichkeit, as well as of urban laughter in the “public sphere” before its modern elevation to the central doctrine of bourgeois society. The sources suggest that humour was of essential importance to the public in the early modern city, a counter-public in the sense of an independent political arbiter.

One of the best known compositions from Robert Schumann's "song year" of 1840 is the ballad "Die beiden Grenadiere," op. 49, no. 1, to a poem by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). Any work about Napoleon, in any genre, was inevitably politically charged, both at the time Heine wrote his poem (perhaps in 1821, after hearing the news of the former emperor's death on 5 May 1821) and the date of its most famous musical setting (at the beginning of the decade when Germany was edging towards revolutionary outbreak). What impelled this 21st-century investigation of the song was curiosity about its confusing initial gesture in the piano, a tonic six-four chord as an anacrusis, leading to unharmonized tonic pitches on the downbeat of measure 1. Speculation about Schumann's intention led to an investigation of both men's attitudes towards Napoleon, especially the aftermath of his downfall. That Heine venerated Napoleon (who emancipated the Jews) cannot be doubted, but Heine, given to paradox and contradiction, was no hagiographer. His poem is as much literary as it is political, with its borrowings from Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Herder's translation of the Scottish ballad "Edward." The First Empire, like all empires, is not merely historical fact but a confabulation of poetic legends. Heine's underlying concern, I would argue, was not Bonapartism per se but rising German nationalism of the sort he found ominous and that Schumann, to some as yet ill-defined degree, supported. But composer and poet both associated Napoleon with the ideals of the French Revolution in the days before it and the emperor succumbed to what is darkest in human nature. In my opinion, Schumann understood Heine's delineation of nationalistic fanaticism and found apt musical gestures for that understanding. Here, I trace the composer's lifelong sense of identification with Napoleon and the compositional decisions that tell of a political point of view in "Die beiden Grenadiere."

In this fascinating article, the Professor of Archaeology in the University of Exeter shows us that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was not only the author of Faust, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and of beautiful lyrics, ballads and love-songs, but was keenly interested in prehistory and was well abreast of the subject as it was developing in Germany in the early nineteenth century.

AbstractThis essay adds to our existing understanding of what it meant to be a member of the English Catholic community during the late Elizabeth and early Stuart period by exploring Catholic musical culture in Lancashire. This was a uniquely Catholic village, which, like the majority of villages, towns and cities in early modern England, was filled with the singing of ballads. Ballads have almost exclusively been treated in scholarship as a ‘Protestant’ phenomenon and the ‘godly ballad’ associated with the very fabric of a distinctively Protestant Elizabethan and Stuart entertainment culture. By investigating the songs and ballads in two manuscript collections from the Catholic network surrounding the Blundell family this essay will show how Catholics both composed and ‘converted’ existing ballads to voice social, devotional, and political concerns. The ballads performed in Little Crosby highlight a vibrant Catholic community, where musical expression was fundamental. Performance widened the parochial religious divide, whilst enhancing Catholic integration. This essay uncovers the way Catholics used music to voice religious and exhort protest as much as prayer. Finally, by investigating the tunes and melodies preserved in the manuscripts, I demonstrate how priests serving this network used ballads as part of their missionary strategy.

“Para el camino” Canto a la angustia y a las alegrias. Canto porque es necesario can tar para ir dejando una huella en los dias, para ir diciendo cosas prohibidas.“For the Road” I sing of anguish and joy. I sing because it's necessary to sing to leave my mark on time, to say forbidden things.Latin American New Song is distinct from the usual stereotypes of Latin American popular music. Songs such as “Para el camino” do not fit into the common categories of salsa, ballads, Spanish-language versions of U.S. hit songs or popularized traditional styles such as the ranchera and cumbia. Although New Song is not as well known as the more typical styles, its greater social significance has achieved an impact in Latin America far beyond the musical realm.

The article aims at reviewing the rich and ambivalent Western folk ballad research tradition in terms of confluence of the oral and written traditions. Although being well-reflected in the West, this approach is hardly at all present in Lithuania. The article starts with discussing such cultural phenomenon as broadside ballads. In surveying them, the author maintains that popular publications of the 16th–19th century Europe (bibliothèque bleue, skyllingtricker, Volksbuch, pliegos de cordel, лубочная литература, etc.) were an inherent part of the folk culture. Printed sheets of folksongs and ballads used to be popular in Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and subsequently in America. However, although spread and promoted by the press, the ballads hardly ascended the field of interest of the educated elite, remaining instead in the “lower” spheres of the popular culture.The first collectors of ballads from the 18th century (the “antiquarian period”) paid little attention to the sources of their material, being instead very keen on improving and elaborating of the ballad texts, and presenting them as creative manifestations of the “original bard” or the “national muse”. After the collections by Thomas Percy and Walter Scott appeared, William Motherwell turned back to the still thriving ballad tradition. This Scottish scholar, followed by his Danish colleague Svend Grundtvig and the American Francis James Child founded the modern ballad folklore research, since their collections represented the oral folk tradition rather than engaging in search for the “original” folk ballads. The subsequent researchers, influenced by the Child’s ballad scholarship (Phillips Barry, Cecil J. Sharp, Olive D. Campbell, Louise Pound, Henry M. Belden, etc.), continued investigating the American ballad legacy. However, while collecting and encouraging to further collect the surviving ballads they increasingly realized the huge distance between their endeavors and the Child’s collection. The heterogeneous and fragmented nature of the ballads from the oral tradition was increasingly recognized and acknowledged, along with unavoidable impact of the written and printed sources.Barre J. Toelkien, the scholar belonging to even later generation, attempted methodical indexing of the oral ballads belonging to the Child’s collection. Dianne M. Dugaw in turn suggested that assuming the non-written songs, those from the oral tradition, being inherently different from the printed ones had largely affected the way in which folklore researchers perceived and interpreted folksongs. She concluded that differences devised between the written and non-written, between commercial and non-commercial forms were frequently just illusive, since commercial dissemination constituted an integral part of the folksongs development.In view of the confluence of the oral and written traditions surveyed in this article, it is reasonable to conclude that written culture, or rather the popular press, constituted a significant factor affecting the existence of folk ballads in the West; because of obvious reasons, such culture was absent in old-time Lithuania. Contrary to Lithuania, the ballad tradition of the West was nurtured by the written and printed sources. Therefore, the Lithuanian case could present a kind of thought experiment to the folklore researcher, vividly illustrating the plausible ballad tradition development in the West, if it could be unaffected by such phenomena as printed texts in native languages, readily available to the common people.

Known as ‘the Indonesian Bob Dylan’, Iwan Fals is one of the country's most popular singers. Many of his ballads address important social and political matters. He has repeatedly been approached by both opposition parties to stand for Parliament, but says he is not interested. His live performances are frequently banned. In 1984 the army halted a show in Pekanbaru, Sumatra, on the grounds that two of his songs — ‘Demokrasi Nasi’ (Rice Democracy) and ‘Mbak Tini’ (Sister Tini) — were a threat to public order. In 1989 the police banned his 100-town tour. ‘All I carry is a guitar made of wood and strings,’ he said then. ‘How can this be dangerous, compared to a tank?’ And his shows continue to be banned — most recently in Ujung Pandang in 1996

The urgency of the study is explained by the importance of a thorough study of typology and classification of concepts in terms of modern cognitive linguistics, linguoculturology, history, ethnolinguistics, philosophy and psychology, including folklore concept as a set of signs that form a semiotic model of national and cultural experience and allow in-depth study of cultural processes in the light of historical and national factors. The aim of the article is to try to comprehend the concept and folklore concept from the standpoint of modern researchers working in various fields of humanities, to analyse, compare the main aspects of studying the problem, considering industry specific features. The main research method is a theoretical method that involves analysis, synthesis, generalisation of the theoretical basis on this topic, and the subject of study – the term concept as a tool of scientific analysis, mental construct and unit of consciousness. The article identifies the main structural and classification features of concepts, diversity of views on the problem of folklore concept from the standpoint of scholars from different fields of humanities and representatives of different cultural strata, the specific features of Ukrainian folklore are considered in detail on the example of texts of thoughts, historical songs, songs-chronicles, wedding songs, carols, Christmas carols, ballads. The materials presented in this paper will help to clarify the specific features and breadth of the mode of understanding certain cultural, folklore and historical phenomena at the intersection of various humanities and social sciences.

AbstractThis article examines early modern English public houses and related period miscellany—broadside ballads, conduct books, and songs—to more closely investigate the discourses and performances of drinking culture. Drinking culture, I argue, not only had a significant role in shaping the Restoration's civic culture of political participation and the emerging early modern public sphere, but also positioned emotions of pleasure and melancholy as social and political objects of care and cultivation. While the politics of pub culture and intoxication have been well documented by historians and literary scholars of early modern England and eighteenth-century America, much of this discussion has not yet been incorporated into political assessments of the public sphere and its history. Reinserting emotion and intoxication into the emergence of the public sphere helps to flesh out the history of feeling and social ritual in civic engagement.

Recent investigations into the survival and dissemination of traditional songs have elucidated the intertwining relationship between print and oral song traditions. Musical repertories once considered distinct, namely broadside ballads and traditional songs, now appear to have inhabited a shared space. Much scholarly attention has been focused on the print and oral interface that occurred in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.Less attention has been paid, however, to music in Ireland where similar economic, cultural and musical forces prevailed. Yet, Ireland’s engagement in various nationalist activities throughout the nineteenth century added a distinctly political twist to Ireland’s print–oral relationship. Songbooks, a tool for many nineteenth-century nationalist movements, often embodied the confluence of print and oral song traditions. Lacking musical notation, many songbooks were dependent on oral traditions such as communal singing to transmit their contents; success also depended on the large-scale distribution networks of booksellers and ballad hawkers. This article seeks to explore further the print–oral interface within the context of Irish nationalism. Specifically, I will examine how one particular movement, Young Ireland, manifested this interface within their songbook, Spirit of the Nation. By examining the production, contents, and ideology of this songbook, the complex connections between literature, orality and nationalism emerge.

The Lieder of Finnish composer Yrjö Kilpinen (1892-1959) provide an interesting opportunity to study the interaction of national identity and musical aesthetics in National Socialist Germany. His German-language songs, above all to texts by Christian Morgenstern, enjoyed considerable success in Germany of the 1930s. Kilpinen's own political sympathies made him a model for Nazi ideologists, even as a non-German composing in the quintessentially German musical genre of the Lied. Reviews of his Lieder in the German-language press expound on the "Nordic" qualities of the work of this "Aryan" composer. Closer examination of the Lieder urn den Tod reveals a stark, at times heavy-handed compositional technique, which well suited the political ideology of the Third Reich.

This paper examines about Romanticism or Romantic era, themes and some famous writers, poets and poems of romantic era. Romanticism is one of the repetitive topics that are connected to either creative mind, vision, motivation, instinct, or independence. The subject frequently condemns the past, worries upon reasonableness, disconnection of the essayist and pays tribute to nature. Gone before by Enlightenment, Romanticism brought crisp verse as well as extraordinary books in English Literature. Begun from England and spread all through Europe including the United States, the Romantic development incorporates well known journalists, for example, William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Lord Byron, Shelley, Chatterton, and Hawthorne. ‘Romantic’ has been adjusted from the French word romaunt that implies a story of Chivalry. After two German scholars Schlegel siblings utilized this word for verse, it changed into a development like an epidemic and spread all through Europe. Romanticism in English writing started during the 1790s with the distribution of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth's "Preface" to the subsequent version (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he portrayed verse as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", turned into the statement of the English Romantic development in verse. The first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was set apart by advancements in both substance and artistic style and by a distraction with the mysterious, the intuitive and the heavenly. An abundance of abilities, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. what's more, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling, have a place with this first phase. The second phase of Romanticism, involving the period from around 1805 to the 1830s, was set apart by a reviving of social patriotism and another regard for national roots, as bore witness to by the accumulation and impersonation of local old stories, people songs and verse, society move and music, and even recently disregarded medieval and Renaissance works. The resuscitated recorded appreciation was converted into creative composition by Sir Walter Scott, who is frequently considered to have imagined the verifiable novel. At about this equivalent time English Romantic verse had arrived at its peak in progress of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

<p>Eighteenth-century American thespians, balladeers, and artists used performances of Columbia, an anthropomorphic metaphor for the body politic, to animate Enlightenment precepts of natural rights and liberty. Following the American Revolution, anti-slavery sympathizers staged Columbia as a symbol both of political liberty from Great Britain and of personal liberty in engravings, plays, and ballads that depicted her bequeathing freedom to Africans from the throne of her Temple. But in reaction to slave-trade abolition-Great Britain's 1807 legislation and the United States' ban in 1808-cultural producers began bifurcating constitutional from personal freedom in their iterations of Columbia. Anti-slavery advocates still used Columbia as an iconic syncretism of political and personal liberty to critique slavery. Others, however, threatened by the possibility of black freedom associated with slave-trade abolition, staged Columbia to represent political but not personal liberty. Thus, just as the slave-trade ban went into effect, Philadelphia's New Theater performed Columbia in dances, songs, and allegorical set pieces that f&ecirc;ted political independence, but in which slaves were absent, an erasure that reinforced whiteness as the defining qualification for American citizenship. Postabolition performances of Columbia in her Temple of Liberty, constructed on rigidifying edifices of racial codification, banished blacks from the civic polity-a far cry from Enlightenment precepts of liberty and rights.</p>

Based on a multi-sited ethnographic research between 2010 and 2013, this article asserts that Kurdish and Alevi social movements in Turkey and in the transnational space have relied heavily on music and activist musicians to engage community members. This article marks several key songs, musicians, and events that effectively formed the soundtrack for these movements. Kurdish Alevi cultural entrepreneurs in Germany and Istanbul have established a transnational social field in which they can relate to members from those communities living in multiple locations. This multiplicity results from simultaneous politicization processes of Alevi and Kurdish movements that have allowed old and new actors to engage with political and social capital along with symbolic capital through cultural and religious activism around multiple identities. The transnational space has allowed new actors to employ different means to serve their main political goals: cultural, musical, and those of other art forms, along with public campaigns to mobilize activists. Therefore, cultural entrepreneurs and other religio-political actors have been navigating in this transnational space while reformulating their political demands.

AbstractThis article examines the emotional standards and experiences connected with the entehno laiko music composed by Mikis Theodorakis that was immensely popular among left-wing Greek migrants, workers and students, living in West Germany in the 1960s and the early 1970s. Expanding on a body of literature that explores the transnational dimensions of protest movements in the 1960s and the 1970s, the article demonstrates that these transnational dimensions were not mutually exclusive with the fact that at least some of those protestors felt that they belonged to a particular nation. Drawing on the conceptual framework put forth by Barbara Rosenwein, it argues that the performance of these songs was conducive to the making of a (trans)national emotional community. On the one hand, for Greek left-wingers residing in West Germany and, after 1967, for Greek centrists too, the collective singing of music composed by Theodorakis initially served as a means of ‘overcoming fear’ and of forging committed militants who struggled for the social and political transformation of their country of origin. On the other, from the late 1960s onwards those migrants increasingly enacted this emotional community with local activists from West Germany as well.

In this article, I analyze the social and cultural trends from within the music scene that counter challenges the moderate and extreme right. This music centers on the issue of ethnic exclusivity and aggressively insists on accepting Germany as a diverse society, however uncomfortable a fit that may still be for many. Certain bands and musicians move from politics to identity politics, in an attempt to generate a discourse about racism and national identity. By foregrounding the contingent relationship between citizen and nation, bands like Advanced Chemistry destabilize any naturalized or motivated link between self and state. Songs like "Fremd im eigenen Land" dismantle any proprietary relationship between German ethnicity and entitlement to the rights of citizenship. An image of a new Germany emerges that insists on the political acceptance of diversity. Nevertheless, this vision is subject to the pressures of reality: Germany is not by any stretch of the imagination a hate-free zone. Structured in part by responses to alienation within Germany, as well as by imported musical forms of male affinity, some bands, rappers, and musicians are organizing themselves into new fraternities. While criticizing or rejecting certain Americanized clichés of masculinity, the bands I discuss look beyond the caricatures of yuppies and cowboys to different models.

Abstract The restoration of the Jesuits in Tyrol in 1838/39 shocked the region’s liberals and this shock found expression in the medium of poetry as exemplified by the polemical “Jesuitenlieder” (Jesuit songs) that circulated throughout Tyrol and southern Germany. A few years later a debate developed in German newspapers about the influence of the Jesuits in Tyrol. While older, but also more recent studies often only focused on the literary quality and the liberal elements of the debate, the affinity of this discourse for the tropes of the conspiracy theory has been overlooked until now. Ultimately, the appeal of invoking such tropes was the possibility it afforded of branding the so-called “Jesuitism” and, in doing so, covertly criticizing the government.

Abstract Today, the film Carbide and Sorrel, by the eminent and recently deceased DEFA director Frank Beyer, is a valuable retrospective look at the construction of the new Germany. Through the story of a worker tossed by his workmates onto the country’s roads in search of carbide in the summer of 1945, this 1963 comedy, made two years after the construction of the Berlin Wall, is a portrait of German society in the grip of the future protagonists of the Cold War. The protagonist’s comic peregrinations between the American and Soviet occupiers are an oblique depiction, reinforced by popular songs of the day, of a utopian existence beyond the dominant political powers.

Strauss's song “Frühlingsfeier,” op. 56, no. 5, was originally composed for voice and piano in 1906 and orchestrated in 1933. Its choice of poet—Heinrich Heine—–is unusual in the context of the literary trends and political attitudes in Germany at the contemporaneous moments. “Frühlingsfeier” resembles Strauss's opera Salome in subject matter: female grief for a beautiful man. The corybantic musical style of Strauss's setting is emphasized in its orchestral version, which was intended for the soprano Viorica Ursuleac, who recorded it in 1936. Strauss's stature as a Lieder composer—despite the popularity of many of his songs—has often been queried. However, what seems on the surface to be a continuation of the late-Romantic tradition is subtly inflected by his poetic decisions and by musical renderings that need to be understood as part of a flexible continuum between versions of the song. Past and present are of less concern than being able to move fluidly between past, present, and future. Such movement opens up the possibility of a less rigid interpretation of Strauss's historical standing that allows his songs to be considered as other than simply regressive.

One of the most creative communicative strategies of German twentieth-century political song has been narrative role-play. From the songs of Kurt Tucholsky and Walter Mehring in Weimar cabaret during the 1920s to the dramatic monologues of Franz Josef Degenhardt in the 1960s and beyond, singers have assumed identifiable roles to parody the language, mannerisms, and characteristics of known establishment social types. Role play has also been evident in the narrative identities constructed by singers and performers, either by means of literary association or by association with certain political ideas or stances, as in the case of Ernst Busch embodying the proletarian worker. This article examines different types of role-play, including that of Hans-Eckard Wenzel and Steffen Mensching who, in their 1980s performances, assumed the ironic masks of clowns, with which they projected an alternative ‘carnival’ vision of society in the German Democratic Republic. David Robb is Senior Lecturer in German at Queen's University of Belfast. He is an experienced songwriter and performing musician, the author of Zwei Clowns im Lande des verlorenen Lachens: das Liedertheater Wenzel & Mensching (1998) and the editor of Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s (2007).

75 years have passed since the liberation of Auschwitz, but racism, nationalism and xenophobia (including anti-Semitism) are still widespread; in fact, due to an increasingly solipsistic policy of international leaders, hostility against those who don’t match race, religion, culture or sexual orientation is even experiencing a renaissance. Fake news start to replace facts. In Germany, politicians of the (democratically elected) right-wing party AfD (Alternative for Germany] publicly question the significance of the holocaust. According to the polls, around 33% of European youths have little or no knowledge about the attempted annihilation of Jews during World War II. In order to prevent the return of barbarism it is essential to remember and understand the characteristics that actually led to barbarism in the first place. Peter Weiss’ play Die Ermittlung: Oratorium in 11 Gesängen [The Investigation. Oratorio in 11 Songs] written in 1965, takes a very thorough look at what Auschwitz was, how it had been made possible and how it survived in society even after the war. The following article examines the play and its context in literature and films on the Holocaust, paying particular attention to the possibility of explaining the, as Elie Wiesel has put it, “unexplainable” and converting it into a teaching experience for current generations.

The nature of the first English newspapers through the eyes of a contemporary playwright Ben Jonson in his play “The Staple of News” is considered. These first-born publications inherited from their predecessops – actually the books, socalled “News books”, “Fair bulletins”, “News ballads”, “News”, “Newsletters”, hybrid publications (two pages of printed messages and two blank pages for handwritten information for the areas where there was still no printing press) – a book format and two-column layout, which restrained development of journalism. The things were not better in terms of filling the content of first periodicals. The journalistic profession was just getting back on its feet, and its criteria were developed through a long process of “trial and error”. In addition, the quality of news was strongly influenced by the political factor in the form of censorship bans directed to coverage of domestic political news and ethical behavior of journalists as well as by the economic factor which dictated the fastest possible profit and caused neglecting the reliability of information and other standards of journalistic profession, which were not completely comprehended at that time. On the other hand, the continuous lies or half-truths in the newspapers could also repel the regular and potential readers, and this factor played a restraining role in descent of these publications to the level of gossip and hearsay. The Dutch newspapers were dominated before the appearance of the first English newspapers in the information space of Misty Albion, which came to the attention of Robert Burton, the English clergyman, writer and scientist. Being a skeptic and pessimist, he called his book “Anatomy of Melancholy” (1621) for good reason. In the same year, the first English newspaper “Corante, or Weekely Newes from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bogemia, France and the Law countreys” appeared under the Dutch influence. Four years later, the second newspaper “Mercurius Britannicus” was published. The first newspaper was depicted in detail and the second one was depicted briefly in the play of the English playwright Ben Jonson “The Staple of News” (1625). Оbviously this is the first English work dedicated to the newspaper and its journalists.

История новой музыки пятидесятых и шестидесятых годов XX века излагается в особом ракурсе. Автор указывает на ту огромную роль, которую сыграла в ее развитии политическая ситуация эпохи холодной войны. В то время как СССР и его сателлиты поставили искусство на службу пропаганде и отдавали предпочтение благозвучным произведениям, напоминающим народные песни и танцы, в Западной Европе, и особенно в Западной Германии, мощную финансовую поддержку получила диссонантная музыка, опирающаяся на технику шёнберговской додекафонии («дегенеративное искусство», как называли такую музыку в Третьем рейхе). Эстетика этого абстрактного, трудного для восприятия широкой аудиторией искусства была ориентирована на постоянное новаторство и на полное, беспрепятственное раскрытие индивидуальности композитора. В результате магистральный путь развития новой музыки стали определять явления, которые в иной политической и экономической ситуации были бы маргинальными, а авангардное направление оказалось голосом мира, расположенного по западную сторону железного занавеса, точно так же, как голосом стран социалистического лагеря являлся социалистический реализм. The new music of the 1950s and 1960s is considered in the special historical perspective. The author points to the huge role the political situation of the Cold War era played in its development. While the USSR and its satellites put art at the service of propaganda and preferred consonant works reminiscent of folk songs and dances, in Western Europe, and especially in Western Germany, dissonant musi c based on the Schoenberg's dodecaphony (former “entartete Kunst”) received strong financial support. The aesthetics of this abstract art, which has not yet received recognition from a wide audience, was focused on the constant innovation and on the full, unhindered discovery of the composer's individuality. As a result, the development of the new music was determined by phenomena that would have been marginal in a different political and economic situation, and the avant-garde turned out to be the voice of the world on the western side of the Iron Curtain, just as socialist realism was the voice of the socialist camp.

The article examines the aesthetics of Soviet documentary films and German non-fiction and experimental films. It appeared in the wide artistic context of the avant-garde of the 1920s and was radically reworked in the 1930s. The subject of the article is the concept of the documentary in a totalitarian culture and its purpose is to show the transformation of reality in the film art of the 1930s. The article analyses the stylistic and theoretical features of Dziga Vertov’s and Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries. The novelty of the article lies in the author’s appeal to understudied films that embody the totalitarian aesthetics of the era of Stalinism and German Nazism. The author poses a question about the existence of obvious similarities and differences between Russian and German films, which is highly relevant in the light of ongoing scientific discussions about the influence of totalitarian regimes on creative processes. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that, despite the figurative and semantic similarity of individual episodes of the films by Vertov and Riefenstahl, and their common political pathos and interest in capturing images of leaders and their meetings with people on the screen, the directors had different attitudes towards the representation of political and social reality. In Three Songs about Lenin, Lullaby and Three Heroines, Vertov turns to folklore and epic genres, and creates an intertextual cinematic world that includes a wide range of meanings and topics that do not fit into the official Soviet canons. In Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl aestheticizes politics and depicts on the screen the official myth about the state and its citizen, which was inspired by the heroics of antiquity and Wagner’s operas adopted by the official ideology of fascism. Riefenstahl shot a fact with the aim of aestheticizing it, while Vertov gave it a new figurative meaning on the editing table. It is natural that the soviet director’s aesthetics could not coincide with the era: Vertov’s works did not appear on the screen, and he himself was forgotten. Riefenstahl, on the contrary, became the main cinematographer of Hitler’s Germany.

Anders Toftgaard: Amongst speaking statues and admonishing ghosts. Mazarinades in the collections of The Royal Library Mazarinade is a term for political writing that was published in different forms in France during (and related to) the Fronde (1648–1653). The Fronde was a series of civil wars that first broke out when Louis XIV (born 1638) was still a child, and Mazarin was the Chief Minister of France and responsible for the young king’s education. Mazarin governed the country together with the king’s mother, Anne of Austria. The term mazarinade covers pamphlets, letters, official documents, burlesque poetry, sonnets and ballads, discourses and dialogues.The Royal Library in Copenhagen holds a collection of mazarinades. The Copenhagen collection was overlooked by scholars and Hubert Carrier (who travelled widely) because it had not been properly catalogued. The collection of mazarinades in the Royal Library has now been catalogued by the author of the article, and the catalogue is available in Fund og Forskning online. The article serves as an introduction to this hitherto unknown collection of mazarinades. After a presentation of the Fronde, and the term mazarinade and its denotation, the article lists the rare and unique mazarinades in the collections of The Royal Library, Copenhagen and where possible, traces their provenance.The collection consists of 33 volumes of mazarinades that have been put together in the 19th century in order to form a single collection: Collection de mazarinades. Apart from this Collection de mazarinades there are other mazarinades in the holdings, stemming both from the Royal Library and from the University Library. The 33 volumes (one volume has been missing for years) have been grouped together by various subsets. One of these subsets is a collection of mazarinades created by Pierre Camuset, who lived during the time of the Fronde. Camuset introduces himself as “conseiller du roi, eslu en l’election de Paris”. Archival records show that he was appointed to this position on 9 December 1622, that in 1641 he married Agnès, daughter of Jean Le Noir, lawyer to the Parliament of Parisian, and that he died some years before 1670.In the Collection de Mazarinades, there are approx. 100 mazarinades which were considered rare or “rarissime” by Célestin Moreau in his Bibliographie des mazarinades (1850–1851). There are three mazarinades, which would seem to be unique; three mazarinades, which are not recorded in the existing bibliographies of mazarinades (made by D’Artois and Carrier, in the Bibliothèque Mazarine) but of which there are copies in other libraries. There is a mazarinade printed by Samuel Brown in The Hague, which has not been recorded elsewhere. Finally, there are 11 mazarinades printed by Jean-Aimé Candy in Lyon, of which only three, judging from existing catalogues and bibliographies, seem to exist in other libraries.Only few of the mazarinades were brought to Denmark during the Fronde. Most of them were collected by Danish 18th century collectors. Surprisingly, only a small part stems from the incredibly rich library of Count Otto Thott (1703–1785). When Thott’s library was auctioned off, his mazarinades were bought by Herman Treschow (1739–1797) who acted as a commission agent for numerous book collectors, and due to the detailed cataloguing in Thott’s auction catalogue, it would probably be possible to find the volumes from his library in a foreign library.Both Hans Gram (1685–1748) and Bolle Willum Luxdorph (1716–1788) owned copies of Gabriel Naudé’s Mascurat in which they wrote handwritten notes. Luxdorph was the great collector of Danish press freedom writings. In his marginal notes he compares a passage in Naudé’s text about common people appropriating the art of printing with his own experience of a servant who came up with songs that were “assez mechants” during the fall of Struensee on 17 January 1772: “Mon valet faisait aussi d’asséz méchans vers su aujet de la revolution du 17de janvier 1772”. Luxdorph’s reading of Mascurat is thus in close connection with his interest in writings on press freedom.The Mazarinades are valuable both for studies in history, literary history and history of the book. More specifically, the collection of Mazarinades in the Royal Library, on the one hand, through the example of Pierre Camuset, shows how an individual tried to get a grasp of an abnormal period, and on the other hand, through the example of Luxdoph, very clearly testifies to the 18th century interest in the history of the book and in historical periods with de facto freedom of the press.

Čenču Jezups or Dzērkste (real name Jezups Kindzuļs, 1888–1941?) was a Latgalian public figure, agronomist, publicist and writer. Date of his death is unknown – he was arrested in February 1941 by NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), but after that there is no information about his further life. He participated in the Latgalian Awakening movement at the beginning of 20th century. Later J. Kindzuļs was one of the organizers of the Latgalian congress (1917) in Rēzekne and a member of Constitutional Assembly of Latvia (1920–1922). He was an editor of such periodicals as “Latgalīts” (1921), “Latgolas Zemkūpis” (1924–1935), “Latgolas lauksaimnīks” (calendar, 1924–1935). He wrote his novel “Pīters Vylāns” between 1935 and 1941. It was first published in Daugavpils in 1943 by writer and publisher Vladislavs Luocis. Later it was published again in Germany in 1967.Čenču Jezups’ novel “Pīters Vylāns” was analysed by Miķelis Bukšs, Ilona Salceviča, Oskars Seiksts. The mentioned papers reveal the meaning of Latgalian self-confidence, which is disclosed in “Pīters Vylāns”, but unfortunately the author of this novel seems to be forgotten. Therefore the aim of this research is to “decode” factors of inspiration in Čenču Jezups’ novel “Pīters Vylāns” to gain more information about author’s life and his value system.Inspiration is always connected with writer’s life experience. Furthermore, the writer creates his own world. Vladislavs Luocis wrote that J. Kindzuļs planned to write a trilogy (Lōcis 1965: 26), but because of Latvia’s occupation by the Soviet Union this intention was not fulfilled. Factors of inspiration are divided into two groups: literary and non-literary (Lukaševičs 2007: 5). Non-literary factors of inspiration are those connected with J. Kindzuļs’ life (social and political events, education and public activities, private life). Literary and cultural factors of inspiration refer to his interests and Latgalian self-identification.Novel “Pīters Vylāns” was written during the authoritarian regime of Kārlis Ulmanis (1934–1940) and deals with peasants’ life during the Russian Revolution of 1905 (1905–1907) in Latgale. The problems of Latgalian identity (to be russified or polonized, quest for identity as a possibility) are dealt with by means of such characters as Vera Semjonova, Stefa, Meikuls Stumbris and Buks. It may be that the characters Pīters Vylāns and Ontons Sleižs are the two sides of J. Kindzuļs’ alter ego. His life experience until World War I is revealed in Pīters Vylāns, but after 1920 – in Ontons Sleižs. J. Kindzuļs may have studied either agronomy or law in Petersburg (after 1907). He took part in Latgalian Musical society and later he worked in the editorial office of newspaper “Drywa” (1908–1912). J. Kindzuļs was involved in the First World War and after that he worked in Rēzekne Commerce School (1919). After 1922 he started farming in his household “Pelēķi” in Laucesa rural municipality and was busy with issues of agronomy in Latgale.J. Kindzuļs’ private life is revealed in two women characters: Elvira and Stefa. Kindzuļs himself had three wives: unknown (married before 1919), Hortenzija Kindzule (Dardedze, married about 1921), Jadviga Kindzule (Kondrāte, married before 1933). J. Kindzuļs became a widower twice. He had two sons: Česlavs (from his first marriage) and Andrivs Jēkabs (from the second marriage). The third child was a daughter, but he and his wife Jadviga lost her because she died of an illness when she was 3.Because of lack of information about J. Kindzuļs, there is no possibility to find out his interests. The only way to get more information about J. Kindzuļs is to research his novel “Pīters Vylāns”. From the novel we know that for J. Kindzuļs there are three groups of literary and cultural factors of inspiration. Firstly, it is Latgalian self-confidence, which appears in the use of Roman Catholic elements such as rites, prayers and honour songs for God. Secondly, it is syncretism of Christian faith and paganism, which is presented as rewriting of folksongs by hand and “vakariešona” or evening gathering. Thirdly, it is European culture, because it is clear that J. Kindzuļs knew, for example, such writers as Goethe, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, classical music (F. F. Chopin) and architecture. The amount of information about J. Kindzuļs must be enriched and research must be continued. Novel “Pīters Vylāns” was written after 1935 and it is autobiographical. Such characters as Pīters Vylāns and Ontons Sleižs reflect the personality of J. Kindzuļs, but Elvira and Stefa reveal some traits of his wives Hortenzija and Jadviga. J. Kindzuļs glorifies values which became significant after 1934: land and farming, peasants and unity. He describes the Latvians of Latgale during the Russian Revolution of 1905 (1905–1907), but at the same time he criticizes the tendency to be latvianized. The same attitude he has to russification. He accepts the ideological course of Kārlis Ulmanis policy and this ideological position of J. Kindzuļs is manifested as a form of rebellion.

In the 1940s, the totalitarian occupying regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union implemented the strictest control and ideological guidance of intellectual and spiritual life of all time in Estonia. Essentially, the mechanisms and results of control are known. Cultural life was subjected to strict pre-censorship and post-publication censorship, and in the Soviet era also to thematic dictation. The intellectual and spiritual resistance of Estonians in those years, in other words their refusal to accept the ruling ideology, has been studied very little. The most widespread way of putting up intellectual and spiritual resistance was to remain silent, in other words to avoid creating works that were agreeable to the authorities. Selective silence, that is the selection of one’s points of emphasis, and splitting, in other words writing for oneself works that one keeps in one’s drawer while at the same time writing for publication in print, are also placed in this category. Recording actual history in diaries through the eyes of contemporaries of events, reading intellectually and spiritually enjoyable literature, and other such actions were ways of putting up intellectual and spiritual resistance. The main objective of this study is to ascertain in historical context the attempts to put up intellectual and spiritual resistance in the comedies from the 1940s by Hugo Raudsepp (1883–1952), one of the most outstanding Estonian playwrights of the 20th century. Ideologically speaking, dramatic literature was clearly one of the most vulnerable branches of literature. It was created for public presentation in theatres, after all, for which reason authors had to be particularly careful in their wording. On the other hand, plays provided both authors and directors with opportunities to conceal messages between the lines. For this reason, theatre became exceedingly popular in Estonia by the final decades of the Soviet era. The ridicule and mocking of the Soviet regime were especially enjoyed. The subjugation of Estonian intellectual and spiritual life to the ideological requirements of the occupying regime was launched at the time of pre-war Stalinism (1940–1941). Its aim was to rear Soviet-minded people who would help to justify, fortify and enhance the Soviet regime. The systematic control of the activities of creative persons and the working out of dictates and regulations were nevertheless not yet completed during the first year of Soviet rule. Many outstanding cultural figures remained silent or earned a living by translating texts. At that time, Hugo Raudsepp wrote the non-political novel Viimne eurooplane [The Last European], which is noteworthy to this day, while his plays from the period of independent Estonian statehood were not staged in theatres. Starting with the German occupation (1941–1944), the point of departure for Hugo Raudsepp was writing between the lines in his comedies in order to get both readers and theatregoers to think and to give them strength of soul. In 1943, he wrote the comedy Vaheliku vapustused [Interspatial Jolts], which has later been styled as a masterpiece. He concealed numerous signs between the lines of this play referring to the fate of a small people, in other words Estonia, between its great neighbouring powers the Soviet Union and Germany. Performances of this play were soon banned. Performances in theatres of all other plays by Hugo Raudsepp were similarly banned, with one exception. During post-war Stalinism in 1944–51, the sovietisation of Estonian cultural life resumed. Hugo Raudsepp did not initially write on topical Soviet themes, rather he sought subject matter from earlier times. His first play from that period entitled Rotid [Rats] (1946) was about the German occupation during the Second World War and it ridiculed the occupying Germans. Raudsepp also skilfully wove messages supporting Estonian cultural identity into the play. The play was staged in the Estonia Theatre but was soon banned. Raudsepp’s second play from that period, Tagatipu Tiisenoosen (1946), earned first prize at the state comedy competition in that same year. The action in the play was set in the period of Estonian National Awakening at the end of the 19th century. It ridiculed Baltic Germans and the behaviour of parvenu Estonians. Similarly to his previous play, he demonstrated nationalist mentality in this comedy by way of nationalist songs. It is noteworthy that by the summer of 1947, Tagatipu Tiisenoosen had also reached expatriate Estonians and it was staged with an altered title as the only Stalinist- era play from Soviet Estonia in Canada (1952), Australia (1954) and Sweden (1956). The thematic precepts imposed on Estonian writers and the mechanism for ensuring that those precepts were followed became even stricter starting in 1947. Raudsepp wrote his next 7 plays on required Soviet subject matter: post-war land reform (Tillereinu peremehed [The Owners of Tillereinu], 1947), monetary reform (Noorsulane Ilmar [Ilmar the Young Farmhand], 1948), kolkhozes (Küpsuseksam [Matriculation Exam] and Lasteaed [Kindergarten], 1949, Mineviku köidikuis [In the Fetters of the Past] (1950) and his so-called Viimane näidend [Last Play], 1950 or 1951), and the beginning of the Soviet regime in Estonia in 1940 (Pööripäevad Kikerpillis [Solstices in Kikerpill], 1949). Hugo Raudsepp skilfully wove words of wisdom for Estonians on surviving under foreign rule through the mouths of his characters, or discreetly laughed about Soviet reality in a way that the censors did not grasp. Post-war cultural policy culminated with the 8th Plenum of the Estonian Communist (Bolshevist) Party (EC(B)P) Central Committee on 21–26 March 1950, where among other things, the EC(B)P Central Committee Bureau was accused of allowing the exaltation of the superiority of Western European science and culture. Cultural figures were branded bourgeois nationalists and they faced serious ordeals. The fate of the great figure of Estonian dramatic literature was very harsh. Hugo Raudsepp was depicted as a ‘fascist henchman’ in 1950. He was expelled from the Estonian Writers’ Union and was deprived of his personal pension. He was arrested on 11 May 1951. Opposition to the Soviet regime was stressed in the charges presented to him. His play Vaheliku vapustused, which the German occupying regime had banned, and his only play that was allowed at that time, Lipud tormis [Flags in the Storm], were named as the primary evidence supporting the charges. Hugo Raudsepp was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in the autumn of 1951. He hoped to the last possible moment that he would be allowed to serve his sentence in Estonia. Unfortunately, on 18 February 1952 he was sent by train from Tallinn to Narva and on 19 February on to Leningrad. From there his journey took him to Vjatka, Kirov and finally Irkutsk oblast. This great man’s health was poor, and he soon died on 15 September 1952. Very few new literary works appeared in the 1940s. The historical nadir is altogether seen in post-war book production in the era of Stalinism. Estonian theatre was similarly in a most difficult situation due to censorship, shortage of repertoire, scarcity of funding, and layoffs and sackings of theatre personnel. Nowadays the survival of theatre at the time, regardless of difficult times, is appreciated, and actors are recognised for preserving Estonian identity and uniting the people. Hugo Raudsepp’s role as a playwright in supporting intellectual and spiritual resistance to foreign authorities has to be recognised on the basis of his occupation-era comedies. Hugo Raudsepp was one of the most productive authors of his day, writing a total of 11 plays in 1943–51. According to the assessment of scholars of literature, he never once rose with these works to the leading-edge level of his previous works. It was impossible to create masterpieces that would become classics in that time of strict ideological precepts and the monitoring of their observance. Taking into consideration the extremely restricted creative conditions, his works were still masterpieces of their time. As Hugo Raudsepp’s oeuvre demonstrates, spirit still managed to cleverly trump power regardless of censorship and official precepts. The denunciation of Stalin’s personality cult in 1956 once again opened the door to the theatre for Hugo Raudsepp’s best comedies from Estonia’s era of independent statehood. The witticism and laughter of Hugo Raudsepp’s comedies gave people renewed strength of soul.

Canon and oblivion. The memorials of archaeologyThe article takes its point of departure in the sun chariot; the find itself and its find site at Trundholm bog where it was discovered in 1902. The famous sun chariot, now at the National Museum in Copenhagen, is a national treasure included in the Danish “Cultural Canon” and “History Canon”.The find site itself has alternated bet­ween experiencing intense attention and oblivion. A monument was erected in 1925; a new monument was then created in 1962 and later moved in 2002. The event of 1962 was followed by ceremonies, speeches and songs, and anniversary celebrations were held in 2002, during which a copy of the sun chariot was sacrificed.The memorial at Trundholm bog is only one of several memorials at archaeological find sites in Denmark. Which finds have been commemorated and marked by memorials? When did this happen? Who took the initiative? How were they executed? Why are these finds remembered? What picture of the past do we meet in this canon in stone?Find sites and archaeological memorials have been neglected in archaeology and by recent trends in the study of the history of archaeology. Considering the impressive research on monuments and monumentality in archaeology, this is astonishing. However, memorials in general receive attention in an active research field on the use of history and heritage studies, where historians and ethnologists dominate. The main focus here is, however, on war memorials. An important source of inspiration has been provided by a project led by the French historian Pierre Nora who claims that memorial sites are established when the living memory is threatened (a thesis refuted by the many Danish “Reunion” monuments erected even before the day of reunification in 1920).Translated into Danish conditions, studies of the culture of remembrance and memorials have focused on the wars of 1848-50 and 1864, the Reunion in 1920, the Occupation in 1940-45 and, more generally, on conflicts in the borderland bet­ween Denmark and Germany.In relation to the total number of memorials and public meeting places in Denmark, archaeological memorials of archaeology are few in number, around 1 % of the total. However, they prompt crucial questions concerning the use of the past, on canon and oblivion.“Canon” means rule, and canonical texts are the supposed genuine texts in the Bible. The concept of canon became a topic in the 1990s when Harold Bloom, in “The Western Canon”, identified a number of books as being canonical. In Denmark, canon has been a great issue in recent years with the appearance of the “Danish Literary Canon” in 2004, and the “Cultural Canon” and the “History Canon”, both in 2006. The latter includes the Ertebølle culture, the sun chariot and the Jelling stone. The political context for the creation of canon lists is the so-called “cultural conflict” and the debate concerning immigration and “foreigners”.Canon and canonization means a struggle against relativism and oblivion. Canon means that something ought to be remembered while something else is allowed to be forgotten. Canon lists are constructed when works and values are perceived as being threatened by oblivion. Without ephemerality and oblivion there is no need for canon lists. Canon and oblivion are linked.Memorials mean canonization of certain individuals, collectives, events and places, while others are allowed to be forgotten. Consequently, archaeological memorials constitute part of the canonization of a few finds and find sites. According to Pierre Nora’s thesis, memorials are established when the places are in danger of being forgotten.Whether one likes canon lists or not, they are a fact. There has always been a process of prioritisation, leading to some finds being preserved and others discarded, some being exhibited and others ending up in the stores.Canonization is expressed in the classical “Seven Wonders of the World”, the “Seven New Wonders of the World” and the World Heritage list. A find may be declared as treasure trove, as being of “unique national significance” or be honoured by the publication of a monograph or by being given its own museum.In practice, the same few finds occur in different contexts. There seems to be a consensus within the subject of canonization of valuing what is well preserved, unique, made of precious metals, bears images and is monumental. A top-ten canon list of prehistoric finds from Denmark according to this consensus would probably include the following finds: The sun chariot from Trundholm, the girl from Egtved, the Dejbjerg carts, the Gundestrup cauldron, Tollund man, the golden horns from Gallehus, the Mammen or Bjerringhøj grave, the Ladby ship and the Skuldelev ships.Just as the past may be used in many different ways, there are many forms of memorial related to monuments from the past or to archaeological excavations. Memorials were constructed in the 18th and 19th centuries at locations where members of the royal family had conducted archaeology. As with most other memorials from that time, the prince is at the centre, while antiquity and archaeology create a brilliant background, for example at Jægerpris (fig. 2). Memorials celebrating King Frederik VII were created at the Dæmpegård dolmen and at the ruin of Asserbo castle. A memorial celebrating Count Frederik Sehested was erected at Møllegårdsmarken (fig. 3). Later there were also memorials celebrating the architect C.M. Smith at the ruin of Kalø Castle and Svend Dyhre Rasmussen and Axel Steensberg, respectively the finder and the excavator of the medieval village at Borup Ris.Several memorials were erected in the decades around 1900 to commemorate important events or persons in Danish history, for example by Thor Lange. The memorials were often located at sites and monuments that had recently been excavated, for example at Fjenneslev (fig. 4).A large number of memorials commemorate abandoned churches, monasteries, castles or barrows that have now disappeared, for example at the monument (fig. 5) near Bjerringhøj.Memorials were erected in the first half of the 20th century near large prehistoric monuments which also functioned as public meeting places, for example at Glavendrup, Gudbjerglund and Hohøj. Prehistoric monuments, especially dolmens, were also used as models when new memorials were created during the 19th and 20th centuries.Finally, sculptures were produced at the end of the 19th century sculptures where the motif was a famous archaeological find – the golden horns, the girl from Egtved, the sun chariot and the woman from Skrydstrup.In the following, this article will focus on a category of memorials raised to commemorate an archaeological find. In Denmark, 24 archaeological find sites have been marked by a total of 26 monuments (fig. 6). This survey is based on excursions, scanning the literature, googling on the web and contact with colleagues. The monuments are presented chronological, i.e. by date of erection. 1-2) The golden horns from Gallehus: Found in 1639 and 1734; two monu­ments in 1907. 3) The Snoldelev runic stone: Found in c. 1780; monument in 1915. 4) The sun chariot from Trundholm bog: Found in 1902; monument in 1925; renewed in 1962 and moved in 2002. 5) The grave mound from Egtved: Found in 1921; monument in 1930. 6) The Dejbjerg carts. Found in 1881-83; monument in 1933. 7) The Gundestrup cauldron: Found in 1891; wooden stake in 1934; replaced with a monument in 1935. 8) The Bregnebjerg burial ground: Found in 1932; miniature dolmen in 1934. 9) The Brangstrup gold hoard. Found in 1865; monument in 1935.10-11) Maglemose settlements in Mulle­rup bog: Found in 1900-02; two monuments in 1935 and 1936. 12) The Skarpsalling vessel from Oudrup Heath: Found in 1891; monument in 1936. 13) The Juellinge burial ground: Found in 1909; monument in 1937. 14) The Ladby ship: Found in 1935; monument probably in 1937. 15) The Hoby grave: Found in 1920; monument in 1939. 16) The Maltbæk lurs: Found in 1861 and 1863; monument in 1942. 17) Ginnerup settlement: First excavation in 1922; monument in 1945. 18) The golden boats from Nors: Found in 1885; monument in 1945. 19) The Sædinge runic stone: Found in 1854; monument in 1945. 20) The Nydam boat: Found in 1863; monument in 1947. 21) The aurochs from Vig: Found in 1904; monument in 1957. 22) Tollund Man: Found in 1950; wooden stake in 1968; renewed inscription in 2000. 23) The Veksø helmets: Found in 1942; monument in 1992. 24) The Bjæverskov coin hoard. Found in 1999; monument in 1999. 25) The Frydenhøj sword from Hvidovre: Found in 1929; monument in 2001; renewed in 2005. 26) The Bellinge key: Found in 1880; monument in 2003.Two monuments (fig. 7) raised in 1997 at Gallehus, where the golden horns were found, marked a new trend. From then onwards the find itself and its popular finders came into focus. At the same time the classical or old Norse style of the memorials was replaced by simple menhirs or boulders with an inscription and sometimes also an image of the find. One memorial was constructed as a miniature dolmen and a few took the form of a wooden stake.The finds marked by memorials represent a broader spectrum than the top-ten list. They represent all periods from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages over most of Denmark. Memorials were created throughout the 20th century; in greatest numbers in the 1930s and 1940s, but with none between 1968 and 1992.The inscriptions mention what was found and, in most cases, also when it happened. Sometimes the finder is named and, in a few instances, also the person on whose initiative the memorial was erected. The latter was usually a representative part of the political agency of the time. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was the royal family and the aristocracy. In the 20th century it was workers, teachers, doctors, priests, farmers and, in many cases, local historical societies who were responsible, as seen on the islands of Lolland and Falster, where ten memorials were erected between 1936 and 1951 to commemorate historical events, individuals, monuments or finds.The memorial from 2001 at the find site of the Frydenhøj sword in Hvidovre represents an innovation in the tradition of marking history in the landscape. The memorial is a monumental hybrid between signposting and public art (fig. 8). It formed part of a communication project called “History in the Street”, which involved telling the history of a Copenhagen suburb right there where it actually happened.The memorials marking archaeological finds relate to the nation and to nationalism in several ways. The monuments at Gallehus should, therefore, be seen in the context of a struggle concerning both the historical allegiance and future destiny of Schleswig or Southern Jutland. More generally, the national perspective occurs in inscriptions using concepts such as “the people”, “Denmark” and “the Danes”, even if these were irrelevant in prehistory, e.g. when the monument from 1930 at Egtved mentions “A young Danish girl” (fig. 9). This use of the past to legitimise the nation, belongs to the epoch of World War I, World War II and the 1930s. The influence of nationalism was often reflected in the ceremonies when the memorials were unveiled, with speeches, flags and songs.According to Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Inge Adriansen, prehistoric objects that are applicable as national symbols, should satisfy three criteria. The should: 1) be unusual and remarkable by their technical and artistic quality; 2) have been produced locally, i.e. be Danish; 3) have been used in religious ceremonies or processions. The 26 archaeological finds marked with memorials only partly fit these criteria. The finds also include more ordinary finds: a burial ground, settlements, runic stones, a coin hoard, a sword and a key. Several of the finds were produced abroad: the Gundestrup cauldron, the Brangstrup jewellery and coins and the Hoby silver cups.It is tempting to interpret the Danish cultural canon as a new expression of a national use of the past in the present. Nostalgia, the use of the past and the creation of memorials are often explained as an expression of crisis in society. This seems reasonable for the many memorials from 1915-45 with inscriptions mentioning hope, consolation and darkness. However, why are there no memorials from the economic crisis years of the 1970s and 1980s? It seems as if the past is recalled, when the nation is under threat – in the 1930s and 40s from expansive Germany – and since the 1990s by increased immigration and globalisation.The memorials have in common local loss and local initiative. A treasure was found and a treasure was lost, often to the National Museum in Copenhagen. A treasure was won that contributed to the great narrative of the history of Denmark, but that treasure has also left its original context. The memorials commemorate the finds that have contributed to the narrative of the greatness, age and area of Denmark. The memorials connect the nation and the native place, the capital and the village in a community, where the past is a central concept. The find may also become a symbol of a region or community, for example the sun chariot for Trundholm community and the Gundestrup cauldron for Himmerland.It is almost always people who live near the find site who want to remember what has been found and where. The finds were commemorated by a memorial on average 60 years after their discovery. A longer period elapsed for the golden horns from Gallehus; shortest was at Bjæverskov where the coin hoard was found in March 1999 and a monument was erected in November of the same year.Memorials might seem an old-fashioned way of marking localities in a national topography, but new memorials are created in the same period as many new museums are established.A unique find has no prominent role in archaeological education, research or other work. However, in public opinion treasures and exotic finds are central. Folklore tells of people searching for treasures but always failing. Treasure hunting is restricted by taboos. In the world of archaeological finds there are no taboos. The treasure is found by accident and in spite of various hindrances the find is taken to a museum. The finder is often a worthy person – a child, a labourer or peasant. He or she is an innocent and ordinary person. A national symbol requires a worthy finder. And the find occurs as a miracle. At the find site a romantic relationship is established between the ancestors and their heirs who, by way of a miracle, find fragments of the glorious past of the nation. A paradigmatic example is the finding of the golden horns from Gallehus. Other examples extend from the discovery of the sun chariot in Trundholm bog to the Stone Age settlement at Mullerup bog.The article ends with a catalogue presenting the 24 archaeological find sites that have been marked with monuments in present-day Denmark.Jes WienbergHistorisk arkeologiInstitutionen för Arkeologi och ­Antikens historiaLunds Universitet

Abstract Historians have recently shown how the concept of ‘sustainability’ (Nachhaltigkeit) first emerged through statist ambitions to enfold nature into political economy in eighteenth-century Germany. Shifting the focus from forestry to mining, this article draws upon the case of Prussian mining official Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the ‘Mining School’ he founded in Bad Steben to argue that sustainable resource management also entailed the strict discipline of labour relations and a programme of ‘psychological policy’. Humboldt's Mining School sought to address administrative concerns about ‘Raubbau’ – the rash exploitation of mineral resources ‘without consideration for the future’ – by cultivating a new generation of mine foremen loyal to the state and schooled in its protocol. Ostensibly, Humboldt wished to purge the industry of ‘superstitious’ folk knowledge that undermined the state's commitment to long-term exploitation. Yet analysis of mining songs and sagas suggests a striking analogy between official and vernacular understandings of resource extraction as an ethical matter. Thus, the environmental alarms sounded by German miners around 1800 were triggered by transgressions of a social nature; and political concerns about social order in the ‘mining state’ were constitutive of material concerns about natural resources.

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. 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Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. 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In 1956, John Cage predicted that “in the future, records will be made from records” (Duffel, 202). Certainly, musical creativity has always involved a certain amount of appropriation and adaptation of previous works. For example, Vivaldi appropriated and adapted the “Cum sancto spiritu” fugue of Ruggieri’s Gloria (Burnett, 4; Forbes, 261). If stuck for a guitar solo on stage, Keith Richards admits that he’ll adapt Buddy Holly for his own purposes (Street, 135). Similarly, Nirvana adapted the opening riff from Killing Jokes’ “Eighties” for their song “Come as You Are”. Musical “quotation” is actively encouraged in jazz, and contemporary hip-hop would not exist if the genre’s pioneers and progenitors had not plundered and adapted existing recorded music. Sampling technologies, however, have taken musical adaptation a step further and realised Cage’s prediction. Hardware and software samplers have developed to the stage where any piece of audio can be appropriated and adapted to suit the creative impulses of the sampling musician (or samplist). The practice of sampling challenges established notions of creativity, with whole albums created with no original musical input as most would understand it—literally “records made from records.” Sample-based music is premised on adapting audio plundered from the cultural environment. This paper explores the ways in which technology is used to adapt previous recordings into new ones, and how musicians themselves have adapted to the potentials of digital technology for exploring alternative approaches to musical creativity. Sampling is frequently defined as “the process of converting an analog signal to a digital format.” While this definition remains true, it does not acknowledge the prevalence of digital media. The “analogue to digital” method of sampling requires a microphone or instrument to be recorded directly into a sampler. Digital media, however, simplifies the process. For example, a samplist can download a video from YouTube and rip the audio track for editing, slicing, and manipulation, all using software within the noiseless digital environment of the computer. Perhaps it is more prudent to describe sampling simply as the process of capturing sound. Regardless of the process, once a sound is loaded into a sampler (hardware or software) it can be replayed using a MIDI keyboard, trigger pad or sequencer. Use of the sampled sound, however, need not be a faithful rendition or clone of the original. At the most basic level of manipulation, the duration and pitch of sounds can be altered. The digital processes that are implemented into the Roland VariOS Phrase Sampler allow samplists to eliminate the pitch or melodic quality of a sampled phrase. The phrase can then be melodically redefined as the samplist sees fit: adapted to a new tempo, key signature, and context or genre. Similarly, software such as Propellerhead’s ReCycle slices drum beats into individual hits for use with a loop sampler such as Reason’s Dr Rex module. Once loaded into Dr Rex, the individual original drum sounds can be used to program a new beat divorced from the syncopation of the original drum beat. Further, the individual slices can be subjected to pitch, envelope (a component that shapes the volume of the sound over time) and filter (a component that emphasises and suppresses certain frequencies) control, thus an existing drum beat can easily be adapted to play a new rhythm at any tempo. For example, this rhythm was created from slicing up and rearranging Clyde Stubblefield’s classic break from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer”. Sonic adaptation of digital information is not necessarily confined to the auditory realm. An audio editor such as Sony’s Sound Forge is able to open any file format as raw audio. For example, a Word document or a Flash file could be opened with the data interpreted as audio. Admittedly, the majority of results obtained are harsh white noise, but there is scope for serendipitous anomalies such as a glitchy beat that can be extracted and further manipulated by audio software. Audiopaint is an additive synthesis application created by Nicolas Fournel for converting digital images into audio. Each pixel position and colour is translated into information designating frequency (pitch), amplitude (volume) and pan position in the stereo image. The user can determine which one of the three RGB channels corresponds to either of the stereo channels. Further, the oscillator for the wave form can be either the default sine wave or an existing audio file such as a drum loop can be used. The oscillator shapes the end result, responding to the dynamics of the sine wave or the audio file. Although Audiopaint labours under the same caveat as with the use of raw audio, the software can produce some interesting results. Both approaches to sound generation present results that challenge distinctions between “musical sound” and “noise”. Sampling is also a cultural practice, a relatively recent form of adaptation extending out of a time honoured creative aesthetic that borrows, quotes and appropriates from existing works to create new ones. Different fields of production, as well as different commentators, variously use terms such as “co-creative media”, “cumulative authorship”, and “derivative works” with regard to creations that to one extent or another utilise existing works in the production of new ones (Coombe; Morris; Woodmansee). The extent of the sampling may range from subtle influence to dominating significance within the new work, but the constant principle remains: an existing work is appropriated and adapted to fit the needs of the secondary creator. Proponents of what may be broadly referred to as the “free culture” movement argue that creativity and innovation inherently relies on the appropriation and adaptation of existing works (for example, see Lessig, Future of Ideas; Lessig, Free Culture; McLeod, Freedom of Expression; Vaidhyanathan). For example, Gwen Stefani’s 2004 release “Rich Girl” is based on Louchie Lou and Michie One’s 1994 single of the same title. Lou and One’s “Rich Girl”, in turn, is a reggae dance hall adaptation of “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof. Stefani’s “na na na” vocal riff shares the same melody as the “Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum” riff from Fiddler on the Roof. Samantha Mumba adapted David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” for her second single “Body II Body”. Similarly, Richard X adapted Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ and Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me” for a career saving single for Sugababes. Digital technologies enable and even promote the adaptation of existing works (Morris). The ease of appropriating and manipulating digital audio files has given rise to a form of music known variously as mash-up, bootleg, or bastard pop. Mash-ups are the most recent stage in a history of musical appropriation and they epitomise the sampling aesthetic. Typically produced in bedroom computer-based studios, mash-up artists use software such as Acid or Cool Edit Pro to cut up digital music files and reassemble the fragments to create new songs, arbitrarily adding self-composed parts if desired. Comprised almost exclusively from sections of captured music, mash-ups have been referred to as “fictional pop music” because they conjure up scenarios where, for example, Destiny’s Child jams in a Seattle garage with Nirvana or the Spice Girls perform with Nine Inch Nails (Petridis). Once the initial humour of the novelty has passed, the results can be deeply alluring. Mash-ups extract the distinctive characteristics of songs and place them in new, innovative contexts. As Dale Lawrence writes: “the vocals are often taken from largely reviled or ignored sources—cornball acts like Aguilera or Destiny’s Child—and recast in wildly unlikely contexts … where against all odds, they actually work”. Similarly, Crawford argues that “part of the art is to combine the greatest possible aesthetic dissonance with the maximum musical harmony. The pleasure for listeners is in discovering unlikely artistic complementarities and revisiting their musical memories in mutated forms” (36). Sometimes the adaptation works in the favour of the sampled artist: George Clinton claims that because of sampling he is more popular now than in 1976—“the sampling made us big again” (Green). The creative aspect of mash-ups is unlike that usually associated with musical composition and has more in common with DJing. In an effort to further clarify this aspect, we may regard DJ mixes as “mash-ups on the fly.” When Grandmaster Flash recorded his quilt-pop masterpiece, “Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” it was recorded while he performed live, demonstrating his precision and skill with turntables. Modern audio editing software facilitates the capture and storage of sound, allowing mash-up artists to manipulate sounds bytes outside of “real-time” and the live performance parameters within which Flash worked. Thus, the creative element is not the traditional arrangement of chords and parts, but rather “audio contexts”. If, as Riley pessimistically suggests, “there are no new chords to be played, there are no new song structures to be developed, there are no new stories to be told, and there are no new themes to explore,” then perhaps it is understandable that artists have searched for new forms of musical creativity. The notes and chords of mash-ups are segments of existing works sequenced together to produce inter-layered contexts rather than purely tonal patterns. The merit of mash-up culture lies in its function of deconstructing the boundaries of genre and providing new musical possibilities. The process of mashing-up genres functions to critique contemporary music culture by “pointing a finger at how stifled and obvious the current musical landscape has become. … Suddenly rap doesn’t have to be set to predictable funk beats, pop/R&B ballads don’t have to come wrapped in cheese, garage melodies don’t have to recycle the Ramones” (Lawrence). According to Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School critic, popular music (of his time) was irretrievably simplistic and constructed from easily interchangeable, modular components (McLeod, “Confessions”, 86). A standardised and repetitive approach to musical composition fosters a mode of consumption dubbed by Adorno “quotation listening” and characterised by passive acceptance of, and obsession with, a song’s riffs (44-5). As noted by Em McAvan, Adorno’s analysis elevates the producer over the consumer, portraying a culture industry controlling a passive audience through standardised products (McAvan). The characteristics that Adorno observed in the popular music of his time are classic traits of contemporary popular music. Mash-up artists, however, are not representative of Adorno’s producers for a passive audience, instead opting to wrest creative control from composers and the recording industry and adapt existing songs in pursuit of their own creative impulses. Although mash-up productions may consciously or unconsciously criticise the current state of popular music, they necessarily exist in creative symbiosis with the commercial genres: “if pop songs weren’t simple and formulaic, it would be much harder for mashup bedroom auteurs to do their job” (McLeod, “Confessions”, 86). Arguably, when creating mash-ups, some individuals are expressing their dissatisfaction with the stagnation of the pop industry and are instead working to create music that they as consumers wish to hear. Sample-based music—as an exercise in adaptation—encourages a Foucauldian questioning of the composer’s authority over their musical texts. Recorded music is typically a passive medium in which the consumer receives the music in its original, unaltered form. DJ Dangermouse (Brian Burton) breached this pact to create his Grey Album, which is a mash-up of an a cappella version of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ eponymous album (also known as the White Album). Dangermouse says that “every kick, snare, and chord is taken from the Beatles White Album and is in their original recording somewhere.” In deconstructing the Beatles’ songs, Dangermouse turned the recordings into a palette for creating his own new work, adapting audio fragments to suit his creative impulses. As Joanna Demers writes, “refashioning these sounds and reorganising them into new sonic phrases and sentences, he creates acoustic mosaics that in most instances are still traceable to the Beatles source, yet are unmistakeably distinct from it” (139-40). Dangermouse’s approach is symptomatic of what Schütze refers to as remix culture: an open challenge to a culture predicated on exclusive ownership, authorship, and controlled distribution … . Against ownership it upholds an ethic of creative borrowing and sharing. Against the original it holds out an open process of recombination and creative transformation. It equally calls into question the categories, rifts and borders between high and low cultures, pop and elitist art practices, as well as blurring lines between artistic disciplines. Using just a laptop, an audio editor and a calculator, Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, created the Night Ripper album using samples from 167 artists (Dombale). Although all the songs on Night Ripper are blatantly sampled-based, Gillis sees his creations as “original things” (Dombale). The adaptation of sampled fragments culled from the Top 40 is part of Gillis’ creative process: “It’s not about who created this source originally, it’s about recontextualising—creating new music. … I’ve always tried to make my own songs” (Dombale). Gillis states that his music has no political message, but is a reflection of his enthusiasm for pop music: “It’s a celebration of everything Top 40, that’s the point” (Dombale). Gillis’ “celebratory” exercises in creativity echo those of various fan-fiction authors who celebrate the characters and worlds that constitute popular culture. Adaptation through sampling is not always centred solely on music. Sydney-based Tom Compagnoni, a.k.a. Wax Audio, adapted a variety of sound bytes from politicians and media personalities including George W. Bush, Alexander Downer, Alan Jones, Ray Hadley, and John Howard in the creation of his Mediacracy E.P.. In one particular instance, Compagnoni used a myriad of samples culled from various media appearances by George W. Bush to recreate the vocals for John Lennon’s Imagine. Created in early 2005, the track, which features speeded-up instrumental samples from a karaoke version of Lennon’s original, is an immediate irony fuelled comment on the invasion of Iraq. The rationale underpinning the song is further emphasised when “Imagine This” reprises into “Let’s Give Peace a Chance” interspersed with short vocal fragments of “Come Together”. Compagnoni justifies his adaptations by presenting appropriated media sound bytes that deliberately set out to demonstrate the way information is manipulated to present any particular point of view. Playing the media like an instrument, Wax Audio juxtaposes found sounds in a way that forces the listener to confront the bias, contradiction and sensationalism inherent in their daily intake of media information. … Oh yeah—and it’s bloody funny hearing George W Bush sing “Imagine”. Notwithstanding the humorous quality of the songs, Mediacracy represents a creative outlet for Compagnoni’s political opinions that is emphasised by the adaptation of Lennon’s song. Through his adaptation, Compagnoni revitalises Lennon’s sentiments about the Vietnam War and superimposes them onto the US policy on Iraq. An interesting aspect of sampled-based music is the re-occurrence of particular samples across various productions, which demonstrates that the same fragment can be adapted for a plethora of musical contexts. For example, Clyde Stubblefield’s “Funky Drummer” break is reputed to be the most sampled break in the world. The break from 1960s soul/funk band the Winstons’ “Amen Brother” (the B-side to their 1969 release “Color Him Father”), however, is another candidate for the title of “most sampled break”. The “Amen break” was revived with the advent of the sampler. Having featured heavily in early hip-hop records such as “Words of Wisdom” by Third Base and “Straight Out of Compton” by NWA, the break “appears quite adaptable to a range of music genres and tastes” (Harrison, 9m 46s). Beginning in the early 1990s, adaptations of this break became a constant of jungle music as sampling technology developed to facilitate more complex operations (Harrison, 5m 52s). The break features on Shy FX’s “Original Nutta”, L Double & Younghead’s “New Style”, Squarepusher’s “Big Acid”, and a cover version of Led Zepplin’s “Whole Lotta Love” by Jane’s Addiction front man Perry Farrell. This is to name but a few tracks that have adapted the break. Wikipedia offers a list of songs employing an adaptation of the “Amen break”. This list, however, falls short of the “hundreds of tracks” argued for by Nate Harrison, who notes that “an entire subculture based on this one drum loop … six seconds from 1969” has developed (8m 45s). The “Amen break” is so ubiquitous that, much like the twelve bar blues structure, it has become a foundational element of an entire genre and has been adapted to satisfy a plethora of creative impulses. The sheer prevalence of the “Amen break” simultaneously illustrates the creative nature of music adaptation as well as the potentials for adaptation stemming from digital technology such as the sampler. The cut-up and rearrangement aspect of creative sampling technology at once suggests the original but also something new and different. Sampling in general, and the phenomenon of the “Amen break” in particular, ensures the longevity of the original sources; sampled-based music exhibits characteristics acquired from the source materials, yet the illegitimate offspring are not their parents. Sampling as a technology for creatively adapting existing forms of audio has encouraged alternative approaches to musical composition. Further, it has given rise to a new breed of musician that has adapted to technologies of adaptation. Mash-up artists and samplists demonstrate that recorded music is not simply a fixed or read-only product but one that can be freed from the composer’s original arrangement to be adapted and reconfigured. Many mash-up artists such as Gregg Gillis are not trained musicians, but their ears are honed from enthusiastic consumption of music. Individuals such as DJ Dangermouse, Gregg Gillis and Tom Compagnoni appropriate, reshape and re-present the surrounding soundscape to suit diverse creative urges, thereby adapting the passive medium of recorded sound into an active production tool. References Adorno, Theodor. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Ed. J. Bernstein. London, New York: Routledge, 1991. Burnett, Henry. “Ruggieri and Vivaldi: Two Venetian Gloria Settings.” American Choral Review 30 (1988): 3. Compagnoni, Tom. “Wax Audio: Mediacracy.” Wax Audio. 2005. 2 Apr. 2007 http://www.waxaudio.com.au/downloads/mediacracy>. Coombe, Rosemary. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1998. Demers, Joanna. Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity. Athens, London: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Dombale, Ryan. “Interview: Girl Talk.” Pitchfork. 2006. 9 Jan. 2007 http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/37785/Interview_Interview_Girl_Talk>. Duffel, Daniel. Making Music with Samples. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2005. Forbes, Anne-Marie. “A Venetian Festal Gloria: Antonio Lotti’s Gloria in D Major.” Music Research: New Directions for a New Century. Eds. M. Ewans, R. Halton, and J. Phillips. London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004. Green, Robert. “George Clinton: Ambassador from the Mothership.” Synthesis. Undated. 15 Sep. 2005 http://www.synthesis.net/music/story.php?type=story&id=70>. Harrison, Nate. “Can I Get an Amen?” Nate Harrison. 2004. 8 Jan. 2007 http://www.nkhstudio.com>. Lawrence, Dale. “On Mashups.” Nuvo. 2002. 8 Jan. 2007 http://www.nuvo.net/articles/article_292/>. Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas. New York: Random House, 2001. ———. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. McAvan, Em. “Boulevard of Broken Songs: Mash-Ups as Textual Re-Appropriation of Popular Music Culture.” M/C Journal 9.6 (2006) 3 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/02-mcavan.php>. McLeod, Kembrew. “Confessions of an Intellectual (Property): Danger Mouse, Mickey Mouse, Sonny Bono, and My Long and Winding Path as a Copyright Activist-Academic.” Popular Music & Society 28.79. ———. Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. United States: Doubleday Books. Morris, Sue. “Co-Creative Media: Online Multiplayer Computer Game Culture.” Scan 1.1 (2004). 8 Jan. 2007 http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display_article.php?recordID=16>. Petridis, Alexis. “Pop Will Eat Itself.” The Guardian UK. March 2003. 8 Jan. 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,1169,922797,00.html>. Riley. “Pop Will Eat Itself—Or Will It?”. The Truth Unknown (archived at Archive.org). 2003. 9 Jan. 2007 http://web.archive.org/web/20030624154252 /www.thetruthunknown.com/viewnews.asp?articleid=79>. Schütze, Bernard. “Samples from the Heap: Notes on Recycling the Detritus of a Remixed Culture”. Horizon Zero 2003. 8 Jan. 2007 http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/remix.php?tlang=0&is=8&file=5>. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York, London: New York University Press, 2003. Woodmansee, Martha. “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity.” The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Eds. M. Woodmansee, P. Jaszi and P. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1994. 15. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Collins, Steve. "Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/09-collins.php>. APA Style Collins, S. 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OS MOVIMENTOS ARTÍSTICOS QUE PODEM TRANSFORMAR A SOCIEDADE BRASILEIRAO presente trabalho aqui apresentado tem como objetivo apresentar as diversidades culturais existentes na sociedade muitas vezes não difusas. Muitas vezes os movimentos artísticos independentes transformam a sociedade de forma direta ou indireta. Os movimentos culturais independentes surgem na sociedade por ela mesma como uma consequência da falta de arte oferecida pelo estado, além de significar a expressão de uma população que tem a voz sufocada por maiores forças. As fotos que serão apresentadas a seguir teve o intuito de registrar momentos importantes para os grupos sociais em questão. A fotografia que significa ‘’escrita da luz’’ capta e repassa o tempo e o espaço paralisado por uma maquina tecnológica. Como fotógrafo documental e graduado em história, vi a trama política e social que estão incluídas nas diversas maneiras de se expressar artisticamente em grupo, especificamente por grupos marginalizados.Os movimentos artísticos independentes são aqueles que ocorrem sem iniciativa do estado – tão menos há ligação entre o povo e governo para a realização das atividades. Batalhas de rimas, recitais de poesias, shows abertos e teatro de rua são exemplos desses movimentos. A ideia principal é fomentar a arte e oferecer entretenimento à população, seja porque não há oferta de arte à sociedade ou porque a arte oferecida a esta não é libertadora. A arte tem de libertar e não aprisionar, tem que se posicionar perante à politica e à realidade social existente nas cidades. Os diversos governos ao longo da história utilizaram a arte como ferramenta de libertação ou repressão, da Grécia à Alemanha Nazista, do Império Romano aos dias de hoje – uns libertaram para a vida, outros deram circo para reprimir e outros caçavam artistas. O motivo é simples e coeso, a arte pode politizar e os donos do poder sabem disso. Porém, a população também é detentora deste conhecimento. Oferecer arte e cultura para populações marginalizadas que antes não tinham acesso à educação de forma prazerosa agora passa a ter. Letras de músicas, poesias sobre a vida e sociedade, teatro criticando a realidade, tende a transformar a sociedade. O papel da fotografia se torna essencial: captar a transformação ao longo dos diferentes momentos para registrar e ter as provas de que os movimentos aglomeram pessoas, as deixam felizes e fazem elas pensar.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: CULTURA. ARTE. SOCIEDADE. JUVENTUDE. TRANSFORMAÇÃO THE MOVEMENT ARTISTIC INDEPENDT THAT CAN TRANSFORM THE BRAZILIAN SOCIETYThe present work presented here aims to present the cultural diversities existing in society that are often non-diffuse. Independent artistic movements often transform society directly or indirectly. Independent cultural movements emerge in society by itself as a consequence of the lack of art offered by the state, besides signifying the expression of a population that has a voice suffocated by greater forces. The photos that will be presented below were intended to record important moments for the social groups in question. The photograph meaning ''writing of light'' captures and passes time and space paralyzed by a technological machine. As a documentary photographer and graduated in history, I saw the political and social fabric that are included in the various ways of expressing themselves artistically in groups, specifically by marginalized groups. Independent artistic movements are those that occur without state initiative – the less there is a connection between the people and government to carry out the activities. Battles of rhymes, poetry recitals, open shows and street theater are examples of these movements. The main idea is to promote art and offer entertainment to the population, either because there is no art offer to society or because the art offered to society is not liberating. Art must liberate and not imprison, it has to stand before the politics and social reality existing in cities. The various governments throughout history have used art as a tool of liberation or repression, from Greece to Nazi Germany, from the Roman Empire to the present day – some have freed for life, others have given circus to repress and others hunted artists. The reason is simple and cohesive, art can politicize and the owners of power know it. However, the population also has this knowledge. Offering art and culture to marginalized populations that previously did not have access to education in a pleasurable way now begins to have. Lyrics of songs, poetry about life and society, theater criticizing reality, tends to transform society. The role of photography becomes essential: capturing the transformation along the different moments to record and have the evidence that movements crowd people, make them happy and make them think.KEYWORDS: CULTURE. ART. SOCIETY. YOUTH. TRANSFORMATION.

This article proposes that the growing popularity of reality television in the southernmost state of India, Kerala – disseminated locally and throughout the Indian diaspora – is not the product of an innocuous nostalgia for a fast-disappearing regional identity but rather a spectacular example of an emergent ideology that displaces cultural memory, collective identity, and secular nationalism with new, globalised forms of public sentiment. Further, it is arguable that this g/local media culture also displaces hard-won secular feminist constructions of gender and the contemporary modern “Indian woman.” Shows like Idea Star Singer (hereafter ISS) (Malayalam [the language spoken in Kerala] television’s most popular reality television series), based closely on American Idol, is broadcast worldwide to dozens of nations including the US, the UK, China, Russia, Sri Lanka, and several nations in the Middle East and the discussion that follows attempts both to account for this g/local phenomenon and to problematise it. ISS concentrates on staging the diversity and talent of Malayalee youth and, in particular, their ability to sing ‘pitch-perfect’, by inviting them to perform the vast catalogue of traditional Malayalam songs. However, inasmuch as it is aimed at both a regional and diasporic audience, ISS also allows for a diversity of singing styles displayed through the inclusion of a variety of other songs: some sung in Tamil, some Hindi, and some even English. This leads us to ask a number of questions: in what ways are performers who subscribe to regional or global models of televisual style rewarded or punished? In what ways are performers who exemplify differences in terms of gender, sexuality, religion, class, or ability punished? Further, it is arguable that this show—packaged as the “must-see” spectacle for the Indian diaspora—re-imagines a traditional past and translates it (under the rubric of “reality” television) into a vulgar commodification of both “classical” and “folk” India: an India excised of radical reform, feminists, activists, and any voices of multiplicity clamouring for change. Indeed, it is my contention that, although such shows claim to promote women’s liberation by encouraging women to realise their talents and ambitions, the commodification of the “stars” as televisual celebrities points rather to an anti-feminist imperial agenda of control and domination. Normalising Art: Presenting the Juridical as Natural Following Foucault, we can, indeed, read ISS as an apparatus of “normalisation.” While ISS purports to be “about” music, celebration, and art—an encouragement of art for art’s sake—it nevertheless advocates the practice of teaching as critiqued by Foucault: “the acquisition and knowledge by the very practice of the pedagogical activity and a reciprocal, hierarchised observation” (176), so that self-surveillance is built into the process. What appears on the screen is, in effect, the presentation of a juridically governed body as natural: the capitalist production of art through intense practice, performance, and corrective measures that valorise discipline and, at the end, produce ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects. The Foucauldian isomorphism of punishment with obligation, exercise with repetition, and enactment of the law is magnified in the traditional practice of music, especially Carnatic, or the occasional Hindustani refrain that separates those who come out of years of training in the Gury–Shishya mode (teacher–student mode, primarily Hindu and privileged) from those who do not (Muslims, working-class, and perhaps disabled students). In the context of a reality television show sponsored by Idea Cellular Ltd (a phone company with global outposts), the systems of discipline are strictly in line with the capitalist economy. Since this show depends upon the vast back-catalogue of film songs sung by playback singers from the era of big studio film-making, it may be seen to advocate a mimetic rigidity that ossifies artistic production, rather than offering encouragement to a new generation of artists who might wish to take the songs and make them their own. ISS, indeed, compares and differentiates the participants’ talents through an “opaque” system of evaluations which the show presents as transparent, merit-based and “fair”: as Foucault observes, “the perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (183). On ISS, this evaluation process (a panel of judges who are renowned singers and composers, along with a rotating guest star, such as an actor) may be seen as a scopophilic institution where training and knowledge are brought together, transforming “the economy of visibility into the exercise of power” (187). The contestants, largely insignificant as individuals but seen together, at times, upon the stage, dancing and singing and performing practised routines, represent a socius constituting the body politic. The judges, enthroned on prominent and lush seats above the young contestants, the studio audience and, in effect, the show’s televised transnational audience, deliver judgements that “normalise” these artists into submissive subjectivity. In fact, despite the incoherence of the average judgement, audiences are so engrossed in the narrative of “marks” (a clear vestige of the education and civilising mission of the colonial subject under British rule) that, even in the glamorous setting of vibrating music, artificial lights, and corporate capital, Indians can still be found disciplining themselves according to the values of the West. Enacting Keraleeyatham for Malayalee Diaspora Ritty Lukose’s study on youth and gender in Kerala frames identity formations under colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism as she teases out ideas of resistance and agency by addressing the complex mediations of consumption or consumptive practices. Lukose reads “consumer culture as a complex site of female participation and constraint, enjoyment and objectification” (917), and finds the young, westernised female as a particular site of consumer agency. According to this theory, the performers on ISS and the show’s MC, Renjini Haridas, embody this body politic. The young performers all dress in the garb of “authentic identity”, sporting saris, pawaadu-blouse, mundum-neertha, salwaar-kameez, lehenga-choli, skirts, pants, and so on. This sartorial diversity is deeply gendered and discursively rich; the men have one of two options: kurta-mundu or some such variation and the pant–shirt combination. The women, especially Renjini (educated at St Theresa’s College in Kochi and former winner of Ms Kerala beauty contest) evoke the MTV DJs of the mid-1990s and affect a pidgin-Malayalam spliced with English: Renjini’s cool “touching” of the contestants and airy gestures remove her from the regional masses; and yet, for Onam (festival of Kerala), she dresses in the traditional cream and gold sari; for Id (high holy day for Muslims), she dresses in some glittery salwaar-kameez with a wrap on her head; and for Christmas, she wears a long dress. This is clearly meant to show her ability to embody different socio-religious spheres simultaneously. Yet, both she and all the young female contestants speak proudly about their authentic Kerala identity. Ritty Lukose spells this out as “Keraleeyatham.” In the vein of beauty pageants, and the first-world practice of indoctrinating all bodies into one model of beauty, the youngsters engage in exuberant performances yet, once their act is over, revert back to the coy, submissive docility that is the face of the student in the traditional educational apparatus. Both left-wing feminists and BJP activists write their ballads on the surface of women’s bodies; however, in enacting the chethu or, to be more accurate, “ash-push” (colloquialism akin to “hip”) lifestyle advocated by the show (interrupted at least half a dozen times by lengthy sequences of commercials for jewellery, clothing, toilet cleaners, nutritious chocolate bars, hair oil, and home products), the participants in this show become the unwitting sites of a large number of competing ideologies. Lukose observes the remarkable development from the peasant labor-centered Kerala of the 1970s to today’s simulacrum: “Keraleeyatham.” When discussing the beauty contests staged in Kerala in the 1990s, she discovers (through analysis of the dress and Sanskrit-centred questions) that: “Miss Kerala must be a naden pennu [a girl of the native/rural land] in her dress, comportment, and knowledge. Written onto the female bodies of a proliferation of Miss Keralas, the nadu, locality itself, becomes transportable and transposable” (929). Lukose observes that these women have room to enact their passions and artistry only within the metadiegetic space of the “song and dance” spectacle; once they leave it, they return to a modest, Kerala-gendered space in which the young female performers are quiet to the point of inarticulate, stuttering silence (930). However, while Lukose’s term, Keraleeyatham, is useful as a sociological compass, I contend that it has even more complex connotations. Its ethos of “Nair-ism” (Nayar was the dominant caste identity in Kerala), which could have been a site of resistance and identity formation, instead becomes a site of nationalist, regional linguistic supremacy arising out of Hindu imaginary. Second, this ideology could not have been developed in the era of pre-globalised state-run television but now, in the wake of globalisation and satellite television, we see this spectacle of “discipline and punish” enacted on the world stage. Thus, although I do see a possibility for a more positive Keraleeyatham that is organic, inclusive, and radical, for the moment we have a hegemonic, exclusive, and hierarchical statist approach to regional identity that needs to be re-evaluated. Articulating the Authentic via the Simulacrum Welcome to the Malayalee matrix. Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum is our entry point into visualising the code of reality television. In a state noted for its distinctly left-leaning politics and Communist Party history which underwent radical reversal in the 1990s, the political front in Kerala is still dominated by the LDF (Left Democratic Front), and resistance to the state is an institutionalised and satirised daily event, as marked by the marchers who gather and stop traffic at Palayam in the capital city daily at noon. Issues of poverty and corporate disenfranchisement plague the farming and fishing communities while people suffer transportation tragedies, failures of road development and ferry upkeep on a daily basis. Writers and activists rail against imminent aerial bombing of Maoists insurgent groups, reading in such statist violence repression of the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples scattered across many states of eastern and southern India. Alongside energy and ration supply issues, politics light up the average Keralaite, and yet the most popular “reality” television show reflects none of it. Other than paying faux multicultural tribute to all the festivals that come and go (such as Id, Diwaali, Christmas, and Kerala Piravi [Kerala Day on 1 November]), mainly through Renjini’s dress and chatter, ISS does all it can to remove itself from the turmoil of the everyday. Much in the same way that Bollywood cinema has allowed the masses to escape the oppressions of “the everyday,” reality television promises speculative pleasure produced on the backs of young performers who do not even have to be paid for their labour. Unlike Malayalam cinema’s penchant for hard-hitting politics and narratives of unaccounted for, everyday lives in neo-realist style, today’s reality television—with its excessive sound and light effects, glittering stages and bejewelled participants, repeat zooms, frontal shots, and artificial enhancements—exploits the paradox of hyper-authenticity (Rose and Wood 295). In her useful account of America’s top reality show, American Idol, Katherine Meizel investigates the fascination with the show’s winners and the losers, and the drama of an American “ideal” of diligence and ambition that is seen to be at the heart of the show. She writes, “It is about selling the Dream—regardless of whether it results in success or failure—and about the enactment of ideology that hovers at the edges of any discourse about American morality. It is the potential of great ambition, rather than of great talent, that drives these hopefuls and inspires their fans” (486). In enacting the global via the site of the local (Malayalam and Tamil songs primarily), ISS assumes the mantle of Americanism through the plain-spoken, direct commentaries of the singers who, like their US counterparts, routinely tell us how all of it has changed their lives. In other words, this retrospective meta-narrative becomes more important than the show itself. True to Baudrillard’s theory, ISS blurs the line between actual need and the “need” fabricated by the media and multinational corporations like Idea Cellular and Confident Group (which builds luxury homes, primarily for the new bourgeoisie and nostalgic “returnees” from the diaspora). The “New Kerala” is marked, for the locals, by extravagant (mostly unoccupied) constructions of photogenic homes in garish colours, located in the middle of chaos: the traditional nattumparathu (countryside) wooden homes, and traffic congestion. The homes, promised at the end of these shows, have a “value” based on the hyper-real economy of the show rather than an actual utility value. Yet those who move from the “old” world to the “new” do not always fare well. In local papers, the young artists are often criticised for their new-found haughtiness and disinclination to visit ill relatives in hospital: a veritable sin in a culture that places the nadu and kin above all narratives of progress. In other words, nothing quite adds up: the language and ideologies of the show, espoused most succinctly by its inarticulate host, is a language that obscures its distance from reality. ISS maps onto its audience the emblematic difference between “citizen” and “population”. Through the chaotic, state-sanctioned paralegal devices that allow the slum-dwellers and other property-less people to dwell in the cities, the voices of the labourers (such as the unions) have been silenced. It is a nation ever more geographically divided between the middle-classes which retreat into their gated neighbourhoods, and the shanty-town denizens who are represented by the rising class of religio-fundamentalist leaders. While the poor vote in the Hindu hegemony, the middle classes text in their votes to reality shows like ISS. Partha Chatterjee speaks of the “new segregated and exclusive spaces for the managerial and technocratic elite” (143) which is obsessed by media images, international travel, suburbanisation, and high technology. I wish to add to this list the artificially created community of ISS performers and stars; these are, indeed, the virtual and global extension of Chatterjee’s exclusive, elite communities, decrying the new bourgeois order of Indian urbanity, repackaged as Malayalee, moneyed, and Nayar. Meanwhile, the Hindu Right flexes its muscle under the show’s glittery surface: neither menacing nor fundamentalist, it is now “hip” to be Hindu. Thus while, on the surface, ISS operates according to the cliché, musicinu mathamilla (“music has no religion”), I would contend that it perpetuates a colonising space of Hindu-nationalist hegemony which standardises music appreciation, flattens music performance into an “art” developed solely to serve commercial cinema, and produces a dialectic of Keraleeyatham that erases the multiplicities of its “real.” This ideology, meanwhile, colonises from within. The public performance plays out in the private sphere where the show is consumed; at the same time, the private is inserted into the public with SMS calls that ultimately help seal the juridicality of the show and give the impression of “democracy.” Like the many networks that bring the sentiments of melody and melancholy to our dinner table, I would like to offer you this alternative account of ISS as part of a bid for a more vociferous, and critical, engagement with reality television and its modes of production. Somehow we need to find a way to savour, once again, the non-mimetic aspects of art and to salvage our darkness from the glitter of the “normalising” popular media. References Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. New York: Telos, 1975. ———. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. California: Stanford UP, 1988. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Lukose, Ritty. “Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India.” Journal of Social History 38.4 (Summer 2005): 915-35. Meizel, Katherine. “Making the Dream a Reality (Show): The Celebration of Failure in American Idol.” Popular Music and Society 32.4 (Oct. 2009): 475-88. Rose, Randall L., and Stacy L. Wood. “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television.” Journal of Consumer Research 32 (Sep. 2005): 284-96.

Introduction: Socialism – from Eternal Reality to Passing DreamThe Year of Revolutions in 1989 presaged the end of the Cold War. For many people, it must have felt like the end of the Twentieth Century, and the 1990s a period of waiting for the Millennium. However, the 1990s was, in fact, a period of profound transformation in the post-Socialist world.In early representations of Socialism’s end, a dominant narrative was that of collapse. Dramatic events, such as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in Germany enabled representation of the end as an unexpected moment. Senses of unexpectedness rested on erstwhile perceptions of Socialism as eternal.In contrast, the 1990s came to be a decade of revision in which thinking switched from considering Socialism’s persistence to asking, “why it went wrong?” I explore this question in relation to former-Yugoslavia. In brief, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was replaced through the early 1990s by six independent nation states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Kosovo came much later. In the states that were significantly ethnically mixed, the break-up was accompanied by violence. Bosnia in the 1990s will be remembered for an important contribution to the lexicon of ideas – ethnic cleansing.Revisionist historicising of the former-Yugoslavia in the 1990s was led by the scholarly community. By and large, it discredited the Ancient Ethnic Hatreds (AEH) thesis commonly held by nationalists, simplistic media commentators and many Western politicians. The AEH thesis held that Socialism’s end was a consequence of the up-swelling of primordial (natural) ethnic tensions. Conversely, the scholarly community tended to view Socialism’s failure as an outcome of systemic economic and political deficiencies in the SFRY, and that these deficiencies were also, in fact the root cause of those ethnic tensions. And, it was argued that had such deficiencies been addressed earlier Socialism may have survived and fulfilled its promise of eternity (Verdery).A third significant perspective which emerged through the 1990s was that the collapse of Socialism was an outcome of the up-swelling of, if not primordial ethnic tensions then, at least repressed historical memories of ethnic tensions, especially of the internecine violence engendered locally by Nazi and Italian Fascist forces in WWII. This perspective was particularly en vogue within the unusually rich arts scene in former-Yugoslavia. Its leading exponent was Slovenian avant-garde rock band Laibach.In this article, I consider Laibach’s career and methods. For background the article draws substantially on Alexei Monroe’s excellent biography of Laibach, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (2005). However, as I indicate below, my interpretation diverges very significantly from Monroe’s. Laibach’s most significant body of work is the cover versions of Western pop songs it recorded in the middle part of its career. Using a technique that has been labelled retroquotation (Monroe), it subtly transforms the lyrical content, and radically transforms the musical arrangement of pop songs, thereby rendering them what might be described as martial anthems. The clearest illustration of the process is Laibach’s version of Opus’s one hit wonder “Live is Life”, which is retitled as “Life is Life” (Laibach 1987).Conventional scholarly interpretations of Laibach’s method (including Monroe’s) present it as entailing the uncovering of repressed forms of individual and collective totalitarian consciousness. I outline these ideas, but supplement them with an alternative interpretation. I argue that in the cover version stage of its career, Laibach switched its attention from seeking to uncover repressed totalitarianism towards uncovering repressed memories of ethnic tension, especially from WWII. Furthermore, I argue that its creative medium of Western pop music is especially important in this regard. On the bases of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bosnia (University of Melbourne Human Ethics project 1544213.1), and of a reading of SFRY’s geopolitical history, I demonstrate that for many people, Western popular cultural forms came to represent the quintessence of what it was to be Yugoslav. In this context, Laibach’s retroquotation of Western pop music is akin to a broader cultural practice in the post-SFRY era in which symbols of the West were iconoclastically transformed. Such transformation served to reveal a public secret (Taussig) of repressed historic ethnic enmity within the very heart of things that were regarded as quintessentially and pan-ethnically Yugoslav. And, in so doing, this delegitimised memory of SFRY ever having been a properly functioning entity. In this way, Laibach contributed significantly to a broader process in which perceptions of Socialist Yugoslavia came to be rendered less as a reality with the potential for eternity than a passing dream.What Is Laibach and What Does It Do?Originally of the industrial rock genre, Laibach has evolved through numerous other genres including orchestral rock, choral rock and techno. It is not, however, a rock group in any conventional sense. Laibach is the musical section of a tripartite unit named Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) which also encompasses the fine arts collective Irwin and a variety of theatre groups.Laibach was the name by which the Slovenian capital Ljubljana was known under the Austrian Habsburg Empire and then Nazi occupation in WWII. The choice of name hints at a central purpose of Laibach and NSK in general, to explore the relationship between art and ideology, especially under conditions of totalitarianism. In what follows, I describe how Laibach go about doing this.Laibach’s central method is eclecticism, by which symbols of the various ideological regimes that are its and the NSK’s subject matter are intentionally juxtaposed. Eclecticism of this kind was characteristic of the postmodern aesthetics typical of the 1990s. Furthermore, and counterintuitively perhaps, postmodernism was as much a condition of the Socialist East as it was the Capitalist West. As Mikhail N. Epstein argues, “Totalitarianism itself may be viewed as a specific postmodern model that came to replace the modernist ideological stance elaborated in earlier Marxism” (102). However, Western and Eastern postmodernisms were fundamentally different. In particular, while the former was largely playful, ironicising and depoliticised, the latter, which Laibach and NSK may be regarded as being illustrative of, involved placing in opposition to one another competing and antithetical aesthetic, political and social regimes, “without the contradictions being fully resolved” (Monroe 54).The performance of unresolved contradictions in Laibach’s work fulfils three principal functions. It works to (1) reveal hidden underlying connections between competing ideological systems, and between art and power more generally. This is evident in Life is Life. The video combines symbols of Slovenian romantic nationalism (stags and majestic rural landscapes) with Nazism and militarism (uniforms, bodily postures and a martial musical arrangement). Furthermore, it presents images of the graves of victims of internecine violence in WWII. The video is a reminder to Slovenian viewers of a discomforting public secret within their nation’s history. While Germany is commonly viewed as a principal oppressor of Slovenian nationalism, the rural peasantry, who are represented as embodying Slovenian nationalism most, were also the most willing collaborators in imperialist processes of Germanicisation. The second purpose of the performance of unresolved contradictions in Laibach’s work is to (2) engender senses of the alienation, especially as experienced by the subjects of totalitarian regimes. Laibach’s approach in this regard is quite different to that of punk, whose concern with alienation - symbolised by safety pins and chains - was largely celebratory of the alienated condition. Rather, Laibach took a lead from seminal industrial rock bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle (see, for example, Walls of Sound (Throbbing Gristle 2004)), whose sound one fan accurately describes as akin to, “the creation of the universe by an angry titan/God and a machine apocalypse all rolled into one” (rateyourmusic.com). Certainly, Laibach’s shows can be uncomfortable experiences too, involving not only clashing symbols and images, but also the dissonant sounds of, for example, martial music, feedback, recordings of the political speeches of totalitarian leaders and barking dogs, all played at eardrum-breaking high volumes. The purpose of this is to provide, as Laibach state: “a ritualized demonstration of political force” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 44). In short, more than simply celebrating the experience of totalitarian alienation, Laibach’s intention is to reproduce that very alienation.More than performatively representing tyranny, and thereby senses of totalitarian alienation, Laibach and NSK set out to embody it themselves. In particular, and contra the forms of liberal humanism that were hegemonic at the peak of their career in the 1990s, their organisation was developed as a model of totalitarian collectivism in which the individual is always subjugated. This is illustrated in the Onanigram (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst), which, mimicking the complexities of the SFRY in its most totalitarian dispensation, maps out in labyrinthine detail the institutional structure of NSK. Behaviour is governed by a Constitution that states explicitly that NSK is a group in which, “each individual is subordinated to the whole” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 273). Lest this collectivism be misconceived as little more than a show, the case of Tomaž Hostnik is instructive. The original lead singer of Laibach, Hostnik committed ritual suicide by hanging himself from a hayrack, a key symbol of Slovenian nationalism. Initially, rather than mourning his loss, the other members of Laibach posthumously disenfranchised him (“threw him out of the band”), presumably for his act of individual will that was collectively unsanctioned.Laibach and the NSK’s collectivism also have spiritual overtones. The Onanigram presents an Immanent Consistent Spirit, a kind of geist that holds the collective together. NSK claim: “Only God can subdue LAIBACH. People and things never can” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 289). Furthermore, such rhetorical bombast was matched in aspiration. Most famously, in one of the first instances of a micro-nation, NSK went on to establish itself as a global and virtual non-territorial state, replete with a recruitment drive, passports and anthem, written and performed by Laibach of course. Laibach’s CareerLaibach’s career can be divided into three overlapping parts. The first is its career as a political provocateur, beginning from the inception of the band in 1980 and continuing through to the present. The band’s performances have touched the raw nerves of several political actors. As suggested above, Laibach offended Slovenian nationalists. The band offended the SFRY, especially when in its stage backdrop it juxtaposed images of a penis with Marshal Josip Broz “Tito”, founding President of the SFRY. Above all, it offended libertarians who viewed the band’s exploitation of totalitarian aesthetics as a route to evoking repressed totalitarian energies in its audiences.In a sense the libertarians were correct, for Laibach were quite explicit in representing a third function of their performance of unresolved contradictions as being to (3) evoke repressed totalitarian energies. However, as Žižek demonstrates in his essay “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists”, Laibach’s intent in this regard is counter-totalitarian. Laibach engage in what amounts to a “psychoanalytic cure” for totalitarianism, which consists of four envisaged stages. The consumers of Laibach’s works and performances go through a process of over-identification with totalitarianism, leading through the experience of alienation to, in turn, disidentification and an eventual overcoming of that totalitarian alienation. The Žižekian interpretation of the four stages has, however been subjected to critique, particularly by Deleuzian scholars, and especially for its psychoanalytic emphasis on the transformation of individual (un)consciousness (i.e. the cerebral rather than bodily). Instead, such scholars prefer a schizoanalytic interpretation which presents the cure as, respectively collective (Monroe 45-50) and somatic (Goddard). Laibach’s works and pronouncements display, often awareness of such abstract theoretical ideas. However, they also display attentiveness to the concrete realities of socio-political context. This was reflected especially in the 1990s, when its focus seemed to shift from the matter of totalitarianism to the overriding issue of the day in Laibach’s homeland – ethnic conflict. For example, echoing the discourse of Truth and Reconciliation emanating from post-Apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s, Laibach argued that its work is “based on the premise that traumas affecting the present and the future can be healed only by returning to the initial conflicts” (NSK Padiglione).In the early 1990s era of post-socialist violent ethnic nationalism, statements such as this rendered Laibach a darling of anti-nationalism, both within civil society and in what came to be known pejoratively as the Yugonostagic, i.e. pro-SFRY left. Its darling status was cemented further by actions such as performing a concert to celebrate the end of the Bosnian war in 1996, and because its ideological mask began to slip. Most famously, when asked by a music journalist the standard question of what the band’s main influences were, rather than citing other musicians Laibach stated: “Tito, Tito and Tito.” Herein lies the third phase of Laibach’s career, dating from the mid-1990s to the present, which has been marked by critical recognition and mainstream acceptance, and in contrasting domains. Notably, in 2012 Laibach was invited to perform at the Tate Modern in London. Then, entering the belly of what is arguably the most totalitarian of totalitarian beasts in 2015, it became the first rock band to perform live in North Korea.The middle part in Laibach’s career was between 1987 and 1996. This was when its work consisted mostly of covers of mainstream Western pop songs by, amongst others Opus, Queen, The Rolling Stones, and, in The Final Countdown (1986), Swedish ‘big hair’ rockers. It also covered entire albums, including a version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. No doubt mindful of John Lennon’s claim that his band was more popular than the Messiah himself, Laibach covered the Beatles’ final album Let It Be (1970). Highlighting the perilous hidden connections between apparently benign and fascistic forms of sedentarism, lead singer Milan Fras’ snarling delivery of the refrain “Get Back to where you once belong” renders the hit single from that album less a story of homecoming than a sinister warning to immigrants and ethnic others who are out of place.This career middle stage invoked critique. However, commonplace suggestions that Laibach could be characterised as embodying Retromania, a derivative musical trend typical of the 1990s that has been lambasted for its de-politicisation and a musical conservatism enabled by new sampling technologies that afforded a forensic documentary precision that prohibits creative distortion (Reynolds), are misplaced. Several scholars highlight Laibach’s ceaseless attention to musical creativity in the pursuit of political subversiveness. For example, for Monroe, the cover version was a means for Laibach to continue its exploration of the connections between art and ideology, of illuminating the connections between competing ideological systems and of evoking repressed totalitarian energies, only now within Western forms of entertainment in which ideological power structures are less visible than in overt totalitarian propaganda. However, what often seems to escape intellectualist interpretations presented by scholars such as Žižek, Goddard and (albeit to a lesser extent) Monroe is the importance of the concrete specificities of the context that Laibach worked in in the 1990s – i.e. homeland ethno-nationalist politics – and, especially, their medium – i.e. Western pop music.The Meaning and Meaningfulness of Western Popular Culture in Former YugoslaviaThe Laibach covers were merely one of many celebrations of Western popular culture that emerged in pre- and post-socialist Yugoslavia. The most curious of these was the building of statues of icons of screen and stage. These include statues of Tarzan, Bob Marley, Rocky Balboa and, most famously, martial arts cinema legend Bruce Lee in the Bosnian city of Mostar.The pop monuments were often erected as symbols of peace in contexts of ethnic-national violence. Each was an ethnic hybrid. With the exception of original Tarzan Johnny Weismuller — an ethnic-German American immigrant from Serbia — none was remotely connected to the competing ethnic-national groups. Thus, it was surprising when these pop monuments became targets for iconoclasm. This was especially surprising because, in contrast, both the new ethnic-national monuments that were built and the old Socialist pan-Yugoslav monuments that remained in all their concrete and steel obduracy in and through the 1990s were left largely untouched.The work of Simon Harrison may give us some insight into this curious situation. Harrison questions the commonplace assumption that the strength of enmity between ethnic groups is related to their cultural dissimilarity — in short, the bigger the difference the bigger the biffo. By that logic, the new ethnic-national monuments erected in the post-SFRY era ought to have been vandalised. Conversely, however, Harrison argues that enmity may be more an outcome of similarity, at least when that similarity is torn asunder by other kinds of division. This is so because ownership of previously shared and precious symbols of identity appears to be seen as subjected to appropriation by ones’ erstwhile comrades who are newly othered in such moments.This is, indeed, exactly what happened in post-socialist former-Yugoslavia. Yugoslavs were rendered now as ethnic-nationals: Bosniaks (Muslims), Croats and Serbs in the case of Bosnia. In the process, the erection of obviously non-ethnic-national monuments by, now inevitably ethnic-national subjects was perceived widely as appropriation – “the Croats [the monument in Mostar was sculpted by Croatian artist Ivan Fijolić] are stealing our Bruce Lee,” as one of my Bosnian-Serb informants exclaimed angrily.However, this begs the question: Why would symbols of Western popular culture evoke the kinds of emotions that result in iconoclasm more so than other ethnically non-reducible ones such as those of the Partisans that are celebrated in the old Socialist pan-Yugoslav monuments? The answer lies in the geopolitical history of the SFRY. The Yugoslav-Soviet Union split in 1956 forced the SFRY to develop ever-stronger ties with the West. The effects of this became quotidian, especially as people travelled more or less freely across international borders and consumed the products of Western Capitalism. Many of the things they consumed became deeply meaningful. Notably, barely anybody above a certain age does not reminisce fondly about the moment when participation in martial arts became a nationwide craze following the success of Bruce Lee’s films in the golden (1970s-80s) years of Western-bankrolled Yugoslav prosperity.Likewise, almost everyone above a certain age recalls the balmy summer of 1985, whose happy zeitgeist seemed to be summed up perfectly by Austrian band Opus’s song “Live is Life” (1985). This tune became popular in Yugoslavia due to its apparently feelgood message about the joys of attending live rock performances. In a sense, these moments and the consumption of things “Western” in general came to symbolise everything that was good about Yugoslavia and, indeed to define what it was to be Yugoslavs, especially in comparison to their isolated and materially deprived socialist comrades in the Warsaw Pact countries.However, iconoclastic acts are more than mere emotional responses to offensive instances of cultural appropriation. As Michael Taussig describes, iconoclasm reveals the public secrets that the monuments it targets conceal. SFRY’s great public secret, known especially to those people old enough to have experienced the inter-ethnic violence of WWII, was ethnic division and the state’s deceit of the historic normalcy of pan-Yugoslav identification. The secret was maintained by a formal state policy of forgetting. For example, the wording on monuments in sites of inter-ethnic violence in WWII is commonly of the variety: “here lie the victims in Yugoslavia’s struggle against imperialist forces and their internal quislings.” Said quislings were, of course, actually Serbs, Croats, and Muslims (i.e. fellow Yugoslavs), but those ethnic nomenclatures were almost never used.In contrast, in a context where Western popular cultural forms came to define the very essence of what it was to be Yugoslav, the iconoclasm of Western pop monuments, and the retroquotation of Western pop songs revealed the repressed deceit and the public secret of the reality of inter-ethnic tension at the heart of that which was regarded as quintessentially Yugoslav. In this way, the memory of Yugoslavia ever having been a properly functioning entity was delegitimised. Consequently, Laibach and their kind served to render the apparent reality of the Yugoslav ideal as little more than a dream. ReferencesEpstein, Mikhail N. After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Amherst: U of Massachusettes P, 1995.Goddard, Michael. “We Are Time: Laibach/NSK, Retro-Avant-Gardism and Machinic Repetition,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 11 (2006): 45-53.Harrison, Simon. “Identity as a Scarce Resource.” Social Anthropology 7 (1999): 239–251.Monroe, Alexei. Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.NSK. Neue Slowenische Kunst. Ljubljana: NSK, 1986.NSK. Padiglione NSK. Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 1993.rateyourmusic.com. 2018. 3 Sep. 2018 <https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/throbbing-gristle>.Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Žižek, Slavoj. “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists?” 3 Sep. 2018 <www.nskstate.com/appendix/articles/why_are_laibach.php.>

Collectives bring people and their concerns together. In the twenty-first century, this assembly happens across different material and virtual spaces that, together, establish connective layers of society. A kind of politics has emerged that seeks new forms of communication and expression and proposes new modes of (co)existence. Riots in the suburbs of metropolitan areas, the repair of a public village centre, railway workers’ strikes, green activists’ protests, songs in support of tsunami victims… These are some examples of collective actions that unite people and places. But very often these kinds of events and social practices take place and fade away too quickly without visible traces of becoming collectives. This article focuses on the contingent spaces that enable collective action and provide possibilities for “peripheral” concerns and communities to become public. The concept of “diasporas” is widened to permit discussion of how emerging (international) communities make their voices heard through political events. Some theoretical concepts will be illustrated, using two examples of collective action on 1 May 2009 that demonstrate different initiatives concerning the global (economic) crisis. Assembling Collectives and Affective Events Building a house/centre and singing for something: these are examples of practices that bring people and their ideals together in a collective action or event. This article discusses the different communities that evolve within spaces that enable collective action. These communities are formed not only on the basis of nationality, occupation, or race; elements of (temporal) membership are created out of a wide spectrum of affiliations and a sense of solidarity. Hinchliffe (13) argues that collective action can be seen as a collection of affects that link together disparate places and times, and thus the collective is a matter of considerable political interest. The emergent spaces of collective action publicise particular concerns that may connect already existing but (spatially) dispersed communities and diasporas. However, there is a need to discuss the affects, places, and temporalities that make the assemblage of new collectivities possible. The political potential of collective spaces needs careful elaboration in order that such initiatives may continue to grow without extending the influence of existing (capitalist) powers. Various communities connected “glocally” (locally and globally) can call new publics into existence, posing questions to politics which are not yet “of politics” (Thrift 3). Thus collective action can invent new connecting concerns and practices that catalyse (political) change in society. To understand the complex spatiality of collective action and community formations, it is crucial to look at processes of “affect”. Affects occur in society as “in-becoming” atmospheres and “imitation-suggestions” (Brennan 1-10) that stimulate concerns and motivate practices. The “imitation” can also be an invention that creatively binds existing know-how and experiences into a local-social context. Thinking about affects within the spaces of collective action provides a challenge to rethink what is referred to simply as the “social”. Massumi (228) argues that such affects are virtual expressions of the actually existing things that embody them; however, affects such as emotions and feelings are also autonomous to the degree that they exceed the particular body within which they are presently confined. The emerging bodies, or spaces, of collective action thus carry the potential to transform coexistence across both intellectual and physical boundaries, and communication technology has been instrumental in linking the affective spaces of collective action across both time and space. According to Thrift, the collision of different space-times very often provokes a “stutter” in social relations: the jolt which arises from new encounters, new connections, new ways of proceeding. But how can these turbulent spheres and trajectories of collective action be described and discussed? Here the mechanisms of “events” themselves need to be addressed. The “event” represents, abstractly, a spatio-temporal locus where different concerns and practices are encountered and negotiated. “Event” refers to an incoming, or emerging, object (agent) triggering, through various affective responses, new ideas and initiatives (Clark 33). In addition to revolutions or tsunamis, there are also smaller-scale events that change how people live and come together. In this sense, events can be understood to combine individual and social “bodies” within collective action and imaginations. As Appadurai has argued, the imagination is central to all forms of agency, is itself a social practice, and is the key component of our new global order (Appadurai 29-30). Flusty (7) argues that the production of the global is as present in our day-to-day thoughts and actions as it is in the mass movement of capital, information, and populations which means that there should be the potential to include more people in the democratic process (Whatmore). This process can be seen to be a defining characteristic of the term cosmopolitics which Thrift describes as: “one of the best hopes for changing our engagement with the political by simply acknowledging that there is more there” (Thrift 189). For many, these hopes are based on a new kind of telematic connectedness, in which tele- and digital communications represent the beginning of a global networked consciousness based on the continuous exchange of ideas, both cognitive and affective. Examples of Events and Collectives Taking Place on 1 May 2009 The first day in May is traditionally dedicated to working people, and there are many public gatherings to express solidarity with workers and left-wing (“red”) policy. Issues concerning work and various productions are complex, and recently the global economic crisis exposed some weaknesses in neoliberal capitalism. Different participatory/collective actions and spaces are formed to make some common concerns public at the same time in various locations. The two following examples are part of wider “ideoscapes” (official state ideologies and counter-ideologies) (see Appadurai) in action that help to illustrate both the workings of twenty-first century global capitalism and the translocal character of the public concern. EuroMayDay One alternative form of collective action is EuroMayDay, which has taken place on May 1 every year since 2001 in several cities across (mainly Western) Europe. For example, in 2006 a total of about 300,000 young demonstrators took part in EuroMayDay parades in 20 EU cities (Wikipedia). The purpose of this political action is “to fight against the widespread precarisation of youth and the discrimination of migrants in Europe and beyond: no borders, no workfare, no precarity!” (EuroMayDay). This manifesto indicates that the aim of the collective action is to direct public attention to the insecure conditions of immigrants and young people across Europe. These groups may be seen to constitute a kind of European “diasporic collective” in which the whole of Europe is figured as a “problem area” in which unemployment, displacement, and (possibly) destitution threaten millions of lives. In this emerging “glocality”, there is a common, and urgent, need to overcome the boundaries of exclusion. Here, the proposed collective body (EuroMayDay) is described as a process for action, thus inviting translocal public participation. The body has active nodes in (Western) Europe (Bremen, Dortmund, Geneva, Hamburg, Hanau, Lisbon, Lausanne, Malaga, Milan, Palermo, Tübingen, Zürich) and beyond (Tokyo, Toronto, Tsukuba). The collective process marks these cities on the map through a webpage offering contacts with each of the “nodes” in the network. On 1 May 2009, May Day events, or parades, took place in all the cities listed above. The “nodes” of the EuroMayDay process prepared posters and activities following some common lines, although collective action had to be performed locally in every city. By way of example, let’s look at how this collective action realised its potential in Berlin, Germany. The posters (EuroMayDay Berlin, "Call") articulate the oppressive and competitive power of capitalism which affects everyone, everyday, like a machine: it constitutes “the permanent crisis”. One’s actual or potential unemployment and/or immigrant status may cause insecurity about the future. There is also a focus on liminal or transitional time, and a call for a new collectivity to overcome oppressive forces from above that protect the interests of the State and the banks. EuroMayDay thus calls for the weaving together of different forms of resistance against a deeply embedded capitalist system and the bringing together of common concerns for the attention of the general public through the May Day parade. Another poster (EuroMayDay Berlin, "May"), depicting the May Day parade, centres around the word “KRISE?” (“crisis”). The poster ends with an optimistic call to action, expressing a desire to free capitalism from institutional oppression and recreate it in a more humanistic way. Together, these two posters represent fragments of the “ideoscope” informing the wider, collective process. In Berlin in 2009, thousands of people (mostly young) participated in the May Day parade (which started from the public square Bebelplatz), backed by a musical soundtrack (see Rudi). Some people also had posters in their hands, displaying slogans like: “For Human Rights”; “Class Struggle”; “Social Change Not Climate Change”; and “Make Capitalism a Thing of the Past”. Simultaneously, dozens of other similar parades were taking place across the cities of Europe, all bearing “accelerated affective hope” (Rosa) for political change and demanding justice in society. Unfortunately, the May Day parade in Berlin took a violent turn at night, when some demonstrators attacked police and set cars on fire. There were also clashes during demonstrations in Hamburg (Kirschbaum). The media blamed the clashes also on the economic recession and recently dashed hopes for change. The Berlin May Day parade event was covered on the EuroMayDay webpage and on television news. This collective action connected many people; some participated in the parade, and many more saw the clashes and burning cars on their screens. The destructive and critical force of the collective action brought attention to some of the problems associated with youth employment and immigration though, sadly, without offering any concrete proposals for a solution to the problem. The emotional character of the street marches, and later the street fighting, were arguably an important aspect of the collective action inasmuch as they demonstrated the potential for citizens to unite, translocally, around affective as well as material grief (a process that has been given dramatic expression in more recent times with events in Egypt, Libya, and Syria). Further, although the recent May Day events have achieved very little in terms of material results, the network remains active, and further initiatives are likely in the future. “Let’s Do It! My Estonia” On 1 May 2009, about 11,000 people participated in a public “thought-bee” in Estonia (located in north-eastern Europe in the region of the Baltic Sea) and (through the Estonian diaspora) abroad. The “thought-bee” can be understood as a civil society initiative designed to bring people together for discussion and problem-solving with regards to everyday social issues. The concept of the “bee” combines work with pleasure. The bee tradition was practised in old Estonian farming communities, when families in adjacent villages helped one another. Bees were often organised for autumn harvesting, and the intense, communal work was celebrated by offering participants food and drink. Similarly, during the Soviet era, on certain Saturdays there were organised days (obligatory) for collective working (e.g. to reconstruct sites or to pick up litter). Now the “bee” concept has become associated with brainstorming in small groups across the country as well as abroad. The number of participants in the May 1st thought-bee was relatively large, given that Estonia’s total population is only 1.4 million. The funding of the initiative combined public and private sources, e.g. Estonian Civil Society Foundation, the European Commission, and some companies. The information sheet, presented to participants of the May 1st thought-bee, explains the event’s purpose in this way: The main purpose of today’s thought-bee is to initiate as many actions as possible that can change life in Estonia for the better. My Estonia, our more enjoyable and more efficient society, will appear through smaller and bigger thoughts. In the thought-bee we think how to make life better for our own home-place... Let’s think together and do it! (Teeme Ära, "Teeme", translated from Estonian) The civil society event grew out of a collective action on 3 May 2008 to pick up and dispose of litter throughout Estonia. The thought-bee initiative was coordinated by volunteers. The emotional appeal to participate in the thought-bee event on May 1st was presented and circulated in newspapers, radio, television, Internet portals, and e-mails. Famous people called on residents to take part in the public discussion events. Some examples of arguments for the collective activity included the economic crisis, the need for new jobs, self-responsibility, environmental pressures, and the general need to learn and find communal solutions. The thought-bee initiative took place simultaneously in about 500 “thought-halls” all over Estonia and abroad. Small groups of people registered, chose main discussion topics (with many suggestions from organisers of the bee) and made their groups visible as nodes on the “initiative” webpage. Other people had the opportunity of reading several proposals from the various thought-halls and of joining as members of the public brainstorming event on 1 May. The virtual and living map of the halls presented them as (green) nodes with location, topics, members, and discussion leaders. Various sites such as schools, clubs, cultural centres, municipality buildings, and theatres became part of the multiple and synchronous “space-times” within the half-day thought-bee event. Participants in the thought-bee were asked to bring their own food to share and, in some municipalities, open concerts were held to celebrate the day. These practices indicate some continuity with the national tradition of bees, where work has always been combined with pleasure. Most “thought-halls” were located in towns and smaller local centres as well as on several Estonian islands. Moreover, these thought-halls provided for both as face-to-face and online encounters. Further, one English-speaking discussion group was organised in Tallinn so that non-Estonian speakers could also participate. However, the involvement of Russian-speaking people in the initiative remained rather limited. It is important to note that these embodied spaces of participation were also to be found outside of Estonia—in Brussels, Amsterdam, Toronto, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Prague, Baltimore, New York, and San Diego—and, in this way, the Estonian diaspora was also given the opportunity to become involved in the collective action. Following the theories of Thrift and Clark cited at the beginning of this article, it is interesting to see an event in which simultaneously connected places, embodying multiple voices, becomes part of the communal present with a shared vision of the future. The conclusions of each thought-hall discussion group were recorded on video shortly after the event. These videos were made available on the “Let’s Do It! My Estonia” webpage. The most frequently addressed topics of the thought-bee (in order of importance) were: community activities and collaboration; entrepreneurship and new jobs; education, values; free time and sport; regional development; rural life; and the environment and nature conservation (PRAXIS). The participants of the collective action were aware of the importance of local as well as national initiatives as a catalyst for change. The initiative “Let’s Do It! My Estonia” continued after the events of May Day 2009; people discussed issues and suggested proposals through the “initiative” webpage and supported the continuation of the collective action (Teeme Ära, "Description"). Environmental concerns (e.g. planting trees, reducing noise, and packaging waste) appear as important elements in these imaginings along with associated other practices for the improvement of daily life. It is important to understand the thought-bee event as a part of an emerging collective action that started with a simple litter clean-up and grew, through various other successful local community initiatives, into shared visions for a better future predicated upon the principles of glocality and coexistence. The example indicates that (international) NGOs can apply, and also invent, radical information politics to change the terms of debate in a national context by providing a voice for groups and issues that would otherwise remain unheard and unseen (see also Atkinson and Scurrah 236-44). Conclusions The collective actions discussed above have created new publics and contingent spaces to bring additional questions and concerns into politics. In both cases, the potential of “the event” (as theorised in the introduction of this article) came to the foreground, creating an additional international layer of temporal connectivity between many existing social groups such as unemployed young people or members of a village union. These events were both an “outcome” of, and an attempt to change, the involuntary exclusion of certain “peripheral” groups within the melting pot that the European Union has become. As such, they may be thought of as extending the concept of “diasporas” to include emerging platforms of collective action that aim to make problematic issues visible and multiple voices heard across the wider public. This, in turn, illustrates the need to rethink diasporas in the context of the intensive de-territorialisation of human concerns, “space-times and movement-trajectories yet to (be)come” (Braziel and Mannur 18). Both the examples of collective action discussed here campaigned for “changing the world” through a one-day event and may thus be understood in terms of Rosa’s theory of “social acceleration” (Rosa). This theory shows how both to the “contraction of the present” and the general instability of contemporary life have given rise to a newly affective desire to improve life through an expression of the collective will. Such a tendency can clearly take on far more radical forms as has been recently demonstrated by the mass protests and revolts against autocratic ruling powers in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. In this article, however, cosmopolitics is better understood in terms of the particular skills (most evident in the Estonian case) and affective spheres that mobilised in suggestions to bring about local action and global change. Together, these examples of collective action are part of a wider “ideoscape” (Appadurai) trying to reduce the power of capitalism and of the state by encouraging alternative forms of collective action that are not bound up solely with earning money or serving the state as a “salient” citizen. However, it could be argued that “EuroMayDay” is ultimately a reactionary movement used to highlight the oppressive aspects of capitalism without offering clear alternatives. By contrast, “Let’s Do It! My Estonia” has facilitated interactive public discussion and the practice of local skills that have the power to improve everyday life and the environment in a material and quantifiable way. Such changes in collective action also illustrate the speed and “imitative capacity stimulating expressive interactions” that now characterise everyday life (Thrift). Crucially, both these collective events were achieved through rapid advances in communication technologies in recent times; this technology made it possible to spread know-how as well as feelings of solidarity and social contact across the world. Further research on these fascinating developments in g/local politics is clearly urgently needed to help us better understand the changes in collective action currently taking place. Acknowledgements This research was supported by Estonian Science Foundation grant SF0130008s07 and by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Center of Excellence CECT). References Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 25-48. Atkinson, Jeffrey, and Martin Scurrah. Globalizing Social Justice: The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in Bringing about Social Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2009. Braziel, Jana Evans, and Anita Mannur. “Nation, Migration, Globalisation: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies.” Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 1-18. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. London: Continuum, 2004. Clark, Nigel. “The Play of the World.” Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research. Eds. Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose, and Sarah Whatmore. London: Sage, 2003. 28-46. EuroMayDay. “What Is EuroMayDay?” 23 May 2009. ‹http://www.euromayday.org/about.php›. EuroMayDay Berlin. “Call of May Parade.” 3 Aug. 2009. ‹http://maydayberlin.blogsport.de/aufruf/text-only/›. EuroMayDay Berlin. “May Parade Poster.” 3 Aug. 2009. ‹http://maydayberlin.blogsport.de/propaganda/›. Flusty, Steven. De-Coca-Colonization. Making the Globe from the Inside Out. New York: Routledge, 2004. Hinchliffe, Steve. Geographies of Nature: Societies, Environments, Ecologies. London: Sage, 2007. Kirschbaum, Erik. “Police Hurt in May Day Clashes in Germany.” Reuters, 3 Aug. 2009. ‹http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5401UI20090501›. Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Ed. Paul Patton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 217-39. PRAXIS. “Minu Eesti mõttetalgute ideede tähtsamad analüüsitulemused” (Main analysing results about ideas of My Estonia thought-bee). 26 Oct. 2009. ‹http://www.minueesti.ee/index.php?leht=6&mID=949›. Rosa, Hartmut. “Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronised High-Speed Society.” Constellations 10 (2003): 1-33. Rudi 5858. “Mayday-Parade-Demo in Berlin 2009.” 3 Aug. 2009. ‹http://wn.com/Rudi5858›. Teeme Ära. “Teeme Ära! Minu Eesti” (Let’s Do It! My Estonia). Day Program of 1 May 2009. Printed information sheet, 2009. Teeme Ära. “Description of Preparation and Content of Thought-bee.” 20 Apr. 2009. ‹http://www.minueesti.ee/?leht=321›. Thrift, Nigel. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics and Affect. London: Routledge, 2008. Whatmore, Sarah. “Generating Materials.” Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research. Eds. Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose and Sarah Whatmore. London: Sage, 2003. 89-104. Wikipedia. “EuroMayDay.” 23 May 2009. ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EuroMayDay›.

IntroductionThere are two types of Africa. The first is a place where people and cultures live. The second is the image of Africa that has been invented through colonial knowledge and power. The colonial image of Africa, as the Other of Europe, a land “enveloped in the dark mantle of night” was supported by western states as it justified their colonial practices (Hegel 91). Any evidence that challenged the myth of the Dark Continent was destroyed, removed or ignored. While the looting of African natural resources has been studied, the looting of African knowledges hasn’t received as much attention, partly based on the assumption that Africans did not produce knowledge that could be stolen. This article invalidates this myth by examining the legacy of Ethiopia’s indigenous Ge’ez literature, and its looting and abduction by powerful western agents. The article argues that this has resulted in epistemic violence, where students of the Ethiopian indigenous education system do not have access to their books, while European orientalists use them to interpret Ethiopian history and philosophy using a foreign lens. The analysis is based on interviews with teachers and students of ten Ge’ez schools in Ethiopia, and trips to the Ethiopian manuscript collections in The British Library, The Princeton Library, the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and The National Archives in Addis Ababa.The Context of Ethiopian Indigenous KnowledgesGe’ez is one of the ancient languages of Africa. According to Professor Ephraim Isaac, “about 10,000 years ago, one single nation or community of a single linguistic group existed in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Horn of Africa” (The Habesha). The language of this group is known as Proto-Afroasiatic or Afrasian languages. It is the ancestor of the Semitic, Cushitic, Nilotic, Omotic and other languages that are currently spoken in Ethiopia by its 80 ethnic groups, and the neighbouring countries (Diakonoff). Ethiopians developed the Ge’ez language as their lingua franca with its own writing system some 2000 years ago. Currently, Ge’ez is the language of academic scholarship, studied through the traditional education system (Isaac, The Ethiopian). Since the fourth century, an estimated 1 million Ge’ez manuscripts have been written, covering religious, historical, mathematical, medicinal, and philosophical texts.One of the most famous Ge’ez manuscripts is the Kebra Nagast, a foundational text that embodied the indigenous conception of nationhood in Ethiopia. The philosophical, political and religious themes in this book, which craft Ethiopia as God’s country and the home of the Ark of the Covenant, contributed to the country’s success in defending itself from European colonialism. The production of books like the Kebra Nagast went hand in hand with a robust indigenous education system that trained poets, scribes, judges, artists, administrators and priests. Achieving the highest stages of learning requires about 30 years after which the scholar would be given the rare title Arat-Ayina, which means “four eyed”, a person with the ability to see the past as well as the future. Today, there are around 50,000 Ge’ez schools across the country, most of which are in rural villages and churches.Ge’ez manuscripts are important textbooks and reference materials for students. They are carefully prepared from vellum “to make them last forever” (interview, 3 Oct. 2019). Some of the religious books are regarded as “holy persons who breathe wisdom that gives light and food to the human soul”. Other manuscripts, often prepared as scrolls are used for medicinal purposes. Each manuscript is uniquely prepared reflecting inherited wisdom on contemporary lives using the method called Tirguamme, the act of giving meaning to sacred texts. Preparation of books is costly. Smaller manuscript require the skins of 50-70 goats/sheep and large manuscript needed 100-120 goats/sheep (Tefera).The Loss of Ethiopian ManuscriptsSince the 18th century, a large quantity of these manuscripts have been stolen, looted, or smuggled out of the country by travellers who came to the country as explorers, diplomats and scientists. The total number of Ethiopian manuscripts taken is still unknown. Amsalu Tefera counted 6928 Ethiopian manuscripts currently held in foreign libraries and museums. This figure does not include privately held or unofficial collections (41).Looting and smuggling were sponsored by western governments, institutions, and notable individuals. For example, in 1868, The British Museum Acting Director Richard Holms joined the British army which was sent to ‘rescue’ British hostages at Maqdala, the capital of Emperor Tewodros. Holms’ mission was to bring treasures for the Museum. Before the battle, Tewodros had established the Medhanialem library with more than 1000 manuscripts as part of Ethiopia’s “industrial revolution”. When Tewodros lost the war and committed suicide, British soldiers looted the capital, including the treasury and the library. They needed 200 mules and 15 elephants to transport the loot and “set fire to all buildings so that no trace was left of the edifices which once housed the manuscripts” (Rita Pankhurst 224). Richard Holmes collected 356 manuscripts for the Museum. A wealthy British woman called Lady Meux acquired some of the most illuminated manuscripts. In her will, she bequeathed them to be returned to Ethiopia. However, her will was reversed by court due to a campaign from the British press (Richard Pankhurst). In 2018, the V&A Museum in London displayed some of the treasures by incorporating Maqdala into the imperial narrative of Britain (Woldeyes, Reflections).Britain is by no means the only country to seek Ethiopian manuscripts for their collections. Smuggling occurred in the name of science, an act of collecting manuscripts for study. Looting involved local collaborators and powerful foreign sponsors from places like France, Germany and the Vatican. Like Maqdala, this was often sponsored by governments or powerful financers. For example, the French government sponsored the Dakar-Djibouti Mission led by Marcel Griaule, which “brought back about 350 manuscripts and scrolls from Gondar” (Wion 2). It was often claimed that these manuscripts were purchased, rather than looted. Johannes Flemming of Germany was said to have purchased 70 manuscripts and ten scrolls for the Royal Library of Berlin in 1905. However, there was no local market for buying manuscripts. Ge’ez manuscripts were, and still are, written to serve spiritual and secular life in Ethiopia, not for buying and selling. There are countless other examples, but space limits how many can be provided in this article. What is important to note is that museums and libraries have accrued impressive collections without emphasising how those collections were first obtained. The loss of the intellectual heritage of Ethiopians to western collectors has had an enormous impact on the country.Knowledge Grabbing: The Denial of Access to KnowledgeWith so many manuscripts lost, European collectors became the narrators of Ethiopian knowledge and history. Edward Ullendorff, a known orientalist in Ethiopian studies, refers to James Bruce as “the explorer of Abyssinia” (114). Ullendorff commented on the significance of Bruce’s travel to Ethiopia asperhaps the most important aspect of Bruce’s travels was the collection of Ethiopic manuscripts… . They opened up entirely new vistas for the study of Ethiopian languages and placed this branch of Oriental scholarship on a much more secure basis. It is not known how many MSS. reached Europe through his endeavours, but the present writer is aware of at least twenty-seven, all of which are exquisite examples of Ethiopian manuscript art. (133)This quote encompasses three major ways in which epistemic violence occurs: denial of access to knowledge, Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts, and the handling of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts from the past. These will be discussed below.Western ‘travellers’, such as Bruce, did not fully disclose how many manuscripts they took or how they acquired them. The abundance of Ethiopian manuscripts in western institutions can be compared to the scarcity of such materials among traditional schools in Ethiopia. In this research, I have visited ten indigenous schools in Wollo (Lalibela, Neakutoleab, Asheten, Wadla), in Gondar (Bahita, Kuskwam, Menbere Mengist), and Gojam (Bahirdar, Selam Argiew Maryam, Giorgis). In all of the schools, there is lack of Ge’ez manuscripts. Students often come from rural villages and do not receive any government support. The scarcity of Ge’ez manuscripts, and the lack of funding which might allow for the purchasing of books, means the students depend mainly on memorising Ge’ez texts told to them from the mouth of their teacher. Although this method of learning is not new, it currently is the only way for passing indigenous knowledges across generations.The absence of manuscripts is most strongly felt in the advanced schools. For instance, in the school of Qene, poetic literature is created through an in-depth study of the vocabulary and grammar of Ge’ez. A Qene student is required to develop a deep knowledge of Ge’ez in order to understand ancient and medieval Ge’ez texts which are used to produce poetry with multiple meanings. Without Ge’ez manuscripts, students cannot draw their creative works from the broad intellectual tradition of their ancestors. When asked how students gain access to textbooks, one student commented:we don’t have access to Birana books (Ge’ez manuscripts written on vellum). We cannot learn the ancient wisdom of painting, writing, and computing developed by our ancestors. We simply buy paper books such as Dawit (Psalms), Sewasew (grammar) or Degwa (book of songs with notations) and depend on our teachers to teach us the rest. We also lend these books to each other as many students cannot afford to buy them. Without textbooks, we expect to spend double the amount of time it would take if we had textbooks. (Interview, 3 Sep. 2019)Many students interrupt their studies and work as labourers to save up and buy paper textbooks, but they still don’t have access to the finest works taken to Europe. Most Ge’ez manuscripts remaining in Ethiopia are locked away in monasteries, church stores or other places to prevent further looting. The manuscripts in Addis Ababa University and the National Archives are available for researchers but not to the students of the indigenous system, creating a condition of internal knowledge grabbing.While the absence of Ge’ez manuscripts denied, and continues to deny, Ethiopians the chance to enrich their indigenous education, it benefited western orientalists to garner intellectual authority on the field of Ethiopian studies. In 1981, British Museum Director John Wilson said, “our Abyssinian holdings are more important than our Indian collection” (Bell 231). In reaction, Richard Pankhurst, the Director of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, responded that the collection was acquired through plunder. Defending the retaining of Maqdala manuscripts in Europe, Ullendorff wrote:neither Dr. Pankhurst nor the Ethiopian and western scholars who have worked on this collection (and indeed on others in Europe) could have contributed so significantly to the elucidation of Ethiopian history without the rich resources available in this country. Had they remained insitu, none of this would have been possible. (Qtd. in Bell 234)The manuscripts are therefore valued based on their contribution to western scholarship only. This is a continuation of epistemic violence whereby local knowledges are used as raw materials to produce Eurocentric knowledge, which in turn is used to teach Africans as though they had no prior knowledge. Scholars are defined as those western educated persons who can speak European languages and can travel to modern institutions to access the manuscripts. Knowledge grabbing regards previous owners as inexistent or irrelevant for the use of the grabbed knowledges.Knowledge grabbing also means indigenous scholars are deprived of critical resources to produce new knowledge based on their intellectual heritage. A Qene teacher commented: our students could not devote their time and energy to produce new knowledges in the same way our ancestors did. We have the tradition of Madeladel, Kimera, Kuteta, Mielad, Qene and tirguamme where students develop their own system of remembering, reinterpreting, practicing, and rewriting previous manuscripts and current ones. Without access to older manuscripts, we increasingly depend on preserving what is being taught orally by elders. (Interview, 4 Sep. 2019)This point is important as it relates to the common myth that indigenous knowledges are artefacts belonging to the past, not the present. There are millions of people who still use these knowledges, but the conditions necessary for their reproduction and improvement is denied through knowledge grabbing. The view of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts dismisses the Ethiopian view that Birana manuscripts are living persons. As a scholar told me in Gondar, “they are creations of Egziabher (God), like all of us. Keeping them in institutions is like keeping living bodies in graveyards” (interview, 5 Oct. 2019).Recently, the collection of Ethiopian manuscripts by western institutions has also been conducted digitally. Thousands of manuscripts have been microfilmed or digitised. For example, the EU funded Ethio-SPaRe project resulted in the digital collection of 2000 Ethiopian manuscripts (Nosnitsin). While digitisation promises better access for people who may not be able to visit institutions to see physical copies, online manuscripts are not accessible to indigenous school students in Ethiopia. They simply do not have computer or internet access and the manuscripts are catalogued in European languages. Both physical and digital knowledge grabbing results in the robbing of Ethiopian intellectual heritage, and denies the possibility of such manuscripts being used to inform local scholarship. Epistemic Violence: The European as ExpertWhen considered in relation to stolen or appropriated manuscripts, epistemic violence is the way in which local knowledge is interpreted using a foreign epistemology and gained dominance over indigenous worldviews. European scholars have monopolised the field of Ethiopian Studies by producing books, encyclopaedias and digital archives based on Ethiopian manuscripts, almost exclusively in European languages. The contributions of their work for western scholarship is undeniable. However, Kebede argues that one of the detrimental effects of this orientalist literature is the thesis of Semiticisation, the designation of the origin of Ethiopian civilisation to the arrival of Middle Eastern colonisers rather than indigenous sources.The thesis is invented to make the history of Ethiopia consistent with the Hegelian western view that Africa is a Dark Continent devoid of a civilisation of its own. “In light of the dominant belief that black peoples are incapable of great achievements, the existence of an early and highly advanced civilization constitutes a serious anomaly in the Eurocentric construction of the world” (Kebede 4). To address this anomaly, orientalists like Ludolph attributed the origin of Ethiopia’s writing system, agriculture, literature, and civilisation to the arrival of South Arabian settlers. For example, in his translation of the Kebra Nagast, Budge wrote: “the SEMITES found them [indigenous Ethiopians] negro savages, and taught them civilization and culture and the whole scriptures on which their whole literature is based” (x).In line with the above thesis, Dillman wrote that “the Abyssinians borrowed their Numerical Signs from the Greeks” (33). The views of these orientalist scholars have been challenged. For instance, leading scholar of Semitic languages Professor Ephraim Isaac considers the thesis of the Arabian origin of Ethiopian civilization “a Hegelian Eurocentric philosophical perspective of history” (2). Isaac shows that there is historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence that suggest Ethiopia to be more advanced than South Arabia from pre-historic times. Various Ethiopian sources including the Kebra Nagast, the works of historian Asres Yenesew, and Ethiopian linguist Girma Demeke provide evidence for the indigenous origin of Ethiopian civilisation and languages.The epistemic violence of the Semeticisation thesis lies in how this Eurocentric ideological construction is the dominant narrative in the field of Ethiopian history and the education system. Unlike the indigenous view, the orientalist view is backed by strong institutional power both in Ethiopia and abroad. The orientalists control the field of Ethiopian studies and have access to Ge’ez manuscripts. Their publications are the only references for Ethiopian students. Due to Native Colonialism, a system of power run by native elites through the use of colonial ideas and practices (Woldeyes), the education system is the imitation of western curricula, including English as a medium of instruction from high school onwards. Students study the west more than Ethiopia. Indigenous sources are generally excluded as unscientific. Only the Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts is regarded as scientific and objective.ConclusionEthiopia is the only African country never to be colonised. In its history it produced a large quantity of manuscripts in the Ge’ez language through an indigenous education system that involves the study of these manuscripts. Since the 19th century, there has been an ongoing loss of these manuscripts. European travellers who came to Ethiopia as discoverers, missionaries and scholars took a large number of manuscripts. The Battle of Maqdala involved the looting of the intellectual products of Ethiopia that were collected at the capital. With the introduction of western education and use of English as a medium of instruction, the state disregarded indigenous schools whose students have little access to the manuscripts. This article brings the issue of knowledge grapping, a situation whereby European institutions and scholars accumulate Ethiopia manuscripts without providing the students in Ethiopia to have access to those collections.Items such as manuscripts that are held in western institutions are not dead artefacts of the past to be preserved for prosperity. They are living sources of knowledge that should be put to use in their intended contexts. Local Ethiopian scholars cannot study ancient and medieval Ethiopia without travelling and gaining access to western institutions. This lack of access and resources has made European Ethiopianists almost the sole producers of knowledge about Ethiopian history and culture. For example, indigenous sources and critical research that challenge the Semeticisation thesis are rarely available to Ethiopian students. Here we see epistemic violence in action. Western control over knowledge production has the detrimental effect of inventing new identities, subjectivities and histories that translate into material effects in the lives of African people. In this way, Ethiopians and people all over Africa internalise western understandings of themselves and their history as primitive and in need of development or outside intervention. African’s intellectual and cultural heritage, these living bodies locked away in graveyards, must be put back into the hands of Africans.AcknowledgementThe author acknowledges the support of the Australian Academy of the Humanities' 2019 Humanities Travelling Fellowship Award in conducting this research.ReferencesBell, Stephen. “Cultural Treasures Looted from Maqdala: A Summary of Correspondence in British National Newspapers since 1981.” Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 231-246.Budge, Wallis. A History of Ethiopia, Nubia and Abyssinia. London: Methuen and Co, 1982.Demeke, Girma Awgichew. The Origin of Amharic. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2013.Diakonoff, Igor M. Afrasian Languages. Moscow: Nauka, 1988.Dillmann, August. Ethiopic Grammar. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2005.Hegel, Georg W.F. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover, 1956.Isaac, Ephraim. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church. New Jersey: Red Sea Press, 2013.———. “An Open Letter to an Inquisitive Ethiopian Sister.” The Habesha, 2013. 1 Feb. 2020 <http://www.zehabesha.com/an-open-letter-to-an-inquisitive-young-ethiopian-sister-ethiopian-history-is-not-three-thousand-years/>.Kebra Nagast. "The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelik I." Trans. Wallis Budge. London: Oxford UP, 1932.Pankhurst, Richard. "The Napier Expedition and the Loot Form Maqdala." Presence Africaine 133-4 (1985): 233-40.Pankhurst, Rita. "The Maqdala Library of Tewodros." Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 223-230.Tefera, Amsalu. ነቅዐ መጻህፍት ከ መቶ በላይ በግዕዝ የተጻፉ የእኢትዮጵያ መጻህፍት ዝርዝር ከማብራሪያ ጋር።. Addis Ababa: Jajaw, 2019.Nosnitsin, Denis. "Ethio-Spare Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia: Salvation, Preservation and Research." 2010. 5 Jan. 2019 <https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/ethiostudies/research/ethiospare/missions/pdf/report2010-1.pdf>. Ullendorff, Edward. "James Bruce of Kinnaird." The Scottish Historical Review 32.114, part 2 (1953): 128-43.Wion, Anaïs. "Collecting Manuscripts and Scrolls in Ethiopia: The Missions of Johannes Flemming (1905) and Enno Littmann (1906)." 2012. 5 Jan. 2019 <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00524382/document>. Woldeyes, Yirga Gelaw. Native Colonialism: Education and the Economy of Violence against Traditions in Ethiopia. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2017.———. “Reflections on Ethiopia’s Stolen Treasures on Display in a London Museum.” The Conversation. 2018. 5 June 2018 <https://theconversation.com/reflections-on-ethiopias-stolen-treasures-on-display-in-a-london-museum-97346>.Yenesew, Asres. ትቤ፡አክሱም፡መኑ፡ አንተ? Addis Ababa: Nigid Printing House, 1959 [1951 EC].

IntroductionIf human beings have become a geophysical force, capable of impacting the very crust and atmosphere of the planet, and if geophysical forces become objects of study, presences able to be charted over millions of years—one of our many problems is a 'naming' problem. - Bethany NowviskieThe anthropocene "denotes the present time interval, in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities" (S.Q.S.). Although the narrative and terminology of the anthropocene has not been officially legitimized by the scientific community as a whole, it has been adopted worldwide by a plethora of social and cultural studies. The challenges of the anthropocene demand interdisciplinary efforts and actions. New contexts, situations and environments call for original naming propositions: new terminologies are always illegitimate at the moment of their first appearance in the world.Against the background of the naming challenges of the anthropocene, we will map the emergence and tell the story of a tiny world within the world of media studies: the world of the term 'nanomedia' and its hyphenated sister 'nano-media'. While we tell the story of the uses of this term, its various meanings and applications, we will provide yet another possible interpretation and application to the term, one that we believe might be helpful to interdisciplinary media studies in the context of the anthropocene. Contemporary media terminologies are usually born out of fortuitous exchanges between communication technologies and their various social appropriations: hypodermic media, interactive media, social media, and so on and so forth. These terminologies are either recognised as the offspring of legitimate scientific endeavours by the media theory community, or are widely discredited and therefore rendered illegitimate. Scientific legitimacy comes from the broad recognition and embrace of a certain term and its inclusion in the canon of an epistemology. Illegitimate processes of theoretical enquiry and the study of the kinds of deviations that might deem a theory unacceptable have been scarcely addressed (Delborne). Rejected terminologies and theories are marginalised and gain the status of bastard epistemologies of media, considered irrelevant and unworthy of mention and recognition. Within these margins, however, different streams of media theories which involve conceptual hybridizations can be found: creole encounters between high culture and low culture (James), McLuhan's hybrid that comes from the 'meeting of two media' (McLuhan 55), or even 'bastard spaces' of cultural production (Bourdieu). Once in a while a new media epistemology arises that is categorised as a bastard not because of plain rejection or criticism, but because of its alien origins, formations and shape. New theories are currently emerging out of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinking which are, in many ways, bearers of strange features and characteristics that might render its meaning elusive and obscure to a monodisciplinary perspective. Radical transdisciplinary thinking is often alien and alienated. It results from unconventional excursions into uncharted territories of enquiry: bastard epistemologies arise from such exchanges. Being itself a product of a mestizo process of thinking, this article takes a look into the term nanomedia (or nano-media): a marginal terminology within media theory. This term is not to be confounded with the term biomedia, coined by Eugene Thacker (2004). (The theory of biomedia has acquired a great level of scientific legitimacy, however it refers to the moist realities of the human body, and is more concerned with cyborg and post-human epistemologies. The term nanomedia, on the contrary, is currently being used according to multiple interpretations which are mostly marginal, and we argue, in this paper, that such uses might be considered illegitimate). ’Nanomedia’ was coined outside the communications area. It was first used by scientific researchers in the field of optics and physics (Rand et al), in relation to flows of media via nanoparticles and optical properties of nanomaterials. This term would only be used in media studies a couple of years later, with a completely different meaning, without any acknowledgment of its scientific origins and context. The structure of this narrative is thus illegitimate, and as such does not fit into traditional modalities of written expression: there are bits and pieces of information and epistemologies glued together as a collage of nano fragments which combine philology, scientific literature, digital ethnography and technology reviews. Transgressions Illegitimate theories might be understood in terms of hybrid epistemologies that intertwine disciplines and perspectives, rendering its outcomes inter or transdisciplinary, and therefore prone to being considered marginal by disciplinary communities. Such theories might also be considered illegitimate due to social and political power struggles which aim to maintain territory by reproducing specific epistemologies within a certain field. Scientific legitimacy is a social and political process, which has been widely addressed. Pierre Bourdieu, in particular, has dedicated most of his work to deciphering the intricacies of academic wars around the legitimacy or illegitimacy of theories and terminologies. Legitimacy also plays a role in determining the degree to which a certain theory will be regarded as relevant or irrelevant:Researchers’ tendency to concentrate on those problems regarded as the most important ones (e.g. because they have been constituted as such by producers endowed with a high degree of legitimacy) is explained by the fact that a contribution or discovery relating to those questions will tend to yield greater symbolic profit (Bourdieu 22).Exploring areas of enquiry which are outside the boundaries of mainstream scientific discourses is a dangerous affair. Mixing different epistemologies in the search for transversal grounds of knowledge might result in unrecognisable theories, which are born out of a combination of various processes of hybridisation: social, technological, cultural and material.Material mutations are happening that call for new epistemologies, due to the implications of current technological possibilities which might redefine our understanding of mediation, and expand it to include molecular forms of communication. A new terminology that takes into account the scientific and epistemological implications of nanotechnology applied to communication [and that also go beyond cyborg metaphors of a marriage between biology and cibernetics] is necessary. Nanomedia and nanomediations are the terminologies proposed in this article as conceptual tools to allow these further explorations. Nanomedia is here understood as the combination of different nanotechnological mediums of communication that are able to create and disseminate meaning via molecular exchange and/ or assembly. Nanomediation is here defined as the process of active transmission and reception of signs and meaning using nanotechnologies. These terminologies might help us in conducting interdisciplinary research and observations that go deeper into matter itself and take into account its molecular spaces of mediation - moving from metaphor into pragmatics. Nanomedia(s)Within the humanities, the term 'nano-media' was first proposed by Mojca Pajnik and John Downing, referring to small media interventions that communicate social meaning in independent ways. Their use of term 'nano-media' proposes to be a revised alternative to the plethora of terms that categorise such media actions, such as alternative media, community media, tactical media, participatory media, etc. The metaphor of smallness implied in the term nano-media is used to categorise the many fragments and complexities of political appropriations of independent media. Historical examples of the kind of 'nano' social interferences listed by Downing (2),include the flyers (Flugblätter) of the Protestant Reformation in Germany; the jokes, songs and ribaldry of François Rabelais’ marketplace ... the internet links of the global social justice (otromundialista) movement; the worldwide community radio movement; the political documentary movement in country after country.John Downing applies the meaning of the prefix nano (coming from the Greek word nanos - dwarf), to independent media interventions. His concept is rooted in an analysis of the social actions performed by local movements scattered around the world, politically engaged and tactically positioned. A similar, but still unique, proposition to the use of the term 'nano-media' appeared 2 years later in the work of Graham St John (442):If ‘mass media’ consists of regional and national print and television news, ‘niche media’ includes scene specific publications, and ‘micro media’ includes event flyers and album cover art (that which Eshun [1998] called ‘conceptechnics’), and ‘social media’ refers to virtual social networks, then the sampling of popular culture (e.g. cinema and documentary sources) using the medium of the programmed music itself might be considered nano-media.Nano-media, according to Graham St John, "involves the remediation of samples from popular sources (principally film) as part of the repertoire of electronic musicians in their efforts to create a distinct liminalized socio-aesthetic" (St John 445). While Downing proposes to use the term nano-media as a way to "shake people free of their obsession with the power of macro-media, once they consider the enormous impact of nano-technologies on our contemporary world" (Downing 1), Graham St John uses the term to categorise media practices specific to a subculture (psytrance). Since the use of the term 'nano-media' in relation to culture seems to be characterised by the study of marginalised social movements, portraying a hybrid remix of conceptual references that, if not completely illegitimate, would be located in the border of legitimacy within media theories, I am hereby proposing yet another bastard version of the concept of nanomedia (without a hyphen). Given that neither of the previous uses of the term 'nano-media' within the discipline of media studies take into account the technological use of the prefix nano, it is time to redefine the term in direct relation to nanotechnologies and communication devices. Let us start by taking a look at nanoradios. Nanoradios are carbon nanotubes connected in such a way that when electrodes flow through the nanotubes, various electrical signals recover the audio signals encoded by the radio wave being received (Service). Nanoradios are examples of the many ways in which nanotechnologies are converging with and transforming our present information and communication technologies. From molecular manufacturing (Drexler) to quantum computing (Deutsch), we now have a wide spectrum of emerging and converging technologies that can act as nanomedia - molecular structures built specifically to act as communication devices.NanomediationsBeyond literal attempts to replicate traditional media artifacts using nanotechnologies, we find deep processes of mediation which are being called nanocommunication (Hara et al.) - mediation that takes place through the exchange of signals between molecules: Nanocommunication networks (nanonetworks) can be used to coordinate tasks and realize them in a distributed manner, covering a greater area and reaching unprecedented locations. Molecular communication is a novel and promising way to achieve communication between nanodevices by encoding messages inside molecules. (Abadal & Akyildiz) Nature is nanotechnological. Living systems are precise mechanisms of physical engineering: our molecules obey our DNA and fall into place according to biological codes that are mysteriously written in our every cell. Bodies are perfectly mediated - biological systems of molecular communication and exchange. Humans have always tried to emulate or to replace natural processes by artificial ones. Nanotechnology is not an exception. Many nanotechnological applications try to replicate natural systems, for example: replicas of nanostructures found in lotus flowers are now being used in waterproof fabrics, nanocrystals, responsible for resistance of cobwebs, are being artificially replicated for use in resistant materials, and various proteins are being artificially replicated as well (NNI 05). In recent decades, the methods of manipulation and engineering of nano particles have been perfected by scientists, and hundreds of nanotechnological products are now being marketed. Such nano material levels are now accessible because our digital technologies were advanced enough to allow scientific visualization and manipulation at the atomic level. The Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STMs), by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer (1986), might be considered as the first kind of nanomedia devices ever built. STMs use quantum-mechanical principles to capture information about the surface of atoms and molecules, allowed digital imaging and visualization of atomic surfaces. Digital visualization of atomic surfaces led to the discovery of buckyballs and nanotubes (buckytubes), structures that are celebrated today and received their names in honor of Buckminster Fuller. Nanotechnologies were developed as a direct consequence of the advancement of digital technologies in the fields of scientific visualisation and imaging. Nonetheless, a direct causal relationship between nano and digital technologies is not the only correlation between these two fields. Much in the same manner in which digital technologies allow infinite manipulation and replication of data, nanotechnologies would allow infinite manipulation and replication of molecules. Nanocommunication could be as revolutionary as digital communication in regards to its possible outcomes concerning new media. Full implementation of the new possibilities of nanomedia would be equivalent or even more revolutionary than digital networks are today. Nanotechnology operates at an intermediate scale at which the laws of classical physics are mixed to the laws of quantum physics (Holister). The relationship between digital technologies and nanotechnologies is not just instrumental, it is also conceptual. We might compare the possibilities of nanotechnology to hypertext: in the same way that a word processor allows the expression of any type of textual structure, so nanotechnology could allow, in principle, for a sort of "3-D printing" of any material structure.Nanotechnologies are essentially media technologies. Nanomedia is now a reality because digital technologies made possible the visualization and computational simulation of the behavior of atomic particles at the nano level. Nanomachines that can build any type of molecular structure by atomic manufacturing could also build perfect replicas of themselves. Obviously, such a powerful technology offers medical and ecological dangers inherent to atomic manipulation. Although this type of concern has been present in the global debate about the social implications of nanotechnology, its full implications are yet not entirely understood. A general scientific consensus seems to exist, however, around the idea that molecules could become a new type of material alphabet, which, theoretically, would make possible the reconfiguration of the physical structures of any type of matter using molecular manufacturing. Matter becomes digital through molecular communication.Although the uses given to the term nano-media in the context of cultural and social studies are merely metaphorical - the prefix nano is used by humanists as an allegorical reference of a combination between 'small' and 'contemporary' - once the technological and scientifical realities of nanomedia present themselves as a new realm of mediation, populated with its own kind of molecular devices, it will not be possible to ignore its full range of implications anymore. A complexifying media ecosystem calls for a more nuanced and interdisciplinary approach to media studies.ConclusionThis article narrates the different uses of the term nanomedia as an illustration of the way in which disciplinarity determines the level of legitimacy or illegitimacy of an emerging term. We then presented another possible use of the term in the field of media studies, one that is more closely aligned with its scientific origins. The importance and relevance of this narrative is connected to the present challenges we face in the anthropocene. The reality of the anthropocene makes painfully evident the full extent of the impact our technologies have had in the present condition of our planet's ecosystems. For as long as we refuse to engage directly with the technologies themselves, trying to speak the language of science and technology in order to fully understand its wider consequences and implications, our theories will be reduced to fancy metaphors and aesthetic explorations which circulate around the critical issues of our times without penetrating them. The level of interdisciplinarity required by the challenges of the anthropocene has to go beyond anthropocentrism. Traditional theories of media are anthropocentric: we seem to be willing to engage only with that which we are able to recognise and relate to. Going beyond anthropocentrism requires that we become familiar with interdisciplinary discussions and perspectives around common terminologies so we might reach a consensus about the use of a shared term. For scientists, nanomedia is an information and communication technology which is simultaneously a tool for material engineering. For media artists and theorists, nano-media is a cultural practice of active social interference and artistic exploration. However, none of the two approaches is able to fully grasp the magnitude of such an inter and transdisciplinary encounter: when communication becomes molecular engineering, what are the legitimate boundaries of media theory? If matter becomes not only a medium, but also a language, what would be the conceptual tools needed to rethink our very understanding of mediation? Would this new media epistemology be considered legitimate or illegitimate? Be it legitimate or illegitimate, a new media theory must arise that challenges and overcomes the walls which separate science and culture, physics and semiotics, on the grounds that it is a transdisciplinary change on the inner workings of media itself which now becomes our vector of epistemological and empirical transformation. 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Now in its thirtieth season, in 2018, The Simpsons is a popular culture phenomenon. The series is known as much for its social commentary as its humour and celebrity appearances. Nonetheless, The Simpsons’ ratings have declined steadily since the early 2000s, and fans have grown more vocal in their calls for the program’s end. This article provides a case study of episode “That 90s Show” (S19, E11) as a flashpoint that exemplifies fan desires for the series’ conclusion. This episode is one of the most contentious in the program’s history, with online outrage at the retconning of canon and both fans and anti-fans (Gray) of The Simpsons demanding its cancellation or “fan euthanasia”. The retconning of the canon in this episode makes evident the perceived decline in the quality of the series, and the regard for fan desires. “That 90s Show” is ultimately a failed attempt to demonstrate the continued relevance of the series to audiences, and popular culture at large, via its appeal to 1990s nostalgia.“That 90s Show”“That 90s Show” begins with Bart and Lisa’s discovery of Marge’s Springfield University diploma. This small incident indicates an impending timeline shift and “retcon”; canonically Marge never attended college, having fallen pregnant with Bart shortly after completing high school. The episode then offers an extended flashback to Marge and Homer’s life in the 1990s. The couple are living together in the Springfield Place apartment complex, with Homer working a variety of menial jobs to support Marge while she attends college. Homer and Marge subsequently break up, and Marge begins to date Professor Stephan August. In his despair, Homer can no longer perform R & B ballads with his ensemble. The band changes genres, and their new incarnation, Sadgasm, are soon credited with initiating the grunge movement. Sadgasm gain worldwide fame for their songs “Margerine” (a version of “Glycerine” by Bush), and “Politically Incorrect/Shave Me” (set to the melody of “Rape Me” by Nirvana) – which is later parodied in the episode by guest star Weird Al Yankovic as “BrainFreeze”. Homer develops an addiction to oversized, sweetened Starbucks coffee, and later, insulin, becoming a recluse despite the legion of fans camped out on his front lawn.Marge and Professor August soon part company due to his rejection of heteronormative marriage rituals. Upon her return to campus, Marge observes an MTV report on Sadgasm’s split, and Homer’s addiction, and rushes to Homer’s bedside to help him through recovery. Marge and Homer resume their relationship, and the grunge movement ends because Homer claims he “was too happy to ever grunge again.”While the episode rates a reasonable 6.1 on IMDB, fan criticism has largely focused on the premise of the episode, and what has been perceived to be the needless retconning of The Simpsons canon. Critic Robert Canning notes: “…what ‘That 90s Show’ did was neither cool nor interesting. Instead, it insulted lifelong Simpsons fans everywhere. With this episode, the writers chose to change the history of the Simpson family.” Canning observes that the episode could have worked if the flashback had been to the 1980s which supports canonicity, rather than a complete “retcon”. The term “retcon” (retroactive continuity) originates from narrative devices used in North American superhero comics, and is now broadly applied to fictional narrative universes. Andrew Friedenthal (10-11) describes retconning as “… a revision of the fictional universe in order to make the universe fresh and exciting for contemporary readers, but it also involves the influence of the past, as it directly inscribes itself upon that past.” While Amy Davis, Jemma Gilboy and James Zborowski (175-188) have highlighted floating timelines as a feature of long running animation series’ where characters remain the same age, The Simpsons does not fully adhere to this trope: “… one of the ‘rules’ of the ‘comic-book time’ or ‘floating timeline’ trope is that ‘you never refer to specific dates’… a restriction The Simpsons occasionally eschews” (Davis, Gilboy, and Zborowski 177).For many fans, “That 90s Show” becomes abstruse by erasing Marge and Homer’s well-established back story from “The Way We Was” (S2, E12). In the established narrative, Marge and Homer had met, fell in love and graduated High School in 1974; shortly after Marge fell pregnant with Bart, resulting in the couple’s shotgun wedding. “That 90s Show” disregards the pre-existing timeline, extending their courtship past high school and adding the couple’s breakup, and Homer’s improbable invention of grunge. Fan responses to “That 90s Show” highlight this episode of The Simpsons as a flashpoint for the sharp decline of quality in the series (despite having long since “jumped the shark”); but also, a decline in regard for the desires of fans. Thus, “That 90s Show” fails not only in rewriting its canon, and inserting the narrative into the 1990s; it also fails to satiate its loyal audience by insisting upon its centrality to 1990s pop culture.While fans have been vocal in online forums about the shift in the canon, they have also reflected upon the tone-deaf portrayal of the 1990s itself. During the course of the episode many 90s trends are introduced, the most contentious of which is Homer’s invention of grunge with his band Sadgasm. While playing a gig at Springfield University a young man in the audience makes a frantic phone call, shouting over the music: “Kurt, it’s Marvin. Your cousin, Marvin Cobain. You know that new sound you’re looking for…?,” thrusting the receiver towards the stage. The link to Nirvana firmly established, the remainder of the episode connects Homer’s depression and musical expression more and more blatantly to Kurt Cobain’s biography, culminating in Homer’s seclusion and near-overdose on insulin. Fans have openly debated the appropriateness of this narrative, and whether it is disrespectful to Cobain’s legacy (see Amato). Henry Jenkins (41) has described this type of debate as a kind of “moral economy” where fans “cast themselves not as poachers but as loyalists, rescuing essential elements of the primary text ‘misused’ by those who maintain copyright control over the program materials.” In this example, many original fans of The Simpsons felt the desire to rescue both Cobain’s and The Simpsons’ legacy from a poorly thought-out retcon seen to damage the legacy of both.While other trends associated with the 90s (Seinfeld; Beanie babies; Weird Al Yankovic; Starbucks; MTV VJs) all feature, it is Homer’s supposed invention of grunge which most overtly attempts to rewrite the 90s and reaffirm The Simpsons’ centrality to 90s pop culture. As the rest of this article will discuss, by rewriting the canon, and the 1990s, “That 90s Show” has two unrealised goals— firstly, to captivate an audience who have grown up with The Simpsons, via an appeal to nostalgia; and secondly, inserting themselves into the 1990s as an effort to prove the series’ relevance to a new generation of audience members who were born during that decade, and who have a nostalgic craving for the media texts of their childhood (Atkinson). Thus, this episode is indicative of fan movement towards an anti-fan position, by demanding the series’ end, or “fan euthanasia” (Williams 106; Booth 75-86) and exposing the “… dynamic spectrum of emotional reactions that fandom can generate” (Booth 76-77).“Worst. Episode. Ever”: Why “That 90s Show” FailedThe failure of “That 90s Show” can be framed in terms of audience reception— namely the response of original audience members objecting to the retconning of The Simpsons’ canon. Rather than appealing to a sense of nostalgia among the audience, “That 90s Show” seems only to suggest that the best episodes of The Simpsons aired before the end of the 1990s. Online forums devoted to The Simpsons concur that the series was at its peak between Seasons 1-10 (1989-1999), and that subsequent seasons have failed to match that standard. British podcaster Sol Harris spent four months in 2017 watching, rating, and charting The Simpsons’ declining quality (Kostarelis), with the conclusion that series’ downfall began from Season 11 onwards (despite a brief spike following The Simpsons Movie (2007)). Any series that aired on television post-1999 has been described as “Zombie Simpsons” by fans on the Dead Homer Society forum: “a hopelessly mediocre imitation that bears only a superficial resemblance to the original. It is the unwanted sequel, the stale spinoff, the creative dry hole that is kept pumping in the endless search for more money. It is Zombie Simpsons” (Sweatpants). It is essential to acknowledge the role of economics in the continuation of The Simpsons, particularly in terms of the series’ affiliation with the Fox Network. The Simpsons was the first series screened on Fox to reach the Top 30 programs in the US, and despite its overall decline, it is still one of the highest rating programs for the 18-49 demographic, enabling Fox to charge advertisers accordingly for a so-called “safe” slot (Berg). During its run, it has been estimated variously that Fox has been building towards a separate Simpsons cable channel, thus the consistent demand for new content; and, that the series has earned in excess of $4.6 billion for Fox in merchandising alone (Berg). Laura Bradley outlines how the legacy of The Simpsons beyond Season 30 has been complicated by the ongoing negotiations for Disney to buy 20th Century Fox – under these arrangements, The Simpsons would likely be screened on ABC or Hulu, should Disney continue producing the series (Bradley). Bradley emphasises the desire for fan euthanasia of the Zombie Simpsons, positing that “the series itself could end at Season 30, which is what most fans of the show’s long-gone original iteration would probably prefer.”While more generous fans expand the ‘Golden Age’ of The Simpsons to Season 12 (Power), the Dead Homer Society argues that their Zombie Simpsons theory is proven by the rise of “Jerkass Homer”, where Homer’s character changed from delightful doofus to cruel and destructive idiot (Sweatpants; Holland). The rise of Jerkass Homer coincides with the moment where Chris Plante claims The Simpsons “jumped the shark”. The term “jumping the shark” refers to the peak of a series before its inevitable, and often sharp, decline (Plante). In The Simpsons, this moment has been variously debated as occurring during S8, E23 “Homer’s Enemy” (Plante), or more popularly, S9, E2 “The Principle and the Pauper” (Chappell; Cinematic) – which like “That 90s Show”, received a vitriolic response for its attempt to retcon the series’ narrative history. “The Principal and the Pauper” focuses on Principal Skinner, and the revelation that he had assumed the identity of his (presumed dead during the Vietnam War) Army Sergeant, Seymour Skinner. The man we have known as Skinner is revealed to be “no-good-nik” Armin Tanzarian. This episode is loathed not only by audiences, but in hindsight, The Simpsons’ creative team. Voice actor Harry Shearer was scathing in his assessment:You’re taking something that an audience has built eight years or nine years of investment in and just tossed it in the trash can for no good reason, for a story we’ve done before with other characters. It’s so arbitrary and gratuitous, and it’s disrespectful to the audience. (Wilonsky)The retcon present in both “That 90s Show” and “The Principal and the Pauper” proves that long-term fans of The Simpsons have been forgotten in Groening’s quest to reach the pinnacle of television longevity. On this basis, it is unsurprising that fans have been demanding the end of the series since the turn of the millennium.As a result, fans such as the Dead Homer Society maintain a nostalgic longing for the Golden Age of The Simpsons, while actively campaigning for the program’s cancellation, a practice typically associated with anti-fans. Jonathan Gray coined the term “anti fan” to describe “… the active and vocal dislike or hate of a program, genre, or personality (841). For Gray, the study of anti-fans emphasises that the hatred of a text can “… produce just as much activity, identification, meaning, and ‘effects’ or serve just as powerfully to unite and sustain a community or subculture” (841). Gray also stresses the discourse of morality used by anti-fans to validate their reading position, particularly against texts that are broadly popular. This argument is developed further by Jenkins and Paul Booth.“Just Pick a Dead End, and Chill Out till You Die”: Fan EuthanasiaWhile some fans of The Simpsons have moved towards anti-fan practices (active hatred of the series, and/or a refusal to watch the show), many more occupy a “middle-ground”, pleading for a form of “fan euthanasia”; where fans call for their once loved object (and by extension, themselves) to “be put out of its misery” (Booth 76). The shifting relationship of fans of The Simpsons represents an “affective continuum”, where “… fan dissatisfaction arises not because they hate a show, but because they feel betrayed by a show they once loved. Their love of a text has waned, and now they find themselves wishing for a quick end to, a revaluation of, something that no longer lives up to the high standard they once valued” (Booth 78). While calls to end The Simpsons have existing since the end of the Golden Age, other fans (Ramaswamy) have suggested it is more difficult to pinpoint when The Simpsons lost its way. Despite airing well after the Golden Age, “That 90s Show” represents a flashpoint for fans who read the retcon as “… an insult to life-long Simpsons fans everywhere… it’s an episode that rewrites history… for the worse” (Canning). In attempting to appeal to the 90s nostalgia of original fans, ‘That 90s Show’ had the opposite effect; it instead reaffirms the sharp decline of the series since its Golden Age, which ended in the 1990s.Shifting the floating timeline of The Simpsons into the 1990s and overturning the canon to appeal to a new generation is dubious for several reasons. While it is likely that original viewers of The Simpsons (their parents) may have exposed their children to the series, the program’s relevance to Millennials is questionable. In 2015, Todd Schneider data mapped audience ratings for Seasons 1-27, concluding that there has been an 80% decline in viewership between Season 2 (which averaged at over 20 million American viewers per episode) to Season 27 (which averaged at less than 5 million viewers per episode). With the growth of SVOD services during The Simpsons’ run, and the sheer duration of the series, it is perhaps obvious to point out the reduced cultural impact of the program, particularly for younger generations. Secondly, “That 90s Show’s” appeal to nostalgia raises the question of whom nostalgia for the 1990s is aimed at. Atkinson argues that children born in the 1990s feel nostalgia for the era becausewe're emotionally invested in the entertainment from that decade because back then, with limited access to every album/TV show/film ever, the ones you did own meant absolutely everything. These were the last pop-culture remnants from that age when the internet existed without being all-consuming. … no wonder we still 'ship them so hard.Following this argument, if you watched The Simpsons as a child during the 1990s, the nostalgia you feel would be, like your parents, for the Golden Age of The Simpsons, rather than the pale imitation featured in “That 90s Show”. As Alexander Fury writes of the 90s: “perhaps the most important message … in the 90s was the idea of authenticity;” thus, if the children of the 90s are watching The Simpsons, they would look to Seasons 1-10 – when The Simpsons was an authentic representation of ‘90s popular culture.Holland has observed that The Simpsons endures “in part due to the way it adapts and responds to events around it”, citing the recent release of clips responding to current events – including Homer attempting to vote; and Trump’s tenure in the White House (Brockington). Yet the failure of “That 90s Show” marks not only The Simpsons increasingly futile efforts to appeal to a “liberal audience” by responding to contemporary political discourse. The failure to adapt is most notable in Hari Kondabolu’s documentary The Problem With Apu which targeted racist stereotypes, and The Simpsons’ poorly considered response episode (S29, E 15) “No Good Read Goes Unpunished”, the latter of which featured an image of Apu signed with Bart’s catchphrase, “Don’t have a cow, man” (Harmon). Groening has remained staunch, insisting that “it’s a time in our culture where people love to pretend they’re offended”, and that the show “speaks for itself” (Keveney). Groening’s statement was followed by the absence of Apu from the current season (Snierson), and rumours that he would be removed from future storylines (Culbertson).“They’ll Never Stop The Simpsons”The case study of The Simpsons episode “That 90s Show” demonstrates the “affective continuum” occupied at various moments in a fan’s relationship with a text (Booth). To the displeasure of fans, their once loved object has frequently retconned canon to capitalise on popular culture trends such as nostalgia for the 1990s. This episode demonstrates the failure of this strategy, as it both alienated the original fan base, and represented what many fans have perceived to be a sharp decline in The Simpsons’ quality. Arguably the relevance of The Simpsons might also remain in the 1990s. Certainly, the recent questioning of issues regarding representations of race, negative press coverage, and the producers’ feeble response, increases the weight of fan calls to end The Simpsons after Season 30. As they sang in S13, E17, perhaps “[We’ll] Never Stop The Simpsons”, but equally, we may have reached the tipping point where audiences have stopped paying attention.ReferencesAmato, Mike. “411: ‘That 90s Show.” Me Blog Write Good. 12 Dec. 2012. 2 Oct. 2018 <https://meblogwritegood.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/411-that-90s-show/>.Atkinson, S. “Why 90s Kids Can’t Get over the 90s and Are Still So Nostalgic for the Decade.” Bustle. 14 Apr. 2018. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://www.bustle.com/p/why-90s-kids-cant-get-over-the-90s-are-still-so-nostalgic-for-the-decade-56354>.Berg, Madeline. “The Simpsons Signs Renewal Deal for the Record Books.” Forbes. 4 Nov. 2016. 20 Nov. 2018 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2016/11/04/the-simpsons-signs-renewal-deal-for-the-record-books/#264a50b61b21>.Booth, Paul. “Fan Euthanasia: A Thin Line between Love and Hate.” Everybody Hurts: Transitions, Endings, and Resurrections in Fan Cultures. Ed. Rebecca Williams. 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