Journal articles on the topic 'Pragmatic organisation dynamic display'

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are severely challenged by their difficulties with language and communication. Some research suggests that augmented language input, whereby a speaking communication partner adopts and uses an augmentative or alternative communication (AAC) system for both expressive and receptive language, can be effective with these individuals. The Pragmatic Organization Dynamic Display (PODD) system is both a method and tool for developing and utilizing augmented language input. As a promising practice, PODD provides strategies to support the design, production, and implementation of communication systems that enable genuine communication for a variety of functions in all daily environments. PODD includes strategies to minimize some of the common difficulties associated with the use of multi-level communication books. Specifically, PODD: (a) supports the individual who relies on AAC and his/her communication partners to move efficiently between pages to locate required vocabulary, (b) reduces the time required to access vocabulary to produce multi-symbol messages, (c) provides a strategy for quick access to predictable messages, and (d) enables access to a broad range of vocabulary for spontaneous, unpredicted messages. This article explores the use of the PODD system for individuals with ASD, with emphasis on features that address the unique communication challenges faced by these individuals.

This essay hypothesizes that the tension between religious ideology and pragmatism has persisted throughout Iranian history. The Iranian Revolution simply put it on graphic display in the contemporary period. The essay also suggests that the dynamic processes of cultural maturation seem to be shifting the balance of influence increasingly away from religious ideology toward pragmatic calculation of the national interest in the making and implementation of foreign policy decisions. The obvious implications of all this for US-Iran relations are mentioned.

Transmission of malaria-causing parasites to mosquitoes relies on the production of gametocyte stages and their development into gametes. These stages display various microtubule cytoskeletons and the architecture of the corresponding microtubule organisation centres (MTOC) remains elusive. Combining ultrastructure expansion microscopy (U-ExM) with bulk proteome labelling, we first reconstructed in 3D the subpellicular microtubule network which confers cell rigidity to Plasmodium falciparum gametocytes. Upon activation, as the microgametocyte undergoes three rounds of endomitosis, it also assembles axonemes to form eight flagellated microgametes. U-ExM combined with Pan-ExM further revealed the molecular architecture of the bipartite MTOC coordinating mitosis with axoneme formation. This MTOC spans the nuclear membrane linking cytoplasmic basal bodies to intranuclear bodies by proteinaceous filaments. In P. berghei, the eight basal bodies are concomitantly de novo assembled in a SAS6- and SAS4-dependent manner from a deuterosome-like structure, where centrin, γ-tubulin, SAS4 and SAS6 form distinct subdomains. Basal bodies display a fusion of the proximal and central cores where centrin and SAS6 are surrounded by a SAS4-toroid in the lumen of the microtubule wall. Sequential nucleation of axonemes and mitotic spindles is associated with a dynamic movement of γ-tubulin from the basal bodies to the intranuclear bodies. This dynamic architecture relies on two non-canonical regulators, the calcium-dependent protein kinase 4 and the serine/arginine-protein kinase 1. Altogether, these results provide insights into the molecular organisation of a bipartite MTOC that may reflect a functional transition of a basal body to coordinate axoneme assembly with mitosis.

Ideas of homeostasis derive from the concept of the organism as an open system. These ideas can be traced back to Heraclitus. Hopkins, Bernard, Hill, Cannon, Weiner and von Bertalanffy developed further the mechanistic basis of turnover of biological components, and Schoenheimer and Rittenberg were pioneers of experimental approaches to the problems of measuring pool sizes and dynamic fluxes. From the second half of the twentieth century, a biophysical theory mainly founded on self-organisation and Dynamic Systems Theory allowed us to approach the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the organised complexity that characterises living systems. This combination of theoretical framework and more refined experimental techniques revealed that feedback control of steady states is a mode of operation that, although providing stability, is only one of many modes and may be the exception rather than the rule. The concept of homeodynamics that we introduce here offers a radically new and all-embracing concept that departs from the classical homeostatic idea that emphasises the stability of the internal milieu toward perturbation. Indeed, biological systems are homeody- namic because of their ability to dynamically self-organise at bifurcation points of their behaviour where they lose stability. Consequently, they exhibit diverse behaviour; in addition to monotonic stationary states, living systems display complex behaviour with all its emergent characteristics, i.e., bistable switches, thresholds, waves, gradients, mutual entrainment, and periodic as well as chaotic behaviour, as evidenced in cellular phenomena such as dynamic (supra)molecular organisation and flux coordination. These processes may proceed on different spatial scales, as well as across time scales, from the very rapid processes within and between molecules in membranes to the slow time scales of evolutionary change. It is dynamic organisation under homeodynamic conditions that make possible the organised complexity of life.

This paper analyses the determinants of different organisational techniques dedicated to creativity by stressing the crucial role played by the dynamic innovative capacities of firms in this process. In particular, we show that the impact of creativity methods varies with the type of innovator (product versus process; single versus complex). We use a bivariate probit estimation on a sample of 4,570 manufacturing firms drawn from the 2010 French Community Innovation Surveys (CIS 2010) to study how the innovation profiles of firms impact the propensity to use organisational creativity methods. The estimation results show a strong but differentiated impact of the innovation profiles of firms (products/process, single/complex) on the use of different creativity methods. These empirical results display the accuracy of modern research on the determinants of intra-firm organisation of creativity.

Over the recent decade, the number of architectural competitions organised in Lithuania has been continuously growing. Analysis and inventory of the competitions reveal the essential features of the period, qualitative and dynamic changes in this field, and at the same time may be useful for improvement of the competition organisation system in the nearest future. The paper deals with the legislation changes that influence the competitions as well as introduces quantitative and typological analysis of the competitions of 1999–2009 comparing it with that of other periods. Achievements of the Lithuanian architects at international competitions, participation of foreign architects at creative contests of Lithuania are described. New manifestations of architectural criticism of competitions, the theme of plagiarism, gaps in competition organization, “commercialization”, the tendency of strengthening pragmatic ambitions are described. Santrauka Pastarąjį dešimtmetį Lietuvoje organizuojama vis daugiau architektūrinių konkursų. Jų analizė ir inventorizacija ne tik atskleidžia esminius laikotarpio bruožus, kokybinius ir dinaminius poslinkius šioje srityje, bet kartu gali būti naudinga tobulinant konkursų organizavimo sistemą artimiausioje ateityje. Straipsnyje aptariami konkursams įtaką darantys teisinės bazės pokyčiai, atliekama kiekybinė ir tipologinė 1999–2009 m. konkursų analizė, kuri lyginama su kitais periodais. Aprašomi Lietuvos architektų pasiekimai tarptautiniuose konkursuose, užsienio architektų dalyvavimas Lietuvos kūrybinėse varžytuvėse. Aprašomos naujos konkursų architektūros kritikos apraiškos, plagiato tema, konkursų organizacinės spragos, komercialėjimas, pragmatinių siekių stiprėjimo tendencija.

Over the recent decade, the number of architectural competitions organised in Lithuania has been continuously growing. Analysis and inventory of the competitions reveal the essential features of the period, qualitative and dynamic changes in this field, and at the same time may be useful for improvement of the competition organisation system in the nearest future. The paper deals with the legislation changes that influence the competitions as well as introduces quantitative and typological analysis of the competitions of 1999–2009 comparing it with that of other periods. Achievements of the Lithuanian architects at international competitions, participation of foreign architects at creative contests of Lithuania are described. New manifestations of architectural criticism of competitions, the theme of plagiarism, gaps in competition organization, “commercialization”, the tendency of strengthening pragmatic ambitions are described. Santrauka Pastarąjį dešimtmetį Lietuvoje organizuojama vis daugiau architektūrinių konkursų. Jų analizė ir inventorizacija ne tik atskleidžia esminius laikotarpio bruožus, kokybinius ir dinaminius poslinkius šioje srityje, bet kartu gali būti naudinga tobulinant konkursų organizavimo sistemą artimiausioje ateityje. Straipsnyje aptariami konkursams įtaką darantys teisinės bazės pokyčiai, atliekama kiekybinė ir tipologinė 1999–2009 m. konkursų analizė, kuri lyginama su kitais periodais. Aprašomi Lietuvos architektų pasiekimai tarptautiniuose konkursuose, užsienio architektų dalyvavimas Lietuvos kūrybinėse varžytuvėse. Aprašomos naujos konkursų architektūros kritikos apraiškos, plagiato tema, konkursų organizacinės spragos, komercialėjimas, pragmatinių siekių stiprėjimo tendencija.

Chitin is a highly abundant polymer in nature and a principal component of apical extracellular matrices in insects. In addition, chitin has proved to be an excellent biomaterial with multiple applications. In spite of its importance, the molecular mechanisms of chitin biosynthesis and chitin structural diversity are not fully elucidated yet. To investigate these issues, we use Drosophila as a model. We previously showed that chitin deposition in ectodermal tissues requires the concomitant activities of the chitin synthase enzyme Kkv and the functionally interchangeable proteins Exp and Reb. Exp/Reb are conserved proteins, but their mechanism of activity during chitin deposition has not been elucidated yet. Here, we carry out a cellular and molecular analysis of chitin deposition, and we show that chitin polymerisation and chitin translocation to the extracellular space are uncoupled. We find that Kkv activity in chitin translocation, but not in polymerisation, requires the activity of Exp/Reb, and in particular of its conserved Nα-MH2 domain. The activity of Kkv in chitin polymerisation and translocation correlate with Kkv subcellular localisation, and in absence of Kkv-mediated extracellular chitin deposition, chitin accumulates intracellularly as membrane-less punctae. Unexpectedly, we find that although Kkv and Exp/Reb display largely complementary patterns at the apical domain, Exp/Reb activity nonetheless regulates the topological distribution of Kkv at the apical membrane. We propose a model in which Exp/Reb regulate the organisation of Kkv complexes at the apical membrane, which, in turn, regulates the function of Kkv in extracellular chitin translocation.

This study explores the relationship between spirituality in the corporate environment and corporate or organisational citizenship behaviour. The relationships amongst the sub-dimensions of workplace spirituality (meaningfulness of work, sense of community, alignment with organisational values) and the sub-dimensions of corporate or organisational citizenship behaviour (altruism, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, courtesy, civic virtue) are also examined. The extent to which the sub-dimensions of organisational citizenship behaviour predict workplace spirituality are analysed. The study was undertaken in a retail products outlet that focuses on quality and professionalism. The sample was drawn using cluster sampling and the adequacy of the sample was assessed using the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity. Data was collected using a closed-ended, established questionnaire and analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The results reflect that the organisation is fairly high on workplace spirituality with the focus being on meaningfulness of work and, on corporate or organisational citizenship behaviour with altruism and civic virtue being its greatest strength. There is a significant relationship between spirituality in the corporate environment and corporate or organisational citizenship behaviour, with sportsmanship and civic virtue being strong predictors of workplace spirituality. The results therefore, display the dynamic relationship between spirituality in the corporate environment and corporate or organisational citizenship behaviour, which when nurtured has the potential to enhance both bottom-lines of profits and people as well as society as a whole.

We have shown previously that intracellular phagosome movement requires microtubules. Here we provide evidence that within cells phagosomes display two different kinds of microtubule-based movements in approximately equal proportions. The first type occurs predominantly in the cell periphery, often shortly after the phagosome is formed, and at speeds below 0.1 microm/second. The second is faster (0.2-1.5 micron/second) and occurs mainly after phagosomes have reached the cell interior. Treating cells with nanomolar concentrations of taxol or nocodazole alters microtubule dynamics without affecting either total polymer mass or microtubule organisation. Such treatments slow the accumulation of phagosomes in the perinuclear region and reduce the number of slow movements by up to 50% without affecting the frequency of fast movements. This suggests that a proportion of slow movements are mediated by microtubule dynamics while fast movements are powered by microtubule motors. In macrophages, interphase microtubules radiate from the microtubule organising centre with their plus-end towards the cell periphery. To understand the behaviour of ‘early’ phagosomes at the cell periphery we investigated their ability to bind microtubule plus-ends in vitro. We show that early phagosomes have a strong preference for microtubule plus-ends, whereas ‘late’ phagosomes do not, and that plus-end affinity requires the presence of microtubule-associated proteins within cytosol. We suggest that phagosomes can bind to the plus-ends of dynamic microtubules and move by following their shrinkage or growth.

After the long summer of migration, strong social and political movements of solidarity with and resistance against refugees developed in Europe. Expressions of solidarity and resistance were also recognisable in the sport system, especially in voluntary sport clubs (VSCs). As a result of this observation, the following article addresses the question: “Which organisational conditions of VSCs promote or hinder the implementation of sport activities for refugees?” To this aim, the article analyses and discusses the results of three research projects concerning sport offers for refugees in Germany. The interview material (n=49) collected in these projects was examined through the qualitative technique of thematic analysis and interpreted through a systems theoretical framework. The results show that conditions which promote and hinder the implementation of sport offers for refugees were identified in all formal (decision programmes, communication channels, and human resources) and informal (organisation culture) decision premises. Furthermore, the implementation of sport offers for refugees is particularly dependent on human resources within the sport clubs. The data show that the resolute will of individuals or small groups of people is highly relevant for the implementation of these sport offers. Finally, when it comes to organizing support for refugees, VSCs display an unexpected dynamic and a high capacity to mobilise resources within a short period of time. The discussion reflects these results and articulates strategies to safeguard, foster, and facilitate the social engagement of VSCs in relation to refugees.

This paper is configured as an ethnographic discussion on the religious and social ties of different Roma/Gypsy communities from Bulgaria within their post-socialist labour migrations to Spain. It aims to add new fieldwork results and interpretations to the lacuna of studies on the interrelations between faith and migration. Most publications show the specificity of Roma economic activities in the context of their migratory movements, but the role of religious network and its social commitment is a less analysed issue. Roma migrants have different religious profile and are Orthodox Christians, Muslims, or Evangelical Christians. Bearing in mind the religious landscapes in Bulgaria and Spain, which are predominantly Orthodox or Catholic, respectively, all migrant workers have left from an Orthodox home country and settled in a Catholic destination country. The text examines Roma mobility from the early 1990s until today. While settling in Spain, Roma/Gypsies present themselves to Spanish people as ‘Bulgarians’ and they are often recognised by them in this way. In the period prior to Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union in 2007 most Roma migrants had no residence or work permits or neither. In some cases, they benefited from the services of the ‘Caritas’ Catholic organisation. However, they are not influenced by Catholicism as a faith and have only pragmatic aims in using its services. In this dynamic context, the social ties created on the basis of joining a particular religious community acquire importance for Evangelical believers, unlike the Orthodox Christians and the Muslims who rely on their family contacts mostly. Evangelical networks have a double accumulation effect and the believers employ both bridging and bonding social ties in producing their religious and social commitment. However, the social potential of the Evangelical networks is not fully used by Roma migrants in Spain.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential for eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) to go beyond static reporting. A taxonomy structure of information is developed for providing a knowledge base and insights for an XBRL taxonomy for integrated reporting (IR). Design/methodology/approach Design Science (DS) research, as a pragmatic exploratory research approach, is embraced to create a new “artefact” and thematic content analysis is used to analyse IR in practice. Findings Using XBRL for IR allows a shift from static and periodic reporting to more relevant and dynamic corporate disclosure for stakeholders, who can navigate and retrieve customised disclosure information according to their interest by exploiting the multidimensionality of IR and overcome some of its criticisms. The bi-dimensional taxonomy structure the authors’ present allows users to navigate disclosure from two different perspectives (content elements (CE) and capitals), display specific themes of interest, and drill down to more detailed information. Because of its evidence-based nature and levels of disaggregation, it provides flexibility to preparers and users of information. Additionally, the findings demonstrate the need to codify sector-specific information for the CE, so that to direct the efforts toward the development of sector-specific taxonomy extensions in developing an XBRL taxonomy for IR. Research limitations/implications The limitations of DS research are, first, the artefact design and, second, its effects in practice. The first limitation stems from the social actors’ perspective taken into account to develop the taxonomy structure, which derives from the analysis of the reporting practices rather than a pluralistic approach and dialogic engagement. The second limitation relates to the XBRL taxonomy development process because, since the study is limited to the “design” phase being codification and structuring the knowledge base for an XBRL taxonomy, there is a need to develop a taxonomy in XBRL and then apply it in practice to empirically demonstrate the potential and benefits of XBRL in the IR context. Practical implications The taxonomy structure is targeted at entities interested in designing an XBRL taxonomy for IR. This is a call for academics and practitioners to explore the potential of technology to improve corporate disclosure and open up new projections for resurging themes on intellectual capital (IC) reporting with prospects for IC “fourth-stage” research focused on IC disclosure. Originality/value This is an interdisciplinary research employing the DS approach, which is rooted in information systems research. It is the first academic study providing pragmatic results for using XBRL in the context of IC and IR.

Interrogative statements are used to perform the intention of the query in various discourse-stylistic forms of the Ukrainian language. This article aims to analyze interrogative statements from the stand-point of their functioning as syntactic constructions. Drawing on a wide range of literary sources, the author states that, fulfilling the epistemological need to fill information gaps in speaker’s knowledge, the interrogative statement is the most relevant linguistic sign used to express the speaker’s motivation and needs. The interrogative statement is, however, a clear example of communicative-pragmatic functions which include figurativeness, expression of will, emotionality, evaluation, and tolerance, verbalized in a speech in accordance with the speaker’s intentions. A suggested in terpretation of the linguistic nature of interrogative constructions attests to their ambivalence and semantic syncretism along with the performance of primary and secondary functions. The discourse-stylistic continuum of the Ukrainian language, i.e., vernacular, literary, journalistic, religious, and epistolary, represents a rather extensive functional potential of inter-rogative constructions. In spoken discourse, interrogative expressions, e.g., address-oriented syntactic units, verbalize the specifying and clarifying intentions of the query, thus highlighting their primary function in the dialogic discourse. In other registers, these are secondary func-tions related to the following aspects: 1) figurativeness and aesthetics of speech which em phasizes the linguo-creative nature of a speaker, i.e., fiction; 2) the display of certain information which has a purposeful influence on the addressee of the speech and encourages specific actions, i.e., journalistic discourse; 3) the creation of aphoristic and rhetorical dialogue, establishing spiritual values and a human worldview, i.e., religious discourse; 4) the creation of epistolary dialogue as a marker of the interrogative searching process focused on essential phenomena related to pub-lic and private life and aimed at the formation of textual communication conceived in time and space. This article introduces the concept of interrogative discourse as a dynamic continuum of human communication, a special mode of cognition and reflection of reality, one of the latest fragments of linguistic knowledge. Keywords: interrogative statement, discourse-stylistic continuum, the intention of inquiry, address-ability, dialogicality / quasi-dialogicality, interrogative discourse.

Introduction. The lack of a coherent legal systemology and its constituent part – information law systemology – prevents the formalisation of evidence-based solutions for the basic theoretical problems of the enforcement and the interpretation of law in the conditions of the coming information society. The development of an appropriate formal-theoretical apparatus and science and methodical base is possible only on the basis of a productive systemological concept. The justification for this concept is based on the study of philosophical foundations and fundamental principles (including integrity, dynamic equilibrium, entropy minimisation, necessary variety, and feedback) and the use of logical and linguistic methods of the so called “ICS”-approach (“information, cybernetic and synergetic”). Theoretical Basis. Methods. This was an “ICS”- approach with conceptual and logical modelling of systems of legal regulation, information sphere (infosphere), information legal relations, information worker, system analysis and classification of base types and forms of existence together with the qualitative manifestation of legal information in ergasystems. Further, synthesis and modification of private scientific results of the author published between 2005–2021 (copyrighted author’s scientific works) and educational books were also used. Results. Elucidation and development of the base components of the science and methodical base of an information law systemology. This includes the conceptual and logical model of the infosphere (taking into account digital transformation), legal ergasystem, and stereotypical information legal relations. Information workings are developed, basic concepts and methodological principles and methods of modern information law systemology are updated. A system organisation is identified, also a logical decomposition of the object of the information law industry is carried out. Corresponding complexes of legal norms are defined, as are identifications of quantity and quality conditions for the efficiency of the legal regulation of information relations in the infosphere. A multilevel system of pragmatic principles of legal interaction in infosphere is also defined. Discussion and Conclusion. This has developed the base components of the scientific and methodical base of information law systemology providing a methodological basis for the development of an adequate formal-theoretical apparatus. This allows the formalisation of the decisions of the main theoretical problems of enforcement and law interpretation, as well as the development and implementation of special information and legal technologies based on the concept of information and functional databases – as well as knowledge to ensure the increase of the informational effectiveness of the legal ergasystems as an “ICS-systems”. This is all subject to subjective organising of human activity and the objective synergetic processes of disorganisation.

The modern terms of existential development of man and society are characterized by a brindle and dynamics of variations for possibilities and risks, influences and situations, in what take place social co-operating of person with her vital environment. Such influences and situations contain powerful potentials of personality development, but does not promise his lightness, safety, simplicity and unambiguity. Such terms are investigation of features of psycho-cultural development in the period of postmodern which begins more to answer game modus. On this basis a social subject almost always appears before the existential necessity of conscious choice of game (playing) mechanics of the life – to stick to simple, pleasant, however insidious facilities which often conduct in a trap, in particular to pathological playing dependence, gambling, or to elect the heavy, but interesting, difficult, but useful invariant of game as a functional attribute of lines of personality and public development. The ontological brindle of influences of environment, ponderability of cultural risks which are contained by postmodern, pulls out before scientific psychology the task of sound research of adaptive-developing potential of game as a psycho-social program of human vital functions in the conditions of his existential development. This task it is expedient to execute on methodological basis of integration phenomenological, formally-ontological (ontological modeling) and systemgenesis approaches. The corresponding model of manifestation of adaptive-developing potential of game it is expedient to construct as an ontogenetic signature. This signature has universal character and gives possibility to analyse any social events, situations and to design (to forecast) their forming and development in a prospect. The table of contents of ontogenetic signature of game is based on conformities to law of systemgenesis of psychical human activity, taxonomical system of types of leading activity, general conformities to law of development of higher psychical human functions and conformities to law of cyclic-canonical act. Architectonics the signature over brought in research, formulations and structure of her components, answer methodological terms phenomenological, formally-ontological and системогенетичного approaches. It allows to position a signature the canonical method of the pragmatic use of game as a subject program of vital functions of man. It is suggested to choose a logical-semantic triplet – elementary ontological abstract system бA subject (S) is Object (О) is Relation/Action (R)с the universal cellular structure of any forms of game action. A triplet is an universal psychological mechanism due to which the display of any game structure gets organized on any stage or phase of motion of such display. A key mechanism, matrix modus of subjects existence, is a game (playing), social role. It is systemgenesis appears and takes place as activity of Subject (S) in relation to Object (О) with Relation/by Action (R). The action (R) of subject will be realized through: а) thought activity in form deductions, b) verbal and c) kinematics praxis. In realization of social role it is expedient to distinguish: а) maximin motivation and b) minimax motivation. Within the limits of scientific psychology game-theoretical principle of minimax-maximin and usefulness principle as a general system-forming factor of situation is acquired fundamental multidisciplinary value. Qualificatory character for stability of mechanisms of development of subject potential is acquired by age of early youth (from 15 to 17-18 years). Such age contains terminal importance of ability of subject for co-operative mutually beneficial activity from application by him game (playing) program. This stage determines the prevailing orientation of further vital functions – adaptive or developing. The vital situations of subject it is expedient to profile on criteria: «usual – unique», «difficult – dynamic – uncertainty»; on the degree of vagueness «unstable – risky – full uncertainty». The game program of actions of subject in the situation of certain type can carry or stereotype, or unique character. The stereotype game (playing) program answers signs adaptive, finitary, iterative, with obvious rules is in basis of adaptation. The unique game (playing) program has subject-developing character because the terms of her realization compel a subject not only to adapt oneself but also initiative to influence on a situation, create or modify her under own aims and necessities. Coming from the rich in content features of two fundamental classes of playing forms are games as forms of adaptation and game as active programs of vital human functions, objective differentiation of game situations on the basis of their finitary and iterativeness, level of evidence of terms of situation for a subject, the class of games which take place as finitary and iterative forms of subject adaptation is offered, to determine igroid or game similar form. The game forms of unique genesis it is suggested to determine an existential game. Igroid is the optimal mean of generalization, transferrableness and translation of cultural experience. It is a class of game and playing simulation, which is characterized by the fixed functional, rules, scenarios, strategies, limitations, by axioms set to beginning of game. Prevailing of igroid forms of behavior can conduce to development of playing dependence. An existential game is the phenomenon, rules and scenario of which for a subject appear in the process of his motion. Ontological, systemgenesis descriptions (by attributes) of existential game are signs of the canonically accomplished act. Igroid is a separable or simplified existential game. Igroid is orientated on gaining experience of social co-operation, adaptation of subject. An existential game is orientated on development of creative attitude toward reality. Due to probabilistic character of the real life adaptive-developing potential of game gets the aspect-tensor of ontogenetic existential complication as an attributive condition of phylogenesis and ontogenetic evolutional development of man. Ontogenetic the signature of game answers essence and functionals of such development. Topological ontosignature of games are embraced by six levels: a 1) level of the phenomena of game; 2) level of game specieses, in a civilized manner withstand mechanic and scenarios; 3) level of genuses of game (branch on the criterion of public, social specific of game); 4) level of families of game (appears on the game-theoretical criteria of classification and on the unicity of tool of game); 5) level of types of game (differentiation on the criterion of connection of game with a kind leading activity); 6) the greatest level of domens (appears two separate classes of game – igroid and existential game and differentiated on the basis of type of strategic complication of terms. For today there is possibility empiric to investigate the phenomena of game only. The conceptual levels of ontosignature are intended for the sound and comprehensive theoretical design of corresponding games manifestation.

The Routledge Handbook of language and culture represents a comprehensive study on the inextricable relationship between language and culture. It is structured into seven parts and 33 chapters. Part 1, Overview and historical background, by Farzad Sharifian, starts with an outline of the book and a synopsis of research on language and culture. The second chapter, John Leavitt’s Linguistic relativity: precursors and transformations discusses further the historical development of the concept of linguistic relativity, identifying different schools’ of thought views on the relation between language and culture. He also tries to demystify some misrepresentations held towards Boas, Sapir, and Whorf’ theories (pp. 24-26). Chapter 3, Ethnosyntax, by Anna Gladkova provides an overview of research on ethnosyntax, starting from the theoretical basis laid by Sapir and Whorf and investigates the differences between a narrow sense of ethnosyntax, which focuses on cultural meanings of various grammatical structures and a broader sense, which emphasises the pragmatic and cultural norms’ impact on the choice of grammatical structures. John Leavitt presents in the fourth chapter, titled Ethnosemantics, a historical account of research on meaning across cultures, introducing three traditions, i.e. ‘classical’ ethnosemantics (also referred to as ethnoscience or cognitive anthropology), Boasian cultural semantics (linguistically inspired anthropology) and Neohumboldtian comparative semantics (word-field theory, or content-oriented Linguistics). In Chapter 5, Goddard underlines the fact that ethnopragmatics investigates emic (or culture-internal) approaches to the use of different speech practices across various world languages, which accounts for the fact that there exists a connection between the cultural values or norms and the speech practices peculiar to a speech community. One of the key objectives of ethnopragmatics is to investigate ‘cultural key words’, i.e. words that encapsulate culturally construed concepts. The concept of ‘linguaculture’ (or languaculture) is tackled in Risager’s Chapter 6, Linguaculture: the language–culture nexus in transnational perspective. The author makes reference to American scholars that first introduced this notion, Paul Friedrich, who looks at language and culture as a single domain in which verbal aspects of culture are mingled with semantic meanings, and Michael Agar, for whom culture resides in language while language is loaded with culture. Risager himself brought forth a new global and transnational perspective on the concept of linguaculture, i.e. the use of language (linguistic practice) is seen as flows in people’s social networks and speech communities. These flows enhance as people migrate or learn new languages, in permanent dynamics. Lidia Tanaka’s Chapter 7, Language, gender, and culture deals with research on language, gender, and culture. According to her, the language-gender relationship has been studied by researchers from various fields, including psychology, linguistics, and anthropology, who mainly consider gender as a construct that preserves inequalities in society, with the help of language, too. Tanaka lists diachronically different approaches to language and gender, focusing on three specific ones: gender stereotyped linguistic resources, semantically, pragmatically or lexically designated language features (including register) and gender-based spoken discourse strategies (talking-time imbalances or interruptions). In Chapter 8, Language, culture, and context, Istvan Kecskes delves into the relationship between language, culture, and context from a socio-cognitive perspective. The author considers culture to be a set of shared knowledge structures that encapsulate the values, norms, and customs that the members of a society have in common. According to him, both language and context are rooted in culture and carriers of it, though reflecting culture in a different way. Language encodes past experience with different contexts, whereas context reflects present experience. The author also provides relevant examples of formulaic language that demonstrate the functioning of both types of context, within the larger interplay between language, culture, and context. Sara Miller’s Chapter 9, Language, culture, and politeness reviews traditional approaches to politeness research, with particular attention given to ‘discursive approach’ to politeness. Much along the lines of the previous chapter, Miller stresses the role of context in judgements of (im)polite language, maintaining that individuals represent active agents who challenge and negotiate cultural as well as linguistic norms in actual communicative contexts. Chapter 10, Language, culture, and interaction, by Peter Eglin focuses on language, culture and interaction from the perspective of the correspondence theory of meaning. According to him, abstracting language and culture from their current uses, as if they were not interdependent would not lead to an understanding of words’ true meaning. David Kronenfeld introduces in Chapter 11, Culture and kinship language, a review of research on culture and kinship language, starting with linguistic anthropology. He explains two formal analytic definitional systems of kinship terms: the semantic (distinctions between kin categories, i.e. father vs mother) and pragmatic (interrelations between referents of kin terms, i.e. ‘nephew’ = ‘child of a sibling’). Chapter 12, Cultural semiotics, by Peeter Torop deals with the field of ‘semiotics of culture’, which may refer either to methodological instrument, to a whole array of methods or to a sub-discipline of general semiotics. In this last respect, it investigates cultures as a form of human symbolic activity, as well as a system of cultural languages (i.e. sign systems). Language, as “the preserver of the culture’s collective experience and the reflector of its creativity” represents an essential component of cultural semiotics, being a major sign system. Nigel Armstrong, in Chapter 13, Culture and translation, tackles the interrelation between language, culture, and translation, with an emphasis on the complexities entailed by translation of culturally laden aspects. In his opinion, culture has a double-sided dimension: the anthropological sense (referring to practices and traditions which characterise a community) and a narrower sense, related to artistic endeavours. However, both sides of culture permeate language at all levels. Chapter 14, Language, culture, and identity, by Sandra Schecter tackles several approaches to research on language, culture, and identity: social anthropological (the limits at play in the social construction of differences between various groups of people), sociocultural (the interplay between an individual’s various identities, which can be both externally and internally construed, in sociocultural contexts), participatory-relational (the manner in which individuals create their social–linguistic identities). Patrick McConvell, in Chapter 15, Language and culture history: the contribution of linguistic prehistory reviews research in this field where historical linguistic evidence is exploited in the reconstruction and understanding of prehistoric cultures. He makes an account of research in linguistic prehistory, with a focus on proto- and early Indo-European cultures, on several North American language families, on Africa, Australian, and Austronesian Aboriginal languages. McConvell also underlines the importance of interdisciplinary research in this area, which greatly benefits from studies in other disciplines, such as archaeology, palaeobiology, or biological genetics. Part four starts with Ning Yu’s Chapter 16, Embodiment, culture, and language, which gives an account of theory and research on the interplay between language, culture, and body, as seen from the standpoint of Cultural Linguistics. Yu presents a survey of embodiment (in embodied cognition research) from a multidisciplinary perspective, starting with the rather universalistic Conceptual Metaphor Theory. On the other hand, Cultural Linguistics has concentrated on the role played by culture in shaping embodied language, as various cultures conceptualise body and bodily experience in different ways. Chapter 17, Culture and language processing, by Crystal Robinson and Jeanette Altarriba deals with research in the field of how culture influence language processing, in particular in the case of bilingualism and emotion, alongside language and memory. Clearly, the linguistic and cultural character of each individual’s background has to be considered as a variable in research on cognition and cognitive processing. Frank Polzenhagen and Xiaoyan Xia, in Chapter 18, Language, culture, and prototypicality bring forth a survey of prototypicality across different disciplines, including cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. According to them, linguistic prototypes play a critical part in social (re-)cognition, as they are socially diagnostic and function as linguistic identity markers. Moreover, individuals may develop ‘culturally blended concepts’ as a result of exposure to several systems of conceptual categorisation, especially in the case of L2 learning (language-contact or culture-contact situations). In Chapter 19, Colour language, thought, and culture, Don Dedrick investigates the issue of the colour words in different languages and how these influence cognition, a question that has been addressed by researchers from various disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, or neuroscience. He cannot but observe the constant debate in this respect, and he argues that it is indeed difficult to reach consensus, as colour language occasionally reveals effects of language on thought and, at other times, it is impervious to such effects. Chapter 20, Language, culture, and spatial cognition, by Penelope Brown concentrates on conceptualisations of space, providing a framework for thinking about and referring to objects and events, along with more abstract notions such as time, number, or kinship. She lists three frames of reference used by languages in order to refer to spatial relations, i.e. a) an ‘absolute’ coordinate system, like north, south, east, west; b) a ‘relative’ coordinate system envisaged from the body’s standpoint; and c) an intrinsic, object-centred coordinate system. Chris Sinha and Enrique Bernárdez focus on, in Chapter 21, Space, time, and space–time: metaphors, maps, and fusions, research on linguistic and cultural concepts of time and space, starting with the seminal Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which they denounce for failing to situate space–time mapping within the broader patterns of culture and world perspective. Sinha and Bernárdez further argue that although it is possible in all cultures for individuals to experience and discuss about events in terms of their duration and succession, the specific words and concepts they use to refer to temporal landmarks temporal and duration are most of the time language and culture specific. Chapter 22, Culture and language development, by Laura Sterponi and Paul Lai provides an account of research on the interplay between culture and language acquisition. They refer to two widely accepted perspectives in this respect: a developmental mechanism inherent in human beings and a set of particular social contexts in which children are ‘initiated’ into the cultural meaning systems. Both perspectives define culture as “both related to the psychological make-up of the individual and to the socio-historical contexts in which s/he is born and develops”. Anna Wierzbicka presents, in Chapter 23, Language and cultural scripts discusses representations of cultural norms which are encoded in language. She contends that the system of meaning interpretation developed by herself and her colleagues, i.e. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), may easily be used to capture and convey cultural scripts. Through NSM cross-cultural experiences can be captured in a thorough manner by using a reduced number of conceptual primes which seem to exist in all languages. Chapter 24, Culture and emotional language, by Jean-Marc Dewaele brings forth the issue of the relationship between language, culture, and emotion, which has been researched by cultural and cognitive psychologists and applied linguists alike, although with some differences in focus. He considers that within this context, it is important to see differences between emotion contexts in bilinguals, since these may lead to different perceptions of the self. He infers that generally, culture revolves around the experience and communication of emotions, conveyed through linguistic expression. The fifth part starts with Chapter 25, Language and culture in sociolinguistics, by Meredith Marra, who underlines that culture is a central concept in Interactional Sociolinguistics, where language is considered as social interaction. In linguistic interaction, culture, and especially cultural differences are deemed as a cause of potential miscommunication. Mara also remarks that the paradigm change in sociolinguistics, from Interactional Sociolinguistics to social constructionism reshaped ‘culture’ into a more dynamic as well as less rigid concept. Claudia Strauss’ Chapter 26, Language and culture in cognitive anthropology deals with the relationship between human society and human thought/thinking. The author contends that cognitive anthropologists may be subdivided into two groups, i.e. ones that are concerned with the process of thinking (cognition-in-practice scholars), and the others focusing on the product of thinking or thoughts (concerned with shared cultural understandings). She goes on to explore how different approaches to cognitive anthropology have counted on units of language, i.e. lexical items and their meanings, along with larger chunks of discourse, as information, which may represent learned cultural schemata. Part VI starts with Chapter 27, Language and culture in second language learning, by Claire Kramsch, in which she makes a survey of the definition of ‘culture’ in foreign language learning and its evolution from a component of literature and the arts to a more comprehensive purport, that of culturally appropriate use of language, along with an appropriate use of sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic norms. According to her, in the postmodern era, communication is not only mere transmission of information, it represents construal and positioning of the self and of self-identity. Chapter 28, Writing across cultures: ‘culture’ in second language writing studies, by Dwight Atkinson focuses on the usefulness of culture in second-language writing (SLW). He reviews several approaches to the issue: contrastive rhetoric (dealing with the impact of first-language patterns of text organisation on writers in a second language), or even alternate notions, like‘ cosmopolitanism’, ‘critical multiculturalism’, and hybridity, as of late native culture is becoming irrelevant or at best far less significant. Ian Malcolm tackles, in Chapter 29, Language and culture in second dialect learning, the issue of ‘standard’ Englishes (e.g., Standard American English, Standard Australian English) versus minority ‘non-standard’ speakers of English. He deplores the fact that in US specialist literature, speaking the ‘non-standard’ variety of English was associated with cognitive, cultural, and linguistic insufficiency. He further refers to other specialists who have demonstrated that ‘non-standard’ varieties can be just as systematic and highly structured as the standard variety. Chapter 30, Language and culture in intercultural communication, by Hans-Georg Wolf gives an account of research in intercultural education, focusing on several paradigms, i.e. the dominant one, investigating successful functioning in intercultural encounters, the minor one, exploring intercultural understanding and the ‘deconstructionist, and or postmodernist’. He further examines different interpretations of the concepts associated with intercultural communication, including the functionalist school, the intercultural understanding approach and a third one, the most removed from culture, focusing on socio-political inequalities, fluidity, situationality, and negotiability. Andy Kirkpatrick’s Chapter 31, World Englishes and local cultures gives a synopsis of research paradigm from applied linguistics which investigates the development of Englishes around the world, through processes like indigenisation or nativisation of the language. Kirkpatrick discusses the ways in which new Englishes accommodate the culture of the very speech community which develops them, e.g. adopting lexical items to express to express culture-specific concepts. Speakers of new varieties could use pragmatic norms rooted in cultural values and norms of the specific new speech community which have not previously been associated with English. Moreover, they can use these new Englishes to write local literatures, often exploiting culturally preferred rhetorical norms. Part seven starts with Chapter 32, Cultural Linguistics, by Farzad Sharifian gives an account of the recent multidisciplinary research field of Cultural Linguistics, which explores the relationship between language and cultural cognition, particularly in the case of cultural conceptualisations. Sharifian also brings forth illustrations of how cultural conceptualisations may be linguistically encoded. The last chapter, A future agenda for research on language and culture, by Roslyn Frank provides an appraisal of Cultural Linguistics as a prospective path for research in the field of language and culture. She states that ‘Cultural Linguistics could potentially create a paradigm that “successfully melds together complementary approaches, e.g., viewing language as ‘a complex adaptive system’ and bringing to bear upon it concepts drawn from cognitive science such as ‘distributed cognition’ and ‘multi-agent dynamic systems theory’.” She further asserts that Cultural Linguistics has the potential to function as “a bridge that brings together researchers from a variety of fields, allowing them to focus on problems of mutual concern from a new perspective” and most likely unveil new issues (as well as solutions) which have not been evident so far. In conclusion, the Handbook will most certainly serve as clear and coherent guidelines for scholarly thinking and further research on language and culture, and also open up new investigative vistas in each of the areas tackled.

This paper aims to put forward the benefits and utility of internship programmes for organisations, employers and interning students. It suggests conceptualising internship as a realistic job preview experience for interns. It questions if “being in the situation” gives a new set of relevant reference points for future pragmatic decisions to an intern and the organisation in assessing work environment and benefits attached for self-development. It also underlines the importance of increasing the information quality in an internship programme to improve recruitment image of an organisation and create employability of an intern in the industry, which are mainly affected by the dynamic concepts of economies and employment. Approach: The paper adopts a discursive analysis to present the importance of increasing the information quality in internship programmes and increasing its contribution to recruitment and selection process and employability of individuals. Findings: Information quality in a general management sense emerges as the key to provide deeper meaning and contributes value to the processes created for transfer of skills and knowledge, and add value to the recruitment exercise, especially in nonlinear economies. Practical Implication: High-quality information programmes contribute to employability, career development for the intern and recruitment brand image for the host in the digital age. Originality: The relationship between internship, realistic job preview experience and information quality is one which bear the same cohesive structural functionality and are based on the utility for the emerging demands of the market.

Spermatogenesis is a highly specialised differentiation process driven by a dynamic gene expression program and ending with the production of mature spermatozoa. Whereas hundreds of genes are known to be essential for male germline proliferation and differentiation, the contribution of several genes remains uncharacterized. The predominant expression of the latest globin family member, androglobin (Adgb), in mammalian testis tissue prompted us to assess its physiological function in spermatogenesis. Adgb knockout mice display male infertility, reduced testis weight, impaired maturation of elongating spermatids, abnormal sperm shape and ultrastructural defects in microtubule and mitochondrial organisation. Epididymal sperm from Adgb knockout animals display multiple flagellar malformations including coiled, bifid or shortened flagella, and erratic acrosomal development. Following immunoprecipitation and mass spectrometry, we could identify septin 10 (Sept10) as interactor of Adgb. The Sept10-Adgb interaction was confirmed both in vivo using testis lysates, and in vitro by reciprocal co-immunoprecipitation experiments. Furthermore, absence of Adgb leads to mislocalisation of Sept10 in sperm, indicating defective manchette and sperm annulus formation. Finally, in vitro data suggest that Adgb contributes to Sept10 proteolysis in a calmodulin (CaM)-dependent manner. Collectively, our results provide evidence that Adgb is essential for murine spermatogenesis and further suggest that Adgb is required for sperm head shaping via the manchette and proper flagellum formation.

Non-linear dimensionality reduction (NLDR) methods such as t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding (t-SNE) are ubiquitous in the natural sciences, however, the appropriate use of these methods is difficult because of their complex parameterisations; analysts must make trade-offs in order to identify structure in the visualisation of an NLDR technique. We present visual diagnostics for the pragmatic usage of NLDR methods by combining them with a technique called the tour. A tour is a sequence of interpolated linear projections of multivariate data onto a lower dimensional space. The sequence is displayed as a dynamic visualisation, allowing a user to see the shadows the high-dimensional data casts in a lower dimensional view. By linking the tour to an NLDR view, we can preserve global structure and through user interactions like linked brushing observe where the NLDR view may be misleading. We display several case studies from both simulations and single cell transcriptomics, that shows our approach is useful for cluster orientation tasks. The implementation of our framework is available as an R package called liminal available at https://github.com/sa-lee/liminal.

Branding is a concept of contemporary business and is considered one of the key elements for positioning products or services in consumers’ minds. A brand should be built on the clear foundation, while continually enforcing the same brand values, visibility and authenticity. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the role of sport events in the process of destination branding. The paper begins with theoretical explanations of the process, models and the importance of destination branding, highlighting the models of city branding with special regard to the importance of organising sport events. The special attention is given to one of the most famous models which measures the attractiveness and the positioning of a city and it is the Anholt’s model City Brands Index (Anholt, 2006) that unifies six aspects of the city and which is based on the previous Hexagonal model of the competitive identity (Anholt, 2002). The research question of this paper is based on how every mentioned element can be improved through the organisation of the sports events in the function of city branding as tourist destinations. The analysis presented in this paper undoubtedly shows that the use of sports events in the function of city branding as tourist destinations is a complex and demanding process that enriches tourist potential of the destination and makes it sustainable in the tourism market. Organising sports events, especially large sports events, can contribute to the improvement of the city’s recognisability in the international environment. Big sports events are making the existing image of the city stronger by adding the new component as the host city of a certain event. In this way, they contribute to the creation of the active image of the city (Xing i Chalip, 2006). There is also an improvement of the sports and accomodation infrastructure of the city after the completion of the events. The pulse of the city gets the new dynamic element, so the sports events are used in the function of rebranding the city like Singapore (Oi, 2015). Regardless if it is the co-branding approach i.e. the application of the first level access of destination accreditation or the organisation of the sport events that emphasise the characteristics of the destination, sports events are the opportunity to emphasise the physical aspects of the city. Organisation gives the opportunity to ‘make what is intangible tangible’ i.e. to display to the visitors the sports spirit of the city and its residents and therefore improve people as the last component of the Anholt’s model of the city branding. In the paper, there are examples of the successful organisation of the sports events in the function of destination branding and the conclusive remarks are given for the application of the sports events in the further practice with a special review on the challenges of destination branding on the grounds of the sports events organisation in the period of the pandemics.

1. A Minor Philosopher According to Guattari and Deleuze's definition, a 'minor literature' is the literature of a minority that makes use of a major language, a literature which deterritorialises that language and interconnects meanings of the most disparate levels, inseparably mixing and implicating poetic, psychological, social and political issues with each other. In analogy, the Japanese media theorist Toshiya Ueno has refered to Félix Guattari as a 'minor philosopher'. Himself a practicing psychoanalyst, Guattari was a foreigner to the Grand Nation of Philosophy, whose natives mostly treat him like an unworthy bastard. And yet he has established a garden of minor flowers, of mongrel weeds and rhizomes that are as polluting to philosophy as Kafka's writing has been to German literature (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka). The strategies of 'being minor' are, as exemplified by Guattari's writings (with and without Deleuze), deployed in multiple contexts: intensification, re-functionalisation, estrangement, transgression. The following offers a brief overview over the way in which Guattari conceptualises media, new technologies and art, as well as descriptions of several media art projects that may help to illustrate the potentials of such 'minor machines'. Without wanting to pin these projects down as 'Guattarian' artworks, I suggest that the specific practices of contemporary media artists can point us in the direction of the re-singularising, deterritorialising and subjectifying forces which Guattari indicated as being germane to media technologies. Many artists who work with media technologies do so through strategies of appropriation and from a position of 'being minor': whenever a marginality, a minority, becomes active, takes the word power (puissance de verbe), transforms itself into becoming, and not merely submitting to it, identical with its condition, but in active, processual becoming, it engenders a singular trajectory that is necessarily deterritorialising because, precisely, it's a minority that begins to subvert a majority, a consensus, a great aggregate. As long as a minority, a cloud, is on a border, a limit, an exteriority of a great whole, it's something that is, by definition, marginalised. But here, this point, this object, begins to proliferate ..., begins to amplify, to recompose something that is no longer a totality, but that makes a former totality shift, detotalises, deterritorialises an entity.' (Guattari, "Pragmatic/Machinic") In the context of media art, 'becoming minor' is a strategy of turning major technologies into minor machines. a. Krzysztof Wodiczko (PL/USA): Alien Staff Krzysztof Wodiczko's Alien Staff is a mobile communication system and prosthetic instrument which facilitates the communication of migrants in their new countries of residence, where they have insufficient command of the local language for communicating on a par with the native inhabitants. Alien Staff consists of a hand-held staff with a small video monitor and a loudspeaker at the top. The operator can adjust the height of the staff's head to be at a level with his or her own head. Via the video monitor, the operator can replay pre-recorded elements of an interview or a narration of him- or herself. The recorded material may contain biographical information when people have difficulties constructing coherent narratives in the foreign language, or it may include the description of feelings and impressions which the operator normally doesn't get a chance to talk about. The Staff is used in public places where passers-by are attracted to listen to the recording and engage in a conversation with the operator. Special transparent segments of the staff contain memorabilia, photographs or other objects which indicate a part of the personal history of the operator and which are intended to instigate a conversation. The Alien Staff offers individuals an opportunity to remember and retell their own story and to confront people in the country of immigration with this particular story. The Staff reaffirms the migrant's own subjectivity and re-singularises individuals who are often perceived as representative of a homogenous group. The instrument displaces expectations of the majority audience by articulating unformulated aspects of the migrant's subjectivity through a medium that appears as the attractive double of an apparently 'invisible' person. 2. Mass Media, New Technologies and 'Planetary Computerisation' Guattari's comments about media are mostly made in passing and display a clearly outlined opinion about the role of media in contemporary society: a staunch critique of mass media is coupled with an optimistic outlook to the potentials of a post-medial age in which new technologies can develop their singularising, heterogenic forces. The latter development is, as Guattari suggests, already discernible in the field of art and other cultural practices making use of electronic networks, and can lead to a state of 'planetary computerisation' in which multiple new subject-groups can emerge. Guattari consistently refers to the mass media with contempt, qualifying them as a stupefying machinery that is closely wedded to the forces of global capitalism, and that is co-responsible for much of the reactionary hyper-individualism, the desperation and the "state of emergency" that currently dominates "four-fifth of humanity" (Guattari, Chaosmosis 97; cf. Guattari, Drei Ökologien 16, 21). Guattari makes a passionate plea for a new social ecology and formulates, as one step towards this goal, the necessity, "to guide these capitalist societies of the age of mass media into a post-mass medial age; by this I mean that the mass media have to be reappropriated by a multiplicity of subject-groups who are able to administer them on a path of singularisation" (Guattari, "Regimes" 64). Guattari consistently refers to the mass media with contempt, qualifying them as a stupefying machinery that is closely wedded to the forces of global capitalism, and that is co-responsible for much of the reactionary hyper-individualism, the desperation and the "state of emergency" that currently dominates "four-fifth of humanity" (Guattari, Chaosmosis 97; cf. Guattari, Drei Ökologien 16, 21). Guattari makes a passionate plea for a new social ecology and formulates, as one step towards this goal, the necessity, "to guide these capitalist societies of the age of mass media into a post-mass medial age; by this I mean that the mass media have to be reappropriated by a multiplicity of subject-groups who are able to administer them on a path of singularisation" (Guattari, "Regimes" 64). b. Seiko Mikami (J/USA): World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body An art project that deals with the cut between the human subject and the body, and with the deterritorialisation of the sense of self, is Seiko Mikami's World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body. It uses the visitor's heart and lung sounds which are amplified and transformed within the space of the installation. These sounds create a gap between the internal and external sounds of the body. The project is presented in an-echoic room where sound does not reverberate. Upon entering this room, it is as though your ears are no longer living while paradoxically you also feel as though all of your nerves are concentrated in your ears. The sounds of the heart, lungs, and pulse beat are digitised by the computer system and act as parameters to form a continuously transforming 3-d polygonal mesh of body sounds moving through the room. Two situations are effected in real time: the slight sounds produced by the body itself resonate in the body's internal membranes, and the transfigured resonance of those sounds is amplified in the space. A time-lag separates both perceptual events. The visitor is overcome by the feeling that a part of his or her corporeality is under erasure. The body exists as abstract data, only the perceptual sense is aroused. The visitor is made conscious of the disappearance of the physical contours of his or her subjectivity and thereby experiences being turned into a fragmented body. The ears mediate the space that exists between the self and the body. Mikami's work fragments the body and its perceptual apparatus into data, employing them as interfaces and thus folding the body's horizon back onto itself. The project elucidates the difference between an actual and a virtual body, the actual body being deterritorialised and projected outwards towards a number of potential, virtual bodies that can, in the installation, be experienced as maybe even more 'real' than the actual body. 3. Artistic Practice Guattari's conception of post-media implies criss-crossing intersections of aesthetic, ethical, political and technological planes, among which the aesthetic, and with it artistic creativity, are ascribed a position of special prominence. This special role of art is a trope that recurs quite frequently in Guattari's writings, even though he is rarely specific about the artistic practices he has in mind. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari give some detailled attention to the works of artists like Debussy, Boulez, Beckett, Artaud, Kafka, Kleist, Proust, and Klee, and Chaosmosis includes longer passages and concrete examples for the relevance of the aesthetic paradigm. These examples come almost exclusively from the fields of performing arts, music and literature, while visual arts are all but absent. One reason for this could be that the performing arts are time-based and processual and thus lend themselves much better to theorisation of flows, transformations and differentiations. The visual arts can be related to the abstract machine of faciality (visageité) which produces unified, molar, identical entities out of a multiplicity of different singularities, assigning them to a specific category and associating them with particular social fields (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, Tausend Plateaus 167-91) This semiotic territorialisation is much more likely to happen in the case of static images, whether two- or three-dimensional, than in time-based art forms. An interesting question, then, would be whether media art projects, many of which are time-based, processual and open-ended, can be considered as potential post-medial art practices. Moreover, given the status of computer software as the central motor of the digital age, and the crucial role it plays in aesthetic productions like those discussed here, software may have to be viewed as the epitome of post-medial machines. Guattari seems to have been largely unaware of the beginnings of digital media art as it developed in the 1980s. In generalistic terms he suggests that the artist is particularly well-equipped to conceptualise the necessary steps for this work because, unlike engineers, he or she is not tied to a particular programme or plan for a product, and can change the course of a project at any point if an unexpected event or accident intrudes (cf. Guattari, Drei Ökologien 50). The significance of art for Guattari's thinking comes primarily from its close relation with processes of subjectivation. "Just as scientific machines constantly modify our cosmic frontiers, so do the machines of desire and aesthetic creation. As such, they hold an eminent place within assemblages of subjectivation, themselves called to relieve our old social machines which are incapable of keeping up with the efflorescence of machinic revolutions that shatter our epoch' (Guattari, Chaosmosis 54). The aesthetic paradigm facilitates the development of new, virtual forms of subjectivity, and of liberation, which will be adequate to these machinic revolutions. c. Knowbotic Research + cF: IO_Dencies The Alien Staff project was mentioned as an example for the re-singularisation and the virtualisation of identity, and World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body as an instance of the deterritorialisation and virtualisation of the human body through an artistic interface. The recent project by Knowbotic Research, IO_Dencies -- Questioning Urbanity, deals with the possibilities of agency, collaboration and construction in translocal and networked environments. It points in the direction of what Guattari has called the formation of 'group subjects' through connective interfaces. The project looks at urban settings in different megacities like Tokyo, São Paulo or the Ruhr Area, analyses the forces present in particular local urban situations, and offers experimental interfaces for dealing with these local force fields. IO_Dencies São Paulo enables the articulation of subjective experiences of the city through a collaborative process. Over a period of several months, a group of young architects and urbanists from São Paulo, the 'editors', provided the content and dynamic input for a database. The editors collected material (texts, images, sounds) based on their current situation and on their personal urban experience. A specially designed editor tool allowed the editors to build individual conceptual 'maps' in which to construct the relations between the different materials in the data-pool according to the subjective perception of the city. On the computational level, connectivities are created between the different maps of the editors, a process that is driven by algorithmic self-organisation whose rules are determined by the choices that the editors make. In the process, the collaborative editorial work in the database generates zones of intensities and zones of tension which are visualised as force fields and turbulences and which can be experienced through interfaces on the Internet and at physical exhibition sites. Participants on the Net and in the exhibition can modify and influence these electronic urban movements, force fields and intensities on an abstract, visual level, as well as on a content-based, textual level. This engagement with the project and its material is fed back into the database and influences the relational forces within the project's digital environment. Characteristic of the forms of agency as they evolve in networked environments is that they are neither individualistic nor collective, but rather connective. Whereas the collective is determined by an intentional and empathetic relation between agents within an assemblage, the connective rests on any kind of machinic relation and is therefore more versatile, more open, and based on the heterogeneity of its components or members. In the IO_Dencies interfaces, the different networked participants become visible for each other, creating a trans-local zone of connective agency. The inter-connectedness of their activities can be experienced visually, acoustically, and through the constant reconfiguration of the data sets, an experience which can become the basis of the formation of a specific, heterogeneous group subject. 4. Guattari's Concept of the Machinic An important notion underlying these analyses is that of the machine which, for Guattari, relates not so much to particular technological or mechanical objects, to the technical infrastructure or the physical flows of the urban environment. 'Machines' can be social bodies, industrial complexes, psychological or cultural formations, they are assemblages of heterogeneous parts, aggregations which transform forces, articulate and propel their elements, and force them into a continuous state of transformation and becoming. An important notion underlying these analyses is that of the machine which, for Guattari, relates not so much to particular technological or mechanical objects, to the technical infrastructure or the physical flows of the urban environment. 'Machines' can be social bodies, industrial complexes, psychological or cultural formations, they are assemblages of heterogeneous parts, aggregations which transform forces, articulate and propel their elements, and force them into a continuous state of transformation and becoming. d. Xchange Network My final example is possibly the most evocative in relation to Guattari's notions of the polyvocity and heterogenesis that new media technologies can trigger. It also links up closely with Guattari's own engagement with the minor community radio movement. In late 1997, the E-Lab in Riga initiated the Xchange network for audio experiments on the Internet. The participating groups in London, Ljubljana, Sydney, Berlin, and many other minor and major places, use the Net for distributing their original sound programmes. The Xchange network is "streaming via encoders to remote servers, picking up the stream and re-broadcasting it purely or re-mixed, looping the streams" (Rasa Smite). Xchange is a distributed group, a connective, that builds creative cooperation in live-audio streaming on the communication channels that connect them. They explore the Net as a sound-scape with particular qualities regarding data transmission, delay, feedback, and open, distributed collaborations. Moreover, they connect the network with a variety of other fields. Instead of defining an 'authentic' place of their artistic work, they play in the transversal post-medial zone of media labs in different countries, mailing lists, net-casting and FM broadcasting, clubs, magazines, stickers, etc., in which 'real' spaces and media continuously overlap and fuse (cf. Slater). 5. Heterogenic Practices If we want to understand the technological and the political implications of the machinic environment of the digital networks, and if we want to see the emergence of the group subjects of the post-media age Guattari talks about, we have to look at connectives like Xchange and the editor-participant assemblages of IO_Dencies. The far-reaching machinic transformations which they articulate, hold the potential of what Guattari refers to as the 'molecular revolution'. To realise this revolution, it is vital to "forge new analytical instruments, new concepts, because it is ... the transversality, the crossing of abstract machines that constitute a subjectivity and that are incarnated, that live in very different regions and domains and ... that can be contradictory and antagonistic". For Guattari, this is not a mere theoretical question, but one of experimentation, "of new forms of interactions, of movement construction that respects the diversity, the sensitivities, the particularities of interventions, and that is nonetheless capable of constituting antagonistic machines of struggle to intervene in power relations" (Guattari, "Pragmatic/Machinic" 4-5). The implication here is that some of the minor media practices pursued by artists using digital technologies point us in the direction of the positive potentials of post media. The line of flight of such experimentation is the construction of new and strong forms of subjectivity, "an individual and/or collective reconstitution of the self" (Guattari, Drei Ökologien 21), which can strengthen the process of what Guattari calls "heterogenesis, that is a continuous process of resingularisation. The individuals must, at the same time, become solidary and ever more different" (Guattari, Drei Ökologien 76). References Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Pour une Litterature Mineur. Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1975. ---. Tausend Plateaus. (1980) Berlin: Merve, 1992. Guattari, Félix. Cartographies Schizoanalytiques. Paris: Ed. Galilée, 1989. ---. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. (1992) Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. ---. Die drei Ökologien. (1989) Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1994. ---. "Pragmatic/Machinic." Discussion with Guattari, conducted and transcribed by Charles J. Stivale. (1985) Pre/Text 14.3-4 (1995). ---. "Regimes, Pathways, Subjects." Die drei Ökologien. (1989) Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1994. 95-108. ---. "Über Maschinen." (1990) Schmidgen, 115-32. Knowbotic Research. IO_Dencies. 1997-8. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://io.khm.de/>. De Landa, Manuel. "The Machinic Phylum." Technomorphica. Eds. V2_Organisation. Rotterdam: V2_Organisation, 1997. Mikami, Seiko. World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body. 1997. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://www.ntticc.or.jp/permanent/mikami/mikami_e.php>. Schmidgen, Henning, ed. Ästhetik und Maschinismus: Texte zu und von Félix Guattari. Berlin: Merve, 1995. ---. Das Unbewußte der Maschinen: Konzeptionen des Psychischen bei Guattari, Deleuze und Lacan. München: Fink, 1997. Slater, Howard. "Post-Media Operators." Nettime, 10 June 1998. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://www.factory.org>. Wodiczko, Krzysztof. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://cavs.mit.edu/people/kw.htm>. Xchange. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://xchange.re-lab.net>. (Note: An extended, Dutch version of this text was published in: Oosterling/Thissen, eds. Chaos ex Machina: Het ecosofisch Werk van Félix Guattari op de Kaart Gezet. Rotterdam: CFK, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Andreas Broeckmann. "Minor Media -- Heterogenic Machines: Notes on Félix Guattari's Conceptions of Art and New Media." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/minor.php>. Chicago style: Andreas Broeckmann, "Minor Media -- Heterogenic Machines: Notes on Félix Guattari's Conceptions of Art and New Media," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/minor.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Andreas Broeckmann. (1999) Minor Media -- Heterogenic Machines: Notes on Félix Guattari's Conceptions of Art and New Media. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/minor.php> ([your date of access]).

"I write for a species that does not yet exist." -- Nietzsche (958) III. Note on Self-Organisation and Selectionism According to your mainstream brand neo-Darwinian biologist, natural selection is the stuff of which evolution is made, the First Principle of life. There is nothing in the natural world which cannot be explained by random mutations within the genome and subsequent selection of the fittest form by the natural environment. Beyond the constraints set by the period of waiting for mutations to occur and external conditions, there are no limits to this system, and an organism forms from scratch to a furry crawling thing in a gradual process reliant on external factors. Neo-Darwinism is an attempt to reconcile two theories which are quite simply at odds with one another: Mendelian genetics, which claims that organisms do not change with time, and Darwinism, which claims that they do. This is usually done in a mathematical way, with natural selection as the linchpin of some tight equations. There can be no internal feedback from the body (phenotype) to the genes (genotype). There is no self-organising adaptive order: all emerges from the process of selection as a carefully articulated tree diagram, and adapts over eons. As the Darwinian critic Arthur Koestler pointed out, natural selection is hence the only process found in nature which is devoid of feedback. Neo-Darwinian theory is both unfalsifiable and all-pervasive; it is easy to forget that it is a theory which has not yet been proven beyond doubt by paleontological fact, and that Darwin himself suggested there may be processes other than natural selection at work in the unfolding of life. There are a couple of rogue biologists and a-life crazies, however, that don't believe the Selectionist hype. They are not suggesting that natural selection is a dud theory, but simply that there might be other factors involved, and that the really interesting questions don't just concern life as a Darwinian competition between furry, crawling things, but the interplay between structure and chaos at the basic levels of the system which might give rise to it. Biologists such as Brian Goodwin and Stuart Kauffman take issue with this, claiming that an understanding of life should begin at a more fundamental level than tree diagrams and zoology -- molecular biology, biochemistry, complexity theory. This is the 'language' of life: the way that structure spontaneously emerges from chaos. Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould looked at the fossil record a few years back and decided that there is no proof that one species turns into another slowly: the mathematics of the Neo-Darwinists relied upon the idea that species took hundreds of millions of years to evolve eyes and ears and legs and wings, branching off into other species in the manner of a tree diagram over billions of years. What Eldredge and Gould found was that species seem to spontaneously emerge fully formed: there is minimal variation going on. A species emerges rapidly, it lasts for a time (often a short time), and then it dies off. The in-between period, the period of mutation and selectionism, is largely unaccounted for by the fossil record, especially considering the importance of such transitory phases to the neo-Darwinists. There are many 'missing links' in the record. For over twenty years, Stuart Kauffman has been going on about what we might call a Second Principle in evolutionary biology: self-organisation. He argues that because natural selection alone is not enough to explain the relatively short timescale on which life arose, some other ordering principle is necessary. He locates this, as Katherine Hayles observes, in the ability of complex systems to self-organise (241). A self-organising system involves the heresy of internal feedback and internally-produced constraints. Living creatures would converge upon certain forms as much as diverge from them due to the influence of mutations caused by cosmic rays, wild chance and external factors. Creatures will not just evolve over billions of years due to selection, but will appear in a more concerted and spontaneous manner. Systems will seek their own order. The heresy in this (as far as neo-Darwinians are concerned, but not all evolutionary biologists) is located in the fact that such enabling constraints emerge from within the system itself. Consequently, natural selection is not the only force at work in evolution. The system is its own material of expression, and can generate its own tendencies and limits. Kauffman calls this process antichaos, or "order for free" (335). One can sense that such a theory would be objectionable to biologists: there is nothing distinctively biological about this explanation, which in fact borrows from physics and complexity theory, and it explores living organisms, chemical compositions and non-biological aggregates alike as systems, privileging no particular machine. A 'complex system', in particular, can be anything from the stockmarket to a flock of birds. XI. Sonicform We might note here a similarity with virtual artist Keith Nettos's Java-based sound system, Sonicform, whose evolving sound structures can be obtained from the artist on request <lucidweave@usa.net>: the divide between living and non-living is not the issue. As Keith puts it, "it's an echo of that Descartian dichotomy between mind and matter. Do such distinctions help us to know ourselves better? I'm not sure that they do". Sonicform is more a world of Newtonian discovery than biblical creation. Self-organisation works on a generative systemic level, and is a prerequisite more so than a defining quality of life or evolution; it is necessary but not sufficient to characterise an organic system. The computer is the perfect environment in which to explore the confusion and commonalities between animate and inanimate systems, and in that confusion, reveal something of the processes underlying the actual generation of self and order in the universe. Information-processing, and life, require a certain type of complexity. The system must be dynamic, yet allow for novel patterns. The computer emphasises the logic as well as the mechanics of life, which are then honed and honoured by the more familiar conception of natural selection. IV. Self-organisation is the natural consequence of simple components (cells, units of sound, air molecules, genes) interacting via equally simple rules. Patterns and forms emerge from the collective raucous, and these forms give rise to other forms. The components in such a system are bimbos: they have no idea what is going on in the greater body, and don't care. In other words, a complex system emerges from lots of small but well-chosen components interacting in a rule-governed way, developing a larger behaviour or pattern which cannot be predicted or divined from these constituent parts. Random mutation and selection will act upon such a system -- this is how Selectionism fits in: forms will not just evolve from scratch via selection, but will spontaneously emerge from within the system, working in conjunction with the First Principle. IV. Sonicform In the Sonicform system, the components are 'sound fragments', the samples attached to the images in the top left-hand corner of the screen at startup, and also the people seated at terminals who interact with these fragments. Although it might seem to be stretching the concept of systemic components to include the user population, the fact that the emerging pattern is dependent on these users to evolve renders them part of the system. The organisation of a machine has less to do with its materiality than with the inter-relations of its components. The rules in Sonicform are the 'sound controllers' located on the right-hand side of the screen, containing basic instructions such as "play sound", "loop sound" and "stop sound" that control the sound fragments and consequently limit the structure of the emerging acoustic pattern. Because Sonicform is linked via the Net to 'sonicserver' and consequently the multiple versions of itself which are being executed at any point in time, any changes that a user makes (e.g. attraction towards a particular kind of sound) are detected by sonicserver and fed back into a primary chain structure. This is the formative basis of Sonicform's 'evolution': a selection of internal behavioural constraints generated by its constituent parts. The heresy in this is the implication that both biological and technical systems are capable of self-organisation and evolution, that both are constellations of universes which are capable of autonomy and complexity (and 'life' as a certain form of complexity). This is not anti-humanist. It's not even post-humanist. Ideology is a human concept which is brought to bear on technology. We're talking a different register altogether. Technical machines, organic machines, conceptual machines: each will beget the other, each will inscribe its own pattern on the process, each will redefine the limits of such connections. VII. The Death of Metaphor: All That Consists Is Real 'Machinic heterogenesis', a term used by Felix Guattari in his book Chaosmosis, is a mode of being and production that draws on complexity theory and the work of Francisco Varela (a biologist interested in self-organisation in immune networks) and Kauffman. Guattari extends the concept of self-organisation to create a pragmatic philosophy. Machinic heterogenesis is a term to describe the way that the machines which populate the universe connect with each other, mutually affect each other, exchange segments and then bifurcate into new machines. Collective existential mutation. When we sit at a computer screen, we are connected with the computer's universes of reference through the circuits of sight, the play of fingers across the keyboard, the conceptual and logical limits of the exchange laid down by both parties. There is a certain synchrony going on across the zone of intersection and compromise to the limits of this exchange. In other words, the limits of the medium define the exchange and what we are becoming as we connect with it. What is the 'ness' of the computer medium, and what are the possible universes of exchange which extend from this? Sonicform explores this exchange through sound, and through a system which explicitly invites us to be a part of an evolving structure. The use of complexity theory and evolution in Sonicform makes explicit the rethinking of machines which we have been doing here in general: machines speak to machines before they speak to Man, and the ontological domains that they reveal and secrete tend towards pattern in an innate way, determined by the mode of aggregation of their constituent parts. Sonicform rethinks technology in terms of evolutionary, collective entities. And this rethinking allows for the particular qualities of the medium itself, its own characteristics, its own unique interpretations of our model of evolution, to express themselves. Here I might note something: evolution cannot be naturalised and reified as an entity independent of the conceptual, technical and scientific machinery of its production. In the eagerness to import biological models to the computer in a-life, we sometimes forget that from its very origins, the human species has been constituted by technical evolution, and that it is the mediation afforded by technics which makes "it impossible simply to describe evolution in terms of a self-contained, or monadic, subject that passively 'adapts' to an object-like environment" (Pearson 4). Similarly, we have produced our various models of evolution by analysing the 'natural environment' through the mediation of technology. Technology has always enjoyed more than just the position of a neutral tool to locate and test Nature, and has its own unique limits and qualities to contribute to anything we produce with it. So this will be the beginning of our rethinking. Constellations of universes colliding, machines exchanging particularities, components that retain their autonomy and yet can collect and self-organise into complex systems, even life. "The ideas that we have been devoting space to here -- instability, fluctuation, complex systems -- diffuse into the social sciences", in the words of Ilya Prigogine (312). If we can create an evolving complex system on the screen which we ourselves are components of, we tend to rethink the interface between nature and technology. What does it say about the "reference point" of the natural world when creatures whose entire function consists of weird acoustic dances across computer circuitry begin to self-replicate and exhibit the signs of open-ended evolution, resulting in formations which no longer have analogues in the 'natural' world? I'd like to hesitate a start here. Biology is its own material of semiotic expression. Techné is its own material of semiotic expression. To address the interface between nature and technology, we need a philosophy of cells, flocks, patterns, components, motors, and elements. We need a philosophy that will create an interference pattern across the zone of intersection. References Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Kauffman, Stuart. "Order For Free." The Third Culture. Ed. Brockman. New York: Touchstone Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1968. Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. London: Bantam Books, 1984. Pearson, Keith Ansell. Viroid Life. London: Routledge, 1997. This work is part of the Australian Network for Art and Technology's Deep Immersion: Creative Collaborations project, funded by the AFC. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Belinda Barnet. "Machinic Heterogenesis and Evolution: Collected Notes on Sound, Machines and Sonicform." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/sonic.php>. Chicago style: Belinda Barnet, "Machinic Heterogenesis and Evolution: Collected Notes on Sound, Machines and Sonicform," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sonic.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Belinda Barnet. (1999) Machinic heterogenesis and evolution: collected notes on sound, machines and Sonicform. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/sonic.php> ([your date of access]).

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’— Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)Dickens’s famous pedant, Thomas Gradgrind, was not an anomaly. He is the pedagogical manifestation of the rise of quantification in modernism that was the necessary adjunct to massive urbanisation and industrialisation. His classroom caricatures the dominant epistemic modality of modern global democracies, our unwavering trust in numbers, “data”, and reproductive predictability. This brief quotation from Hard Times both presents and parodies the 19th century’s displacement of what were previously more commonly living and heterogeneous existential encounters with events and things. The world had not yet been made predictably repetitive through industrialisation, standardisation, law, and ubiquitous codes of construction. Theirs was much more a world of unique events and not the homogenised and orthodox iteration of standardised knowledge. Horses and, by extension, all entities and events gradually were displaced by their rote definitions: individuals of a so-called natural kind were reduced to identicals. Further, these mechanical standardisations were and still are underwritten by mapping them into a numerical and extensive characterisation. On top of standardised objects and procedures appeared assigned numerical equivalents which lent standardisation the seemingly apodictic certainty of deductive demonstrations. The algebraic becomes the socially enforced criterion for the previously more sensory, qualitative, and experiential encounters with becoming that were more likely in pre-industrial life. Here too, we see that the function of this reproductive protocol is not just notational but is the sine qua non for, in Althusser’s famous phrase, the manufacture of citizens as “subject subjects”, those concrete individuals who are educated to understand themselves ideologically in an imaginary relation with their real position in any society’s self-reproduction. Here, however, ideology performs that operation through that nominally least political of cognitive modes, the supposed friend of classical Marxism’s social science, the mathematical. The historical onset of this social and political reproductive hegemony, this uniform supplanting of time’s ineluctable differencing with the parasite of its associated model, can partial be found in the formation of metrics. Before the 19th century, the measures of space and time were local. Units of length and weight varied not just between nations but often by municipality. These parochial standards reflected indigenous traditions, actualities, personalities, and needs. This variation in measurement standards suggested that every exchange or judgment of kind and value relied upon the specificity of that instance. Every evaluation of an instance required perceptual acuity and not the banality of enumeration constituted by commodification and the accounting practices intrinsic to centralised governance. This variability in measure was complicated by similar variability in the currencies of the day. Thus, barter presented the participants with complexities and engagements of skills and discrete observation completely alien to the modern purchase of duplicate consumer objects with stable currencies. Almost nothing of life was iterative: every exchange was, more or less, an anomaly. However, in 1790, immediately following the French Revolution and as a central manifestation of its movement to rational democratisation, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand proposed a metrical system to the French National Assembly. The units of this metric system, based originally on observable features of nature, are now formally codified in all scientific practice by seven physical constants. Further, they are ubiquitous now in almost all public exchanges between individuals, corporations, and states. These units form a coherent and extensible structure whose elements and rules are subject to seemingly lossless symbolic exchange in a mathematic coherence aided by their conformity to decimal representation. From 1960, their basic contemporary form was established as the International System of Units (SI). Since then, all but three of the countries of the world (Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States), regardless of political organisation and individual history, have adopted these standards for commerce and general measurement. The uniformity and rational advantage of this system is easily demonstrable in just the absurd variation in the numeric bases of the Imperial / British system which uses base 16 for ounces/pounds, base 12 for inches/feet, base three for feet/yards, base 180 for degrees between freezing and cooling, 43,560 square feet per acre, eights for division of inches, etc. Even with its abiding antagonism to the French, Britain officially adopted the metric system as was required by its admission to the EU in 1973. The United States is the last great holdout in the public use of the metric system even though SI has long been the standard wanted by the federal government. At first, the move toward U.S. adoption was promising. Following France and rejecting England’s practice, America was founded on a decimal currency system in 1792. In 1793, Jefferson requested a copy of the standard kilogram from France in a first attempt to move to the metric system: however, the ship carrying the copy was captured by pirates. Indeed, The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 expressed a more serious national intention to adopt SI, but after some abortive efforts, the nation fell back into the more archaic measurements dominant since before its revolution. However, the central point remains that while the U.S. is unique in its public measurement standard among dominant powers, it is equally committed to the hegemonic application of a numerical rendition of events.The massive importance of this underlying uniformity is that it supplies the central global mechanism whereby the world’s chaotic variation is continuously parsed and supplanted into comparable, intelligible, and predictable units that understand individuating difference as anomaly. Difference, then, is understood in this method not as qualitative and intensive, which it necessarily is, but quantitative and extensive. Like Gradgrind’s “horse”, the living and unique thing is rendered through the Apollonian dream of standardisation and enumeration. While differencing is the only inherent quality of time’s chaotic flow, accounting and management requite iteration. To order the reproduction of modern society, the unique individuating differences that render an object as “this one”, what the Medieval logicians called haecceities, are only seen as “accidental” and “non-essential” deviations. This is not just odd but illogical since these very differences allow events to be individuated items so to appear as countable at all. As Leibniz’s principle, the indiscernibility of identicals, suggests, the application of the metrical same to different occasions is inherently paradoxical: if each unit were truly the same, there could only be one. As the etymology of “anomaly” suggests, it is that which is unexpected, irregular, out of line, or, going back to the Greek, nomos, at variance with the law. However, as the only “law” that always is at hand is the so-called “Second Law of Thermodynamics”, the inconsistently consistent roiling of entropy, the evident theoretical question might be, “how is anomaly possible when regularity itself is impossible?” The answer lies not in events “themselves” but exactly in the deductive valorisations projected by that most durable invention of the French Revolution adumbrated above, the metric system. This seemingly innocuous system has formed the reproductive and iterative bias of modern post-industrial perceptual homogenisation. Metrical modeling allows – indeed, requires – that one mistake the metrical changeling for the experiential event it replaces. Gilles Deleuze, that most powerful French metaphysician (1925-1995) offers some theories to understand the seminal production (not reproduction) of disparity that is intrinsic to time and to distinguish it from its homogenised representation. For him, and his sometime co-author, Felix Guattari, time’s “chaosmosis” is the host constantly parasitised by its symbolic model. This problem, however, of standardisation in the face of time’s originality, is obscured by its very ubiquity; we must first denaturalise the seemingly self-evident metrical concept of countable and uniform units.A central disagreement in ancient Greece was between the proponents of physis (often translated as “nature” but etymologically indicative of growth and becoming, process and not fixed form) and nomos (law or custom). This is one of the first ethical and so political debates in Western philosophy. For Heraclitus and other pre-Socratics, the emphatic character of nature was change, its differencing dynamism, its processual but not iterative character. In anticipation of Hume, Sophists disparaged nomos (νόμος) as simply the habituated application of synthetic law and custom to the fluidity of natural phenomena. The historical winners of this debate, Plato and the scientific attitudes of regularity and taxonomy characteristic of his best pupil, Aristotle, have dominated ever since, but not without opponents.In the modern era, anti-enlightenment figures such as Hamann, Herder, and the Schlegel brothers gave theoretical voice to romanticism’s repudiation of the paradoxical impulses of the democratic state for regulation and uniformity that Talleyrand’s “revolutionary” metrical proposal personified. They saw the correlationalism (as adumbrated by Meillassoux) between thought and thing based upon their hypothetical equitability as a betrayal of the dynamic physis that experience presented. Variable infinity might come either from the character of God or nature or, as famously in Spinoza’s Ethics, both (“deus sive natura”). In any case, the plenum of nature was never iterative. This rejection of metrical regularity finds its synoptic expression in Nietzsche. As a classicist, Nietzsche supplies the bridge between the pre-Socratics and the “post-structuralists”. His early mobilisation of the Apollonian, the dream of regularity embodied in the sun god, and the Dionysian, the drunken but inarticulate inexpression of the universe’s changing manifold, gives voice to a new resistance to the already dominate metrical system. His is a new spin of the mythic representatives of Nomos and physis. For him, this pair, however, are not – as they are often mischaracterised – in dialectical dialogue. To place them into the thesis / antithesis formulation would be to give them the very binary character that they cannot share and to, tacitly, place both under Apollo’s procedure of analysis. Their modalities are not antithetical but mutually exclusive. To represent the chaotic and non-iterative processes of becoming, of physis, under the rubric of a common metrics, nomos, is to mistake the parasite for the host. In its structural hubris, the ideological placebo of metrical knowing thinks it non-reductively captures the multiplicity it only interpellates. In short, the polyvalent, fluid, and inductive phenomena that empiricists try to render are, in their intrinsic character, unavailable to deductive method except, first, under the reductive equivalence (the Gradgrind pedagogy) of metrical modeling. This incompatibility of physis and nomos was made manifest by David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) just before the cooptation of the 18th century’s democratic revolutions by “representative” governments. There, Hume displays the Apollonian dream’s inability to accurately and non-reductively capture a phenomenon in the wild, free from the stringent requirements of synthetic reproduction. His argument in Book I is succinct.Now as we call every thing custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv'd solely from that origin. (Part 3, Section 8)There is nothing in any object, consider'd in itself, which can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion beyond it; ... even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience. (Part 3, Section 12)The rest of mankind ... are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. (Part 4, Section 6)In sum, then, nomos is nothing but habit, a Pavlovian response codified into a symbolic representation and, pragmatically, into a reproductive protocol specifically ordered to exclude anomaly, the inherent chaotic variation that is the hallmark of physis. The Apollonian dream that there can be an adequate metric of unrestricted natural phenomena in their full, open, turbulent, and manifold becoming is just that, a dream. Order, not chaos, is the anomaly. Of course, Kant felt he had overcome this unacceptable challenge to rational application to induction after Hume woke him from his “dogmatic slumber”. But what is perhaps one of the most important assertions of the critiques may be only an evasion of Hume’s radical empiricism: “there are only two ways we can account for the necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: either experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make experience possible. The former supposition does not hold of the categories (nor of pure sensible intuition) ... . There remains ... only the second—a system ... of the epigenesis of pure reason” (B167). Unless “necessary agreement” means the dictatorial and unrelenting insistence in a symbolic model of perception of the equivalence of concept and appearance, this assertion appears circular. This “reading” of Kant’s evasion of the very Humean crux, the necessary inequivalence of a metric or concept to the metered or defined, is manifest in Nietzsche.In his early “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), Nietzsche suggests that there is no possible equivalence between a concept and its objects, or, to use Frege’s vocabulary, between sense or reference. We speak of a "snake" [see “horse” in Dickens]: this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.The literal is always already a reductive—as opposed to literature’s sometimes expansive agency—metaphorisation of events as “one of those” (a token of “its” type). The “necessary” equivalence in nomos is uncovered but demanded. The same is reproduced by the habitual projection of certain “essential qualities” at the expense of all those others residing in every experiential multiplicity. Only in this prison of nomos can anomaly appear: otherwise all experience would appear as it is, anomalous. With this paradoxical metaphor of the straight and equal, Nietzsche inverts the paradigm of scientific expression. He reveals as a repressive social and political obligation the symbolic assertion homology where actually none can be. Supposed equality and measurement all transpire within an Apollonian “dream within a dream”. The concept captures not the manifold of chaotic experience but supplies its placebo instead by an analytic tautology worthy of Gradgrind. The equivalence of event and definition is always nothing but a symbolic iteration. Such nominal equivalence is nothing more than shifting events into a symbolic frame where they can be commodified, owned, and controlled in pursuit of that tertiary equivalence which has become the primary repressive modality of modern societies: money. This article has attempted, with absurd rapidity, to hint why some ubiquitous concepts, which are generally considered self-evident and philosophically unassailable, are open not only to metaphysical, political, and ethical challenge, but are existentially unjustified. All this was done to defend the smaller thesis that the concept of anomaly is itself a reflection of a global misrepresentation of the chaos of becoming. This global substitution expresses a conservative model and measure of the world in the place of the world’s intrinsic heterogenesis, a misrepresentation convenient for those who control the representational powers of governance. In conclusion, let us look, again too briefly, at a philosopher who neither accepts this normative world picture of regularity nor surrenders to Nietzschean irony, Gilles Deleuze.Throughout his career, Deleuze uses the word “pure” with senses antithetical to so-called common sense and, even more, Kant. In its traditional concept, pure means an entity or substance whose essence is not mixed or adulterated with any other substance or material, uncontaminated by physical pollution, clean and immaculate. The pure is that which is itself itself. To insure intelligibility, that which is elemental, alphabetic, must be what it is itself and no other. This discrete character forms the necessary, if often tacit, precondition to any analysis and decomposition of beings into their delimited “parts” that are subject to measurement and measured disaggregation. Any entity available for structural decomposition, then, must be pictured as constituted exhaustively by extensive ones, measurable units, its metrically available components. Dualism having established as its primary axiomatic hypothesis the separability of extension and thought must now overcome that very separation with an adequacy, a one to one correspondence, between a supposedly neatly measurable world and ideological hegemony that presents itself as rational governance. Thus, what is needed is not only a purity of substance but a matching purity of reason, and it is this clarification of thought, then, which, as indicated above, is the central concern of Kant’s influential and grand opus, The Critique of Pure Reason.Deleuze heard a repressed alternative to the purity of the measured self-same and equivalent that, as he said about Plato, “rumbled” under the metaphysics of analysis. This was the dark tradition he teased out of the Stoics, Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, Nicholas d’Autrecourt, Spinoza, Meinong, Bergson, Nietzsche, and McLuhan. This is not the purity of identity, A = A, of metrical uniformity and its shadow, anomaly. Rather than repressing, Deleuze revels in the perverse purity of differencing, difference constituted by becoming without the Apollonian imposition of normalcy or definitional identity. One cannot say “difference in itself” because its ontology, its genesis, is not that of anything itself but exactly the impossibility of such a manner of constitution: universal anomaly. No thing or idea can be iterative, separate, or discrete.In his Difference and Repetition, the idea of the purely same is undone: the Ding an sich is a paradox. While the dogmatic image of thought portrays the possibility of the purely self-same, Deleuze never does. His notions of individuation without individuals, of modulation without models, of simulacra without originals, always finds a reflection in his attitudes toward, not language as logical structure, but what necessarily forms the differential making of events, the heterogenesis of ontological symptoms. His theory has none of the categories of Pierce’s triadic construction: not the arbitrary of symbols, the “self-representation” of icons, or even the causal relation of indices. His “signs” are symptoms: the non-representational consequences of the forces that are concurrently producing them. Events, then, are the symptoms of the heterogenetic forces that produce, not reproduce them. To measure them is to export them into a representational modality that is ontologically inapplicable as they are not themselves themselves but the consequences of the ongoing differences of their genesis. Thus, the temperature associated with a fever is neither the body nor the disease.Every event, then, is a diaphora, the pure consequent of the multiplicity of the forces it cannot resemble, an original dynamic anomaly without standard. This term, diaphora, appears at the conclusion of that dialogue some consider Plato’s best, the Theaetetus. There we find perhaps the most important discussion of knowledge in Western metaphysics, which in its final moments attempts to understand how knowledge can be “True Judgement with an Account” (201d-210a). Following this idea leads to a theory, usually known as the “Dream of Socrates”, which posits two kinds of existents, complexes and simples, and proposes that “an account” means “an account of the complexes that analyses them into their simple components … the primary elements (prôta stoikheia)” of which we and everything else are composed (201e2). This—it will be noticed—suggests the ancient heritage of Kant’s own attempted purification of mereological (part/whole relations) nested elementals. He attempts the coordination of pure speculative reason to pure practical reason and, thus, attempts to supply the root of measurement and scientific regularity. However, as adumbrated by the Platonic dialogue, the attempted decompositions, speculative and pragmatic, lead to an impasse, an aporia, as the rational is based upon a correspondence and not the self-synthesis of the diaphorae by their own dynamic disequilibrium. Thus the dialogue ends inconclusively; Socrates rejects the solution, which is the problem itself, and leaves to meet his accusers and quaff his hemlock. The proposal in this article is that the diaphorae are all that exists in Deleuze’s world and indeed any world, including ours. Nor is this production decomposable into pure measured and defined elementals, as such decomposition is indeed exactly opposite what differential production is doing. For Deleuze, what exists is disparate conjunction. But in intensive conjunction the same cannot be the same except in so far as it differs. The diaphorae of events are irremediably asymmetric to their inputs: the actual does not resemble the virtual matrix that is its cause. Indeed, any recourse to those supposedly disaggregate inputs, the supposedly intelligible constituents of the measured image, will always but repeat the problematic of metrical representation at another remove. This is not, however, the traditional postmodern trap of infinite meta-shifting, as the diaphoric always is in each instance the very presentation that is sought. Heterogenesis can never be undone, but it can be affirmed. In a heterogenetic monism, what was the insoluble problem of correspondence in dualism is now its paradoxical solution: the problematic per se. What manifests in becoming is not, nor can be, an object or thought as separate or even separable, measured in units of the self-same. Dogmatic thought habitually translates intensity, the differential medium of chaosmosis, into the nominally same or similar so as to suit the Apollonian illusions of “correlational adequacy”. However, as the measured cannot be other than a calculation’s placebo, the correlation is but the shadow of a shadow. Every diaphora is an event born of an active conjunction of differential forces that give rise to this, their product, an interference pattern. Whatever we know and are is not the correlation of pure entities and thoughts subject to measured analysis but the confused and chaotic confluence of the specific, material, aleatory, differential, and unrepresentable forces under which we subsist not as ourselves but as the always changing product of our milieu. In short, only anomaly without a nominal becomes, and we should view any assertion that maps experience into the “objective” modality of the same, self-evident, and normal as a political prestidigitation motivated, not by “truth”, but by established political interest. ReferencesDella Volpe, Galvano. Logic as a Positive Science. London: NLB, 1980.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.———. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.Guenon, René. The Reign of Quantity. New York: Penguin, 1972.Hawley, K. "Identity and Indiscernibility." Mind 118 (2009): 101-9.Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon, 2014.Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1929.Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum, 2008.Naddaf, Gerard. The Greek Concept of Nature. Albany: SUNY, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.———. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Trans. Walter Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking, 1976.Welch, Kathleen Ethel. "Keywords from Classical Rhetoric: The Example of Physis." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 17.2 (1987): 193–204.

Jamming culture has become associated with digital manipulation and reuse of materials. As well, the term jamming has long been used by musicians (and other performers) to mean improvisation, especially in collaborative situations. A practice that gets to the heart of both these meanings is live coding; where digital content (music and/or visuals predominantly) is created through computer programming as a performance. During live coding performances digital content is created and presented in real time. Normally the code from the performers screen is displayed via data projection so that the audience can see the unfolding process as well as see or hear the artistic outcome. This article will focus on live coding of music, but the issues it raises for jamming culture apply to other mediums also. Live coding of music uses the computer as an instrument, which is “played” by the direct construction and manipulation of sonic and musical processes. Gestural control involves typing at the computer keyboard but, unlike traditional “keyboard” instruments, these key gestures are usually indirect in their effect on the sonic result because they result in programming language text which is then interpreted by the computer. Some live coding performers, notably Amy Alexander, have played on the duality of the keyboard as direct and indirect input source by using it as both a text entry device, audio trigger, and performance prop. In most cases, keyboard typing produces notational description during live coding performances as an indirect music making, related to what may previously have been called composing or conducting; where sound generation is controlled rather than triggered. The computer system becomes performer and the degree of interpretive autonomy allocated to the computer can vary widely, but is typically limited to probabilistic choices, structural processes and use of pre-established sound generators. In live coding practices, the code is a medium of expression through which creative ideas are articulated. The code acts as a notational representation of computational processes. It not only leads to the sonic outcome but also is available for reflection, reuse and modification. The aspects of music described by the code are open to some variation, especially in relation to choices about music or sonic granularity. This granularity continuum ranges from a focus on sound synthesis at one end of the scale to the structural organisation of musical events or sections at the other end. Regardless of the level of content granularity being controlled, when jamming with code the time constraints of the live performance environment force the performer to develop succinct and parsimonious expressions and to create processes that sustain activity (often using repetition, iteration and evolution) in order to maintain a coherent and developing musical structure during the performance. As a result, live coding requires not only new performance skills but also new ways of describing the structures of and processes that create music. Jamming activities are additionally complex when they are collaborative. Live Coding performances can often be collaborative, either between several musicians and/or between music and visual live coders. Issues that arise in collaborative settings are both creative and technical. When collaborating between performers in the same output medium (e.g., two musicians) the roles of each performer need to be defined. When a pianist and a vocalist improvise the harmonic and melodic roles are relatively obvious, but two laptop performers are more like a guitar duo where each can take any lead, supportive, rhythmic, harmonic, melodic, textual or other function. Prior organisation and sensitivity to the needs of the unfolding performance are required, as they have always been in musical improvisations. At the technical level it may be necessary for computers to be networked so that timing information, at least, is shared. Various network protocols, most commonly Open Sound Control (OSC), are used for this purpose. Another collaboration takes place in live coding, the one between the performer and the computer; especially where the computational processes are generative (as is often the case). This real-time interaction between musician and algorithmic process has been termed Hyperimprovisation by Roger Dean. Jamming cultures that focus on remixing often value the sharing of resources, especially through the movement and treatment of content artefacts such as audio samples and digital images. In live coding circles there is a similarly strong culture of resource sharing, but live coders are mostly concerned with sharing techniques, processes and tools. In recognition of this, it is quite common that when distributing works live coding artists will include descriptions of the processes used to create work and even share the code. This practice is also common in the broader computational arts community, as evident in the sharing of flash code on sites such as Levitated by Jared Tarbell, in the Processing site (Reas & Fry), or in publications such as Flash Maths Creativity (Peters et al.). Also underscoring this culture of sharing, is a prioritising of reputation above (or prior to) profit. As a result of these social factors most live coding tools are freely distributed. Live Coding tools have become more common in the past few years. There are a number of personalised systems that utilise various different programming languages and environments. Some of the more polished programs, that can be used widely, include SuperCollider (McCartney), Chuck (Wang & Cook) and Impromptu (Sorensen). While these environments all use different languages and varying ways of dealing with sound structure granularity, they do share some common aspects that reveal the priorities and requirements of live coding. Firstly, they are dynamic environments where the musical/sonic processes are not interrupted by modifications to the code; changes can be made on the fly and code is modifiable at runtime. Secondly, they are text-based and quite general programming environments, which means that the full leverage of abstract coding structures can be applied during live coding performances. Thirdly, they all prioritise time, both at architectural and syntactic levels. They are designed for real-time performance where events need to occur reliably. The text-based nature of these tools means that using them in live performance is barely distinguishable from any other computer task, such as writing an email, and thus the practice of projecting the environment to reveal the live process has become standard in the live coding community as a way of communicating with an audience (Collins). It is interesting to reflect on how audiences respond to the projection of code as part of live coding performances. In the author’s experience as both an audience member and live coding performer, the reception has varied widely. Most people seem to find it curious and comforting. Even if they cannot follow the code, they understand or are reassured that the performance is being generated by the code. Those who understand the code often report a sense of increased anticipation as they see structures emerge, and sometimes opportunities missed. Some people dislike the projection of the code, and see it as a distasteful display of virtuosity or as a distraction to their listening experience. The live coding practitioners tend to see the projection of code as a way of revealing the underlying generative and gestural nature of their performance. For some, such as Julian Rohrhuber, code projection is a way of revealing ideas and their development during the performance. “The incremental process of livecoding really is what makes it an act of public reasoning” (Rohrhuber). For both audience and performer, live coding is an explicitly risky venture and this element of public risk taking has long been central to the appreciation of the performing arts (not to mention sport and other cultural activities). The place of live coding in the broader cultural setting is still being established. It certainly is a form of jamming, or improvisation, it also involves the generation of digital content and the remixing of cultural ideas and materials. In some ways it is also connected to instrument building. Live coding practices prioritise process and therefore have a link with conceptual visual art and serial music composition movements from the 20th century. Much of the music produced by live coding has aesthetic links, naturally enough, to electronic music genres including musique concrète, electronic dance music, glitch music, noise art and minimalism. A grouping that is not overly coherent besides a shared concern for processes and systems. Live coding is receiving greater popular and academic attention as evident in recent articles in Wired (Andrews), ABC Online (Martin) and media culture blogs including The Teeming Void (Whitelaw 2006). Whatever its future profile in the boarder cultural sector the live coding community continues to grow and flourish amongst enthusiasts. The TOPLAP site is a hub of live coding activities and links prominent practitioners including, Alex McLean, Nick Collins, Adrian Ward, Julian Rohrhuber, Amy Alexander, Frederick Olofsson, Ge Wang, and Andrew Sorensen. These people and many others are exploring live coding as a form of jamming in digital media and as a way of creating new cultural practices and works. References Andrews, R. “Real DJs Code Live.” Wired: Technology News 6 July 2006. http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71248-0.html>. Collins, N. “Generative Music and Laptop Performance.” Contemporary Music Review 22.4 (2004): 67-79. Fry, Ben, and Casey Reas. Processing. http://processing.org/>. Martin, R. “The Sound of Invention.” Catapult. ABC Online 2006. http://www.abc.net.au/catapult/indepth/s1725739.htm>. McCartney, J. “SuperCollider: A New Real-Time Sound Synthesis Language.” The International Computer Music Conference. San Francisco: International Computer Music Association, 1996. 257-258. Peters, K., M. Tan, and M. Jamie. Flash Math Creativity. Berkeley, CA: Friends of ED, 2004. Reas, Casey, and Ben Fry. “Processing: A Learning Environment for Creating Interactive Web Graphics.” International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. San Diego: ACM SIGGRAPH, 2003. 1. Rohrhuber, J. Post to a Live Coding email list. livecode@slab.org. 10 Sep. 2006. Sorensen, A. “Impromptu: An Interactive Programming Environment for Composition and Performance.” In Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Music Conference 2005. Eds. A. R. Brown and T. Opie. Brisbane: ACMA, 2005. 149-153. Tarbell, Jared. Levitated. http://www.levitated.net/daily/index.html>. TOPLAP. http://toplap.org/>. Wang, G., and P.R. Cook. “ChucK: A Concurrent, On-the-fly, Audio Programming Language.” International Computer Music Conference. ICMA, 2003. 219-226 Whitelaw, M. “Data, Code & Performance.” The Teeming Void 21 Sep. 2006. http://teemingvoid.blogspot.com/2006/09/data-code-performance.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brown, Andrew R. "Code Jamming." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/03-brown.php>. APA Style Brown, A. (Dec. 2006) "Code Jamming," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/03-brown.php>.

Complex systems are an invention of the universe. It is not at all clear that science has an a priori primacy claim to the study of complex systems. (Galanter 5) Introduction In popular dialogues, describing a system as “complex” is often the point of resignation, inferring that the system cannot be sufficiently described, predicted nor managed. Transport networks, management infrastructure and supply chain logistics are all often described in this way. In socio-cultural terms “complex” is used to describe those humanistic systems that are “intricate, involved, complicated, dynamic, multi-dimensional, interconnected systems [such as] transnational citizenship, communities, identities, multiple belongings, overlapping geographies and competing histories” (Cahir & James). Academic dialogues have begun to explore the collective behaviors of complex systems to define a complex system specifically as an adaptive one; i.e. a system that demonstrates ‘self organising’ principles and ‘emergent’ properties. Based upon the key principles of interaction and emergence in relation to adaptive and self organising systems in cultural artifacts and processes, this paper will argue that complex systems are cultural systems. By introducing generic principles of complex systems, and looking at the exploration of such principles in art, design and media research, this paper argues that a science of cultural systems as part of complex systems theory is the post modern science for the digital age. Furthermore, that such a science was predicated by post structuralism and has been manifest in art, design and media practice since the late 1960s. Complex Systems Theory Complexity theory grew out of systems theory, an holistic approach to analysis that views whole systems based upon the links and interactions between the component parts and their relationship to each other and the environment within they exists. This stands in stark contrast to conventional science which is based upon Descartes’s reductionism, where the aim is to analyse systems by reducing something to its component parts (Wilson 3). As systems thinking is concerned with relationships more than elements, it proposes that in complex systems, small catalysts can cause large changes and that a change in one area of a system can adversely affect another area of the system. As is apparent, systems theory is a way of thinking rather than a specific set of rules, and similarly there is no single unified Theory of Complexity, but several different theories have arisen from the natural sciences, mathematics and computing. As such, the study of complex systems is very interdisciplinary and encompasses more than one theoretical framework. Whilst key ideas of complexity theory developed through artificial intelligence and robotics research, other important contributions came from thermodynamics, biology, sociology, physics, economics and law. In her volume for the Elsevier Advanced Management Series, “Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations”, Eve Mitleton-Kelly describes a comprehensive overview of this evolution as five main areas of research: complex adaptive systems dissipative structures autopoiesis (non-equilibrium) social systems chaos theory path dependence Here, Mitleton-Kelly points out that relatively little work has been done on developing a specific theory of complex social systems, despite much interest in complexity and its application to management (Mitleton-Kelly 4). To this end, she goes on to define the term “complex evolving system” as more appropriate to the field than ‘complex adaptive system’ and suggests that the term “complex behaviour” is thus more useful in social contexts (Mitleton-Kelly). For our purpose here, “complex systems” will be the general term used to describe those systems that are diverse and made up of multiple interdependent elements, that are often ‘adaptive’, in that they have the capacity to change and learn from events. This is in itself both ‘evolutionary’ and ‘behavioural’ and can be understood as emerging from the interaction of autonomous agents – especially people. Some generic principles of complex systems defined by Mitleton Kelly that are of concern here are: self-organisation emergence interdependence feedback space of possibilities co-evolving creation of new order Whilst the behaviours of complex systems clearly do not fall into our conventional top down perception of management and production, anticipating such behaviours is becoming more and more essential for products, processes and policies. For example, compare the traditional top down model of news generation, distribution and consumption to the “emerging media eco-system” (Bowman and Willis 14). Figure 1 (Bowman & Willis 10) Figure 2 (Bowman & Willis 12) To the traditional news organisations, such a “democratization of production” (McLuhan 230) has been a huge cause for concern. The agencies once solely responsible for the representation of reality are now lost in a global miasma of competing perspectives. Can we anticipate and account for complex behaviours? Eve Mitleton Kelly states that “if organisations are understood as complex evolving systems co-evolving as part of a social ‘ecosystem’, then that changed perspective changes ways of acting and relating which lead to a different way of working. Thus, management strategy changes, and our organizational design paradigms evolve as new types of relationships and ways of working provide the conditions for the emergence of new organisational forms” (Mitleton-Kelly 6). Complexity in Design It is thus through design practice and processes that discovering methods for anticipating complex systems behaviours seem most possible. The Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD) research programme, is a contemporary interdisciplinary research cluster consisting of academics and designers from architectural engineering, robotics, geography, digital media, sustainable design, and computing aiming to explore the possibility of trans disciplinary principles of complexity in design. Over arching this work is the conviction that design can be seen as model for complex systems researchers motivated by applying complexity science in particular domains. Key areas in which design and complexity interact have been established by this research cluster. Most immediately, many designed products and systems are inherently complex to design in the ordinary sense. For example, when designing vehicles, architecture, microchips designers need to understand complex dynamic processes used to fabricate and manufacture products and systems. The social and economic context of design is also complex, from market economics and legal regulation to social trends and mass culture. The process of designing can also involve complex social dynamics, with many people processing and exchanging complex heterogeneous information over complex human and communication networks, in the context of many changing constraints. Current key research questions are: how can the methods of complex systems science inform designers? how can design inform research into complex systems? Whilst ECiD acknowledges that to answer such questions effectively the theoretical and methodological relations between complexity science and design need further exploration and enquiry, there are no reliable precedents for such an activity across the sciences and the arts in general. Indeed, even in areas where a convergence of humanities methodology with scientific practice might seem to be most pertinent, most examples are few and far between. In his paper “Post Structuralism, Hypertext & the World Wide Web”, Luke Tredennick states that “despite the concentration of post-structuralism on text and texts, the study of information has largely failed to exploit post-structuralist theory” (Tredennick 5). Yet it is surely in the convergence of art and design with computation and the media that a search for practical trans-metadisciplinary methodologies might be most fruitful. It is in design for interactive media, where algorithms meet graphics, where the user can interact, adapt and amend, that self-organisation, emergence, interdependence, feedback, the space of possibilities, co-evolution and the creation of new order are embraced on a day to day basis by designers. A digitally interactive environment such as the World Wide Web, clearly demonstrates all the key aspects of a complex system. Indeed, it has already been described as a ‘complexity machine’ (Qvortup 9). It is important to remember that this ‘complexity machine’ has been designed. It is an intentional facility. It may display all the characteristics of complexity but, whilst some of its attributes are most demonstrative of self organisation and emergence, the Internet itself has not emerged spontaneously. For example, Tredinnick details the evolution of the World Wide Web through the Memex machine of Vannevar Bush, through Ted Nelsons hypertext system Xanadu to Tim Berners-Lee’s Enquire (Tredennick 3). The Internet was engineered. So, whilst we may not be able to entirely predict complex behavior, we can, and do, quite clearly design for it. When designing digitally interactive artifacts we design parameters or co ordinates to define the space within which a conceptual process will take place. We can never begin to predict precisely what those processes might become through interaction, emergence and self organisation, but we can establish conceptual parameters that guide and delineate the space of possibilities. Indeed this fact is so transparently obvious that many commentators in the humanities have been pushed to remark that interaction is merely interpretation, and so called new media is not new at all; that one interacts with a book in much the same way as a digital artifact. After all, post-structuralist theory had established the “death of the author” in the 1970s – the a priori that all cultural artifacts are open to interpretation, where all meanings must be completed by the reader. The concept of the “open work” (Eco 6) has been an established post modern concept for over 30 years and is commonly recognised as a feature of surrealist montage, poetry, the writings of James Joyce, even advertising design, where a purposive space for engagement and interpretation of a message is designated, without which the communication does not “work”. However, this concept is also most successfully employed in relation to installation art and, more recently, interactive art as a reflection of the artist’s conscious decision to leave part of a work open to interpretation and/or interaction. Art & Complex Systems One of the key projects of Embracing Complexity in Design has been to look at the relationship between art and complex systems. There is a relatively well established history of exploring art objects as complex systems in themselves that finds its origins in the systems art movement of the 1970s. In his paper “Observing ‘Systems Art’ from a Systems-Theroretical Perspective”, Francis Halsall defines systems art as “emerging in the 1960s and 1970s as a new paradigm in artistic practice … displaying an interest in the aesthetics of networks, the exploitation of new technology and New Media, unstable or de-materialised physicality, the prioritising of non-visual aspects, and an engagement (often politicised) with the institutional systems of support (such as the gallery, discourse, or the market) within which it occurs” (Halsall 7). More contemporarily, “Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970”, at Tate Modern, London, focuses upon systems artists “rejection of art’s traditional focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments al focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments with media that included dance, performance and…film & video” (De Salvo 3). Artists include Andy Warhol, Richard Long, Gilbert & George, Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. In 2002, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New York, held an international exhibition entitled “Complexity; Art & Complex Systems”, that was concerned with “art as a distinct discipline offer[ing] its own unique approache[s] and epistemic standards in the consideration of complexity” (Galanter and Levy 5), and the organisers go on to describe four ways in which artists engage the realm of complexity: presentations of natural complex phenomena that transcend conventional scientific visualisation descriptive systems which describe complex systems in an innovative and often idiosyncratic way commentary on complexity science itself technical applications of genetic algorithms, neural networks and a-life ECiD artist Julian Burton makes work that visualises how companies operate in specific relation to their approach to change and innovation. He is a strategic artist and facilitator who makes “pictures of problems to help people talk about them” (Burton). Clients include public and private sector organisations such as Barclays, Shell, Prudential, KPMG and the NHS. He is quoted as saying “Pictures are a powerful way to engage and focus a group’s attention on crucial issues and challenges, and enable them to grasp complex situations quickly. I try and create visual catalysts that capture the major themes of a workshop, meeting or strategy and re-present them in an engaging way to provoke lively conversations” (Burton). This is a simple and direct method of using art as a knowledge elicitation tool that falls into the first and second categories above. The third category is demonstrated by the ground breaking TechnoSphere, that was specifically inspired by complexity theory, landscape and artificial life. Launched in 1995 as an Arts Council funded online digital environment it was created by Jane Prophet and Gordon Selley. TechnoSphere is a virtual world, populated by artificial life forms created by users of the World Wide Web. The digital ecology of the 3D world, housed on a server, depends on the participation of an on-line public who accesses the world via the Internet. At the time of writing it has attracted over a 100,000 users who have created over a million creatures. The artistic exploration of technical applications is by default a key field for researching the convergence of trans-metadisciplinary methodologies. Troy Innocent’s lifeSigns evolves multiple digital media languages “expressed as a virtual world – through form, structure, colour, sound, motion, surface and behaviour” (Innocent). The work explores the idea of “emergent language through play – the idea that new meanings may be generated through interaction between human and digital agents”. Thus this artwork combines three areas of converging research – artificial life; computational semiotics and digital games. In his paper “What Is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory”, Philip Galanter describes all art as generative on the basis that it is created from the application of rules. Yet, as demonstrated above, what is significantly different and important about digital interactivity, as opposed to its predecessor, interpretation, is its provision of a graphical user interface (GUI) to component parts of a text such as symbol, metaphor, narrative, etc for the multiple “authors” and the multiple “readers” in a digitally interactive space of possibility. This offers us tangible, instantaneous reproduction and dissemination of interpretations of an artwork. Conclusion: Digital Interactivity – A Complex Medium Digital interaction of any sort is thus a graphic model of the complex process of communication. Here, complexity does not need deconstructing, representing nor modelling, as the aesthetics (as in apprehended by the senses) of the graphical user interface conveniently come first. Design for digital interactive media is thus design for complex adaptive systems. The theoretical and methodological relations between complexity science and design can clearly be expounded especially well through post-structuralism. The work of Barthes, Derrida & Foucault offers us the notion of all cultural artefacts as texts or systems of signs, whose meanings are not fixed but rather sustained by networks of relationships. Implemented in a digital environment post-structuralist theory is tangible complexity. Strangely, whilst Philip Galanter states that science has no necessary over reaching claim to the study of complexity, he then argues conversely that “contemporary art theory rooted in skeptical continental philosophy [reduces] art to social construction [as] postmodernism, deconstruction and critical theory [are] notoriously elusive, slippery, and overlapping terms and ideas…that in fact [are] in the business of destabilising apparently clear and universal propositions” (4). This seems to imply that for Galanter, post modern rejections of grand narratives necessarily will exclude the “new scientific paradigm” of complexity, a paradigm that he himself is looking to be universal. Whilst he cites Lyotard (6) describing both political and linguistic reasons why postmodern art celebrates plurality, denying any progress towards singular totalising views, he fails to appreciate what happens if that singular totalising view incorporates interactivity? Surely complexity is pluralistic by its very nature? In the same vein, if language for Derrida is “an unfixed system of traces and differences … regardless of the intent of the authored texts … with multiple equally legitimate meanings” (Galanter 7) then I have heard no better description of the signifiers, signifieds, connotations and denotations of digital culture. Complexity in its entirety can also be conversely understood as the impact of digital interactivity upon culture per se which has a complex causal relation in itself; Qvortups notion of a “communications event” (9) such as the Danish publication of the Mohammed cartoons falls into this category. Yet a complex causality could be traced further into cultural processes enlightening media theory; from the relationship between advertising campaigns and brand development; to the exposure and trajectory of the celebrity; describing the evolution of visual language in media cultures and informing the relationship between exposure to representation and behaviour. In digital interaction the terms art, design and media converge into a process driven, performative event that demonstrates emergence through autopoietic processes within a designated space of possibility. By insisting that all artwork is generative Galanter, like many other writers, negates the medium entirely which allows him to insist that generative art is “ideologically neutral” (Galanter 10). Generative art, like all digitally interactive artifacts are not neutral but rather ideologically plural. Thus, if one integrates Qvortups (8) delineation of medium theory and complexity theory we may have what we need; a first theory of a complex medium. Through interactive media complexity theory is the first post modern science; the first science of culture. References Bowman, Shane, and Chris Willis. We Media. 21 Sep. 2003. 9 March 2007 http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php>. Burton, Julian. “Hedron People.” 9 March 2007 http://www.hedron.com/network/assoc.php4?associate_id=14>. Cahir, Jayde, and Sarah James. “Complex: Call for Papers.” M/C Journal 9 Sep. 2006. 7 March 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/journal/upcoming.php>. De Salvo, Donna, ed. Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970. London: Tate Gallery Press, 2005. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989. Galanter, Phillip, and Ellen K. Levy. Complexity: Art & Complex Systems. SDMA Gallery Guide, 2002. Galanter, Phillip. “Against Reductionism: Science, Complexity, Art & Complexity Studies.” 2003. 9 March 2007 http://isce.edu/ISCE_Group_Site/web-content/ISCE_Events/ Norwood_2002/Norwood_2002_Papers/Galanter.pdf>. Halsall, Francis. “Observing ‘Systems-Art’ from a Systems-Theoretical Perspective”. CHArt 2005. 9 March 2007 http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2005/abstracts/halsall.htm>. Innocent, Troy. “Life Signs.” 9 March 2007 http://www.iconica.org/main.htm>. Johnson, Jeffrey. “Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD).” 2007. 9 March 2007 http://www.complexityanddesign.net/>. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962. Mitleton-Kelly, Eve, ed. Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations. Elsevier Advanced Management Series, 2003. Prophet, Jane. “Jane Prophet.” 9 March 2007 http://www.janeprophet.co.uk/>. Qvortup, Lars. “Understanding New Digital Media.” European Journal of Communication 21.3 (2006): 345-356. Tedinnick, Luke. “Post Structuralism, Hypertext & the World Wide Web.” Aslib 59.2 (2007): 169-186. Wilson, Edward Osborne. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: A.A. Knoff, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Cham, Karen, and Jeffrey Johnson. "Complexity Theory: A Science of Cultural Systems?." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/08-cham-johnson.php>. APA Style Cham, K., and J. Johnson. (Jun. 2007) "Complexity Theory: A Science of Cultural Systems?," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/08-cham-johnson.php>.

Playing in childhood we are presented with foundational puzzles. Many of these arise directly from our negotiations with the laws of physics; others arise from the deliberate activities of our elders, teachers and siblings. As we sit on our grandmother’s knee we are presented with a range of playful and deceptive games. Something as simple as a loop of wool can initiate this play: now it is a straight thread; now it is a loop. Something as simple as the opening hand is the potential source of a problem that may stay with us for a lifetime: now it is a hand with open palm; now it is a fist that hides. Something as simple as a dropped toy ball can initiate the motive to engage with the world as a problem: now it is here, at hand; now it is gone, down there and rolling away. While each of these events is real, the space and time of such play can be described as an illusion. The figure of this illusion is itself a loop within which a special kind of logic pertains. This logic is illustrated in D. W. Winnicott’s concept of illusory experience and in John Dewey’s concept of perplexity as the source of human thinking. As illusions, loops are puzzling; as real objects and events, loops pre-figure and offer to mediate the development of our understanding of our being in the world. Donald Woods Winnicott (1896-1971) a British child psychoanalyst, spent much of his time exploring the relationships that children form with objects. His work offers accounts of an extraordinary array of everyday engagements that children have with simple things such as their own toes and bits of string. A key aspect of Winnicott’s theories of the formative years is the sustaining of a loop, or in Winnicott’s terms, "an intermediate state" between the child and reality. I am here staking a claim for an intermediate state between a baby’s inability and his growing ability to recognize and accept reality. I am therefore studying the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion, and yet becomes the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own. We can share a respect for illusory experience, and if we wish we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusory experiences. This is a natural root of grouping among human beings. (Winnicott 3) Social groups establish preferred forms to account for dynamic systems in everyday life. The hand, for example, might be generally agreed to be an open hand, at rest, which means that fingers are curved towards the palm and the palm is down. The number of variations in the way in which a hand might be found, and described, is so large as to be able to symbolise an entire language. From the outside, to a non-signer, it is an illusion that hand-signing is language, just as it is an illusion that spoken and written languages are languages to those who do not share the particular language illusion. Within the range of possible hand gestures, a loop or tension-of-illusion is established: those in the loop can comprehend the signing as language; those outside the loop can only pretend that the illusion works. Recalling that the word "illusion" takes its origin in the Latin for play ("ludere") it comes as no surprise that initiation games frequently use spurious loop activities to trap the outsider in ways that will embarrass the new-comer. The sense of mockery in the word "illusion" is made evident as the new-comer has no way of determining the validity of the pretend inside information. Suggestions that they drink some foul concoction can only be answered by drinking the concoction: there is no way from the outside of the illusion group to resolve the challenge. To enter the inside of the loop, the new-comer has to cross some kind of line in a way that leaves a mark: the affect of embarrassment is often enough. Our ability to suspend disbelief and sustain the illusion as loop is a fundamental requirement of our social being and of our cognitive development. "Once upon a time" is a call to step inside the loop of fiction where things may emerge that cannot otherwise emerge. While this loop may be seen as nothing more than an inner fantasy world, it is impossible to sustain this concept unless we deny the common reality of such a world. The world of the loop is not some kind of denial of an outer reality, nor is it an assertion of an inner freedom that can remain separate to an external reality. We may claim to make words mean whatever we wish them to mean in an inner and private dimension, but in making such a claim we must use a common meaning of "meaning" and we must use the syntax and grammar of a language. Much as we might wish for such an interiority, Winnicott requires us to recognise the further need for an "intermediate area of experience". This intermediate area is the public space of shared illusion: It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated. (Winnicott 2) In this intermediate area, it is possible to sustain illusions only in relation to a presumed other reality. That is, the logics of illusion are logics that apply, if differently, in the outer and inner realms of experience. The reality of a loop may seem soft. Loops are readily formed without substantial alteration of the loop forming material. Loops are also frightening in their potential operation as capturing devices. The forces they can activate are deadly. As dynamic objects, loops offer their own interpretation of Winnicott’s concept of illusion. At some point the game or play of illusions terminates in a disclosure of closure that instructs the play. The closed hand that hides the marble opens to reveal the marble. One moment in the play of logics is elected or given a priority. The relative stability of this pattern is made obvious in certain forms of illusion that take illusions as their "fixed" shape. Knitting, for example, consists of loops interlocked with loops. As anyone who has pulled knitting apart knows, interlocking is fundamentally an illusion in its making and a disillusion in its pulling apart. Knitting can then be seen, in this sense to be "fake". Fakes "Fake" does not mean "false" except that we have come to see the dressing up of things as being insubstantial and therefore not warranting attention. Worse, we see "fake" as being morally repugnant in that a fake thing takes the place of a real thing. But "fake" also means "a coil of rope". In this case, the fake is substantial while ever it exists. Thus, a fake is a kind of benevolent illusion. The shape that the coil of rope makes is no less real, in time, than the ship-deck on which it is formed. When it is uncoiled, the rope takes on its "true" or active shape. Should the uncoiled rope form a loop, this loop is potentially malevolent. It may take the leg of a sailor. In childhood, this game is played out using simple loops and slip knots that hold but let go when pulled. The dynamic forms are sometimes the illusion; sometimes it is the static form that is the illusion. That is, the pragmatic interpretation allows for the display of the fake as a cognitive toy. Any state of the dynamic form may take priority at any one time for the purposes of the use of the system. When we sit down, our height differences are reduced: this fake is a crucial part of our social world. Loops Winnicott lets us see the life-long significance of the looping and faking that we daily use to sustain our dynamic worlds . In our loop worlds we establish a space "between thumb and the teddy bear, between the oral erotism and the true object-relationship" (Winnicott 2). Within the loop, the status of objects and systems is open to transformation, just as, over time, in the material world, objects and systems are transformed. The valency of any object or system, viewed from within the loop, is fundamentally indeterminate and hence open. It is within this loop-logic that we can understand the ironic singing of songs whose content is radically alternative to the situation of the singing: children can be heard singing songs filled with sexual connotations without there being any awareness of the inappropriate content; many people can hear and sing along with Bette Midler’s rendition of "God is watching us" without the irony striking home that God is doing this from a distance of total indifference. The tongue in Bette’s cheek could not get any bigger, but from within the loop, the song can have any value the singer selects. While we may sustain fantasy worlds as intermediate worlds, Winnicott makes obvious that "the mother’s main task (next to providing opportunity for illusion) is disillusionment" (Winnicott 12). At some point the disjunction between illusion and reality becomes perplexing. The ball that the child drops does evade the child’s grasp. It is not simply a matter of sustaining the mood. Either the ball can be recovered or else it cannot. Perplexity and the Dialectic of Loss John Dewey (1859-1952) is a major figure in American pragmatist schools of philosophy and in educational philosophy, especially problem-based theories of learning. His work bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and covers all the major social and cultural issues of his day. As a thorough thinker, Dewey offers to provide explanations for most aspects of what is practically required of us in our living socially responsible lives. Even our "negative" affects, such as perplexity, are presented by Dewey as indicators of our practical connection with reality. For Dewey, perplexity is a key feature of the state of mind that initiates the growth of the individual through engagement with the problematics of the world in which they live. Dewey points out that "thinking begins as soon as the baby who has lost the ball that he is playing with begins to foresee the possibility of something not yet existing—its recovery" (How We Think 89). Losing the ball creates a difficulty, seeing that the ball might be recovered, the child is then able to move to resolve the difficulty, through action, in the real world. In this simple form we can determine the process of thesis (loss), anti-thesis (promise of recovery or remedy), synthesis (resolution of the problem with an enhanced understanding of the process). The theological allusions should not be discounted in this model. Nor should we forget Winnicott’s caution here "that the task of reality-acceptance is never completed". The ball game is still a game that retains the general forgiveness of the loop in that the real loss is mitigated by the surrounding and support "illusion" that the parent will recover the ball for the child. It may be socially frowned on, but adults still drop things just to instigate the "illusion" that others will recover their loss (for an extended account of Dewey’s notion of perplexity, see Russell). Still, the loss of the ball is a problem that holds very real interest for the baby and therefore the problem is perplexing. According to Dewey: "Interest marks the annihilation of the distance between the person and the materials and results of his action; it is the sign of their organic union" (Middle Works 160). Being "entirely taken up with" (p. 160) the loss of the ball, the baby experiences the situation in what McLuhan describes as "depth". In the depth approach attention is able to shift from content to attention itself: "Consciousness itself is an inclusive process not at all dependent on content. Consciousness does not postulate consciousness in particular" (McLuhan 247). Conclusion The capacity of consciousness to take an interest, in Dewey’s terms, is the same capacity that consciousness displays in the sustaining of the loop of illusion. For Dewey, "interest marks the annihilation of the distance between the person and the materials and results of his action". This annihilation, in Winnicott’s gentler terms, is more of respite in the long journey. For Winnicott "no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality". The intermediary illusions remain illusions even if they are instructive. For Dewey, the focus on perplexity allows that the strain is integrated in an affect-complex that both sustains the illusion ("I can get the ball back") in the manner of a hypothesis ("I had the ball, I lost the ball—losing the ball was a process, regaining the ball could also be a process—I can have the ball again"). Granted, Dewey, as a pragmatist, starts with a real world process. Nonetheless, his approach points to the deeper connections between consciousness itself and the operations of the psychological development of the individual. From the perspective of perplexity, the puzzles of childhood are also the puzzles of the adult. As adults we continue to play with loops of all kinds. We maintain intermediary spaces and we conspire in the social illusions of language References Dewey, John. How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1933. Dewey, John. The Middle Works, 1899-1924. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Vol. 7. Carbondale and Edwardsville: South Illinios U P, 1979. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet, 1964. Russell, Keith. "The Problem of the Problem and Perplexity." Themes and Variations in PBL. Proc. of the 5th International Biennial PBL Conference, 7-10 Jul. 1999, U of Quebec. U of Newcastle: PROBLARC, 1999. 180-95. Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock, 1971. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Russell, Keith. "Loops and Fakes and Illusions" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/fakes.php>. Chicago Style Russell, Keith, "Loops and Fakes and Illusions" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/fakes.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Russell, Keith. (2002) Loops and Fakes and Illusions. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/fakes.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Most developed countries, including Australia, have a strong focus on national, state and local strategies for emergency management and response in the face of disasters and crises. This framework can include coping with catastrophic dislocation, service disruption, injury or loss of life in the face of natural disasters such as major fires, floods, earthquakes or other large-impact natural events, as well as dealing with similar catastrophes resulting from human actions such as bombs, biological agents, cyber-attacks targeting essential services such as communications networks, or other crises affecting large populations. Emergency management frameworks for crisis and disaster response are distinguished by their focus on the domestic context for such events; that is, how to manage and assist the ways in which civilian populations, who are for the most part inexperienced and untrained in dealing with crises and disasters, are able to respond and behave in such situations so as to minimise the impacts of a catastrophic event. Even in countries like Australia that demonstrate a strong public commitment to cultural pluralism and social cohesion, ethno-cultural diversity can be seen as a risk or threat to national security and values at times of political, natural, economic and/or social tensions and crises. Australian government policymakers have recently focused, with increasing intensity, on “community resilience” as a key element in countering extremism and enhancing emergency preparedness and response. In some sense, this is the result of a tacit acknowledgement by government agencies that there are limits to what they can do for domestic communities should such a catastrophic event occur, and accordingly, the focus in recent times has shifted to how governments can best help people to help themselves in such situations, a key element of the contemporary “resilience” approach. Yet despite the robustly multicultural nature of Australian society, explicit engagement with Australia’s cultural diversity flickers only fleetingly on this agenda, which continues to pursue approaches to community resilience in the absence of understandings about how these terms and formations may themselves need to be diversified to maximise engagement by all citizens in a multicultural polity. There have been some recent efforts in Australia to move in this direction, for example the Australian Emergency Management Institute (AEMI)’s recent suite of projects with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities (2006-2010) and the current Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee-supported project on “Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism” (Grossman and Tahiri), which I discuss in a longer forthcoming version of this essay (Grossman). Yet the understanding of ethno-cultural identity and difference that underlies much policy thinking on resilience remains problematic for the way in which it invests in a view of the cultural dimensions of community resilience as relic rather than resource – valorising the preservation of and respect for cultural norms and traditions, but silent on what different ethno-cultural communities might contribute toward expanded definitions of both “community” and “resilience” by virtue of the transformative potential and existing cultural capital they bring with them into new national and also translocal settings. For example, a primary conclusion of the joint program between AEMI and the Australian Multicultural Commission is that CALD communities are largely “vulnerable” in the context of disasters and emergency management and need to be better integrated into majority-culture models of theorising and embedding community resilience. This focus on stronger national integration and the “vulnerability” of culturally diverse ethno-cultural communities in the Australian context echoes the work of scholars beyond Australia such as McGhee, Mouritsen (Reflections, Citizenship) and Joppke. They argue that the “civic turn” in debates around resurgent contemporary nationalism and multicultural immigration policies privileges civic integration over genuine two-way multiculturalism. This approach sidesteps the transculturational (Ortiz; Welsch; Mignolo; Bennesaieh; Robins; Stein) aspects of contemporary social identities and exchange by paying lip-service to cultural diversity while affirming a neo-liberal construct of civic values and principles as a universalising goal of Western democratic states within a global market economy. It also suggests a superficial tribute to cultural diversity that does not embed diversity comprehensively at the levels of either conceptualising or resourcing different elements of Australian transcultural communities within the generalised framework of “community resilience.” And by emphasising cultural difference as vulnerability rather than as resource or asset, it fails to acknowledge the varieties of resilience capital that many culturally diverse individuals and communities may bring with them when they resettle in new environments, by ignoring the question of what “resilience” actually means to those from culturally diverse communities. In so doing, it also avoids the critical task of incorporating intercultural definitional diversity around the concepts of both “community” and “resilience” used to promote social cohesion and the capacity to recover from disasters and crises. How we might do differently in thinking about the broader challenges for multiculturalism itself as a resilient transnational concept and practice? The Concept of Resilience The meanings of resilience vary by disciplinary perspective. While there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, it is widely acknowledged that resilience refers to the capacity of an individual to do well in spite of exposure to acute trauma or sustained adversity (Liebenberg 219). Originating in the Latin word resilio, meaning ‘to jump back’, there is general consensus that resilience pertains to an individual’s, community’s or system’s ability to adapt to and ‘bounce back’ from a disruptive event (Mohaupt 63, Longstaff et al. 3). Over the past decade there has been a dramatic rise in interest in the clinical, community and family sciences concerning resilience to a broad range of adversities (Weine 62). While debate continues over which discipline can be credited with first employing resilience as a concept, Mohaupt argues that most of the literature on resilience cites social psychology and psychiatry as the origin for the concept beginning in the mid-20th century. The pioneer researchers of what became known as resilience research studied the impact on children living in dysfunctional families. For example, the findings of work by Garmezy, Werner and Smith and Rutter showed that about one third of children in these studies were coping very well despite considerable adversities and traumas. In asking what it was that prevented the children in their research from being negatively influenced by their home environments, such research provided the basis for future research on resilience. Such work was also ground-breaking for identifying the so-called ‘protective factors’ or resources that individuals can operationalise when dealing with adversity. In essence, protective factors are those conditions in the individual that protect them from the risk of dysfunction and enable recovery from trauma. They mitigate the effects of stressors or risk factors, that is, those conditions that predispose one to harm (Hajek 15). Protective factors include the inborn traits or qualities within an individual, those defining an individual’s environment, and also the interaction between the two. Together, these factors give people the strength, skills and motivation to cope in difficult situations and re-establish (a version of) ‘normal’ life (Gunnestad). Identifying protective factors is important in terms of understanding the particular resources a given sociocultural group has at its disposal, but it is also vital to consider the interconnections between various protective mechanisms, how they might influence each other, and to what degree. An individual, for instance, might display resilience or adaptive functioning in a particular domain (e.g. emotional functioning) but experience significant deficits in another (e.g. academic achievement) (Hunter 2). It is also essential to scrutinise how the interaction between protective factors and risk factors creates patterns of resilience. Finally, a comprehensive understanding of the interrelated nature of protective mechanisms and risk factors is imperative for designing effective interventions and tailored preventive strategies (Weine 65). In short, contemporary thinking about resilience suggests it is neither entirely personal nor strictly social, but an interactive and iterative combination of the two. It is a quality of the environment as much as the individual. For Ungar, resilience is the complex entanglements between “individuals and their social ecologies [that] will determine the degree of positive outcomes experienced” (3). Thinking about resilience as context-dependent is important because research that is too trait-based or actor-centred risks ignoring any structural or institutional forces. A more ecological interpretation of resilience, one that takes into a person’s context and environment into account, is vital in order to avoid blaming the victim for any hardships they face, or relieving state and institutional structures from their responsibilities in addressing social adversity, which can “emphasise self-help in line with a neo-conservative agenda instead of stimulating state responsibility” (Mohaupt 67). Nevertheless, Ungar posits that a coherent definition of resilience has yet to be developed that adequately ‘captures the dual focus of the individual and the individual’s social ecology and how the two must both be accounted for when determining the criteria for judging outcomes and discerning processes associated with resilience’ (7). Recent resilience research has consequently prompted a shift away from vulnerability towards protective processes — a shift that highlights the sustained capabilities of individuals and communities under threat or at risk. Locating ‘Culture’ in the Literature on Resilience However, an understanding of the role of culture has remained elusive or marginalised within this trend; there has been comparatively little sustained investigation into the applicability of resilience constructs to non-western cultures, or how the resources available for survival might differ from those accessible to western populations (Ungar 4). As such, a growing body of researchers is calling for more rigorous inquiry into culturally determined outcomes that might be associated with resilience in non-western or multicultural cultures and contexts, for example where Indigenous and minority immigrant communities live side by side with their ‘mainstream’ neighbours in western settings (Ungar 2). ‘Cultural resilience’ considers the role that cultural background plays in determining the ability of individuals and communities to be resilient in the face of adversity. For Clauss-Ehlers, the term describes the degree to which the strengths of one’s culture promote the development of coping (198). Culturally-focused resilience suggests that people can manage and overcome stress and trauma based not on individual characteristics alone, but also from the support of broader sociocultural factors (culture, cultural values, language, customs, norms) (Clauss-Ehlers 324). The innate cultural strengths of a culture may or may not differ from the strengths of other cultures; the emphasis here is not so much comparatively inter-cultural as intensively intra-cultural (VanBreda 215). A culturally focused resilience model thus involves “a dynamic, interactive process in which the individual negotiates stress through a combination of character traits, cultural background, cultural values, and facilitating factors in the sociocultural environment” (Clauss-Ehlers 199). In understanding ways of ‘coping and hoping, surviving and thriving’, it is thus crucial to consider how culturally and linguistically diverse minorities navigate the cultural understandings and assumptions of both their countries of origin and those of their current domicile (Ungar 12). Gunnestad claims that people who master the rules and norms of their new culture without abandoning their own language, values and social support are more resilient than those who tenaciously maintain their own culture at the expense of adjusting to their new environment. They are also more resilient than those who forego their own culture and assimilate with the host society (14). Accordingly, if the combination of both valuing one’s culture as well as learning about the culture of the new system produces greater resilience and adaptive capacities, serious problems can arise when a majority tries to acculturate a minority to the mainstream by taking away or not recognising important parts of the minority culture. In terms of resilience, if cultural factors are denied or diminished in accounting for and strengthening resilience – in other words, if people are stripped of what they possess by way of resilience built through cultural knowledge, disposition and networks – they do in fact become vulnerable, because ‘they do not automatically gain those cultural strengths that the majority has acquired over generations’ (Gunnestad 14). Mobilising ‘Culture’ in Australian Approaches to Community Resilience The realpolitik of how concepts of resilience and culture are mobilised is highly relevant here. As noted above, when ethnocultural difference is positioned as a risk or a threat to national identity, security and values, this is precisely the moment when vigorously, even aggressively, nationalised definitions of ‘community’ and ‘identity’ that minoritise or disavow cultural diversities come to the fore in public discourse. The Australian evocation of nationalism and national identity, particularly in the way it has framed policy discussion on managing national responses to disasters and threats, has arguably been more muted than some of the European hysteria witnessed recently around cultural diversity and national life. Yet we still struggle with the idea that newcomers to Australia might fall on the surplus rather than the deficit side of the ledger when it comes to identifying and harnessing resilience capital. A brief example of this trend is explored here. From 2006 to 2010, the Australian Emergency Management Institute embarked on an ambitious government-funded four-year program devoted to strengthening community resilience in relation to disasters with specific reference to engaging CALD communities across Australia. The program, Inclusive Emergency Management with CALD Communities, was part of a wider Australian National Action Plan to Build Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security in the wake of the London terrorist bombings in July 2005. Involving CALD community organisations as well as various emergency and disaster management agencies, the program ran various workshops and agency-community partnership pilots, developed national school education resources, and commissioned an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness (Farrow et al.). While my critique here is certainly not aimed at emergency management or disaster response agencies and personnel themselves – dedicated professionals who often achieve remarkable results in emergency and disaster response under extraordinarily difficult circumstances – it is nevertheless important to highlight how the assumptions underlying elements of AEMI’s experience and outcomes reflect the persistent ways in which ethnocultural diversity is rendered as a problem to be surmounted or a liability to be redressed, rather than as an asset to be built upon or a resource to be valued and mobilised. AEMI’s explicit effort to engage with CALD communities in building overall community resilience was important in its tacit acknowledgement that emergency and disaster services were (and often remain) under-resourced and under-prepared in dealing with the complexities of cultural diversity in emergency situations. Despite these good intentions, however, while the program produced some positive outcomes and contributed to crucial relationship building between CALD communities and emergency services within various jurisdictions, it also continued to frame the challenge of working with cultural diversity as a problem of increased vulnerability during disasters for recently arrived and refugee background CALD individuals and communities. This highlights a common feature in community resilience-building initiatives, which is to focus on those who are already ‘robust’ versus those who are ‘vulnerable’ in relation to resilience indicators, and whose needs may require different or additional resources in order to be met. At one level, this is a pragmatic resourcing issue: national agencies understandably want to put their people, energy and dollars where they are most needed in pursuit of a steady-state unified national response at times of crisis. Nor should it be argued that at least some CALD groups, particularly those from new arrival and refugee communities, are not vulnerable in at least some of the ways and for some of the reasons suggested in the program evaluation. However, the consistent focus on CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘in need’ is problematic, as well as partial. It casts members of these communities as structurally and inherently less able and less resilient in the context of disasters and emergencies: in some sense, as those who, already ‘victims’ of chronic social deficits such as low English proficiency, social isolation and a mysterious unidentified set of ‘cultural factors’, can become doubly victimised in acute crisis and disaster scenarios. In what is by now a familiar trope, the description of CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ precludes asking questions about what they do have, what they do know, and what they do or can contribute to how we respond to disaster and emergency events in our communities. A more profound problem in this sphere revolves around working out how best to engage CALD communities and individuals within existing approaches to disaster and emergency preparedness and response. This reflects a fundamental but unavoidable limitation of disaster preparedness models: they are innately spatially and geographically bounded, and consequently understand ‘communities’ in these terms, rather than expanding definitions of ‘community’ to include the dimensions of community-as-social-relations. While some good engagement outcomes were achieved locally around cross-cultural knowledge for emergency services workers, the AEMI program fell short of asking some of the harder questions about how emergency and disaster service scaffolding and resilience-building approaches might themselves need to change or transform, using a cross-cutting model of ‘communities’ as both geographic places and multicultural spaces (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan) in order to be more effective in national scenarios in which cultural diversity should be taken for granted. Toward Acknowledgement of Resilience Capital Most significantly, the AEMI program did not produce any recognition of the ways in which CALD communities already possess resilience capital, or consider how this might be drawn on in formulating stronger community initiatives around disaster and threats preparedness for the future. Of course, not all individuals within such communities, nor all communities across varying circumstances, will demonstrate resilience, and we need to be careful of either overgeneralising or romanticising the kinds and degrees of ‘resilience capital’ that may exist within them. Nevertheless, at least some have developed ways of withstanding crises and adapting to new conditions of living. This is particularly so in connection with individual and group behaviours around resource sharing, care-giving and social responsibility under adverse circumstances (Grossman and Tahiri) – all of which are directly relevant to emergency and disaster response. While some of these resilient behaviours may have been nurtured or enhanced by particular experiences and environments, they can, as the discussion of recent literature above suggests, also be rooted more deeply in cultural norms, habits and beliefs. Whatever their origins, for culturally diverse societies to achieve genuine resilience in the face of both natural and human-made disasters, it is critical to call on the ‘social memory’ (Folke et al.) of communities faced with responding to emergencies and crises. Such wellsprings of social memory ‘come from the diversity of individuals and institutions that draw on reservoirs of practices, knowledge, values, and worldviews and is crucial for preparing the system for change, building resilience, and for coping with surprise’ (Adger et al.). Consequently, if we accept the challenge of mapping an approach to cultural diversity as resource rather than relic into our thinking around strengthening community resilience, there are significant gains to be made. For a whole range of reasons, no diversity-sensitive model or measure of resilience should invest in static understandings of ethnicities and cultures; all around the world, ethnocultural identities and communities are in a constant and sometimes accelerated state of dynamism, reconfiguration and flux. But to ignore the resilience capital and potential protective factors that ethnocultural diversity can offer to the strengthening of community resilience more broadly is to miss important opportunities that can help suture the existing disconnects between proactive approaches to intercultural connectedness and social inclusion on the one hand, and reactive approaches to threats, national security and disaster response on the other, undermining the effort to advance effectively on either front. This means that dominant social institutions and structures must be willing to contemplate their own transformation as the result of transcultural engagement, rather than merely insisting, as is often the case, that ‘other’ cultures and communities conform to existing hegemonic paradigms of being and of living. In many ways, this is the most critical step of all. A resilience model and strategy that questions its own culturally informed yet taken-for-granted assumptions and premises, goes out into communities to test and refine these, and returns to redesign its approach based on the new knowledge it acquires, would reflect genuine progress toward an effective transculturational approach to community resilience in culturally diverse contexts.References Adger, W. Neil, Terry P. Hughes, Carl Folke, Stephen R. Carpenter and Johan Rockström. “Social-Ecological Resilience to Coastal Disasters.” Science 309.5737 (2005): 1036-1039. ‹http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5737/1036.full> Bartowiak-Théron, Isabelle, and Anna Corbo Crehan. “The Changing Nature of Communities: Implications for Police and Community Policing.” Community Policing in Australia: Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) Reports, Research and Policy Series 111 (2010): 8-15. Benessaieh, Afef. “Multiculturalism, Interculturality, Transculturality.” Ed. A. Benessaieh. Transcultural Americas/Ameriques Transculturelles. Ottawa: U of Ottawa Press/Les Presses de l’Unversite d’Ottawa, 2010. 11-38. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Sociocultural Factors, Resilience and Coping: Support for a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Resilience.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29 (2008): 197-212. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Cultural Resilience.” Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural School Psychology. Ed. C. S. Clauss-Ehlers. New York: Springer, 2010. 324-326. Farrow, David, Anthea Rutter and Rosalind Hurworth. Evaluation of the Inclusive Emergency Management with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities Program. Parkville, Vic.: Centre for Program Evaluation, U of Melbourne, July 2009. ‹http://www.ag.gov.au/www/emaweb/rwpattach.nsf/VAP/(9A5D88DBA63D32A661E6369859739356)~Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf/$file/Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf>.Folke, Carl, Thomas Hahn, Per Olsson, and Jon Norberg. “Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30 (2005): 441-73. ‹http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.30.050504.144511>. Garmezy, Norman. “The Study of Competence in Children at Risk for Severe Psychopathology.” The Child in His Family: Children at Psychiatric Risk. Vol. 3. Eds. E. J. Anthony and C. Koupernick. New York: Wiley, 1974. 77-97. Grossman, Michele. “Resilient Multiculturalism? Diversifying Australian Approaches to Community Resilience and Cultural Difference”. Global Perspectives on Multiculturalism in the 21st Century. Eds. B. E. de B’beri and F. Mansouri. London: Routledge, 2014. Grossman, Michele, and Hussein Tahiri. Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism. Canberra: Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee, forthcoming 2014. Grossman, Michele. “Cultural Resilience and Strengthening Communities”. Safeguarding Australia Summit, Canberra. 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.safeguardingaustraliasummit.org.au/uploader/resources/Michele_Grossman.pdf>. Gunnestad, Arve. “Resilience in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: How Resilience Is Generated in Different Cultures.” Journal of Intercultural Communication 11 (2006). ‹http://www.immi.se/intercultural/nr11/gunnestad.htm>. Hajek, Lisa J. “Belonging and Resilience: A Phenomenological Study.” Unpublished Master of Science thesis, U of Wisconsin-Stout. Menomonie, Wisconsin, 2003. Hunter, Cathryn. “Is Resilience Still a Useful Concept When Working with Children and Young People?” Child Family Community Australia (CFA) Paper 2. Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Joppke, Christian. "Beyond National Models: Civic Integration Policies for Immigrants in Western Europe". West European Politics 30.1 (2007): 1-22. Liebenberg, Linda, Michael Ungar, and Fons van de Vijver. “Validation of the Child and Youth Resilience Measure-28 (CYRM-28) among Canadian Youth.” Research on Social Work Practice 22.2 (2012): 219-226. Longstaff, Patricia H., Nicholas J. Armstrong, Keli Perrin, Whitney May Parker, and Matthew A. Hidek. “Building Resilient Communities: A Preliminary Framework for Assessment.” Homeland Security Affairs 6.3 (2010): 1-23. ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=6.3.6>. McGhee, Derek. The End of Multiculturalism? Terrorism, Integration and Human Rights. Maidenhead: Open U P, 2008.Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2000. Mohaupt, Sarah. “Review Article: Resilience and Social Exclusion.” Social Policy and Society 8 (2009): 63-71.Mouritsen, Per. "The Culture of Citizenship: A Reflection on Civic Integration in Europe." Ed. R. Zapata-Barrero. Citizenship Policies in the Age of Diversity: Europe at the Crossroad." Barcelona: CIDOB Foundation, 2009: 23-35. Mouritsen, Per. “Political Responses to Cultural Conflict: Reflections on the Ambiguities of the Civic Turn.” Ed. P. Mouritsen and K.E. Jørgensen. Constituting Communities. Political Solutions to Cultural Conflict, London: Palgrave, 2008. 1-30. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Intr. Fernando Coronil and Bronislaw Malinowski. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1995 [1940]. Robins, Kevin. The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Final Report on the Transversal Study on Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity. Culture and Cultural Heritage Department. Strasbourg: Council of European Publishing, 2006. Rutter, Michael. “Protective Factors in Children’s Responses to Stress and Disadvantage.” Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore 8 (1979): 324-38. Stein, Mark. “The Location of Transculture.” Transcultural English Studies: Fictions, Theories, Realities. Eds. F. Schulze-Engler and S. Helff. Cross/Cultures 102/ANSEL Papers 12. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 251-266. Ungar, Michael. “Resilience across Cultures.” British Journal of Social Work 38.2 (2008): 218-235. First published online 2006: 1-18. In-text references refer to the online Advance Access edition ‹http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2006/10/18/bjsw.bcl343.full.pdf>. VanBreda, Adrian DuPlessis. Resilience Theory: A Literature Review. Erasmuskloof: South African Military Health Service, Military Psychological Institute, Social Work Research & Development, 2001. Weine, Stevan. “Building Resilience to Violent Extremism in Muslim Diaspora Communities in the United States.” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 5.1 (2012): 60-73. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation World. Eds. M. Featherstone and S. Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194-213. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. Vulnerable But Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of\ Resilience and Youth. New York: McGraw Hill, 1982. NotesThe concept of ‘resilience capital’ I offer here is in line with one strand of contemporary theorising around resilience – that of resilience as social or socio-ecological capital – but moves beyond the idea of enhancing general social connectedness and community cohesion by emphasising the ways in which culturally diverse communities may already be robustly networked and resourceful within micro-communal settings, with new resources and knowledge both to draw on and to offer other communities or the ‘national community’ at large. In effect, ‘resilience capital’ speaks to the importance of finding ‘the communities within the community’ (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan 11) and recognising their capacity to contribute to broad-scale resilience and recovery.I am indebted for the discussion of the literature on resilience here to Dr Peta Stephenson, Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, who is working on a related project (M. Grossman and H. Tahiri, Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism, forthcoming 2014).

IntroductionThis article explores the work of lists in mediating the materiality and complexity of everyday life. In contemporary cultural contexts the endless proliferation of listing forms and practices takes on a “self-reflexivity” that signals their functional and productive role in negotiating the everyday. Grocery lists, to do lists, and other fragmentary notes work as personal tools for ordering and managing daily needs and activities. But what do these fragments tell us about the work of lists? Do they “merely” describe or provide analytical insight into the everyday? To address these questions we explore the issues and anxieties raised by everyday consumption drawing on theories of everyday life. These concerns, which are examined in detail in the second part of the paper, lie at the heart of French writer Georges Perec’s interest in the “infra-ordinary”—that which resides within the everyday. In the parts of his writing that he designated in retrospect as “sociological,” Perec takes the form and function of lists as a starting point for a range of literary experiments that work as tools of discovery and invention capable in their seeming banality of both mapping and disrupting everyday life. Les Choses (Things) and Je Me Souviens (I Remember), for example, take the form of endless and repetitious lists of things, places, people, and memories, collections of fragments that aim to achieve a new kind of sociology of everyday life. While this project may be contentious in terms of its “representativeness,” as a discursive method or mode of ethnographic practice (Becker) it points to the generative power of lists as both of the everyday and as an analytical tool of discovery for understanding the everyday. Perec’s sociology of the everyday is not, we argue, articulated as a form of a cohesive or generalizable characterisation of social institutions, but rather emerges as an “invent-ory” of the rich texture and disjunctures that populated his everyday spaces, personal encounters, and memories. Lists and the EverydayTo see lists as tools of common use, to paraphrase Spufford (2), is to place the list squarely within the realm of the everyday. A particular feature of the everyday—its “special quality,” as Highmore puts it—is that it is characterised by “the unnoticed, the inconspicuous, the unobtrusive” (Highmore 1). The everyday is enigmatic, elusive, difficult to grasp, and important because of this. In Maurice Blanchot’s famous formulation, “whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes” (14). Its pervasiveness renders it as platitude, but, as Blanchot adds, “this banality is also what is most important, if it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived” (13). This tension poses special challenges for critics of the everyday who must register it as a part of, as inhering in, “manifold lived experience” without it “dissolving” into “statistics, properties, data” when it is “made the object of study” (Sheringham 360). In short, as Fran Martin (2) points out, “even though it surrounds us completely and takes up the vast majority of our time, the everyday is extremely difficult to pin down.” It is a predicament that is made all the more difficult in light of the complicated entanglement of the everyday and consumer capitalism (Jagose; Lury; Schor and Holt). This close relationship between consumer objects—things—and everyday life (along with other historical factors), has profoundly shifted critical understanding of the processes of subject formation and identity performance. One influential formulation of these transformations, associated most strongly with the work of Giddens and Beck, is captured in the notion of “reflexive modernity.” This refers to the understanding that, increasingly, at a broader societal level, “the very idea of controllability, certainty or security” is being challenged (Beck, World Risk Society 2)—developments that impact directly on how self-identity is formed (Giddens), reformed and performed (Hall). Faced with such upheavals, it is suggested that the individual increasingly “must produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves” (Beck, “Reinvention” 13), they must self-reflexively “invent” themselves. As Slater puts it, individuals, by force of circumstance, are required to “choose, construct, interpret, negotiate, display who they are to be seen as” (84) using a wide array of resources, both material and symbolic. Consumerism, it is widely argued, proffers its goods as solutions to these problems of identity (Slater 85). For instance, Adam Arvidsson notes how goods are used in the construction of “social relations, shared emotions, personal identity or forms of community” (18). This is particularly the case in relation to lifestyle consumption, which for Chaney (11) functions as a response to the loss of meaning in modern life following the sorts of larger societal upheavals described by Giddens and Beck and others. The general implication of lifestyle consumption across its various forms is that “‘every choice’ […] all acts of purchase or consumption, […] ‘are decisions not only about how to act but who to be’” (Warde in Slater 85). It is here that we can place the contemporary work of lists and the proliferation of list forms and practices. Lists figure in vital ways within this context of consumer-based everyday life. At a general level, lists assist us in making sense of the activities, objects, and experiences that feed and constitute daily life. In this sense, the list is a crucial mediating device, a means of organising things and bringing the mundanities and the exigencies of the everyday under control:The list categorises the ongoing chores of everyday life: organising and managing shopping, work, laundry, meetings, parking fines, and body management. (Crewe 33)In relation to lifestyle consumption, lists and inventories constitute one key way in which “we attempt to organise and order consumption” (Crewe 29). In this sense, lists are, for Louise Crewe, important “scripting devices that help us to manage the mundanity and weighty materiality of consumption” (Crewe 29). The use of the phrase “scripting device” is important here insofar as it suggests a double-movement in which lists simultaneously serve as “devices for regulating and disciplining the consuming body” (that is, lists as “prompts” that encourage us to follow the “script” of consumer culture) and work productively to “narrate practice and desire” (part of the “scripting” of self-identity and performance) (Crewe 30).In developing and illustrating these ideas, Crewe draws on Bill Keaggy’s found shopping lists project. Originally a blog, and subsequently a book entitled Milk Eggs Vodka, Keaggy gathers (and offers humorous commentary on) a wide array of discarded shopping lists that range from the mundane, to the bizarre, to the profound, each, in their own way, surprisingly rich and revealing of the scribes who penned them. Individually, the lists relay, through object names, places, actions, and prompts, the mundane landscape of everyday consumption. For example: Zip lockIceBeerFruit (Keaggy 42) SunglassesShoesBeer$Food (Keaggy 205)Keaggy’s collection comes to life, however, through his own careful organisation of these personal fragments into meaningful categories delineated by various playful and humorous characteristics. This listing of lists performs a certain transformation that works only in accumulation, in the book’s organisation, and through Keaggy’s humorous annotations. That is, Keaggy’s deliberate organisation of the lists into categories that highlight certain features over others, and his own annotations, introduces an element of invention and play, and delivers up many unexpected insights into their anonymous compilers’ lives. This dual process of utilising the list form as a creative and a critical tool for understanding the everyday also lies at the heart of Georges Perec’s literary and sociological project. Georges Perec: Towards an Invent-ory of Everyday LifeThe work of the French experimental writer Georges Perec is particularly instructive in understanding the generative potential of the act of listing. Perec was especially attuned to the effectiveness and significance of lists in revealing what is important in the mundane and quotidian—what he calls the “infra-ordinary” or “endotic” (as opposed to the “extraordinary” and “exotic”). As shall be detailed below, Perec’s creative recuperation of the list form as a textual device and critical tool leads us to a fuller appreciation of how, in Crewe’s words, “the most mundane, ordinary, invisible, and seemingly uninteresting things can be as significant and revealing as the most dramatic” (44).Across Perec’s diverse literary output, lists figure repeatedly in ways that speak directly to their ability to shed light on the inner workings of the everyday—their ability to make the familiar strange (Highmore 12)—and to reveal the entangled interactions between everyday consumption and personal identity. It is in this second sense that lists operate in his novel Things: A Story of the Sixties (Les Choses, 1965), a book that the French philosopher Alain Badiou (20, note 1) describes as a “rigorous literary version of the Marxist theme of alienation—especially the prevalence of things over existence.” Things tells of the endeavours of Sylvie and Jérôme, a young Parisian couple who, in Bourdieu’s terms, attempt to improve their social position in part through the cultural capital resources they see as invested in consumer objects, in the “things” that they acquire and desire. Perec’s telling of this narrative is heavily populated with lists of these semiotically loaded objects of consumer desire, taste, and distinction. The book opens, for example, with a descriptive listing of the kinds of decorative elements that visitors would encounter in the entrance hall of an idealised, imagined Paris apartment the couple longed for:Your eye, first of all, would glide over the grey fitted carpet in the narrow, long and high-ceilinged corridor. Its walls would be cupboards, in light-coloured wood, with fittings of gleaming brass. Three prints, depicting, respectively, the Derby winner Thunderbird, a paddle-steamer named Ville-de-Montereau, and a Stephenson locomotive, would lead to a leather curtain hanging on thick, black, grainy wooden rings which would slide back at the merest touch. (Perec, Things 21) This (and other detailed) listing of idealised objects—which, as the book progresses, are set in stark opposition to their present lived reality—tells the reader a great deal about the two protagonists’ wants and desires (“they both possessed, alas, but a single passion, the passion for a higher standard of living, and it exhausted them”—Perec, Things 35), and wider collective identification with these desires. Indeed, such identifications clearly had wide social resonance in France (and elsewhere) with Things collecting the Prix Renaudot. The ability of lists to speak to collective social (not just individual) experience was also explored by Perec in Je me souviens (1978), a book modelled on a project by Joe Brainard and which comprised a series of personal recollections of largely unremarkable events, which, nevertheless, at the time, had gained some form of purchase within the collective psyche of the French people—in Perec’s words, a random list of “little fragments of the everyday, things which, in such and such a year, everyone more or less the same age has seen, or lived, or share, and which have subsequently disappeared or been forgotten” (cited in Adair 178). For example:(item 57) I remember that Christian Jacque divorced Renée Faure in order to marry Martine Carol.(item 247) I remember that De Gaulle had a brother named Paul who was director of the Foire de Paris. (cited in Adair 179)Both these texts are component parts in a larger project of Perec’s to develop “an anthropology of everyday life” (Perec, “Notes” 142 note §). Howard Becker has offered a challenging, though also somewhat ambivalent, critique of Perec’s “sociological” method in these and other texts, contrasting Perec’s descriptive ethnography with the work that social scientists do. Becker takes aim at the way Perec’s detailed listing of objects, people, events, and memories eschews narrative and sociological design, referring to Perec’s method as “proto-ethnography,” or “detailed ‘raw description’” (73). Yet Becker is also drawn in by the end products of that method: “As you read Perec’s descriptions, you increasingly succumb to the feeling (at least I do, and I think others do as well) that this is important, though you can’t say how” (71). Ultimately, his criticism decries Perec’s failure to impose an explicit order on his lists and fragments, perhaps missing the significance of the way they are always bounded and underpinned by a conceptual principle: “It does not seem to have the kind of cohesion, at least not obviously, that social scientists like to ascribe to a culture, a similarity or interlocking or affinity of the parts to one another…” (74). That is, Perec’s lists stand as fragments, but fragments that do add up to something, as Becker admits: “The whole is more than the parts” (69). This ambivalence points to the analytical potential Perec found within those fragments, the “raw description,” that can only be understood through the end product. It could be argued that his lists defy the very possibility of presenting the everyday as a cohesive whole, and promote instead the everyday in its rich texture, as repetition and disjuncture. This project presents itself, in short, as a sociology of the everyday, whilst subverting the functionalist traditions of sociological observation and classification (Boyne). As Perec asks of the habitual, “How are we to speak of [...] ‘common things,’ how to track them down rather, flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue [...]?” (Perec, “Approaches” 210). Lists (alongside other forms of description) play a vital role in this project and provide a partial answer to the above questions, and this is why Perec’s lists actively seek out the banal or quotidian. In addition to the examples cited above, fascination with enumeration of this kind is most strikingly realised in his essay, “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four” (Реrес, “Attempt” 244-249), and his later radio broadcast, “An Attempt at а Description of Things Seen at Mabillon Junction on 19 Мау 1978” (Bellos 640). At very least, Perec’s experiments serve as testimony to his ability to transform the trivial into the poetic—list-making as “invent-ory”. Importantly, however, Perec makes the shift from the inventory as a pragmatic listing form, “presenting a simple series of units,” “collected by a conceptual principle” (Belknap 2, 3), to a more transformative or analytical discursive practice. In all the above cases, Perec’s “accumulation is used in conjunction with other forms, devices, and intentions” (Bellos 670), such as, for instance, in the deployment of the list (the “invent-ory”) as an effective lever with which to pry open for inspection the seemingly inscrutable inner workings of everyday spaces, things, memories, in order that they might “speak of what is [and] of what we are” (Perec, “Approaches” 210).In this way, Perec’s use of lists (and various forms of categorisation) can be understood as a critique of the very possibility of stable method applied to classificatory ordering systems. In its place he promotes a set of practices that are oriented towards, and appropriate to, investigations of the everyday, rather than establishing scientific universals. At points in his work Perec expresses discomfort or even anxiety in taking the act of classification as a “method.” He begins his essay “Think/Classify,” for instance, by lamenting the “discursive deficiency” of his own use of classification in grasping the everyday, which at the same time calls “the thinkable and the classifiable into question” (189). And, yet, the act of listing, situated as it is for Perec firmly within the material contexts of particular activities and spaces, ultimately offers a productive means by which to understand, and negotiate, the everyday.ConclusionIn this paper we have examined the everyday work of lists and the functions that they serve in mediating the materiality and complexity of everyday life. In the first section of the paper, following Crewe, we explored the dual function of lists as scripting devices in simultaneously “disciplining” us as consumers as well and as a means of controlling the everyday in ways that also feed our sense of self-identity. In this sense lists are complex devices. Perec was especially attuned to the layers of complexity that attend our engagement with lists. In particular, as we explored in the second part of the paper, Perec saw lists as a critical and productive tool (an invent-ory) and used them to scrutinise common things in the hope that they might “speak of what is [and] of what we are” (Perec, “Approaches” 210). Lists remain, in this sense, an accessible discursive technology often surprising for their subtle revelations about the everyday even while they maintain adherence to an inherently recognisable form.In setting out the importance of his own “project,” and the need to question the habitual, Perec provides a set of instructions (his “pedagogic strategy”—Adair 177), presented as an approach (if not a method), and which signals his desire to critique the traditions of social science as a method of material and social ordering and analysis. Perec’s appropriation of this approach, this discursive technology, also works as a provocation, as a “project” that others might adopt. He prompts his readers to “make an inventory of your pockets, your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out” (Perec, “Approaches” 210). This is a challenge that was built upon in different ways by a number of writers inspired by the esprit of Perec’s approach to the everyday, associated also with “a wider cultural shift from systems and structures to practices and performances” (Sherringham 292). Sherringham, for instance, traces the “redirection of ethnographic scrutiny from the far to the near” in the work of Augé, Ernaux, Maspero and Réda amongst others (292-359). Perec’s lists thus serve as a series of provocations which still hold critical purchase, and the full implications of which are still to be realised.ReferencesAdair, Gilbert. “The Eleventh Day: Perec and the Infra-ordinary.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction XXIX.1 (2009): 176-88.Arvidsson, Adam. Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture. London: Routledge, 2006.Badiou, Alain. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2012.Beck, Ulrich. “The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization.” Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Eds. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. 1-55.---. World Risk Society. Malden, MA: Polity, 1999.Becker, Howard. “Georges Perec’s Experiments in Social Description.” Ethnography 2.1 (2001): 63-76.Bellos, David. Georges Perec: A Life in Words. London: Harvill, 1999.Blanchot, Maurice. “Everyday Speech.” Trans. Susan Hanson. Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 12-20.Boyne, Roy. “Classification.” Theory, Culture and Society 23.2-3 (2006): 21-30.Chaney, David. Lifestyles. London: Routledge, 1996.Crewe, Louise. “Life Itemised: Lists, Loss, Unexpected Significance, and the Enduring Geographies of Discard.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 27-46. Hall, Stuart. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” Modernity and Its Futures. Ed. Stuart Hall and Tony McGrew. Cambridge: Polity, 1992. 274-316.Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002.Jagose, Annamarie. “The Invention of Lifestyle.” Interpreting Everyday Culture. Ed. Fran Martin. London: Hodder Arnold, 2003. 109-23.Keaggy, Bill. Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found. Cincinnati: How Books, 2007. Lury, Celia. Consumer Culture. Oxford: Polity Press, 1996. Martin, Fran. “Introduction.” Interpreting Everyday Culture. Ed. Fran Martin. London: Hodder Arnold, 2003. 1-10.Perec, Georges. “Approaches to What?” Species of Spaces. 209-11.---. “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four.” Species of Spaces. 244-49.---. “Notes on What I’m Looking For.” Species of Spaces. 141-43.---. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Ed. and trans. John Sturrock. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1997.---. Things: A Story of the Sixties. Trans. David Bellos. London: Harvill, 1990.---. “Think/Classify.” Species of Spaces. 188-205.Schor, Juliet and Holt, Douglas B., eds. The Consumer Society Reader. New York: The New Press, 2011.Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 1997.

Apparently some people upon coming across [Down Syndrome dolls] were offended. […] Still, it’s curious, and telling, what gives offense. Was it the shock of seeing a doll not modeled on the normative form that caused such offense? Or the assumption that any representation of Down Syndrome must naturally intend ridicule? Either way, it would seem that we might benefit from an examination of such reactions—especially as they relate to instances of the idealisation of the human form that dolls […] represent. (Faulkner) IntroductionWhen Joanne Faulkner describes public criticism of dolls designed to look like they have Down Syndrome, she draws attention to the need for an examination of the way discourses of disability are communicated. She calls, in particular, for an interrogation of people’s reactions to the disruption of the idealised human form that most dolls adopt. The case of Down Syndrome dolls is fascinating, yet critical discussion of these dolls from a disability or cultural studies perspective is conspicuously lacking. To address this lack, this paper draws upon theories of the cultural construction of disability, beauty, and normalcy (Garland-Thompson, Kumari Campbell, Wendell), to explore the way ideas about disability are communicated and circulated. The dominant discourse of disability is medical, where people are diagnosed or identified as disabled if they meet certain criteria, or lists of physical impairments. These lists have a tendency to subsume the disparate qualities of disability (Garland-Thompson) and remove people considered disabled from the social and cultural world in which they live (Snyder and Mitchell 377). While Down Syndrome dolls, produced by Downi Creations and Helga’s European Speciality Toys (HEST) in the US and Europe respectively, are reflective of such lists, they also perform the cultural function of increasing the visibility of disability in society. In addition, the companies distributing these dolls state that they are striving for greater inclusion of people with Down Syndrome (Collins, Parks). However, the effect of the dominance of medicalised discourses of disability can be seen in the public reaction to these dolls. This paper seeks also to bring an interrogation of disability into dialogue with a critical analysis of the discursive function of lists.The paper begins with a consideration of lists as they have been used to define disability and organise knowledge within medicine, and the impact this has had on the position of disability within society. In order to differentiate itself from medical discourses, the emerging social model also relied on lists during the 1980s and 1990s. However, these lists also decontextualised disability by ignoring certain factors for political advantage. The social model, like medicine, tended to ignore the diversity of humanity it was apparently arguing for (Snyder and Mitchell 377). The focus then shifts to the image of Down Syndrome dolls and the ensuing negative interpretation of them focusing, in particular, on reader comments following a Mail Online (Fisher) article. Although the dolls were debated across the blogosphere on a number of disability, special needs parenting, and Down Syndrome specific blogs, people commenting on The Mail Online—a UK based conservative tabloid newspaper—offer useful insights into communication and meaning making around disability. People establish meanings about disability through communication (Hedlund 766). While cultural responses to disability are influenced by a number of paradigms of interpretation such as superstition, religion, and fear, this paper is concerned with the rejection of bodies that do not ascribe to cultural standards of beauty and seeks to explore this paradigm alongside and within the use of lists by the various models of disability. This paper interrogates the use of lists in the way meanings about disability are communicated through the medical diagnostic list, the Down Syndrome dolls, and reactions to them. Each list reduces the disparate qualities and experiences of disability, yet as a cultural artefact, these dolls go some way towards recognising the social and cultural world that medicalised discourses of disability ignore. Drawing on the use of lists within different frameworks of disability, this paper contrasts the individual, or medical, model of disability (that being disabled is a personal problem) with the social model (that exclusion due to disability is social oppression). Secondly, the paper compares the characteristics of Down Syndrome dolls with actual characteristics of Down Syndrome to conclude that these features aim to be a celebrated, not stigmatised, aspect of the doll. By reasserting alternative notions of the body, the dolls point towards a more diverse society where disability can be understood in relation to social oppression. However, these aims of celebration have not automatically translated to a more diverse understanding. This paper aims to complicate perceptions of disability beyond a rudimentary list of characteristics through a consideration of the negative public response to these dolls. These responses are an example of the cultural subjugation of disability.Lists and the Creation of Normative Cultural ValuesFor Robert Belknap, lists are the dominant way of “organizing data relevant to human functioning” (8). While lists are used in a number of ways and for a variety of purposes, Belknap divides lists into two categories—the practical and the literary. Practical lists store meanings, while literary lists create them (89). Belknap’s recognition of the importance of meaning making is particularly relevant to a cultural interrogation of disability. As Mitchell and Snyder comment:Disability’s representational “fate” is not so much dependant upon a tradition of negative portrayals as it is tethered to inciting the act of meaning-making itself. (6)Disability unites disparate groups of people whose only commonality is that they are considered “abnormal” (Garland-Thompson). Ableism—the beliefs, processes, and practices which produce the ideal body—is a cultural project in which normative values are created in an attempt to neutralise the fact that all bodies are out of control (Kumari Campbell). Medical models use diagnostic lists and criteria to remove bodies from their social and cultural context and enforce an unequal power dynamic (Snyder and Mitchell 377).By comparison, the social model of disability shifts the emphasis to situate disability in social and cultural practices (Goggin and Newell 36). Lists have also been integral to the formation of the social model of disability as theorists established binary oppositions between medical and social understandings of disability (Oliver 22). While these lists have no “essential meaning,” through discourse they shape human experience (Liggett). Lists bring disparate items together to structure meaning and organisation. According to Hedlund, insights into the experience of disability—which is neither wholly medical nor wholly social—can be found in the language we use to communicate ideas about disability (766). For example, while the recent production of children’s dolls designed to reflect a list of the physical features of Down Syndrome (Table 2) may have no inherent meaning, negative public reception reveals recognisable modes of understanding disability. Down Syndrome dolls are in stark contrast to dolls popularly available which assume a normative representation. For Blair and Shalmon (15), popular children’s toys communicate cultural standards of beauty. Naomi Wolf describes beauty as a socially constructed normative value used to disempower women in particular. The idealisation of the human form is an aspect of children’s toys that has been criticised for perpetuating a narrow conception of beauty (Levy 189). Disability is likewise subject to social construction and is part of a collective social reality beyond diagnostic lists (Hedlund 766).Organising Knowledge: The Social vs. Medical Model of DisabilityDisability has long been moored in medical cultures and institutions which emphasise a sterile ideal of the body based on a diagnosis of biological difference as deviance. For example, in 1866, John Langdon Down sought to provide a diagnostic classification system for people with, what would later come to be called (after him), Down Syndrome. He focused on physical features:The hair is […] of a brownish colour, straight and scanty. The face is flat and broad, and destitute of prominence. The cheeks are roundish, and extended laterally. The eyes are obliquely placed, and the internal canthi more than normally distant from one another. The palpebral fissure is very narrow. The forehead is wrinkled transversely from the constant assistance which the levatores palpebrarum derive from the occipito-frontalis muscle in the opening of the eyes. The lips are large and thick with transverse fissures. The tongue is long, thick, and is much roughened. The nose is small. The skin has a slight dirty yellowish tinge, and is deficient in elasticity, giving the appearance of being too large for the body. (Down)These features form what Belknap would describe as a “pragmatic” list (12). For Belknap, scientific classification, such as the description Langdon Down offers above, introduces precision and validation to the use of lists (167). The overt principle linking these disparate characteristics together is the normative body from which these features deviate. Medicalised discourses, such as Down’s list, have been linked with the institutionalisation of people with this condition and their exclusion from the broader community (Hickey-Moody 23). Such emphasis on criteria to proffer diagnosis removes and decontextualises bodies from the world in which they live (Snyder and Mitchell 370). This world may in fact be the disabling factor, rather than the person’s body. The social model emerged in direct opposition to medicalised definitions of disability as a number of activists with disabilities in the United Kingdom formed The Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) and concluded that people with disability are disabled not by their bodies but by a world structured to exclude their bodies (Finkelstein 13). By separating disability (socially created) from impairment (the body), disability is understood as society’s unwillingness to accommodate the needs of people with impairments. The British academic and disability activist Michael Oliver was central to the establishment of the social model of disability. Following the activities of the UPIAS, Oliver (re)defined disability as a “form of social oppression,” and created two lists (reproduced below) to distinguish between the social and individual (or medical) models of disability. By utilising the list form in this way, Oliver both provided a repository of information regarding the social model of disability and contextualised it in direct opposition to what he describes as the individual model. These lists present the social model as a coherent discipline, in an easy to understand format. As Belknap argues, the suggestion of order is a major tool of the list (98). Oliver’s list suggests a clear order to the emerging social model of disability—disability is a problem with society, not an individual. However, this list was problematic because it appeared to disregard impairment within the experience of disability. As the “impersonal became political” (Snyder and Mitchell 377), impairment became the unacknowledged ambiguity in the binary opposition the social model was attempting to create (Shakespeare 35). Nevertheless, Oliver’s lists successfully enforced a desired order to the social model of disability. The individual modelThe social modelPersonal tragedy theorySocial oppression theoryPersonal problemSocial problemIndividual treatmentSocial actionMedicalisationSelf helpProfessional dominanceIndividual and collective responsibilityExpertiseExperienceAdjustmentAffirmationIndividual identityCollective identityPrejudiceDiscriminationAttitudesBehaviourCareRightsControlChoicePolicyPoliticsIndividual adaptation Social changeTable 1 The Individual v Social Model of Disability (Oliver)The social model then went through a period of “lists,” especially when discussing media and culture. Positive versus negative portrayals of disability were identified and scholars listed strategies for the appropriate representation of disability (Barnes, Barnes Mercer and Shakespeare). The representations of impairment or the physical markers of disability were discouraged as the discipline concerned itself with establishing disability as a political struggle against a disabling social world. Oliver’s lists arrange certain “facts” about disability. Disability is framed as a social phenomenon where certain aspects are emphasised and others left out. While Oliver explains that these lists were intended to represent extreme ends of a continuum to illustrate the distinction between disability and impairment (33), these are not mutually exclusive categories (Shakespeare 35). Disability is not simply a list of physical features, nor is it a clear distinction between individual/medical and social models. By utilising lists, the social model reacts to and attempts to move beyond the particular ordering provided by the medical model, but remains tied to a system of classification that imposes order on human functioning. Critical analysis of the representation of disability must re-engage the body by moving beyond binaries and pragmatic lists. While lists organise data central to human functioning, systems of meaning shape the organisation of human experience. Down Syndrome dolls, explored in the next section, complicate the distinction between the medical and social models.Down Syndrome DollsThese dolls are based on composites of a number of children with Down Syndrome (Hareyan). Helga Parks, CEO of HEST, describes the dolls as a realistic representation of nine physical features of Down Syndrome. Likewise, Donna Moore of Downi Creations employed a designer to oversee the production of the dolls which boast 13 features of Down Syndrome (Velasquez). These features are listed in the table below. HEST Down Syndrome Dolls Downi CreationsSmall ears set low on head with a fold at the topSmall ears with a fold at the topEars set low on the headSmall mouthSmall mouthProtruding tongueSlightly protruding tongueShortened fingers Shortened fingersPinkie finger curves inwardAlmond shaped eyesAlmond-shaped eyesHorizontal crease in palm of handHorizontal crease in palm of handGap between first and second toeA gap between the first and second toesShortened toesFlattened back of headFlattened back of headFlattened bridge across nose Flattened bridge across noseOptional: An incision in the chest to indicate open-heart surgery Table 2: Down Syndrome Dolls (Parks, Velasquez) Achieving the physical features of Down Syndrome is significant because Parks and Moore wanted children with the condition to recognise themselves:When a child with Down’s syndrome [sic.] picks up a regular doll, he doesn’t see himself, he sees the world’s perception of “perfect.” Our society is so focused on bodily perfection. (Cresswell)Despite these motivations, studies show that children with Down Syndrome prefer to play with “typical dolls” that do not reflect the physical characteristics of Down Syndrome (Cafferty 49). According to Cafferty, it is possible that children prefer typical dolls because they are “more attractive” (49). Similar studies of diverse groups of children have shown that children prefer to play with dolls they perceive as fitting into social concepts of beauty (Abbasi). Deeply embedded cultural notions of beauty—which exclude disability (see Morris)—are communicated from childhood (Blair & Shalmon 15). Notions of bodily perfection dominate children’s toys and Western culture in general as Cresswell comments above. Many bodies, not just those deemed “disabled,” do not conform to these cultural standards. Cultural ideals of beauty and an idealisation of the human body according to increasingly narrow parameters are becoming conflated with conceptions of normality (Wendell 86). Recognition of disability as subject to cultural rejection allows us to see “beauty and normalcy [as] a series of practices and positions [taken] in order to avoid the stigmatization of ugliness and abnormality” (Garland-Thompson). The exaggerated features of the doll problematise the idea that people with disability should strive to appear as nondisabled as possible and in turn highlights that some people, such as those with Down Syndrome, cannot “pass” as nondisabled and must therefore navigate a life and community that is not welcoming. While lists of the features of Down Syndrome store associated medicalised meanings, the discussion of the dolls online (the medium through which they are sold) provides insight into the cultural interpretation of disability and the way meaning is made. The next section of the paper considers a selection of negative responses to the Down Syndrome dolls that followed an article published in Mail Online (Fisher). What Causes Offence? Prior to Down Syndrome dolls, the majority of “disability dolls” were constructed through their accessories rather than through the dolls’ physical form and features. Wheelchairs, white canes, guide dogs and harnesses, plastic walkers, leg braces, and hearing aids could be purchased for use with dolls. Down Syndrome dolls look different as the features of impairment are embedded in the dolls’ construction. While accessories have a more temporary feel about them, the permanence of the impairments attributed to the doll was problematic for some who felt it projected a negative image of disability. Listed below are several negative comments following an article published in Mail Online (Fisher):What a grim world we are living in. No longer are dollies for play, for make believe, or for fun. Now it all about self image and psychological “help.” We “disabled” know we are “disabled”—we don’t need a doll to remind us of that! Stop making everything PC; let children be children and play and laugh once again!I think it’s sick and patronising.Who on earth are those education “experts?” Has nobody told them that you don’t educate children by mirroring their defects/weaknesses/negative traits but by doing exactly the opposite, mirroring back the BEST in them?The Downs Syndrome doll looks like they took the physical traits and presented them in an exaggerated way to make them more noticeable. That doll does not look attractive to me at all. If someone has a child that WANTS such a doll, fine. I can’t really see how it would help many of them, it would be like a huge sign saying “You are different.”The terminology used (grim, sick, patronising, defect, weak, negative, unattractive, different) to describe disability in these posts is significant. These descriptions are ideological categories which disadvantage and devalue “bodies that do not conform to certain cultural standards” (Garland-Thompson). Implicit and explicit in all of these comments is the sense that disability and Downs Syndrome in particular is undesirable, unattractive even. When listed together, like Belknap’s literary lists, they are not random or isolated interpretations; they form part of a larger system of meaning making around disability.These responses are informed by the notion that in order to gain equality in society, people with disability must suppress their difference and focus instead on how they are really just like everybody else. However, this focus ignores barriers to inclusion, such as in the rejection of bodies that do not ascribe to cultural standards of beauty. An increasing visibility of impairment in popular culture such as children’s toys advances an understanding of disability as diversity through difference and not something inherently bad. ConclusionPeter Laudin of Pattycake Doll, a company which sells Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Disabled dolls, has found that children “love all dolls unconditionally whether it’s special needs or not” (Lee Adam). He suggests that the majority of the negative responses to the Down Syndrome dolls stem from prejudice (Lee Adam). Dolls popularly available idealise the human form and assume a normative representation. While this has been criticised for communicating damaging standards of beauty from childhood (Levy, Blair and Shalmon), critiques about disability are not as widely understood. The social and medical models of disability focus attention on certain aspects of disability through lists; however, the reduction of diagnostic criteria in the form of a list (whether medical or social) decontextualises disability from the social and cultural world. Thus, the list form, while useful, has elided the disparate qualities of disability. As Belknap argues, lists “ask us to make them meaningful” (xv). Although the dolls discussed in this paper have been criticised for stereotyping and emphasising the difference between children with disability and those without, an inclusion of the physical features of Down Syndrome is consistent with recent moves within critical disability studies to re-engage the body (Shakespeare 35). As Faulkner notes in the epigraph to this paper, an examination of negative reactions to these dolls reveals much about the cultural position of people with disability. References Abbasi, Jennifer. “Why 6-Year Old Girls Want to be Sexy.” Live Science 16 July (2012). 30 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.livescience.com/21609-self-sexualization-young-girls.html›. Barnes, Colin. Disabling Imagery and the Media: An Exploration of the Principles for Media Representations of Disabled People. Krumlin Halifax: Ryburn Publishing, 1992. 5 Aug. 2012 http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/archiveuk/Barnes/disabling%20imagery.pdf.Barnes, Colin, Geoff Mercer, and Tom Shakespeare. Exploring Disability: A Sociological Introduction. Malden: Polity Press, 1999.Belknap, Robert. The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing. New Haven: Yale U P, 2004.Blair, Lorrie, and Maya Shalmon. “Cosmetic Surgery and the Cultural Construction of Beauty.” Art Education 58.3 (2005): 14-18.Cafferty, Diana De Rosa. A Doll Like Me: Do Children with Down Syndrome Prefer to Play with Dolls That Have the Physical Features Associated with Down Syndrome? MS thesis. U of California, 2012. Campbell, Fiona Kumari. Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.Collins, Allyson. “Dolls with Down Syndrome May Help Kids.” ABC News. 27 Jun. 2008. 4 Oct. 2012 ‹http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Parenting/story?id=5255393&page=1#.UGzQXK6T-XP›. Cresswell, Adam. “Dolls with Disability Divide Opinion.” The Australian 12 Jul. 2008. 26 Dec. 2008 ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24000338-23289,00.html›.Down, John Langdon. “Observations on an Ethnic Classification of Idiots.” Neonatology on the Web. 1866. 3 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.neonatology.org/classics/down.html›.Faulkner, Joanne “Disability Dolls.” What Sorts of People? 26 Jun. 2008. 29 Aug. 2012 ‹http://whatsortsofpeople.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/disability-dolls/›.Finkelstein, Vic. “Representing Disability.” Disabling Barriers—Enabling Environments. Ed. John Swain, et al. Los Angeles: Sage, 2004. 13-20.Fisher, Lorraine. “Parents’ Fury at ‘Down's Syndrome Dolls’ Designed to Help Children Deal with Disability.” Mail Online 7 Jul. 2008. 26 Dec. 2008. ‹http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1032600/Parents-fury-Downs-Syndrome-dolls-designed-help-children-deal-disability.html›. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Re-Shaping, Re-Thinking, Re-Defining: Feminist Disability Studies.” The Free Library 1 Jan. 2008. 3 Aug. 2012. ‹http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Re-shaping, Re-thinking, Re-defining: Feminist Disability Studies.-a084377500›.Goggin, Gerard and Christopher Newell. Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid. Sydney: U of New South Wales, 2005.Hareyan, Armen. “Using Dolls to Reduce the Stigma of Down Syndrome.” EMax Health. 4 Dec. 2008. Jan 2009 ‹http://www.emaxhealth.com/7/22865.html›.Hedlund, Marianne. “Disability as a Phenomenon: A Discourse of Social and Biological Understanding.” Disability & Society. 15.5 (2000): 765-80.Hickey-Moody, Anna. Unimaginable Bodies. Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2009.Lee Adams, William. “New Dolls on the Block.” Time Magazine 19 Mar. 2009. 13 Dec. 2009. ‹http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1886457,00.html›.Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Collingwood: Black Inc. 2010.Liggett, Helen. “Stars are not Born: An Interpretive Approach to the Politics of Disability” in Disability Studies: Past Present and Future. Ed. Len Barton and Mike Oliver. Leeds: The Disability Press, 1997. 178-194.Mitchell, David and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor, The U of Michigan P, 2000.Morris, Jenny “A Feminist Perspective.” Framed. Ed. Ann Pointon & Chris Davies. London: British Film Institute, 1997. 21-30. Oliver, Michael. Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.Parks, Helga. “New Doll Is Child’s Best Friend.” HEST Press Release, 2005. Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs. London: Routledge, 2006.Snyder, Sharon, and David Mitchell. “Re-Engaging the Body: Disability Studes and the Resistance to Embodiment.” Public Culture 13.3 (2001): 367-89.Velasquez, Leticia. “Downi Creations.” 2007. 4 Dec. 2009. ‹http://cause-of-our-joy.blogspot.com/2007/08/downi-creations.html›.Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge, 1996.Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002 [1991].

In a listicle on becomingminimalist.com, Joshua Becker argues that advances in personal computing have contributed to the growing popularity of the minimalist lifestyle. Becker explains that computational media can efficiently absorb physical artefacts like books, photo albums, newspapers, clocks, calendars, and more. In Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Happy Old Year (2019, ฮาวทูทิ้ง ทิ้งอย่างไร..ไม่ให้เหลือเธอ) the protagonist Jean also argues that material possessions are wasteful and unnecessary in the era of cloud storage. In the film, she redesigns her old-fashioned and messy childhood home to create a minimalist home office. In decluttering their material possessions through a partial reliance on computational storage, Jean and Becker conveniently dispense with the materiality of informational infrastructures and digital archives. Informational technology’s ever-growing capacity for storage and circulation also intensify anxieties about clutter. During our online interactions, we inadvertently leave an amassing trail of metadata behind that allows algorithms to “personalise” our interfaces. Consequently, our interfaces are “cluttered” with recommendations that range from toothpaste to news, movies, clothes, and more, based on a narrow and homophilic comparison of datasets. Notably, this hypertrophic trail of digital clutter threatens to overrepresent and blur personal identities. By mindfully reducing excessive consumption and discarding wasteful possessions, our personal spaces can become tidy and coherent. On the other hand, there is little that individuals can do to control nonhuman forms of digital accumulation and the datafied archives that meticulously record and store our activities on a micro-temporal scale. In this essay, I explore archive fever as the prosthetic externalisation of memory across physical and digital spaces. Paying close attention to Sianne Ngai’s work on vernacular aesthetic categories and Susanna Paasonen’s exploration of equivocal affective sensations, I study how advocates of minimalist design seek to recuperate our fraught capacities for affective experience in the digital era. In particular, I examine how Thamrongrattanarit problematises minimalist design, prosthetic memory, and the precarious materiality of digital media in Happy Old Year and Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy (2013, แมรี่ อีส แฮปปี้, แมรี่ อีส แฮปปี้). Transmedial Minimalist Networks and Empty Spaces Marie Kondo famously teaches us how to segregate objects that spark joy from material possessions that can be discarded (Kondo). The KonMari method has a strong transmedial presence with Kondo’s bestselling books, her blog and online store, a Netflix series, and sticky memes that feature her talking about objects that do not spark joy. It is interesting to note the rising popularity of prescriptive minimalist lifestyle blogs that utilise podcasts, video essays, tutorials, apps, and more to guide the mindful selection of essential material possessions from waste. Personal minimalism is presented as an antidote to late capitalist clutter as self-help gurus appear across our computational devices teach us how we can curb our carbon footprints and reduce consumerist excess. Yet, as noted by Katherine Hayles, maximal networked media demands a form of hyper-attention that implicates us in multiple information streams at once. There is a tension between the overwhelming simultaneity in the viewing experience of transmedial minimalist lifestyle networks and the rhetoric of therapeutic selection espoused in their content. In their ethnographic work with minimalists, Eun Jeong Cheon and Norman Makoto Su explore how mindfully constructed empty spaces can serve as a resource for technological design (Cheon and Su). Cheon and Su note how empty spaces possess a symbolic and functional value for their respondents. Decluttered empty spaces offer a sensuous experience for minimalists in coherently representing their identity and serve as a respite from congested and busy cities. Furthermore, empty spaces transform the home into a meaningful site of reflection about people’s objects and values as minimalists actively work to reduce their ownership of physical artefacts and the space that material possessions occupy in their homes and minds: the notion of gazing upon empty spaces is not simply about reading or processing information for minimalists. Rather, gazing gives minimalists, a visual indicator of their identity, progress, and values. (Cheon and Su 10) Instead of seeking to fill and augment empty space, Cheon and Su ask what it might mean to design technology that appreciates the absence of information and the limitation of space. The Interestingness of “Total Design and Internet Plenitude” Sianne Ngai argues that in a world where we are constantly hailed as aesthetic subjects, our aesthetic experiences grow increasingly fragile and ineffectual (Ngai 2015). Ngai further contends that late capitalism makes the elite exaggeration of the autonomy of art (at auction houses, mega-exhibitions, biennales, and more) concurrently possible with the hyper-aestheticisation of everyday life. The increase in inconsequential aesthetic experiences mirrors a larger habituation to aesthetic novelty along with the loss of the traditional friction between art and the commodity form: in tandem with these seismic changes to longstanding ideas of art’s vocation, weaker aesthetic categories crop up everywhere, testifying in their very proliferation to how, in a world of “total design and Internet plenitude”, aesthetic experience while less rarefied also becomes less intense. (Ngai 21) Ngai offers us the cute, interesting, and zany as the key vernacular categories that describe aesthetic experience in “the hyper-commodified, information-saturated, and performance-driven conditions of late-capitalist culture” (1). Aesthetic experience no longer subscribes to an exceptionally single feeling but is located at the ambiguous mixture of mundane affect. Susanna Paasonen notes how Ngai’s analysis of an everyday aesthetic experience that is complex and equivocal helps explain how seemingly contradictory and irreconcilable affective tensions might in fact be mutually co-dependent with each other (Paasonen). By critiquing the broad and binary generalisations about addiction and networked technologies, Paasonen emphasises the ambivalent and fleeting nature of affective formation in the era of networked media. Significantly, Paasonen explores how ubiquitous networked infrastructures bind us in dynamic sensations of attention and distraction, control and helplessness, and boredom and interest. For Ngai, the interesting is a “low, often hard-to-register flicker of affect accompanying our recognition of minor differences from a norm” (18). There is a discord between knowledge and feeling (and cognition and perception) at the heart of the interesting. We are drawn to the interesting object after noticing something peculiar about it and yet, we are simultaneously at a loss of knowledge about the exact contents of that peculiarity. The "interesting" is embodied in the seriality of constant circulation and a temporal experience of in-betweenness and anticipation in a paradoxical era of routinised novelty. Ngai notes how in the 1960s, many minimalist conceptual artists were preoccupied with tracking the movement of objects and information by transport and communication technologies. In offering a representation of networks of circulation, “merely interesting” conceptual art disseminates information about itself and makes technologies of distribution central to its process of production. The interesting is a pervasive aesthetic judgment that also explains our affectively complex rapport with information in the context of networked technologies. Acclimatised to the repetitive tempos of internet browsing and circular refreshing, Paasonen notes we often oscillate between boredom and interest during our usage of networked media. As Ngai explains, the interesting is “a discursive aesthetic about difference in the form of information and the pathways of its movement and exchange” (1). It is then “interesting” to explore how Thamrongrattanarit tracks the circulation of information and the pathways of transmedial exchange across Twitter and cinema in Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy. Digital Memory in MIHMIH Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy is adapted from a set of 410 consecutive tweets by Twitter user @marymaloney. The film instantiates the phatic, ephemeral flow of a Twitter feed through its deadpan and episodic narrative. The titular protagonist Mary is a fickle-headed high-school senior trying to design a minimalist yearbook for her school to preserve their important memories. Yet, the sudden entry of an autocratic principal forces her to follow the school administration’s arbitrary demands and curtail her artistic instincts. Ultimately, Mary produces a thick yearbook that is filled with hagiographic information about the anonymous principal. Thamrongrattanarit offers cheeky commentary about Thailand’s authoritarian royalist democracy where the combination of sudden coups and unquestioning obedience has fostered a peculiar environment of political amnesia. Hagiographic and bureaucratic informational overload is presented as an important means to sustain this combination of veneration and paranoia. @marymaloney’s haphazard tweets are superimposed in the film as intertitles and every scene also draws inspiration from the tweet displayed in an offhand manner. We see Mary swiftly do several random and unexplained things like purchase jellyfishes, sleep through a sudden trip to Paris, rob a restaurant, and more in rapid succession. The viewer is overwhelmed because of a synchronised engagement with two different informational currents. We simultaneously read the tweet and watch the scene. The durational tension between knowing and feeling draws our attention to the friction between conceptual interpretation and sensory perception. Like the conceptual artists of the 1960s, Thamrongrattanarit also shows “information in the act of being circulated” (Ngai 157). Throughout the film, we see Mary and her best friend Suri walk along emptied railway tracks that figuratively represent the routes of informational circulation across networked technologies. With its quirky vignettes and episodic narrative progression, MIHMIH closely mirrors Paasonen’s description of microevents and microflow-like movement on social media. The film also features several abrupt and spectacular “microshocks” that interrupt the narrative’s linear flow. For example, there is a running gag about Mary’s cheap and malfunctioning phone frequently exploding in the film while she is on a call. The repetitive explosions provide sudden jolts of deadpan humour. Notably, Mary also mentions how she uses bills of past purchases to document her daily thoughts rather than a notebook to save paper. The tweets are visually represented through the overwhelming accumulation of tiny bills that Mary often struggles to arrange in a coherent pattern. Thamrongrattanarit draws our attention to the fraught materiality of digital memory and microblogging that does not align with neat and orderly narrativisation. By encouraging a constant expression of thoughts within its distinctive character limit, Twitter promotes minimal writing and maximal fragmentation. Paasonen argues that our networked technologies take on a prosthetic function by externalising memory in their databases. This prosthetic reserve of datafied memory is utilised by the algorithmic unconscious of networked media for data mining. Our capacities for simultaneous multichannel attention and distraction are increasingly subsumed by capital’s novel forms of value extraction. Mary’s use of bills to document her diary takes on another “interesting” valence here as Thamrongrattanarit connects the circulation of information on social media with monetary transactions and the accumulation of debt. While memory in common parlance is normally associated with acts of remembrance and commemoration, digital memory refers to an address for storage and retrieval. Wendy Chun argues that software conflates storage with memory as the computer stores files in its memory (Chun). Furthermore, digital memory only endures through ephemeral processes of regeneration and degeneration. Even as our computational devices move towards planned obsolescence, digital memory paradoxically promises perpetual storage. The images of dusty and obsolete computers in MIHMIH recall the materiality of the devices whose databases formerly stored many prosthetic memories. For Wolfgang Ernst, digital archives displace cultural memory from a literary-based narrativised framework to a calculative and mathematical one as digital media environments increasingly control how a culture remembers. As Jussi Parikka notes “we are miniarchivists ourselves in this information society, which could be more aptly called an information management society” (2). While traditional archives required the prudent selection and curation of important objects that will be preserved for future use on a macro temporal scale, the Internet is an agglomerative storage and retrieval database that records information on a micro temporal scale. The proliferation of agglomerative mini archives also create anxieties about clutter where the miniarchivists of the “information-management society” must contend with the effects of our ever-expanding digital trail. It is useful to note how processes of selection and curation that remain central to minimalist decluttering can be connected with the design of a personal archive. Ernst further argues that digital memory cannot be visualised as a place where objects lay in static rest but is better understood as a collection of mini archives in motion that become perceptible because of dynamic signal-based processing. In MIHMIH, memory inscription is associated with the “minimalist” yearbook that Mary was trying to create along with the bills where she documents her tweets/thoughts. At one point, Mary tries to carefully arrange her overflowing bills across her wall in a pattern to make sense of her growing emotional crisis. Yet, she is overwhelmed by the impossibility of this task. Networked media’s storage of prosthetic memory also makes self-representation ambiguous and messy. As a result, Mary’s story does align with cathartic and linear narrativisation but a messy agglomerative database. Happy Old Year: Decluttering to Mend Prosthetic Memories Kylie Cardell argues that the KonMari method connects tidiness to the self-conscious design of a curated personal archive. Marie Kondo associates decluttering with self-representation. "As Kondo is acutely aware, making memories is not simply about recuperating and preserving symbolic objects of the past, but is a future-oriented process that positions subjects in a peculiar way" (Cardell 2). This narrative formation of personal identity involves carefully storing a limited number of physical artefacts that will spark joy for the future self. Yet, we must segregate these affectively charged objects from clutter. Kondo encourages us to make intuitive judgments of conviction by overcoming ambivalent feelings and attachments about the past that are distributed over a wide set of material possessions. Notably, this form of decluttering involves archiving the prosthetic memories that dwell in our (analogue) material possessions. In Happy Old Year, Jean struggles to curate her personal archive as she becomes painfully aware of the memories that reside in her belongings. Interestingly, the film’s Thai title loosely translates as “How to Dump”. Jean has an urgent deadline to declutter her home so that it can be designed into a minimalist home office. Nevertheless, she gradually realises that she cannot coldly “dump” all her things and decides to return some of the borrowed objects to her estranged friends. This form of decluttering helps assuage her guilt about letting go of the past and allows her to (awkwardly and) elegantly honour her prosthetic memories. HOY reverses the clichéd before-after progression of events since we begin with the minimalist home and go back in flashbacks to observe its inundated and messy state. HOY’s after-before narrative along with its peculiar title that substitutes ‘new’ with ‘old’ alludes to the clashing temporalities that Jean is caught up within. She is conflicted between deceptive nostalgic remembrance and her desire to start over with a minimalist-blank slate that is purged of her past regrets. In many remarkable moments, HOY instantiates movement on computational screens to mirror digital media’s dizzying speeds of circulation and storage. Significantly, the film begins with the machinic perspective of a phone screen capturing a set of minimalist designs from a book. Jean refuses to purchase (and store) the whole book since she only requires a few images that can be preserved in her phone’s memory. As noted in the introduction, minimalist organisation can effectively draw on computational storage to declutter physical spaces. In another subplot, Jean is forced to retrieve a photo that she took years ago for a friend. She grudgingly searches through a box of CDs (a cumbersome storage device in the era of clouds) but ultimately finds the image in her ex-boyfriend Aim’s hard disk. As she browses through a folder titled 2013, her hesitant clicks display a montage of happy and intimate moments that the couple shared together. Aim notes how the computer often behaves like a time machine. Unlike Aim, Jean did not carefully organise and store her prosthetic memories and was even willing to discard the box of CDs that were emblematic of defunct and wasteful accumulation. Speaking about how memory is externalised in digital storage, Thamrongrattanarit notes: for me, in the digital era, we just changed the medium, but human relationships stay the same. … It’s just more complicated because we can communicate from a distance, we can store a ton of memories, which couldn’t have ever happened in the past. (emphasis added) When Jean “dumped” Aim to move to Sweden, she blocked him across channels of networked communicational media to avoid any sense of ambient intimacy between them. In digitising our prosthetic memories and maintaining a sense of “connected presence” across social media, micro temporal databases have made it nearly impossible to erase and forget our past actions. Minimalist organisation might help us craft a coherent and stable representation of personal identity through meticulous decluttering. Yet, late-capitalist clutter takes on a different character in our digital archives where the algorithmic unconscious of networked media capitalises on prosthetic storage to make personal identity ambiguous and untidy. It is interesting to note that Jean initially gets in touch with Aim to return his old camera and apologise for their sudden breakup. The camera can record events to “freeze” them in time and space. Later in the film, Jean discovers a happy family photo that makes her reconsider whether she has been too harsh on her father because of how he “dumped” her family. Yet, Jean bitterly finds that her re-evaluation of her material possessions and their dated prosthetic memories is deceptive. In overidentifying with the frozen images and her affectively charged material possessions, she is misled by the overwhelming plenitude of nostalgic remembrance. Ultimately, Jean must “dump” all her things instead of trying to tidy up the jumbled temporal frictions. In the final sequence of HOY, Jean lies to her friend Pink about her relationship with Aim. She states that they are on good terms. Jean then unfriends Aim on Facebook, yet again rupturing any possibility of phatic and ambient intimacy between them. As they sit before her newly emptied house, Pink notes how Jean can do a lot with this expanded space. In a tight close-up, Jean gazes at her empty space with an ambiguous yet pained expression. Her plan to cathartically purge her regrets and fraught memories by recuperating her prosthetic memories failed. With the remnants of her past self expunged as clutter, Jean is left with a set of empty spaces that will eventually resemble the blank slate that we see at the beginning of the film. The new year and blank slate signify a fresh beginning for her future self. However, this reverse transition from a minimalist blank slate to her chaotically inundated childhood home frames a set of deeply equivocal affective sensations. Nonetheless, Jean must mislead Pink to sustain the notion of tidy and narrativised coherence that equivocally masks her fragmented sense of an indefinable loss. Conclusion MIHMIH and HOY explore the unresolvable and conflicting affective tensions that arise in an ecosystem of all-pervasive networked media. Paasonen argues that our ability to control networked technologies concurrently fosters our mundane and prosthetic dependency on them. Both Jean and Mary seek refuge in the simplicity of minimalist design to wrestle control over their overstimulating spaces and to tidy up their personal narratives. It is important to examine contemporary minimalist networks in conjunction with affective formation and aesthetic experience in the era of “total design and internet plenitude”. In an information-management society where prosthetic memories haunt our physical and digital spaces, minimalist decluttering becomes a form of personal archiving that simultaneously empowers unambiguous aesthetic feeling and linear and stable autobiographical representation. The neatness of minimalist decluttering conjugates with an ideal self that can resolve ambivalent affective attachments about the past and have a coherent vision for the future. Yet, we cannot sort the clutter that resides in digital memory’s micro temporal archives and drastically complicates our personal narratives. Significantly, the digital self is not compatible with neat and orderly narrativisation but instead resembles an unstable and agglomerative database. References Cardell, Kylie. “Modern Memory-Making: Marie Kondo, Online Journaling, and the Excavation, Curation, and Control of Personal Digital Data.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.3 (2017): 499–517. DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2017.1337993. Cheon, Eun Jeong, and Norman Makoto Su. “The Value of Empty Space for Design.” Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018. DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3173623. Ernst, Wolfgang, and Jussi Parikka. Digital Memory and the Archive. U of Minnesota P, 2013. Happy Old Year. Dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit. Happy Ending Film, 2019. Hayles, N. Katherine. “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine.” ADE Bulletin (2010): 62-79. DOI: 10.1632/ade.150.62. Kondo, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Ten Speed Press, 2010. Kyong, Chun Wendy Hui. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. MIT P, 2013. Mankowski, Lukasz. “Interview with Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit: Happy Old Year Is Me in 100% for the First Time.” Asian Movie Pulse, 9 Feb. 2020. <http://asianmoviepulse.com/2020/02/interview-with-nawapol-thamrongrattanarit-2/>. Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy. Dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit. Pop Pictures, 2013. Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard UP, 2015. Paasonen, Susanna. Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media. MIT P, 2021. Stephens, Paul. The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

IntroductionCoffee, as a stimulant, and the spaces in which it is has been consumed, have long played a vital role in fostering communication, creativity, and sociality. This article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. In developing these themes, this article is structured in two parts. The first looks back to the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a historical context to the contemporary role of the café as a key site of creativity through its facilitation of social interaction, communication and information exchange. The second explores the continuation of the link between cafés, communication and creativity, through an instance from the mid-twentieth century where this process becomes individualised and is tied more intrinsically to the material surroundings of the café itself. From this, we argue that in order to understand the connection between café space and creativity, it is valuable to consider the rich polymorphic material and aesthetic composition of cafés. The Social Life of Coffee: London’s Coffee Houses While the social consumption of coffee has a long history, here we restrict our focus to a discussion of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the seventeenth century that the vogue of these coffee houses reached its zenith when they operated as a vibrant site of mercantile activity, as well as cultural and political exchange (Cowan; Lillywhite; Ellis). Many of these coffee houses were situated close to the places where politicians, merchants, and other significant people congregated and did business, near government buildings such as Parliament, as well as courts, ports and other travel route hubs (Lillywhite 17). A great deal of information was shared within these spaces and, as a result, the coffee house became a key venue for communication, especially the reading and distribution of print and scribal publications (Cowan 85). At this time, “no coffee house worth its name” would be without a ready selection of newspapers for its patrons (Cowan 173). By working to twenty-four hour diurnal cycles and heightening the sense of repetition and regularity, coffee houses also played a crucial role in routinising news as a form of daily consumption alongside other forms of habitual consumption (including that of coffee drinking). In Cowan’s words, “restoration coffee houses soon became known as places ‘dasht with diurnals and books of news’” (172). Among these was the short-lived but nonetheless infamous social gossip publication, The Tatler (1709-10), which was strongly associated with the London coffee houses and, despite its short publication life, offers great insight into the social life and scandals of the time. The coffee house became, in short, “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed” (Cowan 172). The proprietors of coffee houses were quick to exploit this situation by dealing in “news mongering” and developing their own news publications to supplement their incomes (172). They sometimes printed news, commentary and gossip that other publishers were not willing to print. However, as their reputation as news providers grew, so did the pressure on coffee houses to meet the high cost of continually acquiring or producing journals (Cowan 173; Ellis 185-206). In addition to the provision of news, coffee houses were vital sites for other forms of communication. For example, coffee houses were key venues where “one might deposit and receive one’s mail” (Cowan 175), and the Penny Post used coffeehouses as vital pick-up and delivery centres (Lillywhite 17). As Cowan explains, “Many correspondents [including Jonathan Swift] used a coffeehouse as a convenient place to write their letters as well as to send them” (176). This service was apparently provided gratis for regular patrons, but coffee house owners were less happy to provide this for their more infrequent customers (Cowan 176). London’s coffee houses functioned, in short, as notable sites of sociality that bundled together drinking coffee with news provision and postal and other services to attract customers (Cowan; Ellis). Key to the success of the London coffee house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the figure of the virtuoso habitué (Cowan 105)—an urbane individual of the middle or upper classes who was skilled in social intercourse, skills that were honed through participation in the highly ritualised and refined forms of interpersonal communication, such as visiting the stately homes of that time. In contrast to such private visits, the coffee house provided a less formalised and more spontaneous space of sociality, but where established social skills were distinctly advantageous. A striking example of the figure of the virtuoso habitué is the philosopher, architect and scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Hooke, by all accounts, used the opportunities provided by his regular visits to coffee houses “to draw on the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals, from servants and skilled laborers to aristocrats, as well as to share and display novel scientific instruments” (Cowan 105) in order to explore and develop his virtuoso interests. The coffee house also served Hooke as a place to debate philosophy with cliques of “like-minded virtuosi” and thus formed the “premier locale” through which he could “fulfil his own view of himself as a virtuoso, as a man of business, [and] as a man at the centre of intellectual life in the city” (Cowan 105-06). For Hooke, the coffee house was a space for serious work, and he was known to complain when “little philosophical work” was accomplished (105-06). Sociality operates in this example as a form of creative performance, demonstrating individual skill, and is tied to other forms of creative output. Patronage of a coffee house involved hearing and passing on gossip as news, but also entailed skill in philosophical debate and other intellectual pursuits. It should also be noted that the complex role of the coffee house as a locus of communication, sociality, and creativity was repeated elsewhere. During the 1600s in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), for example, coffee houses served as sites of intensive literary activity as well as the locations for discussions of art, sciences and literature, not to mention also of gambling and drug use (Hattox 101). While the popularity of coffee houses had declined in London by the 1800s, café culture was flowering elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the late 1870s in Paris, Edgar Degas and Edward Manet documented the rich café life of the city in their drawings and paintings (Ellis 216). Meanwhile, in Vienna, “the kaffeehaus offered another evocative model of urban and artistic modernity” (Ellis 217; see also Bollerey 44-81). Serving wine and dinners as well as coffee and pastries, the kaffeehaus was, like cafés elsewhere in Europe, a mecca for writers, artists and intellectuals. The Café Royal in London survived into the twentieth century, mainly through the patronage of European expatriates and local intellectuals such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, and Henri Bergson (Ellis 220). This pattern of patronage within specific and more isolated cafés was repeated in famous gatherings of literary identities elsewhere in Europe throughout the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, a picture emerges of how the social functions of the coffee house and its successors, the espresso bar and modern café, have shifted over the course of their histories (Bollerey 44-81). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffee house was an important location for vibrant social interaction and the consumption and distribution of various forms of communication such as gossip, news, and letters. However, in the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café was more commonly a site for more restricted social interaction between discrete groups. Studies of cafés and creativity during this era focus on cafés as “factories of literature, inciters to art, and breeding places for new ideas” (Fitch, The Grand 18). Central in these accounts are bohemian artists, their associated social circles, and their preferred cafés de bohème (for detailed discussion, see Wilson; Fitch, Paris Café; Brooker; Grafe and Bollerey 4-41). As much of this literature on café culture details, by the early twentieth century, cafés emerge as places that enable individuals to carve out a space for sociality and creativity which was not possible elsewhere in the modern metropolis. Writing on the modern metropolis, Simmel suggests that the concentration of people and things in cities “stimulate[s] the nervous system of the individual” to such an extent that it prompts a kind of self-preservation that he terms a “blasé attitude” (415). This is a form of “reserve”, he writes, which “grants to the individual a [certain] kind and an amount of personal freedom” that was hitherto unknown (416). Cafés arguably form a key site in feeding this dynamic insofar as they facilitate self-protectionism—Fitch’s “pool of privacy” (The Grand 22)—and, at the same time, produce a sense of individual freedom in Simmel’s sense of the term. That is to say, from the early-to-mid twentieth century, cafés have become complex settings in terms of the relationships they enable or constrain between living in public, privacy, intimacy, and cultural practice. (See Haine for a detailed discussion of how this plays out in relation to working class engagement with Paris cafés, and Wilson as well as White on other cultural contexts, such as Japan.) Threaded throughout this history is a clear celebration of the individual artist as a kind of virtuoso habitué of the contemporary café. Café Jama Michalika The following historical moment, drawn from a powerful point in the mid-twentieth century, illustrates this last stage in the evolution of the relationship between café space, communication, and creativity. This particular historical moment concerns the renowned Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who is most well-known for his avant-garde piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), his Polymorphia (1961), and St Luke Passion (1963-66), all of which entailed new compositional and notation techniques. Poland, along with other European countries devastated by the Second World War, underwent significant rebuilding after the war, also investing heavily in the arts, musical education, new concert halls, and conservatoria (Monastra). In the immediate post-war period, Poland and Polish culture was under the strong ideological influence exerted by the Soviet Union. However, as Thomas notes, within a year of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were flickering signs of moderation in Polish culture” (83). With respect to musical creativity, a key turning point was the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival of 1956. “The driving force” behind the first festival (which was to become an annual event), was Polish “composers’ overwhelming sense of cultural isolation and their wish to break the provincial nature of Polish music” at that time (Thomas 85). Penderecki was one of a younger generation of composers who participated in, and benefited from, these early festivals, making his first appearance in 1959 with his composition Strophes, and successive appearances with Dimensions of Time and Silence in 1960, and Threnody in 1961 (Thomas 90). Penderecki married in the 1950s and had a child in 1955. This, in combination with the fact that his wife was a pianist and needed to practice daily, restricted Penderecki’s ability to work in their small Krakow apartment. Nor could he find space at the music school which was free from the intrusion of the sound of other instruments. Instead, he frequented the café Jama Michalika off the central square of Krakow, where he worked most days between nine in the morning and noon, when he would leave as a pianist began to play. Penderecki states that because of the small space of the café table, he had to “invent [a] special kind of notation which allowed me to write the piece which was for 52 instruments, like Threnody, on one small piece of paper” (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). In this, Penderecki created a completely new set of notation symbols, which assisted him in graphically representing tone clustering (Robinson 6) while, in his score for Polymorphia, he implemented “novel graphic notation, comparable with medical temperature charts, or oscillograms” (Schwinger 29) to represent in the most compact way possible the dense layering of sounds and vocal elements that is developed in this particular piece. This historical account is valuable because it contributes to discussions on individual creativity that both depends on, and occurs within, the material space of the café. This relationship is explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Polyclinic”, where he develops an extended analogy between the writer and the café and the surgeon and his instruments. As Cohen summarises, “Benjamin constructs the field of writerly operation both in medical terms and as a space dear to Parisian intellectuals, as an operating table that is also the marble-topped table of a café” (179). At this time, the space of the café itself thus becomes a vital site for individual cultural production, putting the artist in touch with the social life of the city, as many accounts of writers and artists in the cafés of Paris, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe attest. “The attraction of the café for the writer”, Fitch argues, “is that seeming tension between the intimate circle of privacy in a comfortable room, on the one hand, and the flow of (perhaps usable) information all around on the other” (The Grand 11). Penderecki talks about searching for a sound while composing in café Jama Michalika and, hearing the noise of a passing tram, subsequently incorporated it into his famous composition, Threnody (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). There is an indirect connection here with the attractions of the seventeenth century coffee houses in London, where news writers drew much of their gossip and news from the talk within the coffee houses. However, the shift is to a more isolated, individualistic habitué. Nonetheless, the aesthetic composition of the café space remains essential to the creative productivity described by Penderecki. A concept that can be used to describe this method of composition is contained within one of Penderecki’s best-known pieces, Polymorphia (1961). The term “polymorphia” refers not to the form of the music itself (which is actually quite conventionally structured) but rather to the multiple blending of sounds. Schwinger defines polymorphia as “many formedness […] which applies not […] to the form of the piece, but to the broadly deployed scale of sound, [the] exchange and simultaneous penetration of sound and noise, the contrast and interflow of soft and hard sounds” (131). This description also reflects the rich material context of the café space as Penderecki describes its role in shaping (both enabling and constraining) his creative output. Creativity, Technology, Materialism The materiality of the café—including the table itself for Penderecki—is crucial in understanding the relationship between the forms of creative output and the material conditions of the spaces that enable them. In Penderecki’s case, to understand the origins of the score and even his innovative forms of musical notation as artefacts of communication, we need to understand the material conditions under which they were created. As a fixture of twentieth and twenty-first century urban environments, the café mediates the private within the public in a way that offers the contemporary virtuoso habitué a rich, polymorphic sensory experience. In a discussion of the indivisibility of sensation and its resistance to language, writer Anna Gibbs describes these rich experiential qualities: sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of “being in the café” (201). Gibbs’s point is that the world of the café is highly synaesthetic and infused with sensual interconnections. The din of the café with its white noise of conversation and overlaying sounds of often carefully chosen music illustrates the extension of taste beyond the flavour of the coffee on the palate. In this way, the café space provides the infrastructure for a type of creative output that, in Gibbs’s case, facilitates her explanation of expression and affect. The individualised virtuoso habitué, as characterised by Penderecki’s work within café Jama Michalika, simply describes one (celebrated) form of the material conditions of communication and creativity. An essential factor in creative cultural output is contained in the ways in which material conditions such as these come to be organised. As Elizabeth Grosz expresses it: Art is the regulation and organisation of its materials—paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials—according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and intensify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (4). Materialist and medium-oriented theories of media and communication have emphasised the impact of physical constraints and enablers on the forms produced. McLuhan, for example, famously argued that the typewriter brought writing, speech, and publication into closer association, one effect of which was the tighter regulation of spelling and grammar, a pressure toward precision and uniformity that saw a jump in the sales of dictionaries (279). In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, McLuhan sees the typewriter as enabling a patterned layout of text that functions as “a musical score for choral speech” (278). In the same way, the café in Penderecki’s recollections both constrains his ability to compose freely (a creative activity that normally requires ample flat surface), but also facilitates the invention of a new language for composition, one able to accommodate the small space of the café table. Recent studies that have sought to materialise language and communication point to its physicality and the embodied forms through which communication occurs. As Packer and Crofts Wiley explain, “infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape” (3). The confined and often crowded space of the café and its individual tables shape the form of productive output in Penderecki’s case. Targeting these material constraints and enablers in her discussion of art, creativity and territoriality, Grosz describes the “architectural force of framing” as liberating “the qualities of objects or events that come to constitute the substance, the matter, of the art-work” (11). More broadly, the design features of the café, the form and layout of the tables and the space made available for individual habitation, the din of the social encounters, and even the stimulating influences on the body of the coffee served there, can be seen to act as enablers of communication and creativity. Conclusion The historical examples examined above indicate a material link between cafés and communication. They also suggest a relationship between materialism and creativity, as well as the roots of the romantic association—or mythos—of cafés as a key source of cultural life as they offer a “shared place of composition” and an “environment for creative work” (Fitch, The Grand 11). We have detailed one example pertaining to European coffee consumption, cafés and creativity. While we believe Penderecki’s case is valuable in terms of what it can tell us about forms of communication and creativity, clearly other cultural and historical contexts may reveal additional insights—as may be found in the cases of Middle Eastern cafés (Hattox) or the North American diner (Hurley), and in contemporary developments such as the café as a source of free WiFi and the commodification associated with global coffee chains. Penderecki’s example, we suggest, also sheds light on a longer history of creativity and cultural production that intersects with contemporary work practices in city spaces as well as conceptualisations of the individual’s place within complex urban spaces. References Benjamin, Walter. “Polyclinic” in “One-Way Street.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1998: 88-9. Bollerey, Franziska. “Setting the Stage for Modernity: The Cosmos of the Coffee House.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 44-81. Brooker, Peter. Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. Houndmills, Hamps.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004. Fitch, Noël Riley. Paris Café: The Sélect Crowd. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2007. -----. The Grand Literary Cafés of Europe. London: New Holland Publishers (UK), 2006. Gibbs, Anna. “After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Siegworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 186-205. Grafe, Christoph, and Franziska Bollerey. “Introduction: Cafés and Bars—Places for Sociability.” Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display. Eds. Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey. New York: Routledge, 2007. 4-41. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Haine, W. Scott. The World of the Paris Café. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1985. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Krzysztof Penderecki. Dir. Andreas Missler-Morell. Spektrum TV production and Telewizja Polska S.A. Oddzial W Krakowie for RM Associates and ZDF in cooperation with ARTE, 2000. Lillywhite, Bryant. London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Abacus, 1974. Monastra, Peggy. “Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia and Fluorescence.” Moldenhauer Archives, [US] Library of Congress. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/moldenhauer/2428143.pdf› Packer, Jeremy, and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley. “Introduction: The Materiality of Communication.” Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. New York, Routledge, 2012. 3-16. Robinson, R. Krzysztof Penderecki: A Guide to His Works. Princeton, NJ: Prestige Publications, 1983. Schwinger, Wolfram. Krzysztof Penderecki: His Life and Work. Encounters, Biography and Musical Commentary. London: Schott, 1979. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: The Free P, 1960. Thomas, Adrian. Polish Music since Szymanowski. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. White, Merry I. Coffee Life in Japan. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Wilson, Elizabeth. “The Bohemianization of Mass Culture.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2.1 (1999): 11-32.

Introduction This paper explores some specific conjunctions that tie together two nations, Japan and the Philippines. Over the past 30 years both have become entwined as a transfer of people, cultures and societies have connected and formed some interesting developments. Relations between both countries have been highly influenced through the deployment of State intervention (historically colonial and post-colonial), as well as through actors’ initiatives, leading to the development of a complex network that links both countries. It is in these relations that I would like to locate a transition between two stages in Japan-Philippine relations. I argue, this is a transition, where marriages of one kind (international marriages), the bonding of social actors from two distinct cultural spheres, gives way to another form of marriage. This transition locates the term marriage as part of an ongoing process and a discursive realm in a larger ‘affective complex’ that has developed. In this paper, I focus on this term ‘affective complex’ as it offers some interesting avenues in order to understand the continuing development of relations between Japan and the Philippines. By ‘affective complex’ I refer to the ‘cultural responses’ that people use in reaction to situations in which they find themselves which are not mediated by language. I suggest that this complex is a product of a specific encounter that exists between two nations as understood and mediated by Japanese actors’ positionings vis-à-vis foreign resident Filipinos. In tracing a moment between Japan and the Philippines, I delineate emerging properties that currently allude to a transition in relations between both countries. I would like to show that the properties of this transition are creating an emergent phenomena, a complex? This is developing through interactions between human actors whose trajectories as transnational migrants and permanent foreign residents are coming under the scrutiny of Japanese State forces in a heavily contested discursive field. This paper focuses upon the nature of the complex that entwines both countries and examines Japan’s particular restructuring of parts of its workforce in an attempt to include foreign migrants. To do this I first offer an outline of my fieldwork and then delineate the complex that ties both countries within present theoretical boundaries. This paper is based on fieldwork which deals with the theme of International Marriages between Japanese and Filipino couples. In the field I have observed the different ways in which Filipinos or Japanese with a connection to the Philippines orientate themselves within Japanese society vis-à-vis the Philippines. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus exclusively on a particular moment in my field: a care-giver course run privately with approval and recognition from local government. This course was offered exclusively for Filipino nationals with permanent residency and a high level of Japanese. As part of a larger field, a number of overlapping themes and patterns were present within the attitudes of those participating in the course. These were cultural responses that social actors carry with them which constitute part of an ‘affective complex’, its gradual emergence and unfolding. To further locate this fieldwork and its theoretical boundaries, I also position this research within current understandings of complexity. Chesters and Welsh have referred to a complex system as being a non-linear, non-deterministic system. However, from my perspective, these parameters are insufficient if institutions, organisations and human actors exhibit linear and deterministic properties (properties that discursively capture, locate and define elements in a system). In my research, I am dealing with actors, in this case Filipinos who are seen first as recipients and then as providers of welfare services. Japanese actors act as suppliers of a service both to long-term residents and to the State. In this case the following question arises: whose ‘complexes’ may be defined by a mixture of both these parameters and how can it be possible to take into account relationships whose existence cuts across them? Could a complex not be any number of these terrains which have emerged through encounters between two countries? Marriage could be a starting point for complexes that can come under scrutiny at a higher level, that of the State forces. In addition, a study of complexity in the Social Sciences focuses on how structures form rather than by focusing on any prior structured existence. Any focus on a complex system is to analyze holistic multiple elements in order to descriptively locate structures, what they penetrate, and what they are penetrated by. Human actors’ actions, strategies and expectations merge under the influence of these structures, while simultaneously influencing them. As elements interact, emergent phenomena (properties that emerge at a higher level) show a system that is process dependent, organic, and always evolving (Arthur 109). Locating Affect Deleuze and Guattari refined the discursive realm to emphasise how spaces of creation, dialogue and the casting of influence are affective, institutional and State-influenced. Within these spaces I locate the existence of ‘affective complexes’ which are discursively constructed and deployed by local actors. I will to argue that international marriages have laid a groundwork in which ‘affect’ itself has become a catalyst, re-orientating perceptions of and toward Filipinos. Following Deleuze, we can understand ‘affect’ as an intensity which, to repeat, is an expression of human relationships not mediated directly through language (Rodriguez). However, I want to suggest ‘affect’ also comes under the scrutiny of, and is discursively appealed to by, State forces as ‘affective capital’. When I refer to ‘affective capital’ I mean the potential labour discursively constructed. This construction is then “projected and tapped” in response to the changing nature of Japan’s labour market – in particular, the shortage of care-givers. This construction itself exists as an ongoing management strategy that deals with certain foreign nationals in Japan. Here, in response to the transformations of service work, ‘affective capital’ is the commoditised value of care inherent the discourse. It is the kernel of ‘affective labour’. This was very clear in my fieldwork, wherein Filipinos were targeted exclusively as the recipients of training in the health-care sector based on an understanding of the form of ‘affect’ that they possess. In this context, ‘affect’ adds intensity to meaning and is used in a wide range of cultural contexts, yet its very essence eludes description, especially when that essence as used by ‘active agents’ may be misconstrued in its deployment or discursively captured. Returning to the Deleuzian interpretation of ‘affect’, it could be interpreted as the outcome of encounters between actors and as such, a ‘mode’ in which becoming can initiate possibilities. I refer to ‘affect’, the deployment of shared, performed, communicated non-verbal ‘content’, as a powerful tool and an essential component in everyday habituated practice. In other areas of my field (not included in this discussion), ‘affect’ deployed by both actors, husband and wife, within and beyond the family, manifests itself as a mode of being. This at times adds to the location of actors’ intentions, be they spoken or performative. In this sense, locating the ‘affect’ in my research has meant observing the way in which Filipinos negotiate the availability of life strategies and opportunities available to them. At the same time, ‘affect’ is also produced by Japanese actors realigning themselves vis-à-vis both foreign actors and social change, as well as by effectuating strategies to emergent situations in Japan such as care management. ‘Affective capital’ is an inherent long-term strategy which has its roots in the cultural resources at the disposal of non-Japanese partners who, over the years, in the short and long term put to use discursively produced ‘affect’. ‘Affect’, produced in reactions to situations, encounters and events, can work in favour of long-term residents who do not have access to the same conditions Japanese may find in the labour sector. From encounters in my fieldwork, the location of ‘affect’ is an asset not just within immediate relationships, but as a possible expression of strategies that have arisen in response to the recognition of reactionary elements in Japanese society. By reactionary elements I refer to the way in which a complex may realign itself when ‘interfered’ with at another level, that of the State. The Japanese State is facing labour shortages in certain sectors due to social change, therefore they must secure other potential sources of labour. Appropriation of human resources locally available has become one Japanese State solution for this labour shortage. As such, ‘affect’ is brought into the capitalist fold in response to labor shortages in the Health Sector. Background The Philippines is a prime example of a nomad nation, where an estimated eight million of the population currently work or live overseas while remitting home (Phillippines Overseas Employment Agency). Post-colonial global conditions in the Asia Pacific region have seen the Philippines cater to external national situations in order to participate in the global labour market. These have been in the form of flows of labour and capital outsourced to those economies which are entangled with the Philippines. In this context, marriage between both countries has come to be made up almost exclusively of Japanese men with Filipina women (Suzuki). These marriages have created nascent partnerships that have formed links within homes in both countries and supported the creation of a complex system tying together both nations. Yet, in the entanglement of what seems to be two economies of desire, some interesting observations can be drawn from what I consider to be the by-products of these marriages. Yet what does this have to do with a marriage? First, I would like to put forward that certain international marriages may have developed within the above discursive framework and, in the case of the Philippines and Japan, defined certain characteristics that I will explain in more detail. Over the past 20 years, Filipinos who came to Japan on entertainment visas or through encounters with Japanese partners in the Philippines have deployed discursively constructed ‘affective capital’ in strategies to secure relationships and a position in both societies. These strategies may be interpreted as being knowledgeable, creative and possessive of the language necessary for negotiating long-term dialogues, not only with partners and surrounding family, but also with Japanese society. These deployments also function as an attempt to secure additional long term benefits which include strengthening ties to the Philippines through increasing a Japanese spouse’s involvement and interest in the Philippines. It is here that Filipinos’ ‘affect’ may be traced back to a previous deployment of categories that influences local Japanese actors’ decisions in offering a course exclusively for Filipino residents. This offers the first hint as to why only Filipinos were targeted. In Japan, secure permanent work for resident Filipinos can be, at times, difficult even when married to a partner with a stable income. The reality of remitting home to support family members and raising a family in Japan is a double burden which cannot be met solely by the spouse’s salary. This is an issue which means actors (in this case, partners) recourse to their ‘affective capital’ in order to secure means towards a livelihood. In this context, marriages have acted as a primary medium entangling both countries. Yet changes in Japan are re-locating ‘possible’ resources that are rationalised as a surplus from these primary encounters. Shifts in Japan’s social landscape have over the past 10 years led to an increasing awareness of the high stakes involved in care for the ageing and invalid in Japanese society. With over 21% of the population now over 65, the care industry has seen a surge in demand for labour, of which there is currently a shortfall (Statistics Bureau Japan). With the Philippines having strategically relocated its economy to accommodate demands for the outsourcing of health care workers and nurses overseas, Japan, realigning its economy to domestic change, has shown a new type of interest (albeit reluctant) in the Philippines. In 2005, changes and reforms to Japan’s Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act successfully curtailed the flow of Filipinos applying to Japan to work as entertainers. This was in part due to pressure from the interventionary power of the U.S: in 2006 the U.S. State department published the Trafficking in Persons Report, which stipulated that Japan had yet to comply in improving the situation of persons trafficked to Japan (U.S. State Department). This watershed reform has become a precursor to the Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement ratified by Japan and the Philippines to promote the ‘trans-border flow of goods, person, services and capital between Japan and the Philippines (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and has now temporarily realigned both economies into a new relationship. Under the terms ‘movement of natural persons’, Filipino candidates for qualified nurses and certified care workers would be allowed a stay of up to three years as nurses, or four for certified care workers (Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Nonetheless, this lip service in showing openness to admit a new category of Filipino is the continuation of a mode of ‘servicing’ within the Japanese nation, albeit under the guise of ‘care work’, and rests upon the capitalist rationalisation of hired workers for Japan’s tertiary sectors. The Philippines, a nation which is positively export-orientated in terms of its human resources in response to care inequalities that exist between nations at a global level (Parreñas 12-30), is now responding to the problematic issue of care that has become a serious concern in Japan. Fieldwork To place these issues in context I want to locate the above issues within a part of my present fieldwork. In 2006, I participated in a privately funded non-profit venture set up for Filipino residents with the aim of training them to be care-givers. The course was validated and acknowledged by the local prefectural government and primarily limited to a group of 20 participants who paid approximately sixty thousand yen ($485) for the three month course including training and text books. One Filipina acquaintance enthusiastically introduced me to the retired bank manager who had set up a fund for the three month care-giver course for Filipina residents. Through interviews with the course providers, one underlying theme in the planning of the course was clear: the core idea that Filipinos have a predisposition to care for the elderly, reflecting Filipino social values no longer existent in Japan. In particular, two Japanese words employed to reflect these views – ‘omoiyari’ (思いやり), meaning “compassion” or “considerateness” and ‘yasashisa’ (優しさ) meaning “kindness toward others” – were reiterated throughout the course as a requisite for dealing with the elderly or those in need of care. One core presupposition underlining the course was that the Philippines still cherishes values which are on the decline in Japan, offering a care ethos based on Christian values ready for deployment in such work. I believe this marks a transition point in how both countries’ relations are moving away from ‘entertainment-based’ care to ‘care within an institutional setting’, such as private nursing homes or hospitals. In both cases, ‘care’ (as it is ironically known in both industries, the deployment of hospitality and attendance), operates as a dynamic of desire within a social field which orientates how residents (i.e. foreign female residents with permanent residency) are used. Yet, why would the Philippines be such an attractor? It is not difficult to see how ‘affect’ is discursively rationalised and deployed and projected onto Philippine society. This ‘affect’ acts as an attractor and belongs to an ‘imagined’ cultural repertoire that Japan has created in response to its turbulent marriage to the Philippines. In this sense, the care course promoted this ‘caring affective side’ of Filipinas here in Japan, and provided a dynamic engagement for potential negotiation, persuasion and tension between ‘local actors’ (course providers and participants) who come under the direct remit of the Japanese State (care institutions, hospitals and nursing homes). I say “tension”, as to date only a handful (three women out of a total of sixty) of those who participated in the course have taken up employment in the care industry. As one participant, a divorcee, commented, the reluctance to seek work as a qualified care worker resided in an economic framework, she says: this is a useful investment, but I don’t know if I can do this work full time to live off and support my families…but it is another arrow in my bow if the situation changes. Yet, for another woman, care work was an extension of something that they were familiar with. She jokingly added with a sigh of resignation: Oh well, this is something we are used to, after all we did nothing but care for our papa-san (husband)! When I discussed these comments with an N.G.O. worker connected to the course she pessimistically summed up what she thought by saying: The problem of care in Japan was until very recently an issue of unpaid work that women have had to bear. In a sense, looking after the aged living at home has been a traditional way to treat people with respect. Yet, here in Japan we have experienced an excessively long period whereby it was de facto that when a woman married into someone’s family, she would care for the husband and his family. Now, this isn’t an individual problem anymore, it’s a societal one. Care is now becoming an institutional practice which is increasing paid work, yet the State works on the assumption that this is low paid work for people who have finished raising their children; hard labour for low wages. All the women have graduated and are licensed to work, yet at 1000 yen (U.S. $8) an hour for psychologically demanding hard labour they will not work, or start and finish realising the demands. Travelling between locations also is also unpaid, so at the most in one day they will work 2-3 hours. It is the worst situation possible for those who choose to work. The above opinion highlights the ambiguities that exist in the constant re-alignment of offering work to foreign residents in the effort to help integrate people into Japan’s tertiary ‘care sector’ in response to the crisis of a lack of manpower. To date most women who trained on this course have not pursued positions within the health sector. This indicates a resistance to the social beliefs that continue to categorise female foreign residents for gendered care work. Through three successive batches of students (sixty women in total) the president, staff and companies who participated in this pilot scheme have been introduced to Filipino residents in Japanese society. In one respect, this has been an opportunity for the course providers to face those who have worked, or continue to work at night. Yet, even this exposure does not reduce the hyper-feminisation of care; rather, it emphasises positions. One male coordinator brazenly mentioned the phrase ashi wo aratte hoshii, meaning ‘we want to give them a clean break’. This expression is pregnant with the connotation that these women have been involved in night work have done or still participate in. These categorisations still do not shake themselves free from previous classifications of female others located in Japanese society; the ongoing legacy that locates Filipinos in a feminised discursive space. As Butler has elucidated, ‘cultural inscriptions’ and ‘political forces with strategic interests’ work to keep the ‘body bounded and constituted’ (Butler 175). It is possible to see that this care course resides within a continuously produced genealogy that tries to constitute bodies. This resides under the rubric of a dominant fantasy that locates the Philippines in Japan as a source of caring and hospitality. Now, those here are relocated under a restructuring industry outsourcing work to those located in the lower tiers of the labour sector. Why other nationals have not been allowed to participate in the course is, I stress, a testimony to this powerful discourse. Major national and international media coverage of both the course and company and those women who found employment has also raised interest in the curious complex that has arisen from this dynamic, including a series of specials aired on Japanese television by NHK (NHK Kaigo no Jinzai ga Nigete iku). This is very reminiscent of a ‘citationary’ network where writings, news items and articles enter into a perpetuating relationship that foments and bolsters the building up of a body of work (Said) to portray Japan’s changing circumstances. As seen from a traced genealogy, initial entanglements between two nations, in conjunction with societal change in Japan, have created a specific moment in both countries’ trajectories. Here, we can see an emergent phenomena and the relocation of a discursive structure. An affective complex can be located that marks a shift in how foreign residents are perceived and on what terms they can participate or contribute to Japanese society. Within this structure, ‘care’ is relocated – or, rather, trapped – and extracted as labour surplus that resides in an antagonistic relationship of domination highlighting how a specific moment existing between two countries can be ‘structured’ by needs in the ‘engaging’ country, in this case Japan. Non-linear elements in a complex system that contest how discursive practices in Japanese society locate foreign residents, within the rubric of an ‘imagined’ ethos of compassion and kindness that emanates from outside of Japan, seem to display ‘affective’ qualities. Yet, are these not projected categories deployed to continue to locate migrant labour (be they permanent or temporary residents) within an ongoing matrix that defines what resources can be discursively produced? However, these categories do not take into account the diverse structures of experience that both Japanese nationals and Filipino nationals experience in Japan (Suzuki). Conclusion In this paper I have briefly delineated a moment which rests between specific trajectories that tie two nations. A complex of marriages brought about within a specific historic post-colonial encounter has contributed to feminising the Philippines: firstly, for women in marriages, and now secondly for ‘potential resources’ available to tackle societal problems in Japan. As I have argued a discursively produced ‘affective complex’ is an authorising source of otherness and could be part of a precursor complex which is now discursively relocating human resources within one country (Japan) as a ‘reluctant source’ of labour, while entering into a new discursive mode of production that shapes attitudes toward others. I also suggest that there is a very specific complex at work here which follows an as of yet faint trajectory that points to the re-organisation of a relationship between Japan and the Philippines. Yet, there are linear elements (macro-level forces rooted in the Japanese State’s approach to care vis-à-vis the Philippines) operating at the fundamental core of this care-giver course that are being constantly challenged and cut across by non-linear elements, that is, human actors and their ambivalence as the beneficiaries/practitioners of such practices. This is the continued feminisation of a highly gendered dynamic that locates labour as and when it sees fit, but through the willing coercion of local agents, with an interest in mediating services through and for the State, for the welfare of the Nation. The desiring-machine that brings together Japan and the Philippines is also one that continues to locate the potential in foreign actors located within Japan’s institutional interpellation for its care market. Within these newly emergent relationships, available political and social capital is being reshaped and imagined in reaction to social change in Japan. By exploring two entangled nations situated within global capitalist production in the twenty-first century, my research points towards new ways of looking at emerged complexes (international marriages) that precludes the reconfigurations of ongoing emerging complexes that discursively locate residents as caregivers, who fall under the jurisdiction and glare of political powers, government subjects and State forces. References Artur, W. Brian. “Complexity and the Economy.” Science 284.2 (1999): 107-109. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Chester, Graeme, and Ian Welsh. “Complexity and Social Movement(s): Process and Emergence in Planetary Action Systems.” Theory, Culture & Society 22.5 (2005): 187-211. Deleuze, Giles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Japan). Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement Press Statement. 29 Nov. 2004. 29 Mar. 2007 http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/philippine/joint0411.html>. NHK Kaigo no Jinzai ga Nigete iku. 介護の人材が逃げて行く (“Care Workers Are Fleeing.”) Televised 11 Mar. 2007. 29 Mar. 2007 http://www.nhk.or.jp/special/onair/070311.html>. Parreñas, Rachel Salazar. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. Philippines Overseas Employment Agency. “Stock Estimates of Filipinos Overseas.” 2 May 2007 http://www.poea.gov.ph/html/statistics.html>. Rodriguez, Encarnación Gutiérrez. “Reading Affect – On the Heterotopian Spaces of Care and Domestic Work in Private Households.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 8 (2007). 2 May 2007 http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/2-07/07-2-11-e.pdf>. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1995. Statistics Bureau and Statistical Research and Training Institute. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (Philippines). 2005. 2 May 2007 http://www.poea.gov.ph/docs/STOCK%20ESTIMATE%202004.xls>. Suzuki, Nobue. “Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 33.4 (2004): 481-506. “Trafficking in Persons Report.” U.S. State Department. 2006. 29 Apr. 2007. http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/66086.pdf>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lopez, Mario. "From Bride to Care Worker?: On Complexes, Japan and the Philippines." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/04-lopez.php>. APA Style Lopez, M. (Jun. 2007) "From Bride to Care Worker?: On Complexes, Japan and the Philippines," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/04-lopez.php>.

Paul Virilio. The Information Bomb. London: Verso, 2000. 145 pp., ISBN: 1-85984-745-5 (hardback). Born in Paris in 1932, the French political and 'technocultural' theorist Paul Virilio is the leading exponent of the idea that 'dromology' (the logic of speed) stands at the centre of the political formation and technocultural transformation of the contemporary world. Virilio is an architect of the 'Brutalist' school and political 'critic of the art of technology' as well as a Husserlian phenomenologist and post-Einsteinian analyst of technoculture. In recent years Virilio has developed his own political approach to the technocultural and experiential effects of speed and technoscience on the organisation of cyberspace and cyberculture. It is an approach that is increasingly being adopted and adapted by a variety of pre-eminent thinkers on the Left such as Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek and Andre Gorz. As the son of a Breton mother and an Italian communist father in Nazi-occupied France, Virilio spent the majority of World War II as an anxious evacuee in Nantes. In 1950 he converted to Christianity in the fraternity of 'worker-priests'. Virilio was educated at the L'École des Métiers d'Art in Paris and first became a craftsman in stained glass before becoming a sort of intellectual provocateur and co-editor of Architecture Principe, an architectural group and occasional review devoted to radical political and architectural experimentation. Between 1963 and 1966 Virilio dedicated his time to studying the architecture of war and to the construction of the 'bunker church' of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay at Nevers. Virilio became politically active during the 1968 May revolt and this led to an irrevocable split with his partner in Architecture Principe, the architect Claude Parent. In 1969 Virilio was instated as a professor of architecture at the École Speciale d'Architecture at the behest of the students there, a position he occupied until his retirement in 1997. Virilio's major work is Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1986), written, he maintains, to raise the political question of speed as the hidden side of economic development. Virilio's recent texts such as Open Sky (1997) and now The Information Bomb can therefore be regarded as important advances in his current work on the politics of techno, or, cyberculture. As the son of a Breton mother and an Italian communist father in Nazi-occupied France, Virilio spent the majority of World War II as an anxious evacuee in Nantes. In 1950 he converted to Christianity in the fraternity of 'worker-priests'. Virilio was educated at the L'École des Métiers d'Art in Paris and first became a craftsman in stained glass before becoming a sort of intellectual provocateur and co-editor of Architecture Principe, an architectural group and occasional review devoted to radical political and architectural experimentation. Between 1963 and 1966 Virilio dedicated his time to studying the architecture of war and to the construction of the 'bunker church' of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay at Nevers. Virilio became politically active during the 1968 May revolt and this led to an irrevocable split with his partner in Architecture Principe, the architect Claude Parent. In 1969 Virilio was instated as a professor of architecture at the École Speciale d'Architecture at the behest of the students there, a position he occupied until his retirement in 1997. Virilio's major work is Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1986), written, he maintains, to raise the political question of speed as the hidden side of economic development. Virilio's recent texts such as Open Sky (1997) and now The Information Bomb can therefore be regarded as important advances in his current work on the politics of techno, or, cyberculture. Virilio's newest political and technocultural work, The Information Bomb, is set to become an important text of intellectual and dromological analysis. On its opening page Virilio quotes Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist, chief architect of quantum mechanics and founder of the 'uncertainty principle': 'No one can say what will be "real" for people when the wars which are now beginning come to an end'. Briefly, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that if a simultaneous calculation is made of the location and speed of a particle then, no matter how faithful the calculations, there is always an uncertainty in the values acquired. It deals with the simultaneous calculation of energy and time. The uncertainty occurs because the act of perceiving the system interferes with it in an unpredictable manner. But uncertainty is only significant at the atomic and subatomic levels and at these levels throws the principle of causality into confusion. Virilio's The Information Bomb therefore examines the dromological and uncertain relationships between the 'reality' of the war universe, speed and, crucially, our perception of its main causalities. The key question and the first sentence of Virilio's book is: 'The civilianisation or militarisation of science?' Virilio answers by describing what he calls the catastrophes of postmodern technoscience and globalisation, Americanisation, biotechnology, Internet pornography and the advertising industry in the most uncompromising terms. Virilio's riposte to the question is already contained in the book's title. This is because, for him, since the end of World War II, the militarisation of science and the construction of two kinds of bomb have overshadowed civilian life. The first is the atom bomb, 'which is capable of using the energy of radioactivity to smash matter'. The second is the information bomb, 'which is capable of using the interactivity of information to wreck the peace between nations'. Virilio delineates the existence of the information bomb, of an explosion of mediated misery around the world, in terms of the deterioration of language and the sheer seductive power of TV and computer screens, the acceleration of history and the emergence of new inter-generational conflicts. Virilio forcefully argues that the advent of the information bomb requires the creation of a new type of social deterrence if nations are to avoid the 'fission' of their 'social cores' as they enter into the uncertain and often shocking world of chronopolitics. For this is a topsy-turvy world where neo-liberalism confronts 'cyberfeminism' and the military-scientific complex contemplates the arrival of 'cyberwar' and 'grey ecology' (the pollution of distances) under the sign of cinematic disinformation from Hollywood and the technological transformation of work through the introduction of mobile phones and 'zero-hour' contracts. Or, as Virilio says at one point in The Information Bomb: in today's 'dromocratic' capitalism, when the biotech corporation calls, 'you come running'. It would, though, be incorrect to view Virilio's political opposition to the uncritical acceptance of technoculture and the explosion of the information bomb as a wholly pessimistic stance on the spread of neo-liberalism in realms such as the multimedia. Virilio's work is, for example, in no way analogous to that of Baudrillard, the intellectual high priest of postmodernism. In truth, Virilio manifestly frames his recent writings in relation to a guarded optimism concerning what I have elsewhere called his 'hypermodern' technocultural theory: a theory involved with the acceleration and dislocation of modern forms of thought about the contemporary world and how it is depicted. It is therefore perfectly plausible to derive from Virilio's dromological texts a scientifically 'uncertain' conception of 'reality' that focusses on the concepts of hypermodernism and 'hypermodernity'. The latter is an idea centred on coming to terms with the speeding-up of historical processes and a critical analysis of modernity based on a political perception of technoculture that is catastrophic. In this way, Virilio typically conceives of the developments he documents in The Information Bomb not as the psychoanalytic problems of progress but as the technoscientific and 'excessive' displacement of them. It is a conceptualisation that is evident in his dromological and dynamic writings on the subject of 'information superhighways' and the 'full range of communications disturbances acquired over the recent centuries of technology'. 'In this field', Virilio says, progress 'acts like a forensic scientist on us' since it violates 'each bodily orifice'. But such 'brutal incursions' do not merely influence individuals; they colonise them. For Virilio, then, progress 'heaps up, accumulates and condenses in each of us the full range of (visual, social, psycho-motor, affective, sexual, etc.) detrital disorders which it has taken on with each innovation, each with their full complement of specific injuries'. All criticism of technology having disappeared, 'we have slid unconsciously from pure technology to techno-culture and, lastly, to the dogmatism of a totalitarian techno-cult...' As can be ascertained from the above examples, Virilio's work sits uneasily with almost all the prevailing paradigms and methodological approaches currently on offer. Chasing a multitude of Foucauldian discontinuities and shape-shifting Deleuzian inflected 'lines of flight' simultaneously, The Information Bomb can thus be seen as a reflection of his self-professed 'anarcho-Christianity'. It is a methodological stance, political perspective and religious position Virilio shares to some extent with the author of The Technological Society (1964), the late Jacques Ellul. Viewed from this angle, Virilio's oppositional and overtly political writings on the 'hypermodern condition' present a comprehensible methodological outlook. It is, however, an outlook that is somewhat at odds with the political and intellectual terrain occupied by 'transpolitical' postmodernists such as Baudrillard, 'poststructuralist anarchists' like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and the deconstructionist and 'spectral Marxist' Jacques Derrida. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine that Virilio's rather abstract writings in The Information Bomb opposing the rise of neo-liberalism and the hypermodern condition have not touched a nerve in France. Left-leaning theoreticians and the editors of newspapers such as Le Monde Diplomatique regularly pursue Virilio's forthright opinions in the form of articles and interviews on everything from Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992) to his own thoughts on the end of geography and technoculture. Virilio is therefore a very creative political theorist who articulates himself with equal ease in academic and non-specialist technocultural works. Unlike Foucault, Virilio is the personification of the 'engaged intellectual'. Rather than simply opting for the life of a professor of architecture at the École Speciale d' Architecture, Virilio has always chosen to communicate his ideas to as wide an audience as possible, a strategy that earned him a 'National Award for Criticism' in 1987. Virilio's contemporary writings thus necessarily involve a dromological, political and technocultural encounter with the militarisation of science in the shape of the Internet. Even so, unlike Virilio's earlier texts such as Open Sky (1997), in The Information Bomb Virilio does not merely concentrate his gaze on society's apparent need for speed but, decisively, on its present-day extension into pornography and advertising and their integration into the commercialisation of the art world. Describing the 1997 London Royal Academy exhibition entitled 'Sensation' ostensibly held to present young British artists, Virilio suggests that, like many others, in actuality, this exhibition was designed and presented by 'the sex-culture-advertising movement'. This is because the '110 works on display (a portrait of child-murderer Myra Hindley, casts of childlike bodies with mouths replaced by phalluses, etc.) belonged, without exception, to Charles Saatchi, one of Britain's great advertising moguls'. What is at issue here for Virilio is the recognition that, like the need for speed and the example of the Internet, the distinctions between the world of pornography, the world of art and the world of advertising have all but been obliterated in the name of nothing more profound than 'breaking down the last taboos'. However, in Virilio's hypermodern conception of the 'terminal arts', a 'confrontation between a tortured body and an automatic camera' not only signifies the coming of the 'sex-culture-advertising-complex' but, equally importantly, the onset of 'endocolonisation' or, what takes place when militarised technoscience colonises the human body with the aim of reducing every member of humanity that has 'had its day' to the status of a 'specimen'. The political critiques provided by Virilio in The Information Bomb are a welcome development. For, today, it is sometimes all too easy to criticise the discipline of cultural studies for its celebration of political, technological and cultural différance without any corresponding recognition of economic and other inequalities founded on class, gender and race. Moreover, Virilio's fervent and occasionally maniacal critique of the art of technology stands out because it stretches from political and technocultural studies to economic and film studies, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph. Taking in Hollywood directors and obvious film productions such as Jan de Bont's Speed as well as the work of French cinematic pioneers like the Lumière brothers', Virilio's The Information Bomb is an important publication. But, unlike numerous other 'cybercultural' tomes, the significance of this book is derived from the fact that it also manages to extend the scope of political and technocultural studies through the provision of often-abstruse pronouncements such as Kafka's claim that the cinema 'involves putting the eye into uniform'. The political critiques provided by Virilio in The Information Bomb are a welcome development. For, today, it is sometimes all too easy to criticise the discipline of cultural studies for its celebration of political, technological and cultural différance without any corresponding recognition of economic and other inequalities founded on class, gender and race. Moreover, Virilio's fervent and occasionally maniacal critique of the art of technology stands out because it stretches from political and technocultural studies to economic and film studies, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph. Taking in Hollywood directors and obvious film productions such as Jan de Bont's Speed as well as the work of French cinematic pioneers like the Lumière brothers', Virilio's The Information Bomb is an important publication. But, unlike numerous other 'cybercultural' tomes, the significance of this book is derived from the fact that it also manages to extend the scope of political and technocultural studies through the provision of often-abstruse pronouncements such as Kafka's claim that the cinema 'involves putting the eye into uniform'. Yet it would be wrong to think that such an individualistic political and technocultural approach cannot be extended beyond Virilio's own anarcho-Christianity or the writings of Ellul. For example, Virilio's The Art of the Motor (1995) has been an important reference point in the recent writings of imaginative Marxists as distinct as Zizek in The Plague of Fantasies (1997) and Gorz in Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society (1999). It would be difficult to believe that The Information Bomb will not become another significant source in the future works of other creative radicals, offering as it does not only a provisional pathway out of the quicksand of postmodernism but also a way into the sympathies of ordinary people. Firing off political concepts and technocultural neologisms at the speed of light, Virilio's passionately argued texts do not always hit their intended targets. But for anyone seeking a hypermodern critique of the cultural logic of late militarism that ranges from the Internet and the commercialisation of art to endocolonisation and the accident, Virilio's radical political and technocultural theory of speed contained in The Information Bomb is just what you have been waiting for. Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Armitage. "The Uncertainty Principle: Paul Virilio's 'The Information Bomb'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/virilio.php>. Chicago style: John Armitage, "The Uncertainty Principle: Paul Virilio's 'The Information Bomb'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/virilio.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Armitage. (2000) The uncertainty principle: Paul Virilio's 'The information bomb'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/virilio.php> ([your date of access]).

At last year’s Tour de France—the three-week cycling race—the winner of one stage was disqualified for allegedly obstructing a competitor. In newspapers and on social media, cycling fans immediately started a heated debate about the decision and about the actual course of events. They uploaded photographs and videos, which they had often edited and augmented with graphics to support their interpretation of the situation or to direct attention to some neglected detail (Simpson; "Tour de France").Due to their competitive character and their audience’s partisanship, modern media sports continuously create controversial moments like this, thereby providing ample opportunities for what Jason Mittell—with respect to complex narratives in recent TV drama—called “forensic fandom” ("Forensic;" Complex), in which audience members collectively investigate ambivalent or enigmatic elements of a media product, adding their own interpretations and explanations.Not unlike that of TV drama, sport’s forensic fandom is stimulated through complex forms of seriality—e.g. the successive stages of the Tour de France or the successive games of a tournament or a league, but also the repetition of the same league competition or tournament every (or, in the case of the Olympics, every four) year(s). To articulate their take on the disqualification of the Tour de France rider, fans refer to comparable past events, activate knowledge about rivalries between cyclists, or note character traits that they condensed from the alleged perpetrator’s prior appearances. Sport thus creates a continuously evolving and recursive storyworld that, like all popular seriality, proliferates across different media forms (texts, photos, films, etc.) and different media platforms (television, social media, etc.) (Kelleter).In the following I will use two examples (from 1908 and 1966) to analyse in greater detail why and how sport’s seriality and forensic attitude contribute to the highly dynamic “transmedia intertextuality” (Kinder 35) of media sport. Two arguments are of special importance to me: (1) While social media (as the introductory example has shown) add to forensic fandom’s proliferation, it was sport’s strongly serialized evaluation of performances that actually triggered the “spreadability” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green) of sport-related topics across different media, first doing so at the end of the 19th century. What is more, modern sport owes its very existence to the cross-media circulation of its events. (2) So far, transmedia has mainly been researched with respect to fictional content (Jenkins; Evans), yet existing research on documentary transmedia forms (Kerrigan and Velikovsky) and social media seriality (Page) has shown that the inclusion of non-fiction can broaden our knowledge of how storytelling sprawls across media and takes advantage of their specific affordances. This, I want to argue, ensures that sport is an insightful and important example for the understanding of transmedia world-building.The Origins of Sport, the Olympics 1908, and World-BuildingSome authors claim that it was commercial television that replaced descriptive accounts of sporting events with narratives of heroes and villains in the 1990s (Fabos). Yet even a cursory study of past sport reporting shows that, even back when newspapers had to explain the controversial outcome of the 1908 Olympic Marathon to their readers, they could already rely on a well-established typology of characters and events.In the second half of the 19th century, the rules of many sports became standardized. Individual events were integrated in organized, repetitive competitions—leagues, tournaments, and so on. This development was encouraged by the popular press, which thus enabled the public to compare performances from different places and across time (Werron, "On Public;" Werron, "World"). Rankings and tables condensed contests in easily comparable visual forms, and these were augmented by more narrative accounts that supplemented the numbers with details, context, drama, and the subjective experiences of athletes and spectators. Week by week, newspapers and special-interest magazines alike offered varying explanations for the various wins and losses.When London hosted the Olympics in 1908, the scheduled seriality and pre-determined settings and protagonists allowed for the announcement of upcoming events in advance and for setting up possible storylines. Two days before the marathon race, The Times of London published the rules of the race, the names of the participants, a distance table listing relevant landmarks with the estimated arrival times, and a turn-by-turn description of the route, sketching the actual experience of running the race for the readers (22 July 1908, p. 11). On the day of the race, The Times appealed to sport’s seriality with a comprehensive narrative of prior Olympic Marathon races, a map of the precise course, a discussion of the alleged favourites, and speculation on factors that might impact the performances:Because of their inelasticity, wood blocks are particularly trying to the feet, and the glitter on the polished surface of the road, if the sun happens to be shining, will be apt to make a man who has travelled over 20 miles at top speed turn more than a little dizzy … . It is quite possible that some of the leaders may break down here, when they are almost within sight of home. (The Times 24 July 1908, p. 9)What we see here can be described as a world-building process: The rules of a competition, the participating athletes, their former performances, the weather, and so on, all form “a more or less organized sum of scattered parts” (Boni 13). These parts could easily be taken up by what we now call different media platforms (which in 1908 included magazines, newspapers, and films) that combine them in different ways to already make claims about cause-and-effect chains, intentions, outcomes, and a multitude of subjective experiences, before the competition has even started.The actual course of events, then, like the single instalment in a fictional storyworld, has a dual function: on the one hand, it specifies one particular storyline with a few protagonists, decisive turning points, and a clear determination of winners and losers. On the other hand, it triggers the multiplication of follow-up stories, each suggesting specific explanations for the highly contingent outcome, thereby often extending the storyworld, invoking props, characters, character traits, causalities, and references to earlier instalments in the series, which might or might not have been mentioned in the preliminary reports.In the 1908 Olympic Marathon, the Italian Dorando Pietri, who was not on The Times’ list of favourites, reached the finish first. Since he was stumbling on the last 300 meters of the track inside the stadium and only managed to cross the finish line with the support of race officials, he was disqualified. The jury then declared the American John Hayes, who came in second, the winner of the race.The day after the marathon, newspapers gave different accounts of the race. One, obviously printed too hastily, declared Pietri dead; others unsurprisingly gave the race a national perspective, focusing on the fate of “their” athletes (Davis 161, 166). Most of them evaluated the event with respect to athletic, aesthetic, or ethical terms—e.g. declaring Pietri the moral winner of the race (as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Daily Mail of July 25). This continues today, as praising sport performers often figures as a last resort “to reconstruct unproblematic heroism” (Whannel 44).The general endeavour of modern sport to scrutinize and understand the details of the performance provoked competing explanations for what had happened: was it the food, the heat, or the will power? In a forensic spirit, many publications added drawings or printed one of the famous photographs displaying Pietri being guided across the finish line (these still regularly appear in coffee-table books on sports photography; for a more extensive analysis, see Stauff). Sport—just like other non-fictional transmedia content—enriches its storyworld through “historical accounts of places and past times that already have their own logic, practice and institutions” (Kerrigan and Velikovsky 259).The seriality of sport not only fostered this dynamic by starting the narrative before the event, but also by triggering references to past instalments through the contingencies of the current one. The New York Times took the biggest possible leap, stating that the 1908 marathon must have been the most dramatic competition “since that Marathon race in ancient Greece, where the victor fell at the goal and, with a wave of triumph, died” (The New York Times 25 July 1908, p. 1). Dutch sport magazine De Revue der Sporten (6 August 1908, p. 167) used sport’s seriality more soberly to assess Hayes’ finishing time as not very special (conceding that the hot weather might have had an effect).What, hopefully, has become clear by now, is that—starting in the late 19th century—sporting events are prepared by, and in turn trigger, varying practices of transmedia world-building that make use of the different media’s affordances (drawings, maps, tables, photographs, written narratives, etc.). Already in 1908, most people interested in sport thus quite probably came across multiple accounts of the event—and thereby could feel invited to come up with their own explanation for what had happened. Back then, this forensic attitude was mostly limited to speculation about possible cause-effect chains, but with the more extensive visual coverage of competitions, especially through moving images, storytelling harnessed an increasingly growing set of forensic tools.The World Cup 1966 and Transmedia ForensicsThe serialized TV live transmissions of sport add complexity to storytelling, as they multiply the material available for forensic proliferations of the narratives. Liveness provokes a layered and constantly adapting process transforming the succession of actions into a narrative (the “emplotment”). The commentators find themselves “in the strange situation of a narrator ignorant of the plot” (Ryan 87), constantly balancing between mere reporting of events and more narrative explanation of incidents (Barnfield 8).To create a coherent storyworld under such circumstances, commentators fall back on prefabricated patterns (“overcoming bad luck,” “persistence paying off,” etc.) to frame the events while they unfold (Ryan 87). This includes the already mentioned tropes of heroism or national and racial stereotypes, which are upheld as long as possible, even when the course of events contradicts them (Tudor). Often, the creation of “non-retrospective narratives” (Ryan 79) harnesses seriality, “connecting this season with last and present with past and, indeed, present with past and future” (Barnfield 10).Instant-replay technology, additionally, made it possible (and necessary) for commentators to scrutinize individual actions while competitions are still ongoing, provoking revisions of the emplotment. With video, DVD, and online video, the second-guessing and re-telling of elements—at least in hindsight—became accessible to the general audience as well, thereby dramatically extending the playing field for sport’s forensic attitude.I want to elaborate this development with another example from London, this time the 1966 Men’s Football World Cup, which was the first to systematically use instant replay. In the extra time of the final, the English team scored a goal against the German side: Geoff Hurst’s shot bounced from the crossbar down to the goal line and from there back into the field. After deliberating with the linesman, the referee called it a goal. Until today it remains contested whether the ball actually was behind the goal line or not.By 1966, 1908’s sparsity of visual representation had been replaced by an abundance of moving images. The game was covered by the BBC and by ITV (for TV) and by several film companies (in colour and in black-and-white). Different recordings of the famous goal, taken from different camera angles, still circulate and are re-appropriated in different media even today. The seriality of sport, particularly World Cup Football’s return every four years, triggers the re-telling of this 1966 game just as much as media innovations do.In 1966, the BBC live commentary—after a moment of doubt—pretty soberly stated that “it’s a goal” and observed that “the Germans are mad at the referee;” the ITV reporter, more ambivalently declared: “the linesman says no goal … that’s what we saw … It is a goal!” The contemporary newsreel in German cinemas—the Fox Tönende Wochenschau—announced the scene as “the most controversial goal of the tournament.” It was presented from two different perspectives, the second one in slow motion with the commentary stating: “these images prove that it was not a goal” (my translation).So far, this might sound like mere opposing interpretations of a contested event, yet the option to scrutinize the scene in slow motion and in different versions also spawned an extended forensic narrative. A DVD celebrating 100 years of FIFA (FIFA Fever, 2002) includes the scene twice, the first time in the chapter on famous controversies. Here, the voice-over avoids taking a stand by adopting a meta-perspective: The goal guaranteed that “one of the most entertaining finals ever would be the subject of conversation for generations to come—and therein lies the beauty of controversies.” The scene appears a second time in the special chapter on Germany’s successes. Now the goal itself is presented with music and then commented upon by one of the German players, who claims that it was a bad call by the referee but that the sportsmanlike manner in which his team accepted the decision advanced Germany’s global reputation.This is only included in the German version of the DVD, of course; on the international “special deluxe edition” of FIFA Fever (2002), the 1966 goal has its second appearance in the chapter on England’s World Cup history. Here, the referee’s decision is not questioned—there is not even a slow-motion replay. Instead, the summary of the game is wrapped up with praise for Geoff Hurst’s hat trick in the game and with images of the English players celebrating, the voice-over stating: “Now the nation could rejoice.”In itself, the combination of a nationally organized media landscape with the nationalist approach to sport reporting already provokes competing emplotments of one and the same event (Puijk). The modularity of sport reporting, which allows for easy re-editing, replacing sound and commentary, and retelling events through countless witnesses, triggers a continuing recombination of the elements of the storyworld. In the 50 years since the game, there have been stories about the motivations of the USSR linesman and the Swiss referee who made the decision, and there have been several reconstructions triggered by new digital technology augmenting the existing footage (e.g. King; ‘das Archiv’).The forensic drive behind these transmedia extensions is most explicit in the German Football Museum in Dortmund. For the fiftieth anniversary of the World Cup in 2016, it hosted a special exhibition on the event, which – similarly to the FIFA DVD – embeds it in a story of gaining global recognition for the fairness of the German team ("Deutsches Fußballmuseum").In the permanent exhibition of the German Football Museum, the 1966 game is memorialized with an exhibit titled “Wembley Goal Investigation” (“Ermittlung Wembley-Tor”). It offers three screens, each showing the goal from a different camera angle, a button allowing the visitors to stop the scene at any moment. A huge display cabinet showcases documents, newspaper clippings, quotes from participants, and photographs in the style of a crime-scene investigation—groups of items are called “corpus delicti,” “witnesses,” and “analysis.” Red hand-drawn arrows insinuate relations between different items; yellow “crime scene, do not cross” tape lies next to a ruler and a pair of tweezers.Like the various uses of the slow-motion replays on television, in film, on DVD, and on YouTube, the museum thus offers both hegemonic narratives suggesting a particular emplotment of the event that endow it with broader (nationalist) meaning and a forensic storyworld that offers props, characters, and action building-blocks in a way that invites fans to activate their own storytelling capacities.Conclusion: Sport’s Trans-Seriality Sport’s dependency on a public evaluation of its performances has made it a dynamic transmedia topic from the latter part of the 19th century onwards. Contested moments especially prompt a forensic attitude that harnesses the affordances of different media (and quickly takes advantage of technological innovations) to discuss what “really” happened. The public evaluation of performances also shapes the role of authorship and copyright, which is pivotal to transmedia more generally (Kustritz). Though the circulation of moving images from professional sporting events is highly restricted and intensely monetized, historically this circulation only became a valuable asset because of the sprawling storytelling practices about sport, individual competitions, and famous athletes in press, photography, film, and radio. Even though television dominates the first instance of emplotment during the live transmission, there is no primordial authorship; sport’s intense competition and partisanship (and their national organisation) guarantee that there are contrasting narratives from the start.The forensic storytelling, as we have seen, is structured by sport’s layered seriality, which establishes a rich storyworld and triggers ever new connections between present and past events. Long before the so-called seasons of radio or television series, sport established a seasonal cycle that repeats the same kind of competition with different pre-conditions, personnel, and weather conditions. Likewise, long before the complex storytelling of current television drama (Mittell, Complex TV), sport has mixed episodic with serial storytelling. On the one hand, the 1908 Marathon, for example, is part of the long series of marathon competitions, which can be considered independent events with their own fixed ending. On the other hand, athletes’ histories, continuing rivalries, and (in the case of the World Cup) progress within a tournament all establish narrative connections across individual episodes and even across different seasons (on the similarities between TV sport and soap operas, cf. O’Connor and Boyle).From its start in the 19th century, the serial publication of newspapers supported (and often promoted) sport’s seriality, while sport also shaped the publication schedule of the daily or weekly press (Mason) and today still shapes the seasonal structure of television and sport related computer games (Hutchins and Rowe 164). This seasonal structure also triggers wide-ranging references to the past: With each new World Cup, the famous goal from 1966 gets integrated into new highlight reels telling the German and the English teams’ different stories.Additionally, together with the contingency of sport events, this dual seriality offers ample opportunity for the articulation of “latent seriality” (Kustritz), as a previously neglected recurring trope, situation, or type of event across different instalments can eventually be noted. As already mentioned, the goal of 1966 is part of different sections on the FIFA DVDs: as the climactic final example in a chapter collecting World Cup controversies, as an important—but rather ambivalent—moment of German’s World Cup history, and as the biggest triumph in the re-telling of England’s World Cup appearances. In contrast to most fictional forms of seriality, the emplotment of sport constantly integrates such explicit references to the past, even causally disconnected historical events like the ancient Greek marathon.As a result, each competition activates multiple temporal layers—only some of which are structured as narratives. It is important to note that the public evaluation of performances is not at all restricted to narrative forms; as we have seen, there are quantitative and qualitative comparisons, chronicles, rankings, and athletic spectacle, all of which can create transmedia intertextuality. Sport thus might offer an invitation to more generally analyse how transmedia seriality combines narrative and other forms. Even for fictional transmedia, the immersion in a storyworld and the imagination of extended and alternative storylines might only be two of many dynamics that structure seriality across different media.AcknowledgementsThe two anonymous reviewers and Florian Duijsens offered important feedback to clarify the argument of this text.ReferencesBarnfield, Andrew. "Soccer, Broadcasting, and Narrative: On Televising a Live Soccer Match." Communication & Sport (2013): 326–341.Boni, Marta. "Worlds Today." World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries. Ed. Marta Boni. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017. 9–27."Das Archiv: das Wembley-Tor." Karambolage, 19 June 2016. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://sites.arte.tv/karambolage/de/das-archiv-das-wembley-tor-karambolage>.The Daily Mail, 25 July 1908.Davis, David. Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush: The 1908 Olympic Marathon and the Three Runners Who Launched a Sporting Craze. Thomas Dunne Books, 2012."Deutsches Fußballmuseum zeigt '50 Jahre Wembley.'" 31 July 2016. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://www.fussballmuseum.de/aktuelles/item/deutsches-fussballmuseum-zeigt-50-jahre-wembley-fussballmuseum-zeigt-50-jahre-wembley.htm>.Evans, Elizabeth. Transmedia Television Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life. New York: Routledge, 2011.Fabos, Bettina. "Forcing the Fairytale: Narrative Strategies in Figure Skating." Sport in Society 4 (2001): 185–212.FIFA Fever (DVD 2002).FIFA Fever: Special Deluxe Edition (DVD 2002).Hutchins, Brett, and David Rowe. Sport beyond Television: The Internet, Digital Media and the Rise of Networked Media Sport. New York: Routledge, 2012.Jenkins, Henry. "Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment: An Annotated Syllabus." Continuum 24.6 (2010): 943–958.Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media. Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013.Kelleter, Frank. "Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality." Media of Serial Narrative. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2017. 7–34.Kerrigan, Susan, and J.T. Velikovsky. "Examining Documentary Transmedia Narratives through the Living History of Fort Scratchley Project." Convergence 22.3 (2016): 250–268.Kinder, Marsha. "Playing with Power on Saturday Morning Television and on Home Video Games." Quarterly Review of Film and Television 14 (1992): 29–59.King, Dominic. "Geoff Hurst’s Goal against West Germany DID Cross the Line!" Daily Mail Online. 4 Jan. 2016. 6 Feb. 2018 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3384366/Geoff-Hurst-s-goal-against-West-Germany-DID-cross-line-Sky-Sports-finally-prove-linesman-right-award-controversial-strike-1966-World-Cup-final.html>.Kustritz, Anne. "Seriality and Transmediality in the Fan Multiverse: Flexible and Multiple Narrative Structures in Fan Fiction, Art, and Vids." TV/Series 6 (2014): 225–261.Mason, Tony. "Sporting News, 1860-1914." The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Eds. Michael Harris and Alan Lee. Associated UP, 1986. 168–186.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press, 2015.———. "Forensic Fandom and the Drillable Text." Spreadable Media. 17 Dec. 2012. 4 Jan. 2018 <http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/mittell/>.The New York Times 25 July 1908.O’Connor, Barbara, and Raymond Boyle. "Dallas with Balls: Televised Sport, Soap Opera and Male and Female Pleasures." Leisure Studies 12.2 (1993): 107–119.Page, Ruth. "Seriality and Storytelling in Social Media." StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 5.1 (2013): 31–54.Puijk, Roel. "A Global Media Event? Coverage of the 1994 Lillehammer Olympic Games." International Review for the Sociology of Sport 35.3 (2000): 309–330.De Revue der Sporten, 6 August 1908.Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.Simpson, Christopher. "Peter Sagan’s 2017 Tour de France Disqualification Appeal Rejected by CAS." Bleacher Report. 6 July 2017. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2720166-peter-sagans-2017-tour-de-france-disqualification-appeal-rejected-by-cas>.Stauff, Markus. "The Pregnant-Moment-Photograph: The London 1908 Marathon and the Cross-Media Evaluation of Sport Performances." Historical Social Research (forthcoming). The Times, 22 July 1908.The Times, 24 July 1908."Tour de France: Peter Sagan Disqualified for Elbowing Mark Cavendish." 4 July 2017. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/cycling/2017/07/04/demare-wins-tour-stage-as-cavendish-involved-in-nasty-crash/103410284/>.Tudor, Andrew. "Them and Us: Story and Stereotype in TV World Cup Coverage." European Journal of Communication 7 (1992): 391–413.Werron, Tobias. "On Public Forms of Competition." Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 14.1 (2014): 62–76.———. "World Sport and Its Public. On Historical Relations of Modern Sport and the Media." Observing Sport: System-Theoretical Approaches to Sport as a Social Phenomenon. Eds. Ulrik Wagner and Rasmus Storm. Schorndorf: Hofmann, 2010. 33–59.Whannel, Garry. Media Sport Stars. Masculinities and Moralities. London/New York: Routledge, 2001.

Drawing on my recent experience of working in collaboration with the artist-led project, Open City, I want to explore the potential of an active and resistant - rather than passive and acquiescent – form of stillness that can be activated strategically within a performance-based practice. The article examines how stillness and other forms of non-productive or non-teleological activity might contribute towards the production of a radically dissenting – yet affirmative – model of contemporary subjectivity. It will investigate how the performance of stillness within an artistic practice could offer a pragmatic model through which to approach certain philosophical concepts in relation to the construction of subjectivity, by proposing a practical application of the various ideas explored therein. Stillness is often presented as antithetical to the velocity, mobility, speed and supposed freedom proposed by new technologies and the various accelerated modes by which we are encouraged to engage with the world. In one sense, stillness and slowness have been deemed outmoded or anachronistic forms of temporality, as fastness and efficiency have become the privileged terms. Alternatively, stillness has been reclaimed as part of a resistant – or at least reactive – “counter-culture” for challenging the enforced and increased pace at which we are required to perform. The intent, however, is not to focus on the transcendent possibilities – or even nostalgic dimension – of stillness, where it could be seen as a form of escape from the accelerated temporalities of contemporary capitalism, a move towards a slower, more spiritual or meditative existence by the removal of or self-imposed isolation from contemporary societal pressures. Instead, this article attempts to explore the potential within those forms of stillness specifically produced in and by contemporary capitalism, by reflecting on how they might be (re)inhabited – or appropriated through an artistic practice – as sites of critical action. The article will suggest ways in which habitually resented, oppressive or otherwise tedious forms of stillness, inaction or immobility can be turned into active or resistant strategies for producing the self differently to dominant ideological expectations or pressures. With reference to selected theoretical ideas primarily within the writing of Gilles Deleuze – especially in relation to Spinoza’s Ethics – I want to explore how the collective performance of stillness in the public realm produces an affect that both reveals and disrupts habitual patterns of behaviour. Stillness presents a break or pause in the flow of events, illuminating temporal gaps and fissures in which alternative or unexpected possibilities – for life – might be encountered and encouraged. The act of collective stillness can be understood as a mode of playful resistance to, or refusal of, societal norms, a wilful and collaborative attempt to break or rupture habitual flows. However, collective stillness also has the capacity to exceed or move beyond resistance by producing germinal conditions for a nascent community of experience no longer bound by existing protocol; a model of “communitas” emerging from the shared act of being still. The focus then, is to reflect on how the gesture of stillness performed within the context of an artistic practice – such as that of Open City – might offer an exemplar for the production of an affirmative form of subjectivity, by arguing how the practice of stillness paradoxically has the potential for increasing an individual’s capacity to act. Open City is an investigation-led artistic project – led by Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday – that explores how public space is conceptualised and organised by interrogating the ways in which our daily actions and behaviours are conditioned and controlled. Their research activity involves inviting, instructing or working with members of the public to create discreet interventions and performances, which put into question or destabilise habitual patterns or conventions of public behaviour, through the use of invitations, propositions, site-specific actions and performative events. The practical and theoretical research phase of the Open City project was initiated in 2006 in collaboration with artist/performer Simone Kenyon. During this phase of research Open City worked with teachers of the Alexander Technique deconstructing the mechanics of walking, and observed patterns of group behaviour and ‘everyday’ movements in public spaces. This speculative phase of research was expanded upon through a pilot project where the artists worked with members of the public, inviting them to attempt to get lost in the city, to consider codes of conduct through observation and mimicry, to explore behavioural patterns in the public realm as a form of choreography, and to approach the spaces of the city as an amphitheatre or stage upon which to perform. This culminated in a series of public performances and propositional/instructive works as part of the nottdance festival in Nottingham (2007) where audiences were invited to participate in choreographed events, creating a number of fleeting and partially visible performances throughout the city. Members of the public were issued specific time-based invitations for collective and individual actions such as ‘Day or night – take a walk in which you notice and deliberately avoid CCTV cameras’ or ‘On the high street during rush hour … suddenly and without warning, stop and remain still for five minutes … then carry on walking as before.’ Image 1: Open City, documentation of publicly-sited postcards. As part of this phase of activity, I was invited by Open City to produce a piece of writing in response to their work – to be serialised over a number of publicly distributed postcards – which would attempt to critically contextualise the various issues and concerns emerging from the investigation-led research that the project had been developing in the public realm. The postcards included an instruction written by Open City on one side, and my serialised text on the other. I have since worked more collaboratively with Open City on new research investigating how the different temporalities within the public realm might be harnessed or activated creatively; how movement and mobility affect the way in which place and locality are encountered or understood. My involvement with the project has specifically been in exploring the use of text-based elements, instructions and propositions and has included further publicly-sited postcard texts and the development of sound-based works using iPod technology to create synchronised actions. In 2008, I successfully secured Arts Council of England funding for a practice-based research trip to Japan with Open City in which we initiated our specific investigations around stillness, slowness, obstruction, and blockage. During this phase of research we became interested in how speed and slowness can be utilised within a performance practice to create points of anchor and location within the urban environment, or in order to affect a psychological shift in the way that space is encountered and understood. Image 2: Open City, research investigations, Japan, 2008.On one level, Open City can be located within a tradition of publicly-sited performance practices. This genealogy of politically – and more often playfully – resistant actions, interventions and models of spatial occupation or navigation can be traced back to the ludic practice of Surrealist errance or aimless wandering into and through the Situationists’ deployment of the dérive and conceptualisation of “psychogeography” during the 1950s and 60s. In its focus on collective action and inhabitation of the everyday as a site of practice, Open City is also part of a trajectory of artistic activity – epitomised perhaps by Allan Kaprow’s Happenings – intent on blurring the line between art and life, or in drawing attention to those aspects of reality marginalised by dominant discourses and ideologies. Performed as part of an artistic practice, non-habitual or even habitually discouraged actions such as aimless wandering, standing still, even the (non)event of 'doing nothing' operate as subtle methods through which to protest against increasingly legislated conditions of existence, by proposing alternative modes of behaviour or suggesting flexibility therein. Artistic practice can be seen as a site of investigation for questioning and dismantling the dominant order – or “major” language – through acts of minor rebellion that – whilst predominantly impotent or ineffective – might still remind us that we have some agency and do not always need to wholly and passively acquiesce. Life itself becomes the material for a work of art, and it is through such an encounter that we might be encouraged to conceive other possibilities for life. Through art, life is rendered plastic and capable of being actively shaped or made into something different to how it might habitually be. However the notion of ‘life as a work of art’ is not exclusive to artistic practice. Various theorists and philosophers – including Nietzsche, Foucault, Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari – have advocated the necessity of viewing life as a kind of project or mode of invention, suggesting ways in which one’s “style of life” or way of existing might be produced or constructed differently. They urge us to consider how we might actively and consciously attend to the full possibilities of life in order to become more human, by increasing our “affective capacity,” that is, our capacity to affect and be affected in affirming or “augmentative terms” (Deleuze, Spinoza and Us 124). In one sense, Spinoza’s Ethics offers a pragmatic model – or guide to living – through which to attempt to increase one’s potential capacity for being, by maximising the possibility of augmentative experiences or joyful encounters. Here, Spinoza formulates a plan or model through which one might attempt to move from the “inadequate” realm of signs and effects – the first order of knowledge in which the body is simply subject to external forces and random encounters of which it remains ignorant – towards a second order of knowledge. Here, the individual body is able to construct concepts of causes or “common notions” with other “bodies in agreement.” The “common notions” of the second order are produced at the point where the individual is able to rise above the condition of simply experiencing effects and signs in order to form agreements or joyful encounters with other bodies. These harmonious synchronicities with other bodies harness life-affirming affects whilst repelling those that threaten to absorb or deplete power. It is only through the construction of “concepts” – an understanding of causality – that it is possible to move from the realm of inadequate ideas towards the production of “adequate ideas from which true actions ensue” (Deleuze, Spinoza and the Three Ethics 143). According to Spinoza’s Ethics, the challenge is to attempt to move from a state in which existence is passively experienced – or suffered blindly – as a series of effects upon the body, towards understanding – and working harmoniously with – the causes themselves. In his reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, Gilles Deleuze suggests that this shift occurs through consciously selecting those affects that offer the possibilities of augmentation (an increase in power through joy) rather than diminution (the decrease of power through sadness). Whilst Spinoza appears to denounce affects as simply inadequate ideas that should be avoided, Deleuze argues that there are certain life-affirming or joyful affects that can be seen as the “dark precursors” of the notions (The Three Ethics 144). According to Deleuze, whilst such “signs of augmentation remain passions and the ideas that they presuppose remain inadequate,” they alone have the capacity to enable the individual to increase in power, for the “selection” of affect is in itself the “condition of leaving the first kind of knowledge, and for attaining the concept” (The Three Ethics 144). For Deleuze-Spinoza, the production of subjectivity is a form of endeavour or “passional struggle,” whereby the individual attempts to increase his or her capacity for turning affects or signs into common notions or concepts (The Three Ethics 145). Deleuze argues that the “common notions are an Art, the art of Ethics itself: organising good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting” (Spinoza and Us 119). This is then a life-long project or practice – the making of life into a work of art – focused on increasing one’s potential to affect and be affected by signs that increase power, whilst simultaneously reducing or minimising one’s threshold of affectivity towards those which diminish or reduce it. I am interested in the role that the artist or artist collective could have in the production of this Spinozist model of subjectivity; how they might function as an intermediary or catalyst, creating conditions or events in which augmentative affects – such as those made possible through a dynamic or active form of stillness – are increased and their energies harnessed. Here perhaps, the affective potential of an art practice is in itself the “dark precursor” of common notions, drawing together bodies in agreement by calling into being an audience or community of experience. On one level, the artist performs an analogous role to Spinoza’s “scholia” – the intermittent sequence of polemical notations “inserted into the demonstrative chain” of propositions – within the Ethics, which according to Deleuze:Operate in the shadows, trying to distinguish between what prevents us from reaching our common notions and what, on the contrary, allows us to do so, what diminishes and what augments our power, the sad signs of our servitude and the joyous signs of our liberations (The Three Ethics 146).Certainly the project, Open City, attempts to draw attention to the habitually endured –or suffered – signs and affects of contemporary experience; striving to remedy the sad affects of capitalism through the production of playful, disruptive or even joyful interventions, events and encounters between bodies in agreement. The disempowering experience or affect of being controlled – blocked, stopped or restricted – by societal or moral codes and civic laws, is replaced by a minor logic of ambiguous, arbitrary and optional rules. Such rules foreground experimentation and request an ethical rather than obedient engagement that in turn serves to liberate the individual from habitual passivity. Open City attempts to reveal – and then resist or refuse – the hidden rules that determine how to operate or perform within contemporary capitalism, the coded orders on how to behave, move and interact. It exposes such insidious legislation as constructs whose logic has been put in place or brought into effect over time, and which in turn might be revoked, dislocated or challenged. For Open City, the performance of stillness can be used as a gesture through which to break from or rupture the orchestrated and controlled flow of capitalist behaviours and its sad affects. Image 3: Open City, documentation of performance, Nottingham, 2008. Random acts of stillness produce moments of friction within the smooth, regulated flows of contemporary capitalism; singularised or inconsistent glitches or jolts that call to attention its unnoticed rhythms and temporal speeds, by becoming its counter-point or by appropriating its “language” for “strange and minor uses” (Deleuze and Guattari 17). Dawdling or meandering reveals the fierceness of the city’s unspoken bylaws, whilst the societal pressure towards speed and efficiency is thwarted by moments of deliberate non-production, inaction and the act of doing nothing. In one example of collective action – at noon on a shopping street – around fifty pedestrians, suddenly and without warning, stop still in their tracks and remain like this for five minutes before resuming their daily activity. In another, a group of individuals draw to a standstill and slowly sway from side to side; their stillness becomes a device for affecting a block or obstacle that limits or modifies others’ behaviour, creating an infinitely imaginable ricochet of further breaks and amendments to routine journeys and directional flows. Open City often mimics or misuses familiar behavioural patterns witnessed in the public realm, inhabiting their language or codes in a way that playfully transforms their use or proposes elasticity or flexibility therein. Habitual or routine actions are isolated and disinvested of their function or purpose, or become repeated until all sense of teleological imperative is wholly evacuated or rendered absurd. For example, a lone person stops still and holds their hand out to check for rain. Over and over, the same action is repeated but by different individuals; the authenticity of the original gesture shattered and separated from any causal motivation by the reverberations of its uncanny echo. Such performed actions remove or distance the response or reaction from its originary stimulus or excitation, creating an affective gap between – a no longer known or present – cause and its effect. This however, is not to return action back to realm of Spinoza’s first order of knowledge – where the body only experiences effects and remains ignorance of their cause – but rather an attempt to create a gap or space of “hesitancy” in which a form of creativity might emerge. Within the act of stillness, habitually imperceptible rhythms and speeds become visible. By being still it is possible to witness or attend to the presence of different or heterogeneous temporal “refrains” or durations operating beneath and within the surface appearance of capitalism’s homogeneous flow.Open City attempts to recuperate the creative potential within those moments of stillness generated through the accelerated technologies of contemporary capitalism: the situational ennui endured whilst waiting or queuing; the moments of collective and synchronised impasse controlled by technologies such as traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, and even – though perhaps more abstractly – the nebulous experience of paralysis and impotency induced by fear, anxiety and uncertainty. Performances attempt to neutralise these various diminutive affects by re-inhabiting or re-framing them; ‘turning’ their stillness towards a form of memorial, protest or social gathering, or alternatively rendering it seemingly empty, unreadable or absurd. This emptiness can also be understood as a form of disinterestedness that refuses to react to immediate stimulus – or lack of – and rather remains open to other possibilities of existence or inhabitation. Stillness is curiously equivocal, an “ambiguous or fluctuating sign” that has the capacity to “affect us with joy and sadness at the same time” (Deleuze The Three Ethics 140). The external appearance of stillness is ultimately blank, its “event” able to affect a “vectorial passage” of contradictory directions, towards an “increase or decrease, growth or decline, joy or sadness” (Deleuze, The Three Ethics 140). Open City attempts to transform the – potentially – diminutive affects of stillness into “augmentative powers” by occupying the stillness of contemporary capitalism as a disguise or camouflage for producing invisible performances that hijack a familiar language in order to misuse its terms. More recently Open City have adapted or occupied the moments of stillness made possible or enabled by everyday technologies: the inconsistent rhythm patterns of stopping, pausing or circling about on the spot exhibited by someone absorbed in a mobile-phone call, text messaging or changing a track on their MP3 player. Here, certain technologies allow, legitimate or even give permission for the disruption of the flow of movement within the city, or are used as a device through which to explore and exploit the potential of collective synchronised action through the use of recorded instructions.Image 4: Open City, public performance from the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008).The alienating and atomising affects of such personal technologies – which are habitually used and isolate the individual from their immediate surroundings and from others around them – are transformed into tools for producing collective action. In one sense, Open City’s performances operate as a form of “minor art” as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, where a major language – the dominant order of capitalism and control – is neutralised or deterritorialised before being “appropriated for strange and minor uses” (17). For Deleuze and Guattari a minor practice is always political and collective, signalling the “movement from the individual to a ‘collective multiplicity’” where there is no longer an individual subject as such but “only collective assemblages of enunciation”(18). The minor always operates within the terms of the major but functions as a destabilising agent where it attempts – according to Simon O’Sullivan – to “stammer and stutter the commodity form, disassembling those already existing forms of capital and indeed moving beyond the latter’s very logic” (73). However, as with all acts of deterritorialisation there is always the potential that they will in turn become reterritorialised; assimilated or absorbed back into the language of the “major”. This can be seen, for example, in the way that the proposed radical potential of the flash-mob phenomenon has been swiftly recuperated through the language of the corporate publicity campaigns of high-profile companies – specifically telecommunication multi-nationals - for whom the terms ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’ are developed as Unique Selling Points for further capitalist gain.By contrast, the intent of Open City is to create an event that operates not only as a visible rupture, but which also has the capacity to transform or radicalise the subjectivities of those involved beyond the duration of the event itself. Open City encourage the movement from the individual to a “collective multiplicity,” through performances that produce synchronised action where individuals become temporally united by a rule or instruction that they are collectively adhering to. Publicly distributed postcards have been used to invite or instruct as-yet-unknown publics to participate in collective action, setting the terms for the possibility of imagined or future assemblies. Or more recently, recorded spoken word instructions listened to using MP3 player technology have been used to harmonise the speeds, stillness and slowness of individual bodies to produce the possibility of a new collective rhythm or “refrain” (Guattari, Subjectivities). For example, within the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008) a group of individuals were led on a guided walk in which they engaged with a series of spoken instructions listened to using MP3 player technology. The instructions invited a number of discreet performances culminating in a collective moment of stillness that was at once a public spectacle and a space of self-contained or private reflection. Image 5: Open City, public performance from the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008). Once still, the individuals listened to a further spoken text which interrogated how the act of ‘being still’ might shift in meaning moving from or between different positions. For example, stillness can be experienced as a controlling or restrictive mode of enforced waiting, as an act of resistant refusal or protest, or alternatively as a model of quiet contemplation or idle daydreaming. For Spinoza, a body is defined by its speeds and slowness – by the relationship between motion and rest – and by its capacity to affect and be affected. In attempting to synchronise the speeds and affectivity of individuals through group action, Open City create the conditions for the production of Spinoza’s “common notions” – or second kind of knowledge – through the organisation of a collective or shared understanding of causality by bodies in agreement. Acts of collective stillness also function in an analogous manner to the transitional or liminal phase within ritual performance by producing the possibility of “communitas,” the transient experience of togetherness or even of collective subjectivity. In From Ritual to Theatre, The Human Seriousness of Play, anthropologist Victor Turner identifies a form of “existential or spontaneous communitas” – an acute experience of community – experienced by individuals immersed in the "no longer/not yet" liminal space of a given ritualistic process, in which “the past is momentarily negated, suspended or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance” (44). Stillness is presented as pure disinterestedness, a non-teleological event enabling nothing but the possibility of a community of experience to come into being.Within Open City then, the gesture of stillness recurs as a device or “event-encounter” for simultaneously producing a break or hiatus in an already existing formulation of experience, at the same time as creating a gap or space of possibility in which to imagine or affirm an alternative mode of being. Referring to the Deleuzian notion of encounter, O’Sullivan reflects on the dual presence of rupture and affirmation within the moment of encounter itself whereby “our typical ways of being in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted” (Sullivan,xxiv). He argues that the encounter:Operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack. However … the rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently (Sullivan, xxv).Open City attempts to create the conditions for these dual possibilities – of rupture and affirmation – through the production of joyful encounters between bodies within the event of performed stillness. Stillness operates as a double gesture where it creates a stop or block – a break with the already existing or with the events of the past – and also a moment of pause, the liminal space of projection; a future-oriented or preparatory zone of pure potentiality. Stillness thus offers the simultaneous possibility of termination and of a new beginning, within which it becomes possible to move from a paradigm of resistance – to the present conditions of existence – towards one of augmentative refusal or proposal that invites reflection on a still future-possible way of life. Poised at a point of anticipation or as a prophetic mode of waiting, stillness offers the promise of as-yet-undecided possibilities where options for future action or existence remain momentarily open, not yet known. Collective stillness thus always has a quality of “futurity” by creating the transitional conditions of communitas or the possibility of a community emerging outside or beyond the temporal frame of capitalism: a community that is still in waiting. ReferencesBergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari.“What Is a Minor Literature.” Kafka toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.Deleuze, Gilles. “Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics’.” Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco. London: Verso, 1998.———. “Life as a Work of Art.” Negotiations: 1972-1990. New York: Columbia U P, 1995.———. “Spinoza and Us.” Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. R. Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988. Guattari, Felix. “Subjectivities: For Better and for Worse.” The Guattari Reader. Ed. G. Genosko. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996.Foucault, Michel. “An Aesthetics of Existence.” Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Ed. L. Kritzman. London: Routledge, 1990.O’Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics. Trans. A Boyle. London: Everyman, 1989. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982.

This paper will use the popular television character, Dexter Morgan, to interrogate the relationship between self and persona, and unsettle the distinction between the two terms. This operation will enable me to raise a series of questions about the critical vocabulary and scholarly agenda of the nascent discipline of persona studies, which, I argue, needs to develop a critical genealogy of the term “persona.” This paper makes a modest contribution to such a project by drawing attention to some key questions regarding the discourse of authenticity in persona studies. For those not familiar with the show, Dexter portrays the life of a serial killer who only kills other serial killers. This is because Dexter, under the tutelage of his deceased father, develops a code that enables him to find a “socially useful” purpose for his homicidal impulses—by exclusively targeting other killers he rationalises his own deadly acts. Dexter necessarily leads a double life, which entails performing a series of normative social roles that conceal his true identity, and the murderous activities of his “dark passenger.” This apparent split between “true” self and “false” persona says a lot about popular conceptions of the performative nature of the self in contemporary culture, and provides a useful framework for unpacking some of the aporias generated by the concept of persona.My aim in the present context is to substantiate the argument that persona studies needs to engage with the philosophical discourse of “self” and “authenticity” if it is to provide a convincing account of the status and function of persona today. The term “persona” derives from the classical Latin word for mask, and has its roots in the theatre of ancient Greece. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term thus:1. An Assumed character or role, especially one adopted by an author in his or her writing, or by a performer.2.a. as the aspect of a person’s character that is displayed to or perceived by others.b. Psychol. In Jungian psychology: the outer or assumed aspect of character; a set of attitudes adopted by an individual to fit his or her perceived social role. Contrasted with anima.For Jung the persona is “a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual” (305). We can see that all these usages share a theatrical or actorly dimension. Persona is something we adopt, display, or assume. Further, it is an external quality, which masks, presumably, that which is not assumed or displayed—the private self. Thus, persona is predicated on an opposition between inside and outside. Moreover, it is not a value neutral concept, but one, I will argue, that connotes a sense of “inauthenticity” through suggesting a division between self and role. The “self” is a complicated word with a wide range of usages and connotations. The OED notes that when used with reference to a person the word refers to an essential entity.3. Chiefly Philos. That which in a person is really and intrinsically he (in contradistinction to what is adventitious); the ego (often identified with the soul or mind as opposed to the body); a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness.Of course both terms are further complicated by the way they function within specific specialised discourses. Jung’s use of the term “persona” is part of a complex psychological theory of personality, and the term “self” appears in a multitude of forms in a plethora of scholarly disciplines. The “self” is obviously a key concept in psychology and philosophy, where it is sometimes conflated with something called the subject, or discussed with reference to questions of personal identity. Michel Foucault’s project to track “the constitution of the subject across history which has led us up to the modern concept of the self” (202) is perhaps the most complex and rich body of work with which persona studies must reckon if it is to produce a distinctive account of the relationship between persona and self. In broad terms, this paper advocates a loosely Foucauldian approach to understanding the relationship between self and persona, but defers a detailed encounter with Foucault’s work on the subject (which requires a much larger canvas).For the moment I want to focus on the status of authenticity in the self/persona relationship with specific reference to world of Dexter, which provides an accessible forum for examining a contemporary manifestation of the self/persona relationship with specific reference to the question of authenticity. Dexter conveys the division between authentic inner self and persona through the use of a first person narrative voice that provides a running commentary on the character’s thoughts, and exposes the gap between Dexter’s various social roles and his real sociopathic self. Dexter Morgan is, of course, an unreliable narrator, yet he is acutely aware of how others perceive him, and his narrative voice-over functions as a device to bind the viewer to the character’s first-person perspective. This is important because Dexter is devoid of empathy—he lacks the ability to feel genuine emotion, and conform to the social conventions that govern everyday activities, yet he is focus of audience identification. This means the voice-over must perform the work of making Dexter sympathetic.The voice-over narration in Dexter is characterised by an obsession with the presentation of self, and the disparity between self and persona. In an early episode, Dexter’s narrative voice proclaims a love of Halloween because it is “the one time of year when everyone wears a mask—not just me. People think it's fun to pretend you're a monster. Me, I spend my life pretending I'm not. Brother, friend, boyfriend—all part of my costume collection” (Dexter “Let’s Give the Boy a Hand”).Dexter develops a series of social masks and routines to disguise his “real” self. He is compelled to develop a series of elaborate ruses to appear like a regular guy—a “normal” person who needs to perform a series of social roles. He thus becomes a studious observer of everyday life, and much of the show’s appeal lies in the way he dissects the minutiae of human behavior in order to learn how be normal. Indeed, because he does not comprehend emotion he must learn how to read the external signs that convey care, love, interest, concern and so on—“I just don't understand all that emotion, which makes it tough to fake,” he declares (Dexter, “Popping Cherry”). Each social role requires a considerable degree of actorly preparation, and Dexter demonstrates what we might call, with Erving Goffman, a dramaturgical approach to everyday life (2).For example, Dexter enters into a relationship with Rita, an ostensibly naïve, doe-eyed single mother of two children and a victim of domestic violence—he chooses her because he believes that she is as damaged as he is, and unlikely to challenge him too strongly—“Rita's ex-hubby, the crack addict, repeatedly raped her, knocked her around. Ever since then she's been completely uninterested in sex. That works for me!” (Dexter “Dexter”). Rita provides the perfect cover because she facilitates Dexter’s construction of himself as a normal, heterosexual family man. However, in order to play this most paradigmatic normative role, he must learn how to play with children, and feign affection and intimacy. J. M. Tyree observes that Dexter “employs a fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy for imitating normal life” (82). Of course, he cannot maintain the role too long before Rita becomes suspicious, and aware of Dexter’s repeated lies and evasions.In short, Dexter dramatises what Goffman calls impression management—the character of Dexter Morgan must consistently “give off” signs of normativity (80). Goffman argues that we are all compelled to perform social roles in the manner of Dexter, and this perhaps accounts for why the show appealed to such a wide audience. In many ways, Dexter exposes normative behavior as an “act” that nobody can sustain no matter how hard they try. Dexter’s struggle to decode the conventions that govern everyday life make him a sympathetic character despite his obviously sociopathic tendencies. In other words we are all a little bit like Dexter insofar we must all perform social roles we may not find comfortable. Of course, the whole question of impression management in Dexter becomes even more complex if one considers Michael C. Hall’s celebrity persona and his performance as the titular character, but I do not have the space to pursue this line of inquiry in the present context.So, Dexter is a consummate actor within his “everyday” world, and neatly, perhaps too neatly, confirms Goffman’s “dramaturgical” theory of the “self.” In his essay, “Letter to a Poor Actor” David E. R. George provides a fascinating critique of Goffman from the perspective of a theatre studies scholar. George provocatively claims that Goffman was attracted to theatrical metaphors because of the “anti-theatrical prejudice” embedded within the western tradition. George cites Jonash Barish’s authoritative tome on this topic, which argues “that with infrequent exceptions, terms borrowed from the theatre—theatrical, operatic, melodramatic, stagey, etc.—tend to be hostile or belittling” (1).Barish cites instances of this prejudice from Plato through to St Augustine and beyond, and George situates Goffman within this powerful tradition. He writes,the theatrum mundi metaphor has always been a recipe for paranoia, and in this respect Goffman appears merely to be continuing a long philosophical tradition: the actor-as-paranoiac puts on the maximum number of masks to protect a threatened and fragile self against the daily threat of intimacy, disrespect, deception. (353)It is hardly surprising, then, that Dexter, a paranoid sociopath, stands as an exemplary instance of Goffman’s dramaturgical conception of the self, for Dexter is a show that consistently presents narratives about the relationship between the need to protect the “fragile” self through the construction of various personae. George also argues, with Lyman and Scott, that a “dramatistic” approach to understanding the world produces a cynical perspective because drama is predicated on the split between appearance and reality, nothing is what it appears to be, and nobody is what they appear to be (7). The actor, traditionally, has always worn a mask in some form or another. From the literal masks worn by the actors in ancient Greece to the sophisticated make-up and prosthetic devices worn by today’s thespians, actors, even when they are supposedly playing themselves, expose the gap between self and persona. Arguably, the most challenging and provocative aspect of George’s theory of the actor for persona studies lies in his thesis about how the reviled art of the theatre, which has been pilloried for so many centuries, can function as a paradigm for authenticity. He cites Artaud and Grotowski as examples of two iconic figures that view the theatre as a sacred space that facilitates ‘close encounters of the authentic kind (George 361).George attempts to rescue an authentic core identity, which he perceives to be under siege from the likes of Goffman, who proffers an “onion” model of the self. In George’s reading, Goffman produces a self without an essential, authentic core. This is hardly surprising given Goffman’s background. As an advocate of symbolic interactionism, a school of sociology that proposes that the self is produced as a result of various acts of socialisation, Goffman’s dramaturgical account of the self reinforces George Herbert Mead’s belief that “when a self does appear it always involves an experience of another; there could not be an experience of the self simply by itself” (195).Dexter not only dramatises this self/other dynamic, but also underscores the extent to which we, to use the terminology of Benita Luckmann, inhabit a series of “small life-worlds.” In other words, we lead a series of part-time lives in part-time worlds—modern life, for Luckmann writing in 1970, unfolds on multiple stages that are not necessarily connected or operate according to the same regulatory principles. She writes,The multi-world existence of modern man requires frequent ‘gear-shifting.’ As he moves from one small world into the next, he is faced with at least marginally different expectations, requiring different role performances in concert with different sets of people. (590)Dexter must negotiate a variety of different social roles, each with different requirements and demands. He must, therefore, cultivate a professional persona as a blood-splatter analyst, and perform the personal roles of brother, lover, husband, and so on. Each of these roles occurs in a different “life world” and requires a different presentation of self. Luckmann’s analysis of modern life remains compelling despite being written more than 40 years ago, and she raises one of the most crucial questions for persona studies: what “self,” if any, functions as the executive “gear-shifter?” In Dexter, the narrative voice, the voice behind the masks implies such an essential entity—the true, authentic self, which is consistent with Jung’s account of the relationship between self and persona.Despite a welter of critical theory that debunks the possibility of an essential, self-identical, authentic self (from Adorno’s anti-Heideggerean argument in The Jargon of Authenticity to various post-structuralist theories of subjectivity, especially Judith Butler’s conception of performativity) the idea of sovereign self stubbornly persists in everyday discourse. One of the tasks of persona studies must be to examine these common notions of self and authenticity. On one level, most people experience the “self” as something that refers to what we might call a singular sense of being, and speak about when the feel “most like themselves.” For some, the self emerges within the private realm, the “backstage” areas to use Goffman’s terminology (3). Others speak of feeling most like themselves in executing a social role or some kind of professional occupation. For example, take this extract from a contemporary self-growth web site:Are you feeling like you don’t know who you are anymore? Or maybe you feel like you never really knew yourself. Perhaps you’ve gone through most of your life living by other people’s agendas or ideas of who you should be, and are just now realizing that you really don’t know yourself, your dreams, or your purpose. (Ewing 2013)From the Platonic exhortation to “know thyself” through to the advice dispensed by self-help gurus, the self emerges as a persistent, if elusive, trope in scholarly and everyday discourse. Persona studies needs to reckon with the scope and breadth of the deployment of the self. Indeed it is the very ubiquity of terms like self, authenticity, and persona that require genealogical analysis in the Foucauldian sense of the term. This task entails looking for and uncovering the conditions of possibility for talking about the self across a wide range of contexts.In summary, then, I contend that persona studies needs to carefully examine the relationship between various theories of self and the discourse of authenticity, and establish the extent to which Goffman’s apparently cynical account for the self challenges the assumed authenticity of the self in the Jungian paradigm. Of course, there are many other approaches one could take to this question. For example, Sartrean existentialism problematises any simple opposition between self and persona in its insistence that the self is the product of the others’ perceptions of the subject. This position is captured in his famous maxim that “hell is other people.” This is not because other people are inherently antagonistic or hostile, but that one’s sense of self is in the hands of others. Sartre dramatises this conundrum elegantly in his 1944 play, No Exit.Sartre’s philosophy also engages with the discourse of authenticity, which it borrows from Heidegger’s Being and Time. Existentialism, in its many guises, dominated continental philosophy up until the 1960s and popularised the idea of “authenticity” as an ideal, which enables one to avoid the tyranny of the “They” and avoid the pitfalls of living in bad faith. There is a possibility that the nascent discipline of Persona Studies, as articulated by P. David Marshall and others, risks ignoring the crucial relationship between the discourse of authenticity and the presentation of self by concentrating on the “presentational self” as a set of pragmatic, tactical techniques designed to maximise the impact of impression management within a variety of social and professional contexts (Marshall “Persona”; Barbour and Marshall “Academic”). A more detailed and direct engagement with Foucault’s account of the emergence and constitution of the modern subject, as well as with theories of performativity and authenticity that challenge the arguments and verities of Goffman, and Jung, can provide a richer account of how the concept of persona operates today with reference to, say, “the networked self” (Papacharissi; Barbour and Marshall).So, I would like to conclude by returning to Dexter and the question of authenticity. Dexter can never really manage to identify his authentic self—his “gear-changing” core.It’s there always, this Dark Passenger. And when he’s driving, I feel alive, half sick with the thrill of complete wrongness [...] lately there are these moments when I feel connected to something else... someone. It’s like the mask is slipping and things... people... who never mattered before are suddenly starting to matter. (Dexter, “An Inconvenient Lie”)In this speech, he paradoxically identifies his “dark passenger” as the driver (Luckmann’s “gear-changer”) but then feels “the mask” slipping. There is something beyond what he assumed to be his dark core—the innermost aspect of being that makes executive decisions. Moreover, the status of Dexter’s “dark passenger” is unclear in this speech—is he ‘”he self” or some external agent impelling Dexter to commit murder. Either way Dexter questions the motives and authenticity of this “dark passenger” and those of us with a stake in the nascent discipline of persona studies would do well to be equally skeptical about the status of our key terms.References Adorno, Theodor. The Jargon of Authenticity. Trans. Tarnowski, Knut and Will, Fredric. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.“An Inconvenient Lie.” Dexter. Season 2, Episode 3. DVD Showtime, 2007.Barbour K and Marshall P. D. “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web.” First Monday 17.9 (2012). 16 May 2014 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3969/3292.Barish, Jonas. The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice. University of California Press, 1981.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.“Dexter.” Dexter. Season 1, Episode 1. DVD Showtime, 2006.Ewing, Catherine. ‘Do You Feel Like a Stranger to Yourself?’ 17 April 2014 ‹ http://reawakenyourdreamer.com/2013/09/feel-like-stranger/ ›.Foucault, Michel. “About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth.” Political Theory (1993): 198-227.George, David E.R. “Letter to a Poor Actor.” New Theatre Quarterly 2.8 (1986): 352-362.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson. London: Blackwell, 2006.Jung, Carl. Collected Works 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand.” Dexter. Season 1, Episode 4. DVD Showtime, 2006.Luckmann, Benita. “The Small Life-Worlds of Modern Man.” Social Research 37.4 (1970): 580-596.Lyman, S. M., and Scott, M. B. The Drama of Social Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Presss, 1975.Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15 (2014): 153-170.Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.Papacharissi, Zizi (ed.). A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.“persona, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. 12 April 2014.“Popping Cherry.” Dexter. Season 1, Episode 3. DVD Showtime, 2006.Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage, 1989.“self, pron., adj., and n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. 13 April 2014.Tyree, J.M. “Spatter Pattern.” Film Quarterly 62.1 (2008): 82-85.

Introduction Nun habe ich Euch genug geschrieben, diesen Brief wenn sei [sic] lesen würden, dann würde ich den Genickschuß bekommen.Now I have written you enough, this letter if they would read it, I would get the neck shot. (M., all translations from German sources and quotations by the author) When the German soldier Otto M. wrote these lines from Russia to his family on 3 September 1943 during the Second World War, he knew that his war letter would not be subject to the National Socialist censorship apparatus. The letter contains, inter alia, detailed information about the course of the war on the front, troop locations, and warnings about the Nazi regime. M., as he wrote in the letter, smuggled it past the censorship via a “comrade”. As a German soldier, M. was a member of the Volksgemeinschaft—a National Socialist concept that drew a “racist and anti-Semitic borderline” (Wildt 48)—and was thus not socially excluded due to his status. Nevertheless, in the sentence quoted above, M. anticipates possible future consequences of his deviant actions, which would be carried out by “them”—potentially leading to his violent death. This article investigates how social and societal exclusion is brought forth by everyday media practices such as writing letters. After an introduction to the thesis under discussion, I will briefly outline the linguistic research on National Socialism that underlies the approach presented. In the second section, the key concepts of agency and dispositif applied in this work are discussed. This is followed by two sections in which infrastructural and interactional practices of exclusion are analysed. The article closes with some concluding remarks. During the Second World War, Wehrmacht soldiers and their relatives could not write and receive letters that were not potentially subject to controls. Therefore, the blunt openness with which M. anticipated the brutal sanctions of behavioural deviations in the correspondence quoted above was an exception in the everyday practice of war letter communication. This article will thus pursue the following thesis: private communication in war letters was subject to specific discourse conditions under National Socialism, and this brought forth excluding agency, which has two intertwined readings. Firstly, “excluding” is to be understood as an attribute of “agency” in the sense of an acting entity that either is included and potentially excludes or is excluded due to its ascribed agency. For example, German soldiers who actively participated in patriotic service were included in the Volksgemeinschaft. By contrast, Jews or Communists, to name but a few groups that, from the perspective of racist Nazi ideology, did not contribute to the community, were excluded from it. Such excluding agencies are based on specific practices of dispositional arrangement, which I refer to as infrastructural exclusion of agency. Secondly, excluding agency describes a linguistic practice that developed under National Socialism and has an equally stabilising effect on it. Excluding agency means that agents, and hence protagonists, are excluded by means of linguistic mitigation and omission. This second reading emphasises practices of linguistic construction of agency in interaction, which is described as interactional exclusion of agency. In either sense, exclusion is inextricably tied to the notion of agency, which is illustrated in this article by using data from field post letters of the Second World War. Social exclusion, along with its most extreme manifestations under fascism, is both legitimised and carried out predominantly through discursive practices. This includes for the public domain, on the one hand, executive language use such as in laws, decrees, orders, court hearings, and verdicts, and on the other hand, texts such as ideological writings, speeches, radio addresses, folk literature, etc. Linguistic research on National Socialism and its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion has long focussed on the power of a regulated public use of language that seemed to be shaped by a few protagonists, most notably Hitler and Goebbels (Schlosser; Scholl). More recent works, however, are increasingly devoted to the differentiation of heterogeneous communities of practice, which were primarily established through discursive practices and are manifested accordingly in texts of that time (Horan, Practice). Contrary to a justifiably criticised “exculpation of the speakers” (Sauer 975) by linguistic research, which focusses on language but not on situated, interactional language use, such a perspective is increasingly interested in “discourse in National Socialism, with a particular emphasis on language use in context as a shared, communicative phenomenon” (Horan, Letter 45). To understand the phenomenon of social and societal exclusion, which was constitutive for National Socialism, it is also necessary to analyse those discursive practices of inclusion and exclusion through which the speakers co-constitute everyday life. I will do this by relating the discourse conditions, based on Foucault’s concept of dispositif (Confessions 194), to the agency of the correspondents of war letters, i.e. field post letters. On Agency and Dispositif Agency and dispositif are key concepts for the analysis of social exclusion, because they can be applied to analyse the situated practices of exclusion both in terms of the different capacities for action of various agents, i.e. acting entities, and the inevitably asymmetrical arrangement within which actions are performed. Let me first, very briefly, outline some linguistic conceptions of agency. While Ahearn states that “agency refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (28) and thus conceives agency as a potential, Duranti understands agency “as the property of those entities (i) that have some degree of control over their own behavior, (ii) whose actions in the world affect other entities’ (and sometimes their own), and (iii) whose actions are the object of evaluation (e.g. in terms of their responsibility for a given outcome)” (453). Deppermann considers agency to be a means of social and situational positioning: “‘agency’ is to capture properties of the subject as agent, that is, its role with respect to the events in which it is involved” (429–30). This is done by linguistic attribution. Following Duranti, this analysis is based on the understanding that agency is established by the ascription of action to an entity which is thereby made or considered accountable for the action. This allows a practice-theoretical reference to Garfinkel’s concept of accountability and identifies agentive practices as “visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical purposes” (7). The writing of letters in wartime is one such reflexive discursive practice through which agents constitute social reality by means of ascribing agency. The concept of semantic roles (Fillmore; von Polenz), offers another, distinctly linguistic access to agency. By semantic roles, agency in situated interaction is established syntactically and semantically. Put simply, a distinction is made between an Agent, as someone who performs an action, and a Patient, as someone to whom an action occurs (von Polenz 170; semantic roles such as Agent, Patient, Experiencer, etc. are capitalised by convention). Using linguistic data from war letters, this concept is discussed in more detail below. In the following, “field post” is considered as dispositif, by which Foucault means a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus [dispositif]. The apparatus [dispositif] itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (Foucault, Confessions 194) The English translation of the French “dispositif” as “apparatus” encourages an understanding of dispositif as a rather rigid structure. In contrast, the field post service of the Second World War will be used here to show how such dispositifs enable practices of exclusion or restrict access to practices of inclusion, while these characteristics themselves are in turn established by practices or, as Foucault calls them, procedures (Foucault, Discourse). An important and potentially enlightening notion related to dispositif is that of agencement, which in turn is borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari and was further developed in particular in actor-network theory (Çalışkan and Callon; Gherardi). What Çalışkan and Callon state about markets serves as a general description of agencement, which can be defined as an “arrangement of heterogeneous constituents that deploys the following: rules and conventions; technical devices; metrological systems; logistical infrastructures; texts, discourses and narratives …; technical and scientific knowledge (including social scientific methods), as well as the competencies and skills embodied in living beings” (3). This resembles Foucault’s concept of dispositif (Foucault, Confessions; see above), which “denotes a heterogeneous ensemble of discursive and nondiscursive elements with neither an originary subject not [sic] a determinant causality” (Coté 384). Considered morphosemantically, agencement expresses an important interrelation: in that it is derived from both the French agencer (to construct; to arrange) and agence (agency; cf. Hardie and MacKenzie 58) and is concretised and nominalised by the suffix -ment, agencement elegantly integrates structure and action according to Giddens’s ‘duality of structure’. While this tying aspect certainly contributes to a better understanding of dispositional arrangements and should therefore be considered, agencement, as applied in actor-network theory, emphasises above all “the fact that agencies and arrangements are not separate” (Çalışkan and Callon) and is, moreover, often employed to ascribe agency to material objects, things, media, etc. This approach has proven to be very fruitful for analyses of socio-technical arrangements in actor-network theory and practice theory (Çalışkan and Callon; Gherardi). However, within the presented discourse-oriented study on letter writing and field post in National Socialism, a clear analytical differentiation between agency and arrangement, precisely in order to point out their interrelation, is essential to analyse practices of exclusion. This is why I prefer dispositif to agencement as the analytical concept here. Infrastructural Exclusion of Agency in Field Post Letters In the Second World War, writing letters between the “homeland” and the “frontline” was a fundamental everyday media practice with an estimated total of 30 to 40 billion letters in Germany (Kilian 97). War letters were known as field post (Feldpost), which was processed by the field post service. The dispositif “field post” was, in opposition to the traditional postal service, subject to specific conditions regarding charges, transport, and above all censorship. No transportation costs arose for field post letters up to a weight of 250 grams. Letters could only be sent by or to soldiers with a field post number that encoded the addresses of the field post offices. Only soldiers who were deployed outside the Reich’s borders received a field post number (Kilian 114). Thus, the soldiers were socially included as interactants due to their military status. The entire organisation of the field post was geared towards enabling members of the Volksgemeinschaft to communicatively shape, maintain, and continue their social relationships during the war (Bergerson et al.). Applying Foucault, the dispositif “field post” establishes selection and exclusion mechanisms in which “procedures of exclusion” (Discourse 52) become manifest, two of which are to be related to the field post: “exclusion from discourse” and “scarcity of speaking subjects” (Spitzmüller and Warnke 73). Firstly, “procedures of exclusion ensure that only certain statements can be made in discourse” (Spitzmüller and Warnke 73). This exclusion procedure ought to be implemented by controlling and, ultimately, censoring field post letters. Reviews were carried out by censorship offices (Feldpostprüfstellen), which were military units independent of the field post offices responsible for delivery. Censorship initially focussed on military information. However, “in the course of the war, censorship shifted from a control measure aimed at defence towards a political-ideological review” (Kilian 101). Critical remarks could be legally prosecuted and punished with prison, penitentiary, or death (Kilian 99). Hence, it is assumed that self-censorship played a role not only for public media, such as newspapers, but also for writing private letters (Dodd). As the introductory quotation from Otto M. shows, writers who spread undesirable information in their letters anticipated the harshest consequences. In this respect, randomised censorship—although only a very small proportion of the high volume of mail was actually opened by censors (Kilian)—established a permanent disposition of control that resulted in a potentially discourse-excluding social stratification of private communication. Secondly, the dispositif “field post” was inherently exclusive and excluding, as those who did not belong to the Volksgemeinschaft could not use the service and thus could not acquire agentive capacity. The “scarcity of speaking subjects” (Spitzmüller and Warnke 73) was achieved by restricting participation in the field post system to members of the Volksgemeinschaft. Since agency is based on the most basic prerequisite, namely the ability to act linguistically at all, the mere possibility of exercising agency was infrastructurally restricted by the field post system. Excluding people from “agency-through-language” means excluding them from an “agency of an existential sort” (Duranti 455), which is described here, regarding the field post system, as infrastructural exclusion of agency. Interactional Exclusion of Agency in Field Post Letters In this section, I will elaborate how agency is brought forth interactionally through linguistic means on the basis of data from a field post corpus that was compiled in the project “Linguistic Social History 1933 to 1945” (Kämper). The aim of the project is an actor-based description of discursive practices and patterns at the time of National Socialism, which takes into account the fact that society in the years 1933 to 1945 consisted of heterogeneous communities of practice (Horan, Practice). Letter communication is considered to be an interaction that is characterised by mediated indexicality, accountability, reflexivity, sequentiality, and reciprocity (Dang-Anh) and is performed as situated social practice (Barton and Hall). The corpus of field letters examined here provides access to the everyday communication of members of the ‘integrated society’, i.e. those who were neither high-ranking members of the Nazi apparatus nor exposed to the repressions of the fascist dictatorship. The corpus consists of about 3,500 letters and about 2.5 million tokens. The data were obtained by digitising letter editions using OCR scans and in cooperation with the field post archive of the Museum for Communication Berlin (cf. sources below). We combine qualitative and quantitative methods, the latter providing heuristic indicators for in-depth hermeneutical analysis (Felder; Teubert). We apply corpus linguistic methods such as keyword, collocation and concordance analysis to the digitised full texts in order to analyse the data intersubjectively by means of corpus-based hermeneutic discourse analysis (Dang-Anh and Scholl). However, the selected excerpts of the corpus do not comprise larger data sets or complete sequences, but isolated fragments. Nevertheless, they illustrate the linguistic (non-)constitution of agency and thus distinctively exemplify exclusionary practices in field post letter writing. From a linguistic point of view, the exclusion of actors from action is achieved syntactically and semantically by deagentivisation (Bernárdez; von Polenz 186), as will be shown below. The following lines were written by Albert N. to his sister Johanna S. and are dated 25 June 1941, shortly after the beginning of the German Wehrmacht’s military campaign in Russia (Russlandfeldzug) a few days earlier. Vor den russ. Gefangenen bekommt man einen Ekel, d.h. viele Gefangene werden nicht gemacht.One gets disgusted by the Russian prisoners, i.e. many prisoners are not made. (N.) In the first part of the utterance, “mitigation of agency” (Duranti 465) is carried out using the impersonal pronoun “man” (“one”) which does not specify its referent. Instead, by means of deagentivisation, the scope of the utterance is generalised to an indefinite in‑group of speakers, whereby the use of the impersonal pronoun implies that the proposition is valid or generally accepted. Moreover, the use of “one” generalises the emotional expression “disgust”, thus suggesting that the aversive emotion is a self-evident affect experienced by everyone who can be subsumed under “one”. In particular, this includes the author, who is implicitly displayed as primarily perceiving the emotion in question. This reveals a fundamental practice of inclusion and exclusion, the separating distinction between “us”/“we” and “them”/“the others” (Wodak). In terms of semantic roles, the inclusive and generalised formal Experiencer “one” is opposed to the Causative “Russian prisoner” in an exclusionary manner, implicitly indicating the prisoners as the cause of disgust. The subsequent utterance is introduced by “i.e.”, which marks the causal link between the two phrases. The wording “many prisoners are not made” strongly suggests that it refers to homicides, i.e. executions carried out at the beginning of the military campaign in Russia by German troops (Reddemann 222). The depiction of a quasi-universal disgust in the first part establishes a “negative characterization of the out-group” (Wodak 33) which, in the expressed causal relation with the second phrase, seems to morally legitimise or at least somehow justify the implied killings. The passive form entirely omits an acting entity. Here, deagentivisation obscures the agency of the perpetrators. However, this is not the only line between acting and non-acting entities the author draws. The omission of an agent, even the impersonal “one”, in the second part, and the fact that there is no talk of self-experienceable emotions, but war crimes are hinted at in a passive sentence, suggest the exclusion of oneself as a joint agent of the indicated actions. As further data from the corpus indicate, war crimes are usually not ascribed to the writer or his own unit as the agents but are usually attributed to “others” or not at all. Was Du von Juden schreibst, ist uns schon länger bekannt. Sie werden im Osten angesiedelt.What you write about Jews is already known to us for some time. They are being settled in the East. (G.) In this excerpt from a letter, which Ernst G. wrote to his wife on 22 February 1942, knowledge about the situation of the Jews in the war zone is discussed. The passage appears quite isolated with its cotext in the letter revolving around quite different, trivial, everyday topics. Apparently, G. refers in his utterance to an earlier letter from his wife, which has not been preserved and is therefore not part of the corpus. “Jews” are those about whom the two agents, the soldier and his wife, write, whereas “us” refers to the soldiers at the front. In the second part, agency is again obscured by deagentivisation. While “they” anaphorically refers to “Jews” as Patients, the agents of their alleged resettlement remain unnamed in this “agent-less passive construction” (Duranti 466). Jews are depicted here as objects being handled—without any agency of their own. The persecution of the Jews and the executions carried out on the Russian front (Reddemann 222), including those of Jews, are euphemistically played down here as “settlements”. “Trivialization” and “denial” are two common discursive practices of exclusion (Wodak 134) and emerge here, as interactional exclusion of agency, in one of their most severe manifestations. Conclusion Social and societal exclusion, as has been shown, are predominantly legitimised as well as constituted, maintained, and perpetuated by discursive practices. Field post letters can be analysed both in terms of the infrastructure—which is itself constituted by infrastructuring practices and is thus not rigid but dynamic—that underlies excluding letter-writing practices in times of war, and the extent to which linguistic excluding practices are performed in the letters. It has been shown that agency, which is established by the ascription of action to an entity, is a central concept for the analysis of practices of exclusion. While I propose the division into infrastructural and interactional exclusion of agency, it must be pointed out that this can only be an analytical distinction and both bundles of practices, that of infrastructuring and that of interacting, are intertwined and are to be thought of in relation to each other. Bringing together the two concepts of agency and dispositif, despite the fact that they are of quite different origins, allows an analysis of exclusionary practices, which I hope does justice to the relation of interaction and infrastructure. By definition, exclusion occurs against the background of an asymmetrical arrangement within which exclusionary practices are carried out. Thus, dispositif is understood as an arranged but flexible condition, wherein agency, as a discursively ascribed or infrastructurally arranged property, unfolds. Social and societal exclusion, which were constitutive for National Socialism, were accomplished not only in public media but also in field post letters. Writing letters was a fundamental everyday media practice and the field post was a central social medium during the National Socialist era. However, exclusion occurred on different infrastructural and interactional levels. As shown, it was possible to be excluded by agency, which means exclusion by societal status and role. People could linguistically perform an excluding agency by constituting a division between “us” and “them”. Also, specific discourses were excluded by the potential control and censorship of communication by the authorities, and those who did not suppress agency, for example by self-censoring, feared prosecution. Moreover, the purely linguistic practices of exclusion not only constituted or legitimised the occasionally fatal demarcations drawn under National Socialism, but also concealed and trivialised them. As discussed, it was the perpetrators whose agency was excluded in war letters, which led to a mitigation of their actions. In addition, social actors were depreciated and ostracised through deagentivisation, mitigation and omission of agency. In extreme cases of social exclusion, linguistic deagentivisation even prepared or resulted in the revocation of the right to exist of entire social groups. The German soldier Otto M. feared fatal punishment because he did not communicatively act according to the social stratification of the then regime towards a Volksgemeinschaft in a field post letter. This demonstrates how thin the line is between inclusion and exclusion in a fascist dictatorship. I hope to have shown that the notion of excluding agency can provide an approach to identifying and analytically understanding such inclusion and exclusion practices in everyday interactions in media as dispositional arrangements. However, more research needs to be done on the vast yet unresearched sources of everyday communication in the National Socialist era, in particular by applying digital means to discourse analysis (Dang-Anh and Scholl). Sources G., Ernst. “Field post letter: Ernst to his wife Irene. 22 Feb. 1942.” Sei tausendmal gegrüßt: Briefwechsel Irene und Ernst Guicking 1937–1945. Ed. Jürgen Kleindienst. Berlin: JKL Publikationen, 2001. Reihe Zeitgut Spezial 1. M., Otto. 3 Sep. 1943. 3.2002.7163. Museum for Communication, Berlin. Otto M. to his family. 16 Sep. 2020 <https://briefsammlung.de/feldpost-zweiter-weltkrieg/brief.html?action=detail&what=letter&id=1175>. N., Albert. “Field post letter: Albert N. to his sister Johanna S. 25 June 1941.” Zwischen Front und Heimat: Der Briefwechsel des münsterischen Ehepaares Agnes und Albert Neuhaus 1940–1944. Ed. Karl Reddemann. Münster: Regensberg, 1996. 222–23. References Ahearn, Laura M. “Agency and Language.” Handbook of Pragmatics. Eds. Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010. 28–48. Barton, David, and Nigel Hall. Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000. Bergerson, Andrew Stuart, Laura Fahnenbruck, and Christine Hartig. “Working on the Relationship.” Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany. Eds. Elizabeth Harvey et al. Vol. 65. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 256–79. Bernárdez, Enrique. “A Partial Synergetic Model of Deagentivisation.” Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 4.1–3 (1997): 53–66. Çalışkan, Koray, and Michel Callon. “Economization, Part 2: A Research Programme for the Study of Markets.” Economy and Society 39.1 (2010): 1–32. Coté, Mark. “What Is a Media Dispositif? Compositions with Bifo.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 35.4 (2011): 378–86. Dang-Anh, Mark, and Stefan Scholl. “Digital Discourse Analysis of Language Use under National Socialism: Methodological Reflections and Applications.” Writing the Digital History of Nazi Germany. Eds. Frederike Buda and Julia Timpe. Boston, Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming. Dang-Anh, Mark. Protest twittern: Eine medienlinguistische Untersuchung von Straßenprotesten. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2019. Locating Media/Situierte Medien 22. 22 Sep. 2020 <https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839448366>. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deppermann, Arnulf. “Unpacking Parental Violence in Narratives: Agency, Guilt, and Pedagogy in Narratives about Traumatic Interpersonal Experiences.” Applied Linguistics 41.3 (2020): 428–51. Dodd, W.J. National Socialism and German Discourse. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018. Duranti, Alessandro. “Agency in Language.” A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Ed. Alessandro Duranti. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. 451–73. Felder, Ekkehard. “Lexik und Grammatik der Agonalität in der linguistischen Diskursanalyse.” Diskurs – Interdisziplinär. Eds. Heidrun Kämper and Ingo H. Warnke. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 87–121. Fillmore, Charles J. “The Case for Case.” Universals in Linguistic Theory. Eds. Emmon Bach and Robert T. Harms. London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. 1–88. Foucault, Michel. “The Confessions of Flesh.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Ed. Michel Foucault. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. 194–228. ———. “The Order of Discourse.” Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert J.C. Young. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. 51–78. Garfinkel, Harold, ed. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1967. Gherardi, Silvia. “To Start Practice Theorizing Anew: The Contribution of the Concepts of Agencement and Formativeness.” Organization 23.5 (2016): 680–98. Giddens, Anthony. Central Problems in Social Theory. London: Macmillan Education UK, 1979. Hardie, Iain, and Donald MacKenzie. “Assembling an Economic Actor: The Agencement of a Hedge Fund.” The Sociological Review 55.1 (2007): 57–80. Horan, Geraldine. “‘Er zog sich die ‚neue Sprache‘ des ‚Dritten Reiches‘ über wie ein Kleidungsstück‘: Communities of Practice and Performativity in National Socialist Discourse.” Linguistik online 30.1 (2007): 57–80. 22 Sep. 2020 <https://doi.org/10.13092/lo.30.549>. ———. “‘Lieber Guter Onkel Hitler’: A Linguistic Analysis of the Letter as a National Socialist Text-Type and a Re-Evaluation of the ‘Sprache im/des Nationalsozialismus’ Debate.” New Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on the German Language, National Socialism, and the Shoah. Eds. Peter Davies and Andrea Hammel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. 45–58. Kämper, Heidrun. “Sprachliche Sozialgeschichte 1933 bis 1945 – Ein Projektkonzept.” Sprachliche Sozialgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus. Eds. Heidrun Kämper and Britt-Marie Schuster. Bremen: Hempen Verlag, 2018. 9–25. Kilian, Katrin Anja. “Das Medium Feldpost als Gegenstand interdisziplinärer Forschung: Archivlage, Forschungsstand und Aufbereitung der Quelle aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg.” Dissertation. Technische Universität Berlin, 2001. 22 Sep. 2020 <https://doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-322>. Reddemann, Karl, ed. Zwischen Front und Heimat: Der Briefwechsel des münsterischen Ehepaares Agnes und Albert Neuhaus 1940–1944. Münster: Regensberg, 1996. Sauer, Christoph. “1933–1945.” Handbuch Sprache und Politik: In 3 Bänden. Eds. Thomas Niehr, Jörg Kilian, and Martin Wengeler. Bremen: Hempen Verlag, 2017. 975–98. Schlosser, Horst Dieter. Sprache unterm Hakenkreuz: Eine andere Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus. Köln: Böhlau, 2013. Scholl, Stefan. “Für eine Sprach- und Kommunikationsgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus: Ein Programmatischer Forschungsüberblick.” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 59 (2019): 409–44. Spitzmüller, Jürgen, and Ingo H. Warnke. Diskurslinguistik: Eine Einführung in Theorien und Methoden der transtextuellen Sprachanalyse. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2011. Teubert, Wolfgang. “Corpus Linguistics: An Alternative.” Semen 27 (2009): 1–25. Von Polenz, Peter. Deutsche Satzsemantik: Grundbegriffe des Zwischen-den-Zeilen-Lesens. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1985. Wildt, Michael. “Volksgemeinschaft: A Modern Perspective on National Socialist Society.” Visions of Community in Nazi Germany. Eds. Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 43–59. Wodak, Ruth. “Discourse and Politics: The Rhetoric of Exclusion.” The Haider Phenomenon in Austria. Eds. Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002. 33–60.

Fig. 1: Photo by Miguel Orós, from unsplash.comFeminism has stalled at the bedroom door. In the post-#metoo era, more than ever, we need intimate civil rights in our relationships to counter the worrisome prevailing trends: Intimate partner violence. Interpersonal abuse. Date rape. Sexual harassment. Online harassment. Bullying. Rage. Sexual Assault. Abusive relationships. Revenge porn. There’s a lot of damage done when we get up close and personal. In the 21st century, we have come far in terms of equality and respect between the genders, so there’s a lot to celebrate. We also note that the Australian government has stepped in recently with the theme ‘Keeping Australians safe and secure’, by pledging $78 million to combat domestic violence, much of which takes place behind closed doors (Morrison 2019). Herein lies the issue: while governments legislate to protect victims of domestic violence — out of the public eye, private behaviours cannot be closely monitored, and the lack of social enforcement of these laws threatens the safety of intimate relationships. Rather, individuals are left to their own devices. We outline here a guideline for intimate civility, an individually-embraced code of conduct that could guide interpersonal dynamics within the intimate space of relationships. Civility does not traditionally ‘belong’ in our most intimate relationships. Rather, it’s been presumed, even idealised, that intimacy in our personal lives transcends the need for public values to govern relationships between/among men and women (i.e., that romantic love is all you need). Civility developed as a public, gendered concept. Historically, a man’s home – and indeed, his partner – became his dominion, promoting hegemonic constructions of masculinity, and values that reflect competition, conquest, entitlement and ownership. Moreover, intimate relationships located in the private domain can also be considered for/by both men and women a retreat, a bastion against, or excluded from the controls and demands of the public or ‘polis’ - thus from the public requirement for civility, further enabling its breakdown. The feminist political theorist Carole Pateman situated this historical separation as an inheritance of Hegel’s double dilemma: first, a class division between civil society and the state (between the economic man/woman, or private enterprise and public power) and second, a patriarchal division between the private family (and intimate relationships) and civil society/the state. The private location, she argues, is “an association constituted by ties of love, blood … subjection and particularity” rather than the public sphere, “an association of free and equal individuals” (225). In Hegel’s dilemma, personal liberty is a dualism, only constructed in relation to a governed, public (patriarchal) state. Alternately, Carter depicts civility as a shared moral good, where civility arises not only because of concern over consequences, but also demonstrates our intrinsic moral obligation to respect people in general. This approach subsequently challenges our freedom to carry out private, uncivil acts within a truly civil society.Challenges to Gender EthicsHow can we respond to this challenge in gender ethics? Intimate civility is a term coined by Elizabeth Reid Boyd and Abigail Bray. It came out of their discussions proposing “a new poetics of romance” which called for rewritten codes of interpersonal conduct, an “entente cordiale; a cordial truce to end the sex wars”. Reid Boyd and Bray go further:Politeness is personal and political. We reclaim courtesy as applied sexual and social ethics, an interpersonal, intimate ethics, respectful and tolerant of difference. Gender ethics must be addressed, for they have global social and cultural ramifications that we should not underestimate. (xx)As researchers, we started to explore the idea of intimate civility in interpersonal violence, developing an analysis using social construction and attachment theory simultaneously. In defining the term, we soon realised the concept had wider applications that could change how we think about our most intimate relationships – and how we behave in them. Conceptualising intimate civility involves imagining rights and responsibilities within the private sphere, whether or not loving, familial and natural. Intimate civility can operate through an individually embraced code of conduct to guide interpersonal dynamics within the intimate space of relationships.Gringart, Grobbelaar, and Bender explored the concept of intimate civility by investigating women’s perspectives on what may harmonise their intimate relationships. Women’s most basic desires included safety, equality and respect in the bedroom. In other words, intimate civility is an enactment of human-rights, the embodiment of regard for another human being, insofar as it is a form of ensuring physical and mental integrity, life, safety and protection of all beings. Thus, if intimate civility existed as a core facet of each individual’s self-concept, the manifestation of intimate partner violence ideally would not occur. Rage, from an intimate civility perspective, rips through any civil response and generates misconduct towards another. When we hold respect for others as equal moral beings, civility is key to contain conflicts, which prevents the escalation of disagreements into rage. Intimate civility proposes that civility becomes the baseline behaviour that would be reciprocated between two individuals within the private domain of intimate relationships. Following this notion, intimate civility is the foremost casualty in many relationships characterised by intimate partner violence. The current criminalisation of intimate partner violence leaves unexplored the previously privatised property of the relational – including the inheritance of centuries of control of women’s bodies and sexuality – and how far, in this domain, notions of civility might liberate and/or oppress. The feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray argues that these kinds of ‘sexuate rights’ must apply to both men and women and the reality of their needs and desires. Equality, she argued, could not be achieved without a rewriting of the rights and obligations of each sex, qua different, in social rights and obligations (Yan).Synonyms for intimacy include, amongst others, closeness, attachment, togetherness, warmth, mutual affection, familiarity and privacy. Indirectly, sexual relations are also often synonymous with intimate relationships. However, sex is not intimacy, as both sex and intimacy both exist without the other. Bowlby proposed that throughout our lives we are attentive to the responsiveness and the availability of those that we are attached to, and suggested that “intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s life revolves, not only when he is an infant or a toddler, but throughout his adolescence and his years of maturity as well, and on into old age” (442). Although love is not by nature reciprocal, in intimacy we seek reciprocity – to love one another at the same time in a shared form of commitment. Kierkegaard hypothesised that genuine love is witnessed by one continuing to love another after their death as it obviates any doubt that the beloved was loved and was not merely instrumental (Soble).Intimate Civility as a Starting PointCivility includes qualities such as trust, duty, morality, sacrifice, self-restraint, respect, and fairness; a common standard allowing individuals to work, live and associate together. Intimacy encourages caring, loyalty, empathy, honesty, and self-knowledge. Thus, intimate civility should begin with those closest to us; being civil in our most intimate relationships. It advocates the genuine use of terms of endearment, not terms of abuse. We can only develop qualities such as morality and empathy, crucial for intimate relationships, if we have experienced secure, intimate relationships. Individuals reared in homes devoid of intimate civility will be challenged to identify and promote the interest or wellbeing of their intimate counterparts, and have to seek outside help to learn these skills: it is a learnt behaviour, both at an interpersonal and societal level. Individuals whose parents were insensitive to their childhood needs, and were unable to perceive, interpret and respond appropriately to their subtle communications, signals, wishes and mood will be flailing in this interpersonal skill (Holmes and Slade). Similarly, the individual’s inclusion in a civil society will only be achieved if their surrounding environment promotes and values virtues such as compassion, fairness and cooperation. This may be a challenging task. We envisage intimate civility as a starting point. It provides a focus to discuss and explore civil rights, obligations and responsibilities, between and among women and men in their personal relationships. As stated above, intimate civility begins with one's relationship with oneself and the closest relationships in the home, and hopefully reaches outwards to all kinds of relationships, including same sex, transgender, and other roles within non-specific gender assignment. Therefore, exploring the concept of intimate civility has applications in personal therapy, family counselling centres and relationship counselling environments, or schools in sexual education, or in universities promoting student safety. For example, the 2019 “Change the Course” report was recently released to augment Universities Australia’s 2016 campaign that raised awareness on sexual assault on campus. While it is still under development, we envision that intimate civility decalogue outlined here could become a checklist to assist in promoting awareness regarding abuse of power and gender roles. A recent example of cultural reframing of gender and power in intimate relationships is the Australian Government’s 2018 Respect campaign against gender violence. These recent campaigns promote awareness that intimate civility is integrated with a more functional society.These campaigns, as the images demonstrate, aim at quantifying connections between interactions on an intimate scale in individual lives, and their impacts in shaping civil society in the arena of gender violence. They highlight the elasticity of the bonds between intimate life and civil society and our collective responsibility as citizens for reworking both the gendered and personal civility. Fig. 2: Photo by Tyler Nix: Hands Spelling Out LOVE, from unsplash.comThe Decalogue of Intimate Civility Overall, police reports of domestic violence are heavily skewed towards male on female, but this is not always the case. The Australian government recently reported that “1 in 6 Australian women and 1 in 16 men have been subjected, since the age of 15, to physical and/or sexual violence by a current or previous cohabiting partner” (Australian Institutes of Health and Welfare). Rather than reiterating the numbers, we envisage the decalogue (below) as a checklist of concepts designed to discuss and explore rights, obligations and responsibilities, between and among both partners in their intimate relationships. As such, this decalogue forms a basis for conversation. Intimate civility involves a relationship with these ten qualities, with ourselves, and each other.1) Intimate civility is personal and political. Conceptualising intimate civility involves imagining rights and responsibilities within the private sphere. It is not an impingement on individual liberty or privacy but a guarantor of it. Civil society requires us not to defend private infringements of inter-personal respect. Private behaviours are both intimate in their performance and the springboard for social norms. In Geoffrey Rush’s recent defamation case his defence relied not on denying claims he repeatedly touched his fellow actor’s genitalia during their stage performance in a specific scene, despite her requests to him that he stop, but rather on how newspaper reporting of her statements made him out to be a “sexual pervert”, reflecting the complex link between this ‘private’ interaction between two people and its very public exposé (Wells). 2) Intimate civility is an enactment of a civil right, insofar as it is a form of ensuring physical and mental integrity, life, safety and protection. Intimate civility should begin with those closest to us. An example of this ethic at work is the widening scope of criminalisation of intimate partner abuse to include all forms of abusive interactions between people. Stalking and the pre-cursors to physical violence such as controlling behaviours, online bullying or any actions used to instil fear or insecurity in a partner, are accorded legal sanctions. 3) Intimate civility is polite. Politeness is more than manners. It relates to our public codes of conduct, to behaviours and laws befitting every civilian of the ‘polis’. It includes the many acts of politeness that are required behind closed doors and the recognition that this is the place from which public civility emerges. For example, the modern parent may hope that what they sanction as “polite” behaviour between siblings at home might then become generalised by the child into their public habits and later moral expectations as adults. In an ideal society, the micro-politics of family life become the blueprint for moral development for adult expectations about personal conduct in intimate and public life.4) Intimate civility is equitable. It follows Luce Irigaray’s call for ‘sexuate rights’ designed to apply to men and women and the reality of their needs and desires, in a rewriting of the social rights and obligations of each sex (Yan and Irigaray). Intimate civility extends this notion of rights to include all those involved in personal relations. This principle is alive within systemic family therapy which assumes that while not all members of the family system are always able to exert equal impacts or influence, they each in principle are interdependent participants influencing the system as a whole (Dallos and Draper). 5) Intimate civility is dialectical. The separation of intimacy and civility in Western society and thought is itself a dualism that rests upon other dualisms: public/private, constructed/natural, male/female, rational/emotional, civil/criminal, individual/social, victim/oppressor. Romantic love is not a natural state or concept, and does not help us to develop safe governance in the world of intimate relationships. Instead, we envisage intimate civility – and our relationships – as dynamic, dialectical, discursive and interactive, above and beyond dualism. Just as individuals do not assume that consent for sexual activity negotiated in one partnership under a set of particular conditions, is consent to sexual activity in all partnerships in any conditions. So, dialectics of intimate civility raises the expectation that what occurs in interpersonal relationships is worked out incrementally, between people over time and particular to their situation and experiences. 6) Intimate civility is humane. It can be situated in what Julia Kristeva refers to as the new humanism, emerging (and much needed) today. “This new humanism, interaction with others – all the others – socially marginalised, racially discriminated, politically, sexually, biologically or psychically persecuted others” (Kristeva, 2016: 64) is only possible if we immerse ourselves in the imaginary, in the experience of ‘the other’. Intimate civility takes on a global meaning when human rights action groups such as Amnesty International address the concerns of individuals to make a social difference. Such organisations develop globally-based digital platforms for interested individuals to become active about shared social concerns, understanding that the new humanism ethic works within and between individuals and can be harnessed for change.7) Intimate civility is empathic. It invites us to create not-yet-said, not-yet-imagined relationships. The creative space for intimate civility is not bound by gender, race or sexuality – only by our imaginations. “The great instrument of moral good is the imagination,” wrote the poet Shelley in 1840. Moral imagination (Reid Boyd) helps us to create better ways of being. It is a form of empathy that encourages us to be kinder and more loving to ourselves and each other, when we imagine how others might feel. The use of empathic imagination for real world relational benefits is common in traditional therapeutic practices, such as mindfulness, that encourages those struggling with self compassion to imagine the presence of a kind friend or ally to support them at times of hardship. 8) Intimate civility is respectful. Intimate civility is the foremost casualty in many relationships characterised by forms of abuse and intimate partner violence. “Respect”, wrote Simone Weil, “is due to the human being as such, and is not a matter of degree” (171). In the intimate civility ethic this quality of respect accorded as a right of beings is mutual, including ourselves with the other. When respect is eroded, much is lost. Respect arises from empathy through attuned listening. The RESPECT! Campaign originating from the Futures without Violence organisation assumes healthy relationships begin with listening between people. They promote the understanding that the core foundation of human wellbeing is relational, requiring inter-personal understanding and respect.9) Intimate civility is a form of highest regard. When we regard another we truly see them. To hold someone in high regard is to esteem them, to hold them above others, not putting them on a pedestal, or insisting they are superior, but to value them for who they are. To be esteemed for our interior, for our character, rather than what we display or what we own. It connects with the humanistic psychological concept of unconditional positive regard. The highest regard holds each other in arms and in mind. It is to see/look at, to have consideration for, and to pay attention to, recently epitomised by the campaign against human trafficking, “Can You See Me?” (Human Trafficking), whose purpose is to foster public awareness of the non-verbal signs and signals between individuals that indicate human trafficking may be taking place. In essence, teaching communal awareness towards the victimisation of individuals. 10) Intimate civility is intergenerational. We can only develop qualities such as morality and empathy, crucial for intimate relationships, if we have experienced (or imagined) intimate relationships where these qualities exist. Individuals reared in homes devoid of intimate civility could be challenged to identify and promote the interest or wellbeing of their intimate counterparts; it is a learnt behaviour, both at an interpersonal and societal level. Childhood developmental trauma research (Spinazzola and Ford) reminds us that the interaction of experiences, relational interactions, contexts and even our genetic amkeup makes individuals both vulnerable to repeating the behaviour of past generations. However, treatment of the condition and surrounding individuals with people in their intimate world who have different life experiences and personal histories, i.e., those who have acquired respectful relationship habits, can have a positive impact on the individuals’ capacity to change their learned negative behaviours. In conclusion, the work on intimate civility as a potential concept to alleviate rage in human relationships has hardly begun. The decalogue provides a checklist that indicates the necessity of ‘intersectionality’ — where the concepts of intimate civility connect to many points within the public/private and personal/political domains. Any analysis of intimacy must reach further than prepositions tied to social construction and attachment theory (Fonagy), to include current understandings of trauma and inter-generational violence and the way these influence people’s ability to act in healthy and balanced interpersonal relationships. While not condoning violent acts, locating the challenges to intimate civility on both personal and societal levels may leverage a compassionate view of those caught up in interpersonal violence. The human condition demands that we continue the struggle to meet the challenges of intimate civility in our personal actions with others as well as the need to replicate civil behaviour throughout all societies. ReferencesBowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. Vol. 3. New York: Basic Books, 1980.Carter, Stephen. Civility: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy. New York: Basic Books, 1998.Dallos, Rudi, and Ros Draper. An Introduction to Family Therapy: Systemic Theory and Practice. 2nd ed. Open University Press: Berkshire, 2005.Australian Institutes of Health and Welfare, Australian Government. Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence in Australia. 2018. 6 Feb. 2019 <https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/domestic-violence/family-domestic-sexual-violence-in-australia-2018/contents/summary>. Fonagy, Peter. Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis. New York: Other Press, 2001.Gringart, Eyal, Madalena Grobbelaar, and Alise Bender. Intimate Civility: The Perceptions and Experiences of Women on Harmonising Intimate Relationships. Honours thesis, 2018.Holmes, Jeremy, and Arietta Slade. Attachment in Therapeutic Practice. Los Angeles: Sage, 2018. Human Trafficking, Jan. 2019. 14 Feb. 2019 <https://www.a21.org/content/can-you-see-me/gnsqqg?permcode=gnsqqg&site=true>.Kristeva, Julia. Teresa My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila. New York: Columbia UP, 2016.Morrison, Scott. “National Press Club Address.” 11 Feb. 2019. 26 Feb. 2019 <https://www.pm.gov.au/media/national-press-club-address-our-plan-keeping-australians-safe-and-secure>.Pateman, Carole. “The Patriarchal Welfare State.” Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender Divisions. Eds. Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle. London: Polity Press, 1994. 223-45.Reid Boyd, Elizabeth. “How Creativity Can Help Us Cultivate Moral Imagination.” The Conversation, 30 Jan. 2019. 11 Feb. 2019 <http://theconversation.com/how-creativity-can-help-us-cultivate-moral-imagination-101968>.Reid Boyd, Elizabeth, and Abigail Bray. Ladies and Gentlemen: Sex, Love and 21st Century Courtesy. Unpublished book proposal, 2005.Commonwealth of Australia. Respect Campaign. 2018, 9 Jan. 2019 <http://www.respect.gov.au/the-campaign/campaign-materials/>.Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry. London: Ginn and Company, 1840.Soble, Alan. Philosophy of Sex and Love. St Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1998.Weil, Simone. Waiting on God. London: Fontana Collins, 1968.Wells, Jamelle. “Geoffrey Rush, Erin Norvill and the Daily Telegraph: The Stakes Are High in This Defamation Trial.” ABC News 12 Nov. 2018. 23 Feb. 2019 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-10/geoffrey-rush-defamation-trial-a-drama-with-final-act-to-come/10483944>.Yan, Liu, and Luce Irigaray. “Feminism, Sexuate Rights and the Ethics of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Luce Irigaray.” Foreign Literature Studies (2010): 1-9.

All history of this area and the general talk and all of that is that 1973 was a turning point and the Aquarius Festival is credited with having turned this region around in so many ways, but I think that is a myth ... and I have to honour the truth; and the truth is that old Dicke Donelly came and did a Welcome to Country the night before the festival. (Joseph in Joseph and Hanley)In 1973 the Australian Union of Students (AUS) held the Aquarius Arts and Lifestyle Festival in a small, rural New South Wales town called Nimbin. The festival was seen as the peak expression of Australian counterculture and is attributed to creating the “Rainbow Region”, an area with a concentration of alternative life stylers in Northern NSW (Derrett 28). While the Aquarius Festival is recognised as a founding historical and countercultural event, the unique and important relationships established with Indigenous people at this time are generally less well known. This article investigates claims that the 1973 Aquarius Festival was “the first event in Australian history that sought permission for the use of the land from the Traditional Owners” (Joseph and Hanley). The diverse international, national and local conditions that coalesced at the Aquarius Festival suggest a fertile environment was created for reconciliatory bonds to develop. Often dismissed as a “tree hugging, soap dodging movement,” the counterculture was radically politicised having sprung from the 1960s social revolutions when the world witnessed mass demonstrations that confronted war, racism, sexism and capitalism. Primarily a youth movement, it was characterised by flamboyant dress, music, drugs and mass gatherings with universities forming the epicentre and white, middle class youth leading the charge. As their ideals of changing the world were frustrated by lack of systematic change, many decided to disengage and a migration to rural settings occurred (Jacob; Munro-Clarke; Newton). In the search for alternatives, the counterculture assimilated many spiritual practices, such as Eastern traditions and mysticism, which were previously obscure to the Western world. This practice of spiritual syncretism can be represented as a direct resistance to the hegemony of the dominant Western culture (Stell). As the new counterculture developed, its progression from urban to rural settings was driven by philosophies imbued with a desire to reconnect with and protect the natural world while simultaneously rejecting the dominant conservative order. A recurring feature of this countercultural ‘back to the land’ migration was not only an empathetic awareness of the injustices of colonial past, but also a genuine desire to learn from the Indigenous people of the land. Indigenous people were generally perceived as genuine opposers of Westernisation, inherently spiritual, ecological, tribal and communal, thus encompassing the primary values to which the counterculture was aspiring (Smith). Cultures converged. One, a youth culture rebelling from its parent culture; the other, ancient cultures reeling from the historical conquest by the youths’ own ancestors. Such cultural intersections are rich with complex scenarios and politics. As a result, often naïve, but well-intended relations were established with Native Americans, various South American Indigenous peoples, New Zealand Maori and, as this article demonstrates, the Original People of Australia (Smith; Newton; Barr-Melej; Zolov). The 1960s protest era fostered the formation of groups aiming to address a variety of issues, and at times many supported each other. Jennifer Clarke says it was the Civil Rights movement that provided the first models of dissent by formulating a “method, ideology and language of protest” as African Americans stood up and shouted prior to other movements (2). The issue of racial empowerment was not lost on Australia’s Indigenous population. Clarke writes that during the 1960s, encouraged by events overseas and buoyed by national organisation, Aborigines “slowly embarked on a political awakening, demanded freedom from the trappings of colonialism and responded to the effects of oppression at worst and neglect at best” (4). Activism of the 1960s had the “profoundly productive effect of providing Aborigines with the confidence to assert their racial identity” (159). Many Indigenous youth were compelled by the zeitgeist to address their people’s issues, fulfilling Charlie Perkins’s intentions of inspiring in Indigenous peoples a will to resist (Perkins). Enjoying new freedoms of movement out of missions, due to the 1967 Constitutional change and the practical implementation of the assimilation policy, up to 32,000 Indigenous youth moved to Redfern, Sydney between 1967 and 1972 (Foley, “An Evening With”). Gary Foley reports that a dynamic new Black Power Movement emerged but the important difference between this new younger group and the older Indigenous leaders of the day was the diverse range of contemporary influences. Taking its mantra from the Black Panther movement in America, though having more in common with the equivalent Native American Red Power movement, the Black Power Movement acknowledged many other international struggles for independence as equally inspiring (Foley, “An Evening”). People joined together for grassroots resistance, formed anti-hierarchical collectives and established solidarities between varied groups who previously would have had little to do with each other. The 1973 Aquarius Festival was directly aligned with “back to the land” philosophies. The intention was to provide a place and a reason for gathering to “facilitate exchanges on survival techniques” and to experience “living in harmony with the natural environment.” without being destructive to the land (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Early documents in the archives, however, reveal no apparent interest in Australia’s Indigenous people, referring more to “silken Arabian tents, mediaeval banners, circus, jugglers and clowns, peace pipes, maypole and magic circles” (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). Obliterated from the social landscape and minimally referred to in the Australian education system, Indigenous people were “off the radar” to the majority mindset, and the Australian counterculture similarly was slow to appreciate Indigenous culture. Like mainstream Australia, the local counterculture movement largely perceived the “race” issue as something occurring in other countries, igniting the phrase “in your own backyard” which became a catchcry of Indigenous activists (Foley, “Whiteness and Blackness”) With no mention of any Indigenous interest, it seems likely that the decision to engage grew from the emerging climate of Indigenous activism in Australia. Frustrated by student protestors who seemed oblivious to local racial issues, focusing instead on popular international injustices, Indigenous activists accused them of hypocrisy. Aquarius Festival directors, found themselves open to similar accusations when public announcements elicited a range of responses. Once committed to the location of Nimbin, directors Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen began a tour of Australian universities to promote the upcoming event. While at the annual conference of AUS in January 1973 at Monash University, Dunstan met Indigenous activist Gary Foley: Gary witnessed the presentation of Johnny Allen and myself at the Aquarius Foundation session and our jubilation that we had agreement from the village residents to not only allow, but also to collaborate in the production of the Festival. After our presentation which won unanimous support, it was Gary who confronted me with the question “have you asked permission from local Aboriginal folk?” This threw me into confusion because we had seen no Aboriginals in Nimbin. (Dunstan, e-mail) Such a challenge came at a time when the historical climate was etched with political activism, not only within the student movement, but more importantly with Indigenous activists’ recent demonstrations, such as the installation in 1972 of the Tent Embassy in Canberra. As representatives of the counterculture movement, which was characterised by its inclinations towards consciousness-raising, AUS organisers were ethically obliged to respond appropriately to the questions about Indigenous permission and involvement in the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. In addition to this political pressure, organisers in Nimbin began hearing stories of the area being cursed or taboo for women. This most likely originated from the tradition of Nimbin Rocks, a rocky outcrop one kilometre from Nimbin, as a place where only certain men could go. Jennifer Hoff explains that many major rock formations were immensely sacred places and were treated with great caution and respect. Only a few Elders and custodians could visit these places and many such locations were also forbidden for women. Ceremonies were conducted at places like Nimbin Rocks to ensure the wellbeing of all tribespeople. Stories of the Nimbin curse began to spread and most likely captivated a counterculture interested in mysticism. As organisers had hoped that news of the festival would spread on the “lips of the counterculture,” they were alarmed to hear how “fast the bad news of this curse was travelling” (Dunstan, e-mail). A diplomatic issue escalated with further challenges from the Black Power community when organisers discovered that word had spread to Sydney’s Indigenous community in Redfern. Organisers faced a hostile reaction to their alleged cultural insensitivity and were plagued by negative publicity with accusations the AUS were “violating sacred ground” (Janice Newton 62). Faced with such bad press, Dunstan was determined to repair what was becoming a public relations disaster. It seemed once prompted to the path, a sense of moral responsibility prevailed amongst the organisers and they took the unprecedented step of reaching out to Australia’s Indigenous people. Dunstan claimed that an expedition was made to the local Woodenbong mission to consult with Elder, Uncle Lyle Roberts. To connect with local people required crossing the great social divide present in that era of Australia’s history. Amy Nethery described how from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, a “system of reserves, missions and other institutions isolated, confined and controlled Aboriginal people” (9). She explains that the people were incarcerated as a solution to perceived social problems. For Foley, “the widespread genocidal activity of early “settlement” gave way to a policy of containment” (Foley, “Australia and the Holocaust”). Conditions on missions were notoriously bad with alcoholism, extreme poverty, violence, serious health issues and depression common. Of particular concern to mission administrators was the perceived need to keep Indigenous people separate from the non-indigenous population. Dunstan described the mission he visited as having “bad vibes.” He found it difficult to communicate with the elderly man, and was not sure if he understood Dunstan’s quest, as his “responses came as disjointed raves about Jesus and saving grace” (Dunstan, e-mail). Uncle Lyle, he claimed, did not respond affirmatively or negatively to the suggestion that Nimbin was cursed, and so Dunstan left assuming it was not true. Other organisers began to believe the curse and worried that female festival goers might get sick or worse, die. This interpretation reflected, as Vanessa Bible argues, a general Eurocentric misunderstanding of the relationship of Indigenous peoples with the land. Paul Joseph admits they were naïve whites coming into a place with very little understanding, “we didn’t know if we needed a witch doctor or what we needed but we knew we needed something from the Aborigines to lift the spell!”(Joseph and Hanley). Joseph, one of the first “hippies” who moved to the area, had joined forces with AUS organisers. He said, “it just felt right” to get Indigenous involvement and recounted how organisers made another trip to Woodenbong Mission to find Dickee (Richard) Donnelly, a Song Man, who was very happy to be invited. Whether the curse was valid or not it proved to be productive in further instigating respectful action. Perhaps feeling out of their depth, the organisers initiated another strategy to engage with Australian Indigenous people. A call out was sent through the AUS network to diversify the cultural input and it was recommended they engage the services of South African artist, Bauxhau Stone. Timing aligned well as in 1972 Australia had voted in a new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam brought about significant political changes, many in response to socialist protests that left a buoyancy in the air for the counterculturalist movement. He made prodigious political changes in support of Indigenous people, including creating the Aboriginal Arts Board as part of the Australian Council of the Arts (ACA). As the ACA were already funding activities for the Aquarius Festival, organisers were successful in gaining two additional grants specifically for Indigenous participation (Farnham). As a result We were able to hire […] representatives, a couple of Kalahari bushmen. ‘Cause we were so dumb, we didn’t think we could speak to the black people, you know what I mean, we thought we would be rejected, or whatever, so for us to really reach out, we needed somebody black to go and talk to them, or so we thought, and it was remarkable. This one Bau, a remarkable fellow really, great artist, great character, he went all over Australia. He went to Pitjantjatjara, Yirrkala and we arranged buses and tents when they got here. We had a very large contingent of Aboriginal people come to the Aquarius Festival, thanks to Whitlam. (Joseph in Joseph and Henley) It was under the aegis of these government grants that Bauxhau Stone conducted his work. Stone embodied a nexus of contemporary issues. Acutely aware of the international movement for racial equality and its relevance to Australia, where conditions were “really appalling”, Stone set out to transform Australian race relations by engaging with the alternative arts movement (Stone). While his white Australian contemporaries may have been unaccustomed to dealing with the Indigenous racial issue, Stone was actively engaged and thus well suited to act as a cultural envoy for the Aquarius Festival. He visited several local missions, inviting people to attend and notifying them of ceremonies being conducted by respected Elders. Nimbin was then the site of the Aquarius Lifestyle and Celebration Festival, a two week gathering of alternative cultures, technologies and youth. It innovatively demonstrated its diversity of influences, attracted people from all over the world and was the first time that the general public really witnessed Australia’s counterculture (Derrett 224). As markers of cultural life, counterculture festivals of the 1960s and 1970s were as iconic as the era itself and many around the world drew on the unique Indigenous heritage of their settings in some form or another (Partridge; Perone; Broadley and Jones; Zolov). The social phenomenon of coming together to experience, celebrate and foster a sense of unity was triggered by protests, music and a simple, yet deep desire to reconnect with each other. Festivals provided an environment where the negative social pressures of race, gender, class and mores (such as clothes) were suspended and held the potential “for personal and social transformation” (St John 167). With the expressed intent to “take matters into our own hands” and try to develop alternative, innovative ways of doing things with collective participation, the Aquarius Festival thus became an optimal space for reinvigorating ancient and Indigenous ways (Dunstan, “A Survival Festival”). With philosophies that venerated collectivism, tribalism, connecting with the earth, and the use of ritual, the Indigenous presence at the Aquarius Festival gave attendees the opportunity to experience these values. To connect authentically with Nimbin’s landscape, forming bonds with the Traditional Owners was essential. Participants were very fortunate to have the presence of the last known initiated men of the area, Uncle Lyle Roberts and Uncle Dickee Donnely. These Elders represented the last vestiges of an ancient culture and conducted innovative ceremonies, song, teachings and created a sacred fire for the new youth they encountered in their land. They welcomed the young people and were very happy for their presence, believing it represented a revolutionary shift (Wedd; King; John Roberts; Cecil Roberts). Images 1 and 2: Ceremony and talks conducted at the Aquarius Festival (people unknown). Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Paul White. The festival thus provided an important platform for the regeneration of cultural and spiritual practices. John Roberts, nephew of Uncle Lyle, recalled being surprised by the reaction of festival participants to his uncle: “He was happy and then he started to sing. And my God … I couldn’t get near him! There was this big ring of hippies around him. They were about twenty deep!” Sharing to an enthusiastic, captive audience had a positive effect and gave the non-indigenous a direct Indigenous encounter (Cecil Roberts; King; Oshlak). Estimates of the number of Indigenous people in attendance vary, with the main organisers suggesting 800 to 1000 and participants suggesting 200 to 400 (Stone; Wedd; Oshlak: Joseph; King; Cecil Roberts). As the Festival lasted over a two week period, many came and left within that time and estimates are at best reliant on memory, engagement and perspectives. With an estimated total attendance at the Festival between 5000 and 10,000, either number of Indigenous attendees is symbolic and a significant symbolic statistic for Indigenous and non-indigenous to be together on mutual ground in Australia in 1973. Images 3-5: Performers from Yirrkala Dance Group, brought to the festival by Stone with funding from the Federal Government. Photographs reproduced by permission of photographer and festival attendee Dr Ian Cameron. For Indigenous people, the event provided an important occasion to reconnect with their own people, to share their culture with enthusiastic recipients, as well as the chance to experience diverse aspects of the counterculture. Though the northern NSW region has a history of diverse cultural migration of Italian and Indian families, the majority of non-indigenous and Indigenous people had limited interaction with cosmopolitan influences (Kijas 20). Thus Nimbin was a conservative region and many Christianised Indigenous people were also conservative in their outlook. The Aquarius Festival changed that as the Indigenous people experienced the wide-ranging cultural elements of the alternative movement. The festival epitomised countercultural tendencies towards flamboyant fashion and hairstyles, architectural design, fantastical art, circus performance, Asian clothes and religious products, vegetarian food and nudity. Exposure to this bohemian culture would have surely led to “mind expansion and consciousness raising,” explicit aims adhered to by the movement (Roszak). Performers and participants from Africa, America and India also gave attending Indigenous Australians the opportunity to interact with non-European cultures. Many people interviewed for this paper indicated that Indigenous people’s reception of this festival experience was joyous. For Australia’s early counterculture, interest in Indigenous Australia was limited and for organisers of the AUS Aquarius Festival, it was not originally on the agenda. The counterculture in the USA and New Zealand had already started to engage with their Indigenous people some years earlier. However due to the Aquarius Festival’s origins in the student movement and its solidarities with the international Indigenous activist movement, they were forced to shift their priorities. The coincidental selection of a significant spiritual location at Nimbin to hold the festival brought up additional challenges and countercultural intrigue with mystical powers and a desire to connect authentically to the land, further prompted action. Essentially, it was the voices of empowered Indigenous activists, like Gary Foley, which in fact triggered the reaching out to Indigenous involvement. While the counterculture organisers were ultimately receptive and did act with unprecedented respect, credit must be given to Indigenous activists. The activist’s role is to trigger action and challenge thinking and in this case, it was ultimately productive. Therefore the Indigenous people were not merely passive recipients of beneficiary goodwill, but active instigators of appropriate cultural exchange. After the 1973 festival many attendees decided to stay in Nimbin to purchase land collectively and a community was born. Relationships established with local Indigenous people developed further. Upon visiting Nimbin now, one will see a vibrant visual display of Indigenous and psychedelic themed art, a central park with an open fire tended by local custodians and other Indigenous community members, an Aboriginal Centre whose rent is paid for by local shopkeepers, and various expressions of a fusion of counterculture and Indigenous art, music and dance. While it appears that reconciliation became the aspiration for mainstream society in the 1990s, Nimbin’s early counterculture history had Indigenous reconciliation at its very foundation. The efforts made by organisers of the 1973 Aquarius Festival stand as one of very few examples in Australian history where non-indigenous Australians have respectfully sought to learn from Indigenous people and to assimilate their cultural practices. It also stands as an example for the world, of reconciliation, based on hippie ideals of peace and love. They encouraged the hippies moving up here, even when they came out for Aquarius, old Uncle Lyle and Richard Donnelly, they came out and they blessed the mob out here, it was like the hairy people had come back, with the Nimbin, cause the Nimbynji is the little hairy people, so the hairy people came back (Jerome). References Barr-Melej, Patrick. “Siloísmo and the Self in Allende’s Chile: Youth, 'Total Revolution,' and the Roots of the Humanist Movement.” Hispanic American Historical Review 86.4 (Nov. 2006): 747-784. Bible, Vanessa. Aquarius Rising: Terania Creek and the Australian Forest Protest Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of New England, Armidale, 2010. Broadley, Colin, and Judith Jones, eds. Nambassa: A New Direction. Auckland: Reed, 1979. Bryant, Gordon M. Parliament of Australia. Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. 1 May 1973. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Cameron, Ian. “Aquarius Festival Photographs.” 1973. Clarke, Jennifer. Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the Coming of the Sixties to Australia. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008. Derrett, Ross. Regional Festivals: Nourishing Community Resilience: The Nature and Role of Cultural Festivals in Northern Rivers NSW Communities. PhD Thesis. Southern Cross University, Lismore, 2008. Dunstan, Graeme. “A Survival Festival May 1973.” 1 Aug. 1972. Pamphlet. MS 6945/1. Nimbin Aquarius Festival Archives. National Library of Australia, Canberra. ---. E-mail to author, 11 July 2012. ---. “The Aquarius Festival.” Aquarius Rainbow Region. n.d. Farnham, Ken. Acting Executive Officer, Aboriginal Council for the Arts. 19 June 1973. Letter. MS ACC GB 1992.0505. Australian Union of Students. Records of the AUS, 1934-1991. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Foley, Gary. “Australia and the Holocaust: A Koori Perspective (1997).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_8.html›. ---. “Whiteness and Blackness in the Koori Struggle for Self-Determination (1999).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_9.html›. ---. “Black Power in Redfern 1968-1972 (2001).” The Koori History Website. n.d. 20 May 2013 ‹http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_1.html›. ---. “An Evening with Legendary Aboriginal Activist Gary Foley.” Conference Session. Marxism 2012 “Revolution in the Air”, Melbourne, Mar. 2012. Hoff, Jennifer. Bundjalung Jugun: Bundjalung Country. Lismore: Richmond River Historical Society, 2006. Jacob, Jeffrey. New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1997. Jerome, Burri. Interview. 31 July 2012. Joseph, Paul. Interview. 7 Aug. 2012. Joseph, Paul, and Brendan ‘Mookx’ Hanley. Interview by Rob Willis. 14 Aug. 2010. Audiofile, Session 2 of 3. nla.oh-vn4978025. Rob Willis Folklore Collection. National Library of Australia, Canberra. Kijas, Johanna, Caravans and Communes: Stories of Settling in the Tweed 1970s & 1980s. Murwillumbah: Tweed Shire Council, 2011. King, Vivienne (Aunty Viv). Interview. 1 Aug. 2012. Munro-Clarke, Margaret. Communes of Rural Australia: The Movement Since 1970. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1986. Nethery, Amy. “Aboriginal Reserves: ‘A Modern-Day Concentration Camp’: Using History to Make Sense of Australian Immigration Detention Centres.” Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2009. 4. Newton, Janice. “Aborigines, Tribes and the Counterculture.” Social Analysis 23 (1988): 53-71. Newton, John. The Double Rainbow: James K Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009. Offord, Baden. “Mapping the Rainbow Region: Fields of Belonging and Sites of Confluence.” Transformations 2 (March 2002): 1-5. Oshlak, Al. Interview. 27 Mar. 2013. Partridge, Christopher. “The Spiritual and the Revolutionary: Alternative Spirituality, British Free Festivals, and the Emergence of Rave Culture.” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7 (2006): 3-5. Perkins, Charlie. “Charlie Perkins on 1965 Freedom Ride.” Youtube, 13 Oct. 2009. Perone, James E. Woodstock: An Encyclopedia of the Music and Art Fair. Greenwood: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005. Roberts, John. Interview. 1 Aug. 2012. Roberts, Cecil. Interview. 6 Aug. 2012. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: University of California Press,1969. St John, Graham. “Going Feral: Authentica on the Edge of Australian culture.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 8 (1997): 167-189. Smith, Sherry. Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Stell, Alex. Dancing in the Hyper-Crucible: The Rite de Passage of the Post-Rave Movement. BA (Honours) Thesis. University of Westminster, London, 2005. Stone, Trevor Bauxhau. Interview. 1 Oct. 2012. Wedd, Leila. Interview. 27 Sep. 2012. White, Paul. “Aquarius Revisited.” 1973. Zolov, Eric. Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.