Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Person-Plus-Object"

Abstract. Possibilities for behavior (i.e., affordances) can be perceived with units spanning anatomical components and external objects. For example, affordances for standing on an inclined surface can be perceived with an object held in the hand or attached to the head. We investigated whether these two person-plus-object perceptual systems exhibit the same pattern of nonlinear phase transitions in perception of this affordance. Blindfolded participants explored an inclined surface with a rod held in the hand or attached to the head and reported whether they could stand on that surface. Inclinations were presented in ascending or descending sequences. In both conditions, responses exhibited negative hysteresis – perceptual boundaries occurred at steeper angles for descending than for ascending sequences. The generalization of this pattern across components that differ in physiology, sensitivity, and experience is consistent with both the soft assembly of perceptual devices and with a dynamical systems perspective on perception of affordances.

Perception of possibilities for behavior reflects the task-specific fit between action capabilities and environmental properties. We investigated whether this is so for a behavior that requires spontaneously and temporarily coordinating anatomical components and inert objects into a person-plus-object action system—stepping over an expanse with crutches. We found that perception of this affordance (a) scaled to an anthropometric property of primary relevance to performing this behavior (leg length), (b) reflected the ability to perform this behavior, and that (c) variability in perception decreased with practice perceiving this affordance. The results are consistent with the proposal that perceiving affordances for a given behavior requires assembling a task-specific perceptual instrument.

The article deals with the content space of positive assessment in modern English, which is formed under the infl uence of the type of assessment (moral and ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, social, emotional as well as the assessment of physical and empirical characteristics of the evaluation object), the obje ct of evaluation (person / non-person), and the nominative plane of subjects, actions and qualities that can potentially be positively assessed. The units used to positively assess moral, ethical, and emotional characteristics of the evaluation object correlate with the object of the “person” assessment, and units that correlate with a positive assessment of empirical features correlate with the object of the “non-person” assessment. The study reported in the article was conducted at the lexical and semantic levels. Semantics of the content plane of positive assessment is mainly laid down by three main verb ideas of “love”, “appreciate”, “improve”. Common for all parts of nominative thematic spheres are “love”, “friendship”, “pleasure”, “intelligence”, “harmonicity”, “respect” and others. The largest number of thematic planes can be noticed in adjectives and adverbs. Analysis at the lexemic level proved that multivalued words, in which all values would be evaluated, are rather few. In most cases, the evaluative value appears in the vocabulary of positive evaluation as the main one. Only in a small number of lexemes, semantic variants are formed in the process of development of semantic structure of lexemes. Within the semantic structure, lexemes are sometimes combined by semantic variants, which have an opposite score. All this indicates that the assessment in a number of cases is secondary: it is formed as an indication of the secondary characteristcs of the sign. If the score is at the “top” of a lexeme’s semantics, it can usually be applied to a large number of disparity characteristics of various objects. The assessment depends greatly on the situation in which it is used, that is, on the contextual environment and the nature of the speech act. Sociolinguistic aspects of communication as well as expressive stylistic color of the speech act play a special role in the variability of speech assessments. Adjectives that express the assessment and indicate any sign of the subject more often than other parts of the language are independently used to form the evaluative context. However, a signifi cant number of estimated nouns and verbs rarely appear in the context of isolation. These words require the explication of the estimated signs of the reference, which creates the possibility of sharing the evaluated words of diff erent parts of the language in the same context. Key words: vocabulary of positive semantics, register, semantic space, “plus-score”, melioration, derogativeness.

Contractual transfer of author’s economic rights will be effective only when the transferor was authorized to dispose of such rights. Acquiring a right from a person who is not authorized to alienate it is not known to copyright law. In this respect, the Roman principle of Nemo plus iuris in alium transferre potest quam ipse habet is fully applied, which entails a number of consequences. One of such consequences is the uncertainty as to the dispositive effect of an agreement obligating to transfer such rights, which in the era of mass trading in author’s economic rights may lead to significant distortions. Therefore, some proposals are formulated in the literature to protect good faith purchasers. For instance, it is suggested that Art. 169 of the Polish Civil Code may be applied to intangible property rights. Verifying the legitimacy of such a proposal requires the examination of legislative motives behind the solution adopted in the regulation mentioned above and the assessment of those motives from the perspective of the copyright law principles. What is of crucial importance here is to answer the question about the role of the possession of a thing for the legal substantiation of good faith acquisition from an unauthorized person. Rejection of the theory which derives the legitimacy of the person disposing of the right from the very fact of them possessing the thing in fact opens way to consider whether it is possible to adopt a similar solution in the copyright law. The author’s monopoly is completely independent from the possession of the object in which the work is possibly embodied. Therefore, is it dogmatically legitimate to apply Art. 169 of the Civil Code to a purchaser of author’s economic rights? The article attempts to answer this question.

Recent research has investigated whether the representation of space around the body, in terms of reach–action (imagining of reaching another person) and comfort–social (tolerance of the other’s proximity) spaces, may reflect a shared sensorimotor basis. Some studies exploiting motor plasticity induced by tool use have not observed sensorimotor identity (i.e., the same mechanisms that underlie, based on sensory information, the representation of proximal space in terms of action possibilities, goal-directed motor actions, and anticipation of the sensorimotor consequences), whereas evidence to the contrary has also emerged. Since the data are not fully convergent, here we wondered whether or not the combination of motor plasticity induced by tool use and the processing of the role of social context might reflect a similar modulation in both spaces. To this end, we conducted a randomized control trial with three groups of participants (N = 62) in which reaching and comfort distances were measured in Pre- and Post-tool-use sessions. The tool-use sessions were conducted under different conditions: (i) in the presence of a social stimulus (determining the social context) (Tool plus Mannequin group); (ii) without any stimulus (Only Tool group); (iii) in the presence of a box (Tool plus Object group) as a control condition. Results showed an extension of comfort distance in the Post-tool session of the Tool plus Mannequin group compared with the other conditions. Conversely, the reaching distance was larger after tool use than at the Pre-tool-use session, independently of the experimental conditions. Our findings suggest that motor plasticity impacts reaching and comfort spaces to different degrees; while reaching space is markedly sensitive to motor plasticity, comfort space needs qualification of social context information.

RÉSUMÉ. La deixis est une référence dans un discours qui devient l'un des éléments importants de la communication. Cette étude tente d'explorer la forme et la fonction de la deixis survenue dans chaque discours d'un film français. Cette étude est réalisée en utilisant une approche qualitative. L'objet de cette recherche est un film français intitulé Ma Vie de Courgette. Les données sont collectées à l'aide de techniques d'observation, d'enregistrement et de prise de notes. Les résultats montrent qu'il y a 4 formes de deixis survenues dans ce film, à savoir la deixis de la personne et du social, la deixis du temps, la deixis du lieu et la deixis du discours. Ces quatre formes ont des fonctions diverses, à savoir les fonctions référentielles, émotives, conatives et phatiques. Cette étude révèle également que la fonction métalinguistique et la fonction poétique ne se produisent pas dans le discours. La deixis de la personne et la deixis du social sont la forme la plus fréquente dans le discours. De plus, le référentiel est la fonction la plus fréquemment exécutée dans le discours. Cette étude pourrait contribuer à enrichir les références de recherche dans le domaine pragmatique, notamment sur la deixis. Mots-clés : deixis, film, fonction, forme, pragmatique. ABSTRACT. Deixis is a reference in a speech that becomes one of the important elements in communication. This study attempts to explore the form and function of the deixis occurred in every speech of a French movie. This study is conducted by using a qualitative approach. The object of this research is a French movie entitled Ma Vie de Courgette. The data is collected by using observation, recording, and note-talking techniques. The findings shows that there are 4 forms of deixis occurred in this movie, namely deixis of person and social, deixis of time, deixis of the place, and deixis of discourse. These four forms have diverse functions, namely referential, emotive, conative, and phatic functions. This study also reveals that metalinguistic function and poetic function are not occurred in the speech. Deixis of person and deixis of social are the form that most frequently occurred in the speech. In addition, referential is the function that most frequently performed in the speech. This study may contribute to enrich research references in the pragmatics field, especially about deixis. Keywords: deixis, movie, Ma Vie de Courgette.

The article clarifies the functional and stylistic parameters of evaluation as a linguistic category, which covers different levels of language units with evaluative semantics and conveys the positive or negative attitude of the speaker to the named subject, phenomenon, concept. Positive or negative semantic scale of evaluation is formed in accordance with certain social, national-cultural, moral values. Logical (rational) and emotional (irrational) assessment in the text interact. Logical evaluation is motivated by objective thoughts, and emotional – the feelings of the subject to the object (person, object, phenomenon, event, etc.). Units of logical evaluation are words and phrases with positive and negative semantics from the intellectual sphere of linguistic thinking, and units of emotional – expressive-connotative linguistic means. Evaluation is done through the use of language units registered in dictionaries or in the memory of native speakers in terms of their values: good and evil, truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, benefit and harm, beauty and ugliness, allowed and forbidden. Evaluative semantics is revealed in the appropriate contextual conditions, in particular in updating the structure and semantics of components, stylistic marking of syntactic units. The combination of logical and emotional assessment allows closely related to the communication situation pragmatic evaluation of the text as a whole, in particular verbal acts of approval, encouragement, commitment (plus on the scale) or vice versa condemnation, contempt (minus on the scale), which are based on a common fund knowledge and norms of interlocutors. The stylistic potential of evaluation in the text is revealed on lexical, phraseological, syntactic levels. Texts differ in style and content differ in the way they express verbal axiology.

This study aims to find out the tax obligations and aspects of tax collection on transactions on the online marketplace according to Government Regulation No. 46 of 2013 and Government Regulation No. 23 of 2018. The research method used in this study is descriptive qualitative research. The object of this research is Businessman X as one of the sellers on the online marketplace. . Businessman X is an entrepreneur in the fashion field, the researcher’s consideration is choosing businessmen X, because businessman x meets the criteria set by the researcher. The data used is primary data. Data collection techniques from this study are observation, interview, document and triangulation. The result of this research analysis is that Businessman X already has an NPWP and reports the annual tax return of Private Person Taxpayers every year, but has not paid SPT Masa Ata his business income. The amount of Final PPh that should be paid by Business X since 2016 - 2020 is Rp. 34.856.105. the calculation is obtained from the amount of Final Income Tax payable according to the tarif provisions of Government Regulation No. 46 of 2013 and Government Regulation No. 23 of 2018 plus administrative sanctions in the form of interest of 2% for 34 months in accordance with the provisions of Law No. 28 of 2007 Article 9 Paragraph (2a). business X does not pay Final Income tax or his business income because he has no knowledge of taxes on online businesses and the appropriateness with the amount of tax to be paid. Not optimal tax receipts on the online marketplace have an impact on the maximum potential state tax receipts

The obligation of Muslim towards their relatives who died there are four cases, namely bathing, believing, praying and burying. The community considers that there is no need to think about how to care for the body from the beginning to the finish because there are already their own officers. Rhile in a hadist from ‘Aisyah said Rasullah SAW: “Anyone who bathes a corpse and is guarded by trust and cannot be opened (secret) about the protection of the sympathy for the people there hen comes from sin for hs condition. Based on the hadist mentioned the person who mentioned bathe the corpse in priority is his own closest family, then if the family cannot, then other people can do it, while bathing is included in the case of receiving a corpse based on the results of an interview with teacher Madrasah Diniyah Baitul Athfal by agreeing to him about the management of the body, it is expected if it involves family members. Who can use the world od the sunna of the prophet and also in the future can be used as a successor. In Madrasah Diniyah Baitul Athfal involved in the learning process due to shortages in madrasah are short plus students do not have books about the management of bodies or jurisprudence books become obstacles in the process of learning. Teaching lessons for students or instructors. After obtaining data from data collection, .researchers create a system with predetermined and more relevant methods using the Multimedia Development Life Cycle (MDLC) Method. Based on the results obtained for 9352 and included in the category of Good, then the application was validated that can be applied to the research object.

In order to understand the physiological role of the caudate nucleus, we combine here our laboratory data on cats with reports of patients with selective damage to this nucleus. Cats with bilateral removal of the caudate nuclei showed a stereotyped behavior consisting of persistently approaching and then following a person, another cat, or any object, and attempting to contact the target. Simultaneously, the animals exhibited a friendly disposition and persistent docility together with purring and forelimbs treading/kneading. The magnitude and duration of this behavior was proportional to the extent of the removal reaching a maximum after ablations of 65% or more of the caudate tissue. These cats were hyperactive but they had lost the feline elegance of movements. Additional features of acaudate cats were: (1) postural and accuracy deficits (plus perseveration) in paw usage tasks including bar pressing for food reward; (2) cognitive and perceptual impairments on a T-maze battery of tasks and on the bar pressing tasks; (3) blockage or blunting of the species-specific behavioral response to a single injection of morphine; Unilateral caudate nucleus removal did not produce global behavioral effects, but only deficit in the contralateral paw contact placing reaction and paw usage/bar pressing. Moreover and surprisingly, we found hypertrophy of the ipsilateral caudate nucleus following prenatal focal neocortical removal. The findings in human were also behavioral (not neurological) and also occurred with unilateral caudate damage. The main manifestations consisted of loss of drive (apathy), obsessive-compulsive behavior, cognitive deficits, stimulus-bound perseverative behavior, and hyperactivity. Based on all of the above data we propose that the specific function of the caudate nucleus is to control approach-attachment behavior, ranging from plain approach to a target, to romantic love. This putative function would account well for the caudate involvement in the pathophysiology of a number of clinical syndromes that we mention, all of which compromise approach-attachment- affect behaviors. In addition we conclude that the caudate nucleus contributes importantly to body and limbs posture as well as to the accuracy and speed of directed movements

Summary The paper deals with a few aspects of the morphosyntax of clitics in Piedmontese (Western Romance) and their historical development. In Piedmontese an element =l= (orthographically l’) is obligatorily inserted between the Subject Clitics and all and only the inflected forms of “to have”; in several varieties of Piedmontese this element has a double interpretation synchronically, either as a semantically null element or as an Object Clitic of 3rd singular. Although the presence of such an element is not rare among neighboring Romance varieties, where it generally acts as a 3rd singular subject clitic, it is argued that in Piedmontese its peculiar distribution is intimately tied to other unusual morphosyntactic features, all of them having developed within the last two-to-three centuries. In particular, historical reanalysis of l’ was crucial in the positioning of the object clitics after the participle in compound verbal forms (a rare pattern among Romance languages). Partially correcting traditional analyses (such as Meyer-Lübke 1900), it is argued that the necessity to avoid ambiguity and clearly identify a pronominal object was at best a contributing factor in triggering morphological change. The postpositioning of the object clitics was rather mainly the result of the extension in use of the subject clitics, and of the ensuing reanalysis of the element l’. This was made possible by two conditions: a restricted set of occurrences in which l’ was found, and a ready-made alternative interpretation. Comparison with neighboring varieties shows that such a development was not possible in those Romance languages which did not have an element similar to l’ in the restricted range of uses of premodern Piedmontese. Résumé Cet article traite de quelques aspects de la morphologie des clitiques en piémontais (une langue romane occidentale) et de leur développement historique. On trouve en piémontais un élément =l= (l’ dans l’orthographe) obligatoirement inséré entre les clitiques du sujet et les formes fléchies du verb ‘avoir’. Dans plusieurs variétés du piémontais cet élément peut être interprété soit comme un élément sémantiquement vide, soit comme le clitique objet de la troisième personne singulier. Bien que la présence d’un élément similaire au l’ piémontais n’est pas rare parmi les variétés voisines (où il joue généralement le rôle de clitique sujet de la troisième personne singulière), l’article démontre que la distribution inhabituelle de cet élément en piémontais est étroitement liée à un certain nombre d’autres particularités morphosyntactiques qui se sont toutes développés durant les deux ou trois derniers siècles. En particulier, la réanalyse historique de l’élément l’ a été décisive pour le positionnement des clitiques objet après le participe dans les temps composés — une solution fort rare parmi les langues romanes. Avec une révision partielle des analyses traditionelles (par ex. Meyer-Lübke 1900), on démontre que la nécessité d’éviter toute ambiguïté et de distinguer clairement un objet pronominal a joué tout au plus un rôle complémentaire dans le changement morphologique. Le positionnement des clitiques object après le participe a été plutôt le résultat d’une extension de l’usage des clitiques sujet, ce qui a amené à une réanalyse de l’élément l’. Cette réanalyse a été permise par deux conditions: une distribution fort limitée de l’ et la possibilité de l’amener à une analyse alternative. La comparaison avec les variétés voisines démontre que le même développement qu’on trouve en piémontais ne s’est pas produit dans ces langues romanes qui étaient dépourvues d’un élément comparable à l’ dans les domaines d’usage bien limités qu’on trouvait en piémontais pré-moderne. Zusammenfassung Dieser Artikel befaßt sich mit einigen Aspekten der Morphosyntax von Klitika im Piedmontesischen (Westromanisch) und mit ihrer historischen Entwicklung. Im Piedmontesichen ist es obligatorisch, ein Element =l= (ortographisch l’) zwischen Subjektsklitika und allen flektierten Formen (und nur diesen) des Verbs ‘haben’ einzufügen. In manchen Mundarten des Piedmontesischen ist dieses Element in zweifacherweise interpretierbar, und zwar entweder als semantisch leeres Element oder als Objektklitikum der 3. Person Singular. Obgleich das Element selbst in benachbarten romanischen Varietäten nicht selten vorkommt und dort im allgemeinen als Klitikum der 3. Person Singular fungiert, wird hier argumentiert, daß seine eigenartige Distribution im Piedmontesischen in engem Zusammenhang mit anderen ungewöhnlichen morphosyntaktischen Phänomenen steht, die sich allesamt innerhalb der letzten zwei bis drei Jahrhunderte entwickelt haben. Insbesondere war eine historische Reanalyse des Elements l’ entscheidend für die Position von Objektsklitika nach dem Partizip in zusammengesetzten Verbformen, was in romanischen Sprachen selten vorkommt. Dieser Artikel berichtigt teilweise traditionelle Analysen (z. B. Meyer — Lübke 1900) und argumentiert, daß die Notwendigkeit, Mehrdeutigkeit zu vermeiden und ein Objektpronomen eindeutig zu identifizieren höchstens sekundär zu morphologischen Veränderungen beigetragen hat. Vielmehr war die Entwicklung nachgestellter Objektsklitika hauptsächlich das Ergebnis einer Ausweitung des Gebrauchs von Subjektsklitika und einer darauffolgenden Reanalyse des Elements l’. Dies wurde durch zwei Faktoren ermöglicht: eine begrenzte Anzahl möglicher Kontexte für l’ und eine bereits vorhandene alternative Interpretationsmöglichkeit. Der Vergleich mit benachbarten Varietäten zeigt, daß eine solche Entwicklung in denjenigen romanischen Sprachen nicht möglich war, die kein dem l’ ähnliches Element in begrenzt möglichen Kontexten nach Art des Früh-Piedmontesischen aufwiesen.

Object Patients with systemic cancer and a single brain metastasis who undergo treatment with resection plus radiotherapy live longer and have a better quality of life than those treated with radiotherapy alone. Historically, whole-brain radiotherapy (WBRT) has been the mainstay of radiation therapy; however, it is associated with significant delayed neurocognitive sequelae. In this study, the authors looked at survival in patients with single and multiple intracranial metastases who had undergone surgery and adjuvant stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) to the tumor bed and synchronous lesions. Methods The authors retrospectively reviewed the records from an 8-year period at a single institution for consecutive patients with brain metastases treated via complete resection of dominant lesions and adjuvant radiosurgery. The cohort was analyzed for time to local progression, synchronous lesion progression, new intracranial lesion development, systemic progression, and overall survival. The Kaplan-Meier method (stratified by age, sex, tumor histology, and number of intracranial lesions prior to surgery) was used to calculate both progression-free and overall survival. A Cox proportional-hazards regression model was also fitted with the number of intracranial lesions as the predictor and survival as the outcome controlling for disease severity, age, sex, and primary histology. Results The median overall follow-up among the 150-person cohort eligible for analysis was 17 months. Patients had an average age of 46.2 years (range 16–82 years), and 62.7% were female. The mean (± standard deviation) number of intracranial lesions per patient was 2.5 ± 2.3. The mean time between surgery and stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) was 3.2 ± 4.1 weeks. Primary cancers included lung cancer (43.3%), breast cancer (21.3%), melanoma (10.0%), renal cell carcinoma (6.7%), and colon cancer (6.7%). The average number of isocenters per treated lesion was 7.6 ± 6.6, and the average treatment dose was 17.8 ± 2.8 Gy. One-year survival for patients in this cohort was 52%, and the 1-year local control rate was 77%. The median (±standard error) overall survival was 13.2 ± 1.9 months. There was no difference in survival between patients with a single lesion and those with multiple lesions (p = 0.319) after controlling for age, sex, and histology of primary tumor. Patients with primary breast histology had the greatest overall median survival (22.9 ± 6.2 months); patients with colorectal cancer had the shortest overall median survival (5.3 ± 1.8 months). The most common cause of death in this series was systemic progression (79%). Conclusions These results confirm that 1-year survival for patients with multiple intracranial metastases treated with resection followed by SRS to both the tumor bed and synchronous lesions is similar to established outcomes for patients with a single intracranial metastasis.

Ardiansyah. Evaluation of Regional Regulation Number 44 of 2002 concerning Peace and Order in Lima Belas Ilir Village, East Ilir I District. This study aims to: 1) Analyze and describe the Evaluation of Regional Regulation Number 44 of 2002 concerning Peace and Order in Lima Belas Ilir Village, East Ilir I District; 2) Analyze and describe the Supporting and Hindering Factors for the Evaluation of Regional Regulation No. 44 of 2002 concerning Peace and Order in Limabelas Ilir Village, East Ilir District I. The research design used in this study is qualitative descriptive. Descriptive research can be interpreted as a problem-solving procedure that is investigated by describing / describing the state of the subject/object of research (a person, institution, society and others) at the present time based on facts that appear or as they are (Nawawi in Klicit, 2008). The results of the study concluded that: 1) The implementation of Regional Regulation No. 44 of 2002 concerning Peace and Order in Limabelas Ilir Village, Ilir Timur I District has not been optimal so far. Problems related to peace and order still often occur, such as thuggery and violations by street vendors that disturb public order and order. Education has been carried out many times through socialization and approaches through local community leaders, but the number of violations has not been able to be suppressed and is still occurring. Related to this, the lack of a high level of public awareness in complying with the regulations is considered to be the main cause of frequent violations, plus the lack of optimal enforcement of violations committed, so that violators are not deterred and tend to be ordinary in committing violations; 2) Supporting Factors for the Evaluation of Regional Regulation No. 44 of 2002 concerning Peace and Order in Fifteen Ilir Village, East Ilir District I is the existence of clear rules or legal basis contained in Regional Regulation No. 44 of 2002 concerning Peace and Order itself, then the high commitment shown by the employees of the Fifteen Ilir Village Office. Meanwhile, the inhibiting factor is that there are still many residents of Lima Belas Ilir Village who do not understand Regional Regulation Number 44 of 2002, the level of public awareness in complying with regulations is still lacking, lack of supervision from related parties, so that in the implementation of Regional Regulation Number 44 of 2002 has not been able to be applied properly, and the approach taken to the community is still not optimal.

Usucapio (acquisitive prescription or adverse possession) ultimately brings the factual and legal situation in accord by "turning" a long-term possession that was incompatible with ownership into legal ownership (title to property). The former owner loses the right of ownership whereas the possessor becomes the new owner, thus acquiring the right of possession and other ownership entitlements. Usucapio also terminates other third-party rights on the object of acquisition, provided that the person who acquires ownership by prescription acted in good faith (bona fides) regarding the presence of those rights. However, due to the principle of reliance on real estate records in land registry or real estate cadastre, some legislations limit the effect of usucapio in relation to a bona fide acquirer of ownership from the registered owner who alienated the immovable property before the registration of acquisition by usucapio, or before entering a note on pending ownership dispute into real estate records. Referring to the principle of reliance, the bona fide acquirer of ownership or another right becomes the legal owner (mortgage creditor, etc.), while the usucapio possessor loses his ownership acquired through prescription. When considering the two competing principles: the principle of reliance on real estate records and the principle that "no one can transfer more rights to another than he himself has" (Lat. Nemo plus iuris ad alium transferre potest quam ipse habet), recent legislation and judicial practice has given priority to the principle of reliance on real estate records as the fundamental principle in cadastral or land registry record-keeping, particularly in view of the increasing accuracy of real estate records and the importance of security of legal transactions. Yet, the vital corrective to the principle of reliance is the conscientious (bona fide) conduct of the acquirer. The assessment of conscientiousness must include a check on the ownership status in cadastral records, as well as the examination of all other ownership-related facts that may not be registered in case there is a discrepancy between the registered and unregistered owner status. In this paper, the author analyzes the fairness of the legal solution that usucapio shall take effect only towards the current owner but not towards third conscientious acquirers, the possibility of abuse of the principle of reliance by the registered owner and the fact that the conscientiousness of the acquirer is assessed only on the basis of verification of the registered status, the need to check the status of unregistered immovable property during the purchase in order to preserve the conscientiousness of the acquisition, etc.

Abstract: In Comparative and European Property law, there is a clear need for studies into the fundamental basis of the legal systems in Europe. One part of this fundamental basis is the creation and extinction of property rights. One of the most interesting elements of this subject and the reason for this article is the idea of concurrence of the right of ownership and a limited property right burdening that same right of ownership held by the same person. This possibility is not recognized in every legal system. In the discussion on the development of a European property law, this fundamental question and the differing treatments it receives in various European legal systems are very vital. Very interestingly, the argumentation used in German, French, Dutch and English law is very similar but reaches different results. The possibility of holding a property right and ownership over the same object is recognized in German law, but generally not in Dutch, French and English law. Only when the position of third parties is taken into account some convergence between the various approaches to this problem can be reached. The European Commission, when working on property law proposals such as a possible right of Euro-Mortgage, other property security rights, but also in the area of EU consumer law, should therefore take these doctrinal differences and similarities between these four Member States into account. Résumé: Il existe en droit comparé et en droit européen de la propriété un besoin évident d’approfondir les bases fondamentales des systèmes de droit en Europe. Une partie de cette base fondamentale concerne l’acquisition et l’extinction des droits réels. L’un des éléments les plus intéressants sur ce sujet, objet de cet article, est l’idée de concours entre le droit de propriété (right of ownership) et un droit réel limité (limited property right) grevant ce même droit de propriété, détenus par la même personne. Cette possibilité n’est pas reconnue dans tous les systèmes de droit. Dans la discussion sur le développement d’un droit européen de la propriété, cette question fondamentale, ainsi que les différents traitements reçus dans les divers systèmes de droit sont d’une extrême importance. Il est très intéressant de constater que l’argumentation utilisée en droit allemand, français, néerlandais et anglais est très similaire, mais aboutit à des résultats différents. La possibilité de détenir un droit réel (holding a property right) et un droit de propriété (ownership) sur le même objet est reconnue en droit allemand, mais généralement pas en droit néerlandais, français et anglais. C’est seulement lors de la prise en compte de la position des tiers que certaines convergences apparaissent entre les différentes approches de ce problème. La Commission européenne, lorsqu’elle travaille sur des propositions concernant le droit de la propriété tel qu’une éventuelle euro-hypothèque, d’autres droits de sûretés, mais aussi le droit européen de la consommation, devrait donc prendre en considération les différences et similitudes doctrinales entre ces quatre États Membres.

Introduction / background / objectives Mobile phones are used more frequently, both in a personal and professional context. Several researchers have presented evidence that they are objects that generally contain several microorganisms, some of which are possibly pathogenic. There will be some professional sectors where this issue may become problematic, namely between hospital health institutions (not only due to the type of microorganisms that exist, but also due to the immunosuppression and/ or general bad medical conditions of the individuals present). The aim of this review is to understand what is described in terms of biological risk for workers who handle mobile phones, although almost all published studies convert to the Health sector and the emphasis is given to patients (and secondarily to the community) and not to the workers themselves. Methodology It is a Scoping Review, initiated through a survey conducted in April 2019 in the databases “CINALH plus with full text, Medline with full text, Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Cochrane Methodology Register, Nursing and Allied Health Collection: comprehensive, MedicLatina and RCAAP”. Content The temperature of the mobile phone can create good conditions for the development of some microorganisms. From here they can pass to the user’s face, eyes and mouth. In addition, some of the mobile phones used at work are not just for one person, but are passed between shifts; in some countries they are shared by several members of the family and/ or lent to children, to play. In addition, many use this object during meals/ in the kitchen and even when they are in the bathroom, which enhances the microbiological load. Smartphones appear to be more contaminated, due to being generally larger and providing more interaction and handling; simultaneously, those with a touch screen have less colonization than keyboards (possibly due to the homogeneity of the surface). Some researchers have hypothesized that there is a relationship between the colonization of some mobile phones and that which exists inside women’s bags, where they are usually transported. Conclusions Although the studies were very dispar in relation to looking for any type of microorganisms or just bacteria or viruses and in addition to the real microbiological diversity between countries, the different cultivation techniques certainly made it possible for some strains to grow and others not to be viable. Although these biases can justified some significant percentage differences, it was also clear that all cell phones contain numerous microorganisms, although most of these are not relevant for immunocompetent individuals, bet all articles were written before the Pandemic by Covid-19 . Thus, in the context of Occupational Health, there seems to be no significant risk for workers who are not immunosuppressed. However, the exceptions, simultaneously, can become relevant: for Employees with changes in the functioning of the immune system, for microorganisms with multidrug resistance to conventionally used drugs and, obviously, at this stage (april 2020 ) for new strains, for which there is still no natural immunity (by previous infection) or provided by an effective vaccine and, therefore, capable of causing very extensive disease in populations and, although the number of serious cases is small, given the contagion dimension, this acquires a very relevant amplitude, for all its human, emotional, technical, labor and economic implications. For this reason, it is recommended to use the phone very carefully (especially in circumstances where biological contamination is more likely and/ or intense), both at work and in a personal context; as well as the proper and regular disinfection of these objects, by 70% alcohol.

Introduction & Purpose Alpine skiing, like many outdoor sports, presents significant challenges for motion capture due to its large capture volumes, high athlete speeds, variable environmental conditions, and occlusions, e.g., due to snow spray. While traditional marker-based motion capture systems offer highest precision in the lab, they are usually unsuitable for outdoor settings. Sensor-based methods, such as inertial measurement units, however, may suffer from inaccuracies due to sensor noise and drift, while they only provide relative segment positions (Fasel et al., 2018). Therefore, recent studies in alpine skiing preferably used video-based systems (Heinrich et al., 2023; Spörri, 2016). These methods rely on multi-camera setups that require synchronization and camera calibration. However, the extensive manual digitization required for both keypoints and reference points introduces a substantial workload in post-processing, particularly when cameras must pan, tilt, and zoom to cover large capture volumes (Spörri, 2016). Recent advancements in computer vision have unveiled great potential for human motion capture, especially in automating much of the manual work required for video-based systems (Fang et al., 2017; Redmon et al., 2016; Zwölfer et al., 2023a). We therefore developed a novel, hybrid 3D motion capture approach that automates the detection of reference points using a reference point detection algorithm and the digitization of keypoints using a skier-specific keypoint detection algorithm. This reduces the reliance on manual digitization and enhances the scalability and practicality of large-scale motion capture in outdoor environments. The aim of this study was to a) evaluate the performance of the skier-specific keypoint detection against manual digitization and b) determine the impact of the skier-specific keypoint detection on the overall performance of the hybrid 3D motion capture pipeline. Methods The experimental setup involved a multi-camera system comprising eight Sony AX53 cameras uniformly distributed around a capture volume on a ski slope in Zürs am Arlberg, AT. The capture volume measured approximately 250 x 80 x 20 meters. To calibrate the cameras, approximately 300 reference points were placed within this area and surveyed geodetically. Each reference point was equipped with a 9 x 9 cm cube that displayed Aruco markers on all sides, enabling their automated detection by our reference point detection algorithm. This arrangement allowed for continuous calibration of each camera in every frame, accommodating for panning, tilting, and zooming. Camera calibration and 3D reconstruction were performed using the Direct Linear Transformation (DLT) method (Abdel-Aziz & Karara, 1971). In total, ten state-certified Austrian ski instructors performed eight runs according to the progression levels of the Austrian ski curriculum (Österreichischer Skischulverband, 2018). To develop a keypoint detection model, capable of detecting a skier, including equipment, e.g., skis and poles, we finetuned AlphaPose’s HALPE26 model (Fang et al., 2017), which was designed to estimate 26 body keypoints for general motions, on a skier-specific dataset. Training was done for 200 epochs with a learning rate of 10-3 and data augmentation enabled. AlphaPose was chosen for its proven performance in alpine skiing scenarios (Zwölfer et al., 2023a). For the skier-specific dataset, we manually digitized six runs, marking 24 keypoint, including 18 body keypoints, ski tips, ski tails, and poles, in each image. The six runs were selected to include slow, medium and high-speed skiing of one male and one female subject. These digitized images complement the datasets built by Bachmann et al. (2019) and later by Zwölfer et al. (2023b) and Heinrich et al. (2023), all using the same set of keypoints. In total, our comprehensive skier-specific dataset comprised about 15,000 images, with approximately two-thirds of all images originating from the current measurement. The accuracy of our model was evaluated in 2D image space by calculating the mean per joint position error (MPJPE), percentage of correct keypoints (PCK), and mean average precision (mAP) metrics on a test set of about 2,000 images that were excluded from training. In addition, we determined the impact of the keypoint detection algorithm on the hybrid motion capture pipeline. We, therefore, processed one of the manually digitized runs by the skier-specific model as well as the HALPE26 model. Using the calibration matrices, we reconstructed the 3D motion of the skier for each method and calculated the mean lengths of eight body segments (upper arms, forearms, thighs, and shanks). We compared the measured physical lengths and the mean segment lengths reconstructed from manually digitized keypoints, keypoints processed by the HALPE26 model, and our skier-specific model. We also quantified the variation of segment lengths by calculating their mean standard deviation across all 250 frames of the run. Results on segment lengths (mean values and variations) were calculated without any smoothing or filtering. Results Our skier-specific keypoint detection model achieved a PCK of 98%, a mAP of 0.97, and a MPJPE of 10.32 pixels on the test set. Visual assessment of the detected keypoints supported these quantitative results, showing only a few flawed detections. Most inaccuracies involved ski tails or poles and were primarily due to occlusions. Representative images showcasing the model's performance are displayed in Figure 1 (left). The plausibility of the skier-specific model for 3D reconstruction is demonstrated in the 3D visualization of a sample run shown in Figure 1 (right). Differences between measured and reconstructed segment lengths (mean across all frames) ranged from a minimum of 0.2 cm to a maximum of 2.3 cm, with only small differences observed among the different keypoint detection methods investigated. The evaluation of the variations in segment lengths revealed a mean standard deviation of 4.6 cm for manually annotated frames, compared to 4.5 cm for frames processed by the HALPE26 model. The mean deviation for frames processed by our skier-specific model was reduced to 3.4 cm. Discussion Our results demonstrated that the accuracy and precision of our model are at least on par with manual digitization, as evidenced both visually and through quantitative evaluation. On the 2D de tection level, the PCK, MPJPE, and mAP metrics reflected the model’s high performance, aligning with previous studies (Bachmann et al., 2019, Zwölfer et al., 2023a), who reported comparable MPJPE values when applying keypoint detection to regular skiing scenarios. On the 3D reconstruction level, differences between measured and reconstructed segment lengths for all three keypoint detection methods were within the range of typical measurement errors of about 2 cm. However, on this single run, our new model outperformed manual digitization and plain AlphaPose detections in terms of segment length variation. This was especially surprising, as our 3D reconstruction did not enforce temporal smoothness or kinematic constraints such as segment length consistency. This suggests that our model may benefit synergistically from both the pretrained data and manual annotations, possibly averaging out the low precision in manual digitization. While these variations in segment lengths may appear large, no smoothing or filtering was applied. For biomechanical analysis, results can be significantly improved by smoothing the data, e.g., using splines. By integrating our skier-specific keypoint detection model to our hybrid motion capture pipeline, we reduced the manual work required for digitizing all frames in all perspectives from dozens of hours for a single run to just a few minutes of computing time. It is essential to mention that this evaluation was limited to a single run. Moreover, the accuracy of the 3D data heavily relies on accurate camera calibration and temporal synchronization. Therefore, ablation studies to evaluate the influence of the reference point detection algorithm and the temporal synchronization method will be realized in a future study. Conclusion We implemented a skier-specific keypoint detection model capable of detecting a skier, including skis and poles, which showed good performance in both 2D image space and 3D reconstruction. By eliminating the manual digitization workload, the hybrid 3D motion capture pipeline facilitates large-scale motion capture in similar outdoor settings and enhances the scalability of biomechanical research in outdoor sports like alpine skiing. Additionally, this method allows us to automatically digitize the remaining runs recorded during this field study, resulting in an extensive 3D dataset crucial for the future development of fully computer vision-based motion capture methods. References Abdel-Aziz, Y. I., & Karara, H. M. (1971). Direct linear transformation from comparator coordinates into object space coordinates in close-range photogrammetry. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 38(1), 49-55. Bachmann, R., Spörri, J., Fua, P., & Rhodin, H. (2019). Motion capture from pan-tilt cameras with unknown orientation. arXiv, 1908.11676. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1908.11676 Fang, H. S., Xie, S., Tai, Y. W., & Lu, C. (2017). RMPE: Regional multi-person pose estimation. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2353-2362. https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ICCV.2017.256 Fasel, B., Spörri, J., Chardonnens, J., Kröll, J., Müller, E., & Aminian, K. (2018). Joint inertial sensor orientation drift reduction for highly dynamic movements. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 22(1), 77-86. https://doi.org/10.1109/JBHI.2017.2659758 Heinrich, D., van den Bogert, A., Mössner, M., & Nachbauer, W. (2023). Model-based estimation of muscle and ACL forces during turning maneuvers in alpine skiing. Scientific Reports, 13, Article 9026. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-35775-4 Österreichischer Skischulverband. (2018). Snowsport Austria - Die Österreichische Skischule - Vom Einstieg zur Perfektion. In vier Stufen zum Erfolg (2nd ed.) [Snowsport Austria - The Austrian Ski School - From entry to perfection. Four steps to success]. Brüder Hollinek. Redmon, J., Divvala, S., Girshick, R., & Farhadi, A. (2016). You only look once: Unified, real-time object detection. 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 779-788. https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/CVPR.2016.91 Spörri, J. (2016). Research dedicated to sports injury prevention – the ‘sequence of prevention’ on the example of alpine ski racing. University of Salzburg, Austria. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.28451.89126 Zwölfer, M., Heinrich, D., Wandt, B., Rhodin, H., Spörri, J., & Nachbauer, W. (2023a). Deep learning-based 2D keypoint detection in alpine skiing – A performance analysis of state-of-the-art algorithms applied to regular skiing and injury situations. JSAMS Plus, 2, Article 100034. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsampl.2023.100034 Zwölfer, M., Heinrich, D., Wandt, B., Rhodin, H., Spörri, J., & Nachbauer, W. (2023b). A graph-based approach can improve keypoint detection of complex poses: a proof-of-concept on injury occurrences in alpine ski racing. Scientific Reports, 13, Article 21465. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-47875-2

Increasing preoccupations and interest manifested for the Romanian language as a foreign language compose a focused and clear expression in the volume “Romanian as a foreign language. Methodology and cultural applicability”, launched at the Turku University publishing house, Finland (2018). The editors, Paul Nanu (Department of Romanian Language and Culture, University of Turku, Finland) and Emilia Ivancu (Department of Romanian Studies of the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Poland) with this volume, continue a series of activities dedicated to the promotion of the Romanian language and culture outside the country borders. This volume brings together a collection of articles, previously announced and briefly presented at a round table organized by the two Romanian lectors, as a section of the International Conference “Dialogue of cultures between tradition and modernity”, (Philological Research and Multicultural Dialogue Centre, Department of Philology, Faculty of History and Philology, “1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia). The thirteen authors who sign the articles are teachers of Romanian as a foreign language, either in the country or abroad. The challenge launched by the organisers pointed both at the teaching methods of Romanian as a foreign language – including the authors’ reflections upon the available textbooks (Romanian language textbooks) and the cultural implications of this perspective on the Romanian language. It is probably no accident that the first article of the aforementioned volume – “Particularities of teaching Romanian as a foreign language for the preparatory year. In quest of “the ideal textbook’’ (Cristina Sicoe, University of the West, Timișoara) – brings a strict perspective upon that what should be, from the author’s point of view, “the ideal textbook”. The fact that it does not exist, and has little chances ever to exist, could maybe be explained by the multitude of variables which appear in practice, within the didactic triangle composed by teacher – student – textbook. The character of the variables is the result of particular interactions established between the components of the triad. A concurrent direction is pointed out by the considerations that make the object of the second article, “To a new textbook of Romanian language as a foreign language’’ (Ana-Maria Radu-Pop, University of the West, Timișoara). While the previous article was about an ideal textbook for foreign students in the preparatory year of Romanian, this time, the textbook in question has another target group, namely Erasmus students and students from Centres of foreign languages. Considering that this kind of target group “forms a distinct category”, the author pleads for the necessity of editing adequate textbooks with a part made of themes, vocabulary, grammar and a part made of culture and civilization – the separation into parts belongs to the author – that should consider the needs of this target group, their short stay in Romania (three months to one year) and, last but not least, the students’ poor motivation. These distinctive notes turn the existent RFL textbooks[1] in that which the author calls “level crossings”, which she explains in a humorous manner[2]. Since the ideal manual seems to be in no hurry to appear, the administrative-logistic implications of teaching Romanian as a foreign language (for the preparatory year) should be easier to align with the standards of efficiency. This matter is addressed by Mihaela Badea and Cristina Iridon from the Oil & Gas University of Ploiești, in the article “Administrative/logistic difficulties of teaching RFL. Case study”. Starting from a series of practical experiences, the authors are purposing to suggest “several ideas to improve existent methodologies of admitting foreign students and to review the ARACIS criteria from March 2017, regarding external evaluation of the ‘Romanian as a foreign language’ study programme”. Among other things, an external difficulty is highlighted (common to all universities in the country), namely the permission to register foreign students until the end of the first semester of the academic year, meaning around the middle of February. The authors punctually describe the unfortunate implications of this legal aspect and the regrettable consequences upon the quality of the educational act. They suggest that the deadline for admitting foreign students not exceed the 1st of December of every academic year. The list of difficulties in teaching Romanian as a foreign language is extremely long, reaching sensitive aspects from an ethical perspective of multiculturalism. This approach belongs to Constantin Mladin from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia, who writes about “The role of the ethical component in the learning process of a foreign language and culture. The Macedonian experience”. Therefore, we are moving towards the intercultural competences which, as the author states, are meant to “adequately and efficiently round the acquired language competences”. In today’s Macedonian society, that which the author refers to, a society claimed to be multiethnic, multilingual and pluriconfessional, the emotional component of an intercultural approach needs a particular attention. Thus, reconfigurations of the current didactic model are necessary. The solution proposed and successfully applied by Professor Constantin Mladin is that of shaking the natural directions in which a foreign language and culture is acquired: from the source language/culture towards the target language/culture. All this is proposed in the context in which the target group is extremely heterogeneous and its “emotional capacity of letting go of the ethnocentric attitudes and perceptions upon otherness” seem to lack. When speaking about ‘barriers’, we often mean ‘difficulty’. The article written by Silvia Kried Stoian and Loredana Netedu from the Oil & Gas University of Ploiești, called “Barriers in the intercultural communication of foreign students in the preparatory year”, is the result of a micro-research done upon a group of 37 foreign students from 10 different countries/cultural spaces, belonging to different religions (plus atheists), speakers of different languages. From the start, there are many differences to be reconciled in a way reasonable enough to reduce most barriers that appear in their intercultural communication. Beneficial and obstructive factors – namely communication barriers – coexist in a complex communicational environment, which supposes identifying and solving the latter, in the aim of softening the cultural shock experienced within linguistic and cultural immersion. Several solutions are recommended by the two authors. An optimistic conclusion emerges in the end, namely the possibility that the initial inconvenient of the ethnical, linguistic and cultural heterogeneity become “an advantage in learning the Romanian language and acquiring intercultural communication”. Total immersion (linguistic and cultural), as well as the advantage it represents as far as exposure to language is concerned, is the subject of the article entitled “Cultural immersion and exposure to language”, written by Adina Curta (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia). Considered to be a factor of rapid progress and effectiveness of acquisition, exposure to language that arises from the force of circumstances could be extended to that what may be named orchestrated exposure to language. This phrase is consented to reunite two types of resources, “a category of statutory resources, which are the CEFRL suggestions, and a category of particular resources, which should be the activities proposed by the organizers of the preparatory year of RFL”. In this respect, we are dealing with several alternating roles of the teacher who, besides being an expert, animator, facilitator of the learning process or technician, also becomes a cultural and linguistic coach, sending to the group of immersed students a beneficial message of professional and human polyvalence. A particular experience is represented by teaching the Romanian language at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. This experience is presented by Nicoleta Neșu in the article “The Romanian language, between mother tongue and ethnic language. Case study”. The particular situation is generated by the nature of the target group, a group of students coming, on the one hand, from Romanian families, who, having lived in Italy since early childhood, have studied in the Italian language and are now studying the Romanian language (mother tongue, then ethnic language) as L1, and, on the other hand, Italian mother tongue students who study the Romanian language as a foreign language. The strategies that are used and the didactic approach are constantly in need of particularization, depending on the statute that the studied language, namely the Romanian language, has in each case. In the area of teaching methodology for Romanian as a foreign language, suggestions and analyses come from four authors, namely Eliana-Alina Popeți (West University of Timișoara), “Teaching the Romanian language to students from Romanian communities from Serbia. Vocabulary exercise”, Georgeta Orian (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia) “The Romanian language in the rhythm of dance and hip-hop music”, Coralia Telea (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia), “Explanation during the class of Romanian as a foreign language” and Emilia Ivancu (Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Poland), “Romanian (auto)biographic discourse or the effect of literature upon learning RFL”. The vocabulary exercise proposed to the students by Eliana-Alina Popeți is a didactic experiment through which the author checked the hypothesis according to which a visual didactic material eases the development of vocabulary, especially since the textual productions of the students, done through the technique that didactics calls “reading images”, were video recorded and submitted to mutual evaluation as well as to self-evaluation of grammar, coherence and pronunciation. The role of the authentic iconographic document is attested in the didactics of modern languages, as the aforementioned experiment confirms once again the high coefficient of interest and attention of the students, as well as the vitality and authenticity of interaction within the work groups. It is worth mentioning that these students come from the Serbian Republic and are registered in the preparatory year at the Faculty of Letters, History and Theology of the West University of Timișoara. Most of them are speakers of different Romanian patois, only found on the territory of Serbia. The activity consisted of elaborating written texts starting from an image (a postcard reproducing a portrait of the Egyptian artist Eman Osama), imagining a possible biography of the character. In the series of successful authentic documents in teaching-learning foreign languages, there is also the song. The activities described by Georgeta Orian were undertaken either with Erasmus students from the preparatory year at the “1 Decembrie 1989” University of Alba Iulia, or with Polish students (within the Department of Romanian Studies in Poznań), having high communication competences (B1-B2, or even more). There were five activities triggered by Romanian songs, chosen by criteria of sympathy with the interests of the target group: youngsters, late teenagers. The stake was “a more pleasant and, sometimes, a more useful learning process”, mostly through discovery, through recourse to musical language, which has the advantage of breaking linguistic barriers in the aim of creating a common space in which the target language, a language of “the other”, becomes the instrument of speaking about what connects us. The didactic approach, when it comes to Romanian as a foreign language taught to students of the preparatory year cannot avoid the extremely popular method of the explanation. Its story is told by Coralia Telea. With a use of high scope, the explanation steps in in various moments and contexts: for transmitting new information, for underlining mechanisms generating new rules, in evaluation activities (result appreciation, progress measurements). Still, the limits of this method are not left out, among which the risk of the teachers to annoy their audience if overbidding this method. Addressing (Polish) students from the Master’s Studies Program within the Romania Philology at the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Emilia Ivancu crosses, through her article, the methodological dimensions of teaching Romanian as a foreign language, entering the curricular territory of the problematics in question by proposing an optional course entitled Romanian (auto)biographic discourse”. Approaching contact with the Romanian language as a foreign language at an advanced level, the stakes of the approach and the proposed contents differ, obviously, from the ones only regarding the creation and development of the competence of communication in the Romanian Language. The studied texts have been grouped into correspondence/epistolary discourse, diaries, memoires and (auto)biography as fiction. Vasile Alecsandri, Sanda Stolojan, Paul Goma, Neagoe Basarab, Norman Manea, Mircea Eliade are just a few of the writers concerned, submitted to discussions with the help of a theoretical toolbox, offered to the students as recordings of cultural broadcasts, like Profesioniștii or Rezistența prin cultură etc. The consequences of this complex approach consisted, on the one hand, of the expansion of the readings for the students and, on the other hand, in choosing to write dissertations on these topics. A “tangible” result of Emilia Ivancu’s course is the elaboration of a volume entitled România la persoana întâi, perspective la persoana a treia (Romania in the first person, perspectives in the third person), containing seven articles written by Polish Master’s students. Master’s theses, a PhD thesis, several translations into the Polish language are also “fruits” of the initiated course. Of all these, the author extracted several conclusions supporting the merits and usefulness of her initiative. The volume ends with a review signed by Adina Curta (1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia), “The Romanian language, a modern, wanted language. Iuliana Wainberg-Drăghiciu – Textbook of Romanian language as a foreign language”. The textbook elaborated by Iuliana Wainberg-Drăghiciu (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia) respects the CEFRL suggestions, points at the communicative competences (linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic) described for levels A1 and A2, has a high degree of accessibility through a trilingual dictionary (Romanian-English-French) which it offers to foreign students and through the phonetic transcription of new vocabulary units.

AbstractA century ago the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam acquired a 19th-century album containing 56 rapid sketches in black chalk after 17th-century, mostly Dutch paintings (Note 1). The sketches, which are numberd, have the names of the painters wrillen on them in the artist's own hand. They were first published in 1895 (Note 2) by E. W. Moes, who concluded that they were by a Delft artist, and C. Hofstede de Groot, who convincingly attributed them to Leonaert Bramer (1596-1674) and identified two of the paintings in question. Since then various other paintings have been identified (Notes 5, 7, 8, 11 and 12), notably by A. Blankert, who has made his findings available for the present publication, and other drawings belonging to the series have been found, Frits Lugt leading the way here (Notes 9 and 10). The present study, the first to be undertaken in depth since 1895, has brought to light three more sketches after paintings by Bramer himself (cat. nos.9-11) and one probably after Wouwerman (cat. no.65), while seven more paintings have been identified and one of the sketches without a name has proved to be after a painting by Antonio Maria Viani. Two lists of the sketches so far found are given here: that of State I reproduces the original order, that of State II gives the artists in alphabetical order as they appear in the catalogue published here. These sketches are of exceptional documentary value, since they have not only given us the names of some previously unknown painters, such as M. de Berch, J. Garbaal, P. Monincx and A. Pick, but they have also revealed unexpected aspects of some well-known ones, e.g. a still life by P. van Groenewegen, a Dutch landscape by J.B. Weenix and a genre piece of a very Utrecht character by L. de Jongh. Moreover, the sketches afford a fine glimpse of collecting in Holland in the 17th century, a subject otherwise known uirtually only from non-visual documents. On the back of one of the drawings (cat. no.6) appears a list of the owners of the pictures sketched (Fig. I), possibly written by Bramer himself. This is reproduced here in an amplified version of Moes' transcription, with one completely new name yielded by the present study. The styles given in the list suggest that the men concerned appear in it in order of their social standing. The first, Simon Graswinckel (c.1611-71), was a member of a wealthy Delft family of brewers and regents. He owned a great deal of property in and around Delft, but is reported by his brothers-in-law to have spent his time in gaming-houses and taverns (Note 30). His will of 1663 is known, but no paintings are mentioned in it. The second man on the list was probably a Van Beresteijn, another family from the wealthy upper echelons of Delft society. His precise identity came to light in a roundabout way via the inventory of 28 February 1652 of Adriaen van Vredenburg, in which are listed a number of paintings that were very probably sketched by Bramer (Note 32), notably one of Jezebel, this mention and Bramer's sketch being virtually unique indications of this subject in Dutch 17th-century painting. Vredenburg does not appear in the list of owners of the paintings, but on his death his property went to his stepdaughter, whose guardian he had been and who married Theodorus van Beresteijn in November 1652. Antonie van Bronchorst is known only from the commission he gave Bramer in 1653 to painl frescoes in his house (Note 34), while Capitein van der Bon..., Nicolaas van der Werch and Johan Persijn have not yet been traced in the Delft archives. Willem de Langue (1599-1666), on the other hand, was a lawyer and a connoisseur of paintings unparalleled in Delft in the mid 17th century (Note 36). He himself made the inventories of the paintings in important estates and he numbered many artists among his clientele (Note 37). Portraits of him and his wife by Van Vliet are known (Note 38), while he also appears as an officer in a militia piece of 1648 by Jacob Willemsz Delff (Fig. 2). Abraham de Cooge (before 1600-after 1680) was the most versatile person in the list, being an engraver, painter, dealer in tulip bulbs, organs and paintings and pottery manufacturer (Note 39). He was registered in the Guild of St. Luke in Delft in 1632 and two paintings by him are known (Note 40). In 1646 Leonaerl Bramer made illustrations to the picaresque novel Lazarilo de Tormes for him (Note 17). In the 1650's De Cooge was increasingly involved in art-dealing and that on no small scale. He also had representatives in Antwerp, so was probably among the biggest art-dealers in the Northern Netherlands. Adam Pick (c. 1622-before 1666) enrolled in the Guild of St. Luke in Delft in 1642 (Note 43) and was active in the town up to the early 1650's as a painter of landscapes, genre pieces and still lifes (Fig.3) and also as the keeper of the Toelast ( Wine Cask) inn. He probably moved to Leiden, where he is mentioned in 1654 as a vintner, in 1653, perhaps as a consequence of the death of his first wife in 1652, f or he certainly sold the inn that year. The inventory of their joint property drawn up in 1653 includes a list of paintings, which tally with nos.8(?) -98 in the State I list. Only one painting by Pick is known (Fig.3), plus the sketch by Bramer after another (cat. no.44). Reinier Jansz Vermeer (1591-1652, Note 46), the father of Johannes, started out as a silk weaver, but appears in 1629 as an innkeeper and in 1631 was registered in the Guild of St. Luke in Delft as an art-dealer. From then on he came into frequent contact with local painters, Bramer included, but his dealing was probably only a sideline of his innkeeping. He died in October 1652. The last owner on the list is Bramer himself, who returned to Delft in 1628 after a lengthy period in France and Italy (1614-27, Note 49). He played a leading part in the Guild of St. Luke and was among the most successful painters in Delft around the middle of the 17th century. Later in life, however, he was often in financial difficulties (Note 50). He was one of the very few Dutch fresco painters (Note 51), as well as a painter of history and genre pieces and a prolific draughtsman and illustrator (Note 52), while just one document provides evidence of his dealing in paintirtgs (Note 54). The presence of works by Bramer himself among the sketches seems to rule out the theory that he made them as an aide mémoire for his own use (Note 15), while their very rapid character makes it unlikely that they were produced for one of the owners as an art-object. It also seems highly improbable that the collectors/owners would have wanted their collections of paintings sketched together in one book. The most acceptable suggestion appears to be that they were made in connection with a forthcoming sale of pictures, particularly as three of the owners listed were involved in art-dealing, while in the cases of Vermeer, Pick and Van Beresteijn there was every reason for paintings from their collections being sold around the end of 1652 or beginning of 1653: Vermeer's death left his family in dire financial straits, Pick will probably have sold his pictures (as he did his inn) before moving to Leiden and Van Beresteijn will probably have wanted to realize some money on his wife's inheritance. Thus the dates of Vermeer's burial in October 1652 and Pick's inventory of March 1653 would seem to provide crucial clues to the dating of the sketches, which were probably made in rapid succession, to judge from the unity of style, despite the great diversity of the models, and the straightforward consecutive numbering. Presumably the intention was to bring these pictures from Delft collections together for a sale (Note 18) and Bramer was commissioned to make sketches in advance (or even to make a certain selection, Note 19) possibly to give an idea of what was on offer to collectors or dealers elsewhere (which might explain the 'inking in' of the painters' names originally written in chalk on five of the drawings, cat. nos. 17, 35, 36, 47 and 64). Bramer made such chalk inscriptions on ten of the drawings (Note 20), probably while sketching them. Afterwards he inscribed and numbered all of them in ink (Note 5). Notes in another 17th-century hand appear on cat. nos.22 and 24. The sheets may all have been of the same size originally, but have since been cut down, often wholly or partly along the framing lines around the sketch. This may well have been done by Bramer himsef or the dealer he made them for. Just over half of them remained together and were stuck into the present album in the 19th century. There are no portraits among the sketches and only two stll lifes and two marine paintings, but eleven Italianate landscapes and 22 history paintings. Thus the subjects differ somewhat from the categories arrived at by Montiasfor mid 17th-century Delft from his study of inventories (Note 56). The preference for history pieces is probably to be explained by the high social standing of the owners. The majority of the pictures were very modern for that time and of the 41 artists, 28 were still alive in 1652-3 and eight of them were only 35 or younger. Bramer's material contradicts Montlas' conclusion that Delft collectors showed a preference for local painters (Note 58), whose work amounted to 40-50% of that listed in the inventories. Of Bramer's 41 painters, only thirteen were from Delft (Note 59) and only five are found in Montias' list of the most common painters in Delft inventories. Thus the pictures sketched by Bramer fall outside the 'normal Delft pattern' and evince a less provincial taste. However, the collectors were still not among the leading figures of their day in this field by comparison with, for example, Boudewijn de Man of Delft (Note 62), whose collection included works by Goltzius, Bloemaert, Rubens, Rembrandt and Ter Brugghen in 1644. The pictures sketched by Bramer were presumably to be brought together for public auction and the sketches may very probably have been made with an eye to the sale catalogue. While sale catalogues are known in the second half of the 17th century, they only relate to very important collections, which makes these sketches very unusual as a documentation of a sale of pictures from average well-to-do collectors and dealers. The collection of sketches as such certainly has no parallel at this period (Note 64).

AbstractAttitude role shift is a sign language strategy to report someone else’s utterance or thought. It has been analyzed either as a kind of demonstration or, alternatively, as a complex construction involving subordination plus a context-shifting operator. The present work reports the results of a sentence-to-picture matching task developed in three different sign languages (Italian Sign Language, French Sign Language and Catalan Sign Language) with the aim of providing experimental evidence about the nature of role shift. The task assessed the comprehension of indexical first-person pronouns in various syntactic contexts with and without role shift. We showed that constructions with role shift, which require context-shifting for the first-person pronoun, are never easier to comprehend than constructions without role shift that do not require context-shifting. In some cases, they are even more difficult. Additionally, we show that, in Italian Sign Language only, sentences in which the role shifted first-person pronoun is in object position are more difficult than sentences in which it is in subject position. We argue that this can be interpreted as an intervention effect and that this is an argument in favor of positing a context-shifting operator in the periphery of the role shift clause. Considering that the population of adult Deaf signers includes, besides native signers, a majority of individuals with a more or less severe delayed first language exposure, the second goal of this paper is to study the effects of age of exposure on comprehension of sentences with role shift. In the three languages under investigation, we found that native signers generally outperformed non-native signers in sentences with role shift and in subordinate clauses without role shift. This confirms that delayed language exposure has a lasting impact on adults’ comprehension of subordinate clauses of various degrees of complexity.

Abstract Background Cognitive impairment mainly affects learning and problem solving abilities of the person. Traditional medicines, due to fewer side effects, more efficacy and lesser cost are still the choice of treatment in India. The main objective of the present study is to explore the nootropic potential of ethanol extract of Elettaria cardamomum Maton fruits. The present study was conducted by using exteroceptive behavioral models like elevated plus maze, passive avoidance apparatus and object recognition task at doses 100, 300 and 500 mg/kg. Results Ethanol extract of E. cardamomum fruits significantly decreased transfer latency and increased step down latency and discrimination index respectively when compared to normal control groups. Piracetam and diazepam exhibited respective rise and fall in memory of the animals. The effect of plant extract on total serum cholesterol, acetylcholinesterase and malondialdehyde were more effective at two higher doses. However, it decreased serum glucose levels insignificantly whereas a significant rise in brain GSH levels was observed with increasing dose of the extract. Conclusions The study concludes that the nootropic effect of ethanol extract may be attributable to its anti-oxidant, anti-cholinesterase and cholesterol as well as glucose lowering potential.

Soumission à Epi-revel Today, Alzheimer’s disease affects over eight hundred and sixty thousand people in France; no medical treatment has been found to help thwart its consequences and inescapable death. Memory, speech as well as behavioural problems deeply affect the demented persons who, moreover, often feel persecuted by the surrounding environment. Some are placed in nursing homes and come up against two problems: on the one hand, the institutional crisis prevalent in our society; on the other hand, rejection, unprecedented violence and a denial of their illness which in the end leads to a denial of their entire being. The fact is that carers try to defend themselves when faced with the difficult reality of dementia as observed in Alzheimer’s patients. Rather than being a subject, the demented person becomes an object and sinks deeper and deeper into his/her distress as a result… La maladie d'Alzheimer touche aujourd'hui plus de huit cent soixante mille personnes en France, aucun traitement médical n'a été trouvé pour permettre de déjouer ses conséquences et l'inéluctabilité de la mort. Troubles mnésiques, altération de la parole, et troubles du comportement viennent ainsi ravager les sujets déments qui, de surcroît se sentent souvent persécutés par l'environnement qui les entoure. Certains sont placés en institution et doivent alors se heurter à un double problème : d'une part, à la crise institutionnelle qui marque notre époque ; d'autre part, à un rejet, une violence sans précédent et un déni de leur pathologie qui aboutit finalement à un déni de la totalité de leur être. Le fait est que les soignants tentent de se défendre face à cette difficile réalité constituée par la démence de type Alzheimer. Devenu objet plutôt que sujet, le dément s'enfonce ainsi un peu plus dans sa détresse… National audience

The U.S. Constitution charges Congress with promoting ‘the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.’ This is achieved through copyrights. The most common argument in favour of the distribution of exclusive copyrights is that they provide an incentive for artists and scientists to create their works. But, as I will show, the characteristics of intellectual objects (objects that can be copyrighted) can support the contradictory arguments that one, exclusive copyrights are necessary and two, that they should not exist at all. I conclude that the appropriate amount of copyright protection protects the incentive for producers to create while also defending the public’s right to a rich intellectual realm. This is sometimes termed ‘thin’ copyright protection. Thin copyright protection is far weaker than the current copyright regime. For instance, the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998 extended copyright protection to the life of the author plus 70 years, and in the case of works created by corporate entities the act extended protection to 95 years. This is a far cry from copyright’s original duration of 14 years (plus one possible renewal). It would be difficult to argue that these extensions provide any extra incentive for authors to create, while on the other hand they surely attack the public’s right to a robust intellectual realm. Therefore, the current copyright regime needs to be substantially weakened to a ‘thin’ level. To avoid confusion, I will call works that have the potential to be copyrighted ‘intellectual objects’ before they are copyrighted and use the term ‘copyrighted works’ for intellectual objects after they are copyrighted. Intellectual objects, however, are not objects in the ordinary sense of the word. The particular edition of a book (and the particular copy of a particular edition of a book) is not an intellectual object. It is merely a manifestation (or instance) of the intellectual object. The work, in the broadest sense, is the actual intellectual object. In other words, the manifestation of the work is not the intellectual object, but the work itself is. An individual book is an instantiation of the work, which is the actual intellectual object. Without delving too far into the ontology of artworks it is necessary for this discussion only to see that when talking about intellectual objects we are not talking about physical objects but about objects that can be instantiated in many locations. That is, intellectual objects can be reproduced without losing their intellectual value. Copyright discussions often begin with the incentive argument mentioned above. An incentive is needed to foster innovation because intellectual objects are non-rivalrous (with regards to consumption) and non-excludable before they are copyrighted. A non-rivalrous good is a good for which enjoyment of it by some agents does not diminish available opportunities for others to enjoy it as well. A non-excludable good, on the other hand, is a good for which it is not possible to prevent individuals (who do not own the good) from consuming it or partaking of the benefits of it (at a relatively low cost). Since intellectual objects are non-rivalrous and non-excludable there is good reason to believe that without copyright protection authors would reduce their production of intellectual objects. This is because without this protection there would be (arguably) no way for authors to receive compensation for their work and to recoup the costs that went into producing the intellectual object at hand. The fact that intellectual objects are non-rivalrous means that there is no reason why you and I cannot read the same book at the same time. My reading the same work that you are reading (as opposed to reading the same manifestation of the intellectual object) does not decrease your enjoyment in reading that book. That is, the fact that we are both reading Moby Dick in the same period of time does not diminish either of our utilities. This should be contrasted with rivalrous private goods. Take, for instance, a bag of potato chips that you have just bought from your local grocery store. If I eat all of your chips you can no longer derive pleasure from them and if you eat the chips I cannot derive pleasure from them. Rivalrous goods are marked by this relationship. One person’s full enjoyment of such a good disallows another person’s full enjoyment of a rivalrous good. Edwin Hettinger aptly explains the concept of non-rivalrousness in his essay ‘Justifying Intellectual Property’ by writing that intellectual objects are goods which ‘are not consumed by their use’ (34). Purely non-excludable goods are goods for which there is no way for one person to exclude another from their use or consumption. An example of a purely non-excludable good is the air. It is absolutely impossible for one to exclude another person from breathing the air (except perhaps by killing them). Yet, intellectual objects are not purely non-excludable but relatively non-excludable. This ‘relative’ non-excludability arises from the fact that a person can exclude another from the physical instantiation of an intellectual object s/he owns (where s/he owns the physical instantiation and not the intellectual object). That is, s/he can prevent another person from taking his/her copy of The Corrections. But s/he cannot exclude another from the intellectual object instantiated in the book. This is because a person’s copy of The Corrections is, in many ways, a piece of physical property and not of intellectual property. What I am concerned with here is intellectual property and thus with intellectual objects (what are later the copyrighted works). Copyrighted works are legally excludable, but it is still difficult to restrict their distribution. This means that they are quasi-non-excludable. That intellectual objects are non-rivalrous and non-excludable leads to two contradictory conclusions. The first argues that there is a very good justification for having strong copyright laws; namely that without strong copyright laws works that originally had great value will be copied by unauthorised entities who will sell the copied works for very little and will give none of it back to the author of the work. This means that the author will eventually have no financial incentive to create his/her works. However, these attributes of intellectual objects also mean that there is a very good for having weak (or thin) copyrights (or no copyrights at all). Since there is no reason why each person should not be able to possess all of the great works for a very cheap price (which having weak or short copyrights would ensure). This is especially true given the fact that the entire reasoning for having copyrights at all (in this line of argument) is to ensure the progress of science and the arts which presumably are meant to belong to every citizen of the United States. The first branch of this tension could be called the producer’s conclusion and the second could be called the consumer’s conclusion. If we believe the first conclusion we will have to side with producers over consumers, whereas if we believe the second we will have to side with consumers over producers. These contradictory results both follow from the fact that intellectual works are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Since they are non-rivalrous and non-excludable there is every reason to leave them that way (that is, not to have copyrights) as it benefits the public but for the same reason there is every reason to have strong copyrights so that authors will create intellectual works in the future. Hettinger notes that the justification for copyright at this level is paradoxical. ‘It establishes a right to restrict the current availability and use of intellectual products for the purpose of increasing the production and thus future availability and use of new intellectual products’ (48). That is, the logic is that you’ll get more intellectual objects if you limit the current availability of intellectual objects. Law Professor and copyright specialist Paul Goldstein summarises this argument in his book Copyright’s Highway when he writes, ‘since copyright allows creators and publishers of literary and artistic works to charge a price for gaining access to these works, the inescapable effect is to withhold the work from people who will not or cannot pay that price, even though giving them free access would harm no one else’ (176). But this is only one side of the tension, to elucidate the other side which Goldstein subscribes to, he writes that ‘if society withholds property rights from creative work, the price that its producers can charge for access to it will begin to approach zero; their revenues will diminish and, with them, their incentives to produce more’ (177). So we are left with this tension that must be duly dealt with by policy makers. In light of the tension we should measure copyright protection by both of its poles. These poles correspond in the first case to the author’s rights and in the second to the consumer’s rights. The best copyright protection will accept what both sets of rights demand to the extent that it can, but when it cannot it will side with the user since the set of users more or less corresponds to the public at large. (We are all users of intellectual objects but are not all authors of them.) What this means for enacting copyright policies is that copyright protection should exist, but it should exist no more than is necessary for promoting the arts and sciences. That is, copyrights should be seen as incentives to create, not property rights. The fact that there are incentives will please authors and the fact that they are limited (through broad fair use exemptions, a healthy distinction between ideas and expressions, and having copyright protections for a relatively short period of time) will please users. All in all this is the best way of seeing our way through the tension at the heart of copyright law. In terms of the enactment of the law, copyright laws should be limited in duration and scope. First, copyright protection should not last for 70 years plus the life of the author, which is too long to justify in terms of providing an incentive for authors to create. Second, fair use provisions for copying parts of works should be broadened and minor infractions (such as private copying, regardless of the difficulties in defining what ‘private’ means) should not be prosecuted since small amounts of copying do not encroach on the effectiveness of the incentive for authors to create. Third, the idea/expression distinction should be strongly and vigorously maintained. While all of these changes appear on the surface to be siding with the public over authors, the fact that copyright protection exists at all is obviously to the author’s advantage. Thus, these changes constitute a copyright regime that is more beneficial to all, authors and public included. References Bell, Tom W. “Diagram of ‘The Paths of Intellectual Property’.” http://www.tomwbell.com/teaching/Prop_Paths.pdf>. Goldstein, Paul. Copyright’s Highway. From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox (rev. ed.). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2003. Hettinger, Edwin. “Justifying Intellectual Property.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 18 (1989): 31-52. Morgan, Scott. “Columbus Farmers Market Contemplates Countersuing Recording Industry Association of America, Which Is Suing Market over Pirated Music.” Packet Online 16 Oct. 2003. http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=1091&dept_id=425707&newsid=10328460&PAG=461&rfi=9>. Samuels, Edward. “The Idea-Expression Dichotomy in Copyright Law.” 56 Tenn. L. Rev. 321 (1989). ’ Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York, NY: New York UP, 2001. Note A basic discussion of public goods can be found at http://www.pitt.edu/~upjecon/MCG/MICRO/GOVT/Pubgood.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Raven, Francis. "Copyright and Public Goods: An Argument for Thin Copyright Protection." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/06-raven.php>. APA Style Raven, F. (Jul. 2005) "Copyright and Public Goods: An Argument for Thin Copyright Protection," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/06-raven.php>.

Curating content is a key part of a social media user’s profile—and recent reports reveal an upward trend in the curating of video, image, and text based content (Meeker). Through “engagement”—in other words, posting content, liking, sharing, or commenting on another’s content—that content becomes part of the user’s profile and contributes to their “activity.” A user’s understanding of another user in the network depends on curation, on what another user posts and their engagement with the content. It is worth while studying content curation in terms of meaning, which involves clarifying how a user makes themselves meaningful depending on what they curate and their engagement with the curated content, and also how other users gain meaning from someone else’s curatorial work, determining how they position themselves in relation to others. This essay analyses the structure of meaning underpinning an individual’s act of curating content in social media, each time they publish content (“post”) or republish content (like, share, and/or comment) on their social media homepage. C.S. Peirce’s semiotics is the method for clarifying this structure. Based on an application of Peirce’s tripartite structure of semiosis, it becomes clear that curated content is a sign representative of the user who posted the content, the poster, and that, with the range of ways this representation takes place, it is possible to begin a classification of social media signs. Background: Meaning, Self-Documentation, Semiotics The study of meaning is a growing field in the research of social media. Lomborg makes a case for the importance of studying meaning due to social media’s “constant flux” and evolution as an object of study. In this context, structures of meaning are a stabilising component that provides “the key to explaining continuity and change in social media over time” (Lomborg 1). In her study of social media, Langlois defines meaning broadly as something we create and find. “Finding meaning” and “making sense” of the world, people, and objects involves the whole gamut of decoding meaning and applying social and cultural ideas as well as a more Deleuzian pedagogy of “real thinking” which involves creating new concepts (Deleuze Difference; Dillet). An analysis of the structure of meaning underpinning content curation extends existing research on self-documentation online, self-presentation, and personal media assemblages/personal media archives (see Doster; Good; Orkibi; Storsul). As noted by Langlois, “There has been a massive popularisation of self-documentation” (114) and it involves more than publishing reflections on blogging and microblogging platforms. It involves forms that focus on “self-presence” and “self-actualisation,” including sharing pictures, videos, and memes, writing comments, and “the use of buttons such as the Facebook ‘Like’ button” (117). Recent research discusses how Facebook profiles use the platform to collate content in a manner similar to that of diaries and scrapbooks. Good explains how social media users today and users in the print era use “tokens” to communicate taste and build cultural capital. An “interest token” is content that is shared: in the print era these are mainly clippings and in social media these are “digital articles” such as links to video clips as well as liking friends’ posts (568). Crucial to the content in both eras is the latent presence of the user. For example, in Victorian Britain contributors to confession books would hint at their desires through textual quotations. Good describes much the same structure of meaning underlying a user’s publishing of content on Facebook: “Tokens, when analysed as part of a broader media assemblage in a Facebook page or scrapbook page, can essentially speak volumes about a user’s cultural aspirations, dispositions and desires for social distinction” (568). Doster also reiterates this point about how digital technology enables users to associate themselves with digital content in order to represent themselves in complex ways. The structure of meaning analysed in this essay is found in the very phenomena identified above: when a user, by publishing content or republishing another’s content, is using their profile to curate content which is interpreted by other users to say something about them. As noted, current social media research discusses how, on platforms such as Facebook, users collate content as an important strategy of self-documentation and self-presentation. Other research examines in detail the conditions influencing the production of meaning (Langlois), identifying the software algorithms described by Chowdhry that decide what content social media users see on the platform, influencing what they curate in the first place—for example, when a user republishes, by liking, sharing, and/or commenting on, another friend’s post, a social organisation’s post, or even an advertisement. This paper, however, analyses the structure of meaning specifically. Peirce’s semiotics is a conceptual framework that explains how this structure of meaning works. Semiotics has a fruitful history of explaining in detail the problem of meaning. Chuang and Huang are clear about the benefit of Peircian semiotics as a conceptual framework for systematically presenting and processing an object of analysis (341); Metro-Roland is also adamant about the value of Peirce’s theory for offering a “robust heuristic tool” (272); and Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image famously praises Peirce’s Sign as an alternative to Ferdinand de Saussure’s more restrictive schema in semiology (Dawkins). Semiotics clarifies how an individual act of content curation is a triadic Sign (Representamen, Object, Interpretant). This triadic structure explains how posters are represented by content, and, in turn, how the content is interpreted to be representative of them. Following from semiotics, this paper seeks to “identify signs and describe their functioning” (Culler viii) and beyond its scope is an analysis of the conditions under which the Sign is produced. The Sign, According to C.S. Peirce Peirce’s semiotic, a branch of philosophy, is triadic. He proposes that we can think “only in terms of three”, and, from these “modes of valency,” and based also on his critique of Kant (Deledalle), he claims three phenomenological categories of being: Firstness and the state of possibility; Secondness and the state of existential relations; and Thirdness and the state of certainty, reasoning, and general rules. In relation to these three modes of being he claims that the way we make sense of the world—a process he names semiosis—also has three constituents. The three constituents of semiosis inform the three core elements of Peirce’s triadic Sign. There is the Sign itself, which Peirce calls the Representamen or Sign; there is the Object the Sign represents; and there is the resulting thought that follows, called the Interpretant (CP 1.541). (References to Peirce’s work are based on the customary practice of citing his collected works: CP, Collected Papers, with volume and page numbers.) Given that semiotics is triadic, Peirce defines three kinds of Representamen, three kinds of Object, and three kinds of Interpretant. For the sake of simplification this paper focuses on Peirce’s Object and Interpretant. They are briefly explained below and noted schematically in the appendix. In terms of Peirce’s Object, there are three kinds of Sign–Object relation. From the category of Thirdness, a Sign represents its Object according to an imagined idea. Peirce describes this relation with the Symbol. From the category of Secondness, a Sign represents its Object by being physically linked to its Object, and in this case it represents an actual object. Peirce describes this relation with the Index. From the category of Firstness, a Sign represents its Object based on qualitative resemblance, and in this case it represents a possible object. Peirce describes this relation with the Icon. In his explication of Peirce, Deledalle reminds us that “Nothing in itself is icon, index or Symbol” (20), meaning, for example, that what is an index in one semiosis could be a symbol in another. Deledalle discusses a symptom as a Sign of an illness, which is the Object, and an example is a symptom such as a person’s shivering. He writes: “If this symptom is referred to in a lecture on medicine as always characterising a certain illness, the symptom is a symbol. If the doctor encounters it while he is examining a patient, the symptom is the index of the illness” (19–20). Expanding Deledalle’s discussion, if the symptom were represented in a graphic of a shivering man, the symptom is an icon. Consider the three ways a Sign is interpreted. From Thirdness, the Sign is associated with the Object based on a conceptual connection imagined by the interpreter. This is an arbitrary connection based on convention. This kind of interpretation is called an Argument. In Secondness, Sign and Object are interpreted to form a physical pair and the interpreting mind simply remarks on this connection. “The Index asserts nothing,” writes Peirce, “it only says ‘There!’” (CP 3.361). This kind of Interpretant is called a Dicent. In Firstness, the qualities of the Sign are interpreted to resemble a possible Object, and those qualities “excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness” (CP 2.299). This kind of Interpretant is called a Rhema. The three kinds of Representamen, three kinds of Sign–Object relation and three kinds of Interpretant together create 10 principal classes of Sign. It is worth noting that Peirce originally envisaged five categories of being, which would produce further classes of Signs; moreover, in his cinema books Deleuze develops an even more expansive taxonomy of Signs from Peirce’s theoretical framework, and this is based on his subdivision of Peirce’s categories. Crucial is how semiosis depends upon “the set of knowledge and beliefs that will be brought to bear” (Metro-Rowland 274), or what Peirce calls collateral experience. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s first appearance on The Tonight Show explains the importance of collateral experience for meaningfulness (Goldenberg). Seinfeld says he loves a particular sign he saw on the freeway—which is unique to New York—that reads “Left turn OK.” When pronouncing the text on the sign he intentionally adds a pause, so it sounds more like, “Left turn... Okay.” Seinfeld explains that the structure of the text adds a more personal and human tone than is typical of street signs (a tone Seinfeld makes perfectly obvious through his exaggerated pronunciation), and the use of the colloquial and friendly “okay” also contributes to this personal touch. Seinfeld explains how a driver can’t help but to interpret the sign as being more like a piece of advice they could take or leave. Similar, he says, would be signs like “U-turn: enjoy it” and “Right turn: why not?” Seinfeld is making clear that the humour of the example lies with the fact that a driver’s initial response to such as sign is to take it as an instruction; in other words, the driver’s collateral experience tells them that the object of the sign is an instruction. Towards a Classification of Social Media Signs It is fair to say that how one is perceived online is influenced by the content they curate. For example, Storsul cites the following comment from a teenager: “On Facebook, you judge each other’s lives. That’s what you do. I look at pictures, how they are, and I look at interests if we share some interests. If you visit my profile you can find out everything about me” (24). In her discussion of interest tokens, Good makes clear how content online means more than what the content itself is about—it’s also used to portray a person’s cultural aspirations, social capital, and even sexual desire. Similarly, Barash et al. identifies the importance to a user’s social media post of their image projected, noting how these are typically characterised according to scales such as cool–uncool, entertaining–boring, and uplifting–depressing (209). Peirce’s tripartite structure of the Sign is a useful tool for comprehending the relationship between users and content. Consider the following hypothetical example, indicative of a typical example of curated content: a poster publishing on Facebook their holiday photos, together with a brief introductory comment. Using Peirce, this is an individual act of semiosis that can be analysed according to the following general structure: the Sign is made up of the images and the poster’s text; the Object is the poster herself; and the Interpretant is the resulting thought(s) of another user looking at this Sign. The curated content is a Sign of the poster no matter what, and that is because the poster has published this content themselves and it is literally attributed to them, through their name and profile image. But of course the meaningfulness created from this structure also depends on the user’s collateral experience of the poster. The poster of curated content is always present as the Object of the Sign and, insofar as this presence is based on their publication (and/or republication) of content to the platform, the Sign–Object relation is principally indexical. However, and as will become apparent below, there is scope in the structure of meaning for this physical “presence” of the poster to appear otherwise. The poster’s indexical presence is ostensibly more complex as they can also be absently present—for example, if they post without commenting, or simply “Listen to…” or share content. More complex still is how a share involves a different kind of presence to posting and “liking.” It is reasonable to say that each kind of presence has a different effect on the meaningfulness of the Sign. Also, consider the effect of the poster’s comment, should they choose to leave one. Based on Peirce’s phenomenology, a poster could write a comment that makes some conceptual claim (Thirdness); or that simply points to the content, similar to the function of a demonstrative pronoun (Secondness); or that is designed to excite sensations in the mind (Firstness)—for example, poetic text in the manner of a haiku. Analysing another hypothetical example will help clarify the semiotic mixes potential to content curation. Imagine a close-up image of a steak, posted in Facebook. Accompanying the image is the linguistic text “Lunch with the work crew.” The Sign is the image plus the text; the Object is the poster (in this case, “Clinton”); and the Interpretant is the idea created in the mind of the user, scrolling the feed of content on their home page, who perceives this Sign. The most obvious and salient way this Sign works is as a statement of actual fact; that is, the comment states an activity and, in terms of its relation to the image, only has a “pointing” function and provides information about its Object of actual fact only. From Peirce, this class of Sign is (IV), a Dicent Indexical Sinsign. There is also the potential, however, for this particular Sign to motivate a more conceptual or generalised interpretation of the poster. The use of slang in the text would resonate with a certain group and result in a more generalised interpretation of Clinton—for example, “Just smashed this steak after some fun runners down south.” In this text, a certain group would understand “runners” as waves at the beach, and therefore this Sign is representative of its Object as a surfer, and, more complex still, perhaps as a privileged surfer since Clinton clearly enjoys surfing on a weekday—in other words, he’s not a “weekend warrior.” From Peirce, this class of Sign is (X), an Argument Symbolic Legisign. But another user may interpret this Sign in a slightly less complex way, equally valid and important. Perhaps they don’t “get” the surfing slang in Clinton’s comment, but they understand a surfing reference has been made nonetheless. In this case a user might interpret the Sign in the following way: “He’s making some comment about surfing, but I don’t understand it.” From Peirce, this class of Sign is (VII), a Dicent Indexical Legisign. But what if Clinton simply posted this image of the steak with no text? In this case the user interpreting the Sign is directed to the Object (“Clinton”: the profile that posted the content), but the Sign does not describe anything about the Object. Instead, “The sign deals with possible evidence that some relations have been connected, and thus indicates some previous state of affairs” (Chuang and Huang 347). From Peirce, this class of Sign is (III), a Rhematic Indexical Sinsign. As a final example (which by no means concludes the analysis of this Sign), what if Clinton posted this image by way of a like only? The effect of the like is to determine the poster as less “present” than they would be had they only posted the content, or shared it, or left a comment on it. Despite the fact that the like still shows the poster as curator—and, ostensibly, publisher—of the content, determining their indexical presence, the like also allows for an iconic Sign–Object relation. As was mentioned earlier, “Nothing in itself is icon, index or symbol” (Deledalle 20). Given the poster’s iconic representation by the Sign, the poster is interpreted as a possible Object. What happens is that the qualities of the content would be interpreted to resemble some possibility of a person/Object. The user has a vague sense of somebody, but that somebody is present more as a pattern, diagram, or scheme. From Peirce, this class of Sign is (II), a Rhematic Iconic Sinsign. Conclusion This paper aims to identify and describe the structure of meaning underlying the proposition, “We are what we curate online.” Using Peirce’s tripartite Sign, it is clear that the content a user curates is representative of them; in terms of the different ways users engage with content, it is possible to begin to classify curated content into different kinds of Signs. What needs to be emphasised, and what becomes apparent from the preliminary classification undertaken here, is that another user’s interpretation of these Signs—and any Signs, for that matter—depends on the knowledge they bring to semiosis. Finally, while this paper has chosen deliberately to engage with the structure of meaning underpinning an individual act of curation and has made inroads into a classification of Signs produced from this structure, further semiotic research could take into consideration the conditions under which the Signs are created, in terms of software’s role influencing the creation of Signs and a user’s collateral knowledge. Appendix Given the breadth of Peirce’s work and the multiple and often varied definitions of his concepts, it is reasonable to consult a respected secondary synthesis of Peirce’s semiotic. The following tables are from Deledalle (19). Table 1: The Three Trichotomies of Signs 1 2 3 Representamen Object Interpretant Qualisign Icon Rhema Sinsign Index Dicisign Legisign Symbol Argument Table 2: The 10 Classes of Sign “All expressions such as R1, O2, I3, should be read according to Peirce in the following way: a Representamen ‘which is’ a First, an Object ‘which is’ a Second, an Interpretant ‘which is’ a Third (8.353)” (Deledalle 19). R O I I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X R1 R2 R2 R2 R3 R3 R3 R3 R3 R3 O1 O1 O2 02 01 02 02 03 03 03 I1 I1 I1 I2 I1 I1 I2 I1 I2 I3 Rhematic Iconic Qualisign Rhematic Iconic Sinsign Rhematic Indexical Sinsign Dicent Indexical Sinsign Rhematic Iconic Legisign Rhematic Indexical Legisign Dicent Indexical Legisign Rhematic Symbolic Legisign Dicent Symbolic Legisign Argument Symbolic Legisign References Barash, Vladamir, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Ellen Isaacs, and Victoria Bellotti. “Faceplant: Impression (Mis)management in Facebook Status Updates.” Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. May 2015 ‹http://www.aaai.org/›. Chowdhry, Amit. “Facebook Changes Newsfeed Algorithm to Prioritise Content from Friends Over Pages.” Forbes 23 Mar. 2015. 18 June 2015 ‹http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/04/23/facebook-changes-news-feed-algorithm-to-prioritize-content-from-friends-over-pages/›. 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Doster, Leigh. “Millenial Teens Design and Redesign Themselves in Online Social Networks.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 12 (2013): 267–79. Goldenberg, Max. Once Upon a Time Seinfeld Was a Little Boy. 19 Mar. 2007. Web video. 5 Apr. 2015 ‹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYJxcFaRpMU›. Good, Katie Day. “From Scrapbook to Facebook: A History of Personal Media Assemblages and Archives.” New Media & Society 15.4 (2012): 559–73. Langlois, Ganaele. Meaning in the Age of Social Media. NY: Palgrave, 2014. Lomborg, Stine. “'Meaning' in Social Media.” Social Media + Society 1.1 (Apr.–June 2015): 1–2. Meeker, Mary. “Internet Trends 2015 – Code Conference.” 2015. 10 Jun. 2015 ‹http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/internet-trends-v1›. Metro-Rowland, Michelle. “Interpreting Meaning: An Application of Peircian Semiotics to Tourism.” Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment 11.2 (2009): 270–79. Orkibi, Eithan. “‘New Politics,’ New Media – New Political Language? A Rhetorical Perspective on Candidates’ Self-Presentation in Electronic Campaigns in the 2013 Israel Elections.” Israeli Affairs 21.2 (2015): 277–92. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Vols. 1–6. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1932. Storsul, Tanja. “Deliberation or Self-Presentation: Young People, Politics and Social Media.” Nordicom Review 35.2 (2014): 17–28.

PurposeThis paper provides practical advice for archaeologists and heritage specialists wishing to use ML approaches to identify archaeological features in high-resolution satellite imagery (or other remotely sensed data sources). We seek to balance the disproportionately optimistic literature related to the application of ML to archaeological prospection through a discussion of limitations, challenges and other difficulties. We further seek to raise awareness among researchers of the time, effort, expertise and resources necessary to implement ML successfully, so that they can make an informed choice between ML and manual inspection approaches.Design/methodology/approachAutomated object detection has been the holy grail of archaeological remote sensing for the last two decades. Machine learning (ML) models have proven able to detect uniform features across a consistent background, but more variegated imagery remains a challenge. We set out to detect burial mounds in satellite imagery from a diverse landscape in Central Bulgaria using a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) plus additional but low-touch training to improve performance. Training was accomplished using MOUND/NOT MOUND cutouts, and the model assessed arbitrary tiles of the same size from the image. Results were assessed using field data.FindingsValidation of results against field data showed that self-reported success rates were misleadingly high, and that the model was misidentifying most features. Setting an identification threshold at 60% probability, and noting that we used an approach where the CNN assessed tiles of a fixed size, tile-based false negative rates were 95–96%, false positive rates were 87–95% of tagged tiles, while true positives were only 5–13%. Counterintuitively, the model provided with training data selected for highly visible mounds (rather than all mounds) performed worse. Development of the model, meanwhile, required approximately 135 person-hours of work.Research limitations/implicationsOur attempt to deploy a pre-trained CNN demonstrates the limitations of this approach when it is used to detect varied features of different sizes within a heterogeneous landscape that contains confounding natural and modern features, such as roads, forests and field boundaries. The model has detected incidental features rather than the mounds themselves, making external validation with field data an essential part of CNN workflows. Correcting the model would require refining the training data as well as adopting different approaches to model choice and execution, raising the computational requirements beyond the level of most cultural heritage practitioners.Practical implicationsImproving the pre-trained model’s performance would require considerable time and resources, on top of the time already invested. The degree of manual intervention required – particularly around the subsetting and annotation of training data – is so significant that it raises the question of whether it would be more efficient to identify all of the mounds manually, either through brute-force inspection by experts or by crowdsourcing the analysis to trained – or even untrained – volunteers. Researchers and heritage specialists seeking efficient methods for extracting features from remotely sensed data should weigh the costs and benefits of ML versus manual approaches carefully.Social implicationsOur literature review indicates that use of artificial intelligence (AI) and ML approaches to archaeological prospection have grown exponentially in the past decade, approaching adoption levels associated with “crossing the chasm” from innovators and early adopters to the majority of researchers. The literature itself, however, is overwhelmingly positive, reflecting some combination of publication bias and a rhetoric of unconditional success. This paper presents the failure of a good-faith attempt to utilise these approaches as a counterbalance and cautionary tale to potential adopters of the technology. Early-majority adopters may find ML difficult to implement effectively in real-life scenarios.Originality/valueUnlike many high-profile reports from well-funded projects, our paper represents a serious but modestly resourced attempt to apply an ML approach to archaeological remote sensing, using techniques like transfer learning that are promoted as solutions to time and cost problems associated with, e.g. annotating and manipulating training data. While the majority of articles uncritically promote ML, or only discuss how challenges were overcome, our paper investigates how – despite reasonable self-reported scores – the model failed to locate the target features when compared to field data. We also present time, expertise and resourcing requirements, a rarity in ML-for-archaeology publications.

Retro fashion trends continue to be a feature of the contemporary clothing market, providing alternate configurations of womanhood from which women can fashion their identities (Hackett). This article examines the design attributes of 1950s-style clothing, that some women choose to wear over more contemporary styles. The 1950s style can be located in a distinctly hourglass design that features a small waist with distinct bust and hips. This article asks: what are the design features of this style that lead women to choose it over contemporary fashion? Taking a material culture approach, it firstly looks at the design features of the garments and the way they are marketed. Secondly, it draws upon interviews and a survey conducted with women who wear these clothes. Thirdly, it investigates the importance of this silhouette to the women who wear it, through the key concepts of body shape and size. Clothing styles of the 1950s were influenced by the work of Christian Dior, particularly his "New Look" collection of 1947. Dior’s design focus was on emphasising female curves, featuring full bust and flowing skirts cinched in with a narrow waist (Dior), creating an exaggerated hourglass shape. The look was in sharp contrast to fashion designs of the Second World War and offered a different conceptualisation of the female body, which was eagerly embraced by many women who had grown weary of rationing and scarcity. Post-1950s, fashion designers shifted their focus to a slimmer ideal, often grounded in narrow hips and a smaller bust. Yet not all women suit this template; some simply do not have the right body shape for this ideal. Additionally, the intervening years between the 1950s and now have also seen an incremental increase in body sizes so that a slender figure no longer represents many women. High-street brand designers, such as Review, Kitten D’Amour and Collectif, have recognised these issues, and in searching for an alternative conceptualisation of the female body have turned to the designs of the 1950s for their inspiration. The base design of wide skirts which emphasise the relative narrowness of the waist is arguably more suited to many women today, both in terms of fit and shape. Using a material culture approach, this article will examine these design features to uncover why women choose this style over more contemporary designs. Method This article draws upon a material culture study of 1950s-designed clothes and why some contemporary women choose to wear 1950s-style clothing as everyday dress. Material culture is “the study through artefacts of the beliefs—values, ideas, attitudes and assumptions—of a particular community or society at a given time” (Prown 1). The premise is that a detailed examination of a culture’s relationship with its objects cannot be undertaken without researching the objects themselves (Hodder 174). Thus both the object is analysed and the culture is surveyed about their relationship with the object. In this study, analysis was conducted in March and September 2019 on the 4,286 items of clothing available for sale by the 19 brands that the interview subjects wear, noting the design features that mark the style as "1950s" or "1950s-inspired". Further, a quantitative analysis of the types of clothing (e.g. dress, skirt, trousers, etc.) was undertaken to reveal where the design focus lay. A secondary analysis of the design brands was also undertaken, examining the design elements they used to market their products. In parallel, two cohorts of women who wear 1950s-style clothing were examined to ascertain the social meanings of their clothing choices. The first group comprised 28 Australian women who participated in semi-structured interviews. The second cohort responded to an international survey that was undertaken by 229 people who sew and wear historic clothing. The survey aimed to reveal the meaning of the clothes to those who wear them. Both sets of participants were found through advertising the study on Facebook in 2018. The interview subjects were selected with the requirement that they self-identified as wearing 1950s-style clothing on a daily basis. The survey examined home dressmakers who made historic-style clothing and asked them a range of questions regarding their sewing practice and the wearing of the clothes. Literature Review While subcultures have adopted historic clothing styles as part of their aesthetic (Hebdige), the more mainstream wearing of clothing from alternative eras as an everyday fashion choice has its roots in the hippy movement of the late 1960s (Cumming 109). These wearers are not attempting to “‘rebel’ against society, nor … explicitly ‘subvert’ items that are offered by mainstream culture” (Veenstra and Kuipers 362-63), rather they are choosing styles that both fit in with contemporary styles, yet are drawn from a different design ideal. Wearers of vintage clothing often feel that modern clothing is designed for an ideal body size or shape which differed markedly from their own (Smith and Blanco 360-61). The fashion industry has long been criticised for its adherence to an ultra-thin body shape and it is only in the last decade or so that small changes have begun to be made (Hackett and Rall 270-72). While plus-size models have begun to appear in advertising and on cat-walks, and fashion brands have begun to employ plus-sized fit models, the shift to inclusivity has been limited as the models persistently reflect the smaller end of the “plus” spectrum and continue to have slim, hourglass proportions (Gruys 12-13). The overwhelming amount of clothing offered for sale remains within the normative AU8-16 clothing range. This range is commonly designated “standard” with any sizes above this “plus-sized”. Yet women around the world do not fit neatly into this range and the average woman in countries such as Australia and the United States are at the upper edge of normative size ranges. In Australia, the average woman is around an AU16 (Olds) and in the US they are in the lower ranges of plus sizes (Gruys) which calls into question the validity of the term “plus-sized”. Closely related to body size, but distinctly different, is the concept of body shape. Body shape refers to the relative dimensions of the body, and within fashion, this tends to focus on the waist, hips and bust. Where clothing from the 1960s onwards has generally presented a slim silhouette, 1950s-style clothing offers an arguably different body shape. Christian Dior’s 1947 "New Look" design collection came to dominate the style of the 1950s. Grounded in oversized skirts, cinched waists, full bust, and curved lines of the mid-nineteenth century styles, Dior sought to design for “flower-like women” (Dior 24) who were small and delicate, yet had full hips and busts. While Dior’s iteration was an exaggerated shape that required substantial body structuring through undergarments, the pronounced hourglass design shape became identified with 1950s-style clothing. By the 1960s the ideal female body shape had changed dramatically, as demonstrated by the prominent model of that decade, the gamine Twiggy. For the next few decades, iterations of this hyper-thin design ideal were accelerated and fashion models in magazines consistently decreased in size (Sypeck et al.) as fashion followed trends such as "heroin chic", culminating in the "size zero" scandals that saw models' BMI and waist-to-height rations plummet to dangerously unhealthy sizes (Hackett and Rall 272-73; Rodgers et al. 287-88). The majority of the fashion industry, it appears, is not designing for the average woman. Discrimination against “fat” people leads to industry practices that actively exclude them from product offerings (Christel). This has been variously located as being entrenched anywhere from the top of the industry (Clements) to the entry level, where design students are taught their trade using size 8 models (Rutherford-Black et al.). By restricting their designs in terms of size and shape offering, clothing brands collectively restrict the ability of people whose bodies fall outside that arbitrary range to fashion their identity but are eager nonetheless to participate in fashion (Church Gibson; Peters). This resulting gap provides an opportunity for brands to differentiate their product offering with alternate designs that cater to this group. Findings 1950s-Style Clothing There are several key styles that could arguably be identified as “1950s”; however, one of the findings in this study was that the focus of the designs was on the voluptuous style of the 1950s associated with Dior’s New Look, featuring a cinched-in waist, full bust, and predominantly wide, flowing skirts. A count of the garments available for sale on the websites of these brands found that the focus is overwhelmingly on dresses (64% of the 4,286 garments on offer), with skirts and bifurcated garments being marketed in far smaller numbers, 10% (679) and 7% (467) respectively. The majority of the skirts were wide, with just a few being narrow, often in a hobble-skirt style. Both styles emphasise wide hips and narrow waists. The high number of dresses with voluminous skirts suggest that this design aesthetic is popular amongst their customers; these women are seeking designs that are based on a distinctly, if exaggerated, female form. Many of the brands surveyed have an extended size collection, outside the normative AU8-16, with one brand going as high as a UK32. Sizing standards have ceased to be universally used by clothing designers, with brands often creating their own size scales, making it difficult to make direct size comparisons between the brands (Hackett and Rall, 267). Despite this, the analysis found that many of these brands have extended their sizing ranges well into the plus-sized bracket, with one brand going up to a size 32. In most brands, the exact same designs are available throughout the sizes rather than having a separate dedicated plus-size range. Only one design brand had a dedicated separate "plus-size" range where the clothing differed from their "standard-sized" ranges. Further, many of the brands did not use terminology separating sizes into “standard” or “plus-size”. Beyond the product offering, this analysis also looked at the size of the models that design brands use to market their clothes. Four brands did not use models, displaying the clothes in isolation. Eight of the brands used a range of models of different sizes to advertise their clothes, reflecting the diversity of the product range. Seven of the brands did not, preferring to use models of smaller size, usually around a size AU8, with a couple using the occasional model who was a size AU12. Body Shape There were two ideal body shapes in the 1950s. The first was a voluptuous hourglass shape of a large bust and hips, with a small cinched-in waist. The second was more slender, as exemplified by women such as Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn, this was “a subdued and classy sensuality, often associated with the aristocrat and high fashion” (Mazur). It is the first that has come to be the silhouette most commonly associated with the decade among this cohort, and it is this conceptualisation of a curvy ideal that participants in this study referenced when discussing why they wear these clothes: I'm probably like a standard Australia at 5'10" but I am curvy. A lot of corporate clothes I don't think are really made to fit women in the way they probably could and they could probably learn a bit from looking back a bit more at the silhouettes for you know, your more, sort of average women with curves. (Danielle) The 50s styles suit my figure and I wear that style on an everyday basis. (Survey Participant #22) As these women note, this curvy ideal aligns with their own figures. There was also a sense that the styles of the 1950s were more forgiving, and thus suited a wider range of body shapes, than more contemporary styles: these are the styles of clothes I generally wear as the 50’s and 60’s styles flatter the body and are flattering to most body types. (Survey Participant #213) In contrast, some participants chose the style because it created the illusion of a body shape they did not naturally possess. For example, Emma stated: I’m very tall and I found that modern fast fashion is often quite short on me whereas if it’s either reproduction or vintage stuff it tends to suit me better in length. It gives me a bit of shape; I’m like a string bean, straight up and down. (Emma) For others it allows them to control or mask elements of their body: okay, so the 1950s clothes I find give you a really feminine shape. They always consider the fact that you have got a waist. And my waist [inaudible]. My hips I always want to hide, so those full skirts always do a good job at hiding those hips. I feel… I feel pretty in them. (Belinda) Underlying both these statements is the desire to create a feminine silhouette, which in turn increases feelings of being attractive. This reflects Christian Dior’s aim to ground his designs in femininity. This locating of the body ideal in exaggerated curves and equating it to a sense of femininity was reflected by a number of participants. The sensory appeal of 1950s designs led to one participant feeling “more feminine because of that tiny waist and heels on” (Rosy). This reflects Dior’s design aim to create highly feminine clothing styles. Another participant mused upon this in more detail: I love how pretty they make me feel. The tailoring involved to fit your individual body to enhance your figure, no matter your size, just amazes me. In by-gone eras, women dressed like women, and men like men ... not so androgynous and sloppy like today. I also like the idea of teaching the younger generation about history ... and debunking a lot of information and preconceived notions that people have. But most of all ... THE PRETTY FACTOR! (Survey Participant #130) Thus the curvy style is conceived to be distinctly feminine and thus a clear marker of the female identity of the person wearing the clothes. Body Size Participants were also negotiating the relative size of their bodies when it came to apparel choice. Body size is closely related to body shape and participants often negotiated both when choosing which style to wear. For example, Skye stated how “my bust and my waist and my hips don’t fit a standard [size]”, indicating that, for her, both issues impacted on her ability to wear contemporary clothing. Ashleigh concurred, stating: I was a size 8, but I was still a very hourglass sized 8. So modern stuff doesn’t even work with me when I’m skinnier and that shape. (Ashleigh) Body size is not just about measurements around the hips and torso, it also affects the ability to choose clothing for those at the higher and lower ends of the height spectrum. Gabrielle discussed her height, saying: so I’m really tall, got quite big hips … . So I quite like that it cinches the waist a bit, goes over the hips and hides a little bit [laughs] I don’t know … I really like that about it I guess. (Gabrielle) For Gabrielle, her height creates a further dimension for her to negotiate. In this instance, contemporary fashion is too short for her to feel comfortable wearing it. The longer skirts of 1950s style clothing provide the desired coverage of her body. The curvy contours of 1950s-designed clothing were found by some participants to be compatible with their body size, particularly for those in the large size ranges. The following statement typifies this point of view: the later styles are mostly small waist/full skirt that flatters my plus size figure. I also find them the most romantic/attractive. (Survey Participant #74) The desire to feel attractive in clothes when negotiating body size reflects the concerns participants had regarding shape. For this cohort, 1950s-style clothing presents a solution to these issues. Discussion The clothing designs of the 1950s focus on a voluptuous body shape that is in sharp contrast to the thin ideal of contemporary styles. The women in this study state that contemporary designs just do not suit their body shape, and thus they have consciously sought out a style that is designed along lines that do. The heavy reliance on skirts and dresses that cinch at the waist and flare wide over the hips suggests that the base silhouette of the 1950s designed clothing is flattering for a wide range of female shapes, both in respect to shape and size. The style is predominantly designed around flared skirts which serves to reduce the fit focus to the waist and bust, thus women do not have to negotiate hip size when purchasing or wearing clothes. By removing one to the three major fit points in clothing, the designers are able to cater to a wider range of body shapes. This is supported in the interviews with women across the spectrum of body shapes, from those who note that they can "hide their wider hips" and to those women who use the style to create an hourglass shape. The wider range of sizes available in the 1950s-inspired clothing brands suggests that the flexibility of the style also caters to a wide range of body sizes. Some of the brands also market their clothes using models with diverse body sizes. Although this is, in some cases, limited to the lower end of the “plus”-size bracket, others did include models who were at the higher end. This suggests that some of these brands recognise the market potential of this style and that their customers are welcoming of body diversity. The focus on a relatively smaller waist to hip and bust also locates the bigger body in the realm of femininity, a trait that many of the respondents felt these clothes embodied. The focus on the perceived femininity of this style, at any size, is in contrast to mainstream fashion. This suggests that contemporary fashion designers are largely continuing to insist on a thin body ideal and are therefore failing to cater for a considerable section of the market. Rather than attempting to get their bodies to fit into fashion, these women are finding alternate styles that fit their bodies. The fashion brands analysed did not create an artificial division of sizing into “standard” and “plus” categories, reinforcing the view that these brands are size-inclusive and the styles are meant for all women. This posits the question of why the fashion industry continues this downward trajectory in body size. Conclusion The design of 1950s-inspired clothing provides an alternate silhouette through which women can fashion their identity. Designers of this style are catering to an alternate concept of feminine beauty than the one provided by contemporary fashion. Analysis of the design elements reveals that the focus is on a narrow waist below a full bust, with wide flowing skirts. In addition, women in this study felt these designs catered for a wide variety of body sizes and shapes. The women interviewed and surveyed in this study feel that designers of contemporary styles do not cater for their body size and/or shape, whereas 1950s-style clothing provides a silhouette that flatters them. Further, they felt the designs achieved femininity through the accentuating of feminine curves. The dominance of the dress, a highly gendered garment, within this modern iteration of 1950s-style underscores this association with femininity. This reflects Christian Dior’s design ethos which placed emphasis on female curves. This was to become one of the dominating influences on the clothing styles of the 1950s and it still resonates today with the clothing choices of the women in this study. References Christel, Deborah A. "It's Your Fault You're Fat: Judgements of Responsibility and Social Conduct in the Fashion Industry." Clothing Cultures 1.3 (2014): 303-20. DOI: 10.1386/cc.1.3.303_1. Church Gibson, Pamela. "'No One Expects Me Anywhere': Invisible Women, Ageing and the Fashion Industry." Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, eds. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson. Routledge, 2000. 79-89. Clements, Kirstie. "Former Vogue Editor: The Truth about Size Zero." The Guardian, 6 July 2013. <https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2013/jul/05/vogue-truth-size-zero-kirstie-clements>. Cumming, Valerie. Understanding Fashion History. Batsford, 2004. Dior, Christian. Dior by Dior: The Autobiography of Christian Dior. Trans. Antonia Fraser. V&A Publishing, 1957 [2018]. Gruys, Kjerstin. "Fit Models, Not Fat Models: Body Inclusiveness in the Us Fit Modeling Job Market." Fat Studies (2021): 1-14. Hackett, L.J. "‘Biography of the self’: Why Australian Women Wear 1950s Style Clothing." Fashion, Style and Popular Culture 16 Apr. 2021. <http://doi.org/10.1386/fspc_00072_1>. Hackett, L.J., and D.N. Rall. “The Size of the Problem with the Problem of Sizing: How Clothing Measurement Systems Have Misrepresented Women’s Bodies from the 1920s – Today.” Clothing Cultures 5.2 (2018): 263-83. DOI: 10.1386/cc.5.2.263_1. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture the Meaning of Style. Methuen & Co Ltd, 1979. Hodder, Ian. The Interpretation of Documents and Material Culture. Sage, 2012. Mazur, Allan. "US Trends in Feminine Beauty and Overadaptation." Journal of Sex Research 22.3 (1986): 281-303. Olds, Tim. "You’re Not Barbie and I’m Not GI Joe, So What Is a Normal Body?" The Conversation, 2 June 2014. Peters, Lauren Downing. "You Are What You Wear: How Plus-Size Fashion Figures in Fat Identity Formation." Fashion Theory 18.1 (2014): 45-71. DOI: 10.2752/175174114X13788163471668. Prown, Jules David. "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method." Winterthur Portfolio 17.1 (1982): 1-19. DOI: 10.1086/496065. Rodgers, Rachel F., et al. "Results of a Strategic Science Study to Inform Policies Targeting Extreme Thinness Standards in the Fashion Industry." International Journal of Eating Disorders 50.3 (2017): 284-92. DOI: 10.1002/eat.22682. Rutherford-Black, Catherine, et al. "College Students' Attitudes towards Obesity: Fashion, Style and Garment Selection." Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management 4.2 (2000): 132-39. Smith, Dina, and José Blanco. "‘I Just Don't Think I Look Right in a Lot of Modern Clothes…’: Historically Inspired Dress as Leisure Dress." Annals of Leisure Research 19.3 (2016): 347-67. Sypeck, Mia Foley, et al. "No Longer Just a Pretty Face: Fashion Magazines' Depictions of Ideal Female Beauty from 1959 to 1999." International Journal of Eating Disorders 36.3 (2004): 342-47. DOI: 10.1002/eat.20039. Veenstra, Aleit, and Giselinde Kuipers. "It Is Not Old-Fashioned, It Is Vintage, Vintage Fashion and the Complexities of 21st Century Consumption Practices." Sociology Compass 7.5 (2013): 355-65. DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12033.

Digital Articulations of the Relational Self Identity continues to be one of the enduring topics in digital media research. This interdisciplinary take on the digital self extends the discussion in my dissertation (Harju) of contemporary articulations of the relational self in the digital context by focusing on potentiality of the evolving self. I adopt a relational approach to being (Gergen Relational) where the self is seen as always already a product of relations, borne out of them as well as dependent on them (Gergen Realities). The self as fluid and processual is reflective of our liquid times (Bauman), of globalisation and digitalisation where we are surrounded by global flows of images, taste and trends (Appadurai).The view of the self as a process underlies future-oriented action, emphasing the becoming of the self. The process of becoming implies the potential of the self that can be narrated into existence. The relational view of the self, perhaps indirectly, also posits the self as a temporal interface between the present and the future, as a site where change unfolds. It is therefore important to critically reflect on the kinds of potentialities we can discover and engage with and the kinds of futures (Berardi) we can construct.Extending Gergen’s conceptualisation of the kinds of relations to include non-human actors (e.g. media technologies) as well socio-cultural and economic forces allows me to explore the conflicting forces shaping the self, for example, the influence the market exerts on self-construction together with the media logics that guide digital self-production practices. Because of the market’s dominant position in today’s imagination, I seek to explore the relational processes of inclusion and exclusion that position individuals relative to as well as in terms of the market as more or less included or excluded subjects (Harju).The digital environment is a unique setting for identity projects as it provides spatial and temporal flexibility, the possibility for curation, consideration and reconstruction. At the same time, it lacks a certain historicity; as Smith and Watson note, the self constructed online lacks narrative beginning and end that in “analog life writing [are] distinguishable by birth or death” (90). While it is tempting therefore to assume that self-construction online is free from all constraints, this is not necessarily so as the self is nevertheless produced within the wider socio-cultural context in which it also needs to “make sense,” these conditions persisting across these modes of being. Self as a relational process inevitably connects what for analytical purposes may be called online and offline social spaces as there is a processual linkage, a relational flow, that connects any online entity to a form outside the digital realm.Media institutions and the process of mediation (Rak Boom!) shape the autobiographical practices (Poletti), and the notion of automedia was introduced as a way to incorporate images, text and technologies as constitutive in autobiographic accounts (Smith and Watson) and help see online life as life instead of mere representation (Rak "Life"). The automedial approach rejects essentialist accounts of the self, assuming rather that the self is called into being and constructed in and by the materiality of the medium, in the process of mediation. This furthermore entails a move beyond the literary in terms of autobiographies toward consideration of the enabling and restricting roles of media technologies in the kinds of selves that can be constructed (Maguire 74).Viewing the self as always already relationally emergent (Gergen Relational) and combining this view with the framework of automedial construction of the self allows us to bring into the examination of the digital self the socio-cultural and economic forces and the diverse discourses meeting at the site of the self. Importantly, the relational approach prioritises relations and therefore the self is constituted in a relational flow in a process of becoming, placing importance on the kinds of relational configurations where the becoming of the self takes place.This paper explores how the digital self is forged under the joint pressures of consumerist logic and media logics in the contemporary society where “being a consumer” is the predominant subjectivity (Firat; Bauman). I draw on sociology of consumption to examine the relational tensions shaping identity construction of marginalised individuals. To empirically illustrate the discussion I draw on a previous study (Harju and Huovinen) on plus-sized fashion blogging and examine fatshion blogging as a form of automedia (see also Rak "Digital" on blogs).Plus-Sized Fashion Bloggers and Market-Mediated IdentityPlus-sized fashion bloggers, “fatshionistas,” actively seek social and cultural inclusion by way of fashion. As a collective activity, plus-sized fashion blogging is more than diary writing (see also Rak Digital) but also more than fashion blogging: the blogs constitute “networked, collective and active consumer resistance,” illuminating “marginalised consumers’ identity work at the intersection of commercial culture and the counter-representations of traditional femininity” (Harju and Huovinen 1603). Blogging resistant or subversive identities into being is thus also a form of activism and political action (Connell). As a form of automedia and autobiographical production, fatshion blogging has as its agenda the construction of alternative subjectivities and carving out a legitimate social space in the “fatosphere,” “a loosely interconnected network of online resources aimed at creating a safe space where individuals can counter fat prejudice, resist misconceptions of fat, engage in communal experiences and promote positive understandings of fat” (Gurrieri and Cherrier 279). Fashion blogs are rich in self-images portraying “fat fashion”: thus, not only fashion as a physical medium and the images representative of such materiality, but also the body acts as a medium.Plus-sized fashion bloggers feel marginalised as women due to body size but they also face rejection in and by the market. Normalised discourses around fashion and the female body as one that is fashioned render fashion blogging an avenue to normativity (Berlant): the symbolic power of taste (Bourdieu) embedded in fashion is harnessed to construct the desired self and to mobilise discourses of acceptable subjectivity. However, it is these very discourses that also construct the “state of being fat” as deviant and stigmatise the larger body as something falling outside the definition of good taste (LeBesco).The description on the Fatshionista! Livejournal page summarizes the agenda that despite the focus on fashion carries political undertones:Welcome, fatshionistas! We are a diverse fat-positive, anti-racist, disabled-friendly, trans-inclusive, queer-flavored, non-gender-specific community, open to everyone. Here we will discuss the ins and outs of fat fashions, seriously and stupidly--but above all--standing tall, and with panache. We fatshionistas are self-accepting despite The Man's Saipan-made boot at our chubby, elegant throats. We are silly, and serious, and want shit to fit.In a previous study (Harju and Huovinen) on the conflicted identity construction of plus-sized fashion bloggers (see also Gurrieri and Cherrier; Limatius) we found the complex performative tactics used in constructing the plus-sized blogger identity both resisted the market as well as embraced it: the bloggers seek similarity via appeals to normativity (see also Coleman and Figueroa) yet underline difference by rejecting the demands of normative ideals.The bloggers’ similarity seeking tactics (Harju and Huovinen) emphasise shared commonalities with the feminine ideals (ultra-femininity, posing and girliness) and on the face of it contribute to reproducing not only the gendered self but also the market-compromised self that endorses a very specific type of femininity. The plus-sized blogger identity, although inherently subversive as it seeks to challenge and expand the repertoire and imagery available to women, nevertheless seeks inclusion by way of the market, the very same that rejected them as “consumers”. This relational tension is negotiated on the blogs, and resistance emerges through articulating difference.Thus, the bloggers’ diversity asserting tactics (Harju and Huovinen) add to the complexity of the identity project and constitute explicit resistance, giving rise to resistant consumer identity. Bodily differences are highlighted (e.g. the bigger body is embraced, skin and body revealed rather than concealed) as the bloggers take control of how they are represented, using media to challenge the market that defines acceptable femininity in ways that ostracises fat women. The contradictory processes at the site of the self give rise to relational tension (Gergen Relational) and blogging offers a site for collective negotiation. For the plus-sized bloggers, to be included means no longer occupying the margins: self-images displaying the fat body contribute to corporeal empowerment (Harju and Huovinen) where flaunting the fat body helps construct the identity of a “fatshionista” blogger liberated from shame and stigma attached to the bigger body:I decided to start this blog after being a regular poster on the Fatshionista LiveJournal community. Finding that community changed my whole outlook on life, I was fat (still am) & unhappy with myself (not so much now). I was amazed to find a place where fat people celebrated their bodies, instead of being ashamed. (Harju and Huovinen 1614).The fatshion blog as a form of automedia is driven by the desire for change in the social circumstances where self-construction can take place, toward the future potential of the self, by diversifying acceptable subject positions and constructing novel identification points for fat women. The means are limited, however, and despite the explicit agenda of promoting body positivity, the collective aspirations are rooted in consumption and realised in the realm of fashion and the market.The question, therefore, is whether resistance outside the market is possible when so much of our social existence is bound up with the market and consumerist logic, or whether the desire for inclusion, manifest in aspirational normativity (Berlant) with the promise of social acceptance linked to normative way of life, necessitates market participation and the adoption of consumer subjectivity? Consumer subjectivity offers normative intelligibility in the various expressions of identity, providing tools for the becoming of an included subject. However, it raises the question of whether resistant identity can occur outside the market and outside the logic of consumption when it seeks social inclusion.Market-compromised identity is a double-edged sword; while participation via the market may help construct a self that is intelligible, market participation also disciplines the subject to take part in a certain way, of becoming a certain type of consuming subject, all the time harnessing the self for the benefit of the market. With no beginning or an end, the digital self is in constant processual flux, responding to conflicting relational input. The market adds to this complexity as “the neoliberal subject is compelled to participate in society as both an enthusiastic consumer and as a self-controlled subject” (Guthman 193).Social Imaginaries as Horizons of Constrained Possibility Identity possibilities are inscribed in the popular imagination, and the concept of social imaginary (Castoriadis; Taylor) provides a useful lens through which to examine articulations of the digital self. Social imaginaries are not unitary constructions and different imaginaries are evoked in different contexts. Likewise, although often shared, they are nevertheless unique to the individual, presenting as a terrain of conceivable action befitting of the individual engaged in the act of imagining.In our socially saturated times relational input is greater than ever (Gergen Relational). Imagining now draws on a wider range of identity possibilities, the ways of imagining the self being reflective of the values of any given time. Both consumption and media infiltrate the social imagination which today is not only compromised by market logic but has become constitutive of a terrain where the parameters for inclusion, change and resistance are limited. Practices of performing desirable femininity normalise a certain way of being and strike a constitutive boundary between what is desirable and what is not. The plus-sized fashion blogging makes visible the lack of diversity in the popular imagination (Harju and Huovinen) while fatshion blogging also reveals what possibilities there are for inclusion (i.e. via consumption and by mobilising normative femininity) and where the boundaries of identity work lie (see also Connell).The fat body is subjected to discipline (Giovanelli and Ostertag; LeBesco) and “becoming fat” is regularly viewed as a lack of control. Not limited to fat subjects, the prevalent discourses of the self emphasise control and responsibility for the self (rather than community), often masquerading as self-approval. The same discourses, however, highlight work on the self (McRobbie) and cultivating the self by various means of self-management or self-tracking (Rettberg). Such self-disciplining carries the implication of the self as somewhat lacking (Skeggs Imagining, Exchange), of being in some way unintelligible (Butler).In plus-sized blogging, the fat body needs to be subjected to fashioning to become intelligible within the dominant discourses in the public sphere. The fatshionista community is a politically oriented movement that rejects the normative demands governing the body, yet regimes of ‘self-improvement’ are evident on the individual blogs displaying the fashioned body, which is befitting of the normative understandings of the female subject as sexualised, as something to be consumed (see also Maguire). Contrary to the discourses of fat female subjects where the dimension of sexuality is largely absent, this is also linked to the problematics related to the visibility of female subjects. The negotiation of relational tension is manifest as negotiation of competing discourses where bloggers adopt the hegemonic visual discourses to subvert the stigmatising discourses that construct the fat female subject as lacking. Utilising media logics (e.g. micro-celebrity) to gain visibility as fat subjects is an important aspect of the fatshionistas’ automedial self-construction.I argue that social imaginaries that feed into identity construction and offer pathways to normalcy cannot be seen simply and only as enabling, but instead they construct horizons of constrained possibility (Harju), thereby imposing limitations to the kind of acceptable identity positions marginalised individuals can seek. Digital productions form chains of symbolic entities and acquire their meaning by being interconnected as well as by being connected to popular social imaginaries. Thus, the narrative construction of the self in the digital production, and the recognition of the self in the becoming, is the very utility of the digital object. This is because through the digital artefact the individual becomes relationally linked to chains of significations (Harju). Through such linkages and subverted discourses, the disenfranchised may become enfranchised.Toward Horizons of Potentiality and PossibilityThe relational self is a process under continual change and thus always becoming. This approach opens up new avenues for exploring the complexities of the digital self that is never ‘just’ a reproduction. Automedia entails both the media about the maker (the subject) and the process of mediating the self (Rak "Life" 161) The relational approach helps overcome the binary distinction in modes of being (online versus offline), instead bringing into focus the relational flow between various articulations of the self in different relational scenarios. Then perhaps the question is not “what kinds of selves become or are borne digital” (Rak Life 177), but what kinds of selves are possible in the first place under the current conditions that include the digital as one mode of being, mediating the becoming, with the digital as one relational space of articulation of the self among many.Where in On Being Online I discussed the constraining effects of market ideology embedded in social imaginaries on how the self can be articulated, Berardi in his book Futurability offers a more optimistic take, noting how the different paths we take result in different possibilities becoming realised, resulting in different social realities in the future. Future is not a linear development from the present; rather, the present harbours the potential for multiple futures. Berardi notes how the “[f]uture is not prescribed but inscribed, so it must be selected and extracted through interpretation” (236). Despite the dominant code - which in our times is consumption (Baudrillard) - hindering the process of interpretation, there is hope in Berardi’s notion of inscribed possibilities for resistance and change, for different ways of being and becoming.This is the space the plus-sized fashion bloggers occupy as they grasp the potentialities in the present and construct new ways of being that unfold as different social realities in the future. In blogging, platform affordances together with other media technologies are intertwined with future-oriented life narration in the construction of the fatshionista identity which involves retrospective interpretation of life experiences as a fat woman as well as self-liberation in the form of conscious rejection of the dominant discourses around fat female subjects.The digital self is able to negotiate such diverse, even conflicting forces in the active shaping of the social reality of its existence. Blogging as automedia can constitute an act of carving out alternative futures not limited to the digital realm. Perhaps when freed from aspirational normativity (Berlant) we are able to recover hope in the inscribed possibilities that might also hide the potential for a transition from a subjectivity enslaved to the market logic (see Firat Violence) to a self actively engaged in changing the social circumstances and the conditions in which subjectivity is construed (see Firat and Dholakia). In the becoming, the digital self occupies a place between the present and the future, enmeshed in various discourses of aspiration, mediated by material practices of consumption and articulated within the limits of current media practices (Harju). A self in the making, it is variably responsive to the multitude of relational forces continually flowing at the site of it.Although the plus-sized bloggers’ identity work can be seen as an attempt to transform or discipline the self into something more intelligible that better fits the existing narratives of the self, they are also adding new narratives to the repertoire. If we adopt the view of self-conception as discourse about the self, that is, “the performance of languages available in the public sphere” (Gergen, Realities 185) whereby the self is made culturally intelligible by way of narration within ongoing relationships, we can see how the existing cultural discourses of the self are not only inclusive, but also alienating and othering. There is a need for identity politics that encourage the production of alternative discourses of the self for more inclusive practices of imagining. 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Over the last two decades the female forensic pathologist investigator has become a prominent figure in crime fiction. Her presence causes suspicion on a number of levels in the narrative and this article will examine the reasons for that suspicion and the manner in which it is presented in two texts: Patricia Cornwell’s Postmortem and Tess Gerritsen’s The Sinner. Cornwell and Gerritsen are North American crime writers whose series of novels both feature female forensic pathologists who are deeply involved in homicide investigation. Cornwell’s protagonist is Dr Kay Scarpetta, then-Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. Gerritsen’s is Dr Maura Isles, a forensic pathologist in the Boston Medical Examiner’s office. Their jobs entail attending crime scenes to assess bodies in situ, performing examinations and autopsies, and working with police to solve the cases.In this article I will first examine Western cultural attitudes towards dissection and autopsy since the twelfth century before discussing how the most recent of these provoke suspicion in the selected novels. I will further analyse this by drawing on Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject. I will then consider how female pathologist protagonists try to deflect their colleagues’ suspicion of their professional choices, drawing in part on Judith Butler’s ideas of gender as a performative category. I define ‘gender’ as the socially constructed roles, activities, attributes, and behaviours that Western culture considers appropriate for women and men, and ‘sex’ as the physical biological characteristics that differentiate women and men. I argue that the female forensic pathologist investigator is portrayed as suspicious in the chosen novels for her occupation of the abject space caused by her sex in her roles as investigator and pathologist, her identification with the dead, and her performance of elements of both masculine and feminine conventional gender roles. Scholars such as Barthes, Rolls, and Grauby have approached detective fiction by focusing on intertextuality, the openness of the text, and the possibility of different meanings, with Vargas being one example of how this can operate; however, this article focuses on examining how the female forensic pathologist investigator is represented as suspicious in mainstream crime novels that attract a readership seeking resolution and closure.A significant part of each of these novels focuses on the corpse and its injuries as the site at which the search for truth commences, and I argue that the corpse itself, those who work most closely with it and the procedures they employ in this search are all treated with suspicion in the crime fiction in this study. The central procedures of autopsy and dissection have historically been seen as abominations, in some part due to religious views such as the belief of Christians prior to the thirteenth century that the resurrection of the soul required an intact body (Klaver 10) and the Jewish and Muslim edicts against disfigurement of the dead (Davis and Peterson 1042). In later centuries dissection was made part of the death sentence and was perceived “as an abhorrent additional post-mortem punishment” that “promised the exposure of nakedness, dismemberment, and the deliberate destruction of the corpse,” which was considered “a gross assault on the integrity and the identity of the body, and upon the repose of the soul” (Richardson 154). While now a mainstay of many popular crime narratives, the autopsy as a procedure in real life continues to appall much of the public (Klaver 18). This is because “the human body—especially the dead human body—is an object still surrounded by taboos and prohibitions” (Sawday 269). The living are also reluctant to “yield the subjecthood of the other-dead to object status” (Klaver 18), which often produces a horrified response from some families to doctors seeking permission to dissect for autopsy. According to Gawande, when doctors suggest an autopsy the victim’s family commonly asks “Hasn’t she been through enough?” (187). The forensic pathologists who perform the autopsy are themselves linked with the repugnance of the act (Klaver 9), and in these novels that fact combined with the characters’ willingness to be in close proximity with the corpse and their comfort with dissecting it produces considerable suspicion on the part of their police colleagues.The female sex of the pathologists in these novels causes additional suspicion. This is primarily because women are “culturally associated [...] with life and life giving” (Vanacker 66). While historically women were also involved in the care of the sick and the dead (Nunn and Biressi 200), the growth of medical knowledge and the subsequent medicalisation of death in Western culture over the past two centuries has seen women relegated to a stylised kind of “angelic ministry” (Nunn and Biressi 201). This is an image inconsistent with these female characters’ performance of what is perceived as a “violent ‘reduction’ into parts: a brutal dismemberment” (Sawday 1). Drawing on Butler’s ideas about gender as a culturally constructed performance, we can see that while these characters are biologically female, in carrying out tasks that are perceived as masculine they are not performing their traditional gender roles and are thus regarded with suspicion by their police colleagues. Both Scarpetta and Isles are aware of this, as illustrated by the interior monologue with which Gerritsen opens her novel:They called her the Queen of the Dead. Though no one ever said it to her face, Dr. Maura Isles sometimes heard the nickname murmured in her wake as she travelled the grim triangle of her job between courtroom and death scene and morgue. [...] Sometimes the whispers held a tremolo of disquiet, like the murmurs of the pious as an unholy stranger passes among them. It was the disquiet of those who could not understand why she chose to walk in Death’s footsteps. Does she enjoy it, they wonder? Does the touch of cold flesh, the stench of decay, hold such allure for her that she has turned her back on the living? (Gerritsen 6)The police officers’ inability to understand why Isles chooses to work with the dead leads them to wonder whether she takes pleasure in it, and because they cannot comprehend how a “normal” person could act that way she is immediately marked as a suspicious Other. Gerritsen’s language builds images of transgression: words such as murmured, wake, whispers, disquiet, unholy, death’s footsteps, cold, stench, and decay suggest a fearful attitude towards the dead and the abjection of the corpse itself, a topic I will explore shortly. Isles later describes seeing police officers cast uneasy glances her way, noting details that only reinforce their beliefs that she is an odd duck: The ivory skin, the black hair with its Cleopatra cut. The red slash of lipstick. Who else wears lipstick to a death scene? Most of all, it’s her calmness that disturbs them, her coolly regal gaze as she surveys the horrors that they themselves can barely stomach. Unlike them, she does not avert her gaze. Instead she bends close and stares, touches. She sniffs. And later, under bright lights in her autopsy lab, she cuts. (Gerritsen 7) While the term “odd duck” suggests a somewhat quaintly affectionate tolerance, it is contrasted by the rest of the description: the red slash brings to mind blood and a gaping wound perhaps also suggestive of female genitalia; the calmness, the coolly regal gaze, and the verb “surveys” imply detachment; the willingness to move close to the corpse, to touch and even smell it, and later cut it open, emphasise the difference between the police officers, who can “barely stomach” the sight, and Isles who readily goes much further.Kristeva describes the abject as that which is not one thing or another (4). The corpse is recognisable as once-human, but is no-longer; the body was once Subject, but we cannot make ourselves perceive it yet as fully Object, and thus it is incomprehensible and abject. I suggest that the abject is suspicious because of this “neither-nor” nature: its liminal identity cannot be pinned down, its meaning cannot be determined, and therefore it cannot be trusted. In the abject corpse, “that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight [...] that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything” (Kristeva 4), we see the loss of borders between ourselves and the Other, and we are simultaneously “drawn to and repelled” by it; “nausea is a biological recognition of it, and fear and adrenalin also acknowledge its presence” (Pentony). In these novels the police officers’ recognition of these feelings in themselves emphasises their assumptions about the apparent lack of the same responses in the female pathologist investigators. In the quote from The Sinner above, for example, the officers are unnerved by Isles’ calmness around the thing they can barely face. In Postmortem, the security guard who works for the morgue hides behind his desk when a body is delivered (17) and refuses to enter the body storage area when requested to do so (26) in contrast with Scarpetta’s ease with the corpses.Abjection results from “that which disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4), and by having what appears to be an unnatural reaction to the corpse, these women are perceived as failing to respect systems and boundaries and therefore are viewed as abject themselves. At the same time, however, the female characters strive against the abject in their efforts to repair the disturbance caused by the corpse and the crime of murder that produced it by locating evidence leading to the apprehension of the culprit. Ever-present and undermining these attempts to restore order is the evidence of the crime itself, the corpse, which is abject not only for its “neither-nor” status but also because it exposes “the fragility of the law” (Kristeva 4). In addition, these female pathologist characters’ sex causes abjection in another form through their “liminal status” as outsiders in the male hierarchy of law enforcement (Nunn and Biressi 203); while they are employed by it and work to maintain its dominance over law-breakers and society in general, as biological females they can never truly belong.Abjection also results from the blurring of boundaries between investigator and victim. Such blurring is common in crime fiction, and while it is most likely to develop between criminal and investigator when the investigator is male, when that investigator is female it tends instead to involve the victim (Mizejewski 8). In these novels this is illustrated by the ways in which the female investigators see themselves as similar to the victims by reason of gender plus sensibility and/or work. The first victim in Cornwell’s Postmortem is a young female doctor, and reminders of her similarities to Scarpetta appear throughout the novel, such as when Scarpetta notices the pile of medical journals near the victim's bed (Cornwell 12), and when she considers the importance of the woman's fingers in her work as a surgeon (26). When another character suggests to Scarpetta that, “in a sense, you were her once,” Scarpetta agrees (218). This loss of boundaries between self and not-self can be considered another form of abjection because the status and roles of investigator and victim become unclear, and it also results in an emotional bond, with both Scarpetta and Isles becoming sensitive to what lies in wait for the bodies. This awareness, and the frisson it creates, is in stark contrast to their previous equanimity. For example, when preparing for an autopsy on the body of a nun, Isles finds herself fighting extreme reluctance, knowing that “this was a woman who had chosen to live hidden from the eyes of men; now she would be cruelly revealed, her body probed, her orifices swabbed. The prospect of such an invasion brought a bitter taste to [Isles’s] throat and she paused to regain her composure” (Gerritsen 57). The language highlights the penetrative nature of Isles’s contact with the corpse through words such as revealed, orifices, probed, and invasion, which all suggest unwanted interference, the violence inherent in the dissecting procedures of autopsy, and the masculine nature of the task even when performed by a female pathologist. This in turn adds to the problematic issue here of gender as performance, a subject I will discuss shortly.In a further blurring of those boundaries, the female characters are often perceived as potential victims by both themselves and others. Critic Lee Horsley describes Scarpetta as “increasingly giv[ing] way to a tendency to see herself in the place of the victim, her interior self exposed and open to inspection by hostile eyes” (154). This is demonstrated in the novel when plot developments see Scarpetta’s work scrutinised (Cornwell 105), when she feels she does not belong to the same world as the living people around her (133), and when she almost becomes a victim in a literal sense at the climax of the novel, when the perpetrator breaks into her home to torture and kill her but is stopped by the timely arrival of a police officer (281).Similarly, Gerritsen’s character Isles comes to see herself as a possible victim in The Sinner. When it is feared that the criminal is watching the Boston police and Isles realises he may be watching her too, she thinks about how “she was accustomed to being in the eye of the media, but now she considered the other eyes that might be watching her. Tracking her. And she remembered what she had felt in the darkness at [a previous crime scene]: the prey’s cold sense of dread when it suddenly realises it is being stalked” (Gerritsen 222). She too almost becomes a literal victim when the criminal enters her home with intent to kill (323).As investigators, these characters’ sex causes suspicion because they are “transgressive female bod[ies] occupying the spaces traditionally held by a man” (Mizejewski 6). The investigator in crime fiction has “traditionally been represented as a marginalized outsider” (Mizejewski 11), a person who not only needs to think like the criminal in order to apprehend them but be willing to use violence or to step outside the law in their pursuit of this goal, and is regarded as suspicious as a result. To place a woman in this position then makes that investigator’s role doubly suspicious (Mizejewski 11). Judith Butler’s work on gender as performance provides a useful tool for examining this. Because “the various acts of gender create the gender itself” (Butler 522), these female characters are judged as woman or not-woman according to what they do. By working as investigators in the male-dominated field of law-enforcement and particularly by choosing to spend their days handling the dead in ways that involve the masculine actions of penetrating and dismembering, each has “radically crossed the limits of her gender role, with her choice of the most unsavoury and ‘unfeminine’ of professions” (Vanacker 65). The suspicion this attracts is demonstrated by Scarpetta being compared to her male predecessor who got on so well with the police, judges, and lawyers with whom she struggles (Cornwell 91). This sense of marginalisation and unfavourable comparison is reinforced through her recollections of her time in medical school when she was one of only four women in her class and can remember vividly the isolating tactics the male students employed against the female members (60). One critic has estimated the dates of Scarpetta’s schooling as putting her “on the leading edge of women moving into professionals schools in the early 1970s” (Robinson 97), in the time of second wave feminism, when such changes were not welcomed by all men in the institutions. In The Sinner, Isles wants her male colleagues to see her as “a brain and a white coat” (Gerritsen 175) rather than a woman, and chooses strategies such as maintaining an “icy professionalism” (109) and always wearing that white coat to ensure she is seen as an intimidating authority figure, as she believes that once they see her as a woman, sex will get in the way (175). She wants to be perceived as a professional with a job to do rather than a prospective sexual partner. The white coat also helps conceal the physical indicators of her sex, such as breasts and hips (mirroring the decision of the murdered nun to hide herself from the eyes of men and revealing their shared sensibility). Butler’s argument that “the distinction between appearance and reality [...] structures a good deal of populist thinking about gender identity” (527) is appropriate here, for Isles’s actions in trying to mask her sex and thus her gender declare to her colleagues that her sex is irrelevant to her role and therefore she can and should be treated as just another colleague performing a task.Scarpetta makes similar choices. Critic Bobbie Robinson says “Scarpetta triggers the typical distrust of powerful women in a male-oriented world, and in that world she seems determined to swaddle her lurking femininity to construct a persona that keeps her Other” (106), and that “because she perceives her femininity as problematic for others, she intentionally misaligns or masks the expectations of gender so that the masculine and feminine in her cancel each other out, constructing her as an androgyne” (98). Examples of this include Scarpetta’s acknowledgement of her own attractiveness (Cornwell 62) and her nurturing of herself and her niece Lucy through cooking, an activity she describes as “what I do best” (109) while at the same time she hides her emotions from her colleagues (204) and maintains that her work is her priority despite her mother’s accusations that “it’s not natural for a woman” (34). Butler states that “certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of a gender core or identity, and that these acts either conform to an expected gender identity or contest that expectation in some way” (527). Scarpetta’s attention to her looks and her enjoyment of cooking conform to a societal assumption of female gender identity, while her construction of an emotionless facade and focus on her work falls more in the area of expected male gender identity.These characters deliberately choose to perform in a specific manner as a way of coping and succeeding in their workplace: by masking the most overt signs of their sex and gender they are attempting to lessen the suspicion cast upon them by others for not being “woman.” There exists, however, a contradiction between that decision and the clear markers of femininity demonstrated on occasion by both characters, for example, the use by Isles of bright red lipstick and a smart Cleopatra haircut, and the performance by both of the “feminised role as caretaker of, or alignment with, the victim’s body” (Summers-Bremner 133). While the characters do also perform the more masculine role of “rendering [the body’s] secrets in scientific form” (Summers-Bremner 133), a strong focus of the novels is their emotional connection to the bodies and so this feminised role is foregrounded. The attention to lipstick and hairstyle and their overtly caring natures fulfill Butler’s ideas of the conventional performance of gender and may be a reassurance to readers about the characters’ core femininity and their resultant availability for romance sub-plots, however they also have the effect of emphasising the contrasting performative gender elements within these characters and marking them once again in the eyes of other characters as neither one thing nor another, and therefore deserving of suspicion.In conclusion, the female forensic pathologist investigator is portrayed in the chosen novels as suspicious for her involvement in the abject space that results from her comfort around and identification with the corpse in contrast to the revulsion experienced by her police colleagues; her sex in her roles as investigator and pathologist where these roles are conventionally seen as masculine; and her performance of elements of both masculine and feminine conventional gender roles as she carries out her work. This, however, sets up a further line of inquiry about the central position of the abject in novels featuring female forensic pathologist investigators, as these texts depict this character’s occupation of the abject space as crucial to the solving of the case: it is through her ability to perform the procedures of her job while identifying with the corpse that clues are located, the narrative of events reconstructed, and the criminal identified and apprehended.ReferencesBarthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cape. 1975. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal. 40.4 (1988): 519–31. 5 October 2011 ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893›Cornwell, Patricia. Postmortem. London: Warner Books, 1994. Davis, Gregory J. and Bradley R. Peterson. “Dilemmas and Solutions for the Pathologist and Clinician Encountering Religious Views of the Autopsy.” Southern Medical Journal. 89.11 (1996): 1041–44. Gawande, Atul. Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. London: Profile Books, 2003.Gerritsen, Tess. The Sinner. Sydney: Random House, 2003. Grauby, Francois. “‘In the Noir’: The Blind Detective in Bridgette Aubert’s La mort des bois.” Mostly French: French (in) detective fiction. Modern French Identities, v.88. Ed. Alistair Rolls. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2009.Horsley, Lee. Twentieth Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Klaver, Elizabeth. Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Culture. Albany: State U of NYP, 2005.Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.Mizejewski, Linda. “Illusive Evidence: Patricia Cornwell and the Body Double.” South Central Review. 18.3/4 (2001): 6–20. 19 March 2010. ‹http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190350›Nunn, Heather and Anita Biressi. “Silent Witness: Detection, Femininity, and the Post Mortem Body.” Feminist Media Studies. 3.2 (2003): 193–206. 18 January 2011. ‹http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1468077032000119317›Pentony, Samantha. “How Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection Works in Relation to the Fairy Tale and Post Colonial Novel: Angela Carter’s The Blood Chamber and Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.” Deep South. 2.3 (1996): n.p. 13 November 2011. ‹http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol2no3/pentony.html›Richardson, Ruth. “Human Dissection and Organ Donation: A Historical Background.” Mortality. 11.2 (2006): 151–65. 13 May 2011. ‹http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576270600615351›Robinson, Bobbie. “Playing Like the Boys: Patricia Cornwell Writes Men.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 39.1 (2006): 95–108. 2 August 2010. ‹http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2006.00205.x/full›Rolls, Alistair. “An Uncertain Place: (Dis-)Locating the Frenchness of French and Australian Detective Fiction.” in Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction. Modern French Identities, v.88. Ed. Alistair Rolls. Oxford: Peter Lang. 2009.---. “What Does It Mean? Contemplating Rita and Desiring Dead Bodies in Two Short Stories by Raymond Carver.” Literature and Aesthetics: The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics. 18.2 (2008): 88-116. Sawday, Jonathon. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1996.Summers-Bremner, Eluned. “Post-Traumatic Woundings: Sexual Anxiety in Patricia Cornwell’s Fiction.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics. 43 (2001): 131–47. Vanacker, Sabine. “V.I Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta: Creating a Feminist Detective Hero.” Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel. Ed. Peter Messent. London: Pluto P, 1997. 62–87. Vargas, Fred. This Night’s Foul Work. Trans. Sian Reynolds. London: Harvill Secker, 2008.

As the single most successful social-networking Website to date, Facebook has caused a shift in both practice and perception of online socialisation, and its relationship to the offline world. While not the first online social networking service, Facebook’s user base dwarfs its nearest competitors. Mark Zuckerberg’s creation boasts more than 750 million users (Facebook). The currently ailing MySpace claimed a ceiling of 100 million users in 2006 (Cashmore). Further, the accuracy of this number has been contested due to a high proportion of fake or inactive accounts. Facebook by contrast, claims 50% of its user base logs in at least once a day (Facebook). The popular and mainstream uptake of Facebook has shifted social use of the Internet from various and fragmented niche groups towards a common hub or portal around which much everyday Internet use is centred. The implications are many, but this paper will focus on the progress what Mimi Marinucci terms the “Facebook effect” (70) and the evolution of lists as a filtering mechanism representing one’s social zones within Facebook. This is in part inspired by the launch of Google’s new social networking service Google+ which includes “circles” as a fundamental design feature for sorting contacts. Circles are an acknowledgement of the shortcomings of a single, unified friends list that defines the Facebook experience. These lists and circles are both manifestations of the same essential concept: our social lives are, in fact, divided into various zones not defined by an online/offline dichotomy, by fantasy role-play, deviant sexual practices, or other marginal or minority interests. What the lists and circles demonstrate is that even very common, mainstream people occupy different roles in everyday life, and that to be effective social tools, social networking sites must grant users control over their various identities and over who knows what about them. Even so, the very nature of computer-based social tools lead to problematic definitions of identities and relationships using discreet terms, in contrast to more fluid, performative constructions of an individual and their relations to others. Building the Monolith In 1995, Sherry Turkle wrote that “the Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life” (180). Turkle describes the various deliberate acts of personnae creation possible online in contrast to earlier constraints placed upon the “cycling through different identities” (179). In the past, Turkle argues, “lifelong involvement with families and communities kept such cycling through under fairly stringent control” (180). In effect, Turkle was documenting the proliferation of identity games early adopters of Internet technologies played through various means. Much of what Turkle focused on were MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and MOOs (MUD Object Oriented), explicit play-spaces that encouraged identity-play of various kinds. Her contemporary Howard Rheingold focused on what may be described as the more “true to life” communities of the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) (1–38). In particular, Rheingold explored a community established around the shared experience of parenting, especially of young children. While that community was not explicitly built on the notion of role-play, the parental identity was an important quality of community members. Unlike contemporary social media networks, these early communities were built on discreet platforms. MUDs, MOOs, Bulletin Board Systems, UseNet Groups and other early Internet communication platforms were generally hosted independently of one another, and even had to be dialled into via modem separately in some cases (such as the WELL). The Internet was a truly disparate entity in 1995. The discreetness of each community supported the cordoning off of individual roles or identities between them. Thus, an individual could quite easily be “Pete” a member of the parental WELL group and “Gorak the Destroyer,” a role-player on a fantasy MUD without the two roles ever being associated with each other. As Turkle points out, even within each MUD ample opportunity existed to play multiple characters (183–192). With only a screen name and associated description to identify an individual within the MUD environment, nothing technical existed to connect one player’s multiple identities, even within the same community. As the Internet has matured, however, the tendency has been shifting towards monolithic hubs, a notion of collecting all of “the Internet” together. From a purely technical and operational perspective, this has led to the emergence of the ISP (Internet service provider). Users can make a connection to one point, and then be connected to everything “on the Net” instead of individually dialling into servers and services one at a time as was the case in the early 1980s with companies such as Prodigy, the Source, CompuServe, and America On-Line (AOL). The early information service providers were largely walled gardens. A CompuServe user could only access information on the CompuServe network. Eventually the Internet became the network of choice and services migrated to it. Standards such as HTTP for Web page delivery and SMTP for email became established and dominate the Internet today. Technically, this has made the Internet much easier to use. The services that have developed on this more rationalised and unified platform have also tended toward monolithic, centralised architectures, despite the Internet’s apparent fundamental lack of a hierarchy. As the Internet replaced the closed networks, the wider Web of HTTP pages, forums, mailing lists and other forms of Internet communication and community thrived. Perhaps they required slightly more technological savvy than the carefully designed experience of walled-garden ISPs such as AOL, but these fora and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) rooms still provided the discreet environments within which to role-play. An individual could hold dozens of login names to as many different communities. These various niches could be simply hobby sites and forums where a user would deploy their identity as model train enthusiast, musician, or pet owner. They could also be explicitly about role-play, continuing the tradition of MUDs and MOOs into the new millennium. Pseudo- and polynymity were still very much part of the Internet experience. Even into the early parts of the so-called Web 2.0 explosion of more interactive Websites which allowed for easier dialog between site owner and viewer, a given identity would be very much tied to a single site, blog or even individual comments. There was no “single sign on” to link my thread from a music forum to the comments I made on a videogame blog to my aquarium photos at an image gallery site. Today, Facebook and Google, among others, seek to change all that. The Facebook Effect Working from a psychological background Turkle explored the multiplicity of online identities as a valuable learning, even therapeutic, experience. She assessed the experiences of individuals who were coming to terms with aspects of their own personalities, from simple shyness to exploring their sexuality. In “You Can’t Front on Facebook,” Mimi Marinucci summarizes an analysis of online behaviour by another psychologist, John Suler (67–70). Suler observed an “online disinhibition effect” characterised by users’ tendency to express themselves more openly online than offline (321). Awareness of this effect was drawn (no pun intended) into popular culture by cartoonist Mike Krahulik’s protagonist John Gabriel. Although Krahulik’s summation is straight to the point, Suler offers a more considered explanation. There are six general reasons for the online disinhibition effect: being anonymous, being invisible, the communications being out of sync, the strange sensation that a virtual interlocutor is all in the mind of the user, the general sense that the online world simply is not real and the minimisation of status and authority (321–325). Of the six, the notion of anonymity is most problematic, as briefly explored above in the case of AOL. The role of pseudonymity has been explored in more detail in Ruch, and will be considered with regard to Facebook and Google+ below. The Facebook effect, Marinucci argues, mitigates all six of these issues. Though Marinucci explains the mitigation of each factor individually, her final conclusion is the most compelling reason: “Facebook often facilitates what is best described as an integration of identities, and this integration of identities in turn functions as something of an inhibiting factor” (73). Ruch identifies this phenomenon as the “aggregation of identities” (219). Similarly, Brady Robards observes that “social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook collapse the entire array of social relationships into just one category, that of ‘Friend’” (20). Unlike earlier community sites, Ruch notes “Facebook rejects both the mythical anonymity of the Internet, but also the actual pseudo- or polynonymous potential of the technologies” (219). Essentially, Facebook works to bring the offline social world online, along with all the conventional baggage that accompanies the individual’s real-world social life. Facebook, and now Google+, present a hard, dichotomous approach to online identity: anonymous and authentic. Their socially networked individual is the “real” one, using a person’s given name, and bringing all (or as many as the sites can capture) their contacts from the offline world into the online one, regardless of context. The Facebook experience is one of “friending” everyone one has any social contact with into one homogeneous group. Not only is Facebook avoiding the multiple online identities that interested Turkle, but it is disregarding any multiplicity of identity anywhere, including any online/offline split. David Kirkpatrick reports Mark Zuckerberg’s rejection of this construction of identity is explained by his belief that “You have one identity … having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” (199). Arguably, Zuckerberg’s calls for accountability through identity continue a perennial concern for anonymity online fuelled by “on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog” style moral panics. Over two decades ago Lindsy Van Gelder recounted the now infamous case of “Joan and Alex” (533) and Julian Dibbell recounted “a rape in cyberspace” (11). More recent anxieties concern the hacking escapades of Anonymous and LulzSec. Zuckerberg’s approach has been criticised by Christopher Poole, the founder of 4Chan—a bastion of Internet anonymity. During his keynote presentation at South by SouthWest 2011 Poole argued that Zuckerberg “equates anonymity with a lack of authenticity, almost a cowardice.” Yet in spite of these objections, Facebook has mainstream appeal. From a social constructivist perspective, this approach to identity would be satisfying the (perceived?) need for a mainstream, context-free, general social space online to cater for the hundreds of millions of people who now use the Internet. There is no specific, pre-defined reason to join Facebook in the way there is a particular reason to join a heavy metal music message board. Facebook is catering to the need to bring “real” social life online generally, with “real” in this case meaning “offline and pre-existing.” Very real risks of missing “real life” social events (engagements, new babies, party invitations etc) that were shared primarily via Facebook became salient to large groups of individuals not consciously concerned with some particular facet of identity performance. The commercial imperatives towards monolithic Internet and identity are obvious. Given that both Facebook and Google+ are in the business of facilitating the sale of advertising, their core business value is the demographic information they can sell to various companies for target advertising. Knowing a user’s individual identity and tastes is extremely important to those in the business of selling consumers what they currently want as well as predicting their future desires. The problem with this is the dawning realisation that even for the average person, role-playing is part of everyday life. We simply aren’t the same person in all contexts. None of the roles we play need to be particularly scandalous for this to be true, but we have different comfort zones with people that are fuelled by context. Suler proposes and Marinucci confirms that inhibition may be just as much part of our authentic self as the uninhibited expression experienced in more anonymous circumstances. Further, different contexts will inform what we inhibit and what we express. It is not as though there is a simple binary between two different groups and two different personal characteristics to oscillate between. The inhibited personnae one occupies at one’s grandmother’s home is a different inhibited self one plays at a job interview or in a heated discussion with faculty members at a university. One is politeness, the second professionalism, the third scholarly—yet they all restrain the individual in different ways. The Importance of Control over Circles Google+ is Google’s latest foray into the social networking arena. Its previous ventures Orkut and Google Buzz did not fare well, both were variously marred by legal issues concerning privacy, security, SPAM and hate groups. Buzz in particular fell afoul of associating Google accounts with users” real life identities, and (as noted earlier), all the baggage that comes with it. “One user blogged about how Buzz automatically added her abusive ex-boyfriend as a follower and exposed her communications with a current partner to him. Other bloggers commented that repressive governments in countries such as China or Iran could use Buzz to expose dissidents” (Novak). Google+ takes a different approach to its predecessors and its main rival, Facebook. Facebook allows for the organisation of “friends” into lists. Individuals can span more than one list. This is an exercise analogous to what Erving Goffman refers to as “audience segregation” (139). According to the site’s own statistics the average Facebook user has 130 friends, we anticipate it would be time-consuming to organise one’s friends according to real life social contexts. Yet without such organisation, Facebook overlooks the social structures and concomitant behaviours inherent in everyday life. Even broad groups offer little assistance. For example, an academic’s “Work People” list may include the Head of Department as well as numerous other lecturers with whom a workspace is shared. There are things one might share with immediate colleagues that should not be shared with the Head of Department. As Goffman states, “when audience segregation fails and an outsider happens upon a performance that was not meant for him, difficult problems in impression management arise” (139). By homogenising “friends” and social contexts users are either inhibited or run the risk of some future awkward encounters. Google+ utilises “circles” as its method for organising contacts. The graphical user interface is intuitive, facilitated by an easy drag and drop function. Use of “circles” already exists in the vocabulary used to describe our social structures. “List” by contrast reduces the subject matter to simple data. The utility of Facebook’s friends lists is hindered by usability issues—an unintuitive and convoluted process that was added to Facebook well after its launch, perhaps a reaction to privacy concerns rather than a genuine attempt to emulate social organisation. For a cogent breakdown of these technical and design problems see Augusto Sellhorn. Organising friends into lists is a function offered by Facebook, but Google+ takes a different approach: organising friends in circles is a central feature; the whole experience is centred around attempting to mirror the social relations of real life. Google’s promotional video explains the centrality of emulating “real life relationships” (Google). Effectively, Facebook and Google+ have adopted two different systemic approaches to dealing with the same issue. Facebook places the burden of organising a homogeneous mass of “friends” into lists on the user as an afterthought of connecting with another user. In contrast, Google+ builds organisation into the act of connecting. Whilst Google+’s approach is more intuitive and designed to facilitate social networking that more accurately reflects how real life social relationships are structured, it suffers from forcing direct correlation between an account and the account holder. That is, use of Google+ mandates bringing online the offline. Google+ operates a real names policy and on the weekend of 23 July 2011 suspended a number of accounts for violation of Google’s Community Standards. A suspension notice posted by Violet Blue reads: “After reviewing your profile, we determined the name you provided violates our Community Standards.” Open Source technologist Kirrily Robert polled 119 Google+ users about their experiences with the real names policy. The results posted to her on blog reveal that users desire pseudonymity, many for reasons of privacy and/or safety rather than the lack of integrity thought by Zuckerberg. boyd argues that Google’s real names policy is an abuse of power and poses danger to those users employing “nicks” for reasons including being a government employment or the victim of stalking, rape or domestic abuse. A comprehensive list of those at risk has been posted to the Geek Feminism Wiki (ironically, the Wiki utilises “Connect”, Facebook’s attempt at a single sign on solution for the Web that connects users’ movements with their Facebook profile). Facebook has a culture of real names stemming from its early adopters drawn from trusted communities, and this culture became a norm for that service (boyd). But as boyd also points out, “[r]eal names are by no means universal on Facebook.” Google+ demands real names, a demand justified by rhetoric of designing a social networking system that is more like real life. “Real”, in this case, is represented by one’s given name—irrespective of the authenticity of one’s pseudonym or the complications and dangers of using one’s given name. Conclusion There is a multiplicity of issues concerning social networks and identities, privacy and safety. This paper has outlined the challenges involved in moving real life to the online environment and the contests in trying to designate zones of social context. Where some earlier research into the social Internet has had a positive (even utopian) feel, the contemporary Internet is increasingly influenced by powerful and competing corporations. As a result, the experience of the Internet is not necessarily as flexible as Turkle or Rheingold might have envisioned. Rather than conducting identity experimentation or exercising multiple personnae, we are increasingly obligated to perform identity as it is defined by the monolithic service providers such as Facebook and Google+. This is not purely an indictment of Facebook or Google’s corporate drive, though they are obviously implicated, but has as much to do with the new social practice of “being online.” So, while there are myriad benefits to participating in this new social context, as Poole noted, the “cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself.” Areas for further exploration include the implications of Facebook positioning itself as a general-purpose user authentication tool whereby users can log into a wide array of Websites using their Facebook credentials. If Google were to take a similar action the implications would be even more convoluted, given the range of other services Google offers, from GMail to the Google Checkout payment service. While the monolithic centralisation of these services will have obvious benefits, there will be many more subtle problems which must be addressed. References Blue, Violet. “Google Plus Deleting Accounts en Masse: No Clear Answers.” zdnet.com (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/google-plus-deleting-accounts-en-masse-no-clear-answers/56›. boyd, danah. “Real Names Policies Are an Abuse of Power.” zephoria.org (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/04/real-names.html›. Cashmore, Pete. “MySpace Hits 100 Million Accounts.” mashable.com (2006). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://mashable.com/2006/08/09/myspace-hits-100-million-accounts›. Dibble, Julian. My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1998. Facebook. “Fact Sheet.” Facebook (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistic›. Geek Feminism Wiki. “Who Is Harmed by a Real Names Policy?” 2011. 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy› Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Google. “The Google+ Project: Explore Circles.” Youtube.com (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocPeAdpe_A8›. Kirkpatrick, David. The Facebook Effect. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Marinucci, Mimi. “You Can’t Front on Facebook.” Facebook and Philosophy. Ed. Dylan Wittkower. Chicago & La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2010. 65–74. Novak, Peter. “Privacy Commissioner Reviewing Google Buzz.” CBC News: Technology and Science (2010). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2010/02/16/google-buzz-privacy.html›. Poole, Christopher. Keynote presentation. South by SouthWest. Texas, Austin, 2011. Robards, Brady. “Negotiating Identity and Integrity on Social Network Sites for Educators.” International Journal for Educational Integrity 6.2 (2010): 19–23. Robert, Kirrily. “Preliminary Results of My Survey of Suspended Google Accounts.” 2011. 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://infotrope.net/2011/07/25/preliminary-results-of-my-survey-of-suspended-google-accounts/›. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Ruch, Adam. “The Decline of Pseudonymity.” Posthumanity. Eds. Adam Ruch and Ewan Kirkland. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary.net Press, 2010: 211–220. Sellhorn, Augusto. “Facebook Friend Lists Suck When Compared to Google+ Circles.” sellmic.com (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://sellmic.com/blog/2011/07/01/facebook-friend-lists-suck-when-compared-to-googleplus-circles›. Suler, John. “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” CyberPsychology and Behavior 7 (2004): 321–326. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Van Gelder, Lindsy. “The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover.” Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices Ed. Rob Kling. New York: Academic Press, 1996: 533–46.

The Internet has long been a venue for individuals to craft their online personas on their own terms, and many have embraced the opportunity to take on a persona that is not associated with a legally recognised name. The rise of social networking has continued to spur proliferation of online personas, but often in ways that intensify corporate mediation of these personas. Debates about online pseudonymity exemplify these tensions, especially when social media corporations attempt to implement “real name policies” that require users to use one, legally recognised name in their online interactions. These debates, however, have broader stakes: they are negotiations over who has the right to control the individual presentation of self, and thus part of a larger conversation about information control and the future of Internet culture. While there was some coverage of these debates in traditional news media, blogs were a key site for examining how real name policies affect oppressed or marginalised groups. To explore these issues, this essay analyses the rhetoric of feminist and anti-racist blog posts that argue for protecting online pseudonymity practices. In general, these sites construct pseudonymity as a technology of resistance and as a vital tool in ensuring that the Internet remains (or becomes) a democratising force. The essay will first provide an overview of the issue and of blog posts about real name policies and gender and/or race, which were selected by the depth and interest of their commentary, and found by search engine or Twitter hashtag using search terms such as “pseudonymity” and “real name policy.” The essay will then explore how these blog posts theorise how real name policies contribute to the broader move toward a surveillance society. Through these arguments, these bloggers reveal that various online communities have vastly different ways of understanding what it means to construct an online persona, and that these varied understandings in turn shape how communities inscribe value (or danger) in pseudonymous Internet practices. Feminist and Anti-Racist Blogger Responses to Real Name Policies While online pseudonymity has long been hotly debated, the conversation intensified following moves by Google-plus to implement “real name policies” in July 2011. Officially these real name policies were intended to improve the experience of users by making it easy to be found online and ensuring that online conversations remained civil. Critics of real name policies often object to the term “real name” and its implication that a pseudonym is a “fake” name. Moreover, proponents of pseudonymity tend to distinguish between pseudonymity and anonymity; a pseudonym is a public persona with relationships, a reputation to uphold, and often years of use. A pseudonym is thus not a way of escaping the responsibilities of having one’s online actions associated with one’s public persona—it is quite the opposite. Nevertheless, defenders of pseudonymity generally argue that both pseudonymity and anonymity must be permitted. Supporters argue that real name policies will enhance the experience of users, and particularly that they will help stop the widespread incivility of many internet comments, on the presumption that using one’s real name will ensure accountability for one’s behavior online. On the other side, many bloggers have argued that the use of real names will not solve these problems and will instead be a threat to the safety and privacy of users, as well as stymieing debate about important or controversial issues. Moreover, many of these bloggers theorise about gender, politics, technology, and identity in ways that resonate well with broader feminist and critical race theory, as well as current conversations about technology and surveillance society. Feminist and other defenses of pseudonymity have used a variety of tactics. One has been to portray pseudonymity as a standard part of Internet culture, and legal names or “wallet names” as an arbitrary way of governing production of public personas. Underlying this framing of pseudonymity as a fundamental part of Internet culture is a long tradition of defining the Internet as a free, open, and democratic space. Internet enthusiasts have long described and prescribed an Internet in which anyone is free to explore and exchange ideas without the ordinary limits imposed by the flesh world, arguing that the Internet encourages more open debate, decentralises networks of knowledge, allows users to try on new identities, and challenges the rigidity of categories and hierarchies that shape knowledge and conversations in the non-virtual world (Rheingold, Plant). Traditionally, pseudonymity and anonymity have been key ways for users to pursue these ends. Thus, the ability to create one or more online personas has, in this conversation, a direct relationship to questions of democracy and about whose practices count as legitimate or valuable in the online world. Additionally, many feminist bloggers frame real name policies as an attempt at corporate control; these policies thus are symbolic to some bloggers of the shift from what they imagine was once a free and open Internet to a corporate-controlled, highly commercialised realm. s.e. smith, for example, writes that “This is what the nymwars are about; a collision between capitalism and the rest of us, where identities are bargaining chips and tools,” with “nym” being the term for the name and persona that one employs online (“The Google+ Nymwars”). Pseudonymity is thus understood by these bloggers as a necessary practice in a democratic Internet, in which one has the right to define one’s own persona online, rather than allowing one’s persona to be defined by a corporation. This framing of pseudonymity as a normalised and valuable part of Internet communication also seems to be an attempt to pre-empt the question of why someone needs a pseudonym if they are not doing anything wrong, but many of the arguments in favor of pseudonyms in fact address this question directly by producing long lists, such as those at geekfeminism and techdirt. In particular, feminist and anti-racist arguments for protecting pseudonymity emphasise that this practice is especially important for women and other marginalised groups, especially since using a real name may expose them to harassment, discrimination, or social consequences. Women who discuss feminism, for example, are sometimes subject to death and rape threats (Hess; Sarkeesian; s.e. smith “On Blogging, Threats, and Silence”). While many feminist bloggers choose to use their real names anyway, most still suggest that pseudonymity must remain a choice anywhere where one seeks to have conversations about issues of import. Moreover, these arguments are a reversal of the claim that real name requirements will stop harassment—while real name policies are purportedly instated to protect the safety of online conversations, many bloggers, pseudonymous and otherwise, suggest that real name policies make women and minorities of all kinds less safe, both online and off-line, and have other negative effects on these groups as well. For instance, Elusis writes that: For minorities, often their name and reputation doesn’t just affect them, it affects their family, and it affects other members of their minority group. Stories of not just outing but of harassment, abuse, and death threats that escalated to the point of being taken seriously by law enforcement (which takes rather a lot). […] Men who get in arguments with other people online don’t get threatened with rape on a regular basis. Unsurprisingly, trans people get abused in this way too. People of color get driven from online spaces** for daring to speak out. (Hyperlinks in original) Likewise, Sarah Stokely writes: As a woman who’s written about feminism online and received anonymous hatemail and death threats for doing so, I would like to preserve my right to post under a pseudonym to keep myself safe in the real world and if I choose, so I’m not identified as a woman online in places where it might not be safe to do so. […] I don’t believe that getting rid of anonymity online will stop bad behaviour like the abuse and death threats I’ve received. I do think that getting rid of anonymity and pseudonymity online will make it easier for people like myself to become targets of abuse and potentially put us in danger. Note that these comments suggest that simply being a woman or member of any kind of minority may make one a target of harassment. Also notice that these comments tend to frame real name policies as an expression of the privileged—real name policies only appear innocuous because of the assumption that the experiences of financially privileged English-speaking white men are universal, and that knowledge of the experiences of marginalised groups is not necessary to design safe and effective policies for consumers of technology. According to feminist blogger critiques of real name policies, it is this privilege that assumes that those using pseudonyms are the “Others” that decent people must be protected from, instead of examining the possibility that those using the pseudonyms might be the ones in danger. A quotation from Geek Feminism, a site whose lengthy discussions of pseudonymity are often cited by bloggers, further illustrates the centrality of privilege to this debate: the writer notes that a proponents of real name policies has dismissed critique by saying, “Don’t say anything in a comment thread that you wouldn’t say in person,” and Geek Feminism responds, “but that sounds like the voice of someone who’s never received abuse or harassment in person” (“Hacker News and Pseudonymity”). The many bloggers who critique the privilege they find responsible for real name policies suggest that beneath conflicts over pseudonymity and accountability online is not the question of how the online world relates to the flesh world, but instead a fundamental disagreement about the nature of accountability and free expression in the flesh world. In this light, attempts to make the online world mimic the accountabilities and social norms of the offline world operate under the assumption that oppression and abuse are not the norm in the flesh world, and that it is Internet technology and Internet culture that has made conversations uncivil or unsafe, and that these should be converted to be more like the flesh world. In this set of assumptions, the flesh world is characterised by respectful and safe interactions, categories of identity are natural as opposed to something that society imposes on individuals, and the existing ways of holding people accountable for their words and actions is very effective at protecting people. Clearly, however, it takes a degree of privilege to characterise the flesh world this way. Thus, the pseudonymity debate is largely about deeper-seated questions on the nature of identity and power in online and offline settings, while appearing to be about the differences between the real world and the online world. Other bloggers have also countered the assumption that real name policies make the Internet safer, often by pointing out that sites that have mandated the use of real names still see a great deal of harassment. s.e. smith, for instance, argues, “If Google really cares about safety, it needs strong, effective, and enforceable site policies. It needs to create a culture of safety, because, well, if your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault. Real names policies don’t work. Good site policies and the cultivation of a culture of mutual respect do” (“The Google+ Nymwars,” hyperlinks in original). Pseudonyms allow users to participate in important debates online while maintaining a public persona that allows for continued conversations and interactions, which is vital for sustained activism. In this light, policies that take away users’ abilities to control or shape their online personas may force users to choose silence for their own safety. Individual control over online personas is thus both a safety issue and a free speech issue; in direct contradiction to claims that real name policies make users safer and more able to participate in civil discussions. Other pro-pseudonymity bloggers also celebrate the way that a “robust culture of pseudonymity” focuses discussion on ideas rather than the privilege of the speaker, “which, I often think, is why authoritarians and those with authoritarian tendencies hate it” (Paolucci). boyd notes that: the issue of reputation must be turned on its head when thinking about marginalised people. Folks point to the issue of people using pseudonyms to obscure their identity and, in theory, ‘protect’ their reputation. The assumption baked into this is that the observer is qualified to actually assess someone’s reputation. All too often, and especially with marginalised people, the observer takes someone out of context and judges them inappropriately. boyd is one of many bloggers who note that if one’s name is coded as white, Anglo, and male, using one’s real name may often enhance one’s credibility and authority, but if one’s name is coded otherwise, a pseudonym may be helpful; again, assuming that the white male experience is universal allows one to assume that using a real name is a harmless request. In general, these bloggers’ tactics all serve to denaturalise the assumption that a real name is the normal, desirable, and traditional mode of presenting one’s persona, and highlight the ways that real name policies claim to reflect universal concerns but primarily reflect wealthy white men’s experiences with online personas. Information, Power, and Control over Online Personas Additionally, defenders of pseudonymity associate real name policies with the move to a surveillance society, with particular emphasis on corporate surveillance of consumer behavior, also known as the “personal information economy.” Many feminist blogger discussions of pseudonymity note that while real name policies are purportedly intended for safety and protection, they actually allow corporations to amass huge swaths of data about individuals and to keep nearly all the online activities of one person attached to their name. For example blogger much_a_luck writes that: This is exactly the source of trying to pin down who users ‘really’ are. The advertising economy is super-creepy to me, everybody trying to make money by telling people about something someone else is doing, as efficiently as possible. Maybe I'm naive, but I feel like the internet's advertising-driven economy, with it’s [sic] ability to track and target activity, has just blown this whole sector completely out of control. (Paolucci) And indeed the practice of gathering and storing as much information as possible, simply on the chance that an institution might one day use this information, is becoming a more common fear, whether with regard to corporate data mining or recent news stories about privacy and government surveillance. In the larger conversation about surveillance, in fact, it is often the case that while one side argues that information gathering makes everyone safer, an opposition will claim that such measures actually make people vulnerable to abuses of this information. Blogger Space_dinosaur_blue has called real name policies a “security placebo” that claims to stop harassment while actually doing nothing but invading privacy (comment to Paolucci). s.e. smith has argued: What this is really about, of course, is capitalism. […] For the owners of […] sites like Google+ and Facebook, there’s also a big potential to make a profit through the direct commodification of user identities. […] The standards that Google+ sets revolve around the purchase, sale, and exchange of identity, a multibillion dollar industry worldwide. This is what people should be talking about. (“The Google+ Nymwars”) Clearly, the pseudonymity debate resonates in many ways with broader discussions of surveillance, corporate and otherwise. First, scholars have often noted that surveillances practices tend to be more harmful to those in marginalised or oppressed groups, and feminist arguments for pseudonymity reinforce this finding. Additionally, many defenders of pseudonymity point out the dissembling found in companies’ claims that real name policies are there to protect the safety of users and create a civil and decent space for people to interact while actually using the data for marketing research purposes. Framing pseudonymity as anti-social, uncivil, and dangerous, assumes a criminality so to speak, or at the very least, an illegitimacy, on the part of pseudonym users. The rhetorical move here is worth noting: implicitly suggesting that a real name is an inherent part of civility and safety is also suggesting that you have an ethical obligation to those who would compile information about you. In other words, the rules of civility demand that you participate in the corporatisation and commodification of your identity and personal information. Shaping an online persona—or multiple personas—is not an act of creativity or political resistance or freedom; it is assumed to be an act of aggression toward others. We see here a new form of the “good citizenship” argument that characterises the surveillance society. In debates about national security, for instance, acceptance of extensive surveillance of all citizens is framed as a contribution to national security. Here, however, it is not national security but corporate interests that have been inserted as the epitome of the “common good.” In this framework, an anti-corporate approach to personal information appears to be anti-social and even unethical. Commodification of identity is not only the norm but also an obligation of citizenship. Furthermore, as scholars of surveillance have noted (Gilliom and Monahan for instance), social networking creates an environment in which most individuals are participating in creating a surveillance society simply through the level of documentation they voluntarily provide. Again, more and more, willing participation in surveillance practices—making it easy to be surveilled—is becoming part of one’s civic duty. Thus, the debate over pseudonymity is also a debate about the extent to which corporations can expect compliance to the increasingly normalised demands of a surveillance society. And so, for all of these reasons, debates over pseudonymity reveal a host of complex and multi-layered tensions about technology’s influence on the construction of personas, and how these personas are shaped by encroaching forms of surveillance and the marketing of identities. Proponents of pseudonymity use numerous strategies to challenge, subvert, or reconceptualise privileged assumptions about the complex relationships among names, personas, and identities. In doing so, they contribute to an important shift, from the classic question of “What’s in a name?” to “Who wants to know, and why?” References boyd, danah. “‘Real Names’ Policies Are an Abuse of Power.” Zephoria 4 Aug. 2011. 18 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/04/real-names.html›. Coffeeandink. “RaceFail: Once More, with Misdirection.” Coffeeandink 2 Mar. 2009. 18 Oct. 2013 ‹http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/901816.html›. Elusis. “Don’t Try to Teach Your Internet Grandmother to Suck Eggs: On Anonymity/Pseudonymity.” Elusis 5 Mar. 2009. 18 Oct. 2013 ‹http://elusis.livejournal.com/1891498.html›. Geek Feminism. “Hacker News and Pseudonymity.” Geek Feminism Wiki n.d. 15 Jan. 2014 ‹http://geekfeminism.org/2010/06/10/hacker-news-and-pseudonymity/›. Gilliom, John, and Torin Monahan. SuperVision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Hess, Amanda. “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet.” Pacific Standard 6 Jan. 2014. 15 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170/›. Masnick, Mike. “What’s in a Name: The Importance of Pseudonymity and the Dangers of Requiring ‘Real Names.’” TechDirt 5 Aug. 2011. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110805/14103715409/whats-name-importance-pseudonymity-dangers-requiring-real-names.shtml›. Paolucci, Denise. “Real Name Policies: They Just Don’t Work.” Dreamwidth 3 Aug. 2011. 15 Oct. 2013 ‹http://denise.dreamwidth.org/60359.html›. Plant, Sadie. Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2002. Sarkeesian, Anita. “Harassment, Misogyny and Silencing on YouTube.” Feminist Frequency 7 June 2012. 17 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/06/harassment-misogyny-and-silencing-on-youtube/›. smith, s.e. “The Google+ Nymwars: Where Identity and Capitalism Collide.” Tiger Beatdown 3 Aug. 2011. 18 Oct. 2013 ‹http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/08/03/the-google-nymwars-where-identity-and-capitalism-collide/›. smith, s.e. “On Blogging, Threats, and Silence.” Tiger Beatdown 11 Oct. 2011. 17 Apr. 2014 ‹http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/11/on-blogging-threats-and-silence/›. Stokely, Sarah. “Why Google Should Allow Anonymous/Pseudonymous Names on Google+.” Sarah Stokely: On Teaching and Participating in Online Media 8 July 2011. 15 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.sarahstokely.com/blog/2011/07/why-google-should-allow-anonymouspseudonymous-names-on-google/›. “Who Is Harmed by a Real Names Policy?” Geek Feminism Wiki n.d. 15 Oct. 2013 ‹http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F›.

Indigenous cross-cultural training has been around since the 1980s. It is often seen as a way to increase the skills and competency of staff engaged in providing service to Indigenous clients and customers, teaching Indigenous students within universities and schools, or working with Indigenous communities (Fredericks and Bargallie, “Indigenous”; “Which Way”). In this article we demonstrate how such training often exposes power, whiteness, and concepts of an Indigenous “other”. We highlight how cross-cultural training programs can potentially provide a setting in which non-Indigenous participants can develop a deeper realisation of how their understandings of the “other” are formed and enacted within a “white” social setting. Revealing whiteness as a racial construct enables people to see race, and “know what racism is, what it is not and what it does” (Bargallie, 262). Training participants can use such revelations to develop their racial literacy and anti-racist praxis (Bargallie), which when implemented have the capacity to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations.What Does the Literature Say about Cross-Cultural Training? An array of names are used for Indigenous cross-cultural training, including cultural awareness, cultural competency, cultural responsiveness, cultural safety, cultural sensitivity, cultural humility, and cultural capability. Each model takes on a different approach and goal depending on the discipline or profession to which the training is applied (Hollinsworth). Throughout this article we refer to Indigenous cross-cultural training as “cultural competence” or “cultural awareness” and discuss these in relation to their application within higher education institutions. While literature on health and human services programs in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other nation states provide clear definitions of terms such as “cultural safety”, cultural competence or cultural awareness is often lacking a concise and consistent definition.Often delivered as a half day or a one to two-day training course, it is unrealistic to think that Indigenous cultural competence can be achieved through one’s mere attendance and participation. Moreover, when courses centre on “cultural differences” and enable revelations about those differences they are in danger of presenting idealised notions of Indigeneity. Cultural competence becomes a process through which an Indigenous “other” is objectified, while very little is offered by way of translating knowledge and skills into practice when working with Indigenous peoples.What this type of learning has the capacity to do is oversimplify and reinforce racism and racist stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous cultures. What is generally believed is that if non-Indigenous peoples know more about Indigenous peoples and cultures, relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples will somehow improve. The work of Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson is vital to draw on here, when she asks, has the intellectual investment in defining our cultural differences resulted in the valuing of our knowledges? Has the academy become a more enlightened place in which to work, and, more important, in what ways have our communities benefited? (xvii)What is revealed in a range of studies – whether centring on racism and discrimination or the ongoing disparities across health, education, incarceration, employment, and more – is that despite forty plus years of training focused on understanding cultural differences, very little has changed. Indigenous knowledges continue to be devalued and overlooked. Everyday and structural racisms shape everyday experiences for Indigenous employees in Australian workplaces such as the Australian Public Service (Bargallie) and the Australian higher education sector (Fredericks and White).As the literature demonstrates, the racial division of labour in such institutions often leaves Indigenous employees languishing on the lower rungs of the employment ladder (Bargallie). The findings of an Australian university case study, discussed below, highlights how power, whiteness, and concepts of “otherness” are exposed and play out in cultural competency training. Through their exposure, we argue that better understandings about Indigenous Australians, which are not based on culture difference but personal reflexivity, may be gained. Revealing What Was Needed in the Course’s Foundation and ImplementationThis case study is centred within a regional Australian university across numerous campuses. In 2012, the university council approved an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander strategy, which included a range of initiatives, including the provision of cross-cultural training for staff. In developing the training, a team explored the evidence as it related to university settings (Anning; Asmar; Butler and Young; Fredericks; Fredericks and Thompson; Kinnane, Wilks, Wilson, Hughes and Thomas; McLaughlin and Whatman). This investigation included what had been undertaken in other Australian universities (Anderson; University of Sydney) and drew on the recommendations from earlier research (Behrendt, Larkin, Griew and Kelly; Bradley, Noonan, Nugent and Scales; Universities Australia). Additional consultation took place with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders.While some literature on cross-cultural training centred on the need to understand cultural differences, others exposed the problems of focusing entirely on difference (Brach and Fraser; Campinha-Bacote; Fredericks; Spencer and Archer; Young). The courses that challenged the centrality of cultural difference explained why race needed to be at the core of its training, highlighting its role in enabling discussions of racism, bias, discrimination and how these may be used as means to facilitate potential individual and organisational change. This approach also addressed stereotypes and Eurocentric understandings of what and who is an Indigenous Australian (Carlson; Gorringe, Ross and Forde; Hollinsworth; Moreton-Robinson). It is from this basis that we worked and grew our own training program. Working on this foundational premise, we began to separate content that showcased the fluidity and diversity of Indigenous peoples and refrained from situating us within romantic notions of culture or presenting us as an exotic “other”. In other words, we embraced work that responded to non-Indigenous people’s objectified understandings and expectations of us. For example, the expectation that Indigenous peoples will offer a Welcome to Country, performance, share a story, sing, dance, or disseminate Indigenous knowledges. While we recognise that some of these cultural elements may offer enjoyment and insight to non-Indigenous people, they do not challenge behaviours or the nature of the relationships that non-Indigenous people have with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Bargallie; Fredericks; Hollinsworth; Westwood and Westwood; Young).The other content which needed separating were the methods that enabled participants to understand and own their standpoints. This included the use of critical Indigenous studies as a form of analysis (Moreton-Robinson). Critical race theory (Delgado and Stefancic) was also used as a means for participants to interrogate their own cultural positionings and understand the pervasive nature of race and racism in Australian society and institutions (McLaughlin and Whatman). This offered all participants, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous, the opportunity to learn how institutional racism operates, and maintains discrimination, neglect, abuse, denial, and violence, inclusive of the continued subjugation that exists within higher education settings and broader society.We knew that the course needed to be available online as well as face-to-face. This would increase accessibility to staff across the university community. We sought to embed critical thinking as we began to map out the course, including the theory in the sections that covered colonisation and the history of Indigenous dispossession, trauma and pain, along with the ongoing effects of federal and state policies and legislations that locates racism at the core of Australian politics. In addition to documenting the ongoing effects of racism, we sought to ensure that Indigenous resistance, agency, and activism was highlighted, showing how this continues, thus linking the past to the contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples.Drawing on the work of Bargallie we wanted to demonstrate how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples experience racism through systems and structures in their everyday work with colleagues in large organisations, such as universities. Participants were asked to self-reflect on how race impacts their day-to-day lives (McIntosh). The final session of the training focused on the university’s commitment to “Closing the Gap” and its Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP). The associated activity involved participants working individually and in small groups to discuss and consider what they could contribute to the RAP activities and enact within their work environments. Throughout the training, participants were asked to reflect on their personal positioning, and in the final session they were asked to draw from these reflections and discuss how they would discuss race, racism and reconciliation activities with the governance of their university (Westwood and Westwood; Young).Revelations in the Facilitators, Observers, and Participants’ Discussions? This section draws on data collected from the first course offered within the university’s pilot program. During the delivery of the in-person training sessions, two observers wrote notes while the facilitators also noted their feelings and thoughts. After the training, the facilitators and observers debriefed and discussed the delivery of the course along with the feedback received during the sessions.What was noticed by the team was the defensive body language of participants and the types of questions they asked. Team members observed how there were clear differences between the interest non-Indigenous participants displayed when talking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and a clear discomfort when they were asked to reflect on their own position in relation to Indigenous people. We noted that during these occasions some participants crossed their arms, two wrote notes to each other across the table, and many participants showed discomfort. When the lead facilitator raised this to participants during the sessions, some expressed their dislike and discomfort at having to talk about themselves. A couple were clearly unhappy and upset. We found this interesting as we were asking participants to reflect and talk about how they interpret and understand themselves in relation to Indigenous people and race, privilege, and power.This supports the work of DiAngelo who explains that facilitators can spend a lot of time trying to manage the behaviour of participants. Similarly, Castagno identifies that sometimes facilitators of training might overly focus on keeping participants happy, and in doing so, derail the hard conversations needed. We did not do either. Instead, we worked to manage the behaviours expressed and draw out what was happening to break the attempts to silence racial discussions. We reiterated and worked hard to reassure participants that we were in a “safe space” and that while such discussions may be difficult, they were worth working through on an individual and collective level.During the workshop, numerous emotions surfaced, people laughed at Indigenous humour and cried at what they witnessed as losses. They also expressed anger, defensiveness, and denial. Some participants revelled in hearing answers to questions that they had long wondered about; some openly discussed how they thought they had discovered a distant Aboriginal relative. Many questions surfaced, such as why hadn’t they ever been told this version of Australian history? Why were we focusing on them and not Aboriginal people? How could they be racist when they had an Aboriginal friend or an Aboriginal relative?Some said they felt “guilty” about what had happened in the past. Others said they were not personally responsible or responsible for the actions of their ancestors, questioning why they needed to go over such history in the first place? Inter-woven within participants’ revelations were issues of racism, power, whiteness, and white privilege. Many participants took a defensive stance to protect their white privilege (DiAngelo). As we worked through these issues, several participants started to see their own positionality and shared this with the group. Clearly, the revelation of whiteness as a racial construct was a turning point for some. The language in the group also changed for some participants as revelations emerged through the interrogation and unpacking of stories of racism. Bargallie’s work exploring racism in the workplace, explains that “racism”, as both a word and theme, is primarily absent in conversations amongst non-Indigenous colleagues. Despite its entrenchment in the dialogue, it is rarely, if ever addressed. In fact, for many non-Indigenous people, the fear of being accused of racism is worse than the act of racism itself (Ahmed; Bargallie). We have seen this play out within the media, sport, news bulletins, and more. Lentin describes the act of denying racism despite its existence in full sight as “not racism”, arguing that its very denial is “a form of racist violence” (406).Through enhancing racial literacy, Bargallie asserts that people gain a better understanding of “what racism is, what racism is not and how race works” (258). Such revelations can work towards dismantling racism in workplaces. Individual and structural racism go hand-in-glove and must be examined and addressed together. This is what we wanted to work towards within the cultural competency course. Through the use of critical Indigenous studies and critical race theory we situated race, and not cultural difference, as central, providing participants with a racial literacy that could be used as a tool to challenge and dismantle racism in the workplace.Revelations in the Participant Evaluations?The evaluations revealed that our intention to disrupt the status quo in cultural competency training was achieved. Some of the discussions were difficult and this was reflected in the feedback. It was valuable to learn that numerous participants wanted to do more through group work, conversations, and problem resolution, along with having extra reading materials. This prompted our decision to include extra links to resource learning materials through the course’s online site. We also opted to provide all participants with a copy of the book Indigenous Australia for Dummies (Behrendt). The cost of the book was built into the course and future participants were thankful for this combination of resources.One unexpected concern raised by participants was that the course should not be “that hard”, and that we should “dumb down” the course. We were astounded considering that many participants were academics and we were confident that facilitators of other mandatory workplace training, for example, staff Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), Fire Safety, Risk Management, Occupational Health and Safety, Discrimination and more, weren’t asked to “dumb down” their content. We explained to the participants what content we had been asked to deliver and knew their responses demonstrated white fragility. We were not prepared to adjust the course and dumb it down for white understandings and comfortabilities (Leonardo and Porter).Comments that were expected included that the facilitators were “passionate”, “articulate”, demonstrated “knowledge” and effectively “dealt with issues”. A couple of the participants wrote that the facilitators were “aggressive” or “angry”. This however is not new for us, or new to other Aboriginal women. We know Aboriginal women are often seen as “aggressive” and “angry”, when non-Indigenous women might be described as “passionate” or “assertive” for saying exactly the same thing. The work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson in Australia, and the works of numerous other Aboriginal women provide evidence of this form of racism (Fredericks and White; Bargallie; Bond). Internationally, other Indigenous women and women of colour document the same experiences (Lorde). Participants’ assessment of the facilitators is consistent with the racism expressed through racial microaggression outside of the university, and in other organisations. This is despite working in the higher education sector, which is normally perceived as a more knowledgeable and informed environment. Needless to say, we did not take on these comments.The evaluations did offer us the opportunity to adjust the course and make it stronger before it was offered across the university where we received further evaluation of its success. Despite this, the university decided to withdraw and reallocate the money to the development of a diversity training course that would cover all equity groups. This meant that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be covered along with sexual diversity, gender, disability, and people from non-English speaking backgrounds. The content focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was reduced to one hour of the total course. Including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in this way is not based on evidence and works to minimise Indigenous Australians and their inherent rights and sovereignty to just another “equity group”. Conclusion We set out to develop and deliver a cross-cultural course that was based on evidence and a foundation of 40 plus years’ experience in delivering such training. In addition, we sought a program that would align with the university’s Reconciliation Action Plan and the directions being undertaken in the sector and by Universities Australia. Through engaging participants in a process of critical thinking centring on race, we developed a training program that successfully fostered self-reflection and brought about revelations of whiteness.Focusing on cultural differences has proven ineffective to the work needed to improve the lives of Indigenous Australian peoples. Recognising this, our discussions with participants directly challenged racist and negative stereotypes, individual and structural racism, prejudices, and white privilege. By centring race over cultural difference in cultural competency training, we worked to foster self-revelation within participants to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations. The institution’s disbandment and defunding of the program however is a telling revelation in and of itself, highlighting the continuing struggle and importance of placing additional pressure on persons, institutions, and organisations to implement meaningful structural change. ReferencesAhmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.Anderson, Ian. “Advancing Indigenous Health through Medical Education”. 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«Music conveys different meanings to everyone, and sometimes, it can even communicate different things at different times to the same person», Daniel Barenboim once said. This is tantamount to saying that music is influenced by the context in which it is played, whilst at the same time influencing the context of those who are listening to it. As such, music exists within a system of relationships. From this, it follows that music can be interpreted as a public art – when it is performed in front of an audience – when it is played by one or more musicians in the presence of a listener or listeners who witness the performance. This premise sparks an initial reflection: music, the most ephemeral of all the arts, excepting the work of composers (the technicians who “create” music), is born, grows, develops and dies in the moment of the performance, in which its entire existential cycle resides. And the proof of its existence can only be found in that moment of contact between the artist and their audience. That is the moment in which music exists. The period of history that we are currently living through – the social context of the pandemic, with theatres and concert halls shuttered – has relegated the existence of music to the medium that plays it. In this specific moment, music exists only if it is “recorded” on a medium – in other words, deprived of the vital force of the act of “live” public performance, which is the very proof of its existence. Although there have always been forms and genres of music that have evolved specifically for private settings (chamber music, for example), it is nonetheless a feature of our time to give even those forms and genres a public dimension; indeed, since the 19th century, chamber music has been performed in public settings – concert halls, auditoriums, theatres. That very same private dimension that defines chamber or home concerts instead takes on a public nature: as such, we find home concerts being played as part of major festivals (think of the “Piano City” model, which has now spread worldwide), bringing the public into private homes, giving the masses a taste of a type of musical creation designed for a reserved, elegant, unique setting; a type of musical creation that requires an attentive ear, but that is no longer the preserve of the few. From this starting point, it becomes clear how music, in its ephemerality, is nonetheless conditioned by the historical and social context of the time in which it is played, and not only the historical context in which it is created. Here again is the theme of creation: it is at this level that the material factors – namely the writing techniques adopted by individual composers to create their music, the music of each specific moment in history, the music of each specific geographical place – become intertwined with the cultural factors. Since the time when music transitioned from the dimension of oral transmission, as it originated, to the dimension of written transmission, the techniques of writing music have undergone a process of constant evolution by which they have ultimately created a structure within a system that has long been recognised – at least to the ear of Western listeners – as the koiné, the only possible musical language: the tonal system. This includes the majority of what is commonly referred to as the “classical” repertoire – the body of work studied in music schools, according to general consensus, despite the fact that it is also very much a feature of the “pop” repertoire, which is somehow perceived as an element that exists in contrast with the former. So much so that the introduction of courses of study dedicated to pop music in conservatories has truly shocked and bewildered some, as if the existence of two concepts of making music – which have always been considered distant from one another – within the same educational system were entirely inconceivable. Art music and pop music: two opposing faces that form a double-sided mirror reflecting the ways in which music is conceived today. And yet, there are forms and genres of what we now consider to be art music – forms and genres that have been incorporated into a “classical” musical repertoire, the preserve of specific audiences in specific venues – that were once the pop of yesteryear. Because pop is not merely the “song” genre (the canzone, the lieder, the chanson, etc.): pop is also – as we have been reminded on many occasions, even recently – opera, for example, not because “pop” is simply short for “popular”, and the word therefore comes with an implied meaning of “common” or “simple”, but because it forms an integral part of the cultural and social fabric, both in Italy and beyond. The same language and the same writing technique can therefore be adapted to two incredibly different ways of making music (art music and pop music); the technique is the same, yet it is used in different ways, some being more complex, others somewhat simpler; what changes is the context in which the music is made – the cultural position that we intend to attribute to the music itself. The idea of giving music a certain cultural position has had a clear influence on public consciousness and tastes: indeed, the very fact that our idea of “art” music is defined by its origins in a repertoire tradition, built up and stratified over time, within which there is actually hidden a “pop” dimension – as defined above, with reference to the example of opera – has resulted in that specific musical model being pigeonholed into a sector, contrasting it with a broader social dimension that recognises as music what we now conceive as commercial music, “pop” music in the pejorative sense of the term, divorced from its nobler roots. The relationship between technical and cultural factors has always marked the history of music, with the various historical periods – each with their own social context – ultimately deciding whether it is the former or the latter that prevail in the relationship between the two. Moreover, the relationship between material factors (compositional and writing technique) and immaterial factors (the cultural context of those who make and listen to music) intersects with the products of another key relationship, namely that between creativity and technique, the unique combination of which gives rise to any given piece of music. Indeed, much as is the case for the relationship between technique and culture, the relationship between creativity and technique also shifts and transforms depending on the historical period. This even holds true within the same “musical type”: just think of the technique/creativity relationship as applied to the classical repertoire and the technique/creativity relationship as applied to art music, be it classical or contemporary. Although we are in the same cultural context – what is, as a gross oversimplification, commonly considered the context to which art or classical music belongs – but the balance of power between the two factors is entirely subverted. This leads us to the conclusion that the relationship between creativity and technique does not necessarily involve an equation. Just think of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and, in particular, his instrumental chamber music (which, as previously mentioned, we have made into a public form by inserting it into contexts with a public audience) or his symphonic music. How many times have we heard it defined as simple, melodic, catchy, pleasant? This is the general consensus; it is the social dimension of Mozart’s music that makes it a largely accessible listening experience even to the “untrained ears” of those who do not have a musical background. What lies behind this way of thinking about and considering music – specifically Mozart’s music, in this case – is an enormous misconception: the idea that music that is easy to listen to and enjoy is music written easily, or in other words, that what underpins this ease of listening is technical simplicity. Mozart’s writing absorbs into itself all its technical complexities, which are rendered imperceptible to the listener, as if disguised by the final audible product, and yet present within it: in short, Mozart did not write “simple” music. He was wholly familiar with technique, particularly instrumental technique, and thus demanded the maximum possible performance from each individual instrument in terms of sonority, timbre, colour; he did this in a new way compared to his contemporaries, ultimately producing a catalogue whose longevity and usability over time is destined to last eternally. Let us return to the intersection between our two relationships: technique/culture and technique/creativity. Mozart wrote differently from the other composers of his time: whilst nowadays, we listen to his music without any difficulty, his contemporaries struggled to understand him and his work. In terms of technique vs. creativity, when it comes to Mozart’s output, we could be forgiven for believing that it is the creative dimension that “wins”. And yet, Mozart’s music is anything but simple: it is not the result of a spur-of-the-moment burst of creativity, but rather the result of a creative act that is the culmination of his technical mastery and deeply intimate knowledge of instruments. Staying with the technique/creativity dichotomy for a moment, let us instead consider the effect that The Rite of Spring had on its listeners in Paris on 29 May 1913, but let us also consider how we feel today when we listen to a piece of contemporary art music. The relationship between that very same pair of qualities seems to be subverted: the creative act seems to be transformed into a show of pure technique. So what has changed? First of all, the koiné, as mentioned previously, has changed: from the Short Century onwards, composers started working and continue to work not only in an effort to create new forms of art, but also to create new forms of linguistic expression. This has served to distance art music from the listener (a distancing which has only further driven a wedge between the worlds of “classical” music and “pop” music, as touched upon previously) as a result of feeling betrayed, having lost their ability to understand. It is once again the immaterial factor, as represented by the cultural context, that conditions how the public receives the work of musical art and influences whether that same musical object will exist only in the moment of its creation and first performance or whether it will stand the test of time. Music’s relationship with time – a factor that affects the technique/culture duality, if it is indeed true that the passage of time and historical eras, with all the resultant changes, see the former of the two material and immaterial factors prevail over the latter at times, and vice versa at others, making music a heteronomous art – develops in complex directions. Time is one of the essential components of music, together with pitch, intensity and timbre: time, understood as the duration of each individual sound, within the “musical discourse”, structured into periods and phrases, organised within a system of measurement that recognises in each beat, measure or bar the set of values (notes of a specific duration) encompassed between two vertical lines placed on the stave. Time is thus understood to be one of the fundamental components of musical structure. And amongst the arts, this particular definition of time is only found in music. In much the same vein, the temporal dimension that underpins the concept of performance is unique to music (and the non-plastic arts): indeed, music only exists as public art for as long as it is being performed by a performer. To add a further layer, each performer has their own internal sense of time, their own way of experiencing and conceiving of time, which in turn affects the timing of their performance. This is what makes each performance – even of the same piece – different from the others in terms of both its total duration and the duration of each individual musical gesture made by each individual performer. Then there is the need for music – though the same can be said of architecture as well as any other form of artistic expression – to last over time. A need which, in the case of music, is satisfied on the one hand by merely overcoming the hurdle of the very first performance, following which there is X number of subsequent performances, demonstrating the longevity of a specific piece over time, thanks to performative actions repeated by different performers; on the other, by the identification and use of media which allow for the reproduction of specific performative actions, making them available to listen to ab aeterno, albeit with the loss of the public dimension of the music. Played back, these performances become a source of inspiration and imitation for other performers: a piece of music that stands the test of time due to being performed and played back multiple times will become part of the repertoire. The definition we are referring to here is a collection of sheets, pieces, works that time does not tarnish, but rather cements and preserves, reviving the audience’s need to listen to them again, because the audience recognises themselves in them, feels comforted and satisfied, despite acknowledging that each performance has characteristics that differ from previous ones and that will differ from subsequent ones. This demonstrates how the figure of the performer becomes part of music itself, playing a rather significant role in the redefinition of the creative process: if the piece being played is the same (i.e. written by a specific composer or group of composers), what makes each rendition unique is the co-creative action of the performer or performers. The performer(s)’ being involved in the creation of the work does not always necessarily presume the existence of a systemic or choral logic which establishes links between the creator of the work (i.e. the composer), the performer(s) and the audience. This type of three-way relationship is possible in a context in which the three participants in the system act “simultaneously”, so to speak. In other words, whilst this was possible in Mozart’s day, when the composer himself wrote specific sheets of music earmarked for specific performers – consider, for example, his Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622, the last sheet composed by Mozart and allocated to his friend and brother Mason, an extraordinary virtuoso of the instrument, Anton Stadler – it is obviously no longer possible to achieve this today, with the same Concerto entrusted to a performer who not only has no way of hearing Stadler’s original performance, but also has no way of establishing a dialogue or relationship with the composer. Not to mention the public dimension of the performance, with its contemporary rituality, so far removed from that of Mozart’s era. The “circuit” of the systemic logic laid out above therefore “breaks” when the “maker” of the work eventually dies, but this ultimately lends any connection added value as compared with the context of “simultaneous” creation: for the performers, this relationship with the composer is a plus. Being able to co-create a piece by playing it in the presence of the person who composed it not only allows the performer to fully capture the essence of the written music, but also gives the composer an opportunity to determine that when performed, their work does in fact correspond to what they committed to paper. Here, the duality of technique/creativity crops up once again: creativity, which forms the foundation of the act and process of composition, is finally faced with the technical capabilities of the instrument(s), whose repositories are the performers themselves, capable of playing their part in the simultaneous creation by offering the composer guidance in terms of technical and performance-related issues, even though this may impact upon the composer’s creative freedom. Nevertheless, the systemic-choral logic can also be applied in music coloured by other nuances of meaning, in reference to specific musical genres, be it chamber music, symphonic music, choral music, etc. These are all genres which live and die on cooperation between groups of people, interaction between peers – such as the members of a quartet, for example – or complementary interaction between performers of different “ranks” in a hierarchy, where within individual groups (the sections of an orchestra being a prime model), certain specific instrumentalists are given a primary role as compared with others. In all these cases, the co-creative action which links together composer and performer is complemented by the co-creative action that consists of multiple performers coming together to play and, in doing so, collaboratively bring to life a specific musical object. As the result of the composer’s primal act of creation, subsequently co-created by the performer(s), every type of music ultimately “exists” only at the moment when it encounters the audience. This encounter, this meeting, takes the form of a ritual of sorts in performance venues, theatres, concert halls and auditoriums, but it is by no means limited to these places. Music aspires to escape from those environments, as if to invade society. In other words, music is not just a public art: it is also a social art, in that it establishes relationships between artists and audiences, as well as between members of these audiences themselves; the latter phenomenon occurs not only at the moment of shared listening, but also after the fact, at the moment of reflection on what they have heard. That it is a social art, in the sense of being able to bring together different components of society, does not necessarily mean that it is an art that engages with social issues. The subjective dimension of the primordial creative act may very well derive from a wholly pure and extremely personal creative urge, an impulse, a need, entirely divorced from any kind of socio-political involvement. Music is pure art par excellence, especially instrumental music. Hence even today, it is possible to choose to make “music for music’s sake”, according to an agenda that has echoes of Parnassianism: “l’art pour l’art”, as famously proclaimed by Théophile Gautier, has no social, moral, educational or utilitarian purpose - rather, it is an end in itself. On the contemporary music scene, however, it is nonetheless true that an increasing proportion of composers are drawing their creative drive from the world around them. Social engagement has entered the world of “pop” music - it can be found in sheets of contemporary art music. It was in the 1960s that Luigi Nono brought music into workrooms and factories. Indeed, his thoughts on the matter are well known: «For me personally, making music is about having an effect on contemporary life, on the contemporary situation, on the contemporary class struggle [...]». Nowadays, it is no longer a question of the class struggle, nor do we feel a pressing need to bring contemporary music to the masses – after all, that is the purpose of “pop”. Art music interprets the reality around it by placing an emphasis on issues of gender – the theme of equal opportunities being a mainstay of contemporary music – of integration – with contemporary Western music being played on ethnic instruments, instruments from the cultures of people who have immigrated to the West, or even contemporary art music interacting with styles from other musical cultures – of the needs of young people, both performers and composers, to whom specific projects, calls and competitions are dedicated. The musical language of contemporary society, in all its many and varied forms, allows the younger composers in particular to enjoy an expressive and creative freedom that simply has no equal in any other context or at any other time in history. Having dismantled the common koiné, contemporary art music – as a combinatorial art – opens up a world of multifaceted and incredibly diverse possibilities for the synthesis of technique and creativity. This does not mean leaving the composer free to create without a formal education; on the contrary, it means structuring the educational path of a student/composer in a way that allows them to discover how music can come into contact with other languages, mix with other artistic forms, go beyond its own boundaries to absorb and draw upon what contemporary culture and society can offer, in terms of inspiration, to the trained ear of the musician. In order to be a musician nowadays, it is no longer sufficient to simply have a knowledge of the more material factors, the techniques (of both composition and performance) referred to at the start of this text: the performer and the composer are at the heart of an “extended” educational system that offers them professional development that does not become apparent in the mere act of creation or performance, but instead nourishes their relationship with the world of the production, reproduction, distribution and marketing of music. And yet, all this is still not enough to guarantee a future for music. In order to spark a social transformation that would make music a part of people’s lives – and not simply for the pleasure of listening to it, as a soundtrack in the background of other activities, but as a discipline with the power to actually improve people’s lives, which music is, to all intents and purposes, in view of the studies demonstrating that a knowledge of it bolsters the intellectual faculties of the individual – it is necessary for music to grow in step with the individual, in the context of educational courses shared by all students, not just those who intend to enter the world of music professionally. A step in this direction has already been taken – albeit with a top-down approach, at the level of higher musical and university education – with the development of study programmes that establish links between music and the scientific disciplines (for example, the agreement between the Milan Conservatory and the Politecnico di Milano) as well as the humanities (for example, the agreement between the Milan Conservatory and the University of Milan). The future of music lies in its ability to resume its central position in the world of higher education. Indeed, this role had been attributed to it since the Middle Ages: a fundamental aspect of higher education, music took pride of place amongst the liberal arts, a part of the Quadrivium together with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, and alongside grammar, rhetoric and dialectic in the Trivium. Heteronomy is therefore a consubstantial characteristic of music from and throughout every age, and is now pushing it towards a more free, open and constant dialogue with other disciplines than some other arts manage, especially in its relationship with new technologies, ultimately with a view to creating brand-new professional profiles.

SCULLY: I said, I got the lab to rush the results of the Szczesny autopsy, if you're interested.MULDER: I heard you, Scully.SCULLY: And Szczesny did indeed drown, but not as the result of the inhalation of ectoplasm as you so vehemently suggested.MULDER: Well, what else could she possibly have drowned in?SCULLY: Margarita mix, upchucked with about 40 ounces of Corcovado Gold tequila which, as it turns out, she and her friends rapidly consumed in the woods while trying to reenact the Blair Witch Project.MULDER: Well, I think that demands a little deeper investigation, don't you?SCULLY: No, I don't.— The X-Files, “All Things” (0717) IntroductionMikel J. Koven argues that “The X-Files [1993-2002, films 2005, 2010, revived 2016-2018] was the American television series that defined the zeitgeist of the 1990s” (337) by tapping into “pre-millenium paranoia and the collapse of traditional beliefs” (338). In each episode, “True Believer” and FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and his partner, the skeptical and rational Dr Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), travel through a post-Cold War American landscape that is manifesting varying levels of anxiety about the century to come. The series is preoccupied with a series of questions that have, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, come to be answered fairly definitively. Have aliens visited Earth? (Well, if you believe a team of Harvard scientists, maybe [see Freeman], but there is no evidence of alien colonisation just yet.) Does the US government have its citizens’ best interests at heart? (In its current incarnation, no.) Will climate change have monstrous consequences? (Yes, we’re seeing them.) What do we do about the shady forces operating in post-Soviet Union Russia? (God knows, but they seem to be doing a good job of changing the shape of “democracy” in an increasing number of countries.)These broader socio-political aspects of The X-Files have been explored in a number of studies (see Koven; Moses; Wildermuth). In this article, I focus in more closely on some of the ways in which the character of Scully can be read as a complex engagement with a particularly 1990s version of third-wave feminism. I suggest that the type of feminism embodied in the character of Scully taps into the zeitgeist of the 1990s, a decade characterised not only by a growing media-driven “backlash” against feminism (see Faludi), but also by emergent third wave of feminism driven by movements such as “Riot Grrrl” (centred on openly feminist bands like Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear) and the various, and often contested, feminisms endorsed by a new generation of writers like Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolf, and even Katie Roiphe. Part of Scully’s longevity as a feminist icon can be attributed to the fact that while she is not without her own contradictions and complexities, she emerged from a televisual landscape dominated by particularly insipid representations of professional women. Scully, with her combination of lively wit and serious scientific mind, represented a radical imagining of professional femininity in the 1990s.Working against the Backlash: Scully and the Power of ProfessionalismBy the late 1980s, the political gains made by the second-wave feminism in the 1960s and early 1970s had come increasingly under fire in a “backlash” that “worked to revoke the gains made by the feminist movement” (Genz and Brabon 53). L.S. Kim argues this backlash is reflected in the fact that while strong female characters had always been a feature of US television (e.g. Mary Tyler Moore), in the 1990s televisual landscape feminism was often made popular in a type of “postfeminist discourse in which it is acceptable to be pro-woman but not to be feminist” (319). The quintessential example of this trend was David E. Kelley’s series about a Boston lawyer, Ally McBeal (1997-2002), in which McBeal’s primary dilemma is presented as being that she has “too many choices, too much freedom, and too much desire” which leads to “never-ending searching and even to depression and dysfunction” (Kim 319). McBeal’s professional success never seems to compensate for her various romantic disappointments and these remain the focal point of Kelley’s series.Part of what sets Scully apart from a character like McBeal is her unerring professionalism, and her strong commitment to equality in her relationship with Mulder. Scully displays none of McBeal’s neuroses, and she is unapologetically feminist in her disposition. She also understands implicitly the pivotal role she plays in the partnership at the heart of the X-Files. Scully is, then, a capable, professional woman who not only remains professional at all times, but who also works as a powerful grounding force to her partner’s more outlandish approaches and theories. As series creator Chris Carter has been forced to concede on numerous occasions, without the rational and practical figure of Scully in the morgue to (usually) prove and (sometimes) disprove Mulder’s theories, The X-Files as we know them would cease to exist. In fact, and somewhat paradoxically, in order to best understand Scully as a character, one needs to recognise the significance of the relationship between Scully and Mulder that lies at the heart of the series. The sheer force of Scully’s professionalism, and its resistance to being conscripted straightforwardly into a traditional romantic plot, becomes an important contributor to the powerful sexual tension between Mulder and Scully that came to define the series. Scully also, as critics and commentators were quick to point out, takes on the traditionally masculine role of skeptical scientist on the series, with Mulder positioned in the typically feminine role of intuitive “believer” (in, among other things, aliens, Chupacabra, big foot, and psychic powers). There are, of course, problems with this approach, but for now it is enough to simply point out that this positioning of Mulder and Scully is an important feature of the internal structure of The X-Files and speaks to an awareness of, and desire to challenge, the traditional association of women with intuition and men with rationality. Indeed, Linda Badley points out that the relationship between the two agents is “remarkably egalitarian, challenging traditional gender roles as portrayed on television” (63).Scully and Mulder’s relationship, a relationship that is at once personal and professional, is also grounded in genuine equality and respect. Mulder never undermines Scully, he (occasionally) knows when to bow to her superior scientific reasoning, and his eventual love for his partner is based in his understanding that Scully’s skepticism offers the perfect counterpart to his openness to the paranormal. In fact, one might say that Mulder, at least in part, falls in love with Scully’s professionalism and with her commitment to scientific reasoning. Mulder admits as much himself in the film The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998): “as difficult and frustrating as it’s been sometimes, your goddamn strict rationalism and science have saved me a thousand times over. You kept me honest. You made me a whole person.” In this calculation, Scully is not only Mulder’s equal, she is his missing piece. While she might sometimes grumble about merely playing Watson to Mulder’s Holmes (see “Fight Club” [0720]), Scully’s role is much more important than this, and Mulder (and the viewer) knows it.In the context of the televisual landscape of the 1990s, this representation of Scully as a character who is every bit as intelligent and as integral to the action of the series as her male partner, was incredibly powerful. It marked Scully as a third-wave feminist character in an era dominated by women who seemed to conform to the kind of problematic post-feminism embodied by Ally McBeal. In a recent interview, Gillian Anderson acknowledged the significant role Scully played in opening up possibilities for the representation of women on television in the 1990s. She observed, “a lot of women felt that they saw something recognisable for the first time [in Scully and] there were a lot of young women whose eyes were opened to feeling like they were finally represented in some way on television” (Anderson in Idato n.p.) Many women saw themselves in this character, and there can be little doubt The X-Files spearheaded a shift towards a more representative approach to the writing of female roles in US television in which layered and complex characters such as Scully became the norm rather than the exception. Rosalind Gill, for example, notes that “quality television” has “evolved since the 1990s into a site of rich and complex representations of gender including Homeland, Veep, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Transparent, and The Good Wife” (620).One of the other pervasive positive effects associated with the character of Scully is that she functioned, and indeed continues to function, as a role model for women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). A recent report commissioned by 21st Century Fox, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and J. Walter Thompson Intelligence found that “Scully’s media depiction of a high-achieving woman in STEM asked a generation of girls and women to imagine new professional options… Scully also influenced a generation of young women to study and pursue careers in STEM” (3). Although this report is not entirely impartial (21th Century Fox owns The X-Files), it found that “among women who are familiar with Scully’s character, 91% say she is a role model for girls and women” (5). This finding tallies with those of a variety of earlier online observers who noticed Scully had become a touchstone character “who inspired an entire generation of young women to pursue medical, scientific, and law enforcement degrees as positions” (Consalvi). To an extent not seen before in the history of television, Scully became an important role model for young women in the STEM professions. Scully’s fictional professionalism helped to create a new generation of real-life female STEM professionals.But it is worth remembering that in other respects, Scully is a complicated feminist heroine. This is largely because The X-Files’ production team’s own feminist credentials were often less-than-inspiring. The series was created by a man, and was written and directed predominantly by men in all of its various filmic and televisual incarnations. As Anderson herself pointed out on her Twitter feed for 29 June 2017, of the 207 episodes of X-Files produced, only 2 were directed by women (fig. 1). Famously, when the X-Files began in the early 1990s, Anderson was paid far less than her co-star Duchovny and was even asked to stand behind him on camera. The actor agitated successfully for equal pay after three years in the role, and for the right to stand beside her televisual partner, rather than behind him, even if, somewhat astonishingly, Twenty First Century Fox also offered Anderson less than Duchovny to reprise her famous role in 2016. (Anderson eventually received equal pay for equal billing.)Fig. 1: Gillian Anderson tweet, 29 June 2017.It ought to be remembered, then, that Scully’s feminism is predominantly a construction of men, overlaid with the undoubted feminine empowerment brought to the role by Anderson. As far back as 1998, Linda Badley noticed that for Scully/Anderson “the transference of ‘feminist’ characteristics between character and star is unusually strong—to the extent that a discussion of one must refer to the other. And Anderson/Scully is instantly recognisable as an icon of popular feminism” (62). But in more recent years, Anderson has made even clearer her own feminist leanings. She has done this through the publication (with Jennifer Nadel) of the explicitly feminist We: The Uplifting Manuel for Women Seeking Happiness (2017); by taking up more explicitly feminist roles, such as that of Stella Gibson in the acclaimed BBC series The Fall (2013-present); and through her Twitter feed. The significance of Anderson’s online feminist presence is highlighted by Lauren Modery, who notes: “the next time you’re having a day where you’re not sure if you’re being the best feminist you can be, just ask yourself “what would Gillian Anderson do?” and go to her Twitter account” (Modery). Scully’s 1990s Feminism in a Twenty-First Century ContextFor much of the series, Scully’s feminism can be viewed as a form of the “New Feminism” that Stephanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon associate with the late 1990s and with Natasha Walter’s book The New Feminism (1998). This “New Feminism” attempts to break from second-wave feminism by decoupling the personal from the political (64). Badley, for example, points out that Scully’s feminism is strictly based on individual empowerment: “rather than challenge patriarchy directly or join forces with women activists, Scully channels her anger/ambition into fitting into the system” (70). But equally, Scully’s feminism could be seen as a prototype of the kind of “neo-liberal” feminism that theorists such as Angela McRobbie associate with the present moment, a feminism which “discards the older, welfarist and collectivist feminism of the past, in favour of individualist striving” (4). Certainly, over the course of the 25 years, The X-Files has been in existence, we have seen little evidence that Scully has female friends (or indeed, that she interacts with anyone much outside of Mulder and her family).When other women do enter the picture, such as when Mulder’s one-time lover and co-founder of the X-Files, Diana Fowley appears in the fifth season of the series (see “The End” [0520]), Scully is often positioned in an antagonistic relationship with them. In this context, it is notable that “All Things,” a seventh-season episode directed and written by Anderson, places Scully’s interaction with Colleen Azar, a woman from the American Taoist Healing Centre, at the centre of the narrative. Azar’s exhortations to Scully to “slow down” are presented as the wise words of a female ally in this episode, and Scully does well to heed them. This episode, consciously I think, works as a counter to the more typical representation of Scully as being in competition with women for Mulder’s interest, evident in episodes like “Alpha” (0616) and “Syzygy” (0313). In this respect, Anderson appears to be aligning Scully with a feminism that is much more inclusive than it appears in other, male-written, episodes.From the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century, one of the more problematic elements The X-Files has to do with its representation of sex and sexuality. Sex, in the world of The X-Files, is very 1990s in orientation. In fact, it echoes the way in which sex operated in the Clinton impeachment: denial, denial, denial, even in the face of clear evidence it took place. We see this most obviously in “All Things,” which begins with a shot of Scully getting dressed in front of a mirror, that pans to a shot of an undressed Mulder in bed. This opening seems to suggest the two had spent the night together, but nothing overtly sexual actually takes place in the episode. Indeed, any sexual activity that ever takes place in the X-Files happens off camera, but it is nonetheless worth pointing out that while the equally solitary Mulder is repeatedly characterised in the series by his porn fetish, Scully’s sexuality is repeatedly denied or diminished in the series. Moreover, any overt expression of Scully’s sexuality (such as in “Milagro,” [0618] where she falls for a writer living next door to Mulder) typically ends badly, with Scully placed in peril by her sexual desires.Scully’s continued presence in the twenty-first century, however, means that while her character is rooted in what we might call a “1990s feminist disposition” (she prides herself on being a “woman in a man’s world”; she demonstrates little interest in stereotypically feminine pursuits such as shopping or make up; her focus is on work, rather than romance), she has also been allowed the room to grow and develop. Perhaps most notably, the 2018 Scully is allowed to embrace her sexuality. Sexual activity still appears off screen, of course, but in “Plus One” (1103), we see her actively pursue sex with Mulder (twice!), while her vibrator makes an unapologetic cameo appearance in “Rm9sbG93ZXJz” (1107). Given that we live in a decade saturated in sexual imagery, it makes no sense for 2018 Scully to be as chaste and buttoned up as she was in the 1990s.Finally, in a series in which the wild speculation of the conspiracy theories is almost always true, Scully’s feminist commitment to rationality, science and the power of logic might appear to be undermined at every turn. Badley, for example, reminds us that while Scully may “have medicine and the law on her side ... Mulder’s vision is validated by Chris Carter, as the prologue to nearly every episode reminds us” (67). This is highlighted in “Field Trip” (0621) when Scully wonders, “Mulder, can’t you just for once, just ... for the novelty of it, come up with the simplest explanation, the most logical one instead of automatically jumping to UFOs or Bigfoot or…” Mulder simply counters with:Scully, in six years, how … how often have I been wrong? No seriously, I mean, every time I bring you a case we go through this perfunctory dance. You tell me that I’m not being scientifically rigorous and that I’m off my nut, and then in the end who turns out to be right like 98.95 of the time? I just think I’ve ... earned the benefit of the doubt here.Interestingly enough, however, it is Scully who solves the mystery at the heart of this particular episode of X-Files—Mulder and Scully are indeed trapped inside a giant fungus, being slowly digested by its gooey secretions.And while Mulder’s viewpoint is most often endorsed in the series, the chaos of the Trump administration illustrates perfectly the dangers behind the valorisation of the irrational over the rational. In a decade in which rationality itself is coming under increasing threat—by “fake news”; through a hostility towards the science of climate change; in the desire to wind back further the gains of the feminist movement—we need to remember the importance of the strong and abiding relationship between rationality and feminism. This is a relationship that goes at least as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759-1797) Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), is at the heart of the feminist gothic writings of women like Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) and Mary Shelley (1797-1851). This commitment to the power of rationality lives on in the character of Dana Scully.Conclusion: Scully as Twenty-First-Century Feminist IconI have argued throughout this article that there are limitations of the kind of feminism embodied in Scully, but it is clear that she has come to represent a type of woman who refuses to let men dictate her behaviour, and who maintains her professionalism even under the most difficult of circumstances. A host of Scully memes now circulating on the web celebrate the character’s competence, intelligence, and compassion (figs. 2, 3, and 4). The character of Scully now exists far beyond the confines of the television screen and the imaginations of her predominantly male authors. Scully’s continuing relevance to twenty-first century feminists is reflected in this meme recently placed by Anderson on her Twitter account in response to the allegations of sexual misconduct directed at US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanagh (fig. 5). Rarely have the 1990s seemed so relevant to the present moment.Fig. 2: Scully meme, Meme Generator.Fig. 3: Rustnsplinters, “Scully Motivational.” Deviant Art.Fig. 4: E.H. Redlum, “Scully: Meme Style.” Deviant Art.Fig. 5: Gillian Anderson tweet.ReferencesBadley, Linda. “Scully Hits the Glass Ceiling: Postmodernism, Postfeminism, Posthumanism, and The X-Files.” Fantasy Girls: Gender in the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television. Ed. Elyce Rae Helford. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 61-90.Consalvi, Sydney. “The Scully Effect Continues: How The X-Files’ Dana Scully Changed Television Forever.” Odyssey. 9 Aug. 2016. 1 Dec. 2018 <https://www.theodysseyonline.com/scully-effect>.Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women. London: Vintage, 1991.Freeman, David. “Scientists Say Mysterious ‘Oumuamua’ Object Could Be an Alien Spacecraft: Harvard Researchers Raise the Possibility That It’s a Probe Sent by Extraterrestrials.” NBCNews.com. 6 Nov. 2018. 1 Dec. 2018 <https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/scientists-say-mysterious-oumuamua-object-could-be-alien-spacecraft-ncna931381>.Genz, Stéphanie, and Benjamin A. Brabon. Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009.Gill, Rosalind. “Post-Postfeminism? New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times.” Feminist Media Studies 16.4 (2016): 610-30.Idato, Michael. “Gillian Anderson on Why She’s Closing The X-Files after 25 Years.” The Sydney Morning Herald. 15 Jan. 2018. 1 Dec. 2018 <https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/times-up-gillian-anderson-on-why-shes-closing-the-xfiles-after-25-years-20180115-h0iapf.html>.Kim, L.S. “‘Sex and the Single Girl’ in Postfeminism: The F Word on Television.” Television and New Media 2.4 (Nov. 2001): 319-334.Koven, Mikel J. “The X-Files.” Essential Cult TV Reader. Ed. David Lavery. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2010. 337-343.McRobbie, Angela. “Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times.” Australian Feminist Studies 30:83 (2015): 3-20.Modery, Lauren. “Gillian Anderson Is the Feminist Twitter Hero We Need Right Now.” Birth. Movies. Death. 25 Jan. 2018. 1 Dec. 2018 <https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2018/01/25/gillian-anderson-is-the-feminist-twitter-hero-we-need-right-now>.Moses, Michael Valdez. “Kingdom of Darkness: Autonomy and Conspiracy in The X-Files and Millenium.” The Philosophy of TV Noir. Eds. Steven M. Sanders and Aeon J. Skoble. Lexington: U. of Kentucky P., 2008. 203-228.21stCentury Fox, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and J. Walter Thompson Intelligence. The ‘Scully Effect’: I Want to Believe… in STEM. 2018. <https://impact.21cf.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/03/ScullyEffectReport_21CF_1-1.pdf>.Wildermuth, Mark E. Gender, Science Fiction Television, and the American Security State: 1958-Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.X-Files: Fight the Future. Dir. Rob Bowman. Perf. Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny. 20th Century Fox. 1998.

‘Complex(ity)’ is currently fashionable in the humanities. Fashions come and go, but in this article I argue that the interest in complexity connects with something deeper, an intellectual revolution that began before complexity became trendy, and will continue after the spotlight passes on. Yet to make this case, and understand and advance this revolution, we need a better take on ‘complexity’. ‘Complex’ is of course complex. In common use it refers to something ‘composed of many interrelated parts’, or problems ‘so complicated or intricate as to be hard to deal with’. I will call this popular meaning, with its positive and negative values, complexity-1. In science it has a more negative sense, complexity-2, referring to the presenting complexity of problems, which science will strip down to underlying simplicity. But recently it has developed positive meanings in both science and humanities. Complexity-3 marks a revolutionarily more positive attitude to complexity in science that does seek to be reductive. Humanities-style complexity-4, which acknowledges and celebrates the inherent complexity of texts and meanings, is basic in contemporary Media and Cultural studies (MaC for short). The underlying root of complex is plico bend or fold, plus con- together, via complector grasp (something), encompass an idea, or person. The double of ‘complex’ is ‘simple’, from Latin simplex, which less obviously also comes from plico, plus semel once, at the same time. ‘Simple’ and ‘complex’ are closer than people think: only a fold or two apart. A key idea is that these elements are interdependent, parts of a single underlying form. ‘Simple(x)’ is another modality of ‘complex’, dialectically related, different in degree not kind, not absolutely opposite. The idea of ‘holding together’ is stronger in Latin complex, the idea of difficulty more prominent in modern usage, yet the term still includes both. The concept ‘complex’ is untenable apart from ‘simple’. This figure maps the basic structures in ‘complexity’. This complexity contains both positive and negative values, science and non-science, academic and popular meanings, with folds/differences and relationships so dynamically related that no aspect is totally independent. This complex field is the minimum context in which to explore claims about a ‘complexity revolution’. Complexity in Science and Humanities In spite of the apparent similarities between Complexity-3 (sciences) and 4 (humanities), in practice a gulf separates them, policed from both sides. If these sides do not talk to each other, as they often do not, the result is not a complex meaning for ‘complex’, but a semantic war-zone. These two forms of complexity connect and collide because they reach into a new space where discourses of science and non-science are interacting more than they have for many years. For many, in both academic communities, a strong, taken-for-granted mindset declares the difference between them is absolute. They assume that if ‘complexity’ exists in science, it must mean something completely different from what it means in humanities or everyday discourse, so different as to be incomprehensible or unusable by humanists. This terrified defence of the traditional gulf between sciences and humanities is not the clinching argument these critics think. On the contrary, it symptomises what needs to be challenged, via the concept complex. One influential critic of this split was Lord Snow, who talked of ‘two cultures’. Writing in class-conscious post-war Britain he regretted the ignorance of humanities-trained ruling elites about basic science, and scientists’ ignorance of humanities. No-one then or now doubts there is a problem. Most MaC students have a science-light education, and feel vulnerable to critiques which say they do not need to know any science or maths, including complexity science, and could not understand it anyway. To understand how this has happened I go back to the 17th century rise of ‘modern science’. The Royal Society then included the poet Dryden as well as the scientist Newton, but already the fissure between science and humanities was emerging in the elite, re-enforcing existing gaps between both these and technology. The three forms of knowledge and their communities continued to develop over the next 400 years, producing the education system which formed most of us, the structure of academic knowledges in which culture, technology and science form distinct fields. Complexity has been implicated in this three-way split. Influenced by Newton’s wonderful achievement, explaining so much (movements of earthly and heavenly bodies) with so little (three elegant laws of motion, one brief formula), science defined itself as a reductive practice, in which complexity was a challenge. Simplicity was the sign of a successful solution, altering the older reciprocity between simplicity and complexity. The paradox was ignored that proof involved highly complex mathematics, as anyone who reads Newton knows. What science held onto was the outcome, a simplicity then retrospectively attributed to the universe itself, as its true nature. Simplicity became a core quality in the ontology of science, with complexity-2 the imperfection which challenged and provoked science to eliminate it. Humanities remained a refuge for a complexity ontology, in which both problems and solutions were irreducibly complex. Because of the dominance of science as a form of knowing, the social sciences developed a reductivist approach opposing traditional humanities. They also waged bitter struggles against anti-reductionists who emerged in what was called ‘social theory’. Complexity-4 in humanities is often associated with ‘post-structuralism’, as in Derrida, who emphasises the irreducible complexity of every text and process of meaning, or ‘postmodernism’, as in Lyotard’s controversial, influential polemic. Lyotard attempted to take the pulse of contemporary Western thought. Among trends he noted were new forms of science, new relationships between science and humanities, and a new kind of logic pervading all branches of knowledge. Not all Lyotard’s claims have worn well, but his claim that something really important is happening in the relationship between kinds and institutions of knowledge, especially between sciences and humanities, is worth serious attention. Even classic sociologists like Durkheim recognised that the modern world is highly complex. Contemporary sociologists agree that ‘globalisation’ introduces new levels of complexity in its root sense, interconnections on a scale never seen before. Urry argues that the hyper-complexity of the global world requires a complexity approach, combining complexity-3 and 4. Lyotard’s ‘postmodernism’ has too much baggage, including dogmatic hostility to science. Humanities complexity-4 has lost touch with the sceptical side of popular complexity-1, and lacks a dialectic relationship with simplicity. ‘Complexity’, incorporating Complexity-1 and 3, popular and scientific, made more complex by incorporating humanities complexity-4, may prove a better concept for thinking creatively and productively about these momentous changes. Only complex complexity in the approach, flexible and interdisciplinary, can comprehend these highly complex new objects of knowledge. Complexity and the New Condition of Science Some important changes in the way science is done are driven not from above, by new theories or discoveries, but by new developments in social contexts. Gibbons and Nowottny identify new forms of knowledge and practice, which they call ‘mode-2 knowledge’, emerging alongside older forms. Mode-1 is traditional academic knowledge, based in universities, organised in disciplines, relating to real-life problems at one remove, as experts to clients or consultants to employers. Mode-2 is orientated to real life problems, interdisciplinary and collaborative, producing provisional, emergent knowledge. Gibbons and Nowottny do not reference postmodernism but are looking at Lyotard’s trends as they were emerging in practice 10 years later. They do not emphasise complexity, but the new objects of knowledge they address are fluid, dynamic and highly complex. They emphasise a new scale of interdisciplinarity, in collaborations between academics across all disciplines, in science, technology, social sciences and humanities, though they do not see a strong role for humanities. This approach confronts and welcomes irreducible complexity in object and methods. It takes for granted that real-life problems will always be too complex (with too many factors, interrelated in too many ways) to be reduced to the sort of problem that isolated disciplines could handle. The complexity of objects requires equivalent complexity in responses; teamwork, using networks, drawing on relevant knowledge wherever it is to be found. Lyotard famously and foolishly predicted the death of the ‘grand narrative’ of science, but Gibbons and Nowottny offer a more complex picture in which modes-1 and 2 will continue alongside each other in productive dialectic. The linear form of science Lyotard attacked is stronger than ever in some ways, as ‘Big Science’, which delivers wealth and prestige to disciplinary scientists, accessing huge funds to solve highly complex problems with a reductionist mindset. But governments also like the idea of mode-2 knowledge, under whatever name, and try to fund it despite resistance from powerful mode-1 academics. Moreover, non-reductionist science in practice has always been more common than the dominant ideology allowed, whether or not its exponents, some of them eminent scientists, chose to call it ‘complexity’ science. Quantum physics, called ‘the new physics’, consciously departed from the linear, reductionist assumptions of Newtonian physics to project an irreducibly complex picture of the quantum world. Different movements, labelled ‘catastrophe theory’, ‘chaos theory’ and ‘complexity science’, emerged, not a single coherent movement replacing the older reductionist model, but loosely linked by new attitudes to complexity. Instead of seeing chaos and complexity as problems to be removed by analysis, chaos and complexity play a more ambiguous role, as ontologically primary. Disorder and complexity are not later regrettable lapses from underlying essential simplicity and order, but potentially creative resources, to be understood and harnessed, not feared, controlled, eliminated. As a taste of exciting ideas on complexity, barred from humanities MaC students by the general prohibition on ‘consorting with the enemy’ (science), I will outline three ideas, originally developed in complexity-3, which can be described in ways requiring no specialist knowledge or vocabulary, beyond a Mode-2 openness to dynamic, interdisciplinary engagement. Fractals, a term coined by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, are so popular as striking shapes produced by computer-graphics, circulated on T-shirts, that they may seem superficial, unscientific, trendy. They exist at an intersection between science, media and culture, and their complexity includes transactions across that folded space. The name comes from Latin fractus, broken: irregular shapes like broken shards, which however have their own pattern. Mandelbrot claims that in nature, many such patterns partly repeat on different scales. When this happens, he says, objects on any one scale will have equivalent complexity. Part of this idea is contained in Blake’s famous line: ‘To see the world in a grain of sand’. The importance of the principle is that it fundamentally challenges reductiveness. Nor is it as unscientific as it may sound. Geologists indeed see grains of sand under a microscope as highly complex. In sociology, instead of individuals (literal meaning ‘cannot be divided’) being the minimally simple unit of analysis, individuals can be understood to be as complex (e.g. with multiple identities, linked with many other social beings) as groups, classes or nations. There is no level where complexity disappears. A second concept is ‘fuzzy logic’, invented by an engineer, Zadeh. The basic idea is not unlike the literary critic Empson’s ‘ambiguity’, the sometimes inexhaustible complexity of meanings in great literature. Zadeh’s contribution was to praise the inherent ambiguity and ambiguity of natural languages as a resource for scientists and engineers, making them better, not worse, for programming control systems. Across this apparently simple bridge have flowed many fuzzy machines, more effective than their over-precise brothers. Zadeh crystallised this wisdom in his ‘Principle of incompatibility’: As the complexity of a system increases, our ability to make precise and yet significant statements about its behaviour decreases until a threshold is reached beyond which precision and significance (or relevance) become almost mutually exclusive characteristics (28) Something along these lines is common wisdom in complexity-1. For instance, under the headline “Law is too complex for juries to understand, says judge” (Dick 4), the Chief Justice of Australia, Murray Gleeson, noted a paradox of complexity, that attempts to improve a system by increasing its complexity make it worse (meaningless or irrelevant, as Zadeh said). The system loses its complexity in another sense, that it no longer holds together. My third concept is the ‘Butterfly Effect’, a name coined by Lorenz. The butterfly was this scientist’s poetic fantasy, an imagined butterfly that flaps its wings somewhere on the Andes, and introduces a small change in the weather system that triggers a hurricane in Montana, or Beijing. This idea is another riff on the idea that complex situations are not reducible to component elements. Every cause is so complex that we can never know in advance just what factor will operate in a given situation, or what its effects might be across a highly complex system. Travels in Complexity I will now explore these issues with reference to a single example, or rather, a nested set of examples, each (as in fractal theory) equivalently complex, yet none identical at any scale. I was travelling in a train from Penrith to Sydney in New South Wales in early 2006 when I read a publicity text from NSW State Rail which asked me: ‘Did you know that delays at Sydenham affect trains to Parramatta? Or that a sick passenger on a train at Berowra can affect trains to Penrith?’ No, I did not know that. As a typical commuter I was impressed, and even more so as an untypical commuter who knows about complexity science. Without ostentatious reference to sources in popular science, NSW Rail was illustrating Lorenz’s ‘butterfly effect’. A sick passenger is prosaic, a realistic illustration of the basic point, that in a highly complex system, a small change in one part, so small that no-one could predict it would matter, can produce a massive, apparently unrelated change in another part. This text was part of a publicity campaign with a scientific complexity-3 subtext, which ran in a variety of forms, in their website, in notices in carriages, on the back of tickets. I will use a complexity framework to suggest different kinds of analysis and project which might interest MaC students, applicable to objects that may not refer to be complexity-3. The text does two distinct things. It describes a planning process, and is part of a publicity program. The first, simplifying movement of Mode-1 analysis would see this difference as projecting two separate objects for two different specialists: a transport expert for the planning, a MaC analyst for the publicity, including the image. Unfortunately, as Zadeh warned, in complex conditions simplification carries an explanatory cost, producing descriptions that are meaningless or irrelevant, even though common sense (complexity-1) says otherwise. What do MaC specialists know about rail systems? What do engineers know about publicity? But collaboration in a mode-2 framework does not need extensive specialist knowledge, only enough to communicate with others. MaC specialists have a fuzzy knowledge of their own and other areas of knowledge, attuned by Humanities complexity-4 to tolerate uncertainty. According to the butterfly principle it would be foolish to wish our University education had equipped us with the necessary other knowledges. We could never predict what precise items of knowledge would be handy from our formal and informal education. The complexity of most mode-2 problems is so great that we cannot predict in advance what we will need to know. MaC is already a complex field, in which ‘Media’ and ‘Culture’ are fuzzy terms which interact in different ways. Media and other organisations we might work with are often imbued with linear forms of thought (complexity-2), and want simple answers to simple questions about complex systems. For instance, MaC researchers might be asked as consultants to determine the effect of this message on typical commuters. That form of analysis is no longer respectable in complexity-4 MaC studies. Old-style (complexity-2) effects-research modelled Senders, Messages and Receivers to measure effects. Standard research methods of complexity-2 social sciences might test effects of the message by a survey instrument, with a large sample to allow statistically significant results. Using this, researchers could claim to know whether the publicity campaign had its desired effect on its targeted demographic: presumably inspiring confidence in NSW Rail. However, each of these elements is complex, and interactions between them, and others that don’t enter into the analysis, create further levels of complexity. To manage this complexity, MaC analysts often draw on Foucault’s authority to use ‘discourse’ to simplify analysis. This does not betray the principle of complexity. Complexity-4 needs a simplicity-complexity dialectic. In this case I propose a ‘complexity discourse’ to encapsulate the complex relations between Senders, Receivers and Messages into a single word, which can then be related to other such elements (e.g. ‘publicity discourse’). In this case complexity-3 can also be produced by attending to details of elements in the S-M-R chain, combining Derridean ‘deconstruction’ with expert knowledge of the situation. This Sender may be some combination of engineers and planners, managers who commissioned the advertisement, media professionals who carried it out. The message likewise loses its unity as its different parts decompose into separate messages, leaving the transaction a fraught, unpredictable encounter between multiple messages and many kinds of reader and sender. Alongside its celebration of complexity-3, this short text runs another message: ‘untangling our complex rail network’. This is complexity-2 from science and engineering, where complexity is only a problem to be removed. A fuller text on the web-site expands this second strand, using bullet points and other signals of a linear approach. In this text, there are 5 uses of ‘reliable’, 6 uses of words for problems of complexity (‘bottlenecks’, ‘delays’, ‘congestion’), and 6 uses of words for the new system (‘simpler’, ‘independent’). ‘Complex’ is used twice, both times negatively. In spite of the impression given by references to complexity-3, this text mostly has a reductionist attitude to complexity. Complexity is the enemy. Then there is the image. Each line is a different colour, and they loop in an attractive way, seeming to celebrate graceful complexity-2. Yet this part of the image is what is going to be eliminated by the new program’s complexity-2. The interesting complexity of the upper part of the image is what the text declares is the problem. What are commuters meant to think? And Railcorp? This media analysis identifies a fissure in the message, which reflects a fissure in the Sender-complex. It also throws up a problem in the culture that produced such interesting allusions to complexity science, but has linear, reductionist attitudes to complexity in its practice. We can ask: where does this cultural problem go, in the organisation, in the interconnected system and bureaucracy it manages? Is this culture implicated in the problems the program is meant to address? These questions are more productive if asked in a collaborative mode-2 framework, with an organisation open to such questions, with complex researchers able to move between different identities, as media analyst, cultural analyst, and commuter, interested in issues of organisation and logistics, engaged with complexity in all senses. I will continue my imaginary mode-2 collaboration with Railcorp by offering them another example of fractal analysis, looking at another instant, captured in a brief media text. On Wednesday 14 March, 2007, two weeks before a State government election, a very small cause triggered a systems failure in the Sydney network. A small carbon strip worth $44 which was not properly attached properly threw Sydney’s transport network into chaos on Wednesday night, causing thousands of commuters to be trapped in trains for hours. (Baker and Davies 7) This is an excellent example of a butterfly effect, but it is not labelled as such, nor regarded positively in this complexity-1 framework. ‘Chaos’ signifies something no-one wants in a transport system. This is popular not scientific reductionism. The article goes on to tell the story of one passenger, Mark MacCauley, a quadriplegic left without power or electricity in a train because the lift was not working. He rang City Rail, and was told that “someone would be in touch in 3 to 5 days” (Baker and Davies 7). He then rang emergency OOO, and was finally rescued by contractors “who happened to be installing a lift at North Sydney” (Baker and Davies 7). My new friends at NSW Rail would be very unhappy with this story. It would not help much to tell them that this is a standard ‘human interest’ article, nor that it is more complex than it looks. For instance, MacCauley is not typical of standard passengers who usually concern complexity-2 planners of rail networks. He is another butterfly, whose specific needs would be hard to predict or cater for. His rescue is similarly unpredictable. Who would have predicted that these contractors, with their specialist equipment, would be in the right place at the right time to rescue him? Complexity provided both problem and solution. The media’s double attitude to complexity, positive and negative, complexity-1 with a touch of complexity-3, is a resource which NSW Rail might learn to use, even though it is presented with such hostility here. One lesson of the complexity is that a tight, linear framing of systems and problems creates or exacerbates problems, and closes off possible solutions. In the problem, different systems didn’t connect: social and material systems, road and rail, which are all ‘media’ in McLuhan’s highly fuzzy sense. NSW Rail communication systems were cumbrously linear, slow (3 to 5 days) and narrow. In the solution, communication cut across institutional divisions, mediated by responsive, fuzzy complex humans. If the problem came from a highly complex system, the solution is a complex response on many fronts: planning, engineering, social and communication systems open to unpredictable input from other surrounding systems. As NSW Rail would have been well aware, the story responded to another context. The page was headed ‘Battle for NSW’, referring to an election in 2 weeks, in which this newspaper editorialised that the incumbent government should be thrown out. This political context is clearly part of the complexity of the newspaper message, which tries to link not just the carbon strip and ‘chaos’, but science and politics, this strip and the government’s credibility. Yet the government was returned with a substantial though reduced majority, not the swingeing defeat that might have been predicted by linear logic (rail chaos = electoral defeat) or by some interpretations of the butterfly effect. But complexity-3 does not say that every small cause produces catastrophic effects. On the contrary, it says that causal situations can be so complex that we can never be entirely sure what effects will follow from any given case. The political situation in all its complexity is an inseparable part of the minimal complex situation which NSW Rail must take into account as it considers how to reform its operations. It must make complexity in all its senses a friend and ally, not just a source of nasty surprises. My relationship with NSW Rail at the moment is purely imaginary, but illustrates positive and negative aspects of complexity as an organising principle for MaC researchers today. The unlimited complexity of Humanities’ complexity-4, Derridean and Foucauldian, can be liberating alongside the sometimes excessive scepticism of Complexity-2, but needs to keep in touch with the ambivalence of popular complexity-1. Complexity-3 connects with complexity-2 and 4 to hold the bundle together, in a more complex, cohesive, yet still unstable dynamic structure. It is this total sprawling, inchoate, contradictory (‘complex’) brand of complexity that I believe will play a key role in the up-coming intellectual revolution. But only time will tell. References Baker, Jordan, and Anne Davies. “Carbon Strip Caused Train Chaos.” Sydney Morning Herald 17 Mar. 2007: 7. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976. Dick, Tim. “Law Is Now Too Complex for Juries to Understand, Says Judge.” Sydney Morning Herald 26 Mar. 2007: 4. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus, 1930. Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” In Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972. Gibbons, Michael. The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage, 1994. Lorenz, Edward. The Essence of Chaos. London: University College, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London: Routledge, 1964. Mandelbrot, Benoit. “The Fractal Geometry of Nature.” In Nina Hall, ed. The New Scientist Guide to Chaos. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Nowottny, Henry. Rethinking Science. London: Polity, 2001. Snow, Charles Percy. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. London: Faber 1959. Urry, John. Global Complexity. London: Sage, 2003. Zadeh, Lotfi Asker. “Outline of a New Approach to the Analysis of Complex Systems and Decision Processes.” ILEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 3.1 (1973): 28-44. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hodge, Bob. "The Complexity Revolution." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>. APA Style Hodge, B. (Jun. 2007) "The Complexity Revolution," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>.

Story spreads out through time the behaviors or bodies – the shapes – a self has been or will be, each replacing the one before. Hence a story has before and after, gain and loss. It goes somewhere…Moreover, shape or body is crucial, not incidental, to story. It carries story; it makes story visible; in a sense it is story. Shape (or visible body) is in space what story is in time. (Bynum, quoted in Garland Thomson, 113-114) Drawing on Goffman’s classic work on stigma, research documenting the existence of discrimination and bias against individuals classified as obese goes back five decades. Since Cahnman published “The Stigma of Obesity” in 1968, other researchers have well documented systematic and growing discrimination against fat people (cf. Puhl and Brownell; Puhl and Heuer; Puhl and Heuer; Fikkan and Rothblum). While weight-based stereotyping has a long history (Chang and Christakis; McPhail; Schwartz), contemporary forms of anti-fat stigma and discrimination must be understood within a social and economic context of neoliberal healthism. By neoliberal healthism (see Crawford; Crawford; Metzel and Kirkland), I refer to the set of discourses that suggest that humans are rational, self-determining actors who independently make their own best choices and are thus responsible for their life chances and health outcomes. In such a context, good health becomes associated with proper selfhood, and there are material and social consequences for those who either unwell or perceived to be unwell. While the greatest impacts of size-based discrimination are structural in nature, the interpersonal impacts are also significant. Because obesity is commonly represented (at least partially) as a matter of behavioral choices in public health, medicine, and media, to “remain fat” is to invite commentary from others that one is lacking in personal responsibility. Guthman suggests that this lack of empathy “also stems from the growing perception that obesity presents a social cost, made all the more tenable when the perception of health responsibility has been reversed from a welfare model” (1126). Because weight loss is commonly held to be a reasonable and feasible goal and yet is nearly impossible to maintain in practice (Kassierer and Angell; Mann et al.; Puhl and Heuer), fat people are “in effect, asked to do the impossible and then socially punished for failing” (Greenhalgh, 474). In this article, I explore how weight-based stigma shaped the decisions of bariatric patients to undergo weight loss surgery. In doing so, I underline the work that emotion does in circulating anti-fat stigma and in creating categories of subjects along lines of health and responsibility. As well, I highlight how fat bodies are lived and negotiated in space and place. I then explore ways in which participants take up notions of time, specifically in regard to risk, in discussing what brought them to the decision to have bariatric surgery. I conclude by arguing that it is a dynamic interaction between the material, social, emotional, discursive, and the temporal that produces not only fat embodiment, but fat subjectivity “failed”, and serves as an impetus for seeking bariatric surgery. Methods This article is based on 30 semi-structured interviews with American bariatric patients. At the time of the interview, individuals were between six months and 12 years out from surgery. After obtaining Intuitional Review Board approval, recruitment occurred through a snowball sample. All interviews were audio-taped with permission and verbatim interview transcripts were analyzed by means of a thematic analysis using Dedoose (www.dedoose.com). All names given in this article are pseudonyms. This work is part of a larger project that includes two additional interviews with bariatric surgeons as well as participant-observation research. Findings Navigating Anti-Fat Stigma In discussing what it was like to be fat, all but one of the individuals I interviewed discussed experiencing substantive size-based stigma and discrimination. Whether through overt comments, indirect remarks, dirty looks, open gawking, or being ignored and unrecognized, participants felt hurt, angry, and shamed by friends, family, coworkers, medical providers, and strangers on the street because of the size of their bodies. Several recalled being bullied and even physically assaulted by peers as children. Many described the experience of being fat or very fat as one of simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility. One young woman, Kaia, said: “I absolutely was not treated like a person … . I was just like this object to people. Just this big, you know, thing. That’s how people treated me.” Nearly all of my participants described being told repeatedly by others, including medical professionals, that their inability to lose weight was effectively a failure of the will. They found these comments to be particularly hurtful because, in fact, they had spent years, even decades, trying to lose weight only to gain the weight back plus more. Some providers and family members seemed to take up the idea that shame could be a motivating force in weight loss. However, as research by Lewis et al.; Puhl and Huerer; and Schafer and Ferraro has demonstrated, the effect this had was the opposite of what was intended. Specifically, a number of the individuals I spoke with delayed care and avoided health-facilitating behaviors, like exercising, because of the discrimination they had experienced. Instead, they turned to health-harming practices, like crash dieting. Moreover, the internalization of shame and blame served to lower a sense of self-worth for many participants. And despite having a strong sense that something outside of personal behavior explained their escalating body weights, they deeply internalized messages about responsibility and self-control. Danielle, for instance, remarked: “Why could the one thing I want the most be so impossible for me to maintain?” It is important to highlight the work that emotion does in circulating such experiences of anti-fat stigma and discrimination. As Fraser et al have argued in their discussion on fat and emotion, the social, the emotional, and the corporeal cannot be separated. Drawing on Ahmed, they argue that strong emotions are neither interior psychological states that work between individuals nor societal states that impact individuals. Rather, emotions are constitutive of subjects and collectivities, (Ahmed; Fraser et al.). Negative emotions in particular, such as hate and fear, produce categories of people, by defining them as a common threat and, in the process, they also create categories of people who are deemed legitimate and those who are not. Thus following Fraser et al, it is possible to see that anti-fat hatred did more than just negatively impact the individuals I spoke with. Rather, it worked to produce, differentiate, and drive home categories of people along lines of health, weight, risk, responsibility, and worth. In this next section, I examine the ways in which anti-fat discrimination works at the interface of not only the discursive and the emotive, but the material as well. Big Bodies, Small Spaces When they discussed their previous lives as very fat people, all of the participants made reference to a social and built environment mismatch, or in Garland Thomson’s terms, a “misfit”. A misfit occurs “when the environment does not sustain the shape and function of the body that enters it” (594). Whereas the built environment offers a fit for the majority of bodies, Garland Thomson continues, it also creates misfits for minority forms of embodiment. While Garland Thomson’s analysis is particular to disability, I argue that it extends to fat embodiment as well. In discussing what it was like to navigate the world as fat, participants described both the physical and emotional pain entailed in living in bodies that did not fit and frequently discussed the ways in which leaving the house was always a potential, anxiety-filled problem. Whereas all of the participants I interviewed discussed such misfitting, it was notable that participants in the Greater New York City area (70% of the sample) spoke about this topic at length. Specifically, they made frequent and explicit mentions of the particular interface between their fat bodies and the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), and the tightly packed spaces of the city itself. Greater New York City area participants frequently spoke of the shame and physical discomfort in having to stand on public transportation for fear that they would be openly disparaged for “taking up too much room.” Some mentioned that transit seats were made of molded plastic, indicating by design the amount of space a body should occupy. Because they knew they would require more space than what was allotted, these participants only took seats after calculating how crowded the subway or train car was and how crowded it would likely become. Notably, the decision to not take a seat was one that was made at a cost for some of the larger individuals who experienced joint pain. Many participants stated that the densely populated nature of New York City made navigating daily life very challenging. In Talia’s words, “More people, more obstacles, less space.” Participants described always having to be on guard, looking for the next obstacle. As Candice put it: “I would walk in some place and say, ‘Will I be able to fit? Will I be able to manoeuvre around these people and not bump into them?’ I was always self-conscious.” Although participants often found creative solutions to navigating the hostile environment of both the MTA and the city at large, they also identified an increasing sense of isolation that resulted from the physical discomfort and embarrassment of not fitting in. For instance, Talia rarely joined her partner and their friends on outings to movies or the theater because the seats were too tight. Similarly, Decenia would make excuses to her husband in order to avoid social situations outside of the home: “I’d say to my husband, ‘I don’t feel well, you go.’ But you know what? It was because I was afraid not to fit, you know?” The anticipatory scrutinizing described by these participants, and the anxieties it produced, echoes Kirkland’s contention that fat individuals use the technique of ‘scanning’ in order to navigate and manage hostile social and built environments. Scanning, she states, involves both literally rapidly looking over situations and places to determine accessibility, as well as a learned assessment and observation technique that allows fat people to anticipate how they will be received in new situations and new places. For my participants, worries about not fitting were more than just internal calculation. Rather, others made all too clear that fat bodies are not welcome. Nina recalled nasty looks she received from other subway riders when she attempted to sit down. Decenia described an experience on a crowded commuter train in which the woman next to her openly expressed annoyance and disgust that their thighs were touching. Talia recalled being aggressively handed a weight loss brochure by a fellow passenger. When asked to contrast their experiences living in New York City with having travelled or lived elsewhere, participants almost universally described the New York as a more difficult place to live for fat people. However, the experiences of three of the Latinas that I interviewed troubled this narrative. Katrina felt that the harassment she received in her country of origin, the Dominican Republic, was far worse than what she now experienced in the New York Metropolitan Area. Although Decenia detailed painful experiences of anti-fat stigma in New York City, she nevertheless described her life as relatively “easy” compared to what it was like in her home country of Brazil. And Denisa contrasted her neighbourhood of East Harlem with other parts of Manhattan: “In Harlem it's different. Everybody is really fat or plump – so you feel a bit more comfortable. Not everybody, but there's a mix. Downtown – there's no mix.” Collectively, their stories serve as a reminder (see Franko et al.; Grabe and Hyde) to be suspicious of over determined accounts that “Latino culture” is (or people of colour communities in general are), more accepting of larger bodies and more resistant to weight-based stigma and discrimination. Their comments also reflect arguments made by Colls, Grosz, and Garland Thomson, who have all pointed to the contingent nature between space and bodies. Colls argue that sizing is both a material and an emotional process – what size we take ourselves to be shifts in different physical and emotional contexts. Grosz suggests that there is a “mutually constitutive relationship between bodies and cities” – one that, I would add, is raced, classed, and gendered. Garland Thomson has described the relationship between bodies and space/place as “a dynamic encounter between world and flesh.” These encounters, she states, are always contingent and situated: “When the spatial and temporal context shifts, so does the fit, and with it meanings and consequences” (592). In this sense, fat is materialized differently in different contexts and in different scales – nation, state, city, neighbourhood – and the materialization of fatness is always entangled with raced, classed, and gendered social and political-economic relations. Nevertheless, it is possible to draw some structural commonalities between divergent parts of the Greater New York City Metropolitan Area. Specifically, a dense population, cramped physical spaces, inaccessible transportation and transportation funding cuts, social norms of fast paced life, and elite, raced, classed, and gendered norms of status and beauty work to materialize fatness in such a way that a ‘misfit’ is often the result for fat people who live and/or work in this area. And importantly, misfitting, as Garland Thomson argues, has consequences: it literally “casts out” when the “shape and function of … bodies comes into conflict with the shape and stuff of the built world” (594). This casting out produces some bodies as irrelevant to social and economic life, resulting in segregation and isolation. To misfit, she argues, is to be denied full citizenship. Responsibilising the Present Garland Thomson, discussing Bynum’s statement that “shape carries story”, argues the following: “the idea that shape carries story suggests … that material bodies are not only in the spaces of the world but that they are entwined with temporality as well” (596). In this section, I discuss how participants described their decisions to get weight loss surgery by making references to the need take responsibility for health now, in the present, in order to avoid further and future morbidity and mortality. Following Adams et al., I look at how the fat body is lived in a state of constant anticipation – “thinking and living toward the future” (246). All of the participants I spoke with described long histories of weight cycling. While many managed to lose weight, none were able to maintain this weight loss in the long term – a reality consistent with the medical fact that dieting does not produce durable results (Kassirer and Angell; Mann et al.; Puhl and Heuer). They experienced this inability as not only distressing, but terrifying, as they repeatedly regained the lost weight plus more. When participants discussed their decisions to have surgery, they highlighted concerns about weight related comorbidities and mobility limitations in their explanations. Consistent then with Boero, Lopez, and Wadden et al., the participants I spoke with did not seek out surgery in hopes of finding a permanent way to become thin, but rather a permanent way to become healthy and normal. Concerns about what is considered to be normative health, more than simply concerns about what is held to be an appropriate appearance, motivated their decisions. Significantly, for these participants the decision to have bariatric surgery was based on concerns about future morbidity (and mortality) at least as much, if not more so, than on concerns about a current state of ill health and impairment. Some individuals I spoke with were unquestionably suffering from multiple chronic and even life threatening illnesses and feared they would prematurely die from these conditions. Other participants, however, made the decision to have bariatric surgery despite the fact that they had no comorbidities whatsoever. Motivating their decisions was the fear that they would eventually develop them. Importantly, medial providers explicitly and repeatedly told all of these participants that lest they take drastic and immediate action, they would die. For example: Faith’s reproductive endocrinologist said: “you’re going to have diabetes by the time you’re 30; you’re going to have a stroke by the time you’re 40. And I can only hope that you can recover enough from your stroke that you’ll be able to take care of your family.” Several female participants were warned that without losing weight, they would either never become pregnant or they would die in childbirth. By contrast, participants stated that their bariatric surgeons were the first providers they had encountered to both assert that obesity was a medical condition outside of their control and to offer them a solution. Within an atmosphere in which obesity is held to be largely or entirely the result of behavioural choices, the bariatric profession thus positions itself as unique by offering both understanding and what it claims to be a durable treatment. Importantly, it would be a mistake to conclude that some bariatric patients needed surgery while others choose it for the wrong reasons. Regardless of their states of health at the time they made the decision to have surgery, the concerns that drove these patients to seek out these procedures were experienced as very real. Whether or not these concerns would have materialized as actual health conditions is unknown. Furthermore, bariatric patients should not be seen as having been duped or suffering from ‘false consciousness.’ Rather, they operate within a particular set of social, cultural, and political-economic conditions that suggest that good citizenship requires risk avoidance and personal health management. As these individuals experienced, there are material and social consequences for ‘failing’ to obtain normative conceptualizations of health. This set of conditions helps to produce a bariatric patient population that includes both those who were contending with serious health concerns and those who feared they would develop them. All bariatric patients operate within this set of conditions (as do medical providers) and make decisions regarding health (current, future, or both) by using the resources available to them. In her work on the temporalities of dieting, Coleman argues that rather than seeing dieting as a linear and progressive event, we might think of it instead a process that brings the future into the present as potential. Adams et al suggest concerns about potential futures, particularly in regard to health, are a defining characteristic of our time. They state: “The present is governed, at almost every scale, as if the future is what matters most. Anticipatory modes enable the production of possible futures that are lived and felt as inevitable in the present, rendering hope and fear as important political vectors” (249). The ability to act in the present based on potential future risks, they argue, has become a moral imperative and a marker of proper of citizenship. Importantly, however, our work to secure the ‘best possible future’ is never fully assured, as risks are constantly changing. The future is thus always uncertain. Acting responsibly in the present therefore requires “alertness and vigilance as normative affective states” (254). Importantly, these anticipations are not diagnostic, but productive. As Adams et al state, “the future arrives already formed in the present, as if the emergency has already happened…a ‘sense’ of the simultaneous uncertainty and inevitability of the future, usually manifest in entanglements of fear and hope” (250). It is in this light, then, that we might see the decision to have bariatric surgery. For these participants, their future weight-related morbidity and mortality had already arrived in the present and thus they felt they needed to act responsibly now, by undergoing what they had been told was the only durable medical intervention for obesity. The emotions of hope, fear, anxiety and I would suggest, hatred, were key in making these decisions. Conclusion Medical, public health, and media discourses frame obesity as an epidemic that threatens to bring untold financial disaster and escalating rates of morbidity and mortality upon the nation state and the world at large. As Fraser et al argue, strong emotions (such hatred, fear, anxiety, and hope), are at the centre of these discourses; they construct, circulate, and proliferate them. Moreover, they create categories of people who are deemed legitimate and categories of others who are not. In this context, the participants I spoke with were caught between a desire to have fatness understood as a medical condition needing intervention; the anti-fat attitudes of others, including providers, which held that obesity was a failure of the will and nothing more; their own internalization of these messages of personal responsibility for proper behavioural choices, and, the biologically intractable nature of fatness wherein dieting not only fails to reduce weight in the vast majority of cases but results, in the long term, in increased weight gain (Kassirer and Angell; Mann et al.; Puhl and Heuer). Widespread anxiety and embarrassment over and fear and hatred of fatness was something that the individuals I interviewed experienced directly and which signalled to them that they were less than human. Their desire for weight loss, therefore was partially a desire to become ‘normal.’ In Butler’s term, it was the desire for a ‘liveable life. ’A liveable life, for these participants, included a desire for a seamless fit with the built environment. The individuals I spoke with were never more ashamed of their fatness than when they experienced a ‘misfit’, in Garland Thomson’s terms, between their bodies and the material world. Moreover, feelings of shame over this disjuncture worked in tandem with a deeply felt, pressing sense that something must be done in the present to secure a better health future. The belief that bariatric surgery might finally provide a durable answer to obesity served as a strong motivating factor in their decisions to undergo bariatric surgery. By taking drastic action to lose weight, participants hoped to contest stigmatizing beliefs that their fat bodies reflected pathological interiors. Moreover, they sought to demonstrate responsibility and thus secure proper subjectivities and citizenship. In this sense, concerns, anxieties, and fears about health cannot be disentangled from the experience of anti-fat stigma and discrimination. Again, anti-fat bias, for these participants, was more than discursive: it operated through the circulation of emotion and was experienced in a very material sense. The decision to have weight loss surgery can thus be seen as occurring at the interface of emotion, flesh, space, place, and time, and in ways that are fundamentally shaped by the broader social context of neoliberal healthism. AcknowledgmentI am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this article for their helpful feedback on earlier version. References Adams, Vincanne, Michelle Murphy, and Adele E. Clarke. “Anticipation: Technoscience, Life, Affect, Temporality.” Subjectivity 28.1 (2009): 246-265. 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Introduction The first “Aquarius Festival” came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971 and was reprised in 1973 in the small rural town of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales. Both events reflected the Zeitgeist in what was, in some ways, an inchoate expression of the so-called “counterculture” (Roszak). Rather than attempting to analyse the counterculture as a discrete movement with a definable history, I enlist the theory of cultural memes to read the counter culture as a Dawkinsian cluster meme, with this paper offered as “testimonio”, a form of quasi-political memoir that views shifts in the culture through the lens of personal experience (Zimmerman, Yúdice). I track an evolving personal, “internal” topography and map its points of intersection with the radical social, political and cultural changes spawned by the “consciousness revolution” that was an integral part of the counterculture emerging in the 1970s. I focus particularly on the notion of “consciousness raising”, as a Dawkinsian memetic replicator, in the context of the idealistic notions of the much-heralded “New Age” of Aquarius, and propose that this meme has been a persistent feature of the evolution of the “meme cluster” known as the counterculture. Mimesis and the Counterculture Since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins floated the notion of cultural memes as a template to account for the evolution of ideas within political cultures, a literature of commentary and criticism has emerged that debates the strengths and weaknesses of his proposed model and its application across a number of fields. I borrow the notion to trace the influence of a set of memes that clustered around the emergence of what writer Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy, in her 1980 book of that name. Ferguson’s text, subtitled Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, was a controversial attempt to account for what was known as the “New Age” movement, with its late millennial focus on social and personal transformation. That focus leads me to approach the counterculture (a term first floated by Theodore Roszak) less as a definable historical movement and more as a cluster of aspirational tropes expressing a range of aspects or concerns, from the overt political activism through to experimental technologies for the transformation of consciousness, and all characterised by a critical interrogation of, and resistance to, conventional social norms (Ferguson’s “personal and social transformation”). With its more overtly “spiritual” focus, I read the “New Age” meme, then, as a sub-set of this “cluster meme”, the counterculture. In my reading, “New Age” and “counterculture” overlap, sharing persistent concerns and a broad enough tent to accommodate the serious—the combative political action of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), say, (see Elbaum)—to the light-hearted—the sport of frisbee for example (Stancil). The interrogation of conventional social and political norms inherited from previous generations was a prominent strategy across both movements. Rather than offering a sociological analysis or history of the ragbag counterculture, per se, my discussion here focuses in on the particular meme of “consciousness raising” within that broader set of cultural shifts, some of which were sustained in their own right, some dropping away, and many absorbed into the dominant mainstream culture. Dawkins use of the term “meme” was rooted in the Greek mimesis, to emphasise the replication of an idea by imitation, or copying. He likened the way ideas survive and change in human culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. While the transmission of memes does not depend on a physical medium, such as the DNA of biology, they replicate with a greater or lesser degree of success by harnessing human social media in a kind of “infectivity”, it is argued, through “contagious” repetition among human populations. Dawkins proposed that just as biological organisms could be said to act as “hosts” for replicating genes, in the same way people and groups of people act as hosts for replicating memes. Even before Dawkins floated his term, French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (165, emphasis mine) Ideas have power, in Monod’s analysis: “They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighbouring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains” (Monod, cited in Gleick). Emblematic of the counterculture were various “New Age” phenomena such as psychedelic drugs, art and music, with the latter contributing the “Aquarius” meme, whose theme song came from the stage musical (and later, film) Hair, and particularly the lyric that runs: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. The Australian Aquarius Festivals of 1971 and 1973 explicitly invoked this meme in the way identified by Monod and the “Aquarius” meme resonated even in Australia. Problematising “Aquarius” As for the astrological accuracy of the “Age of Aquarius meme”, professional astrologers argue about its dating, and the qualities that supposedly characterise it. When I consulted with two prominent workers in this field for the preparation of this article, I was astonished to find their respective dating of the putative Age of Aquarius were centuries apart! What memes were being “hosted” here? According to the lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. (Hair) My astrologer informants assert that the moon is actually in the seventh house twice every year, and that Jupiter aligns with Mars every two years. Yet we are still waiting for the outbreak of peace promised according to these astrological conditions. I am also informed that there’s no “real” astrological underpinning for the aspirations of the song’s lyrics, for an astrological “Age” is not determined by any planet but by constellations rising, they tell me. Most important, contrary to the aspirations embodied in the lyrics, peace was not guiding the planets and love was not about to “steer the stars”. For Mars is not the planet of love, apparently, but of war and conflict and, empowered with the expansiveness of Jupiter, it was the forceful aggression of a militaristic mind-set that actually prevailed as the “New Age” supposedly dawned. For the hippified summer of love had taken a nosedive with the tragic events at the Altamont speedway, near San Francisco in 1969, when biker gangs, enlisted to provide security for a concert performance by The Rolling Stones allegedly provoked violence, marring the event and contributing to a dawning disillusionment (for a useful coverage of the event and its historical context see Dalton). There was a lot of far-fetched poetic licence involved in this dreaming, then, but memes, according to Nikos Salingaros, are “greatly simplified versions of patterns”. “The simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate”, he writes, and the most successful memes “come with a great psychological appeal” (243, 260; emphasis mine). What could be retrieved from this inchoate idealism? Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation Aquarius, Aquarius. (Hair) In what follows I want to focus on this notion: “mind’s true liberation” by tracing the evolution of this project of “liberating” the mind, reflected in my personal journey. Nimbin and Aquarius I had attended the first Aquarius Festival, which came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971. I travelled there from Perth, overland, in a Ford Transit van, among a raggedy band of tie-dyed hippie actors, styled as The Campus Guerilla Theatre Troupe, re-joining our long-lost sisters and brothers as visionary pioneers of the New Age of Aquarius. Our visions were fueled with a suitcase full of potent Sumatran “buddha sticks” and, contrary to Biblical prophesies, we tended to see—not “through a glass darkly” but—in psychedelic, pop-, and op-art explosions of colour. We could see energy, man! Two years later, I found myself at the next Aquarius event in Nimbin, too, but by that time I inhabited a totally different mind-zone, albeit one characterised by the familiar, intense idealism. In the interim, I had been arrested in 1971 while “tripping out” in Sydney on potent “acid”, or LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide); had tried out political engagement at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne; had camped out in protest at the flooding of Lake Pedder in the Tasmanian wilderness; met a young guru, started meditating, and joined “the ashram”—part of the movement known as the Divine Light Mission, which originated in India and was carried to the “West” (including Australia) by an enthusiastic and evangelical following of drug-toking drop-outs who had been swarming through India intent on escaping the dominant culture of the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Thus, by the time of the 1973 event in Nimbin, while other festival participants were foraging for “gold top” magic mushrooms in farmers’ fields, we devotees had put aside such chemical interventions in conscious awareness to dig latrines (our “service” project for the event) and we invited everyone to join us for “satsang” in the yellow, canvas-covered, geodesic dome, to attend to the message of peace. The liberation meme had shifted through a mutation that involved lifestyle-changing choices that were less about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and more about engaging directly with “mind’s true liberation”. Raising Consciousness What comes into focus here is the meme of “consciousness raising”, which became the persistent project within which I lived and worked and had my being for many years. Triggered initially by the ingestion of those psychedelic substances that led to my shocking encounter with the police, the project was carried forward into the more disciplined environs of my guru’s ashrams. However, before my encounter with sustained spiritual practice I had tried to work the shift within the parameters of an ostensibly political framework. “Consciousness raising” was a form of political activism borrowed from the political sphere. Originally generated by Mao Zedong in China during the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the vested colonial interests that were choking Chinese nationalism in the 1940s, to our “distant, foreign brains” (Monod), as Western revolutionary romantics, Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book were taken up, in a kind of international counterculture solidarity with revolutionaries everywhere. It must be admitted, this solidarity was a fairly superficial gesture. Back in China it might be construed as part of a crude totalitarian campaign to inculcate Marxist-Leninist political ideas among the peasant classes (see Compestine for a fictionalised account of traumatic times; Han Suyin’s long-form autobiography—an early example of testimonio as personal and political history—offers an unapologetic account of a struggle not usually construed as sympathetically by Western commentators). But the meme (and the processes) of consciousness raising were picked up by feminists in the United States in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Brownmiller 21) and it was in this form I encountered it as an actor with the politically engaged theatre troupe, The Australian Performing Group, at Carlton’s Pram Factory Theatre in late 1971. The Performance Group I performed as a core member of the Group in 1971-72. Decisions as to which direction the Group should take were to be made as a collective, and the group veered towards anarchy. Most of the women were getting together outside of the confines of the Pram Factory to raise their consciousness within the Carlton Women’s Liberation Cell Group. While happy that the sexual revolution was reducing women’s sexual inhibitions, some of the men at the Factory were grumbling into their beer, disturbed that intimate details of their private lives—and their sexual performance—might be disclosed and raked over by a bunch of radical feminists. As they began to demand equal rights to orgasm in the bedroom, the women started to seek equal access within the performance group, too. They requested rehearsal time to stage the first production by the Women’s Theatre Group, newly formed under the umbrella of the wider collective. As all of the acknowledged writers in the Group so far were men—some of whom had not kept pace in consciousness raising—scripts tended to be viewed as part of a patriarchal plot, so Betty Can Jump was an improvised piece, with the performance material developed entirely by the cast in workshop-style rehearsals, under the direction of Kerry Dwyer (see Blundell, Zuber-Skerritt 21, plus various contributors at www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/). I was the only male in the collective included in the cast. Several women would have been more comfortable if no mere male were involved at all. My gendered attitudes would scarcely have withstood a critical interrogation but, as my partner was active in launching the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Director Kerry Dwyer liked my physicalised approach to performance (we were both inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski and the earlier surrealistic theories of Antonin Artaud), and I was cast to play all the male parts, whatever they would be. Memorable material came up in improvisation, much of which made it into the performances, but my personal favorite didn’t make the cut. It was a sprawling movement piece where I was “born” out of a symbolic mass of writhing female bodies. It was an arduous process and, after much heaving and huffing, I emerged from the birth canal stammering “SSSS … SSSS … SSMMMO-THER”! The radical reversioning of culturally authorised roles for women has inevitably, if more slowly, led to a re-thinking of the culturally approved and reinforced models of masculinity, too, once widely accepted as entirely biologically ordained rather than culturally constructed. But the possibility of a queer re-versioning of gender would be recognised only slowly. Liberation Meanwhile, Dennis Altman was emerging as an early spokesman for gay, or homosexual, liberation and he was invited to address the collective. Altman’s stirring book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, had recently been published, but none of us had read it. Radical or not, the Group had shown little evidence of sensitivity to gender-queer issues. My own sexuality was very much “oppressed” rather than liberated and I would have been loath to use “queer” to describe myself. The term “homosexual” was fraught with pejorative, quasi-medical associations and, in a collective so divided across strict and sometimes hostile gender boundaries, deviant affiliations got short shrift. Dennis was unsure of his reception before this bunch of apparent “heteros”. Sitting at the rear of the meeting, I admired his courage. It took more self-acceptance than I could muster to confront the Group on this issue at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, “homosexuality” was still something I was supposed to “get over”, so I failed to respond to Altman’s implicit invitation to come out and join the party. The others saw me in relationship with a woman and whatever doubts they might have carried about the nature of my sexuality were tactfully suspended. Looking back, I am struck by the number of simultaneous poses I was trying to maintain: as an actor; as a practitioner of an Artaudian “theatre of cruelty”; as a politically committed activist; and as a “hetero”-sexual. My identity was an assemblage of entities posing as “I”; it was as if I were performing a self. Little gay boys are encouraged from an early age to hide their real impulses, not only from others—in the very closest circle, the family; at school; among one’s peers—but from themselves, too. The coercive effects of shaming usually fix the denial into place in our psyches before we have any intellectual (or political) resources to consider other options. Growing up trying to please, I hid my feelings. In my experience, it could be downright dangerous to resist the subtle and gross coercions that applied around gender normativity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, of the British object-relations school, argues that when the environment does not support the developing personality and requires the person to sacrifice his or her own spontaneous needs to adapt to environmental demands, there is not even a resting-place for individual experience and the result is a failure in the primary narcissistic state to evolve an individual. The “individual” then develops as an extension of the shell rather than that of the core [...] What there is left of a core is hidden away and is difficult to find even in the most far-reaching analysis. The individual then exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true self hidden. (212) How to connect to that hidden core, then? “Mind’s true liberation...” Alienated from the performative version of selfhood, but still inspired by the promise of liberation, even in the “fuzzy” form for which my inchoate hunger yearned (sexual liberation? political liberation? mystical liberation?), I was left to seek out a more authentic basis for selfhood, one that didn’t send me spinning along the roller-coaster of psychedelic drugs, or lie to me with the nostrums of a toxic, most forms of which would deny me, as a sexual, moral and legal pariah, the comforts of those “anchorage points to the social matrix” identified by Soddy (cited in Mol 58). My spiritual inquiry was “counter” to these institutionalised models of religious culture. So, I began to read my way through a myriad of books on comparative religion. And to my surprise, rather than taking up with the religions of antique cultures, instead I encountered a very young guru, initially as presented in a simply drawn poster in the window of Melbourne’s only vegetarian restaurant (Shakahari, in Carlton). “Are you hungry and tired of reading recipe books?” asked the figure in the poster. I had little sense of where that hunger would lead me, but it seemed to promise a fulfilment in ways that the fractious politics of the APG offered little nourishment. So, while many of my peers in the cities chose to pursue direct political action, and others experimented with cooperative living in rural communes, I chose the communal lifestyle of the ashram. In these different forms, then, the conscious raising meme persisted when other challenges raised by the counterculture either faded or were absorbed in the mainstream. I finally came to realise that the intense disillusionment process I had been through (“dis-illusionment” as the stripping away of illusions) was the beginning of awakening, in effect a “spiritual initiation” into a new way of seeing myself and my “place” in the world. Buddhist teachers might encourage this very kind of stripping away of false notions as part of their teaching, so the aspiration towards the “true liberation” of the mind expressed in the Aquarian visioning might be—and in my case, actually has been and continues to be—fulfilled to a very real extent. Gurus and the entire turn towards Eastern mysticism were part of the New Age meme cluster prevailing during the early 1970s, but I was fortunate to connect with an enduring set of empirical practices that haven’t faded with the fashions of the counterculture. A good guitarist would never want to play in public without first tuning her instrument. In a similar way, it is now possible for me to tune my mind back to a deeper, more original source of being than the socially constructed sense of self, which had been so fraught with conflicts for me. I have discovered that before gender, and before sexuality, in fact, pulsing away behind the thicket of everyday associations, there is an original, unconditioned state of beingness, the awareness of which can be reclaimed through focused meditation practices, tested in a wide variety of “real world” settings. For quite a significant period of time I worked as an instructor in the method on behalf of my guru, or mentor, travelling through a dozen or so countries, and it was through this exposure that I was able to observe that the practices worked independently of culture and that “mind’s true liberation” was in many ways a de-programming of cultural indoctrinations (see Marsh, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2007 for testimony of this process). In Japan, Zen roshi might challenge their students with the koan: “Show me your original face, before you were born!” While that might seem to be an absurd proposal, I am finding that there is a potential, if unexpected, liberation in following through such an inquiry. As “hokey” as the Aquarian meme-set might have been, it was a reflection of the idealistic hope that characterised the cluster of memes that aggregated within the counterculture, a yearning for healthier life choices than those offered by the toxicity of the military-industrial complex, the grossly exploitative effects of rampant Capitalism and a politics of cynicism and domination. The meme of the “true liberation” of the mind, then, promised by the heady lyrics of a 1970s hippie musical, has continued to bear fruit in ways that I could not have imagined. References Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. Blundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. 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