Articles de revues sur le sujet « Arbitrato rituale »

Rituals are found in all types of performance domains, from high-stakes athletics and military to the daily morning preparations of the working family. Yet despite their ubiquity and widespread importance for humans, we know very little of ritual’s causal basis and how (if at all) they facilitate goal-directed performance. Here, in a fully pre-registered pre/post experimental design, we examine a candidate proximal mechanism, the error-related negativity (ERN), in testing the prediction that ritual modulates neural performance-monitoring. Participants completed an arbitrary ritual—novel actions repeated at home over one week—followed by an executive function task in the lab during electroencephalographic (EEG) recording. Results revealed that relative to pre rounds, participants showed a reduced ERN in the post rounds, after completing the ritual in the lab. Despite a muted ERN, there was no evidence that the reduction in neural monitoring led to performance deficit (nor a performance improvement). Generally, the findings are consistent with the longstanding view that ritual buffers against uncertainty and anxiety. Our results indicate that ritual guides goal-directed performance by regulating the brain’s response to personal failure.

Entre sociedades amerindias del noroeste mexicano, la muerte de una persona produce un equívoco y un vínculo indebido entre el fallecido y su colectivo de origen; el equívoco debe solucionarse y el vínculo disolverse. Morir implica el inicio de un “Gran viaje” por parte la persona fallecida. Sus parientes y amigos deben trabajar en conjunto para ayudarla a transmigrar a un nuevo plano de existencia. El objetivo de este artículo es describir algunos aspectos de estos rituales para establecer conexiones de transformación con dos pasajes de las Mitológicas de Lévi-Strauss. Por un lado, evocaré el mito de referencia y el ritual asociado y, por otro, remitiré a la vida breve tratada en Lo crudo y lo cocido. Veremos cómo los rituales –con sus propias plasticidades– administran un arbitraje imposible que permite construir la buena distancia entre relaciones indebidas creando conexiones y desconexiones en distintos planos de existencia.

In the realities of the millennium the transcendent is banalized – at any moment the user of web 2.0 can find himself in the meditation space of the Buddhist ritual of building a sand mandala or order a moleben in one of the Orthodox churches of the world. The Internet and new media technologies provide an opportunity to host and store data that is potentially accessible to many people. Sacred texts of various religious traditions, rituals and practical instructions to them, liturgies, molebens, magic formulas and so on, are no longer the domain of a narrow circle of charismatic professionals. And that in itself raises the question of authenticity and authority to any user of such information and practices. Are genuine and credible online ritual practices, digitized sacred and teacher texts, symbolic images, icons, tanks, vlogs with detailed instructions on the rules of prayers by agreement or online collective pujas? And, if the adept of the religion is an offline authority to which this question may be forwarded, what should do a neophyte, an interested person or a researcher of religions? The focus of the article is the methodology of studying digital discourse of Orthodoxy concerning the epistemic authority and the legitimacy of online rituals. The author analyzes in detail the key concepts of digital studies interdisciplinary research field. The typology of online religious epistemic authorities by H. Kempbell, the concept of «strategic arbitration» by P.H. Chon and the concept of «religious digital third space» by S. Huve and N.Ash-Sheibiare examined in depth. The results of the author’s probing online study of the Orthodox online practices and digital discourse around them are of particular interest. As a final chord, the article offers specific promising directions of online research of digital Orthodox discourse of Orthodoxy. As such, the paper presents the narrative practices of theological bloggers and theo bloggers, the strategic arbitration of theological bloggers regarding the epistemic authority of the repertoire of variations of the practice of «prayer by agreement» on the digital platforms of the Orthodox social network «Elica» and the mobile application «Prayer by Agreement» and, finally, the hybrid digital proposal on rituals and practices of the network «Elica», «Notes».

Heinemann’s lavishly illustrated book aims first and foremost to study the images of Dionysos and his cortège on symposium ware during the 5th century BC in their social and ritual contexts. The rationale behind the research is the belief that the decoration deployed on figured pottery is not arbitrary but is intimately and meaningfully intertwined with the use of the vase. Furthermore, the meanings of such imagery are not a prioristic but need to be retrieved by the viewer every time s/he interacts with the object, in an everlasting ‘battle’ between object and subject. Retrieving the potential resonance of such iconography to a given viewer requires in turn an examination of the communication processes—i.e. rituals, plays, etc.—in which the symposium ware is inserted and the particular needs it helped fulfill, which are, unfortunately, lost to us.

With the birth and growth of the arbitration phenomena in recent decades, establishment of Court of Arbitration in the form of International Commercial Arbitration Law, international treaties and domestic independent and particular laws by countries, the increasing tendency of traders and businesses to resolve problems through this body gradually leads to excellence of the position of this body and typically coercion and obligation of officials and supporters of this entity to modify or supplement the former rules or ratify new and progressive legislation with broader discretionary limits for arbitrators, so that the establishment and ratification of regulations in form of conventions with membership of many countries has been the result of meeting will of politicians with fortune and tendency of businessmen, merchants and etc. If there is alleged invalidity of the contract, Limits and scope of arbitration referee. This issue calls “competence-competence” principle and we seek to investigate whether the possibility of accepting the competence to judge. It means making decision about competence of referee. Competency of arbitration board is inherent and it is created by law and it is separate from competency of public arbitration. Arbitration ritual theory is differences as a separate method of dispute resolution in international commercial transactions. However, Consistent with the dominance of the national authority on private equity, the entity is located at the foot of the rights of nature into the public law; although, private perspective is dominance.

AbstractGrounded against a background of a critique of Western characterizations of time in Africa in simple terms such as cyclical or devoid of a sense of the future, the essay analyzes the complex ways in which Africans experience time. Although no single time construct can be applied to all of Africa, since each culture experiences time dynamically in its own way, certain commonalities can be drawn. Today, as millions of Africans find themselves at the confluence of tradition and modernity, the way in which they experience time is multilevel. Conceptions of time are embedded in multiple institutions and practices: life cycles; occupational calendars observed by farmers, fishermen and other workers; ritual calendrical systems in which there are definite patterns of days set aside for performing specific rituals of state; annual festivals that mark the commencement of the local year rather than the arbitrary January 1; myths, legends and genealogies that embody temporal constructs; various indigenous mechanisms and strategies used to establish chronologies, etc.

Sequence learning underlies many uniquely human behaviours, from complex tool use to language and ritual. To understand whether this fundamental cognitive feature is uniquely derived in humans requires a comparative approach. We propose that the vicarious (but not individual) learning of novel arbitrary sequences represents a human cognitive specialization. To test this hypothesis, we compared the abilities of human children aged 3–5 years and orangutans to learn different types of arbitrary sequences (item-based and spatial-based). Sequences could be learned individually (by trial and error) or vicariously from a human (social) demonstrator or a computer (ghost control). We found that both children and orangutans recalled both types of sequence following trial-and-error learning; older children also learned both types of sequence following social and ghost demonstrations. Orangutans' success individually learning arbitrary sequences shows that their failure to do so in some vicarious learning conditions is not owing to general representational problems. These results provide new insights into some of the most persistent discontinuities observed between humans and other great apes in terms of complex tool use, language and ritual, all of which involve the cultural learning of novel arbitrary sequences. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours’.

This paper aims to describe a traditional ritual in Tanimbar-Maluku, which is the ritual of asking for requests or applications with its own uniqueness in which the position and value of women are very high because they have a special room that no one can find, with this ritual, women's existence is in the spotlight both in the scope of the family and society in dealing with polemic about the position of women today. The problem in this paper is focused on the value of women in adat which can be implemented or equated with the reality of social life so that the position of men and women can be equal. To approach this problem the theoretical references from the theory of cultural structuralism and the theory of postmodern feminism are used to collaborate between interconnected cultural and feminist roles. The data is collected through observation and interview results from the informant descriptively ... and the data analysis conducted is qualitative analysis. The results obtained are ritual entrance asking to pay attention to the position and values of women; it is not arbitrary to get women (Tanimbar) so this paper provides a concrete contribution that reconstructs the understanding of women's position and values in cultural and social contexts so that there is a balance between men and women.

This article provides a corrective to recent scholarship surrounding modern migration control, which has emphasised the shared origins of the legal systems created to control migration in the us, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The article demonstrates that the implementation of migration controls in British colonies was arbitrary. It uses the personal papers of Clarence Wilfred Cousins, the Chief Immigration Officer in the Cape, then South Africa (1905–1922), to demonstrate the role of frontier guards in shaping migration experiences. The article highlights the uses and limitations of using ‘ritual’ to understand migration control and how border spaces are experienced.

This paper considers the definition and meaning of an eruv1 as “territoriality without sovereignty” in Jewish tradition (Fonrobert 2005). It begins by exploring the origin and development of the term eruv itself, as well as its applications in different urban settings. It distinguishes between, on the one hand, the “enclosure” of the eruv that is made up of various natural and artificial structures that define its perimeter and, on the other hand, the “ritual community” created by the symbolic collection of bread that is known as eruvei chatzeirot. It suggests that much of the controversy, including legal issues of separation of church and state, as well as emotional issues such as the charge of “ghetto-ization”, surrounding urban eruvin (plural of eruv) may be connected to the identification of the area demarcated by an eruv as a “territoriality”. It argues that the enclosure of an eruv is not in itself religious in nature but rather makes up a completely arbitrary and generic “space”, and that it is only through and on account of the eruvei chatzeirot that this space becomes meaningful as a purely symbolic “place” one day a week (on the Sabbath). In the course of this analysis, it considers the one “weekday” on which an eruv may be significant – the Jewish holiday of Purim – and how on that day it may be a tool by which the area defined as part of a given city may be extended.

The kings of Dahomey in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries claimed to ‘own’ the heads of all their subjects. Contemporary European observers of the pre-colonial period understood this claim in terms of the king's exclusive (and arbitrary) right to inflict capital punishment, decapitation being the normal Dahomian method of execution. More recent Dahomian tradition, however, suggests a ritual aspect to the claim, connecting it with stories that the early king Wegbaja (the second or third ruler of Dahomey, but conventionally regarded as its true founder and the creator of many of its political and judicial institutions) prohibited the decapitation of corpses before burial, supposedly in order to prevent the misappropriation of the heads for use in the manufacture of ‘amulets’, or for ritual abuse by enemies of the deceased. The article argues, drawing upon contemporary European accounts of the pre-colonial period and ethnographic material from the neighbouring and related society of Porto-Novo as well as Dahomian traditions, that unlike many of the supposed innovations traditionally attributed to Wegbaja this prohibition of the decapitation of corpses is probably a genuine Dahomian innovation, even if its attribution specifically to Wegbaja is doubtful, but that its significance and purpose is misrepresented in Dahomian tradition. The decapitation of corpses in earlier times was probably related to the practice of separate burial and subsequent veneration of the deceased''s head as part of the ancestor cult of his own lineage. The suppression of this practice by the kings of Dahomey can be understood in terms of their desire (for which there is other evidence) to downgrade the ancestor cults of the component lineages of Dahomey, in order to emphasize the special status of the public cult of the royal ancestors, and more generally to concentrate or monopolize ritual as well as political and judicial power in the hands of the monarchy.

AbstractCharacteristic of the recent cognitive approach to religion (CSR) is the thesis that religious discourse and practice are rooted in an inveterate human propensity to explain events in terms of agent causality. This thesis readily lends itself to the critical understanding of religious belief as “our intuitive psychology run amok.” This effective restriction of the scientific critique of agent causality to notions of supernatural agency appears arbitrary, however, in light of evidence from cognitive and social psychology that our sense of human agency, including our own, is interpretive in nature. In this paper I argue that a cognitive approach to religion that extends the critique of agent causality to the folk psychological experience of conscious will is able to shed light on several characteristically religious phenomena, such as spirit possession, ritual action, and spontaneous action in Zen Buddhism.

The publication of Sir James Frazer's Totemism and Exogamy raised as many problems for anthropologists as it tried to solve: namely, why do symbols that stand for any social group become imbued with religious, ritual, social, and mystical significance, and how do these totemic conceptual systems relate to systems of action? More often than not, symbols of group unity—whatever the group—possess more than one dimension, and these dimensions are often hard to differentiate analytically and ethnographically. In the mainstream of anthropology symbols and their use have been deemed to reflect patterns of social organization. Within this paradigm the majority of authors treat the choice of symbol as either essentially arbitrary or deterministically compelled. We find that the old paradigm of symbol as a reflection of something essentially social—cultural inversion, as some authors would have it, or vaguely and vulgarly determined as others put it—is rather suspect.

Abstract Amidst the politics of the Mamluk-era spice route, why did the standard-bearers of Islamic law routinely oppose the sultanate’s imposition of an alms-tax on merchandise (zakāt al-tijāra), despite the abundance of support for such a tax within the classical tradition of Islamic law? Rather than contending – as some modern scholars have – that prominent jurists developed loopholes that circumvented the original intent of the law to protect the wealthy and the ruling class, I argue that it was precisely the jurists’ careful defense of exemptions and exclusions that allowed them to define the essence of zakāt against forms of taxation they considered unlawful. By narrowing the scope of zakāt, jurists attempted to achieve a moral aim that went beyond the ritual purification of wealth: a limit on the sultanate’s otherwise arbitrary power to tax Muslims as it wished. In doing so, they alleviated some of the tax burden for spice merchants and camel herders alike.

The situation in the world caused by the spread of the new coronavirus infection forced the executive authorities in many countries to issue acts that provided for strict restrictions on constitutional rights, in particular, freedom of religion. First of all, we are talking about the prohibition of worship, religious rituals and coram populo ceremonies, the use of a truncated burial format in order to protect public health. The article aims to investigate the measures taken by state authorities and religious organizations in Russia and Italy, to assess their validity and proportionality, based on the standards of the Council of Europe. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the mechanisms of interaction between the authorities of various levels and religious leaders in order to develop acceptable solutions, identified the similarities and differences of the relevant legal regulation in these states. Author of the article tries to answer the question of a fair balance of constitutional values in emergency conditions - the protection of public health and the ability to manifest one's religious beliefs through external actions (forum externum). Revealing the influence of digital technologies on the transformation of worship and religious rituals in conditions of isolation of citizens, the author draws attention to the fact that in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, “virtual faith” cannot replace Eucharistic communion in the temple, which should be taken into account when developing and applying regulatory legal acts. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion about the importance of finding compromise solutions and notes that the distortion of understanding of the norms on the autonomy of religious organizations and the fundamental provisions of the secular nature of the state leads to a disproportionate restriction of the constitutional rights and freedoms of citizens: the arbitrary administrative closure of religious buildings, the involvement of believers and clergymen in criminal proceedings. and administrative responsibility.

Abstract This article focuses on a Tamil Hindu woman named Aaru, who embodied the Goddess in possession performances from age thirteen, resisted marriage through her twenties, and committed suicide at twenty--nine. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Aaru and her family conducted between 2006 and 2019, it analyses narratives concerning her untimely death, subsequent deification, and eventual domestication as a pūvāṭaikkāri. It highlights the hermeneutical challenges associated with three intersecting spheres: the dominant categories that shape the scholarly understanding of Hinduism; vernacular Hinduism as revealed in Aaru’s complex story; and the ethnographic research and writing process. I resist an arbitrary resolution of the gaps and seeming inconsistencies that abound in these accounts, arguing instead that we can enlarge and nuance our understandings of matters as diverse as ritual relationships with the dead, the nature of Tamil family deities, and the gendered tensions of the contemporary moment if we hold space for multiple interpretive possibilities. Indeed, Aaru’s case offers us significant resources for a fuller, more inclusive appreciation of the textures of vernacular Hinduism – Hinduism as it is experienced, lived, and practiced in particular places and contexts – and compels us to consider the limitations of prevailing interpretive paradigms and the fragmental and shifting nature of ethnographic knowledge.

Bach and Harnish’s (1979) Speech Act Schema (SAS) breaks down into a series of inferential steps the process involved in understanding an utterance as a particular kind of speech act. At the heart of the SAS lies the notion of illocutionary intention, a special kind of reflexive intention whose fulfilment consists in its recognition. This article re-assesses Bach and Harnish’s Speech Act Schema in two ways. First, I discuss three types of indirect speech acts—acts exchanged between intimates, alerts, and ritual indirectness—arguing that in all three cases, a perlocutionary effect of re-affirming or testing the degree of sharedness between speaker and addressee is also achieved, making all three types of acts overt collateral acts in Bach and Harnish’s terminology. Second, I consider cases when the speaker’s illocutionary intention exists in only a rudimentary form, such as children’s early directives and metaphorical utterances expressing feelings. In such cases, the hearer is called upon to play a more active role, by constructing (rather than recognizing) an understanding based on the linguistic material provided by the speaker. The need to account for this second set of acts challenges the centrality of the speaker’s illocutionary intention as the ultimate arbitrator of communicative outcomes and forces us to accord at least equal weight to the contribution of the hearer. The end result is a novel emphasis on the intersubjective aspects of linguistic communication, which were given less prominence in more traditional models, such as the SAS.

This study is a literary study that discusses the picture of the social reality of Japanese society in a novel by Rei Kimura entitled Butterfly in the Wind. The method used is descriptive analytic. The data are in the form of excerpts or sentence excerpts in novels that describe the social reality of Japanese society. The theory used is the sociological theory of literature and Marx's social analysis approach. From the analysis, it is concluded that various social realities of Japanese society are depicted in the novel Butterfly in the Wind which includes aspects of politics, economy, culture, education, family, morals, gender, religion, and technology. In the political aspect, it is illustrated that the attitude of government (bakufu) is arbitrary and unfair, especially among farmers and fishermen groups. The economic aspect illustrates the economic gap between groups of aristocrats and ordinary people. Cultural and religious aspects are reflected in the patriarchal culture of Japanese society and Buddhist rituals which are carried out such as funeral processions. The aspect of education illustrates the unfairness and distribution of education for Japanese society at that time. The family aspect shows a picture of affection between family members, especially parents and children. The moral aspect is reflected in the behavior of people who hate Okichi's background as a concubine. The gender aspect illustrates the gender bias between men and women. Finally, on the technological aspect, the reality of Japanese technology is still low compared to European and American countries.

One relates to existential reality through the lenses that one's culture supplies. The culture of each society, in turn, includes the way it relates to time and, as a result, to history. Time as a physical quantity would appear to be a neutral concept, but its measurement is arbitrary. Time is certainly not neutral in any culture. It assumes various qualities, depending on the symbolic meaning that persons attribute to it. One therefore finds different approaches to history or to the writing of history in different cultures. The Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic eras and the Romans in the ancient world attempted to write history for its own sake and to satisfy intellectual curiosity. On the other hand, the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians wrote chronographies, but not history in the western sense. Ancient Israel lies between these: one finds historiography in the Bible, but not history for its own sake. The Bible presents a view of divine providence in history, with God's essence being visible through historical deeds. Great importance thus attaches to remembrance through various rituals, in prayers and in celebrations on the Shabbat, festive days, and mourning and fast days. These do not, however, require those remembering to be historians. On the contrary, a society that molds its members in accordance with unequivocal memory patterns does not permit them to examine its history in a critical fashion; it constructs in them a collective memory, which transmits a single incontestable message.

Study of symbols or the theory of symbolism makes micro study of the culture. Symbols are the gestures, objects and language, which form the basis of human communication. Interpretation of symbol may differ according to the culture. At the same time a symbol may have one meaning in one culture another meaning in another culture. Symbols represent signs which are used to signify objects, real or imaginary. Symbols are arbitrary based on convention of culture. Interpretation of symbol depends on culture. Symbols are means of Communication of language, a form of ritual expression, cultural interpretation, expression of art and belief. Symbols should not be looked at in an abstract way and at meaning as constructed apart from human action but rather at the way meaning is constructed and used in the context of this action. Symbolism studies how a culture functions on the basis of its meanings, how a symbol is interpreted and so on. Symbolism studies the interrelationship between culture, language and people. Culture is constructed on the basis of different symbols. There are different meanings of symbols. The same symbol in different contexts may have different kinds of meanings. Symbols are directed by cultural norms. As cultural norms are diverse symbols too are multicoil, multifocal and multivariate and they can represent many things. Symbols do not necessarily have the same meaning in different context. Thick description by Clifford Geertz takes into account the fact that any aspect of human behavior has more than one meaning.

What triggered the emergence of uniquely human behaviors (language, religion, music) some 100,000 years ago? A non-circular, speculative theory based on the mother-infant relationship is presented. Infant “cuteness” evokes the infant schema and motivates nurturing; the analogous mother schema (MS) is a multimodal representation of the carer from the fetal/infant perspective, motivating fearless trust. Prenatal MS organizes auditory, proprioceptive, and biochemical stimuli (voice, heartbeat, footsteps, digestion, body movements, biochemicals) that depend on maternal physical/emotional state. In human evolution, bipedalism and encephalization led to earlier births and more fragile infants. Cognitively more advanced infants survived by better communicating with and motivating (manipulating) mothers and carers. The ability to link arbitrary sound patterns to complex meanings improved (proto-language). Later in life, MS and associated emotions were triggered in ritual settings by repetitive sounds and movements (early song, chant, rhythm, dance), subdued light, dull auditory timbre, psychoactive substances, unusual tastes/smells and postures, and/or a feeling of enclosure. Operant conditioning can explain why such actions were repeated. Reflective consciousness emerged as infant-mother dyads playfully explored intentionality (theory of mind, agent detection) and carers predicted and prevented fatal infant accidents (mental time travel). The theory is consistent with cross-cultural commonalities in altered states (out-of-body, possessing, floating, fusing), spiritual beings (large, moving, powerful, emotional, wise, loving), and reports of strong musical experiences and divine encounters. Evidence is circumstantial and cumulative; falsification is problematic.

<p>Humans as socio-cultural creatures can never be separated from the use of symbols, including symbols related to linguistics, which are used as sacred symbols in Hinduism in Bali, namely scripts, both Wreastra and Wijaksara Scripts. Hindus in Bali, for the most part, consider that the Wreastra script is only an ordinary script, which has no philosophical meaning, making researchers interested in studying the philosophical meaning in the Wreastra Script that is accompanied by the study of Wijaksara Script.</p><p>Starting from this background, there are several research problem formulations, namely what is the meaning of the Wreastra and the Wijaksara Scripts in Hinduism. To answer these problems, the researcher use structural theories, semiotic theories, and theories of meaning. This type of research is qualitative research, with a philosophical-symbolic approach.</p><p>The results of this study are the Wreastra and Wijaksara scripts have a meaning as worship to the God with all its manifestations adjusted to the script used. The application of the Wreastra and Wijaksara scripts in religious ritual activities in Bali as part of socio-religious activities can be seen from its use in the Rerajahang Kajang, Ulap-Ulap and Pecaruan rites.</p><p>The conclusion that can be drawn is that the Wreastra and Wijaksara scripts have a high philosophical meaning of God, so that in writing and its use is not arbitrary, always starting with prayer of worship to the God.</p>

As an archaeologist who ‘works’ with water, my experience has largely focused on the historical ecology of water management within agricultural landscapes (particularly in Eastern Africa) and I have only just begun to think about the broader materiality of water itself, but in this context I find Strang's essay thought-provoking and extremely useful with a great deal to commend. If I read it correctly, Strang's key premise is that water is ‘good to think with’ since it permeates all aspects of human and biophysical processes – thinking through water thus allows us to think across scales, from the molecular to the global, and to explore recursive relations at each level. At the same time, as an element integral to the physical/biological sustenance of all life, and also a core symbolic or cognitive referent, tracing relationalities of water within and between communities therefore also forces us to bridge common disciplinary boundaries and theoretical approaches. Thus at the same time as using water to ‘think through’ human–material relations, Strang also uses water to think through and reconcile different approaches within social theory. Finally, Strang's focus on materiality argues that water's immutable physical properties determine certain ‘universal’ and ‘non-arbitrary’ approaches to water – both physically in the sense of its management (capture, storage, irrigation, drainage) and symbolically and cognitively in terms of water's various positions in ideological regimes and its consequent uses in ceremonial and ritual life. Overall, Strang argues that the immutable physical properties of water induce physical and cognitive responses such that we should think of water as possessing a certain material agency.

Introduction. The paper deals with studying the formation of culture elements during the Cossacks revival process in the late 20th – early 21st centuries. The cultural pattern of a community is always changing. Cultural practices and traditions of the past get integrated into the modern social conditions, while new values and rituals assume the character of traditional ones. The topicality of the subject derives from the fact that the Cossack culture was subject to a dramatic transformation in the 20th century, while many elements of the culture were wiped out. The transmission of the cultural tradition was interrupted. The Cossacks revival in the late 20th century supposed a return to traditional historical forms. However, this task proved difficult because of the break in the transmission of the ethnic culture. The formation of the present-day Cossack cultural system supposed the selection of some elements of culture from the past and their integration into the new conditions as well as the creation of new forms of culture that would contribute to the cultural identification of the Cossacks. Methods and materials. Historiography has predominantly described the traditional forms of the Cossack culture. The issues of cultural construction were touched upon only occasionally. This paper applies the historical and chronological, historicalgenetic methods as well as the conception of socio-cultural construction. Analysis. During the Cossacks revival process its participants demonstrated a sharp increase of interest in the traditional forms of culture. The attempts at their integration into the present-day conditions led to the deformation of cultural forms. They lost their authenticity and transformed themselves into secondary forms of culture, thus cultural patterns of the modern Cossacks got changed. At the same time, new cultural traditions and norms were “invented”. Their function was to fix Cossacks identity and to show that the Cossacks do exist in the social life of the country. The adaptation of the traditions and historical elements of the Cossack socio-cultural system had its peculiarities. The traditions and elements were taken from different epochs and formed an arbitrary composition of different cultural phenomena. Traditions played an important role in the Cossacks revival process because they acted as cultural identification markers for the Cossack community. For that reason even new cultural practices were given the appearance of traditions. Results. In the late 20th – early 21st centuries the restoration of the Cossack culture was actually its construction. A number of trends can be traced in the process. They developed concurrently and contributed to the creation of new cultural milieu.

The article analyzes the problems of anthropological linguistics. In the last decades, the ideas of anthropological linguistics have been actualized, which contributed to the revival of interest in Alexander von Humboldt’s idea that a language is “activity of national spirit.” It focuses on the study of the manifestations of the “human spirit” in language, customs, rituals, myths – in other words, the analysis of the processes of perception, knowledge, thinking, and man’s emotional attitude to the world. Language as “activity of national spirit” in accordance with the direction of anthropological linguistics is considered both as a tool of mental ordering of the world and as a mirror of ethnic worldview. Before linguistics opened a new field of research related to the hermeneutic study of language, which allowed us to move from empirical data to their interpretation analysis, i.e. to rise from the level of registration of facts to the level of their explanation. From linguistics “in itself and for itself” (F. Saussure), it turned into a “why/why-linguistics” (A.E. Kibrik). And in this transformation of interpretative linguistics, cognitive science has a special role and gives cultural, ethno-psychological, and historical explanation to the linguistic facts. The author believes that an adequate description of the nation’s psychology and its culture should be obtained based on the data of their language. Appeals to authorities’ opinions in the field of literature or philosophical thought are not convincing, because it is always a point of view from the outside, which is subjective. According to the author, it is necessary to abandon the imposed assessments and penetrate into the ideology of language. Moreover, the success of cognitive-oriented linguistics suggests that the language structure is not arbitrary and it is significantly motivated by the organization of cognitive structure, which is reflected in the mirror of natural language. Using a lot of dialect material, the author proves that by studying the dialect word we will be able to understand not only the archetype of our culture, but also its true essence. The author illustrates this position on the example of such basic concept of Russian traditional culture as WORK. The analysis of dialect material in the proposed perspective allowed to critically assess the negative perception of the Russian people, who are allegedly characterized as lazy and passive. According to the author, WORK is not just an activity, but an ethically significant activity, which is still determined by the Russian mentality, so the idea that Russians do not accept hard work is denial of the moral basics of their life.

Harvey Whitehouse offers a complex and stimulating theory of rituals that bind people together and propagate via affiliative imitation. The Ritual Animal argues that fundamental problems of group cooperation can be solved by causally opaque and goal-demoted behaviors which produce arbitrary cultural conventions, honest signals of membership, and collective fused identities. This amply evidenced and compelling account explains a broad variety of prominent examples, yet other key causal mechanisms emerge from the ethnographic literature and analytical reflection on affiliation and groups. Taking a glance at some widespread and unusual rituals, this paper highlights the importance of cultural transmission via pedagogy with or without copying, costly signaling and coordination without coalitional groups, and meta-representations of impenetrable ritual efficacy. Future research can explain how bonding rituals become central features of social interaction without relying upon a quite debatable adaptive function of ritual behavior for cooperation – or anything else.

Rituals and texts have had different and arbitrary status and roles within the different traditions and discourses of Buddhist teachings. In the open hermeneutics of Mahayana ideology they have both been negated and affirmed as a means of reaching and expressing truth. The aim of this article is, with examples from primarily contemporary Japanese Zen Buddhism, to explain rituals in the performative and institutional contexts. It is argues that power, exchange and meaning are important and related frames of interpretation.

In the literature on sacred food in Hinduism, vegetarian offerings to Sanskritic deities (Sanskrit naivedya, prasada; Tamil naivettiyam, pracatam) are privileged. If meat is mentioned, it is in reference to sacrificial worship; and even so, the analysis often stops at ritual killing. Here, however, I focus on the wealth of religious meanings and ritual dynamics inherent to the ritual display and communal feasting—incorporating, if not centred on, meat—known as pataiyal or feast-offerings, performed in or after worship. I describe two forms of these feast-offerings: (1) following sacrificial worship to tutelary deities in rural Tamil Nadu and (2) during worship to divinized ancestors in Singapore. Departing from Brahminical exegeses, I probe the meanings and merits of meat offerings from the perspective of those immersed in the agrarian productive process (farmers and those from farming traditions) for whom eating meat, if not killing animals, is routine. Meat offerings, I argue, are not so much arbitrators of ritual purity-pollution or hierarchy, but more of kinship and commensality, and thus intimacy, between specific deities and their devotees. I foreground a pragmatic everyday theology, not necessarily explicit, but inherent to the lives, worlds, religious beliefs and ritual practices of ordinary peoples living their ordinary lives.

This article examines the ambiguities of arbitrage, focusing on illegal coffee trade across the Uganda-Kenya border. I show how residents of the borderlands harnessed ordinary tools (gunny sacks, tin cans, and gravity scales) and cultural repertoires (kinship, language, and ritual) to cultivate and capitalize on difference. They reworked territorial jurisdiction, measurement standards, and surface appearances in a form of arbitrage known as magendo. While magendo is an ordinary occurrence at the border, I focus on a particular period in which magendo reached spectacular new levels. The resulting binge economy was characterized by competitive gift-giving and interethnic conviviality, but its excessive margins eventually challenged prevailing notions of moral selfhood, gender relations, and the authority of elder men. Seeing arbitrage not merely as the reserve of high finance but also as a strategy of African frontiers provides a way to connect the anthropology of finance to enduring concerns around the postcolonial politics of borders, gerontocracy, and value. Muhtasari Nakala hii inachunguza utata wa arbitrage. Maandishi yangu yanazingatia biashara wa kahawa mpakani mwa Kenya na Uganda. Katika nakala hii, ninaonyesha jinsi wakazi wa mipakani walitumia zana za kila siku (magunia, madebe, na mizani) na pia mbinu za kitamaduni (ukoo, lugha, na mila) kuzalisha na kukuza tofauti za kisokoni na faida. Aidha wahusika hawa walipinda na kufinyanga dhana kuhusu udhibiti wa mipaka, desturi za kukadiri, na muonekano wa nje kwa kupitia kitendo cha arbitrage: almaarufu kama magendo. Ingawa uchukuzi magendo si taratibu geni kwa uchumi za mipakani, nakala hii inazingatia wakati ambapo uchuuzi wa kahawa ulifikia kilele cha kustaajabisha na kuleta uchumi wa ukwasi. Kwa upande moja msimu huo ulileta urafiki kati ya jamii tofauti na mienendo kama vile mashindano ya kutunukiana zawadi. Kwa upande mwingine, faida za kiajabu ziliibua miangalio mipya kuhusu maswala ya uadilifubinafsi, jinsia katika jamii, na mamlaka ya wazee. Kuelewa arbitrage kama zaidi ya mazoezi ya kifedha, bali pia kama mkakati wa uchumi za mapembezoni, inatupa njia ya kuunganisha anthropolojia ya fedha na masawali ya mipaka baada ya ukoloni, utawala wa wakongwe, na thamani.

AbstractThis paper aims to examine the enunciation (uccāraṇa-kāla) time intervals for śrīvidyā pañcadaśī, a fifteen seed-syllable mantra (bīja-mantra) related to the homonymous śākta school Śrīvidyā or Traipuradarśaṇa. Following the indications provided in the Yoginīhṛdaya, with Dīpikā commentary by Amṛtānanda, and the Varivasyāraharasya by Bhāskararāya with Prakāśa auto-commentary, the research finds that these durations are not arbitrary at all but rather the result of a rigorous assessment. Moreover, the duration values suggest a specific conceptual goal that the mathematical rigor manifested by the authors seeks to fulfil: the progressive diminution of time intervals in order to achieve an atemporal dimension. The choice of the units of measurement itself is designed to meet this metaphysical and ritual need. By counting the intervals (both relative and overall) of mantra recitation, it is also possible to confirm the resonance nature of the sounds following nasalisations, sounds conceived by the authors as entirely independent of the reciter’s phonatory activity.

Children across Africa, not unlike elsewhere in the world, suffer myriad hardships, some of which include sexual and physical violence, economic exploitation and ritual killings. Using a literature review, this article maps the foci of research on the status and value attributed to children in various African contexts. The article also juxtaposes this value by considering how children have been maltreated historically and contemporaneously, discussing how notions of personhood contribute to the devaluation and possible revaluation of children. Here, the authors contrast two dominant positions in the treatment of personhood in Africa as communitarian – personhood-as-acquired and personhood-as-endowed. Noting the appeal and limits of these positions, the authors articulate a synthesis of both that could contribute towards a revaluation of children in African contexts. They argue that while ‘personhood-as-endowed’ safeguards against a hierarchy of persons that might be vulnerable to abuse and arbitrary excesses sanctioned by one’s community, ‘personhood-as-acquired’ holds adults to a high moral standard which has a protective effect for children while maintaining the role of community in cultivating moral development.

The attribution of osteological remains of a bird discovered in Preceramic deposits at Nemocón IV rockshelter (Sabana de Bogotá, Colombia) to Ara sp. (macaws) is confirmed through osteological and morphometrical analyses. Thirteen bones were recovered from two adjacent, arbitrary excavation levels; and are considered the remains of a single individual because of the rarity of the taxon, their similar size and taphonomic alteration, and the presence of paired elements. Radiocarbon dating of the macaw reveals it comes from the ninth millennium cal BP, the oldest date recorded from Nemocón IV. Paleoenvironmental data suggest that, during the deposition of the Preceramic levels at Nemocón IV, climatic conditions were close to those of today. The modern range of the macaws is outside these climatic parameters, and all modern Ara species are allochthonous to the Sabana de Bogotá, indicating the archaeological macaw was also allochthonous in Preceramic times. Analysis of the remains shows the macaw was not dismembered, so it is unlikely that it was used as food. Early conquest records indicate macaws were traded and maintained outside their natural ranges as pets, as a source of feathers, for use in rituals, or for a combination of uses.

Literature—at least serious literature—is something that we work at. This is especially true within the academy. Literature departments are places where workers labour over texts carefully extracting and sharing meanings, for which they receive monetary reward. Specialised languages are developed to describe professional concerns. Over the last thirty years, the productions of mass culture, once regarded as too slight to warrant laborious explication, have been admitted to the academic workroom. Gothic studies—the specialist area that treats fearful and horrifying texts —has embraced the growing acceptability of devoting academic effort to texts that would once have fallen outside of the remit of “serious” study. In the seventies, when Gothic studies was just beginning to establish itself, there was a perception that the Gothic was “merely a literature of surfaces and sensations”, and that any Gothic of substantial literary worth had transcended the genre (Thompson 1). Early specialists in the field noted this prejudice; David Punter wrote of the genre’s “difficulty in establishing respectable credentials” (403), while Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick hoped her work would “make it easier for the reader of ‘respectable’ nineteenth-century novels to write ‘Gothic’ in the margin” (4). Gothic studies has gathered a modicum of this longed-for respectability for the texts it treats by deploying the methodologies used within literature departments. This has yielded readings that are largely congruous with readings of other sorts of literature; the Gothic text tells us things about ourselves and the world we inhabit, about power, culture and history. Yet the Gothic remains a production of popular culture as much as it is of the valorised literary field. I do not wish to argue for a reintroduction of the great divide described by Andreas Huyssen, but instead to suggest that we have missed something important about the ways in which popular Gothics—and perhaps other sorts of popular text—function. What if the popular Gothic were not a type of work, but a kind of play? How might this change the way we read these texts? Johan Huizinga noted that “play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own. Every child knows perfectly well he is ‘only pretending’, or that it was ‘only for fun’” (8). If the Gothic sometimes offers playful texts, then those texts might direct readers not primarily towards the real, but away from it, at least for a limited time. This might help to account for the wicked spectacle offered by Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, and in particular, its presentation of the black mass. The black mass is the parody of the Christian mass thought to be performed by witches and diabolists. Although it has doubtless been performed on rare occasions since the Middle Ages, the first black mass for which we have substantial documentary evidence was celebrated in Hampstead on Boxing Day 1918, by Montague Summers; it is a satisfying coincidence that Summers was one of the Gothic’s earliest scholars. We have record of Summer’s mass because it was watched by a non-participant, Anatole James, who was “bored to tears” as Summers recited tracts of Latin and practiced homosexual acts with a youth named Sullivan while James looked on (Medway 382-3). Summers claimed to be a Catholic priest, although there is some doubt as to the legitimacy of his ordination. The black mass ought to be officiated by a Catholic clergyman so the host may be transubstantiated before it is blasphemed. In doing so, the mass de-emphasises interpretive meaning and is an assault on the body of Christ rather than a mutilation of the symbol of Christ’s love and sacrifice. Thus, it is not conceived of primarily as a representational act but as actual violence. Nevertheless, Summers’ black mass seems like an elaborate form of sexual play more than spiritual warfare; by asking an acquaintance to observe the mass, Summers formulated the ritual as an erotic performance. The black mass was a favourite trope of the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out features an extended presentation of the mass; it was first published in 1934, but had achieved a kind of genre-specific canonicity by the nineteen-sixties, so that many Gothics produced and consumed in the sixties and seventies featured depictions of the black mass that drew from Wheatley’s original. Like Summers, Wheatley’s mass emphasised licentious sexual practice and, significantly, featured a voyeur or voyeurs watching the performance. Where James only wished Summers’ mass would end, Wheatley and his followers presented the mass as requiring interruption before it reaches a climax. This version of the mass recurs in most of Wheatley’s black magic novels, but it also appears in paperback romances, such as Susan Howatch’s 1973 The Devil on Lammas Night; it is reimagined in the literate and genuinely eerie short stories of Robert Aickman, which are just now thankfully coming back into print; it appears twice in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books. Nor was the black mass confined to the written Gothic, appearing in films of the period too; The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), The Witches (1966), Satan’s Skin, aka Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), The Wicker Man (1973), and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974) all feature celebrations of the Sabbat, as, of course do the filmed adaptations of Wheatley’s novels, The Devil Rides Out (1967) and To the Devil a Daughter (1975). More than just a key trope, the black mass was a procedure characteristic of the English Gothic of the sixties; narratives were structured so as to lead towards its performance. All of the texts mentioned above repeat narrative and trope, but more importantly, they loosely repeat experience, both for readers and the characters depicted. While Summers’ black mass apparently made for tiresome viewing, textual representations of the black mass typically embrace the pageant and sensuality of the Catholic mass it perverts, involving music, incense and spectacle. Often animalistic sex, bestiality, infanticide or human sacrifice are staged, and are intended to fascinate rather than bore. Although far from canonical in a literary sense, by 1969 Wheatley was an institution. He had sold 27 million books worldwide and around 70 percent of those had been within the British market. All of his 55 books were in print. A new Wheatley in hardcover would typically sell 30,000 copies, and paperback sales of his back catalogue stood at more than a million books a year. While Wheatley wrote thrillers in a range of different subgenres, at the end of the sixties it was his ‘black magic’ stories that were far and away the most popular. While moderately successful when first published, they developed their most substantial audience in the sixties. When The Satanist was published in paperback in 1966, it sold more than 100,000 copies in the first ten days. By 1973, five of these eight black magic titles had sold more than a million copies. The first of these was The Devil Rides Out which, although originally published in 1934, by 1973, helped by the Hammer film of 1967, had sold more than one and a half million copies, making it the most successful of the group (“Pooter”; Hedman and Alexandersson 20, 73). Wheatley’s black magic stories provide a good example of the way that texts persist and accumulate influence in a genre field, gaining genre-specific canonicity. Wheatley’s apparent influence on Gothic texts and films that followed, coupled with the sheer number of his books sold, indicate that he occupied a central position in the field, and that his approach to the genre became, for a time, a defining one. Wheatley’s black magic stories apparently developed a new readership in the sixties. The black mass perhaps became legible as a salacious, nightmarish version of some imaginary hippy gathering. While Wheatley’s Satanists are villainous, there is a vaguely progressive air about them; they listen to unconventional music, dance in the nude, participate in unconventional sexual practice, and glut themselves on various intoxicants. This, after all, was the age of Hair, Oh! Calcutta! and Oz magazine, “an era of personal liberation, in the view of some critics, one of moral anarchy” (Morgan 149). Without suggesting that the Satanists represent hippies there is a contextual relevancy available to later readers that would have been missing in the thirties. The sexual zeitgeist would have allowed later readers to pornographically and pleasurably imagine the liberated sexuality of the era without having to approve of it. Wheatley’s work has since become deeply, embarrassingly unfashionable. The books are racist, sexist, homophobic and committed to a basically fascistic vision of an imperial England, all of which will repel most casual readers. Nor do his works provide an especially good venue for academic criticism; all surface, they do not reward the labour of careful, deep reading. The Devil Rides Out narrates the story of a group of friends locked in a battle with the wicked Satanist Mocata, “a pot-bellied, bald headed person of about sixty, with large, protuberant, fishy eyes, limp hands, and a most unattractive lisp” (11), based, apparently, on the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley (Ellis 145-6). Mocata hopes to start a conflict on the scale of the Great War by performing the appropriate devilish rituals. Led by the aged yet spry Duke de Richleau and garrulous American Rex van Ryn, the friends combat Mocata in three substantial set pieces, including their attempt to disrupt the black mass as it is performed in a secluded field in Wiltshire. The Devil Rides Out is a ripping story. Wheatley’s narrative is urgent, and his simple prose suggests that the book is meant to be read quickly. Likewise, Wheatley’s protagonists do not experience in any real way the crises and collapses that so frequently trouble characters who struggle against the forces of darkness in Gothic narratives. Even when de Richlieu’s courage fails as he observes the Wiltshire Sabbat, this failure is temporary; Rex simply treats him as if he has been physically wounded, and the Duke soon rallies. The Devil Rides Out is remarkably free of trauma and its sequelæ. The morbid psychological states which often interest the twentieth century Gothic are excluded here in favour of the kind of emotional fortitude found in adventure stories. The effect is remarkable. Wheatley retains a cheerful tone even as he depicts the appalling, and potentially repellent representations become entertainments. Wheatley describes in remarkable detail the actions that his protagonists witness from their hidden vantage point. If the Gothic reader looks forward to gleeful blasphemy, then this is amply provided, in the sort of sardonic style that Lewis’ The Monk manages so well. A cross is half stomped into matchwood and inverted in the ground, the Christian host is profaned in a way too dreadful to be narrated, and the Duke informs us that the satanic priests are eating “a stillborn baby or perhaps some unfortunate child that they have stolen and murdered”. Rex is chilled by the sound of a human skull rattling around in their cauldron (117-20). The mass offers a special quality of experience, distinct from the everyday texture of life represented in the text. Ostensibly waiting for their chance to liberate their friend Simon from the action, the Duke and Rex are voyeurs, and readers participate in this voyeurism too. The narrative focus shifts from Rex and de Richlieu’s observation of the mass, to the wayward medium Tanith’s independent, bespelled arrival at the ritual site, before returning to the two men. This arrangement allows Wheatley to extend his description of the gathering, reiterating the same events from different characters’ perspectives. This would be unusual if the text were simply a thriller, and relied on the ongoing release of new information to maintain narrative interest. Instead, readers have the opportunity to “view” the salacious activity of the Satanists a second time. This repetition delays the climactic action of the scene, where the Duke and Rex rescue Simon by driving a car into the midst of the ritual. Moreover, the repetition suggests that the “thrill” on offer is not necessarily related to plot —it offers us nothing new —but instead to simply seeing the rite performed. Tanith, although conveyed to the mass by some dark power, is delayed and she too becomes a part of the mass’ audience. She saw the Satanists… tumbling upon each other in the disgusting nudity of their ritual dance. Old Madame D’Urfé, huge-buttocked and swollen, prancing by some satanic power with all the vigour of a young girl who had only just reached maturity; the Babu, dark-skinned, fleshy, hideous; the American woman, scraggy, lean-flanked and hag-like with empty, hanging breasts; the Eurasian, waving the severed stump of his arm in the air as he gavotted beside the unwieldy figure of the Irish bard, whose paunch stood out like the grotesque belly of a Chinese god. (132) The reader will remember that Madame D’Urfé is French, and that the cultists are dancing before the Goat of Mendes, who masquerades as Malagasy, earlier described by de Richlieu as “a ‘bad black’ if ever I saw one” (11). The human body is obsessively and grotesquely racialized; Wheatley is simultaneously at his most politically vile and aesthetically Goya-like. The physically grotesque meshes with the crudely sexual and racist. The Irishman is typed as a “bard” and somehow acquires a second racial classification, the Indian is horrible seemingly because of his race, and Madame D’Urfé is repulsive because her sexuality is framed as inappropriate to her age. The dancing crone is defined in terms of a younger, presumably sexually appealing, woman; even as she is denigrated, the reader is presented with a contrary image. As the sexuality of the Satanists is excoriated, titillation is offered. Readers may take whatever pleasure they like from the representations while simultaneously condemning them, or even affecting revulsion. A binary opposition is set up between de Richlieu’s company, who are cultured and moneyed, and the Satanists, who might masquerade as civilised, but reveal their savagery at the Sabbat. Their race becomes a further symptom of their lack of civilised qualities. The Duke complains to Rex that “there is little difference between this modern Satanism and Voodoo… We might almost be witnessing some heathen ceremony in an African jungle!” (115). The Satanists become “a trampling mass of bestial animal figures” dancing to music where, “Instead of melody, it was a harsh, discordant jumble of notes and broken chords which beat into the head with a horrible nerve-racking intensity and set the teeth continually on edge” (121). Music and melody are cultural constructions as much as they are mathematical ones. The breakdown of music suggests a breakdown of culture, more specifically, of Western cultural norms. The Satanists feast, with no “knives, forks, spoons or glasses”, but instead drink straight from bottles and eat using their hands (118). This is hardly transgression on the scale of devouring an infant, but emphasises that Satanism is understood to represent the antithesis of civilization, specifically, of a conservative Englishness. Bad table manners are always a sign of wickedness. This sort of reading is useful in that it describes the prejudices and politics of the text. It allows us to see the black mass as meaningful and places it within a wider discursive tradition making sense of a grotesque dance that combines a variety of almost arbitrary transgressive actions, staged in a Wiltshire field. This style of reading seems to confirm the approach to genre text that Fredric Jameson has espoused (117-9), which understands the text as reinforcing a hegemonic worldview within its readership. This is the kind of reading the academy often works to produce; it recognises the mass as standing for something more than the simple fact of its performance, and develops a coherent account of what the mass represents. The labour of reading discerns the work the text does out in the world. Yet despite the good sense and political necessity of this approach, my suggestion is that these observations are secondary to the primary function of the text because they cannot account for the reading experience offered by the Sabbat and the rest of the text. Regardless of text’s prejudices, The Devil Rides Out is not a book about race. It is a book about Satanists. As Jo Walton has observed, competent genre readers effortlessly grasp this kind of distinction, prioritising certain readings and elements of the text over others (33-5). Failing to account for the reading strategy presumed by author and audience risks overemphasising what is less significant in a text while missing more important elements. Crucially, a reading that emphasises the political implications of the Sabbat attributes meaning to the ritual; yet the ritual’s ability to hold meaning is not what is most important about it. By attributing meaning to the Sabbat, we miss the fact of the Sabbat itself; it has become a metaphor rather than a thing unto itself, a demonstration of racist politics rather than one of the central necessities of a black magic story. Seligman, Weller, Puett and Simon claim that ritual is usually read as having a social purpose or a cultural meaning, but that these readings presume that ritual is interested in presenting the world truthfully, as it is. Seligman and his co-authors take exception to this, arguing that ritual does not represent society or culture as they are and that ritual is “a subjunctive—the creation of an order as if it were truly the case” (20). Rather than simply reflecting history, society and culture, ritual responds to the disappointment of the real; the farmer performs a rite to “ensure” the bounty of the harvest not because the rite symbolises the true order of things, but as a consolation because sometimes the harvest fails. Interestingly, the Duke’s analysis of the Satanists’ motivations closely accords with Seligman et al.’s understanding of the need for ritual to console our anxieties and disappointments. For the cultists, the mass is “a release of all their pent-up emotions, and suppressed complexes, engendered by brooding over imagined injustice, lust for power, bitter hatred of rivals in love or some other type of success or good fortune” (121). The Satanists perform the mass as a response to the disappointment of the participant’s lives; they are ugly, uncivil outsiders and according to the Duke, “probably epileptics… nearly all… abnormal” (121). The mass allows them to feel, at least for a limited time, as if they are genuinely powerful, people who ought to be feared rather than despised, able to command the interest and favour of their infernal lord, to receive sexual attention despite their uncomeliness. Seligman et al. go on to argue ritual “must be understood as inherently nondiscursive—semantic content is far secondary to subjunctive creation.” Ritual “cannot be analysed as a coherent system of beliefs” (26). If this is so, we cannot expect the black mass to necessarily say anything coherent about Satanism, let alone racism. In fact, The Devil Rides Out tends not to focus on the meaning of the black mass, but on its performance. The perceivable facts of the mass are given, often in instructional detail, but any sense of what they might stand for remains unexplicated in the text. Indeed, taken individually, it is hard to make sense or meaning out of each of the Sabbat’s components. Why must a skull rattle around a cauldron? Why must a child be killed and eaten? If communion forms the most significant part of the Christian mass, we could presume that the desecration of the host might be the most meaningful part of the rite, but given the extensive description accorded the mass as a whole, the parody of communion is dealt with surprisingly quickly, receiving only three sentences. The Duke describes the act as “the most appalling sacrilege”, but it is left at that as the celebrants stomp the host into the ground (120). The action itself is emphasised over anything it might mean. Most of Wheatley’s readers will, I think, be untroubled by this. As Pierre Bourdieu noted, “the regularities inherent in an arbitrary condition… tend to appear as necessary, even natural, since they are the basis of the schemes of perception and appreciation through which they are apprehended” (53-4). Rather than stretching towards an interpretation of the Sabbat, readers simply accept it a necessary condition of a “black magic story”. While the genre and its tropes are constructed, they tend to appear as “natural” to readers. The Satanists perform the black mass because that is what Satanists do. The representation does not even have to be compelling in literary terms; it simply has to be a “proper” black mass. Richard Schechner argues that, when we are concerned with ritual, “Propriety”, that is, seeing the ritual properly executed, “is more important than artistry in the Euro-American sense” (178). Rather than describing the meaning of the ritual, Wheatley prefers to linger over the Satanist’s actions, their gluttonous feasting and dancing, their nudity. Again, these are actions that hold sensual qualities for their performers that exceed the simply discursive. Through their ritual behaviour they enter into atavistic and ecstatic states beyond everyday human consciousness. They are “hardly human… Their brains are diseased and their mentality is that of the hags and the warlocks of the middle ages…” and are “governed apparently by a desire to throw themselves back into a state of bestiality…” (117-8). They finally reach a state of “maniacal exaltation” and participate in an “intoxicated nightmare” (135). While the mass is being celebrated, the Satanists become an undifferentiated mass, their everyday identities and individuality subsumed into the subjunctive world created by the ritual. Simon, a willing participant, becomes lost amongst them, his individual identity given over to the collective, subjunctive state created by the group. Rex and the Duke are outside of this subjunctive world, expressing revulsion, but voyeuristically looking on; they retain their individual identities. Tanith is caught between the role played by Simon, and the one played by the Duke and Rex, as she risks shifting from observer to participant, her journey to the Sabbat being driven on by “evil powers” (135). These three relationships to the Sabbat suggest some of the strategies available to its readers. Like Rex and the Duke, we seem to observe the black mass as voyeurs, and still have the option of disapproving of it, but like Simon, the act of continuing to read means that we are participating in the representation of this perversity. Having committed to reading a “black magic story”, the reader’s procession towards the black mass is inevitable, as with Tanith’s procession towards it. Yet, just as Tanith is compelled towards it, readers are allowed to experience the Sabbat without necessarily having to see themselves as wanting to experience it. This facilitates a ludic, undiscursive reading experience; readers are not encouraged to seriously reflect on what the Sabbat means or why it might be a source of vicarious pleasure. They do not have to take responsibility for it. As much as the Satanists create a subjunctive world for their own ends, readers are creating a similar world for themselves to participate in. The mass—an incoherent jumble of sex and violence—becomes an imaginative refuge from the everyday world which is too regulated, chaste and well-behaved. Despite having substantial precedent in folklore and Gothic literature (see Medway), the black mass as it is represented in The Devil Rides Out is largely an invention. The rituals performed by occultists like Crowley were never understood by their participants as being black masses, and it was not until the foundation of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in the later nineteen-sixties that it seems the black mass was performed with the regularity or uniformity characteristic of ritual. Instead, its celebration was limited to eccentrics and dabblers like Summers. Thus, as an imaginary ritual, the black mass can be whatever its writers and readers need it to be, providing the opportunity to stage those actions and experiences required by the kind of text in which it appears. Because it is the product of the requirements of the text, it becomes a venue in which those things crucial to the text are staged; forbidden sexual congress, macabre ceremony, violence, the appearance of intoxicating and noisome scents, weird violet lights, blue candle flames and the goat itself. As we observe the Sabbat, the subjunctive of the ritual aligns with the subjunctive of the text itself; the same ‘as if’ is experienced by both the represented worshippers and the readers. The black mass offers an analogue for the black magic story, providing, almost in digest form, the images and experiences associated with the genre at the time. Seligman et al. distinguish between modes that they term the sincere and the ritualistic. Sincerity describes an approach to reading the world that emphasises the individual subject, authenticity, and the need to get at “real” thought and feeling. Ritual, on the other hand, prefers community, convention and performance. The “sincere mode of behavior seeks to replace the ‘mere convention’ of ritual with a genuine and thoughtful state of internal conviction” (103). Where the sincere is meaningful, the ritualistic is practically oriented. In The Devil Rides Out, the black mass, a largely unreal practice, must be regarded as insincere. More important than any “meaning” we might extract from the rite is the simple fact of participation. The individuality and agency of the participants is apparently diminished in the mass, and their regular sense of themselves is recovered only as the Duke and Rex desperately drive the Duke’s Hispano into the ritual so as to halt it. The car’s lights dispel the subjunctive darkness and reduce the unified group to a gathering of confused individuals, breaking the spell of naughtily enabling darkness. Just as the meaningful aspect of the mass is de-emphasised for ritual participants, for readers, self and discursive ability are de-emphasised in favour of an immersive, involving reading experience; we keep reading the mass without pausing to really consider the mass itself. It would reduce our pleasure in and engagement with the text to do so; the mass would be revealed as obnoxious, unpleasant and nonsensical. When we read the black mass we tend to put our day-to-day values, both moral and aesthetic, to one side, bracketing our sincere individuality in favour of participation in the text. If there is little point in trying to interpret Wheatley’s black mass due to its weakly discursive nature, then this raises questions of how to approach the text. Simply, the “work” of interpretation seems unnecessary; Wheatley’s black mass asks to be regarded as a form of play. Simply, The Devil Rides Out is a venue for a particular kind of readerly play, apart from the more substantial, sincere concerns that occupy most literary criticism. As Huizinga argued that, “Play is distinct from ‘ordinary’ life both as to locality and duration… [A significant] characteristic of play [is] its secludedness, its limitedness” (9). Likewise, by seeing the mass as a kind of play, we can understand why, despite the provocative and transgressive acts it represents, it is not especially harrowing as a reading experience. Play “lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil…. The valuations of vice and virtue do not apply...” (Huizinga 6). The mass might well offer barbarism and infanticide, but it does not offer these to its readers “seriously”. The subjunctive created by the black mass for its participants on the page is approximately equivalent to the subjunctive Wheatley’s text proposes to his readers. The Sabbat offers a tawdry, intoxicated vision, full of strange performances, weird lights, queer music and druggy incenses, a darkened carnival apart from the real that is, despite its apparent transgressive qualities and wretchedness, “only playing”. References Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Ellis, Bill. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2000. Hedman, Iwan, and Jan Alexandersson. Four Decades with Dennis Wheatley. DAST Dossier 1. Köping 1973. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge, 1989. Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. International Library of Sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949. Medway, Gareth J. The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism. New York: New York UP, 2001. “Pooter.” The Times 19 August 1969: 19. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1980. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Revised and Expanded ed. New York: Routledge, 1988. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. 1980. New York: Methuen, 1986. Seligman, Adam B, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett and Bennett Simon. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Thompson, G.R. Introduction. “Romanticism and the Gothic Imagination.” The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Ed. G.R. Thompson. Pullman: Washington State UP, 1974. 1-10. Wheatley, Dennis. The Devil Rides Out. 1934. London: Mandarin, 1996.

Poverty is a complex subject in traditional African cultures. It is the lack of provision to satisfy the basic human needs of the population. The prosperity gospel as part of Pentecostal Christianity, with origins in the United States of America, presents itself as a new model for poverty eradication. Pentecostal Christianity and the proliferation of Pentecostal churches in Africa, many of whom are adherents of prosperity theology over a period of more than three decades, have not translated to a more prosperous continent, and sub-Saharan Africa is still notably one of the poorest regions of the world. Poverty is a concept with many dimensions that attempts to ascertain the varying degrees of deprivation experienced by populations, individually or collectively. However, certain subjective and sometimes arbitrary interpretations of biblical texts on prosperity as the basis for prosperity theology have encouraged capitalist impulses that often supplant the pursuit of spiritual advantages, leading instead to an increase in crimes including robbery, financial fraud, kidnapping, ritual killings and many other social vices. This article examines the different perspectives of the prosperity gospel, the biblical sources and interpretations used as well as its interpretation of poverty. It shows how prosperity theology, with its own interpretation of poverty, erodes the valuable indigenous resources available to fight poverty within African religious communities, which emphasise community, positive family attachments, social support networks, moral values and accountability, and it examines the implications this has for socio-economic development in Africa.Contribution: This article challenges the theology of prosperity that characterises Pentecostal Christianity and is pervasive in Africa. It contributes to the discourse on how the challenges of poverty require the more community-centred approaches that traditional African values offer as against the self-centredness and greed promoted by the prosperity theology.

Metaphors of 'game' and 'play' are increasingly popular in academic writing, partly because games themselves are becoming increasingly important to media experience, and partly because something in the 'game' idea seems to describe the post-modern experience. However, the metaphor sometimes forgets what games can be like in practice. What I want to do, then, is go a round or two with the term, to question what the metaphor invokes. Round I: 'Game'? Games are played on a dedicated field -- a board, a screen, a playing-ground -- which is marked off so that in some sense it becomes a separate 'space', Huizinga's "magic circle". Play begins, and then, Huizinga argues, it is over, its effects lost (13). Players choose to play, agreeing to arbitrary rules controlling the game 'world'; goals and penalties are agreed in advance. Thus the gameworld provides an oasis of order in a chaotic, unruly world (Huizinga again); despite (sometimes) volumes of rules, games themselves are less complex and more clearly defined than "the casual and confused reign of everyday existence" (Berger, qtd. in Holquist 122). The sanctity of the game-space offers something more than mere order. The construction of order through arbitrary rules temporarily dissolves the significance of the outside world. Players concentrate wholly on the game -- on the dice or the puck or the pawn; good gameplay (to use Banks's expression) makes you forget yourself and the passage of time, not operating consciously but going with the flow. Play, writes Csikszentmihalyi, "is going. It is what happens after all the decisions are made -- when 'let's go' is the last thing one remembers" (45). It is a difficult state to attain but it seems valuable, from academia's overly rationalistic perspective, to get out of our heads and let some other sense drive for a while. Games engage different senses. Players use skills not ordinarily valued, striving for self-fulfilling perfection. Mundane time is linear, but games are full of diversionary, goal-deferring loops -- "the movement which is play has no goal which brings it to an end; rather it renews itself in constant repetition" (Gadamer 93). Gameplay is unpredictable; it shuttles back and forth, unsettled, dynamic, open to chance. You cannot surely predict the outcome. And then you play again. We like, too, the superficiality of games. They are useless, wilfully inefficient, pursued solely for the pleasures they provide. Games can be seen as representative -- of power struggles, of unspeakable impulses -- but the action is distanced from the self. Imbued in an (in)animate piece or a disguised self, games license performance, freedom from the mundane self. Most importantly, game goals aren't 'really' important; we don't 'really' care; "no chains of causes and effects, means and ends, are supposed to connect the isolated area of play with the real world or ordinary life (Riezler 511). Thus, reasons the theorist, the gameworld is a privileged space. Having freely chosen to play and consented to pre-determined constraints, players slip the controlling lead of the superego in pursuit of mastery. Difficult impulses are exorcised -- cathartically, if you like -- in the safety of the gamespace, the temporary "otherwhere" of experience where nothing really matters; no lives are actually sacrificed; no deaths are permanent; no loss is irreversible. Games are interactive, simultaneously controlled and risky. If one excels, one is celebrated; if one loses -- ah well, it was only a game. Afterwards it ceases to matter: handshakes all round and down to the pub. Or so the theorists tell us. Round II: The Magic Circle My brother and his friends liked to play Skirmish. But afterwards, they were stiff and sore, with bruises lasting for months or longer. Players are regularly injured, permanently maimed, or even killed while playing those games we call 'sport'. True, you might forget yourself while playing, but what about afterwards? The embodiedness of players -- the constancy of muscle memory, bruises and scars -- imprints lasting effects on minds and flesh, inextricably binding the game world to the mundane. Besides physical injuries, however, are the continuity of memory and the excess of feelings (affect). Games, after all, are played by people, "who only indirectly and ambiguously share in the perfect order of their games" (Holquist 115), stuck as we are with irrational feelings. Losers feel sore, disgruntled; someone else has proven cleverer or faster or trickier; they never quite got in the flow; it wasn't fun. So when Stephenson writes, "play is enjoyed, no matter who wins" (46) -- well, no. People sulk, they cry, they become vengeful: people don't like losing -- witness the origins of football hooliganism. Perhaps the cost of being rationally detached from the outcome of a game, of leaving the mundane, ratiocinatic world behind, is an irrational, affective investment that sometimes matters when it shouldn't. To describe games as discrete, then, assumes that people are disembodied, completely rational and extremely forgetful: these are the only terms under which gameplay can be "detached". Huizinga and Caillois posit such players when they describe games as 'separate', 'unproductive', 'unreal'. They let the metaphor take over, mistaking form for practice. Somewhat extremely, Gadamer argues, "the real subject of the game ... is not the player, but instead the game itself" (95). No game, however, exists prior to or without players, and no players are free from the 'irrational' of their bodies and senses. Round III: Representation John Banks's "Controlling Gameplay" reminds us of the 'other senses' invoked in play. Games, he argued, are never simply representational. Gameplay is a forward momentum, engrossing and unselfconscious. He was right, but I want to recall, momentarily, the representativeness of games. It is, after all, partly their commitment to symbols that makes people willing to (be) hurt in a game, even to risk their lives. Besides the irrational commitment to the symbol engendered by the affective gameworld, is the representational content. The violence debate hinges around the detachment of the gameworld: theorists argue that in gamespace, it's 'not real; we're 'just playing'; "things within this area mean what we order them to mean. They are cut off from their meanings in the so-called real world or ordinary life" (Riezler 511). The game frame theoretically negates commitment to content and underlying meanings (see Bologh). Fink reminds us, though, that content always draws on the world of experience: it "is always partly, but never wholly, the creation of fantasy. It always has to do with real objects [or ideas], which fantasy transforms into play objects" (qtd. in Anchor 92). Hodge and Tripp argue that, although play modality undermines or inverts meanings, symbols retain their mundane meaning: "the surface content of the image coexists as part of the content. An image of violence is still an image of violence, and viewers who enjoy it are still endorsing those impulses in themselves" (117). Games invoke the imaginary, the symbolic and the sensual in ways beyond ordinary 'consciousness', but that never makes it insignificant. Memory and affect again. Structural anthropology provides ample evidence that games represent society (see, for example, Cheska). Clifford Geertz showed how games structurally reflect (often backwards) the values of a society. The game, he argued, reminds players of the overlap between their own and their society's values (27). Thus games function as social ritual (see Bakhtin, Caillois or Huizinga). But ritual, Handelman shows, is "how society should be" (189) -- in which case he is arguing that society should be ordered, rigidly rule-bound, oriented towards arbitrary goals and values, competitive, and simplistically representational. People -- and indeed, existence -- are complex, messy, defiant and irrational. "Not recognising the bounds between stylised game and causal reality is to do violence to the complexity of existence" (Holquist 121). Round IV: Structure Another remove from content, is structure. In Western society games are agonistic. Huizinga explicitly argued that their value lay in striving for glory over one's fellows, in proving oneself superior: that is what winning is. Although theorists now value the process more than the goals, gameplay nevertheless consists in trying to beat your opponent. Games are about conquest. Even those games featuring teamwork only require cooperation to vanquish opponents -- to inflict on them the humiliation, disappointment and (however infinitesimally) diminished social status that inevitably accompany losing. Moreover, there are hierarchies within teams. A good point guard is never as well paid as a good forward; the Dungeon Master or GM determines the 'fate' of the other players. Just as players and teams are hierarchised, so are leagues, reflecting Western society's valorisation of hierarchy. Many must be conquered for the individual to triumph. While players may freely accede to rules, they don't decide them -- they are governed conservatively. Rules may evolve organically but become reified, regulated top-down, detailed knowledge itself becoming a source of hierarchical authority. Game rules are not folk-knowledge; they are dictated, published, refereed: another source of contest. Time The game metaphor has its uses. Certainly what happens when one disappears or is lost in gameplay is worth serious attention. But to pretend that games are microcosmic, free, without affect, effect or meaning, and that they end with the final bell, is to forget the player, who lives on in the society reflected by the game. References Anchor, Robert. "History and Play: Johan Huizinga and his Critics." History and Theory 17 (1966): 63-93. Banks, John. "Controlling Gameplay." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). 15 Oct. 2000 <http://www.api-network.com/mc/9812/game.php>. Bologh, Roslyn Wallach. "On Fooling Around: A Phenomenological Analysis of Playfulness." The Annals of Phenomenological Sociology 1 (1976): 1113-25. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Stith Bennett. "An Exploratory Model of Play." American Anthropologist. 44 (1974): 45-58. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. "The Ontology of the Work of Art and Its Hermeneutical Significance. Play as the Clue to Ontological Explanation." Truth and Method. (1960). Trans. and ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming. London: Sheed and Ward, 1975. 91-119. Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." Daedalus 101.1 (1972): 1-37. Handelman, Don. "Play and Ritual: Complementary Frames of Meta-Communication." It's a Funny Thing, Humor. Ed. Anthony J Chapman and Hugh Foot. Oxford: Pergamon, 1976. 185-92. Holquist, Michael. "How to Play Utopia: Some Brief Notes on the Distinctiveness of Utopian Fiction." Game, Play, Literature. Ed. Jacques Ehrmann. Boston: Beacon, 1968. 106-23. Hodge, Robert, and David Tripp. Children and Television: A Semiotic Approach. Cambridge: Polity, 1986. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Trans. anonymous. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949 [1944]. Riezler, Kurt. "Play and Seriousness." The Journal of Philosophy. 38 (1941): 507-17. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Rebecca Farley. "Game." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/game.php>. Chicago style: Rebecca Farley, "Game," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/game.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Rebecca Farley. (2000) Game. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/game.php> ([your date of access]).

Sugar pigs are traditional confections shaped like sugar mice with little legs and no tail. One might, therefore, nibble the trotters of a sugar pig or suck delicately upon the nose of a sugar pig, but one must never eat one’s sugary treats like a pig. As an imagined border between the private world inside the body and the public world outside, the mouth is an unstable limit of selfhood. Food can easily cause disgust as it passes through this hazardous terrain, and this disgust is produced less by the thought of incorporation than by socially constructed boundaries such as the division between human and animal. In order to guard against disgust and the moral judgement it incurs about the eater, the mouth is governed by myriad rules and, in the case of the juvenile mouth, subject to adult surveillance. This paper investigates children’s consumption of confectionery in relation to the mouth as a liminal border space. Children are “sugar pigs” in as much as they disregard the conventions of civilised eating that govern the mouth, preferring instead to slubber, gnaw, lick, and chew like animals, to reveal the contents of their mouths and examine the contents of others, to put lollies in and out of their mouths with dirty hands, and to share single lollies. Children’s lolly rituals resist civilised eating norms, but they hold important cultural meanings that parallel and subvert those of the adult world. Children’s mouths are communal spaces and the rituals that take place in them are acts of friendship, intimacy, and power. Eating norms instituted over thousands of years ensure that people do not eat like animals, and the pig, in particular, stands in opposition to civilised eating. In On Good Manners for Boys (1530), Erasmus of Rotterdam advises that a general guide to eating like a human being is to eat inconspicuously and self-consciously—to “lick a plate or dish to which some sugar or sweet substance has adhered is for cats, not people,” he explains, and to “gnaw bones is for a dog”—and he compares ill-mannered eating with that of pigs, observing how some people “slubber up their meat like swine” (qtd. in Kass 145). Unrefined table manners and uncontrolled appetite continue to elicit such expressions of disgust as “dirty pig” and “greedy pig.” Pigs grunt. Pigs snuffle among refuse. Pigs, as Bob Ashley et al. note, represent all that is uncivilised and exist only as a signifier of appetite (2). The pig and civilisation, however, do not exist simply in opposition. Cookery writer Jane Grigson argues that European civilisation has been founded upon the pig (qtd. in Ashley et al. 2). Also, because the pig’s body is pinkish, soft, and flabby like a human body and because pigs were usually housed near or even inside human dwellings, the pig confounds the human/animal binary: it is “a threshold animal” (Stallybrass and White qtd. in Ashley et al. 7). Furthermore, the steady evolution of eating practices suggests that humans would eat like animals if left in their natural state. Food rules are part of the “attempt to exclude piggishness” from human civilisation, which, according to Ashley et al., demonstrates “precisely the proximity of human and pig” (7). As physician Leon Kass observes, eating conventions “show us both how much we have taken instruction and how much we needed it” (139). Humans aspire to purity and perfection, but William Ian Miller explains that “fuelling no small part of those aspirations is disgust with what we are or with what we are likely to slide back into” (Anatomy xiv). Eating norms, therefore, do not emphasise the difference between human and the pig as much as they express the underlying anxiety that the human mouth and the act of eating are utterly animal. ‘Lollies’ is the Australian term for the confectionery that children mostly buy, and while the child with a lolly pouched in its cheek is such a familiar, even iconic, image that it features on the covers of two recent books about confectionery (Richardson, Whittaker), licking, gnawing, and slubbering—Erasmus’ wonderfully evocative and piggish word—aptly describe the consumption of lollies. Many lollies are large and hard, and eating them requires time, effort, concentration, and conspicuous mouth activity: the cheek bulges and speaking is difficult; a great deal of saliva is produced and the area around the mouth becomes smeared with coloured drool; and there is always the possibility of the lolly falling out. The smaller the child’s mouth, or the larger the lolly, the more impossible it is to eat inconspicuously and self-consciously. Endless chewing is similarly animal-like, and “the bovine look” of teenagers featured in public complaints when chewing gum was mass-produced in the twentieth century (Hendrickson 7). Humans must not eat like animals, but overly-stuffed cheeks, sucking and slubbering mouths, licking tongues, gnawing teeth, and mindlessly ruminating jaws are unashamedly animal-like. Other rules guard against disgust arising from the sight of half-chewed food. When food is in the process of becoming part of the body, it quickly acquires the quality of things with which disgust is more readily associated, things that are, according to Miller, moist rather than dry, viscid rather than free-flowing, pliable rather than hard, things that are “oozy, mucky, gooey, slimy, clammy, sticky, tacky, dank, squishy, or filmy” (“Darwin’s Disgust” 338). Soft lollies with their vividly-coloured and glossy or sugar-encrusted surfaces look magical, but once they go into the mouth are “magically transformed into the disgusting” (Anatomy Miller 96). Food in the process of “becoming” must, therefore, never be seen again. The process of transformation takes place in the private interior of the body, but, if the mouth is open, half-transformed food is visible, and chewed food, according to Miller, “has the capacity to be even more disgusting than feces [sic]” (Anatomy 96). Sometimes, the sight of half-consumed lollies inside children’s mouths is deliberate because children poke out their tongues and look into each other’s mouths to monitor the progress of lollies that change colour as they break down. Miller explains that the rules of disgust are suspended in sexual and non-sexual love: “Disgust marks the boundaries of the self; the relaxing of them marks privilege, intimacy, duty, and caring” (Anatomy xi). This principle applies to children’s lolly rituals. If children forget to note the colour of a Clinker as they bite it, or if they want to note the progress of a Cloud or gobstopper, they open their mouths and even poke out their tongues so a friend can inspect the colour of the lolly, or their tongue. Such acts are marks of friendship. It is not something children do with everyone. The mouth is a threshold of self that children relax as a marker of privilege. The clean/unclean binary exerts a powerful influence on food because, in addition to the way in which food is eaten, it determines the kind of food that is eaten. The mouth is a border between the self (the eater) and the other (the eaten), so what is eaten (the other) eventually becomes the eater (the self). Paradoxically, the reverse is also true; the eater becomes what is eaten—hence, “we are what we eat.” Little wonder then that food is a site of anxiety, surveillance, and control. The pig eats anything, but children’s consumption is strictly monitored. The clean food imperative means that food must be uncontaminated by the world outside the body, and lollies violate the clean food category in this regard. Large, hard lollies can fall out of the mouth, or children may be obliged to violently expel them if they are danger of choking. The young protagonists in Saturdee, Norman Lindsay’s bildungsroman set in country Victoria after WWI, arrange a secret tryst with some girls, and when their plan is discovered a horde of spectators assembles to watch the proceedings: [Snowey Critchet] had provided himself with a bull’s-eye; a comestible about the size of a cricket ball, which he stowed away in one cheek, as a monkey pouches an orange, where it distended his face in a most obnoxious manner. He was prepared, it seemed, to spend the entire afternoon inspecting a scandal, while sucking his bull’s-eye down to edible proportions. (147) Amid a subsequent volley of taunts and cow dung, Snowey lands in the gutter, a reprisal that “was like to be Snowey’s end through causing him to bolt his bull’s-eye whole. It was too large to swallow but large enough to block up his gullet and choke him. Frenziedly he fought his way out of the gutter and ran off black in the face to eject his windpipe obstruction” (147-8). Choking episodes are further aspects of children’s consumption that adults would deem dangerous as well as disgusting. If a child picks up a lolly from the ground, an adult is likely to slap it away and spit out the word “Dirty!” The child’s hands are potentially part of the contaminated outside world, hence, wash your hands before you eat, don’t eat with your fingers, don’t lick your fingers, don’t put your fingers into your mouth, don’t handle food if you aren’t going to eat it, don’t eat food that others have touched. Lolly-consumption breaches the clean/unclean divide when children put fingers into mouths to hook tacky lollies like Minties off the back teeth, remove lollies in order to observe their changing shape or colour, pull chewing gum from the mouth, or push bubble gum back in. The mouth is part of the clean world inside the body; adult disgust stems from concern about contamination through contact with the world outside the body, including the face and hands. The hands are also involved in playground rituals. Children often remove lollies from their mouths, play with them, and put them back in. Such invented rituals include sharpening musk sticks by twisting them in the mouth before jabbing friends with them and returning them to the mouth. Teenagers also bite the heads off jelly babies and rearrange the bodies in multicoloured versions before eating them. These rituals expose half-consumed lollies, and allow lollies to be contaminated by the outside world, but they are markers of friendship and ways of belonging to particular groups as well as sources of entertainment. The ultimate cause for disgust, apart from sharing with a pig perhaps, arises when children violate the boundary between one mouth and another by sharing a single lolly. “Can I have a lick o’ your lollipop?” is an expression that belongs to a time when germs were yet to consume the public imagination, and it demonstrates that children have long been disposed to sharing confectionery in this way. Allowing someone to share an all-day sucker indicates friendship because it involves sacrifice as well as intimacy. How many times the friend licks it indicates how important a friend they are. Chewing gum and hard lollies such as bull’s-eyes and all-day suckers are ideal for sharing because they last a long time. Snowey’s choking episode is punishment both for having such a lolly while others did not, and for not sharing it. When friends share a single lolly in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief it is a sign of their growing intimacy. Rudy and Liesel had only enough money for one lolly: “they unwrapped it and tried biting it in half, but the sugar was like glass. Far too tough, even for Rudy’s animal-like choppers. Instead, they had to trade sucks on it until it was finished. Ten sucks for Rudy. Ten for Liesel. Back and forth” (168). Rudy asks Liesel to kiss him on many occasions, but she never does. She regrets this after he is killed, so here the shared lolly stands in lieu of intimacy rather than friendship. Lollies are still shared in this way in Australian playgrounds, but often it is only hard lollies, and only with close friends. A hard lolly has a clearly defined boundary that can easily be washed, but even unwashed the only portion that is contaminated, and contaminable, is the visible surface of the lolly. This is not the case with a stick of chewing gum. In response to Tom Sawyer’s enquiry as to whether or not she likes rats, Becky Thatcher replies,“What I like, is chewing gum.” “O, I should say so! I wish I had some now.” “Do you? I’ve got some. I’ll let you chew it a while, but you must give it back to me.” That was agreeable, so they chewed it turn about, and dangled their legs against the bench in excess of contentment.” (58) Unlike the clearly defined boundary of a gobstopper, the boundary of chewing gum continually shifts and folds in on itself. The entire confection is contaminated through contact with the mouth of the other. The definition of clean food also includes that which is deemed appropriate for eating, and part of the appeal of lollies is their junk status. Some lollies are sugar versions of “good” foodstuffs: strawberries and cream, wildberries, milk bottles, pineapples, and bananas. Even more ironic, especially in light of the amount of junk food in many adult diets, others are sugar versions of junk food: fries, coke bottles, Pizzas, Hot Dogs, and Hamburgers, all of which are packaged like miniatures of actual products. Lollies, like their British equivalent, kets (which means rubbish), are absolutely distinct from the confectionery adults eat, and British sociologist Allison James shows that this is because they “stand in contrast to conventional adult sweets and adult eating generally” (298). Children use terms like junk and ket intentionally because there is a “power inherent in the conceptual gulf between the worlds of the adult and the child” (James, “Confections” 297). Parents place limits on children’s consumption because lollies are seen to interfere with the consumption of good food, but, as James explains, for children, “it is meals which disrupt the eating of sweets” (“Confections” 296). Some lollies metaphorically violate a different kind of food taboo by taking the form of “unclean” animals like rats, pythons, worms, cats, dinosaurs, blowflies, cane toads, and geckos. This highlights the arbitrary nature of food categories: snakes, lizards, and witchetty grubs do not feature on European menus, but indigenous Australians eat them. Neither do white Australians eat horses, frogs, cats, dogs, and insects, which are considered delicacies in other cultures, some even in other European cultures. Eating human beings is widely-considered taboo, but children enjoy eating lollies shaped like parts of the human body. A fundraiser at a Queensland school fete in 2009 epitomised the contemporary fascination with consuming body parts. Traditionally, the Guess-The-Number fundraiser involves guessing the number of jelly beans in a glass jar, but in this instance the jar held teeth, lips, noses, eyeballs, ears, hearts, and feet. Similarly, when children eat Tongue Pops—tangy tongue-shaped lollies on a stick—the irony of having two tongues, of licking your own tongue, is not lost on children. Other lollies represent tiny people, and even babies. In the ordinary world, children are small and powerless, but the magic of lollies enables them to be the man-eating giant, while Chicos and jelly babies represent the powerless child. Children welcome the opportunity to “bite someone else’s head off” for a change. These lollies are anonymous people, but Freddo Frog and Caramello Koala have names as well as bodies and facial features, while others, like Cadbury’s seven Magical Elves, even have personalities. One of these, Aquamarine, is depicted as a winking character dressed in blue, and described on the wrapper as “a talented musician who plays music to inspire the Elves to enjoy themselves and work harder, but is a bit of a farty pants.” Advertisements also commonly personify lollies by giving them faces, voices, and limbs, so that even something as un-humanlike as a red ball, in the case of the Jaffa, is represented as a cheeky character in the act of running away. And children happily eat them all. Cannibalism rates highly in the world of children’s confectionery (James 298). If lollies are “metaphoric rubbish,” as James explains, they can also be understood as metaphorically breaking food taboos (299). Not only do children’s rituals create a sense of friendship, belonging, even intimacy, but engaging in them is also an act of power because children know that these practices disgust adults. Lollies give children permission to transgress the rules of civilised eating and this carnivalesque subversion is part of the pleasure of eating lollies. James suggests that confectionery is neither raw nor cooked, but belongs to a third food category that helps to define “the disorderly and inverted world of children” (“Confections” 301). In James’ analysis, children and adults inhabit separate worlds, and she views children’s sweets as part of the “alternative system of meanings through which [children] can establish their own integrity” (“Confections” 301, 305). In the sense that they exist outside of officialdom, children have inherited the carnivalesque tradition of the festive life, which Bakhtin theorises as “a second world” organised on the basis of laughter (6, 8). In this topsy-turvy, carnivalesque realm, with its emphasis on the grotesque body, laughter, fun, exuberance, comic rituals, and other non-official values, children escape adult rule. Lollies may be rubbish in the adult world, but, like the carnival fool, they are “king” in the child’s second and festive life, where bodies bulge, feasting is a public and often grotesque event, and children are masters of their own destiny. Eating lollies, then, represents a “metaphoric chewing up of adult order” and a means of the child assuming control over at least one of its orifices (James 305-6). In this sense, the pig is not a symbol of the uncivilised but the un-adult. Children are pigs with sugar—slubbering around hard lollies, licking other children’s lollies, metaphorically cannibalising jelly babies—and if they disgust adults it is because they challenge the eating norms that guard against the ever-present reminder that eating is an animal act. Eating practices “civilize the human animal” (Kass 131), but eating is inherently an untidy experience, and any semblance of order, as anthropologist Mary Douglas explains, is only created by exaggerating difference (qtd. in Ashley et al. 3). The pig is commonly understood to be the antithesis of civilisation and, therefore, the means by which we understand ourselves as civilised beings. The child with a lolly, however, is evidence that the line between human and animal is a tenuous divide. References Ashley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones and Ben Taylor. Food and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 2004. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans.Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: M.I.T. P, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968. Hendrickson, Robertson. The Great American Chewing Gum Book. Radnor, Pennsylvania: Chilton, 1976. James, Allison. “Confections, Concoctions and Conceptions.” Popular Culture: Past and Present. Eds Bernard Waites, Tony Bennett and Graham Martin. London: Routledge, 1986. 294-307. James, Allison. “The Good, the Bad and the Delicious: The Role of Confectionery in British Society.” Sociological Review 38, 1990: 666-88. Kass, Leon R. The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. New York: Free Press, 1994. Lindsay, Norman. Saturdee. London: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Miller, William Ian. “Darwin’s Disgust.” Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Ed. David Howes. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1997. Mason, Laura. Sugar Plums and Sherbet: The Pre-history of Sweets. Devon: Prospect, 1998. Richardson, Tim. Sweets: A History of Temptation. London: Bantam Books, 2003. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: Collier, 1962. Whittaker, Nicholas. Sweet Talk: The Secret History of Confectionery. London: Phoenix, 1999. Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. Sydney: Picador, 2005.

At first, no doubt, only the reproduction and transmission of works of art will be affected. It will be possible to send anywhere or to re-create anywhere a system of sensations, or more precisely a system of stimuli, provoked by some object or event in any given place. Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity. We shall only have to summon them and there they will be…They will not merely exist in themselves but will exist wherever someone with a certain apparatus happens to be. (Paul Valéry, ‘The Conquest of Ubiquity’, 225-6) Paul Valéry made these remarks in 1934, as the first drive-in movie theater opened in New Jersey, as Muzak was born, as the Associated Press started its international wirephoto service, and as a company called Imperial & International Communications renamed itself Cable & Wireless. Regular TV broadcasting would begin in England two years later, and in the U.S. in 1939, the same year John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry completed the prototype of the first digital computer. (Caslon Analytics) Valéry’s prognostications may of course be read alongside the thinking of Walter Benjamin, who quotes this passage in his famous essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Both stress that it is not simply the forms taken by art works that are changing, but their very conditions of possibility, or put another way (Benjamin’s), that they are henceforth designed with their reproducibility in mind. It is therefore neither uniqueness, nor specificity, but the potential for ‘ubiquity’, that yields the value of the work made for the new media. Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.(226) Two things have always struck me about Valéry’s analysis. The first is his characterization – for want of a better word, metaphysical – of the new cultural produce. It is not simply a movement from the clunky physicality of the artisanal object to that of the commodity; rather, it is a commutation, a transmogrification, a liquidation of the cultural object, whose value and form henceforth arise according to its new fluidity. The cultural ‘fluid’ – what is given (data) to our ‘sense organs’ – behaves more like energy, or money, than the older art object. These properties suggest a whole new political economy of the culture industries. Just as we are accustomed, if not enslaved, to the various forms of energy that pour into our homes, we shall find it perfectly natural to receive the ultrarapid variations or oscillations that our sense organs gather in and integrate to form all we know. I do not know whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality So began what we might call our Broadband Dreaming. Secondly, Valéry cannot but invoke the public utility company, a dominant corporate form in his day, but which to us is an endangered species, having almost liquidated itself over the course of the last few decades’ ecstatic neoliberalism. According to the Shorter OED, the “utility” provides something “able to satisfy human needs or wants”; it is a service (such as electricity or water) considered essential to the community; and it describes the provider of such a service or supply, usually ‘a nationalized or private monopoly subject to public regulation’. And this is precisely why I return to Valéry in opening a volume on ‘fibre’. For it is the privatization of communications infrastructure, hastening the closure of this zone of ‘public’ interest and community ‘needs’ – and this is as much about the downgrading of expectations as of actual services – that underlies the current political economy of networks and networked culture, and which prompts many of the articles collected here. What’s more, Valéry is especially alert to the peculiar purity of demand that the utility assumes, and our impatience for art’s sensory data “when not only our mind desires it, but our soul and whole being craves and as it were anticipates it”. Perhaps this well-nigh existential impatience is a necessary condition of networking – will we ever be satisfied with the bandwidth we have? As Gerard Goggin writes in the feature article: As the citizen is recast as consumer and customer, we rethink our cultural and political axioms as well as the axes that orient our understandings in this area. Information might travel close to the speed of light, and we might fantasise about optical fibre to the home (or pillow), but our terrain, our band where the struggle lies today, is narrower than we wish. That which we have ‘on tap’ has a way of engendering in us a reliance and an appetite somewhat out of keeping with actual need. Where conventional economic analysis might therefore struggle to explain our current obsession with fibre, histories of addiction, of affect and of symbolic exchange might succeed. The Fibreculture Flavour When we started the Fibreculture list in early 2001, national communications policy was a central concern, as was the question of how to make the best of it through critique and alternative networking practices, against the many challenges presented by the global and local zeitgeist of privatization, and by the post-dotcom deflation of the telecoms sector. Ravenous former monopolies, in rebound mode, were punished for their over-extensions into markets they knew little about, as the blue skies clouded over. Against this backdrop, it seemed most urgent to support, build upon, and learn from the experiences of a panoply of alternative media networks – of virtual communities getting real, and real communities going virtual – in order to learn the lessons of the dotcom debacle. Buzzwords were: D.I.Y. and tactical media, openness, sustainability, and collaborative and distributed models. But this collaboration between Fibreculture and M/C is not just content-sharing by two networks with overlapping interests, although this sort of temporary network chiasm demonstrates an untapped flexibility that ICTs retain in spite of the calcification of their institutions and their economic devaluation post-dotcom. Rather, at the heart of this experiment was an alternative peer-review process, a much-needed intervention into the orthodoxy (too long unrenovated) of blind peer-review. It took the form of a supplementary round of ‘collaborative text filtering’. Traditionally, peer-review is closed (‘blind’), centralized, and tends to be somewhat arbitrary; our alternative is distributed, open and more heuristic. From the list’s subscribers, small cells of four or five readers were formed; submissions were posted to the list, assigned to a cell, and readers were asked to post their critical responses within two weeks. Some of the ensuing dialogue was fascinating, all of it engaged and generous. The Fibreculture flavour thus consists of a wider discussion and debate inflecting the author’s final submission. ‘Review’ here was oriented towards an opening, rather than a closure, of the text, giving rise to a sharing of resources, references and informed opinions. These exchanges remain accessible via the list archives (look for subject lines ‘MCFIBRE’ and ‘Re: MCFIBRE’) at: <http://lists.myspinach.org/archives/fibreculture/2003-June/subject.html> <http://lists.myspinach.org/archives/fibreculture/2003-May/subject.html> What’s lost is anonymity and the discursive or disciplinary specialization of reviewers – both are key components of the older model, both with their downside. The question must be asked: If interdisciplinarity means anything beyond the proliferation of competing discourses, what are its implications for the practices and economies of academic publishing, and for the ‘knowledge economy’ generally? Of course, the spread of topics does mirror Fibreculture’s interests. Half of the authors assembled here are regular contributors to the list. They include its co-founder, Geert Lovink, who manages to report and speculate (at once!) on the much-paraded relationship between art and science; and Gerard Goggin, whose informative feature article takes up many of the concerns raised above, with respect to broadband infrastructure (and policy) in particular. Emy Tseng and Kyle Eischen take the notion of infrastructure more technically in considering how it might inform a progressive techno-geography. Fibreculture explores the politics of networks and ICTs, but also their cultures. The experiential (and ‘affective’) dimension of networked culture was also a prevalent theme of responses to the Call For Papers, including artist and architect Petra Gemeinboeck’s theoretical explanation of her installation Maya – Veil of Illusion. Fibre is where the economic meets the social, where the public meets the private, and intrudes upon it. Grayson Cooke responds in kind (and with humour) to the intrusive excesses of Spam. For Adrian Mackenzie, both social and technical practices “are integrated in our politics. When politics integrates human affairs and technical things, collective affects concerning infrastructure arise… Infrastructures are integral to how cultural forms of life render and inhabit their worlds.” But some aspects of sociality migrate to the networks more easily than others, as Jon Marshall discovers in his analysis of gendered and gendering behaviour online. For all their complexity, the interweavings of affect in the networks are anything but random. As we find in Andrew Murphie’s anthropological musing (after José Gil) on the place of ritual in the technosphere: Even at its apparently most disorganized … (in ritual ecstasy for example), ritual magic is in reality extremely organised (although an organisation of forces and translations rather than one of stable states). As Gil writes, even the 'gestures, words, or cries of the possessed are coded'. Indeed, the codes involved are precisely those of possession, but of a possession by networks rather than of them… Also of a theoretical bent is Andrew Goffey’s fascinating synopsis of the relationship – potentially very revealing – between immunology and theories of networked communication and organization. A welcome reminder of the necessity, and the speculative pleasures, of pressing on with cross-disciplinary investigation, even when it seems ‘interdisciplinarity’ has devolved from a type of work to a mere ‘framework’ for funding agendas and institutional window-dressing. As with all Fibreculture projects, no all-inclusive vision of anything is offered here. What we present instead is another installment of networked multiplicity, the unpredictable mixture of codes, idioms and critical thought on which list cultures seem to thrive. With thanks to the team at M/C, to the contributors and reviewers (especially Mel Gregg, Ned Rossiter and Esther Milne), and to all who contribute to the Fibreculture community. http://www.fibreculture.org Works Cited Paul Valéry, ‘The Conquest of Ubiquity’, in Aesthetics, trans. Ralph Manheim, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. Caslon Analytics, ‘Media and Communications Timeline’ 1926-50 <http://www.caslon.com.au/timeline5.htm> accessed 18/08/03 Links http://lists.myspinach.org/archives/fibreculture/2003-June/subject.html http://lists.myspinach.org/archives/fibreculture/2003-May/subject.html http://www.caslon.com.au/timeline5.htm http://www.fibreculture.org/ http://www.fibreculture.org/index.html http://www.fibreculture.org/mcfibre.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Teh, David. "Fibre " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/01-editorial.html >. APA Style Teh, D. (2003, Aug 26). Fibre . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/01-editorial.html >

Memory depends on void, as void depends on memory, to think. -- Anne Carson Sunday, 26th December, 1999 It was a peculiar ritual to perform to bring a personal end to the twentieth century. A journey through the snow to visit Egypt, at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan. I took two books, the latest New Yorker and the New York Times to keep me company. Ancient Egyptian funeral art fascinates me. How unreadable it is. Perhaps it isn't meant to be read. If it is addressed to anyone, or anything, it isn't human. It addresses otherness itself, eternity. Serenity masks, and faces, nothingness. A reminder of how little a decade, or a century matters, even a millennium, compared to these fragments of monuments that could stare down handfuls of years in their thousands -- and still not blink. As Paul Valery wrote: "we later civilisations ... we too now know we are mortal. We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries..." (23). Our ancestors may have conquered space, spread ourselves thin across the bread of the earth, but Egypt conquered time. Their empires of the dead will probably still be living when the last of ours are rat food. As Paul Valery wrote: "we later civilisations ... we too now know we are mortal. We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries..." (23). Our ancestors may have conquered space, spread ourselves thin across the bread of the earth, but Egypt conquered time. Their empires of the dead will probably still be living when the last of ours are rat food. Thanks to universal standard time, everyone could know where they stood in relation to the planet's movement. Thanks to geopositioning, everyone could know the coordinates upon the map that corresponded to the patch of earth under foot. As the world turned, an arc of humans from one latitude to another could experience the arbitrary yet somehow convincing sensation of leaving the twentieth century. As the New Yorker reported: "in a daring act of multiculturalism, the good people of Tonga rose at midnight to sing the 'Hallelujah Chorus' from Handel's Messiah" (Lane 24). Meanwhile, in New York, the Caligula of capital George Soros offered his 250-odd guests bronze medallions featuring etched profiles of himself, and the inscription: "Enlightened by the Past. Embraced by the present. Empowered by the future" (Cassidy 26). Y2K kept bothering me. It was all a little too much data hitting the sensoria. I tried to ignore it, to think about Egypt. I thought that if I closed my eyes to the world's turning, it would go away. It won't go away. Not any more. There is nowhere left to hide. At twilight, in the desert, your satellite phone rings. It's a telemarketer. Egypt is exhausting, even at the Met. There's so many objects, so much information. I'd brought a book or two, so I could pause for coffee and make some notes. The books were by Harold Innis, that quirky old communication theorist. He's a detour, like Egypt, but he'll get us to where I want to go, to thinking media. Egypt is exhausting, even at the Met. There's so many objects, so much information. I'd brought a book or two, so I could pause for coffee and make some notes. The books were by Harold Innis, that quirky old communication theorist. He's a detour, like Egypt, but he'll get us to where I want to go, to thinking media. A simple observation. Consider what it makes it possible to think: "empires must be considered from the standpoint of two dimensions, those of space and time, and persist by overcoming the bias of media, which over-emphasise either dimension. They have tended to flourish under conditions in which civilisation reflects the influence of more than one medium and in which the bias of one medium toward decentralisation is offset by the bias of another toward centralisation" (Empire 7). Consider, for instance, Egypt, where: "a concern with problems of space and time appears to have marked the beginnings of civilisation... A change from a pre-dynastic to dynastic society, or a precise recognition of time... appears to have coincided with writing, monumental architecture and sculpture" (Bias 92). Kings and priests colonised time. "The permanence of death became a basis of continuity through the development of the idea of immortality, preservation of the body, and development of writing in the tombs by which the magical power of the spoken word was perpetuated in pictorial representation of the funeral ritual" (Bias 93). On the one hand, "the pyramids were an index to power over time" (Bias 135). On the other, "by escaping from the heavy medium of stone, thought gained lightness" (Empire 16). The papyrus document became the means for scribes and soldiers to colonise space. These different media, with their different properties, were the basis of a flexible continuity and integrity for the empire, but also a source of conflict within it. "The profound disturbances in Egyptian civilisation involved in the shift from absolute monarchy to a more democratic organisation coincides with a shift in emphasis on stone as a medium of communicating or as a basis of prestige, as shown in the pyramids, to an emphasis on papyrus" (Empire 15). But it was not to last. Egypt "failed to establish a stable compromise between a bias dependent on stone in the pyramids and a bias dependent on papyrus and hieroglyphics" (Bias 96). Failed, and yet succeeded, in replicating itself by virtue of the fascination those of us who, like Valery, see something strikingly different in the shape of this ancient space and time. There's some irony in monuments to eternity being themselves preserved at the Met. "The emphasis of a civilisation on means of extending its duration as in Egypt accompanied by reliance on permanence gives that civilisation a prominent position in periods such as the present when time is of little significance" (Bias 66). What can you say about a civilisation that gives itself an early mark and toddles into its second millennium a year early? One in which global empires grow and merge and collapse each week on the lone and level sands of the market. Or where Danny Hillis, Silicon Valley magus, is making a monument to last out the centuries -- and it's a clock. What is to become of it all? Consider this observation, by Innis, of what became of Egypt: "we can perhaps assume that the use of a medium of communication over a long period will to some extent determine the character of knowledge to be communicated and suggest that its pervasive influence will eventually create a civilisation in which life and flexibility will become exceedingly difficult to maintain and that the advantages of a new medium will become such as to lead to the emergence of a new civilisation" (Bias 34). The scribes and the priests, between them, ran things, and for centuries kept control of the skills to do so. This very facility became a limit, making the empire vulnerable to stagnation and conquest from without. Consider how this might work out in more recent times, when monopolies guard their source code and battle against open source technologies. Innis writes that "a simple flexible system of writing admits of adaptation to the vernacular but slowness of adaptation facilitates monopoly of knowledge and hierarchies" (Bias 4). Microsoft write twentieth century hieroglyphics. It is an empire with an Egyptian approach to source code intended to perpetuate itself through time, even at the risk of arresting flexible and adaptive approaches to creating communication tools anywhere else. Or take the lead story that greeted me over coffee in the Met's cafe: AMERICA ONLINE AGREES TO BUY TIME WARNER FOR $165 BILLION; MEDIA DEAL IS RICHEST MERGER (New York Times 11 Jan 2000). This is the way of things now. Vigorous new empires annex old Egypts in a burst of press release fireworks. Empires that straddle continents but are not built to last much longer than London's Millennium Dome, structures held aloft by tensed steel cables, built to be seen on television by distant cousins by not by any descendants. We may have left the twentieth century, but has it left us? Its ruins lie about us, persisting, insisting. Its miniature monuments lie in the landfill of memory. So many new ways that were discovered, during the century, for impressing the century on memory. Perhaps that's why so little of its architecture is built to last. The great pyramid of Las Vegas is an image preserved in a million snapshots. The monument has become something miniature, even molecular. Exotic pesticide residues now shop up in Antarctic penguins. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write: "a monument does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event" (176). Perhaps Innis is wrong about this civilisation. It looks like its bias is towards the colonising of space, but in its own way it has colonised time, too. It communicates its chaos, its blind will to creative destruction, through the pulverising of every last particle of the earth. The twentieth century's answer to the pyramids, it's ongoing contributions to civilisation, are the death factories of the Holocaust and the negative architecture of the bombing of Hiroshima. And yet, those memories aside, it was also the century in which for the first time one glimpses a possible life outside the monopoly of knowledge by priests and scribes, where no matter how hard they try, empires can no longer control for millennia the flows of information that allow them to colonise space and time. I'm tempted to say that if Egypt lives on in the Book of the Dead, our time will live on as a Book of the Undead. It left its mark by mummifying nothing except change itself. But the book is one of the things the twentieth century changed too. As Friedrich Kittler writes, "as long as the book was responsible for all serial data flows, words quivered with sensuality and memory" (10). But the book has lost its sovereignty. The scribes and priests and scholars who monopolised knowledge and prestige through mastery of textual codes are going the way of their Egyptian precursors, into the museums. References Cassidy, John. "The Well-Heeled and the Wonky Toast the Millennium." New Yorker 17 Jan. 2000: Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? London: Verso, 1994. Innis, Harold A. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1964. ---. Empire and Communications. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1972. Friedrich A. Kittler. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Anthony Lane. "The New Year Stumbles In." New Yorker 17 Jan. 2000: 24. Paul Valery. The Outlook for Intelligence. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: McKenzie Wark. "Book of the Undead." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/undead.php>. Chicago style: McKenzie Wark, "Book of the Undead," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (200x), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/undead.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: McKenzie Wark. (2000) Book of the Undead. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/undead.php> ([your date of access]).

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

Let’s begin with the paradox of disavowal. On the one hand, we all “know” that television is hypnotic. On the other hand, we tend to imagine that we each – perhaps alone – remain impervious to the blandishments it murmurs as we watch it, often without being fully aware we are doing so. One of the many things contributing to the invention of television, according to Stefan Andriopoulos, was “spiritualist research into the psychic television of somnambulist mediums” (618). His archaeology of the technological medium of television uncovers a reciprocal relation (or “circular causality”) between the new technology and contemporary cultural discourses such that “while spiritualism serves as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the invention of electrical television, the emerging technology simultaneously fulfils the very same function for spiritualist research on psychic telesight” (618). Television and the occult seem to be inextricably linked from the outset, so that perhaps the claims of some schizophrenics: that television addresses them personally and importunes them with suggestions, are not so outlandish as one might at first think. Nor, perhaps, are they merely a delusion able to be safely located in the pathology of the other. In fact it could be argued, as Laurent Gerbereau does, that television, as distinct from film with its historical imbrication of crowds with the image, aims to create the illusion of intimacy, as if the viewer were the only person watching and were being addressed directly by the medium. With two exceptions, the illusion of direct contact is sustained by the exclusion of crowds from the image. The first is major sporting events, which people gather to watch on large screens or in bars (which Gerbereau notes) and where, I think, the experience of the crowd requires amplification of itself, or parts of itself, by the large screen images. The second is the more recent advent of reality TV in which contestants’ fates are arbitrated by a public of voting viewers. This illusion of direct contact is facilitated by the fact that viewing actually does take place more and more in individual isolation as the number of TV sets in households multiplies. And it is true in spite of the growth in what Anna McCarthy has called “ambient television”, the television of waiting rooms, airport terminals and bars, which enables us to be alone with the illusion of company, without the demands that being in company might potentially make. Television can be understood as a form of refuge from the crowd. Like the crowd, it offers anonymity and the voyeuristic pleasures of seeing without being seen. But it requires no special skill (for example, of negotiating movement in a crowd) and it seems, on the face of things, to obviate the risk that individuals will themselves become objects of observation. (This, however, is an illusion, given the array of practices, like data-mining, that aim to make new segments of the market visible.) It also enables avoidance of physical contact with others – the risks of being bumped and jostled that so preoccupied many of the early commentators on modernity. New mobile technologies extend the televisual illusion of direct address. You can receive confidences from a friend on the mobile phone, but you can also receive a lot of spam which addresses “you” in an equally intimate mode. You are, of course, not yourself under these conditions, but potentially a member of a consuming public, as the availability of many visual subscription services for 3G phones, including televisually-derived ones like one-minute soap episodes, makes clear. Television cathects (in Virginia Nightingale’s suggestive psychoanalytically-inflected usage) aspects of the human in order to function, and I have argued elsewhere that what it primarily cathects is human affect (Gibbs). We could think of this investment of media in the human body in a number of different ways: in the terms suggested by Mark Seltzer when he writes of the “miscegenation” of bodies and machines, of nature and culture; or we could adapt Eugene Hacker’s term “biomediation”; or again Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “remediation”, which have the advantage of moving beyond earlier models of the cyborg (such as Donna Haraway’s), in the way they describe how media repurposes the human (Angel and Gibbs). Here I want to focus on the media’s capture of human attention. This returns me to the question of television as a hypnotic medium. But on the way there we need to take one short detour. This involves Julian Jaynes’s remarkable book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind published in 1976 and only since the late nineties beginning to be rescued by its uptake by the likes of Daniel Dennett and Antonio Damasio from its early reception as an intriguing but highly eccentric text. The book proposes taking literally the fact that in The Iliad the gods speak directly to the characters, admonishing them to perform certain acts. In this way, the voices of the gods seem to replace the kind of psychic interiority with which we are familiar. Jaynes argues that people once did actually hallucinate these voices and visions. Consciousness comes into being relatively recently in human history as these voices are internalised and recognised as the formation of the intentions of an “analogue I” – a process Jaynes suggests may have happened quite suddenly, and which involves the forging of closer relations between the two hemispheres of the brain. What drives this is the need for the more diffuse kinds of control enabled by relative individual autonomy, as social organisations become larger and their purposes more complex. Jaynes views some forms of consciousness (those which, like hypnosis, the creation of imaginary friends in childhood, religious ecstasy, or, arguably, creative states, involve a degree of dissociation) as atavistic vestiges of the bicameral state. While he insists that the hypnotic state is quite distinct from everyday experiences, such as being so lost in television that you don’t hear someone talking to you, other writers on hypnosis take the contrary view. So does Dennett, who wants to argue that the voices of the gods needn’t have been actually hallucinated in quite the way Jaynes suggests. He proposes that advertising jingles that get “on the brain”, and any admonitions that have a superegoic force, may also be contemporary forms of the voices of the gods. So we arrive, again, from a quite different avenue of approach, at the idea of television as a hypnotic medium, one that conscripts a human capacity for dissociation. It is perhaps worth noting at this point that, while we tend to associate dissociation with dysfunction, with splitting (in the psychoanalytic sense) and trauma, Jaynes sees it in far more positive terms – at least when it is accompanied by certain kinds of voices. He characterises hypnosis, for example, as a “supererogatory enabler” (379) militated against by consciousness which, to save us from our impulses, creates around us “a buzzing cloud of whys and wherefores”, so that “we know too much to command ourselves very far” [into the kinds of superhuman feats made possible with the assistance of the gods] (402). Most writers on hypnosis speak of the necessity for inducing the hypnotic state, and I want to suggest that televisual “flow” performs this function continuously, even though, as Jane Feuer and Margaret Morse respectively have suggested, television is designed for intermittent spectatorship and is often actually watched in states of distraction. While the interactivity of the internet and the mobile phone militate against this, they do not altogether vitiate it, especially as video and animation are increasingly appearing on these media. The screen has ways of getting your attention by activating the orienting reflexes with sudden noises, changes of scene, cuts, edits, zooms and pans. These reflexes form the basis of what Silvan Tomkins calls the surprise-startle affect which alerts us to a new state of affairs, and technologies of the screen constantly reactivate them (Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi). No wonder, given the need for surprise, that sensationalism is such a well-used technique. While some writers (like S. Elizabeth Bird) link this to the production of “human interest” which creates a focus for everyday talk about news and current affairs that might otherwise be unengaging, I want to focus on the less rational aspects of sensationalism. Televisual sensationalism, which has its origins in the gothic, includes the supernatural, though this may appear as frequently in the guise of laughter as in horror, even if this laughter is sometimes uneasy or ambivalent. Hypnotism as entertainment might also qualify as sensationalism in this sense. A quick survey of Websites about hypnosis on television reveals that stage hypnosis appeared on American television as least as early as 1949, when, for 10 minutes after the CBS evening news on Friday nights, Dr Franz Polgar would demonstrate his hypnotic technique on members of the audience. It has featured as a frequent trope in mystery and suspense genres from at least as early as 1959, and in sitcoms, drama series, comedy sketches and documentaries since at least 1953. If on one level we might interpret this as television simply making use of what has been – and to some extent continues to be – popular as live entertainment, at another we might view it as television’s mise-en-abyme: the presentation of its own communicational models and anti-models for the reception of commands by voices. It’s ironic, then, that the BBC Editorial Guidelines treat hypnotism as a special kind of program rather than a feature of the medium and – in conformity with the Hypnotism Act 1952 – require that demonstrations of public hypnotism be licensed and authorised by a “senior editorial figure”. And the guideline on “Images of Very Brief Duration” (which follows the wording of the Agreement associated with the BBC’s Charter) states that programs should not “include any technical device which, by using images of very brief duration or by any other means, exploits the possibility of conveying a message to, or otherwise influencing the minds of, persons watching or listening to the programmes without their being aware, or fully aware, of what has occurred”. Finally, though, if psychoanalysis is, as Borch-Jacobsen suggests, one more chapter in the history of trance (in spite of its apparent rejection of techniques of suggestion as it attempts to establish its scientific and therapeutic credentials), then perhaps screen-based technologies should be taken seriously as another. What this might suggest about the constitution of belief requires further investigation – especially under conditions in which the pervasiveness of media and its potentially addictive qualities efface the boundary that usually demarcates the time and place of trance as ritual. Such an investigation may just possibly have some bearing on paradoxes such as the one Lyn Spigel identifies in relation to her observation that while the scripting of the “grand narratives of national unity that sprang up after 9/11 were for many people more performative than sincere”, Americans were nevertheless compelled to perform belief in these myths (or be qualified somehow as a bad American) and, further, may have ended by believing their own performances. References Andriopoulis, Stefan. “Psychic Television.” Critical Inquiry 31.3 (2005): 618-38. Angel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “Media, Affect and the Face: Biomediation and the Political Scene.” Forthcoming in Southern Review: Communication, Politics and Culture Special Issue 38.3 (2005). Bird, S. Elizabeth. “News We Can Use: An Audience Perspective on the Tabloidisation of News in the United States.” In Virginia Nightingale and Karen Ross, eds., Critical Readings: Media and Audiences. Maidenhead: Open UP, 2003. 65-86. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Cambridge Mass., MIT P, 1999. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. The Emotional Tie. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1992. Feuer, Jane. “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology.” In Regarding Television: Critical Approaches – An Anthology. 1983. Gerbereau, Laurent. “Samples or Symbols? The Role of Crowds and the Public on Television.” L’image 1 (1995): 97-123. Gibbs, Anna. “Disaffected.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.3 (2002): 335-41. Jaynes, Julian. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Kubey, Richard, and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. “Television Addiction.” http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/drugs/television_addiction.htm>. McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Morse, Margaret. “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, The Mall and Television.” In Patricia Mellencamp, ed., Logics of Television. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990. 193-221. Nightingale, Virginia. “Are Media Cyborgs?” In Angel Gordo-Lopez and Ian Parker, eds., Cyberpsychology. London: Macmillan, 1999. Selzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Tomkins, Silvan S. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. New York: Springer, 1962. Spigel, Lyn. “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11.” American Quarterly 56.2 (2004): 235-70. Thacker, Eugene. “What Is Biomedia.” Configurations 11 (2003): 47-79. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gibbs, Anna. "In Thrall: Affect Contagion and the Bio-Energetics of Media." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/10-gibbs.php>. APA Style Gibbs, A. (Dec. 2005) "In Thrall: Affect Contagion and the Bio-Energetics of Media," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/10-gibbs.php>.

Now in its thirtieth season, in 2018, The Simpsons is a popular culture phenomenon. The series is known as much for its social commentary as its humour and celebrity appearances. Nonetheless, The Simpsons’ ratings have declined steadily since the early 2000s, and fans have grown more vocal in their calls for the program’s end. This article provides a case study of episode “That 90s Show” (S19, E11) as a flashpoint that exemplifies fan desires for the series’ conclusion. This episode is one of the most contentious in the program’s history, with online outrage at the retconning of canon and both fans and anti-fans (Gray) of The Simpsons demanding its cancellation or “fan euthanasia”. The retconning of the canon in this episode makes evident the perceived decline in the quality of the series, and the regard for fan desires. “That 90s Show” is ultimately a failed attempt to demonstrate the continued relevance of the series to audiences, and popular culture at large, via its appeal to 1990s nostalgia.“That 90s Show”“That 90s Show” begins with Bart and Lisa’s discovery of Marge’s Springfield University diploma. This small incident indicates an impending timeline shift and “retcon”; canonically Marge never attended college, having fallen pregnant with Bart shortly after completing high school. The episode then offers an extended flashback to Marge and Homer’s life in the 1990s. The couple are living together in the Springfield Place apartment complex, with Homer working a variety of menial jobs to support Marge while she attends college. Homer and Marge subsequently break up, and Marge begins to date Professor Stephan August. In his despair, Homer can no longer perform R & B ballads with his ensemble. The band changes genres, and their new incarnation, Sadgasm, are soon credited with initiating the grunge movement. Sadgasm gain worldwide fame for their songs “Margerine” (a version of “Glycerine” by Bush), and “Politically Incorrect/Shave Me” (set to the melody of “Rape Me” by Nirvana) – which is later parodied in the episode by guest star Weird Al Yankovic as “BrainFreeze”. Homer develops an addiction to oversized, sweetened Starbucks coffee, and later, insulin, becoming a recluse despite the legion of fans camped out on his front lawn.Marge and Professor August soon part company due to his rejection of heteronormative marriage rituals. Upon her return to campus, Marge observes an MTV report on Sadgasm’s split, and Homer’s addiction, and rushes to Homer’s bedside to help him through recovery. Marge and Homer resume their relationship, and the grunge movement ends because Homer claims he “was too happy to ever grunge again.”While the episode rates a reasonable 6.1 on IMDB, fan criticism has largely focused on the premise of the episode, and what has been perceived to be the needless retconning of The Simpsons canon. Critic Robert Canning notes: “…what ‘That 90s Show’ did was neither cool nor interesting. Instead, it insulted lifelong Simpsons fans everywhere. With this episode, the writers chose to change the history of the Simpson family.” Canning observes that the episode could have worked if the flashback had been to the 1980s which supports canonicity, rather than a complete “retcon”. The term “retcon” (retroactive continuity) originates from narrative devices used in North American superhero comics, and is now broadly applied to fictional narrative universes. Andrew Friedenthal (10-11) describes retconning as “… a revision of the fictional universe in order to make the universe fresh and exciting for contemporary readers, but it also involves the influence of the past, as it directly inscribes itself upon that past.” While Amy Davis, Jemma Gilboy and James Zborowski (175-188) have highlighted floating timelines as a feature of long running animation series’ where characters remain the same age, The Simpsons does not fully adhere to this trope: “… one of the ‘rules’ of the ‘comic-book time’ or ‘floating timeline’ trope is that ‘you never refer to specific dates’… a restriction The Simpsons occasionally eschews” (Davis, Gilboy, and Zborowski 177).For many fans, “That 90s Show” becomes abstruse by erasing Marge and Homer’s well-established back story from “The Way We Was” (S2, E12). In the established narrative, Marge and Homer had met, fell in love and graduated High School in 1974; shortly after Marge fell pregnant with Bart, resulting in the couple’s shotgun wedding. “That 90s Show” disregards the pre-existing timeline, extending their courtship past high school and adding the couple’s breakup, and Homer’s improbable invention of grunge. Fan responses to “That 90s Show” highlight this episode of The Simpsons as a flashpoint for the sharp decline of quality in the series (despite having long since “jumped the shark”); but also, a decline in regard for the desires of fans. Thus, “That 90s Show” fails not only in rewriting its canon, and inserting the narrative into the 1990s; it also fails to satiate its loyal audience by insisting upon its centrality to 1990s pop culture.While fans have been vocal in online forums about the shift in the canon, they have also reflected upon the tone-deaf portrayal of the 1990s itself. During the course of the episode many 90s trends are introduced, the most contentious of which is Homer’s invention of grunge with his band Sadgasm. While playing a gig at Springfield University a young man in the audience makes a frantic phone call, shouting over the music: “Kurt, it’s Marvin. Your cousin, Marvin Cobain. You know that new sound you’re looking for…?,” thrusting the receiver towards the stage. The link to Nirvana firmly established, the remainder of the episode connects Homer’s depression and musical expression more and more blatantly to Kurt Cobain’s biography, culminating in Homer’s seclusion and near-overdose on insulin. Fans have openly debated the appropriateness of this narrative, and whether it is disrespectful to Cobain’s legacy (see Amato). Henry Jenkins (41) has described this type of debate as a kind of “moral economy” where fans “cast themselves not as poachers but as loyalists, rescuing essential elements of the primary text ‘misused’ by those who maintain copyright control over the program materials.” In this example, many original fans of The Simpsons felt the desire to rescue both Cobain’s and The Simpsons’ legacy from a poorly thought-out retcon seen to damage the legacy of both.While other trends associated with the 90s (Seinfeld; Beanie babies; Weird Al Yankovic; Starbucks; MTV VJs) all feature, it is Homer’s supposed invention of grunge which most overtly attempts to rewrite the 90s and reaffirm The Simpsons’ centrality to 90s pop culture. As the rest of this article will discuss, by rewriting the canon, and the 1990s, “That 90s Show” has two unrealised goals— firstly, to captivate an audience who have grown up with The Simpsons, via an appeal to nostalgia; and secondly, inserting themselves into the 1990s as an effort to prove the series’ relevance to a new generation of audience members who were born during that decade, and who have a nostalgic craving for the media texts of their childhood (Atkinson). Thus, this episode is indicative of fan movement towards an anti-fan position, by demanding the series’ end, or “fan euthanasia” (Williams 106; Booth 75-86) and exposing the “… dynamic spectrum of emotional reactions that fandom can generate” (Booth 76-77).“Worst. Episode. Ever”: Why “That 90s Show” FailedThe failure of “That 90s Show” can be framed in terms of audience reception— namely the response of original audience members objecting to the retconning of The Simpsons’ canon. Rather than appealing to a sense of nostalgia among the audience, “That 90s Show” seems only to suggest that the best episodes of The Simpsons aired before the end of the 1990s. Online forums devoted to The Simpsons concur that the series was at its peak between Seasons 1-10 (1989-1999), and that subsequent seasons have failed to match that standard. British podcaster Sol Harris spent four months in 2017 watching, rating, and charting The Simpsons’ declining quality (Kostarelis), with the conclusion that series’ downfall began from Season 11 onwards (despite a brief spike following The Simpsons Movie (2007)). Any series that aired on television post-1999 has been described as “Zombie Simpsons” by fans on the Dead Homer Society forum: “a hopelessly mediocre imitation that bears only a superficial resemblance to the original. It is the unwanted sequel, the stale spinoff, the creative dry hole that is kept pumping in the endless search for more money. It is Zombie Simpsons” (Sweatpants). It is essential to acknowledge the role of economics in the continuation of The Simpsons, particularly in terms of the series’ affiliation with the Fox Network. The Simpsons was the first series screened on Fox to reach the Top 30 programs in the US, and despite its overall decline, it is still one of the highest rating programs for the 18-49 demographic, enabling Fox to charge advertisers accordingly for a so-called “safe” slot (Berg). During its run, it has been estimated variously that Fox has been building towards a separate Simpsons cable channel, thus the consistent demand for new content; and, that the series has earned in excess of $4.6 billion for Fox in merchandising alone (Berg). Laura Bradley outlines how the legacy of The Simpsons beyond Season 30 has been complicated by the ongoing negotiations for Disney to buy 20th Century Fox – under these arrangements, The Simpsons would likely be screened on ABC or Hulu, should Disney continue producing the series (Bradley). Bradley emphasises the desire for fan euthanasia of the Zombie Simpsons, positing that “the series itself could end at Season 30, which is what most fans of the show’s long-gone original iteration would probably prefer.”While more generous fans expand the ‘Golden Age’ of The Simpsons to Season 12 (Power), the Dead Homer Society argues that their Zombie Simpsons theory is proven by the rise of “Jerkass Homer”, where Homer’s character changed from delightful doofus to cruel and destructive idiot (Sweatpants; Holland). The rise of Jerkass Homer coincides with the moment where Chris Plante claims The Simpsons “jumped the shark”. The term “jumping the shark” refers to the peak of a series before its inevitable, and often sharp, decline (Plante). In The Simpsons, this moment has been variously debated as occurring during S8, E23 “Homer’s Enemy” (Plante), or more popularly, S9, E2 “The Principle and the Pauper” (Chappell; Cinematic) – which like “That 90s Show”, received a vitriolic response for its attempt to retcon the series’ narrative history. “The Principal and the Pauper” focuses on Principal Skinner, and the revelation that he had assumed the identity of his (presumed dead during the Vietnam War) Army Sergeant, Seymour Skinner. The man we have known as Skinner is revealed to be “no-good-nik” Armin Tanzarian. This episode is loathed not only by audiences, but in hindsight, The Simpsons’ creative team. Voice actor Harry Shearer was scathing in his assessment:You’re taking something that an audience has built eight years or nine years of investment in and just tossed it in the trash can for no good reason, for a story we’ve done before with other characters. It’s so arbitrary and gratuitous, and it’s disrespectful to the audience. (Wilonsky)The retcon present in both “That 90s Show” and “The Principal and the Pauper” proves that long-term fans of The Simpsons have been forgotten in Groening’s quest to reach the pinnacle of television longevity. On this basis, it is unsurprising that fans have been demanding the end of the series since the turn of the millennium.As a result, fans such as the Dead Homer Society maintain a nostalgic longing for the Golden Age of The Simpsons, while actively campaigning for the program’s cancellation, a practice typically associated with anti-fans. Jonathan Gray coined the term “anti fan” to describe “… the active and vocal dislike or hate of a program, genre, or personality (841). For Gray, the study of anti-fans emphasises that the hatred of a text can “… produce just as much activity, identification, meaning, and ‘effects’ or serve just as powerfully to unite and sustain a community or subculture” (841). Gray also stresses the discourse of morality used by anti-fans to validate their reading position, particularly against texts that are broadly popular. This argument is developed further by Jenkins and Paul Booth.“Just Pick a Dead End, and Chill Out till You Die”: Fan EuthanasiaWhile some fans of The Simpsons have moved towards anti-fan practices (active hatred of the series, and/or a refusal to watch the show), many more occupy a “middle-ground”, pleading for a form of “fan euthanasia”; where fans call for their once loved object (and by extension, themselves) to “be put out of its misery” (Booth 76). The shifting relationship of fans of The Simpsons represents an “affective continuum”, where “… fan dissatisfaction arises not because they hate a show, but because they feel betrayed by a show they once loved. Their love of a text has waned, and now they find themselves wishing for a quick end to, a revaluation of, something that no longer lives up to the high standard they once valued” (Booth 78). While calls to end The Simpsons have existing since the end of the Golden Age, other fans (Ramaswamy) have suggested it is more difficult to pinpoint when The Simpsons lost its way. Despite airing well after the Golden Age, “That 90s Show” represents a flashpoint for fans who read the retcon as “… an insult to life-long Simpsons fans everywhere… it’s an episode that rewrites history… for the worse” (Canning). In attempting to appeal to the 90s nostalgia of original fans, ‘That 90s Show’ had the opposite effect; it instead reaffirms the sharp decline of the series since its Golden Age, which ended in the 1990s.Shifting the floating timeline of The Simpsons into the 1990s and overturning the canon to appeal to a new generation is dubious for several reasons. While it is likely that original viewers of The Simpsons (their parents) may have exposed their children to the series, the program’s relevance to Millennials is questionable. In 2015, Todd Schneider data mapped audience ratings for Seasons 1-27, concluding that there has been an 80% decline in viewership between Season 2 (which averaged at over 20 million American viewers per episode) to Season 27 (which averaged at less than 5 million viewers per episode). With the growth of SVOD services during The Simpsons’ run, and the sheer duration of the series, it is perhaps obvious to point out the reduced cultural impact of the program, particularly for younger generations. Secondly, “That 90s Show’s” appeal to nostalgia raises the question of whom nostalgia for the 1990s is aimed at. Atkinson argues that children born in the 1990s feel nostalgia for the era becausewe're emotionally invested in the entertainment from that decade because back then, with limited access to every album/TV show/film ever, the ones you did own meant absolutely everything. These were the last pop-culture remnants from that age when the internet existed without being all-consuming. … no wonder we still 'ship them so hard.Following this argument, if you watched The Simpsons as a child during the 1990s, the nostalgia you feel would be, like your parents, for the Golden Age of The Simpsons, rather than the pale imitation featured in “That 90s Show”. As Alexander Fury writes of the 90s: “perhaps the most important message … in the 90s was the idea of authenticity;” thus, if the children of the 90s are watching The Simpsons, they would look to Seasons 1-10 – when The Simpsons was an authentic representation of ‘90s popular culture.Holland has observed that The Simpsons endures “in part due to the way it adapts and responds to events around it”, citing the recent release of clips responding to current events – including Homer attempting to vote; and Trump’s tenure in the White House (Brockington). Yet the failure of “That 90s Show” marks not only The Simpsons increasingly futile efforts to appeal to a “liberal audience” by responding to contemporary political discourse. The failure to adapt is most notable in Hari Kondabolu’s documentary The Problem With Apu which targeted racist stereotypes, and The Simpsons’ poorly considered response episode (S29, E 15) “No Good Read Goes Unpunished”, the latter of which featured an image of Apu signed with Bart’s catchphrase, “Don’t have a cow, man” (Harmon). Groening has remained staunch, insisting that “it’s a time in our culture where people love to pretend they’re offended”, and that the show “speaks for itself” (Keveney). Groening’s statement was followed by the absence of Apu from the current season (Snierson), and rumours that he would be removed from future storylines (Culbertson).“They’ll Never Stop The Simpsons”The case study of The Simpsons episode “That 90s Show” demonstrates the “affective continuum” occupied at various moments in a fan’s relationship with a text (Booth). To the displeasure of fans, their once loved object has frequently retconned canon to capitalise on popular culture trends such as nostalgia for the 1990s. This episode demonstrates the failure of this strategy, as it both alienated the original fan base, and represented what many fans have perceived to be a sharp decline in The Simpsons’ quality. Arguably the relevance of The Simpsons might also remain in the 1990s. Certainly, the recent questioning of issues regarding representations of race, negative press coverage, and the producers’ feeble response, increases the weight of fan calls to end The Simpsons after Season 30. As they sang in S13, E17, perhaps “[We’ll] Never Stop The Simpsons”, but equally, we may have reached the tipping point where audiences have stopped paying attention.ReferencesAmato, Mike. “411: ‘That 90s Show.” Me Blog Write Good. 12 Dec. 2012. 2 Oct. 2018 <https://meblogwritegood.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/411-that-90s-show/>.Atkinson, S. “Why 90s Kids Can’t Get over the 90s and Are Still So Nostalgic for the Decade.” Bustle. 14 Apr. 2018. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://www.bustle.com/p/why-90s-kids-cant-get-over-the-90s-are-still-so-nostalgic-for-the-decade-56354>.Berg, Madeline. “The Simpsons Signs Renewal Deal for the Record Books.” Forbes. 4 Nov. 2016. 20 Nov. 2018 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2016/11/04/the-simpsons-signs-renewal-deal-for-the-record-books/#264a50b61b21>.Booth, Paul. “Fan Euthanasia: A Thin Line between Love and Hate.” Everybody Hurts: Transitions, Endings, and Resurrections in Fan Cultures. Ed. Rebecca Williams. 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