Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Airplanes on television”

When physicists write the variable v, they usually mean the velocity of an object in an inertial coordinate system, otherwise known as a reference frame. This is the most common velocity concept in modern physics. The velocity of an object in this sense depends on which inertial coordinate system one is working with. For example, an airplane in flight has a velocity of about 500 miles per hour in a coordinate system anchored in a nearby mountain, a velocity of more than 60 000 miles per hour in a coordinate system anchored in the sun, and a velocity of 0 in a coordinate system anchored in the airplane itself. The widely accepted idea that the ticking rate of a clock is a function of this type of clock velocity is absurd. It implies that a human analyst can control the ticking rates of physical clocks through the mental act of selecting a coordinate system. This is a nonsensical mingling of imagination with reality that is akin to believing that a movie character can jump out of your television set and take a seat in your living room. Despite this absurdity, the idea that a clock’s ticking rate depends on its velocity in an inertial coordinate system is a staple of modern physics. It is a pillar of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. It is central to the standard analysis of the so-called twin paradox. It underlies the predictions of Hafele and Keating concerning the ticking rates of clocks that travel in airplanes. Velocity absurdity of this sort flourishes today, and it may well continue to flourish for many years to come.

United States Air Force planes fly across mountains of green forest; behind them, fine white streams of chemical spray fill the sky. The planes fly alone or in formation covering wide swaths of the entire landscape. These images of the herbicide spraying during the United States-Vietnam War are ubiquitous in media material about Agent Orange, the most heavily used of the fifteen herbicides sprayed during the war. This representation of the war does not include guns, grenades, tanks, bombs, or dead bodies. Instead, contemporary documentary filmmakers offer images of airplanes and chemical barrels to provide evidence of another weapon of war, pan dead and leafless forests in an otherwise lush landscape of green, and zero in on children’s deformed bodies to show the lasting environmental and health effects of Agent Orange. In this essay I share preliminary thoughts from my new project on Agent Orange and film in the United States and Vietnam. The bulk of social science writing on Agent Orange has focused on American veterans and their fight to secure benefits, while film scholars have analyzed the Vietnam War in Hollywood movies and television. I investigate documentary film, the transnational activism that generates these films, and the representations of gender, disabilities, bodies, history and culture within them. Here I offer a close reading of two turn-of-the-twenty-first-century documentaries about Agent Orange in Vietnam.

On the television program MythBusters , which aired on the Discovery Channel from 2003 to 2016, the hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman tested popular myths and ideas arising everywhere from folklore to popular culture, designating them as either “busted” or “confirmed.” The show used engaging and entertaining variations on the scientific method to answer questions such as whether you get wetter when walking or running in the rain or what the fastest way is to board an airplane. I hear frequently from young scientists that the show inspired their generation to join the scientific enterprise. I sat down with Savage for an interview about what we can learn about public engagement in science.

The 20th century has seen considerable technological achievement that has had far-reaching consequences on the way people live and do business. The first half of the century saw remarkable developments in transportation with the automobile and the airplane and in communications with radio and television. These developments would not have been possible without associated advances in materials technology. The second half of the century has been characterized by the development of the computer (see the cover of this issue).Nineteenth century futurists equated progress with scale. The bigger the better. One can only speculate on what these savants would say if introduced to what we currently call progress. Progress is now measured by how small you can make a device, how narrow you can make a conductor, and how many circuits you can fit onto the point of a pin (see Figure 1).

Nowadays passive bistatic radars (PBR) allow for detection, determination of coordinates and tracking of moving objects. In order to enable PBR integration into air traffic control systems, it is necessary to solve the problem of recognizing airborne objects, in particular, propeller-driven aircraft (AC). This will increase the degree of aviation safety. To solve the recognition problem, the analysis of propeller-driven aircraft echo signals, such as helicopter and propeller airplane, is performed. The in-formative features that can be used for recognition of propeller-driven aircraft in PBRs are defined. The method for propeller-driven aircraft recognition is proposed, that is based on extraction of modulation components originated from the rotational parts of the aircraft and estimation of their rotation parameters. The algorithm for echo signal processing is developed, which makes it possible to apply the proposed recognition method for PBRs. The experimental results of the processing algorithm are presented on the example of real signals reflected from the Mi- 8 helicopter and the Cessna 172 propeller aircraft. The experimental data are recorded by two different PBRs using DVB-T2 digital terrestrial television signals standard for airspace illumination. The estimated rotation parameters of the aircraft propeller blades correspond to the actual values. Such a correspondence allows not only to recognize the aircraft group, but in some cases to identify its type.

IoT devices are widely used in the smart home, automobile, and aerospace areas. Note, however, that recent information on thefts and hacking have given rise to many problems. The aim of this study is to overcome the security weaknesses of existing Internet of Things (IoT) devices using Blockchain technology, which is a recent issue. This technology is used in Machine-to-Machine (M2M) access payment—KYD (Know Your Device)—based on the reliability of existing IoT devices. Thus, this paper proposes a BoT (Blockchain of Things) ecosystem to overcome problems related to the hacking risk of IoT devices to be introduced, such as logistics management and history management. There are also many security vulnerabilities in the sensor multi-platform from the IoT point of view. In this paper, we propose a model that solves the security vulnerability in the sensor multi-platform by using blockchain technology on an empirical model. The color spectrum chain mentioned in this paper suggests a blockchain technique completed by using the multiple-agreement algorithm to enhance Thin-Plate Spline (TPS) performance and measure various security strengths. In conclusion, we propose a radix of the blockchain’s core algorithm to overcome the weaknesses of sensor devices such as automobile, airplane, and close-circuit television (CCTV) using blockchain technology. Because all IoT devices use wireless technology, they have a fundamental weakness over wired networks. Sensors are exposed to hacking and sensor multi-platforms are vulnerable to security by multiple channels. In addition, since IoT devices have a lot of security weaknesses we intend to show the authentication strength of security through the color spectrum chain and apply it to sensor and multi-platform using Blockchain in the future.

This proposed Conference paper which emphasis on Intellectual property rights defines as: “The rights given to people over the creation of their minds” (Fred Warshofsky: Intellectual property, John Willey and Sons, 1994, p5). The researchers will focus on Historical Background ,development of Intellectual property , patent, importance and significance, research problem, research methodology, research contents, findings and recommendations. The Historical background and development to industrial intellectual property patent and design act refers to the pioneer International Convention ; 1883 which held in Paris it assumed as bed rock and foundation to whole industrial rights as amended and revised in 1979, Patent Cooperation Treaty, 1970 and Model Law for developing Countries on Marks, Trade Names and Act of unfair Competition, WIPO, 1958, then Strasbourg Agreement Concerning International Patent Classification, 1971. In addition to other International Conventions and national Acts that protecting and organizing industrial intellectual Property and Patent rights Provisions .The Characteristics and main Features of Intellectual Industrial Property :From the above mentioned definition which reflects the apparent characteristics of (I.P) to be two types such as follows: 1)The unpreceded discoveries either in the area of newly discoveries pertaining manufacturing of new models of cars ,refrigerators ,televisions ,airplane ,etc….2)specific trade marks or design recognizing the quality of apparatus manufactured ,e.g: milk, ceiling fan, motor or fashion of clothes .The significance and Importance of the forgoing paper may appears in: (i) exposition and highlighting the International and national legal systems that concerning with the protection of intellectual property and patent’s rights. (ii) It gives key and pre-requisite to protection that given to the authors rights patent and new discovery in the field of applied sciences. (iii) It explores the essentials that tackled to patents, industrial design and ownership of copyrights. For the research Problem: It might respond to such presumed questions: (i) What is the scope of industrial intellectual property? (ii) What are the international organizations that concern to protect patent, trademarks, trade secrets and industrial designs? (iii) What is the patent and ordained procedures that requested for its registration? (iv) Describe the copy right and designs which are protected by Law provisions (v) classify the classes of infringements to industrial and intellectual properties and which: are the prescribed the criminal and civil remedies: The research Methods that adopted: According to on going conference paper the researchers intend to adopt inductive analytical comparative research methodology. Literature Review: There are various masters, Ph.D Thesis and researchers contribution in this context such as: (i) Salwa Jameel Ahmed: Al-Himayt Aljnayiat Li Al-milkyat Al-fikryyah, Ph.D thesis, Ain Shumsh University (2015). (ii) Jide Babafemi: Intellectual Property the Law and Practice of Copyright, Trade marks, Patent and Industrial Design in Nigeria, 1st Edition, Justin Books Limited, Ibadan, Oyo, Nigeria (2007) (iii) Vinod V. Spole: Managing Intellectual Property: the strategic imperative, 3rd edition, PHI Learning private Limited, New Delhi (2012). Our proposed conference paper is similar with these works but it defers because it focused on Emirates Laws. The Contents of the Paper: It is primary concentrates on: (i) Definition of Industrial intellectual property, it’s features and significance (ii) Patent Protection base on Emirates Laws (iii) Criminal and Civil Protection to copy right and industrial design pursuit to Emirates Laws. (iv) Judicial precedents on industrial and Patent protection with reference to Emirates Laws

Technology has played a major role in changing the passenger experience in commercial aviation. Various laws and regulations in the aviation sector once prevented airlines from setting their own fares, but the eventual deregulation of this sector allowed airlines to create new business models and increase their profitability. This development led to greater competition between airlines and two main models developed: legacy and low-cost. A major trend since deregulation has been the decreased seat pitch in airplanes in order for airlines to maximize their profits. Utilizing classes such as first, business, and economy has allowed companies to negotiate seat pitch with a given price difference per option. The amenities that are available in the air have changed as a result of technological advancements as well. There has been a dramatic impact on inflight entertainment as a result of the better television technology and the development of touch screens. However, travelers believe that the quality of inflight meals has progressively declined. In addition, the impact of artificial intelligence has been massive for airlines, making certain processes more convenient for both the company and passengers. Although most individuals presume that airline companies receive a large profit per passenger, this is not the case since the cost for an average ticket in the commercial aviation industry has increased minimally compared to other industries. This paper analyzes the effects of such factors on the commercial aviation industry and whether the consumer experience has been positively or negatively impacted by them.

This study is based on the qualitative content analysis of three private televisions news “GEO, EXPRESS and DUNYA NEWS” to explore ethical issues such as irresponsible reporting, unauthentic information, and sensationalism in live reporting of the crisis. The main purpose of this study is to know whether or not television news channels violate ethics in live reporting of the crisis. All national and international bodies of journalism said that media must follow media ethics for the general interest of society as no society afford free and irresponsible media. Data in the form of different news reports of GEO, EXPRESS and DUNYA televisions has been collected carefully and analyzed. For the purpose of this study three incidents i.e Bhoja airplane crash, Jinnah Avenue incident and Wagah border Lahore blast have been selected to explore ethical issues in live coverage of the crisis. It has been observed that private television channels violate media ethics in live coverage of crisis due to many factors like the competitive nature of the market, less control of editorial policy, lack of training and awareness. The study suggests that all stakeholders including media houses, authorities and civil society should form a comprehensive code of conduct to ensure implementation of media ethics for the general interest of society.

By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).

Longing on a large scale is what makes history.Don DeLillo, UnderworldIntroductionWhile the media industries have been rather thoroughly dissected for their capacity to generate enthusiasm through well-honed practices of marketing and patterns of consumerism, any analysis of the shift underway to capture and modulate the ‘enthusiastic’ and affective labour of media industry practitioners themselves may still have much to learn by reaching back to the long tradition in Western philosophy: a tradition, starting with the Greeks that has almost always contrasted enthusiasm with reason (Heyd). To quote Hume: “Hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance, are … the true sources of enthusiasm” (73). Hume’s remarks are contextualised in protestant theological debates of the 18th century, where enthusiasm was a term for a religious practice, in which God possesses the believer. Especially English preachers and theologians were putting considerable energy into demonising this far too ecstatic form of belief in god (Heyd). This ambivalent attitude towards enthusiasm time-travels from the Greeks and the Enlightenment period straight into the 20th century. In 1929, William Henry Schoenau, an early author of self-help literature for the white-collar worker, aimed to gain a wider audience with the title: “Charm, Enthusiasm and Originality - their Acquisition and Use”. According to him, enthusiasm is necessary for the success of the salesman, and has to be generated by techniques such as a rigorous special diet and physical exercises of his facial muscles. But it also has to be controlled:Enthusiasm, when controlled by subtle repression, results in either élan, originality, magnetism, charm or “IT”, depending on the manner of its use. Uncontrolled enthusiasm results in blaring jazz, fanaticism and recklessness. A complete lack of enthusiasm produces the obsequious waiter and the uneducated street car conductor. (7)Though William Henry Schoenau got rather lost in his somewhat esoteric take on enthusiasm – for him it was a result of magnetic and electric currents – we argue that Schoenau had a point: Enthusiasm is a necessary affect in many forms of work, and especially so in the creative industries. It has to be generated, it sometimes has to be enacted, and it has also to be controlled. However, we disagree with Schoenau in one important issue: For us, enthusiasm can only be controlled up to a certain degree. Enthusiasm in the Creative IndustriesSchoenau wrote for an audience of salesmen and ambitious managers. This was simultaneous with the rise of Fordism. Most labour in Fordism was routine labour with the assembly line as its iconic representation. In mass-production itself, enthusiasm was not needed, often not even wanted. Henry Ford himself noted dryly: “Why do I get a human being when all I want is a pair of hands” (Kane 128). It was reserved for few occupational groups situated around the core of the mass-produced economy, such as salesmen, inventors, and leaders like him. “Henry Ford had a burning enthusiasm for the motor car” (Pearle 196).In industrial capitalism enthusiasm on a larger scale was not for the masses. It could be found in political movements, but hardly in the realm of work. This was different in the first socialist state. In the 1920s and 1930s Soviet Union the leaders turned their experience in stimulating a revolutionary mindset into a formula for industrial development – famously documented in Dziga Vertov’s “Enthusiasm. Symphony of the Donbass”.In capitalist countries things changed with the crisis of Fordism. The end of mass production and its transformation to flexible specialisation (Piore/Sabel) prepared the ground for a revival of enthusiasm on a large scale. Post-industrial economies rely on permanent innovation. Now discourses in media, management, and academia emphasise the relevance of buzzwords such as flexibility, adaptability, change, youth, speed, fun, and creativity. In social science debates around topics such as the cultural economy (Ray/Sayers, Cook et al., du Gay/Pryke, Amin/Thrift), affective labour (Lazzarato, Hardt/Negri, Virno) and creative industries (Florida, Hartley) gained in momentum (for an interesting take on enthusiasm see Bröckling). Enthusiasm has become an imperative for most professions. Those who are not on fire are in danger of getting fired. Producing and Consuming EnthusiasmOur interest in enthusiasm as affective labour emerged in an ethnographic and experimental project that we conducted in 2003-2007 in London’s creative industries. The project brought together three industrial and one academic partner to produce a reality TV show tailor-made for IPTV (internet-protocol-based television). During this project we encountered enthusiasm in many forms. Initially, we were faced with the need to be enthusiastic, while we established the project coalition. To be convincing, we had to pitch the commercial potential of such a project enthusiastically to our potential partners, and often we had to cope with rejections and start the search and pitch again (Caldwell). When the project coalition was set up, we as academic partners managed the network. In the following two years we had to cope with our partner’s different directions, different rhythms and different styles of enthusiasm. The TV producer for example had different ways to express excitement than the new media firm. Such differences resulted in conflicts and blockades, and part of our task as project managers was to rebuild an enthusiastic spirit after periods of frustration. At the same time enthusiasm was one of the ingredients of the digital object that we produced: `Real’ emotions form the material of most reality TV shows (Grindstaff). Affects are for reality TV, what steel was for a Fordist factory. We needed an enthusiastic audience as part of the filmed material. There is thus a need to elicit, select, engineer and film such emotions. To this aim we engaged with the participants and the audience in complex ways, sometimes by distancing ourselves, other times by consciously manipulating them, and at even other times by sharing enthusiasm (similar processes in respect to other emotions are ethnographically described in Hesmondhalgh/Baker). Generating and managing enthusiasm is obviously a necessary part of affective labour in the creative industries. However, just as Hesmondhalgh/Baker indicate, this seemingly simple claim is problematic.Affective Labour as Practice‘Affective labour’ is a term that describes labour through its products: ‘A feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion’ (Hardt/Negri 292-293). Thus, the term ‘affective labour’ usually describes a sector by the area of human endeavour, which it commodifies. But the concept looses its coherence, if it is used to describe labour by its practice (for an analogue argument see Dowling). The latter is what interests us. Such a usage will have to re-introduce the notion of the working subject. To see affective labour as a practice should enable us to describe in more detail, how enthusiasm shapes the becoming of a cultural object. Who employed affect when and what kinds of affects in which way? Analysing enthusiasm as social practice and affective labour usually brings about one of two contrasting perceptions. On the one hand one can celebrate enthusiasm – like Pekka Himanen – as one of the key characteristics for a new work ethic emerging alongside the Protestant Ethic. On the other hand we find critique of the need to display affects. Barbara Ehrenreich shows how a forced display of enthusiasm becomes a requirement for all office workers to survive in late capitalism. Judging from our experience these two approaches need to be synthesized: Much affective labour consists in the display of affects, in showing off, in pretending. On the other hand, enthusiasm can only realise its potential, if it is ‘real’ (as opposed to enacted).With Ehrenreich, Hochschild and many others we think that an analysis of affective labour as a practice needs to start with a notion of expression. Enthusiasm can be expressed through excited gestures, rapid movements, raised voices, eyes wide open, clapping hands, speech. For us it was often impossible to separate which expression was ‘genuine’ and which was enacted. Judging from introspection, it is probable that many actors had a similar experience to ours: They mixed some genuine enthusiasm with more or less enforced forms of re-enactment. Perhaps re-enactment turned to a ‘real’ feeling: We enacted ourselves into an authentic mood - an effect that is also described as “deep acting” (Grandey). What can happen inside us, can also happen in social situations. German philosopher Max Scheler went to substantial lengths to make a case for the contagiousness of affects, and enthusiasm is one of the most contagious affects. Mutual contagiousness of enthusiasm can lead to collective elation, with or without genuine enthusiasm of all members. The difference of real, authentic affects and enacted affects is thus not only theoretically, but also empirically rather problematic. It is impossible to make convincing claims about the degree of authenticity of an affect. However, it is also impossible to ignore this ambivalence. Both ‘authentic’ and ‘faked’ enthusiasm can be affective labour, but they differ hugely in terms of their productive capacities.Enthusiasm as Productive ForceWhy is enthusiasm so important in the first place? The answer is threefold. Firstly, an enthusiastic worker is more productive. He or she will work more intensively, put in more commitment, is likely to go the so-called extra mile. Enthusiasm can create a surplus of labour and a surplus of value, thus a surplus of productivity. Secondly enthusiasm is part of the creative act. It can unleash energies and overcome self-imposed limitations. Thirdly enthusiasm is future-oriented, a stimulus for investment, always risky. Enthusiasm can be the affective equivalent of venture capital – but it is not reified in capital, but remains incorporated in labour. Thus enthusiasm not only leads to an increase of productivity, it can be productive itself. This is what makes it to one of the most precious commodities in the creative industries. To make this argument in more detail we need to turn to one of the key philosophers of affect.Thinking Enthusiasm with SpinozaFor Spinoza, all affects are derivatives of a first basic drive or appetite. Desire/appetite is the direct equivalent of what Spinoza calls Conatus: Our striving to increase our power. From this starting point, Spinoza derives two basic affects: pleasure/joy and sadness/pain. Pleasure/joy is the result of an increase of our power, and sadness/pain is the result of its decrease. Spinoza explains all other affects through this basic framework. Even though enthusiasm is not one of the affects that Spinoza mentions, we want to suggest that Spinoza’s approach enables us to understand the productivity of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a hybrid between desire (the drive) and joy (the basic affect). Like hope or fear, it is future-oriented. It is a desire (to increase our power) combined with an anticipated outcome. Present and the future are tightly bound. Enthusiasm differs in this respect from its closest relatives: hope and optimism. Both hope and optimism believe in the desired outcome, but only against the odds and with a presumption of doubt. Enthusiasm is a form of ecstatic and hyper-confident hope. It already rewards us with joy in the present.With Spinoza we can understand the magical trick of future-oriented enthusiasm: To be enthusiastic means to anticipate an outcome of an increased power. This anticipation increases our power in the present. The increased power in the present can then be used to achieve the increased power in the future. If successful, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is this future-orientedness, which can make enthusiasm productive. Actions and PassionsIn its Greek origin (‘enthousiasmos’) to be enthusiastic meant to be possessed or inspired by a god. An enthusiast was someone with an intense religious fervour and sometimes someone with an exaggerated belief in religious inspiration. Accordingly, enthusiasm is often connected to the devotion to an ideal, cause, study or pursuit. In late capitalism, we get possessed by different gods. We get possessed by the gods of opportunity – in our case the opportunities of a new technology like IPTV. Obsessions cannot easily be switched on and off. This is part of affective labour: The ability to open up and let the gods of future-oriented enthusiasm take hold of us. We believe in something not for the sake of believing, but for the sake of what we believe in. But at the same time we know that we need to believe. The management of this contradiction is a problem of control. As enthusiasm now constitutes a precious commodity, we cannot leave it to mere chance. Spinoza addresses exactly this point. He distinguishes two kinds of affects, actions and passions. Actions are what we control, passions are what controls us. Joy (= the experience of increased power of acting) can also weaken, if someone is not able to control the affection that triggered the joy. In such a case it becomes a passion: An increase of power that weakens in the long run. Enthusiasm is often exactly this. How can enthusiasm as a passion be turned into an action? One possible answer is to control what Spinoza calls the ‘ideas’ of the bodily affections. For Spinoza, affections (affectiones) ‘strike’ the body, but affect (affectus) is formed of both, of the bodily affectiones, but also of our ideas of these affectiones. Can such ideas become convictions, beliefs, persuasions? Our experience suggests that this is indeed possible. The excitement about the creative possibilities of IPTV, for example, was turned into a conviction. We had internalised the affect as part of our beliefs. But we had internalised it for a prize: The more it became an idea the more stable it got, but the less it was a full, bodily affect, something that touched our nervous system. We gained power over it for the price that it became less powerful in its drive.Managing the UnmanageableIn all institutions and organisations enthusiasm needs to be managed on a regular basis. In project networks however the orchestration of affects faces a different set of obstacles than in traditional organizations. Power structures are often shifting and not formally defined. Project partners are likely to have diverging interests, different expectations and different views on how to collaborate. What might be a disappointing result for one partner can be a successful result for another one. Differences of interest can be accompanied by differences of the expression of enthusiasm. This was clearly the case in our project network. The TV company entered a state of hype and frenzy while pitching the project. They were expressing their enthusiasm with talk about prominent TV channels that would buy the product, and celebrities who would take part in the show. The new media company showed its commitment through the development of beautifully designed time plans and prototypes – one of them included the idea to advertise the logo of the project on banners placed on airplanes. This sort of enthusiastic presentation led the TV producer to oppose the vision of the new media’s brand developer: She perceived this as an example of unrealistic pipe dreams. In turn the TV producer’s repeated name-dropping led other partners to mistrust them.Timing was another reason why it seemed to be impossible to integrate the affective cohorts of all partners into one well-oiled machine. Work in TV production requires periods of heightened enthusiasm while shooting the script. Not surprisingly, TV professionals save up their energy for this time. In contrast, new media practitioners create their products on the go: hype and energy are spread over the whole work process. Their labour becomes materialised in detailed plans, concepts, and prototypes. In short, the affective machine of a project network needs orchestration. This is a question of management.As this management failed so often in our project, we could discover another issue in the universe of enthusiasm: Disappointed high spirits can easily turn into bitterness and hostility. High expectations can lead to a lack of motivation and finally to a loss of loyalty towards the product and towards other project partners. Thus managing enthusiasm is not just about timing. It is also about managing disappointment and frustration. These are techniques, which have to be well developed on the level of the self-management as well as group management.Beyond the ProjectWe want to conclude this paper with a scene that happened at the very end of the project. In a final meeting, all partners agreed – much to our surprise – that the product was a big success. At that time we as academic partners found this irritating. There were many reasons why we disagreed: we did not produce a new format, we did not get positive user feedback, and we could not sell the show to further broadcasters (our original aims). However, all of this did not seem to have any impact on this final assessment. At the time of the meeting this looked for us like surreal theatre. Looking back now, this display of enthusiasm was indeed perhaps a ‘rational’ thing to do. Most projects and products in the creative industries are not successful on the market (Frith). To recreate the belief that one will eventually be successful (McRobbie) seems to be the one task of affective labour that stands out at the end of the lifecycle of many creative project networks.References Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift, eds. The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.Broeckling, Ulrich. “Enthusiasten, Ironiker, Melancholiker. Vom Umgang mit der unternehmerischen Anrufung.” Mittelweg 36.4 (2008): 80-86.Caldwell, John Thornton. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 200. Cook, Ian, et al., eds. Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns. Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2000.Dowling, Emma. “Producing the Dining Experience: Measure, Subjectivity and the Affective Worker.” Ephemera 7 (2007): 117-132.Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream. London: Granta, 2005.Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2002.Du Gay, Paul. and Michael Pryke, eds. Cultural Economy. Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. London: Sage, 2002.Grandy, Alicia. “Emotion Regulation in the Workplace: A New Way to Conceptualise Emotional Labour.” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 5 (2000): 95-110.Grindstaff, Laura. The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.Hartley, John, ed. Creative Industries. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.Hesmondhalgh, David, and Sarah Baker. “Creative Work and Emotional Labour in the Television Industry.” Theory, Culture and Society 25.5 (2008): 97-119.Heyd, Michael. “Be Sober and Reasonable." The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995.Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic. London: Random House, 2002.Hume, David. “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm.” Essays, Moral Political and Literary, I.X.3. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1742/1987.Johnson, Gregory. “The Tree of Melancholy. Kant on Philosophy and Enthusiasm.” Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion. Eds. Chris L. Firestone and Stephen R. Palmquist. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. 43-61.Kane, Pat. The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living. London: Pan Books, 2005.Lazzarato, Maurizio. "Verwertung und Kommunikation." Umherschweifende Produzenten. Eds. Negri et al., Berlin: ID Verlag, 1998.Lutz, Burkart. Der kurze Traum immerwährender Prosperität: Eine Neuinterpretation der industriell-kapitalistischen Entwicklung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1984.Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism. London, 1978.McRobbie, Angela. “From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at Work in the Cultural Economy.” Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. Eds. Paul du Gay and M. Pryke. London: Sage, 2001. 97-114.Pearle, Norman V. Enthusiasm Makes the Difference. Worl's Work: Kingswood and London, 1967.Piore, Michael, and Charles Sabel. Das Ende der Massenproduktion. Studie über die Requalifizierung der Arbeit und die Rückkehr der Ökonomie in die Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985.Ray, Larry, and Andrew Sayer, eds. Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn. London: Sage, 1999.Reich, Robert. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism. New York: Knopf, 1991.Scheler, Max. Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. Gesammelte Werke, VII. Bonn: Bouvier, 1973 [1913].Schoenau, William H. Charm, Enthusiasm and Originality: Their Acquisition and Use. Los Angeles: Eln Publishing, 1929.Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. The Collected Works of Spinoza I, trans. E. Curley. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1985. Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude. For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Perhaps the supreme quality of print is one that is lost on us, since it has so casual and obvious an existence (McLuhan 160). Print Machine (Thad Donovan, 1995) In the introduction to his book on 9/11, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek uses an analogy of letter writing to emphasize the contingency of post-9/11 reality. In the example, Zizek discusses the efforts of writers to escape the eyes of governmental censors and a system that used blue ink to indicate a message was true, red ink to indicate it was false. The story ends with an individual receiving a letter from the censored country stating that the writer could not find any red ink. The ambiguity and the duplicity of writing, suggested in Zizek’s tale of colored inks, is a condition of the contemporary world, even if we are unaware of it. We exist in an age in which print—the economization of writing—has an increasingly significant and precarious role in our lives. We turn to the Internet chat room for textual interventions in our sexual, political and aesthetic lives. We burn satanic Harry Potter books and issue fatwas against writers like Salman Rushdie. We narrate our lives using pictures, fonts of varying typeface and color, and sound on our personalized homepages. We throw out our printed books and buy audio ones so we can listen to our favorite authors in the car. We place trust of our life savings, personal numbers, and digital identity in the hands of unseen individuals behind computer screens. Decisively, we are a print people, but our very nature of being dependent on the technologies of print in our public and private lives leads to our inability to consider the epistemological, social and existential effects of print on us. In this article, I focus on the current manifestations of print—what I call “newprint”—including their relationships to consumerism, identity formation and the politics of the state. I will then consider the democratic possibilities of print, suggested by the personalization of print through the Internet and home publishing, and conclude with the implications of the end of print that include the possibility of a post-print language and the middle voice. In order to understand the significance of our current print culture, it is important to situate print in the context of the history of communication. In earlier times, writing had magical associations (Harris 10), and commonly these underpinnings led to the stratification of communities. Writing functioned as a type of black box, “the mysterious technology by which any message [could] be concealed from its illiterate bearer” (Harris 16). Plato and Socrates warned against the negative effects of writing on the mind, including the erosion of memory (Ong 81). Though it once supplemented the communicational bases of orality, the written word soon supplanted it and created a dramatic existential shift in people—a separation of “the knower from the known” (Ong 43-44). As writing moved from the inconvenience of illuminated manuscripts and hand-copied texts, it became systemized in Gutenberg print, and writing then took on the signature of the state—messages between people were codified in the technology of print. With the advent of computer technologies in the 1990s, including personal computers, word processing programs, printers, and the Internet, the age of newprint begins. Newprint includes the electronic language of the Internet and other examples of the public alphabet, including billboards, signage and the language of advertising. As much as members of consumer society are led to believe that newprint is the harbinger of positive identity construction and individualism, closer analysis of the mechanisms of newprint leads to a different conclusion. An important context of new print is found in the space of the home computer. The home computer is the workstation of the contemporary discursive culture—people send and receive emails, do their shopping on the Internet, meet friends and even spouses through dating services, conceal their identity on MUDs and MOOs, and produce state-of-the-art publishing projects, even books. The ubiquity of print in the space of the personal computer leads to the vital illusion that this newprint is emancipatory. Some theorists have argued that the Internet exhibits the spirit of communicative action addressed by Juergen Habermas, but such thinkers have neglected the fact that the foundations of newprint, just like those of Gutenberg print, are the state and the corporation. Recent advertising of Hewlett-Packard and other computer companies illustrates this point. One advertisement suggested that consumers could “invent themselves” through HP computer and printer technology: by using the varied media available to them, consumers can make everything from personalized greeting cards to full-fledged books. As Friedrich Kittler illustrates, we should resist the urge to separate the practices of writing from the technologies of their production, what Jay David Bolter (41) denotes as the “writing space”. For as much as we long for new means of democratic and individualistic expression, we should not succumb to the urge to accept newprint because of its immediacy, novelty or efficiency. Doing so will relegate us to a mechanistic existence, what is referenced metaphorically in Thad Donovan’s “print machine.” In multiple contexts, newprint extends the corporate state’s propaganda industry by turning the written word into artifice. Even before newprint, the individual was confronted with the hegemony of writing. Writing creates “context-free language” or “autonomous discourse,” which means an individual cannot directly confront the language or speaker as one could in oral cultures (Ong 78). This further division of the individual from the communicational world is emphasized in newprint’s focus on the aesthetics of the typeface. In word processing programs like Microsoft Word, and specialized ones like TwistType, the consumer can take a word or a sentence and transform it into an aesthetic formation. On the word processing program that is producing this text, I can choose from Blinking Background, Las Vegas Lights, Marching Red or Black Ants, Shimmer, and Sparkle Text. On my campus email system I am confronted with pictorial backgrounds, font selection and animation as an intimate aspect of the communicational system of my college. On my cell phone I can receive text messages, and I can choose to use emoticons (iconic characters and messages) on the Internet. As Walter Ong wrote, “print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did … control of position is everything in print” (Ong 121). In the case of the new culture of print, the control over more functions of the printed page, specifically its presentation, leads some consumers to believe that choice and individuality are the outcomes. Newprint does not free the writer from the constraints imposed by the means of traditional print—the printing press—rather, it furthers them as the individual operates by the logos of a predetermined and programmed electronic print. The capacity to spell and write grammatically correct sentences is abated by the availability of spell- and grammar-checking functions in word processing software. In many ways, the aura of writing is lost in newprint in the same way in which art lost its organic nature as it moved into the age of reproducibility (Benjamin). Just as filters in imaging programs like Photoshop reduce the aesthetic functions of the user to the determinations of the software programmer, the use of automated print technologies—whether spell-checking or fanciful page layout software like QuarkXpress or Page Maker—will further dilute the voice of the writer. Additionally, the new forms of print can lead to a fracturing of community, the opposite intent of Habermas’ communicative action. An example is the recent growth of specialized languages on the Internet. Some of the newer forms of such languages use combinations of alphanumeric characters to create a language that can only be read by those with the code. As Internet print becomes more specialized, a tribal effect may be felt within our communities. Since email began a few years ago, I have noticed that the nature of the emails I receive has been dramatically altered. Today’s emails tend to be short and commonly include short hands (“LOL” = “laugh out loud”), including the elimination of capitalization and punctuation. In surveying students on the reasons behind such alterations of language in email, I am told that these short hands allow for more efficient forms of communication. In my mind, this is the key issue that is at stake in both print and newprint culture—for as long as we rely on print and other communicational systems as a form of efficiency, we are doomed to send and receive inaccurate and potentially dangerous messages. Benedict Anderson and Hannah Arendt addressed the connections of print to nationalistic and fascist urges (Anderson; Arendt), and such tendencies are seen in the post-9/11 discursive formations within the United States. Bumper stickers and Presidential addresses conveyed the same simplistic printed messages: “Either You are with Us or You are with the Terrorists.” Whether dropping leaflets from airplanes or in scrolling text messages on the bottom of the television news screen, the state is dependent on the efficiency of print to maintain control of the citizen. A feature of this efficiency is that newprint be rhetorically immediate in its results, widely available in different forms of technology, and dominated by the notion of individuality and democracy that is envisioned in HP’s “invent yourself” advertsiements. As Marshall McLuhan’s epigram suggests, we have an ambiguous relationship to print. We depend on printed language in our daily lives, for education and for the economic transactions that underpin our consumer world, yet we are unable to confront the rhetoric of the state and mass media that are consequences of the immediacy and magic of both print and new print. Print extends the domination of our consciousness by forms of discourse that privilege representation over experience and the subject over the object. As we look to new means of communicating with one another and of expressing our intimate lives, we must consider altering the discursive foundations of our communication, such as looking to the middle voice. The middle voice erases the distinctions between subjects and objects and instead emphasizes the writer being in the midst of things, as a part of the world as opposed to dominating it (Barthes; Tyler). A few months prior to writing this article, I spent the fall quarter teaching in London. One day I received an email that changed my life. My partner of nearly six years announced that she was leaving me. I was gripped with the fact of my being unable to discuss the situation with her as we were thousands of miles apart and I struggled to understand how such a significant and personal circumstance could be communicated with the printed word of email. Welcome to new print! References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1976. Barthes, Roland. “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970. 134-56. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard, 2002. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Harris, Roy. The Origin of Writing. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986. Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1991. Tyler, Stephen A. “The Middle Voice: The Influence of Post-Modernism on Empirical Research in Anthropology.” Post-modernism and Anthropology. Eds. K. Geuijen, D. Raven, and J. de Wolf. Assen, The Neatherlands: Van Gorcum, 1995. Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lukas, Scott A. "Nevermoreprint." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/04-lukas.php>. APA Style Lukas, S. (Jun. 2005) "Nevermoreprint," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/04-lukas.php>.

Michael Smith, the Martian of Robert Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land is having a lot of difficulty in understanding what makes up that strange creature he has just encountered for the first time, the "human." A trip to the local zoo and a cage of monkeys provides the answer for him. There, a peanut is thrown to a small monkey who takes it eagerly. This monkey is immediately bowled over by a larger monkey, and the peanut is stolen from him. The small monkey runs away howling, until it tracks down an even smaller monkey to beat the daylights out of. The rest of the monkeys choose to ignore the entire incident altogether. At this, Michael begins to laugh uncontrollably, so hard that he is unable to stop for hours. A revelatory moment, at last the Martian has understood (in his idiolect, he has "grokked") that fundamental secret of what it is to be human: "I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts-because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting-of course it wasn't funny; it was tragic. That's why I had to laugh. I looked at a cage full of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I've seen and heard and read about - and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing" (Heinlein 289). Slovoj Zizek's Lacanian psychoanalytic writings are often based around this same fundamental insight into the human condition: that one should remain aware of the utterly strange and paradoxical chasm that lies at the centre of our psychic make-up. Zizek would consider Michael's laughter at the monkeys an example of concealment of primal trauma via the safety gauge of laughter, for this act of jouissance, as Flieger puts is (taking her cue from Freud): "breaks laws and re-establishes them simultaneously, but avoids tragic conflict by re-routing deadly hostile impulses along a route of substitutive conciliation" (Flieger 65). Behind this jouissance lies the Real,which must be understood as that crucial X factor behind existence, that chaotic "inruption of non-sense" (as Eagleton paraphrases) into the carefully-constructed orders of the Symbolic and the Imaginary (42). At this point, then, we might suppose that laughter is a purely beneficial and therapeutic act, halting probable psychosis. This perhaps explains why Zizek is so interested in the cynical strain he has identified as one of modern society's greatest afflictions, which he identifies as a kind of jouissance without the Real. Cynicism is one of the recurring bugbears of Zizek's recent work,stretching back to his first major work in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). His theory is grounded in Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason (first published in 1983), in which cynicism is defined as "enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernised, unhappy consciousness, on which Enlightenment has laboured-well-off and miserable at the same time" (5). Sloterdijk interprets the period of the Enlightenment as the formative period for the development of our modern subjectivity, and Zizek adds (following Lacan) that this is because this period saw the birth of the Cartesian "subject". The performative act of becoming a subject, Zizek indicates, is another way of evading the Real: "subjectivization is a way to elude the void which "is" the subject, it is ultimately a defense mechanism against the subject" (Enjoy 186). The historicity of this cynical attitude is a point that Zizek continually reiterates-the "false consciousness" of cynicism developed because "the Enlightenment project has gone wrong" (136). Such a historicist view points to the finitude of the cynical split. The optimistic obverse of this focus on the past is that one day there may be the possibility for suture. But as for contemporary society, Zizek negates the paranoiac Adornian conclusion that our modern age is a post-ideological one. Instead, he asserts that we are in fact so entrenched in ideology that it is difficult to even distinguish its parameters. There is a breakdown in the relationship between the 'knowledge' and the 'act': "the cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he nonetheless still insists upon the mask" (Subject 29). A problem is still raised, for while emphasising that cynicism is a much more insidious kind of masked ideology, he also emphasises the absolute necessity of every ideological foundation. The danger lies because the "true" face is kept hidden from view: "the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they [i.e. cynical people] overlook, what they misrecognise, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity" (Subject 32) One of the strategies of cynical consciousness is the "kynical", the attitude to constantly critique society, coined by Sloterdijk) (Subject 29). In recent comedy, one of the chief examplars of "kynical", understated, humour would have to be Jerry Seinfeld's observational style of standup comedy that become so popular during the nineties (i.e. "what's the deal with-airports/queues/etc."). Seinfeld avoids the overtly political in his comedy, but his usual focus on the banalities of the quotidian (as he calls it, the "minutiae") can be interpreted as an attack on aspects of Western consumer culture. The very act of asking the question "what's the deal?" implies a certain dissatisfaction with the status quo of consumer culture, it poses the question "why is our society so strange?" In response to such a question, the audience laughs because it recognises the particular aspect of society that Seinfeld aims to deconstruct. At the same time, an economy of desire is constructed around the act of the laughter itself. For Zizek, cynicism is a self-gratifying gesture that follows the fetishistic logic of "I know very well the truth of this statement, but in the meantime." There is jouissance in the act of recognition (or false consciousness), which of course deflects the original impulse that we presume to be social critique. This "kynicism" performs the opposite effect of Victor Shklovsky's concept of ostraneniye, the method of "making strange" the symbolic language, which Zizek would interpret as the "philosophical experience of 'wondering'" Enjoy 53). Seinfeld's comedy skips over that moment of comprehension, that breakdown to the shock of the Real. In other words, Seinfeld's cynicism yada yada yadas over the point de capiton. Therefore, cynicism is another attempt to reposition the symbolic as the primary level of experience, to usurp the Real with "reality."However, in the turbulent days that followed September 11, we find a counter at least to this "kynical" style of humour (the kind of comedy exemplified in Australia by such TV shows as The Glass House and the now-defunct Good News Week). The satirical show Politically Incorrect was pulled from the air on the American ABC network, after its host, Bill Maher, disputed President Bush's statement that the World Trade Centre terrorists were "cowardly." On the show airing on the seventeenth of September, Maher made the following statement: "we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly-staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly. " Au contraire to the show's title, this was perhaps one of the most politically correct statements ever made on American television, and it cost Maher his television show. Politically Incorrect was immediately pulled from the air in many American states (including Washington DC), and the show, crippled by public criticism and the loss of advertising money, was axed soon after. Maher normally utilised a "kynical" standpoint to throw stones at the big Other (i.e. the US political system), and as we have already seen with the example of Seinfeld, the jolting "Real" moment of the humour never seems to happen. Was Maher's September 11 comment one of the sublime instances of the letter "reaching its destination" to the American public? The jolting ostraneniye of this comedy is precisely that here there is no joke, no consoling sedative of jouissance, and the shock that followed in this humour deficit was one of denial and anger. One may argue that this instance provided a more "Real" moment for the American public than the media spectacle surrounding September 11 itself. Zizek writes in "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" (posted on the internet on the same day as that episode of Politically Incorrect), that Americans have libidinally invested in images of catastrophe for years. Catastrophe is one of the healthiest signs of the persistence of the symbolic order. By saying "we are the cowards!", Maher was essentially telling his public "we are the enemy!" or "we are the Symbolic!", and for a short time he dissolved the force of the non-existent Big Other. It is no wonder that he was ejected from this symbolic order at lightning speed. Here, I can't help being reminded of Guy Debord's axiom in The Society of the Spectacle, that "in a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false". In Zizek's cynical society, it seems to be strange but true that when the joke isn't funny anymore is really when it breaks the most societal taboos. Works Cited Eagleton, Terry. "Enjoy!" Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24:2 (2001), pp.40-52. Flieger, Jerry Aline. "Has Oedipus Signed Off (or Struck Out)?: Zizek, Lacan and the Field of Cyberspace." Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24:2 (2001), pp.53-77. Heinlein, Robert. Stranger in a Strange Land. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982 (1961). Maher, Bill. "Politically Incorrect." Screened September 17th, 2001. Sloterdijk, Peter. The Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by M.Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (1983). Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 2001 (1992). ---. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1999 (1989). Links http://de.indymedia.org/2001/09/7659.shtml http://www.millionflagmarch.com/bill/moreinfo.htm http://www.abc.net.au/glasshouse/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Blackwood, Gemma. "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/3-blackwood-that-joke.php>. APA Style Blackwood, G. (2003, Nov 10). That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/3-blackwood-that-joke.php>

Michael Smith, the Martian of Robert Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land is having a lot of difficulty in understanding what makes up that strange creature he has just encountered for the first time, the "human." A trip to the local zoo and a cage of monkeys provides the answer for him. There, a peanut is thrown to a small monkey who takes it eagerly. This monkey is immediately bowled over by a larger monkey, and the peanut is stolen from him. The small monkey runs away howling, until it tracks down an even smaller monkey to beat the daylights out of. The rest of the monkeys choose to ignore the entire incident altogether. At this, Michael begins to laugh uncontrollably, so hard that he is unable to stop for hours. A revelatory moment, at last the Martian has understood (in his idiolect, he has "grokked") that fundamental secret of what it is to be human: "I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts-because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting-of course it wasn't funny; it was tragic. That's why I had to laugh. I looked at a cage full of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I've seen and heard and read about - and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing" (Heinlein 289). Slovoj Zizek's Lacanian psychoanalytic writings are often based around this same fundamental insight into the human condition: that one should remain aware of the utterly strange and paradoxical chasm that lies at the centre of our psychic make-up. Zizek would consider Michael's laughter at the monkeys an example of concealment of primal trauma via the safety gauge of laughter, for this act of jouissance, as Flieger puts is (taking her cue from Freud): "breaks laws and re-establishes them simultaneously, but avoids tragic conflict by re-routing deadly hostile impulses along a route of substitutive conciliation" (Flieger 65). Behind this jouissance lies the Real,which must be understood as that crucial X factor behind existence, that chaotic "inruption of non-sense" (as Eagleton paraphrases) into the carefully-constructed orders of the Symbolic and the Imaginary (42). At this point, then, we might suppose that laughter is a purely beneficial and therapeutic act, halting probable psychosis. This perhaps explains why Zizek is so interested in the cynical strain he has identified as one of modern society's greatest afflictions, which he identifies as a kind of jouissance without the Real. Cynicism is one of the recurring bugbears of Zizek's recent work,stretching back to his first major work in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). His theory is grounded in Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason (first published in 1983), in which cynicism is defined as "enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernised, unhappy consciousness, on which Enlightenment has laboured-well-off and miserable at the same time" (5). Sloterdijk interprets the period of the Enlightenment as the formative period for the development of our modern subjectivity, and Zizek adds (following Lacan) that this is because this period saw the birth of the Cartesian "subject". The performative act of becoming a subject, Zizek indicates, is another way of evading the Real: "subjectivization is a way to elude the void which "is" the subject, it is ultimately a defense mechanism against the subject" (Enjoy 186). The historicity of this cynical attitude is a point that Zizek continually reiterates-the "false consciousness" of cynicism developed because "the Enlightenment project has gone wrong" (136). Such a historicist view points to the finitude of the cynical split. The optimistic obverse of this focus on the past is that one day there may be the possibility for suture. But as for contemporary society, Zizek negates the paranoiac Adornian conclusion that our modern age is a post-ideological one. Instead, he asserts that we are in fact so entrenched in ideology that it is difficult to even distinguish its parameters. There is a breakdown in the relationship between the 'knowledge' and the 'act': "the cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he nonetheless still insists upon the mask" (Subject 29). A problem is still raised, for while emphasising that cynicism is a much more insidious kind of masked ideology, he also emphasises the absolute necessity of every ideological foundation. The danger lies because the "true" face is kept hidden from view: "the illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they [i.e. cynical people] overlook, what they misrecognise, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity" (Subject 32) One of the strategies of cynical consciousness is the "kynical", the attitude to constantly critique society, coined by Sloterdijk) (Subject 29). In recent comedy, one of the chief examplars of "kynical", understated, humour would have to be Jerry Seinfeld's observational style of standup comedy that become so popular during the nineties (i.e. "what's the deal with-airports/queues/etc."). Seinfeld avoids the overtly political in his comedy, but his usual focus on the banalities of the quotidian (as he calls it, the "minutiae") can be interpreted as an attack on aspects of Western consumer culture. The very act of asking the question "what's the deal?" implies a certain dissatisfaction with the status quo of consumer culture, it poses the question "why is our society so strange?" In response to such a question, the audience laughs because it recognises the particular aspect of society that Seinfeld aims to deconstruct. At the same time, an economy of desire is constructed around the act of the laughter itself. For Zizek, cynicism is a self-gratifying gesture that follows the fetishistic logic of "I know very well the truth of this statement, but in the meantime." There is jouissance in the act of recognition (or false consciousness), which of course deflects the original impulse that we presume to be social critique. This "kynicism" performs the opposite effect of Victor Shklovsky's concept of ostraneniye, the method of "making strange" the symbolic language, which Zizek would interpret as the "philosophical experience of 'wondering'" Enjoy 53). Seinfeld's comedy skips over that moment of comprehension, that breakdown to the shock of the Real. In other words, Seinfeld's cynicism yada yada yadas over the point de capiton. Therefore, cynicism is another attempt to reposition the symbolic as the primary level of experience, to usurp the Real with "reality."However, in the turbulent days that followed September 11, we find a counter at least to this "kynical" style of humour (the kind of comedy exemplified in Australia by such TV shows as The Glass House and the now-defunct Good News Week). The satirical show Politically Incorrect was pulled from the air on the American ABC network, after its host, Bill Maher, disputed President Bush's statement that the World Trade Centre terrorists were "cowardly." On the show airing on the seventeenth of September, Maher made the following statement: "we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly-staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly. " Au contraire to the show's title, this was perhaps one of the most politically correct statements ever made on American television, and it cost Maher his television show. Politically Incorrect was immediately pulled from the air in many American states (including Washington DC), and the show, crippled by public criticism and the loss of advertising money, was axed soon after. Maher normally utilised a "kynical" standpoint to throw stones at the big Other (i.e. the US political system), and as we have already seen with the example of Seinfeld, the jolting "Real" moment of the humour never seems to happen. Was Maher's September 11 comment one of the sublime instances of the letter "reaching its destination" to the American public? The jolting ostraneniye of this comedy is precisely that here there is no joke, no consoling sedative of jouissance, and the shock that followed in this humour deficit was one of denial and anger. One may argue that this instance provided a more "Real" moment for the American public than the media spectacle surrounding September 11 itself. Zizek writes in "Welcome to the Desert of the Real" (posted on the internet on the same day as that episode of Politically Incorrect), that Americans have libidinally invested in images of catastrophe for years. Catastrophe is one of the healthiest signs of the persistence of the symbolic order. By saying "we are the cowards!", Maher was essentially telling his public "we are the enemy!" or "we are the Symbolic!", and for a short time he dissolved the force of the non-existent Big Other. It is no wonder that he was ejected from this symbolic order at lightning speed. Here, I can't help being reminded of Guy Debord's axiom in The Society of the Spectacle, that "in a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false". In Zizek's cynical society, it seems to be strange but true that when the joke isn't funny anymore is really when it breaks the most societal taboos. Works Cited Eagleton, Terry. "Enjoy!" Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24:2 (2001), pp.40-52. Flieger, Jerry Aline. "Has Oedipus Signed Off (or Struck Out)?: Zizek, Lacan and the Field of Cyberspace." Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 24:2 (2001), pp.53-77. Heinlein, Robert. Stranger in a Strange Land. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982 (1961). Maher, Bill. "Politically Incorrect." Screened September 17th, 2001. Sloterdijk, Peter. The Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by M.Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (1983). Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 2001 (1992). ---. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1999 (1989). Links http://de.indymedia.org/2001/09/7659.shtml http://www.millionflagmarch.com/bill/moreinfo.htm http://www.abc.net.au/glasshouse/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Blackwood, Gemma. "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/3-blackwood-that-joke.php>. APA Style Blackwood, G. (2003, Nov 10). That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/3-blackwood-that-joke.php>

IntroductionThe death of Chris Cornell in the spring of 2017 shook me. As the lead singer of Soundgarden and a pioneer of early 1990s grunge music, his voice revealed an unbridled pain and joy backed up by the raw, guitar-driven rock emanating from the Seattle, Washington music scene. I remember thinking, there’s only one left, referring to Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam, and lone survivor of the four seminal grunge bands that rose to fame in the early 1990s whose lead singers passed away much too soon. Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died in 2002 at the age of 35, and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 had resonated around the globe. I thought about when Cornell and Staley said goodbye to their friend Andy Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, after he overdosed on heroine in 1990. Wood’s untimely death at the age of 24, only days before his band’s debut album release, shook the close-knit Seattle music scene and remained a source of angst and inspiration for a genre of music that shaped youth culture of the 1990s.When grunge first exploded on the pop culture scene, I was a college student flailing around in pursuit of an English degree I had less passion for than I did for music. I grew up listening to The Beatles and Prince; Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis; David Bowie and Willie Nelson, along with a litany of other artists and musicians crafting the kind of meaningful music I responded to. I didn’t just listen to music, I devoured stories about the musicians, their often hedonistic lifestyles; their processes and epiphanies. The music spoke to my being in the world more than the promise of any college degree. I ran with friends who shared this love of music, often turning me on to new bands or suggesting some obscure song from the past to track down. I picked up my first guitar when John Lennon died on the eve of my eleventh birthday and have played for the past 37 years. I rely on music to relocate my sense of self. Rhythm and melody play out like characters in my life, colluding to make me feel something apart from the mundane, moving me from within. So, when I took notice of grunge music in the fall of 1991, it was love at first listen. As a pop cultural phenomenon, grunge ruptured the music and fashion industries caught off guard by its sudden commercial appeal while the media struggled to galvanize its relevance. As a subculture, grunge rallied around a set of attitudes and values that set the movement apart from mainstream (Latysheva). The grunge sound drew from the nihilism of punk and the head banging gospel of heavy metal, tinged with the swagger of 1970s FM rock running counter to the sleek production of pop radio and hair metal bands. Grunge artists wrote emotionally-laden songs that spoke to a particular generation of youth who identified with lyrics about isolation, anger, and death. Grunge set off new fashion trends in favor of dressing down and sporting the latest in second-hand, thrift store apparel, ripping away the Reagan-era starched white-collared working-class aesthetic of the 1980’s corporate culture. Like their punk forbearers who railed against the status quo and the trappings of success incurred through the mass appeal of their art, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and the rest of the grunge cohort often wrestled with the momentum of their success. Fortunes rained down and the media ordained them rock stars.This auto-ethnography revisits some of the cultural impacts of grunge during its rise to cultural relevance and includes my own reflexive interpretation positioned as a fan of grunge music. I use a particular auto-ethnographic orientation called “interpretive-humanistic autoethnography” (Manning and Adams 192) where, along with archival research (i.e. media articles and journal articles), I will use my own reflexive voice to interpret and describe my personal experiences as a fan of grunge music during its peak of popularity from 1991 up to the death of Cobain in 1994. It is a methodology that works to bridge the personal and popular where “the individual story leaves traces of at least one path through a shifting, transforming, and disappearing cultural landscape” (Neumann 183). Grunge RootsThere are many conflicting stories as to when the word “grunge” was first used to describe the sound of a particular style of alternative music seeping from the dank basements and shoddy rehearsal spaces in towns like Olympia, Aberdeen, and Seattle. Lester Bangs, the preeminent cultural writer and critic of all things punk, pop, and rock in the 1970s was said to have used the word at one time (Yarm), and several musicians lay claim to their use of the word in the 1980s. But it was a small Seattle record label founded in 1988 called Sub Pop Records that first included grunge in their marketing materials to describe “the grittiness of the music and the energy” (Yarm 195).This particular sound grew out of the Pacific Northwest blue-collar environment of logging towns, coastal fisheries, and airplane manufacturing. Seattle’s alternative music scene unfolded as a community of musicians responding to the tucked away isolation of their musty surroundings, apart from the outside world, free to submerge themselves in their own cultural milieu of rock music, rain, and youthful rebellion.Where Seattle stood as a major metropolitan city soaked in rainclouds for much of the year, I was soaking up the desert sun in a rural college town when grunge first leapt into the mainstream. Cattle ranches and cotton fields spread across the open plains of West Texas, painted with pickup trucks, starched Wrangler Jeans, and cowboy hats. This was not my world. I’d arrived the year prior from Houston, Texas, an urban sprawl of four million people, but I found the wide-open landscape a welcome change from the concrete jungle of the big city. Along with cowboy boots and western shirts came country music, and lots of it. Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, George Straight; some of the voices that captured the lifestyle of my small rural town, twangy guitars and fiddles blaring on local radio. While popular country artists recorded for behemoth record labels like Warner Brothers and Sony, the tiny Sub Pop Records championed the grunge sound coming out of the Seattle music scene. Sub Pop became a playground for those who cared about their music and little else. The label cultivated an early following through their Sub Pop Singles Club, mailing seven-inch records to subscribers on a monthly basis promoting new releases from up-and-coming bands. Sub Pop’s stark, black and white logo showed up on records sleeves, posters, and t-shirts, reflecting a no-nonsense DIY-attitude rooted in in the production of loud guitars and heavy drums.Like the bands it represented, Sub Pop did not take itself too seriously when one of their best-selling t-shirts simply read “Loser” embracing the slacker mood of newly minted Generation X’ers born between 1961 and 1981. A July 1990 Time Magazine article described this twenty-something demographic as having “few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own” suggesting they “possess only a hazy sense of their own identity” (Gross & Scott). As a member of this generation, I purchased and wore my “Loser” t-shirt with pride, especially in ironic response to the local cowboy way of life. I didn’t hold anything personal against the Wrangler wearing Garth Brooks fan but as a twenty-one-year-old reluctant college student, I wanted to rage with contempt for the status quo of my environment with an ambivalent snarl.Grunge in the MainstreamIn 1991, the Seattle sound exploded onto the international music scene with the release of four seminal grunge-era albums over a six-month period. The first arrived in April, Temple of the Dog, a tribute album of sorts to the late Andy Wood, led by his close friend, Soundgarden singer/songwriter, Chris Cornell. In August, Pearl Jam released their debut album, Ten, with its “surprising and refreshing, melodic restraint” (Fricke). The following month, Nirvana’s Nevermind landed in stores. Now on a major record label, DGC Records, the band had arrived “at the crossroads—scrappy garageland warriors setting their sights on a land of giants” (Robbins). October saw the release of Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger as “a runaway train ride of stammering guitar and psycho-jungle telegraph rhythms” (Fricke). These four albums sent grunge culture into the ether with a wall of sound that would upend the music charts and galvanize a depressed concert ticket market.In fall of 1991, grunge landed like a hammer when I witnessed Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV for the first time. Sonically, the song rang like an anthem for the Gen Xers with its jangly four-chord opening guitar riff signaling the arrival of a youth-oriented call to arms, “here we are now, entertain us” (Nirvana). It was the visual power of seeing a skinny white kid with stringy hair wearing baggy jeans, a striped T-shirt and tennis shoes belting out choruses with a ferociousness typically reserved for black-clad heavy metal headbangers. Cobain’s sound and look didn’t match up. I felt discombobulated, turned sideways, as if vertigo had taken hold and I couldn’t right myself. Stopped in the middle of my tracks on that day, frozen in front of the TV, the subculture of grunge music slammed into my world while I was on my way to the fridge.Suddenly, grunge was everywhere, As Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam albums and performances infiltrated radio, television, and concert halls, there was no shortage of media coverage. From 1992 through 1994, grunge bands were mentioned or featured on the cover of Rolling Stone 33 times (Hillburn). That same year, The New York Times ran the article “Grunge: A Success Story” featuring a short history of the Seattle sound, along with a “lexicon of grunge speak” (Marin), a joke perpetrated by a former 25-year-old Sub Pop employee, Megan Jasper, who never imagined her list of made-up vocabulary given to a New York Times reporter would grace the front page of the style section (Yarm). In their rush to keep up with pervasiveness of grunge culture, even The New York Times fell prey to Gen Xer’s comical cynicism.The circle of friends I ran with were split down the middle between Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a preference for one over the other, as the two bands and their respective front men garnered much of the media attention. Nirvana seemed to appeal to people’s sense of authenticity, perhaps more relatable in their aloofness to mainstream popularity, backed up with Cobain’s simple-yet-brilliant song arrangements and revealing lyrics. Lawrence Grossberg suggests that music fans recognise the difference between authentic and homogenised rock, interpreting and aligning these differences with rock and roll’s association with “resistance, refusal, alienation, marginality, and so on” (62). I tended to gravitate toward Nirvana’s sound, mostly for technical reasons. Nevermind sparkled with aggressive guitar tones while capturing the power and fragility of Cobain’s voice. For many critics, the brilliance of Pearl Jam’s first album suffered from too much echo and reverb muddling the overall production value, but twenty years later they would remix and re-release Ten, correcting these production issues.Grunge FashionAs the music carved out a huge section of the charts, the grunge look was appropriated on fashion runways. When Cobain appeared on MTV wearing a ragged olive green cardigan he’d created a style simply by rummaging through his closet. Vedder and Cornell sported army boots, cargo shorts, and flannel shirts, suitable attire for the overcast climate of the Pacific Northwest, but their everyday garb turned into a fashion trend for Gen Xers that was then milked by designers. In 1992, the editor of Details magazine, James Truman, called grunge “un fashion” (Marin) as stepping out in second-hand clothes ran “counter to the shellacked, flashy aesthetic of 1980s” (Nnadi) for those who preferred “the waif-like look of put-on poverty” (Brady). But it was MTV’s relentless airing of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden videos that sent Gen Xers flocking to malls and thrift-stores in search grunge-like apparel. I purchased a pair of giant, heavyweight Red Wing boots that looked like small cars on my feet, making it difficult to walk, but at least I was prepared for any terrain in all types of weather. The flannel came next; I still wear flannos. Despite its association with dark, murky musical themes, grunge kept me warm and dry.Much of grunge’s appeal to the masses was that it was not gender-specific; men and women dressed to appear unimpressed, sharing a taste for shapeless garments and muted colors without reference to stereotypical masculine or feminine styles. Cobain “allowed his own sexuality to be called into question by often wearing dresses and/or makeup on stage, in film clips, and on photo shoots, and wrote explicitly feminist songs, such as ‘Sappy’ or ‘Been a Son’” (Strong 403). I remember watching Pearl Jam’s 1992 performance on MTV Unplugged, seeing Eddie Vedder scrawl the words “Pro Choice” in black marker on his arm in support of women’s rights while his lyrics in songs like “Daughter”, “Better Man”, and “Why Go” reflected an equitable, humanistic if somewhat tragic perspective. Females and males moshed alongside one another, sharing the same spaces while experiencing and voicing their own response to grunge’s aggressive sound. Unlike the hypersexualised hair-metal bands of the 1980s whose aesthetic motifs often portrayed women as conquests or as powerless décor, the message of grunge rock avoided gender exploitation. As the ‘90s unfolded, underground feminist punk bands of the riot grrrl movement like Bikini Kill, L7, and Babes in Toyland expressed female empowerment with raging vocals and buzz-saw guitars that paved the way for Hole, Sleater-Kinney and other successful female-fronted grunge-era bands. The Decline of GrungeIn 1994, Kurt Cobain appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine in memoriam after committing suicide in the greenhouse of his Seattle home. Mass media quickly spread the news of his passing internationally. Two days after his death, 7,000 fans gathered at Seattle Center to listen to a taped recording of Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife, a rock star in her own right, reading the suicide note he left behind.A few days after Cobain’s suicide, I found myself rolling down the highway with a carload of friends, one of my favorite Nirvana tunes, “Come As You Are” fighting through static. I fiddled with the radio to clear up the signal. The conversation turned to Cobain as we cobbled together the details of his death. I remember the chatter quieting down, Cobain’s voice fading as we gazed out the window at the empty terrain passing. In that reflective moment, I felt like I had experienced an intense, emotional relationship that came to an abrupt end. This “illusion of intimacy” (Horton and Wohl 217) between myself and Cobain elevated the loss I felt with his passing even though I had no intimate, personal ties to him. I counted this person as a friend (Giles 284) because I so closely identified with his words and music. I could not help but feel sad, even angry that he’d decided to end his life.Fueled by depression and a heroin addiction, Cobain’s death signaled an end to grunge’s collective appeal while shining a spotlight on one of the more dangerous aspects of its ethos. A 1992 Rolling Stone article mentioned that several of Seattle’s now-famous international musicians used heroin and “The feeling around town is, the drug is a disaster waiting to happen” (Azzerad). In 2002, eight years to the day of Cobain’s death, Layne Staley, lead singer of Alice In Chains, another seminal grunge outfit, was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose (Wiederhorn). When Cornell took his own life in 2017 after a long battle with depression, The Washington Post said, “The story of grunge is also one of death” (Andrews). The article included a Tweet from a grieving fan that read “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in” (@ThatEricAlper).ConclusionThe grunge movement of the early 1990s emerged out of musical friendships content to be on their own, on the outside, reflecting a sense of isolation and alienation in the music they made. As Cornell said, “We’ve always been fairly reclusive and damaged” (Foege). I felt much the same way in those days, sequestered in the desert, planting my grunge flag in the middle of country music territory, doing what I could to resist the status quo. Cobain, Cornell, Staley, and Vedder wrote about their own anxieties in a way that felt intimate and relatable, forging a bond with their fan base. Christopher Perricone suggests, “the relationship of an artist and audience is a collaborative one, a love relationship in the sense, a friendship” (200). In this way, grunge would become a shared memory among friends who rode the wave of this cultural phenomenon all the way through to its tragic consequences. But the music has survived. Along with my flannel shirts and Red Wing boots.References@ThatEricAlper (Eric Alper). “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in.” Twitter, 18 May 2017, 02:41. 15 Sep. 2018 <https://twitter.com/ThatEricAlper/status/865140400704675840?ref_src>.Andrews, Travis M. “After Chris Cornell’s Death: ‘Only Eddie Vedder Is Left. Let That Sink In.’” The Washington Post, 19 May 2017. 29 Aug. 2018 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsmorning-mix/wp/2017/05/19/after-chris-cornells-death-only-eddie-vedder-is-left-let-that-sink-in>.Azzerad, Michael. “Grunge City: The Seattle Scene.” Rolling Stone, 16 Apr. 1992. 20 Aug. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/grunge-city-the-seattle-scene-250071/>.Brady, Diane. “Kids, Clothes and Conformity: Teens Fashion and Their Back-to-School Looks.” Maclean’s, 6 Sep. 1993. Brodeur, Nicole. “Chris Cornell: Soundgarden’s Dark Knight of the Grunge-Music Scene.” Seattle Times, 18 May 2017. 20 Aug. 2018 <https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/music/chris-cornell-soundgardens-dark-knight-of-the-grunge-music-scene/>.Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. Eds. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000. 733-768.Foege, Alec. “Chris Cornell: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, 28 Dec. 1994. 12 Sep. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/chris-cornell-the-rolling-stone-interview-79108/>.Fricke, David. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-251421/>.Giles, David. “Parasocial Interactions: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research.” Media Psychology 4 (2002): 279-305.Giles, Jeff. “The Poet of Alientation.” Newsweek, 17 Apr. 1994, 4 Sep. 2018 <https://www.newsweek.com/poet-alienation-187124>.Gross, D.M., and S. Scott. Proceding with Caution. Time, 16 July 1990. 3 Sep. 2018 <http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,155010,00.html>.Grossberg, Lawrence. “Is There a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. The Adoring Audience” Fan Culture and Popular Media. Ed. Lisa A. Lewis. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. 50-65.Hillburn, Robert. “The Rise and Fall of Grunge.” Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1998. 20 Aug. 2018 <http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/31/entertainment/ca-54992>.Horton, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interactions: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Process 19 (1956): 215-229.Latysheva, T.V. “The Essential Nature and Types of the Youth Subculture Phenomenon.” Russian Education and Society 53 (2011): 73–88.Manning, Jimmie, and Tony Adams. “Popular Culture Studies and Autoethnography: An Essay on Method.” The Popular Culture Studies Journal 3.1-2 (2015): 187-222.Marin, Rick. “Grunge: A Success Story.” New York Times, 15 Nov. 1992. 12 Sep. 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/15/style/grunge-a-success-story.html>.Neumann, Mark. “Collecting Ourselves at the End of the Century.” Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. Eds. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner. London: Alta Mira Press, 1996. 172-198.Nirvana. "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Nevermind, Geffen, 1991.Nnadi, Chioma. “Why Kurt Cobain Was One of the Most Influential Style Icons of Our Times.” Vogue, 8 Apr. 2014. 15 Aug. 2018 <https://www.vogue.com/article/kurt-cobain-legacy-of-grunge-in-fashion>.Perricone, Christopher. “Artist and Audience.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 24 (2012). 12 Sep. 2018 <https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF00149433.pdf>.Robbins, Ira. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 15 Aug. 2018 <https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-25142>.Strong, Catherine. “Grunge, Riott Grrl and the Forgetting of Women in Popular Culture.” The Journal of Popular Culture 44.2 (2011): 398-416. Wiederhorn, Jon. “Remembering Layne Staley: The Other Great Seattle Musician to Die on April 5.” MTV, 4 June 2004. 23 Sep. 2018 <http://www.mtv.com/news/1486206/remembering-layne-staley-the-other-great-seattle-musician-to-die-on-april-5/>.Yarm, Mark. Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. Three Rivers Press, 2011.

There are spells in the world: incantations that can transform reality through the power of procedural utterances. The marriage vow, the courtroom sentence, the shaman’s curse: these words are codes that change reality. (Finn 90) Introduction As a child, stories on magic were “opportunities to escape from reality” (Brugué and Llompart 1), or what Rosengren and Hickling describe as being part of a set of “causal belief systems” (77). As an adult, magic is typically seen as being “pure fantasy” (Rosengren and Hickling 75), while Bever argues that magic is something lost to time and materialism, and alternatively a skill that Yeats believed that anyone could develop with practice. The etymology of the word magic originates from magein, a Greek word used to describe “the science and religion of the priests of Zoroaster”, or, according to philologist Skeat, from Greek megas (great), thus signifying "the great science” (Melton 956). Not to be confused with sleight of hand or illusion, magic is traditionally associated with learned people, held in high esteem, who use supernatural or unseen forces to cause change in people and affect events. To use magic these people perform rituals and ceremonies associated with religion and spirituality and include people who may identify as Priests, Witches, Magicians, Wiccans, and Druids (Otto and Stausberg). Magic as Technology and Technology as Magic Although written accounts of the rituals and ceremonies performed by the Druids are rare, because they followed an oral tradition and didn’t record knowledge in a written form (Aldhouse-Green 19), they are believed to have considered magic as a practical technology to be used for such purposes as repelling enemies and divining lost items. They curse and blight humans and districts, raise storms and fogs, cause glamour and delusion, confer invisibility, inflict thirst and confusion on enemy warriors, transform people into animal shape or into stone, subdue and bind them with incantations, and raise magical barriers to halt attackers. (Hutton 33) Similarly, a common theme in The History of Magic by Chris Gosden is that magic is akin to science or mathematics—something to be utilised as a tool when there is a need, as well as being used to perform important rituals and ceremonies. In TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information, Davis discusses ideas on Technomysticism, and Thacker says that “the history of technology—from hieroglyphics to computer code—is itself inseparable from the often ambiguous exchanges with something nonhuman, something otherworldly, something divine. Technology, it seems, is religion by other means, then as now” (159). Written language, communication, speech, and instruction has always been used to transform the ordinary in people’s lives. In TechGnosis, Davis (32) cites Couliano (104): historians have been wrong in concluding that magic disappeared with the advent of 'quantitative science.’ The latter has simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and its goals by means of technology. Electricity, rapid transport, radio and television, the airplane, and the computer have merely carried into effect the promises first formulated by magic, resulting from the supernatural processes of the magician: to produce light, to move instantaneously from one point in space to another, to communicate with faraway regions of space, to fly through the air, and to have an infallible memory at one’s disposal. Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) In early 2021, at the height of the pandemic meta-crisis, blockchain and NFTs became well known (Umar et al. 1) and Crypto Art became the hot new money-making scheme for a small percentage of ‘artists’ and tech-bros alike. The popularity of Crypto Art continued until initial interest waned and Ether (ETH) started disappearing in the manner of a classic disappearing coin magic trick. In short, ETH is a type of cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin. NFT is an acronym for Non-Fungible Token. An NFT is “a cryptographic digital asset that can be uniquely identified within its smart contract” (Myers, Proof of Work 316). The word Non-Fungible indicates that this token is unique and therefore cannot be substituted for a similar token. An example of something being fungible is being able to swap coins of the same denomination. The coins are different tokens but can be easily swapped and are worth the same as each other. Hackl, Lueth, and Bartolo define an NFT as “a digital asset that is unique and singular, backed by blockchain technology to ensure authenticity and ownership. An NFT can be bought, sold, traded, or collected” (7). Blockchain For the newcomer, blockchain can seem impenetrable and based on a type of esoterica or secret knowledge known only to an initiate of a certain type of programming (Cassino 22). The origins of blockchain can be found in the research article “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”, published by the Journal of Cryptology in 1991 by Haber, a cryptographer, and Stornetta, a physicist. They were attempting to answer “epistemological problems of how we trust what we believe to be true in a digital age” (Franceschet 310). Subsequently, in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote The White Paper, a document that describes the radical idea of Bitcoin or “Magic Internet Money” (Droitcour). As defined by Myers (Proof of Work 314), a blockchain is “a series of blocks of validated transactions, each linked to its predecessor by its cryptographic hash”. They go on to say that “Bitcoin’s innovation was not to produce a blockchain, which is essentially just a Merkle list, it was to produce a blockchain in a securely decentralised way”. In other words, blockchain is essentially a permanent record and secure database of information. The secure and permanent nature of blockchain is comparable to a chapter of the Akashic records: a metaphysical idea described as an infinite database where information on everything that has ever happened is stored. It is a mental plane where information is recorded and immutable for all time (Nash). The information stored in this infinite database is available to people who are familiar with the correct rituals and spells to access this knowledge. Blockchain Smart Contracts Blockchain smart contracts are written by a developer and stored on the blockchain. They contain the metadata required to set out the terms of the contract. IBM describes a smart contract as “programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met”. There are several advantages of using a smart contract. Blockchain is a permanent and transparent record, archived using decentralised peer-to-peer Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). This technology safeguards the security of a decentralised digital database because it eliminates the intermediary and reduces the chance of fraud, gives hackers fewer opportunities to access the information, and increases the stability of the system (Srivastava). They go on to say that “it is an emerging and revolutionary technology that is attracting a lot of public attention due to its capability to reduce risks and fraud in a scalable manner”. Despite being a dry subject, blockchain is frequently associated with magic. One example is Faustino, Maria, and Marques describing a “quasi-religious romanticism of the crypto-community towards blockchain technologies” (67), with Satoshi represented as King Arthur. The set of instructions that make up the blockchain smart contracts and NFTs tell the program, database, or computer what needs to happen. These instructions are similar to a recipe or spell. This “sourcery” is what Chun (19) describes when talking about the technological magic that mere mortals are unable to comprehend. “We believe in the power of code as a set of magical symbols linking the invisible and visible, echoing our long cultural tradition of logos, or language as an underlying system of order and reason, and its power as a kind of sourcery” (Finn 714). NFTs as a Conceptual Medium In a “massively distributed electronic ritual” (Myers, Proof of Work 100), NFTs became better-known with the sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Christie’s for US$69,346,250. Because of the “thousandfold return” (Wang et al. 1) on the rapidly expanding market in October 2021, most people at that time viewed NFTs and cryptocurrencies as the latest cash cow; some artists saw them as a method to become financially independent, cut out the gallery intermediary, and be compensated on resales (Belk 5). In addition to the financial considerations, a small number of artists saw the conceptual potential of NFTs. Rhea Myers, a conceptual artist, has been using the blockchain as a conceptual medium for over 10 years. Myers describes themselves as “an artist, hacker and writer” (Myers, Bio). A recent work by Myers, titled Is Art (Token), made in 2023 as an Ethereum ERC-721 Token (NFT), is made using a digital image with text that says “this token is art”. The word ‘is’ is emphasised in a maroon colour that differentiates it from the rest in dark grey. The following is the didactic for the artwork. Own the creative power of a crypto artist. Is Art (Token) takes the artist’s power of nomination, of naming something as art, and delegates it to the artwork’s owner. Their assertion of its art or non-art status is secured and guaranteed by the power of the blockchain. Based on a common and understandable misunderstanding of how Is Art (2014) works, this is the first in a series of editions that inscribe ongoing and contemporary concerns onto this exemplar of a past or perhaps not yet realized blockchain artworld. (Myers, is art editions). This is a simple example of their work. A lot of Myers’s work appears to be uncomplicated but hides subtle levels of sophistication that use all the tools available to conceptual artists by questioning the notion of what art is—a hallmark of conceptual art (Goldie and Schellekens 22). Sol LeWitt, in Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, was the first to use the term, and described it by saying “the idea itself, even if not made visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product”. According to Bailey, the most influential American conceptual artists of the 1960s were Lucy Lippard, Sol LeWitt, and Joseph Kosuth, “despite deriving from radically diverse insights about the reason for calling it ‘Conceptual Art’” (8). Instruction-Based Art Artist Claudia Hart employs the instructions used to create an NFT as a medium and artwork in Digital Combines, a new genre the artist has proposed, that joins physical, digital, and virtual media together. The NFT, in a digital combine, functions as a type of glue that holds different elements of the work together. New media rely on digital technology to communicate with the viewer. Digital combines take this one step further—the media are held together by an invisible instruction linked to the object or installation with a QR code that magically takes the viewer to the NFT via a “portal to the cloud” (Hart, Digital Combine Paintings). QR codes are something we all became familiar with during the on-and-off lockdown phase of the pandemic (Morrison et al. 1). Denso Wave Inc., the inventor of the Quick Response Code or QR Code, describes them as being a scannable graphic that is “capable of handling several dozen to several hundred times more information than a conventional bar code that can only store up to 20 digits”. QR Codes were made available to the public in 1994, are easily detected by readers at nearly any size, and can be reconfigured to fit a variety of different shapes. A “QR Code is capable of handling all types of data, such as numeric and alphabetic characters, Kanji, Kana, Hiragana, symbols, binary, and control codes. Up to 7,089 characters can be encoded in one symbol” (Denso Wave). Similar to ideas used by the American conceptual artists of the 1960s, QR codes and NFTs are used in digital combines as conceptual tools. Analogous to Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, the instruction is the medium and part of the artwork. An example of a Wall Drawing made by Sol LeWitt is as follows: Wall Drawing 11A wall divided horizontally and vertically into four equal parts. Within each part, three of the four kinds of lines are superimposed.(Sol LeWitt, May 1969; MASS MoCA, 2023) The act or intention of using an NFT as a medium in art-making transforms it from being solely a financial contract, which NFTs are widely known for, to an artistic medium or a standalone artwork. The interdisciplinary artist Sue Beyer uses Machine Learning and NFTs as conceptual media in her digital combines. Beyer’s use of machine learning corresponds to the automatic writing that André Breton and Philippe Soupault of the Surrealists were exploring from 1918 to 1924 when they wrote Les Champs Magnétiques (Magnetic Fields) (Bohn 7). Automatic writing was popular amongst the spiritualist movement that evolved from the 1840s to the early 1900s in Europe and the United States (Gosden 399). Michael Riffaterre (221; in Bohn 8) talks about how automatic writing differs from ordinary texts. Automatic writing takes a “total departure from logic, temporality, and referentiality”, in addition to violating “the rules of verisimilitude and the representation of the real”. Bohn adds that although “normal syntax is respected, they make only limited sense”. An artificial intelligence (AI) hallucination, or what Chintapali (1) describes as “distorted reality”, can be seen in the following paragraph that Deep Story provided after entering the prompt ‘Sue Beyer’ in March 2022. None of these sentences have any basis in truth about the person Sue Beyer from Melbourne, Australia. Suddenly runs to Jen from the bedroom window, her face smoking, her glasses shattering. Michaels (30) stands on the bed, pale and irritated. Dear Mister Shut Up! Sue’s loft – later – Sue is on the phone, looking upset. There is a new bruise on her face. There is a distinction between AI and machine learning. According to ChatGPT 3.5, “Machine Learning is a subset of AI that focuses on enabling computers to learn and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed. It involves the development of algorithms and statistical models that allow machines to automatically learn from data, identify patterns, and make informed decisions or predictions”. Using the story generator Deep Story, Beyer uses the element of chance inherent in Machine Learning to create a biography on herself written by the alien other of AI. The paragraphs that Deep Story produces are nonsensical statements and made-up fantasies of what Beyer suspects AI wants the artist to hear. Like a psychic medium or oracle, providing wisdom and advice to a petitioner, the words tumble out of the story generator like a chaotic prediction meant to be deciphered at a later time. This element of chance might be a short-lived occurrence as machine learning is evolving and getting smarter exponentially, the potential of which is becoming very evident just from empirical observation. Something that originated in early modernist science fiction is quickly becoming a reality in our time. A Metamodern Spell Casting Metamodernism is an evolving term that emerged from a series of global catastrophes that occurred from the mid-1990s onwards. The term tolerates the concurrent use of ideas that arise in modernism and postmodernism without discord. It uses oppositional aspects or concepts in art-making and other cultural production that form what Dember calls a “complicated feeling” (Dember). These ideas in oscillation allow metamodernism to move beyond these fixed terms and encompass a wide range of cultural tendencies that reflect what is known collectively as a structure of feeling (van den Akker et al.). The oppositional media used in a digital combine oscillate with each other and also form meaning between each other, relating to material and immaterial concepts. These amalgamations place “technology and culture in mutual interrogation to produce new ways of seeing the world as it unfolds around us” (Myers Studio Ltd.). The use of the oppositional aspects of technology and culture indicates that Myers’s work can also be firmly placed within the domain of metamodernism. Advancements in AI over the years since the pandemic are overwhelming. In episode 23 of the MIT podcast Business Lab, Justice stated that “Covid-19 has accelerated the pace of digital in many ways, across many types of technologies.” They go on to say that “this is where we are starting to experience such a rapid pace of exponential change that it’s very difficult for most people to understand the progress” (MIT Technology Review Insights). Similarly, in 2021 NFTs burst forth in popularity in reaction to various conditions arising from the pandemic meta-crisis. A similar effect was seen around cryptocurrencies after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2007-2008 (Aliber and Zoega). “The popularity of cryptocurrencies represents in no small part a reaction to the financial crisis and austerity. That reaction takes the form of a retreat from conventional economic and political action and represents at least an economic occult” (Myers, Proof of Work 100). When a traumatic event occurs, like a pandemic, people turn to God, spirituality (Tumminio Hansen), or possibly the occult to look for answers. NFTs took on the role of precursor, promising access to untold riches, esoteric knowledge, and the comforting feeling of being part of the NFT cult. Similar to the effect of what Sutcliffe (15) calls spiritual “occultures” like “long-standing occult societies or New Age healers”, people can be lured by “the promise of secret knowledge”, which “can assist the deceptions of false gurus and create opportunities for cultic exploitation”. Conclusion NFTs are a metamodern spell casting, their popularity borne by the meta-crisis of the pandemic; they are made using magical instruction that oscillates between finance and conceptual abstraction, materialism and socialist idealism, financial ledger, and artistic medium. The metadata in the smart contract of the NFT provide instruction that combines the tangible and intangible. This oscillation, present in metamodern artmaking, creates and maintains a liminal space between these ideas, objects, and media. The in-between space allows for the perpetual transmutation of one thing to another. These ideas are a work in progress and additional exploration is necessary. An NFT is a new medium available to artists that does not physically exist but can be used to create meaning or to glue or hold objects together in a digital combine. Further investigation into the ontological aspects of this medium is required. The smart contract can be viewed as a recipe for the spell or incantation that, like instruction-based art, transforms an object from one thing to another. The blockchain that the NFT is housed in is a liminal space. The contract is stored on the threshold waiting for someone to view or purchase the NFT and turn the objects displayed in the gallery space into a digital combine. 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