Journal articles: 'Get involved by taking a refereeing course' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

This text analyses the process of collective construction of the Political-Pedagogic Project of the degree in Indigenous Pedagogy at Midwestern State University in Guarapuava, Paraná, Brazil, from the demand presented by the indigenous community of Rio das Cobras.After explaining the juridical-pedagogical aspects of access to higher education the pedagogy course, and the formation of indigenous teachers, the authors present the process of the collective construction of the project and subjects involved, including an introduction to the process of special selection of candidates to the course and their profiles. Using a bibliographic research method, mediated with a documentary analysis, the authors consider how this process encouraged the subjects to think about the social function of the public university, that is, to get closer to the people and to construct strategies to access and provide continuity for subjects of minority groups. The consolidation of the pedagogy course, while taking into account indigenous people’s cultural and epistemological particularities, is a way to resist, to take part in the university, and to ensure that the university helps to fortify processes of auto-organization, of human formation in all dimensions, of access to different kinds of knowledge, of professional qualification, and of reevaluation of the pedagogical work at the university.

Abstract:

ABSTRACTThe structural conditions associated with increased inequality amidst rapid change brought about by growing financialization and efforts to get the ‘unbanked’ sections of society into the formal financial system have created the conditions under which illegal pyramid and ponzi schemes, fake investment schemes, and legal multi-level marketing companies have been able to flourish. In contemporary Johannesburg and Soweto the originators of money multiplication schemes and the agents who ‘work’ to recruit new members position themselves in this context as financial entrepreneurs and brokers who embody a range of seemingly contradictory discourses, drawing on discourses of ‘empowerment’, ‘self-help’, ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘religiously sanctioned wealth and prosperity’ in the course of their risk taking in the field of finance. Based on a series of case studies of female agents of ‘push-push’ schemes, the article shows how many of these discourses reflect some of the conditions of contemporary capitalism: citizens are expected to be active investors, active entrepreneurs and hard workers who are able to work from home and without a boss. Moreover, the schemes use sophisticated technologies, marketing strategies and other practices which simulate formality, legality and sincerity – echoing religious practices and discourses. At the same time a set of cultural values and social logics that are not necessarily produced by neo-liberal capitalism and financialization, but are certainly activated by them, makes it hard for citizens to recognize or admit the forms of deception involved, unless deception is seen to be central to the operation of the modern state or the present ‘get-rich-quick’ culture. Risk taking, and pursuit of social mobility, originate in dual economy legacies, with their unfulfilled expectations, wealth disparities and frustrated class aspiration. Participants in pyramid schemes have ideologies combining ‘progress’ with ‘imminent doom’, entrepreneurship with greed: contradictory attitudes reflective of financialization in the broader world.

Abstract:

Calculus is a branch of mathematics that is applied to solve various problems in various fields of science such as engineering, physics, medicine, chemistry, economics, and various other sciences. However, most students assume that calculus is an elusive material. Therefore, it is necessary to have a study of the difficulties of students in solving calculus questions, given the very importance of this concept in taking the next course. This study is qualitative descriptive research that involved forty-two second semester students of the Mathematics Education Program of IAIN Palopo, and six of them are the interview subjects. In data collection, it used written tests and interviews. Furthermore, the data obtained are then analyzed through reduction, data presentation, and conclusions withdrawal. The findings show that the students get learning difficulties in reading by 52.38%, in writing by 66.67%, and in accounting by 57.14%. The factors causing these difficulties, namely students are not able to identify questions, difficulties in using integral symbols, difficulties in using proper techniques and formulas, difficulties in understanding the steps to solve partial integral problems, difficulties in calculations, difficulties in solving until the final stage of the integral process.

Abstract:

Abstract Drawing on interviews with key informants and seasonal workers in Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria and the UK, and on non-participant ethnographies, this paper demonstrates that, despite various limitations associated with work in the agriculture sector, migrants strategically choose the times and destinations of their trips abroad, taking into account a variety of factors, including family commitments, economic goals at the origin, wages and working conditions, health issues and welfare opportunities. The findings illustrate that, depending on their commitments and economic objectives, Romanians who work in agriculture develop different mobility practices. While some work abroad only occasionally, when they need to supplement their home-country income, others engage in circular migration or extend the periods of time they spend abroad. In host countries, most workers try out various jobs and typically get involved in repeated migration once they have found a suitable arrangement. Some workers combine seasonal work in one or more countries of destination, over the course of the same year, with the aim of securing income for longer periods of time, while others opt for long-term migration or move into sectors that offer better opportunities.

Abstract:

I became involved in science communication over 20 years ago. With a background in microbiology and genetics, I had started my working life editing and abstracting science journals while taking a postgraduate course in information science. That led to 3 years running a scientific library for Cadbury Schweppes and then a position as biotechnology information specialist at the British Library. This was in the early 1980s and was the first flowering of commercial biotechnology. The European Biotechnology Information Project (EBIP) was intended to help scientists get to grips with information sources in hitherto unfamiliar areas such as legislation, intellectual property and marketing. In practice, we found that scientists, being resourceful types, were quite happy delving into any sort of literature with minimal help, but we did find we had a ready audience of teachers, journalists, legislators and venture capitalists among others who needed our help to explain what this ‘new’ science was all about. It was at this point that I realized that I was happier (and better) at explaining biology and its applications to non-biologists than explaining the finer points of EU regulations to scientists. So when, in 1985, I saw an advertisem*nt from the Biochemical Society for a ‘Research and Information Officer’, it seemed like a good career move.

Abstract:

The article is aimed at reflecting the essence of the course of European countries to reduce carbon emissions, which is the core of the policy of decarbonization. The stages of implementation of such a policy lead to structural changes in production, and quarantine conditions during the pandemic lead to changes in public consumption of certain types of goods. In addition to the economic stages of the implementation of the «green program», the EU countries have developed an investment plan to activate private and public production in the appropriate direction. Private investors join it in order to get involved in projects with the State guarantee of their implementation – both in European countries and from abroad. At present, such promising and global economic and investment measures to ensure the policy of decarbonization are not taking place in Ukraine. However, the private sector of Ukrainian production reacts ahead, in contrast to the State legislative position, with a certainty as to priority opportunities in order to increase competitiveness. Taking into account these major external factors of influence, it is identified the goods that have undergone significant changes in their demand, namely: devices for heating the premises. The dynamics of the sale of this product has increased in the world market due to lockdowns in different countries, and in the Ukrainian market – due to the fact that domestic producers have competitive prospects. The article examines the volume of world imports and exports of devices for heating premises, describes ways of selling Ukrainian goods abroad, as well as reasoned prospects for new, underserved foreign markets. In addition, domestic enterprises carrying out innovative production of this ware are identified and an analysis of its competitiveness is carried out. The successful sale of this product is facilitated by the independent work of the domestic producer to promote its own export goods, as well as existing consumer changes due to the deepening of most European countries into the «green» policy.

Abstract:

The article emphasizes that the History of Ukrainian Culture is a component of the humanitarian cycle of disciplines; that a successful use of region-related history materials in the course of its teaching is ensured due to their cross-curricular nature; these materials increase learning motivation. It is noted that the discipline “History of Ukrainian Culture” combines the study of culture history and current trends of socio-cultural development of society in the context of globalization and modernization. It is aimed at developing students’ intention to get involved into the native culture, to respect a person as the main value, regardless of nationality, religion, place of residence. The development regularities of the Ukrainian culture in the context of socio-historical circ*mstances as well as the panorama of national and world cultural processes and their main stages, specific phenomena of the national Ukrainian culture are the object of the course studies. The experience has shown that appealing to the origins and current state of Ukrainian culture, especially taking into consideration the regional component, arouses keen interest of education seekers. The acquired knowledge remains in memory, performs educational function, arouses further interest in learning the history, culture and traditions of the native land. One can say without any exaggeration that knowledge of the culture history of your own people, your country, and your native land enhances personality, forms values, and cultivates dignity in man. It is assumed that the use of region-related history materials at lectures and seminars makes it possible to talk more convincingly, illustratively, vividly about the major milestones in the history of both national and world culture, contributes to the patriotic upbringing of students. At present, the issues related to scientific and methodological substantiation of the use of the region-oriented materials in teaching the History of Ukrainian culture in order to generate the culture of patriotism seem to be topical.

Abstract:

The importance of effective communication, both written and oral, has been widely documented within the STEM community. In fact, the ability to communicate effectively is a skillset that is often required by employers. Oftentimes it is challenging to make the transition from academia to the work place. The ability to communicate well is a critical element of this transition. This paper will describe a more authentic experience using a professional conference format that provides students an opportunity to sharpen both their written and oral communication skills. The professional conference paper activity has been utilized in a second-level physics course at American University for 15 years. The conference paper activity allows students to experience all aspects of a professional conference, which is something that they do not get in other courses. This paper will describe the conference paper activity and focus on the use of a rubric that has recently been implemented in order to assist students during multiple phases of the writing process. Through the conference paper, students must communicate about a technical topic in physics while simultaneously connecting that topic to their major field of study. Numerous steps are involved in the paper writing process and each one is designed to emulate an actual conference. The conference paper activity and the associated rubric discussed in this paper offer a unique opportunity for multiple points of feedback, both from the instructor and from their classmates, while the writing process is taking place. Too often in academia a writing activity is designed in such a way that students merely submit their final written papers for a grade. Once a final paper is submitted, there is no opportunity for feedback that will aid in the actual development and writing of the paper. A more traditional paper writing experience does not provide opportunities for formative feedback prior to submission of the final paper. Hence, students do not have the necessary opportunities to really think about and reflect on what they are writing. This paper will address the importance of providing this more formative feedback using a unique rubric designed to assist students while the writing is actually taking place. A summary of students’ perceptions of this process will also be provided.

Abstract:

The objective of this study is to help students in developing their ideas in writing due to their difficulties to arrange ideas. Although they do have ideas, they cannot structure their ideas well in their papers. Several factors could cause this problem such as lack of vocabulary and knowledge or strategies in arranging ideas in papers. Another factor is unclear explanation and insufficient guidance from the teachers. Based on literature review, dictoglos can be a guide for students to develop their ideas in writing. It is a teaching technique which incorporates various activities such listening, taking notes, discussing, and reconstructing which have some standard procedures and variations. English as an international language has been known all over the world. People cannot deny it, because many countries use and learn the language. The fact shows that the language is used as a second or a foreign language in each country in the world. Many people learn it to get involved in the world globalization era, where English in written or oral form of communication is used. Therefore, it is a must for people to learn English. Whether they are students, worker, or other occupations that they belong to, they must study English. It can be learned through learning at school, in a course, or in their own ways. People must learn the language skills in order to master English well. The journey of the learning could be similar to a child learning to walk where he may fall down to the floor and get up to stand again and learn to walk continuously so that he can walk well. It is also the same when we learn a language. We must start from listening, speaking, reading and writing. The four language skills should be learned continuously and patiently. Writing as one of the language skill at any level of education that has to be mastered is rather difficult than other skills. Students feel difficult to arrange their ideas in papers. Actually they have ideas but it is hard for them to deliver it into their paper or they have many ideas but they cannot choose what ideas should be chosen to develop. It happens because they have lack of vocabulary, cannot arrange the ideas correctly, berita terkini internasional do not know how to develop their ideas. This could happen because there is no clear enough information from the teacher. It is also possible that the teacher do not teach well. In addition to teachers, it should be acknowledged that there are many other factors that cause the inability of students to write in English. Because some problems above, the writer wants to give an alternative solution to overcome the problem that is an approach to teach writing. It is hoped that the students have ability to develop their ideas in writing. The approach is called Dictogloss. In this approach students is trained to write their elaboration of one idea or improve simply an idea or a topic chosen by a teacher or they choose it freely from their own.

Abstract:

Introduction. In recent years, the structure and content of training of specialists of further education have significantly improved. The increased popularity of the secondary vocational education system is evidenced by the fact that more than half of the Russian teenagers after graduating from the main stage of secondary school become applicants of technical schools and colleges. In order to manage students’ education more effectively, among other measures, it is necessary to diagnose the motivation of enrolled students at the stage of admission to the educational institution and to identify the degree of awareness of their future career choice, as these factors directly depend on the success of educational programmes.The aim of the article was to reveal the trends of influence of students’ results at the Basic State Exam (OGE – the exam, which is taken when finishing education in the 9th (final) form of comprehensive school) on the level of knowledge of Computer Science in colleges and to find out the subjective reasons of students’ preferences for the secondary vocational education system to continue studies and to enter a profession.Methodology and research methods. In the course of the study, a review and generalisation of the content of scientific sources related to the problems of professional choice and training motivation were used. Diagnostics of motivation of college students in Moscow, Moscow region and the regions of Russia was conducted through the methods of testing, surveys and anonymous questioning. Processing of the obtained data was carried out by the methods of correlation, variance and regression analysis; the degree of statistical reliability of the results was evaluated by calculating the Student’s t-test and the Fisher’s F-test.Results and scientific novelty. The authors have calculated the numerical indicators of relationship between students’ academic performance in computer science and the Basic State Exam taking, the reasons for choosing the secondary vocational education and the specialty. Constructed graphs and approximating curves prove the fact that the success degree when learning the certain discipline in college results from the assessment within the discipline taken at the Basic State Exam in school. In the regions of Russia, this factor guarantees a higher level of knowledge on Computer Science – by about 20%, and in the Moscow region – by 10%. The statistics on respondents’ professional orientation were collected. A regression model, demonstrating the impact of students’ motivational attitudes on their training in the subject discipline, is presented. It was found out that the motives “subsequent admission to a specialised university”, “obtaining a profession”, “business attitude to a profession” and “prestige of a profession” have the most positive influence in this context. The variance analysis confirmed the determinism of the learning outcomes by the reasons for the choice of secondary vocational education and profession. It is concluded that the reasons for the low or medium students’ performance include not only their weak motivation for education, but also the state of the entire education system, including the institutions of the Basic State Exam (OGE) and the Unified State Exam (EGE – high school final and university entrance exam taken upon completion of the 11th form), as well as the lack of clear criteria for the admission of applicants to the institutions of secondary vocational education. To get a specific specialty, the desire to study, its informed choice and prestige of profession positively affect students’ learning outcomes in Computer Science education.Practical significance. The research materials can be useful for teachers of secondary vocational education and for specialists involved in career guidance.

Abstract:

The article investigates the impact of Great Britain on the evolution of colonialism in the late ХІХ and early ХХ centuries. It is analyzed the sources and scientific literature on the policy of the United Kingdom in the colonial question in the late ХІХ – early ХХ century. The reasons, course and consequences of the intensification of British policy in the colonial problem are described. The process of formation and implementation of London’s initiatives in the colonial question during the period under study is studied. It is considered the position of Great Britain on the transformation of the colonial system in the late XIX – early XX centuries. The resettlement activity of the British and the peculiarities of their mentality, based on the idea of racial superiority and the new national messianism, led to the formation of developed resettlement colonies. The war for the independence of the North American colonies led to the formation of a new state on their territory, and the rest of the “white” colonies of Great Britain had at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries had to build a new policy of relations, taking into account the influence of the United States on them, and the general decline of economic and military-strategic influence of Britain in the world, and the militarization of other leading countries. As a result, a commonwealth is formed instead of an empire. With regard to other dependent territories, there is also a change in policy towards the liberalization of colonial rule and concessions to local elites. In the late ХІХ – early ХІХ centuries the newly industrialized powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) sought to seize the colonies to reaffirm their new status in the world, the great colonial powers of the past (Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands) sought to retain what remained to preserve their international prestige, and Russia sought to expand. The largest colonial empires, Great Britain and France, were interested in maintaining the status quo. In the colonial policy of the United Kingdom, it is possible to trace a certain line related to attempts to preserve the situation in their remote possessions and not to get involved in conflicts and costly measures where this can be avoided. In this sense, the British government showed some flexibility and foresight – the relative weakening of the military and economic power of the empire due to the emergence of new states, as well as the achievement of certain self-sufficiency, made it necessary to reconsider traditional foreign policy. Colonies are increasingly no longer seen as personal acquisitions of states, and policy toward these territories is increasingly seen as a common deal of the international community and even its moral duty. The key role here was to be played by Great Britain, which was one of the first to form the foundations of a “neocolonial” system that presupposes a solidarity policy of Western countries towards the rest of the world under the auspices of London. Colonial system in the late ХІХ – early ХІХ century underwent a major transformation, which was associated with a set of factors, the main of which were – the emergence of new industrial powers on the world stage, the internal evolution of the British Empire, changes in world trade, the emergence of new weapons, general growth of national and religious identity and related with this contradiction. The fact that the First World War did not solve many problems, such as Japanese expansionism or British marinism, and caused new ones, primarily such as the Bolshevik coup in Russia and the coming to power of the National Socialists in Germany, the implementation of the above trends stretched to later moments.

Abstract:

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> This is a critique – a rebuke of a method that I helped promote and grow within the cartographic discipline.</p><p>During this era of big-data fetishism, cartographers (including this author) have been searching for ways to analyze maps that are more quantitative than previous, descriptive methods. This discipline-specific shift is part of a much larger, well-documented swing in the sciences away from qualitative analysis (observation, interviewing, and descriptive evaluation) to quantitative data analysis (eye tracking, mouse-click watching, and statistical evaluation). To garner broad research appeal today (i.e., grant funding and publication), cartographic researchers often need to embrace some sort of statistical analysis.</p><p>It is argued here, however, that the results of this positivist trend are <i>not</i> all positive.</p><p>Enter Quantitative Content Analysis (QCA). In a matter of less than 10 years, QCA has gone from an esoteric research technique borrowed from the social sciences to a sure-fire method with which to push out numbers-driven cartographic publications.</p><p>I argue that QCA, a method that once gave promise to help bridge the art-versus-science dichotomy in the mapping sciences, is utterly failing the discipline. The cumulative result of contemporary QCA studies, both well and poorly done, is banal cartography. <i>Banal cartography</i> is defined here as map research that is largely insignificant, unoriginal, and sheds little-to-no-insight on maps that was not already discernible via qualitative observation.</p><p>There are three broad reasons QCA is failing.</p><p>First, QCA is frequently used for the wrong reason. All foundational literature on QCA notes that it should only be used to help answer pre-existing research questions of significance. Reviewing twenty-first-century QCA research in cartography, it is obvious that this is rarely the reason the method is chosen. Instead, it is often used in cartography to create large amounts of numeric data from which researchers can harvest answers to post-facto research questions of dubious merit. This approach nullifies the legitimacy of QCA.</p><p>Second, QCA simply sucks the soul out of cartographic research. The results of the research result in descriptive statistics – when we’re lucky! – that do nothing more than describe a sample of maps that is rarely, if ever, random. The journal articles read like fantasy football statistics about teams and players no one has ever heard of.</p><p>Instead of allowing us to analyze maps for what they are – a communication device in a particular social context – researchers using QCA typically break maps down into a set of binary codes of 1s and 0s.</p><p>Map has a north arrow? Check (1); Map has a title? No (0); ad nauseam.</p><p>Ironically, the numeracy of QCA is working to undermine our understanding of the complexity of maps. QCA merely provides a sum of all a map’s, or group of map’s, parts. We know that maps are always more complex than the elements comprising them. In this regard, QCA adds to a cartographer’s understanding of maps what counting the number of different brush strokes comprising a piece of fine art does for an art historian. With QCA, we are literally taking a visual communication and trying to force it into a data table. What a godawful thing to do!</p><p>Third, cartographers are often sloppy at content analysis making it unlikely most of the (typically inane) results could ever be replicated. If the results can’t be reliably replicated, what’s the point of stripping maps down into numbers and squashing them into spreadsheets? After all, one of the main benefits of content analysis is its supposed replicability.</p><p>Content analysis is brutal. I often quip to my students that I wouldn’t wish the method on my worst enemies. Developing useful codes takes hours, days, and even months of trial and error. Finding a sample of maps that is robust, non-hom*ogenous, and not too systematically sampled is a chore. Then actually doing the analysis? Please see the first sentence of this paragraph for a synopsis.</p><p>That is a summary for one researcher. Content analysis is supposed to be replicable. One must find a second researcher willing to memorize the archaic coding scheme developed by the first, and then go through the same arduous process. Human error and sleep-deprived cheating exists in almost all studies. (Few researchers would openly admit this. But humans are involved in processing massive amounts of visual data. Some of whom are not paid much, if anything, to do it. Of course the work is fallible!)</p><p>Finally, after all of this work, <i>what</i> researchers discover is rarely a diamond in the rough. More typically a lump of coal. Of course, in science this is what is supposed to happen. If you aren’t failing to prove things most of the time, you aren’t doing science. In reality, of course, after spending months, years, and tons of assistant money on coding large datasets, you cannot end up with nothing.</p><p>And alas we come full-circle back to the original problem. New research questions are asked, post-facto (one of the biggest sins in QCA).</p><p>Questions like:</p><p>Was there variation in the dimensionality of bar charts found accompanying <i>Average Annual Precipitation</i> maps in Goode’s World Atlas? Result: Wow! They went three-dimensional for two editions in the 1990s even against the sage advice of Edward Tufte? We can write about this! (Never mind that, perhaps given the context, the change had nothing to do with cartographic decision-making, but a new intern hired to create the graphics.) QCA has a place in cartography, but it’s time we call a spade a spade. Many of the studies using this method are done poorly, are of minimal relevance, and probably don’t provide any knowledge or insight we couldn’t get more reliably via other means. I am not critiquing others alone. Some of my previous research is guilty of this as well. I never felt quite right about it. Artificial intelligence of maps will help alleviate much of the human error and allow us to ask more interesting questions about large samples of maps in the future. It may not alleviate the issues discussed in reason two, however. And until cartographic researchers stop creating QCA datasets to simply harvest for publications, the problem of banal cartography will continue for the foreseeable future. If nothing else, hopefully this abstract helps fuel a debate in the methodology sections of these future papers.</p>

Abstract:

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Electronic health records have become the fulcrum for efforts by institutions to reduce errors, improve safety, reduce cost, and improve compliance with recommended guidelines. In recent times they are also being considered as a potential game changer for improving patient recruitment for clinical trials (CT). Although the use of CDS for clinical care is partially understood, its use for CT patient identification and recruitment is young and a great deal of experimental and theoretical research is needed in this area to optimize the use of CDS tools that personalize patient care by identifying relevant clinical trials and other research interventions. The use of CDS tools for CT recruitment offers a great deal of possibilities, but some initial usage has been disappointing. This may not be surprising because, while the implementation of these interventions is somewhat simple, ensuring that they are embedded into the right point of the care providers workflow is highly complex and may affect many actors in a clinical care setting, including patients, nurses, physicians, clinical coordinators, and investigators. Overcoming the challenges of alerting providers regarding their patient’s eligibility for clinical trials is an important and difficult challenge. Translating that effort into effective recruitment will require understanding of the psychological and workflow barriers and facilitators for how providers respond to automated alerts requesting patient referrals. Evidence from using CDS for clinical care that shows alerts become increasingly ignored over time or with more exposure (1, 2). The features, timing, and method of these alerts are important usability factors that may influence effectiveness of the referral process. Focus group methods capture the shared perspectives of a phenomenon and have been shown to be an effective method for identifying perceptions, attitudes, information needs, and other human factors effecting workflow (3, 4). Our objective was to develop a generalizable method for measuring physician and clinic level factors defining a successful point of care recruitment program in an outpatient care setting. To achieve this we attempted to (a) Characterize provider’s attitudes regarding CTs referrals and research. (b) Identify perceived workflow strategies and facilitators relevant to CT recruitment in primary care. (c) Develop and test a pilot instrument. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: The methods had 3 phases: focus groups, development of item pool, and tool development. Focus group topics were developed by 4 experienced investigators, with training in biomedical informatics, cognitive psychology, human factors, and workflow analysis, based upon a knowledge of the literature. A script was developed and the methods were piloted with a group of 4 clinicians. In all, 16 primary care providers, 5 clinic directors, and 6 staff supervisors participated in 6 focus groups, with an average of 5 participants each, to discuss clinical trial recruitment at the point of care. Focus groups were conducted by the development team. Audio recording were content coded and analyzed to identify themes by consensus of 3 authors. Item Pool generation involved extracting items identified in the focus group analysis, selecting a subset deemed most interesting based on knowledge of the recruitment literature and iteratively writing and refining questions. Instrument development consisted of piloting an initial 7-item questionnaire with a local primary provider sample. Questions were correlated with the item pool and limited to reduce provider burden, based on those that the study team deemed most applicable to information technology supported recruitment. Descriptive statistical analysis was performed on the pilot survey results. An online survey was developed based on the findings of the focus groups and emailed to 127 primary care providers who were invited to participate. In total, 36 questionnaires were completed. This study was approved by the University of Utah Institutional Review Board. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: The results section is organized into 3 sections: (a) Focus groups, (b) Item generation; and (c) Questionnaire pilot. (I) (1) Focus Groups. Themes identified through a qualitative review are presented below with illustrative comments of participants. The diversity of attitudes and willingness to support clinical trial recruitment varied so substantially that no single pattern emerged. Attitudes ranged from enthusiastic support, to interest in some trials to disinterest or distrust in trials in general. Compensation for time spent, which could be monetary, informational, or through professional recognition; and provider relationship with the study team or pre-selection of specific trials by a clinic oversight committee, and importance to providers practice positively affected willingness to help recruit. “I would love to get people into clinical trials as much as possible... If it works for them you are going to help a whole lot of other people.” If we felt like we have done every possible thing that was already established as evidence-based and it didn’t work out, then we would consider the trials. I think that studies are more beneficial for specific specialists... There might be a whole slew of things that I never deal with or don’t care about because it’s not prevalent for my patient population. Local and reputable... A long distance someone asking to do something is just not the same as someone in the trenches with you. The bottom line is how much work is involved at our end and if there is going to be any compensation for that. I think also the providers would like have feedback on what they referred them to. And how did it go? So did we pick the right patient? ... It helps us to know, did they even sign up for the study? Getting your name on a research paper would be nice too. Lack of information regarding trials reduced support for recruitment of patients. Providers stated that they do not know how to quickly find information about studies, nor do they have time to find the information, and therefore cannot efficiently council patients regarding trial participation. Notifications regarding clinical trials that were deemed to be important included: Trial coordinator intention to recruit patients, enrollment of a patient in a clinical drug trial, trial progress and result updates, and reports of effectiveness of provider recruitment efforts. Perceived information needs regarding trials that providers are referring patients to included: trial purpose, design, benefits and risks, potential side effects, intervention details, medication class (mechanism of action), drug interactions with study drug, study timeline, coordinator contact information, link to print off patient handouts, enrollment instructions, and a link to study website. (2) It’s just we don’t know any of the information ... and it can’t take any of our time. ... I don’t have time to research it. Sometimes the patients ask me questions about it and I would like to be in a position where I have some information about it before I am asked. It would be nice to be notified if they [my patients] are enrolled in the trial, when it turns into actual recruitment. I do like to know if they’re in [a trial] so that when they come in for problems, I at least know that they might be on a study medication so I can be safe. I’ll get an ER message, “The patient got admitted. There blood pressure’s, you know, tanked, because they’re on a study drug I didn’t know anything about.” if there’s certain side effects that I need to be watching out for. It would also be good to have a contact person from the study in case we need to notify them of. “this person’s possible having an adverse event. Look into it more.” (3) Provider burden associated with patient recruitment appeared to be a deterrent. These burdens included adding to the providers task list, increasing the time required to complete a visit, and usurpation of control over the patients care plan with the associated effect on provider quality scores. We don’t have time. I mean, we don’t even take a lunch break. I have 15 minutes and now this is taking this many minutes away from my 15 minutes. I am just sick of extra work. We already have so much extra work. It’s just more stuff to do. We are maxed out on stuff to do. Right now, part of our compensation depends on having our patients A1Cs controlled. And so if we’re taking a chance that maybe they’re getting a medicine, maybe they’re not, maybe it’ll help, maybe it won’t, its gonna further delay our ability to get paid. Cause they’re like “I’m not going to let you go mess up my patient and I’m going to have to deal with the consequences is kind of the way they think. If you’re going to put the patient in a study, being able drop them from our registry so we don’t get penalized for a negative outcome [is important]. (4) Patient’s needs were a priority among factors influencing likelihood to help recruitment patients. Providers considered perceived benefit or risk to the patient, such as additional healthcare services, increased monitoring, financial assistance, or access to new treatments when other options have been ineffective, important; as well as continuance of established care that has proven effective, and ethical recruitment that addresses language and mental health to ensure that patients can make decisions regarding study participation. If there’s something great that’s gonna benefit a patient, I would definitely wanna know about it to give them that option. You know that’s what we wanna try to do is make our patients better. Someone who is really well controlled and doing well, I would not tend to put them toward the study. Just keep going with what’s working right now. Sometimes there’s financial incentives for them to participate, so you know, if its a good fit its easy to at least offer that to the patient. They get treatment maybe that they can’t afford. You don’t want to be seen as somebody who's forcing a patient... if their provider is telling them this is a good idea you are more likely to get your patient to do it. I think they have to understand what a clinical trial is, first of all, in that it’s a trial. Right? We’re trying to figure out if a certain treatment is good or not. It may not work. It may work. With many patients, they don’t only have medical problems, but significant mental illness that sometimes interferes a lot with just our treatment of them here for their clinical problems. And so, that probably would interfere with someone’s ability to understand and consent to a trial. And the patients have the right to make that choice. I don’t need to be—I don’t mind influencing them on things I know about, I think are invaluable, but I don’t need to be a barrier to them. (5) Perceived responsibility in trial recruitment varied substantially, from no involvement at all, to prescreening, counseling, or recruiting patients. Some providers felt that they should have the right to say “no” to recruitment of their patients while others believed prescreening was an unnecessary burden, outside of their role as a primary care provider. if someone prescreens and thinks its appropriate and gives me that judgment call to say, do you think it would be a good fit? I think one of them, they sent, and I said, Oh, I don’t think it would be a good fit because of this...So that would be fine. I don’t think I need to be a gatekeeper for studies. I mean, if there’s people that qualify for a study, and there’s a great study that’s been approved, and they can recruit them without me knowing, that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I liked how it was—I could do a simple referral ... someone else figured out the qualifications. if we knew of ongoing studies and if we thought a certain patient may qualify for a certain study, we just contact the coordinator, and then they just take care of the rest. I think that appropriate ... from our perspective, would be, “Are you interested?” “This is the number for a person who can sit with you, talk with you about a trial, tell you everything about it, answer your questions, and then you can make a decision.” I’m not going to let you go mess up my patient and I’m going to have to deal with the consequences. (6) A clinic-implementation approach that systemizes workflow, limits the number of trials providers are asked to recruit for, and minimizes provider time burden is needed. Suggested methods for informing providers of patient clinical trial eligibility included: email, alerts, in-basket messages, texts, phone-calls, and in-person contact. People are so sick of change, change, change, change ... if there’s no stability whatsoever, then people get frustrated and start to burn out. Having my staff remember how to do it correctly and I remember what studies we have going ... it becomes somewhat of a burden... it’s hard for us to remember as we are flying through our day. There just needs to be a clear understanding with those roles... Who does the patient call? We don’t want to look like we don’t know what we are doing. There probably should be a selection committee put together from various people who have stakes in the community, at least who can say, “This would be applicable for xx clinic.” (7) Provider Suggestions Providers had multiple suggestions regarding notification methods. (II) Development of item pool and construction of questionnaire The specific items were constructed from literature review on physician’s attitudes and results from the focus group. The overarching concern was on readability, brief questionnaire size, and relevance. A large item were constructed and then reduced through piloting. (III) Questionnaire Pilot Results: The 7-item pilot questionnaire was completed by 36 physicians (28% response rate). In this section, we report the empirical results. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Discussion Relevance of Methods. Overall, the described methods for determining components for a recruitment program in primary care shows early promise. The focus groups that consisted of providers, staff and administrators resulted in insights as to workflows, attitudes, and clinical processes. These insights significantly varied across clinics. This variation supported the need for an individualized clinic-based approach that will meet local needs. During the course of the study, participants were willing to participate in all activities (although some requested payment). We were able to conduct the focus groups as scheduled and obtained the desired input. The analysis of the focus group transcripts was performed using iterative discussions and did not needed any special adaptation for this area of study. The pilot survey response rate was within the expected for this type of study. Focus groups can rapidly provide rich information regarding attitudes and other factors affecting provider participation at the point of care. However, findings from focus groups must always be confirmed through larger studies. It is important to keep the focus groups small and to hold multiple focus groups to offset the more vocal participants that may influence comments of others. This study shows that using our 3-step approach it is possible to gather important information on clinician’s and staff perceptions and needs to participate in point of care patient recruitment for CT. The focus groups also provide an important step for survey construction. Designing surveys empirically requires multiple validation efforts, which will be conducted in the future. However, we can draw preliminary conclusions from the results of the pilot study which are quite informative and they are discussed below. Near future work will be to expand the response rate through additional local survey and conduct formal psychometric testing and validation both locally and nationally. A final validation will be proposed through the CTSA consortiums. Variation in responses. There was a lack of normal curves in our survey results. This points to the need to target education and recruitment efforts by provider type (with similar perspectives). Identification of these types would be useful. Some specific points regarding variability that should be considered in program design. Preferences for trail recruitment methods. Many trial recruitment notification methods have the potential to be successful when used judiciously and done well, particularly if the trial coordinator/provider relationship is supported by reciprocal benefits to the provider. Consistency in workflow within seems paramount to success. Providers can pull some notifications at a time they choose, while other notifications interrupt and must be used sparingly. Some allow review of multiple patients at the same time, and some foster easy access to the patient’s medical record. Conclusions. The authors recommend that recruitment HIT be customizable at the clinic and provider level by responsibility and interest to allow selection of level of information, delivery method, that is, email, text, in-basket, alert, dashboard, mail; frequency of notification, and an opt out feature. These customizable options will allow for better support of clinic workflow or goals. There is the potential with machine learning technology to monitor provider interactions with trial notifications and for the system to automatically make adjustments to the method and level that best supports each physician. Limitations: The major limitation is the focus on one site only and one delivery system (university based). The low response makes generalization difficult. Efforts to improve the rate are underway. Many populations are under-represented in Utah. Full psychometric analysis was not conducted but will part of the final project.

Abstract:

Field-based research programs offer students a singular opportunity to understand that today there are no simple scientific, economic or socio-political answers to the complex questions facing governments, communities, and local organizations. Through their research, students can gain a first-hand appreciation that decision making in the real world is a mix of all these disciplines, and that they have a vital role to play in participating in this process. According to the most recent Open Doors report (2006), issued by the Institute of International Education, about 206,000 US students studied abroad in 2004/5. While about 55% studied in Europe, an increasing number studied in other host countries around the world. Social science and physical science students comprised about 30% of all US study abroad students in this period. While study abroad programs encompassing a field research component are still in the minority, an increasing number of home institutions and field-based providers are supporting and conducting these types of programs. As the student papers in this Special Issue of Frontiers demonstrate, there is high quality work being produced by undergraduates in settings as diverse as France, Thailand, Kenya, South Africa and Mali. For these students this opportunity was likely a new experience, involving living and studying in international settings; dealing with language and culture differences; matriculating in programs operated by host country universities, independent program providers, or their home institution’s international program; and learning how to conduct research that meets professional standards. Much has been written and discussed regarding pre-departure orientation of US students studying abroad, along with studies and evaluations of the study abroad experience. Less discussion and research has focused on the experiences of the on-site faculty and staff who host students and incorporate field-based research into their courses and programs. These courses and programs involving student research include the following types: • International university-based research, in which the student conducts research on a topic as part of a course or term paper; • Independent field-based research, in which the student identifies a topic, organizes the project, and conducts the field work, analysis, write-up, etc. for an overall grade; • Collective field-based research, in which students, working under the guidance of a professor (either US or international), conduct a research project as part of a US-based course, or complementary to the professor’s research focus; • Client-focused, directed, field-based research in which the research conducted is in response to, or in collaboration with, a specific client ranging from an NGO, to a corporation, to an indigenous community, or a governmental agency. The purpose of this article is to describe some of the issues and challenges that on-site faculty and staff encounter in preparing and supporting US undergraduate students to conduct formal research projects in international settings in order to maximize their success and the quality of their research. The perspectives described below have been gathered through informal surveys with a range of international program faculty and staff; discussions with program managers and faculty; and through our own experience at The School for Field Studies (SFS), with its formal directed research model. The survey sought responses in the following areas, among others: preparing students to conduct successfully their field-based research in a different socio-cultural environment; the skill building needs of students; patterns of personal, cultural, and/or technical challenges that must be addressed to complete the process successfully; and, misconceptions that students have about field-based research. Student Preparation Students work either individually or in groups to conduct their research, depending on the program. In either case on-site faculty and staff focus immediately on training students on issues ranging from personal safety and risk management, to cultural understanding, language training, and appropriate behavior. In programs involving group work, faculty and staff have learned that good teamwork dynamics cannot be taken for granted. They work actively with students in helping them understand the ebb and flow of groups, the mutual respect which must be extended, and the active participation that each member must contribute. As one on-site director indicates, “Students make their experience what it is through their behavior. We talk a lot about respecting each other as individuals and working together to make the project a great experience.” Cultural and sensitivity training are a major part of these field-based programs. It is critical that students learn and appreciate the social and cultural context in which they will conduct their research. As another on-site director states, “It is most important that the students understand the context in which the research is happening. They need to know the values and basic cultural aspects around the project they will be working on. It is not simply doing ‘good science.’ It requires understanding the context so the science research reaches its goal.” On-site faculty and staff also stress the importance of not only understanding cultural dynamics, but also acting appropriately and sensitively relative to community norms and expectations. Language training is also a component of many of these programs. As a faculty member comments, “Students usually need help negotiating a different culture and a new language. We try to help the students understand that they need to identify appropriate solutions for the culture they are in, and that can be very difficult at times.” Skill Building Training students on the technical aspects of conducting field-based research is the largest challenge facing most on-site faculty and staff, who are often struck by the following: • A high percentage of students come to these programs with a lack of knowledge of statistics and methods. They’ve either had very little training in statistics, or they find that real world conditions complicate their data. According to one faculty member, “Statistics are a big struggle for most students. Some have done a class, but when they come to work with real data it is seldom as black and white as a text book example and that leads to interpretation issues and lack of confidence in their data. They learn that ecology (for example) is often not clear, but that is OK.” • Both physical and social science students need basic training in scientific methodology in order to undertake their projects. Even among science majors there is a significant lack of knowledge of how to design, manage and conduct a research project. As a program director states, “Many students begin by thinking that field research is comprised only of data collection. We intensively train students to understand that good research is a process that begins with conceptualization of issues, moves into review of relevant literature, structures a research hypothesis, determines indicators and measurements, creates the research design, collects data, undertakes analysis and inference. This is followed by write-up in standard scientific format for peer review and input. This leads to refining earlier hypotheses, raising new questions and initiating further research to address new questions.” Consistently, on-site faculty have indicated that helping students understand and appreciate this cycle is a major teaching challenge, but one that is critical to their education and the success of their various field research projects. • The uncertainty and ambiguity that are often present in field research creates challenges for many students who are used to seeking ‘the answer in the book.’ On-site faculty help students understand that science is a process in which field-based research is often non-linear and prone to interruption by natural and political events. It is a strong lesson for students when research subjects, be they animal or human, don’t cooperate by failing to appear on time, or at all, and when they do appear they may have their own agendas. Finally, when working with human communities, student researchers need to understand that their research results and recommendations are not likely to result in immediate action. Program faculty help them to understand that the real world includes politics, conflicting attitudes, regulatory issues, funding issues, and other community priorities. • Both physical and social science students demonstrate a consistent lack of skill in technical and evidence-based writing. For many this type of writing is completely new and is a definite learning experience. As a faculty member states, “Some students find the report writing process very challenging. We want them to do well, but we don’t want to effectively write their paper for them.” Challenges The preceding points address some of the technical work that on-site faculty conduct with students. Faculty also witness and experience the ‘emotional’ side of field-based research being conducted by their students. This includes what one faculty member calls “a research-oriented motivation” — the need for students to develop a strong, energized commitment to overcome all the challenges necessary to get the project done. As another professor indicates, “At the front end the students don’t realize how much effort they will have to expend because they usually have no experience with this sort of work before they do their project.” Related to this is the need for students to learn that flexibility in the research process does not justify a sloppy or casual approach. It does mean a recognition that human, political, and meteorological factors may intervene, requiring the ability to adapt to changed conditions. The goal is to get the research done. The exact mechanics for doing so will emerge as the project goes on. “Frustration tolerance” is critical in conducting this type of work. Students have the opportunity to learn that certain projects need to incorporate a substantial window of time while a lengthy ethics approval and permit review system is conducted by various governmental agencies. Students learn that bureaucracies move at their own pace, and for reasons that may not be obvious. Finally, personal challenges to students may include being uncomfortable in the field (wet, hot, covered in scrub itch) or feeling over-tired. As a faculty member states, “Many have difficulty adjusting to the early mornings my projects usually involve.” These issues represent a range of challenges that field-based research faculty and staff encounter in working with undergraduate students in designing and conducting their research projects around the world. In my own experience with SFS field-based staff, and in discussions with a wide variety of others who work and teach on-site, I am consistently impressed by the dedication, energy and commitment of these men and women to train, support and mentor students to succeed. As an on-site director summarizes, essentially speaking for all, “Fortunately, most of the students attending our program are very enthusiastic learners, take their limitations positively, and hence put tremendous effort into acquiring the required skills to conduct quality research.” Summary/Conclusions Those international program faculty and staff who have had years of experience in dealing with and teaching US undergraduates are surprised that the US educational system has not better prepared students on subjects including statistics, scientific report formatting and composition, and research methodologies. They find that they need to address these topics on an intensive basis in order for a substantial number of students to then conduct their research work successfully. Having said this, on-site faculty and staff are generally impressed by the energy and commitment that most students put into learning the technical requirements of a research project and carrying it out to the best of their abilities. Having students conduct real field-based research, and grading these efforts, is a very concrete method of determining the seriousness with which a student has participated in their study abroad program. Encouraging field-based research is good for students and good for study abroad because it has the potential of producing measurable products based on very tangible efforts. In a number of instances students have utilized their field research as the basis for developing their senior thesis or honors project back on their home campus. Successful field research has also formed the basis of Fulbright or Watson proposals, in addition to other fellowships and graduate study projects. An increasing number of students are also utilizing their field research, often in collaboration with their on-site program faculty, to create professional conference presentations and posters. Some of these field-based research models also produce benefits for incountry clients, including NGOs, corporations and community stakeholders. In addition to providing the data, analyses, technical information, and recommendations that these groups might not otherwise be able to afford, it is a concrete mechanism for the student and her/his study abroad program faculty and staff to ‘give back’ to local stakeholders and clients. It changes the dynamic from the student solely asking questions, interviewing respondents, observing communities, to more of a mutually beneficial relationship. This is very important to students who are sensitive to this dynamic. It is also important to their program faculty and staff, and in most cases, genuinely appreciated by the local stakeholders. In essence, community identified and responsive research is an excellent mechanism for giving to a community — not just taking from it. An increasing interest in conducting field-based research on the part of US universities and their students may have the effect of expanding the international destinations to which US students travel. A student’s sociological, anthropological, or environmental interest and their desire to conduct field research in that academic discipline, for example, may help stretch the parameters of the student’s comfort level to study in more exotic (non-traditional) locales. Skill building in preparing for and conducting field-based research is an invaluable experience for the student’s future academic and professional career. It is a fairly common experience for these students to indicate that with all the classroom learning they have done, their study abroad experience wherein they got their hands dirty, their comfort level stretched, their assumptions tested, and their work ethic challenged, provided them with an invaluable and life changing experience. Conducting field-based research in an international setting provides real world experience, as the student papers in this edition of Frontiers attest. It also brings what may have only been academic subjects, like statistics, and research design and methodology, to life in a real-conditions context. On a related note, conducting real field-based work includes the requirement to endure field conditions, remote locations, bad weather, personal discomforts, technological and mechanical breakdowns, and sometimes dangerous situations. Field research is hard work if it is done rigorously. In addition, field work often includes non-cooperating subjects that defy prediction, and may confound a neat research hypothesis. For a student considering a profession which requires a serious commitment to social or physical science field work this study abroad experience is invaluable. It clarifies for the student what is really involved, and it is helpful to the student in assessing their future career focus, as they ask the critical question — would I really want to do this as a fulltime career? US education needs to bridge better the gap between the physical and social sciences. Students are done a disservice with the silo-type education that has been so prevalent in US education. In the real world there are no strictly scientific, economic, or sociological solutions to complex, vexing problems facing the global community. Going forward there needs to be interdisciplinary approaches to these issues by decision makers at all levels. We need to train our students to comprehend that while they may not be an ecologist, or an economist, or a sociologist, they need to understand and appreciate that all these perspectives are important and must be considered in effective decision-making processes. In conclusion, education abroad programs involving serious field-based research are not a distraction or diversion from the prescribed course of study at US home institutions; rather, they are, if done well, capable of providing real, tangible skills and experience that students lack, in spite of their years of schooling. This is the reward that is most meaningful to the international program faculty and staff who teach, mentor and support US students in conducting their field-based research activities. As an Australian on-site program director stated, “there are relatively few students who are adequately skilled in these (field research) areas when they come to our program. Most need a lot of instruction and assistance to complete their research projects, but that of course is part of what we’re all about — helping students acquire or improve these critical skills.” This is the real service that these programs and on-site faculty and staff offer to US undergraduates. Paul Houlihan, President The School for Field Studies

Abstract:

In general sense academic output is measured in terms of grades obtained by students taking a particular course or with the level of understanding generated while undergoing the course. The output in terms of A grades is quite easy to comprehend, although, holds little value, the deeper understanding of the course holds much merit, although, it’s very difficult to comprehend. It is seldom reckoned how creatively a particular course is conceived, designed, delivered and helped to serve the academic fraternity. We try to demonstrate our understanding in all the spheres of our life, in action oriented thoughts, in perception about events, in interaction with the environmental stimulus. We sometime get bored with the mundane routine activities, but, sometimes quite get involved and absorbed in the process. Why particular tasks become mundane to somebody, while it absorbs somebody? Is it creative stimulus? Is it environment stimulus? Is it the personality traits? Is it the subject itself? Being creative in one’s profession often holds its objective treatment to the concept of creativity which is understood to be an expression of the individual talent in a form which is not controlled by the individual itself; rather it is understood to be performed by somebody who is beyond the individual. It may sound little bit tiring and confusing to understand that “being absent” is basically “being present” in a form where the expression of inner understanding happens when one allows the “Flow”. The concept of “Flow” as proposed by Csikszentmihalyi is understood in a perspective where the optimal experience of an individual towards the context of intrinsic motivation and positive experience (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, 2002) is influenced by the individual interaction of person and the environment. “Flow” is also influenced by certain characteristics of motivation, happiness, satisfaction, strength and positive emotions involved in the process where the “Flow” of an individual is enhanced and not obstructed by certain forces (Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre, 1989). The study setting involves academicians from a top level Institute of National Importance engaged in different Engineering, Social Science and Management streams to understand the “Flow”. Primarily observation method along with semi structured questions is employed to understand the responses of the individual, where the responses were allowed to express itself without any obstruction. Responses were gathered in an informal setting so that the respondents may not become aware and try to be politically correct. The findings can be effectively used to design policy intervention at an individual level to cull out the creative genius from a person.

Abstract:

The academic journal is obsolete. In a world where there are more titles than ever, this is a comment on their form – especially the print journal – rather than their quantity. Now that you can get everything online, it doesn’t really matter what journal a paper appears in; certainly it doesn’t matter what’s in the same issue. The experience of a journal is rapidly obsolescing, for both editors and readers. I’m obviously not the first person to notice this (see, for instance, "Scholarly Communication"; "Transforming Scholarly Communication"; Houghton; Policy Perspectives; Teute), but I do have a personal stake in the process. For if the journal is obsolete then it follows that the editor is obsolete, and I am the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. I founded the IJCS and have been sole editor ever since. Next year will see the fiftieth issue. So far, I have been responsible for over 280 published articles – over 2.25 million words of other people’s scholarship … and counting. We won’t say anything about the words that did not get published, except that the IJCS rejection rate is currently 87 per cent. Perhaps the first point that needs to be made, then, is that obsolescence does not imply lack of success. By any standard the IJCS is a successful journal, and getting more so. It has recently been assessed as a top-rating A* journal in the Australian Research Council’s journal rankings for ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), the newly activated research assessment exercise. (In case you’re wondering, M/C Journal is rated B.) The ARC says of the ranking exercise: ‘The lists are a result of consultations with the sector and rigorous review by leading researchers and the ARC.’ The ARC definition of an A* journal is given as: Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/ subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted.Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions. (Appendix I, p. 21; and see p. 4.)Talking of boasting, I love to prate about the excellent people we’ve published in the IJCS. We have introduced new talent to the field, and we have published new work by some of its pioneers – including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. We’ve also published – among many others – Sara Ahmed, Mohammad Amouzadeh, Tony Bennett, Goran Bolin, Charlotte Brunsdon, William Boddy, Nico Carpentier, Stephen Coleman, Nick Couldry, Sean Cubitt, Michael Curtin, Daniel Dayan, Ben Dibley, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, John Frow, Elfriede Fursich, Christine Geraghty, Mark Gibson, Paul Gilroy, Faye Ginsberg, Jonathan Gray, Lawrence Grossberg, Judith Halberstam, Hanno Hardt, Gay Hawkins, Joke Hermes, Su Holmes, Desmond Hui, Fred Inglis, Henry Jenkins, Deborah Jermyn, Ariel Heryanto, Elihu Katz, Senator Rod Kemp (Australian government minister), Youna Kim, Agnes Ku, Richard E. Lee, Jeff Lewis, David Lodge (the novelist), Knut Lundby, Eric Ma, Anna McCarthy, Divya McMillin, Antonio Menendez-Alarcon, Toby Miller, Joe Moran, Chris Norris, John Quiggin, Chris Rojek, Jane Roscoe, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, John Storey, Su Tong, the late Sako Takeshi, Sue Turnbull, Graeme Turner, William Uricchio, José van Dijck, Georgette Wang, Jing Wang, Elizabeth Wilson, Janice Winship, Handel Wright, Wu Jing, Wu Qidi (Chinese Vice-Minister of Education), Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, Robert Young and Zhao Bin. As this partial list makes clear, as well as publishing the top ‘hegemons’ we also publish work pointing in new directions, including papers from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, area studies, economics, education, feminism, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. We have sought to represent neglected regions, especially Chinese cultural studies, which has grown strongly during the past decade. And for quite a few up-and-coming scholars we’ve been the proud host of their first international publication. The IJCS was first published in 1998, already well into the internet era, but it was print-only at that time. Since then, all content, from volume 1:1 onwards, has been digitised and is available online (although vol 1:2 is unaccountably missing). The publishers, Sage Publications Ltd, London, have steadily added online functionality, so that now libraries can get the journal in various packages, including offering this title among many others in online-only bundles, and individuals can purchase single articles online. Thus, in addition to institutional and individual subscriptions, which remain the core business of the journal, income is derived by the publisher from multi-site licensing, incremental consortial sales income, single- and back-issue sales (print), pay-per-view, and deep back file sales (electronic). So what’s obsolete about it? In that boasting paragraph of mine (above), about what wonderful authors we’ve published, lies one of the seeds of obsolescence. For now that it is available online, ‘users’ (no longer ‘readers’!) can search for what they want and ignore the journal as such altogether. This is presumably how most active researchers experience any journal – they are looking for articles (or less: quotations; data; references) relevant to a given topic, literature review, thesis etc. They encounter a journal online through its ‘content’ rather than its ‘form.’ The latter is irrelevant to them, and may as well not exist. The Cover Some losses are associated with this change. First is the loss of the front cover. Now you, dear reader, scrolling through this article online, might well complain, why all the fuss about covers? Internet-generation journals don’t have covers, so all of the work that goes into them to establish the brand, the identity and even the ‘affect’ of a journal is now, well, obsolete. So let me just remind you of what’s at stake. Editors, designers and publishers all take a good deal of trouble over covers, since they are the point of intersection of editorial, design and marketing priorities. Thus, the IJCS cover contains the only ‘content’ of the journal for which we pay a fee to designers and photographers (usually the publisher pays, but in one case I did). Like any other cover, ours has three main elements: title, colour and image. Thought goes into every detail. Title I won’t say anything about the journal’s title as such, except that it was the result of protracted discussions (I suggested Terra Nullius at one point, but Sage weren’t having any of that). The present concern is with how a title looks on a cover. Our title-typeface is Frutiger. Originally designed by Adrian Frutiger for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is suitably international, being used for the corporate identity of the UK National Health Service, Telefónica O2, the Royal Navy, the London School of Economics , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Conservative Party of Canada, Banco Bradesco of Brazil, the Finnish Defence Forces and on road signs in Switzerland (Wikipedia, "Frutiger"). Frutiger is legible, informal, and reads well in small copy. Sage’s designer and I corresponded on which of the words in our cumbersome name were most important, agreeing that ‘international’ combined with ‘cultural’ is the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the journal, so they should be picked out (in bold small-caps) from the rest of the title, which the designer presented in a variety of Frutiger fonts (regular, italic, and reversed – white on black), presumably to signify the dynamism and diversity of our content. The word ‘studies’ appears on a lozenge-shaped cartouche that is also used as a design element throughout the journal, for bullet points, titles and keywords. Colour We used to change this every two years, but since volume 7 it has stabilised with the distinctive Pantone 247, ‘new fuchsia.’ This colour arose from my own environment at QUT, where it was chosen (by me) for the new Creative Industries Faculty’s academic gowns and hoods, and thence as a detailing colour for the otherwise monochrome Creative Industries Precinct buildings. There’s a lot of it around my office, including on the wall and the furniture. New Fuchsia is – we are frequently told – a somewhat ‘girly’ colour, especially when contrasted with the Business Faculty’s blue or Law’s silver; its similarity to the Girlfriend/Dolly palette does introduce a mild ‘politics of prestige’ element, since it is determinedly pop culture, feminised, and non-canonical. Image Right at the start, the IJCS set out to signal its difference from other journals. At that time, all Sage journals had calligraphic colours – but I was insistent that we needed a photograph (I have ‘form’ in this respect: in 1985 I changed the cover of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies from a line drawing (albeit by Sydney Nolan) to a photograph; and I co-designed the photo-cover of Cultural Studies in 1987). For IJCS I knew which photo I wanted, and Sage went along with the choice. I explained it in the launch issue’s editorial (Hartley, "Editorial"). That original picture, a goanna on a cattle grid in the outback, by Australian photographer Grant Hobson, lasted ten years. Since volume 11 – in time for our second decade – the goanna has been replaced with a picture by Italian-based photographer Patrick Nicholas, called ‘Reality’ (Hartley, "Cover Narrative"). We have also used two other photos as cover images, once each. They are: Daniel Meadows’s 1974 ‘Karen & Barbara’ (Hartley, "Who"); and a 1962 portrait of Richard Hoggart from the National Portrait Gallery in London (Owen & Hartley 2007). The choice of picture has involved intense – sometimes very tense – negotiations with Sage. Most recently, they were adamant the Daniel Meadows picture, which I wanted to use as the long-term replacement of the goanna, was too ‘English’ and they would not accept it. We exchanged rather sharp words before compromising. There’s no need to rehearse the dispute here; the point is that both sides, publisher and editor, felt that vital interests were at stake in the choice of a cover-image. Was it too obscure; too Australian; too English; too provocative (the current cover features, albeit in the deep background, a TV screen-shot of a topless Italian game-show contestant)? Running Order Beyond the cover, the next obsolete feature of a journal is the running order of articles. Obviously what goes in the journal is contingent upon what has been submitted and what is ready at a given time, so this is a creative role within a very limited context, which is what makes it pleasurable. Out of a limited number of available papers, a choice must be made about which one goes first, what order the other papers should follow, and which ones must be held over to the next issue. The first priority is to choose the lead article: like the ‘first face’ in a fashion show (if you don’t know what I mean by that, see FTV.com. It sets the look, the tone, and the standard for the issue. I always choose articles I like for this slot. It sends a message to the field – look at this! Next comes the running order. We have about six articles per issue. It is important to maintain the IJCS’s international mix, so I check for the country of origin, or failing that (since so many articles come from Anglosphere countries like the USA, UK and Australia), the location of the analysis. Attention also has to be paid to the gender balance among authors, and to the mix of senior and emergent scholars. Sometimes a weak article needs to be ‘hammocked’ between two good ones (these are relative terms – everything published in the IJCS is of a high scholarly standard). And we need to think about disciplinary mix, so as not to let the journal stray too far towards one particular methodological domain. Running order is thus a statement about the field – the disciplinary domain – rather than about an individual paper. It is a proposition about how different voices connect together in some sort of disciplinary syntax. One might even claim that the combination of cover and running order is a last vestige of collegiate collectivism in an era of competitive academic individualism. Now all that matters is the individual paper and author; the ‘currency’ is tenure, promotion and research metrics, not relations among peers. The running order is obsolete. Special Issues An extreme version of running order is the special issue. The IJCS has regularly published these; they are devoted to field-shaping initiatives, as follows: Title Editor(s) Issue Date Radiocracy: Radio, Development and Democracy Amanda Hopkinson, Jo Tacchi 3.2 2000 Television and Cultural Studies Graeme Turner 4.4 2001 Cultural Studies and Education Karl Maton, Handel Wright 5.4 2002 Re-Imagining Communities Sara Ahmed, Anne-Marie Fortier 6.3 2003 The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption John Hartley 7.1 2004 Creative Industries and Innovation in China Michael Keane, John Hartley 9.3 2006 The Uses of Richard Hoggart Sue Owen, John Hartley 10.1 2007 A Cultural History of Celebrity Liz Barry 11.3 2008 Caribbean Media Worlds Anna Pertierra, Heather Horst 12.2 2009 Co-Creative Labour Mark Deuze, John Banks 12.5 2009 It’s obvious that special issues have a place in disciplinary innovation – they can draw attention in a timely manner to new problems, neglected regions, or innovative approaches, and thus they advance the field. They are indispensible. But because of online publication, readers are not held to the ‘project’ of a special issue and can pick and choose whatever they want. And because of the peculiarities of research assessment exercises, editing special issues doesn’t count as research output. The incentive to do them is to that extent reduced, and some universities are quite heavy-handed about letting academics ‘waste’ time on activities that don’t produce ‘metrics.’ The special issue is therefore threatened with obsolescence too. Refereeing In many top-rating journals, the human side of refereeing is becoming obsolete. Increasingly this labour-intensive chore is automated and the labour is technologically outsourced from editors and publishers to authors and referees. You have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal. At the IJCS the process is still handled by humans – namely, journal administrator Tina Horton and me. We spend a lot of time checking how papers are faring, from trying to find the right referees through to getting the comments and then the author’s revisions completed in time for a paper to be scheduled into an issue. The volume of email correspondence is considerable. We get to know authors and referees. So we maintain a sense of an interactive and conversational community, albeit by correspondence rather than face to face. Doubtless, sooner or later, there will be a depersonalised Text Management System. But in the meantime we cling to the romantic notion that we are involved in refereeing for the sake of the field, for raising the standard of scholarship, for building a globally dispersed virtual college of cultural studies, and for giving everyone – from unfavoured countries and neglected regions to famous professors in old-money universities – the same chance to get their research published. In fact, these are largely delusional ideals, for as everyone knows, refereeing is part of the political economy of publicly-funded research. It’s about academic credentials, tenure and promotion for the individual, and about measurable research metrics for the academic organisation or funding agency (Hartley, "Death"). The IJCS has no choice but to participate: we do what is required to qualify as a ‘double-blind refereed journal’ because that is the only way to maintain repute, and thence the flow of submissions, not to mention subscriptions, without which there would be no journal. As with journals themselves, which proliferate even as the print form becomes obsolete, so refereeing is burgeoning as a practice. It’s almost an industry, even though the currency is not money but time: part gift-economy; part attention-economy; partly the payment of dues to the suzerain funding agencies. But refereeing is becoming obsolete in the sense of gathering an ‘imagined community’ of people one might expect to know personally around a particular enterprise. The process of dispersal and anonymisation of the field is exacerbated by blind refereeing, which we do because we must. This is suited to a scientific domain of objective knowledge, but everyone knows it’s not quite like that in the ‘new humanities’. The agency and identity of the researcher is often a salient fact in the research. The embedded positionality of the author, their reflexiveness about their own context and room-for-manoeuvre, and the radical contextuality of knowledge itself – these are all more or less axiomatic in cultural studies, but they’re not easily served by ‘double-blind’ refereeing. When refereeing is depersonalised to the extent that is now rife (especially in journals owned by international commercial publishers), it is hard to maintain a sense of contextualised productivity in the knowledge domain, much less a ‘common cause’ to which both author and referee wish to contribute. Even though refereeing can still be seen as altruistic, it is in the service of something much more general (‘scholarship’) and much more particular (‘my career’) than the kind of reviewing that wants to share and improve a particular intellectual enterprise. It is this mid-range altruism – something that might once have been identified as a politics of knowledge – that’s becoming obsolete, along with the printed journals that were the banner and rallying point for the cause. If I were to start a new journal (such as cultural-science.org), I would prefer ‘open refereeing’: uploading papers on an open site, subjecting them to peer-review and criticism, and archiving revised versions once they have received enough votes and comments. In other words I’d like to see refereeing shifted from the ‘supply’ or production side of a journal to the ‘demand’ or readership side. But of course, ‘demand’ for ‘blind’ refereeing doesn’t come from readers; it comes from the funding agencies. The Reading Experience Finally, the experience of reading a journal is obsolete. Two aspects of this seem worthy of note. First, reading is ‘out of time’ – it no longer needs to conform to the rhythms of scholarly publication, which are in any case speeding up. Scholarship is no longer seasonal, as it has been since the Middle Ages (with university terms organised around agricultural and ecclesiastical rhythms). Once you have a paper’s DOI number, you can read it any time, 24/7. It is no longer necessary even to wait for publication. With some journals in our field (e.g. Journalism Studies), assuming your Library subscribes, you can access papers as soon as they’re uploaded on the journal’s website, before the published edition is printed. Soon this will be the norm, just as it is for the top science journals, where timely publication, and thereby the ability to claim first discovery, is the basis of intellectual property rights. The IJCS doesn’t (yet) offer this service, but its frequency is speeding up. It was launched in 1998 with three issues a year. It went quarterly in 2001 and remained a quarterly for eight years. It has recently increased to six issues a year. That too causes changes in the reading experience. The excited ripping open of the package is less of a thrill the more often it arrives. Indeed, how many subscribers will admit that sometimes they don’t even open the envelope? Second, reading is ‘out of place’ – you never have to see the journal in which a paper appears, so you can avoid contact with anything that you haven’t already decided to read. This is more significant than might first appear, because it is affecting journalism in general, not just academic journals. As we move from the broadcast to the broadband era, communicative usage is shifting too, from ‘mass’ communication to customisation. This is a mixed blessing. One of the pleasures of old-style newspapers and the TV news was that you’d come across stories you did not expect to find. Indeed, an important attribute of the industrial form of journalism is its success in getting whole populations to read or watch stories about things they aren’t interested in, or things like wars and crises that they’d rather not know about at all. That historic textual achievement is in jeopardy in the broadband era, because ‘the public’ no longer needs to gather around any particular masthead or bulletin to get their news. With Web 2.0 affordances, you can exercise much more choice over what you attend to. This is great from the point of view of maximising individual choice, but sub-optimal in relation to what I’ve called ‘population-gathering’, especially the gathering of communities of interest around ‘tales of the unexpected’ – novelty or anomalies. Obsolete: Collegiality, Trust and Innovation? The individuation of reading choices may stimulate prejudice, because prejudice (literally, ‘pre-judging’) is built in when you decide only to access news feeds about familiar topics, stories or people in which you’re already interested. That sort of thing may encourage narrow-mindedness. It is certainly an impediment to chance discovery, unplanned juxtaposition, unstructured curiosity and thence, perhaps, to innovation itself. This is a worry for citizenship in general, but it is also an issue for academic ‘knowledge professionals,’ in our ever-narrower disciplinary silos. An in-close specialist focus on one’s own area of expertise need no longer be troubled by the concerns of the person in the next office, never mind the next department. Now, we don’t even have to meet on the page. One of the advantages of whole journals, then, is that each issue encourages ‘macro’ as well as ‘micro’ perspectives, and opens reading up to surprises. This willingness to ‘take things on trust’ describes a ‘we’ community – a community of trust. Trust too is obsolete in these days of performance evaluation. We’re assessed by an anonymous system that’s managed by people we’ll never meet. If the ‘population-gathering’ aspects of print journals are indeed obsolete, this may reduce collegiate trust and fellow-feeling, increase individualist competitiveness, and inhibit innovation. In the face of that prospect, I’m going to keep on thinking about covers, running orders, referees and reading until the role of editor is obsolete too. ReferencesHartley, John. "'Cover Narrative': From Nightmare to Reality." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.2 (2005): 131-137. ———. "Death of the Book?" Symposium of the National Scholarly Communication Forum & Australian Academy of the Humanities, Sydney Maritime Museum, 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.humanities.org.au/Resources/Downloads/NSCF/RoundTables1-17/PDF/Hartley.pdf›. ———. "Editorial: With Goanna." International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.1 (1998): 5-10. ———. "'Who Are You Going to Believe – Me or Your Own Eyes?' New Decade; New Directions." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 5-14. Houghton, John. "Economics of Scholarly Communication: A Discussion Paper." Center for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, 2000. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.caul.edu.au/cisc/EconomicsScholarlyCommunication.pdf›. Owen, Sue, and John Hartley, eds. The Uses of Richard Hoggart. International Journal of Cultural Studies (special issue), 10.1 (2007). Policy Perspectives: To Publish and Perish. (Special issue cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Association of American Universities and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable) 7.4 (1998). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html›. "Scholarly Communication: Crisis and Revolution." University of California Berkeley Library. N.d. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Collections/crisis.html›. Teute, F. J. "To Publish or Perish: Who Are the Dinosaurs in Scholarly Publishing?" Journal of Scholarly Publishing 32.2 (2001). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/322/perish5.html›."Transforming Scholarly Communication." University of Houston Library. 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://info.lib.uh.edu/scomm/transforming.htm›.

Abstract:

IntroductionPeople say, “don’t you ever want to come off?” I don’t know. The thought of me getting up without taking something is totally... to me that’s normal. If I haven’t taken anything then I’m not normal. And for me to even, I can’t contemplate not taking something, you know. I’m not a lost cause. I know what my problem is. It’s other people that want me to stop. I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to. Does that make sense to you? (Mya)This extract is taken from an interview that formed part of my doctoral research looking at people’s experiences of injecting drug use and treatment services in London, UK. Here I consider one of the ways participants described their use of drugs through a concept of becoming “normal.” I pay particular attention to Mya’s account and explore the very sense-making that her question (above) demands. Mya uses the concept of normality not only to reflect how drugs have become part of her everyday routines, or part of feeling normal, but actually in materially becoming herself—in embodying a “normal body.” As she puts it, “if I haven’t taken anything then I am not normal.” In this sense, Mya’s problem is not the drugs, but the people who want her to stop taking them. This understanding is important for challenging recent policy shifts towards reducing opiate replacement/substitution services in the UK (HM Government; Home Office).Methods The study took place from January to September 2014, and included participant observation at a drug treatment service, interviews with service providers, and “creative” interviews with people who inject drugs. The project was granted ethical approval by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Ethics Committee and the NHS Regional Ethics Committee. All participants were given pseudonyms.The creative interview is a term coined by Jennifer Mason to describe an in-depth semi-structured interview which produces additional types of data beyond the spoken word. The method was employed to explore participants’ feelings of embodiment as enacted in the drug-using “event.” I used a body mapping (drawing) task in these interviews to aid the communication of hard-to-articulate visceral experiences and depict the many actors, human and nonhuman, involved. (For a fuller explanation of the “events” perspective and methods taken in this study, please see Dennis 2016.) Below, I draw both from Mya’s narrative and her pictorial account.Becoming “Normal” with DiamorphineMya is a 52-year-old woman who was recruited to the study through word of mouth. She attended a supervised injecting clinic where another participant informed her about the study. The purpose of this clinic is to prescribe injectable diamorphine (pharmaceutical heroin) for clients to administer under supervised conditions. This unique service is specifically targeted at people who have previously struggled with the more orthodox opiate substitution treatments, such as methadone and buprenorphine. Mya explained that she had a long history of using street heroin, but in the last ten years has been injecting legally and has also illegally sought diamorphine. Mya’s drug use had become very hard to sustain financially, both in paying for private prescriptions and in the illegal drugs market, and therefore she wanted a prescription through the National Health Service. She was told that this was only possible through this clinic. However, the clinic’s intention was always to reduce this consumption, which Mya did not want to accept. This is because, as she explained, without drugs she is “not normal.”A rhetoric of “normality,” as deployed in the drug field, has taken two dominant paths. The first is in Parker et al.’s “normalisation thesis,” which documents a move during the 1990s when drug use, albeit “recreational drug use,” became increasingly common. A concept of “normalisation” is used to explain this social shift in acceptability towards drug taking. The second lies in a Foucauldian-influenced embodied idea of performing normality in line with dominant neoliberal discourses. For example, Nettleton et al.’s study with recovering heroin users employs a concept of “normalisation” to explore the ways in which people talk about regaining certain bodily practices to fit in with “the norm.” Using the work of Michel Foucault, and his concept of governmentality more specifically, Nettleton et al. argue that “normalisation” is “a crucial aspect of neo-liberal societies, where individuals are encouraged through [decentralised] political projects to become normal: ‘the judges of normality are everywhere’ (Foucault, 1977)” (175). Although there are vast differences, both these accounts seem to share an understanding of normality as a socially or discursively produced set of practices.However, Mya’s narrative of becoming normal seems to be doing something different. She highlights how she becomes normal with drugs in a way that suggests that without drugs she is not normal. This highlights the material work involved in achieving this “normal” state. It is clear that being normal is something we do (both theories above consider normal behaviour as performative) rather than it being pre-defined. But for Mya this is enacted in an ontological rather than learnt way as she connects with drugs. To know normality—“to me that’s normal”—and to be normal—“if I haven’t taken anything then I’m not normal”—are conflated. Karen Barad, in her theory of agential realism, would call this an intra-action rather than an inter-action, where what we know (epistemology) and what is (ontology) collide, or rather elide. It is in these entanglements of matter and meaning that Mya becomes normal. Mya’s narrative highlights the human body as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari) in which drugs have become a part. In this sense, drugs can be seen as part of this embodied self rather than separate. Consequently, Mya’s account is about more than how her body interacts with drugs, but rather how they become together. Drawing from Deleuze’s ontology of becoming, this is the idea that life does not start with any given entities or organisms, but that these forms are brought into being through the forces of life, and as such they are in a constant state of flux, becoming something else.This can challenge ideas of “recovery” (e.g. Home Office) where people are expected to remove themselves from drugs in order to regain their “normal” self. If one’s “normal” includes drugs this calls into question the very attempt to de-couple an entangled relationship that, as another participant put it, “has been a long time in the making” (my emphasis). Therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that Mya explains with a heavy heart that she is feeling substantial pressure to reduce her prescription. She feels the clinic staff fail to understand how drugs are part of her and what constitutes her “normal.” Thus, as she sees it, her “problem” is not the drugs themselves, but the people who want her to stop taking them. Mya’s frustrations start to make more sense—to return to the question in the epigraph—when we think about the body as something we do, involved in a constant task of keeping oneself together.Keeping Oneself TogetherOne does not hang together as a matter of course: keeping oneself together is something the embodied person needs to do. The person who fails to do so dies. (Mol and Law 43)Mol and Law argue that bodies are not something we have but something we do, and that bodies are actively held together through a series of practices. For instance, in their example of hypoglycaemia, a pin prick of blood needs to be taken for the condition to be known, and then counteracted by eating a sugary substance (49). Thinking about Mya’s account of becoming normal in these terms, drugs, instead of being seen as “evil” objects of misuse, can, for Mya at least, be part of this vital (life) project of keeping oneself together. This thoroughly blurs the distinctions between “good” medicine (life sustaining/enhancing) and “bad” drugs of abuse (life destroying). Following a Deleuzian understanding of the human body as an assemblage, making the body “actualise” as one is a process of life: “‘A’ or ‘a’ (one) is always the index of a multiplicity: an event, a singularity, a life...” (Deleuze 388). As such, making bodily boundaries becomes essential. For Mya, drugs are part of this individualisation process in quite overt ways. For example, in her body map (Figure 1) she drew a picture of herself inside a cloud, with voices shouting inwards, penetrating the barrier from outside. About these she said, they are “shouting at me,” “telling me what to do,” and “what’s best for me.” But she was at pains to point out that the depicted cloud is not about representing a pleasurable or disassociated feeling, but more to do with blocking out these intruding voices telling her how to live her life so that they “can’t get to me”:Mya: That makes it sound like the drug makes me feel like I’m in a cloud, it doesn’t, cos I just feel normal, it just helps me to, to deal with things better, it helps me to get less stressful, does that make sense?Author: Normal?Mya: YeahAuthor: So if you haven’t had it, you feel more on edge?Mya: I’m a complete nervous wreck. I’ll be jumping everywhere, you know, if someone opens the window of a bus and I’m jumping.Figure 1: Mya’s Body MapFor Mya, then, her drug use is not about pleasure, or pain for that matter, but about something altogether more vital: it is about keeping together in a stressful, invasive world, to “deal with things better.” It seems that Mya’s drawing—through which she was asked to depict her feelings when using drugs—is about trying to hold the permeable, leaky body together. For the injecting body, which regularly incorporates and excorporates drugs, is an active/metabolic body:The active body has semi-permeable boundaries [...] inside and outside are not so stable. Metabolism, after all, is about eating, drinking and breathing; about defecating, urinating and sweating. For a metabolic body incorporation and excorporation are essential. (Mol and Law 54)A similar argument is made by Vitellone, citing Keane:Heroin is not separate from but becomes central to the body, selfhood, and processes of individualization. Thus according to Keane “a drug is something external that becomes internalized, blurring the distinction between not only inside/outside but also self/other”. (166; see also Keane)In Mya’s drawing and account, drugs are intimately involved in the task of individuating—in making clear boundaries between her and the world. In this sense, her drawing of a cloud can be seen almost like an extra layer of skin.This also occurs in the accounts of two other participants. One female participant commented on how, without drugs, she does not feel herself, to the point that she said, “I don’t want to be in my own skin.” And a male participant also used similar language to note that without heroin (even though he is prescribed methadone, an opiate substitute) he can feel “disembodied”:Everything is all “oh oh” [he makes sounds and body movements to show a fear of things getting too close] like that, everything is like right, like if you’re trying to walk around the streets and it’s just like you can’t handle busy high streets and you know busy like tubes and ...In these accounts, drugs are playing a key role in this boundary work, that is, in enacting the body as One. This resonates strongly with Donna Haraway’s idea of individualisation as “a strategic defense problem” (212). This is the idea that the individual body is not something we are born with, but something we strive towards. Haraway argues that “bodies have become cyborgs,” where “the cyborg is text, machine, body, and metaphor” (212). Mya takes great care in making sure that I have understood this process of boundary-making, which is essential to the cyborg, and on several occasions checks back with me to confirm that she is making sense. She gives the impression that she has been explaining these feelings for years, but still does not feel fully understood. This is perhaps why she seems so thrilled when she feels I have finally got a handle on the dynamic:Mya: But the methadone makes me feel heavy, lethargic, with the diamorphine I can get on with being normal, more better, and not so sleepy, does that make sense? [...] It just helps me cope with everything. You know what I mean, everything. Even ...Author: Like taking the edge off things?Mya: That’s it, the edge off things, you’ve got it! I’ve never thought of that before, that’s a good way of putting it.Author: No cos I was thinking about what you were saying about how you can feel anxious and stuff, and I can imagine it just ...Mya: You’re right, you’ve done it in a nut shell there. Cos people have asked me that before and I haven’t been able to answer. That is a good answer. It takes the edge of things. Yeah.At the end of the interview, and long past this initial reference, Mya shows appreciation of this phrase once more, as an expression which she feels could help in her bid to be better understood:Author: Anyway, I’ll end the interview there.Mya: Was that alright?Author: Yeah, perfect. Is there anything else that you think is important that I’ve missed out?Mya: No not at all. I think you’ve just helped me there by saying it takes the edge off things, I’ve been trying to put that into words for a long time, I didn’t know how to say it ...Although these experiences are of course linked to withdrawal symptoms as a particular arrangement of bodily connections, when I ask about this, it is evident that it is also about something more. For example, in trying to get at why Mya feels she needs diamorphine rather than methadone, she talks about it being “cleaner,” “purer,” “less groggy.” And even though I prompt her on the potential enjoyment, she links “the buzz” to being able to get on with “normal things,” saying “I can act more normal with the heroin”:Mya: Definitely it’s less groggy.Author: And does it give you a slight buzz also?Mya: Sometimes it does yeah. Like I can get on with my housework better and things like that, day to day things, I can act more normal with the heroin. With just the methadone, things just slip.With an interesting use of the term, Mya says that with methadone (which would be the more usual opiate prescribed in heroin treatment) “things just slip.” Again, there is a sense of diamorphine holding her together, in a way that without it she would “slip.” This perhaps highlights the slipperiness of connections that are only ever “partial” (Haraway 181). Rather than becoming too porous, with methadone she becomes too shut off or “groggy,” and again her body becomes unable to do things. This is perhaps why she is so insistent that diamorphine stays put in her life: “I’m not going to lie, even if I don’t get it, I’m still going to use the diamorphine.” Or, in Haraway’s words, she “would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”(181) —she would rather endure the political and potentially criminal consequences of requiring this “outside” substance than pretend to live apart from/above the material world.ConclusionWhen we consider bodies as something we do, rather than have, we see that rather than Mya’s account of normality reflecting a social change (Parker et al.) or solely discursive embodiment (Nettleton et al.), it actually refers to how she becomes her “normal self” in more material ways. Mya’s account thoroughly disrupts a separation of object/subject, as well as several other binaries that underpin contemporary ideas of psychoactive drug use and the body, including drug/medicine, inner/outer, self/other, and of course, normal/pathological. Instead, and in trying to do justice to Mya’s question which opened the essay, her body is seen connecting with drugs in a way that holds her together (as One) in becoming “normal.” Consequently, her fears over having these drugs stopped are very real concerns over a disruption to her corporeality, which demand to be taken seriously. This calls for urgent questions to be asked over current UK policy trends toward eliminating diamorphine prescribing services (see O’Mara) and reducing opiate substitution more generally.References Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.Deleuze, Gilles. “Immanence: A Life.” Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Ed. David Lapoujade. New York: Semiotext(e), 2006. 384­–91.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2004.Dennis, Fay. “Encountering ‘Triggers:’ Drug-Body-World Entanglements of Injecting Drug Use.” Contemporary Drug Problems (2016). <http://cdx.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/03/14/0091450916636379.full.pdf?ijkey=6yYSsmgMiHATwe6&keytype=finite>.Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. HM Government. “Drug Strategy 2010: Reducing Demand, Restricting Supply, Building Recovery: Supporting People to Live a Drug Free Life.” Home Office, 2010. 1 Jan. 2011 <https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/98026/drug-strategy-2010.pdf>.Home Office. “Putting Full Recovery First.” Home Office, 2012. 5 Feb. 2013 <https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/98010/recovery-roadmap.pdf>.Keane, Helen. What’s Wrong with Addiction? Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2002.Mason, Jennifer. “What Is Creative Interviewing?” 2010. 10 May 2013 <http://www.method s.manchester.ac.uk/methods/creativeinterviewing/>.Mol, Annemarie, and John Law. “Embodied Action, Enacted Bodies. The Example of Hypoglycaemia.” Body & Society 10.2 (2004): 43-62.Nettleton, Sarah, Joanne Neale, and Lucy Pickering. “‘I Just Want to Be Normal’: An Analysis of Discourses of Normality among Recovering Heroin Users.” Health 17.2 (2013): 174–190.O’Mara, Erin. “The State We’re In: Heroin Prescribing in the UK.” Drink and Drug News (Dec. 2015). 20 Jan. 2016 <https://drinkanddrugsnews.com/the-state-were-in-2/>.Parker, Howard, Judith Aldridge, and Fiona Measham. Illegal Leisure: The Normalization of Adolescent Recreational Drug Use. Hove: Routledge, 1998.Vitellone, Nicole. “The Rush: Needle Fixation or Technical Materialization?” Journal for Cultural Research 7.2 (2003): 165–177.

Abstract:

Refereed publications (also known as peer-reviewed) are the currency of academia, yet many PhD theses in Australia result in only one or two such papers. Typically, a doctoral thesis requires the candidate to present (and pass) a public Confirmation Seminar, around nine to twelve months into candidacy, in which a panel of the candidate’s supervisors and invited experts adjudicate upon whether the work is likely to continue and ultimately succeed in the goal of a coherent and original contribution to knowledge. A Final Seminar, also public and sometimes involving the traditional viva voce or oral defence of the thesis, is presented two or three months before approval is given to send the 80,000 to 100,000 word tome off for external examination. And that soul-destroying or elation-releasing examiner’s verdict can be many months in the delivery: a limbo-like period during which the candidate’s status as a student is ended and her or his receipt of any scholarship or funding guerdon is terminated with perfunctory speed. This is the only time most students spend seriously writing up their research for publication although, naturally, many are more involved in job hunting as they pin their hopes on passing the thesis examination.There is, however, a slightly more palatable alternative to this nail-biting process of the traditional PhD, and that is the PhD by Published Papers (also known as PhD by Publications or PhD by Published Works). The form of my own soon-to-be-submitted thesis, it permits the submission for examination of a collection of papers that have been refereed and accepted (or are in the process of being refereed) for publication in academic journals or books. Apart from the obvious benefits in getting published early in one’s (hopefully) burgeoning academic career, it also takes away a lot of the stress come final submission time. After all, I try to assure myself, the thesis examiners can’t really discredit the process of double-blind, peer-review the bulk of the thesis has already undergone: their job is to examine how well I’ve unified the papers into a cohesive thesis … right? But perhaps they should at least be wary, because, unfortunately, the requirements for this kind of PhD vary considerably from institution to institution and there have been some cases where the submitted work is of questionable quality compared to that produced by graduates from more demanding universities. Hence, this paper argues that in my subject area of interest—film and television studies—there is a huge range in the set requirements for doctorates, from universities that award the degree to film artists for prior published work that has undergone little or no academic scrutiny and has involved little or no on-campus participation to at least three Australian universities that require candidates be enrolled for a minimum period of full-time study and only submit scholarly work generated and published (or submitted for publication) during candidature. I would also suggest that uncertainty about where a graduate’s work rests on this continuum risks confusing a hard-won PhD by Published Papers with the sometimes risible honorary doctorate. Let’s begin by dredging the depths of those murky, quasi-academic waters to examine the occasionally less-than-salubrious honorary doctorate. The conferring of this degree is generally a recognition of an individual’s body of (usually published) work but is often conferred for contributions to knowledge or society in general that are not even remotely academic. The honorary doctorate does not usually carry with it the right to use the title “Dr” (although many self-aggrandising recipients in the non-academic world flout this unwritten code of conduct, and, indeed, Monash University’s Monash Magazine had no hesitation in describing its 2008 recipient, musician, screenwriter, and art-school-dropout Nick Cave, as “Dr Cave” (O’Loughlin)). Some shady universities even offer such degrees for sale or ‘donation’ and thus do great damage to that institution’s credibility as well as to the credibility of the degree itself. Such overseas “diploma mills”—including Ashwood University, Belford University, Glendale University and Suffield University—are identified by their advertising of “Life Experience Degrees,” for which a curriculum vitae outlining the prospective graduand’s oeuvre is accepted on face value as long as their credit cards are not rejected. An aspiring screen auteur simply specifies film and television as their major and before you can shout “Cut!” there’s a degree in the mail. Most of these pseudo-universities are not based in Australia but are perfectly happy to confer their ‘titles’ to any well-heeled, vanity-driven Australians capable of completing the online form. Nevertheless, many academics fear a similarly disreputable marketplace might develop here, and Norfolk Island-based Greenwich University presents a particularly illuminating example. Previously empowered by an Act of Parliament consented to by Senator Ian Macdonald, the then Minister for Territories, this “university” had the legal right to confer honorary degrees from 1998. The Act was eventually overridden by legislation passed in 2002, after a concerted effort by the Australian Universities Quality Agency Ltd. and the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee to force the accreditation requirements of the Australian Qualifications Framework upon the institution in question, thus preventing it from making degrees available for purchase over the Internet. Greenwich University did not seek re-approval and soon relocated to its original home of Hawaii (Brown). But even real universities flounder in similarly muddy waters when, unsolicited, they make dubious decisions to grant degrees to individuals they hold in high esteem. Although meaning well by not courting pecuniary gain, they nevertheless invite criticism over their choice of recipient for their honoris causa, despite the decision usually only being reached after a process of debate and discussion by university committees. Often people are rewarded, it seems, as much for their fame as for their achievements or publications. One such example of a celebrity who has had his onscreen renown recognised by an honorary doctorate is film and television actor/comedian Billy Connolly who was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by The University of Glasgow in 2006, prompting Stuart Jeffries to complain that “something has gone terribly wrong in British academia” (Jeffries). Eileen McNamara also bemoans the levels to which some institutions will sink to in search of media attention and exposure, when she writes of St Andrews University in Scotland conferring an honorary doctorate to film actor and producer, Michael Douglas: “What was designed to acknowledge intellectual achievement has devolved into a publicity grab with universities competing for celebrity honorees” (McNamara). Fame as an actor (and the list gets even weirder when the scope of enquiry is widened beyond the field of film and television), seems to be an achievement worth recognising with an honorary doctorate, according to some universities, and this kind of discredit is best avoided by Australian institutions of higher learning if they are to maintain credibility. Certainly, universities down under would do well to follow elsewhere than in the footprints of Long Island University’s Southampton College. Perhaps the height of academic prostitution of parchments for the attention of mass media occurred when in 1996 this US school bestowed an Honorary Doctorate of Amphibious Letters upon that mop-like puppet of film and television fame known as the “muppet,” Kermit the Frog. Indeed, this polystyrene and cloth creation with an anonymous hand operating its mouth had its acceptance speech duly published (see “Kermit’s Acceptance Speech”) and the Long Island University’s Southampton College received much valuable press. After all, any publicity is good publicity. Or perhaps this furry frog’s honorary degree was a cynical stunt meant to highlight the ridiculousness of the practice? In 1986 a similar example, much closer to my own home, occurred when in anticipation and condemnation of the conferral of an honorary doctorate upon Prince Philip by Monash University in Melbourne, the “Members of the Monash Association of Students had earlier given a 21-month-old Chihuahua an honorary science degree” (Jeffries), effectively suggesting that the honorary doctorate is, in fact, a dog of a degree. On a more serious note, there have been honorary doctorates conferred upon far more worthy recipients in the field of film and television by some Australian universities. Indigenous film-maker Tracey Moffatt was awarded an honorary doctorate by Griffith University in November of 2004. Moffatt was a graduate of the Griffith University’s film school and had an excellent body of work including the films Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990) and beDevil (1993). Acclaimed playwright and screenwriter David Williamson was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by The University of Queensland in December of 2004. His work had previously picked up four Australian Film Institute awards for best screenplay. An Honorary Doctorate of Visual and Performing Arts was given to film director Fred Schepisi AO by The University of Melbourne in May of 2006. His films had also been earlier recognised with Australian Film Institute awards as well as the Golden Globe Best Miniseries or Television Movie award for Empire Falls in 2006. Director George Miller was crowned with an Honorary Doctorate in Film from the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School in April 2007, although he already had a medical doctor’s testamur on his wall. In May of this year, filmmaker George Gittoes, a fine arts dropout from The University of Sydney, received an honorary doctorate by The University of New South Wales. His documentaries, Soundtrack to War (2005) and Rampage (2006), screened at the Sydney and Berlin film festivals, and he has been employed by the Australian Government as an official war artist. Interestingly, the high quality screen work recognised by these Australian universities may have earned the recipients ‘real’ PhDs had they sought the qualification. Many of these film artists could have just as easily submitted their work for the degree of PhD by Published Papers at several universities that accept prior work in lieu of an original exegesis, and where a film is equated with a book or journal article. But such universities still invite comparisons of their PhDs by Published Papers with honorary doctorates due to rather too-easy-to-meet criteria. The privately funded Bond University, for example, recommends a minimum full-time enrolment of just three months and certainly seems more lax in its regulations than other Antipodean institution: a healthy curriculum vitae and payment of the prescribed fee (currently AUD$24,500 per annum) are the only requirements. Restricting my enquiries once again to the field of my own research, film and television, I note that Dr. Ingo Petzke achieved his 2004 PhD by Published Works based upon films produced in Germany well before enrolling at Bond, contextualized within a discussion of the history of avant-garde film-making in that country. Might not a cynic enquire as to how this PhD significantly differs from an honorary doctorate? Although Petzke undoubtedly paid his fees and met all of Bond’s requirements for his thesis entitled Slow Motion: Thirty Years in Film, one cannot criticise that cynic for wondering if Petzke’s films are indeed equivalent to a collection of refereed papers. It should be noted that Bond is not alone when it comes to awarding candidates the PhD by Published Papers for work published or screened in the distant past. Although yet to grant it in the area of film or television, Swinburne University of Technology (SUT) is an institution that distinctly specifies its PhD by Publications is to be awarded for “research which has been carried out prior to admission to candidature” (8). Similarly, the Griffith Law School states: “The PhD (by publications) is awarded to established researchers who have an international reputation based on already published works” (1). It appears that Bond is no solitary voice in the academic wilderness, for SUT and the Griffith Law School also apparently consider the usual milestones of Confirmation and Final Seminars to be unnecessary if the so-called candidate is already well published. Like Bond, Griffith University (GU) is prepared to consider a collection of films to be equivalent to a number of refereed papers. Dr Ian Lang’s 2002 PhD (by Publication) thesis entitled Conditional Truths: Remapping Paths To Documentary ‘Independence’ contains not refereed, scholarly articles but the following videos: Wheels Across the Himalaya (1981); Yallambee, People of Hope (1986); This Is What I Call Living (1988); The Art of Place: Hanoi Brisbane Art Exchange (1995); and Millennium Shift: The Search for New World Art (1997). While this is a most impressive body of work, and is well unified by appropriate discussion within the thesis, the cynic who raised eyebrows at Petzke’s thesis might also be questioning this thesis: Dr Lang’s videos all preceded enrolment at GU and none have been refereed or acknowledged with major prizes. Certainly, the act of releasing a film for distribution has much in common with book publishing, but should these videos be considered to be on a par with academic papers published in, say, the prestigious and demanding journal Screen? While recognition at awards ceremonies might arguably correlate with peer review there is still the question as to how scholarly a film actually is. Of course, documentary films such as those in Lang’s thesis can be shown to be addressing gaps in the literature, as is the expectation of any research paper, but the onus remains on the author/film-maker to demonstrate this via a detailed contextual review and a well-written, erudite argument that unifies the works into a cohesive thesis. This Lang has done, to the extent that suspicious cynic might wonder why he chose not to present his work for a standard PhD award. Another issue unaddressed by most institutions is the possibility that the publications have been self-refereed or refereed by the candidate’s editorial colleagues in a case wherein the papers appear in a book the candidate has edited or co-edited. Dr Gillian Swanson’s 2004 GU thesis Towards a Cultural History of Private Life: Sexual Character, Consuming Practices and Cultural Knowledge, which addresses amongst many other cultural artefacts the film Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962), has nine publications: five of which come from two books she co-edited, Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War Two, (Gledhill and Swanson 1996) and Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives (Crisp et al 2000). While few would dispute the quality of Swanson’s work, the persistent cynic might wonder if these five papers really qualify as refereed publications. The tacit understanding of a refereed publication is that it is blind reviewed i.e. the contributor’s name is removed from the document. Such a system is used to prevent bias and favouritism but this level of anonymity might be absent when the contributor to a book is also one of the book’s editors. Of course, Dr Swanson probably took great care to distance herself from the refereeing process undertaken by her co-editors, but without an inbuilt check, allegations of cronyism from unfriendly cynics may well result. A related factor in making comparisons of different university’s PhDs by Published Papers is the requirements different universities have about the standard of the journal the paper is published in. It used to be a simple matter in Australia: the government’s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) held a Register of Refereed Journals. If your benefactor in disseminating your work was on the list, your publications were of near-unquestionable quality. Not any more: DEST will no longer accept nominations for listing on the Register and will not undertake to rule on whether a particular journal article meets the HERDC [Higher Education Research Data Collection] requirements for inclusion in publication counts. HEPs [Higher Education Providers] have always had the discretion to determine if a publication produced in a journal meets the requirements for inclusion in the HERDC regardless of whether or not the journal was included on the Register of Refereed Journals. As stated in the HERDC specifications, the Register is not an exhaustive list of all journals which satisfy the peer-review requirements (DEST). The last listing for the DEST Register of Refereed Journals was the 3rd of February 2006, making way for a new tiered list of academic journals, which is currently under review in the Australian tertiary education sector (see discussion of this development in the Redden and Mitchell articles in this issue). In the interim, some university faculties created their own rankings of journals, but not the Faculty of Creative Industries at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) where I am studying for my PhD by Published Papers. Although QUT does not have a list of ranked journals for a candidate to submit papers to, it is otherwise quite strict in its requirements. The QUT University Regulations state, “Papers submitted as a PhD thesis must be closely related in terms of subject matter and form a cohesive research narrative” (QUT PhD regulation 14.1.2). Thus there is the requirement at QUT that apart from the usual introduction, methodology and literature review, an argument must be made as to how the papers present a sustained research project via “an overarching discussion of the main features linking the publications” (14.2.12). It is also therein stated that it should be an “account of research progress linking the research papers” (4.2.6). In other words, a unifying essay must make an argument for consideration of the sometimes diversely published papers as a cohesive body of work, undertaken in a deliberate journey of research. In my own case, an aural auteur analysis of sound in the films of Rolf de Heer, I argue that my published papers (eight in total) represent a journey from genre analysis (one paper) to standard auteur analysis (three papers) to an argument that sound should be considered in auteur analysis (one paper) to the major innovation of the thesis, aural auteur analysis (three papers). It should also be noted that unlike Bond, GU or SUT, the QUT regulations for the standard PhD still apply: a Confirmation Seminar, Final Seminar and a minimum two years of full-time enrolment (with a minimum of three months residency in Brisbane) are all compulsory. Such milestones and sine qua non ensure the candidate’s academic progress and intellectual development such that she or he is able to confidently engage in meaningful quodlibets regarding the thesis’s topic. Another interesting and significant feature of the QUT guidelines for this type of degree is the edict that papers submitted must be “published, accepted or submitted during the period of candidature” (14.1.1). Similarly, the University of Canberra (UC) states “The articles or other published material must be prepared during the period of candidature” (10). Likewise, Edith Cowan University (ECU) will confer its PhD by Publications to those candidates whose thesis consists of “only papers published in refereed scholarly media during the period of enrolment” (2). In other words, one cannot simply front up to ECU, QUT, or UC with a résumé of articles or films published over a lifetime of writing or film-making and ask for a PhD by Published Papers. Publications of the candidate prepared prior to commencement of candidature are simply not acceptable at these institutions and such PhDs by Published Papers from QUT, UC and ECU are entirely different to those offered by Bond, GU and SUT. Furthermore, without a requirement for a substantial period of enrolment and residency, recipients of PhDs by Published Papers from Bond, GU, or SUT are unlikely to have participated significantly in the research environment of their relevant faculty and peers. Such newly minted doctors may be as unfamiliar with the campus and its research activities as the recipient of an honorary doctorate usually is, as he or she poses for the media’s cameras en route to the glamorous awards ceremony. Much of my argument in this paper is built upon the assumption that the process of refereeing a paper (or for that matter, a film) guarantees a high level of academic rigour, but I confess that this premise is patently naïve, if not actually flawed. Refereeing can result in the rejection of new ideas that conflict with the established opinions of the referees. Interdisciplinary collaboration can be impeded and the lack of referee’s accountability is a potential problem, too. It can also be no less nail-biting a process than the examination of a finished thesis, given that some journals take over a year to complete the refereeing process, and some journal’s editorial committees have recognised this shortcoming. Despite being a mainstay of its editorial approach since 1869, the prestigious science journal, Nature, which only publishes about 7% of its submissions, has led the way with regard to varying the procedure of refereeing, implementing in 2006 a four-month trial period of ‘Open Peer Review’. Their website states, Authors could choose to have their submissions posted on a preprint server for open comments, in parallel with the conventional peer review process. Anyone in the field could then post comments, provided they were prepared to identify themselves. Once the usual confidential peer review process is complete, the public ‘open peer review’ process was closed and the editors made their decision about publication with the help of all reports and comments (Campbell). Unfortunately, the experiment was unpopular with both authors and online peer reviewers. What the Nature experiment does demonstrate, however, is that the traditional process of blind refereeing is not yet perfected and can possibly evolve into something less problematic in the future. Until then, refereeing continues to be the best system there is for applying structured academic scrutiny to submitted papers. With the reforms of the higher education sector, including forced mergers of universities and colleges of advanced education and the re-introduction of university fees (carried out under the aegis of John Dawkins, Minister for Employment, Education and Training from 1987 to 1991), and the subsequent rationing of monies according to research dividends (calculated according to numbers of research degree conferrals and publications), there has been a veritable explosion in the number of institutions offering PhDs in Australia. But the general public may not always be capable of differentiating between legitimately accredited programs and diploma mills, given that the requirements for the first differ substantially. From relatively easily obtainable PhDs by Published Papers at Bond, GU and SUT to more rigorous requirements at ECU, QUT and UC, there is undoubtedly a huge range in the demands of degrees that recognise a candidate’s published body of work. The cynical reader may assume that with this paper I am simply trying to shore up my own forthcoming graduation with a PhD by Published papers from potential criticisms that it is on par with a ‘purchased’ doctorate. Perhaps they are right, for this is a new degree in QUT’s Creative Industries faculty and has only been awarded to one other candidate (Dr Marcus Foth for his 2006 thesis entitled Towards a Design Methodology to Support Social Networks of Residents in Inner-City Apartment Buildings). But I believe QUT is setting a benchmark, along with ECU and UC, to which other universities should aspire. In conclusion, I believe further efforts should be undertaken to heighten the differences in status between PhDs by Published Papers generated during enrolment, PhDs by Published Papers generated before enrolment and honorary doctorates awarded for non-academic published work. Failure to do so courts cynical comparison of all PhD by Published Papers with unearnt doctorates bought from Internet shysters. References Brown, George. “Protecting Australia’s Higher Education System: A Proactive Versus Reactive Approach in Review (1999–2004).” Proceedings of the Australian Universities Quality Forum 2004. Australian Universities Quality Agency, 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.auqa.edu.au/auqf/2004/program/papers/Brown.pdf>. Campbell, Philip. “Nature Peer Review Trial and Debate.” Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science. December 2006. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/> Crisp, Jane, Kay Ferres, and Gillian Swanson, eds. Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives. London: Routledge, 2000. Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). “Closed—Register of Refereed Journals.” Higher Education Research Data Collection, 2008. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/online_forms_services/ higher_education_research_data_ collection.htm>. Edith Cowan University. “Policy Content.” Postgraduate Research: Thesis by Publication, 2003. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.ecu.edu.au/GPPS/policies_db/tmp/ac063.pdf>. Gledhill, Christine, and Gillian Swanson, eds. Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War Two. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Griffith Law School, Griffith University. Handbook for Research Higher Degree Students. 24 March 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.griffith.edu.au/centre/slrc/pdf/rhdhandbook.pdf>. Jeffries, Stuart. “I’m a celebrity, get me an honorary degree!” The Guardian 6 July 2006. 11 June 2008 ‹http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1813525,00.html>. Kermit the Frog. “Kermit’s Commencement Address at Southampton Graduate Campus.” Long Island University News 19 May 1996. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.southampton.liu.edu/news/commence/1996/kermit.htm>. McNamara, Eileen. “Honorary senselessness.” The Boston Globe 7 May 2006. ‹http://www. boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/05/07/honorary_senselessness/>. O’Loughlin, Shaunnagh. “Doctor Cave.” Monash Magazine 21 (May 2008). 13 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.monash.edu.au/pubs/monmag/issue21-2008/alumni/cave.html>. Queensland University of Technology. “Presentation of PhD Theses by Published Papers.” Queensland University of Technology Doctor of Philosophy Regulations (IF49). 12 Oct. 2007. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/Appendix/appendix09.jsp#14%20Presentation %20of%20PhD%20Theses>. Swinburne University of Technology. Research Higher Degrees and Policies. 14 Nov. 2007. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.swinburne.edu.au/corporate/registrar/ppd/docs/RHDpolicy& procedure.pdf>. University of Canberra. Higher Degrees by Research: Policy and Procedures (The Gold Book). 7.3.3.27 (a). 15 Nov. 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.canberra.edu.au/research/attachments/ goldbook/Pt207_AB20approved3220arp07.pdf>.

Abstract:

1. Introduction: How the word 'chat' can be demeaning I think the editors mean the word 'chat' to be something of a tease. They remind us that to call something 'chat' might be to strip it of anything more serious or substantial it might be doing and, by extension, to weaken pretty well all talk. It joins 'mere talk', 'rhetoric', 'chatter' and of course 'gossip', with the pungent flavouring of sexism as an added extra. It seems that chat is limp, directionless, passive. Whoever gets to call something 'chat' has scored a win in a battle. Let's just stay with this image for a moment. Suppose it is a rhetorical victory. Scored for which side? In a battle against who or what? Well, for a commonsense view of the world that rates objects over practices, things over their descriptions, and facts over the discovery of facts. And that commonsense view, of course, is the high street version of tangled scholars' web of philosophies -- realism, materialism and essentialism. But breathe easy, because I'm not going to get us stuck in that web. All I want to do is point out -- as has long been pointed out before, especially by feminists taking a cool look at 'female language' - that some uses of the word 'chat' betray a very old-fashioned view of language. To call this edition of M/C 'Chat' is to examine that attitude. The editors want to rate practices over objects, descriptions over what they describe, and the act of discovery over what is discovered. Or at least, even if one doesn't all want to go that far, to redress the balance a little in each case. The attitude the editors want to correct is a rather complacent one. It takes people's exchange of talk as just that; as a means of transmitting what's in one person's head into the head of the other person, more or less. Inefficient, noisy and unreliable, but fixable by technology. This is, of course the 'conduit' metaphor so devastatingly unmasked by Reddy in 1979. But it would be good to see some actual examples of real people really using the word; all this has been rather hypothetical so far. In fact, what we shall find is a bit of a paradox. It turns out, if I can prefigure the action, that when people use the word 'chat' to decribe some stretch of talk, what they want to do (at least in the data I have) is not to sneer at it -- quite the contrary. But it is nevertheless highly rhetorical. It does a job. The speaker tends to use it to promote a description of a warm, informal and above all blameless event, just when there might be reason to believe that in fact something rather different would be more accurate. 2. How to analyse talk as consequential? Let me pause for a moment. Soon I shall be doing a quick survey of some examples of actual live usage of the word. I should say, in parenthesis, that M/C offered me the wonderful opportunity of actually having a link to an audio sample of these extracts, and had the data come from public sources (say from talk radio or a political speech) then I would have jumped at the chance. That way you would have been able yourself to catch the flavour of the talk undiluted by transcription conventions and the overwhelming blandness of print. But all the extracts I shall use in the article are from private conversations, the participants in which didn't give permission for their voices to be broadcast, so I'm afraid that opportunity must be passed up. But given I have transcripts, what now? How to think about language-in-use? Obviously, I have to put my money where my mouth is and treat them not like 'chat' in that demeaning, inconsequential caricature I mentioned at the beginning (and against which this whole issue of M/C is dedicated). What are the broad alternatives available? There are, loosely speaking, two sorts of things one could do, familiar to all students of language. A couple of images will be helpful, if a bit crude. The first is the pearl necklace. Here, the interesting things about the talk are its content (pearls or ivory pieces?) and its setting (one string? two?). Less fancifully, the interest is in asking: what words, what speakers, what occasion? You can trace that from William Labov and his street-level sociolinguistics (1972), or further back if you want to. What you get is a thorough rejection of the words + settings = chat. You discover, by empirical comparison of what words in what settings, such thorough non-'chat' states of affairs as social location, social discourses and social power. If the pearl necklace doesn't appeal -- it seems a bit static perhaps -- then how about the origami bird? In its prior life as undistinguished flat sheet of paper it fails to command much attention. It's the transformation that fascinates. You have to fold it up to produce it, and you have to fold it up in a certain way if you don't want it to produce an aeroplane or a hat or just a disaster. The interesting things, of course, are the details (which side do you fold first? where do you tuck?) and how that produces the beautiful end result. Or, less fancifully, the sequential structure of talk in interaction, how one part supports and constrains the next and how a stretch of it achieves social goals (beautiful or otherwise). Now for the rest of the paper I'm going to try a bit of origami, or rather, some origami-in-reverse. I'm going to try and get across the spirit of Conversation Analysis and, without spraying around too many technical terms (indeed, any, if I can help it) I'm going to take a stretch of talk and see how it folds and tucks together to make it what it is. Doing that will, I hope, show up things about it that might pass unnoticed otherwise). Readers whose fancy is tickled for this sort of thing might well want to have a look at the references at the end of the article to take it all further. 3. Example 1. "about two years ago I came round an':: (..) spent some time chattin' didn't we" Let's make a start with this case. Here we have an encounter between a psychologist and a person he is about to interview. The interview proper hasn't actually started yet, and we can read the lines below as the interviewer 'working up to' the start of the interview proper. Part of it is to remind MA that the psychologist had seen him before. Notice how the psychologist uses the word 'chatting' to describe that earlier encounter. In line 11, MR describes his previous encounter as involving "chattin'. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. I know I shouldn't be calling in evidence which the reader can't get hold of, but Mark Rapley, the psychologist involved (and with whom I worked on the analysis; see Rapley and Antaki) pointed to that line and said to me that ('in fact') his previous dealings with MA, far from being 'chatting', had been a formal administration of a questionnaire, with all the paraphernalia of paper and pencil, and strict question and answer rights and obligations, all going down on the record. "Chattin'"? Calling it "chattin'" obliterates all that in favour of something altogether more homely and friendly. Look at what team of players it's sent out onto the field with: he "came round" (rather, than, say, 'paid an official visit') and "spent some time" (rather than 'completed my business'. They did it together -- hence the "didn't we?" The psychologist was "jus' (..) watchin' what was going on" -- not intervening, merely casually watching the world go by; note also the dropped g's. Now he's back to "see how you were gettin' on" (rather than 'administer a standardised assessment questionnaire'"). What an assembly. I'm trying to leave off any guess at what the interviewer's intentions or motives are -- we just can't know such things. But we can certainly have something to say about the effects his words give off. The origami structure that emerges from the folding is one of the 'chat' having been an interaction off the record, personal and friendly; all hearably at odds with the business the interviewer is officially prosecuting. 4. Example 2: "what Tim does (.) which is come and chat" Here is a very similar case, this time in a committee meeting: Again, I'll briefly gloss the scene (based on the previous talk, and visible in such terms as 'matters arising', the thanks expressed by one speaker to another, and the "we turn to" topic change in line 19/20). A committee meeting is in session, and AC is touting for new names to replace a member who is leaving. Committee membership is, by definition, something that is carefully regulated in standing orders and by convention, and is quite capable of being described in the most off-putting bureaucratic language (as it might be, say, were an errant member being disciplined for some infraction or other, and the thing became legalistic). Here it isn't. How does AC fold it up? AC in lines 1 to 9 is working up a request for other to nominate candidates to replace Tim Brown (all names are of course pseudonyms). We leave aside consideration of how he folds his talk so as to make the request as he does (rather than, say, deliver it as a petulant blast against his colleagues for not having provided him with any names so far). Our interest is in how the folds involve the description 'chat'. Like the psychologist interviewer in extract [1], AC bundles the 'chat' word into a description of the whole scene -- that the postgraduate representative will "come and chat," and that the interviewer "came round an':: (..)spent some time chattin'". To bundle up the description with the act of arrival is an elegantly efficient way of implying that this is the person's interest and motive in the interaction -- what they're there for. This way any candidate member can be reassured that the thing is much less onerous, official and formal than it would have sounded had AC used the bureaucratic description buried away in the Committee statutes. 'Chat', in this fold of the talk, works to eliminate the consequentiality and offputtingness of the event -- even though, of course, when the new member is inducted onto the Committee, he or she will be subject to all the dread rules and regulations that lurk in the other, hidden bureaucratic description. 5. Example 3: "we sat and chatted til about eleven" Here is another case, where, probably because the setting is not as institutional as in the first two, working out what 'chat' is doing will take us a bit more work. First the gloss. Gordon is on the phone to Danielle and talking about what he was doing the other night - we could dwell a little on his description of his guitar performance ('it went down really well') but we'll skip straight to where "chatted" appears. Unlike the previous two cases, it isn't bundled up with arrival at the scene ("come and chat" and "I came round an':: (..)spent some time chattin'"), but it does still get bundled with something -- sitting -- which parcels it up nicely as a combination-verb, something done while doing something else. Gordon and the others had no plans here; the food and wine had been consumed, then "we sat (0.3) an:' chatted (0.4) til: about eleven". Now what does such a description do for his then being struck by the thought that he'd go home and 'just phone her' (".hh then I thought (0.3) I'll come back (0.3) an' I'll jus' jus' phone you t'say that uh I'd like t'see you")? It's a magnificent play of accountability -- it holds off a collection of implications which might damage the tender sentiment presumably involved in wanting to tell someone you'd like to see them. Sitting and chatting is (notwithstanding the wine) not being drunk; it's with other people, so it's not sad-sack lonely rumination; still less is it insistent, stalking, recriminative or even violent obsession. Thinking of Danielle after (merely) being with others sitting and chatting till eleven disarms all of those possibilities; as the discursive psychologists have it (Edwards and Potter 1992) , this is a piece of 'stake management'. Gordon is inoculating himself against being seen to have the wrong sort of motivations. 'Chat' here is used as a part of a positive rhetorical strategy to have sentiments, but of the right sort. 6. Example 4: "I said to him, you know, come down 'n have a chat with me" One last example to see us out. This time we are in a marital counselling session, and the husband's ('Jeff') exams have been part of the topic of conversation, which I will gloss as being about the attention each partner pays to the other. 'Mary' now speaks. Once again the speaker is exploiting the pleasantly unspecific glow that 'chat' can have. Mary wanted Jeff to come down from 'upstairs' and 'have a chat' with her. Against this she puts words in his mouth: "I've gotta start my revising," and then her own commentary -- it was the same "every ni:ght, (.) for o:hh ye:ars.", regular as clockwork and at decidedly antisocial hours. She "never had anyone to ta:lk to" as a consequence. So the hearer is faced with Jeff's choice -- to come down from upstairs (remote, cold) and have a chat with Mary; or pursue his mechanical, laborious, self-centred and inconsiderate regime. There is, in her description, no contest; hence Jeff comes out looking something of a cold fish. Here is a lovely example of 'chat' once again being a good thing, loading the dice in the speaker's favour. 7. Concluding comments I started out saying that the word 'chat' was something of an insult. That certainly might apply when the word is used (or might be used, or is allegedly used) in a discussion about human action, and someone who wants to push the 'real', the 'material' and the 'consequential' might use 'chat' to dismiss an opponent who wants words to be responsible for some rather substantial things: reality, materiality and consequentiality. But there's a nice paradox. When you do take words seriously as doing things, and you look for what 'chat' does in people's actual usage, you find that it isn't an insult. Far from it. In the four cases we looked at the speaker was using 'chat' as a basically pleasant, socially positive and blameless description. Of course, they were doing so for rhetorical purposes, as words always are. But nevertheless there's a paradox there. In the abstract, nasty; in actuality, nice. The one thing that's constant is the fact that, in our analyses, both the hypothetical insulters and our actual glossers are using the word. In the mouths of both parties 'chat' is an interested description, as the discursive psychologists have it, following the tradition established by Garfinkel and, especially, Harvey Sacks (see, for example, the compendious Lectures on Conversation). It is always heard as a contrast (implicit or not) with something else, and does its work that way. Like it or not, 'chat' is no polite cipher. If you look at how it's folded and manipulated into the interaction, you see how it will smooth a potentially difficult interview, naturalise a possibly unwelcome encounter or set up a loaded distinction againt something mechanical and self-interested. All human life is here. If anyone needed persuading that 'chat' isn't chat, then the examples we've looked at here might have gone some way to doing so. References Atkinson, J. M., and J. Heritage, eds. Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Edwards, D., and J. Potter. Discursive Psychology. London: Sage, 1992. Labov, W. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1972. Rapley, M., and C. Antaki. "A Conversation Analysis of the 'Acquiescence' of People with Learning Disabilities." Journal of Community and Applied Psychology 6 (1996): 371-91. Reddy, M. J. "The Conduit Metaphor - A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language." Metaphor and Thought. Ed. A. Ortony. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1979. Sacks, H. Lectures on Conversation. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Notation The notation follows that of Gail Jefferson described in Atkinson and Heritage (ix - xvi), with the following deviations: (..) and (...) are untimed pauses of about .4 and .8 of a second approximately. The author would like to thank Liz Holt and Derek Edwards for permission to use transcript extracts 3 and 4, whose details are as follows -- Extract 3: Holt: 1988 Undated: Side I: Call 4 Extract 4: DE-JF/C1/S1 @ 12 June, 1993 Citation reference for this article MLA style: Charles Antaki. "Two Rhetorical Uses of the Description 'Chat'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/uses.php>. Chicago style: Charles Antaki, "Two Rhetorical Uses of the Description 'Chat'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/uses.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Charles Antaki. (2000) Two rhetorical uses of the description 'chat'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/uses.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

This article uses a case study of a Melbourne-based youth media project called Youthworx to explore the processes at stake in cultural engagement for marginalised young people. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2010, I identify some ways in which the city is implicated in promoting or preventing access to socially valued spaces of creativity and intended social mobility. The ethnographic material presented here has both empirical and theoretical value. It reveals the important relationships between the experience of place, creativity, and social life, demonstrating potentialities and limits of creativity-focused development interventions for marginalised youth. The articulation of these relationships and processes taking place within a particular city setting has theoretical implications. It opens up an opportunity to consider "suburbs" as enacted by specific forms of access, contingencies, and opportunities for a particular demographic, rather than treating "suburbs" as abstract, analytical constructs. Finally, my empirically grounded discussion draws attention to cultural and social consequences that inhabiting certain social worlds and acts of travelling "to and beyond" them have for young people. Youthworx is a community-based youth media initiative employing pathway-based semi-formal creative practices to re-engage young people who have a history of drug or alcohol abuse or juvenile justice, who have been long disconnected from mainstream education, or who are homeless. The focus on media production allows it to tap into, and in fact leverage, popular creativity, tacit knowledge, and familiar media-based activities that young people bring to bear on their media training and work in this context. Underpinned by social and creative industry policy, Youthworx brings together social service agency The Salvation Army (TSA), educational provider Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE (NMIT), youth community media organisation SYN Media, and researchers at Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University. Its day-to-day operation is run by contractual, part-time media facilitators, social workers (as part of TSA’s in-kind support), as well as media industry experts who provide casual media training. Youthworx is characterised by the diversity of its young demographic. One can differentiate between at least two groups of participants: those who join Youthworx because of the social opportunities, and those who put more value on its skill-development, or vocational creative industries orientation. This social organisation is, however, far from static. Over the two years of research (2008-2010) we observed evolving ideas about the identity of the program, its key social functions, and how they can be best served. This had proceeded with the construction of what the Youthworx staff term "a community of safe belonging" to a more "serious" media work environment, exemplified by the establishment of a social enterprise (Youthworx Productions) in 2010 that offers paid traineeships to the most capable and determined young creators. To accommodate the diversity of literacy levels, needs, and aspirations of its young participants, the project offers a tailored media education program with a mix of diversionary, educational, and commercial objectives. One-on-one media training sessions, accredited courses in Creative Industries (Media), and industry training within Youthworx Productions are provided to help young people develop a range of skills transferable into a variety of personal, social and professional contexts. Its creative studio, where learning occurs, is located in a former jeans factory warehouse in the heart of an industrial area of Melbourne’s northern inner-city suburb of Brunswick. Young people are referred to Youthworx by a range of social agencies, and they travel to Brunswick from across Melbourne. Some participants are known to spend over three hours commuting from outer suburbs such as Frankston or even regional towns such as King Lake. Unlike community-based creative programs reliant on established community structures within local suburbs (for example, ICE in Western Sydney), Youthworx moved into Tinning Street in Brunswick because its industry partner—The Salvation Army—had existing youth service infrastructure there. The program, however, was not tapping into an existing media “community of practice” (Lane and Wenger); it had to forge its own culture of media participation. In the early days of the program, there were necessary material resources and professional expertise (teachers/social workers/a creative venue), but it took a long while, and a high level of dedication, passion, and practical optimism on the part of the project managers and teaching staff, for young people to genuinely engage in media training and production. Now, Youthworx’s creative space is a “practised place” in de Certeau’s sense. As “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers” (De Certeau 117), so is the Youthworx space produced by practices of media learning and making by professional creative practitioners and young amateur creators (Raffo; for ideas on institutionalised co-creative practice see Spurgeon et al.). The Brunswick location is where our extensive ethnographic research has taken place, including regular participant observation and qualitative interviews with staff and young participants. The ethnographers frequently travelled with young people to other locations within Melbourne, accompanying them on their trips to youth community radio station SYN Media in the CBD, where they produce a weekly radio show, as well as to film shoots and public social events around the city. As an access learning program for marginalised youth from around Melbourne, Youthworx provides an interesting example to explore how the concerns of material and cultural capital, geographic and cultural distance intersect and shape processes of creative participation and social inclusion. I draw on our ethnographic material to illustrate how these metonymic relationships play out in the ways young participants “travel distance” (Dewson et. al.) on the project and across the city, both figuratively and literally. The idea of “distance travelled” is adapted here from evaluation literature (for other relevant references see Dowmunt et al.; Hayes and Edwards; Holdsworth et al.), and builds on the argument made previously (Podkalicka and Staley 5), to encompass both the geographical mobility and cultural transformation that young people are supported to undergo as an intended outcome of their involvement in Youthworx. This paper also takes inspiration from ethnographic approaches that study a productive and transformative relationship between material culture, spatial geography and processes of identity formation (see Miller). What happens to Youthworx young participants as they travel in a trivial, and at first sight perhaps inconsequential, way between the suburbs they live in, the Youthworx Brunswick location and the city is both experientially real and meaningful. “Suburban space” is then a cultural site that simultaneously refers to concrete, literal places as well as “a state of mind”—that is, identification and connections that are generative of a sense of identity and belonging (Ferber et al.). Youthworx is an intermediary point on these young people’s travels, rather than the final destination (Podkalicka and Staley 5). It provides access to various forms of new spatial, social, and creative experiences and modes of expression. Creating opportunities for highly disenfranchised young people to access and develop new social and creative experiences is an important aspect of Youthworx’s developmental agenda, and is played out at both philosophical and practical levels. On the one hand, a strength-based approach to youth work assumes respect for young people’s potential and knowledges—unlike public discourses that deny them agency due to an assumed lack of life experience (e.g., Poletti). In addition to the material provision of "food and shelter" typical of traditional social work, attention is paid the higher levels of the Maslow hierarchy of human needs, with creativity, self-esteem, and social connectedness at the top of the scale (see also Podkalicka and Campbell; Podkalicka and Thomas). Former Manager of The Salvation Army’s Brunswick Youth Services (BYS)—one of Youthworx’s partners—Craig Campbell argues: Things like truth and beauty are a higher order of dreams for these kids. And by truth I don’t mean the simple lies that can be told to get them out of trouble [but] is there a greater truth to life than a grinding existence in the impoverished neighbourhood, is there something like beauty and aesthetics that wakes us up in the morning and calls a larger life out of us? Most of those kids only faintly dream of such a thing, and this dream is rapidly being extinguished under the weight of drugs and alcohol, abusive family systems, savage interaction with law and justice system, and education as a toxic environment and experience. (Campbell) Campbell's articulate reflection captures the way the Youthworx project has been conceived. It is also a pertinent example of the many reflections on experience and practice at Youthworx that were recorded in my fieldwork, which illustrate the way these kinds of social projects can be understood, interpreted and evaluated. The following personal narrative and contextual description introduce some of the important issues at stake. (The names and other personal details of young people have been changed.) Nineteen-year-old Dave is temporarily staying in an inner-city refuge. Normally, however, like most Youthworx participants, he lives in Broadmeadows, a far northern suburb of Melbourne. To get to Brunswick, where he does his accredited media course three days a week, he either catches a train or waits for a mini-bus to drive him there. The early-morning pick-up for about ten young people is organised by the program’s partner—The Salvation Army. At the Youthworx creative studio, located in the heart of Brunswick, right next to railway tracks, young people produce an array of media products: live and pre-recorded radio programs, digital storytelling, mini-documentaries, and original music. Once at Youthworx, they share the local neighbourhood with other artists who have adapted warehouses into art workshops, studios and galleries. The suburb of Brunswick is well-known for its multicultural profile, a combination of industrial and residential estates, high rates of tertiary students due to its proximity to universities, and its place in the recent history of urban gentrification. However, Youthworx participants don’t seek out or engage with the existing, physically proximate creative base, even within the same street. On a couple of occasions, the opposite has been the case: Youthworx students have been involved in acts of vandalism of local residents’ property, including nearby parked cars. Their connections to the Brunswick neighbourhood remain poor, often reflecting their low social capital as a result of unstable residential situations, isolation, and fraught relationships with family. From Brunswick, they often travel to the city on their own, wander around, sit on the steps of Flinders Street train station—an inner-city hub and popular meeting place for locals and tourists alike. Youthworx plays an important role in these young people’s lives, as an important access point to not only creative digital media-based experiences and skill development, but also to greater and basic geographical mobility and experiences within the city. As one of the students commented: They are giving us chances that we wouldn’t usually get. Every day you’re getting to a place, where it’s pretty damn easy to get into; that’s what’s good about it. There are so many places where you have to do so much to get there and half the time, some people don’t even have the bloody bus ticket to get a [job] interview. But [at Youthworx/BYS], they will pick you up and drive you around if you need it. They are friends. It is reportedly a common practice for many young people at Youthworx and BYS to catch a train or a tram (rather than bus) without paying for a ticket. However, to be caught dodging a fare a few times has legal consequences and young people often face court as a result. The program responds by offering its young participants tickets for public transport, ready for pick-up after afternoon activities, or, if possible, "driving them around"—as some young people told me. The program’s social workers revealed that girls are particularly afraid to travel on their own, especially when catching trains to the outer northern suburbs, for fear of being harassed or attacked. These supported travels are as practical and necessary as they are meaningful for young people’s identity formation, and as such are recognised and built into the project’s design, co-ordination and delivery. At the most basic level, The Salvation Army’s social workers pick young people up from the Broadmeadows area in the mornings. Youthworx creative practitioners assist young people to make trips to SYN Media in the city. For most participants, this is either the first or sporadic experience of travelling to the city, something they enjoy very much but are also somewhat daunted by. Additionally, as part of the curriculum, Youthworx staff make a point of taking young people to inner-city movie theatres or public media events. The following vignette from the fieldwork highlights another important connection between physical journey and creative expression. There is an excitement in Dave’s voice when he talks about his favourite pastime: hanging out around the city. “Why would you walk around the streets?” a curious female friend interjects. Dave replies: “No, it’s not the streets, man. It’s just Federation Square, everywhere … There is just all these young wannabe criminals and sh*t. People don’t know what goes on; and I want to do a doco on the city, a little doco of the people there, because I know a lot of it.” Dave’s interest in exploring the city may be interpreted as a rather common, mundane routine shared by mildly adventurous adolescents of all walks. And yet, there is much more at stake in his account, and for Youthworx young participants more generally. As mentioned before, for many of these young people, it is the first opportunity to travel to the city. This experience then is crucial in a sense of self-exploration and self-discovery. As they overcome their fear of venturing out into the city on their own, they also learn that they have knowledge which others might lack. This moment of realisation is significant and empowering, and they want to communicate this knowledge to others. Youthworx assists them in learning how to translate this knowledge in a creative and constructive way, through an expression that weaves between the free individual and the social voice constructed to enable a dialogue or understanding (Podkalicka; Podkalicka and Campbell; Podkalicka and Thomas; also Soep and Chavez). For an effective communication to occur, a crafted social voice requires skills and a critical awareness of oneself and an audience, which is very different from the modes of expression that these young people might have accessed previously. Youthworx's young participants draw heavily on their life experiences, geographical locations, the suburbs they come from, and places they visit in the city: their cultural productions often reference their homes, music clubs and hang-out venues, inner city streets, Federation Square, and Youthworx’s immediate physical surroundings, with graffiti-covered narrow alleys and railway tracks. The frequent depiction of Youthworx in young people’s creative outputs is often a token of appreciation of the creative, educational and social opportunities it has offered them. Social and professional connections they make there are found to be very valuable. The existing creative industries literature emphasises the importance of social networks to existing communities of interest and practice for human capacity building. Value is argued to lie not only in specific content produced, but in participatory processes that establish a link between personal growth, individual skills and social and professional networks (Hearn and Bridgestock). In a similar vein, Carlo Raffo uses Granovetter’s concept of “weak ties” to suggest that access to “social relations that go beyond the immediate locality and hence their immediate experiences” can provide marginalised young people with “pathways for authentic and informal learning that go beyond the structuring influences of class, gender and ethnicity and into new and emerging economic experiences” (Raffo 11). But higher levels of confidence or social skills are required to make the most of vocational or professional opportunities beyond the supportive context of Youthworx. Connections between Youthworx participants and other creative practitioners within the creative locality of Brunswick have been absent thus far. Transitions into mainstream education and employment have also proven challenging for this group of heavily marginalised youth. As we found during our ongoing fieldwork, even the most talented students find it hard to get into mainstream education courses, or to get or keep jobs. The project serves as a social basis for young people to develop self-agency and determination so they can start engaging with new opportunities and social networks outside the program (Raffo 15). Indeed, the creative practitioners at Youthworx are key facilitators of connections between young people and the external world. They act as positive role models socially, and illustrate what is possible professionally in terms of media excellence and employment (see also Raffo). There are indications that this very supportive, gradual process of social learning is starting to bear fruit for individual students and the Youthworx community as a whole as they grow more confident with themselves, in interactions with others, and the media work they do. Media projects such as Youthworx are examples of what Leadbeater and Wong call “disruptive innovation,” as they provide new ways of learning for those alienated by formal education. The use of digital hands-on media production makes educational processes relevant and engaging for young people. However, as I demonstrate in this paper, there are tangible, material barriers to releasing creativity, or enhancing self-discovery and sociality. There are, as Leadbeater and Wong observe, persistent links between cultural environment, socio-economic status, corresponding attitudes to learning and educational success in the developed world. In the UK, for example, only small percent of those from the lowest socio-economic background go to university (Leadbeater and Wong 10). Youthworx provides an opportunity and motivation for young people to break a cycle of individual self-destructive behaviour (e.g. getting locked up every 6 months), intergenerational reliance on welfare, or entrenched negative attitudes to learning. At the basic level, it encourages and often insists that young people get up in the morning, with social workers often reporting to have to “knock at people’s houses and get them ready.” The involvement in Youthworx is often an important reason to start delineating between day and night, week and weekend. A couple of students commented: I slept a lot. Yeah, I was always sleeping during the day and out at night; I could have still been doing nothing with my life [were it not for Youthworx]. Now people ask if I want to go out during the week, and I just can’t be bothered. I just want to sleep and then go to [Youthworx] and then weekends are when you go out. It also offers a concrete means to begin exploring the city beyond the constraints of their local suburbs. This literal, geographical mobility is interlocked with potential for a changed perception of opportunities, individual transformation and, consequently, social mobility. Dave, as we have seen, is attracted to the idea of exploring the city but also has creative aspirations, and contemplates professional prospects in the creative industries. It is important to note that the participants are resilient in their negotiation between the suburban, Youthworx and inner city worlds they can inhabit. Accessing learning, despite previous negative schooling experiences, is for many of them very important, and reaffirming of life they aspire to. An opportunity to pursue dreams, creative forms of expression, social networks and education is a vital part of human existence. These aspects of social inclusion are recognised in the current articulation of social policy reconceptualised beyond material, economic equality. Creative industry policy, on the other hand, is concerned with fostering creative outputs and skills to generate engagement and employment opportunities in the knowledge-based economies for wide sections of the population. The value is located in human capacity building, involving basic social as well as vocational skills, and links to social networks. The Youthworx project merges these two policy frameworks of the social and creative to test in practice new collaborative approaches to youth development. The spatial and cultural practices of young people described here serve a basis for proposing a theoretical framework that can help understand the term "suburb" in an intrinsically relational, grounded way. The relationships at stake in cultural and social participation for marginalised young people lead me to suggest that the concept of ‘suburb’ takes on two tightly interwoven meanings. The first refers symbolically to a particular locale for popular creativity (Burgess) or even marginal creativity by a group of young people living at the periphery of the social system. The second meaning refers to the interlocked forms of material and cultural capital (and distance), as theorised in Bourdieu’s work (e.g., Bourdieu). It includes physical, spatial conditions and relations, as well as cultural resources and possibilities made available to young participants by the project (e.g., the instituted, supported travel across the city, or the employment of creative practitioners), and interlinked with everyday dispositions, practices, and status of young people (e.g., taste). This empirically-grounded discussion allows to theorise ‘suburbs’ as perceived and socially enacted by concrete, relational forms of access, contingencies, and opportunities for a particular demographic, rather than analytically pre-conceived, designated spaces within an urban system. The ethnographic material reveals that cultural participation for marginalised youth requires an integrated approach, with a parallel focus on material and creative opportunities made available within creative sites such as Youthworx or even the Brunswick creative area. The important material constraints exemplified in this paper concern socio-economic background, cultural disadvantage and geographical isolation and point to the limits of the creative industries-based interventions to address social inclusion if carried out in isolation. They tap into the very basis of risks for this specific demographic of marginalised youth or "youth at risk." The paper suggests that the productive emphasis on the role of media and communication for (youth) development needs to be contextualised and considered along with the actual realities of everyday existence that often limit young people’s educational and vocational prospects (see Bentley et al.; Leadbeater and Wong). On the other hand, an exclusive focus on material support risks cancelling out the possibilities for positive life transitions, such as those triggered by constructive, non-reductionist engagement with “beauty, aesthetics” (Campbell) and creativity. By exploring how participation in Youthworx engenders both the physical mobility between suburbs and the city, and identity transformation, we are able to gain insights into the nature of social exclusion, its meanings for the youth involved and the project managers and staff. Thinking about Youthworx not just as a hub of creative production but as a cultural site—“a space within a practiced place of identity” (De Certeau 117) in the suburb of Brunswick—opens up a discussion that combines the policy language of opportunity and necessity with concrete creative and material possibilities. Social inclusion objectives aimed at positive youth transitions need to be considered in the light of the connection—or disconnection—between the Youthworx Brunswick site itself, young participants’ suburbs, and, by extension, the trajectory between the inner city and other spaces that young people travel through and inhabit. Acknowledgment I would like to thank all the young participants, staff and industry partners involved in the Youthworx project. I also acknowledge the comments of anonymous peer reviewer which helped to strengthen the argument by foregrounding the value of the empirical material. The paper draws on the larger project funded by the Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation. Youthworx research team includes: Prof Denise Meredyth (CI); Prof Julian Thomas (CI); Ass/Prof David MacKenzie (CI); Ass/Prof Ellie Rennie; Chris Wilson (PhD candidate), and Jon Staley (Youthworx Manager and PhD candidate). References Bentley, Tom, and Kate Oakley. “The Real Deal: What Young People Think about Government, Politics and Social Exclusion.” Demos. 12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.demos.co.uk/files/theRealdeal.pdf›. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1987. Burgess, Jean. “Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling.” Continuum 20.2 (2006): 201–14. Campbell, Craig. Personal Interview. Melbourne, 2009. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Dewson, Sara, Judith Eccles, Nii Djan Tackey and Annabel Jackson. “Guide to Measuring Soft Outcomes and Distance Travelled.” The Institute for Employment Studies. 12 Jan. 2011‹http:// www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/distance.pdf›. Dowmunt, Tom, Mark Dunford, and N. van Hemert. Inclusion through Media. London: Open Mute, 2007. Ferber, Sarah, Chris Healy, and Chris McAuliffe. Beasts of Suburbia: Reinterpreting Cultures in Australian Suburbs. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1994. Hayes, Alan, Matthew Gray, and Ben Edwards. “Social Inclusion: Origins, Concepts and Key Themes.” Australian Institute of Family Studies, prepared for the Social Inclusion Unit, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. 2008.12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/Documents/AIFS_SI_concepts_report_20April09.pdf›. Hearn, Gregory, and Ruth Bridgstock. “Education for the Creative Economy: Innovation, Transdisciplinarity, and Networks. Education in the Creative Economy: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of Innovation. Ed. Daniel Araya and Michael Peters. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 93–116. Holdsworth, Roger, Murray Lake, Kathleen Stacey, and John Safford. “Doing Positive Things: You Have to Go Out and Do It: Outcomes for Participants in Youth Development Programs.” Australian Youth Research Centre. 12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/5385FE14-A74C-4B24-98EA-D31EEA8447B2/21803/doing_positive_things1.pdf›. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Leadbeater, Charles, and Annika Wong. “Learning from the Extremes.” CISCO. 12 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.socialinclusion.gov.au/Documents/AIFS_SI_concepts_report_20April09.pdf›. Miller, Daniel. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Podkalicka, Aneta. “Young Listening: An Ethnography of Youthworx Media's Radio Project." Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23.4 (2009): 561–72. ———, and Jon Staley. “Youthworx Media: Creative Media Engagement for ‘at Risk’ Young People.” 3CM 5 (2009). ———, and Julian Thomas. “The Skilled Social Voice: An Experiment in Creative Economy and Communication Rights.’’ International Communication Gazette 72.4–5 (2010): 395–406. ———, and Craig Campbell. “Understanding Digital Storytelling: Beyond the Politics of Voice in Youth Participation Programs.” seminar.net: Media Technology and Lifelong Learning 6.2 (2010). ‹http://www.seminar.net/index.php/home/75-current-issue/150-understanding-digital-storytelling-individual-voice-and-community-building-in-youth-media-programs›. Poletti, Anna. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008. Raffo, Carlo. "Mentoring Disenfranchised Young People: An Action Research Project on the Development of 'Weak Ties' and Social Capital Enhancement." Education and Industry in Partnership 6.3 (2000): 22–42. Soep, Elizabeth, and Vivian Chavez. Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Spurgeon, Christina, Jean Burgess, Helen Klaebe, Kelly McWilliam, Jo Tacchi, and Mimi Tsai. “Co-Creative Media: Theorising Digital Storytelling as a Platform for Researching and Developing Participatory Culture.” 2009 ANZC Conference Proceedings. 2009. 16 Nov. 2010 ‹http://eprints.qut.edu.au/25811/2/25811.pdf›.

Abstract:

Sensei claps his hands and calls “hai douzo!”, and it is as if I woke up from a daydream, though I wasn’t daydreaming. I’m sitting seiza (traditional Japanese kneeling posture) in an aikidō seminar taking place in Jerusalem. In the large mirror, which is installed on the opposite wall, I can see my friends sitting near me in a row that extends to my left and to my right. At the center of the hall, sensei is demonstrating a technique. We observe his physical movements closely, while at the same time we also follow his verbal explanations. Yelena, my colleague and student, is assisting him: as she attacks he performs the correct defensive set of movements. Sometimes his movements with Yelena strike me as so aesthetic, so beautiful, that I become emotional and my eyes become wet. “Hai douzo!” is a cue: we quickly rise from seiza and pair-up. Now it is for us to perform the technique that sensei has taught, attempting to do so as effortlessly and as perfectly as he has. In this paper I inquire into knowledge as a social, embodied and interactional accomplishment. Following phenomenological and interactional theories, I address knowledge not as an abstract notion that exists over and above felt experience and feeling persons, but as felt/sensed and situational action. Interactional studies and theories in particular (Dewey; Garfinkel; Goffman) have stressed not only how inspiring it can be to think with the body, rather than about it or perhaps without it altogether, but also how society and the social are interactional through and through. Further along these lines, social life is seen as essentially (re)assembled (Latour Reassembling), and is continuously (re)created in and through interconnected interactions.Many social theories of the twentieth century are of static nature. If Popperian science sought to ‘capture’, ‘isolate’ and ‘fix’ reality, even momentarily, in order to examine it in a laboratory (be it concrete or metaphorical), emerging mobile and non-representational sensibilities suggest that it is social science that should adapt rather than social life. The notion of mobilities for instance, rests on an approach “which is not limited to representational thinking and feeling, but a different sort of thinking-feeling altogether. It is a recognition that mobilities such as dance involve various combinations of thought, action, feeling and articulation” (Adey 149). Thrift’s non-representational theory too asks social science to move beyond the representational order and beyond acts of ‘interpretation’ of ‘reality-as-text’, and inquire instead into “skills and knowledges [people] get from being embodied beings” (Thrift 127). Latour appealingly suggests that, “to have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated’, moved, put into motion by other entities” (How to Talk 205). The question then is how the body becomes what it knows, and how and where such skill-ful learning takes place, where, together, bodies learn to sense each other and interact in innovative ways, performing new somatic knowledges, sensitivities, and interactions. I use the notion of a kinesthetic community of practice to address these questions, and to inquire into the (inter-)somatic environments where knowledge is both embodied and performed. I suggest that somatic knowledge is gained within a community, whereby “[a]cquiring a body is thus a progressive enterprise that produces at once a sensory medium and a sensitive world” (Latour, How to Talk 207), can be observed in an instructive way. The point here is not only the social nature of knowledge, but also its somatic and performed nature; “The action of knowledge”, as Latour (Latour, How to Talk 214) puts it. With the performative turn, to which I wish to contribute, I contend that we find ourselves less in times of hermeneutics of interpretation, and more in times of intervention and performance.For the purpose of studying a community of kinesthetic practice, I reflect on an occasion of aikidō training, which took place during a seminar given by Doug Wedell sensei during June, 2010, in Jerusalem. More generally, Aikidō is a modern Japanese martial art, which was developed by Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969) during the 1920s and 1930s. The term’s meaning resides in the kanji: Ai (合) meaning blending or harmonizing; Ki (気) meaning spirit, vitality or energy; and Dō (道) meaning way and also ‘discipline of’ or ‘art of’. Hence literally the meaning of aikidō, which is told to newcomers and reiterated to experienced aikidōka (practitioners), is the way of blending and harmonizing with the energy. Indeed, aikidōka view accomplishing the state of aiki, or of “being (one) with” not as a means but as an ends; a case of perfect time and movement, the performance of which means that aggression and risk, pain and injury, have been avoided. Research into bodies and mobilities in aikidō is part of the larger inquiry into systems of embodiment in and of Eastern bodily arts and of course other systems of movements and mobilities. My personal association here concerns practicing aikidō for over two decades, mostly in the dōjō (training hall and community) affiliated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Interspersed Embodied AutoethnographyThe ethnographic text below is what I call an interspersed autoethnography, referring to two points that characterize it as a research method. First, it is an autoethnographic text as it is composed from my own embodied and emotional perspective, as an experienced aikidō practitioner or aikidōka. It is not a typical ‘participant observation’ description because my aikidō practice is deeply personal and has commenced a few years before my practice in academic disciplines began. Articulating my aikidō practice is necessarily for me a personal matter, touching on meaningful social and spiritual nexuses. In doing so my pleasure is twofold, as I am able to bring together my aikidō and my academic life-spheres. Second, the term interspersed describes a reluctance on my behalf to write in a straightforward, seemingly unproblematic, ethnographic genre. While I am completely in accord with works which decenter positivistic scientific writing and offer reflexivity and personal voice (eg. Young), I nonetheless acknowledge the strong claim for authenticity made at times by neat ethnographic extracts ‘from the field’. My preference is for a hybrid text that conveys experience and bodily praxis as they unfold, allowing the interspersing of real-life activity with academic reflection. Such autoethnographic writing is a hybrid genre, simultaneously de- or re-contextualizing academic knowledge and illuminating it via my practice/knowledge of aikidō. Writing in the personal voice of the researcher’s body, and sense of embodiedness, has of course its own history within and outside academic communities. In the type or research produced by colleagues who work on bodily practices and somatic communities, addressing one’s own body is inevitable. The more recent voices in this tradition remind us that “[s]ocial scientists who have gotten deeply involved in kinesthetic cultures have discovered they can analyze cultural information recorded in their own bodies” (Samudra 667). The interspersed embodied autoethnography offered in this paper aims to do just that, to share an embodied experience of actual aikidō training. Your Hands. Extended.Now Doug Wedell sensei slightly bows in my direction, and I, sitting seiza, immediately bow back and run to assist him. He faces me and extends both of his hands forward slightly. This marks for me an invitation. It is an opening, a cue marking that something is (already) going on between us. When Doug sensei raises his hands slightly and extends both of them forward a tension is established, and now it is my turn: I rush in the direction of his hands, seeking to grab both of them with mine. The grab is a type of an attack called ryotedori (lit. in Japanese ‘two-hand-grab’). My hands are extended as my body moves forward, focusing on grabbing Doug’s extended arms powerfully. I would have liked at this point to write that I am experiencing a ‘Zen state of mind’ and that my mind is clear of thoughts, and there are no words humming in me; or that I am experiencing a sensation of ‘flow’. But, alas, the fact is that I am thinking, and quite intensely. More accurately, I am speculating and wondering what will happen to me/my body as my arms approach sensei’s extended arms. Surely, I will not be able to grab his hands, and before physical contact between our limbs will materialize, he will move away swiftly and evade my approach. In terms of the discourse of the Martial Arts, I’m thinking about the technique that Doug sensei might perform with/on me, which will shape our expected embodied interaction. Not so much thinking as sensing: I imagine embodied possible trajectories that might span out from when and where our hands will nearly touch. As I rush in sensei’s direction I’m also aware of my breathing and sweating (both seem too heavy to me, and I repeatedly remind myself that I need to work out more often), of the coolness of the tatami (mattresses) under my feet, and somewhere in the back of my mind I’m concerned that I haven’t arranged my white training shirt (the thick training wear called gi) tidily enough. I’m also registering an anxiety. It has to do with the possible consequences of the technique that he will execute: will it be painful? Will I be hurt? Do I know that technique? Will I perform competently when he executes it? (I wouldn’t want to disappoint him, and in addition there are people watching us). Once, in a seminar in another style of aikidō, the Sensei smacked me on the tatami so powerfully and painfully that my eyes immediately filled with tears, but I bowed and said “domo arigato Sensei!” (“thank you very much, teacher”). Storming at Doug sensei, then, is not without words and many sensations, it is the easy part of this tango; the unexpected moments are very brief and amount to the actual duration of the performance of the technique. In this demonstration, Doug sensei is nagè or the one who performs the technique. In the capacity of teaching a technique, defined as a series of interactional moves that affects the attacker and neutralizes the threat embodied in the attack, nagè is the one exhibiting the technique for students and others to see and learn (which in the martial arts essentially means to try to repeat and imitate). Everyone’s eyes are set on nagè, sometimes with a technical gaze that seeks to unravel the proficient skills he is demonstrating (“how did he move his legs, did you get that? That was subtle!”), and sometimes with an impressionistic gaze that is inspired with his mastery of Ki, and how he connects and blends so effortlessly and effectively with the uke, who is presently myself (“wow, you can really see the Ki”). In aikidō, uke’s role – which I am now embodying – is mainly helping nagè perform the technique correctly, and in the case it is also clearly a demonstration. This is done by approaching Doug sensei (‘attacking’) energetically and effectively. I am generating motility and extending not only my arms and my body in the direction of sensei’s arms and body, but I am also ‘extending Ki’, an intention, an orientation, an invisible energy. Paraphrasing the ethnomethodological dictum “seen but unnoticed” (Garfinkel), for aikidōka Ki is the reverse: noticed but unseen. In fact, it is precisely the noticing of and awareness to Ki that makes a person into an aikidōka; into a member of a community of kinesthetic practice. The notion of community of practice has much more to do with learning in real-life situations and interactions, rather than in classroom contexts where knowledge is commonly presented in an abstracted and decontextualized form. Yet in aikidō training it could be said that “a community of practice is different from the traditional community, primarily because it is defined simultaneously by its membership and by the practice in which that membership engages” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 464). I add the notion of a kinesthetic community of practice to these practices. Following Samudra, I acknowledge that kinesthetic sensitivities and sensibilities are essential in and for martial arts in general, and more prominently for aikidō. The practice that defines the community, then, has to do with developing and enhancing kinesthetic sensitivities.Rushing at sensei Doug, I’m imagining what might/will happen to my body and where will it go. Ryotedori tenchi-nagè (lit. two-hand-grab heaven-and-earth-through) engulfs one possibility, whereby sensei will side-step a little and then raise one hand and lower the other – a movement which will have a particular effect on my body: my feet will be in the air, my body will be more or less horizontal to the tatami, and I will then fall and land on my back. Or he might do a ryotedori enkei-nagè (two-hand-grab circular-throw), whereby he will side-step and then quickly lower and raise his body in a graceful yet abrupt dipping movement, while performing a vertical circular motion with his hands. In this case my body will rhythmically follow his body’s movements, bend and straighten a little and finally bend again beyond my ability to maintain stability. At this point I will lose my balance and fall, either forward or backward, depending on the fleeting subtleties of a particular occasion. Or sensei might choose to do ryotedori irimi-nagè (two-hand-grab forward-thrust), or ryotedori shiho-nagè (two-hand-grab four-directions-throw), which is one of his favorites and one of my most dreaded techniques… My mind is conjuring these associations of names and movements, of techniques and somatic trajectories. Which are now coupled. There is nothing more that I can do about all of this at this stage, besides what I am already doing, which is storming at Doug sensei and committing an “attack”, not allowing my hesitations, anxieties and visualizations to interfere or distract my motility. I know that regardless of the specific technique that he will eventually perform, I will not be able to actually capture his hands, and it is precisely this time-space interval which is the creative opportunity for nagè to execute the technique at the ideal timing. He will begin the technique just before I capture his hands. Not too far or too early; not close or too late. In precisely the right time. What is left for me now to do as uke-in-interaction is to allow my body to be centered and relaxed; try to keep my body attentive and reactive and least rigid as possible, which are the somatic-kinesthetic qualities that ukemi – doing uke – demands (to my understanding). Indeed, as I close in on sensei’s hands, about a foot away or so, at the exact point where I cannot anymore retract my movement, he begins moving. He slides unnoticingly sideways and his hands do a similar motion to that of tenchi-nagè, but not precisely. It’s a different technique: I think it’s ryotedori zepo-nagè (two-hand-grab forward-throw). His sidestepping draws my body low and near his body quickly and powerfully. I’m inside a whirlpool and now really do not have time to ponder or simulate trajectories. There is a split of a second there that the air is drawn out of my lungs. My hands follow sensei’s hands attentively, and my body stays ‘with’ my hands, connected to his movements. Everyone is observing sensei; the nagè. The uke is perceived as a helper; a sideshow. Yet my skills are developed and subtle, and as nagè performs various movements swiftly and minutely, my limbs and body must reflect these movements in a highly attuned manner. My movements are as swift and minute as his. Otherwise, the connection will be asynchronous and uke will fail to follow or be engaged by nagè’s technique. Uke’s embodied abilities (acquired skills) at following through nagè’s leads allows uke’s body to move in a fashion that reflects nagè’s movements in a magnified way. Observers’ correct gaze then should not be set only or even primarily on Nagè, the ‘performer’; it should include the uke, which supplies a type of an embodied mirror to or echo of nagè’s movements. I identify with Samudra’s (671) observation, that “[k]nowing the structure of movement is not the same as experiencing the sensation of movement, however. After more than two decades of training, I know when I am executing a besi correctly: not by the shape of the form but by subtle sensations.” Uke is attending to nagè. It is less a matter of attacking the nagè, if attack is taken simplistically to mean striking/kicking/grabbing the other. More dialectical and interactional, in the nagè-uke dyad the uke supplies the gesture of the audience. Uke audiences nagè – the latter must appreciate (must have acquired the sensitivities and the ‘taste’ to appreciate) nagè, hence to audience nagè and complement her. If we take the notion of audience not as a passive receptor, but as an active, committed and engaged actor, then uke is an active and involved audience. This is how art is consumed, and indeed at stake here is a martial art. The next thing I feel are a variety of sensations, taking place more or less at the same time in different bodily parts, both at the skin level and inside the body. Then my body is suspended in mid-air: two feet up in the air and for a distance of some nine feet. Thanks to Doug sensei I’m micro-flying. This is the last part performed by uke: after the attack and after nagè has performed the technique, uke must make sure that she or he are unharmed while taking the appropriate fall. Relieved, I land softly on the tatami. Conclusions I could have concluded by saying that as it takes two to tango, it also takes two to perform an aikidō technique. But this would have been an over-simplification. It takes two roles to perform a technique, that of the nagè and that of the uke, and in addition it also takes a community of kinesthetic practice in order to learn to perform ‘doing being a nagè’ and also ‘doing being a uke’ (following Garfinkel). It might take two to tango but it takes more (inter)connections and more (inter)actions to learn to tango. Moreover, it is never completely clear, nor can it ever be, whether the occasion at hand is that of learning (training, rehearsing) or that or performing (accomplishing). When I rush at Doug sensei during a seminar class, it seems like a performance: students and others are watching and taking pictures, and the seminar is video-recorded and then uploaded to YouTube and to our websites. But at the same time I am also thinking of the practice I gained with ‘doing being a uke for/with Doug Sensei’. So any performance is also a training session, a rehearsal for an occasion that is known or unknown but nonetheless anticipated. And of course vice versa: every training session or rehearsal is also a performance; an aesthetic and meaningful interaction that stands for itself. In these occasions, kinesthetic and somatic knowledge is simultaneously created, shared, and performed, as are also the sensitivities and sensibilities that are acquired and required in order to reciprocate it; to ‘understand it’ via mobilities. With the interspersed autoethnography presented I have sought to show how, in Latour’s terms, the body learns to be affected with and to the uke in the uke-nagè dyad in aikidō. The skills and sensitivities in and of aikidō are learned through the roles performed during actual practice. What is called ‘the work of the uke’, or ukemi, is an ongoing process of acquiring and refining skills in and for interaction. ReferencesAdey, Peter. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Dewey, John. Reconstruction in Philosophy. New York: Henry Holt, 1920.Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. "Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-Based Practice." Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 461-90. Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Goffman, Erving. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1967.Latour, Bruno. "How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies." Body & Society 10.2-3 (2004): 205-29. ---. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Samudra, Jaida Kim. "Memory in Our Body: Thick Participation and the Translation of Kinesthetic Experience." American Ethnologist 35.4 (2008): 665-81. Thrift, Nigel. J. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. New York: Routledge, 2007. Young, Katharine Galloway. "Perspectives on Embodiment: The Uses of Narrativity in Ethnographic Writing." Journal of Narrative and Life History 1.1 (1991): 213-43.

Abstract:

IntroductionTwo writers, stuck in our university offices, decide to take our thoughts “for a walk” across the page. Writing from Middlesbrough, United Kingdom, and Auckland, New Zealand, we are separated by 18,000 kilometres and 11 hours, and yet here, on the page, our paths meet. How does walking, imaginary or real, affect our thinking? How do the environments through which we move, and the things we see along the way, influence our writing? What role do rhythm and pace play in the process? We invite you to join us on two short walks that reflect on our shared challenges as writers from two different strands of writing studies. Perhaps our paths will intersect, or even overlap, with yours somewhere? Ultimately, we aim to find out what happens when we leave our academic baggage behind, side-stepping dense theoretical arguments and comprehensive literature reviews for a creative-critical exploration. Evija: Let’s admit it, Sophie—I’m stuck. I’ve spent half a day in front of this computer but have hardly typed a line. It’s not just writing. It’s my thinking. I feel like my mind is weighed down by the clutter of thoughts that lead nowhere.Look at my surroundings. My office is crammed with stuff. So many thoughts buried under piles of paper, insisting on their place in the work in which they so obviously do not belong. I also can’t help but feel the magnetic pull of others’ ideas from all the books around me. Each thought, each reference, fights for its place in my work. What an unbearable intertextual mess...Sophie: I think that everyone who has ever tried to write knows exactly what these moments feel like. We can feel so lost, so stuck and blocked. Have you ever noticed that the words that we use about these feelings are intensely visceral? Perhaps that’s why, when the words won’t come, so many of us find it helpful to get up and move our bodies. Evija, shall we leave our desks behind for a while and go for a walk? Would you like to join me?E: Most certainly! Apparently, Friedrich Nietzsche loved to take his mind for a walk (Gros). Ideas, born among books, says Frédéric Gros, “exude the stuffy odour of libraries” (18). Gros describes such books as “grey”: “overloaded with quotations, references, footnotes, explicatory prudence, indefinite refutations” (19). They fail to say anything new and are “crammed”, “stuffed”, and “weighed down”; they are “born of a compilation of the other books” (Gros 19) so also bear their weight. Essentially, we are told, we should think of the books we are writing as “expression[s] of [our] physiology” (Gros 19). If we are shrivelled, stuck, stooped, tense, and tired, so also are our thoughts. Therefore, in order to make your thoughts breathe, walk, and even “dance”, says Nietzsche, you should go outdoors, go up in the mountains.S: As I read what you’ve written here, Evija, I feel as if I’m walking amongst your thoughts, both here on the screen and in my imagination. Sometimes, I’m in perfect step with you. At other times, I want to interrupt, tug on your sleeve and point, and say “Look! Have you seen this, just up ahead?”E: That’s the value of companionship on the road. A shared conversation on the move can lead to a transformation of thought, a conversion, as in the Biblical stories of the roads to Emmaus and Damascus. In fact, we tested the power of walking and talking in rural settings in a series of experimental events organised for academics in Auckland, New Zealand, throughout 2017 (see our blog post on Writing, Writing Everywhere website). It appeared to work very well for writers who had either been “stuck” or in the early stages of drafting. Those who were looking to structure existing thoughts were better off staying put. But walking and talking is an entire other topic (see Anderson) that we should discuss in more depth some other time.Anyway, you’ve brought us to what looks like a forest. Is this where you want us to go?A Walk “into the Woods,” or Getting in the Thick of Free-Writing S: Yes, just follow me. I often walk in the woods close to where I live. Of course, going “into the woods” is itself a metaphor, rich with fairy-tale connotations about creativity. The woods are full of darkness and danger, grandmother’s cottage, wild beasts, witches, poisonous fruits. The woods are where traps are laid, where children wander and get lost, where enchantments befall us. But humans have always been seduced by the woods and what lies in wait there (Maitland). In Jungian terms, losing oneself in darkness is a rite of initiation. By stepping into the woods, we surrender to not knowing, to walking off the path and into the depths of our imagination. I dare you to do that, right now! E: Letting go is not always easy. I keep wanting to respond to your claim by adding scholarly references to important work on the topic. I want to mention the father of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, for whom this form of writing was but “an attempt” (from Old French, “essai”) to place himself in this world, a philosophical and literary adventure that stood very far from the rigidly structured academic essay of the present day (Sturm). We’ve forgotten that writing is a risky undertaking, an exploration of uncharted terrains (Sturm). S: Yes, and in academic thinking, we’re always afraid to ramble. But perhaps rambling is exactly what we need to do. Perhaps we need to start walking without knowing where we’re going ... and see where it takes us. E: Indeed. Instead of going on writing retreats, academics should be sent “into the woods”, where their main task would be to get lost before they even start to think.S: Into the Woods, a reality TV show for academics? But seriously, maybe there is something about walking into the woods—or a landscape different from our habitual one—that symbolises a shift in feeling-state. When I walk into the woods, I purposely place myself in a different world. My senses are heightened. I become acutely aware of each tiny sound—the ticking of the leaves, the wind, the birdsong, the crunch of my feet, the pounding of the blood in my ears. I become less aware of all the difficult parts of myself, my troubles, my stuckness, what weighs on me so heavily. It seems to me that there is a parallel here with a state of consciousness or awareness famously described by the psychologist of optimal experience, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, as “flow”. In flow, “the loss of a sense of self separate from the world around it is sometimes accompanied by a feeling of union with the environment” (Csikszentmihalyi 63), together with pleasure in movement and in the sensory experience of seeing the world. So flow might be one way of thinking about my lived experience of walking in the woods. But this shift has also been described by the psychotherapist Marion Milner as a shift from “narrow thinking” into a “wider” way of looking, listening, feeling, and moving—a feeling state that Milner called the “fat feeling”. She identified this “fat feeling” as characteristic of moments when she experienced intense delight (Milner 15) and she began to experiment with ways in which she could practice it more purposefully.In this sense, walking is a kind of “trick” that I can play upon myself. The shift from office to woods, from sitting at my desk to moving through the world, triggers a shift from preoccupation with the “head stuff” of academic work and into a more felt, bodily way of experiencing. Walking helps me to “get out of my head.”E: So wandering through this thicket becomes a kind of free writing?S: Yes, free writing is like “taking a line for a walk” on the page, words that the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee famously attributed to drawing (Klee 105; see also Raymond). It’s what we’re doing here, wouldn’t you say?Two Lines of Walking: A drawing by Evija. E: Yes—and we don’t know where this walk will lead us. I’m thinking of the many times I have propelled myself into meaningful writing by simply letting the hand do its work and produce written characters on the screen or page. Initially, it looks like nonsense. Then, meaning and order start to emerge.S: Yes, my suggestion is that walking—like writing—frees us up, connects us with the bodily, felt, and pleasurable aspects of the writing process. We need this opportunity to meander, go off at tangents...E: So what qualities do free writing and walking have in common? What is helpful about each of these activities?S: A first guess might be that free writing and walking make use of rhythm. Linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva calls the sound, rhythm, and texture of language the “semiotic”. For Kristeva, the “semiotic” (the realm of bodily drives and affects, rhythms, pre-verbal babble) and the “symbolic” (the realm of prescribed language, linguistic structure, grammar, and judgment) do not exist in rigid opposition to one another. Instead, they form a continuum which she calls “signifiance” or signification (Kristeva 22), a “dialectic” (24) of making meaning. According to Kristeva, even the smallest element of symbolic meaning, the phoneme, is involved in “rhythmic, intonational repetitions” (103) so that, as we order phonemes into words and words into sentences, our language pulses with the operations of our bodily, instinctual drives. Kristeva thinks in terms of an “explosion of the semiotic in the symbolic” (69). E: An explosion. I like that!S: Me too.My theory is that, by letting go into that rhythm a little, we’re enabling ourselves to access some of the pre-verbal force that Kristeva talks about. E: So the rhythm of walking helps us to connect with the rhythmic qualities of the semiotic?S: Exactly. We might say that a lot of academic writing tends to privilege the symbolic—both in terms of the style we choose and the way that we structure our arguments. E: And academic convention requires that we make more references here. For example, as we’re discussing “free writing”, we could cite Ken Macrorie or Peter Elbow, the two grandfathers of the method. Or we might scaffold our talks about collaborative writing as a means of scholarly inquiry, with the work of Laurel Richardson or another authority in the field.S: Yes, and all of this is an important part of academic practice, of course. But perhaps when we give ourselves permission to ramble and meander, to loosen up the relationships between what we feel and what we say, we move along the continuum of meaning-making towards the more felt and bodily, and away from the received and prescribed. …S: And I’ve put an ellipsis there to mark that we are moving into another kind of space now. We’re coming to a clearing in the woods. Because at some point in our rambling, we might want to pause and make a few suggestions. Perhaps we come to a clearing, like this one here. We sit down for a while and collect our thoughts.E: Yes. Let’s sit down. And, while you’re resting, let me tell you what this “collecting of thoughts” reminds me of.I’m thinking that we don’t necessarily need to go anywhere to get away from our particular state of mind. A shared cup of coffee or a conversation can have the same effect. Much has already been said about the effects of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs on writing; all rather harmful ways of going “on a trip” (Laing; Klein). In our case, it’s the blank pages of a shared Google Doc that has brought us together, collecting our thoughts on walking and moving us into a different realm, a new world of exciting and strange ideas to be explored. And the idea of mapping out this space by gradually filling its pages with words sets our minds on a journey.S: That’s interesting. The choreographer Twyla Tharp talks about the power of ritual in creating this shift for us into a creative or flow state. It could be lighting a candle or drinking a glass of water. There is a moment when something “clicks”, and we enter the world of creativity.E: Yes, a thing can act as a portal or gateway. And, as I want to show you, the things in the landscape that we walk through can help us to enter imaginary realms.So can I take you for a little walk now? See that winding country road leading through open fields and rolling hills? That’s where we’re going to start.A publicity image, drawn by Evija, for Walking Talking Writing events for academics, organised at the University of Auckland in 2017.A Walk “through the Countryside”, or Traversing the Landscape of ThoughtsE: Sophie, you spoke earlier about the way that experiencing yourself in relation to the environment is important for opening up your imagination. For example, just allowing yourself to be in the woods and noticing how the space pulsates around you is enough to awaken your bodily awareness.But let’s take a stroll along this road and let me explain to you what’s happening for me. You see, I find the woods too distracting and stimulating. When I’m stuck, I crave openness and space like this landscape that we’re walking through right now. S: Too much detail, too many things, overwhelm you?E: Exactly. Here, where the landscape is simple and spacious, my thoughts can breathe. Ideas quietly graze as I move through them. The country road is under my feet and I know exactly where I’m heading – beyond that horizon line in the distance… I need to be able to look far into that hazy distance to get my sense of seeing things “in depth.” All this makes me think of a study by Mia Keinänen in which she surveyed nine Norwegian academics who habitually walk to think (Keinänen). Based on their personal observations, the resulting article provides interesting material about the importance of walking—its rhythm, environment, and so on—on one’s thinking. For one of the academics, being able to see landmarks and thoughts in perspective was the key to being able to see ideas in new ways. There is a “landscape of thinking”, in which thinking becomes a place and environment is a process.For another participant in the study, thoughts become objects populating the landscape. The thinker walks through these object-thoughts, mapping out their connections, pulling some ideas closer, pushing others further away, as if moving through a 3D computer game.S: Hmm. I too think that we tend to project not only thoughts but also the emotions that we ourselves might be experiencing onto the objects around us. The literary critic Suzanne Nalbantian describes this as the creation of “aesthetic objects”, a “mythopoetic” process by which material objects in the external world “change their status from real to ‘aesthetic’ objects” and begin to function as “anchors or receptacles for subjectivity” (Nalbantien 54).Nalbantian uses examples such as Proust’s madeleine or Woolf’s lighthouse to illustrate the ways in which authors of autobiographical fiction invest the objects around them with a particular psychic value or feeling-tone.For me, this might be a tree, or a fallen leaf on the path. For you, Evija, it could be the horizon, or an open field or a vague object, half-perceived in the distance. E: So there’s a kind of equivalence between what we’re feeling and what we’re noticing? S: Yes. And it works the other way around too. What we’re noticing affects our feelings and thoughts. And perhaps it’s really about finding and knowing what works best for us—the landscape that is the best fit for how we want to feel… E: Or how we want to think. Or write. S: That’s it. Of course, metaphor is another way of describing this process. When we create a metaphor, we bring together a feeling or memory inside us with an object in the outside world. The feeling that we carry within us right now finds perfect form in the shape of this particular hillside. A thought is this pebble. A memory is that cloud…E: That’s the method of loci, which Mia Keinänen also refers to (600) in her article about the walking-thinking Norwegian academics. By projecting one’s learnt knowledge onto a physical landscape, one is able to better navigate ideas.S: Although I can’t help thinking that’s all a little cerebral. For me, the process is more immediate and felt. But I’m sure we’re talking about something very similar...E: Well, the anthropologist Tim Ingold, who has written a great deal on walking, in his article “Ways of Mind-Walking: Reading, Writing, Painting” urges us to rethink what imagination might be and the ways that it might relate to the physical environment, our movement through it, and our vision. He quotes James Elkins’s suggestion (in Ingold 15-16) that true “seeing” involves workings of both the eye and the mind in bringing forth images. But Ingold questions the very notion of imagination as a place inhabited by images. From derelict houses, barren fields and crossroads, to trees, stray dogs, and other people, the images we see around us do not represent “the forms of things in the world” (Ingold 16). Instead, they are gateways and “place-holders” for the truer essence of things they seem to represent (16). S: There’s that idea of the thing acting as a gateway or portal again… E: Yes, images—like the ruins of that windmill over there—do not “stand for things” but help us experientially “find” those things (Ingold16). This is one of the purposes of art, which, instead of giving us representations of things in the world, offers us something which is like the things in the world (16)—i.e., experiences.But as we walk, and notice the objects around us, are there specific qualities about the objects themselves that make this process—what you call “projection”—more or less difficult for us?A drawing by Latvian artist Māris Subačs (2016). The text on the image says: “Clouds slowly moving.” Publicity image for Subačs’s exhibition “Baltā Istaba” (The White Room), taken from Latvijas Sabiedriskie Mediji, https://www.lsm.lv/. S: Well, let’s circle back now—on the road and on the page. We’ve talked about the way that you need wide, open spaces, whereas I find myself responding to a range of different environments in different ways. How do you feel now, as we pause here and begin to retrace our steps? E: How do I feel? I’m not sure. Right now, I’m thinking about the way that I respond to art. For example, I would say that life-like images of physical objects in this world (e.g., a realistic painting of a vase with flowers) are harder to perceive with my mind's eye than, let’s say, of an abstract painting. I don’t want to be too tied to the surface details and physicality of the world. What I see in a picture is not the representation of the vase and flowers; what I see are forms that the “inner life force”, to use Ingold’s term, has taken to express itself through (vaseness, flowerness). The more abstract the image, the more of the symbolic or the imaginary it can contain. (Consider the traditional Aboriginal art, as Ingold invites, or the line drawings of Latvian artist Māris Subačs, as I suggest, depicted above.) Things we can observe in this world, says Ingold, are but “outward, sensible forms” that “give shape to the inner generative impulse that is life itself” (17). (This comes from the underlying belief that the phenomenal world itself is all “figmented” (Ingold 17, referring to literary scholar Mary Carruthers).)S: And, interestingly, I don’t recognise this at all! My experiencing of the objects around me feels very different. That tree, this pine cone in my hand, the solidity of this physical form is very helpful in crystallising something that I’m feeling. I enjoy looking at abstract paintings too. I can imagine myself into them. But the thing-ness of things is also deeply satisfying, especially if I can also touch, taste, smell, hold the thing itself. The poet Selima Hill goes for a walk in order to gather objects in a Tupperware box: “a dead butterfly, a yellow pebble, a scrap of blue paper, an empty condom packet.” Later she places an object from these “Tupperware treasures” on her writing desk and uses it “to focus on the kernel of the poem”, concentrating on it “to select the fragments and images she needs” (Taylor). This resonates with me.E: So, to summarise, walking seems to have something to do with seeing, for both of us. S: Yes, and not just seeing but also feeling and experiencing, with all of our senses. E: OK. And walking like appreciating art or writing or reading, has the capacity to take us beyond what shows at surface level, and so a step closer to the “truer” expression of life, to paraphrase Ingold. S: Yes, and the expression that Ingold calls more “true” is what Kristeva would say is the semiotic, the other-than-meaning, the felt and bodily, always bubbling beneath the surface. E: True, true. And although Ingold here doesn’t say how walking facilitates this kind of seeing and experiencing, perhaps we can make some suggestions here.You focused on the rhythm of walking and thinking/writing earlier. But I’m equally intrigued by the effects of speed. S: That resonates for me too. I need to be able to slow down and really experience the world around me. E: Well, did you know that there are scientific studies that suggest a correlation between the speed of walking and the speed of thinking (Jabr; Oppezzo and Schwartz)? The pace of walking, as the movement of our bodies through space, sets a particular temporal relationship with the objects we move past. In turn, this affects our “thinking time”, and our thinking about abstract ideas (Cuelenaere 127, referring to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s ideas).S: That makes sense to me. I noticed that when we were walking through the woods, we had slowed right down and then, as we reached the open road, you seemed to want to go much faster than me…E: Yes, at a steady pace. That’s perhaps not surprising. Because it seems that the speed of our walking is intimately connected with our vision. So if I’m moving through a landscape in which I’m fully immersed, I’m unable to take in everything around me. I choose to rest my eyes on a few select points of interest. S: Or on the horizon…E: Yes. The path that leads through an open field allows me to rest my eyes on the distant horizon. I register the patterns of fields and houses; and perhaps I catch sight of the trees in my peripheral vision. The detailed imagery, if any, gets reduced to geometrical figures and lines.The challenge is to find the right balance between the stimuli provided by the external world and the speed of movement through it.S: So the pace of walking can enable us to see things in a certain way. For you, this is moving quickly, seeing things vaguely, fragmentally and selectively. For me, it’s an opportunity to take my time, find my own rhythm, to slow down and weigh a thought or a thing. I think I’m probably the kind of walker who stops to pick up sticks and shells, and curious stones. I love the rhythm of moving but it isn’t necessarily fast movement. Perhaps you’re a speed walker and I’m a rambler? E: I think both the pace and the rhythm are of equal importance. The movement can be so monotonous that it becomes a meditative process, in which I lose myself. Then, what matters is no longer the destination but the journey itself. It’s like...S: Evija! Stop for a moment! Over here! Look at this! E: You know, that actually broke my train of thought. S: I’m sorry… I couldn’t resist. But Evija, we’ve arrived at the entrance to the woods again. E: And the light’s fading… I should get back to the office.S: Yes, but this time, we can choose which way to go: through the trees and into the half-dark of my creative subconscious or across the wide, open spaces of your imagination. E: And will we walk slowly—or at speed? There’s still so much to say. There are other landscapes and pathways—and pages—that we haven’t even explored yet.S: But I don’t want to stop. I want to keep walking with you.E: Indeed, Sophie, writing is a walk that never ends. ReferencesAnderson, Jon. “Talking whilst Walking: A Geographical Archaeology of Knowledge.” Area 36.3 (2004): 254-261. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. NewYork: Harper Perennial, 1997.Cuelenaere, Laurence. “Aymara Forms of Walking: A Linguistic Anthropological Reflection on the Relation between Language and Motion.” Language Sciences 33.1 (2011):126-137. Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Gros, Frédéric. The Philosophy of Walking. London: Verso, 2014.Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.———. “Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet.” Journal of Material Culture 9.3 (2004): 315-340.———. Lines: A Brief History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.———. “Ways of Mind-Walking: Reading, Writing, Painting.” Visual Studies 25.1 (2010):15-23.Ingold, Tim, and J.L. Vergunst, eds. Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. London: Ashgate, 2008.Jabr, Ferris. “Why Walking Helps Us Think.” The New Yorker, 3 Sep. 2014. 10 Aug. 2018 <https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/walking-helps-us-think>.Keinänen, Mia. “Taking Your Mind for a Walk: A Qualitative Investigation of Walking and Thinking among Nine Norwegian Academics.” Higher Education 71.4 (2016): 593-605. Klee, Paul. Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye. Ed. J. Spiller. Trans. R. Manheim. London: Lund Humphries, 1961. Klein, Richard. Cigarettes Are Sublime. London: Picador, 1995. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.Laing, Olivia. The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink. Edinburgh: Canongate 2013.Macrorie, Ken. Telling Writing. Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden Book Company, 1976.Maitland, Sarah. Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairy-Tales. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012. Milner, Marion (as Joanna Field). A Life of One’s Own. 1934. London: Virago, 1986.Nalbantien, Suzanne. Aesthetic Autobiography. London: Macmillan, 1994.Oppezzo, Marily, and Daniel L. Schwartz. “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 40.4 (2014): 1142-1152.Richardson, Laurel. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. Ed. N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007. 923-948. Sturm, Sean. “Terra (In)cognita: Mapping Academic Writing.” TEXT 16.2 (2012).Taylor, Debbie. “The Selima Hill Method.” Mslexia 6 (Summer/Autumn 2000). Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. New York: Simon Schuster, 2003.Trofimova, Evija. “Academics Go Walking, Talking, Writing*.” Writing, Writing Everywhere, 8 Dec. 2017. 1 Oct. 2018 <http://www.writing.auckland.ac.nz/2017/12/08/academics-go-walking-talking-writing>.

Abstract:

Introduction This essay is very much an anxious response to an earlier article, "Controlling Gameplay", that I wrote for M/C about gameplay: the immersive, visceral experience of playing computer and video games. I argued that gameplay concerns the event status of playing computer and video games, and that as such it exceeds the symbolic content of games. Now, I continue to be troubled by the implications of this assertion -- does it not give up too much ground gained by the understanding that social practices such as gaming are socially constructed? Does it not return us to all of the problems associated with claims of access to an essential, authentic experience? In short, it becomes very difficult to contest or question such claims. The term gameplay may well function to depoliticise computer gaming; at least if the domain of the properly sociopolitical is understood as the symbolic field! -- and perhaps we shouldn't concede this point too quickly. In the previous article did I almost against myself end up fetishising the technological through the postulation of this sublime experience? The Fetish & Desire You may well be wondering what any of this has got to do with desire. Well, first let me fill you in on the research context out of which these essays emerge. For the past three years I have been undertaking ethnographic research on computer gaming: first, by participating in online gamer fan activities; and second, in an enterprise ethnographic study of Auran, a computer game development company situated in Brisbane, Australia. "Controlling Gameplay" is clearly marked by my immersion and entanglement in an ethnographic relationship with online gamers. The material on which it is based came from spending up to 25 hours a week online playing and discussing games. The point of these comments is not simply to establish my credentials as a gamer, nor to embarrassingly distance myself from 'going native' by making the appropriate gestures about reflexivity. Rather, I insist on these moments of fetishistic disavowal and illusion as a necessary condition of doing ethnographies. This shifts us from the domain of desire to what Slavoj Zizek, following Lacan, theorises as enjoyment. In the introduction to "Controlling Gameplay" I made the banal point that computer game software is a commodity. Computer games offer an example of the informational commodity circulating through the networks of informational capitalism. This is basically the bottom line of gaming: big business. Zizek carefully outlines that central to the Marxist understanding of commodity fetishism -- the displacement of relations among people onto relations among things -- is a fascination for some kind of mysterious 'content' that is presumed to be hidden by the form of commodities (Sublime Object 16-22). An example of this is the cultural studies academic doing ethnographic research, and believing that his work offers "something more", a potential critical edge, than just the commodification and corporatisation of academic work. It would appear, at least initially, that this is precisely how gameplay is working: the hidden technological sublime behind the empty form of the informational commodity. The problem for critical analysis then becomes that of insisting on asking the question of why this 'content' of gameplay is affirmed in the game's particular status of the commodity form. We are not interested in disclosing "the secret behind the form but the secret of this form itself" (Sublime Object 15). In discussions many gamers would insist on the fact that gameplay is simply the fun factor of playing computer games: nothing more and nothing less. Others would insist on refusing to finally fill in this secret content. After describing gameplay as having something to do with an immersive experience of escapism a gamer would invariably move on to suggest that it perhaps involved the design of a good interface that allows the player to seamlessly participate in the game; or it is to do with quality game-design, a careful balancing of various features that define a particular genre. Or it is a skill developed and honed by many hours of gaming; intense gameplay is an insider's experience that is used to define your belonging as a 'hard-core gamer with cred' -- if it has to be explained and described to you, well, you just won't get it, will you? In the movement of these discussions and exchanges desire is not so much to be found or discovered in the hidden content of an essential, authentic experience that is gameplay, but rather it is right there on the surface, in the work of these displacements. If anything then, unconscious desire is not a deep interior experience of gameplay but in the very form of this movement, in the work that is done to elaborate and produce the effect of a hidden content. And the question arises: what is being avoided or obfuscated in this movement that perhaps has nothing at all to do with an experience of gameplay or even desire for that matter? I will return to this question in a moment. The important step here is not to become overly dazzled by this 'content' of gameplay, but instead to ask the question of why it assumes the form of a commodity. But why this focus on the commodity-form, and the process of fetishistic inversion. After all there is a lot more at stake here than simply the commodity-form or some kind of economic reductionism, essentialism or substantialism. There is also the fascinating power of attraction that this "something more" can exert on academic work. This has to do with the status of a sublime materiality that persists beyond the physical materiality of an object in the networks of business, or even that of an object-cause for intersubjective desire played out in the game of ethnographic research. It is precisely this persistence that is so troubling. But is this interest in fetishistic disavowal, the insistence on "something more", simply a more refined type of traditional ideology critique? That is, is it once more a matter of the illusory knowledge or beliefs of misguided naive gamers which the critical intellectual will come along and tear down, to reveal the true state of affairs -- that there is really nothing there except perhaps a complex, overdetermined effect of socioeconomic processes, a social construction if you like? Is all of this concern with the fetish simply an epistemological and monstrous game played out in the interiority of the thinking subject that has in fact very little, if anything, to do with the effective materiality of the complex assemblage that is computer gaming. Perhaps a shift to the materiality of the processes and objects involved in the production of computer gaming would help us to leave behind the problem of the fetish as some tired epistemological quandary about illusory belief. After all, is not the very idea of commodity fetishism based on a rather tired and limiting opposition between people and things? The Factish In his recent Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Bruno Latour attacks the notion of the fetish and the modern critical subject that he believes is behind it. Latour's actor-network theory (nicely explained in Sean Aylward Smith's recent article for M/C, "Where Does the Body End?") works to displace the assumed divide between subjects and objects, particularly humans and nonhumans. This is often theorised through richly detailed ethnographic studies that follow the associations between humans and nonhumans that make up the assemblages and collectivities of scientific practice and technological projects. In Pandora's Hope Latour takes aim at the critical gesture of the iconoclast, the modern critic, who seeks to expose the fetish as "something that is nothing in itself, but simply the blank screen onto which we have projected, erroneously, our fancies, our labor, our hopes and passions". A problem for the anti-fetishist is the assumption that people naively believe in the inherent, mysterious qualities of the object in the first place. Anti-fetishism is not so much about the qualities or status of the object and our relations to it, but more a mode of argument: "it is always an accusation. Some person, or some people, are accused of being taken in -- or worse, of cynically manipulating credulous believers -- by someone who is sure of escaping from this illusion and wants to free the others as well: either from naive belief or from being manipulative. But if anti-fetishism is clearly an accusation, it is not a description of what happens with those who believe or are manipulated" (270). Latour argues that the problem of fetishism is all in the mind of the critical thinker. Believing himself disconnected from the realm of things and objects, this monstrous "mind in the vat" "invents the notion of belief and manipulation and projects this notion upon a situation in which the fetish plays an entirely different role" (270). Latour proposes that we shift our attention to the status of the fetish as a quasi-object or factish. The factish has to be fabricated, made, and invented; as such it has a complex and variable ontology in which it is entangled within collective practice. The status of the factish is all about the associations between humans and nonhumans and refuses the disabling opposition between subject and object, epistemology and ontology, internal belief and external world. The modern critic's belief that others believe functions to render invisible the complicated practice through which the categories are mixed and factishes are constructed. To replace all of this Latour suggests that we adopt a heterogeneous ontology in which we externalise belief "among the multiplicity of nonhumans" (284) -- in short that we recognise the ontological content of beliefs, and grant ontology back to nonhuman entities (273-88). By taking up the approach of actor-network theory I could now follow the diverse actors, both human and nonhuman, that make up the network and practices of computer gaming. When the gamers assert that gameplay is this and that and so on, I can take them at their word. They are not telling me, in some hysterical cycle, 'no it's not that, no, not that'. But instead 'yes it is that, and that as well'. They are affirming the multiple and heterogeneous ontology of humans and nonhumans. So I took this toolbox of concepts with me into my fieldwork encounters and interventions at Auran. And not surprisingly it worked really well. I could now quite easily and comfortably follow the entangled materiality of humans and nonhumans; the multiple shifting ontologies of objects such as game engines that function as representations in design reports; key elements in long term corporate business plans; links in relations with other corporations; development tools for game designers; the focus of licensing agreements; and programming problems and challenges for programmers. Game designers, programmers, CEOs, and public relations officers were more than happy to describe and show me the complex entanglements of humans and nonhumans involved in producing computer games. Now, throughout the period of my fieldwork I have been quite anxious and worried about negotiating the conditions of access, about the control exercised by senior Auran management. But at each stage or period of my research I have been amazed by the level of cooperation and access that has been given to me. Nor has Auran management shown much concern about my access to 'problem areas' of the company as it went through various periods of restructuring. I have had open and what I believe to be frank discussions with disgruntled employees who were very uncomfortable and openly critical of various aspects of Auran. And there has been very little effort to control or restrict my use of this material. My impression is that Auran has been more than pleased to put on display for the dazzled gaze of the ethnographer the corporate processes and mechanisms involved in producing computer game software. Initially I was rubbing my hands with glee at this research opportunity. I can see publication potential and career opportunities emerging from this ethnographic entanglement with Auran. The Fetish and Enjoyment But I have become increasingly anxious and worried about how well the fieldwork at Auran has gone, and how well actor-network theory works in explaining the multiple and heterogeneous ontologies of the humans and nonhumans that I have been mixing with for the past two years. And this worry brings me back to the fetish. I think Latour is correct: belief is not something internal, but more a matter of practice, externalised in the relations among humans and nonhumans. But is this not precisely the more useful and correct definition of the fetish, at least under the conditions of informational capitalism? Far from moving us out of the domain of the fetish into the ontological materiality of the factish, Latour is perhaps describing the fetishistic inversion perfectly. It is not at the level of some kind of internal knowledge, belief or deep mysterious unconscious that the misrecognition of the fetishistic inversion takes place. Rather, it is at the properly social level of our acts, what we do, that we overlook the fetishistic 'repressed' social dimension (Sublime Object 20). This nonknowledge of reality is part of the very effectivity of our social acts, "a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic; that is, a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies a certain non-knowledge of its participants" (Sublime Object 21). The further point to recognise, as Zizek points out, is that commodity fetishism is not just the replacement of people with things, or our overlooking the properly social relations between humans behind things. More importantly, it is that this misrecognition occurs precisely at the level of the network of relations among things -- what is a structural effect of this network of relations starts to appear as the immediate property of one of the elements (Sublime Object 23-4). So from all of this the important point for my purposes is that fetishism is not really about what people know. Of course gamers know very well that their software is a commodity, and that capitalist business interests are basically running the show: they talk about the business of gaming all the time. The point is rather the fact that the fetishistic inversion occurs in the very activity of playing. This misrecognition, or illusion if you will, is not about false knowledge: the illusion is structuring reality, our real social activity: "they know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know" (Sublime Object 32). So Latour is quite insightful, belief is radically exterior and as Zizek points out one of the uptakes of this is that things, commodities, end up believing for us -- "it is belief which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people" (34). But does not Latour's focus on the complex ontology of objects, and our entanglement with them, at least in some way work to challenge this fetishistic inversion? Is not this obfuscation of the process of production, even if we shift that misrecognition to the relations among things, questioned by the process of exposing or opening the black box of the production mechanism? After all, isn't this precisely what we are trying to do with ethnographies? The difficulty, as Zizek writes in "Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes", is that "far from destroying the 'fetishist' illusion, the insight into the production mechanism in fact even strengthens it". It is the disclosure of the production process itself that "serves as the fetish which fascinates with its presence". And what is being concealed, and persists through all this display of disclosure is "the social mode of production" (102). Zizek warns us "the transparency of the process of production is false in so far as it obfuscates the immaterial virtual order which effectively runs the show ... . Capital functions as the sublime irrepresentable Thing, present only in its effects, in contrast to a commodity, a particular material object which miraculously 'comes to life', starts to move as if endowed with an invisible spirit" (103). Time for me to get back to the question of desire. One of the more fascinating and disturbing uptakes of this approach to the fetish is that the fetishistic misrecognition persists and insists beyond any interpretative intervention. This is the necessary conclusion of the fact that fetishism is not about what we know, but what we do: 'I know all too well that computer games are informational commodities generating profits for capitalist enterprises, but damn, they are fun to play.' The problem with gameplay is not one of explaining it, symbolising it, or even finding the appropriate theoretical vocabulary in which to talk about it. Gamers have come up with a range of different and flexible ways of discussing (dare I say, quite reflexively) the experience of gameplay. The problem is that I can never quite get rid of this problem of gameplay, it insists on sticking and attaching itself to my ethnography. Bruno Latour picks up on this dilemma with the observation that despite all the best efforts of the anti-fetishist critic "somehow the fetish gains in strength ... . The more you want it to be nothing, the more action springs back from it" (270). Even the attempt to generate a kind of critical distance through the process of 'writing up' the dissertation is smeared with the rather disgusting, perverted Enjoyment taken in disclosing and robbing the other of their Enjoyment. It is as if we are compelled, interpellated, by an anonymous superegoic injunction to 'Enjoy our gaming'. As Slavoj Zizek argues in his recent work (including the magnificent The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology) the order of capital no longer functions according to the matrix of desire, a prohibitive injunction that sets in motion the impossibility of satisfying desire that is "reflexively inverted into the desire for nonsatisfaction" (345). Instead we get a corporate "little brother" commanding us to Enjoy ourselves! (The Ticklish Subject 347) Perhaps the only response open to us in these circ*mstances is in the act of insisting on a bottom line: $. References Banks, John. "Controlling Gameplay." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). 22 July 1999 <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/game.php>. Latour, Bruno. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1999. Smith, Sean Aylward. "Where Does the Body End?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). 22 July 1999 <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/end.php>. Zizek, Slavoj. "Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes." The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. 86-126. ---. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. ---. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Banks. "From Fetish to Factish and Back Again." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/games.php>. Chicago style: John Banks, "From Fetish to Factish and Back Again," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/games.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Banks. (1999) From fetish to factish and back again. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/games.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

Intellectual property. It's a strange term, indicating from its structure that the questionable notion of property has been appended to something that, in a tangible sense, doesn't even exist. Difficult to grasp, like water, or air, yet at the same time so desirable to own... In Anglo-American law, property is defined, as the eighteenth-century jurist Sir William Blackstone put it, as "that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe" (Terry & Guigni 207). For most physical things, the 'right' of exclusion seems simple enough to understand, and to control. Yet even there, when the boundaries blur, especially over space and time, the results of such 'rights' become less and less manageable, as indicated by the classic 'tragedy of the commons' (Hardin). And once we move outside of the physical realm, and into the world of ideas, or of feelings or the spirit, the notion of an exclusive 'right' of ownership steadily makes less and less sense. It's an issue that's come to the fore with the rise of the Open Source movement, creating software that can be freely shared and used by anyone. There are many arguments about exactly is meant by 'free', though there's often an emphasis on freedom of ideas rather than price: "think of 'free' as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'" is how one group describes it (Free Software Foundation). Unlike proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows, the source-code from which the programs are compiled is available is available for anyone to view, amend, extend. As yet, few programmers are paid to do so; certainly no-one is excluded from doing so. The results from this apparently anarchic and altruistic model would be startling for anyone coming from a conventional economics background: for example, Sourceforge, the main Open Source repository, currently hosts almost 60,000 projects, with almost ten times that number of active contributors (Sourceforge). Some of these projects are huge: for example, the Linux kernel is well over a million lines of code, whilst the Gnome user-interface is already almost twice that size. Open Source programs such as the 'LAMP' quadrivirate of the GNU/Linux operating-system, Apache web-server, MySQL database and PHP, Perl or Python scripting languages provide most of the software infrastructure for the Internet (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python). And the Internet returns the favour, by providing a space in which collaboration can happen quickly and for the most part transparently, without much regard for status or location. Yet central though the Internet may be to this new wave of shared 'public good', the core innovations of Open Source are more social than technological. Of these, probably the most important are a specific kind of collaboration, and an unusual twist on copyright law. Eric Raymond's classic essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' is one of the best descriptions of the social processes behind Open Source (Raymond). "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch", says Raymond: see a need, tackle it, share the initial results, ask for help. Larry Wall, the initiator of Perl, "wanted to create something that was so useful that it would be taken up by many people" (Moody 133), and consciously promoted it in much the same way as a missionary (Moody 131). Open access to communications and a culture of shared learning provides the space to "release early, release often" and invite collaboration. Some projects, such as Apache and PHP, are run as a kind of distributed collective, but many are somewhat hierarchical, with a well-known lead-figure at the centre: Linus Torvalds for Linux, Larry Wall for Perl, Guido van Rossum for Python, Miguel de Icaza for Gnome. Yet the style rarely seems hierarchical in practice: the lead-figure's role is that of coordinator and final arbiter of quality, far removed from the militaristic 'command and control' so common in business environments. What makes it work is that anyone can join in, identify a bug, submit a patch, volunteer to design some desirable function or feature, and gain personal satisfaction and social respect for doing so. Programmers’ motivations vary enormously, of course: some share their work as a kind of libertarian statement, whilst others are more driven by a sense of obligation to others in the software-development community, or in the wider world. Yet for many, perhaps most, it's the personal satisfaction that's most important: as Linus Torvalds comments, "most of the good programmers do [Open Source] programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program" (Torvalds & Ghosh). In that sense it more closely resembles a kind of art-form rather than a conventional business proposition. Realistically, many of the smaller Open Source projects are little more than student exercises, with limited real-world usefulness. But for larger, more relevant projects this borderless, inclusive collaboration usually results in code of very high quality and reliability – "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is another of Raymond's aphorisms – in stark contrast to the notorious security holes and general fragility of proprietary products from Redmond and elsewhere. And it leverages different people's skills to create an extraordinary degree of 'win/win', as Linus Torvalds points out: "imagine ten people putting in one hour each every day on the project. They put in one hour of work, but because they share the end results they get nine hours of 'other peoples work' for free. It sounds unfair: get nine hours of work for doing one hour. But it obviously is not" (Torvalds & Ghosh). It's this kind of return-on-investment that's making many businesses more than willing to embrace the 'insanity' of paying programmers to give away their time on Open Source projects (Pavlicek). The hard part, for many businesses, is that it demands a very different approach to business relationships. "Forget business as usual", writes Russell Pavlicek; "forget about demanding your own way; forget fluffy, empty management speeches; forget about fudging facts; forget about marketing that alienates the community; forget about pushing hype rather than real value; forget about taking more than you give" (Pavlicek 131-7). When everything is open, and everyone is in effect a volunteer, none of those time-dishonoured tactics works well. But the real catch is the legal framework under which Open Source is developed and distributed. Conventionally, placing work in the public domain – the intellectual-property equivalent of the commons – means that anyone can apply even the minutest of changes and then declare it exclusively as their own. Walt Disney famously did exactly this with many classics, such as the Grimms' fairy-tales or Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. The Free Software Foundation's 'GNU Public License' – used for most Open Source software – avoids this by copyrighting the work, permitting freedom to view, amend and extend the code for any purpose, but requiring that any new version permit the same freedoms (GNU/FSF). This inclusive approach – nicknamed 'copyleft' in contrast to conventional copyright – turns the usual exclusive model of intellectual property on its head. Its viral, self-propagating nature uses the law to challenge the law of property: everything it touches is – in principle – freed from exclusive private ownership. Larry Lessig and the Creative Commons legal team have extended this somewhat further, with machine-readable licenses that permit a finer granularity of choice in defining what uses of a work – a musical performance, a book or a Weblog, for example – are open or withheld (Creative Commons). But the central theme is that copyleft, together with the open nature of the Internet, "moves everything that touches it toward the public domain" (Norlin). Which is not a happy thought for those whose business models depend on exclusion and control of access to intellectual property – such as Hollywood, the media and the biotechnology industry – nor, for that matter, for those who'd prefer to keep their secrets secret (AWOLBush). Part of the problem, for such people, is a mistaken notion of what the Internet really is. It's not a pipe or a medium, like cable TV; it's more like a space or a place, a 'world of ends' (Searls & Weinberger). Not so much infrastructure, to be bought and sold, but necessarily shared, it's more 'innerstructure', a kind of artificial force of nature: "like the Earth's fertile surface, it derives much of its fertility from the life it supports" (Searls). Its key characteristics, argues Doc Searls, are that "No-one owns it; Everyone can use it; Anyone can improve it". And these characteristics of the Internet ultimately arise not from the hardware – routers, cables, servers and the like – or even the software, but ultimately from an agreement – the Internet Protocol – and an idea – that network connections can and should be self-routing, beyond direct control. Yet perhaps the most important idea that arises from this is that one of the most basic foundation-stones of Western society – the model of property as an exclusive 'right', a "sole and despotic dominion" – simply doesn't work. This is especially true for supposed 'intellectual property', such as copyrights, trade-marks, patents, genome sequences, scientific theories: after all, from where do those ideas and patterns ultimately arise? Who owns that? In legal terms, there's no definable root for a trail of provenance, no means to identify all involved intermediaries, and hence no ultimate anchor for any kind of property claim. Many other types of intellectual property, such as domain-names, phrases, words, radio-frequencies, colours, sounds - the word 'Yes', the phrase 'The Real Thing', Ferrari red, the sound of a Harley-Davidson – can only be described as arbitrary expropriations from the public domain. In many senses, then, the whole legal edifice of intellectual property is little more than "all smoke and mirrors", held together by lawyers' bluff – hardly a stable foundation for the much-vaunted 'information economy'! Whilst it's not quite true that "nobody owns it", in practice the only viable ownership for any kind of intellectual property would seem to be that of a declaration of responsibility, of stewardship – such as a project-leader's responsibility for an Open Source project – rather than an arbitrary and ultimately indefensible assertion of exclusive 'right'. So a simple question about intellectual property – is it copyright or copyleft? should source-code be proprietary or 'free'? – goes deeper and deeper into the 'innerstructure' of society itself. Miguel Icaza describes this well: "as the years pass and you're working in this framework, you start to reevaluate in many areas your relationships with your friends and your family. The same ideas about free software and sharing and caring about other people start to permeate other aspects of your life" (Moody 323). Perhaps it's time to look more carefully to look more carefully not just at intellectual property, but at the 'rights' and responsibilities associated with all kinds of property, to reach a more equitable and sustainable means to manage the tangible and intangible resources of this world we share. Works Cited Blackstone, Sir William. "Commentaries on the Laws of England." Book 2, 1765, 2, quoted in Andrew Terry and Des Guigni, Business, Society and the Law. Marrickville, Australia: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1994. Hardin, Garrett. "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science 162 (1968): 1243-8. 10 Mar. 2003 <http://www.constitution.org/cmt/tragcomm.htm>. “The Free Software Definition.” Free Software Foundation. 10 Mar. 2003 <http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.php>. Sourceforge. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://sourceforge.net/>. Linux. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.linux.org/>. GNOME. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.gnome.org/>. Apache. The Apache Software Foundation. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.apache.org/>. MySQL. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.mysql.com/>. PHP. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.php.net/>. Perl. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.perl.org/>. Python. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.python.org/>. Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 11 Aug. 1998. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.openresources.com/documents/cathedral-bazaar>. (Note: original location at http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ is no longer accessible.) Moody, Glyn. Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001. Torvalds, Linus, and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. "Interview with Linus Torvalds". First Monday 3.3 (1998). 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/torvalds/index.php>. Pavlicek, Russell C. Embracing Insanity: Open Source Software Development. Indianapolis: Sams Publishing, 2000. "Licenses – GNU Project." GNU/Free Software Foundation. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.fsf.org/licenses/licenses.html#TOCWhatIsCopyleft>. Lessig, Lawrence (Larry). Home page. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig>. Creative Commons. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://creativecommons.org/>. Norlin, Eric. Weblog. 23 Feb. 2003. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.unchartedshores.com/blogger/archive/2003_02_23_ar... ...chive3.html#90388497>. “G W Bush Went AWOL.” AWOLBush.com. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.awolbush.com/>. Searls, Doc, and David Weinberger. World Of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://worldofends.com/>. Searls, Doc. "Is Linux Infrastructure? Or Is it Deeper than That?" Linux Journal 14 May 2002. 10 Mar. 2003 <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6074>. ---. "Setting Fire to Hollywood’s Plans for the Net: The GeekPAC Story". Linux Journal 29 Apr. 2002. 10 Mar. 2003 <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6033>. Links http://creativecommons.org/ http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig http://sourceforge.net/ http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ http://worldofends.com/ http://www.apache.org/ http://www.awolbush.com/ http://www.constitution.org/cmt/tragcomm.htm http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/torvalds/index.html http://www.fsf.org/licenses/licenses.html\lTOCWhatIsCopyleft http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://www.gnome.org/ http://www.linux.org/ http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6033 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6074 http://www.mysql.com/ http://www.openresources.com/documents/cathedral-bazaar http://www.perl.org/ http://www.php.net/ http://www.python.org/ http://www.unchartedshores.com/blogger/archive/2003_02_23_archive3.html\l90388497 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Graves, Tom. "Something Happened on the Way to the ©" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/03-somethinghappened.php>. APA Style Graves, T. (2003, Apr 23). Something Happened on the Way to the ©. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/03-somethinghappened.php>

Abstract:

To listen to them talk, you'd think most Americans hate television. Everyday discourse about television abounds with condemnation of television content. Television is a wasteland, a stream of idiotic material insulting to the intelligence of the viewer. When people deem a particular program worth watching, they often articulate it in contradistinction to the vast majority of awful stuff out there. This almost universal discourse of condemnation does not mean Americans do not watch television, of course. They do, and they watch a great deal of it. Thus we have a conundrum. If it is so awful, why do people watch television? When Americans construct stories about themselves, they construct themselves as choice--making individuals (Polanyi). Sane, mature Americans are expected to be able to make intelligent choices and to live with the consequences of their choices. How, then, can Americans articulate themselves as television viewers, as individuals who choose to view what is clearly awful stuff? In this paper, I want to discuss 'veging out' as an American category of media viewing that resolves this conundrum. In framing their discourse about watching television in terms of 'veging out,' Americans are able to construct themselves as sensible, choice--making persons, and yet explain why they watch large amounts of television. I want to use this example to explore ways that media scholars might supplement explorations of the self as mediated by texts with attention to the ways the viewing self is articulated in everyday discourses about television by viewers. An American Folk Category of Pleasure I said I'm sorry this is late. I just couldn't work on it over the weekend. I just veged out in front of the TV the whole weekend. I realise that's not much of an excuse…but…I had my Arabic test Thursday and I was too burned out afterward to do anything. I had to let my brain recharge. [text one] Let's just veg out tonight. We both had a big lunch, let's just make some popcorn and watch whatever stupid stuff is on TV. Unless you want to get a video. [text two] God, we didn't do anything this weekend. We just sat in front of the TV. (laughs) It was a total veg out weekend, we ordered out every night. John was on the rig for two weeks and then he's had to work late every night since he's been back, and I've had this activity and that activity with the kids, and girl scouts and soccer... We really needed the break. [text three] In the interest of brevity, I offer only three texts here.1 Anyone who has listened to Americans talk about television can probably multiply these examples many times; most Americans of my generation or later have almost certainly been producers of such discourse at one time or another. Each of these examples is drawn from a different context: a student's explanation for handing in a late paper [text one], a wife's suggestion for evening plans [text two], a friend sharing information about her family [text three]. And each is part of the language of experience – the language people use to describe emotions, sensations, and thoughts and, in so doing, articulate a self. 'Veging out' -- the 'veg--' prefix is borrowed from the word 'vegetable' and pronounced with a soft g -- is a nice example of a local taxonomic category of pleasure and the way it is embedded in more complex discursive formations, which it both replicates and refracts. In American society, where sitting in front of the television when there are other things to do is condemned as a waste of time that makes one a 'couch potato,' 'veging out' allows actors to reconstitute 'being a vegetable' as an empowering choice, an intentional and temporary vegetative state one escapes into as a means to relax, reduce stress and 'get away' from one's troubles. Veging out involves escape but specifies that one is escaping to nowhere, that an avoidance of critical mental activity is precisely what is sought. The claim to be veging out thus accepts the general American public discourse of television as a wasteland – the 'waste' in particular involving waste of time -- and simultaneously challenges it by claiming, in essence, that one has a right to do nothing if one has been working 'too hard'. There is nothing fanciful or even insightful in this analysis; discourses in which Americans talk about their television viewing activity tend to be both straightforward and redundant. Americans who say they spent an evening veging out are likely to follow the statement with an explanation of why they are entitled to veg out -- a litany of stresses or labours -- and sometimes also assertions to confirm that the world they escaped to was indeed a place that involved minimal mental activity. For example, the student in Text One quoted above followed it up with the comment, 'There was absolutely nothing on worth watching'. The woman who produced Text Three commented a few lines later, 'It was practically all commercials, nothing could hold my interest because it was always being interrupted. I hardly ever watch TV, I hadn't realised how many commercials there are'. This latter comment also positions the activity as a rare one for this person, emphasising the strategic nature of veging out as a life choice and hence acceptable within American understandings of choice.2 People's own modes of articulation may thus even deny their motivations involve pleasure.3 Choosing to enter the wasteland of television certainly can be, and often is, constructed as a bad choice. As Beeman demonstrates in his analysis of the language of choice in American advertising, making a choice is often constituted as not enough -- one must make the 'right' choice. Discourse about 'veging out' partly forecloses the possibility of the instance described being a bad choice by embedding the choice in the matrix of suffering. Yet as Carbaugh discovers in his sociolinguistic appraisal of TV talk shows, doing something 'wrong' can nonetheless be valorised in America by its formulation as a deliberate exercise of one's right to choose. The moral wrongness of the particular choice is redeemed by the articulation of a self exercising its right to make its own choices, and taking responsibility for those choices. The power of 'veging out' as a representation of social action thus lies in its ability to simultaneously embrace the widespread discourse that 'television is a wasteland' while at the same time subsuming it under the important American discourse of choice. In so doing, it allows Americans to construct themselves as hard--working individuals who choose to waste time as a strategy for resolving the stresses and discomforts of hard work. One articulates a viewing self, that is, which is consonant with the fundamental values of American culture. The Viewing Self The 'viewing self' is that self, or that aspect of the self, constructed through experiences of viewing events and activities in which the person is not a participant. In the contemporary world, such viewing has increased as an activity, accommodated and mediated by film, television, video and other technologies. These technologies offer, among other things, the opportunity for virtual experiences, events and activities that we do not experience with our bodies but which nonetheless offer us comparable fodder for our cognitive processes (Drummond). Studies of the self as viewer have long been dominated in media studies by attention to these virtual experiences as internal. From the early argument that the self is 'interpellated' by the culture industry (Adorno), to the argument that the self is socially and politically positioned in dominated, negotiating or resistant ways (Hall), to the idea of the self as simultaneously occupying multiple (and shifting) spectator positions (Modleski, Williams, Clover, Caton), emphasis has long been on how the viewer experiences structured sets of symbols, appropriates them at various levels of cohesion, cognitively and affectively orders them with regard to pre--existing understandings of and feelings about the world, and uses them in the ongoing construction of the self. I am suggesting here the utility of turning our attention from internal to external articulations of self as viewer. I want to argue that in addition to engaging with the content of the viewing experience, people usually engage with the meaning of the viewing experience as an activity. The viewing experience is never just about engagement with content about what one watches. It is also about the activities of 'watching TV,' 'renting a video,' and 'going to the movies.' Each of these is an experience that must be internally evaluated with regard to one's pre--existing sense of self, and which may have to be verbally articulated in interaction with others. In the latter case, it provides yet more fodder for the construction of the self, as we see versions of ourselves mirrored in the responses of the other to our own self--performance. Given the plethora of media, genres, places and events in which visual media are watched, speaking with others about one's television viewing maps one onto a complex terrain of distinctions about one's taste. One's 'taste' is never innocent, because it ties in to a complex social code that relates it to class, gender, ethnicity, education, and other social categories (Bourdieu). To represent ourselves to others as viewers of any particular kind of media is to position ourselves as particular kinds of persons in relation to others. One can use this code to articulate oneself as a particular kind of person vis--à--vis those with whom one is interacting: an equal who shares common tastes, a superior who enjoys more refined discernment, a populist who revels in his or her common tastes. To speak of our viewing allows us to generate social contact on grounds of shared experience. It allows us to confirm our tastes with regard to the social others who serve as mirrors to our selves. Of course, persons are never omnicompetent in their self--presentations, and efforts to present the self in particular ways can backfire, so that instead of appearing as a woman of discernment one appears pompous; and instead of appearing as a common Joe, one comes across as vulgar. Talking about viewing, in other words, always involves risk. In examining how people manage this risk in their social interactions, as through framing their experience as 'veging out,' we can learn much about how people construct themselves as viewers. Conclusion 'Veging out' is not the only verbal strategy by means of which Americans solve the conundrum of the viewing self. Nor is there anything unique in this American conundrum. Ethnographic accounts clearly demonstrate that many societies offer public condemnatory discourses about television that are at odds with actual viewing practices. The content of television in Belize is 'destroying a whole generation' (Wilk), in Egypt it's a flood of 'moral pollution' (Armbrust), in the Netherlands it's 'an embarrassment' (Alasuutaari). People's ways of speaking about themselves as viewers are clearly often a result of an ambivalence born of their pleasure, on the one hand, and their understanding that one should not be getting pleasure from such stuff, on the other. The result is often discourse that expresses guilt, or embarrassment, as summed up by Alasuutari's informant who said 'I'm ashamed to admit it, but I watch Dallas.' Alasuutari's reliance on interviewing, though, captures the conundrum but not the cultural solutions. An interview with a sociologist is a very different kind of speech act from the quotidian contexts in which people construct themselves as television viewers in interaction with friends, family, the person sitting next to you at the bar, and so forth (Briggs). My objective in this brief exercise is to draw our attention away from interviewing toward ethnography, and away from attention to internal subjectivities to the interactive contexts in which the self is constructed in everyday life. Notes 1 These three examples were all collected among American expatriates while I was teaching at the American University in Cairo. 2 Individual performances of this discourse are always strategic, of course; their articulation shaped by the speakers understanding of the speech event in which they take place. 3 The American discomfort with spending one's leisure pleasurably has been long chronicled. As early as the 1920s the Lynds found the people of Middletown uncomfortable with talking about reading for pleasure rather than instruction and profit. People did not want to articulate themselves as persons who wasted time (Lynd and Lynd 1929: 225) References Adorno, Theodor. 'The Culture Industry Reconsidered.' The Adorno Reader. Ed. Brian O'Connor. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 230-38. Alasuutari, Pertti. ''I'm Ashamed to Admit it, but I have Watched Dallas:' The Moral Hierarchy of Television Programmes.' Media, Culture and Society 14 (1992): 561-582. Armbrust, Walter. Mass Culture and Modernisation in Egypt. Cambridge: University Press, 1996. Beeman, William O. 'Freedom to Choose: Symbolic Values in American Advertising.' The Symbolisation of America. Ed. Herve Varenne. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1986 Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1984. Briggs, Charles. Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Carbaugh, Donal. Talking American: Cultural Discourses on Donahue. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1989. Caton, Steven C. Lawrence of Arabia: a Film's Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Drummond, Lee. American Dreamtime: A Cultural Analysis of Popular Movies and Their Implications for a Science of Humanity. Lanham, MD: Littlefield Adams, 1995. Hall, Stuart. 'Culture, the Media and the 'Ideological Effect.' ' Mass Communication and Society. Ed. James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woolacott. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. - - - . 'The Rediscovery of 'Ideology:' The Return of the Repressed in Media Studies. Culture, Society and the Media. Ed. Michael Gurevitch, T. Bennett, James Curran and Janet Woolacott. London: Methuen, 1982. Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchco*ck and Feminist Analysis. New York: Routledge, 1988 Polanyi, Livia. Telling the American Story. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989 Wilk, Richard. ''It's Destroying a Whole Generation:' Television and Moral Discourse in Belize.' Visual Anthropology 5 (1995): 229-44. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Peterson, Mark Allen. "Choosing the Wasteland" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Peterson.html &gt. Chicago Style Peterson, Mark Allen, "Choosing the Wasteland" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Peterson.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Peterson, Mark Allen. (2002) Choosing the Wasteland. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Peterson.html &gt ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

Introduction The exhibition of an artist’s work is traditionally accepted as representing the final stage of the creative process (Staniszewski). This article asks, however, whether this traditional view can be reassessed so that the curatorial practice of mounting an exhibition becomes, itself, a creative outcome feeding into work that may still be in progress, and that simultaneously operates as a learning and teaching tool. To provide a preliminary examination of the issue, we use a single case study approach, taking an example of practice currently used at an Australian university. In this program, internal and external students work together to develop and deliver an exhibition of their own work in progress. The exhibition space has a professional website (‘CQUniversity Noosa Exhibition Space’), many community members and the local media attend exhibition openings, and the exhibition (which runs for three to four weeks) becomes an outcome students can include in their curriculum vitae. This article reflects on the experiences, challenges, and outcomes that have been gained through this process over the past twelve months. Due to this time frame, the case study is exploratory and its findings are provisional. The case study is an appropriate method to explore a small sample of events (in this case exhibitions) as, following Merriam, it allows the construction of a richer picture of an under-examined phenomenon to be constructed. Although it is clear that this approach will not offer results which can be generalised, it can, nevertheless, assist in opening up a field for investigation and constructing a holistic account of a phenomenon (in this case, the exhibition space as authentic learning experience and productive teaching tool), for, as Merriam states, “much can be learned from a particular case” (51). Jennings adds that even the smallest case study is useful as it includes an “in-depth examination of the subject with which to confirm or contest received generalizations” (14). Donmoyer extends thoughts on this, suggesting that the single case study is extremely useful as the “restricted conception of generalizability … solely in terms of sampling and statistical significance is no longer defensible or functional” (45). Using the available student course feedback, anonymous end-of-term course evaluations, and other available information, this case study account offers an example of what Merriam terms a “narrative description” (51), which seeks to offer readers the opportunity to engage and “learn vicariously from an encounter with the case” (Merriam 51) in question. This may, we propose, be particularly productive for other educators since what is “learn[ed] in a particular case can be transferred to similar situations” (Merriam 51). Breaking Ground exhibition, CQUniversity Noosa Exhibition Space, 2014. Photo by Ulrike Sturm. Background The Graduate Certificate of Creative Industries (Creative Practice) (CQU ‘CB82’) was developed in 2011 to meet the national Australian Quality Framework agency’s Level 8 (Graduate Certificate) standards in terms of what is called in their policies, the “level” of learning. This states that, following the program, graduates from this level of program “will have advanced knowledge and skills for professional or highly skilled work and/or further learning … [and] will apply knowledge and skills to demonstrate autonomy, well-developed judgment, adaptability and responsibility as a practitioner or learner” (AQF). The program was first delivered in 2012 and, since then, has been offered both two and three terms a year, attracting small numbers of students each term, with an average of 8 to 12 students a term. To meet these requirements, such programs are sometimes developed to provide professional and work-integrated learning tasks and learning outcomes for students (Patrick et al., Smith et al.). In this case, professionally relevant and related tasks and outcomes formed the basis for the program, its learning tasks, and its assessment regime. To this end, each student enrolled in this program works on an individual, self-determined (but developed in association with the teaching team and with feedback from peers) creative/professional project that is planned, developed, and delivered across one term of study for full- time students and two terms for part- timers. In order to ensure the AQF-required professional-level outcomes, many projects are designed and/or developed in partnership with professional arts institutions and community bodies. Partnerships mobilised utilised in this way have included those with local, state, and national bodies, including the local arts community, festivals, and educational support programs, as well as private business and community organisations. Student interaction with curation occurs regularly at art schools, where graduate and other student shows are scheduled as a regular events on the calendar of most tertiary art schools (Al-Amri), and the curated exhibition as an outcome has a longstanding tradition in tertiary fine arts education (Webb, Brien, and Burr). Yet in these cases, it is ultimately the creative work on show that is the focus of the learning experience and assessment process, rather than any focus on engagement with the curatorial process itself (Dally et al.). When art schools do involve students in the curatorial process, the focus usually still remains on the students' creative work (Sullivan). Another interaction with curation is when students undertaking a tertiary-level course or program in museum, and/or curatorial practice are engaged in the process of developing, mounting, and/or critiquing curated activities. These programs are, however, very small in number in Australia, where they are only offered at postgraduate level, with the exception of an undergraduate program at the University of Canberra (‘215JA.2’). By adopting “the exhibition” as a component of the learning process rather than its end product, including documentation of students’ work in progress as exhibition pieces, and incorporating it into a more general creative industries focused program, we argue that the curatorial experience can become an interactive learning platform for students ranging from diverse creative disciplines. The Student Experience Students in the program under consideration in this case study come from a wide spectrum of the creative industries, including creative writing, film, multimedia, music, and visual arts. Each term, at least half of the enrolments are distance students. The decision to establish an on-campus exhibition space was an experimental strategy that sought to bring together students from different creative disciplines and diverse locations, and actively involve them in the exhibition development and curatorial process. As well as their individual project work, the students also bring differing levels of prior professional experience to the program, and exhibit a wide range of learning styles and approaches when developing and completing their creative works and exegetical reflections. To cater for the variations listed above, but still meet the program milestones and learning outcomes that must (under the program rules) remain consistent for each student, we employed a multi-disciplinary approach to teaching that included strategies informed by Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner, Frames of Mind), which proposed and defined seven intelligences, and repeatedly criticised what he identified as an over-reliance on linguistic and logical indices as identifiers of intelligence. He asserted that these were traditional indicators of high scores on most IQ measures or tests of achievement but were not representative of overall levels of intelligence. Gardner later reinforced that, “unless individuals take a very active role in what it is that they’re studying, unless they learn to ask questions, to do things hands on, to essentially re-create things in their own mind and transform them as is needed, the ideas just disappear” (Edutopia). In alignment with Gardner’s views, we have noted that students enrolled in the program demonstrate strengths in several key intelligence areas, particularly interpersonal, musical, body-kinaesthetic, and spacial/visual intelligences (see Gardner, ‘Multiple Intelligences’, 8–18). To cater for, and further develop, these strengths, and also for the external students who were unable to attend university-based workshop sessions, we developed a range of resources with various approaches to hands-on creative tasks that related to the projects students were completing that term. These resources included the usual scholarly articles, books, and textbooks but were also sourced from the print and online media, guest speaker presentations, and digital sites such as You Tube and TED Talks, and through student input into group discussions. The positive reception of these individual project-relevant resources is evidenced in the class online discussion forums, where consecutive groups of students have consistently reflected on the positive impact these resources have had on their individual creative projects: This has been a difficult week with many issues presenting. As part of our Free Writing exercise in class, we explored ‘brain dumping’ and wrote anything (no matter how ridiculous) down. The great thing I discovered after completing this task was that by allowing myself to not censor my thoughts by compiling a writing masterpiece, I was indeed “free” to express everything. …. … I understand that this may not have been the original intended goal of Free Writing – but it is something I would highly recommend external students to try and see if it works for you (Student 'A', week 5, term 1 2015, Moodle reflection point). I found our discussion about crowdfunding particularly interesting. ... I intend to look at this model for future exhibitions. I think it could be a great way for me to look into developing an exhibition of paintings alongside some more commercial collateral such as prints and cards (Student 'B', week 6, term 1 2015, Moodle reflection point). In class I specifically enjoyed the black out activity and found the online videos exceptional, inspiring and innovating. I really enjoyed this activity and it was something that I can take away and use within the classroom when educating (Student 'C', week 8, term 1 2015, Moodle reflection point). The application of Gardner’s principles and strategies dovetailed with our framework for assessing learning outcomes, where we were guided by Boud’s seven propositions for assessment reform in higher education, which aim to “set directions for change, designed to enhance learning achievements for all students and improve the quality of their experience” (26). Boud asserts that assessment has most effect when: it is used to engage students in productive learning; feedback is used to improve student learning; students and teachers become partners in learning and assessment; students are inducted into the assessment practices of higher education; assessment and learning are placed at the centre of subject and program design; assessment and learning is a focus for staff and institutional development; and, assessment provides inclusive and trustworthy representation of student achievement. These propositions were integral to the design of learning outcomes for the exhibition. Teachers worked with students, individually and as a group, to build their capacity to curate the exhibition, and this included such things as the design and administration of invitations, and also the physical placement of works within the exhibition space. In this way, teachers and students became partners in the process of assessment. The final exhibition, as a learning outcome, meant that students were engaged in productive learning that placed both assessment and knowledge at the centre of subject and project design. It is a collation of creative pieces that embodies the class, as a whole; however, each piece also represents the skills and creativity of individual students and, in this way, are is a trustworthy representations of student achievement. While we aimed to employ all seven recommendations, our main focus was on ensuring that the exhibition, as an authentic learning experience, was productive and that the students were engaged as responsible and accountable co-facilitators of it. These factors are particularly relevant as almost all the students were either currently working, or planning to work, in their chosen creative field, where the work would necessarily involve both publication, performance, and/or exhibition of their artwork plus collaborative practice across disciplinary boundaries to make this happen (Brien). For this reason, we provided exhibition-related coursework tasks that we hoped were engaging and that also represented an authentic learning outcome for the students. Student Curatorship In this context, the opportunity to exhibit their own works-in-progress provided an authentic reason, with a deadline, for students to both work, and reflect, on their creative projects. The documentation of each student’s creative process was showcased as a stand-alone exhibition piece within the display. These exhibits not only served not only to highlight the different learning styles of each student, but also proved to inspire creativity and skill development. They also provided a working model whereby students (and potential enrollees) could view other students’ work and creative processes from inception to fully-realised project outcomes. The sample online reflections quoted above not only highlight the effectiveness of the online content delivery, but this engagement with the online forum also allowed remote students to comment on each other’s projects as well as to and respond to issues they were encountering in their project planning and development and creative practice. It was essential that this level of peer engagement was fostered for the curatorial project to be viable, as both internal and external students are involved in designing the invitation, catalogue, labels, and design of the space, while on-campus students hang and label work according to the group’s directions. Distance students send in items. This is a key point of this experiment: the process of curating an exhibition of work from diverse creative fields, and from students located thousands of kilometres apart, as a way of bringing cohesion to a diverse cohort of students. That cohesiveness provided an opportunity for authentic learning to occur because it was in relation to a task that each student apparently understood as personally, academically, and professionally relevant. This was supported by the anonymous course evaluation comments, which were overwhelmingly positive about the exhibition process – there were no negative comments regarding this aspect of the program, and over 60 per cent of the class supplied these evaluations. This also met a considerable point of anxiety in the current university environment whereby actively engaging students in online learning interactions is a continuing issue (Dixon, Dixon, and Axmann). A key question is: what relevance does this curatorial process have for a student whose field is not visual art, but, for instance, music, film, or writing? By displaying documentation of work in progress, this process connects students of all disciplines with an audience. For example, one student in 2014 who was a singer/songwriter, had her song available to be played on a laptop, alongside photographs of the studio when she was recording her song with her band. In conjunction with this, the cover artwork for her CD, together with the actual CD and CD cover, were framed and exhibited. Another student, who was also a musician but who was completing a music history project, sent in pages of the music transcriptions he had been working on during the course. This manuscript was bound and exhibited in a way that prompted some audience members to commented that it was like an artist’s book as well as a collection of data. Both of these students lived over 1,000 kilometres from the campus where the exhibition was held, but they were able to share with us as teaching staff, as well as with other students who were involved in the physical setting up of the exhibition, exactly how they envisaged their work being displayed. The feedback from both of these students was that this experience gave them a strong connection to the program. They described how, despite the issue of distance, they had had the opportunity to participate in a professional event that they were very keen to include on their curricula vitae. Another aspect of students actively participating in the curation of an exhibition which features work from diverse disciplines is that these students get a true sense of the collaborative interconnectedness of the disciplines of the creative industries (Brien). By way of example, the exhibit of the singer/songwriter referred to above involved not only the student and her band, but also the photographer who took the photographs, and the artist who designed the CD cover. Students collaboratively decided how this material was handled in the exhibition catalogue – all these names were included and their roles described. Breaking Ground exhibition, CQUniversity Noosa Exhibition Space, 2014. Photo by Ulrike Sturm. Outcomes and Conclusion We believe that the curation of an exhibition and the delivery of its constituent components raises student awareness that they are, as creatives, part of a network of industries, developing in them a genuine understanding of the way the creating industries works as a profession outside the academic setting. It is in this sense that this curatorial task is an authentic learning experience. In fact, what was initially perceived as a significant challenge—, that is, exhibiting work in progress from diverse creative fields—, has become a strength of the curatorial project. In reflecting on the experiences and outcomes that have occurred through the implementation of this example of curatorial practice, both as a learning tool and as a creative outcome in its own right, a key positive indicator for this approach is the high level of student satisfaction with the course, as recorded in the formal, anonymous university student evaluations (with 60–100 per cent of these completed for each term, when the university benchmark is 50 per cent completion), and the high level of professional outcomes achieved post-completion. The university evaluation scores have been in the top (4.5–5/.5) range for satisfaction over the program’s eight terms of delivery since 2012. Particularly in relation to subsequent professional outcomes, anecdotal feedback has been that the curatorial process served as an authentic and engaged learning experience because it equipped the students, now graduates, of the program with not only knowledge about how exhibitions work, but also a genuine understanding of the web of connections between the diverse creative arts and industries. Indeed, a number of students have submitted proposals to exhibit professionally in the space after graduation, again providing anecdotal feedback that the experience they gained through our model has had a sustaining impact on their creative practice. While the focus of this activity has been on creative learning for the students, it has also provided an interesting and engaging teaching experience for us as the program’s staff. We will continue to gather evidence relating to our model, and, with the next iteration of the exhibition project, a more detailed comparative analysis will be attempted. At this stage, with ethics approval, we plan to run an anonymous survey with all students involved in this activity, to develop questions for a focus group discussion with graduates. We are also in the process of contacting alumni of the program regarding professional outcomes to map these one, two, and five years after graduation. We will also keep a record of what percentage of students apply to exhibit in the space after graduation, as this will also be an additional marker of how professional and useful they perceive the experience to be. In conclusion, it can be stated that the 100 per cent pass rate and 0 per cent attrition rate from the program since its inception, coupled with a high level (over 60 per cent) of student progression to further post-graduate study in the creative industries, has not been detrimentally affected by this curatorial experiment, and has encouraged staff to continue with this approach. References Al-Amri, Mohammed. “Assessment Techniques Practiced in Teaching Art at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman.” International Journal of Education through Art 7.3 (2011): 267–282. AQF Levels. Australian Qualifications Framework website. 18 June 2015 ‹http://www.aqf.edu.au/aqf/in-detail/aqf-levels/›. Boud, D. Student Assessment for Learning in and after Courses: Final Report for Senior Fellowship. Sydney: Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2010. Brien, Donna Lee, “Higher Education in the Corporate Century: Choosing Collaborative rather than Entrepreneurial or Competitive Models.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 4.2 (2007): 157–170. Brien, Donna Lee, and Axel Bruns, eds. “Collaborate.” M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). 18 June 2015 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605›. Burton, D. Exhibiting Student Art: The Essential Guide for Teachers. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, New York, 2006. CQUniversity. CB82 Graduate Certificate in Creative Industries. 18 July 2015 ‹https://handbook.cqu.edu.au/programs/index?programCode=CB82›. CQUniversity Noosa Exhibition Space. 20 July 2015 ‹http://www.cqunes.org›. Dally, Kerry, Allyson Holbrook, Miranda Lawry and Anne Graham. “Assessing the Exhibition and the Exegesis in Visual Arts Higher Degrees: Perspectives of Examiners.” Working Papers in Art & Design 3 (2004). 27 June 2015 ‹http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpades/vol3/kdabs.html›. Degree Shows, Sydney College of the Arts. 2014. 18 June 2015 ‹http://sydney.edu.au/sca/galleries-events/degree-shows/index.shtml› Dixon, Robert, Kathryn Dixon, and Mandi Axmann. “Online Student Centred Discussion: Creating a Collaborative Learning Environment.” Hello! Where Are You in the Landscape of Educational Technology? Proceedings ASCILITE, Melbourne 2008. 256–264. Donmoyer, Robert. “Generalizability and the Single-Case Study.” Case Study Method: Key Issues, Key Texts. Eds. Roger Gomm, Martyn Hammersley, and Peter Foster. 2000. 45–68. Falk, J.H. “Assessing the Impact of Exhibit Arrangement on Visitor Behavior and Learning.” Curator: The Museum Journal 36.2 (1993): 133–146. Flyvbjerg, Bent. “Five Misunderstandings about Case-Study Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 12.2 (2006): 219–245. Gardner, H. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, New York: Basic Books, 1983. ———. Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons in Theory and Practice, New York: Basic Books, 2006. George Lucas Education Foundation. 2015 Edutopia – What Works in Education. 16 June 2015 ‹http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-howard-gardner-video#graph3›. Gerring, John. “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?” American Political Science Review 98.02 (2004): 341–354. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. “Museums and Communication: An Introductory Essay.” Museum, Media, Message 1 (1995): 1. Jennings, Paul. The Public House in Bradford, 1770-1970. Keele: Keele University Press, 1995. Levy, Jack S. “Case Studies: Types, Designs, and Logics of Inference.” Conflict Management and Peace Science 25.1 (2008): 1–18. Merriam, Sharan B. Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation: Revised and Expanded from Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education. Jossey-Bass, 2009. Miles, M., and S. Rainbird. From Critical Distance to Engaged Proximity: Rethinking Assessment Methods to Enhance Interdisciplinary Collaborative Learning in the Creative Arts and Humanities. Final Report to the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching, Sydney. 2013. Monash University. Rethinking Assessment to Enhance Interdisciplinary Collaborative Learning in the Creative Arts and Humanities. Sydney: Office of Learning and Teaching, 2013. Muller, L. Reflective Curatorial Practice. 17 June 2015 ‹http://research.it.uts.edu.au/creative/linda/CCSBook/Jan%2021%20web%20pdfs/Muller.pdf›. O’Neill, Paul. Curating Subjects. London: Open Editions, 2007. Patrick, Carol-Joy, Deborah Peach, Catherine Pocknee, Fleur Webb, Marty Fletcher, and Gabriella Pretto. The WIL (Work Integrated Learning) Report: A National Scoping Study [Final Report]. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2008. Rule, A.C. “Editorial: The Components of Authentic Learning.” Journal of Authentic Learning 3.1 (2006): 1–10. Seawright, Jason, and John Gerring. “Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research: A Menu of Qualitative and Quantitative Options.” Political Research Quarterly 61.2 (2008): 294–308. Smith, Martin, Sally Brooks, Anna Lichtenberg, Peter McIlveen, Peter Torjul, and Joanne Tyler. Career Development Learning: Maximising the Contribution of Work-Integrated Learning to the Student Experience. Final project report, June 2009. Wollongong: University of Wollongong, 2009. Sousa, D.A. How the Brain Learns: A Teacher’s Guide. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2001. Stake, R. “Qualitative Case Studies”. The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. 3rd ed. Eds. N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005. 433-466. Staniszewski, Mary Anne. The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Sullivan, Graeme. Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010. University of Canberra. “Bachelor of Heritage, Museums and Conservation (215JA.2)”. Web. 27 July 2015. Ventzislavov, R. “Idle Arts: Reconsidering the Curator.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72.1 (2014): 83–93. Verschuren, P. “Case Study as a Research Strategy: Some Ambiguities and Opportunities.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 6.2 (2003): 121–139. Webb, Jen, and Donna Lee Brien. “Preparing Graduates for Creative Futures: Australian Creative Arts Programs in a Globalising Society.” Partnerships for World Graduates, AIC (Academia, Industry and Community) 2007 Conference, RMIT, Melbourne, 28–30 Nov. 2007. Webb, Jen, Donna Lee Brien, and Sandra Burr. “Doctoral Examination in the Creative Arts: Process, Practices and Standards.” Final Report. Canberra: Office of Learning and Teaching, 2013. Yin, Robert K. Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013.

Abstract:

Women in Universities Women have been fighting for the right to participate in universities since 1873, when Sophia Jex Blake went to court with her fight to enrol at Edinburgh University. In rejecting her application, one of the judges stated: It is a belief, widely entertained, that there is a great difference in the mental constitution of the two sexes, just as there is in their physical conformation. The powers and susceptibilities of women are as noble as those of men; but they are thought to be different, and, in particular, it is considered that they have not the same power of intense labour as men .... (Scutt 224) In Australia, from the 1850s to the 1880s, both the University of Sydney and The University of Melbourne refused to admit women as students. In 1879, the Chancellor of the University of Sydney suggested that: The best course to be taken by advocates of advanced education for women, would be to found some sort of affiliated college for them in the vicinity of the University ... if there really be a widespread wish on the part of young women for a higher education ..." (Scutt 228). Having finally won the right to study at university in 1881, and to enter the academic workforce, women are still finding many of the old prejudices remain. Numerous studies have demonstrated that women's experiences in academe are qualitatively different from men's and that women are systematically paid lower salaries than men of equivalent academic achievement, age and length of service (Bagilhole 431-47; Loder 713-4; McElrath 269-81;). Studies have shown that differences in the experiences of male and female faculty are largely explained by gender (Booth & Burton 312-33; Everett 159-75; Over & Lancaster 309-18; Ready 7) and sex discrimination is highlighted as an ongoing contributor to the inequity (Allport 5-8; Hall & Swadener 1; Tuohy 8). A recent UNESCO-Commonwealth (http://www.unesco.org/) report states that: ... in spite of advances which women have made in many areas of public life in the past two decades, in the area of higher education management they are still a long way from participating on the same footing as men. With hardly an exception, the global picture is one of men outnumbering women at about five to one at middle management level and at about twenty to one at senior management level (Singh 4). The introduction in Australia of Sex Discrimination legislation (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/sex_discrimination/) in 1984 and more recently, Affirmative Action policies ( http://www.austlii.edu.au/) in employment and promotion rounds in some universities has not improved women's situation to the extent expected. In 1978, women held 16% of full time academic posts while gaining 25% of all higher degrees and 30% of undergraduate degrees (Commonwealth Government statistics cited by Over and McKenzie 61-71). In 1999, 54% of students were women yet women's participation in academe had only increased to 35% (DETYA) (http://www.deet.gov.au/). Women are mainly employed at the lowest academic levels. In 1999, 72% of women were employed at Levels A and B (Associate Lecturer/Lecturer) compared to 46% of men, with only 8% of women reaching Levels D and E (Associate Professor/Professor) compared to 26% of men. Women continue to be clustered in the traditionally female areas of Health, Education and Arts while few seem to have successfully broken through the barriers in the traditionally male areas of Engineering, Architecture or Agriculture (DETYA) (http://www.deet.gov.au/). Business has traditionally been viewed as a male preserve but enrolments have increased to the point where women almost equal men. However, the staff ratio of men to women remains very low at 70/30 (DETYA) (http://www.deet.gov.au/). The slow growth rate for women in academe belies the fact that more women than men are now completing university degrees. The purpose of this study was to determine how well the experiences of academic women in the male-dominated faculties of business and commerce, reflect the literature on women in universities, in general. Previous empirical studies have found inequitable treatment of women without necessarily exploring the processes of discrimination. The Study This study involved interviews with academic women who had been employed in faculties of business and commerce for at least five years. The research used the 'snowballing' technique: participants initially comprised women known to me but as these women told female colleagues of my study I was given the names of other women who were willing to participate. Participants comprised twenty-one women from three universities in Western Australia, two universities in New South Wales and one Victorian university. One woman had recently left academe and started her own business because of discriminatory practices she had encountered and another was contemplating leaving. In each university, women comprised a minority of the faculty and felt disadvantaged in some way. A semi-structured interview was used to explore with the women the issues that had been identified from previous studies of sex discrimination in the academic profession. Open-ended questions were used and the interviews conducted face to face, or, in the case of those interstate, via telephone or email. The women spoke frankly about their experiences. Findings and Discussion Promotion Each of the women in this study said that their university had established an internal promotion policy based on merit. However, they felt the greatest problem they had encountered in gaining promotion was in determining the criteria upon which they would be judged each year, and in meeting those criteria. "I have been chasing promotion for over five years. At first I was told that I would not be promoted until I got my masters degree so I worked really hard to complete it but then a male colleague was promoted without a masters. Once I got the masters I was told I needed to publish to be promoted but in the next year someone else was promoted without any publications. You go all out to meet the criteria each year but in the next year the promotions committee changes and so do the criteria for that year"(Lecturer applying for Senior Lecturer position). The promotion procedure at one university was explained by a Senior Lecturer who had served on promotion committees on two occasions. "There are about ten criteria upon which promotion can be based. When the applications are received we all get together to determine which are the criteria to be applied. In the last promotion round only four of the ten criteria were used so only people satisfying those criteria were selected." When asked whether the criteria were the same as the previous year she replied: "Last year there was more emphasis on qualifications and publications. This year community involvement and involvement in university affairs were judged as more important ... it varies from year to year". On questioning about the promotion procedures at their universities, women stated they were largely dissatisfied with the process, that they were presumed to be satisfied with their lot while the men were actively encouraged to apply. "I was told not to bother to apply (for a senior lecturer position) as I would not get it ... that there was a queue of people to be promoted before me - (named males) - and until they were promoted, I would not be considered" (Lecturer). "The position was advertised with a specific male applicant in mind and specifically excluded me by stating that the appointee must have supervisory experience. Women in my department are not given the opportunity to supervise students so I didn't even bother applying."(Lecturer aspiring to a Senior Lecturer position). One woman, upon inquiring why she was not promoted, was told that she should be grateful to have tenure and asked why she wanted to be promoted, anyway. "They would never have said that to a male, they would have expected a male to be working towards promotion" (Associate Lecturer). All women interviewed stated that they had problems keeping up with the 'goal posts' which moved from year to year. The 'moving of the goal posts' is one means by which universities are able to maintain the position of women at lower levels. Unsurprisingly, some women said they felt that promotion at their university was based on politics rather than merit. However, defining merit in universities is problematic. According to Burton (430), definitions of what is meritorious depend upon the power of particular groups to define it and, as a result, can change. The narrow view of merit is 'the best person for the job' which Burton (113) describes as an "overwhelming tendency to select in your own image". Burton (430) and Allport (5) claim universities define merit along male cultural lines with current selection, remuneration and career progression practices strongly influenced by an underlying gender bias. Burton (430) argues that there is still a tendency for work to be ranked as 'men's' or women's work with lower status attributed to the latter and an assumption that different skills and abilities are needed for each. Over and McKenzie (61-71) claim that women are disadvantaged by the fact that invalid merit criteria are applied to them which men as a group are more likely to satisfy. They state that the academic careers of most women do not fit the stereotypic male experience and it is mainly men who decide whether women should be promoted. At one university in the study, the merit criteria for senior lecturer include the requirement that aspirants have a number of overseas conference presentations. "Some of us are single working mothers and overseas conference attendance is out of the question because who's going to mind our children while we are away? The senior males were astonished when I mentioned that this was a problem for me. It had never occurred to them" (Associate Lecturer on why women at her university do not apply for promotion). Family Responsibilities The women commented on the numerous difficulties they had encountered in combining an academic career with responsibility for children. They felt that certain male faculty members perceived married women with children as lacking in career commitment, whereas married men with families were viewed as being more stable and committed to their careers. One married woman claimed that when she needed to go home to tend a sick child, her male Head of Department told her she should "get her priorities right". In 1992, Family Responsibility provisions were added to the Sex Discrimination Act (http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/0/171/top.htm). However, it would appear that individual practice doesn't always follow as a result of changes in policy. Equal Pay On the subject of equal pay for equal work, the women said that they were often paid lower wages than their male colleagues despite having higher qualifications and equivalent teaching and research experience. Some women felt that the barriers between academic levels were used to artificially maintain the wage gap between men and women, regardless of qualifications and ability. This was felt to be particularly the case between the levels of Associate Lecturer (Level A) and Lecturer (Level B). "They find excuses to keep you at Associate Lecturer so that they can pay you less to do the same work that you would be doing as a lecturer ... lecturing, coordinating units and so on"(Associate Lecturer). "There are no men below Lecturer in my Department, either lecturing or with Masters degrees. As soon as they get their Masters they are promoted to Lecturer.... I'm coordinating units as an Associate Lecturer while some male lecturers have less responsibility' (Associate Lecturer with Masters degree and publications) Two women said that they had been performing higher level duties (Level B) for up to five years while working on their Masters but their university refused to pay them at the higher level until they had completed their degree. Even when they satisfied all the requirements for the Masters degree and had a letter from their supervisor saying they had satisfied all the requirements, the university refused to pay them until they had actually graduated, which was some time later. Shortly afterwards their university took on two men to perform the same duties, paying these at the higher level even though they had not completed a masters degree. One former lecturer claimed that she was employed at a time when there was a large turnover of staff in her department. A number of new staff were appointed of whom she was the only female. Although she and the other new staff were all employed at Lecturer Level B, it wasn't until later on that she discovered that the men were appointed at the top of the Lecturer salary scale while she was appointed at the bottom, with a salary differential of about10 000pa. This was despite the fact that both she and the men had similar qualifications and work experience at commencement. Teaching Loads Another complaint by women concerned inequitable teaching loads. An analysis in one Business School showed that women had higher teaching loads while men were given more time off for research. The women complained that the supervision of post-graduate students was divided up between the men, and women were excluded. Since research publication and student supervision are usually the most highly ranked criteria in academic promotion rounds, women who are not given the opportunity to participate in these areas are disadvantaged when applying for promotion. This problem is compounded since women are overwhelmingly employed at the lower levels where responsibility for the majority of teaching takes place. This leaves them with little time left to devote to research even if given the opportunity. The women also said they were often pressured into taking on higher duties than those prescribed in the Position Classification Standards for their level. They tended to acquiesce because of their need to prove they were better than men to gain promotion. One woman said that the extra administrative duties she had been given meant that she had less time for research which actually reduced her prospects for tenure and promotion. She said she didn't dare complain as the men in her department would use it as an excuse to question her commitment to her job. Conclusion An examination of women's perceptions and experiences in the workplace can help us understand the informal processes that work against women. The experiences of the women discussed in this paper provide an insight into the subtle processes that continue to operate in some higher education institutions to prevent women from reaching their full potential. Although equal opportunity legislation (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/about_the_commission/legislation/index.html) has been enacted to prevent discrimination and disadvantage to women, the implementation of policy does not always filter through to the operational levels. It is still possible to circumvent legislation in subtle ways, perhaps without even being aware that these practices are discriminative. The women in this study spoke frankly about their experiences and the difficulties they had encountered in gaining equal recognition to men, with very few satisfied that they were receiving equitable treatment. The women felt that their work was not valued as highly as that of the men they worked with and they were given less opportunities for advancement. Overall, the interviews with the women revealed interesting insights into their experiences in pursuing academic careers and in trying to gain recognition for their achievements. The collective experiences of the women provide an insight into the subtle ways in which disadvantage can be engendered. The findings of this study have serious implications for university administrators, particularly deans and heads of schools. There are many well-qualified women academics and universities cannot afford to overlook the valuable contribution these women can make to teaching, research and university governance. References Allport, Caroline. "Improving Gender Equity: Using Industrial Bargaining". NTEU Frontline4.1 (1996): 5-8. Bacchi, Carol. "The Brick Wall: Why So Few Women Become Senior Academics". Australian Universities Review36.1 (1993): 36-41. Bagilhole, Barbara. "Survivors in a Male Preserve: A Study of British Women Academics' Experiences and Perceptions of Discrimination in a UK University". Higher Education26 (1993): 431-47. Booth, Alison, and Jonathon Burton. "The Position of Women in UK Academic Economics". The Economic Journal110.464 (2000): 312-33. Burton, Clare. "Merit and Gender: Organisations and the Mobilisation of Masculine Bias." Australian Journal of Social Issues22 (1987): 424-35. Burton, Clare. An Equity Review of Staffing Policies and Associated Decision-making at Edith Cowan University. Report commissioned by ECU. 1994. DETYA. Selected Higher Education Statistics. 1999. Everett, James. "Sex, Rank and Qualifications at Australian Universities". Australian Journal of Management19.2 (1994): 159-75. Hall, Elaine, and Beth Blue Swadener. "Chilly Climate: A Study of Subtle Sex Discrimination at a State University". Initiatives (Online)59.3 (2000): 1. Loder, Natasha. "US Science Shocked by Revelations of Sexual Discrimination". Nature405.6787 (2000): 713-4. McElrath, Karen. "Gender, Career Disruption and Academic Rewards". Journal of Higher Education63.3 (1992): 269-81. Over, Ray, and Sandra Lancaster. "The Early Career Patterns of Men and Women in Australian Universities". The Australian Journal of Education28.3 (1984): 309-18. Over, Ray, and Beryl Mckenzie. "Career Prospects for Women in Australian Universities". Journal of Tertiary Educational Administration7.1 (1985): 61-71. Ready, Tinker. "West Coast US Recognizes Academic Gender Bias". Nature Medicine 7.1 (2000): 1. Scutt, Jocelyn. The Sexual Gerrymander.The Law Printer, 1994. Singh, Jasbir. "Women and Management in Higher Education: A Commonwealth Project." A.C.U. Bulletin of Current Documentation. 133 (1998): 2-8. Tuohy, John. "Sex Discrimination Infects Med Schools: Women Say Bias Blocks Chances for Advancement". USA Today2000. 8. Links http://www.unesco.org/ http://www.deet.gov.au/ http://www.hreoc.gov.au/sex_discrimination/ http://www.hreoc.gov.au/about_the_commission/legislation/index.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgibin/disp.pl/au/legis/cth/consol%5fact/aaeofwa 1986634/?query=title+%28+%22affirmative+action%22+%29 http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/0/171/top.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ellis-Newman, Jennifer. "Women and Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Ellis-Newman.xml >. Chicago Style Ellis-Newman, Jennifer, "Women and Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Ellis-Newman.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Ellis-Newman, Jennifer. (2001) Women and Work. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Ellis-Newman.xml > ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

In “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber outline what they term “wicked problems.” According to Rittel and Webber, wicked problems are unavoidably “ill-defined,” that is, unlike “problems in the natural sciences, which are definable and separable and may have solutions that are findable…[wicked problems] are never solved. At best they are only re-solved—over and over again” (160). Rittel and Webber were thinking specifically of the challenges involved in making decisions within immensely complex social circ*mstances—building highways through cities and designing low income housing projects, for example—but public policy-making and urban design are not the only fields rife with wicked problems. Indeed, the nub of Rittel and Webber’s articulation of wicked problems concerns a phenomenon common to many disciplines: interdisciplinary collaboration. As anyone who has collaborated with people outside her area of expertise will acknowledge, interdisciplinary collaboration itself is among the wickedest problems of all. By way of introduction, we direct the Learning Games Initiative (LGI), a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games. In the seven years since LGI was inaugurated, we have undertaken many productive and well-received collaborations, including: 1) leading workshops at national and international conferences; 2) presenting numerous academic talks; 3) editing academic journals; 4) writing books, book chapters, journal articles, and other scholarly materials; 5) exhibiting creative and archival work in museums, galleries, and libraries; and 6) building one of the largest academic research archives of computer games, systems, paraphernalia, and print-, video-, and audio-scholarship in the world. We thus have a fair bit of experience with the wicked problem of collaboration. The purpose of this article is to share some of that experience with readers and to describe candidly some of the challenges we have faced—and sometimes overcome—working collaboratively across disciplinary, institutional, and even international boundaries. Collaborative Circle? Michael Farrell, whose illuminating analysis of “collaborative circles” has lent much to scholars’ understandings of group dynamics within creative contexts, succinctly describes how many such groups form: “A collaborative circle is a set of peers in the same discipline who, through open exchange of support, ideas, and criticism develop into an interdependent group with a common vision that guides their creative work” (266). Farrell’s model, while applicable to several of the smaller projects LGI has nurtured over the years, does not capture the idiosyncratic organizational method that has evolved more broadly within our collective. Rather, LGI has always tended to function according to a model more akin to that found in used car dealerships, one where “no reasonable offer will be refused.” LGI is open to anyone willing to think hard and get their hands dirty, which of course has molded the organization and its projects in remarkable ways. Unlike Farrell’s collaborative circles, for example, LGI’s collaborative model actually decentralizes the group’s study and production of culture. Any member from anywhere—not just “peers in the same discipline”—can initiate or join a project provided she or he is willing to trade in the coin of the realm: sweat equity. Much like the programmers of the open source software movement, LGI’s members work only on what excites them, and with other similarly motivated people. The “buy-in,” simply, is interest and a readiness to assume some level of responsibility for the successes and failures of a given project. In addition to decentralizing the group, LGI’s collaborative model has emerged such that it naturally encourages diversity, swelling our ranks with all kinds of interesting folks, from fine artists to clergy members to librarians. In large part this is because our members view “peers” in the most expansive way possible; sure, optical scientists can help us understand how virtual cameras simulate the real properties of lenses and research linguists can help us design more effective language-in-context tools for our games. However, in an organization that always tries to understand the layers of meaning-making that constitute computer games, such technical expertise is only one stratum. For a game about the cultural politics of ancient Greece that LGI has been working on for the past year, our members invited a musical instrument maker, a potter, and a school teacher to join the development team. These new additions—all experts and peers as far as LGI is concerned—were not merely consultants but became part of the development team, often working in areas of the project completely outside their own specialties. While some outsiders have criticized this project—currently known as “Aristotle’s Assassins”—for being too slow in development, the learning taking place as it moves forward is thrilling to those on the inside, where everyone is learning from everyone else. One common consequence of this dynamic is, as Farrell points out, that the work of the individual members is transformed: “Those who are merely good at their discipline become masters, and, working together, very ordinary people make extraordinary advances in their field” (2). Additionally, the diversity that gives LGI its true interdisciplinarity also makes for praxical as well as innovative projects. The varying social and intellectual concerns of the LGI’s membership means that every collaboration is also an exploration of ethics, responsibility, epistemology, and ideology. This is part of what makes LGI so special: there are multiple levels of learning that underpin every project every day. In LGI we are fond of saying that games teach multiple things in multiple ways. So too, in fact, does collaborating on one of LGI’s projects because members are constantly forced to reevaluate their ways of seeing in order to work with one another. This has been particularly rewarding in our international projects, such as our recently initiated project investigating the relationships among the mass media, new media, and cultural resource management practices. This project, which is building collaborative relationships among a team of archaeologists, game designers, media historians, folklorists, and grave repatriation experts from Cambodia, the Philippines, Australia, and the U.S., is flourishing, not because its members are of the same discipline nor because they share the same ideology. Rather, the team is maturing as a collaborative and productive entity because the focus of its work raises an extraordinary number of questions that have yet to be addressed by national and international researchers. In LGI, much of the sweat equity we contribute involves trying to answer questions like these in ways that are meaningful for our international research teams. In our experience, it is in the process of investigating such questions that effective collaborative relationships are cemented and within which investigators end up learning about more than just the subject matter at hand. They also learn about the micro-cultures, histories, and economies that provide the usually invisible rhetorical infrastructures that ground the subject matter and to which each team member is differently attuned. It is precisely because of this sometimes slow, sometimes tense learning/teaching dynamic—a dynamic too often invoked in both academic and industry settings to discourage collaboration—that François Chesnais calls attention to the fact that collaborative projects frequently yield more benefits than the sum of their parts suggests possible. This fact, says Chesnais, should lead institutions to value collaborative projects more highly as “resource-creating, value-creating and surplus-creating potentialities” (22). Such work is always risky, of course, and Jitendra Mohan, a scholar specializing in cross-cultural collaborations within the field of psychology, writes that international collaboration “raises methodological problems in terms of the selection of culturally-coloured items and their historical as well as semantic meaning…” (314). Mohan means this as a warning and it is heeded as such by LGI members; at the same time, however, it is precisely the identification and sorting out of such methodological problems that seems to excite our best collaborations and most innovative work. Given such promise, it is easy to see why LGI is quite happy to adopt the used car dealer’s slogan “no reasonable offer refused.” In fact, in LGI we see our open-door policy for projects as mirroring our primary object of study: games. This is another factor that we believe contributes to the success of our members’ collaborations. Commercial computer game development is a notoriously interdisciplinary and collaborative endeavor. By collaborating in a fashion similar to professional game developers, LGI members are constantly fashioning more complex understandings of the kinds of production practices and social interactions involved in game development; these practices and interactions are crucial to game studies precisely because they shape what games consist of, how they mean, and the ways in which they are consumed. For this reason, we think it foolish to refuse any reasonable offer to help us explore and understand these meaning-making processes. Wicked Problem Backlash Among the striking points that Rittel and Webber make about wicked problems is that solutions to them are usually created with great care and planning, and yet inevitably suffer severe criticism (at least) or utter annihilation (at worst). Far from being indicative of a bad solution, this backlash against a wicked problem’s solution is an integral element of what we call the “wicked problem dialectic.” The backlash against attempts to establish and nurture transdisciplinary collaboration is easy to document at multiple levels. For example, although our used car dealership model has created a rich research environment, it has also made the quotidian work of doing projects difficult. For one thing, organizing something as simple as a project meeting can take Herculean efforts. The wage earners are on a different schedule than the academics, who are on a different schedule from the artists, who are on a different schedule from the librarians. Getting everyone together in the same room at the same time (even virtually) is like herding cats. As co-directors of LGI, we have done our best to provide the membership with both synchronous and asynchronous resources to facilitate communication (e.g., conference-call enabled phones, online forums, chat clients, file-sharing software, and so on), but nothing beats face-to-face meetings, especially when projects grow complex or deadlines impend mercilessly. Nonetheless, our members routinely fight the meeting scheduling battle, despite the various communication options we have made available through our group’s website and in our physical offices. Most recently we have found that an organizational wiki makes the process of collecting and sharing notes, drawings, videos, segments of code, and drafts of writing decidedly easier than it had been, especially when the projects involve people who do not live a short distance (or a cheap phone call) away from each other. Similarly, not every member has the same amount of time to devote to LGI and its projects despite their considerable and demonstrated interest in them. Some folks are simply busier than others, and cannot contribute to projects as much as they might like. This can be a real problem when a project requires a particular skill set, and the owner of those skills is busy doing other things like working at a paying job or spending time with family. LGI’s projects are always done in addition to members’ regular workload, and it is understandable when that workload has to take precedence. Like regular exercise and eating right, the organization’s projects are the first things to go when life’s demands intrude. Different projects handle this challenge in a variety of ways, but the solutions always tend to reflect the general structure of the project itself. In projects that follow what Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede refer to as “hierarchical collaborations”—projects that are clearly structured, goal-oriented, and define clear roles for its participants—milestones and deadlines are set at the beginning of the project and are often tied to professional rewards that stand-in for a paycheck: recommendation letters, all-expenses-paid conference trips, guest speaking invitations, and so forth (133). Less organized projects—what Lunsford and Ede call “dialogic collaborations”—deal with time scheduling challenges differently. Inherently, dialogic collaborations such as these tend to be less hampered by time because they are loosely structured, accept and often encourage members to shift roles, and often value the process of working toward the project’s goals as highly as actually attaining them (134). The most common adaptive strategy used in these cases is simply for the most experienced members of the team to keep the project in motion. As long as something is happening, dialogic collaborations can be kept fruitful for a very long time, even when collaborators are only able to contribute once or twice a month. In our experience, as long as each project’s collaborators understand its operative expectations—which can, by the way, be a combination of hierarchical and dialogical modes—their work proceeds smoothly. Finally, there is the matter of expenses. As an institutionally unaffiliated collective, the LGI has no established revenue stream, which means project funding is either grant-based or comes out of the membership’s pockets. As anyone who has ever applied for a grant knows, it is one thing to write a grant, and another thing entirely to get it. Things are especially tough when grant monies are scarce, as they have been (at least on this side of the pond) since the U.S. economy started its downward spiral several years ago. Tapping the membership’s pockets is not really a viable funding option either. Even modest projects can be expensive, and most folks do not have a lot of spare cash to throw around. What this means, ultimately, is that even though our group’s members have carte blanche to do as they will, they must do so in a resource-starved environment. While it is sometimes disappointing that we are not able to fund certain projects despite their artistic and scholarly merit, LGI members learned long ago that such hardships rarely foreclose all opportunities. As Anne O’Meara and Nancy MacKenzie pointed out several years ago, many “seemingly extraneous features” of collaborative projects—not only financial limitations, but also such innocuous phenomena as where collaborators meet, the dance of their work and play patterns, their conflicting responsibilities, geographic separations, and the ways they talk to each other—emerge as influential factors in all collaborations (210). Thus, we understand in LGI that while our intermittent funding has influenced the dimension and direction of our group, it has also led to some outcomes that in hindsight we are glad we were led to. For example, while LGI originally began studying games in order to discover where production-side innovations might be possible, a series of funding shortfalls and serendipitous academic conversations led us to favor scholarly writing, which has now taken precedence over other kinds of projects. At the most practical level, this works out well because writing costs nothing but time, plus there is a rather desperate shortage of good game scholarship. Moreover, we have discovered that as LGI members have refined their scholarship and begun turning out books, chapters, and articles on a consistent basis, both they and the organization accrue publicity and credibility. Add to this the fact that for many of the group’s academics, traditional print-based work is more valued in the tenure and promotion economy than is, say, an educational game, an online teachers’ resource, or a workshop for a local parent-teacher association, and you have a pretty clear research path blazed by what Kathleen Clark and Rhunette Diggs have called “dialectical collaboration,” that is, collaboration marked by “struggle and opposition, where tension can be creative, productive, clarifying, as well as difficult” (10). Conclusion In sketching out our experience directing a highly collaborative digital media research collective, we hope we have given readers a sense of why collaboration is almost always a “wicked problem.” Collaborators negotiate different schedules, work demands, and ways of seeing, as well as resource pinches that hinder the process by which innovative digital media collaborations come to fruition. And yet, it is precisely because collaboration can be so wicked that it is so valuable. In constantly requiring collaborators to assess and reassess their rationales, artistic visions, and project objectives, collaboration makes for reflexive, complex, and innovative projects, which (at least to us) are the most satisfying and useful of all. References Chesnais, François. “Technological Agreements, Networks and Selected Issues in Economic Theory.” In Technological Collaboration: The Dynamics of Cooperation in Industrial Innovation. Rod Coombs, Albert Richards, Vivien Walsh, and Pier Paolo Saviotti, eds. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1996. 18-33. Clark, Kathleen D., and Rhunette C. Diggs. “Connected or Separated?: Toward a Dialectical View of Interethnic Relationships.” In Building Diverse Communities: Applications of Communication Research. McDonald, Trevy A., Mark P. Orbe, and Trevellya Ford-Ahmed, eds. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. 3-25. Farrell, Michael P. Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics & Creative Work. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Lunsford, Andrea, and Lisa Ede. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Mohan, Jitendra. “Cross-Cultural Experience of Collaboration in Personality Research.” Personality across Cultures: Recent Developments and Debates. Jitendra Mohan, ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 313-335. O’Meara, Anne, and Nancy R. MacKenzie. “Reflections on Scholarly Collaboration.” In Common Ground: Feminist Collaboration in the Academy. Elizabeth G. Peck and JoAnna Stephens Mink, eds. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998. 209-26. Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Weber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155-69. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ruggill, Judd, and Ken McAllister. "The Wicked Problem of Collaboration." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/07-ruggillmcallister.php>. APA Style Ruggill, J., and K. McAllister. (May 2006) "The Wicked Problem of Collaboration," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/07-ruggillmcallister.php>.

Abstract:

IntroductionA catastrophe is often considered to be a final decisive event, resulting in a disastrous end. Two recent examples of catastrophes satisfying this definition were the 2012 super storm Sandy in the United States of America and the 2011 floods in Brisbane, Australia. The progress of these disasters was reported worldwide, yet coverage soon disappeared from the headlines, leaving people to deal with the aftermath of rebuilding homes, businesses and lives. The diagnosis of breast cancer is an individual’s catastrophic event. While not on the community-wide scale of the disasters mentioned previously, it can have disastrous effects on the individual as well as their family and friends. At the moment 1 in 8 women can expect to have a breast cancer diagnosis. In Australia alone this means approximately 1,375,000 people are likely to receive this diagnosis in the course of their lifetime. This article addresses how breast cancer can and does prompt women and their supportive friends, families and partners to become more creative as a result of the breast cancer (BC) diagnosis. In these cases, creativity—defined as doing something a little differently or thinking outside the square—can offer some remedy for catastrophe. Becoming totally involved in the creative moment, so as to lose all track of time and forget the trials and worries of BC, is referred to as flow. Flow is an “optimal experience” in which “people become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing” (Csikszentmihalyi 53). This is one fruit of the creative process. This article refers to women as having breast cancer because the majority of people diagnosed with BC are women. However it is acknowledged that men constitute 0.8% of the total number of people diagnosed with BC (Breast Cancer in Australia). Responding to public concern, a range of charities has been formed to support people with breast cancer. One such charity is Breast Cancer Care WA (BCCWA). Together with the Australian Research Council (ARC) and Edith Cowan University (ECU), BCCWA supports an online community for people with breast cancer, Breast Cancer Click (Click). The membership of Click includes several male Clickers who are partners and supporters of Click members with BC. The Click online community consists of people with BC and their supporters, as well as health care practitioners and researchers. Those members with breast cancer are very interested in learning more about BC and supporting others in a similar situation whereas the health care practitioners and researchers are both supporting those with breast cancer and exploring the possibilities offered by online communities, to enhance their professional skills. Members of Click could be described as a community of practice, “groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise” (Wenger and Snyder 139), in this case a passion for responding positively to a BC diagnosis. Wenger and Snyder go on to say: “People in communities of practice share their experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems” (140). The Click community helps foster creativity.Many of the verbatim quotes used in this article are taken from the www.breastcancerclick.com.au (Click) website. Instead of identifying a speaker with a personal attribution the term “Clicker” is used, and then qualified as a Clicker with breast cancer (BC) to differentiate the author from a Clicker who supports someone with breast cancer (Supporter). The Click website provides every member with an opportunity to express themselves and they often respond creatively to the challenges that confront them. The Chaos and Catastrophe of a Breast Cancer Diagnosis When a woman is first diagnosed with breast cancer, it is often as a result of her bi-annual mammogram. She expects a routine visit but is advised instead that she requires further investigation because abnormalities have been detected. This is not what she expected. Probably all previous mammograms have been normal. The personal catastrophe occurs when the woman receives a definitive diagnosis of breast cancer. Chaos is added to catastrophe as the patient and her family struggle to grasp the meaning of the diagnosis and the multiplicity of treatment options. For some, the diagnosis is quickly followed by another catastrophic event, the removal of one or both breasts. For others the catastrophe occurs by increments. This is evident in a member’s blog on the Click website,More surgery [...] dammit!!!!!!!!!! I just want this over NOW. The whole lot. I want my hair back, I want my working life back, I want the smile back on my man's face. I want ME back. I want to dance again. I want to have a conversation with friends that doesn't include my diagnosis or prognosis [...] short term, long term [...] any bloody term!!!! (Clicker BC) People with a breast cancer diagnosis do not always have an endpoint in sight, or an acceptable endpoint at all, and the chaos of treatment and recovery is focused on coping with the present and the next treatment on the horizon. This Clicker uses her blog to help her deal with the next stage of a seemingly interminable round of surgical and chemotherapeutic procedures which have thrown herself, her family, her friends and her work life into chaos. Other Clickers immediately responded to her angst with messages of support and understanding. Had this clicker not written a blog, she would not have received this support and consequently she may have coped less successfully with her treatment. Given the chaos and catastrophe inherent in a breast cancer diagnosis, what else can individuals do that makes a positive difference to their lives as they deal with the “treatment, wait, check” cycle that is the medical response to breast cancer? Creativity Arising from Chaos When people receive a life threatening diagnosis such as breast cancer, they sometimes choose to think outside the square, to do things a little differently, to change the way they relate to others, to learn a new art or craft or to take up a musical instrument. Being creative seems to provide distraction from the treatment, and may be something to look forward to when the treatment is over. Some choose to participate in a formal creative therapy program, others seek out a creative pursuit which they can do at home. For some women with a breast cancer diagnosis, joining the Click website is itself a creative act. Contributing to an online community with a common interest in BC which gives them unconditional support, such as Click, also provides them with new skills and allows other people to benefit from their advice and experience: Hi everyone. I know we all have different ways of dealing with our cancer. Mine has been to be more mindful of the wonders around me and savour every possible moment of joy. I have decided to start my own Blog to give myself a creative outlet and share my experiences. (Clicker BC) There may be a number of reasons for participating in an online community of people with breast cancer and their supporters. Whatever the motivation, it requires a person to think laterally and learn new skills in how to navigate and post to a website. A newbie member enters a relationship with people she hasn’t met. She can choose to create a new persona using an avatar, or simply devise a username which represents her online. Creativity, Click and Flow Susan Nesbit, an Associate Professor in the University of Manitoba’s occupational therapy department, was diagnosed with BC in 2000. She used “everyday creativity to maintain a good attitude and positive spirits” and refers to Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” to explain the gratifying experience which occurs when someone fully participates in an activity:that I am doing it for its own sake, and when I become so involved […] that I become spontaneous and almost automatic, I am experiencing flow. My energy flows smoothly, I feel relaxed, comfortable, energetic and totally absorbed, losing track of time. (Nesbit 63) Richards (489) describes creativity as having two conditions: one is originality and the other is meaningfulness. She argues that everyday creativity “in the multitudinous activities of day-to-day life […] has been conceptualised as a survival capability” (489). Click allows members to share this everyday creativity, inspiring a creative response in others. One Clicker (BC), who produces handmade cards at home, was inspired to hold a Skype card-making education session for rural and remote people (with and without BC).Today is a day of craft for me. I held my first remote workshop […] and it was a huge success. Just made a couple of Father's Day cards for a customer and decided to share some of my work with you all. I'd love you to take a peek at my album [...] doing what I love to do was and is my therapy to get me through each new crisis xxx. (Clicker BC) It seems this Clicker first achieved flow through the act of making cards for her own pleasure and then maintained that flow through the planning and execution of an online card making class, which was a great success. She found something that helped her to take control of her life and to live more fully and at the same time gave others the opportunity to do the same. The success of this session might inspire this Clicker to conduct more sessions for others, while those attending the session who may be battling a serious illness, might also achieve flow through absorption in the card-making process, then maintain flow through the positive responses they receive from recipients of these cards. Ripples in this online creative space reach out towards a widening pool of card makers, assisting them to cope with chaotic occurrences. Creative Therapy and Breast Cancer Some women may choose to participate in formal creative therapy programmes such as art therapy to help them deal with their cancer treatment. In general more women than men with cancer choose to use this creative response to help them cope (Geue et al. 168). This intervention when used with breast cancer patients has been shown to enhance psychological well-being by decreasing negative emotional states and enhancing positive ones (Puig et al. 224). For example, music therapy with a group of BC patients waiting for a chemotherapy cycle appeared to directly reduce patients’ anxiety and physiological arousal, while enhancing their sense of wellbeing and control (Bulfone et al. 241). Blogging and Breast Cancer The creative pursuit may already be part of woman’s “normal” or pre-diagnosis life, or may be identified and pursued as a result of the diagnosis and used as informal therapy to keep the chaos at bay, for example through joining a support website and blogging. Orgad’s research shows that when women write about their breast cancer story, “storytelling” online, it helps them cope with their disease. “The act of writing is seen as a crucial affirmation of living, a statement against fearfulness, invisibility and silence” (Lord qtd in. Orgad 67). The new ideas and direction for these women’s creativity may also be used to vent their feelings and to gain perspective on their breast cancer journey, or the story may be written to help others facing a similar journey. As evidenced by the collection of blogs at breastcancerblogs.org it seems a number of women find blogs offer a creative response to their breast cancer journey. The BC blogosphere is a vibrant record of resistance to the disease. Click members are encouraged to blog, and are given space on the site to do so, with full privacy if they choose. A study conducted by Chung and Kim (304) showed those cancer patients and their companions found blogging activity to be helpful in emotion management and for information sharing. The Clickers are also encouraged to complete a SWEE in their blog. SWEE stands for “structured written emotional expression” where a person writes about their breast cancer journey for 10-15 minutes each day for three to five days in a row. The Clicker has the opportunity to creatively express their positive and negative feelings about their breast cancer diagnosis. Research shows that writing a SWEE can be good for both physical and emotional health (Pennebaker 540; Lieberman, Morton and Goldstein 859; Butcher and Buckwalter 114; Stanton et al. 4165; Low, Stanton and Danoff-Burg 187). One Click member, the author of the Paw Paw Salad blog, received a top blog award from the breastcancerblogs website. She writes about her life with breast cancer and the stress of not knowing when or if she will ever be free of the disease. She is positive, however, about the Tamoxifen tablet she must take for another five years or more. She tries to only let the word “cancer” briefly enter her mind, once a day, when she takes her pill and to carry on as normal the rest of the time. On returning home from a camping trip, which she also described in her blog, she noted that her cancer medication bottle was looking battered and dirty.And for the first time, the sight of it made me smile. I've decided that this is just the way my Tamoxifen bottle should look. It’s not a bottle to be kept pristine in a medicine cabinet—I want it to be tossed into suitcases, kept cold in dust-covered eskies, dropped on the floor in the morning flurry. I'm hoping that my daily reminder of cancer will, as often as possible, be washed down with camp-stove coffee. And I’m thinking that the last pill of each year’s prescription demands a champagne and strawberry chaser (Paw Paw Salad). This post demonstrates the blogger’s ability to perceive and describe BC paraphernalia differently, and she uses this perspective to bolster her resilience in the face of the ongoing BC chaos in her life. Some Clickers express ambivalence towards taking Tamoxifen, a hormone based chemotherapeutic agent, because of its potentially deleterious side effects on their everyday sense of wellbeing. This blog entry may give them a new perspective on life, in spite of the possible side effects of the drug, and encourage them to celebrate the end of each year of taking the pill as one step towards being free of cancer. The fact that the writer can go camping while taking the Tamoxifen pill also demonstrates to others that life doesn’t have to stop. Mammoirs Some people with a BC diagnosis (non-Click members) have gone on to write what is affectionately called a “mammoir” a book which recounts their breast cancer journey or provides advice and information for those newly diagnosed with breast cancer. This is the term applied by Clickers even to established works of literature, such as Professor Brenda Walker’s award-winning “mammoir,” Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life. The book describes how Walker took refuge from the chaos of her breast cancer diagnosis in the books she’d always loved. Her experience of chaos prompted her to turn towards the creativity of others, which in turn triggered renewed creativity in the form of her memoir. Conclusion A diagnosis of breast cancer is for most women, a catastrophe. The newly diagnosed person is aware that this diagnosis may well be followed quite quickly by a mastectomy. Together with adjunct treatments, such as chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy, this causes chaos within the woman’s life, family and friendship networks. Each woman and her supporters deal with the catastrophe and ensuing chaos in their own individual creative way. Creative expressions include blogs, where women can tell their story; poetry, such as haikus and free verse; and simple venting of feelings about diagnosis and treatment. The SWEE technique seems to indicate that written engagement helps people cope with their diagnosis and illness. Attendance at art or music therapy sessions has been shown to be therapeutic and “mammoirs” have been written to help others to avoid the pitfalls of the health system or to deal with treatment and its side-effects. Both informal and formal or organised creative therapy appears to have positive psychological effects on the woman with breast cancer. Whether each individual with BC achieved flow, as described by Csikszentmihalyi, is not known, but it appears from the Click community that many do use everyday creative acts to help them deal with the ongoing chaos of their diagnosis and treatment. The Click was created to provide a blank canvas for those with breast cancer and their supporters to reach out to others in a similar situation. Through allowing people to respond creatively and to have those creative responses validated, this reaching out often also involves reaching in—and harnessing creativity. ReferencesAustralian Institute of Health and Welfare and Cancer Australia, 2012, Breast Cancer in Australia: An Overview, Cancer Series 71. CAN 67. Canberra: AIHW.Blog Nation. “breastcancerblogs.org.”2011-2012. 11 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.breastcancerblogs.org/›. Breast Cancer Click. Breast Cancer Care WA. 2013. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.breastcancerclick.com.au›. Bulfone, Teresa, et al. "Effectiveness of Music Therapy for Anxiety Reduction in Women with Breast Cancer in Chemotherapy Treatment." Holistic Nursing Practice 23.4 (2009): 238-242. Butcher, Howard Karl, and K. Buckwalter. "Exasperations as Blessings: Meaning-Making and the Caregiving Experience." Journal of Aging and Identity 7.2 (2002): 113-132. Chung, Deborah S., and Sujin Kim. "Blogging Activity among Cancer Patients and Their Companions: Uses, Gratifications, and Predictors of Outcomes." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59.2 (2007): 297-306. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Geue, Kristina, et al. "An Overview of Art Therapy Interventions for Cancer Patients and the Results of Research." Complementary Therapies in Medicine 18.3 (2010): 160-170. Lieberman, Morton A., and Benjamin A. Goldstein. "Self-Help On-Line: An Outcome Evaluation of Breast Cancer Bulletin Boards." Journal of Health Psychology 10.6 (2005): 855-862. Low, Carissa A., Annette L. Stanton, and Sharon Danoff-Burg. "Expressive Disclosure and Benefit Finding among Breast Cancer Patients: Mechanisms for Positive Health Effects." Health Psychology 25.2 (2006): 181-89. Nesbit, Susan G. "Using Creativity to Experience Flow on My Journey with Breast Cancer." Occupational Therapy in Mental Health 22.2 (2006): 61-79. Orgad, Shani. Storytelling Online: Talking Breast Cancer on the Internet. NY: Peter Lang, 2005. “Jagged Little Pill.” Paw Paw Salad. 16 Oct. 2012. 11 Mar. 2013. ‹http://www.paw-paw-salad.com/›. Pennebaker, J. "Putting Stress into Words: Health, Linguistic, and Therapeutic Implications." Behaviour Research and Therapy 31.6 (1993): 539-548. Puig, Ana, et al. "The Efficacy of Creative Arts Therapies to Enhance Emotional Expression, Spirituality, and Psychological Well-Being of Newly Diagnosed Stage I and Stage II Breast Cancer Patients: A Preliminary Study." The Arts in Psychotherapy 33.3 (2006): 218-228. Richards, Ruth. “When Illness Yields Creativity.” Eminent Creativity, Everyday Creativity and Health. Eds. Mark Runco and Ruth Richards. Greenwich: Ablex, 1997. 485-540. Stanton, Annette L, et al. "Randomized, Controlled Trial of Written Emotional Expression and Benefit Finding in Breast Cancer Patients." Journal of Clinical Oncology 20.20 (2002): 4160-4168. Wenger, Etienne, and William Snyder. "Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier.” Harvard Business Review 78.1 (2000): 139-146. Walker, Brenda. Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life. Australia: Penguin, 2010. Acknowledgements A special thanks to all the people, women and men, who have shared their lives with the research team via the Breast Cancer Click website. Breast Cancer Care WA, our ARC Linkage Project industry partner.

Abstract:

We Break Up, I Publish: Theorising and Emotional Processing like Taylor Swift In 2007 after the rather painful end of my first long-term same-sex relationship I asked myself two questions (and like a good graduate student wrote a paper about it that was subsequently published): (1) what is love; (2) and if love exists, are queer and straight love somehow different. I asked myself the second question because, unlike my previous “straight” breakups (back when I honestly thought I was straight), this one was different, was far more messy, and seemed to have a lot to do with the fact that my then fresh ex-boyfriend and I had dramatically different ideas about how the relationship should look, work, be codified, or if it should or could be codified. It was an eye-opening experience since the truth that these different ideas existed—basically his point of view—really only “came out” in my mind through the act and learning involved in that breakup. Until then, from a Queer Theory perspective, you could have described me as a “man who had sex with men,” called himself hom*osexual, but was so hom*onormative that if you’d approached me with even a light version of Michel Foucault’s thoughts on “Friendship as a Way of Life” I’d have looked at you as queerly, and cluelessly, as possible. Mainstream Queer Theory would have put the end of the relationship down to the difference and conflict between what is pejoratively called the “marriage-chasing-Gay-normaliser,” represented by me, and the “radical-Queer(ness)-of-difference” represented by my ex-boyfriend, although like a lot of theory, that misses the personal (which I recall being political...), and a whole host of non-theoretical problems that plagued that relationship. Basically I thought Queer/hom*osexual/Lesbian/Transgendered and the rest of the alphabet soup was exactly the same as Straight folks both with respect to a subjective understanding of the self, social relations and formations, and how you acted or enacted yourself in public and private except in the bedroom.. I thought, since Canada had legalised same-sex marriage, all was well and equal (other than the occasional hate-crime which would then be justly punished). Of course I understood that at that point Canada was the exception and not the rule with respect to same-sex rights and same-sex marriage, so it followed in my mind that most of our time collectively should be spent supporting those south of the border or overseas who still faced restrictions on these basic rights, or out-and-out violence, persecution and even state-sanctioned death for just being who they are and/or trying to express it. And now, five years on, stating that Canada is the exception as opposed to the rule with respect to the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the codification of same-sex rights in law has the potential to be outdated as the recent successes of social movements, court rulings and the tenor of political debate and voting has shifted internationally with rapid speed. But it was only because of that breakup that these theoretical and practical issues had come out of my queer closet and for the first time I started to question some necessary link between love and codification (marriage), and how the queer in Queer relationships does or potentially can disrupt this link. And not just for Queers, but for Straight folk too, which is the primary point that should be underlined now and is addressed at the end of this paper. Because, embittered as I was at the time, I still basically agree with the theoretical position that I came to in that paper on love—based on a queering of the terms of Alain Badiou—where I affirmed that love resisted codification, especially in its queer form, because it is fidelity to an act and truth between two or more partners which resists the rigid walls of State-based codification (Potts, Love Hurts; Badiou, Ethics and Saint Paul). But as one of the peer reviewers for this paper rightly pointed out, the above distinctions between my ex and myself implicitly rely upon a State-centric model of rights and freedoms, which I attacked in the first paper, but which I freely admit I am guilty of utilising and arguing in favour of here. But that is because I am interested, here, not in talking about love as an abstract concept towards which we should work in our personal relationships, but as the state of things, and specifically the state of same-sex marriage and the discourse and images which surrounds it, which means that the State does matter. This is specifically so given the lack of meaningful challenges to the State System in Canada and the US. I maintain, following Butler, that it is through power, and our response to the representatives of power “hailing us,” that we become bodies that matter and subjects (Bodies That Matter; The Psychic Life of Power; and Giving An Account of Oneself). While her re-reading of Althusser in these texts argues that we should come to a philosophical and political position which challenges this State-based form of subject creation and power, she also notes that politically and philosophically we have yet to articulate such a position clearly, and I’d say that this is especially the case for what is covered and argued in the mainstream (media) debate on same-sex marriage. So apropos what is arguably Foucault’s most mature analysis of “power,” and while agreeing that my State-based argument for inclusion and rights does indeed strengthen the “biopolitical” (The History of Sexuality 140 and 145) control over, in this case, Queer populations, I argue that this is nonetheless the political reality with which we are working in and analyzing, and that is my concern here. Despite a personal desire that this not be the case, the State or state sanctioned institutions do continue to hold a monopoly of power in conferring subjecthood and rights. To take a page from Jeremy Bentham, I would say that arguing from a position which does not start from or seriously consider the State as the current basis for rights and subjecthood, though potentially less ethically problematic and more in line with my personal politics, is tantamount to talking and arguing about “nonsense on stilts.” “Caught in a Bad Romance?” Comparing hom*onationalist Trajectories and the Appeal of Militarist Discourse to LGBT Grassroots Organisations In comparing the discourses and enframings of the debate over same-sex marriage between Canada in the mid 1990s and early 2000s and in the US today, one might presume that how it came to say “I do” in Canada and how it might or might not get “left at the altar” in the US, is the result of very different national cultures. But this would just subscribe to one of a number of “cultural explanations” for perceived differences between Canada and the US that are usually built upon straw-man comparisons which then pillorise the US for something or other. And in doing so it would continue an obscuration that Canada, unlike the US, is unproblematically open and accepting when it comes to multicultural, multiracial and multisexual diversity and inclusion. Which Canada isn’t nor has it ever been. When you look at the current discourse in both countries—by their key political representatives on the international stage—you find the opposite. In the US, you have President Barack Obama, the first sitting President to come out in favour of same-sex marriage, and the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, setting same-sex rights at home and abroad as key policy planks (Gay Rights are Human Rights). Meanwhile, in Canada, you have Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in office since 2006, openly support his Conservative Party’s “traditional marriage” policy which is thankfully made difficult to implement because of the courts, and John Baird, the badly closeted Minister of Foreign Affairs, who doesn’t mention same-sex rights at home or with respect to foreign relations—unless it is used as supplementary evidence to further other foreign policy goals (c.f. Seguin)—only showing off his sexuality outside of the press-gallery to drum up gay-conservative votes or gay-conservative fundraising at LGBTQ community events which his government is then apt to pull funding for (c.f. Bradshaw). Of course my point is not to just reverse the stereotypes, painting an idyllic picture of the US and a grim one of Canada. What I want to problematise is the supposed national cultural distinctions which are naturalised when arguments are made through them as to why same-sex marriage was legalised in Canada, while the Defense of Marriage Act still stands in the US. To follow and extend Jasbir Puar’s argument from Terrorist Assemblages, what we see in both same-sex marriage debates and discourses is really the same phenomenon, but, so far, with different outcomes and having different manifestations. Puar contends that same-sex rights, like most equalising rights for minority groups, are only granted when all three of the following conditions prevail: (1) in a state or narrative of exception, where the nation grants a minority group equal rights because “the nation” feels threatened from without; (2) only on the condition that normalisation (or hom*onormalisation in the case of the Queer community) occurs, with those who don’t conform pushed further from a place in the national-subject; (3) and that the price of admission into being the “allowed Queer” is an ultra-patriotic identification with the Nation. In Canada, the state or narrative of exception was an “attack” from within which resulted in the third criterion being downplayed (although it is still present). Court challenges in a number of provinces led in each case to a successful ruling in favour of legalising same-sex marriage. Appeals to these rulings made their way to the Supreme Court, who likewise ruled in favour of the legalisation of same-sex marriage. This ruling came with an order to the Canadian Parliament that it had to change the existing marriage laws and definition of marriage to make it inclusive of same-sex marriage. This “attack” was performed by the judiciary who have traditionally (c.f. Makin) been much less partisan in appointment or ruling than their counterparts in the US. When new marriage laws were proposed to take account of the direction made by the courts, the governing Liberal Party and then Prime Minister Paul Martin made it a “free vote” so members of his own party could vote against it if they chose. Although granted with only lacklustre support by the governing party, the Canadian LGBTQ community rejoiced and became less politically active, because we’d won, right? International Queers flocked to Canada—one in four same-sex weddings since legalisation in Canada have been to out of country residents (Postmedia News)—as long as they had the proper socioeconomic profile (which is also a racialised profile) to afford the trip and wedding. This caused a budding same-sex marriage tourism and queer love normalisation industry to be built around the Canada Queer experience because especially at the time of legalisation Canada was still one of the few countries to allow for same-sex marriages. What this all means is that hom*onationalism in Canada is much less charged. It manifests itself as fitting in and not just keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to things like community engagement and Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meetings, but trying to do them one better (although only by a bit so as not to offend). In essence, the comparatively bland process in the 1990s by which Canada slowly underwent a state of exception by a non-politically charged and non-radical professional judiciary simply interpreting the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms at the provincial and then the federal level is mirrored in the rather bland and non-radical hom*onationalism which resulted. So unlike the US, the rhetoric of the LGBT community stays subdued unless there’s a hint that the right to same-sex divorce might get hit by Conservative Party guns, in which case all hell breaks loose (c.f. Ha). While the US is subject to the same set of logics for the currently in-progress enactment of legalising same-sex marriage, the state of exception is dramatically different. Puar argues it is the never-ending War on Terror. This also means that the enframings and debate in the US are exceptionally charged and political, leading to a very different type of hom*onationalism and hom*onationalist subject than is found in Canada. American hom*onationalism has not radically changed from Puar’s description, but due to leadership from the top (Obama, Clinton and Lady Gaga) the intensity and thereby structured confinement of what is an acceptable Queer-American subject has become increasingly rigid. What is included and given rights is the hyper-patriotic queer-soldier, the defender of the nation. And what reinforces the rigidity of what amounts to a new “glass closet” for queers is that grassroots organisations have bought into the same rhetoric, logic, and direction as to how to achieve equality as the Homecoming advertisem*nt from the Equal Love Campaign in Britain shows. For the other long-leading nation engaged in the War on Terror narrative, Homecoming provides the imagery of a gay member of the armed services draped in the flag proposing to his partner at the end of duty overseas that ends with the following text: “All men can be heroes. All men can be husbands. End discrimination.” Can’t get more patriotic—and heteronormative with the use of the term “husbands”—than that. Well, unless you’re Lady Gaga. Now Lady Gaga stands out as a public figure whom has taken an explicitly pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance from the outset of her career. And I do not want to diminish the fact that she has been admirably effective in her campaigning and consistent pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance. While above I characterised her input above as leadership from the top, she also, in effect, by standing outside of State Power unlike Obama and Clinton, and being able to be critical of it, is able to push the State in a more progressive direction. This was most obviously evidenced in her very public criticism of the Democratic Party and President Obama for not moving quickly enough to adopt a more pro-queer and pro-LGBT stance after the 2008 election where such promises were made. So Lady Gaga plays a doubled role whereby she also acts as a spokesperson for the grassroots—some would call this co-opting, but that is not the charge made here as she has more accurately given her pre-existing spotlight and Twitter and Facebook presence over to progressive campaigns—and, given her large mainstream media appeal and willingness to use this space to argue for queer and LGBT rights, performs the function of a grassroots organisation by herself as far as the general public is concerned. And in her recent queer activism we see the same sort of discourse and images utilised as in Homecoming. Her work over the first term of Obama’s Presidency—what I’m going to call “The Lady Gaga Offensive”—is indicative: she literally and metaphorically wrapped herself in the American flag, screaming “Obama, ARE YOU LISTENING!!! Repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and [have the hom*ophobic soldiers] go home, go home, go home!” (Lady Gaga Rallies for Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell). And presumably to the same home of otherness that is occupied by the terrorist or anything that falls under the blanket of “anti-American” in Puar’s critique of this approach to political activism. This speech was modelled on her highly successful one at the National Equality March in 2009, which she ended with “Bless God and Bless the Gays.” When the highly watched speeches are taken together you literally can’t top them for Americanness, unless it is by a piece of old-fashioned American apple-pie bought at a National Rifle Association (NRA) bake-sale. And is likely why, after Obama’s same-sex “evolution,” the pre-election ads put out by the Democratic Party this year focused so heavily on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the queer patriotic soldier or veteran’s obligation to or previous service in bearing arms for the country. Now if the goal is to get formal and legal equality quickly, then as a political strategy, to get people onside with same-sex marriage, and from that place to same-sex rights and equal social recognition and respect, this might be a good idea. Before, that is, moving on to a strategy that actually gets to the roots of social inequality and doesn’t rely on “hate of ‘the other’” which Puar’s analysis points out is both a byproduct of and rooted in the base of any nationalist based appeal for minoritarian rights. And I want to underline that I am here talking about what strategy seems to be appealing to people, as opposed to arguing an ethically unproblematic and PC position on equality that is completely inclusive of all forms of love. Because Lady Gaga’s flag-covered and pro-military scream was answered by Obama with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the extension of some benefits to same-sex couples, and has Obama referring to Gaga as “your leader” in the pre-election ads and elsewhere. So it isn’t really surprising to find mainstream LGBT organisations adopting the same discourse and images to get same-sex rights including marriage. One can also take recent poll numbers from Canada as indicative as well. While only 10 percent of Canadians have trust in political parties, and 17 and 16 percent have trust in Parliament and Prime Minister Harper respectively, a whopping 53 percent have trust in the Canadian Forces (Leblanc). One aspect that undergirds Puar’s argument is that especially at a "time of war," more than average levels of affection or trust is shown for those institutions that defend “us,” so that if the face of that institution is reinscribed to the look of the hyper-patriotic queer-soldier (by advertising of the Homecoming sort which is produced not by the State but by grassroots LGBT organisations), then it looks like these groups seem to be banking that support for Gays and Lesbians in general, and same-sex marriage in specific, will further rise if LGBT and Queer become substantively linked in the imagination of the general public with the armed forces. But as 1980s Rockers Heart Asked: “But There’s Something That You Forgot. What about Love?” What these two hom*onationalist trajectories and rhetorics on same-sex marriage entirely skip over is how exactly you can codify “love.” Because isn’t that the purpose of marriage? Saying you can codify it is like grasping at a perfectly measured and exact cubic foot of air and telling it to stay put in the middle of a hurricane. So to return to how I ended my earlier exploration of love and if it could or should be codified: it means that as I affirm love, and as I remain in fidelity to it, I subject myself in my fundamental weakness constantly to the "not-known;" to constant heartbreak; to affirmations which I cannot betray as it would be a betrayal of the truth process itself. It's as if at the very moment the Beatles say the words 'All you need is love' they were subjected to wrenching heartbreak and still went on: 'All you need is love...' (Love Hurts) Which is really depressing when I look back at it now. But it was a bad breakup, and I can tend to the morose in word choice and cultural references when depressed. But it also remains essentially my position. If you impose “till death or divorce do us part” on to love you’re really only just participating in the chimera of static love and giving second wind to a patriarchal institution which has had a crappy record when it comes to equality. It also has the potential to preserve asymmetrical roles “traditional marriage” contains from when the institution was only extended to straight couples. And isn’t equality the underlying philosophical principle and political position that we’re supposedly fighting for if we’re arguing for an equal right to get married? Again, it’s important to try and codify the same rights for everyone through the State at the present time because I honestly don’t see major changes confronting the nation state system in Canada or the US in the near future. We remain the play-children of a digitally entrenched form of Foucaultian biopower that is State and Capital directed. Because while the Occupy Wall Street movements got a lot of hay in the press, I’ve yet to see any substantive or mainstreamed political change come out of them—if someone can direct me to their substantive contribution to the recent US election I’d be happy to revise my position—which is likely to our long term detriment. So this is a pragmatic analysis, one of locating one node in the matrices of power relations, of seeing how mainstream LGBT political organisations and Lady Gaga are applying the “theoretical tool kits” given to us by Foucault and Puar, and seeing how these organisations and Gaga are applying them, but in this case in a way that is likely counter to authorial intention(s) and personal politics (Power/Knowledge 145, 193; Terrorist Assemblages). So what this means is that we’re likely to continue to see, in mainstream images of same-sex couples put out by grassroots LGBT organisations, a hom*onationalism and ideological construction that grows more and more out of touch with Queer realities—the “upper-class house-holding PTA Gay”; although on a positive note I should point out that the Democratic Party in the US seems to be at least including both white and non-white faces in their pre-election same-sex marriage ads—and one that most Queers don’t or can’t fit themselves into especially when it comes down to the economic aspect of that picture, which is contradictory and problematic (c.f. Christopher). It also means that in the US the hom*onationalism on the horizon looks the same as in Canada except with a healthy dose of paranoia of outsiders and “the other” and a flag draped membership in the NRA, that is, for when the queer super-soldier is not in uniform. It’s a straightjacket for a closet that is becoming smaller because it seeks, through the images projected, inclusion for only a smaller and smaller social sub-set of the Lesbian and Gay community and leaves out more and more of the Queer community than it was five years ago when Puar described it. So instead of trying to dunk the queer into the institution of patriarchy, why not, by showing how so many Queers, their relationships, and their loving styles don’t fit into these archetypes help give everyone, including my “marriage-chasing-Gay-normaliser” former self a little “queer eye, for all eyes.” To look at and see modern straight marriage through the lenses and reasons LGBT and Queer communities (by-and-large) fought for years for access to it: as the codification and breakdown of some rights and responsibilities (i.e. taking care of children); as an act which gives you straightforward access to health benefits and hospital visitation rights; as an easy social signifier for others of a commitment to another person that doesn’t use diluted language like “special friend;” and because when it comes down to it that “in sickness and in health” part of the vow—in the language of a queered Badiou, a vow can be read as the affirmation of a universal and disinterested truth (love) and a moment which can’t be erased retrospectively, say, by divorce—seems like a sincere way to value at least one of those you really care for in the world. And hopefully it, as a side-benefit, it acts as a reminder but is not the actuality of that first fuzzy feeling which (hopefully) doesn’t go away. But I learned my lesson the first time and know that the fuzzy feeling might disappear as it often does. It doesn’t matter how far we try and cram it into any variety of hom*onationalist closets, since it’ll always find a way to not be there, no matter how tight you thought you’d locked the door to keep it in for good if it wants out. Because you can’t keep emotions by contract: so at the end of the day the logical, ethical and theoretically sound position is to argue for the abolition of marriage as an institution. However, Plato and others have been making that argument for thousands of years, and it still doesn’t seem to have gained popular traction. And we also need to realise, contrary to the opinion of my former self and The Beatles, that you really do need more than love as fidelity to an event of you and your partner’s making when you are being denied your partners health benefits just because you are a same-sex couple, especially when those health benefits could be saving your life. And if same-sex marriage codification is a quick fix for that and similar issues for those who can fit into the State sanctioned same-sex marriage walls, which admittedly leaves some members of the Queer community who don’t overlap out, as part of an overall and more inclusive strategy that does include them then I’m in favour of it. That is, till the time comes that Straight and Queer can, over time and with a lot of mutual social learning, explore how to recognise and give equal rights with or without State based codification to the multiple queer and sometimes polyamorous relationship models that already populate the Gay and Straight worlds right now. So in the meantime continue to count me down as a “marriage-chasing-Gay.” But just pragmatically, not to normalise, as one of a diversity of political strategies for equality and just for now. References Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. New York: Verso, 2001. ———. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Bradshaw, James. “Pride Toronto Denied Federal Funding.” The Globe and Mail. 7 May. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/pride-toronto-denied-federal-funding/article1211065/›. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,1990. ———. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. ———. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Christopher, Nathaniel. “Openly Gay Men Make Less money, Survey Shows.” Xtra! .5 Nov. 2012 ‹http://www.xtra.ca/public/Vancouver/Openly_gay_men_make_less_money_survey_shows-12756.aspx›. Clinton, Hillary. “Gay Rights Are Human Rights, And Human Rights Are Gay Rights.” United Nations General Assembly. 26 Dec. 2011 ‹http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2011/12/06/383003/sec-clinton-to-un-gay-rights-are-human-rights-and-human-rights-are-gay-rights/?mobile=nc›. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper. New York: Random House,1980. —. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Toronto: Random House, 1977. —. The History of Sexuality Volume One: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978. Heart. “What About Love.” Heart. Capitol Records, 1985. CD. Ha, Tu Thanh. “Dan Savage: ‘I Had Been Divorced Overnight’.” The Globe and Mail. 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/dan-savage-i-had-been-divorced-overnight/article1358211/›. “Homecoming.” Equal Love Campaign. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a54UBWFXsF4›. Leblanc, Daniel. “Harper Among Least Trusted Leaders, Poll Shows.” The Globe and Mail. 12 Nov. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harper-among-least-trusted-leaders-poll-shows/article5187774/#›. Makin, Kirk. “The Coming Conservative Court: Harper to Reshape Judiciary.” The Globe and Mail. 24 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/the-coming-conservative-court-harper-to-reshape-judiciary/article595398/›. “Lady Gaga Rallies for Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ in Portland, Maine.” 9 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4rGla6OzGc›. “Lady Gaga Speaks at Gay Rights Rally in Washington DC as Part of the National Equality March.” 11 Oct. 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jepWXu-Z38›. “Obama’s Stirring New Gay Rights Ad.” Newzar.com. 24 May. 2012 ‹http://newzar.com/obamas-stirring-new-gay-rights-ad/›. Postmedia News. “Same-sex Marriage in Canada will not be Revisited, Harper Says.” 12 Jan. 2012 ‹http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/12/same-sex-marriage-in-canada-will-not-be-revisited-harper-says/›. Potts, Graham. “‘Love Hurts’: Hunter S. Thompson, the Marquis de Sade and St. Paul Queer Alain Badiou’s Truth and Fidelity.” CTheory. rt002: 2009 ‹http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=606›. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: hom*onationalism in Queer Times. London: Duke UP, 2007. Seguin, Rheal. “Baird Calls Out Iran on Human Rights Violations.” The Globe and Mail. 22 Oct. 2012 ‹http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/baird-calls-out-iran-on-human-rights-violations/article4628968/›.

Abstract:

I have only ever owned one pig. It didn’t have a name, due as it was for the table. Just pu‘aka. But I liked feeding it; nothing from the household was wasted. I planned not to become attached. We were having a feast and a pig was the one essential requirement. The piglet came to us as a small creature with a curly tail. It would not even live an adult life, as the fully-grown local pig is a fatty beast with little meat. Pigs are mostly killed when partly grown, when the meat/fat ratio is at its optimum. The pig was one of the few animals to accompany Polynesians as they made the slow journey across the islands and oceans from Asia: pigs and chickens and dogs. The DNA of island pigs reveals details about the route taken that were previously hidden (Larsen et al.). Of these three animals, pigs assumed the most ceremonial importance. In Tonga, pigs often live an exalted life. They roam freely, finding food where they can. They wallow. Wherever there is a pool of mud, often alongside a road, there is a pig wallowing. Huge beasts emerge from their pools with dark mud lining their bellies as they waddle off, teats swinging, to another pleasure. Pig snouts are extraordinarily strong; with the strength of a pig behind them, they can dig holes, uproot crops, and generally wreak havoc. How many times have I chased them from my garden, despairing at the loss of precious vegetables I could get no other way? But they must forage. They are fed scraps, and coconut for protein, but often must fend for themselves. Despite the fact that many meet an early death, their lives seem so much more interesting than those lived by the anonymous residents of intensive piggeries in Australia, my homeland. When the time came for the pig to be sacrificed to the demands of the feast, two young Tongan men did the honours. They also cooked the pig on an open fire after skewering it on a pole. Their reward was the roasted sweetmeats. The ‘umu was filled with taro and cassava, yam and sweet potato, along with lū pulu and lū ika: tinned beef and fish cooked in taro leaves and coconut cream. In the first sitting, all those of high status—church ministers, college teachers, important villagers and pālangi like me—had the first pick of the food. Students from the college and lowly locals had the second. The few young men who remained knew it was their task to finish off all of the food. They set about this activity with intense dedication, paying particular attention to the carcass of the pig. By the end of the night, what was left of our little pig was a pile of bones, the skeleton taken apart at every joint. Not a scrap of anything edible remained. In the early 1980s, I went to live on a small island in the Kingdom of Tonga, where my partner was the Principal of an agricultural college, in the main training young men for working small hereditary mixed farms. Memories of that time and a recent visit inform this reflection on the contemporary Tongan diet and problems associated with it. The role of food in a culture is never a neutral issue. Neither is body size, and Tongans have traditionally favoured the large body as an indication of status (Pollock 58). Similarly the capacity to eat has been seen as positive. Many Tongans are larger than is healthy, with 84% of men and 93% of women “considered overweight or obese” (Kirk et al. 36). The rate of diabetes, 80% of it undiagnosed, has doubled since the 1970s to 15% of the adult population (Colagiuri et al. 1378). In the Tongan diaspora there are also high rates of so-called “metabolic syndrome,” leading to this tendency to diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In Auckland, for instance, Pacific Islanders are 2.5 times more likely to suffer from this condition (Gentles et al.). Its chief cause is not, however, genetic, but comes from “differences in obesity,” leading to a much higher incidence of cardiovascular disease and diabetes (Gentles et al.). Deaths from diabetes in Tonga are common. When a minister’s wife in the neighbouring village to mine died, everyone of status on the island attended the putu. Though her gangrenous foot could have been amputated, the family decided against this, and she soon died from the complications of her diabetes. On arrival at the putu, as well as offering gifts such as mats and tapa, participants lined up to pay very personal respects to the dead woman. This took the form of a kiss on her face. I had never touched a dead person before, let alone someone who had died of gangrene, but life in another culture requires many firsts. I bent down and kissed the dry, cold face of a woman who had suffered much before dying. Young men of the family pushed sand over the grave with their own hands as the rest of us stood around, waiting for the funeral food: pigs, yes, but also sweets made from flour and refined sugar. Diet and eating practices are informed by culture, but so are understandings of illness and its management. In a study conducted in New Zealand, sharp differences were seen between the Tongan diaspora and European patients with diabetes. Tongans were more likely “to perceive their diabetes as acute and cyclical in nature, uncontrollable, and caused by factors such as God’s will, pollution in the environment, and poor medical care in the past”, and this was associated “with poorer adherence to diet and medication taking” (Barnes et al. 1). This suggests that as well as being more likely to suffer from illnesses associated with diet and body size, Tongans may also be less likely to manage them, causing these diseases to be even more debilitating. When James Cook visited the Tongan group and naively named them the Friendly Islands, he was given the customary hospitality shown to one of obviously high status. He and his officers were fed regularly by their hosts, even though this must have put enormous pressure on the local food systems, in which later supply was often guaranteed by the imposition of tapu in order to preserve crops and animals. Further pressure was added by exchanges of hogs for nails (Beaglehole). Of course, while they were feeding him royally and entertaining his crew with wrestling matches and dances, the local chiefs of Ha‘apai were arguing about exactly when they were going to kill him. If it were by night, it would be hard to take the two ships. By day, it might be too obvious. They never could agree, and so he sailed off to meet his fate elsewhere (Martin 279-80). As a visitor of status, he was regularly fed pork, unlike most of the locals. Even now, in contemporary Tonga, pigs are killed to mark a special event, and are not eaten as everyday food by most people. That is one of the few things about the Tongan diet that has not changed since the Cook visits. Pigs are usually eaten on formal feasting occasions, such as after church on the Sabbath (which is rigorously kept by law), at weddings, funerals, state occasions or church conferences. During such conferences, village congregations compete with each other to provide the most lavish spreads, with feasting occurring three times a day for a week or more. Though each pola is spread with a range of local root crops, fish and seafood, and possibly beef or even horse, the pola is not complete unless there is at least one pig on it. Pigs are not commercially farmed in Tonga, so these pigs have been hand- and self-raised in and around villages, and are in short supply after these events. And, although feasts are a visible sign of tradition, they are the exception. Tongans are not suffering from metabolic syndrome because they consume too much pork; they are suffering because in everyday life traditional foods have been supplanted by imports. While a range of traditional foods is still eaten, they are not always the first choice. Some imported foods have become delicacies. Mutton flap is a case in point. Known as sipi (sheep), it is mostly fat and bone, and even when barbequed it retains most of its fat. It is even found on outer islands without refrigeration, because it can be transported frozen and eaten when it arrives, thawed. I remember once the local shopkeeper said she had something I might like. A leg of lamb was produced from under the counter, mistakenly packed in the flap box. The cut was so unfamiliar that nobody else had much use for it. The question of why it is possible to get sipi in Tonga and very difficult to get any other kind of fresh meat other than one’s own pigs or chickens raises the question of how Tonga’s big neighbours think of Pacific islands. Such islands are the recipients of Australian and New Zealand aid; they are also the recipients of their waste. It’s not uncommon to find out of date medications, banned agricultural chemicals, and food that is really unsuitable for human consumption. Often the only fresh and affordable meat is turkey tails, chicken backs, and mutton flap. From July 2006 to July 2007, New Zealand exported $73 million worth of sheep off-cuts to the Pacific (Edwardes & Frizelle). Australia and the US account for the supply of turkey tails. Not only are these products some of the few fresh meat sources available, they are also relatively inexpensive (Rosen et al.). These foods are so detrimental to the health of locals that importing them has been banned in Fiji and independent Samoa (Edwardes & Frizelle). The big nations around the Pacific have found a market for the meat by-products their own citizens will not eat. Local food sources have also been supplanted as a result of the high value placed on other foods, like rice, flour and sugar, which from the nineteenth century became associated with “civilisation and progress” (Pollock 233). To counter this, education programs have been undertaken in Tonga and elsewhere in the Pacific in order to promote traditional local foods. These have also sought to address the impact of high food imports on the trade balance (Pollock 232). Food choices are not just determined by preference, but also by cost and availability. Similarly, the Tonga Healthy Weight Loss Program ran during the late 1990s, but it was found that a lack of “availability of healthy low-cost food was a problem” to its success (Englberger et al. 147). In a recent study of Tongan food preferences, it was found that “in general, Tongans prefer healthier traditional, indigenously produced, foods”, but that they are not always available (Evans et al. 170). In the absence of a consistent supply of local protein sources, the often inferior but available imported sources become the default ingredient. Fish in particular are in short supply. Though many Tongans can still be seen harvesting the reef for seafood at low tide, there is no extensive fishing industry capable of providing for the population at large. Intensive farming of pigs has been considered—there was a model piggery on the college where I lived, complete with facilities for methane collection—but it has not been undertaken. Given the strongly ceremonial function of the pig, it would take a large shift in thinking for it to be considered an everyday food. The first cooked pig I encountered arrived at my house in a woven coconut leaf basket, surrounded by baked taro and yam. It was a small pig, given by a family too poor to hold the feast usually provided after church when it was their turn. Instead, they gave the food portion owed directly to the preacher. There’s a faded photo of me squatting on a cracked linoleum floor, examining the contents of the basket, and wondering what on earth I’m going to do with them. I soon learnt the first lesson of island life: food must be shared. With no refrigeration, no family of strapping youths, and no plans to eat the pig myself, it had to be given away to neighbours. It was that simple. Even watermelon went off within the day. In terms of eating, that small pig would have been better kept until a later day, when it reached optimum size, but each family’s obligation came around regularly, and had to be fulfilled. Feasting, and providing for feasting, was a duty, even a fatongia mamafa: a “heavy duty” among many duties, in which the pig was an object deeply “entangled” in all social relations (Thomas). A small pig was big enough to carry the weight of such obligations, even if it could not feed a crowd. Growing numbers of tourists to Tonga, often ignored benignly by their hosts, are keen to snap photos of grazing pigs. It is unusual enough for westerners to see pigs freely wandering, but what is more striking about some pigs on Tongatapu and ‘Eua is that they venture onto the reefs and mudflats at low tide, going after the rich marine pickings, just as their human counterparts do. The silhouette of a pig in the water as the tropical sun sinks behind, caught in a digital frame, it is a striking memory of a holiday in a place that remains largely uninterested in its tourist potential. While an influx of guests is seen by development consultants as the path to the nation’s economic future, Tongans bemusedly refuse to take this possibility seriously (Menzies). Despite a negative trade balance, partly caused by the importation of foreign food, Tonga survives on a combination of subsistence farming and remittances from Tongans living overseas; the tourist potential is largely unrealised. Dirk Spennemann’s work took a strange turn when, as an archaeologist working in Tonga, it became necessary for him to investigate whether these reef-grazing pigs were disturbing midden contents on Tongatapu. In order to establish this, he collected bags of both wet and dry “pig excreta” (107). Spenemann’s methodology involved soaking the contents of these bags for 48 hours, stirring them frequently; “they dissolved, producing considerable smell” (107). Spennemann concluded that pigs do appear to have been eating fish and shellfish, along with grass and “the occasional bit of paper” (107). They also feed on “seaweed and seagrass” (108). I wonder if these food groups have any noticeable impact on the taste of their flesh? Creatures fed particular diets in order to create a certain distinct taste are part of the culinary traditions of the world. The deli around the corner from where I live sells such gourmet items as part of its lunch fare: Saltbush lamb baguettes are one of their favourites. In the Orkneys, the rare and ancient North Ronaldsay Sheep are kept from inland foraging for most of the year by a high stone fence in order to conserve the grass for lambing time. This forces them to eat seaweed on the beach, producing a distinct marine taste, one that is highly valued in certain Parisian restaurants. As an economy largely cut out of the world economic loop, Tonga is unlikely to find select menus on which its reef pigs might appear. While living on ‘Eua, I regularly took a three hour ferry trip to Tongatapu in order to buy food I could not get on my home island. One of these items was wholemeal flour, from which I baked bread in a mud oven we had built outside. Bread was available on ‘Eua, but it was white, light and transported loose in the back of truck. I chose to make my own. The ferry trip usually involved a very rough crossing, though on calmer days, roof passengers would cook sipi on the diesel chimney, added flavour guaranteed. It usually only took about thirty minutes on the way out from Nafanua Harbour before the big waves struck. I could endure them for a while, but soon the waves, combined with a heavy smell of diesel, would have me heading for the rail. On one journey, I tried to hold off seasickness by focussing on an island off shore from Tongatapu. I went onto the front deck of the ferry and faced the full blast of the wind. With waves and wind, it was difficult to stand. I diligently stared at the island, which only occasionally disappeared beneath the swell, but I soon knew that this trip would be like the others; I’d be leaning over the rail as the ocean came up to meet me, not really caring if I went over. I could not bear to share the experience, so in many ways being alone on the foredeck was ideal for me, if I had to be on the boat at all. At least I thought I was alone, but I soon heard a grunt, and looked across to see an enormous sow, trotters tied front and back, lying across the opposite side of the boat. And like me, she too was succumbing to her nausea. Despite the almost complete self-absorption seasickness brings, we looked at each other. I may have imagined an acknowledgement, but I think not. While the status of pigs in Tongan life remains important, in many respects the imposition of European institutions and the availability of imported foods have had an enormous impact on the rest of the Tongan diet, with devastating effects on the health of Tongans. Instead of the customary two slow-cooked meals, one before noon and one in the evening (Pollock 56), consisting mostly of roots crops, plantains and breadfruit, with a relish of meat or fish, most Tongans eat three meals a day in order to fit in with school and work schedules. In current Tongan life, there is no time for an ‘umu every day; instead, quick and often cheaper imported foods are consumed, though local foods can also be cooked relatively quickly. While some still start the day by grabbing a piece of left over cassava, many more would sit down to the ubiquitous Pacific breakfast food: crackers, topped with a slab of butter. Food is a neo-colonial issue. If larger nations stopped dumping unwanted and nutritionally poor food products, health outcomes might improve. Similarly, the Tongan government could tip the food choice balance by actively supporting a local and traditional food supply in order to make it as cheap and accessible as the imported foods that are doing such harm to the health of Tongans References Barnes, Lucy, Rona Moss-Morris, and Mele Kaufusi. “Illness Beliefs and Adherence in Diabetes Mellitus: A Comparison between Tongan and European Patients.” The New Zealand Medical Journal 117.1188 (2004): 1-9. Beaglehole, J.C. Ed. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery: The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776-1780. Parts I & II. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1967. ­­­____. Ed. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery: The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure 1772-1775. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1969. Colagiuri, Stephen, Ruth Colgaiuri, Siva Na‘ati, Soana Muimuiheata, Zafirul Hussein, and Taniela Palu. “The Prevalence of Diabetes in the Kingdom of Tonga.” Diabetes Care 28.2 (2002): 1378-83. Edwardes, Brennan, and Frank Frizelle. “Globalisation and its Impact on the South Pacific.” The New Zealand Medical Journal 122.1291 (2009). 4 Aug. 2010 Englberger, L., V. Halavatau, Y. Yasuda, & R, Yamazaki. “The Tonga Healthy Weight Loss Program.” Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition 8.2 (1999): 142-48. Gentles, Dudley, et al. “Metabolic Syndrome Prevalence in a Multicultural Population in Auckland, New Zealand.” Journal of the New Zealand Medical Association 120.1248 (2007). 4 Aug. 2010 Kirk, Sara F.L., Andrew J. co*ckbain, and James Beasley. “Obesity in Tonga: A cross-sectional comparative study of perceptions of body size and beliefs about obesity in lay people and nurses.” Obesity Research & Clinical Practice 2.1 (2008): 35-41. Larsen, Gregor, et al. “Phylogeny and Ancient DNA of Sus Provides New Insights into Neolithic Expansion in Island Southeast Asia and Oceania.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104.12 (2007): 4834-39. Martin, John. Tonga Islands: William Mariner’s Account, 1817. Neiafu, Tonga: Vava‘u, 1981. Menzies, Isa. “Cultural Tourism and International Development in Tonga: Notes from the Field”. Unpublished paper. Oceanic Passages Conference. Hobart, June 2010. Pollock, Nancy J. These Roots Remain: Food Habits in Islands of the Central and Eastern Pacific since Western Contact. Honolulu: Institute for Polynesian Studies, 1992. Rosen, Rochelle K., Judith DePue, and Stephen T. McGarvey. “Overweight and Diabetes in American Samoa: The Cultural Translation of Research into Health Care Practice.” Medicine and Health/ Rhode Island 91.12 (2008): 372-78. Spennemann, Dirk H.R. “On the Diet of Pigs Foraging on the Mud Flats of Tongatapu: An Investigation in Taphonomy.” Archaeology in New Zealand 37.2 (1994): 104-10. Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Objects and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1991.

Abstract:

Introduction Taste is considered a gustatory and physiological sense. It is also something that can be developed over time. In Bourdieu’s work taste is a matter of distinction, and a means of drawing boundaries between groups about what constitutes “good” taste. In this context it is necessary to perform or display tastes over and over again. This then becomes part of a cultural habitus, a code that can be read and understood. In the field of “feeding the family” (DeVault) for respondents in my study, healthy food prepared from scratch became the symbol of appropriate mothering, a means of demonstrating a middle class habitus, distinction, and taste. I use the term “family foodways” to emphasize how feeding the family encapsulates more than buying, preparing, cooking, and serving food, it incorporates the ways in which families practice, perform, and “do” family food. These family foodways are about the family of today, as well as an investment in the family of the future, through the reproduction and reinforcement of cultural values and tastes around food. In the UK, there are divisions between what might be considered appropriate and inappropriate family foodways, and a vilification of alternatives that lack time and effort. Warde identifies four antinomies of taste used by advertisers in the marketing of food: “novelty and tradition,” “health and indulgence,” “economy and extravagance,” and “convenience and care” (174). In relation to family foodways, there are inherent tensions in these antinomies, and for mothers in my study in order to demonstrate “care”, it was necessary to eschew “convenience.” Indeed, the time and effort involved in feeding the family healthy meals prepared from scratch becomes an important symbol of middle class taste and investment in the future. The alternative can be illustrated by reference to the media furore around Jamie Oliver’s comments in a Radio Times interview (that coincided with a TV series and book launch) in which Deans quotes Oliver: "You might remember that scene in [a previous series] of Ministry of Food, with the mum and the kid eating chips and cheese out of Styrofoam containers, and behind them is a massive f****** TV.” Oliver uses cultural markers of taste to highlight how “mum” was breaking the rules and conventions associated with appropriate or aspirational class based family foodways. We assume that the “mum and kid” were using their fingers, and not a knife and fork, and that the meal was not on a plate around a table but instead eaten in front of a “massive f****** TV.” Oliver uses these cultural markers of taste and distinction to commit acts of symbolic violence, defined by Bourdieu and Wacquant, as “the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity” (67), to confer judgement and moral approbation regarding family foodways. In this example, a lack of time and effort is associated with a lack of taste. And although this can be linked with poverty, this is not about a lack of money, as the mother and child are eating in front of a big television. Oliver is therefore drawing attention to how family foodways become cultural markers of taste and distinction. I argue that appropriate family foodways have become significant markers of taste, and draw on qualitative data to emphasise how respondents use these to position themselves as “good” mothers. Indeed, the manner of presenting, serving, and eating food fulfils the social function of legitimising social difference (Bourdieu 6). Indeed, Bourdieu claims that mothers are significant as the convertors of economic capital into cultural capital for their children; they are “sign bearing” carriers of taste (Skeggs 22). In taking time to prepare healthy meals from scratch, sourcing organic and/or local ingredients, accommodating each individual household members food preferences or individual health needs, being able to afford to waste food, to take time over the preparation, and eating of a meal around the table together, are all aspects of an aspirational model of feeding the family. This type of intensive effort around feeding becomes a legitimate means of demonstrating cultural distinction and taste. Research Background This paper draws on data from a qualitative study conducted over nine months in 2011. I carried out a series of asynchronous on-line interviews with seventy-five mostly middle class women and men between the ages of twenty-seven and eighty-five. One third of the respondents were male. Two thirds were parents at different stages in the life course, from those who were new to parenting to grand parents. There was also a range of family types including lone parents, and co-habiting and married couples with children (and step-children). The focus of the inquiry was food over the life course and respondents were invited to write their own autobiographical food narratives. Once respondents agreed to participate, I wrote to them: What I’m really after is your “food story.” Perhaps, this will include your earliest food memories, favourite foods, memorable food occasions, whether your eating habits have changed over time and why this may be. Also, absolutely anything food related that you'd like to share with me. For some, if this proved difficult, we engaged in an on-line interview in which I asked a series of questions centred on how they developed their own eating and cooking habits. I did not set out to question respondents specifically about “healthy” or “unhealthy” foodways and did not mention these terms at all. It was very much an open invitation for them to tell their stories in their words and on their terms. It was the common vocabularies (Mills) across the narratives that I was looking to discover, rather than directing these vocabularies in any particular way. I conducted several levels of analysis on the data and identified four themes on the family, health, the body, and the foodie. This discussion is based on the narratives I identified within the family theme. A Taste for “Healthy” Family Foodways When setting out on this research journey, I anticipated a considerable shift in gender roles within the home and a negotiated family model in which “everything could be negotiated” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim xxi), especially “feeding the family” (De-Vault). Considering the rise of male celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver and the development of a distinct foodie identity (Naccarato and LeBesco, Johnston and Baumann, Cairns et al.), I envisaged that men would be more likely to take on this role. Given women’s roles outside the home, I also envisaged the use of convenience food, ready meals, and take-away food. However, what emerged was that women were highly resistant to any notion of relinquishing the responsibility for “feeding the family” (DeVault). Indeed, the women who were parents were keen to demonstrate how they engaged in preparing healthy, home-cooked meals from scratch for their families, despite having working identities. This commitment to healthy family foodways was used as a means of aligning themselves with an intensive mothering ideology (Hays) and to distance themselves from the alternative. It was a means of drawing distinctions and symbolising taste. When it comes to feeding the family, the “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 167) afforded to mothers who transgress the boundaries of appropriate mothering by feeding their children unhealthy and/or convenience food, meant that mothers in my study only fed their children healthy food. It would be inconceivable for them to admit to anything else. This I consider a consequence of dualist and absolutist approaches to food and foodways, whereby “convenience” food continues to be demonised in family food discourses because it symbolises “lack” on many levels, specifically a lack of care and a lack of taste. This was not something I had anticipated at the beginning of the study; that mothers would not use convenience food and only prepared “healthy” meals was a surprise. This is indicative of the power of healthy food discourses and inappropriate family foodways, as symbolised by the mum feeding her kid “cheese and chips out of a Styrofoam container,” in informing respondents’ food narratives. I gained full ethical approval from my university and all respondents were given pseudonyms. The quotes I use here are taken from the narratives within the family theme and are representative of this theme. I cannot include all respondents’ narratives. I include quotes from Faye, a forty-six year-old Secretary married with one child; Laura, a thirty-five year-old Teaching Assistant, married with two children; Zoe, a forty-four year-old Recruiter, married with two children; Gaby, a fifty-one year old Architect Designer, married with two children; Ophelia, a fifty-three year-old Author, married with two children; Valerie, a forty-six year-old Website Manager, single with one child; and Chloe, a forty-six year old Occupational Health Sex Advisor, co-habiting with two children at home. Cooking “proper” healthy family meals is a skilled practice (Short) and a significant aspect of meaningful family-integration (Moiso et al.). It has symbolic and cultural capital and is indicative of a particular middle class habitus and this relates to taste in its broadest sense. Hence, Faye writes: My mum was a fabulous, creative cook; she loved reading cookery books and took great pride in her cooking. We didn't have a lot of money when we were young, but my mum was a very creative cook and every meal was completely delicious and homemade. Faye, despite working herself, and in common with many women juggling the second shift (Hochschild and Machung), is solely responsible for feeding her family. Indeed, Faye’s comments are strikingly similar to those in DeVault’s research carried out over twenty years ago; one of DeVault’s participants was quoted as saying that, “as soon as I get up on the morning or before I go to bed I’m thinking of what we’re going to eat tomorrow” (56). It is significant that cultural changes in the twenty years since DeVaults’ study were not reflected in respondents’ narratives. Despite women working outside of the home, men moving into the kitchen, and easy access to a whole range of convenience foods, women in my study adhered to “healthy” family foodways as markers of taste and distinction. Two decades later, Faye comments: Oh my goodness! I wake up each morning and the first thing I think about is what are we going to have for supper! It's such a drag, as I can never think of anything new or inspirational, despite the fact that we have lots of lovely cookery books! In many ways, these comments serve to reinforce further the status of “feeding the family” (DeVault) as central to maternal identity and part of delineating distinction and taste. Faye, in contrast to her own mother, has the additional pressure of having to cook new and inspirational food. Indeed, if preparing and purchasing food for herself or her family, Faye writes: I would make a packed lunch of something I really enjoyed eating, that's healthy, balanced and nutritious, with a little treat tucked in! […] I just buy things that are healthy and nutritious and things that might be interesting to appear in [my daughter’s] daily lunch box! However, by “just buying things that are healthy”, Faye is contributing to the notion that feeding the family healthily is easy, natural, care work and part of a particular middle class habitus. Again, this is part of what distinguishes cultural approaches to family foodways. Health and healthiness are part of a neo-liberal approach that is about a taste for the future. It is not about instant gratification, but about safeguarding health. Faye positions herself as the “guardian of health” (Beagan et al. 662). This demonstrates the extent to which the caringscape and healthscape can be intertwined (McKie et al.), as well as how health discourses seep into family foodways, whereby a “good mother” ensures the health of her children through cooking/providing healthy food or by being engaged in emotion (food) work. Faye reiterates this by writing, “if I have time [my cooking skills] […] are very good, if I don't they are rumbled together! But everything I cook is cooked with love!” Hence, this emotion work is not considered work at all, but an expression of love. Hence, in terms of distinction and taste, even when cooking is rushed it is conceptualised in the context of being prepared with love, in opposition to the cultural symbol of the mother and child “eating cheese and chips out of a Styrofoam container.” Convenience “Lacks” Taste In the context of Warde’s care and convenience antinomy, food associated with convenience is considered inappropriate. Cooking a family meal from scratch demonstrates care, convenience food for mothers symbolises “lack” on many levels. This lack of care is interwoven into a symbolic capital that supposes a lack of time, education, cultural capital, economic capital, and therefore a lack of taste. Hence, Laura writes: We never buy cakes and eat very few convenience foods, apart from the odd fish finger in a wrap, or a tin of beans. Ready meals and oven chips don’t appeal to me and I want my kids to grow up eating real food. It is notable that Laura makes the distinction between convenience and “real” food. Similarly, Zoe claims: We eat good interesting food every day at home and a takeaway once in a blue moon (2–3 times a year). Ready meals are unheard of here and we eat out sometimes (once a month). In Gaby’s account she makes reference to: “junk food, synthetic food and really overly creamy/stodgy cheap calorie foods” and claims that this kind of food makes her feel “revolted.” In James’s research she makes connections between “junk food” and “junk families.” In Gaby’s account she has a corporeal reaction to the thought of the type of food associated with cheapness and convenience. Ophelia notes that: After 15 years of daily cooking for my family I have become much more confident and proficient in food and what it really means. Today I balance the weekly meals between vegetarian, pasta, fish and meat and we have a lot of salad. I have been trying to cook less meat, maybe twice or sometimes including a roast at weekends, three times a week. Teens need carbs so I cook them most evenings but I don’t eat carbs myself in the evening now unless it’s a pasta dish we are all sharing. Here, Ophelia is highlighting the balance between her desires and the nutritional needs of her children. The work of feeding the family is complex and incorporates a balance of different requirements. The need to display appropriate mothering through feeding the family healthy meals cooked from scratch, was especially pertinent for women working and living on their own with children, such as Valerie: I am also responsible for feeding my daughter […] I make a great effort to make sure she is getting a balanced diet. To this end I nearly always cook meals from scratch. I use meal planners to get organised. I also have to budget quite tightly and meal planning helps with this. I aim to ensure we eat fish a couple of times a week, chicken a couple of times of week, red meat maybe once or twice and vegetarian once or twice a week. We always sit down to eat together at the table, even if it is just the two of us. It gives us a chance to talk and focus on each other. It is notable that Valerie insists that they sit down to eat at a table. This is a particular aspect of a middle class habitus and one that distinguishes Valerie’s family foodways from others, despite their low income. Hence, “proper” mothering is about cooking “proper” meals from scratch, even or perhaps especially if on a limited budget or having the sole responsibility for childcare. Chloe claims: I like to cook from scratch and meals can take time so I have to plan that around work [...] I use cookbooks for ideas for quick suppers [...] thinking about it I do spend quite a lot of time thinking about what I’m going to cook. I shop with meals in mind for each night of the week [...] this will depend on what’s available in the shops and what looks good, and then what time I get home. Here, food provision is ultimately tied up with class and status and again the provision of good “healthy” food is about good “healthy” parenting. It is about time and the lack of it. A lack of time due to having to work outside of the home and the lack of time to prepare or care about preparing healthy meals from scratch. Convenience food is clearly associated with low socio-economic status, a particular working class habitus and lack of care. Conclusion In an era of heightened neo-liberal individualism, there was little evidence of a “negotiated family model” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim) within respondents’ narratives. Mothers in my study went to great lengths to emphasise that they fed their children “healthy” food prepared from scratch. Feeding the family is a central aspect of maternal identity, with intensive mothering practices (Hays) associated with elite cultural capital and a means of drawing distinctions between groups. Hence, despite working full time or part time, the blurring of boundaries between home and work, and the easy availability of convenience foods, ready-meals, and take-away food, women in my study were committed to feeding the family healthy meals cooked from scratch as a means of differentiating their family foodways from others. Dualist and absolutist approaches to food and foodways means that unhealthy and convenience food and foodways are demonised. They are derided and considered indicative of lack on many levels, especially in terms of lacking taste in its broadest sense. Unhealthy or convenient family foodways are associated with “other” (working class) mothering practices, whereby a lack of care indicates a lack of education, time, money, cultural capital, and taste. There are rigid cultural scripts of mothering, especially for middle class mothers concerned with distancing themselves from the symbol of the mum who feeds her children convenience food, or “cheese and chips out of Styrofoam containers in front of a f***ing big television.” References Beagan, Brenda, Gwen Chapman, Andrea D’Sylva, and Raewyn Bassett. “‘It’s Just Easier for Me to Do It’: Rationalizing the Family Division of Foodwork.” Sociology 42.4 (2008): 653–71. Beck, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Individualization, Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. London: Sage, 2002. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2002 [1992]. Cairns, Kate, Josée Johnston, and Shyon Baumann. “Caring about Food: Doing Gender in the Foodie Kitchen.” Gender and Society 24.5 (2010): 591–615. Deans, Jason. “Jamie Oliver Bemoans Chips, Cheese and Giant TVs of Modern-day Poverty.” The Guardian 27 Aug. 2013: 3. DeVault, Marjorie I. Feeding the Family. London: U of Chicago P., 1991. Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1996. Hochschild, Arlie Russell, and Anne Machung, The Second Shift (2nd ed). London: Penguin Books, 2003. James, Allison. “Children’s Food: Reflections on Politics, Policy and Practices.” London: BSA Food Studies Conference, 2010. 3 Dec. 2013. ‹http://www.britsoc.co.uk/media/24962/AllisonJames.ppt‎›. James, Allison, Anne-Trine Kjørholt, and Vebjørg Tingstad. Eds. Children, Food and Identity in Everyday Life, London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann. Foodies, Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Kitchen. London: Routledge, 2010. McKie, Linda, Susan Gregory, and Sophia Bowlby. “Shadow Times: The Temporal and Spatial Frameworks and Experiences of Caring and Working.” Sociology 36.4 (2002): 897–924. Mills, Charles Wright. The Sociological Imagination. London: Penguin, 1959. Naccarato, Peter, and Kathleen LeBesco. Culinary Capital. London: Berg, 2012. Short, Frances. Kitchen Secrets: The Meaning of Cooking in Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Skeggs, Beverley. Class, Self and Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Warde, Alan. Consumption, Food and Taste. London: Sage, 1997.

Abstract:

Data desire flows through protest in the Anthropocene. Citizen science, participation in online discussion forums, documentary film production, protest selfies, glacier recession GPS photography, poster making, etc., are just some of the everyday data proliferation efforts comprising resistance to environmental degradation and destruction. These practices – visualisation, datafication, writing, sign making, archiving geological memory, etc., are, I want to argue, produced pleasurably, especially as modes of emerging as ‘subjects’ in relation to the chaos, chaotic affects, and unprecedented pace of destructive ecological events that these practices try to grasp or ‘make sense of.’ Pleasures of data production are hence closely correlated to emerging as a subject within the Anthropocene. Such pleasures function beyond individual emotion, and in relation to subjectification within chaotic events such as climate change. In this article I propose the concept data desire to map out how ‘data’ and ‘subjectivity’ co-emerge in relation to material forces and how people take pleasure in their subjectification through ‘knowing,’ datafying, and creating ‘meaning’ out of material events which are chaotic or have chaotic affects (Guattari). I take up contrasting terms of ‘pleasure’ and ‘desire’, drawing on the thought of Gilles Deleuze ("Desire"; Essays), for whom pleasure is associated with a craving of individuation in light of chaos while desire speaks to the unlimited postponement of events from being summarised. One such event, and the event I focus on in this article, is oil. Here, I think of the event, not as ‘a moment’ or a ‘happening,’ but as that which has many iterations, instances, and bifurcations, and is often distributed in space and time (Deleuze, The Fold). I draw on my fieldwork in media practices of people taking part in the oil pipeline protests in British Columbia, Canada. I give examples of three data practices, and articulate the relation between media production, generation of ‘data’ and the production of subjectivity within the Anthropocene. These practices include data generation through participation in online news’ comment forums, data created as part of citizen science, and resistance ‘selfies’ or producing oneself as data to be circulated on social media. My analysis diverts from any interest in the representational function of media, towards how pleasures of data practices and the circulation of desire that these are a part of emerge, for many people, as the only ways of becoming subjectified in catastrophic environmental events.Pleasure and desire may not be the most obvious terms to think of when one thinks of resistance, particularly against environmental degradation. While pleasure has been an important aspect of activism, social movements, and feminist politics (e.g. Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta; Sharpe), it has only recently been engaged with in relation to environmental activism, particularly by Craig, and Alaimo. Alaimo defines pleasure as an important aspects of material engagements and more-than-human ontologies marked by connection and kinship characterised by delight. Craig also calls for the recognition that pleasure is central to the everyday lived resistance found in environmental movements such as the slow food movement and urban farming that are anti-consumerist in orientation. These examples mark pleasure as part of the politics of resistance where the emotion emerges from the belief in a harmonious and symbiotic relationship to ‘nature’ and non-human matter through human emotion. Pleasure however, as I intend to show, can also be thought of beyond the individuating ‘emotion’ and as part of larger flows of desire, where ‘desire’ is conceptualised as vitality and ‘ongoing production’ (Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus). Particularly, my focus on pleasure intends to problematise how pleasure through data production emerges perhaps as a mode of ongoing ‘coping’ of ‘navigating’ or of simply ‘trying to be a part of’ or attain some sensation of ‘agency’ amongst ecological catastrophes when being political are deemed to be ineffective or even futile.Data and Desiring-ProductionI propose ‘data desire’ as a concept for thinking about the ongoing social production of subjectivity through data production in the context of the failure of representation in the Anthropocene. Gilles Deleuze ("Desire") argued that pleasure is an individualised emotion related to failures of representation: “pleasure seems to me to be the only means for a person or a subject to ‘find themselves again’ in a process which overwhelms them” ("Desire", n.p.). Such an emotion is one of the outputs of a flow of desire that is non-individual, and not only human.Desiring production “causes the current to flow” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 5) between the event of oil and the production of subjectivity, both which propagate and bifurcate, and are continuously produced anew. Desire is characterised by vitality, or the unceasing capacity of processes to continuously become difference, to continuously change, rather than ‘arrive’, ‘conclude’, or ‘be.’ In other words, to think with ‘desire’ is to note how production flows, like a current, through ‘overwhelming’ events that including oil, and through subjectification, both of which continuously emerge in new contortions and produce new affects. The pleasure that emerges through a subject being produced, or a subject ‘coming into being’ by way of producing data – summarising, visualising, representing, and trying to give ‘meaning’ to ‘the event’ – is affected by the ongoing ability of ‘the event’ to multiply and be postponed from being summarised, as it proliferates and reproduces itself in ever new human and non-human bifurcations – oil spills and leaks, protests, policies, bitumen, new movements, new rhetoric, new sanctions, new pipelines, etc.Malins for instance notes how desireis not that which a pre-existing subject has for something, nor is it motivated by individual lack or the pursuit of pleasure. It is instead best understood as a pre-subjective, pre-conscious life force or energy that flows between bodies, connecting, animating and transforming them. (2)Data desire is therefore most importantly not a feeling that emerges out of a lack of data, or a desire for data. Rather data desires suggests that data practices become modalities through which people involved in environmental resistance can continuously ‘sense’ themselves as part of the event, or gain the sensation that they ‘are’ political, even if only as a sensation and only if momentarily, and within catastrophic events that are also always changing and defy representation. Events such as oil hence require analysis of the entanglement or multiple ways in which processes of subjectification, ecology, and media practices are in themselves multiple and folded together in multiple ways, something Guattari called the three ecologies, and more recently, Murphie referred to as a catastrophic multiplicity. This orientation towards desire as production positions the analysis of the pleasure of data practices beyond that of an individual into the realm of social production.Data Desire Fieldwork in the Oil-EventMy fieldwork focussed on the data practices of residents living in oil pipeline conflicts in British Columbia. This research included examining the media practices and everyday data engagements of residents engaging with and concerned about two oil pipeline projects: Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline, which would move crude oil from Edmonton and terminate in Kitimat in Northern British Columbia, and Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain oil pipeline that also would move crude oil from the Alberta tar sands to Burnaby, British Columbia. This later pipeline already exists, although the proposed project aimed at twinning of the oil pipeline would substantially increase oil tanker traffic along the West Coast and generate new risk of oil spills, given its increased capacity. As part of my research I spoke with a total of twenty-four (24) residents, and six (6) environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) in Northern British Columbia and the Vancouver Metro Area to examine their media practices, digital strategies and other, everyday data practices in the oil pipeline conflict.Against the backdrop of an uptake in big data’s relation to ecological transformation (e.g.: Ruiz; Hogan; Maddalena & Russill), I found the displays of pleasure accompanying individuals’ ostensibly everyday ‘small data’ productions as enunciations of subjectivity and resistance in the oil pipeline movement, under-examined and intriguing. Oil pipeline resistance can be charted along affective lines of pleasure associated with data practices, as people living in oil pipeline conflicts find themselves amidst an ever-expanding flurry of directions and affects that oil takes on: #NoDAPL, the Kalamazoo oil spill, the Conservative party leadership, Indigenous law suit claims, hypocrisy rhetoric, oil pipeline decisions approved, challenged, and deferred at municipal and federal levels. Oil is hence not only a substance but an event that continues to swirl off in new directions, and encompasses and also connects with a multitude of other events, such as urbanisation, 300,000 airplanes taking off and landing on a daily basis, peak oil, and animal extinction. I therefore consider ‘events’ not as ‘happenings’ or singular image events (DeLuca; DeLuca & Peeples; McHendry; Yang) in the way they are often conceptualised within environmental communication literature, but as something that is ongoing, and often extensive beyond a single time and space. Image events may be one of the expressions of a broader and larger (conceptualised as having multiple expressions) event taking place. This section provides three examples of pleasures of emerging as subjects through data practices as political resistance to oil. These include contributing to discussions in online forums, engaging in citizen science, and proliferation of photos of authentic ‘non/environmentalists’ faces on social media.The first example of subjects emerging through practices of data desire is the production of online data, especially in online political forums or online news comments sections. Here, we might envision the pleasure of data production, in the form of writing online comments, as correlating to the individual wish to ‘count’, particularly as ‘individuals’ are seen to be peripheral to geological forces and capitalist machines of oil production, as well as to the processes of decision making, lawsuits, and municipal and regional politics. One example from this study demonstrates how residents living in oil pipeline conflict areas take pleasure in consuming and producing data. The excerpt below comes from a conversation I had with a resident living in and resisting the Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion in the Vancouver Metro Area. This resident, an avid canoer and computer programmer in his thirties, showed immense pleasure in generating data in the form of contributing to news comments sections. Below I treat the participant’s talk not as an ‘account’ in the positivist sense in which ‘interview data’ might be taken to represent ‘participants’ voices.’ Rather, I treat such expression as a flow of desire that flows through individuals, often constituting them as subjects.I love discussing these issues. I love identifying what is not necessarily of paramount concern as opposed to what is. I have a lot of conversations. I have friends involved in policy. And I read. I’ve got news alerts coming my way from—you know, I must have about twelve Google alerts coming up just regarding pipeline issues and environmental issues. It’s become such a passion for me that I almost was sad once I felt it was finally defeated. I would get up in the morning and hop on the computer to read the latest articles and, you know, respond to comments and stuff. Often what I’m more interested in than the news article is the comments because it tells me where the Overton window is at any given time. I mentioned that some people attend rallies and stuff, well I post to the comments sections and I have conversations all the time online.As seen in this excerpt, pleasure/the subject emerge simultaneously through projects of comprehension and expression. The excerpt shows how contributions to conversations are ‘productive’ not in terms of any kind of political outcome, but in terms of a sensation of emerging/becoming subjectified in the event. Pleasure manifests within projects related to constituting subjectivity by not only consuming data, but also contributing to its ongoing production. In other words, this resident living in an oil conflict area found pleasure in calculating the Overton Window of online news comments about the oil pipeline, as well as in being constituted within the event as a political ‘subject’ by producing ‘data’. His becoming ‘subject’ was concurrent to a sensation of being able to ‘summarise’ the event and its articulations under ‘a unity’ and giving some ‘meaning’ to the constantly shifting event of ‘oil’. While both ‘the subject’ and ‘oil’ keep being produced anew, the momentary emotion of ‘pleasure’ functions to give a sensation of albeit temporary coherence. Here, as Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) argue pleasure is “an affection of a person or a subject, a way for people to ‘find themselves’ in the process of desire that exceeds them” (156). This ‘excess’ characterises the evasiveness of ecological events and objects from being ever truly graspable, comprehensible, represented, or even ‘known’ to humans. de Freitas for instance notes how matter is already mathematically monstrous, quite literally multiplying, and evasive in its capacity to be ‘calculated’ (3). Input through online comments are therefore attempts at contribution to calculations, ‘making sense’, and also to feeling ‘counted’, attempts which in themselves amount to a great pleasure.The second example of subjects emerging through practices of data desire involves citizen science as a mode of data generation. Practices such as citizen science became pleasurable activities of subjective enunciations – practices of a ‘subject’ coming into being against, or within, this chaos, through data generation. Citizen science is a prime example of residents living in oil pipeline conflicts becoming enunciated – pleasurably – as subjects in the oil pipeline conflict in BC. Citizen science, for example, can take many forms. Streamkeeping, the act of taking care of local streams, is a key form of citizen science in areas facing oil pipeline conflicts, particularly as it puts data practices front and centre as part of resistance. While streamkeeping has many aspects to it, including stream clean-ups, a key component is the production of data about ecosystems health, which including wading into water to count fish, measure construction runoff such as silt, gravel, and sediment, and create comparative archives. Measuring, noting salmon counts, documenting debris emerged as pleasurable ways of engaging in pipeline politics–emerging as a subject, by way of somehow trying to datafy the oil-event, by making it ‘meaningful.’Data production functions to mathematically calculate a course of action within a concoction of persuasive efforts of oil pipeline corporations, environmental non-governmental organisations, governments, activist, and neighbours to define what ‘political subjectification’ might look like. Science is in perpetual struggle against chaos (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?) and data generation through grass-roots citizen science becomes a tool, or an instillation of data about a changing biome through which to encounter oil, and through which to emerge as a subject in relation to oil. Production of data as part of ‘citizen science’ also functions as a way through which to assert ‘independence’ and stage some resistance within a multiplicity of other ways in which oil becomes a reason of various attempts to define ‘political subjectivity’, such as ENGO campaigns, government statements about the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ process to show resistance to the oil pipelines, and the branding of environmentalists as ecoterrorists. Perhaps data production becomes a way to effectively fold oneself into the oil event, without needing to confront a lack of other ways one could, or might resist oil pipeline development.The third example of the circulation of data desire are the increasingly common expressions of individuated pleasures associated with showing ‘faces’ of people engaged in environmentalist issues like oil pipelines, on various social media feeds that try to portray ‘real’ political subjects, in contrast to stereotypical representations of ‘activists’ or ‘environmentalists.’ Here I am specifically talking about selfies taken at environmental protests. Such productions of images of ‘authentic’ political subjects within oil movements has been a popular way to demonstrate authenticity of resistance efforts within environmental movements, particularly in relation to a struggle against accusations of hypocrisy fed by oil pipeline corporations and pundits (Piotrowski). Given the numerous social media feeds of environmental anti-oil pipeline groups that attempt to show ‘faces’ of ‘real’ political subjects, these depictions attempt to produce subjectivities, particularly with the intensifying circulation of what might be thought of as “faciality enactments” (Piotrowski, 849). Here, ‘faces’ are generated as ‘data’. The continuous production of faces/data becomes what counts, or matters, within resistance, as a way of continuously reproducing environmentalist subjectivity, particularly at a point of ‘crisis’ of environmentalist group identity. Such micro-productions and pleasures of individual faces on social media feeds or Instagram posts, are part of flows of data desire: the desire of individuals to emerge as subjects within a multitude of stereotypes about environmentalism; the desire for environmentalism to assert itself as meaningful within ecological events such as ‘oil’, and the desire of corporations to assert different rhetorics about both oil and environmentalism itself.To close, I have articulated that a subject – a subject that takes part in ‘their’ resistance to ecological degradation – is a residual one, the product of a circulating flow of pre-personal data desire. This data desire exceeds individual pleasures and undulates between the chaotic event of oil, its continuously shifting political, economic, and social affects, and ‘a subject’ also continuously trying to be enunciated and ‘individuated’ in the event. Satisfaction, or pleasure, becomes the individual expression of a larger circuit of circulating desires which shows the flows of data between the expressions of material and ecological events which generate all sorts of breakdowns in meaning about ‘the human’ and the Anthropocene, and between breakdowns of activist’ subjectivity. Desire functions as a mode of inquiry that moves thinking about pleasure beyond individuals’ emotions of ‘their’ craving for individuation and meaning within the chaos of the Anthropocene and in the anti-oil pipeline resistance. Rather than see data production as a response to a lack of information, I have shown how data desire, as a concept, can help to think about ontological production, or the production of subjects. This ontological production refers both to the event’s capacity to become continuously different and unforeseen, and the subject’s ongoing self-production through data practices. Three examples discussed here – participation in online news comments sections, citizen science, and production of activism selfies are just but some of the media practices that are part of the circulation of data desire, though there are undoubtedly more.ReferencesAlaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016.Craig, Geoffrey. “Political Participation and Pleasure in Green Lifestyle Journalism.” Environmental Communication 10.1 (2016): 122–141.Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. New York, NY: Continuum, 1993.———. Essays Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis, MN. 1997.———. “Desire & Pleasure.” Trans. M. McMahon. Unpaginated. 1997. 1 Aug. 2018 <http://www. artdes.monash.edu.au/globe/delfou.html>. Originally published as "Désir et Plaisir" in Magazine Littéraire 325 (Oct. 1994): 59–65.———, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983 [1972].———, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987 [1980].———, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1994.DeLuca, Kevin. Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. New York, NY: The Guilford P, 1999.———, and Jennifer Peeples. “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (2002): 125–151.Goodwin, Jeff, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, eds. Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009.Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana UP, 1995.———. The Three Ecologies. London: Athlone P, 2000.Malins, Peta. “Desiring Assemblages: A Case for Desire over Pleasure in Critical Drug Studies.” International Journal of Drug Policy 49 (Nov. 2017): 126–132.McHendry, George. F. “Whale Wars and the Axiomatization of Image Events on the Public Screen.” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 6.2 (2012): 139–155.Murphie, Andrew. “On Being Affected: Feeling in the Folding of Multiple Catastrophes.” Cultural Studies 32.1 (2018): 18–42.Piotrowski, Marcelina. “‘Authentic’ Folds: Environmental Audiences, Activists and Subjectification in Hypocrisy Micropolitics.” Continuum 31.6 (2017): 844–856.Sharpe, Erin K. “Festivals and Social Change: Intersections of Pleasure and Politics at a Community Music Festival.” Leisure Sciences 30.3 (2008): 217-234.Yang, Fan. “Under the Dome: ‘Chinese’ Smog as a Viral Media Event.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 33.3 (2016): 232–244.

Abstract:

In the contemporary urban environment of mass transit, it falls to a small group of public officers to keep large number of travellers safe. The small size of their force and the often limited powers they exert mean that these public safety ‘transit officers’ must project more authority and control than they really have. It is this ambience of authority and control which, in most situations they encounter and seek to influence, is enough to keep the public safe. This paper examines the ambience of a group of transit officers working on the railway lines of an Australian capital city. We seek to show how transit officers are both influenced by, and seek to influence, the ambience of their workplace and the public spaces they inhabit whilst on duty, and here we take ambience to apply to the surrounding atmosphere, the aura, and the emotional environment of a place or situation: the setting, tone, or mood. For these transit officers to keep the public safe, they must themselves remain safe. A transit officer who is disabled in a confrontation with a violent offender is unable to provide protection to his or her passengers. Thus, in the culture of the transit officers, their own workplace safety takes on a higher significance. It affects not just themselves. The ambience exuded by transit officers, and how transit officers see their relationship with the travelling public, their management and other organisational work groups, is an important determinant of their work group’s safety culture. Researching the Working Lives of Transit Officers in Perth Our discussion draws on an ethnographic study of the working lives and communication cultures of transit officers (TOs) employed by the Public Transport Authority (PTA) of Western Australia (WA). Transit officers have argued that to understand fully the challenges of their work it is necessary to spend time with them as they undertake their daily duties: roster in, roster out. To this end, the research team and the employer organisation secured an ARC Linkage Grant in partnership with the PTA to fund doctoral candidate and ethnographer Christine Teague to research the workers’ point of view, and the workers’ experiences within the organisation. The two-hundred TOs are unique in the PTA. Neither of the other groups who ride with them on the trains, the drivers and revenue protection staff (whose sole job is to sell and check tickets), experiences the combination of intense contact with passengers, danger of physical injury or group morale. The TOs of the PTA in Perth operate from a central location at the main train station and the end stations on each line. Here there are change lockers where they can lock up their uniforms and equipment such as handcuffs and batons when not on duty, an equipment room where they sign out their radios, and ticket-checking machines. At the main train station there is also a gym, a canteen and holding cells for offenders they detain. From these end stations and central location, the TOs fan out across the network to all suburbs where they either operate from stations or onboard the trains. The TOs also do ‘delta van’ duty providing rapid, mobile back-up support for their colleagues on stations or trains, and providing transport for arrested persons to the holding cell or police lock up. TOs are on duty whenever the trains are running–but the evenings and nights are when they are mainly rostered on. This is when trouble mostly occurs. The TOs’ work ends only after the final train has completed its run and all offenders who may require detaining and charging have been transferred into police custody. While the public perceive that security is the TOs’ most frequent role, much of the work involves non-confrontational activity such as assisting passengers, checking tickets and providing a reassuring presence. One way to deal with an ambiguous role is to claim an ambience of power and authority regardless. Various aspects of the TO role permit and hinder this, and the paper goes on to consider aspects of ambience in terms of fear and force, order and safety, and role confusion. An Ambience of Fear and Force The TOs are responsible for front-line security in WA’s urban railway network. Their role is to offer a feeling of security for passengers using the rail network after the bustle of the work day finishes, and is replaced by the mainly recreational travels of the after hours public. This is the time when some passengers find the prospect of evening travel on the public transport rail network unsettling–so unsettling that it was a 2001 WA government election promise (WA Legislative Council) that every train leaving the city centre after 7pm would have two TOs riding on it. Interestingly, recruitment levels have never been high enough for this promise to be fully kept. The working conditions of the TOs reflect the perception, and to an extent, the reality that some late night travel on public transport involves negotiating an edgy ambience with an element of risk, rubbing shoulders with people who may be loud, rowdy, travelling in a group, and or drug and alcohol affected. As Fred (all TO names are pseudonyms) comments: You’re not dealing with rational people, you’re not dealing with ‘people’: most of the people you’re dealing with are either drunk or under the influence of drugs, so they’re not rational, they don’t hear you, they don’t understand what you’re saying, they just have no sense of what’s right or wrong, you know? Especially being under the influence, so I mean, you can talk till you’re blue in the face with somebody who’s drunk or on drugs, I mean, all you have to say is one thing. ‘Oh, can I see your ticket please’, ‘oh, why do I need a f*cking ticket’, you know? They just don’t get simple everyday messages. Dealing with violence and making arrest is a normal part of this job. Jo described an early experience in her working life as a TO:Within the first week of coming out of course I got smacked on the side of the head, but this lady had actually been certified, like, she was nuts. She was completely mental and we were just standing on the train talking and I’ve turned around to say something to my partner and she was fine, she was as calm as, and I turned around and talked to my partner and the next thing I know I ended up with her fist to the side of my head. And I went ‘what the hell was that’? And she went off, she went absolutely ballistic. I ended up arresting her because it was assault on an officer whether she was mental or not so I ended up arresting her.Although Jo here is describing how she experienced an unprovoked assault in the early days of her career as a TO, one of the most frequent precursors to a TO injury occurs when the TO is required to make an arrest. The injury may occur when the passenger to be arrested resists or flees, and the TO gives chase in dark or treacherous circ*mstances such as railway reserves and tunnels, or when other passengers, maybe friends or family of the original person of concern, involve themselves in an affray around the precipitating action of the arrest. In circ*mstances where capsicum spray is the primary way of enforcing compliance, with batons used as a defence tool, group members may feel that they can take on the two TOs with impunity, certainly in the first instance. Even though there are security cameras on trains and in stations, and these can be cued to cover the threatening or difficult situations confronting TOs, the conflict is located in the here-and-now of the exchanges between TOs and the travelling public. This means the longer term consequence of trouble in the future may hold less sway with unruly travellers than the temptation to try to escape from trouble in the present. In discussing the impact of remote communications, Rubert Murdoch commented that these technologies are “a powerful influence for civilised behaviour. If you are arranging a massacre, it will be useless to shoot the cameraman who has so inconveniently appeared on the scene. His picture will already be safe in the studio five thousand miles away and his final image may hang you” (Shawcross 242). Unfortunately, whether public aggression in these circ*mstances is useless or not, the daily experience of TOs is that the presence of closed circuit television (CCTV) does not prevent attacks upon them: nor is it a guarantee of ‘civilised behaviour’. This is possibly because many of the more argumentative and angry members of the public are dis-inhibited by alcohol or other drugs. Police officers can employ the threat or actual application of stun guns to control situations in which they are outnumbered, but in the case of TOs they can remain outnumbered and vulnerable until reinforcements arrive. Such reinforcements are available, but the situation has to be managed through the communication of authority until the point where the train arrives at a ‘manned’ station, or the staff on the delta vehicle are able to support their colleagues. An Ambience of Order and Safety Some public transport organisations take this responsibility to sustain an ambience of order more seriously than others. The TO ethnographer, Christine Teague, visited public transport organisations in the UK, USA and Canada which are recognised as setting world-class standards for injury rates of their staff. In the USA particularly, there is a commitment to what is called ‘the broken windows’ theory, where a train is withdrawn from service promptly if it is damaged or defaced (Kelling and Coles; Maple and Mitchell). According to Henry (117): The ‘Broken Windows’ theory suggests that there is both a high correlation and a causal link between community disorder and more serious crime: when community disorder is permitted to flourish or when disorderly conditions or problems are left untended, they actually cause more serious crime. ‘Broken windows’ are a metaphor for community disorder which, as Wilson and Kelling (1982) use the term, includes the violation of informal social norms for public behaviour as well as quality of life offenses such as littering, graffiti, playing loud radios, aggressive panhandling, and vandalism.This theory implies that the physical ambience of the train, and by extension the station, may be highly influential in terms of creating a safe working environment. In this case of ‘no broken window’ organisations, the TO role is to maintain a high ‘quality of life’ rather than being a role predominantly about restraining and bringing to justice those whose behaviour is offensive, dangerous or illegal. The TOs in Perth achieve this through personal means such as taking pride in their uniforms, presenting a good-natured demeanour to passengers and assisting in maintaining the high standard of train interiors. Such a priority, and its link to reduced workforce injury, suggests that a perception of order impacts upon safety. It has long been argued that the safety culture of an organisation affects the safety performance of that organisation (Pidgeon; Leplat); but it has been more recently established that different cultural groupings in an organisation conceive and construct their safety culture differently (Leith). The research on ‘safety culture’ raises a problematic which is rarely addressed in practice. That problematic is this: managers frequently engage with safety at the level of instituting systems, while workers engage with safety in terms of behaviour. When Glendon and Litherland comment that, contrary to expectations, they could find no relationship between safety culture and safety performance, they were drawing attention to the fact that much managerial safety culture is premised upon systems involving tick boxes and the filling in of report forms. The broken window approach combines the managerial tick box with managerial behaviour: a dis-ordered train is removed from service. To some extent a general lack of fit between safety culture and safety performance endorses Everett’s view that it is conceptually inadequate to conceive organisations as cultures: “the conceptual inadequacy stems from the failure to distinguish between culture and behavioural features of organizational life” (238). The general focus upon safety culture as a way of promoting improvements in safety performance assumes that compliance with a range of safety systems will guarantee a safe workplace. Such an assumption, however, risks positioning the injured worker as responsible for his or her own predicament and sets up an environment in which some management officials are wont to seek ways in which that injured worker’s behaviour failed to conform with safety rules or safety processes. Yet there are roles which place workers in harm’s way, including military duties, law enforcement and some emergency services. Here, the work becomes dangerous as it becomes disorderly. An Ambience of Roles and Confusion As the research reported here progressed, it became clear that the ambience around the presentation of the self in the role of a TO (Goffman) was an important part of how ‘safety’ was promoted and enacted in their work upon the PTA (WA) trains, face to face with the travelling public. Goffman’s view of all people, not specifically TOs, is that: Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of his motive for having this objective, it will be in his interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of him. This will largely be through influencing the perception and definition that others will come to formulate of him. He will influence them by expressing himself in such a way that the kind of impression given off will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan. (3)This ‘influencing of perception’ is an important element of performing the role of a TO. This task of the TOs is made all the more difficult because of confusions about their role in relation to two other officers: police (who have more power to act in situations of public safety) and revenue project officers (who have less), as we now discuss. The aura of the TO role borrows somewhat from those quintessential law and order officers: the police. TOs work in pairs, like many police, to support each other. They have a range of legal powers including the power of arrest, and they carry handcuffs, a baton and capsicum spray as a means of helping ensure their safety and effectiveness in circ*mstances where they might be outnumbered. The tools of their trade are accessibly displayed on heavy leather belts around their waists and their uniforms have similarities with police uniforms. However, in some ways these similarities are problematic, because TOs are not afforded the same respect as police. This situation underlines of the ambiguities negotiated within the ambience of what it is to be a TO, and how it is to conduct oneself in that role. Notwithstanding the TOs’ law and order responsibilities, public perceptions of the role and some of the public’s responses to the officers can position these workers as “plastic cops” (Teague and Leith). The penultimate deterrent of police officers, the stun gun (Taser), is not available to TOs who are expected to control all incidents arising on duty through the fact that they operate in pairs, with capsicum spray available and, as a last resort, are authorised to use their batons in self defence. Furthermore, although TOs are the key security and enforcement staff in the PTA workforce, and are managed separately from related staff roles, they believe that the clarity of this distinction is compromised because of similarities in the look of Revenue Protection Officers (RPOs). RPOs work on the trains to check that passengers have tickets and have paid the correct fares, and obtain names and addresses to issue infringement notices when required. They are not PTA employees, but contracted staff from an outside company. They also work in pairs. Significantly, the RPO uniform is in many respects identical to that of the TO, and this appears to be a deliberate management choice to make the number of TOs seem greater than it is: extending the TO ambience through to the activities of the RPOs. However, in the event of a disturbance, TOs are required and trained to act, while RPOs are instructed not to get involved; even though the RPOs appear to the travelling public to be operating in the role of a law-and-order-keeper, RPOs are specifically instructed not to get involved in breaches of the peace or disruptive passenger behaviour. From the point of view of the travelling public, who observe the RPO waiting for TOs to arrive, it may seems as if a TO is passively standing by while a chaotic situation unravels. As Angus commented: I’ve spoken to quite a few members of public and received complaints from them about transit officers and talking more about the incident have found out that it was actually [RPOs] that are dealing with it. So it’s creating a bad image for us …. It’s Transits that are copping all the flak for it … It is dangerous for us and it’s a lot of bad publicity for us. It’s hard enough, the job that we do and the lack of respect that we do get from people, we don’t need other people adding to it and making it harder. Indeed, it is not only the travelling public who can mistake the two uniforms. Mike tells of an “incident where an officer [TO] has called for backup on a train and the guys have got off [the train at the next station] and just stood there, and he didn’t realise that they are actually [revenue protection] officers, so he effectively had no backup. He thought he did, but he didn’t.” The RPO uniform may confer an ambience of power borrowed from TOs and communicated visually, but the impact is to compromise the authority of the TO role. Unfortunately, what could be a complementary role to the TOs becomes one which, in the minds of the TO workforce, serves to undermine their presence. This effect of this role confusion is to dilute the aura of authority of the TOs. At one end of a power continuum the TO role is minimised by those who see it as a second-rate ‘Wannabe cop’ (Teague and Leith 2008), while its impact is diluted at the other end by an apparently deliberate confusion between the TO broader ‘law and order’ role, and the more limited RPO revenue collection activities. Postlude To the passengers of the PTA in Perth, the presence and actions of transit officers appear as unremarkable as the daily commute. In this ethnographic study of their workplace culture, however, the transit officers have revealed ways in which they influence the ambience of the workplace and the public spaces they inhabit whilst on duty, and how they are influenced by it. While this ambient inter-relationship is not documented in the organisation’s occupational safety and health management system, the TOs are aware that it is a factor in their level at safety at work, both positively and negatively. Clearly, an ethnography study is conducted at a certain point in time and place, and culture is a living and changing expression of human interaction. The Public Transport Authority of Western Australia is committed to continuous improvement in safety and to the investigation of all ways and means in which to support TOs in their daily activities. This is evident not only in their support of the research and their welcoming of the ethnographer into the workforce and onto the tracks, but also in their robust commitment to change as the findings of the research have progressed. In particular, changes in the ambient TO culture and in the training and daily practices of TOs have already resulted from this research or are under active consideration. Nonetheless, this project is a cogent indicator of the fact that a safety culture is critically dependent upon intangible but nonetheless important factors such as the ambience of the workplace and the way in which officers are able to communicate their authority to others. References Everett, James. “Organizational Culture and Ethnoecology in Public Relations Theory and Practice.” Public Relations Research Annual. Vol. 2. Eds. Larissa Grunig and James Grunig. Hillsdale, NJ, 1990. 235-251. Glendon, Ian, and Debbie Litherland. “Safety Climate Factors, Group Differences and Safety Behaviour in Road Construction.” Safety Science 39.3 (2001): 157-188. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Henry, Vincent. The Comstat Paradigm: Management Accountability in Policing, Business and the Public Sector. New York: Looseleaf Law Publications, 2003. Kelling, George, and Catherine Coles. Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Leith, David. Workplace Culture and Accidents: How Management Can Communicate to Prevent Injuries. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2008. Leplat, Jacques. “About Implementation of Safety Rules.” Safety Science 29.3 (1998): 189-204. Maple, Jack, and Chris Mitchell. The Crime Fighter: How You Can Make Your Community Crime-Free. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Pidgeon, Nick. “Safety Culture and Risk Management in Organizations.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 22.1 (1991): 129-140. Shawcross, William. Rupert Murdoch. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. Teague, Christine, and David Leith. “Men of Steel or Plastic Cops? The Use of Ethnography as a Transformative Agent.” Transforming Information and Learning Conference Transformers: People, Technologies and Spaces, Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA, 2008. ‹http://conferences.scis.ecu.edu.au/TILC2008/documents/2008/teague_and_leith-men_of_steel_or_plastic_cops.pdf›. Wilson, James, and George Kelling. “Broken Windows.” The Atlantic Monthly (Mar. 1982): 29-38. WA Legislative Council. “Metropolitan Railway – Transit Guards 273 [Hon Ed Dermer to Minister of Transport Hon. Simon O’Brien].” Hansard 19 Mar. 2009: 2145b.

Abstract:

It’s a cool autumn morning and I am grateful for the sun as it warms the wet concrete. I have been told we will be spending some time outside later, so I am hopeful it will remain sunny. When everyone arrives, we go directly to the principal’s office. Once inside, someone points at the PA system. People pull out their cameras and take a quick photo—we were told the PA system in each school can be different so information about the broadcasting mechanism could be helpful in an emergency. I decide to take a photo as well. Figure 1: PA system inside the principal's office (Photo by Michelle Stewart) The principal joins us and we begin the task of moving through the school: a principal, two plain clothes police officers, two uniformed police officers, two police volunteers and an anthropologist researcher. Our goal is to document the entire school for a police program called School Action For Emergencies (SAFE) that seeks to create emergency plans for each school on a national Canadian police database. It is a massive undertaking to collect the data necessary to create the interactive maps of each school. We were told that potential hiding spaces were one focus alongside the general layout of the school; the other focus is thinking about potential response routes and staging for emergency responders. We snap photos based on our morning training. Broom closets and cubbyholes are now potential hiding spots that must be documented with a photo and narrated with a strategy. Misplaced items present their own challenges. A large gym mattress stored under the stairs. The principal comments that the mattress needs to be returned to the gym; a volunteer crouches down and takes a picture in the event that it remains permanently and creates a potential hiding spot. Figure 2: Documenting gym mat in hallway/potential hiding spot (Photo by Michelle Stewart) We emerge from the school, take a photo of the door, and enter the schoolyard. We move along the fence line: some individuals take notes about the physical characteristics of the property, others jot down the height of the retaining wall, still others take photos of the neighboring properties. Everyone is taking notes, taking photos, or comparing notes and photos. Soon we will be back at the police station for the larger project of harmonizing all the data into a massive mapping database. Locating the State in Its Objects Focusing on a Canadian police program called School Action for Emergency (SAFE), this article discusses the material labour practices required to create a virtual object—an augmented map. This mapping program provides a venue through which to consider the ways augmented objects come into the world. In this article, I discuss the labour practices necessary to create this map and then illustrate how labour practices are erased as part of this production and consumption of an augmented technology meant to facilitate an effective emergency response. In so doing, I will also discuss the production of authority and expertise through deployment of these police aids. As someone concerned with the ways in which the state instantiates itself into the lives of its subjects, I look at the particular enrollment practices of citizen and state agents as part of statecraft (Stewart). From Weber we are told about the role of police as they relate to state power, “state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that 'territory' is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it” (Weber, 34 my emphasis). I would argue that part of this monopoly involves cultivating citizen consent; that the subordination of citizens is equally important to police power as is the state’s permission to act. One way citizen consent is cultivated is through the performance of expertise such that subjects agree to give police power because police appear to be experts. Seen this way, police aids can be critical in cultivating this type of consent through the appearance of police as experts when they appear all knowing; what is often forgotten are the workers and aids that support that appearance (think here of dispatchers and databases). Becoming SAFE The SAFE project is an initiative of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the national police force in Canada. The goal of the program is to “certify” every school in the country, meaning each school will have documentation of the school that has been uploaded into the SAFE computer program. As illustrated in the introduction, this is a time-consuming process requiring not only photos and other data be collected but also all of this data and material be uploaded into the RCMP’s centralized computer program. The desired effect is that each school will have a SAFE program so police and dispatchers can access this massive collection of the data in the event of an emergency. During my time conducting research with the RCMP, I attended training sessions with John, a young corporal in the national police force. One of John’s duties was to coordinate the certification of the SAFE program that included training sessions. The program was initiated in 2007, and within one year, the province we were working in began the process of certifying approximately 850 of its 1700 schools; it had completed over 170 schools and identified 180 local SAFE coordinators. In that first year alone over 23,000 photos had been uploaded and 2,800 school layouts were available. In short, SAFE was a data heavy, labour-intensive process and one of John’s jobs was to visit police stations to get them started certifying local schools. Certification requires that at least one police officer be involved in the documentation of the school (photos and notes). After all the data is collected it must be articulated into the computer program through prompts that allow for photos and narratives to be uploaded. In the session described in the introduction, John worked with a group of local police and police auxiliaries (volunteers). The session started with a short Power Point presentation that included information about recent school tragedies, an audio clip from Columbine that detailed the final moments of a victim as she hid from killers, and then a practical, hands-on engagement with the computer software. Prior to leaving for on-site data collection, John had the trainees open the computer program to become familiar with the screens and prompts. He highlighted the program was user-friendly, and that any mistake made could be corrected. He focused on instilling interest before leaving for the school to collect data. During this on-site visit, as I trailed behind the participants, I was fascinated by one particularly diligent volunteer. He bent, climbed, and stretched to take photos and then made careful notations. Back at the police station he was just as committed to detail when he was paired up with his partner in front of the computer. They poured over their combined notes and photos; making routes and then correcting them; demanding different types of maps to compare their handwritten notes to the apparent errors in the computer map; demanding a street map for one further clarification of the proposed route. His commitment to the process, I started to think, was quite substantial. Because of his commitment, he had to engage in quite a bit of labour. But it was in this process of refining his data that I started to see the erasure of labour. I want to take some time now to discuss the process of erasure by turning attention to feminist and labour theory emerging from science and technology studies as means to articulate what was, and was not, taking place during the data entry. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa highlights the role of care as it relates to labour. In so doing, she joins a literature that draws attention to the ways in which labour is erased through specific social and material practices (see for example works in Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolf). More specifically, Puig de la Bellacasa investigates care in labour as it effects what she calls “knowledge politics” (85). In her work, Puig de la Bellaca discusses Suchman’s research on software design programs that produce virtual “office assistants” to assist the user. Suchman’s work reveals the ways in which this type of “assistant” must be visible enough to assist the user but not visible enough to require recognition. In so doing, Suchman illustrates how these programs replicate the office (and domestic servant) dynamics. Seen this way, labour becomes undervalued (think for example interns, assistants, etc.) and labour that is critical to many offices (and homes). Suchman’s work in this area is helpful when thinking about the role of augmented objects such as the augmented police map because in many ways it is a type of office assistant for police officers, handing over virtual notes and information about a location that police would otherwise not necessarily know thereby replicating the office dynamic of the boss that appears all knowing because, in part, s/he has a team that supports every aspect of their work. This devalued work (the lower paid intern or assistant) facilitates the authority—and ultimately the higher wage of the boss—who appears to earn this status. Let me layer this analysis of the “office assistant” with the similar phenomena in scientific knowledge production. Steven Shapin, a sociologist of science, discusses Robert Boyle’s 17th century laboratory and the various technicians in the background that assisted in experiments but remained ignored. Shapin argues contemporary scientific practice has changed little in this regard as technicians remain unaccounted for in the scientific record. He points out “science could not be made if this technician’s work were not done, but it is thought that anyone can do it” (Shapin, 557). Without these workers and their labour, scientific knowledge would not be possible, and yet they are ignored and their labour contribution erased (for example not included in formal discussion about the research, or more recently not included as authors in articles). Of course many technicians are/were paid, but nevertheless their role in the experiment erased. One figure emerged as the expert, the scientist, whose work appeared to be solely configured and created. Programs such as the SAFE project illustrate ways in which the police officer can emerge as an authority figure; but the authority rests on labour practices that move around in the background and go unacknowledged. Much like the lab, there are many ignored figures that produce the necessary objects of police work. In the case of the SAFE program, the ideal is that a police officer will respond to a call for service and with the click of a computer screen will be immersed in this augmented map. One click reveals data about the PA system, another click offers a full layout of the school, instructions about the design of the exits, notes about potential hiding spots inside, the list goes on. Each click is a product of labourer(s) that compiled the data. But these individuals, much like Boyle’s laboratory technicians, fade into the background and are erased as the police officer emerges as an authority. The map, an augmented object, may be credited with the data it holds, but the data collectors are long forgotten as the police officer stands alone as the subject of authority because of the smooth effects of the augmented map. Smooth Effects In an era of big data and data-intensive experiences, augmented objects are increasingly present in our daily lives—with expanded tolerance and appetite. When engaging an augmented object, there is a built-in expectation that the object will "work;" meaning it will run smoothly and effectively. Take Google Maps as an example: one expects the program will run on different scales, offer the capacity to map directions, and perhaps most importantly to be accurate. When these augmented objects run smoothly they appear to be a self-contained and organized object in and of themselves. This paper intervenes on these assumptions to illustrate that this “smooth effect” can serve to erase the labour necessary to produce the effect. Thinking here of the commodity fetish, one can recall Karl Marx’s intervention that illustrated how objects, commodities, permeate our social worlds in such ways that we can see the object—that we only see the object. This concept, commodity fetishism, argues that we erase the labour and social relations involved in the production of the objects, that we forget all that was required to create the object, and we don’t see all that was destroyed in its making. An example is to think of a cup of coffee. As you sip and consume it, do you think of the commodity chain? Do you think of the worker, the working conditions necessary to plant, harvest, roast and distribute the beans; do you think about the production of the bag the beans were transported in; do you think of the warehouse or coffeehouse from which the bag of beans came from? You more likely think about how it tastes—as an object in and of itself, how it is, rather than how it came into being in the world. Similarly, I want to think about this augmented map and how attention turns to it, not how it came into the world. Thinking about labour as it relates to computer programs and computer worlds, social scientists have investigated the necessary work of computer programmers and other labourers (see for example Kelty). Tiziana Terranova discusses the immaterial and affective labour that makes online communities thrive as individuals lend their labour (often unpaid) to create an online “world” that appears to organically come together—she argues these online communities are a product of free labour. Although the police are not working for “free” the volunteers are and the valorization of labour, if erased, still results in the similar outcome. Terranova is concerned about online communities that don’t simply come into being, but rather are the product of free labour. In the case of the SAFE program, labour practices are rendered invisible when augmented objects appear to be running smoothly —when in fact this appearance of smoothness necessarily requires labour and the commodity being exchanged is the claim to authority. Figure 3: Cross referencing hardcopy map (Photo by Michelle Stewart) Figure 4: Using a hand-drawn map to assist data entry (Photo by Michelle Stewart) Moving in a different direction, but still thinking about labour, I want to turn to the work of Chris Kortright. In his work about agricultural scientists, Kortright carefully details the physical practices associated with growing an experimental crop of sorghum. From the counting and washing of the seeds, to the planting and harvesting of the seeds, he delivers rich ethnographic stories from experimental fields and labs. He closes with the story of one researcher as she enters all the data into the computer to generate one powerpoint. He explains her frustration: “You can’t see all the time we spent. The nights we slept here. All the seeds and plants. The flooding and time at the greenhouse. All the people and the labour.” I nodded, these things had disappeared. In the table, only numbers existed. (Kortright, 20) Kortright argues for the need to recognize the social relations carved out in the field that are erased through the process of producing scientific knowledge—the young researcher ultimately knowing her labour did have a place on the slide.In much the same way, the police and volunteers engaged in a practice of removing themselves from the map. There was not enough space for long sentences explaining the debate about the best route to take; longer sentences were replace with short-phrased instructions. Conjuring the image of the police officer looking for fast, quick information, quick data was what they would deliver. The focus of the program was to place emergency icons (police cars, ambulance, fire engines and helicopters) onto the map, outline response routes, and offer photos as the evidence. Their role as individuals and their labour and creativity (itself a form of labour) was erased as the desired outcome was ease and access to data—a smooth effect. I was often told that many of the police cars don’t yet have a computer inside but in an idealized future world, police cars would be equipped with a computer console. In this world, officers could receive the call for service, access the program and start to move through layers of data rapidly while receiving the details of the call. This officer would arrive informed, and prepared to effectively respond to the emergency. Thinking back to labour required to create the SAFE map for each school (photographing, mapping, writing instructions, comparing details, etc.) and then the processes of hiding that labour (limited photos and short instructions) so that the program would appear to run smoothly and be user-friendly, the SAFE program, as an object, serves to abstract and erase labour. Indeed, the desired result was a smooth running program that operated much like Suchman’s office assistant who should be just visible enough to provide the needed help but otherwise remain invisible; similar in many ways to Shapin/Boyle’s scientific technician who is critical to knowledge production and yet remains formally unrecognized. Conclusion This article investigated a map as an entry point to understand the ways in which labour can be erased in augmented objects and, concurrently, how authority figures or experts instead emerge. My goal was to discuss the labour necessary to make one augmented map while also describing the process by which the labour necessary for the map was concurrently erased. Central to this article are the ways in which labour is erased as one clicks between these layers of data and, in the process, thinks the smoothly operating computer program is a measure of the strength of program itself, and not the labour required therein. By focusing on this augmented object, I am pointing out the collective labour needed to co-produce the map but how that map then helps to produce the police officer as authority figure. My intention is to look at the map as an unexpected entry point through which to understand how consent and authority is cultivated. Accordingly, I am concerned with the labour that is erased as this police figure emerges and authority is cultivated on the ground. I focus on the labour that necessarily to produce the police officer as expert because when that labour is erased we are left only with the authority figure that appears to be self-evident—not co-constructed. To understand state practices, as practices and not magical phenomena, we must look for the ways in which the state comes into being through particular practices, such as policing and to identify the necessary labour involvedReferencesGibson-Graham, J.K., Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff, eds. Re/Presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Kelty, Chris. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Kortright, Chris. “On Labour and Creative Transformations in the Experimental Fields of the Philippines.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 7.4 (2013). Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Econony Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things.” Social Studies of Science 41.1 (2011): 85-106. Shapin, Stephen. “The Invisible Technician.” Scientific American 77 (1989): 554-563. Stewart, Michelle. “The Space between the Steps: Reckoning in an Era of Reconciliation.” Contemporary Justice Review 14.1 (2011): 43-63. Suchman, Lucy. Human-Machine Reconfigurations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labour: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 63 (2000): 33-58. Weber, Max. The Vocation Lectures: "Science as a Vocation", "Politics as a Vocation." Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004.

Abstract:

You look great.You look amazing.I didn’t recognise you.You are looking 10 years younger.Just how much weight have you lost? It really shows.Isn’t Gayle looking great?Have you done it just through diet and exercise, [or surgery]?Have you lost some more since I last saw you?You don’t want to look scrawny.You are not planning to lose any more are you?Have you seen Gayle doesn’t she look drawn?Of course you are still much heavier than the NHS recommendation. Thinking and Writing about Fat… Since the beginning of my academic career I have written auto/biographically. Like others I believe that in including my own experience in my writing I make clear not only the influence my autobiography has on the work that I do but how, in turn, the work that I do influences my autobiography (Stanley; Morgan; Letherby Feminist Research, Interconnected Lives). I began this paper with a list of statements that have been said to me, or about me (and reported to me) by others in the last 18 months since a significant weight loss. As you see the messages ARE mixed and even the ‘compliments’ feel tainted; did I really look so bad before? Jeannine Gailey (16) reminds us that the fat body, especially the female fat body, is marginalised, stigmatised and summarising her study with 74 fat women argues that the women whose voices are represented in this book indicated that they are often hyperinvisible when it comes to their health or actual dealings with health-care practitioners, in addition to frequently feeling invisible with sexual partners, family, friends, colleagues, and strangers. Some of my own (auto/biographical) research has focussed on the experience of ‘infertility’ and ‘involuntary childlessness’ and the above statement also applies to many of my respondents, and similar others, who feel marginalised and stigmatised because of their status as nonmother (e.g. Letherby nonmotherhood). Although not my primary research area I have recently been involved in a number of research projects – either as supervisor or researcher – concerned with weight and/or weight management. One of these focused on the relationship between ‘obesity’ and ‘infertility’ (written, like other phrases in this piece, in quotation marks to highlight the problematic nature of simplistic definitions). Some medical literature suggests that a woman’s body mass index (BMI) is an important determinant of medical outcomes in the treatment of ‘infertility’. However, recent work contests the link between BMI, ‘obesity’ and ‘infertility’. Research from the social sciences shows that medical professionals, media and lay discourse position some individuals as ‘deserving’ and others as ‘undeserving’ of medical treatment (including in/fertility treatment) (Letherby Infertility; Stenhouse and Letherby). Women unable to achieve pregnancy and/or carry a baby to term due to weight related issues (either ‘real’ or assumed) will likely experience multiple stigma in relation to their gender, BMI and fertility status. In addition restricting ‘infertility’ treatment on the grounds of weight can itself cause stigmatization and may lead to depression and low self-esteem. ****I began writing fiction (as an adult) about five years ago and this type of writing has become increasingly important to me both academically and personally and is, I think, another way to tell auto/biographical stories. In my teaching I encourage students to think sociologically about fiction they enjoy and in recent academic writing on reproduction and on bereavement and loss I have included some fictional pieces (e.g. Davidson and Letherby; Letherby Interconnected Lives, Mortality). Taking a traditional view of the relationship between fact and fiction, some might suggest that fiction is the opposite of explicit auto/biographical writing. I disagree. Drawing specifically on respondents’ narratives, or more generally on our research and our own life experiences ‘fiction’ can provide a powerful, accessible narrative (e.g. Frank). What follows is a piece of fiction that is auto/biographical in that it connects to some experiences in my own life (see Letherby Interconnected Lives) and has connections to some of the experience of respondents from various of my research studies. My aim (or rather one of them) in writing this piece was to highlight the stigma and marginalisation that women in these situations sometimes feel. The Mixed Messages, not least with reference to fat, are evident I hope. Mr Sprat and I: A Story He drank three times as much as I did during our first date. I replied ‘yes please,’ when twice he asked if I wanted crisps or nuts with my wine. He suggested a film, followed by more drinks the next time we met. I enjoyed the popcorn in the cinema, the snacks in the pub. He bought us a fish and chip supper on the way home. The cod was fresh and lightly battered, the chips, made from good potatoes, were just the right combination of fat and starch. We ate our meal straight from the paper. He wiped his hands on a tissue but surprised and delighted me by sucking the grease from my fingers one by one. I was lost. I was his. A generous boyfriend he often paid for us to eat out. He never had a pudding but would choose a liqueur, or a shot of whisky, instead. Curious, rather than shocked, I wondered how he could down a pint in just a few seconds. ‘How do you do that, how can you drink it so quickly?’ I asked. ‘I open my throat and it just slips down; only when I'm really thirsty though.' He smacked his lips and wiped his mouth with his hand. He drank the whisky more slowly, ‘to enjoy the hot, fiery kick.’ I always had a taste of his starter and ended my meal with something sweet. Chocolatey creations were my preference but I enjoyed all desserts. He indulged me and reassured me. ‘I love your curves,’ he'd say proving it with his hands and his lips. Many a morning after I’d cook us a big fry-up. ‘Soaks up the booze,’ he said. Amsterdam was his choice for a stag weekend. He travelled with a large group of friends. There weren't any sexual exploits, I'm sure of that, but plenty of drink was taken and some wacky backy smoked. A good time was had by all and it took him a few days to recover from the trip.I choose a country hotel weekend break for my pre-wedding treat. We all had a beauty treatment or two and swam, read and gossiped the two days away. The food was plentiful and beautifully presented. I had to eat leanly between the hen party and the main event to get into my dress.After making such a beautiful speech he deserved to relax a little. But I wish he'd stopped at the champagne. After our first dance he propped up the bar with his mates and my brother and drank more than all of them; mostly beer, a few spirits. I’d been so looking forward to our first night of pleasure as husband and wife but the consummation of our marriage lacked vitality; a waste of the four-poster bed. His breath stank. As soon as it was over he fell asleep, although I was still wide awake. As part of our wedding package there were some goodies waiting for us in the bridal suite including a good sized box of melt-in-the-mouth chocolates. I ate the lot. He made it up to me on the honeymoon. More attentive than ever he hired a boat and took me to secluded beaches. As we sunbathed he lazily stroked my back and my thighs, when we swam we explored each other's bodies undercover of water. ‘I love you, I want you,’ he whispered. ‘I love you so much I want to bite you, to gobble you up.’ My body responded to his touch and to his words. I had never felt so desired, so cherished. The evenings and the nights were the best. We ordered local specialties at dinner and with his bare hands he fed me succulent fish, juicy meats and fruit dripping in syrup. In bed as he licked the excesses off my lips and from my mouth I could taste the wine in his. I drank him in. We were never so in tune again, our senses alive, our individual indulgences merged. We were as one, our bodies replete.Back home he worked hard and played hard keeping up his nights out with the boys and finding new restaurants for us to go to. He became skilled at choosing the correct wine to accompany the dishes I favoured. He drank the pudding wine whilst I ate the pudding. At home he kept beer in the fridge along with a jug of water so he could add a splash to his whisky. For his birthday I treated him to a peaty single malt. Our weekly food bill was a 50/50 split between alcohol and food. I loved to cook. I roasted and baked and chipped and fried. I folded and mixed and whisked. I was adventurous with spices. For my birthday he bought me a cookery book; a best seller from the latest celebrity chef. I experimented some more. My pastry was light and my sauces smooth. He was always appreciative but more often than not he wouldn't finish his food, sometimes leaving as much as he ate. As he carried our glasses (usually his third or fourth alcoholic drink since returning from work, almost always my first) through to the lounge I would take the plates into the kitchen (spooning the remains from his plate into my mouth rather than scraping it into the bin). A hard worker he was promoted, several times. More money led to more expensive tastes and we enjoyed good holidays and ate out even more, sometimes with his colleagues and bosses. A little shy in such company, aware of his status as a working class boy done good, he was always happier after a couple of drinks and would have a quick one before we left the house. In response to my anxious, ‘darling, do you think you should?,’ he would kiss me and say, ‘just a small one to oil the conversation.’I lived for our holidays and the nights we spent alone. We always found something to talk and laugh about and our indulgence of each other's eating and drinking habits was mirrored by a concern for each other's sexual wellbeing. He liked sex with the lights on. I adored it when he quietly sang to me during lovemaking. I hated the corporate entertainment. The women seemed to get thinner each time we met, shrinking as I grew. The way they managed to look as if they were eating the wonderfully cooked and carefully presented food whilst not actually consuming anything was an art form. I couldn't resist the delicious offerings but their snide observation of me turned the food to cardboard in my mouth. His work put him under increasing pressure. Some mornings I could taste alcohol mingled with mint when he kissed me goodbye. I found a bottle of vodka at the back of the cupboard, a cheap brand, that hadn't been in the trolley at our weekly shop. ‘Where did this come from, did you buy it?,’ I asked. ‘I guess I must have, I don't remember,’ he shrugged. The bottle disappeared but he kissed me less and began going straight upstairs when he got home. I'd hear him moving around, opening cupboards, finding hiding places for his not so secret stash.I still shopped and cooked trying new recipes in an attempt to win him back from his liquid mistress. I made meals that in my view were fit for the Gods, rich in flavour and high in calories. But he was less and less interested. He’d push his plate away and re-fill his glass. Eventually I gave up and moved on to cheap two-for-the-price-of-one microwave meals finding their gloopiness strangely comforting. They weren't enough for me though and I’d fill up with extra creamy potatoes or with toast, dripping with butter and topped thickly with cheese or chocolate spread. I ate off and on all day when I was alone and when he was asleep.When I said that I wanted us to have a baby he agreed, clinging, like me, to the hope that a child might make things better. Half-heartedly we tried for a while. The lights were off and there was no singing. Nothing happened. We lied to the GP when asked about our sexual activity, embarrassed and distressed at the lack of passion in our life together. He lied about his drinking too. ‘How much do I drink? Well, a little more than I should I guess, I know I should cut down, but you know how it is?’ He glanced at me, smiled at the male doctor and shrugged. I hated him then. I hated him as he failed to admit that he had a problematic relationship with alcohol, as he duped the GP and won his sympathy rather than rightly causing concern. I could guess what the doctor was thinking. Who wouldn't need a drink when married to a woman like me, a woman who had let food get the better of her spirit and her body? I couldn't lie about my problem. It lay heavy on my bones. I left the surgery with a diet sheet and a red face. When he shook the doctor's hand I turned away in misery and disgust.We drove home with the radio on to cover our silence. Once he tried to take my hand but I pulled away. I went to the kitchen. He went upstairs. I cut some bread and turned on the toaster. He reached into the back of his shirt drawer and pulled out a bottle. One night soon after he took me in his arms, as much of me as he could, holding on tight even as I tried to push him away. ‘Let's do something, anything. I still love you,’ he said. ‘What about a holiday? Please darling. You still love me too don’t you?’ Nodding, I relaxed into him, my bulk against his sharp hips. I packed my optimism along with his tiny shorts and my super-size trousers and dresses but my tentative happiness didn't last long. I couldn't do up the seatbelt in standard class and our upgrade was because of my size rather than our celebrity. For once I wasn't hungry. We tried hard to recreate the more heady days of our relationship but the break was not what either of us wished for. He drank heavily on the return journey, swigging back spirits in the way he once had pints. I closed my eyes to block out the pitying stares.He drank more. He ate even less. He lost his job. I heard him retching in the toilet every morning. He threw his vices up, I kept mine deep inside. As he flushed the toilet I thought of the baby we'd been unable to make I whispered to myself ‘that should be me, the morning sickness should be mine.' Then I went to the kitchen to cook and eat the fried breakfast he couldn’t face anymore. He went out most days, to the pub or the off-license.I went out only to the supermarket. He started to smell. He slept fitfully and snored loudly when he did sleep. He never touched me, unable to make love to me even if either of us had wanted it. When he wasn't sleeping he was drinking. I outgrew my clothes again so I lived in t-shirts and joggers and ordered groceries online. I stuffed the food in as soon as it arrived but it didn't comfort me anymore. He collapsed.I let him go to the hospital alone. He came home. He didn't pour himself a drink. He packed a bag instead. ‘I think I should go, don't you?’ he said.‘Yes’, I said, the tears running down my face. He turned just as he was leaving. ‘Do you think there's a way back for us, we were so good together once?’ ‘I don't know,’ I said. After he left I filled the bin; with dairy and carbohydrates, with fat and sugar… Some Concluding Thoughts… I consider writing as a method of inquiry, a way of finding out about yourself and your topic. Although we usually think about writing as a mode of “telling” about the social world, writing is not just a mopping-up activity at the end of a research project. Writing is also a way of “knowing” – a method of discovery and analysis. By writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable (Richardson 515). I agree. Writing – both in the traditional academic style and utilising prose and fiction – enables us, has enabled me, to reflect in detail about issues and topics and that important to me and to others, issues and topics that are often misunderstood and misrepresented. Fat, alongside in/fertility, childlessness and nonmotherhood, is one such issue. References Frank, Katherine. “‘The Management of Hunger’: Using Fiction in Writing Anthropology.” Qualitative Inquiry 6.4 (2000): 474-488. Gailey, Jeannine A. The Hyper(in)visible Fat Woman: Weight and Gender Discourse in Contemporary Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Letherby, Gayle. Feminist Research in Theory and Practice. Buckingham: Open University, 2003. ———. “Battle of the Gametes: Cultural Representation of Medically Assisted Conception.” Gender, Identity and Reproduction: Social Perspectives, eds. Sarah Earle and Gayle Letherby. London: Palgrave, 2003. 50-65. ———. “‘Infertility’ and ‘Involuntary Childlessness’: Losses, Ambivalences and Resolutions.” Understanding Reproductive Loss: International Perspectives on Life, Death and Fertility, eds. Sarah Earle, Carol Komaromy, and Linda Layne. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012. 9-22. ———. He, Himself and I: Reflections on Inter/connected Lives. Oxford: Clio Press, 2014. ———. “Bathwater, Babies and Other Losses: A Personal and Academic Story.” Mortality: Promoting the Interdisciplinary Study of Death and Dying 20.2 (2015). ‹http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13576275.2014.989494#.VTfN4iFVikp›.Morgan, David. “Sociological Imaginations and Imagining Sociologies: Bodies, Auto/biographies and Other Mysteries.” Sociology 32.4 (1998): 647-63. Richardson, Laurel. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” A Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds. Norman Denzin and Yvonne Lincoln. 1st ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994. 923-948. Stanley, Liz. “On Auto/biography in Sociology.” Sociology 27.1 (1993): 41-52. Stenhouse, Elizabeth, and Gayle Letherby. “Fat and Infertile: Challenging Double Stigma.” Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) Annual Conference, Toronto, Oct. 2012.

Abstract:

The copyrighting of digital augmentations (our data-flesh), their privatization and ownership by others from a vast distance that is simultaneously instantly telematically surmountable started simply enough. It was the initially innocuous corporatization of language and semiotics that started the deeper ontological flip, which placed the posthuman bits and parts over the posthuman that thought that it was running things. The posthumans in question, myself included, didn't help things much when, for instance, we all clicked an unthinking or unconcerned "yes" to Facebook® or Gmail®'s "terms and conditions of use" policies that gives them the real ownership and final say over those data based augments of sociality, speech, and memory. Today there is growing popular concern (or at least acknowledgement) over the surveillance of these augmentations by government, especially after the Edward Snowden NSA leaks. The same holds true for the dataveillance of data-flesh (i.e. Gmail® or Facebook® accounts) by private corporations for reasons of profit and/or at the behest of governments for reasons of "national security." While drawing a picture of this (bodily) state, of the intrusion through language of brands into our being and their coterminous policing of intelligible and iterative body boundaries and extensions, I want to address the next step in copyrighted augmentation, one that is current practice in professional sport, and part of the bourgeoning "anti-aging" industry, with rewriting of cellular structure and hormonal levels, for a price, on the open market. What I want to problematize is the contradiction between the rhetorical moralizing against upgrading the analogue-flesh, especially with respect to celebrity sports stars like Lance Armstrong and Alex Rodriquez, all the while the "anti-aging" industry does the same without censor. Indeed, it does so within the context of the contradictory social messaging and norms that our data-flesh and electric augmentations receive to constantly upgrade. I pose the question of the contradiction between the messages given to our analogue-flesh and data-flesh in order to examine the specific site of commentary on professional sports stars and their practices, but also to point to the ethical gap that exists not just for (legal) performance enhancing drugs (PED), but also to show the link to privatized and copyrighted genomic testing, the dataveillance of this information, and subsequent augmentations that may be undertaken because of the results. Copyrighted Language and Semiotics as Gateway Drug The corporatization of language and semiotics came about with an intrusion of exclusively held signs from the capitalist economy into language. This makes sense if one want to make surplus value greater: stamp a name onto something, especially a base commodity like a food product, and build up the name of that stamp, however one will, so that that name has perceived value in and of itself, and then charge as much as one can for it. Such is the story of the lack of real correlation between the price of Starbucks Coffee® and coffee as a commodity, set by Starbucks® on the basis of the cultural worth of the symbols and signs associated with it, rather than by what they pay for the labor and production costs prior to its branding. But what happens to these legally protected stamps once they start acting as more than just a sign and referent to a subsection of a specific commodity or thing? Once the stamp has worth and a life that is socially determined? What happens when these stamps get verbed, adjectived, and nouned? Naomi Klein, in the book that the New York Times referred to as a "movement bible" for the anti-globalization forces of the late 1990s said "logos, by the force of ubiquity, have become the closest thing we have to an international language, recognized and understood in many more places than English" (xxxvi). But there is an inherent built-in tension of copyrighted language and semiotics that illustrates the coterminous problems with data- and analogue-flesh augments. "We have almost two centuries' worth of brand-name history under our collective belt, coalescing to create a sort of global pop-cultural Morse code. But there is just one catch: while we may all have the code implanted in our brains, we're not really allowed to use it" (Klein 176). Companies want their "brands to be the air you breathe in - but don't dare exhale" or otherwise try to engage in a two-way dialogue that alters the intended meaning (Klein 182). Private signs power first-world and BRIC capitalism, language, and bodies. I do not have a coffee in the morning; I have Starbucks®. I do not speak on a cellular phone; I speak iPhone®. I am not using my computer right now; I am writing MacBook Air®. I do not look something up, search it, or research it; I Google® it. Klein was writing before the everyday uptake of sophisticated miniaturized and mobile computing and communication devices. With the digitalization of our senses and electronic limbs this viral invasion of language became material, effecting both our data- and analogue-flesh. The trajectory? First we used it; then we wore it as culturally and socially demarcating clothing; and finally we no longer used copyrighted speech terms: it became an always-present augmentation, an adjective to the lexicon body of language, and thereby out of democratic semiotic control. Today Twitter® is our (140 character limited) medium of speech. Skype® is our sense of sight, the way we have "real" face-to-face communication. Yelp® has extended our sense of taste and smell through restaurant reviews. The iPhone® is our sense of hearing. And OkCupid® and/or Grindr® and other sites and apps have become the skin of our sexual organs (and the site where they first meet). Today, love at first sight happens through .jpeg extensions; our first sexual experience ranked on a scale of risk determined by the type of video feed file format used: was it "protected" enough to stop its "spread"? In this sense the corporatization of language and semiotics acted as the gateway drug to corporatized digital-flesh; from use of something that is external to us to an augmentation that is part of us and indeed may be in excess of us or any notion of a singular liberal subject.Replacement of Analogue-Flesh? Arguably, this could be viewed as the coming to be of the full replacement of the fleshy analogue body by what are, or started as digital augmentations. Is this what Marshall McLuhan meant when he spoke of the "electronic exteriorization of the central nervous system" through the growing complexity of our "electric extensions"? McLuhan's work that spoke of the "global village" enabled by new technologies is usually read as a euphoric celebration of the utopic possibilities of interconnectivity. What these misreadings overlook is the darker side of his thought, where the "cultural probe" picks up the warning signals of the change to come, so that a Christian inspired project, a cultural Noah’s Ark, can be created to save the past from the future to come (Coupland). Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Guy Debord have analyzed this replacement of the real and the changes to the relations between people—one I am arguing is branded/restricted—by offering us the terms simulacrum (Baudrillard), substitution (Virilio), and spectacle (Debord). The commonality which links Baudrillard and Virilio, but not Debord, is that the former two do not explicitly situate their critique as being within the loss of the real that they then describe. Baudrillard expresses that he can have a 'cool detachment' from his subject (Forget Foucault/Forget Baudrillard), while Virilio's is a Catholic moralist's cry lamenting the disappearance of the heterogeneous experiential dimensions in transit along the various axes of space and time. What differentiates Debord is that he had no qualms positioning his own person and his text, The Society of the Spectacle (SotS), as within its own subject matter - a critique that is limited, and acknowledged as such, by the blindness of its own inescapable horizon.This Revolt Will Be Copyrighted Yet today the analogue - at the least - performs a revolt in or possibly in excess of the spectacle that seeks its containment. How and at what site is the revolt by the analogue-flesh most viewable? Ironically, in the actions of celebrity professional sports stars and the Celebrity Class in general. Today it revolts against copyrighted data-flesh with copyrighted analogue-flesh. This is even the case when the specific site of contestation is (at least the illusion of) immortality, where the runaway digital always felt it held the trump card. A regimen of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and other PEDs purports to do the same thing, if not better, at the cellular level, than the endless youth paraded in the unaging photo employed by the Facebook or Grindr Bodies®. But with the everyday use and popularization of drugs and enhancement supplements like HGH and related PEDs there is something more fundamental at play than the economic juggernaut that is the Body Beautiful; more than fleshy jealousy of Photoshopped® electronic skins. This drug use represents the logical extension of the ethics that drive our tech-wired lives. We are told daily to upgrade: our sexual organs (OkCupid® or Grindr®) for a better, more accurate match; our memory (Google® services) for largeness and safe portability; and our hearing and sight (iPhone® or Skype®) for increase connectivity, engaging the "real" (that we have lost). These upgrades are controlled and copyrighted, but that which grows the economy is an especially favored moral act in an age of austerity. Why should it be surprising, then, that with the economic backing of key players of Google®—kingpin of the global for-profit dataveillance racket—that for $99.95 23andMe® will send one a home DNA test kit, which once returned will be analyzed for genetic issues, with a personalized web-interface, including "featured links." Analogue-flesh fights back with willing copyrighted dataveillance of its genetic code. The test and the personalized results allow for augmentations of the Angelina Jolie type: private testing for genetic markers, a double mastectomy provided by private healthcare, followed by copyrighted replacement flesh. This is where we find the biopolitics of data- and analogue-flesh, lead forth, in an ironic turn, by the Celebrity Class, whom depend for their income on the lives of their posthuman bodies. This is a complete reversal of the course Debord charts out for them: The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived. (SotS) While the electronic global village was to have left the flesh-and-blood as waste, today there is resistance by the analogue from where we would least expect it - attempts to catch up and replant itself as ontologically prior to the digital through legal medical supplementation; to make the posthuman the posthuman. We find the Celebrity Class at the forefront of the resistance, of making our posthuman bodies as controlled augmentations of a posthuman. But there is a definite contradiction as well, specifically in the press coverage of professional sports. The axiomatic ethical and moral sentiment of our age to always upgrade data-flesh and analogue-flesh is contradicted in professional sports by the recent suspensions of Lance Armstrong and Alex Rodriguez and the political and pundit critical commentary on their actions. Nancy Reagan to the Curbside: An Argument for Lance Armstrong and Alex Rodriguez's "Just Say Yes to Drugs" Campaign Probably to the complete shock of most of my family, friends, students, and former lovers who may be reading this, I actually follow sports reporting with great detail and have done so for years. That I never speak of any sports in my everyday interactions, haven't played a team or individual sport since I could speak (and thereby use my voice to inform my parents that I was refusing to participate), and even decline amateur or minor league play, like throwing a ball of any kind at a family BBQ, leaves me to, like Judith Butler, "give an account of oneself." And this accounting for my sports addiction is not incidental or insignificant with respect either to how the posthuman present can move from a state of posthumanism to one of posthumanism, nor my specific interpellation into (and excess) in either of those worlds. Recognizing that I will not overcome my addiction without admitting my problem, this paper is thus a first-step public acknowledgement: I have been seeing "Dr. C" for a period of three years, and together, through weekly appointments, we have been working through this issue of mine. (Now for the sake of avoiding the cycle of lying that often accompanies addiction I should probably add that Dr. C is a chiropractor who I see for back and nerve damage issues, and the talk therapy portion, a safe space to deal with the sports addiction, was an organic outgrowth of the original therapy structure). My data-flesh that had me wired in and sitting all the time had done havoc to the analogue-flesh. My copyrighted augments were demanding that I do something to remedy a situation where I was unable to be sitting and wired in all the time. Part of the treatment involved the insertion of many acupuncture needles in various parts of my body, and then having an electric current run through them for a sustained period of time. Ironically, as it was the wired augmentations that demanded this, due to my immobility at this time - one doesn't move with acupuncture needles deep within the body - I was forced away from my devices and into unmediated conversation with Dr. C about sports, celebrity sports stars, and the recent (argued) infractions by Armstrong and Rodriguez. Now I say "argued" because in the first place are what A-Rod and Armstrong did, or are accused of doing, the use of PEDs, HGH, and all the rest (cf. Lupica; Thompson, and Vinton) really a crime? Are they on their way, or are there real threats of jail and criminal prosecution? And in the most important sense, and despite all the rhetoric, are they really going against prevailing social norms with respect to medical enhancement? No, no, and no. What is peculiar about the "witch-hunt" of A-Rod and Armstrong - their words - is that we are undertaking it in the first place, while high-end boutique medical clinics (and internet pharmacies) offer the same treatment for analogue-flesh. Fixes for the human in posthuman; ways of keeping the human up to speed; arguably the moral equivalent, if done so with free will, of upgrading the software for ones iOS device. If the critiques of Baudrillard and Virilio are right, we seem to find nothing wrong with crippling our physical bodies and social skills by living through computers and telematic technologies, and obsess over the next upgrade that will make us (more) faster and quicker (than the other or others), while we righteously deny the same process to the flesh for those who, in Debord's description, are the most complicit in the spectacle, to the supposedly most posthuman of us - those that have become pure spectacle (Debord), pure simulation (Baudrillard), a total substitution (Virilio). But it seems that celebrities, and sports celebrities in specific haven't gone along for the ride of never-ending play of their own signifiers at the expense of doing away with the real; they were not, in Debord's words, content with "specializing in the seemingly lived"; they wanted, conversely, to specialize in the most maximally lived flesh, right down to cellular regeneration towards genetic youth, which is the strongest claim in favor of taking HGH. It looks like they were prepared to, in the case of Armstrong, engage in the "most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen" in the name of the flesh (BBC). But a doping program that can, for the most part, be legally obtained as treatment, and in the same city as A-Rod plays in and is now suspended for his "crimes" to boot (NY Vitality). This total incongruence between what is desired, sought, and obtained legally by members of their socioeconomic class, and many classes below as well, and is a direct outgrowth of the moral and ethical axiomatic of the day is why A-Rod and Armstrong are so bemused, indignant, and angry, if not in a state of outright denial that they did anything that was wrong, even while they admit, explicitly, that yes, they did what they are accused of doing: taking the drugs. Perhaps another way is needed to look at the unprecedentedly "harsh" and "long" sentences of punishment handed out to A-Rod and Armstrong. The posthuman governing bodies of the sports of the society of the spectacle in question realize that their spectacle machines are being pushed back at. A real threat because it goes with the grain of where the rest of us, or those that can buy in at the moment, are going. And this is where the talk therapy for my sports addiction with Dr. C falls into the story. I realized that the electrified needles were telling me that I too should put the posthuman back in control of my damaged flesh; engage in a (medically copyrighted) piece of performance philosophy and offset some of the areas of possible risk that through restricted techne 23andMe® had (arguably) found. Dr. C and I were peeved with A-Rod and Armstrong not for what they did, but what they didn't tell us. We wanted better details than half-baked admissions of moral culpability. We wanted exact details on what they'd done to keep up to their digital-flesh. Their media bodies were cultural probes, full in view, while their flesh bodies, priceless lab rats, are hidden from view (and likely to remain so due to ongoing litigation). These were, after all, big money cover-ups of (likely) the peak of posthuman science, and the lab results are now hidden behind an army of sports federations lawyers, and agents (and A-Rod's own army since he still plays); posthuman progress covered up by posthuman rules, sages, and agents of manipulation. Massive posthuman economies of spectacle, simulation, or substitution of the real putting as much force as they can bare on resurgent posthuman flesh - a celebrity flesh those economies, posthuman economies, want to see as utterly passive like Debord, but whose actions are showing unexpected posthuman alignment with the flesh. Why are the centers of posthumanist power concerned? Because once one sees that A-Rod and Armstrong did it, once one sees that others are doing the same legally without a fuss being made, then one can see that one can do the same; make flesh-and-blood keep up, or regrow and become more organically youthful, while OkCupid® or Grindr® data-flesh gets stuck with the now lagging Photoshopped® touchups. Which just adds to my desire to get "pumped up"; add a little of A-Rod and Armstrong's concoction to my own routine; and one of a long list of reasons to throw Nancy Reagan under the bus: to "just say yes to drugs." A desire that is tempered by the recognition that the current limits of intelligibility and iteration of subjects, the work of defining the bodies that matter that is now set by copyrighted language and copyrighted electric extensions is only being challenged within this society of the spectacle by an act that may give a feeling of unease for cause. This is because it is copyrighted genetic testing and its dataveillance and manipulation through copyrighted medical technology - the various branded PEDs, HGH treatments, and their providers - that is the tool through which the flesh enacts this biopolitical "rebellion."References Baudrillard, Jean. Forget Foucault/Forget Baudrillard. Trans Nicole Dufresne. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. ————. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 1983. BBC. "Lance Armstong: Usada Report Labels Him 'a Serial Cheat.'" BBC Online 11 Oct. 2012. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/19903716›. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Clark, Taylor. Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture. New York: Back Bay, 2008. Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: Penguin Books, 2009. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red: 1977. Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1999. Lupica, Mike. "Alex Rodriguez Beginning to Look a Lot like Lance Armstrong." NY Daily News. 6 Oct. 2013. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/lupica-a-rod-tour-de-lance-article-1.1477544›. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964. NY Vitality. "Testosterone Treatment." NY Vitality. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://vitalityhrt.com/hgh.html›. Thompson, Teri, and Nathaniel Vinton. "What Does Alex Rodriguez Hope to Accomplish by Following Lance Armstrong's Legal Blueprint?" NY Daily News 5 Oct. 2013. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/i-team/a-rod-hope-accomplish-lance-blueprint-article-1.1477280›. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.

Abstract:

Image 1: “Oklahoma State Highway Re-imagined.” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using Wikimedia image by Ks0stm (CC BY-SA 3 2013). Introduction This article is divided in three major parts. First a scenario, second its context, and third, an analysis. The text draws on ethnographic research on security practices in the United States among police and parts of the intelligence community from 2006 through to the beginning of 2014. Real names are used when the material is drawn from archival sources, while individuals who were interviewed during fieldwork are referred to by their position rank or title. For matters of fact not otherwise referenced, see the sources compiled on “The Complete 911 Timeline” at History Commons. First, a scenario. Oklahoma, 2001 It is 1 April 2001, in far western Oklahoma, warm beneath the late afternoon sun. Highway Patrol Trooper C.L. Parkins is about 80 kilometres from the border of Texas, watching trucks and cars speed along Interstate 40. The speed limit is around 110 kilometres per hour, and just then, his radar clocks a blue Toyota Corolla going 135 kph. The driver is not wearing a seatbelt. Trooper Parkins swung in behind the vehicle, and after a while signalled that the car should pull over. The driver was dark-haired and short; in Parkins’s memory, he spoke English without any problem. He asked the man to come sit in the patrol car while he did a series of routine checks—to see if the vehicle was stolen, if there were warrants out for his arrest, if his license was valid. Parkins said, “I visited with him a little bit but I just barely remember even having him in my car. You stop so many people that if […] you don't arrest them or anything […] you don't remember too much after a couple months” (Clay and Ellis). Nawaf Al Hazmi had a valid California driver’s license, with an address in San Diego, and the car’s registration had been legally transferred to him by his former roommate. Parkins’s inquiries to the National Crime Information Center returned no warnings, nor did anything seem odd in their interaction. So the officer wrote Al Hazmi two tickets totalling $138, one for speeding and one for failure to use a seat belt, and told him to be on his way. Al Hazmi, for his part, was crossing the country to a new apartment in a Virginia suburb of Washington, DC, and upon arrival he mailed the payment for his tickets to the county court clerk in Oklahoma. Over the next five months, he lived several places on the East Coast: going to the gym, making routine purchases, and taking a few trips that included Las Vegas and Florida. He had a couple more encounters with local law enforcement and these too were unremarkable. On 1 May 2001 he was mugged, and promptly notified the police, who documented the incident with his name and local address (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 139). At the end of June, having moved to New Jersey, he was involved in a minor traffic accident on the George Washington Bridge, and officers again recorded his real name and details of the incident. In July, Khalid Al Mihdhar, the previous owner of the car, returned from abroad, and joined Al Hazmi in New Jersey. The two were boyhood friends, and they went together to a library several times to look up travel information, and then, with Al Hazmi’s younger brother Selem, to book their final flight. On 11 September, the three boarded American Airlines flight 77 as part of the Al Qaeda team that flew the mid-sized jet into the west façade of the Pentagon. They died along with the piloting hijacker, all the passengers, and 125 people on the ground. Theirs was one of four airplanes hijacked that day, one of which was crashed by passengers, the others into significant sites of American power, by men who had been living for varying lengths of time all but unnoticed in the United States. No one thought that Trooper Parkins, or the other officers with whom the 9/11 hijackers crossed paths, should have acted differently. The Commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety himself commented that the trooper “did the right thing” at that April traffic stop. And yet, interviewed by a local newspaper in January of 2002, Parkins mused to the reporter “it's difficult sometimes to think back and go: 'What if you had known something else?'" (Clay and Ellis). Missed Opportunities Image 2: “Hijackers Timeline (Redacted).” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s “Working Draft Chronology of Events for Hijackers and Associates”. In fact, several of the men who would become the 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. Mohamed Atta, usually pointed to as the ringleader, was given a citation in Florida that spring of 2001 for driving without a license. When he missed his court date, a bench warrant was issued (Wall Street Journal). Perhaps the warrant was not flagged properly, however, since nothing happened when he was pulled over again, for speeding. In the government inquiries that followed attack, and in the press, these brushes with the law were “missed opportunities” to thwart the 9/11 plot (Kean and Hamilton, Report 353). Among a certain set of career law enforcement personnel, particularly those active in management and police associations, these missed opportunities were fraught with a sense of personal failure. Yet, in short order, they were to become a source of professional revelation. The scenarios—Trooper Parkins and Al Hazmi, other encounters in other states, the general fact that there had been chance meetings between police officers and the hijackers—were re-imagined in the aftermath of 9/11. Those moments were returned to and reversed, so that multiple potentialities could be seen, beyond or in addition to what had taken place. The deputy director of an intelligence fusion centre told me in an interview, “it is always a local cop who saw something” and he replayed how the incidents of contact had unfolded with the men. These scenarios offered a way to recapture the past. In the uncertainty of every encounter, whether a traffic stop or questioning someone taking photos of a landmark (and potential terrorist target), was also potential. Through a process of re-imagining, police encounters with the public became part of the government’s “national intelligence” strategy. Previously a division had been marked between foreign and domestic intelligence. While the phrase “national intelligence” had long been used, notably in National Intelligence Estimates, after 9/11 it became more significant. The overall director of the US intelligence community became the Director National Intelligence, for instance, and the cohesive term marked the way that increasingly diverse institutional components, types of data and forms of action were evolving to address the collection of data and intelligence production (McConnell). In a series of working groups mobilised by members of major police professional organisations, and funded by the US Department of Justice, career officers and representatives from federal agencies produced detailed recommendations and plans for involving police in the new Information Sharing Environment. Among the plans drawn up during this period was what would eventually come to be the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, built principally around the idea of encounters such as the one between Parkins and Al Hazmi. Map 1: Map of pilot sites in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Evaluation Environment in 2010 (courtesy of the author; no longer available online). Map 2: Map of participating sites in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, as of 2014. In an interview, a fusion centre director who participated in this planning as well as its implementation, told me that his thought had been, “if we train state and local cops to understand pre-terrorism indicators, if we train them to be more curious, and to question more what they see,” this could feed into “a system where they could actually get that information to somebody where it matters.” In devising the reporting initiative, the working groups counter-actualised the scenarios of those encounters, and the kinds of larger plots to which they were understood to belong, in order to extract a set of concepts: categories of suspicious “activities” or “patterns of behaviour” corresponding to the phases of a terrorism event in the process of becoming (Deleuze, Negotiations). This conceptualisation of terrorism was standardised, so that it could be taught, and applied, in discerning and documenting the incidents comprising an event’s phases. In police officer training, the various suspicious behaviours were called “terrorism precursor activities” and were divided between criminal and non-criminal. “Functional Standards,” developed by the Los Angeles Police Department and then tested by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), served to code the observed behaviours for sharing (via compatible communication protocols) up the federal hierarchy and also horizontally between states and regions. In the popular parlance of videos made for the public by local police departments and DHS, which would come to populate the internet within a few years, these categories were “signs of terrorism,” more specifically: surveillance, eliciting information, testing security, and so on. Image 3: “The Seven Signs of Terrorism (sometimes eight).” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using materials in the public domain. If the problem of 9/11 had been that the men who would become hijackers had gone unnoticed, the basic idea of the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative was to create a mechanism through which the eyes and ears of everyone could contribute to their detection. In this vein, “If You See Something, Say Something™” was a campaign that originated with the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and was then licensed for use to DHS. The tips and leads such campaigns generated, together with the reports from officers on suspicious incidents that might have to do with terrorism, were coordinated in the Information Sharing Environment. Drawing on reports thus generated, the Federal Government would, in theory, communicate timely information on security threats to law enforcement so that they would be better able to discern the incidents to be reported. The cycle aimed to catch events in emergence, in a distinctively anticipatory strategy of counterterrorism (Stalcup). Re-imagination A curious fact emerges from this history, and it is key to understanding how this initiative developed. That is, there was nothing suspicious in the encounters. The soon-to-be terrorists’ licenses were up-to-date, the cars were legal, they were not nervous. Even Mohamed Atta’s warrant would have resulted in nothing more than a fine. It is not self-evident, given these facts, how a governmental technology came to be designed from these scenarios. How––if nothing seemed of immediate concern, if there had been nothing suspicious to discern––did an intelligence strategy come to be assembled around such encounters? Evidently, strident demands were made after the events of 9/11 to know, “what went wrong?” Policies were crafted and implemented according to the answers given: it was too easy to obtain identification, or to enter and stay in the country, or to buy airplane tickets and fly. But the trooper’s question, the reader will recall, was somewhat different. He had said, “It’s difficult sometimes to think back and go: ‘What if you had known something else?’” To ask “what if you had known something else?” is also to ask what else might have been. Janet Roitman shows that identifying a crisis tends to implicate precisely the question of what went wrong. Crisis, and its critique, take up history as a series of right and wrong turns, bad choices made between existing dichotomies (90): liberty-security, security-privacy, ordinary-suspicious. It is to say, what were the possibilities and how could we have selected the correct one? Such questions seek to retrospectively uncover latencies—systemic or structural, human error or a moral lapse (71)—but they ask of those latencies what false understanding of the enemy, of threat, of priorities, allowed a terrible thing to happen. “What if…?” instead turns to the virtuality hidden in history, through which missed opportunities can be re-imagined. Image 4: “The Cholmondeley Sisters and Their Swaddled Babies.” Anonymous, c. 1600-1610 (British School, 17th century); Deleuze and Parnet (150). CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using materials in the public domain. Gilles Deleuze, speaking with Claire Parnet, says, “memory is not an actual image which forms after the object has been perceived, but a virtual image coexisting with the actual perception of the object” (150). Re-imagined scenarios take up the potential of memory, so that as the trooper’s traffic stop was revisited, it also became a way of imagining what else might have been. As Immanuel Kant, among others, points out, “the productive power of imagination is […] not exactly creative, for it is not capable of producing a sense representation that was never given to our faculty of sense; one can always furnish evidence of the material of its ideas” (61). The “memory” of these encounters provided the material for re-imagining them, and thereby re-virtualising history. This was different than other governmental responses, such as examining past events in order to assess the probable risk of their repetition, or drawing on past events to imagine future scenarios, for use in exercises that identify vulnerabilities and remedy deficiencies (Anderson). Re-imagining scenarios of police-hijacker encounters through the question of “what if?” evoked what Erin Manning calls “a certain array of recognizable elastic points” (39), through which options for other movements were invented. The Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative’s architects instrumentalised such moments as they designed new governmental entities and programs to anticipate terrorism. For each element of the encounter, an aspect of the initiative was developed: training, functional standards, a way to (hypothetically) get real-time information about threats. Suspicion was identified as a key affect, one which, if cultivated, could offer a way to effectively deal not with binary right or wrong possibilities, but with the potential which lies nestled in uncertainty. The “signs of terrorism” (that is, categories of “terrorism precursor activities”) served to maximise receptivity to encounters. Indeed, it can apparently create an oversensitivity, manifested, for example, in police surveillance of innocent people exercising their right to assemble (Madigan), or the confiscation of photographers’s equipment (Simon). “What went wrong?” and “what if?” were different interrogations of the same pre-9/11 incidents. The questions are of course intimately related. Moments where something went wrong are when one is likely to ask, what else might have been known? Moreover, what else might have been? The answers to each question informed and shaped the other, as re-imagined scenarios became the means of extracting categories of suspicious activities and patterns of behaviour that comprise the phases of an event in becoming. Conclusion The 9/11 Commission, after two years of investigation into the causes of the disastrous day, reported that “the most important failure was one of imagination” (Kean and Hamilton, Summary). The iconic images of 9/11––such as airplanes being flown into symbols of American power––already existed, in guises ranging from fictive thrillers to the infamous FBI field memo sent to headquarters on Arab men learning to fly, but not land. In 1974 there had already been an actual (failed) attempt to steal a plane and kill the president by crashing it into the White House (Kean and Hamilton, Report Ch11 n21). The threats had been imagined, as Pat O’Malley and Philip Bougen put it, but not how to govern them, and because the ways to address those threats had been not imagined, they were discounted as matters for intervention (29). O’Malley and Bougen argue that one effect of 9/11, and the general rise of incalculable insecurities, was to make it necessary for the “merely imaginable” to become governable. Images of threats from the mundane to the extreme had to be conjured, and then imagination applied again, to devise ways to render them amenable to calculation, minimisation or elimination. In the words of the 9/11 Commission, the Government must bureaucratise imagination. There is a sense in which this led to more of the same. Re-imagining the early encounters reinforced expectations for officers to do what they already do, that is, to be on the lookout for suspicious behaviours. Yet, the images of threat brought forth, in their mixing of memory and an elastic “almost,” generated their own momentum and distinctive demands. Existing capacities, such as suspicion, were re-shaped and elaborated into specific forms of security governance. The question of “what if?” and the scenarios of police-hijacker encounter were particularly potent equipment for this re-imagining of history and its re-virtualisation. References Anderson, Ben. “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography 34.6 (2010): 777-98. Clay, Nolan, and Randy Ellis. “Terrorist Ticketed Last Year on I-40.” NewsOK, 20 Jan. 2002. 25 Nov. 2014 ‹http://newsok.com/article/2779124›. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II. New York: Columbia UP 2007 [1977]. Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Hijackers Timeline (Redacted) Part 01 of 02.” Working Draft Chronology of Events for Hijackers and Associates. 2003. 18 Apr. 2014 ‹https://vault.fbi.gov/9-11%20Commission%20Report/9-11-chronology-part-01-of-02›. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Kean, Thomas H., and Lee Hamilton. Executive Summary of the 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. 25 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Exec.htm›. Kean, Thomas H., and Lee Hamilton. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. McConnell, Mike. “Overhauling Intelligence.” Foreign Affairs, July/Aug. 2007. Madigan, Nick. “Spying Uncovered.” Baltimore Sun 18 Jul. 2008. 25 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-te.md.spy18jul18-story.html›. Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009. O’Malley, P., and P. Bougen. “Imaginable Insecurities: Imagination, Routinisation and the Government of Uncertainty post 9/11.” Imaginary Penalities. Ed. Pat Carlen. Cullompton, UK: Willan, 2008.Roitman, Janet. Anti-Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013. Simon, Stephanie. “Suspicious Encounters: Ordinary Preemption and the Securitization of Photography.” Security Dialogue 43.2 (2012): 157-73. Stalcup, Meg. “Policing Uncertainty: On Suspicious Activity Reporting.” Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases. Eds. Limor Saminian-Darash and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015. 69-87. Wall Street Journal. “A Careful Sequence of Mundane Dealings Sows a Day of Bloody Terror for Hijackers.” 16 Oct. 2001.

Abstract:

It’s a portrait of grief, to be sure, but it puts grief in the air, as a cultural atmospheric, without giving us anything to mourn.—— Tom Junod, “The Man Who Invented 9/11”The nearly decade-long attempt by families of 9/11 victims to reclaim the remains of their relatives involves rhetorics of bodilessness, waste, and virtuality that offer startling illustrations of what might be termed “the poetics of grief.” After combining as the WTC Families for Proper Burial Inc. in 2002, the families sued the city of New York in 2005. They lost and the case has been under appeal since 2008. WTC Families is asking for nearly one million tons of material to be moved from the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island in order to sift it for human remains. These remains will then be reclaimed and interred: Proper Burial. But the matter is far less definitive. When a judge hearing the appeal asked how one would prove someone’s identity, the city’s lawyer replied, “You have to be able to particularise and say it’s your body. All that’s left here is a bunch of undifferentiated dust.” The reply “elicited gasps and muttered ‘no’s’ from a crowd whose members wore laminated photos of deceased victims” (Hughes). These laminated displays are an attempt by WTC Families to counteract the notion of the victims as “undifferentiated dust”; the protected, hermetic images are testimony to painful uncertainty, an (always) outmoded relic of the evidentiary self.In the face of such uncertainty, it was not only court audiences who waited for a particular response to the terrorist attacks. Adam Hirsch, reviewer for the New York Sun, claimed that “the writer whose September 11 novel seemed most necessary was Don DeLillo. Mr. DeLillo, more than any other novelist, has always worked at the intersection of public terror and private fear.” DeLillo’s prescience regarding the centrality of terrorism in American culture was noted by many critics in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre. The novelist even penned an essay for Harper’s in which he reflected on the role of the novelist in the new cultural landscape of the post-9/11 world. In an online book club exchange for Slate, Meghan O’Rourke says, “DeLillo seemed eerily primed to write a novel about the events of September 11. … Rereading some of his earlier books, including the terrorism-riddled Mao II, I wondered, half-seriously, if Mohamed Atta and crew had been studying DeLillo.” If there was any writer who might have been said to have seen it coming it was DeLillo. The World Trade Center had figured in his novels before the 9/11 attacks. The twin towers are a primary landmark in Underworld, gracing the cover of the novel in ghostly black and white. In Players (1977), a Wall Street worker becomes involved in a terrorist plot to bomb the New York Stock exchange and his wife works in the WTC for the “Grief Management Council”—“Where else would you stack all this grief?” (18).ClassificationsAs the WTC Families for Proper Burial Inc. trial demonstrates, the reality of the terrorist attacks of September 11 offered an altogether more macabre and less poetic reality than DeLillo’s fiction had depicted. The Fresh Kills landfill serves in Underworld as a metaphor for the accumulated history of Cold War America in the last half-century. Taking in the “man-made mountain,” waste management executive Brian Glassic thinks, “It was science fiction and prehistory”; seeing the World Trade Center in the distance, “he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one” (Underworld 184). But the poetic balance DeLillo explores in the 1997 novel has been sundered by the obliteration of the twin towers. Fresh Kills and the WTC are now united by a disquieting grief. The landfill, which closed in 2001, was forced to reopen when the towers collapsed to receive their waste. Fresh Kills bears molecular witness to this too-big collective trauma. “‘They commingled it, and then they dumped it,’ Mr. Siegel [lawyer for WTC Families] said of the remains being mixed with household trash, adding that a Fresh Kills worker had witnessed city employees use that mixture to fill potholes” (Hughes). The revelation is obscene: Are we walking and driving over our dead? The commingling of rubble and human remains becomes a collective (of) contamination too toxic, too overwhelming for conventional comprehension. “You can’t even consider the issue of closure until this issue has been resolved,” says the lawyer representing WTC Families (Hartocollis).Nick Shay, Underworld’s main character, is another waste executive who travels the world to observe ways of dealing with garbage. Of shopping with his wife, Nick says, “Marion and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn’t say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make?” (121). This attests to the virtuality of waste, a potentiality of the products – commercial, temporal, biological – that comprise the stuff of contemporary American culture. Synecdoche and metonymy both, waste becomes the ground of hysteron proteron, the rhetorical figure that disorders time and makes the future always present. Like (its) Fresh Kills, waste is science fiction and prehistory.Repeating the apparent causal and temporal inversion of hysteron proteron, Nick’s son Jeff uses his home computer to access a simultaneous future and past that is the internal horizon of Underworld’s historical fiction. Jeff has previously been using his computer to search for something in the video footage of the “Texas Highway Killer,” a serial murderer who randomly shoots people on Texan highways. Jeff tries to resolve the image so that the pixels will yield more, exposing their past and future. “He was looking for lost information. He enhanced and super-slowed, trying to find some pixel in the data swarm that might provide a clue to the identity of the shooter” (118). Searching for something more, something buried, Jeff, like WTC Families, is attempting to redeem the artifactual and the overlooked by reconfiguring them as identity. DeLillo recognises this molecular episteme through the “dot theory of reality”: “Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true” (177). Like the gleaming supermarket products Nick and Marion see as garbage, the unredeemed opens onto complex temporal and rhetorical orders. Getting inside garbage is like getting “inside a dot.” This approach is not possible for the unplanned waste of 9/11. Having already lost its case, WTC Families will almost certainly lose its appeal because its categories and its means are unworkable and inapplicable: they cannot particularise.PremonitionsIn his 9/11 essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” published in Harper’s a few months after the attacks, DeLillo says “We are all breathing the fumes of lower Manhattan where traces of the dead are everywhere, in the soft breeze off the river, on rooftops and windows, in our hair and on our clothes” (39). DeLillo‘s portrait of molecular waste adumbrates the need to create “counternarratives.” Until the events of 11 September 2001 the American narrative was that of the Cold War, and thus also the narrative of Underworld; one for which DeLillo claims the Bush administration was feeling nostalgic. “This is over now,” he says. “The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative” (34).DeLillo was already at work on a narrative of his own at the time of the terrorist attacks. As Joseph Conte notes, when the World Trade Center was attacked, “DeLillo, had nearly finished drafting his thirteenth novel, Cosmopolis [… and] shared in the collective seizure of the American mind” (179). And while it was released in 2003, DeLillo sets the novel in 2000 on “a day in April.” If the millennium, the year 2000, has been as Boxall claims the horizon of DeLillo’s writing, the tagging of this “day in April” at the beginning of the novel signals Cosmopolis as a limit-work (4). 9/11 functions as a felt absence in the novel, a binding thing floating in the air, like the shirt that DeLillo will use to begin and end Falling Man; a story that will ‘go beyond’ the millennial limit, a story that is, effectively, the counternarrative of which DeLillo speaks in his 9/11 essay. Given the timing of the terrorist attacks in New York, and DeLillo’s development of his novel, it is extraordinary to consider just how Cosmopolis reflects on its author’s position as a man who should have “seen it coming.” The billionaire protagonist Eric Packer traverses Manhattan by car, his journey a bifurcation between sophistication and banality. Along the way he has an onanistic sexual encounter whilst having his prostate examined, hacks into and deletes his wife’s old money European fortune, loses his own self-made wealth by irrationally betting against the rise of the yen, kills a man, and shoots himself in the hand in front of his assassin. Eric actively moves toward his own death. Throughout Eric’s journey the socially binding integrity of the present and the future is teased apart. He continually sees images of future events before they occur – putting his hand on his chin, a bomb explosion, and finally, his own murder – via video screens in his car and wristwatch. These are, as Conte rightly notes, repeated instances of hysteron proteron (186). His corpse does not herald obsolescence but begins the true life of waste: virtual information. Or, as Eric’s “Chief of Theory” asks, “Why die when you can live on a disk?” (106). There are shades here of Jeff’s pixelated excursion into the video footage of the Texas Highway Killer: “Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information.” Life at this level is not only virtual, it is particularised, a point (or a collection of points) Eric comes to grasp during the protracted scene in which he watches himself die: “The stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him” (207). In Falling Man, the work in which DeLillo engages directly with the 9/11 attack, the particularised body recurs in various forms. First there is the (now iconic) falling man: the otherwise unknown victim of the terrorist attack who leapt from the WTC and whose descent was captured in a photograph by Richard Drew. This figure was named (particularised) by Tom Junod (who provides the epigram for this essay) as “The Falling Man.” In DeLillo’s novel another Falling Man, a performance artist, re-enacts the moment by jumping off buildings, reiterating the photograph (back) into a bodily performance. In these various incarnations the falling man is serially particularised: photographed, named, then emulated. The falling man is a single individual, and multiple copies. He lives on long after death and so does his trauma. He represents the poetic expression of collective grief. Particularised bodies also infect the terror narrative of Falling Man at a molecular level. Falling Man’s terrorist, Hammad, achieves a similar life-after-death by becoming “organic shrapnel.” The surviving victims of the suicide bomb attack, months later, begin to display signs of the suicide bombers in lumps and sores emerging from their bodies, too-small bits of the attacker forever incorporated. Hammad is thus paired with the victims of the crash in a kind of disseminative and absorptive (rhetorical) structure. “The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it. The time is coming, our truth, our shame, and each man becomes the other, and the other still another, and then there is no separation” (80). RevisionsThe traces of American culture that were already contained in the landfill in Underworld have now become the resting place of the dust and the bodies of the trauma of 9/11. Rereading DeLillo’s magnum opus one cannot help but be struck by the new resonance of Fresh Kills.The landfill showed him smack-on how the waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not…. He knew the stench must ride the wind into every dining room for miles around. When people heard a noise at night, did they think the heap was coming down around them, sliding toward their homes, an omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows?The wind carried the stink across the kill…. The biggest secrets are the ones spread before us. (184-5)The landfill looms large on the landscape, a huge pile of evidence for the mass trauma of what remains, those that remain, and what may come—waste in all its virtuality. The “omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows” is a picture of dust-blanketed Downtown NYC that everybody, everywhere, continually saw. The mediatory second sight of sifting the landfill, of combing the second site of the victims for its “sodden second thoughts,” is at once something “you wanted ardently and then did not.” The particles are wanted as a distillate, produced by the frameline of an intentional, processual practice that ‘edits’ 9/11 and its aftermath into a less unacceptable sequence that might allow the familiar mourning ritual of burying a corpse. WTC Families Inc. is seeking to throw the frame of human identity around the unincorporated particles of waste in the Fresh Kills landfill, an unbearably man-made, million-ton mountain. This operation is an attempt to immure the victims and their families from the attacks and its afterlife as waste or recycled material, refusing the ever-present virtual life of waste that always accompanied them. Of course, even if WTC Families is granted its wish to sift Fresh Kills, how can it differentiate its remains from those of the 9/11 attackers? The latter have a molecular, virtual afterlife in the present and the living, lumpy reminders that surface as foreign bodies.Resisting the city’s drive to rebuild and move on, WTC Families for Proper Burial Inc. is absorbed with the classification of waste rather than its deployment. In spite of the group’s failed court action, the Fresh Kills site will still be dug over: a civil works project by the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation will reclaim the landfill and rename it “Freshkills Park,” a re-creational area to be twice the size of Central Park—As DeLillo foresaw, “The biggest secrets are the ones spread before us.”ReferencesBoxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Routledge, 2006.Conte, Joseph M. “Writing amid the Ruins: 9/11 and Cosmopolis”. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Ed. John N. Duvall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 179-192.Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003.DeLillo, Don. Players. London: Vintage, 1991.———. Mao II. London: Vintage, 1992.———. Underworld. London: Picador, 1997.———. “In the Ruins of the Future”. Harper’s. Dec. 2001: 33-40.———. Cosmopolis. London: Picador, 2003.———. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007.Hartocollis, Anemona. “Landfill Has 9/11 Remains, Medical Examiner Wrote”. 24 Mar. 2007. The New York Times. 7 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24%20/nyregion/24remains.html›. Hirsch, Adam. “DeLillo Confronts September 11”. 2 May 2007. The New York Sun. 10 May 2007 ‹http://www.nysun.com/arts/delillo-confronts-september-11/53594/›.Hughes, C. J. “9/11 Families Press Judges on Sifting at Landfill”. 16 Dec. 2009. The New York Times. 17 Dec. 2009 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/nyregion/17sift.html›.Junod, Tom. “The Man Who Invented 9/11”. 7 May 2007. Rev. of Falling Man by Don DeLillo. Esquire. 28 May 2007 ‹http://www.esquire.com/fiction/book-review/delillo›.O’Rourke, Meghan. “DeLillo Seemed Almost Eerily Primed to Write a Novel about 9/11”. 23 May 2007. Slate.com. 28 May 2007 ‹http://www.slate.com/id/2166831/%20entry/2166848/›.

Abstract:

Warning: This film may be especially unsatisfying for those who dislike having others read over their shoulders So Is This (1982) is a 43-minute silent film composed entirely of type-set words that appear on the screen one at a time, gradually forming sentences and paragraphs as the viewer pieces the individual frames together. This strange process of reading words on moving celluloid frames is distinct from the self-regulated steady reading of words on the page and, in most cases, words on electronic screens. So Is This shows how film as a critical practice can engage with the writing that surrounds it. Film reviews, film theory, and a range of other texts interact with the ideas and methods of filmmaking. In So Is This, Michael Snow, who is most well known for films such as Wavelength (1967) and La Region Centrale (1971), uses the ‘material’ of film critics – the written word – and the moving image, to raise questions about the specific practices of looking and reading. This exploration of film and writing has been explored in a wealth of conceptual films from the 1960s and 1970s. Lis Rhodes’ Light Reading (1978) uses collage and text, and is possibly referred to in So Is This, which states “this is light reading”, a pun on the two meanings of ‘light’ – as physical brightness, or shallowness (a light read). Mike Dunford’s Tautology (1973) employs single words contrasted with images. Paul Sharits’ Word Movie (1972) explores the relationship between spoken language via the soundtrack and written text on the screen, and comes closest to So Is This in its focus on text as imagery. So Is This stands out among these explorations because of its singular and sustained focus. Snow’s film is composed entirely of text without the inclusion of any pictorial imagery and, unlike Sharits’ film, doesn’t rely on sound. On film and writing/About film and writing . The distinction Morris makes between texts which write on and texts which write about – a choice, she suggests, “made for reasons as well as rhythms” (151) – may seem trivial, but it is a useful place to start thinking about methodological and stylistic tendencies in film criticism. Morris reminds us of the literal meaning of ‘on’ – one writes or scribbles on a surface (151). Film criticism typically contains both Abouts and Ons, with a stronger dose of the former. A writing practice based on ‘abouts’ is one which deciphers texts, ‘cuts’ into them. “Clairvoyant reading tears through” (152), as Morris describes, in order to interpret. The term ‘clairvoyant’ is used to describe a practice which penetrates the surface of a text to find meaning. When Morris reminds her reader that “Ons . . . are the smooth swirls which are not straight lines which bind the pieces [of ideas] together” (151), she gives a warning about the critical ellipses that can occur when a reading practice emphasises the Abouts at the expense of the Ons. The vagueness of ‘smooth swirls’ and ‘straight lines’ is made less opaque when reading Morris’ own particularly likable ‘patterns’, but another way of thinking about the difference between writing on and writing about, is to think about writing on as a method of writing with. Snow, like Morris, pays attention to the small words which cradle the meaning of more complex sentences. The individual words that make up the frames of So Is This are all set to the same margins. This results in the small words taking up a larger portion of the screen, while the longer ones are shrunk to fit the margins. As the title indicates, this process inevitably places more emphasis on the small words. The word which is emphasised the most is ‘this’, which Snow describes as “the most present tense word there is” (‘Comments’ 24). Light Reading . The letters maintain the characteristic imperfections of manual typesetting. They are sometimes cracked, or slightly fraying at the edges. Similarly, Snow uses out-of-date colour film stock to make this ‘black and white’ film, which one soon realises is not black and white, but a range of dark and light colours. Snow continually reminds his viewers that although they are ‘reading’ words, the words are created by light, creating a practice of ‘light reading’. “[I]n this film writing is lighting” So Is This cheekily proclaims. To further emphasise that we are viewing a film, Hillier notes that, “Snow leaves in the end-of-roll flaring – normally simply junked as unusable – during which ‘image’ (here, written text) is progressively unable to be registered” (85). Some words have a flicker effect, and at times the ‘white’ text bleeds into a yellow tone, while the ‘black’ background moves toward a dark green. Although minimal in its use of ‘imagery’, So Is This maintains a particular beauty in the simplicity of shapes and colours and the unpredictable nature of out-of-date film. The duration of each word on the screen varies greatly, as does the darkness in the pauses between words. This rhythmic pacing of words and darkness is amusing and at times infuriating. Unlike other textual forms, where you can scan through sentences and paragraphs to make meaning, So Is This allows you to read one word at a time, at a pace controlled by the filmmaker. These nuances of timing create a ‘tone’ of address – Snow acknowledges that at times he structures the rhythm to make it conversational (‘Comments’ 28) – while also highlighting the ability of the film medium to structure time. This supervised reading in which the audience engages is frustrating – some words are held on the screen for nearly a minute, causing all kinds of bodily aches and irritations – and also very entertaining, although not in the sense that the film promises when it claims that “[i]t's going to get into some real human stuff that will make you laugh and cry and change society”. When watching the film I am reminded of being read aloud to by primary-school teachers, who would hold the book with the text facing the class, allowing students to follow the words while she or he read aloud. The sensation of staring at the teacher’s hands, willing them to turn the page a little faster, resurfaces during So Is This. The film coyly reminds us that; Everybody of course is equal and capable of reading at the same speed. But really some prefer it slow and some prefer it fast and you can't please everybody. So Is This refers to itself as both “script” and “score”. This musical analogy is important, considering Snow’s career as a jazz musician. So Is This is not a film about sound, yet it shares the concerns of rhythm, pace and ‘tone’ that are explored in his musical works. Jim Hillier’s connection between Snow’s description of the concerns of Rameau’s Nephew and the explorations he makes in So Is This, carefully highlights this point. Snow explains; To use spoken language to any deeper effect in film, I think one ought to be involved in provoking differences of hearing and listening counterpointed with those of seeing, watching, looking and making possible raw or concrete understandings. Meaning is a constituent not only of the words used but, even more than in real speech, of qualities possible only with film sound: a conscious use of the differences between actual speech and recorded speech (Snow in Hillier 80). Communal reading In a discussion of Snow’s film works, Thierry de Duve uses the word ‘hostage’ to describe the process of being ‘forced’ to literally ‘read’ an entire film (23). Although joking, de Duve hits on a salient point about the type of reading practice that Snow’s film demands you undertake. It is impossible to skim through the text of So Is This, or to read ahead; a more dedicated and active reader is required. To watch So Is This requires a level of involvement that films - even most experimental films – don’t typically demand. Towards the beginning of the film So Is This informs the audience that it “will consist of single words presented one after another to construct sentences and hopefully (this is where you come in) to convey meanings”. The construction of sentences, into paragraphs, a word at a time, means that the film slyly entices reflection and deliberation, through the necessity of holding onto the previous words, in order to understand the meaning Snow is conveying with subsequent words. This enduring involvement creates a closeness/intimacy with the text. In an interview with Snow, Mike Hoolboom describes So Is This as having a “friendly, warm feeling” (18). This is produced partly by the rhythm and tone of the words but also because the film doesn’t fail to remind its viewers that language is a relationship between people. The sociality of language – written and spoken – is referenced in So Is This when the film flippantly consoles its viewers for watching a film composed solely of text; But look at the bright side of it: Sharing! When was the last time you and your neighbour read together? This is communal reading, it's Group Lit! We could even read aloud but let's not. Is there anybody reading this right now? Secondly, Snow responds to the criticism in his typically humorous manner, by making a film containing nothing but words, which could be read as a direct response to the practices of reading films into theory. When So Is This muses, “a good thing about reading words like this and not hearing a voice is that you can't accuse it of being male or female”, the film responds to the disapproval aimed at Presents. So Is This also responds to the censoring of Snow’s earlier film Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot, (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974). Rameau’s Nephew, a four-and-a-half hour film which contains graphic sexual imagery, was censored by The Ontario Board of Censors. In a hilarious ‘paragraph’ of So Is This, Snow inserts single-frame – and hence subliminal – ‘offensive’ words amongst the slower paced text; Since this film was tit* originally composed ass The Ontario Board of Censors has started to inspect so-called Experimental Films eg This. It's difficult to co*ck understand why but it seems as if their purpose is to protect you from this. To protect you from people like c*nt the author discussing their sexual lives or fantasies on this screen. So Is This goes as far as to directly address the then-Ontario film censor, Mary Brown, who banned Rameau’s Nephew, with a cheery ‘Hi Mary’. These jibes at the practice of film censorship work to highlight the difference between reading a word and seeing a picture. Although the film mocks ideas about semiotics and film, it also, as Hillier argues, engages with semiological concepts much less opaquely than many theorists describe them in books (85). A whole discussion about critical writing practices seems to vibrate within the humorous and ‘light’ text of So Is This. It could be read as a film on film criticism, or at least a response to the methods of film writing, but it is about a lot of other things as well. Scott MacDonald writes that So Is This “turns film onto language in the way that language is normally turned loose on film (20 ‘Interview’). This is certainly true in the sense that language is forced to succumb to the limitations of the celluloid frame, just as the filmic image is typically paraphrased into linguistic descriptions. Works Cited Duve, Thierry de. ‘Here I Am’. Michael Snow, Digital Snow DVD-ROM. Ed. Anne-Marie Duguet. Paris: Pompidou, 2002. Hillier, Jim. ‘Writing, Cinema and the Avant-garde: Michael Snow and So Is This’. Writing and Cinema. Ed. Jonathon Bignell. Edinburgh: Longman, 1999. 74-87. Hoolbloom, Mike. Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada. Toronto: Coach House, 2001. Lauretis, Teresa de. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1984. MacDonald, Scott. ‘So Is This’. Michael Snow, Digital Snow DVD-ROM. Ed. Anne-Marie Duguet. Paris: Pompidou, 2002. Morris, Meaghan. The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism. London: Verso, 1988. Sitney, P. Adams. Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision In Cinema and Literature. New York: Columbia U P, 1990. Snow, Michael. Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot, (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, 1974. ---. Presents, 1981. ---. So Is This, 1982. ---. ‘Present Tense Situation: Michael Snow Comments on So Is This’. Words and Moving Images: Essays on Verbal and Visual Expression in Film and Television. Ed. William C. Wees and Michael Dorland. Montréal: Mediatexte, 1984. 19-32. Testa, Bart. ‘An Axiomatic Cinema: Michael Snow’s Films’. Michael Snow, Digital Snow DVD-ROM. Ed. Anne-Marie Duguet. Paris: Pompidou, 2002. For more information on Michael Snow and several links to sites about his work visit http://www.digitalsnow.org Editors’ Note At the author’s request, and in keeping with Michael Snow’s font choice for So Is This, this article is presented in Helvetica, rather than M/C’s usual font, Verdana. If, however, your browser does not support Helvetica, this article will most likely appear in Arial, a version of Helvetica. Links http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Simon, Jane. "Reading in the Dark" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/05-simon.php>. APA Style Simon, J. (2004, Jan 12). Reading in the Dark. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/05-simon.php>

Abstract:

Background information Sandscript was programmed with the web application « Tchat-scene », created by Carol-Ann Braun and the computer services company Timsoft (). It organizes a data-base of raw material into compositions and sequences allowing to build larger episodes. Multimedia resources are thus attributed to frames surrounding the chat space or to the chat space itself, thus “augmented” to include pre-written texts and graphics. Sandscript works best on a PC, with Internet Explorer. On Mac, use 0S9 and Internet Explorer. You will have to download a chat application for the site to function. Coded conversation General opinion would have it that chat space is a conversational space, facilitating rather than complicating communication. Writing in a chat space is very much influenced by the current ideological stance which sees collaborative spaces as places to make friends, speak freely, flip from one “channel” to another, link with a simple click into related themes, etc. Moreover, chat users tend to think of the chat screen in terms of a white page, an essentially neutral environment. A quick analysis of chat practices reveals a different scenario: chat spaces are highly coded typographical writing spaces, quick to exclude those who don’t abide by the technical and procedural constraints associated with computer reading/writing tools (Despret-Lonné, Gentès). Chatters seek to belong to a “community;” conversely, every chat has “codes” which restrict its membership to the like-minded. The patterns of exchange characteristic of chats are phatic (Jakobson), and their primary purpose is to get and maintain a social link. It is no surprise then that chatters should emphasize two skills: one related to rhetorical ingenuity, the other to dexterity and speed of writing. To belong, one first has to grasp the banter, then manage very quickly the rules and rituals of the group, then answer by mastering the intricacies of the keyboard and its shortcuts. Speed is compulsory if your answers are to follow the communal chat; as a result, sentences tend to be very short, truncated bits, dispatched in a continuous flow. Sandscript attempts to play with the limits of this often hermetic writing process (and the underlying questions of affinity, participation and reciprocity). It opens up a social space to an artistic and fictional space, each with rules of its own. Hyper-linked dialogue Sandscript is not just about people chatting, it is also about influencing the course of these exchanges. The site weaves pre-scripted poetic content into the spontaneous, real-time dialogue of chatters. Smileys and the plethora of abbreviations, punctuations and icons characteristic of chat rooms are mixed in with typographical games that develop the idea of text as image and text as sound — using Morse Code to make text resonate, CB code to evoke its spoken use, and graphic elements within the chat space itself to oppose keyboard text and handwritten graffiti. The web site encourages chatters to broaden the scope of their “net-speak,” and take a playfully conscious stance towards their own familiar practices. Actually, most of the writing in this web-site is buried in the database. Two hundred or so “key words” — expressions typical of phatic exchanges, in addition to other words linked to the idea of sandstorms and archeology — lie dormant, inactive and unseen until a chatter inadvertently types one in. These keywords bridge the gap between spontaneous exchange and multimedia content: if someone types in “hi,” an image of a face, half buried in sand, pops up in a floating window and welcomes you, silently; if someone types in the word “wind,” a typewritten “wind” floats out into the graphic environment and oscillates between the left and right edges of the frames; typing the word “no” “magically” triggers the intervention of an anarchist who says something provocative*. *Sandscript works like a game of ping-pong among chatters who are intermittently surprised by a comment “out of nowhere.” The chat space, augmented by a database, forms an ever-evolving, fluid “back-bone” around which artistic content is articulated. Present in the form of programs who participate in their stead, artists share the spot light, adding another level of mediation to a collective writing process. Individual and collective identities Not only does Sandscript accentuate the multimedia aspects of typed chat dialogues, it also seeks to give a “ shape” to the community of assembled chatters. This shape is musical: along with typing in a nickname of her choice, each chatter is attributed a sound. Like crickets in a field, each sound adds to the next to create a collective presence, modified with every new arrival and departure. For example, if your nick is “yoyo-mama,” your presence will be associated with a low, electronic purr. When “pillX” shows up, his nick will be associated with a sharp violin chord. When “mojo” pitches in, she adds her sound profile to the lot, and the overall environment changes again. Chatters can’t hear the clatter of each other’s keyboards, but they hear the different rhythms of their musical identities. The repeated pings of people present in the same “scape” reinforce the idea of community in a world where everything typed is swept away by the next bit of text, soon to be pushed off-screen in turn. The nature of this orchestrated collective presence is determined by the artists and their programs, not by the chatters themselves, whose freedom is limited to switching from one nick to another to test the various sounds associated with each. Here, identity is both given and built, both individual and collective, both a matter of choice and pre-defined rules. (Goffman) Real or fictitious characters The authors introduce simulated bits of dialogue within the flow of written conversation. Some of these fake dialogues simply echo whatever keywords chatters might type. Others, however, point else where, suggesting a hyper-link to a more elaborate fictionalized drama among “characters.” Sandscript also hides a plot. Once chatters realize that there are strange goings on in their midst, they become caught in the shifting sands of this web site’s inherent duality. They can completely lose their footing: not only do they have to position themselves in relation to other, real people (however disguised…) but they also have to find their bearings in the midst of a database of fake interlocutors. Not only are they expected to “write” in order to belong, they are also expected to unearth content in order to be “in the know.” A hybridized writing is required to maintain this ambivalence in place. Sandscript’s fake dialogue straddles two worlds: it melds in with the real-time small talk of chatters all while pointing to elements in a fictional narrative. For example, “mojo” will say: “silting up here ”, and “zano” will answer “10-4, what now? ” These two characters could be banal chatters, inviting others to join in their sarcastic banter… But they are also specifically referring to incidents in their fictional world. The “chat code” not only addresses its audience, it implies that something else is going on that merits a “click” or a question. “Clicking” at this juncture means more than just quickly responding to what another chatter might have typed. It implies stopping the banter and delving into the details of a character developed at greater length elsewhere. Indeed, in Sandscript, each fictional dialogue is linked to a blog that reinforces each character’s personality traits and provides insights into the web-site’s wind-swept, self-erasing world. Interestingly enough, Sandscript then reverses this movement towards a closed fictional space by having each character not only write about himself, but relate her immediate preoccupations to the larger world. Each blog entry mentions a character’s favorite URL at that particular moment. One character might evoke a web site about romantic poetry, another one on anarchist political theory, a third a web-site on Morse code, etc… Chatters click on the URL and open up an entirely new web-site, directly related to the questions being discussed in Sandscript. Thus, each character represents himself as well as a point of view on the larger world of the web. Fiction opens onto a “real” slice of cyber-space and the work of other authors and programmers. Sandscript mixes up different types of on-line identities, emphasizing that representations of people on the web are neither “true” nor “false.” They are simply artificial and staged, simple facets of identities which shift in style and rhetoric depending on the platform available to them. Again, identity is both closed by our social integration and opened to singular “play.” Conclusion: looking at and looking through One could argue that since the futurists staged their “electrical theater” in the streets of Turin close to a hundred years ago, artists have worked on the blurry edge between recognizable formal structures and their dissolution into life itself. And after a century of avant-gardes, self-referential appropriations of mass media are also second nature. Juxtaposing one “use” along another reveals how different frames of reference include or exclude each other in unexpected ways. For the past twenty years much artwork has which fallen in between genres, and most recently in the realm of what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “relational aesthetics.” Such work is designed not only to draw attention to itself but also to the spectator’s relation to it and the broader artistic context which infuses the work with additional meaning. By having dialogue serve as a hyper-link to multimedia content, Sandscript, however, does more. Even though some changes in the web site are pre-programmed to occur automatically, not much happens without the chatters, who occupy center-stage and trigger the appearance of a latent content. Chatters are the driving force, they are the ones who make text appear and flow off-screen, who explore links, who exchange information, and who decide what pops up and doesn’t. Here, the art “object” reveals its different facets around a multi-layered, on-going conversation, subjected to the “flux” of an un-formulated present. Secondly, Sandscript demands that we constantly vary our posture towards the work: getting involved in conversation to look through the device, all while taking some distance to consider the object and look at its content and artistic “mediations.” (Bolster and Grusin, Manovitch). This tension is at the heart of Sandscript, which insists on being both a communication device “transparent” to its user, and an artistic device that imposes an opaque and reflexive quality. The former is supposed to disappear behind its task; the latter attracts the viewer’s attention over and over again, ever open to new interpretations. This approach is not without pitfalls. One Sandscript chatter wondered if as the authors of the web-site were not disappointed when conversation took the upper hand, and chatters ignored the graphics. On the other hand, the web site’s explicit status as a chat space was quickly compromised when users stopped being interested in each other and turned to explore the different layers hidden within the interface. In the end, Sandscript chatters are not bound to any single one of these modes. They can experience one and then other, and —why not —both simultaneously. This hybrid posture brings to mind Herman’s metaphor of a door that cannot be closed entirely: “la porte joue” —the door “gives.” It is not perfectly fitted and closed — there is room for “play.” Such openness requires that the artistic device provide two seemingly contradictory ways of relating to it: a desire to communicate seamlessly all while being fascinated by every seam in the representational space projected on-screen. Sandscript is supposed to “run” and “not run” at the same time; it exemplifies the technico-semiotic logic of speed and resists it full stop. Here, openness is not ontological; it is experiential, shifting. About the Authors Carol-Ann Braun is multimedia artist, at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecomunications, Paris, France. EmaiL: carol-ann.braun@wanadoo.fr Annie Gentes is media theorist and professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecomunications, Paris, France. Email: Annie.Gentes@enst.fr Works Cited Adamowicz, Elza. Surrealist Collage in Text and Image, Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Augé, Marc. Non-lieux, Introduction à une Anthropologie de la Surmodernité. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation, Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Bourriaud, Nicholas. Esthétique Relationnelle. Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 1998. Despret-Lonnet, Marie and Annie Gentes, Lire, Ecrire, Réécrire. Paris: Bibliothèque Centre Pompidou, 2003. Goffman, Irving. Interaction Ritual. New York: Pantheon, 1967. Habermas, Jürgen. Théorie de l’Agir Communicationnel, Vol.1. Paris: Fayard, 1987. Herman, Jacques. “Jeux et Rationalité.” Encyclopedia Universalis, 1997. Jakobson, Roman.“Linguistics and Poetics: Closing statements,” in Thomas Sebeok. Style in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. Latzko-Toth, Guillaume. “L’Internet Relay Chat, Un Cas Exemplaire de Dispositif Socio-technique,” in Composite. Montreal: Université du Québec à Montréal, 2001. Lyotard, Jean-François. La Condition Post-Moderne. Paris: les Editions de Minuit, 1979. Manovitch, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Michaud, Yves. L’Art à l’Etat Gazeux. Essai sur le Triomphe de l’Esthétique, Les essais. Paris: Stock, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Braun, Carol-Ann & Gentes, Annie. "Dialogue: a hyper-link to multimedia content." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/05_Braun-Gentes.php>. APA Style Braun, C. & Gentes, A. (2004, Jul1). Dialogue: a hyper-link to multimedia content.. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/05_Braun-Gentes.php>

Abstract:

Western notions of authors’ Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), as expressed within copyright law, maintain a potentially fraught relationship with a range of philosophical and theoretical positions on writing and authorship that have developed within contemporary Western thinking. For Roland Barthes, authorship is compromised, de-identified and multiplied by the very nature of writing: ‘Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’ (142). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari follow a related line of thought in A Thousand Plateaus: ‘Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency’ (11). Similarly, in Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida suggests that ‘Writing is that forgetting of the self, that exteriorization, the contrary of the interiorizing memory’ (24). To the extent that these philosophical and theoretical positions emerge within the practices of creative writers as remixes of appropriation, homage and/or pastiche, prima facie they problematize the commercial rights of writers as outlined in law. The case of Kathy Acker often comes up in such discussions. Acker’s 1984 novel Blood and Guts in High School, for example, incorporates techniques that have attracted the charge of plagiarism as this term is commonly defined. (Peter Wollen notes this in his aptly named essay ‘Death [and Life] of the Author.’) For texts like Acker’s, the comeback against charges of plagiarism usually involves underscoring the quotient of creativity involved in the re-combination or ‘remixing’ of the parts of the original texts. (Pure repetition would, it would seem, be much harder to defend.) ‘Plagiarism’, so-called, was simply one element of Acker’s writing technique; Robert Lort nuances plagiarism as it applies to Acker as ‘pseudo-plagiarism’. According to Wollen, ‘as she always argued, it wasn’t really plagiarism because she was quite open about what she did.’ As we shall demonstrate in more detail later on, however, there is another and, we suggest, more convincing reason why Acker’s work ‘wasn’t really plagiarism.’ This relates to her conscious interest in calligraphy and to her (perhaps unconscious) appropriation of a certain strand of Chinese philosophy. All the same, within the Western context, the consistent enforcement of copyright law guarantees the rights of authors to control the distribution of their own work and thus its monetised value. The author may be ‘dead’ in writing—just the faintest trace of remixed textuality—but he/she is very much ‘alive’ as in recognised at law. The model of the author as free-standing citizen (as a defined legal entity) that copyright law employs is unlikely to be significantly eroded by the textual practices of authors who tarry artistically in the ‘de-authored territories’ mapped by figures like Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida. Crucially, disputes concerning copyright law and the ethics of remix are resolved, within the Western context, at the intersection of relatively autonomous creative and legal domains. In the West, it is seen that these two domains are related within the one social fabric; each nuances the other (as Acker’s example shows in the simultaneity of her legal/commercial status as an author and her artistic practice as a ‘remixer’ of the original works of other authors). Legal and writing issues co-exist even as they fray each other’s boundaries. And in Western countries there is force to the law’s operations. However, the same cannot be said of the situation with respect to copyright law in China. Chinese artists are traditionally regarded as being aloof from mundane legal and commercial matters, with the consequence that the creative and the legal domains tend to ‘miss each other’ within the fabric of Chinese society. To this extent, the efficacy of the law is muted in China when it comes into contact with circ*mstances of authorship, writing, originality and creativity. (In saying this though, we do not wish to fall into the trap of cultural essentialism: in this article, ‘China’ and ‘The West’ are placeholders for variant cultural tendencies—clustered, perhaps, around China and its disputed territories such as Taiwan on the one hand, and around America on the other—rather than hom*ogeneous national/cultural blocs.) Since China opened its system to Western capitalist economic activity in the 1980s, an ongoing criticism, sourced mainly out of the West, has been that the country lacks proper respect for notions of authorship and, more directly, for authorship’s derivative: copyright law. Tellingly, it took almost ten years of fierce negotiations between elements of the capitalist lobby in China and the Legislative Bureau to make the Seventh National People’s Congress pass the first Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China on 7 September 1990. A law is one thing though, and adherence to the law is another. Jayanthi Iyengar of Asia Times Online reports that ‘the US government estimates that piracy within China [of all types of products] costs American companies $20-24 billion a year in damages…. If one includes European and Japanese firms, the losses on account of Chinese piracy is in excess of $50 billion annually.’ In 2008, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reported that more than 99% of all music files in China are pirated. In the same year, Cara Anna wrote in The Seattle Times that, in desperation at the extent of Chinese infringement of its Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), Microsoft has deployed an anti-piracy tactic that blacks out the screens of computers detected running a fake copy of Windows. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has filed complaints from many countries against China over IPRs. Iyengar also reports that, under such pressure, the State Intellectual Property Office in Beijing has vowed it will continue to reinforce awareness of IPRs in order to better ensure their protection. Still, from the Western perspective at least, progress on this extremely contentious issue has been excruciatingly slow. Such a situation in respect of Chinese IPRs, however, should not lead to the conclusion that China simply needs to catch up with the more ‘morally advanced’ West. Rather, the problematic relations of the law and of creativity in China allow one to discern, and to trace through ancient Chinese history and philosophy, a different approach to remix that does not come into view so easily within Western countries. Different materialisms of writing and authorship come into play across global space, with different effects. The resistance to both the introduction and the policing of copyright law in China is, we think, the sign of a culture that retains something related to authorship and creativity that Western culture only loosely holds onto. It provides a different way of looking at remix, in the guise of what the West would tend to label plagiarism, as a practice, especially, of creativity. The ‘death’ of the author in China at law (the failure to legislate and/or police his/her rights) brings the author, as we will argue, ‘alive’ in the writing. Remix as anonymous composition (citing Barthes) becomes, in the Chinese example, remix as creative expression of singular feelings—albeit remix set adrift from the law. More concretely, our example of the Chinese writer/writing takes remix to its limit as a practice of repetition without variation—what the West would be likely to call plagiarism. Calligraphy is key to this. Of course, calligraphy is not the full extent of Chinese writing practice—not all writing is calligraphic strictly speaking. But all calligraphy is writing, and in this it influences the ethics of Chinese writing, whether character-based or otherwise, more generally. We will have more to say about the ‘pictorial’ material aspect of Chinese writing later on. In traditional Chinese culture, writing is regarded as a technical practice perfected through reproduction. Chinese calligraphy (visual writing) is learnt through exhaustively tracing and copying the style of the master calligrapher. We are tempted to say that what is at stake in Chinese remix/calligraphy is ‘the difference that cannot be helped:’ that is, the more one tries, as it were, to repeat, the more repetition becomes impossible. In part, this is explained by the interplay of Qing 情 (‘feelings’) and Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’). Now, the order of the characters—Qing 情 (‘feelings’) before Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’)—suggests that Qing creates and supports Yun. To this extent, what we have here is something akin to a Western understanding of creative writing (of the creativity of writing) in which individual and singular feelings are given expression in the very movement of the writing itself (through the bodily actions of the writer). In fact though, the Chinese case is more complicated than this, for the apprenticeship model of Chinese calligraphy cultivates a two-way interplay of Qing 情 (‘feelings’) and Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’). More directly, the ‘composed body movements’ that one learns from the master calligrapher help compose one’s own ‘feelings’. The very repetition of the master’s work (its remixing, as it were…) enables the creativity of the apprentice. If this model of creativity is found somewhat distasteful from a Western perspective (that is, if it is seen to be too restrictive of originality) then that is because such a view, we think, depends upon a cultural misunderstanding that we will try to clear up here. To wit, the so-called Confucian model of rote learning that is more-or-less frowned upon in the West is not, at least not in the debased form that it adopts in Western stereotypes, the philosophy active in the case of Chinese calligraphy. That philosophy is Taoism. As Wing-Tsit Chan elucidates, ‘by opposing Confucian conformity with non-conformity and Confucian worldliness with a transcendental spirit, Taoism is a severe critic of Confucianism’ (136). As we will show in a moment, Chinese calligraphy exemplifies this special kind of Taoist non-conformity (in which, as Philip J. Ivanhoe limns it, ‘one must unweave the social fabric’). Chan again: ‘As the way of life, [Taoism] denotes simplicity, spontaneity, tranquility, weakness, and most important of all, non-action (wu-wei). By the latter is not meant literally “inactivity” but rather “taking no action that is contrary to Nature”—in other words, letting Nature take its own course’ (136). Thus, this is a philosophy of ‘weakness’ that is neither ‘negativism’ nor ‘absolute quietism’ (137). Taoism’s supposed weakness is rather a certain form of strength, of (in the fullest sense) creative possibilities, which comes about through deference to the way of Nature. ‘Hold fast to the great form (Tao), / And all the world will come’ illustrates this aspect of Taoism in its major philosophical tract, The Lao Tzu (Tao-Te Ching) or The Classic of the Way and its Virtue (section 35, Chan 157). The guiding principle is one of deference to the original (way, Nature or Tao) as a strategy of an expression (of self) that goes beyond the original. The Lao Tzu is full of cryptic, metaphoric expressions of this idea: ‘The pursuit of learning is to increase day after day. / The pursuit of Tao is to decrease day after day. / It is to decrease and further decrease until one reaches the point of taking no action. / No action is undertaken, and yet nothing is left undone’ (section 48, Chan 162). Similarly, The female always overcomes the male by tranquility, / And by tranquility she is underneath. / A big state can take over a small state if it places itself below the small state; / And the small state can take over a big state if it places itself below the big state. / Thus some, by placing themselves below, take over (others), / And some, by being (naturally) low, take over (other states) (section 61, Chan 168). In Taoism, it is only by (apparent) weakness and (apparent) in-action that ‘nothing is left undone’ and ‘states’ are taken over. The two-way interplay of Qing 情 (‘feelings’) and Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’), whereby the apprentice copies the master, aligns with this key element of Taoism. Here is the linkage between calligraphy and Taoism. The master’s work is Tao, Nature or the way: ‘Hold fast to the great form (Tao), / And all the world will come’ (section 35, Chan 157). The apprentice’s calligraphy is ‘all the world’ (‘all the world’ being, ultimately in this context, Qing 情 [‘feelings’]). Indeed, Taoism itself is a subtle philosophy of learning (of apprenticeship to a master), unlike Confucianism, which Chan characterises as a doctrine of ‘social order’ (of servitude to a master) (136). ‘“Learn not learn”’ is how Wang Pi, as quoted by Chan (note 121, 170), understands what he himself (Chan) translates as ‘He learns to be unlearned’ (section 64, 170). In unlearning one learns what cannot be taught: this is, we suggest, a remarkable definition of creativity, which also avoids falling into the trap of asserting a one-to-one equivalence between (unlearnt) originality and creativity, for there is both learning and creativity in this Taoist paradox of pedagogy. On this, Michael Meehan points out that ‘originality is an over-rated and misguided concept in many ways.’ (There is even a sense in which, through its deliberate repetition, The Lao Tzu teaches itself, traces over itself in ‘self-plagiarising’ fashion, as if it were reflecting on the re-tracings of calligraphic pedagogy. Chan notes just how deliberate this is: ‘Since in ancient times books consisted of bamboo or wooden slabs containing some twenty characters each, it was not easy for these sentences… to be added by mistake…. Repetitions are found in more than one place’ [note 102, 166].) Thinking of Kathy Acker too as a learner, Peter Wollen’s observation that she ‘incorporated calligraphy… in her books’ and ‘was deeply committed to [the] avant-garde tradition, a tradition which was much stronger in the visual arts’ creates a highly suggestive connection between Acker’s work and Taoism. The Taoist model for learning calligraphy as, precisely, visual art—in which copying subtends creativity—serves to shift Acker away from a Barthesian or Derridean framework and into a Taoist context in which adherence to another’s form (as ‘un-learnt learning’) creatively unravels so-called plagiarism from the inside. Acker’s conscious interest in calligraphy is shown by its prevalence in Blood and Guts in High School. Edward S. Robinson identifies this text as part of her ‘middle phase’, which ‘saw the introduction of illustrations and diagrams to create multimedia texts with a collage-like feel’ (154). To our knowledge, Acker never critically reflected upon her own calligraphic practices; perhaps if she had, she would have troubled what we see as a blindspot in critics’ interpretations of her work. To wit, whenever calligraphy is mentioned in criticism on Acker, it tends to be deployed merely as an example of her cut-up technique and never analysed for its effects in its own cultural, philosophical and material specificity. (Interestingly, if the words of Chinese photographer Liu Zheng are any guide, the Taoism we’re identifying in calligraphy has also worked its way into other forms of Chinese visual art: she refers to ‘loving photographic details and cameras’ with the very Taoist term, ‘lowly’ 低级 [Three Shadows Photography Art Centre 187].) Being ‘lowly’, ‘feminine’ or ‘underneath’ has power as a radical way of learning. We mentioned above that Taoism is very metaphoric. As the co-writer of this paper Cher Coad recalls from her calligraphy classes, students in China grow up with a metaphoric proverb clearly inspired by Lao Tzu’s Taoist philosophy of learning: ‘Learning shall never stop. Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ ‘Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ What could this mean? Before answering this question with recourse to two Western notions that, we hope, will further effect (building on Acker’s example) a rapprochement between Chinese and Western ways of thinking (be they nationally based or not), we reiterate that the infringement of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in China should not be viewed only as an egregious denial of universally accepted law. Rather, whatever else it may be, we see it as the shadow in the commercial realm—mixed through with all the complexities of Chinese tradition, history and cultural difference, and most particularly of the Taoist strand within Confucianism—of the never-quite-perfect copying of calligraphic writing/remixing. More generally, the re-examination of stereotypical assumptions about Chinese culture cues a re-examination of the meaning behind the copying of products and technology in contemporary, industrialised China. So, ‘Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ What is this ‘more than the blue of black’? Or put differently, why is calligraphic writing, as learnt from the master, always infused with the singular feelings of the (apprentice) writer? The work of Deleuze, Guattari and Claire Parnet provides two possible responses. In On the Line, Deleuze and Guattari (and Deleuze in co-authorship with Parnet) author a number of comments that support the conception we are attempting to develop concerning the lines of Chinese calligraphy. A line, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is always a line of lines (‘Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight’ [57]). In the section of On the Line entitled ‘Politics’, Deleuze and Parnet outline the impossibility of any line being just one line. If life is a line (as it is said, you throw someone a life line), then ‘We have as many entangled lines in our lives as there are in the palm of a hand’ (71). Of any (hypothetical) single line it can be said that other lines emerge: ‘Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ The feelings of the apprentice calligrapher (his/her multiple lines) emerge through the repeated copying of the lines and composed body movements of the master. The Deleuzean notion of repetition takes this idea further. Repetitive Chinese calligraphy clearly indexes what Claire Colebrook refers to as ‘Deleuze’s concept of eternal return. The only thing that is repeated or returns is difference; no two moments of life can be the same. By virtue of the flow of time, any repeated event is necessarily different (even if different only to the extent that it has a predecessor)’ (121). Now, it might be objected that Chinese calligraphic practices, because of the substantially ideographic nature of Chinese writing (see Kristeva 72-81), allow for material mutations that can find no purchase in Western, alphabetical systems of writing. But the materiality of time that Colebrook refers to as part of her engagement with Deleuzean non-repetitious (untimely) repetition guarantees the materiality of all modes of writing. Furthermore, Julia Kristeva notes that, with any form of language, one cannot leave ‘the realm of materialism’ (6) and Adrian Miles, in his article ‘Virtual Actual: Hypertext as Material Writing,’ sees the apparently very ‘unmaterial’ writing of hypertext ‘as an embodied activity that has its own particular affordances and possibilities—its own constraints and local actualisations’ (1-2). Calligraphic repetition of the master’s model creates the apprentice’s feelings as (inevitable) difference. In this then, the learning by the Chinese apprentice of the lines of the master’s calligraphy challenges international (both Western and non-Western) artists of writing to ‘remix remix’ as a matter—as a materialisation—of the line. Not the line as a self-identical entity of writing that only goes to make up writing more generally; rather, lines as a materialisation of lines within lines within lines. More self-reflexively, even the collaborative enterprise of this article, co-authored as it is by a woman of Chinese ethnicity and a white Australian man, suggests a remixing of writing through, beneath and over each other’s lines. Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’) expresses and maximises Qing 情 (‘feelings’). Taoist ‘un-learnt learning’ generates remix as the singular creativity of the writer. Writers get into a blue with the line—paint it, black. Of course, these ideas won’t and shouldn’t make copyright infringement (or associated legalities) redundant notions. But in exposing the cultural relativisms often buried within the deployment of this and related terms, the idea of lines of lines far exceeds a merely formalistic practice (one cut off from the materialities of culture) and rather suggests a mode of non-repetitious repetition in contact with all of the elements of culture (of history, of society, of politics, of bodies…) wherever these may be found, and whatever their state of becoming. In this way, remix re-creates the depths of culture even as it stirs up its surfaces of writing. References Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel. New York: Grove Press, 1978. Anna, Cara. ‘Microsoft Anti-Piracy Technology Upsets Users in China.’ The Seattle Times. 28 Oct. 2008 ‹http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2008321919_webmsftchina28.html›. Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author.’ Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977. 142-148. Chan, Wing-Tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969. Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. On the Line. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. ‘Recording Industry Steps Up Campaign against Internet Piracy in China.’ ifpi. 4 Feb. 2008 ‹http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_news/20080204.html›. Ivanhoe, Philip J. ‘Taoism’. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Ed. Robert Audi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 787. Iyengar, Jayanthi. ‘Intellectual Property Piracy Rocks China Boat.’ Asia Times Online. 16 Sept. 2004 ‹http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FI16Ad07.html›. Kristeva, Julia. Language: The Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Lort, Robert. ‘Kathy Acker (1944-1997).’ Jahsonic: A Vocabulary of Culture. 2003 ‹http://www.jahsonic.com/KathyAcker.html›. Meehan, Michael. ‘Week 5a: Playing with Genres.’ Lecture notes. Unit ALL705. Short Stories: Writers and Readers. Trimester 2. Melbourne: Deakin University, 2013. Miles, Adrian. ‘Virtual Actual: Hypertext as Material Writing.’ Studies in Material Thinking 1.2 (April 2008) ‹http://www.materialthinking.org/papers/29›. Robinson, Edward S. Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present. New York: Editions Rodopi, 2011. Three Shadows Photography Art Centre. ‘Photography and Intimate Space Symposium.’ Conversations: Three Shadows Photography Art Centre’s 2007 Symposium Series. Ed. RongRong, inri, et al. Beijing: Three Shadows Press Limited, 2008. 179-191. Wollen, Peter. ‘Death (and Life) of the Author.’ London Review of Books 20.3 (5 Feb. 1998). ‹http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n03/peter-wollen/death-and-life-of-the-author›.

Abstract:

The rise of expertise in the lives of women is a complex and prolonged process that began when the old networks through which women had learned from each other were being discredited or destroyed (Ehrenreich and English). Enclosed spaces of expert power formed separately from political control, market logistics and the pressures exerted by their subjects (Rose and Miller). This, however, was not a question of imposing expertise on women and forcing them to adhere to expert proclamations: “the experts could not have triumphed had not so many women welcomed them, sought them out, and … organised to promote their influence” (Ehrenreich and English 28). Women’s continuing enthusiasm for self-help books – and it is mainly women who buy them (Wood) – attests to the fact that they are still welcoming expertise into their lives. This paper argues that a major factor in the popularity of self-help is the reversal of the conventional ‘priestly’ relationship and ethic of confession, in a process of conversion that relies on the enthusiasm and active participation of the reader.Miller and Rose outline four ways in which human behaviour can be transformed: regulation (enmeshing people in a code of standards); captivation (seducing people with charm or charisma); education (training, convincing or persuading people); and conversion (transforming personhood, and ways of experiencing the world so that people understand themselves in fundamentally new ways). Of these four ways of acting upon others, it is conversion that is the most potent, because it changes people at the level of their own subjectivity – “personhood itself is remade” (Miller and Rose 35). While theories of conversion cannot be adequately discussed here, one aspect held in common by theories of religious conversion as well as those from psychological studies of ‘brainwashing’ is enthusiasm. Rambo’s analysis of the stages of religious conversion, for example, includes ‘questing’ in an active and engaged way, and a probable encounter with a passionately enthusiastic believer. Melia and Ryder, in their study of ‘brainwashing,’ state that two of the end stages of conversion are euphoria and proselytising – a point to which I will return in the conclusion. In order for a conversion to occur, then, the reader must be not only intellectually convinced of the truth, but must feel it is an important or vital truth, a truth she needs – in short, the reader must be enthused. The popularity of self-help books coincides with the rise of psy expertise more generally (Rose, "Identity"; Inventing), but self-help putatively offers escape from the experts, whilst simultaneously immersing its readers in expertise. Readers of self-help view themselves as reading sceptically (Simonds), interpretively (Rosenblatt) and resistingly (Fetterly, Rowe). They choose to read books as an educational activity (Dolby), rather than attending counselling or psychotherapy sessions in which they might be subject to manipulation, domination and control by a therapist (Simonds). I have discussed the nature of the advice in relationship manuals elsewhere (Hazleden, "Relationship"; "Pathology"), but the intention of this paper is to investigate the ways in which the authors attempt to enthuse and convert the reader.Best-Selling ExpertiseIn common with other best-selling genres, popular relationship manuals begin trying to enthuse the reader on the covers, which are intended to attract the reader, to establish the professional – or ‘priestly’ – credentials of the author and to assert the merit of the book, presenting the authors as experienced professionally-qualified experts, and advertising their bestseller status. These factors form part of the marketing ‘buzz’ or collective enthusiasm about a particular author or book.As part of the process of establishing themselves in the priestly role, the authors emphasise their professional qualifications and experience. Most authors use the title ‘Dr’ on the cover (Hendrix, McGraw, Forward, Gray, Cowan and Kinder, Schlessinger) or ‘PhD’ after their names (Vedral, DeAngelis, Spezzano). Further claims on the covers include assertions of the prominence of the authors in their field. Typical are DeAngelis’s claim to being “America’s foremost relationships expert,” and Hendrix’s claim to being “the world’s leading marital therapist.” Clinical and professional experience is mentioned, such as Spezzano’s “twenty-three years of counseling experience” (1) and Forward’s experience as “a consultant in many southern California Medical and psychiatric facilities” (iii). The cover of Spezzano’s book claims that he is a “therapist, seminar leader, author, lecturer and visionary leader.” McGraw emphasises his formal qualifications throughout his book, saying, “I had more degrees than a thermometer” (McGraw 6), and he refers to himself throughout as “Dr. Phil,” much like “Dr Laura” (Schlessinger). Facts and SecretsThe authors claim their ideas are based on clinical practice, research, and evidence. One author claims, “In this book, there is a wealth of tried and accurate information, which has worked for thousands of people in my therapeutic practice and seminars over the last two decades” (Spezzano 1). Another claims that he “worked with hundreds of couples in private practice and thousands more in workshops and seminars” and subsequently based his ideas on “research and clinical observations” (Hendrix xviii). Dowling refers to “four years of research … interviewing professionals who work with and study women.” She went to all this trouble because, she assures us, “I wanted facts” (Dowling, dust-jacket, 30).All this is in order to assure the reader of the relevance and build her enthusiasm about the importance of the book. McGraw (226) says he “reviewed case histories of literally thousands and thousands of couples” in order “to choose the right topics” for his book. Spezzano (7) claims that his psychological exercises come from clinical experience, but “more importantly, I have tested them all personally. Now I offer them to you.” This notion of being in possession of important new knowledge of which the reader is unaware is common, and expressed most succinctly by McGraw (15): “I have learned what you know and, more important, what you don't know.” This knowledge may be referred to as ‘secret’ (e.g. DeAngelis), or ‘hidden’ (e.g. Dowling) or as a recent discovery. Readers seem to accept this – they often assume that self-help books spring ‘naturally’ from clinical investigation as new information is ‘discovered’ about the human psyche (Lichterman 432).The Altruistic AuthorOn the assumption that readers will be familiar with other self-help books, some authors find it necessary to explain why they felt motivated to write one themselves. Usually these take the form of a kind of altruistic enthusiasm to share their great discoveries. Cowan and Kinder (xiv) claim that “one of the wonderful, intrinsic rewards of working with someone in individual psychotherapy is the rich and intense relationship that is established, [but] one of the frustrations of individual work is that in a whole lifetime it is impossible to touch more than a few people.” Morgan (26) assures us that “the results of applying certain principles to my marriage were so revolutionary that I had to pass them on in the four lesson Total Woman course, and now in this book.”The authors justify their own addition to an overcrowded genre by delineating what is distinctive about their own book, or what other “books, articles and surveys missed” (Dowling 30) or misinterpreted. Beattie (98-102) devotes several pages to a discussion of Dowling to assert that Dowling’s ‘Cinderella Complex’ is more accurately known as ‘codependency.’ The authors of another book admit that their ideas are not new, but claim to make a unique contribution because they are “writing from a much-needed male point of view” (Cowan and Kinder, back cover). Similarly, Gray suggests “many books are one-sided and unfortunately reinforce mistrust and resentment toward the opposite sex.” This meant that “a definitive guide was needed for understanding how healthy men and women are different,” and he promises “This book provides that vision” (Gray 4,7).Some authors are vehement in attacking other experts’ books as “gripe sessions,” “gobbledegook” (Schlessinger 51, 87), or “ridiculous” (Vedral 282). McGraw (9) writes “it is amazing to me how this country is overflowing with marital therapists, psychiatrists and psychologists, counselors, healers, advice columnists, and self-help authors – and their approach to relationships is usually so embarrassing that I want to turn my head in shame.” His own book, by contrast, will be quite different from anything the reader has heard before, because “it differs from what relationship ‘experts’ tell you” (McGraw 45).Confessions of an Author Because the authors are writing about intimate relationships, they are also keen to establish their credentials on a more personal level. “Loving, losing, learning the lessons, and reloving have been my path” (Carter-Scott 247-248), says one, and another asserts that, “It’s taken me a long time to understand men. It’s been a difficult and often painful journey and I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way in my own relationships” (DeAngelis xvi). The authors are even keen to admit the mistakes they made in their previous relationships. Gray says, “In my previous relationships, I had become indifferent and unloving at difficult times … As a result, my first marriage had been very painful and difficult” (Gray 2). Others describe the feelings of disappointment with their marriages: We gradually changed. I was amazed to realize that Charlie had stopped talking. He had become distant and preoccupied. … Each evening, when Charlie walked in the front door after work, a cloud of gloom and tension floated in with him. That cloud was almost tangible. … this tension cloud permeated our home atmosphere … there was a barrier between us. (Morgan 18)Doyle (14) tells a similar tale: “While my intentions were good, I was clearly on the road to marital hell. … I was becoming estranged from the man who had once made me so happy. Our marriage was in serious trouble and it had only been four years since we’d taken our vows.” The authors relate the bewilderment they felt in these failing relationships: “My confusion about the psychology of love relationships was compounded when I began to have problems with my own marriage. … we gave our marriage eight years of intensive examination, working with numerous therapists. Nothing seemed to help” (Hendrix xvii).Even the process of writing the relationship manual itself can be uncomfortable: This was the hardest and most painful chapter for me to write, because it hit so close to home … I sat down at my computer, typed out the title of this chapter, and burst into tears. … It was the pain of my own broken heart. (DeAngelis 74)The Worthlessness of ExpertiseThus, the authors present their confessional tales in which they have learned important lessons through their own suffering, through the experience of life itself, and not through the intervention of any form of external or professional expertise. Furthermore, they highlight the failure of their professional training. Susan Forward (4) draws a comparison between her professional life as a relationship counsellor and the “Susan who went home at night and twisted herself into a pretzel trying to keep her husband from yelling at her.” McGraw tells of a time when he was counselling a couple, and: Suddenly all I could hear myself saying was blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah. As I sat there, I asked myself, ‘Has anybody noticed over the last fifty years that this crap doesn’t work? Has it occurred to anyone that the vast majority of these couples aren’t getting any better? (McGraw 6)The authors go to some lengths to demonstrate that their new-found knowledge is unlike anything else, and are even prepared to mention the apparent contradiction between the role the author already held as a relationship expert (before they made their important discoveries) and the failure of their own relationships (the implication being that these relationships failed because the authors themselves were not yet beneficiaries of the wisdom contained in their latest books). Gray, for example, talking about his “painful and difficult” first marriage (2), and DeAngelis, bemoaning her “mistakes” (xvi), allude to the failure of their marriage to each other, at a time when both were already well-known relationship experts. Hendrix (xvii) says: As I sat in the divorce court waiting to see the judge, I felt like a double failure, a failure as a husband and as a therapist. That very afternoon I was scheduled to teach a course on marriage and the family, and the next day, as usual, I had several couples to counsel. Despite my professional training, I felt just as confused and defeated as the other men and women who were sitting beside me.Thus the authors present the knowledge they have gained from their experiences as being unavailable through professional marital therapy, relationship counselling, and other self-help books. Rather, the advice they impart is presented as the hard-won outcome of a long and painful process of personal discovery.Peace and PassionOnce the uniqueness of the advice is established, the authors attempt to enthuse the reader by describing the effects of following it. Norwood (Women 4) says her programme led to “the most rewarding years of my life,” and Forward (10) says she “discovered enormous amounts of creativity and energy in myself that hadn't been available to me before.” Gray (268) asserts that, following his discoveries “I personally experienced this inner transformation,” and DeAngelis (126) claims “I am compassionate where I used to be critical; I am patient where I used to be judgmental.” Doyle (23) says, “practicing the principles described in this book has transformed my marriage into a passionate, romantic union.” Similarly, in discussing the effects of her ideas on her marriage, Morgan (26) speaks of “This brand new love between us” that “has given us a brand new life together.” Having established the success of their ideas and techniques on their own lives, the authors go on to relate stories about their successful application to the lives and relationships of their clients. One author writes that “When I began implementing my ideas … The divorce rate in my practice sharply declined, and the couples … reported a much deeper satisfaction in their marriages” (Hendrix xix). Another claims “Repeatedly I have heard people say that they have benefited more from this new understanding of relationships than from years of therapy” (Gray 7). Morgan, describing the effects of her ‘Total Woman’ classes, says: Attending one of the first classes in Miami were wives of the Miami Dolphin football players … it is interesting to note that their team won every game that next season and became the world champions! … Gals, I wouldn’t dream of taking credit for the Superbowl … (Morgan 188)In case we are still unconvinced, the authors include praise and thanks from their inspired clients: “My life has become exciting and wonderful. Thank you,” writes one (Vedral 308). Gray (6) talks of the “thousands of inspirational comments that people have shared” about his advice. Vedral (307) says “I have received thousands of letters from women … thanking me for shining a beam of light on their situations.” If these clients have transformed their lives, the authors claim, so can the reader. They promise that the future will be “exceptional” (Friedman 242) and “wonderful” (Norwood, Women 257). It will consist of “self fulfilment, love, and joy” (Norwood, Women 26), “peace and joy” (Hendrix xx), “freedom and a lifetime of healing, hope and happiness” (Beattie), “peace, relief, joy, and passion that you will never find any other way” (Doyle 62) – in short, “happiness for the rest of your life” (Spezzano 77).SummaryIn order to effect the conversion of their readers, the authors seek to create enthusiasm about their books. First, they appeal to the modern tradition of credentialism, making claims about their formal professional qualifications and experience. This establishes them as credible ‘priests.’ Then they make calculable, factual, evidence-based claims concerning the number of books they have sold, and appeal to the epistemological authority of the methodology involved in establishing the findings of their books. They provide evidence of the efficacy of their own unique methods by relating the success of their ideas when applied to their own lives and relationships, and those of their clients and their readers. The authors also go to some lengths to establish that they have personal experience of relationship problems, especially those the reader is currently presumed to be experiencing. This establishes the ‘empathy’ essential to Rogerian therapy (Rogers), and an informal claim to lay knowledge or insight. In telling their own personal stories, the authors establish an ethic of confession, in which the truth of oneself is sought, unearthed and revealed in “the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage” (Foucault, History 59). At the same time, by claiming that their qualifications were not helpful in solving these personal difficulties, the authors assert that much of their professional training was useless or even harmful, suggesting that they are aware of a general scepticism towards experts (cf. Beck, Giddens), and share these doubts. By implying that it is other experts who are perhaps not to be trusted, they distinguish their own work from anything offered by other relationship experts, thereby circumventing “the paradox of self-help books’ existence” (Cheery) and proliferation. Thus, the authors present their motives as altruistic, whilst perhaps questioning the motives of others. Their own book, they promise, will be the one (finally) that brings a future of peace, passion and joy. Conversion, Enthusiasm and the Reversal of the Priestly RelationshipAlthough power relations between authors and readers are complex, self-help is evidence of power in one of its most efficacious forms – that of conversion. This is a relationship into which one enters voluntarily and enthusiastically, in the name of oneself, for the benefit of oneself. Such power enthuses, persuades, incites, invites, provokes and entices, and it is therefore a strongly subjectifying power, and most especially so because the relationship of the reader to the author is one of choice. Because the reader can choose between authors, and skip or skim sections, she can concentrate on the parts of the therapeutic diagnosis that she believes specifically apply to her. For example, Grodin (414) found it was common for a reader to attach excerpts from a book to a bathroom mirror or kitchen cabinet, and to re-read and underline sections of a book that seemed most relevant. In this way, through her enthusiastic participation, the reader becomes her own expert, her own therapist, in control of certain aspects of the encounter, which nonetheless must always take place on psy terms.In many conversion studies, the final stage involves the assimilation and embodiment of new practices (e.g. Paloutzian et al. 1072), whereby the convert employs or utilises her new truths. I argue that in self-help books, this stage occurs in the reversal of the ‘priestly’ relationship. The ‘priestly’ relationship between client and therapist, is one in which in which the therapist remains mysterious while the client confesses and is known (Rose, "Power"). In the self-help book, however, this relationship is reversed. The authors confess their own ‘sins’ and imperfections, by relating their own disastrous experiences in relationships and wrong-thinking. They are, of course, themselves enthusiastic converts, who are enmeshed within the power that they exercise (cf. Foucault History; Discipline), as these confessions illustrate. The reader is encouraged to go through this process of confession as well, but she is expected to do so privately, and to play the role of priest and confessor to herself. Thus, in a reversal of the priestly relationship, the person who ‘is knowledge’ within the book itself is the author. It is only if the reader takes up the invitation to perform for herself the priestly role that she will become an object of knowledge – and even then, only to herself, albeit through a psy diagnostic gaze provided for her. Of course, this instance of confession to the self still places the individual “in a network of relations of power with those who claim to be able to extract the truth of these confessions through their possession of the keys to interpretation” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 174), but the keys to interpretation are provided to the reader by the author, and left with her for her own safekeeping and future use. As mentioned in the introduction, conversion involves questing in an active and engaged way, and may involve joy and proselytising. Because the relationship must be one of active participation, the enthusiasm of the reader to apply these truths to her own self-understanding is critical. Indeed, the convert is, by her very nature, an enthusiast.ConclusionSelf-help books seek to bring about a transformation of subjectivity from powerlessness to active goal-setting, personal improvement and achievement. This is achieved by a process of conversion that produces particular choices and types of identity, new subjectivities remade through the production of new ethical truths. Self-help discourses endow individuals with new enthusiasms, aptitudes and qualities – and these can then be passed on to others. Indeed, the self-help reader is invited, by means of the author’s confessions, to become, in a limited way, the author’s own therapist – ie, she is invited to perform an examination of the author’s (past) mistakes, to diagnose the author’s (past) condition and to prescribe an appropriate (retrospective) cure for this condition. Through the process of diagnosing the author and the author’s clients, using the psy gaze provided by the author, the reader is rendered an expert in therapeutic wisdom and is converted to a new belief system in which she will become an enthusiastic participant in her own subjectification. ReferencesBeattie, M. Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself. Minnesota: Hazelden, 1992.Beck, U. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans. M. Ritter. London: Sage, 1992.Carter-Scott, C. If Love Is a Game, These Are the Rules. London: Vermilion, 2000.Cheery, S. "The Ontology of a Self-Help Book: A Paradox of Its Own Existence." Social Semiotics 18.3 (2008): 337-348.Cowan, C., and M. Kinder. Smart Women, Foolish Choices: Finding the Right Men and Avoiding the Wrong Ones. New York: Signet, 1986.DeAngelis, B. Secrets about Men Every Woman Should Know. London: Thirsons, 1990.Dolby, S. Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2005.Dowling, C. The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence. New York: Summit Books, 1981.Doyle, L. The Surrendered Wife: A Step by Step Guide to Finding Intimacy, Passion and Peace with a Man. London: Simon and Schuster, 2000.Dreyfus, H.L., and P. Rabinow. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.Ehrenreich, B., and D. English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. London: Pluto, 1988.Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.———. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. R. Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.Giddens, A. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Oxford: Polity, 1991.Gray, J. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships. London: HarperCollins, 1993.Grodin, D. “The Interpreting Audience: The Therapeutics of Self-Help Book Reading.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8.4 (1991): 404-420.Hamson, S. “Are Men Really from Mars and Women From Venus?” In R. Francoeur and W. Taverner, eds. Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Human Sexuality. 7th ed. Conneticut: McGraw-Hill, 2000.Hazleden, R. “The Pathology of Love in Contemporary Relationship Manuals.” Sociological Review 52.2 (2004). ———. “The Relationship of the Self with Itself in Contemporary Relationship Manuals.” Journal of Sociology 39.4 (Dec. 2003). Hendrix, H. Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. New York: Pocket Books, 1997.Lichterman, Paul. "Self-Help Reading as a Thin Culture." Media, Culture and Society 14.3 (1992): 421-447. Melia, T., and N. Ryder. Lucifer State: A Novel Approach to Rhetoric. Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1983.Miller, P., and N. Rose. “On Therapeutic Authority: Psychoanalytical Expertise under Advanced Liberalism.” History of the Human Sciences 7.3 (1994): 29-64. McGraw, P. Relationship Rescue: Don’t Make Excuses! Start Repairing Your Relationship Today. London: Vermilion, 2001.Morgan, M. The Total Woman. London: Harper Collins, 1973.Norwood, R. Letters From Women Who Love Too Much. New York: Pocket Books, 1988. ———. Women Who Love Too Much: When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He’ll Change. New York: Pocket Books, 1986.Paloutzian, R., J. Richardson, and L. Rambo. “Religious Conversion and Personality Change.” Journal of Personality 67.6 (1999).Ricoeur, P. Oneself as Another. Trans. K. Blamey. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990.Rambo, L. Understanding Conversion. Yale UP, 1993.Rogers, C. On Becoming a Person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.Rosenblatt, L. Literature as Exploration. 5th ed. New York: MLA, 1995.Rose, N. “Identity, Genealogy, History.” In S. Hall and Paul du Gay, eds. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, 1995.———. Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.———. “Power and Subjectivity: Critical History and Psychology.” Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts. 2000. < http://www.academyanalyticarts.org >.———., and P. Miller. “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government.” British Journal of Sociology 43.2 (1992): 173-205.Rowe, Y. “Beyond the Vulnerable Self: The 'Resisting Reader' of Marriage Manuals for Heterosexual Women.” In Kate Bennett, Maryam Jamarani, and Laura Tolton. Rhizomes: Re-Visioning Boundaries conference papers, University of Queensland, 24-25 Feb. 2006.Schlessinger, L. The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. New York, HarperCollins, 2004.Simonds, W. Women and Self-Help Culture: Reading between the Lines. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1992.Spezzano, C. 30 Days to Find Your Perfect Mate: The Step by Step Guide to Happiness and Fulfilment. London: Random House, 1994.Starker, S. Oracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation with Self-Help Books. Oxford: Transaction, 1989.Vedral, J. Get Rid of Him! New York: Warner Books, 1994.Wood, L. “The Gallup Survey: Self-Help Buying Trends.” Publishers Weekly 234 (1988): 33.

Abstract:

"If people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society." -- Orville Schell Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley "Most people aren't very discerning. Maybe they need good financial information, but I don't think people know what good information is when you get into culture, society, and politics." -- Steven Brill,Chairman and Editor-in-chief, Brill's Content Once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisem*nts were easy to recognise. They had simple personalities with goals not much more complicated than selling you a bar of soap or a box of cereal. And they possessed the reassuring familiarity of old friends or relatives you've known all your life. They were Pilgrims who smiled at you from Quaker Oats boxes or little tablets named "Speedy" who joyfully danced into a glass of water with the sole purpose of giving up their short life to help lessen your indigestion from overindulgence. Yes, sometimes they could be a little obnoxious but, hey, it was a predictable annoyance. And once, not very long ago, advertisem*nts also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture, their boundaries were the ad space of magazines or the commercial time of television programs. When the ads got too annoying, you could toss the magazine aside or change the TV channel. The ease and quickness of their dispatch had the abruptness of slamming your front door in the face of an old door-to-door salesman. This all began to change around the 1950s when advertisem*nts acquired a more complex and subtle personality and began straying outside of their familiar media neighborhoods. The social observer Vance Packard wrote a best-selling book in the late 50s called The Hidden Persuaders which identified this change in advertising's personality as coming from hanging around Professor Freud's psychoanalysis and learning his hidden, subliminal methods of trickery. Ice cubes in a glass for a liquor ad were no longer seen as simple props to help sell a brand of whiskey but were now subliminal suggestions of female anatomy. The curved fronts of automobiles were more than aesthetic streamlined design features but rather suggestive of a particular feature of the male anatomy. Forgotten by the new subliminal types of ads was the simple salesmanship preached by founders of the ad industry like David Ogilvy and John Caples. The word "sales" became a dirty word and was replaced with modern psychological buzzwords like subliminal persuasion. The Evolution of Subliminal Techniques The book Hidden Persuaders made quite a stir at the time, bringing about congressional hearings and even the introduction of legislation. Prominent motivation researchers Louis Cheskin and Ernest Dichter utilised the new ad methods and were publicly admonished as traitors to their profession. The life of the new subliminal advertising seemed short indeed. Even Vance Packard predicted its coming demise. "Eventually, say by A.D. 2000," he wrote in the preface to the paperback edition of his book, "all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old- fashioned". Yet, 40 years later, any half-awake observer of popular culture knows that things haven't exactly worked out the way Packard predicted. In fact what seems old-fashioned today is the belief that ads are those simpletons they once were before the 50s and that products are sold for features and benefits rather than for images. Even Vance Packard expresses an amazement at the evolution of advertising since the 50s, noting that today ads for watches have nothing to do with watches or that ads for shoes scarcely mention shoes. Packard remarks "it used to be the brand identified the product. In today's advertising the brand is the product". Modern advertising, he notes, has an almost total obsession with images and feelings and an almost total lack of any concrete claims about the product and why anyone should buy it. Packard admits puzzlement. "Commercials seem totally unrelated to selling any product at all". Jeff DeJoseph of the J. Walter Thompson firm underlines Packard's comments. "We are just trying to convey a sensory impression of the brand, and we're out of there". Subliminal advertising techniques have today infiltrated the heart of corporate America. As Ruth Shalit notes in her article "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders" from the 27 September 1999 issue of Salon magazine, "far from being consigned to the maverick fringe, the new psycho- persuaders of corporate America have colonized the marketing departments of mainstream conglomerates. At companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble and Daimler-Chrysler, the most sought-after consultants hail not from McKinsey & Company, but from brand consultancies with names like Archetype Discoveries, PsychoLogics and Semiotic Solutions". Shalit notes a growing number of CEOs have become convinced they cannot sell their brands until they first explore the "Jungian substrata of four- wheel drive; unlock the discourse codes of female power sweating; or deconstruct the sexual politics of bologna". The result, as Shalit observes, is a "charmingly retro school of brand psychoanalysis, which holds that all advertising is simply a variation on the themes of the Oedipus complex, the death instinct, or toilet training, and that the goal of effective communications should be to compensate the consumer for the fact that he was insufficiently nursed as an infant, has taken corporate America by storm". The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising Yet pervasive as the subliminal techniques of advertising have become, the emerging power of modern advertising ultimately centres around "where" it is rather than "what" it is or "how" it works. The power of modern advertising is within this growing ubiquity or "everywhereness" of advertising rather than the technology and methodology of advertising. The ultimate power of advertising will be arrived at when ads cannot be distinguished from their background environment. When this happens, the environment will become a great continuous ad. In the process, ads have wandered away from their well-known hangouts in magazines and TV shows. Like alien-infected pod-people of early science fiction movies, they have stumbled out of these familiar media playgrounds and suddenly sprouted up everywhere. The ubiquity of advertising is not being driven by corporations searching for new ways to sell products but by media searching for new ways to make money. Traditionally, media made money by selling subscriptions and advertising space. But these two key income sources are quickly drying up in the new world of online media. Journalist Mike France wisely takes notice of this change in an important article "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap" from the 11 October 1999 issue of Business Week. France notes that subscription fees have not worked because "Web surfers are used to getting content for free, and they have been reluctant to shell out any money for it". Advertising sales and their Internet incarnation in banner ads have also been a failure so far, France observes, because companies don't like paying a flat fee for online advertising since it's difficult to track the effectiveness of their marketing dollars. Instead, they only want to pay for actual sales leads, which can be easily monitored on the Web as readers' click from site to site. Faced with the above situation, media companies have gone on the prowl for new ways to make money. This search underpins the emerging ubiquity of advertising: the fact that it is increasingly appearing everywhere. In the process, traditional boundaries between advertising and other societal institutions are being overrun by these media forces on the prowl for new "territory" to exploit. That time when advertisem*nts knew their place in the landscape of popular culture and confined themselves to just magazines or TV commercials is a fading memory. And today, as each of us is bombarded by thousands of ads each day, it is impossible to "slam" the door and keep them out of our house as we could once slam the door in the face of the old door-to-door salesmen. Of course you can find them on the matchbook cover of your favorite bar, on t-shirts sold at some roadside tourist trap or on those logo baseball caps you always pick up at trade shows. But now they have got a little more personal and stare at you over urinals in the men's room. They have even wedged themselves onto the narrow little bars at the check-out counter conveyer belts of supermarkets or onto the handles of gasoline pumps at filling stations. The list goes on and on. (No, this article is not an ad.) Advertising and Entertainment In advertising's march to ubiquity, two major boundaries have been crossed. They are crucial boundaries which greatly enhance advertising's search for the invisibility of ubiquity. Yet they are also largely invisible themselves. These are the boundaries separating advertising from entertainment and those separating advertising from journalism. The incursion of advertising into entertainment is a result of the increasing merger of business and entertainment, a phenomenon pointed out in best-selling business books like Michael Wolf's Entertainment Economy and Joseph Pine's The Experience Economy. Wolf, a consultant for Viacom, Newscorp, and other media heavy-weights, argues business is becoming synonymous with entertainment: "we have come to expect that we will be entertained all the time. Products and brands that deliver on this expectation are succeeding. Products that do not will disappear". And, in The Experience Economy, Pine notes the increasing need for businesses to provide entertaining experiences. "Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience". Yet entertainment, whether provided by businesses or the traditional entertainment industry, is increasingly weighted down with the "baggage" of advertising. In a large sense, entertainment is a form of new media that carries ads. Increasingly, this seems to be the overriding purpose of entertainment. Once, not long ago, when ads were simple and confined, entertainment was also simple and its purpose was to entertain rather than to sell. There was money enough in packed movie houses or full theme parks to make a healthy profit. But all this has changed with advertising's ubiquity. Like media corporations searching for new revenue streams, the entertainment industry has responded to flat growth by finding new ways to squeeze money out of entertainment content. Films now feature products in paid for scenes and most forms of entertainment use product tie-ins to other areas such as retail stores or fast-food restaurants. Also popular with the entertainment industry is what might be termed the "versioning" of entertainment products into various sub-species where entertainment content is transformed into other media so it can be sold more than once. A film may not make a profit on just the theatrical release but there is a good chance it doesn't matter because it stands to make a profit in video rentals. Advertising and Journalism The merger of advertising and entertainment goes a long way towards a world of ubiquitous advertising. Yet the merger of advertising and journalism is the real "promised land" in the evolution of ubiquitous advertising. This fundamental shift in the way news media make money provides the final frontier to be conquered by advertising, a final "promised land" for advertising. As Mike France observes in Business Week, this merger "could potentially change the way they cover the news. The more the press gets in the business of hawking products, the harder it will be to criticize those goods -- and the companies making them". Of course, there is that persistent myth, perpetuated by news organisations that they attempt to preserve editorial independence by keeping the institutions they cover and their advertisers at arm's length. But this is proving more and more difficult, particularly for online media. Observers like France have pointed out a number of reasons for this. One is the growth of ads in news media that look more like editorial content than ads. While long-standing ethical rules bar magazines and newspapers from printing advertisem*nts that look like editorial copy, these rules become fuzzy for many online publications. Another reason making it difficult to separate advertising from journalism is the growing merger and consolidation of media corporations. Fewer and fewer corporations control more and more entertainment, news and ultimately advertising. It becomes difficult for a journalist to criticise a product when it has a connection to the large media conglomerate the journalist works for. Traditionally, it has been rare for media corporations to make direct investments in the corporations they cover. However, as Mike France notes, CNBC crossed this line when it acquired a stake in Archipelago in September 1999. CNBC, which runs a business-news Website, acquired a 12.4% stake in Archipelago Holdings, an electronic communications network for trading stock. Long-term plans are likely to include allowing visitors to cnbc.com to link directly to Archipelago. That means CNBC could be in the awkward position of both providing coverage of online trading and profiting from it. France adds that other business news outlets, such as Dow Jones (DJ), Reuters, and Bloomberg, already have indirect ties to their own electronic stock-trading networks. And, in news organisations, a popular method of cutting down on the expense of paying journalists for content is the growing practice of accepting advertiser written content or "sponsored edit" stories. The confusion to readers violates the spirit of a long-standing American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) rule prohibiting advertisem*nts with "an editorial appearance". But as France notes, this practice is thriving online. This change happens in ever so subtle ways. "A bit of puffery inserted here," notes France, "a negative adjective deleted there -- it doesn't take a lot to turn a review or story about, say, smart phones, into something approaching highbrow ad copy". He offers an example in forbes.com whose Microsoft ads could easily be mistaken for staff-written articles. Media critic James Fallows points out that consumers have been swift to discipline sites that are caught acting unethically and using "sponsored edits". He notes that when it was revealed that amazon.com was taking fees of up to $10,000 for books that it labelled as "destined for greatness", its customers were outraged, and the company quickly agreed to disclose future promotional payments. Unfortunately, though, the lesson episodes like these teach online companies like Amazon centres around more effective ways to be less "revealing" rather than abstention from the practice of "sponsored edits". France reminds us that journalism is built on trust. In the age of the Internet, though, trust is quickly becoming an elusive quality. He writes "as magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television networks rush to colonize the Internet, the Great Wall between content and commerce is beginning to erode". In the end, he ponders whether there is an irrevocable conflict between e-commerce and ethical journalism. When you can't trust journalists to be ethical, just who can you trust? Transaction Fees & Affiliate Programs - Advertising's Final Promised Land? The engine driving the growing ubiquity of advertising, though, is not the increasing merger of advertising with other industries (like entertainment and journalism) but rather a new business model of online commerce and Internet technology called transaction fees. This emerging and potentially dominant Internet e-commerce technology provides for the ability to track transactions electronically on Websites and to garner transaction fees. Through these fees, many media Websites take a percentage of payment through online product sales. In effect, a media site becomes one pervasive direct mail ad for every product mentioned on its site. This of course puts them in a much closer economic partnership with advertisers than is the case with traditional fixed-rate ads where there is little connection between product sales and the advertising media carrying them. Transaction fees are the new online version of direct marketing, the emerging Internet technology for their application is one of the great economic driving forces of the entire Internet commerce apparatus. The promise of transaction fees is that a number of people, besides product manufacturers and advertisers, might gain a percentage of profit from selling products via hypertext links. Once upon a time, the manufacturer of a product was the one that gained (or lost) from marketing it. Now, however, there is the possibility that journalists, news organisations and entertainment companies might also gain from marketing via transaction fees. The spread of transaction fees outside media into the general population provides an even greater boost to the growing ubiquity of advertising. This is done through the handmaiden of media transaction fees: "affiliate programs" for the general populace. Through the growing magic of Internet technology, it becomes possible for all of us to earn money through affiliate program links to products and transaction fee percentages in the sale of these products. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that advertisers are most likely to increasingly pressure media Websites to support themselves with e-commerce transaction fees. Charles Li, Senior Analyst for New Media at Forrester Research, estimates that by the year 2003, media sites will receive $25 billion in revenue from transaction fees, compared with $17 billion from ads and $5 billion from subscriptions. The possibility is great that all media will become like great direct response advertisem*nts taking a transaction fee percentage for anything sold on their sites. And there is the more dangerous possibility that all of us will become the new "promised land" for a ubiquitous advertising. All of us will have some cut in selling somebody else's product. When this happens and there is a direct economic incentive for all of us to say nice things about products, what is the need and importance of subliminal techniques and methods creating advertising based on images which try to trick us into buying things? A Society Without Critics? It is for these reasons that criticism and straight news are becoming an increasingly endangered species. Everyone has to eat but what happens when one can no longer make meal money by criticising current culture? Cultural critics become a dying breed. There is no money in criticism because it is based around disconnection rather than connection to products. No links to products or Websites are involved here. Critics are becoming lonely icebergs floating in the middle of a cyber-sea of transaction fees, watching everyone else (except themselves) make money on transaction fees. The subliminal focus of the current consultancies is little more than a repackaging of an old theme discovered long ago by Vance Packard. But the growing "everywhereness" and "everyoneness" of modern advertising through transaction fees may mark the beginning of a revolutionary new era. Everyone might become their own "brand", a point well made in Tim Peters's article "A Brand Called You". Media critic James Fallows is somewhat optimistic that there still may remain "niche" markets for truthful information and honest cultural criticism. He suggests that surely people looking for mortgages, voting for a politician, or trying to decide what movie to see will continue to need unbiased information to help them make decisions. But one must ask what happens when a number of people have some "affiliate" relationship with suggesting particular movies, politicians or mortgages? Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, has summarised this growing ubiquity of advertising in a rather simple and elegant manner saying "at a certain point, people won't be able to differentiate between what's trustworthy and what isn't". Over the long run, this loss of credibility could have a corrosive effect on society in general -- especially given the media's importance as a political, cultural, and economic watchdog. Schell warns, "if people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society". Yet, will we be able to realise this simple fact when we all become types of Marxists and Leninists? Still, there is the great challenge to America to learn how to utilise transaction fees in a democratic manner. In effect, a combination of the technological promise of the new economy with that old promise, and perhaps even myth, of a democratic America. America stands on the verge of a great threshold and challenge in the growing ubiquity of advertising. In a way, as with most great opportunities or threats, this challenge centres on a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, there is the promise of the emerging Internet business model and its centre around the technology of transaction fees. At the same time, there is the threat posed by transaction fees to America's democratic society in the early years of the new millennium. Yes, once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisem*nts were easy to recognise and also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture. Their greatest, yet silent, evolution (especially in the age of the Internet) has really been in their spread into all areas of culture rather than in methods of trickery and deceit. Now, it is more difficult to slam that front door in the face of that old door-to-door salesman. Or toss that magazine and its ad aside, or switch off commercials on television. We have become that door-to-door salesman, that magazine ad, that television commercial. The current cultural landscape takes on some of the characteristics of the theme of that old science fiction movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A current advertising campaign from RJ Reynolds has a humorous take on the current zeitgeist fad of alien abduction with copy reading "if aliens are smart enough to travel through space then why do they keep abducting the dumbest people on earth?" One might add that when Americans allow advertising to travel through all our space, perhaps we all become the dumbest people on earth, abducted by a new alien culture so far away from a simplistic nostalgia of yesterday. (Please press below for your links to a world of fantastic products which can make a new you.) References Brill, Steven. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. France, Mike. "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. <http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_41/b3650163.htm>. Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. Out of Print, 1957. Pine, Joseph, and James Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Harvard Business School P, 1999. Shalit, Ruth. "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders." Salon Magazine 27 Sep. 1999. <http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/09/27/persuaders/index.php>. Schell, Orville. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. Wolf, Michael. Entertainment Economy. Times Books, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Fraim. "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php>. Chicago style: John Fraim, "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Fraim. (2000) Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

Newspapers and the 7:15 Showing Cinemagoing involves planning. Even in the most impromptu instances, one has to consider meeting places, line-ups and competing responsibilities. One arranges child care, postpones household chores, or rushes to finish meals. One must organise transportation and think about routes, traffic, parking or public transit. And during the course of making plans for a trip to the cinema, whether alone or in the company of others, typically one turns to locate a recent newspaper. Consulting its printed page lets us ascertain locations, a selection of film titles and their corresponding show times. In preparing to feed a cinema craving, we burrow through a newspaper to an entertainment section, finding a tableau of information and promotional appeals. Such sections compile the mini-posters of movie advertisem*nts, with their truncated credits, as well as various reviews and entertainment news. We see names of shopping malls doubling as names of theatres. We read celebrity gossip that may or may not pertain to the film selected for that occasion. We informally rank viewing priorities ranging from essential theatrical experiences to those that can wait for the videotape release. We attempt to assess our own mood and the taste of our filmgoing companions, matching up what we suppose are appropriate selections. Certainly, other media vie to supplant the newspaper's role in cinemagoing; many now access on-line sources and telephone services that offer the crucial details about start times. Nonetheless, as a campaign by the Newspaper Association of America in Variety aimed to remind film marketers, 80% of cinemagoers refer to newspaper listings for times and locations before heading out. The accuracy of that association's statistics notwithstanding, for the moment, the local daily or weekly newspaper has a secure place in the routines of cinematic life. A basic impetus for the newspaper's role is its presentation of a schedule of show times. Whatever the venue -- published, phone or on-line -- it strikes me as especially telling that schedules are part of the ordinariness of cinemagoing. To be sure, there are those who decide what film to see on site. Anecdotally, I have had several people comment recently that they no longer decide what movie to see, but where to see a (any) movie. Regardless, the schedule, coupled with the theatre's location, figures as a point of coordination for travel through community space to a site of film consumption. The choice of show time is governed by countless demands of everyday life. How often has the timing of a film -- not the film itself, the theatre at which it's playing, nor one's financial situation --determined one's attendance? How familiar is the assessment that show times are such that one cannot make it, that the film begins a bit too earlier, that it will run too late for whatever reason, and that other tasks intervene to take precedence? I want to make several observations related to the scheduling of film exhibition. Most generally, it makes manifest that cinemagoing involves an exercise in the application of cinema knowledge -- that is, minute, everyday facilities and familiarities that help orchestrate the ordinariness of cultural life. Such knowledge informs what Michel de Certeau characterises as "the procedures of everyday creativity" (xiv). Far from random, the unexceptional decisions and actions involved with cinemagoing bear an ordering and a predictability. Novelty in audience activity appears, but it is alongside fairly exact expectations about the event. The schedule of start times is essential to the routinisation of filmgoing. Displaying a Fordist logic of streamlining commodity distribution and the time management of consumption, audiences circulate through a machine that shapes their constituency, providing a set time for seating, departure, snack purchases and socialising. Even with the staggered times offered by multiplex cinemas, schedules still lay down a fixed template around which other activities have to be arrayed by the patron. As audiences move to and through the theatre, the schedule endeavours to regulate practice, making us the subjects of a temporal grid, a city context, a cinema space, as well as of the film itself. To be sure, one can arrive late and leave early, confounding the schedule's disciplining force. Most importantly, with or without such forms of evasion, it channels the actions of audiences in ways that consideration of the gaze cannot address. Taking account of the scheduling of cinema culture, and its implication of adjunct procedures of everyday life, points to dimensions of subjectivity neglected by dominant theories of spectatorship. To be the subject of a cinema schedule is to understand one assemblage of the parameters of everyday creativity. It would be foolish to see cinema audiences as cattle, herded and processed alone, in some crude Gustave LeBon fashion. It would be equally foolish not to recognise the manner in which film distribution and exhibition operates precisely by constructing images of the activity of people as demographic clusters and generalised cultural consumers. The ordinary tactics of filmgoing are supplemental to, and run alongside, a set of industrial structures and practices. While there is a correlation between a culture industry's imagined audience and the life that ensues around its offerings, we cannot neglect that, as attention to film scheduling alerts us, audiences are subjects of an institutional apparatus, brought into being for the reproduction of an industrial edifice. Streamline Audiences In this, film is no different from any culture industry. Film exhibition and distribution relies on an understanding of both the market and the product or service being sold at any given point in time. Operations respond to economic conditions, competing companies, and alternative activities. Economic rationality in this strategic process, however, only explains so much. This is especially true for an industry that must continually predict, and arguably give shape to, the "mood" and predilections of disparate and distant audiences. Producers, distributors and exhibitors assess which films will "work", to whom they will be marketed, as well as establish the very terms of success. Without a doubt, much of the film industry's attentions act to reduce this uncertainty; here, one need only think of the various forms of textual continuity (genre films, star performances, etc.) and the economies of mass advertising as ways to ensure box office receipts. Yet, at the core of the operations of film exhibition remains a number of flexible assumptions about audience activity, taste and desire. These assumptions emerge from a variety of sources to form a brand of temporary industry "commonsense", and as such are harbingers of an industrial logic. Ien Ang has usefully pursued this view in her comparative analysis of three national television structures and their operating assumptions about audiences. Broadcasters streamline and discipline audiences as part of their organisational procedures, with the consequence of shaping ideas about consumers as well as assuring the reproduction of the industrial structure itself. She writes, "institutional knowledge is driven toward making the audience visible in such a way that it helps the institutions to increase their power to get their relationship with the audience under control, and this can only be done by symbolically constructing 'television audience' as an objectified category of others that can be controlled, that is, contained in the interest of a predetermined institutional goal" (7). Ang demonstrates, in particular, how various industrially sanctioned programming strategies (programme strips, "hammocking" new shows between successful ones, and counter-programming to a competitor's strengths) and modes of audience measurement grow out of, and invariably support, those institutional goals. And, most crucially, her approach is not an effort to ascertain the empirical certainty of "actual" audiences; instead, it charts the discursive terrain in which the abstract concept of audience becomes material for the continuation of industry practices. Ang's work tenders special insight to film culture. In fact, television scholarship has taken full advantage of exploring the routine nature of that medium, the best of which deploys its findings to lay bare configurations of power in domestic contexts. One aspect has been television time and schedules. For example, David Morley points to the role of television in structuring everyday life, discussing a range of research that emphasises the temporal dimension. Alerting us to the non- necessary determination of television's temporal structure, he comments that we "need to maintain a sensitivity to these micro-levels of division and differentiation while we attend to the macro-questions of the media's own role in the social structuring of time" (265). As such, the negotiation of temporal structures implies that schedules are not monolithic impositions of order. Indeed, as Morley puts it, they "must be seen as both entering into already constructed, historically specific divisions of space and time, and also as transforming those pre-existing division" (266). Television's temporal grid has been address by others as well. Paddy Scannell characterises scheduling and continuity techniques, which link programmes, as a standardisation of use, making radio and television predictable, 'user friendly' media (9). John Caughie refers to the organization of flow as a way to talk about the national particularities of British and American television (49-50). All, while making their own contributions, appeal to a detailing of viewing context as part of any study of audience, consumption or experience; uncovering the practices of television programmers as they attempt to apprehend and create viewing conditions for their audiences is a first step in this detailing. Why has a similar conceptual framework not been applied with the same rigour to film? Certainly the history of film and television's association with different, at times divergent, disciplinary formations helps us appreciate such theoretical disparities. I would like to mention one less conspicuous explanation. It occurs to me that one frequently sees a collapse in the distinction between the everyday and the domestic; in much scholarship, the latter term appears as a powerful trope of the former. The consequence has been the absenting of a myriad of other -- if you will, non-domestic -- manifestations of everyday-ness, unfortunately encouraging a rather literal understanding of the everyday. The impression is that the abstractions of the everyday are reduced to daily occurrences. Simply put, my minor appeal is for the extension of this vein of television scholarship to out-of-home technologies and cultural forms, that is, other sites and locations of the everyday. In so doing, we pay attention to extra-textual structures of cinematic life; other regimes of knowledge, power, subjectivity and practice appear. Film audiences require a discussion about the ordinary, the calculated and the casual practices of cinematic engagement. Such a discussion would chart institutional knowledge, identifying operating strategies and recognising the creativity and multidimensionality of cinemagoing. What are the discursive parameters in which the film industry imagines cinema audiences? What are the related implications for the structures in which the practice of cinemagoing occurs? Vectors of Exhibition Time One set of those structures of audience and industry practice involves the temporal dimension of film exhibition. In what follows, I want to speculate on three vectors of the temporality of cinema spaces (meaning that I will not address issues of diegetic time). Note further that my observations emerge from a close study of industrial discourse in the U.S. and Canada. I would be interested to hear how they are manifest in other continental contexts. First, the running times of films encourage turnovers of the audience during the course of a single day at each screen. The special event of lengthy anomalies has helped mark the epic, and the historic, from standard fare. As discussed above, show times coordinate cinemagoing and regulate leisure time. Knowing the codes of screenings means participating in an extension of the industrial model of labour and service management. Running times incorporate more texts than the feature presentation alone. Besides the history of double features, there are now advertisem*nts, trailers for coming attractions, trailers for films now playing in neighbouring auditoriums, promotional shorts demonstrating new sound systems, public service announcements, reminders to turn off cell phones and pagers, and the exhibitor's own signature clips. A growing focal point for filmgoing, these introductory texts received a boost in 1990, when the Motion Picture Association of America changed its standards for the length of trailers, boosting it from 90 seconds to a full two minutes (Brookman). This intertextuality needs to be supplemented by a consideration of inter- media appeals. For example, advertisem*nts for television began appearing in theatres in the 1990s. And many lobbies of multiplex cinemas now offer a range of media forms, including video previews, magazines, arcades and virtual reality games. Implied here is that motion pictures are not the only media audiences experience in cinemas and that there is an explicit attempt to integrate a cinema's texts with those at other sites and locations. Thus, an exhibitor's schedule accommodates an intertextual strip, offering a limited parallel to Raymond Williams's concept of "flow", which he characterised by stating -- quite erroneously -- "in all communication systems before broadcasting the essential items were discrete" (86-7). Certainly, the flow between trailers, advertisem*nts and feature presentations is not identical to that of the endless, ongoing text of television. There are not the same possibilities for "interruption" that Williams emphasises with respect to broadcasting flow. Further, in theatrical exhibition, there is an end-time, a time at which there is a public acknowledgement of the completion of the projected performance, one that necessitates vacating the cinema. This end-time is a moment at which the "rental" of the space has come due; and it harkens a return to the street, to the negotiation of city space, to modes of public transit and the mobile privatisation of cars. Nonetheless, a schedule constructs a temporal boundary in which audiences encounter a range of texts and media in what might be seen as limited flow. Second, the ephemerality of audiences -- moving to the cinema, consuming its texts, then passing the seat on to someone else -- is matched by the ephemerality of the features themselves. Distributors' demand for increasing numbers of screens necessary for massive, saturation openings has meant that films now replace one another more rapidly than in the past. Films that may have run for months now expect weeks, with fewer exceptions. Wider openings and shorter runs have created a cinemagoing culture characterised by flux. The acceleration of the turnover of films has been made possible by the expansion of various secondary markets for distribution, most importantly videotape, splintering where we might find audiences and multiplying viewing contexts. Speeding up the popular in this fashion means that the influence of individual texts can only be truly gauged via cross-media scrutiny. Short theatrical runs are not axiomatically designed for cinemagoers anymore; they can also be intended to attract the attention of video renters, purchasers and retailers. Independent video distributors, especially, "view theatrical release as a marketing expense, not a profit center" (Hindes & Roman 16). In this respect, we might think of such theatrical runs as "trailers" or "loss leaders" for the video release, with selected locations for a film's release potentially providing visibility, even prestige, in certain city markets or neighbourhoods. Distributors are able to count on some promotion through popular consumer- guide reviews, usually accompanying theatrical release as opposed to the passing critical attention given to video release. Consequently, this shapes the kinds of uses an assessment of the current cinema is put to; acknowledging that new releases function as a resource for cinema knowledge highlights the way audiences choose between and determine big screen and small screen films. Taken in this manner, popular audiences see the current cinema as largely a rough catalogue to future cultural consumption. Third, motion picture release is part of the structure of memories and activities over the course of a year. New films appear in an informal and ever-fluctuating structure of seasons. The concepts of summer movies and Christmas films, or the opening weekends that are marked by a holiday, sets up a fit between cinemagoing and other activities -- family gatherings, celebrations, etc. Further, this fit is presumably resonant for both the industry and popular audiences alike, though certainly for different reasons. The concentration of new films around visible holiday periods results in a temporally defined dearth of cinemas; an inordinate focus upon three periods in the year in the U.S. and Canada -- the last weekend in May, June/July/August and December -- creates seasonal shortages of screens (Rice-Barker 20). In fact, the boom in theatre construction through the latter half of the 1990s was, in part, to deal with those short-term shortages and not some year-round inadequate seating. Configurations of releasing colour a calendar with the tactical manoeuvres of distributors and exhibitors. Releasing provides a particular shape to the "current cinema", a term I employ to refer to a temporally designated slate of cinematic texts characterised most prominently by their newness. Television arranges programmes to capitalise on flow, to carry forward audiences and to counter-programme competitors' simultaneous offerings. Similarly, distributors jostle with each other, with their films and with certain key dates, for the limited weekends available, hoping to match a competitor's film intended for one audience with one intended for another. Industry reporter Leonard Klady sketched some of the contemporary truisms of releasing based upon the experience of 1997. He remarks upon the success of moving Liar, Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997) to a March opening and the early May openings of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) and Breakdown (Jonathan Mostow, 1997), generally seen as not desirable times of the year for premieres. He cautions against opening two films the same weekend, and thus competing with yourself, using the example of Fox's Soul Food (George Tillman, Jr., 1997) and The Edge (Lee Tamahori, 1997). While distributors seek out weekends clear of films that would threaten to overshadow their own, Klady points to the exception of two hits opening on the same date of December 19, 1997 -- Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) and Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Though but a single opinion, Klady's observations are a peek into a conventional strain of strategising among distributors and exhibitors. Such planning for the timing and appearance of films is akin to the programming decisions of network executives. And I would hazard to say that digital cinema, reportedly -- though unlikely -- just on the horizon and in which texts will be beamed to cinemas via satellite rather than circulated in prints, will only augment this comparison; releasing will become that much more like programming, or at least will be conceptualised as such. To summarize, the first vector of exhibition temporality is the scheduling and running time; the second is the theatrical run; the third is the idea of seasons and the "programming" of openings. These are just some of the forces streamlining filmgoers; the temporal structuring of screenings, runs and film seasons provides a material contour to the abstraction of audience. Here, what I have delineated are components of an industrial logic about popular and public entertainment, one that offers a certain controlled knowledge about and for cinemagoing audiences. Shifting Conceptual Frameworks A note of caution is in order. I emphatically resist an interpretation that we are witnessing the becoming-film of television and the becoming-tv of film. Underneath the "inversion" argument is a weak brand of technological determinism, as though each asserts its own essential qualities. Such a pat declaration seems more in line with the mythos of convergence, and its quasi-Darwinian "natural" collapse of technologies. Instead, my point here is quite the opposite, that there is nothing essential or unique about the scheduling or flow of television; indeed, one does not have to look far to find examples of less schedule-dependent television. What I want to highlight is that application of any term of distinction -- event/flow, gaze/glance, public/private, and so on -- has more to do with our thinking, with the core discursive arrangements that have made film and television, and their audiences, available to us as knowable and different. So, using empirical evidence to slide one term over to the other is a strategy intended to supplement and destabilise the manner in which we draw conclusions, and even pose questions, of each. What this proposes is, again following the contributions of Ien Ang, that we need to see cinemagoing in its institutional formation, rather than some stable technological, textual or experiential apparatus. The activity is not only a function of a constraining industrial practice or of wildly creative patrons, but of a complex inter-determination between the two. Cinemagoing is an organisational entity harbouring, reviving and constituting knowledge and commonsense about film commodities, audiences and everyday life. An event of cinema begins well before the dimming of an auditorium's lights. The moment a newspaper is consulted, with its local representation of an internationally circulating current cinema, its listings belie a scheduling, an orderliness, to the possible projections in a given location. As audiences are formed as subjects of the current cinema, we are also agents in the continuation of a set of institutions as well. References Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge, 1991. Brookman, Faye. "Trailers: The Big Business of Drawing Crowds." Variety 13 June 1990: 48. Caughie, John. "Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics." Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steve Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Hindes, Andrew, and Monica Roman. "Video Titles Do Pitstops on Screens." Variety 16-22 Sep. 1996: 11+. Klady, Leonard. "Hitting and Missing the Market: Studios Show Savvy -- or Just Luck -- with Pic Release Strategies." Variety 19-25 Jan. 1998: 18. Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992. Newspaper Association of America. "Before They See It Here..." Advertisem*nt. Variety 22-28 Nov. 1999: 38. Rice-Barker, Leo. "Industry Banks on New Technology, Expanded Slates." Playback 6 May 1996: 19-20. Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Charles Acland. "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php>. Chicago style: Charles Acland, "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Charles Acland. (2000) Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

IntroductionIn 2016, the online cause #Mission22 went viral on social media. Established to raise awareness about high suicide rates among US military veterans, the campaign involves users posting a video of themselves doing 22 push-ups for 22 days, and on some platforms, to donate and recruit others to do the same. Based on a ‘big data’ analysis of Twitter data (over 225,883 unique tweets) during the height of the campaign, this article uses #Mission22 as a site in which to analyse how people depict, self-represent and self-tell as moral subjects using social media campaigns. In addition to spotlighting how such movements are mobilised to portray moral selves in particular ways, the analysis focuses on how a specific online cause like #Mission22 becomes popularly supported from a plethora of possible causes and how this selection and support is shaped by online networks. We speculate that part of the reason why Mission22 went ‘viral’ in the highly competitive attention economies of social media environments was related to visual depictions of affective bodily, fitness and moral practices.Web 2.0 Culture: Self and Mass DepictionWeb 2.0 culture such as social networking sites (eg., Facebook; Instagram), the advent of video sharing technologies (eg., YouTube) and more recently, micro-blogging services like Twitter have created new and transformative spaces to create, depict and display identity. Web 2.0 is primarily defined by user-generated content and interaction, whereby users are positioned as both consumer and producers, or ‘produsers’ of Web content (Bruns and Schmidt). Challenging traditional “broadcast” media models, Web 2.0 gives users a platform to produce their own content and for “the many” to communicate “with the many” (Castells). The growth of mass self communication, supported by broadband and wireless technologies, gives unprecedented power to individuals and groups to depict and represent their identities and relationships to a potential global audience.The rise of user-generated communication technologies dovetails with broader analyses of the changing contours of self and identity in late-modern times. Individuals in the early decades of the 21st century must take charge for how they depict, portray and self-tell as distinctive, unique and individual subjects (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim; Giddens; Bauman). As contemporary lives become less bound to the strictures of tradition, community and religion, the self becomes a project to be worked out and developed. These theorists suggest that via processes of individualisation, detraditionalisation and globalisation, contemporary subjects have become disconnected from the traditional coordinates of community and are thus faced with the imperative of self-construction and reinvention (Elliott and Lemert).More recently, theoretical and empirical work has attempted to interpret and evaluate how networks of mass self-depiction powered by new digital and wireless technologies are reshaping identity practices. For some theorists, like Bauman (Consuming 2) and Turkle, Web 2.0 is a worrying trend. Bauman suggests in the “confessional society” – think reality TV, talk shows, social media – people are compelled to curate and reflect upon their lives in the public realm. These public acts of self-depiction are part of a move to treating the self as a brand to be consumed, “as products capable of drawing attention, and attracting demands and customers” (Bauman and Lyon 33). The consumer quality of new communications sees connections replace relationships as social bonds become short-term and brittle. Turkle makes a similar argument, suggesting that our preoccupation with online curation centres on controlling our identities and depicting “perfect” versions of ourselves. The result is diminished forms of intimacy and connection; we preach authenticity and realness but practice self-curation and self-stylisation.A more positive body of literature has examined how Web technologies work as tools for the formation of self. This literature is based on more close-up and detailed readings of particular platforms and practices rather than relying on sweeping claims about technology and social change. Following Foucault, Bakardjieva & Gaden argue that personal blogs and social networking site (SNS) profiles constitute a contemporary technology of the self, whereby users employ Web 2.0 technologies in everyday life as practices of self care and self-formation. In a similar way, Sauter argues that SNSs, and in particular Facebook, are tools for self-formation through the way in which status updates provide a contemporary form of self-writing. Eschewing the notion of social media activity as narcissistic or self-obsessive, Sauter argues that SNSs are a techno-social practice of self-writing that facilitate individuals to “form relations to self and others by exposing themselves to others and obtaining their feedback” (Sauter 836). Other research has explored young people’s sustained use of social media, particularly Facebook, and how these sites are used to tell and archive “growing up” narratives and key rites of passage (Robards and Lincoln).One area of research that has been overlooked is how people use social media to construct and depict moral identity. Following Sauter’s arguments about the self work that occurs through networked self-writing, we can extend this to include the ethical self work performed and produced through online depictions. One exception is work by Hookway which analyses how people use blogs – an earlier Web 2.0 form – to write and self-examine their moral experiences. This research shows how bloggers use blogging as a form of online self-writing to construct a do-it-yourself form of morality that emphasises the self, emotions, body and ideals of authenticity. Hookway highlights the idea that morality is less about obedience to a code of rules or following external laws to becoming a particular moral person through a set of self-practices. Paralleling broader shifts in identity construction, people are no longer bound to the inherited guidelines of the past, morality becomes a project to be worked out, designed and depicted in relation to Others (Hookway).In Foucault’s terms, morality involves a process of ethical self-stylisation – an “aesthetics of existence” – based on “the ethical work of the self on the self” (Foucault 91). “Care of the self” involves a “set of occupations” or “labours” that connect and link the self to the Other through guidance, counselling and communication (Foucault 50). For Foucault, self-creation and self-care imply “care for others” as individuals perform a mutual concern with achieving an “art of existence”. This is a reciprocated ethics that obligates the individual to care for others in order to help them care for themselves.This stylisation of the ethical self has been drastically reshaped by the new opportunities for self-expression, belonging and communication offered in our digitally networked society. Digital worlds and spaces create new multi-media modes for individuals and groups to depict, perform and communicate particular moral identities and positions. Web 2.0 technologies are seeing the boundaries between the private and public sphere collapse as more people are willing to share the most intimate part of their moral lives with a diverse mix of strangers, friends, family and associates.The confessional quality of online spaces provide a unique opportunity to analyse “lay morality” or everyday moral understandings, constructions and depictions and how this is co-produced in relation to new technological affordances. Following Sayer (951), morality is defined as “how people should treat others and be treated by them, which of course is crucial for their subjective and objective well-being”. Morality is understood as a relational and evaluative practice that involves being responsive to how people are faring and whether they are suffering or flourishing.In this article, we use the #Mission22 campaign – a campaign that went “viral” across multiple social media platforms – as a unique site to analyse and visualise lay moral depictions and constructions. Specifically, we analyse the #Mission22 campaign on Twitter using a big data analysis. Much of the empirical work on online self construction and depiction is either purely theoretical in the vein of Bauman, Turkle and Sauter or based on small qualitative samples such as the work by Lincoln and Robards and Author A. This article is unique not only in investigating the crafting of moral depictions in Web 2.0 forums but also in the scale of the textual and visual representation of mass moral self-depictions it captures and analyses. Big Data Analysis of #Mission22 on TwitterIn order to empirically examine the #Mission22 campaign on Twitter, we used the Twitter API to collect over three months of tweets that contained the campaign hashtag (from 20 Aug. 2016 to 1 Dec. 2016). This resulted in a dataset of 2,908,559 tweets, of which 225,883 were non-duplicated (i.e., some tweets were collected multiple times by the crawler).There were 3,230 user accounts participating during this period, with each user tweeting 70 times on average. As Figure 1 shows, a sizeable percentage of users were quite active at the height of the campaign, although there is clearly a number of users who only tweeted once or twice. More specifically, there were 1,232 users (or 38%) who tweeted at least 100 times, and on the other hand 1080 users (or 33%) who only tweeted two times or less. In addition, a tiny number of ‘power users’ (18 or 0.006%) tweeted more than 400 times during this period. Figure 1: Frequency distribution of #Mission22 tweets for each user in the datasetTo get a sense of what users were talking about during the campaign, we constructed a wordcloud out of the text data extracted from the tweets (see Figure 2). To provide more information and context, usernames (preceded with @) and hashtags (preceded with #) were included along with the words, providing a set of terms. As a result, the wordcloud also shows the user accounts and hashtags that were mentioned most often (note that #Mission22 was excluded from the data as it, by definition of the data collection process, has to occur in every tweet). In order to remove meaningless terms from the dataset we applied several text processing steps. First, all terms were converted to lowercase, such that “Veteran” and “veteran” are treated as the same term. Next, we applied a technique known as term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) to the tweet text data. Tf-idf effectively removes terms that occur so frequently that they provide no interesting information (e.g., the term “mission22”), and also terms that occur extremely infrequently. Finally, we removed English “stop words” from the text data, thereby eliminating common words such as “the” and “and”. Figure 2: Wordcloud of the #Mission22 tweet contentAs Figure 2 shows, the most frequent terms revolve around the campaign message and call-to-action for suicide awareness, including, for example, “day”, “veteran”, “support”, “push-ups”, “band”, “challenge”, “suicide”, “fight”, and “alone”. A number of user accounts are also frequently mentioned, which largely relate to the heavily retweeted users (discussed further below). Furthermore, alongside the central #mission22 hashtag, a number of other popular hashtags were in circulation during the campaign, including “#veteran”, “#americasmission”, “#22kill”, and “#22adayis22toomany”. Table 1 provides the top 50 most frequently occurring terms in decreasing order.Table 1: Top 50 words in the #Mission22 tweet content (decreasing order)1-1011-2021-3031-4041-50day@mrbernardedlong@uc_vetsnothingveteran#veteranbetter@kappasigmauceverysupporteverydaybelieve@ucthetachimissionpush-upschallengetodaytakehelp@sandratxassuicidehaulone#22kill@defensebaronveteransawarenessjustsay@the_usofightaccepted@piedmontlax#veterans@nbcnewsaloneptsdgoodweaknessbandvets22kwrong#nevertrumpcimmunity [sic]#americasmissionshoutoutgodwillA surprising finding of our study is that the vast majority of tweets are simply just retweets of other users. The number of retweets was 223,666, which accounts for about 99% of all tweets in the dataset. Even more surprising was that the vast majority of these retweets are from a single tweet. Indeed, 221,088 (or 98%) of all tweets in the dataset were retweets of the following tweet that was authored on 2 March 2015 by @SandraTXAS (see Figure 3). Clearly we can say that this tweet went ‘viral’ (Jenders et al) in the sense that it became frequently retweeted and gained an increasing amount of attention due to its cumulative popularity and visibility over time. Figure 3: #1 most retweeted #Mission22 tweet – @SandraTXAS (https://twitter.com/SandraTXAS)This highly retweeted or viral #Mission22 tweet provides a point of departure to examine what aspects of the tweet content influence the virality or popularity of #Mission22 tweets during the height of the campaign. To do this, we extracted the next nine most retweeted tweets from our dataset, providing an analysis of the “top 10” retweets (including the @SandraTXAS tweet above). Figure 4: #2 most retweeted - @mrbernarded (https://twitter.com/mrbernarded/status/776221040582295553)This tweet was retweeted 715 times in our dataset. Figure 5: #4 most retweeted - @Mission22 (https://twitter.com/Mission22/status/799872548863414272)This was retweeted 317 times in our dataset. Figure 6: #4 most retweeted - @UCThetaChi (https://twitter.com/UCThetaChi/status/784775641430384640)This was retweeted 180 times in our dataset. Figure 7: #5 most retweeted - @PamKeith2016 (https://twitter.com/PamKeith2016/status/782975576550305792)This was retweeted 121 times in our dataset. Figure 8: #6 most retweeted - @PiedmontLax (https://twitter.com/PiedmontLax/status/770749891698122752)This was retweeted 105 times in our dataset. Figure 9: #7 most retweeted - @PiedmontLax (https://twitter.com/PiedmontLax/status/771181070066692098) This was retweeted 78 times in our dataset. Figure 10: #8 most retweeted - @PatriotBrother (https://twitter.com/PatriotBrother/status/804387050728394752) This was retweeted 59 times in our dataset. Figure 11: #9 most retweeted - @alexgotayjr (https://twitter.com/alexgotayjr/status/787112936644849664) This was retweeted 49 times in our dataset. Figure 12: #10 most retweeted - @csjacobson89 (https://twitter.com/csjacobson89/status/772921614044233729) This was retweeted 45 times in our dataset.DiscussionThis article has provided the first “big data” analysis of the #Mission22 movement that went viral across multiple social media platforms in 2016. We began by arguing that Web 2.0 has ushered in profound changes to how people depict and construct identities that articulate with wider transformations in self and identity in conditions of late-modernity. The “confessional” quality of Web 2.0 means individuals and groups are presented with unprecedented opportunities to “mass self-depict” through new communication and Internet technologies. We suggest that the focus on how Web technologies are implicated in the formation of moral subjectivities is something that has been overlooked in the extant research on identity and Web 2.0 technologies.Filling this gap, we used the #Mission22 movement on Twitter as an empirical site to analyse how contemporary subjects construct and visually depict moral identities in online contexts. A central finding of our analysis of 225883 Twitter posts is that most engagement with #Mission22 was through retweeting. Our data show that retweets were by far the most popular way to interact and engage with the movement. In other words, most people were not producing original or new content in how they participated in the movement but were re-sharing – re-depicting – what others had shared. This finding highlights the importance of paying attention to the architectural affordances of social media platforms, in this case, the affordances of the ‘retweet’ button, and how they shape online identity practices and moral expression. We use moral expression here as a broad term to capture the different ways individuals and groups make moral evaluations based on a responsiveness to how people are faring and whether they are suffering or flourishing (Sayer). This approach provides an emic account of everyday morality and precludes, for example, wider philosophical debates about whether patriotism or nationalistic solidarity can be understood as moral values.The prominence of the retweet in driving the shape and nature of #Mission22 raises questions about the depth of moral engagement being communicated. Is the dominance of the retweet suggestive of a type of “moral slacktivism”? Like its online political equivalent, does the retweet highlight a shallow and cursory involvement with a cause or movement? Did online engagement translate to concrete moral actions such as making a donation to the cause or engaging in some other form of civic activity to draw attention to the movement? These questions are beyond the scope of this article but it is interesting to consider the link between the affordances of the platform, capacity for moral expression and how this translates to face-to-face moral action. Putting aside questions of depth, people are compelled not to ignore these posts, they move from “seeing” to “posting”, to taking action within the affordances of the architectural platform.What then is moving Twitter users to morally engage with this content? How did this movement go viral? What helped bust this movement out of the “long tail distribution” which characterises most movements – that is, few movements “take-off” and become durable within the congested attention economies of social media environments. The Top 10 most retweeted tweets provide powerful answers here. All of them feature highly emotive and affective visual depictions, either high impact photos and statements, or videos of people/groups doing pushups in solidarity together. The images and videos align affective, bodily and fitness practices with nationalistic and patriotic themes to produce a powerful and moving moral co*cktail. The Top 50 words also capture the emotionally evocative use of moral language: words like: alone, fight, challenge, better, believe, good, wrong, god, help, mission, weakness and will.The emotional and embodied visual depictions that characterise the the Top 10 retweets and Top 50 words highlight how moral identity is not just a cerebral practice, but one that is fundamentally emotional and bodily. We do morality not just with our minds and heads but also with our bodies and our hearts. Part of the power of this movement, then, is the way it mobilises interest and involvement with the movement through a physical and embodied practice – doing push-ups. Visually depicting oneself doing push-ups online is a powerful display of morality identity. The “lay morality” being communicated is that not only are you somebody who cares about the flourishing and suffering of Others, you are also a fit, active and engaged citizen. And of course, the subject who actively takes responsibility for their health and well-being is highly valued in neoliberal risk contexts (Lupton).There is also a strong gendered dimensions to the visual depictions used in #Mission22. All of the Top 10 retweets feature images of men, mostly doing push-ups in groups. In the case of the second most popular retweet, it is two men in suits doing push-ups while three sexualised female singers “look-on” admiringly. Further analysis needs to be done to detail the gendered composition of movement participation, but it is interesting to speculate whether men were more likely to participate. The combination of demonstrating care for Other via a strong assertion of physical strength makes this a potentially more masculinised form of moral self-expression.Overall, Mission22 highlights how online self-work and cultivation can have a strong moral dimension. In Foucault’s language, the self-work involved in posting a video or image of yourself doing push-ups can be read as “an intensification of social relations”. It involves an ethics that is about self-creation through visual and textual depictions. Following the more pessimistic line of Bauman or Turkle, posting images of oneself doing push-ups might be seen as evidence of narcissism or a consumerist self-absorption. Rather than narcissism, we want to suggest that Mission22 highlights how a self-based moral practice – based on bodily, emotional and visual depictions – can extend to Others in an act of mutual care and exchange. Again Foucault helps clarify our argument: “the intensification of the concern for the self goes hand in hand with a valorisation of the Other”. What our work does, is show how this operates empirically on a large-scale in the new confessional contexts of Web 2.0 and its cultures of mass self-depiction. ReferencesBakardjieva, Maria, and Georgia Gaden. “Web 2.0 Technologies of the Self.” Philosophy & Technology 25.3 (2012): 399–413.Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.———. Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.———, and David Lyon. Liquid Surveillance. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.Beck, Ulrich, and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Individualisation. London: Sage, 2001.Bruns, Axel, and Jan-Hinrik Schmidt. “Produsage: A Closer Look at Continuing Developments.” New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 17.1 (2011): 3–7.Dutta-Bergman, Mohan J. “Primary Sources of Health Information: Comparisons in the Domain of Health Attitudes, Health Cognitions, and Health Behaviors.” Health Communication 16.3 (2004): 273–288.Elliott, Anthony, and Charles Lemert. The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2006.Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3. New York: Random House, 1986.Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.Hookway, Nicholas. “The Moral Self: Class, Narcissism and the Problem of Do-It-Yourself Moralities.” The Sociological Review, 15 Mar. 2017. <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0038026117699540?journalCode=sora>.Jenders, Maximilian, et al. “Analyzing and Predicting Viral Tweets.” Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW). Rio de Janeiro, 13-17 May 2013.Kata, Anna. “Anti-Vaccine Activists, Web 2.0, and the Postmodern Paradigm: An Overview of Tactics and Tropes Used Online by the Anti-Vaccination Movement.” Vaccine 30.25 (2012): 3778–89.Lincoln, Sian, and Brady Robards. “Editing the Project of the Self: Sustained Facebook Use and Growing Up Online.” Journal of Youth Studies 20.4 (2017): 518–531.Lupton, Deborah. The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body. London: Sage, 1995.Sauter, Theresa. ‘“What's on Your Mind?’ Writing on Facebook as a Tool for Self-Formation.” New Media & Society 16.5 (2014): 823–839.Sayer, Andrew. Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Smith, Gavin J.D., and Pat O’Malley. “Driving Politics: Data-Driven Governance and Resistance.” The British Journal of Criminology 56.1 (2016): 1–24.Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin: New York, 2015.

Abstract:

Many theories address the material adaptations that organisms—including humans—make to their environments, and many address the adaptation of art to different forms. The film Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) by Charlie Kaufman, ostensibly an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, addresses both kinds of adaptation, but also suggests how humans might psychically adapt to their emotional and mental environments, namely by doubling or multiplying their identities to create companions and helpmates who can help them cope with emotional and mental stresses. To expose some of Kaufman’s adaptive moves, I will draw on Wolfgang Iser’s literary anthropology, aimed at exploring “what literature may tell us about our anthropological makeup,” particularly “the human need for make-believe even when it is known to be what it is” (vii). Iser’s theory considers the use of imagination, particularly in the realm of fiction, as a way to “meet certain anthropological needs,” as a tool for human adaptation to social or cultural needs (264). Because of Iser’s emphasis on the importance of both the writer’s and reader’s roles, both may use performances of reading and writing to remake themselves in ways that allow them to function more effectively. Kaufman certainly does in his role as adapter: a type of reader who also writes. Kaufman uses imagination to adapt to his situation, just as humans have always needed their imaginations to adapt to their environments, a need as strong as biological adaptation, considering their psychic needs. Kaufman’s script addresses the major difficulty of how to match a book like The Orchid Thief with expectations for a Hollywood film, including a plot, dynamic characters, and a hook that drives the story. His film persona laments the lack of an overarching, coherent narrative, the relatively small portion of the book where the fascinating title character John LaRoche appears, and, in his conversation with the writing guru Robert McKee, the lack of any change in the people in the book, mainly Orlean and LaRoche. Seemingly promising parts of the book, like the court case, end in a few anti-climactic paragraphs about dropped charges and no-contest pleas, as LaRoche’s grand plan is judicially out-maneuvered. Interspersed with these lamentations are all the false starts and dead ends of Charlie’s composition, represented here in two ways: through watching Charlie type or speak his ideas, and through glimpses of these ideas actualized in film. These abortive attempts set up our expectations for his eventual solution, while showing us the films that never were and capturing some of The Orchid Thief’s non-narrative brilliance. Kaufman manages this, however, by creating the metanarrative of the screenplay’s composition, into which he writes the story of Orlean’s composition of her book. In other words, Kaufman adapts to the problem of adapting the book to a screenplay by thematizing adaptation itself, a concept that fits well with the book’s discussion of adaptation in the biological world. The contrast between Kaufman’s feverish, agonized composition process and Orlean’s placid, cool work creates a dramatic tension in the story, and Kaufman takes revenge on this fantasy of Orlean’s unflappable persona by forcing that persona to unravel more and more as the script progresses. Of course, neither in her book nor in her real life, it should be pointed out, does Orlean suffer from unbearable loneliness, fall in love with LaRoche, use drugs, or turn homicidal. Kaufman, combining selections from the extratextual world, from Orlean’s text, and from his imagination, doubles the real world and the world of the screenplay, distorting them both in the process, but also creating something new. When a new text combines parts of other texts, this doubling multiplies because of the complexity of the relationships involved, since the contexts of all these texts shift when put in new relations to one another. Iser remarks on how the selection of texts and their resulting recontextualization operates on other texts through the reader’s performance, namely by triggering a multiplication of voices, when all of the texts come together and are affected by each other in the recipient’s consciousness (Iser, 237-8). This explanation yields insight into how the performativity of the fictionalizing act and the act of representation merge, through the author’s selection and the recipient’s imagination, when all these different texts are finally placed in a medium where they can interact. The selections and combinations of Kaufman’s script come to fruition in the viewer’s mind, creating a potential for new ideas, new meaning: in other words, intellectual evolution, an adaptation specific to human beings. Iser emphasizes that representation does not merely mirror the existing, but instead creates something new (236). This power of imagination means that we can use make-believe to imagine ourselves in different ways in order to live successfully. This imagining brings together the performances of readers and writers not only to create something new but to cope with the world. For Iser, the creating is the coping, and it tells us something about human nature and how it adapts. Adaptation and The Orchid Thief both refer to Darwin’s The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects and The Origin of Species, outlining his theories of evolution, based on species’ adaptation to their environments. The film invokes Darwin’s words, ideas, and likeness several times: the sequence of film showing the evolution of life, Charlie’s description of this scene for his screenplay, LaRoche and Orlean’s conversation about Darwin, a shot of Darwin’s writings on tape in LaRoche’s van, an imagined scene of Darwin writing the words we hear in narration, a shot of a book of Darwin’s writing in Charlie’s room, and numerous mentions of adaptation and mutation throughout the film in dialogue. The selection of this particular idea, magnified in the film through all of these references, provides a framework for the viewer to understand Kaufman’s choices and the rationalization behind them. Not only do orchids evolve—through mutation—to adapt to their environments, but so do people and ideas, just like the character Charlie Kaufman and his fictional screenplay, as well as the real Charlie Kaufman and his real screenplay. When the elements selected from these extratextual sources are brought together in the text, they “mutually inscribe themselves into one another. Every word becomes dialogic, and every semantic field is doubled by another” (Iser, 238). When combined like this, each element is present in every other one, even if it is literally absent. Sometimes the awareness of what is not present is greater than at others; sometimes, “the present serv[es] only to spotlight the absent” (Iser, 238). Combination doubles meaning by creating an absence for every presence, so that everything said is twofold, the said and the not-said. This doubling is compounded by the text’s self-disclosed fictionality so that what is missing from the text is always already present there as well (Iser, 239). Charlie’s script brings together the elements of writing and Hollywood with the text of Orlean’s book, and his inclusion of these elements creates additional possibilities for the film, many of which are realized through elements that are absent from the book but made present in the film. For example, the romance in the film, which is not present and is even denied in Orlean’s text, only actualizes possibilities already extant in potential in the reader’s mind: for example, Orlean’s rebuttal of any attraction between her and LaRoche (in an interview published in post-film versions of the book and incorporated in the screenplay) introduces the idea to the reader/viewer even if it had not already occurred spontaneously, and this denied possibility explodes in the movie’s latter half, irresistibly demanding exploration, if only because Hollywood films demand romance. In the film, what is absent, yet always present, is a true adaptation of Orlean’s book into a film. It is the subject of the film, and thus always present in one way, but what results is not really an adaptation of the book in the more usual sense. Fictionality enacts one other doubling through the “text’s disclosure of itself as fiction” (Iser, 238). This disclosure happens through two means: “The attitude to be imposed on the reader, and … what the text is meant to represent” (Iser, 238). Including a representation of the writing process—mind you, not the actual writing process—exposes the fictionalizing act, which imposes an attitude on the viewer of taking what is seen as play, as “make-believe”; this is not to say that the play is not purposeful, but it is difficult to lose sight of the film as staged due to the recursiveness of hearing something being composed that we have already seen staged on the screen. Other examples include references to other films, using musical scenes to break tension, and lore about Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) being partly written by twins. These pointers move the viewer to adopt different attitudes to the represented world, and as the tropes are warped here—a musical scene becomes a poignant connection between Charlie and Donald, rather than a beach-blanket, road-trip romp—the viewer gains a different perspective on movie-making. Thus, the viewer is mutated by Adaptation too, becoming, through the process of watching, the kind of audience Kaufman desires. Iser addresses the results of “self-disclosed fictionality” on the recipient of such a fictionalizing act (238-9). As applied to film, if viewers are freed from having to take the film as real, the different attitude to reality the film imposes can be more easily accepted. Thus, new attitudes can be accepted in play, learned through performances of reading or viewing. These attitudes may (although do not necessarily) remain with viewers beyond the represented world’s boundaries, marking a permanent evolution. This possibility of change is important to the disclosure of what the text is meant to represent, which is adaptation, in all its many senses. The writer can, through the fictionalizing act, produce a text; but the text’s recipient must complete the performance of representation through bringing what is represented to fruition through imagination, as Iser explains. Things are made present through imagination that have no reality outside of the text, are made to exist as if they are real in the reader’s imagination. Thus, through the whole process of representation, the fictionalizing act and the reader’s performance, what is not accessible in the extratextual world can be held in the mind, which is the making of make-believe (Iser, 243). Even then, the inaccessible may not be achieved, but only approached through these means: “Aesthetic semblance … neither transcends a given reality nor mediates between idea and manifestation; it is an indication that the inaccessible can only be approached by being staged” (Iser, 243). However, inaccessibility does not reduce the desire for what we cannot possess, as Orlean repeatedly witnesses; we can try to get what we desire, but ultimately it must be inaccessible because we cannot hold onto it at all. The staging of something inaccessible may not be the same as having it, but the manner of staging can also reveal something about what is sought—in this case, passion for Orlean, and perfect adaptation to one’s environment for Kaufman. The inaccessible is often figured as a blank in literature and film; solidifying it into form robs it of its power because the actual can never be the same as that pure potential—think of Orlean’s astonished and disappointed line in the film when she finally sees the ghost orchid: “It’s a flower.” Fear of disappointment prevents her from attempting to see the orchid in the real world, as she explains in her book; she would rather leave the possibility of any fulfillment she might receive in its perfect state of imagination. Even a pure reproduction is impossible, since representation ever creates something new. Film adaptation, of course, falls into this category; that Kaufman’s film does not equal Orlean’s book is obvious to anyone who has experienced both, but Kaufman’s script increases the audience’s awareness of this non-equation of film adaptations to their primary texts, as well as the possibility of the adaptation creating something new. Because of the performative quality of the reader’s role, actualizing the potential of a text, making it tangible through his or her imagination, we must cast Charlie Kaufman’s writing as a performance of reading as well. Iser posits a triadic relationship of the real, the fictional, and the imaginary, in place of the traditional dyad of the real and the fictional. The imaginary is the blank space and formless material made concrete through the fictionalizing act. In Orlean’s book, Florida is the imaginary; she writes, “Florida was to Americans what America had always been to the rest of the world—a fresh, free, unspoiled start. Florida is a wet, warm, tropical place, essentially featureless, and infinitely transformable. … Its essential character can be repeatedly reimagined” (123). For the character Kaufman, the screenplay is the imaginary; it is “infinitely transformable,” and can be “repeatedly reimagined”. Through the unformed potential of the screenplay that he imagines, he can do anything, access anything, even the inaccessible. He can use the screenplay to create fifty movies in one, to create a documentary and a Hollywood action film, a romance, a thriller. He can also use this space of infinite possibility to solve the problem of writing the real screenplay, by writing himself a new self and a partner in the form of a twin brother. Brian McHale explains that the dominant mode of postmodernist fiction is ontological. While McHale’s concern is primarily with questions about the modes of being of the worlds constructed by postmodernist fiction, the construction of new worlds often coincides with attempts by ontologically confused characters to understand themselves and their places in the world—sometimes they solve these problems by creating new worlds to suit (McHale, 9-10). Dick Higgins’s provocative question, quoted by McHale, “Which of my selves is to do [‘what is to be done’]?” highlights the quandary of characters in postmodernist fiction and, we might add, in postmodernist films (McHale, 10). The priority becomes determining the quality of one’s own being, or, given the problem of a certain kind of external reality, determining which self can best adapt to the new world. Kaufman creates multiple ontological layers to approach one of his problems, namely how to adapt a plotless book with no character development into a film. The film’s worlds multiply as he writes the screenplay before our eyes—often after an event that Charlie’s dictations echo—then erases, rewrites, and erases and rewrites, over and over again. I extend McHale’s thesis, however, in that, along with creating new worlds within the text to solve their ontological problems, characters create new selves to solve the problem of who to be in order to live meaningfully. To solve his multitude of problems, Kaufman creates not only a representation of himself in his screenplay (and one might argue, many representations), but also a twin brother who can help him do what he cannot. Kaufman creates at least two other selves to do what needs to be done in the real world and in the film’s world: that is, solving the intractable problem of making a movie out of this book, and for both himself and the character of Susan Orlean, connecting to other people. Kaufman does include a glimpse of the book that is true to its character, but he can’t make a movie out of just this, and a perfect reproduction of the book is impossible anyway—it is inaccessible, which is part of what causes Charlie such agonies. The theme of adaptation introduced by the subject of orchids ultimately provides a way to transform the book into a movie. Consequently, Charlie adapts to the problem in his environment, this unwritten screenplay, by multiplying himself. The character Robert McKee (a real name coincidentally significant in true Dickensian style) presents Charlie with the key to solving the twin problems of the screenplay and his own life; McKee tells Charlie that if characters don’t change there is no story; Charlie is skeptical, at first, at there being people in the world who actually do things, but McKee convinces him it is true. So Charlie, with Donald’s help, changes the characters from The Orchid Thief who do not change, or at least whom we don’t see change because of Orlean’s presentation of them. LaRoche as represented by Orlean does not change; the objects of his passion change, but not his relationship to them. Orlean herself refuses to change, to accept connections to other living things—she gives away the gifts of orchids from the orchid people she interviews. She articulates her lack of connection in an interview after the book’s publication. Kaufman includes this statement in the film, when Donald interviews her while pretending to be Charlie. This statement exposes her detachment, and we certainly do not wonder any more at her dispassionateness, although she says she wishes she had a passion. She claims her passion is for her subjects, but it is hard to believe that when we hear her comments about the relationships of reporters with their subjects. Ultimately, the book is disappointing because the one person present throughout never changes—refuses change, in fact, even when given the opportunity to connect with extraordinary people who might help her to change. For example, she reports, but does not explore, the implications of LaRoche’s change of passion from orchids to computers after his family tragedy; he says, and Kaufman emphasizes this in the film, that he loves computers because they can’t die, unlike the living things he cherished before. He has psychically adapted himself to this painful reality, and even if Orlean doesn’t learn from him, Kaufman does. Unlike Orlean, Charlie succeeds in breaking through his inability to connect with other people; he writes himself as a character who changes, who grows. Donald catalyzes this change, first by introducing Charlie to McKee’s ideas and holding onto them despite Charlie’s scoffing, so that he eventually sways Charlie with his conviction (and his success); and then, in the swamp, when he explains to Charlie that he owns his love and attachments to other people, and their judgments of him cannot make him let them go or spoil them for him. This revelation provides the final impetus for Charlie’s transformation, and he is able to connect to, and ultimately to integrate himself with, Donald, allowing him to continue after Donald is killed. Such integration commonly appears in stories of doubling, and the integrated double must then leave the story somehow. Donald’s effect on the screenplay, then, is the creation of a narrative arc and of characters who change, for better or for worse. Donald invents the relationship between Orlean and LaRoche and their illicit activities. Because of Donald, the movie also metamorphoses into the typical Hollywood film, with drugs, sex, violence, car chases, and a guy getting the girl in the end. But it is also through Donald that the action moves outside of Charlie’s head and that his solitude changes into action in the world involving other people. Thus, the process that brings the movie to that point makes it impossible for us to see it the same way as before, and it lends a significance to the ending that such a “Hollywood” copout wouldn’t otherwise have, just like the reprise of the musical number “Happy Together” in the swamp, this time a demonstration of Charlie’s affection for his brother. In order to excuse this “copout” and the complete departure from The Orchid Thief, Charlie must write himself into the screenplay, to picture his agonizing for us so we will sympathize with his choices, and he must write a double, Donald, who can make these changes, not a copout, but significant evolution. Kaufman changes himself psychically and emotionally in order to do what needs to be done: to create something that can survive through its novelty, to create a self that can survive through adaptation. References Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. London: John Murray, 1859. ———. On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing. 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1877. Iser, Wolfgang. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief. 1998. New York: Ballantine, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bartlett, Lexey A. "Who Do I Turn (in)to for Help?: Multiple Identity as Adaptation in Adaptation." M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/04-bartlett.php>. APA Style Bartlett, L. (May 2007) "Who Do I Turn (in)to for Help?: Multiple Identity as Adaptation in Adaptation," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/04-bartlett.php>.

Abstract:

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“Beyond reasonable doubt” is the standard of proof for criminal cases in a court of law. However, what happens when doubt, reasonable or otherwise, is embedded in the media reporting of criminal cases, even before charges have been laid? This paper will analyse newspaper reports of recent rape cases involving Australian footballers, and identify narrative figures that are used to locate blame solely with the alleged victims, protecting the footballers from blame. I uncover several stock female “characters” which evoke doubt in the women’s claims: the Predatory Woman, who hunts down footballers for sex and is always sexually available to any and all footballers; the Woman Scorned, who makes a false rape complaint out of revenge; and the Gold Digger, who makes a false complaint for money. I will argue that the news media thus effectively provide footballers with a criminal defence, before the cases can even reach court. Rape and Football in Australia The issue of football and rape first came to mass public attention in February 2004, when six players from National Rugby League (NRL) team the Canterbury Bulldogs allegedly raped a woman while at a New South Wales resort. Two weeks later, two players from the St Kilda Australian Football League (AFL) team allegedly raped a woman following their pre-season cup victory. These two football codes are the nation’s most popular, with rugby league dominating the north-eastern states, with the southern, eastern and western the domain of Australian Rules. In neither case were charges laid, and although at least twenty distinct cases have been reported in the Australian media, involving more than fifty-six footballers and officials, only one–NRL star Brett Stewart–has yet been tried. Stewart was acquitted in September 2010. Former AFL footballer Andrew Lovett has also been ordered to stand trial in July 2011 for allegedly raping a woman on Christmas Eve, 2009. Nevertheless, the majority of cases never reach court. In criminal cases, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) ultimately decides whether to pursue charges through the courts, and, as most cases will be decided by a jury drawn from the general public, the DPP must decide whether the general public would accept the prosecution’s evidence as proof of guilt “beyond reasonable doubt.” This means that if a jury retains any doubt that the accused person is guilty, as long as that doubt is reasonable, they must return a verdict of “not guilty.” Public opinion in high-profile cases is therefore extremely important. If the DPP perceives a high level of public scepticism about a particular case, this indicates that the likelihood of the general public accepting the prosecution’s evidence is low, and they will often decide not to pursue the case. My analysis will show that media reports of the cases, which were published before any decision about laying criminal charges was made, can in fact work to create doubt, taking popular, victim-blaming stories to cast doubt on the complainants’ testimonies. Thus “reasonable doubt,” or a doubt that seems reasonable to many or most readers, is created before the case can even reach court. Predatory Women, Gold Diggers and Women Scorned When debate began in 2004 and explanations were sought for the high numbers of cases, stories abounded in which women have consensual sex with footballers, and then make a false rape complaint. I identify the principal characters of these stories as the Predatory Woman, Gold Digger and Woman Scorned. These stories were particularly prevalent amongst football representatives, blog contributors and talkback radio callers. Some media commentators provided alternative explanations (Magnay, for example), and others were explicitly critical of such stories (Pinkney, Wilson, for example); however, other journalists in fact evoked these same stereotypes. All of these characters have “common currency” (Smart 39), and have been used by defence lawyers in criminal trials for centuries, which means they are likely to be believed. These commentators therefore (indirectly) portray the complainants as liars, and reinforce the pervasive victim-blaming discourses in the wider public. The Predatory Woman The Predatory Woman character can be traced back at least as far as the early nineteenth century, when so-called “fallen” women were frequently “scorned as predatory creatures who lured young men into sin” (Clark 59). In her study of newspaper articles on football and sexual assault, gender theorist Kim Toffoletti identified the “predatory female” as a recurrent figure who is used to portray footballers as victims of “deviant” female sexuality (432-3). Toffoletti argues that the assumption underlying the use of the predatory female is that “incidents of sexual assault can occur when women deviate from the ‘conventions’ of heterosexual relations that expect them to be passive and sexually available, and men to exude sexual virility” (433). However, I argue that commentators’ usage often carries this further, and rather than using the story to claim that a victim of rape “deserved” it, the Predatory Woman actually serves as a replacement for the Raped Woman, therefore implicitly claiming that the complainant was lying. The Predatory Woman is the aggressor in all sexual encounters with footballers, a “sexual predator” (McCabe 31) who is said to “target” players and “hunt in packs” (Lyon 1). In a 2004 interview, one footballer described the phenomenon as “frightening” (McCabe 31), and another in 2009 claimed that footballers are “given temptations,” and “some of them [women] are downright predators” (Cunningham 30). The hunting animal metaphor clearly represents women as sexual aggressors, virtually suggesting that they are committing violent acts–moving in on unsuspecting footballers for the “kill” (sex). Thus portraying a complainant as one who seeks out sex with footballers implies that she victimised the players. As a woman cannot be both sexual aggressor and rape victim, the character of the Predatory Woman replaces that of the Raped Woman, therefore invalidating a complainant’s testimony and creating doubt. The Woman Scorned The Woman Scorned, another popular character in footballer sexual assault narratives, has also been evoked by the defence in criminal rape trials for centuries (Sanday; Benedict 2, 39-40, 83; Larcombe 100, 104-106, 111; Lees 78). The prevalence of footballers’ beliefs in the Woman Scorned story when NRL player Simon Williams commented about the prevalence of group sex/rape incidents involving NRL players on the 2009 Four Corners “Code of Silence” episode: It’s not during the act, it’s the way you treat them after it. Most of them could have been avoided, if they [players] had put them [women] in a cab and said thanks or that sort of thing not just kicked her out and called her a dirty whatever. It’s how you treat them afterwards that can cover a lot of that stuff up. Williams’ implicit claim here is that no woman would make a rape complaint as long as footballers always “said thanks” after sex. He thus implies that “most” of the complaints have been about revenge from women who felt mistreated after consensual sex: Women Scorned. The Gold Digger The Gold Digger is also an established character in both football rape stories and criminal rape trials; Peggy Sanday identifies her in cases dating from the eighteenth century. In rape cases, the Gold Digger can be evoked when a prominent and/or wealthy man–such as a noble in the eighteenth century, or a footballer in the present context–is accused of rape, whether or not the alleged victim seeks or receives a financial settlement. Many football fans evoked the Gold Digger on Internet blog sites, even when there were no observable characteristics corresponding to the Gold Digger in any of the media narratives. One declared: “My mum said she was probably being a slu*t, then after they ‘did’ her, she decided 2 say summin coz she thought she could get money or summin out of it [sic]” (in Baird 41). The Gold Digger stereotype invalidates a rape complaint, as a woman who alleges rape for financial gain must be lying, and was therefore not raped. Her claims are to be doubted. Narrative Immunity From 2009 onward, although traces of these characters remained, the focus of the debate shifted, from the possibility of sexual assault to players’ alcohol intake and the prevalence of “group sex.” Nina Philadelphoff-Puren identifies implicit claims that the complainants were lying in the statements of football representatives (37, 41-43), which imply that they must be Predatory Women, Women Scorned or Gold Diggers. In order to show clearly how journalists mobilised these characters more directly to evoke doubt, I conducted a search of the “Newsbank” newspaper database, for opinion pieces that sought to explain why the allegations were made, using varying combinations of the search terms “AFL,” “NRL,” “football,” “sexual assault,” “rape,” “rugby,” “sexual violence,” “sex” and “women.” Articles were sought in broadsheet newspapers The Age (Melbourne) and The Sydney Morning Herald, and tabloids The Herald Sun (Melbourne) and Daily Telegraph (Sydney), the most widely read newspapers in the cities where the alleged incidents occurred. The time-frame selected was 27 February 2004 to 1 May 2004, which covered the period from when the Canterbury Bulldogs case was first reported, until debate died down after the announcement that no charges would be laid against St Kilda footballers Steven Milne and Leigh Montagna. Twenty articles were collected for analysis: two from the Daily Telegraph, eight from the Herald Sun, seven from the Age, and three from the Sydney Morning Herald. Of these, half (ten) overtly blamed the alleged victims, with seven of those explicitly evoking Predatory Woman, Woman Scorned and/or Gold Digger stereotypes, and one strongly implying them. Although it might be expected that tabloid newspapers would be much more likely to (re-)produce popular stereotypes than broadsheets, the same numbers were found in each type of newspaper. The “common currency” (Smart 39) these stories have means that they are more likely to be considered credible than other stories. Their use by respected media commentators–particularly broadsheet journalists, whose publications lay claim to an educated readership and more progressive attitudes–is of even greater significance. In this paper, I will analyse three broadsheet articles in detail, in order to illustrate the various strategies used to evoke the stereotyped characters for an educated readership. The articles selected are by writers from very different backgrounds–a former footballer, a feminist and a “life-skills” coach to AFL footballers–and although it might seem that they would provide markedly different perspectives on the issue, I will show that all three evoke stereotypes that cast doubt on the complainants’ claims. The Story of the “Insider” Former AFL footballer Tim Watson’s “AFL Players and the Trouble Zone” was published shortly after the allegations against the St Kilda AFL players were made public in 2004. The article features a number of Predatory Women, who make “victims” of footballers; however, while Watson does not provide direct narrative accounts of the alleged rapes, he instead recounts narratives of other interactions between footballers and women. Predatory Women therefore come to replace Raped Women as characters and invalidate the alleged victims’ claims; as Watson represents these women as the sole agents, full responsibility for these incidents is attributed to women. The bulk of Watson’s article relates two stories unconnected with any (known) sexual assault cases, about AFL teams travelling to the country for training and being harassed by women. Placing the narratives immediately after warnings about “trouble zones,” when the article is clearly responding to the sexual assault allegations, suggests that his narratives explain what “potential trouble” and “trouble zones” are. He therefore implies that his narratives illustrate what “really” happened with the St Kilda (and Canterbury) players. The only instances where players are given grammatical agency in this narrative is when they “mingled with the locals” and “left the function as a group”; all the narrative action is attributed to women. Mingling has no sexual connotation, and “the locals” is a gender neutral term, implying that the players’ only action at the function was to interact with men and women in a non-sexual way. The characters of “a couple of girls” are introduced, and according to Watson these “girls” made it clear to everyone that they were keen to attract the attention of a couple of the players. One girl was so convinced of her intentions that she sidled up to the coach to explain to him what she planned to do later in the night to one of his players. The team left the function as a group and went back to the hotel without the adoring fans. In order to portray the women more clearly as the sole sexual aggressors–Predatory Women–Watson leaves out any events where players actively participate, events which are highly likely to have occurred. For example, in Watson’s narrative there is no two-way flirtation, and the players do not seek out, encourage or even respond in any (positive) way to the female attention they receive, although anecdotal evidence suggests this is extremely unlikely to have happened (Mewett and Toffoletti 170, 172-73). The women are only grammatical agents with intentions–their agency relates to what they plan to do–however, emphasising the fact that the team left as a group suggests that it was only this defensive action which prevented the women from carrying out their intentions and instigating sexual activity. Using “sidled” rather than “went” or “approached” characterises the woman as sly and manipulative, casting her in a negative light and adding to the sense that she was solely responsible. The second story is described as “almost identical” to the first, but Watson takes even greater pains to emphasise the players’ passivity, again portraying them as victims of Predatory Women. Watson attaches only the passive voice to the players: he says that they were “woken in their hotel rooms” and “subject to determined, but unwanted, advances.” The women are entirely absent from these statements. They appear only as shadows presumed responsible for waking the players and making the unwanted advances. This erasure of the female agent only emphasises the players’ passivity in the face of female seduction and general resistance to overwhelming female sexual aggression. As in the first story, the only action attributed to a footballer is defensive: a senior player convincing the women to leave. This reinforces the idea that male footballers are the victims when it comes to casual sexual relations, and casts doubt on any claims of rape. The Story of the “Insider-Outsider” The second article, “When an Elite Footballer Has Sex with a Girl…,” is by “life skills” coach to AFL players Damien Foster, who calls himself “a classic insider-outsider” to football (SBS). As a partial outsider, Foster would therefore presumably have less vested interest in protecting footballers than Watson; however, his narrative also denies the complaints’ credibility, clearly evoking a victim-blaming character: the Woman Scorned. Foster obliquely claims that the St Kilda and Canterbury cases arose simply because women and men view sex differently and therefore “a footballer may land himself in trouble because it just doesn’t occur to him to develop tactful, diplomatic methods of saying goodbye”. He continues, “When the girl [sic] realises the total indifference with which she is being treated after intimacy, bitterness sets in and it lingers. There are many girls in Australia now in this situation.” While Foster does not directly say that the “girls” who made rape complaints against the Bulldogs and St Kilda are Women Scorned, the fact that this story is used to explain why the allegations were made says it for him. According to Foster’s logic, if footballers learnt to say “thanks, love, that was great” after sex, then no rape complaints would ever be made. A “Feminist” Story? Controversial feminist Germaine Greer would seem even more likely to avoid victim-blame than men involved with football clubs, and she does not follow Watson’s portrayal of utterly passive, squeaky-clean footballers, or Foster’s narrative of undiplomatic players. In “Ugly Sex Has Just Got a Lot Louder,” she does acknowledge that some harm may have been done; however, Greer nevertheless portrays the complainants as Predatory Women, Women Scorned and Gold Diggers. Greer elects to tell a “history” of male footballer-female interactions, establishing male athletes’ disrespect for and mistreatment of women as a given. However, she goes on to evoke the Predatory Woman, portraying her as utterly desperate and willing to go to any lengths to have contact with players. Greer laments, good family men have been known to succumb to the groupies’ onslaught, believing that as long as they don’t kiss these desperate creatures, as long as they make no move that could be interpreted as a sign of affection, they haven’t been genuinely unfaithful to their wives and sweethearts. Indeed, the more brutal the treatment of the women they have casual sex with, the less they have to reproach themselves for. Pack rape in such circ*mstances can come to seem guiltless, a condign punishment for being a stupid slag, even. This explanation of footballers’ behaviour contains several grammatical patterns which represent the players as passive and not responsible for anything that takes place. In the first sentence, the only things these footballers actually do are succumbing and believing, both passive verbs; the rest of the sentence is devoted to what they do not do: “as long as they don’t kiss… as long as they make no move.” Thus it would seem that the players do not actively participate in the sexual activity instigated by these women, that they simply lie back and allow the women to do as they will. That the women are labelled “desperate creatures” who launch an “onslaught” to which footballers “succumb” confirms their sexual aggression. Although the second and third sentences depict violence and rape, these actions are not directly attributed to the players. The brutal treatment of the women the players have casual sex with has no grammatical agent–“the more brutal the treatment of the women they have casual sex with”–dissociating them from the brutality and subtly implying that “someone else” is responsible for it. Similarly, “pack rape” has no agent: no player commits or is involved in it, and it appears to happen independently of them. As Susan Ehrlich demonstrates, this denial of agency is a common tactic for accused rapists to use, in order to deny that they were responsible for their actions (36-61). Thus Greer uses the same grammatical patterns which deflect blame away from footballers, even when the behaviour involved is violent rape. This continual emphasis on the players’ passivity reinforces the portrayal of the women as sexually aggressive Predatory Women. Greer also introduces the figures of the Woman Scorned and Gold Digger. She claims that the only difference between the “old days” and the present scenarios is that now women are “not embarrassed to say that they agreed to sex with one man they’d only just met, or even with two, but they hadn’t agreed to being brutalised, insulted or humiliated, and they want redress.” This paragraph appears almost directly after the one where Greer mentions pack rape and violence, and it may seem therefore that the redress these women seek is for rape. However, since Greer claims that at least some of the women who “want redress” want it because they have been “insulted or humiliated,” rather than raped, this evokes the Woman Scorned. Greer continues by introducing the Gold Digger as a further (and complementary) explanation for these insulted and humiliated women to seek “redress.” Greer writes that women now “also seem quite interested in another factor in sex with footballers – namely, indecent amounts of money.” With this statement, she implies that some women have sex with footballers just so that they can make a rape complaint afterwards and obtain a large payment. She concedes that the women who make allegations against footballers may have been “abused,” but she trivialises them by claiming that they “scream and holler,” portraying them as hysterical. She thus discredits them and casts doubt on their claims. Greer ignores the fact that only one woman has either sought or obtained a financial settlement from footballers for a case of rape, and this woman only applied for it after charges against the players responsible were dropped. Whilst this argument is clearly unfounded, the strength of the Gold Digger story, along with the Woman Scorned and Predatory Woman, is likely to give the impression that the rape complaints made against the footballers were unfounded. Conclusion: The Benefit of the Doubt The fact that a significant number of media commentators employed tactics similar to those defence lawyers use in rape trials suggests that a de facto “trial” took place; one in which stories that discredit the complainants were prominent. These stories were enough to evoke “(un)reasonable doubt” in the women’s claims, and the accused footballers were therefore “acquitted.” That doubt can be evoked so easily in such high-profile cases is particularly problematic as rape cases in general are those least likely to be believed (Jordan 64-83). Further, many victims state that the fear of disbelief is one of the most important factors in deciding not to pursue criminal charges (Warshaw 50). Even if one leaves aside the likelihood that the prevalence of doubt in the media and the “blogosphere” contributed to the DPP’s decision not to pursue charges, the media “acquittal” is likely to have two further effects: it may deter future complainants from coming forward, if they assume that their claims will similarly be doubted; and it contributes to more generalised beliefs that women habitually lie about rape, particularly those who accuse footballers. While of course any accused person must be held innocent until proven guilty, it is equally important to give an alleged victim the benefit of the doubt, and not presume that all rape complainants are liars unless proven otherwise. References “Code of Silence.” Four Corners. ABC, 11 May. 2009. Television. Baird, Julia. “All Together, Boys, for a Weekend Roast.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 February. 2004: 41. Benedict, Jeff. Athletes and Acquaintance Rape. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1998. Clark, Anna. Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770-1845. New York: Pandora Press, 1987. Cunningham, Ryan. “A Footballer’s Life: Confusion, Temptation and Guilt by Association.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 Jun. 2009: 30. Ehrlich, Susan. Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London: Routledge, 2001. Foster, Damien. “When an Elite Footballer Has Sex with a Girl...” Age 23 Mar. 2004: 13. “Foul Play.” Insight. SBS, 16 Apr. 2004. Television. Greer, Germaine. “Ugly Sex Has Just Got a Lot Louder.” Age 23 Mar. 2004: 1, 17. Jordan, Jan. The Word of a Woman?: Police, Rape and Belief. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Larcombe, Wendy. Compelling Engagements: Feminism, Rape Law and Romance Fiction. Sydney: Federation Press, 2005. Lees, Sue. Ruling Passions. Buckingham: Open UP, 1997. Lyon, Karen. “They Love Their Footy, But Can They Keep the Faith?” Age 20 Mar. 2004: 1. Magnay, Jacquelin. “What Dogs Do.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Feb. 2004: 31 McCabe, Helen. “Perilous Games of Sport and Sex.” Daily Telegraph 1 May. 2004: 31. Mewett, Peter, and Kim Toffoletti. “Rogue Men and Predatory Women: Female Fans’ Perceptions of Australian Footballers’ Sexual Conduct.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 43.2 (2008): 165-80. Pinkney, Matthew. “Don’t Make Their Excuses.” Herald Sun 22 March. 2004: 18. Philadelphoff-Puren, Nina. “Dereliction: Women, Rape and Football.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 17. (2004): 35-51. Sanday, Peggy Reeves. A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Smart, Carol. Feminism and the Power of Law. London: Routledge, 1989. Toffoletti, Kim. “How Is Gender-Based Violence Covered in the Sporting News? An Account of the Australian Football League Sex Scandal.” Women’s Studies International Forum 30 (2007): 427-38. Warshaw, Robin. I Never Called It Rape: The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting, and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Watson, Tim. “AFL Players and the Trouble Zone.” Age 18 Mar. 2004: 16. Wilson, Caroline. “All the Dirty Linen Must — and Will — Be Aired.” Age, 21 Mar. 2004: 4.

Abstract:

The first two months of 2021 saw Google and Facebook ‘go dark’ in terms of news content on the Australia versions of their platforms. In January, Google ran a so-called “experiment” which removed or demoted current news in the search results available to a segment of Australian users. While Google was only darkened for some, in February news on Facebook went completely dark, with the company banning all news content and news sharing for users within Australian. Both of these instances of going dark occurred because of the imminent threat these platforms faced from the News Media Bargaining Code legislation that was due to be finalised by the Australian parliament. This article examines how both Google and Facebook responded to the draft Code, focussing on their threats to go dark, and the extent to which those threats were carried out. After exploring the context which produced the threats of going dark, this article looks at their impact, and how the Code was reshaped in light of those threats before it was finally legislated in early March 2021. Most importantly, this article outlines why Google and Facebook were prepared to go dark in Australia, and whether they succeeded in trying to prevent Australia setting the precedent of national governments dictating the terms by which digital platforms should pay for news content. From the Digital Platforms Inquiry to the Draft Code In July 2019, the Australian Treasurer released the Digital Platforms Inquiry Final Report which had been prepared by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). It outlined a range of areas where Australian law, policies and practices were not keeping pace with the realities of a digital world of search giants, social networks, and streaming media. Analysis of the submissions made as part of the Digital Platforms Inquiry found that the final report was “primarily framed around the concerns of media companies, particularly News Corp Australia, about the impact of platform companies’ market dominance of content distribution and advertising share, leading to unequal economic bargaining relationships and the gradual disappearance of journalism jobs and news media publishers” (Flew et al. 13). As such, one of the most provocative recommendations made was the establishment of a new code that would “address the imbalance in the bargaining relationship between leading digital platforms and news media businesses” (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Digital Platforms Inquiry 16). The ACCC suggested such a code would assist Australian news organisations of any size in negotiating with Facebook, Google and others for some form of payment for news content. The report was released at a time when there was a greatly increased global appetite for regulating digital platforms. Thus the battle over the Code was watched across the world as legislation that had the potential to open the door for similar laws in other countries (Flew and Wilding). Initially the report suggested that the digital giants should be asked to develop their own codes of conduct for negotiating with news organisations. These codes would have then been enforced within Australia if suitably robust. However, after months of the big digital platforms failing to produce meaningful codes of their own, the Australian government decided to commission their own rules in this arena. The ACCC thus prepared the draft legislation that was tabled in July 2020 as the Australian News Media Bargaining Code. According to the ACCC the Code, in essence, tried to create a level playing field where Australian news companies could force Google and Facebook to negotiate a ‘fair’ payment for linking to, or showing previews of, their news content. Of course, many commentators, and the platforms themselves, retorted that they already bring significant value to news companies by referring readers to news websites. While there were earlier examples of Google and Facebook paying for news, these were largely framed as philanthropy: benevolent digital giants supporting journalism for the good of democracy. News companies and the ACCC argued this approach completely ignored the fact that Google and Facebook commanded more than 80% of the online advertising market in Australia at that time (Meade, “Google, Facebook and YouTube”). Nor did the digital giants acknowledge their disruptive power given the bulk of that advertising revenue used to flow to news companies. Some of the key features of this draft of the Code included (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, “News Media Bargaining Code”): Facebook and Google would be the (only) companies initially ‘designated’ by the Code (i.e. specific companies that must abide by the Code), with Instagram included as part of Facebook. The Code applied to all Australian news organisations, and specifically mentioned how small, regional, and rural news media would now be able to meaningfully bargain with digital platforms. Platforms would have 11 weeks after first being contacted by a news organisation to reach a mutually negotiated agreement. Failure to reach agreements would result in arbitration (using a style of arbitration called final party arbitration which has both parties present a final offer or position, with an Australian arbiter simply choosing between the two offers in most cases). Platforms were required to give 28 days notice of any change to their algorithms that would impact on the ways Australian news was ranked and appeared on their platform. Penalties for not following the Code could be ten million dollars, or 10% of the platform’s annual turnover in Australia (whichever was greater). Unsurprisingly, Facebook, Google and a number of other platforms and companies reacted very negatively to the draft Code, with their formal submissions arguing: that the algorithm change notifications would give certain news companies an unfair advantage while disrupting the platforms’ core business; that charging for linking would break the underlying free nature of the internet; that the Code overstated the importance and reach of news on each platform; and many other objections were presented, including strong rejections of the proposed model of arbitration which, they argued, completely favoured news companies without providing any real or reasonable limit on how much news organisations could ask to be paid (Google; Facebook). Google extended their argument by making a second submission in the form of a report with the title ‘The Financial Woes of News Publishers in Australia’ (Shapiro et al.) that argued Australian journalism and news was financially unsustainable long before digital platforms came along. However, in stark contrast the Digital News Report: Australia 2020 found that Google and Facebook were where many Australians found their news; in 2020, 52% of Australians accessed news on social media (up from 46% the year before), with 39% of Australians getting news from Facebook, and that number jumping to 49% when specifically focusing on news seeking during the first COVID-19 pandemic peak in April 2021 (Park et al.). The same report highlighted that 43% of people distrust news found on social media (with a further 29% neutral, and only 28% of people explicitly trusting news found via social media). Moreover, 64% of Australians were concerned about misinformation online, and of all the platforms mentioned in the survey, respondents were most concerned about Facebook as a source of misinformation, with 36% explicitly indicating this was the place they were most concerned about encountering ‘fake news’. In this context Facebook and Google battled the Code by launching a public relations campaigns, appealing directly to Australian consumers. Google Drives a Bus Across Australia Google’s initial response to the draft Code was a substantial public relations campaign which saw the technology company advocating against the Code but not necessarily the ideas behind it. Google instead posited their own alternative way of paying for journalism in Australia. On the main Google search landing page, the usually very white surrounds of the search bar included the text “Supporting Australian journalism: a constructive path forward” which linked to a Google page outlining their version of a ‘Fair Code’. Popup windows appeared across many of Google’s services and apps, noting Google “are willing to pay to support journalism”, with a button labelled ‘Hear our proposal’. Figure 1: Popup notification on Google Australia directing users to Google’s ‘A Fair Code’ proposal rebutting the draft Code. (Screen capture by author, 29 January 2021) Google’s popups and landing page links were visible for more than six months as the Code was debated. In September 2020, a Google blog post about the Code was accompanied by a YouTube video campaign featuring Australia comedian Greta Lee Jackson (Google Australia, Google Explains Arbitration). Jackson used the analogy of Google as a bus driver, who is forced to pay restaurants for delivering customers to them, and then pay part of the running costs of restaurants, too. The video reinforced Google’s argument that the draft Code was asking digital platforms to pay potentially enormous costs for news content without acknowledging the value of Google bringing readers to the news sites. However, the video opened with the line that “proposed laws can be confusing, so I'll use an analogy to break it down”, setting a tone that would seem patronising to many people. Moreover, the video, and Google’s main argument, completely ignored the personal data Google receives every time a user searches for, or clicks on, a news story via Google Search or any other Google service. If Google’s analogy was accurate, then the bus driver would be going through every passenger’s bag while they were on the bus, taking copies of all their documents from drivers licenses to loyalty cards, keeping a record of every time they use the bus, and then using this information to get advertisers to pay for a tailored advertisem*nt on the back of the seat in front of every passenger, every time they rode the bus. Notably, by the end of March 2021, the video had only received 10,399 views, which suggests relatively few people actually clicked on it to watch. In early January 2021, at the height of the debate about the Code, Google ran what they called “an experiment” which saw around 1% of Australian users suddenly only receive “older or less relevant content” when searching for news (Barnet, “Google’s ‘Experiment’”). While ostensibly about testing options for when the Code became law, the unannounced experiment also served as a warning shot. Google very effectively reminded users and politicians about their important role in determining which news Australian users find, and what might happen if Google darkened what they returned as news results. On 21 January 2021, Mel Silva, the Managing Director and public face of Google in Australia and New Zealand gave public testimony about the company’s position before a Senate inquiry. Silva confirmed that Google were indeed considering removing Google Search in Australia altogether if the draft Code was not amended to address their key concerns (Silva, “Supporting Australian Journalism: A Constructive Path Forward An Update on the News Media Bargaining Code”). Google’s seemingly sudden escalation in their threat to go dark led to articles such as a New York Times piece entitled ‘An Australia with No Google? The Bitter Fight behind a Drastic Threat’ (Cave). Google also greatly amplified their appeal to the Australian public, with a video featuring Mel Silva appearing frequently on all Google sites in Australia to argue their position (Google Australia, An Update). By the end of March 2021, Silva’s video had been watched more than 2.2 million times on YouTube. Silva’s testimony, video and related posts from Google all characterised the Code as: breaking “how Google search works in Australia”; creating a world where links online are paid for and thus both breaking Google and “undermin[ing] how the web works”; and saw Google offer their News Showcase as a viable alternative that, in Google’s view, was “a fair one” (Silva, “Supporting Australian Journalism”). Google emphasised submissions about the Code which backed their position, including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee who agreed that the idea of charging for links could have a more wide-reaching impact, challenging the idea of a free web (Leaver). Google also continued to release their News Showcase product in other parts of the world. They emphasised that there were existing arrangements for Showcase in Australia, but the current regulatory uncertainty meant it was paused in Australia until the debates about the Code were resolved. In the interim, news media across Australia, and the globe, were filled with stories speculating what an Australia would look like if Google went completely dark (e.g. Cave; Smyth). Even Microsoft weighed in to supporting the Code and offer their search engine Bing as a viable alternative to fill the void if Google really did go dark (Meade, “Microsoft’s Bing”). In mid-February, the draft Code was tabled in Australian parliament. Many politicians jumped at the chance to sing the Code’s praises and lament the power that Google and Facebook have across various spheres of Australian life. Yet as these speeches were happening, the Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was holding weekend meetings with executives from Google and Facebook, trying to smooth the path toward the Code (Massola). In these meetings, a number of amendments were agreed to, including the Code more clearly taking in to account any existing deals already on the table before it became law. In these meetings the Treasurer made in clear to Google that if the deals done prior to the Code were big enough, he would consider not designating Google under the Code, which in effect would mean Google is not immediately subject to it (Samios and Visentin). With that concession in hand Google swiftly signed deals with over 50 Australian news publishers, including Seven West Media, Nine, News Corp, The Guardian, the ABC, and some smaller publishers such as Junkee Media (Taylor; Meade, “ABC Journalism”). While the specific details of these deals were not made public, the deals with Seven West Media and Nine were both reported to be worth around $30 million Australian dollars (Dudley-Nicholson). In reacting to Google's deals Frydenberg described them as “generous deals, these are fair deals, these are good deals for the Australian media businesses, deals that they are making off their own bat with the digital giants” (Snape, “‘These Are Good Deals’”). During the debates about the Code, Google had ultimately ensured that every Australian user was well aware that Google was, in their words, asking for a “fair” Code, and before the Code became law even the Treasurer was conceding that Google’s was offering a “fair deal” to Australian news companies. Facebook Goes Dark on News While Google never followed through on their threat to go completely dark, Facebook took a very different path, with a lot less warning. Facebook’s threat to remove all news from the platform for users in Australia was not made explicit in their formal submissions the draft of the Code. However, to be fair, Facebook’s Managing Director in Australia and New Zealand Will Easton did make a blog post at the end of August 2020 in which he clearly stated: “assuming this draft code becomes law, we will reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram” (Easton). During the negotiations in late 2020 Instagram was removed as an initial target of the Code (just as YouTube was not included as part of Google) along with a number of other concessions, but Facebook were not sated. Yet Easton’s post about removing news received very little attention after it was made, and certainly Facebook made no obvious attempt to inform their millions of Australian users that news might be completely blocked. Hence most Australians were shocked when that was exactly what Facebook did. Facebook’s power has, in many ways, always been exercised by what the platform’s algorithms display to users, what content is most visible and equally what content is made invisible (Bucher). The morning of Wednesday, 17 February 2021, Australian Facebook users awoke to find that all traditional news and journalism had been removed from the platform. Almost all pages associated with news organisations were similarly either disabled or wiped clean, and that any attempt to share links to news stories was met with a notification: “this post can’t be shared”. The Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison reacted angrily, publicly lamenting Facebook’s choice to “unfriend Australia”, adding their actions were “as arrogant as they were disappointing”, vowing that Australia would “not be intimidated by big tech” (Snape, “Facebook Unrepentant”). Figure 2: Facebook notification appearing when Australians attempted to share news articles on the platform. (Screen capture by author, 20 February 2021) Facebook’s news ban in Australia was not limited to official news pages and news content. Instead, their ban initially included a range of pages and services such as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, emergency services pages, health care pages, hospital pages, services providing vital information about the COVID-19 pandemic, and so forth. The breadth of the ban may have been purposeful, as one of Facebook’s biggest complaints was that the Code defined news too broadly (Facebook). Yet in the Australian context, where the country was wrestling with periodic lockdowns and the Coronavirus pandemic on one hand, and bushfires and floods on the other, the removal of these vital sources of information showed a complete lack of care or interest in Australian Facebook users. Beyond the immediate inconvenience of not being able to read or share news on Facebook, there were a range of other, immediate, consequences. As Barnet, amongst others, warned, a Facebook with all credible journalism banned would almost certainly open the floodgates to a tide of misinformation, with nothing left to fill the void; it made Facebook’s “public commitment to fighting misinformation look farcical” (Barnet, “Blocking Australian News”). Moreover, Bossio noted, “reputational damage from blocking important sites that serve Australia’s public interest overnight – and yet taking years to get on top of user privacy breaches and misinformation – undermines the legitimacy of the platform and its claimed civic intentions” (Bossio). If going dark and turning off news in Australia was supposed to win the sympathy of Australian Facebook users, then the plan largely backfired. Yet as with Google, the Australian Treasurer was meeting with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook executives behind closed doors, which did eventually lead to changes before the Code was finally legislated (Massola). Facebook gained a number of concessions, including: a longer warning period before a Facebook could be designated by the Code; a longer period before news organisations would be able to expect negotiations to be concluded; an acknowledgement that existing deals would be taken in to account during negotiations; and, most importantly, a clarification that if Facebook was to once again block news this would both prevent them being subject to the Code and was not be something the platform could be punished for. Like Google, though, Facebook’s biggest gain was again the Treasurer making it clear that by making deals in advance on the Code becoming law, it was likely that Facebook would not be designated, and thus not subject to the Code at all (Samios and Visentin). After these concessions the news standoff ended and on 23 February the Australian Treasurer declared that after tense negotiations Facebook had “refriended Australia”; the company had “committed to entering into good-faith negotiations with Australian news media businesses and seeking to reach agreements to pay for content” (Visentin). Over the next month there were some concerns voiced about slow progress, but then major deals were announced between Facebook and News Corp Australia, and with Nine, with other deals following closely (Meade, “Rupert Murdoch”). Just over a week after the ban began, Facebook returned news to their platform in Australia. Facebook obviously felt they had won the battle, but Australia Facebook users were clearly cannon fodder, with their interests and wellbeing ignored. Who Won? The Immediate Aftermath of the Code After the showdowns with Google and Facebook, the final amendments to the Code were made and it was legislated as the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code (Australian Treasury), going into effect on 2 March 2021. However, when it became legally binding, not one single company was ‘designated’, meaning that the Code did not immediately apply to anyone. Yet deals had been struck, money would flow to Australian news companies, and Facebook had returned news to its platform in Australia. At the outset, Google, Facebook, news companies in Australia and the Australian government all claimed to have won the battle over the Code. Having talked up their tough stance on big tech platforms when the Digital Platforms Inquiry landed in 2019, the Australian Government was under public pressure to deliver on that rhetoric. The debates and media coverage surrounding the Code involved a great deal of political posturing and gained much public attention. The Treasurer was delighted to see deals being struck that meant Facebook and Google would pay Australian news companies. He actively portrayed this as the government protecting Australia’s interest and democracy. The fact that the Code was leveraged as a threat does mean that the nuances of the Code are unlikely to be tested in a courtroom in the near future. Yet as a threat it was an effective one, and it does remain in the Treasurer’s toolkit, with the potential to be deployed in the future. While mostly outside the scope of this article, it should definitely be noted that the biggest winner in the Code debate was Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp. They were the strongest advocates of regulation forcing the digital giants to pay for news in the first place, and had the most to gain and least to lose in the process. Most large news organisations in Australia have fared well, too, with new revenue flowing in from Google and Facebook. However, one of the most important facets of the Code was the inclusion of mechanisms to ensure that regional and small news publishers in Australia would be able to negotiate with Facebook and Google. While some might be able to band together and strike terms (and some already have) it is likely that many smaller news companies in Australia will miss out, since the deals being struck with the bigger news companies appear to be big enough to ensure they are not designated, and thus not subject to the Code (Purtill). A few weeks after the Code became law ACCC Chair Rod Sims stated that the “problem we’re addressing with the news media code is simply that we wanted to arrest the decline in money going to journalism” (Kohler). On that front the Code succeeded. However, there is no guarantee the deals will mean money will support actual journalists, rather than disappearing as extra corporate profits. Nor is there any onus on Facebook or Google to inform news organisations about changes to their algorithms that might impact on news rankings. Also, as many Australia news companies are now receiving payments from Google and Facebook, there is a danger the news media will become dependent on that revenue, which may make it harder for journalists to report on the big tech giants without some perceptions of a conflict of interest. In a diplomatic post about the Code, Google thanked everyone who had voiced concerns with the initial drafts of the legislation, thanked Australian users, and celebrated that their newly launched Google News Showcase had “two million views of content” with more than 70 news partners signed up within Australia (Silva, “An Update”). Given that News Showcase had already begun rolling out elsewhere in the world, it is likely Google were already aware they were going to have to contribute to the production of journalism across the globe. The cost of paying for news in Australia may well have fallen within the parameters Google had already decided were acceptable and inevitable before the debate about the Code even began (Purtill). In the aftermath of the Code becoming legislation, Google also posted a cutting critique of Microsoft, arguing they were “making self-serving claims and are even willing to break the way the open web works in an effort to undercut a rival” (Walker). In doing so, Google implicitly claimed that the concessions and changes to the Code they had managed to negotiate effectively positioned them as having championed the free and open web. At the end of February 2021, in a much more self-congratulatory post-mortem of the Code entitled “The Real Story of What Happened with News on Facebook in Australia”, Facebook reiterated their assertion that they bring significant value to news publishers and that the platform receives no real value in return, stating that in 2020 Facebook provided “approximately 5.1 billion free referrals to Australian publishers worth an estimated AU$407 million to the news industry” (Clegg). Deploying one last confused metaphor, Facebook argued the original draft of the Code was “like forcing car makers to fund radio stations because people might listen to them in the car — and letting the stations set the price.” Of course, there was no mention that following that metaphor, Facebook would have bugged the car and used that information to plaster the internal surfaces with personalised advertising. Facebook also touted the success of their Facebook News product in the UK, albeit without setting a date for the rollout of the product in Australia. While Facebook did concede that “the decision to stop the sharing of news in Australia appeared to come out of nowhere”, what the company failed to do was apologise to Australian Facebook users for the confusion and inconvenience they experienced. Nevertheless, on Facebook’s own terms, they certainly positioned themselves as having come out winners. Future research will need to determine whether Facebook’s actions damaged their reputation or encouraged significant numbers of Australians to leave the platform permanently, but in the wake of a number of high-profile scandals, including Cambridge Analytica (Vaidhyanathan), it is hard to see how Facebook’s actions would not have further undermined consumer trust in the company and their main platform (Park et al.). In fighting the Code, Google and Facebook were not just battling the Australian government, but also the implication that if they paid for news in Australia, they likely would also have to do so in other countries. The Code was thus seen as a dangerous precedent far more than just a mechanism to compel payment in Australia. Since both companies ensured they made deals prior to the Code becoming law, neither was initially ‘designated’, and thus neither were actually subject to the Code at the time of writing. The value of the Code has been as a threat and a means to force action from the digital giants. How effective it is as a piece of legislation remains to be seen in the future if, indeed, any company is ever designated. For other countries, the exact wording of the Code might not be as useful as a template, but its utility to force action has surely been noted. Like the inquiry which initiated it, the Code set “the largest digital platforms, Google and Facebook, up against the giants of traditional media, most notably Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation” (Flew and Wilding 50). Yet in a relatively unusual turn of events, both sides of that battle claim to have won. At the same time, EU legislators watched the battle closely as they considered an “Australian-style code” of their own (Dillon). Moreover, in the month immediately following the Code being legislated, both the US and Canada were actively pursuing similar regulation (Baier) with Facebook already threatening to remove news and go dark for Canadian Facebook users (van Boom). For Facebook, and Google, the battle continues, but fighting the Code has meant the genie of paying for news content is well and truly out of the bottle. References Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Digital Platforms Inquiry: Final Report. 25 July 2019. <https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/inquiries/digital-platforms-inquiry/final-report-executive-summary>. ———. “News Media Bargaining Code: Draft Legislation.” Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, 22 July 2020. <https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/news-media-bargaining-code/draft-legislation>. Australian Treasury. Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Act 2021. Attorney-General’s Department, 2 Mar. 2021. <https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021A00021/Html/Text>. Baier, Jansen. “US Could Allow News Distribution Fees for Google, Facebook.” MediaFile, 31 Mar. 2021. <http://www.mediafiledc.com/us-could-allow-news-distribution-fees-for-google-facebook/>. Barnet, Belinda. “Blocking Australian News Shows Facebook’s Pledge to Fight Misinformation Is Farcical.” The Guardian, 18 Feb. 2021. <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/18/blocking-australian-news-shows-facebooks-pledge-to-fight-misinformation-is-farcical>. ———. “Google’s ‘Experiment’ Hiding Australian News Just Shows Its Inordinate Power.” The Guardian, 14 Jan. 2021. <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/14/googles-experiment-hiding-australian-news-just-shows-its-inordinate-power>. Bossio, Diana. “Facebook Has Pulled the Trigger on News Content — and Possibly Shot Itself in the Foot.” The Conversation, 18 Feb. 2021. <http://theconversation.com/facebook-has-pulled-the-trigger-on-news-content-and-possibly-shot-itself-in-the-foot-155547>. Bucher, Taina. “Want to Be on the Top? Algorithmic Power and the Threat of Invisibility on Facebook.” New Media & Society 14.7 (2012): 1164–80. DOI:10.1177/1461444812440159. Cave, Damien. “An Australia with No Google? The Bitter Fight behind a Drastic Threat.” The New York Times, 22 Jan. 2021. <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/business/australia-google-facebook-news-media.html>. Clegg, Nick. “The Real Story of What Happened with News on Facebook in Australia.” About Facebook, 24 Feb. 2021. <https://about.fb.com/news/2021/02/the-real-story-of-what-happened-with-news-on-facebook-in-australia/>. Dillon, Grace. “EU Contemplates Australia-Style Media Bargaining Code; China Imposes New Antitrust Rules.” ExchangeWire.com, 9 Feb. 2021. <https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2021/02/09/eu-contemplates-australia-style-media-bargaining-code-china-imposes-new-antitrust-rules/>. Dudley-Nicholson, Jennifer. “Google May Escape Laws after Spending Spree.” The Daily Telegraph, 17 Feb. 2021. <https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/google-may-escape-tough-australian-news-laws-after-a-lastminute-spending-spree/news-story/d3b37406bf279ff6982287d281d1fbdd>. Easton, Will. “An Update about Changes to Facebook’s Services in Australia.” About Facebook, 1 Sep. 2020. <https://about.fb.com/news/2020/08/changes-to-facebooks-services-in-australia/>. Facebook. Facebook Response to the Australian Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2020. 28 Aug. 2020. <https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Facebook_0.pdf>. Flew, Terry, et al. “Return of the Regulatory State: A Stakeholder Analysis of Australia’s Digital Platforms Inquiry and Online News Policy.” The Information Society 37.2 (2021): 128–45. DOI:10.1080/01972243.2020.1870597. Flew, Terry, and Derek Wilding. “The Turn to Regulation in Digital Communication: The ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry and Australian Media Policy.” Media, Culture & Society 43.1 (2021): 48–65. DOI:10.1177/0163443720926044. Google. Draft News Media and Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code: Submissions in Response. 28 Aug. 2020. <https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Google_0.pdf>. Google Australia. An Update from Google on the News Media Bargaining Code. 2021. YouTube. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHypeuHePEI>. ———. Google Explains Arbitration under the News Media Bargaining Code. 2020. YouTube. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Io01W3migk>. Kohler, Alan. “The News Bargaining Code Is Officially Dead.” The New Daily, 16 Mar. 2021. <https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2021/03/17/alan-kohler-news-bargaining-code-dead/>. Leaver, Tama. “Web’s Inventor Says News Media Bargaining Code Could Break the Internet. He’s Right — but There’s a Fix.” The Conversation, 21 Jan. 2021. <http://theconversation.com/webs-inventor-says-news-media-bargaining-code-could-break-the-internet-hes-right-but-theres-a-fix-153630>. Massola, James. “Frydenberg, Facebook Negotiating through the Weekend.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 Feb. 2021. <https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/frydenberg-facebook-negotiating-through-the-weekend-on-new-media-laws-20210219-p573zp.html>. Meade, Amanda. “ABC Journalism to Appear on Google’s News Showcase in Lucrative Deal.” The Guardian, 22 Feb. 2021. <http://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/23/abc-journalism-to-appear-on-googles-showcase-in-lucrative-deal>. ———. “Google, Facebook and YouTube Found to Make Up More than 80% of Australian Digital Advertising.” The Guardian, 23 Oct. 2020. <http://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/oct/23/google-facebook-and-youtube-found-to-make-up-more-than-80-of-australian-digital-advertising>. ———. “Microsoft’s Bing Ready to Step in If Google Pulls Search from Australia, Minister Says.” The Guardian, 1 Feb. 2021. <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/01/microsofts-bing-ready-to-step-in-if-google-pulls-search-from-australia-minister-says>. ———. “Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Strikes Deal as Facebook Agrees to Pay for Australian Content.” The Guardian, 15 Mar. 2021. <http://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdochs-news-corp-strikes-deal-as-facebook-agrees-to-pay-for-australian-content>. Park, Sora, et al. Digital News Report: Australia 2020. Canberra: News and Media Research Centre, 16 June 2020. DOI:10.25916/5ec32f8502ef0. Purtill, James. “Facebook Thinks It Won the Battle of the Media Bargaining Code — but So Does the Government.” ABC News, 25 Feb. 2021. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-02-26/facebook-google-who-won-battle-news-media-bargaining-code/13193106>. Samios, Zoe, and Lisa Visentin. “‘Historic Moment’: Treasurer Josh Frydenberg Hails Google’s News Content Deals.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 Feb. 2021. <https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/historic-moment-treasurer-josh-frydenberg-hails-google-s-news-content-deals-20210217-p573eu.html>. Shapiro, Carl, et al. The Financial Woes of News Publishers in Australia. 27 Aug. 2020. <https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Google%20Annex.PDF>. Silva, Mel. “An Update on the News Media Bargaining Code.” Google Australia, 1 Mar. 2021. <http://www.google.com.au/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/>. ———. “Supporting Australian Journalism: A Constructive Path Forward – An Update on the News Media Bargaining Code.” Google Australia, 22 Jan. 2021. <https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/jan-6-letter/>. Smyth, Jamie. “Australian Companies Forced to Imagine Life without Google.” Financial Times, 9 Feb. 2021. <https://www.ft.com/content/fa66e8dc-afb1-4a50-8dfa-338a599ad82d>. Snape, Jack. “Facebook Unrepentant as Prime Minister Dubs Emergency Services Block ‘Arrogant.’” ABC News, 18 Feb. 2021. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-18/facebook-unrepentant-scott-morrison-dubs-move-arrogant/13169340>. ———. “‘These Are Good Deals’: Treasurer Praises Google News Deals amid Pressure from Government Legislation.” ABC News, 17 Feb. 2021. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-17/treasurer-praises-good-deals-between-google-news-seven/13163676>. Taylor, Josh. “Guardian Australia Strikes Deal with Google to Join News Showcase.” The Guardian, 20 Feb. 2021. <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/20/guardian-australia-strikes-deal-with-google-to-join-news-showcase>. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. Van Boom, Daniel. “Facebook Could Block News in Canada like It Did in Australia.” CNET, 29 Mar. 2021. <https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-could-block-news-in-canada-like-it-did-in-australia/>. Visentin, Lisa. “Facebook Refriends Australia after Last-Minute Changes to Media Code.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Feb. 2021. <https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/government-agrees-to-last-minute-amendments-to-media-code-20210222-p574kc.html>. Walker, Kent. “Our Ongoing Commitment to Supporting Journalism.” Google, 12 Mar. 2021. <https://blog.google/products/news/google-commitment-supporting-journalism/>.

Abstract:

IntroductionTraditionally, suburbs have been conceived as dormitory – in binary opposition to the inner-city (Powell). Supporting this stereotypical view have been gendered binaries between inner and outer city areas; densely populated vs. sprawl; gentrified terraces and apartment culture vs. new estates and first home buyers; zones of (male) production and creativity against (female) sedate, consumer territory. These binaries have for over a decade been thoroughly criticised by urban researchers, who have traced such representations and demonstrated how they are discriminatory and incorrect (see Powell; Mee; Dowling and Mee). And yet, such binaries persist in popular media commentaries and even in academic research (Gibson and Brennan-Horley). In creative city research, inner-city areas have been bestowed with the supposed correct mix of conditions that may lead to successful creative ventures. In part, this discursive positioning has been borne out of prior attempts to mapthe location of creativity in the city. Existing research on the geography of creativity in the city have relied on proxy data forms: mapping data on firms and/or employment in the creative industry sectors (e.g. Gibson, Murphy and Freestone; Markusen et al.; Watson). In doing so, the focus has rested on “winners” – i.e. headquarters of major arts and cultural institutions located in inner city/CBD locations, or by looking for concentrations of registered creative businesses. Such previous studies are useful because they give some indication of the geographical spread and significance of creative activities in cities, and help answer questions about the locational preferences of creative industries, including their gravitational pull towards each other in an agglomerative sense (Scott). However, such studies rely on (usually) one proxy data source to reveal the presence of creative activities, rather than detail how creativity is itself apparent in everyday working lives, or embedded in the spaces, networks and activities of the city. The latter, more qualitative aspects of the lived experience of creativity can only at best be inferred from proxy data such as employment numbers and firm location. In contrast, other researchers have promoted ethnographic methods (Drake; Shorthose; Felton, Collis and Graham) including interviewing, snowballing through contacts and participant observation, as means to get ‘inside’ creative industries and to better understand their embeddedness in place and networks of social relations. Such methods provide rich explanation of the internal dynamics and social logics of creative production, but having stemmed from text-based recorded interviews, they produce data without geographical co-ordinates necessary to be mapped in the manner of employment or business location data – and thus remain comparatively “aspatial”, with no georeferenced component. Furthermore, in such studies relational interactions with material spaces of home, work and city are at best conveyed in text form only – from recorded interviews – and thus cannot be aggregated easily as a mapped representation of city life. This analysis takes a different tack, by mapping responses from interviews, which were then analysed using methods more common in mapping and analysing proxy data sources. By taking a qualitative route toward data collection, this paper illustrates how suburbs can actually play a major role in creative city economies, expanding understandings of what constitutes a creative workplace and examining the resulting spatial distributions according to their function. Darwin and the Creative Tropical City Project This article draws on fieldwork carried out in Darwin, NT a small but important city in Australia’s tropical north. It is the government and administration capital of the sparsely populated Northern Territory and continues to grapple with its colonial past, a challenging climate, small population base and remoteness from southern centres. The city’s development pattern is relatively new, even in Australian terms, only dating back to the late 1970s. After wholesale destruction by Cyclone Tracy, Darwin was rebuilt displaying the hallmarks of post-1970 planning schemes: wide ring-roads and cul-de-sacs define its layout, its urban form dominated by stout single-story suburban dwellings built to withstand cyclonic activity. More recently, Darwin has experienced growth in residential tower block apartments, catering to the city’s high degree of fly-in, fly-out labour market of mining, military and public service workers. These high rise developments have been focussed unsurprisingly on coastal suburbs with ample sections of foreshore. Further adding to its peculiar layout, the geographic centre is occupied by Darwin Airport (a chief military base for Australia’s northern frontier) splitting the northern suburbs from those closer to its small CBD, itself jutting to the south on a peninsula. Lacking then in Darwin are those attributes so often heralded as the harbingers of a city’s creative success – density, walkability, tracts of ex-industrial brownfields sites ripe for reinvention as creative precincts. Darwin is a city dominated by its harsh tropical climate, decentralised and overtly dependant on private car transport. But, if one cares to look beyond the surface, Darwin is also a city punching above its weight on account of the unique possibilities enabled by transnational Asian proximity and its unique role as an outlet for indigenous creative work from across the top of the continent (Luckman, Gibson and Lea). Against this backdrop, Creative Tropical City: Mapping Darwin’s Creative Industries (CTC), a federally funded ARC project from 2006 to 2009, was envisaged to provide the evidential base needed to posit future directions for Darwin’s creative industries. City and Territory leaders had by 2004 become enchanted by the idea of ‘the creative city’ (Landry) – but it is questionable how well these policy discourses travel when applied to disparate examples such as Darwin (Luckman, Gibson and Lea). To provide an empirical grounding to creative city ideas and to ensure against policy fetishism the project was developed to map the nature, extent and change over time of Darwin’s creative industries and imagine alternate futures for the city based on a critical appraisal of the applicability of national and international creative industry policy frameworks to this remote, tropical location (Lea et al.). Toward a Typology of Darwin’s Creative Workplaces This article takes one data set gathered during the course of the CTC project, based around a participatory mapping exercise, where interviewees responded to questions about where creative industry activities took place in Darwin by drawing on paper maps. Known as mental maps, these were used to gather individual representations of place (Tuan), but in order to extend their applicability for spatial querying, responses were transferred to a Geographic Information System (GIS) for storage, collation and analysis (Matei et al.). During semi-structured interviews with 98 Darwin-based creative industry practitioners, participants were provided with a base map of Darwin displaying Statistical Local Area (SLA) boundaries and roads for mark up in response to specific questions about where creative activities occurred (for more in depth discussion of this method and its varied outputs, refer to Brennan-Horley and Gibson). The analysis discussed here only examines answers to one question: “Where do you work?” This question elicited a total of 473 work locations from 98 respondents – a fourfold increase over statistics gleaned from employment measures alone (Brennan-Horley). Such an increase resulted from participants identifying their everyday work practices which, by necessity, took place across multiple locations. When transferring the spatial location of workplaces into the GIS, each site was coded depending on whether it was cited by the interviewee as their “major” or primary place of work, or if the place being discussed played a secondary or “minor” role in their creative practice. For example, an artist’s studio was categorised as major, but other minor sites also featured in their mental maps, for example, galleries, supply locations and teaching sites. Each worksite was then assigned to one of four categories: Front, Back, Networking and Supply (Table 1). In a similar fashion to McCannell’s work on the “front and back regions” of tourist towns (597), the creative industries, predicated on the production and exchange of texts, objects and ideas also display front spaces of sorts – sites that facilitate interactions between practitioner and audiences, spaces for performance and consumption. Operating behind these front spaces, are sites where creative endeavours take place – perhaps not as so readily seen or engaged with by wider publics. For example, a rehearsal room, artist’s studio or a theatre company’s office may not be key sites of interaction between creator and audience but remain nonetheless important sites of creative work. However, a binary of Front versus Back could not encapsulate the variety of other everyday, prosaic work sites evident in the data. Participants indicated on their maps visits to the post office to send artworks, going to Bunnings to buy paint (and inadvertently networking with others), through to more fleeting spaces such as artist materials fossicked from parklands to photoshoot locations. These supply sites (each themselves positioned along a continuum of “creative” to “mundane”) were typified as supply locations: sites that act as places to gather inputs into the creative process. Finally, sites where meetings and networking took place (more often than not, these were indicated by participants as occurring away from their major work place) were assigned under a heading of networking spaces. Table 1: A typology of creative workplaces Space Definition Coded examples Front A space for consumption/exchange of creative goods, outputs or expertise. Performance space, Market, Gallery, Client Location, Shopfront, Cinema, Exhibition space, Museum, Festival space Back A site of production, practice or business management Office, Studio, Rehearsal Space, Teaching Space, Factory, Recording Studio Networking A space to meet clients or others involved in creative industries Meeting places Supply Spaces where supplies for creative work are sourced Supplier, Photoshoot Location, Story Location, Shoot Location, Storage Coding data into discrete units and formulating a typology is a reductive process, thus a number of caveats apply to this analysis. First there were numerous cases where worksites fell across multiple categories. This was particularly the case with practitioners from the music and performing arts sector whose works are created and consumed at the same location, or a clothing designer whose studio is also their shopfront. To avoid double counting, these cases were assigned to one category only, usually split in favour of the site’s main function (i.e. performance sites to Front spaces). During interviews, participants were asked to locate parts of Darwin they went to for work, rather than detail the exact role or name for each of those spaces. While most participants were forthcoming and descriptive in their responses, in two percent of cases (n=11) the role of that particular space was undefined. These spaces were placed into the “back” category. Additionally, the data was coded to refer to individual location instances aggregated to the SLA level, and does not take into account the role of specific facilities within suburbs, even though certain spaces were referred to regularly in the transcripts. It was often the case that a front space for one creative industry practitioner was a key production site for another, or operated simultaneously as a networking site for both. Future disaggregated analyses will tease out the important roles that individual venues play in Darwin’s creative economy, but are beyond this article’s scope. Finally, this analysis is only a snapshot in time, and captures some of the ephemeral and seasonal aspects of creative workplaces in Darwin that occurred around the time of interviewing. To illustrate, there are instances of photographers indicating photo shoot locations, sites that may only be used once, or may be returned to on multiple occasions. As such, if this exercise were to be carried out at another time, a different geography may result. Results A cross-tabulation of the workplace typology against major and minor locations is given in Table 2. Only 20 per cent of worksites were designated as major worksites with the remaining 80 per cent falling into the minor category. There was a noticeable split between Back and Front spaces and their Major/Minor designation. 77 per cent of back spaces were major locations, while the majority of Front spaces (92 per cent) fell into the minor category. The four most frequently occurring Minor Front spaces – client location, performance space, markets and gallery – collectively comprise one third of all workplaces for participants, pointing to their important role as interfacing spaces between creative output produced or worked on elsewhere, and wider publics/audiences. Understandably, all supply sites and networking places were categorised as minor, with each making up approximately 20 per cent of all workplaces. Table 2: creative workplaces cross tabulated against primary and secondary workplaces and divided by creative workplace typology. Major Minor Grand Total Back Office 44 1 45 Studio 22 - 22 Rehearsal Space 7 11 18 Undefined - 11 11 Teaching Space 3 1 4 Factory 1 - 1 Recording Studio 1 - 1 Leanyer Swamp 1 - 1 Back space total 79 24 103 Front Client Location - 70 70 Performance Space 2 67 69 Market 1 11 12 Gallery 3 8 11 Site - 8 8 Shopfront 1 3 4 Exhibition Space - 3 3 Cinema 2 1 3 Museum 1 1 2 Shop/Studio 1 - 1 Gallery and Office 1 - 1 NightClub 1 - 1 Festival space - 1 1 Library 1 - 1 Front Space total 14 173 187 Networking Meeting Place - 94 94 Networking space total - 94 94 Supply Supplier - 52 52 Photoshoot Location - 14 14 Story Location - 9 9 Shoot Location - 7 7 Storage - 4 4 Bank - 1 1 Printer - 1 1 Supply Space total - 88 88 Grand Total 93 379 472 The maps in Figures 1 through 4 analyse the results spatially, with individual SLA scores provided in Table 3. The maps use location quotients, representing the diversion of each SLA from the city-wide average. Values below one represent a less than average result, values greater than one reflecting higher results. The City-Inner SLA maintains the highest overall percentage of Darwin’s creative worksites (35 per cent of the total) across three categories, Front, Back and especially Networking sites (60 per cent). The concentration of key arts institutions, performance spaces and CBD office space is the primary reason for this finding. Additionally, the volume of hospitality venues in the CBD made it an amenable place to conduct meetings away from major back spaces. Figure 1: Back spaces by Statistical Local Areas Figure 2: Front spaces by Statistical Local Areas Figure 3: Networking sites, by Statistical Local Areas Figure 4: Supply sites by Statistical Local Areas However this should not deter from the fact that the majority of all worksites (65 per cent) indicated by participants actually reside in suburban locations. Numerically, the vast majority (70 per cent) of Darwin’s Front spaces are peppered across the suburbs, with agglomerations occurring in The Gardens, Fannie Bay, Nightcliff and Parap. The Gardens is the location for Darwin’s biggest weekly market (Mindl Beach night market), and a performance space for festivals and events during the city’s long dry season. Mirroring more the cultures of its neighbouring SE Asian counterparts, Darwin sustains a vibrant market culture unlike that of any other Australian capital city. As the top end region is monsoonal, six months of the year is guaranteed to be virtually rain free, allowing for outdoor activities such as markets and festivals to flourish. Markets in Darwin have a distinctly suburban geography with each of the three top suburban SLAs (as measured by Front spaces) hosting a regular market, each acting as temporary sites of networking and encounter for creative producers and audiences. Importantly, over half of the city’s production sites (Back spaces) were dispersed across the suburbs in two visible arcs, one extending from the city taking in Fannie Bay and across to Winnellie via Parap, and through the northern coastal SLAs from Coconut Grove to Brinkin (Figure 1). Interestingly, 85 per cent of all supply points were also in suburban locations. Figure 4 maps this suburban specialisation, with the light industrial suburb of Winnellie being the primary location for Darwin’s creative practitioners to source supplies. Table 3: Top ten suburbs by workplace mentions, tabulated by workplace type* SLA name Front Back Networking Supply Workplace total Inner City/CBD City - Inner 56 (29.9%) 35 (36%) 57 (60.6%) 13 (14.8%) 162 (34.3%) Inner City Total 56 (29.9%) 35 (36%) 57 (60.6%) 13 (14.8%) 162 (34.3%) Top 10 suburban The Gardens 30 (16%) 3 (2.9%) 6 (6.4%) 5 (5.7%) 44 (9.3%) Winnellie 3 (1.6%) 7 (6.8%) 1 (1.1%) 24 (27.3%) 35 (7.4%) Parap 14 (7.5%) 4 (3.9%) 6 (6.4%) 9 (10.2%) 33 (7%) Fannie Bay 17 (9.1%) 5 (4.9%) 4 (4.3%) 2 (2.3%) 28 (5.9%) Nightcliff 14 (7.5%) 7 (6.8%) 2 (2.1%) 4 (4.5%) 27 (5.7%) Stuart Park 4 (2.1%) 8 (7.8%) 4 (4.3%) 4 (4.5%) 20 (4.2%) Brinkin 1 (0.5%) 8 (7.8%) 9 (9.6%) 2 (2.3%) 20 (4.2%) Larrakeyah 5 (2.7%) 5 (4.9%) 1 (1.1%) 3 (3.4%) 14 (3%) City - Remainder 5 (2.7%) 2 (1.9%) 0 (0%) 6 (6.8%) 13 (2.8%) Coconut Grove 3 (1.6%) 4 (3.9%) 1 (1.1%) 4 (4.5%) 12 (2.5%) Rapid Creek 3 (1.6%) 6 (5.8%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 9 (1.9%) Suburban Total** 131 (70.1%) 67 (65%) 37 (39.4%) 75 (85%) 310 (65.7%) City-Wide Total 187 103 94 88 472 *All percentages calculated from city- wide total **Suburban total row includes all 27 suburbs, not just top tens Discussion There are two key points to take from this analysis. First, the results show the usefulness of combining in-depth qualitative research with GIS mapping methods. Interviewing creative workers about where activities in their working days (or nights) take place, rather than defaulting to incomplete industry statistics can reveal a more comprehensive view of where creative work manifests in the city. Second, the role that multiple, decentred and often suburban facilities played as sites of supply, production and consumption in Darwin’s creative economy leads theories about the spatiality of creativity in the city in new directions. These results clearly show that the cultural binaries that theorists have assumed shape perceptions of the city and its suburbs do not appear in this instance to be infusing the everyday nature of creative work in the city. What was revealed by this data is that creative work in the city creates a variegated city produced through practitioners’ ordinary daily activities. Creative workers are not necessarily resisting or reinventing ideas of what the suburbs mean, they are getting on with creative work in ways that connect suburbs and the city centre in complex – and yet sometimes quite prosaic – ways. This is not to say that the suburbs do not present challenges for the effective conduct of creative work in Darwin – transport availability and lack of facilities were consistently cited problems by practitioners – but instead what is argued here is that ways of understanding the suburbs (in popular discourse, and in response in critical cultural theory) that emanate from Sydney or Los Angeles do not provide a universal conceptual framework for a city like Darwin. By not presuming that there is a meta-discourse of suburbs and city centres that everyone in every city is bound to, this analysis captured a different geography. In conclusion, the case of Darwin displayed decentred and dispersed sites of creativity as the norm rather than the exception. Accordingly, creative city planning strategies should take into account that decentralised and varied creative work sites exist beyond the purview of flagship institutions and visible creative precincts. References Brennan-Horley, Chris. “Multiple Work Sites and City-Wide Networks: A Topological Approach to Understanding Creative Work.” Australian Geographer 41 (2010): 39-56. ———, and Chris Gibson. “Where Is Creativity in the City? Integrating Qualitative and GIS Methods.” Environment and Planning A 41 (2009): 2295–2614.Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. “Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice.” The Information Society 26 (2010): 104-112. Dowling, Robyn, and Kathy Mee. “Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the End of the Millennium.” Sydney: The Emergence of a World City. Ed. John Connell. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000. Drake, Graham. “‘This Place Gives Me Space’: Place and Creativity in the Creative Industries.” Geoforum 34 (2003): 511–524. Felton, Emma, Christy Collis and Phil Graham. “Making Connections: Creative Industries Networks in Outer-Suburban Locations.” Australian Geographer 41 (2010): 57-70. Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. “Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research.” Urban Policy and Research 24 (2006): 455–71. ———, Peter Murphy, and Robert Freestone. “Employment and Socio-Spatial Relations in Australia's Cultural Economy.” Australian Geographer 33 (2002): 173-189. Landry, Charles. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Comedia/Earthscan, 2000. Lea, Tess, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson, Donal Fitzpatrick, Chris Brennan-Horley, Julie Willoughby-Smith, and Karen Hughes. Creative Tropical City: Mapping Darwin’s Creative Industries. Darwin: Charles Darwin University, 2009. Luckman, Sue, Chris Gibson, and Tess Lea. “Mosquitoes in the Mix: How Transferable Is Creative City Thinking?” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (2009): 30, 47-63. Markusen, Ann, Gregory Wassall, Douglas DeNatale, and Randy Cohen. “Defining the Creative Economy: Industry and Occupational Approaches.” Economic Development Quarterly 22 (2008): 24-45. Matei, Sorin, Sandra Ball-Rokeach, and Jack Qiu. “Fear and Misperception of Los Angeles Urban Space: A Spatial-Statistical Study of Communication-Shaped Mental Maps.” Communication Research 28 (2001): 429-463. McCannell, Dean. “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings.” The American Journal of Sociology 79 (1973): 589-603. Mee, Kathy. “Dressing Up the Suburbs: Representations of Western Sydney.” Metropolis Now: Planning and the Urban in Contemporary Australia Eds. Katherine Gibson and Sophie Watson. Sydney: Pluto Press, 1994. 60–77. Powell, Diane. Out West: Perceptions of Sydney’s Western Suburbs. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993. Shorthose, Jim. “Accounting for Independent Creativity in the New Cultural Economy.” Media International Australia 112 (2004): 150-161. Scott, Allen J. The Cultural Economy of Cities. London: Sage, 2000. Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Images and Mental Maps.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 65 (1975): 205-213. Watson, Allan. “Global Music City: Knowledge and Geographical Proximity in London’s Recorded Music Industry.” Area 40 (2008): 12–23.