Journal articles: 'Do-say correspondence' – Grafiati (2024)

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Lying constitutes a problematic behavior for parents and other social agents involved in children's development of effective behaviors. This analysis suggests that lying is, in part, the name for a lack of correspondence between saying and doing, and that effective correspondence training procedures can be designed to teach truthfulness in children through the teaching of either promise-then-do correspondence or do-then-report correspondence. This paper proposes a relational definition of lying and shows its applications in the area of correspondence training. The generalization and maintenance of truthfulness, advantages and disadvantages of correspondence training in the management of lying are also considered.

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Empirical studies in verbal-nonverbal correspondence training have cited Luria's regulatory concept to explain why children who promise what they will do later (say-do or promise-do sequence) often show more correspondence between their verbal and nonverbal behavior than children who report about their prior behavior (in a do-say or do-report sequence). This paper suggests that it is not Luria's regulatory concept that explains the different effectiveness of these methods, but rather the manner in which reinforcement is programmed at various points in their verbal-nonverbal chains.

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Although neglect is the most common form of child maltreatment, a review of the literature since 1980 reveals a lack of controlled child neglect intervention programs. The aim of this study is to assess a new intervention program to improve the classroom behavior of children exposed to neglect only, by reducing disruptive conduct and promoting adaptive conduct. Two matched groups were selected with children of the same ages, sex, and social class (cultural and economic level) and with mothers of similar ages. The experimental group comprised of five children suffering from neglect and no other type of maltreatment. The control group had five children not abused or neglected. All the children were in the same class at school. The percentage of time per session that each child spent engaged in disruptive behavior was measured (baseline) and was found significantly higher among neglected children. Say-Do-Say Correspondence Training was applied with the neglected children and a rapid, significant reduction in their disruptive behavior was observed (and statistically confirmed), bringing such behavior down to the level of the control (i.e., non-neglected) children. These results were maintained when the intervention was halted. We concluded that the adaptive and classroom behavior of neglected children can be improved with this non-intrusive intervention.

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The paper analyzes the results of a sentence repetition task performed by Lithuanian L2 speakers of different language proficiency levels. This paper focuses on a set of targeted verb forms included in the task because they are less likely to occur in free production. The different forms the speakers produced are analyzed by considering their correspondence (or not) to the targeted form, by comparing the speakers among each other with respect to their learner variety and by comparing the task results to the repertoire of the same speaker in the free production data. In multiple cases of failed re-production, the analysis examines what the targeted forms were substituted with and tries to identify possible reasons for such substitution. This analysis confirms the general inability of the basic variety speakers to distinguish between morphologically different forms and the dominant trend showing that L2 learners are more meaning-focused than form-focused. The analysis also shows growing implicit knowledge, or at least gradual passive acquisition, of the less frequent forms as the speaker advances in the post-basic continuum.

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The condensed detachment rule, or ruleD, was first proposed by Carew Meredith in the 1950's for propositional logic based on implication. It is a combination of modus ponens with a “minimal” amount of substitution. We shall give a precise detailed statement of rule D. (Some attempts in the published literature to do this have been inaccurate.)The D-completeness question for a given set of logical axioms is whether every formula deducible from the axioms by modus ponens and substitution can be deduced instead by rule D alone. Under the well-known formulae-as-types correspondence between propositional logic and combinator-based type-theory, rule D turns out to correspond exactly to an algorithm for computing principal type-schemes in combinatory logic. Using this fact, we shall show that D is complete for intuitionistic and classical implicational logic. We shall also show that D is incomplete for two weaker systems, BCK- and BCI-logic.In describing the formulae-as-types correspondence it is common to say that combinators correspond to proofs in implicational logic. But if “proofs” means “proofs by the usual rules of modus ponens and substitution”, then this is not true. It only becomes true when we say “proofs by rule D”; we shall describe the precise correspondence in Corollary 6.7.1 below.This paper is written for readers in propositional logic and in combinatory logic. Since workers in one field may not feel totally happy in the other, we include short introductions to both fields.We wish to record thanks to Martin Bunder, Adrian Rezus and the referee for helpful comments and advice.

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This is a case study about pronunciation teaching in Swedish as a second language. The aim of this study is to compare pronunciation teaching for adults in Finland and Sweden. Data were gathered via interviews with eight teachers and observations of eight Swedish classes. The theoretical framework is language teacher cognition, which implies that we compare what teachers say with what they actually do in the classrooms. The study shows that teachers in both countries find pronunciation a central field of Swedish teaching. However, they think that they lack methods for pronunciation teaching. Most of the pronunciation teaching observed is implicit and integrated in the teaching of other elements, such as vocabulary and grammar. In Sweden, there were more examples of explicit pronunciation teaching than in Finland. In Finland, the minority position of Swedish implies certain challenges for teaching pronunciation and other aspects of the language. Overall, there was much correspondence between the interviews and the observed classes in the two countries.

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Academic literature has begun to be interested in the informational gaps between what companies say and do in relation to their financial performance and their commitment to society and the environment, identifying the use of self-protection and self-enhancement strategies before their interest groups. In this research, based on a statistical analysis of textual data and a correspondence analysis, the sentiment of the discourse that Spanish CEOs have held with their stakeholders regarding the operational and strategic decisions they made in the face of COVID-19 is analysed. The evidence shows that managers who promptly reported negative news regarding divestments, cutting expenses and destroying jobs, used the epidemic as justification. The leaders who combined these decisions with responsible actions—focused on the ethical and commercial sustainable dimensions—adopted an approach with a different degree of self-enhancement to value their responsible decisions. In contrast, optimistic CEOs, altruistically committed to society, opted for more personal, emotional, dynamic and constant channels and procedures, avoiding selfish attributions for their actions.

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A well-known example of variation in Early Modern English is found in the morphology of the third-person singular present tense indicative verb. In general terms there was a gradual shift from - th to - s (e.g., pleaseth to pleases). However, previous studies such as Kytö (1993) and Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003) found that this shift was by no means uniform, varying by, for example, region, type of text, and author. More specifically, Nevalainen, Raumolin-Brunberg, and Trudgill (2001) analyzed the distribution of endings for the third-person singular present indicative verb in Early Modern East Anglian English, i.e., the variety of English used in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. However, for the final twenty-year period of their study (1660-1680), they only have four informants. This article analyzes the distribution of verb endings for a larger number of informants during this period, which marks the final stages of - th recession in East Anglian English, using letters written in Norfolk. The corpus based on these letters allows for a detailed analysis of linguistic and extralinguistic factors that influenced this distribution. Linguistic factors include the stem-final sound and verb-type ( have, do, and say are analyzed separately). Among the extralinguistic factors analyzed are the sex of the author and addressee, the level of formality, and the author’s social class. One of the informants in this study is Sir Thomas Browne. The distribution of verb endings in his correspondence makes him an outlier. His usage has led some authors to exclude his results from their analysis. The present article offers a new approach to dealing with such cases. The overall results are compared with those for other parts of England from the same period in order to identify patterns of regional variation. Finally, an analysis of correspondence for the period 1680-1750 indicates that by this time - th had more or less disappeared from Norfolk correspondence.

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Plutarch's essayde fortuna Romanorumhas attracted divergent judgements. Ziegler dismissed it as ‘eine nicht weiter ernst zu nehmende rhetorische Stilübung’. By Flacelière it was hailed as ‘une ébauche de méditation sur le prodigieux destin de Rome’. It is time to consider the work afresh and to discover whether there is common ground between these two views. Rather than offering a general appreciation, my treatment will take the work chapter by chapter, considering points of interest as they arise. This method will enable us to compare what Plutarch says on particular subjects and themes inde fort. Rom.with what he says or does not say about them elsewhere. We shall thus be able to see clearly that for the most part the ideas he presents in the essay correspond with his thoughts about the rôle of fortune expressed in more serious writing, and that, where there is no correspondence, this is attributable to the rhetorical background. I do not intend to address directly the frequently discussed but insoluble question of whether we have inde fort. Rom.only one of two original works, that is whether there was once ade virtute Romanorumwhich Plutarch composed or answered.De fort. Rom.itself in fact gives almost as much prominence to άρετή as to τúχη, and their competing roles will be carefully evaluated. Nor do I look at the dating of the work (an early date has been suggested on grounds of genre, a later one on grounds of the essay's familiarity with Rome, but there is not enough evidence for a firm conclusion).

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AbstractThe author argues that the Norwegian welfare state has renounced its duties toward a majority of citizens with gender incongruence (i.e. lack of correspondence between sex assigned at birth and a person’s gender identity). The National Treatment Centre for Transsexualism (NBTS in Norwegian), the sole authorised provider of healthcare for gender dysphoria (discomfort related to gender incongruence) in Norway, exercises a strict interpretation of the diagnostic criteria for transsexualism, and rejects all but a quarter of annual referrals. Those “disqualified” do not have access to a second opinion, nor has the Norwegian public health sector established alternative healthcare services, thereby failing its transgender citizens. With regard to legal issues, the Norwegian state failed its transgender citizens by requesting irreversible sterilisation until July 2016 before individuals with gender incongruence can claim legal gender recognition. This is an obvious breach of human rights. Additionally, those rejected by NBTS for not being so-called “real transsexuals” do not have an opportunity to request a legal gender change, and thus the state discriminates, once again, against these gender variant people. Moreover, the author points out that NBTS has a major say in the framing and implementation of trans healthcare policies, building on the conventional gender binary model, which is supported by the “gender-corrected women and men” of the Harry Benjamin Resource Centre (hereafter HBRS), the Clinic’s patient association. This policy framing ensures necessary trans related healthcare only to a very small proportion of citizens with gender incongruence, namely those “selected” by the NBTS, thus causing a grossly unequal distribution of resources within public healthcare services. In order to conceptualise these biased and discriminatory policies toward a considerable number of transgender and gender variant citizens, the author applies political science scholar Nancy Fraser’s conceptual framework of “recognition, (re)presentation and (re-)distribution”. Gender variant groups’ lack of recognition excludes them from access to political representation, and reproduces non-recognition of gender diversity in the transgender spectrum. The author understands the Norwegian authorities’ inept management of large groups of citizens with gender identity issues as institutionalised cisgenderism.

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Beimel et al. in CCC 12’ put forward a paradigm for constructing Private Information Retrieval (PIR) schemes, capturing several previous constructions for k ≥ 3 servers. A key component in the paradigm, applicable to three-server PIR, is a share conversion scheme from corresponding linear three-party secret sharing schemes with respect to a certain type of “modified universal” relation. In a useful particular instantiation of the paradigm, they used a share conversion from ( 2 , 3 ) -CNF over Z m to three-additive sharing over Z p β for primes p 1 , p 2 , p where p 1 ≠ p 2 and m = p 1 · p 2 . The share conversion is with respect to the modified universal relation C S m . They reduced the question of whether a suitable share conversion exists for a triple ( p 1 , p 2 , p ) to the (in)solvability of a certain linear system over Z p . Assuming a solution exists, they also provided a efficient (in m , log p ) construction of such a sharing scheme. They proved a suitable conversion exists for several triples of small numbers using a computer program; in particular, p = p 1 = 2 , p 2 = 3 yielded the three-server PIR with the best communication complexity at the time. This approach quickly becomes infeasible as the resulting matrix is of size Θ ( m 4 ) . In this work, we prove that the solvability condition holds for an infinite family of ( p 1 , p 2 , p ) ’s, answering an open question of Beimel et al. Concretely, we prove that if p 1 , p 2 > 2 and p = p 1 , then a conversion of the required form exists. We leave the full characterization of such triples, with potential applications to PIR complexity, to future work. Although larger (particularly with m a x ( p 1 , p 2 ) > 3 ) triples do not yield improved three-server PIR communication complexity via BIKO’s construction, a richer family of PIR protocols we obtain by plugging in our share conversions might have useful properties for other applications. Moreover, we hope that the analytic techniques for understanding the relevant matrices we developed would help to understand whether share conversion as above for C S m , where m is a product of more than two (say three) distinct primes, exists. The general BIKO paradigm generalizes to work for such Z m ’s. Furthermore, the linear condition in Beimel et al. generalizes to m’s, which are products of more than two primes, so our hope is somewhat justified. In case such a conversion does exist, plugging it into BIKO’s construction would lead to major improvement to the state of the art of three-server PIR communication complexity (reducing Communication Complexity (CC) in correspondence with certain matching vector families).

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Consequently, the present study sheds light on a very important aspect that is a contrastive analysis of segmental vowel phonemes of both L1 and L2. As one of the Problems, that is affecting the teaching/learning process of ELT. Then to clarify the different areas between the segmental vowel phonemes of Arabic and English. It also aims at making a comparative segmental analysis in the vowel phonemes of both L1 - L2, in order to shed light on the areas of difficulties. Taking into account the different forms of sounds in relation to their spellings. Also the sound systems of both languages L1 and L2. Particular the areas of common mistakes. Thus, it encourages teachers to check English pronunciation before teaching and predict problems before they happen. Also the use of advanced methods and pronunciation dictionary for (IPA). It also helps learners to master all the significant sound features and basic structural patterns. On the phonological levels, differences cause difficulties e.g. The areas of Arabic /p/ and /v/ ,and English front vowels phonemes /i:/-/i/- /e/- /æ/, central /ə:/- /ə/-/Λ/,and back/a:/-/o/-/ ﬤ:/-/u/-/u:/ phonemes in English, they do not exist in Arabic. In addition to the English vowel /e/ which doesn’t exist in Arabic. This observation can't be only linguistically, but it will also confirm by L2 learners. These theories need to be clarified in order to allow rules to be expressed. In the English language, there are 26 alphabetical letters which are totally different than their sounds. Another drawback is the alphabetical method which is intended to teach reading by means of spelling. There is no one –to- one correspondence between sounds and letters. That is to say, each different sound cannot be represented by the same letter. There are also words which are spelt differently but sound the same. Therefore, the present study concentrates on the difficulties that Learners and beginners face in using English segmental vowel phonemes. It also tries to get new methods and new ideas. This study is based on the practical experience of the writer, being specialized in English phonology, a lecturer and an author of a phonetics textbook for beginner learners who learn English as a foreign language. And as a supervisor who follows undergraduate students in the field of experience. That is, in order to find out possible remedial solutions, better suggestion and recommendations. Then follows a descriptive method to achieve this purpose. With the sample of twenty student girls. As a case study of undergraduate trainees of Majmaah Universitiy in the training field, to collect data from the subjects’ real environment during talks, speeches, presentations and teaching in the Field Experience. The results were recorded to be analyzed. In particular, the areas of English vowels and diphthongs that are totally different than in Arabic.

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I became a Divisional Public Education Officer (DPEO) for the College's External Affairs Department in 1990. My first media training day was most informative. I learned how to disseminate information; how to inform journalists about issues pertinent on the day; and ways to challenge stigma. I learned that it was safest to assume that most journalists do not usually understand the complexity of mental health issues. The health correspondent for the BBC at the time showed how adequate preparation – making written information available in a helpful question and answer format – and development of personal relationships with journalists through understanding how they work, their deadlines, pressures, etc., are important factors in trying to do the job properly. I also learned the golden rule: never say anything off the record.

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It is truism to say that for an archaeologist the question of chronology is particularly important. In relation to Tarnobrzeg Lusatian Culture, this topic was frequently raised, which in the case of its early and late stages gave satisfactory results. There are numerous determinants of these phases, and they can also be divided into smaller periodical stages. The dynamics of change is well understood. However,p hase II is far more problematic. Basically, it is represented by one type of vessel. In addition, the 150–200 year phase is very compact in terms of inventory and it is almost impossible to identify older or younger materials. The problem of its decline also needs to be emphasized, where when treated through the prism of the San River style as it usually is, it should be prolonged to HaD. The author, using the correspondence board, tries to indicate materials which can be related to the older and younger episode of the second phase of Tarnobrzeg Lusatian Culture.

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‘Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.’ TS Eliot (1888–1965) Have you ever wondered what medical journal editors do? Most editors in the medical field are unpaid and the work is part of the wider culture of service provided by so many in the medical profession. Together with the editorial board and the publisher, an editor will decide the direction of the journal. For instance, decisions are made about what sort of material should be published. One of the most common tasks, however, is the daily screening of manuscripts submitted for publication, many of which are rejected without peer review owing to poor quality, redundant material or the subject of the article being beyond the scope of the journal. After deciding which peer reviewers to send an article to, the editor must make a final decision on a manuscript, which may not necessarily concur with the advice given by the reviewers. With this comes a huge amount of personal responsibility and one to the organisation the editor represents. Take the example of George Lundberg, the editor of JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, who was fired from his position after 17 years with the alleged faux pas of rushing to publish an article to coincide with the Clinton impeachment hearings ‘to extract political leverage.’ Lundberg published research showing that 60% of college students surveyed in 1991 did not think that engaging in oral sex was classed as actually ‘having sex.’ 1 While neither the methods used in the survey nor the results were disputed, the timing of the publication at an awkward political juncture was. Extrapolating this, editors are therefore not just responsible for the content of what is published but also the impact of publications in the wider arena. Editors must also handle a great deal of correspondence, including author queries and complaints, and respond to them in a timely manner. Communication with the team, the publisher, authors and readers is a vital skill. Finally, the editor needs to deal with the journal’s ethical policy when examples of plagiarism, author disputes or other forms of misconduct are evident. Breaches of publication ethics are forms of scientific misconduct that can undermine science and challenge editors, many of whom have little formal training in this field. In this respect, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), founded in 1997 as a voluntary body, has become a central player. COPE provides a discussion forum and advice as well as guidelines for scientific editors with the aim of finding practical ways to deal with forms of misconduct. The Annals is a member of COPE and follows its code of conduct for journal editors. 2 It is a privilege that the current chair of COPE, Dr Barbour, and her colleagues have written this final article in the medical publishing series about challenges in publication ethics. I hope you have found this series useful and enjoyed reading the range of articles we have published from many experts in their fields. JYOTI SHAH Commissioning Editor References 1. Sanders SA , Reinisch JM . Would you say you ‘had sex’ if…? JAMA 1999 ; 281 : 275 – 277 . 2. Committee on Publication Ethics . Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors . Harleston, UK : COPE ; 2011 .

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Marx has always been considered a pure materialist; there has never been any doubt about this point. However, in the first chapter of Das Kapital, ‘‘work’’ is a strange substance, different from the material nature of things, hidden in goods, called by Marx “ghost matter, gelatinious matter, almost no matter at all”. So, in goods there are, together, two kinds of substances: the matter of the objects, and the ghost matter, put there by the work that became itself a matter, and that remains even when you take off all the matter with which goods are made. The ontological monism of Marx -all things are matter-, stands postulating a very suspicious gelatinious matter. Why does Marx behave in this way? Mainly, to lay the foundations of the theoretical concept of “value”, essential to his economic theory. He makes a substantialistic foundation of “value”, thinking, with all the scientists of his time, that theoretical constructs have a substantial base. Even the image “gelatinous” is taken from physics: we might remember that the ether was equally gelatinous. This problem is solved by Diederich and Fulda´s formal reconstruction of value law, in which is no needed to say anything about the kind of substance value is. Let us see how they do it: (Value Law) z ★ v ★ p z is the time of work that is needed to make one product v is the value p is the price of that product ★ is a function that determines the value once the time is known, and then determines the price. The Value Law says that if one knows the time needed to make one product, there is a function that determines the value, and once that the value is determined, there is a function that determines the price. The substantial quality of value is eliminated. But, in this reconstruction, value itself is eliminable because it is possible to put a composit function ★★, and take off the formula the “value”, in this way: VL) z ★★ p And this is possible because in Diederich and Fulda´s reconstruction, even when “value” appears in the formula as a result of a function between “time” and “price”, there is no numerical value of “value”; there is only scales of “time” and “price”. If it is so, Marx´s theory is changed so deeply in this reconstruction, that Marx would not have accepted it. “Value” is a construct that can not be dismissed from the theory without eliminating the theory itself. Let us see first how Marx states the problem. Surprinsingly, he does not try to define “value”, but “equal value”, as it appears when two goods are exchanged in the market. The problem he tries to explain, is how is it possible that: 1 quarter of wheat = 1 quintal of iron Marx answers, followin Aristotle, that they must have something in common: a common substance, a substance created by human work, the value. Mach does the same when he defines first “equal mass” in his reconstruction of classic mechanics, and then defines “mass”, showing that the way Marx goes is legitimate, and that in this direction no common substance is needed. Some years later, Frege and Russell, trying to define “number”, stated that sets have “equal number” when it is possible to put their elements in biunivocal correspondance. “Number” is the set of all sets that have "equal number". In the same way, the symbol (=) (equal) that is put between two products when they are exchanged, needs no common substance. The only thing we need is to state a relationship of biunivocal correspondence between the elements of these two sets. From that point on, we can stand that there is a function in real numbers that goes from the set of time to the set of products, a different function for each kind of product and that this function determines the quantity of a certain product that is related to t hours of work; these functions change, as Marx said, with the development of the productive forces. The time socially necesary to produce an object is the measure of its value. In a formal way: M = fM (tM) N = fN (tN) M has the same value as N if and only if tM = tN. And the claim is that “value” is the set of all sets that have the same value, in a form that resembles the Frege-Russell solution to “number”. The set definition of “value” is possible, instead of defining it by means of an obscure metaphysical substance. Marx´s methodologic problem is solved.

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In 1876, an American newspaperman with the US 7th Cavalry, Mark Kellogg, declared: ‘I go with Custer, and will be at the death.’ This overtly heroic pronouncement embodies what many still want to believe is the greatest role in journalism: to go up to the fight, to be with ‘the boys’, to expose yourself to risk, to get the story and the blood-soaked images, to vividly describe a world of strength and weakness, of courage under fire, of victory and defeat—and, quite possibly, to die. So culturally embedded has this idea become that it raises hopes among thousands of journalism students worldwide that they too might become that holiest of entities in the media pantheon, the television war correspondent. They may find they have left it too late. Accompanied by evolutionary technologies and breathtaking media change, TV war reporting has shifted from an independent style of filmed reportage to live pieces-to-camera from reporters who have little or nothing to say. In this article, I explore how this has come about; offer some views about the resulting negative impact on practitioners and the public; and explain why, in my opinion, our ‘right to know’ about warfare has been seriously eroded as a result. Caption: The technology has improved, but the risks do not go away. Freelancer John Martinkus, author of A Dirty Little War about East Timor, seen here on assignment for SBS Dateline in Kunar province, Afghanistan, in 2005, was kidnapped in Iraq—but he managed to escape. Others have not been so fortunate.

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On March 9, 1623, ten English merchants were beheaded on Amboyna in Indonesia by order of Harman van Speult, the Dutch governor of the island. They died accused of plotting to seize control of Fort Victoria, the island's stronghold, in order to take over the local spice trade. Considering the number of lives lost in the centuries of conflict between Dutch and British merchants in the East Indies, the incident on Amboyna seems in hindsight to have been a rather insignificant affair. Yet the occurrence played an important role in English politics under the early Stuarts, and influenced English/Dutch relations for a century.News of the incident, which the English came to know as the Amboyna Massacre, reached England on May 29, 1624, and caused a diplomatic dilemma. James I, who was negotiating an alliance with the Netherlands against Spain, chose to deal with the situation through diplomacy rather than military reprisals, a position his son supported. It was a decision for which neither the Stuarts' contemporaries nor their modern chroniclers would forgive them. John Chamberlain, the friend and correspondent of many important court figures, wrote in July 1624 that he hoped James would “say lesse so he would do more” to make the Dutch pay for insulting English honor. By February of the next year, he was lamenting that he had “knowne the time when they [the Dutch] durst not have offered the least of those indignities we have lately swallowed and indured.” Chamberlain's belief that James's policy consisted primarily of inaction, and that it played into the hands of the Dutch, has been a popular theme in modern accounts.

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O presente artigo objetiva analisar os efeitos desinentes às irregularidades nos provimentos dos cargos de livre nomeação, isto é, cargos em comissão e funções de confiança, bem como o papel do Ministério Público como agente fiscalizador da Administração Pública, mormente, em relação à regularização destas ocupações. Tais cargos em fidúcia representam uma excepcionalidade no quadro do funcionalismo estatal brasileiro ao dispensarem prévia aprovação em concurso público: trata-se, logo, de ocupações desprovidas de estabilidade, sustentadas pela confiança depositada pelo agente público. No entanto, a miríade de provimentos irregulares e os ruidosos desvios de finalidade nas repartições públicas do país têm comprometido a qualidade dos serviços públicos, bem como a gestão pública, mormente em relação ao Poder Executivo. O presente estudo desenvolveu-se mediante pesquisa bibliográfica e revisão de literatura embasadas em fontes de pesquisa tais quais jurisprudências, doutrinas, artigos científicos, notícias, leis e textos em geral, correspondendo, assim, a pesquisa documental com método indutivo. Concluiu-se, destarte, que o controle externo exercido pelo órgão ministerial configura fator essencial à fiscalização, correção e conscientização quanto aos vícios culturais e políticos inseridos nos provimentos dos cargos em fidúcia – máxime em razão de sua autonomia funcional e comprometimento com a defesa dos interesses coletivos –, desse modo, restabelecendo a qualidade almejada pela população em relação aos serviços públicos e reafirmando os princípios constitucionais basilares da Administração Pública. PUBLIC PROSECUTION CONTROL OVER CIVIL SERVICE MANAGEMENT: A REVIEW OF COMMISSION POSTS AND POSITIONS OF TRUST ABSTRACT The present paper aims to review the effects resulting from irregularities in the provision of free nomination posts, that is to say, commission posts and positions of trust, as well as the Public Ministry role as a supervisory agent for Public Administration, mostly regarding the regulation of those posts. Such fiduciary duty posts represent an exception for the Brazilian State Functionalism scenario when dismissing previous approval in public tendering: it is, therefore, an unstable position, maintained on behalf of the trust in the federal agent. However, a myriad of irregular provisions and misuse at government offices around the country has affected the quality of public services, as well as public management, mostly regarding Executive Power. The present study carried out a bibliographic and literature review based on research sources such as jurisprudence, doctrines, academic papers, news, laws, and texts in general, thereby corresponding to a documental research with the inductive method. Therefore, it was concluded that the ministerial body external control constitutes an essential factor for supervision, correction, and awareness concerning cultural and political behavior embedded with the provision of public posts in fiduciary duty- absolute in functional autonomy and commitment with defending collective interest. Hence, reestablishing the population’s desired quality regarding public service and reaffirming the Public Administration basic constitutional principles. Keywords: Public Administration. Free Nomination Posts. Public Ministry. External Control. Public Management.

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OBJETIVO: Analisar um processo de ensino com o polibol em aulas de Educação Física. MÉTODOS: O estudo se pautou por uma abordagem qualitativa de investigação com orientação na pesquisa-ação, envolvendo 75 estudantes de três turmas de 5º ano de uma escola pública municipal de ensino fundamental anos iniciais. Enquanto instrumentos de coleta de informações foram utilizados questionários, registros de imagens das atividades e desenhos feitos pelos participantes referentes às vivências relacionadas ao jogo. Na construção da unidade didática, realizada em 12 aulas, os procedimentos adotados foram: mapeamento, planejamento, tema/problematização, ressignificação, aprofundamento, ampliação, registro e avaliação. RESULTADOS: Os dados revelaram: alta receptividade entre os alunos, proporcionando um ambiente educacional favorável à diversificação do conteúdo nas aulas de Educação Física; alterações conceituais observadas nos conhecimentos relativos ao esporte; problematização da competição exacerbada, desencadeando reflexões sobre a integração de todos os participantes nas atividades desenvolvidas; aprofundamento e ampliação dos conhecimentos sobre esporte; maior respeito entre os alunos, especialmente quanto às questões de gênero e inclusão; mais responsabilidade e cooperação em tomadas de decisões e atitudes no jogo; dificuldade em compreender a dinâmica do polibol correspondente à utilização concomitante dos membros superiores e inferiores para conduzir a bola; presença significativa da influência do futsal entre os alunos, o que também tornou algumas aprendizagens da estrutura e dinâmica do jogo mais difíceis. CONCLUSÃO: Após a realização deste estudo, podemos afirmar que a tematização do polibol fortaleceu a valorização de uma produção cultural local por parte dos estudantes, ampliando suas perspectivas para além da exclusividade dos esportes já conhecidos, envolvendo um olhar autêntico para os processos de produção das práticas corporais. TITLE: Polibol in physical education: analysis of a teaching process in school ABSTRACT OBJECTIVE: To analyze a teaching process with polibol in Physical Education classes. METHODS: The study was guided by a qualitative research approach with orientation in action research, involving 75 students from three classes of 5th year of a public elementary school in the early years. As instruments for collecting information were used: questionnaires, image records of the activities and drawings made by the participants referring to the experiences related to the game. In the construction of the didactic unit, carried out in 12 classes, the procedures adopted were: mapping, planning, theme / problematization, reframing, deepening, expansion, registration and evaluation. RESULTS: The data revealed: high receptivity among students, providing an educational environment favorable to the diversification of content in Physical Education classes; conceptual changes observed in sports-related knowledge; problematization of exacerbated competition, triggering reflections on the integration of all participants in the activities developed; deepening and expanding knowledge about sport; greater respect among students, especially regarding gender and inclusion issues; more responsibility and cooperation in decision-making and attitudes in the game; difficulty in understanding the dynamics of the polibol corresponding to the concomitant use of the upper and lower limbs to guide the ball; significant presence of the influence of futsal among students, which also made some learning of the structure and dynamics of the game more difficult. CONCLUSION: After conducting this study, we can say that the theme of polibol strengthened the valorization of local cultural production by students, expanding their perspectives beyond the exclusivity of recognized sports, involving an authentic look at the production processes of body practices.

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Objetivo: determinar las principales conductas que constituyen los estilos de vida de los estudiantes de enfermería de una universidad pública. Materiales y Métodos: estudio cuantitativo, descriptivo y transversal. A una muestra de 120 estudiantes de todos los semestres se aplicó el instrumento Cuestionario de Estilos de Vida Saludable, que busca detectar los hábitos de los estudiantes en ocho dimensiones: actividad física, tiempo de ocio, alimentación, consumo de alcohol, cigarrillo y drogas ilegales, sueño, relaciones interpersonales, afrontamiento y estado emocional. Resultados: en la caracterización sociodemográfica se encontró que el 71% de los encuestados corresponden al género femenino, estrato socioeconómico predominante 2 (bajo), edad promedio 20 años, estatura promedio 1,62m, peso promedio 61kg, índice de masa corporal 22,50. Respecto a la actividad física se determinó que la pereza con el 51% de los encuestados y el sedentarismo con un promedio de 8,32 marcan tendencia; en la dimensión tiempo de ocio, se reportó una baja prevalencia en la realización de actividades de este tipo, con un promedio de 7,78, ligeramente superior al punto medio de 7,5; los estudiantes prefieren dedicar su tiempo a estudiar o trabajar (35% de los encuestados). El 41% de los encuestados afirma estar satisfecho con las prácticas que conforman sus estilos de vida. Conclusiones: los estudiantes encuestados presentan prácticas saludables, a excepción de las dimensiones de actividad física y tiempo de ocio; además se sienten satisfechos con sus estilos de vida, independientemente de si éstos son o no saludables.PALABRAS CLAVE: conductas saludables, promoción de la salud, satisfacción personal. Lifestyles in nursing studentsABSTRACTObjective: to identify key behaviors which constitute the lifestyles of nursing students in a public university. Materials and Methods: quantitative, descriptive and cross- sectional study; it was applied a healthy life style questionnaire which looks for testing student´s life style in eight dimensions: physical activity, leisure time , food, alcohol , cigarettes and illegal drugs, sleeping habits, interpersonal relationships, conflict and emotional state was applied to a sample of 120 students of the different semesters. Results: in socio-demographic characterization was found that 71% of the sample are female, predominant socioeconomic status 2 (low), average age 20, average height 1,62m, 61kg average weight, body mass index 22.50. Referring to physical activity it was determined that laziness with 51% of surveyed students and a sedentary lifestyle with an average of 8.32 trendsetters; in the leisure time dimension, a low prevalence in conducting such activities are reported, with an average of 7.78, slightly above the midpoint of 7.5 because the students prefer to spend their time studying or working (35% of surveyed students). 41% of surveyed students say they are satisfied with the practices of their lifestyles. Conclusions: the students surveyed have adequate health practices excepting physical dimension and leisure time activities; also report being satisfied with their lifestyles, whether they are healthy or not. KEYWORDS: health behaviors, health promotion, personal satisfaction. Estilo de vida em estudantes de enfermagemRESUMO Objetivo: identificar comportamentos-chave que constituem os estilos de vida dos estudantes de enfermagem de uma universidade pública. Materiais e Métodos: estudo quantitativo, descritivo; de atividade física, lazer, comida, álcool, cigarros e drogas ilegais, sono, relacionamentos interpessoais, de enfrentamento e estaduais: Questionário Saudável Estilo de Vida instrumento que visa avaliar os estilos de vida dos alunos em oito dimensões foi aplicada percebida emocional a uma amostra de 120 estudantes a cada semestre. Resultados: caracterização sociodemográfica foi constatado que 71% dos entrevistados são do sexo feminino, predominante estrato socioeconômico 2 (baixo), com idade média de 20, média de altura 1,62m, peso médio 61 kg, IMC 22.50 no que diz respeito à atividade física foi determinado que a preguiça com 51% dos entrevistados e um estilo de vida sedentário, com uma média de 8,32 trendsetters; na dimensão do tempo de lazer, uma baixa prevalência na condução de tais atividades são relatados, com uma média de 7,78, ligeiramente acima do ponto médio de 7,5, como estudantes preferem gastar seu tempo estudando ou trabalho (35% dos inquiridos). 41% dos entrevistados dizem que estão satisfeitos com as práticas que fazem seus estilos de vida. Conclusões: os estudantes pesquisados têm práticas de saúde adequados, excepto para as dimensões de actividades de tempos física e de lazer; também relatam estar satisfeito com seus estilos de vida, se são saudáveis ou não. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: comportamentos de saúde, promoção da saúde, satisfação pessoal.

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Este ensaio se interroga sobre a situação de impasse geral na qual vivemos no momento presente, devido à crise profunda da política ocidental moderna e, portanto, da condição histórica ela mesma, enquanto promessa de emancipação dos sujeitos. A falta geral de horizonte, o desaparecimento de um verdadeiro projeto crítico, histórico-político, o vazio de sentido que uma política reduzida à gestão do sistema liberal deixa na sua ruína, caracterizam esse impasse. A questão atual é portanto a da desorientação geral. Esta define o motivo condutor o mais apto a reunir e a articular os diferentes fios dos eventos que tramam hoje o nosso destino. Estes fios trazem todos a marca da ameaça. Que seja a expansão e a intensificação dos atentados do salafismo djihadista na França, na Europa, nos EUA, e a dita “co-radicalização” correspondente da extrema direita islamofóbica; ou o crescimento atual das novas extremas direitas populistas; ou ainda a “política das coisas” do próprio sistema ocidental, reduzindo a política em administração e elegendo a segurança como técnica de governo. Estas ameaças não são todas da mesma espécie, evidentemente, nem se equivalem. No entanto todas têm em comum o fato de atacar em última análise, para lá das solidariedades coletivas, a vida subjetiva, singular, o si. Ou seja, mais precisamente, a relação de si consigo mesmo e com o outro de si, por meio da qual somente um sujeito pode manter uma “linha geral” ao longo de sua existência. De forma que, sob as ameaças diversas, o sujeito perde e se perde (se desorienta) em todas as frentes de luta. Desprovido de sua relação a si, o sujeito ameaçado tende a ser minado : conduzido, dirigido, gerido. última bússola do sobrevivente na época que corre : os recursos do labor que consiste a reatar uma relação de si consigo mesmo e com o outro de si, condição e princípio de toda orientação possível. última forma capaz de opor uma resistência ao tempo presente. Elaborar esses recursos, perlaborá-los, tal é, hoje como ontem, a tarefa da arte, da literatura, do pensamento. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Arte; outro (de si); destino; djihadista; emancipação; existência; extrema direita. RESUME L'essai s’interroge sur la situation de grave impasse générale dans laquelle le monde se trouve aujourd'hui. Cette impasse est présentée comme engendrée par la crise profonde de la politique occidentale moderne, et partant de sa perspective historique, comprise comme promesse d'émancipation des sujets. Le manque général d'horizon historico-politique, la disparition d'un véritable projet critique, le vide de sens qu'une politique réduite à la gestion du système libéral engendre dans sa ruine, caractérisent cette impasse. La question actuelle est donc bien celle de la désorientation générale. Cela définit le motif conducteur le plus apte à rassembler et à articuler les différents fils des événements qui tracent notre destin aujourd'hui. Ces fils portent tous la marque de la menace : que ce soit l'expansion et l'intensification des attaques du salafisme djihadiste en France, en Europe ou aux États-Unis, et ladite « co-radicalisation » de l’extrême droite islamophobe ; ou la croissance actuelle de nouvelles extrêmes droites populistes ; ou la « politique des choses » (la nouvelle technocratie) du système occidental lui-même, réduisant la politique à la gestion des affaires du système et choisissant « la sécurité » comme technique de gouvernement. Ces menaces ne sont pas toutes de même nature, bien sûr, et ne s’équivalent pas. Cependant, elles ont toutes en commun le fait d'attaquer en dernière analyse, au-delà des solidarités collectives, la vie subjective, singulière : le soi. C'est-à-dire, plus précisément : la relation de soi à soi-même et à l'autre de soi, suivant laquelle seulement un sujet peut s’esquisser [se dessiner lui-même] et maintenir une « ligne générale » au long de son existence. De sorte que, sous ces différentes menaces, le sujet perd et se perd (se désoriente) sur tous les fronts de la lutte, sur tous les tableaux. Dépouillé de sa relation à lui-même, le sujet menacé tend à être complètement miné : mené, dirigé, géré tout au long de son existence. Il s’ensuit la dernière boussole du survivant, dans l'époque qui court : celle que fournissent les ressources du travail qui consiste à reprendre une relation de soi avec soi-même et avec l'autre de soi, condition et principe de toute orientation possible. Ultime forme capable d'opposer une résistance au temps présent. Or, élaborer ces ressources, les perlaborer, c'est précisément la tâche de l'art, de la littérature, de la pensée. MOTS-CLÉS: art; autre (de soi); destin; djihadiste; émancipation; existence; extrême droite. ABSTRACT The essay questions the situation of serious global impasse in which the world is today. This impasse is portrayed as engendered by the deep crisis of modern Western politics, and of its historical perspective, understood as a promise of emancipation of subjects. The general lack of a historical-political horizon, the disappearance of a true critical project, the meaningless that a policy reduced to the management of the liberal system engenders in its ruin, characterize this impasse. The question today is therefore that of a general disorientation. This defines the leitmotiv for gathering and articulating the different threads of events that map out our destiny today. These threads all bear the mark of the threat: that it is the expansion and the intensification of attacks of the Jihadist salafist in France, Europe or the United States, and the "co-radicalization" of the Islamophobic far right; or the current growth of new populists far right; or the "politics of things" (the new technocracy) of the Western system itself, reducing politics to the management of the system's affairs and choosing "security" as a technique of government. These threats are not all of the same nature, of course, and they are not equivalent. However, they all have in common the fact of attacking, in the last analysis, beyond collective solidarities, the subjective, singular life: the self. That is to say, more precisely: the relation of oneself to oneself and to the other of oneself, according to which only a subject can to draw oneself and maintain a "general line" throughout his life. So, under these different threats, the subject loses and loses (disorients) oneself on all fronts of the struggle. Stripped of its relation to itself, the threatened subject tends to be completely undermined: led, directed, managed throughout its existence. It follows the last compass of the survivor, in the time that is running: that provided by the resources of work which consists in taking up a relationship of oneself with oneself and with the other of oneself, a condition and principle of any possible orientation. Ultimate form able to oppose a resistance to the present time. Now, to elaborate these resources, to working-through them, is precisely the task of art, of literature, of thought. KEYWORDS: art; other (of oneself); destiny; jihadist; emancipation; existence ; far right.

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This article deals with the functioning of the conceptual metaphors in the short stories of Luigi Pirandello (on the material of a collection of short stories "Novelle per un anno"). Conceptual metaphor appears as one of the central objects of studies within cognitive linguistics and represents the process of interaction between two conceptual domains, one of which (the source domain) helps to organize another (target domain). The history of the formation of ideas about the concept of metaphor dates back to the time of antiquity, and to this day there is a continuing growing interest of researchers in the functioning of the metaphor in its interrelation with the language. For a long time, the metaphor was one of the central objects of linguistic research, in particular of rhetoric and stylistics, and was considered solely as a way of poetical expression of the surrounding reality. Thus, in the classical sense a metaphor is a figure of speech, in which occurs an implicit comparison of two objects based on their similarity. In the second half of the twentieth century there is a rethinking of the concept of metaphor, in particular, from the standpoint of cognitive linguistics. Linguists perceive the metaphor as an element of the cognitive process and believe that language and thinking are closely interrelated, and that metaphor appears to be a natural factor in the process of expressing thoughts and ideas about the surrounding world. Thinking is therefore considered to be a metaphorical process, and metaphor is considered to be a key factor in the formation of speech. Within the cognitive paradigm, linguists focus on the functioning of a metaphor in the process of thinking, whereas its ornamental and expressive functions become less important. Through the usage of metaphors, people are able to express their ideas about the surrounding world, as well as to recreate their own thoughts and ideas, which form part of their unique world outlook. The process of formation of conceptual metaphors occurs due to the existence of a number of conceptual correspondences between the elements of the source and target domains, or metaphorical mapping. The presence of structural, orientational and ontological metaphors in speech is a direct reflection of how language and thinking interact closely with one another. These metaphors are the reproduction of the universal human experience, as well as they can be determined by the purely individual peculiarities of the cognitive processes of the individual, due to cultural, biological and perceptual experiences. The cognitive function of structural metaphors is that the speaker is able to understand the content of the target domain through the prism of the source domain. This is achieved through means of conceptual metaphorical mapping of both domains. Orientational metaphors, unlike structural ones, do not form one concept in terms of another; they create a whole new system of concepts in relation to another system. Ontological metaphors operate with abstract concepts related to human existence, which are often quite complex in terms of description or explanation. Ontological metaphors in the short stories of L. Pirandello represent the author's perception and description of the human experience of handling material objects, in particular as regards the human body as a container of emotions and feelings and container metaphors in general, as well as the introduction of personification in relation to emotions. Conceptual metaphors in the short stories of L. Pirandello acquire a positive, neutral and negative evaluative component and are the reflection of the writer's thinking and shaping his conceptual image of the world, in particular concerning conceptual metaphors related to emotions, ideas and states. There are numerous orientational metaphors as well as ontological metaphors related to human experience and abstract concepts. Also, in the short stories of L. Pirandello there are structural metaphors, which are often more or less universal in terms of expressing abstract concepts with the help of concrete ones. After analyzing the examples of the functioning of conceptual ontological, orientational and structural metaphors, it is important to note that in the work of L. Pirandello conceptual metaphors are connected with the psychological state of the characters associated with emotions related to the feeling of the existential crisis, and sometimes to the emotions of despair, sorrow, anxiety, pain. Many of the metaphors also have a relatively neutral evaluative meaning and describe the emotional state of the characters immersed in calm, meditative reflection on their lives. Some metaphors have a positive evaluative meaning, thus creating the contrast effect of the transition from one emotional state to another. Exploring the functioning of conceptual metaphors in L. Pirandello's short stories, it is fair to say that they are an important component of the author's discourse and represent the conceptual image of the writer's world. This gives a reason to conclude that the use of a conceptual metaphor in discourse directly influences the way people perceive the surrounding world, therefore conceptual metaphors are part of thought and discourse formation, and are a reflection of the perception of the world.

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After three and a half years chairing the editorial board of the Trainees' Forum, Matt Revell has given up the post. He is to be congratulated for the excellent work he has done and the enthusiasm that he brought to the role. He will be missed and we wish him every success in his future career. I now have the privilege of stepping into his editorial shoes. I am reaching the end of my fourth year on the Birmingham orthopaedic SpR rotation and as the current president of the British Orthopaedic Trainees Association I am very aware of all of the issues affecting surgical training. For the last 12 months I have been the trainee representative on the College Council and I am keen that trainees are not only kept aware of what is going on but given an opportunity to respond and be heard. I took on the role of editor of this forum on the understanding that I would have final say over whatever is printed with no outside influence. I will do my best to make the forum as interesting and as informative as possible and I encourage anyone with an opinion to get in touch and have their say.

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my verie good Sr, after my longe desyer to heare from yow I have now receyved two of yours (not missinge those yow have sent before), the one of the 16 of march, the other of the 28. so that I make account to have receyved all which yow have sent, as for answere to the first, be yow sure that albeit I begynne to grow dymme, yet when iust occasion forceth me, I will not omitt to visit yow with my letters, beinge not ignorant of the consolation that such correspondence bringeth widi it. for the sturre about the booke yow presented take yow no great thought, it can do yow no harme, neither need yow to prosecute that matter for your credit, for I do not conceyve yow have lost it by that means, the sturre about that point is not so great heare as I perceyve yow imagin, albeit one of Late of no small reputation hath once againe obiected the same unto me. but I am not moved ther with, but Lett such speeches passe, wherin I fynd much good, and therfor could wish yow wold also deale no more therwith. for I am told yt will but breed amongst us increase of combustions, your zeale against the oath giveth me great edification, and causeth me iustly to see what the generall opinion is in that place [word deleted], which by the grace of god I meane to hold so longe as I live. In that sense yow say yow are a frend to those of the Clinke, I am also a frend, and I thinke I have shewed the same in as good termes as any other of my brethren hath done.

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The Journal is a benefit of membership of the Royal Society of Medicine and through it we aim to offer Fellows something stimulating or instructive or entertaining each month (preferably all three). It has also won a large readership outside the Society. As with medicine itself, the scope is almost limitless—from the clinical anecdote to the latest synthetic molecule, from health service politics to hermeneutics, from bronze age archaeology to art in hospitals. Our guiding principle is that good specialists read outside their specialty. Solemnity is not compulsory. For scientific work we offer a brisk review process, and can publish high-priority papers 6–8 weeks after acceptance, correspondence and meeting reports in as little as 3; thus, we attract good papers by offering an efficient service to authors. Our prime responsibility, however, is to the readers. If you are thinking of submitting a paper, please bear in mind that our readers come from the world over, from many specialties and some from none. Whereas in a specialist journal you may be writing for colleagues with shared knowledge (and jargon), in the JRSM you seek to engage wider attention. Do not be too proud to explain complexities; say why your message is important; and be brief. ~!~With these provisos, we welcome your contributions—whether original papers, reviews, opinion pieces, or whatever. If your article stems from a meeting of one of the Society's Sections or Forums, it should be submitted to Professor Tim David, Proceedings Editor, JRSM, Booth Hall Children's Hospital, Blackley, Manchester M9 7AA (Tel: 0161 220 5536; Fax: 0161 795 7542; E-mail: tim.david@dial.pipex.com ); on the title page please indicate when and where the meeting took place. All other items should be sent to Dr Robin Fox, Editor, JRSM, Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London W1M 8AE (Tel/Fax: 01892 853520; E-mail: 100674.1206@compuserve.com ). The following paragraphs offer hints on preparing and submitting material to the JRSM. Both of us stand ready to help at every stage in the genesis of an article, from the gleam in the eye to the final proofs. Call us or write.

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Artikkel analüüsib huvitavat epistolaarset materjali Teise maailmasõja aastatest ja sellele järgnenud ajast – kasvatusteadlase Enn Koemetsa kirju õepoeg Heino Liimetsale, kellest sai hiljem samuti pedagoogikaõppejõud ja akadeemik. Kirjades võib tähele panna Koemetsa teoreetilisi seisukohti õppimisest ja õpetamisest ning nende rakendamist eesmärgiga kasvatada õepojast teadlast ja õppejõudu. Tervikuna ja koos kommentaaridega ilmuvad kuus Koemetsa kirja aastatest 1942–1943. When discussing Estonian educational science, we need to talk about the Koemets-Liimets family where six people from three generations have been or still are active in this field. Such career choice was first made by the pedagogue, educational scientist and psychologist Enn Koemets (1911–1973). 50 letters, found in the personal home archive of the author of the present article, offer interesting material for a theoretical treatment of Enn Koemets’ biographical data as well as of the growing of Heino Liimets’ into a scientist.The present article publishes in full six letters which Koemets wrote in Tartu from 1942–1943 and sent to Valga to his nephew Heino Liimets (1928–1989), who studied at the Valga Gymnasium and was 14 years old in 1942. Later, Heino Liimets became a pedagogue, educational scientist and a professor as well.First, the article discusses why and how can such continuity of choosing again and again one and the same specialty develop in a family. Looking at it from the viewpoint of educational philosophy, we could answer that this could well be caused by such phenomena as education and growth development. A person does not become a scientist only by studying at some educational institution and passing some specific curriculum, but they have to grow and be raised into being a scientist due to certain conditions or, due to the fact that people of different generations live in the same spiritual space, communicating with each other based on certain ideas, values and principles.Enn Koemets’ letters to his nephew show, on the one hand, the spiritual reality full of ideals and, on the other hand, the real, everyday environment centred on home. We can say without doubt that Koemets attempted to live his real life according to the pedagogical and psychological ideas which he had formulated in his studies. He knowingly and purposefully raised his nephew to be a scientist, a teacher and a colleague at the university.Eleven letters originate from the earlier period of the correspondence (1942–1945), from the time Heino Liimets was a gymnasium student. All these letters are characterised by the fact that Enn Koemets inspired and invited his nephew to enter his own spiritual space. According to the ideas he had published in his research, he taught the young man in the way that would activate his self-education. Koemets wrote to the boy very seriously about the books he was reading and topics he was studying because he knew that the existence of a model and the direct immediate inspiration are essential for the emergence of ideals and higher spiritual aspirations. We can see that Koemets had undertaken the task of teaching the young man to study “in a right way” and to acquire skills and tools (foreign languages, skills for thorough and long-time concentration and for doing research, time management, etc.) necessary for a scientist. He consistently guided the young man in widening his cultural horizons, suggested reading materials and information sources, knowing that a good scientist cannot do without such knowledge and skills. The roots of Koemets’ own aspirations and values should be searched for at the Valga All-boys Gymnasium where he had studied from 1924–1929.Among Koemets’ friends at the gymnasium and at the university was the writer Bernard Kangro, who immigrated to Sweden in 1944. Thanks to Kangro’s novels of the Tartu series, we can find both the Koemets-Liimets’ age-old family residence—the Koemetsa Farm in the Koemetsa Village in Võrumaa County—and Enn Koemets himself captured in a fictional reality. The Enn Koemets, who has been depicted as one of the main characters of Kangro’s novels—the energetic and bright Pärdijaak—was in his letters a similar inspirer and model for his nephew Heino Liimets.

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Realizado a partir de questionários e entrevistas com 36 professoras de escolas públicas de uma das regiões mais pobres do País, tem por objetivo lançar luz nas condições de existência e no espaço dos possíveis do magistério oficial. Dispondo de uma missão e firmadas como agentes ativos da produção simbólica, embora ocupantes dos postos mais inferiores das escalas de prestígio intelectual, as professoras pesquisadas depositam na adesão dóxica às coisas da escola todas as razões de ser do futuro pessoal. Essa adesão manifesta-se no carisma, ou seja, na atitude antieconômica de recusa ao cálculo estritamente econômico no governo da própria vida. Desse modo, o interesse pessoal e a libido profissional convergem para lucros não necessariamente econômicos, sugerindo um caso no qual as práticas e percepções, conquanto coagidas pela lógica do mercado, são comandadas pelo "atrativo da dádiva". Além disso, a investigação tornou possível a descrição da rotina de trabalho dessas professoras. Tudo o que, pelo menos nos grandes centros, se compreende como trabalho pedagógico ou rotina da profissão docente, parece sofrer uma transmutação nessas escolas e nesses exercícios profissionais. O estudo se justifica considerando que a análise das práticas, das posições ocupadas pelos membros do magistério e das tomadas de posição correspondentes permite compreender o lucro de ação característico dessa profissão. Palavras-chave: profissão docente; carisma; dádiva; condições de trabalho; lucro de ação. Abstract This study has been carried out using questionnaires and interviews with 36 teachers of public schools in one of the poorest regions of the country and its aim is to shed light both over the conditions in these public schools occupy. Having a mission statement and performing it as active agents of the symbolic production, though situated in the lowest ranks of intellectual prestige, the teachers of this research consider the school matters as the reason of their personal future. This philosophy of life is expressed in their charisma, or so to say, in their anti-economical attitude, refusing a strictly economic evaluation while running their own life. Consequently, their personal interests and professional libido are drawn to non-necessarily economic profits, suggesting a case in which practices and perceptions, while coaxed by the market logic, are commanded by the attraction of the gift. Furthermore, the research made the description of the work routine of these teachers possible. Everything, at least in major centers, understood as pedagogic work or the routine of the teaching profession, seems to undergo a complete change in said schools and professional practices. The study is justified, considering that the analysis of the practices, of the positions occupied by teachers and of the related stands assumed, enables us to understand the profit of the action characteristic of the mentioned profession. Keywords: teaching; charisma; gift; working conditions; profit of action.

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It's not only recently that computer technology and electronic networking have been surrounded with a vast amount of hyperbole -- sweeping statements of glorious futures awaiting us if we continue on the present course of technological development, with predictions from the 'paperless office' to the vision of permanently uploading one's consciousness to the global matrix, leaving the body behind. At the same time, we have seen dire warnings of a dumbing-down of society through a narrowing of human inventiveness by needlessly accepting the rules of computer logic, and through an overdependency on machines in everyday life -- indeed, the 'Y2K bug' has become something of a wet dream for neo-Luddites: the bigger the crash, the better their chances to do away with computers altogether. It doesn't take much to see that much of these predictions, hopes and dreams are centred around a dichotomy of flesh and mind: from Neuromancer to The Matrix, entering the network appears synonymous with leaving the flesh; increasingly, the growing planetwide network with its brain-like connections of nodes and centres is seen as a global mind, with the bodies of its users merely useless appendages that will be removed once we figure out how to sever mind and body and fully live online. Whether they love or abhor the idea of life in cyberspace -- most commentators' descriptions of the electronic future are to some extent fuelled by this radical and powerful imagery. Reality can't be made to fit into this dichotomy quite as easily, however. The flesh is remarkably resistant to all attempts to overcome it: we might temporarily ignore our bodies as we travel through cyberspace, but the growing rates of carpal tunnel syndrome and back pain amongst computer users are a clear sign that mind and body remain firmly connected, much to the delight of the designers of orthopaedic keyboards and office furniture. And speaking of the office: if anything, paper consumption rates have gone up rather than down, thanks to better and faster personal printers which make printing out yet another revision of the document we're currently working on a breeze (of ozone). The paperless office, once thought to be just around the corner, has receded into the distance. That's not to say that the neo-Luddites got it right on all counts, however. Their main argument against predictions of the 'death of the book' at the hands of hand-held reading screens has long been that no electronic gadget could ever replace the book in its robust versatility. They say that you don't take a laptop computer to read in bed, or while you're taking a bath, for example, and that at any rate a computer disk or an anonymous file on a hard drive just hasn't got the same aura as a rare hardcover edition of the same text. This confuses some very different types and uses of books -- you wouldn't read the rare hardcover in bed (it's too heavy to hold up for long) or, heaven forbid, in the bathtub. If we're talking about a cheap paperback instead, however, reading it in the bath probably isn't a good idea, either: steam and moisture from the water will make its cheap glue runny and its pages soggy, and you'll end up with a lump of papiermaché. And in any case, most people I know shower. This takes us to another way in which the flesh/mind distinction has been framed: descriptions according to which the flesh -- representing here the material world as such -- alone is 'solid', and the mind -- particularly in its cyberspatial/technological form -- is 'ephemeral'. We cling to solid, material artefacts (printed documents, letters, books) to fundament our thoughts, rather than their electronic counterparts (files, emails, Web pages), because the former appear to have a stronger 'presence', and this, too, is a reason the 'paperless office' remains theory. We take what we see on the Net with more than just a grain of salt, while we are far less critical of what we see in newspapers, print journals and books, just because they have a greater materiality. By this mindset, nothing published electronically, available on the World Wide Web, can ever be a classic in the way that the great books of literature we find in the libraries are classics. If you look at the less popular aisles of your library, however, you'll see a different reality emerge: here the off-mainstream works vie for the attention of occasional visitors; with budget restrictions often allowing only the purchase of paperback editions, these books will remain here until they're too worn or decayed to be loaned, or until the latest literary fad demands more storage room -- then they'll be shipped off to the warehouse or sold to whoever takes pity on them. In reality, then, for the majority of printed works (other than those instantly canonised and continually reprinted) the ephemerality of their medium is as much of a threat as it is for works published exclusively online, or perhaps even more so: the last copy of a text, available on the Web, will still be available for a potentially global audience, while the last paperback of an obscure novel, stacked away in the municipal library of a rural town, is practically lost to the world. The same is true for other forms of communication, too: trying to find a letter you received from a friend a few years back is likely to result in searching through multiple shoeboxes full of correspondence, if you bothered to keep it at all; at the same time, like many users you may never have bothered to set expiry limits for the inbox of your email programme, and still have a perfect record of every email communication you've had since you first got online. In the case of public discussion fora such as newsgroups, this may even be cause for concern: the worrysome implications of Internet archival services such as Deja News are only beginning to enter the public consciousness (Bruns, "Archiving the Ephemeral"). Websites, too, may change a lot, but for every link that's suddenly vanished it's also possible to show pages which haven't been updated in years but are still online since nobody ever bothered to delete them. With the ongoing explosion in storage space available, this trend is likely to continue: as the space on hard drives and Webservers gets increasingly difficult to exhaust, fewer people will go through the trouble of cleaning up their storage space regularly. In effect, then, the supposedly ephemeral world of cyberspace is becoming more and more anephemeral. So, how solid is the flesh, and how volatile is the mind? To ask the question this way would only mean continuing a binary division that doesn't appear to exist in reality. As we have seen, the supposedly ephemeral, bodiless existence of cyberspace is showing signs of solidification, while on the other hand the solidity of what we refer to as 'the real world' (in contrast to 'the virtual') is always only a temporal appearance: all flesh is mortal, as it were. In the end, though, perhaps the lesson is that despite all the popular fiction claiming the opposite, flesh and mind are much less divisible than they seem. We don't just leave the body behind as we enter cyberspace, and 'real life' isn't somehow automatically more 'real' than 'virtual' experience. This is evident in other fields of cyberdevelopment, too: after all, the main point of virtual reality gadgetry is to replicate physical experience -- we might want to mould the flesh into new forms, but we're hardly trying to get rid of it. References Axel Bruns. "Archiving the Ephemeral: Deja News and the Ethics of Perfect Memory." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.2 (1998). 1 May 1999 <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/deja.php>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "How Solid Is the Flesh?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/solid.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "How Solid Is the Flesh?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/solid.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Author. (1999) How solid is the flesh? M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/solid.php> ([your date of access]).

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Here at Queensland University of Technology, the former Arts Faculty has been replaced by a new Faculty of Creative Industries led by the internationally renowned scholar John Hartley. This has entailed a great deal of reorganisation, planning and debate - very little of which need concern us here. However there was one discussion that does bear fairly directly on my topic. This had to do with whether the discipline of journalism should be included within Creative Industries. Though this was eventually resolved in the affirmative some felt that to call a journalist 'creative' was tantamount to an insult. What was at stake here was the old issue of the relationship between the journalist and reality. When the word 'creative' is rejected as non-relevant to the practice of journalism what we have is a signal that the doctrine of empiricism is still alive and well. This remains the staple fare of journalist educators despite having been subjected to devastating attacks by Roy Bhaskar in The Possibilities of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (1979) and in Scientific Realism & Human Emancipation (1986). As Bhaskar has pointed out for the empiricist "…the ultimate objects of knowledge are atomistic events. Such events constitute given facts and their conjunctions exhaust the objective content of our idea of natural necessity. Knowledge and the world may be viewed as surfaces whose points are in isomorphic correspondence…" (Bhaskar 24). Within the empiricist worldview the task of the journalist is to boldly go and find out the facts and report them back to the reader. Similarly within the same outlook the task of the documentary photography can be seen as the recording of what is. Outside the realm of the journalist educator few would today subscribe to such a view of the role of the photographer. Not only has theory advanced beyond classical empiricism, but such has been the strength of the reaction, that theorists such as Simon Watney have felt compelled to write an 'obituary notice' for the British Documentary tradition (12). Watney claimed that the activity of the photographers was motivated by a theoretical assumption that they recorded or reported the truth. For Watney it would seem that the truth is that there is no such thing as the truth and that the photographers served institutional and ideological interests. However drawing upon Bhaskarian Critical Realism it is a fairly easy task to refute scepticism in the strong form that Watney advances. To start with, the claim that it is true that there is no truth is itself self-cancelling. Nor can scepticism about the possibility of truth sustain an account of, for example, medical science where our knowledge is progressive and accumulative. More serious for the practice of documentary photography have been the technological advances that have called into question the very possibility of our ever knowing how 'creative' i.e. how much of a faker a photographer has been. It is to the consideration of just this one aspect of the impact of the new digital technology that I now turn. Photography in the Digital Age: Distinguishing between truth and evidence The digital camera would appear to have given the photographer the power of unlimited creativity and indeed to have put her in the position of Absolute Creator. Especially worrying to some is that the evidential status of the photograph has been definitively called into question. Commentators such as Dai Vaughan in For Documentary (1999) see this as the end of relationship between the camera and reality. Brian Winston has expressed similar views in Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (1995). It is important to point out here that we need to avoid confusing the question of evidence and that of truth. The latter concept is ultimately an ontological matter while that of evidence belongs to the realm of epistemology. It is failure to make this distinction that has led to the apocalyptic tone adapted by Vaughan and others. Moreover photography has never had a simple relationship with reality. Photography and fakery have gone hand in hand since the inception of the medium. Dorothea Lange's touching up of her famous Migrant Mother and Robert Capa's faking of the death of the Spanish republican soldier are just two of the most famous examples. The latter produced one of the most famous of all war photographs. Entitled Falling Soldier, it was taken in September 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. It purports to show a soldier at the moment of death. He is thrown backward and his rifle has been flung out of his hand. Capa himself claimed that the photograph was taken when he and the man he was to photograph: …were on the Cordoba front, stranded there, the two of them, Capa with his precious camera and the soldier with his rifle. The soldier was impatient. He wanted to get back to the Loyalist lines. Time and again he climbed up and peered over the sandbags. Each time he would drop back at the warning rattle of machine-gun fire. Finally the soldier muttered something to the effect that he was going to take the long chance. He clambered out of the trench with Capa behind him. The machine guns rattled and Capa automatically snapped his camera, falling beside the body of his companion. Two hours later, when it was dark, and the guns were still, the photographer crept across the broken ground to safety. Later he discovered that he had taken one of the finest action shots of the Spanish war (Whelan 96). Capa's photograph went around the world and it was very effective in mobilising support for the anti-fascist Spanish Republican cause, that is Capa's photo helped the good guys. There has however been a fair deal of controversy over whether this photo was faked. The evidence seems to suggest that it was (Whelan 95-100). Does it matter? Richard Whelan in Robert Capa (1985) concludes: "To insist upon knowing whether the photograph actually shows a man at the moment he has been hit by a bullet is both morbid and trivialising, for the picture's greatness ultimately lies in its symbolic implications, not in its literal accuracy as a report on the death of a particular man" (100). Nigel Warburton in Varieties of Photographic representation: Documentary, Pictorial and Quasi-documentary (1991) however, strongly disagrees. He argues that a question of trust is involved between the photojournalist and her audience and violation of this is by no means a trivial matter. As he puts it: "The photojournalist's main responsibility is to aim to instil true beliefs in the viewers of their pictures. What is more, not all means are acceptable means of instilling these beliefs: the journalist and the photojournalist both have a duty to instil these beliefs by presenting evidence" (207). I am in agreement with Warburton here; trust between the photographer and her audience is crucial, especially if one's aesthetic practice is linked to claims that it is part of an emancipatory endeavour. Though of course the matter of truth cannot be reduced to a question of trust. What ultimately is at stake with regard to truth is the relationship of the photograph to the objective manifold, i.e. the ontological status of the photograph. This can be seen as isomorphic as in correspondence models. For example: Is the photograph of Carlo Giuliani, being shot in Genoa at the anti G8 demonstrations, a photograph of Carlo Giuliani being shot? A more satisfactory approach than the correspondence one is, I believe, to be found within Critical Realist model of truth advanced by Roy Bhaskar in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993). Here the question of truth ultimately comes down to the capacity of the photograph to uncover alethia - truth as the reason for things, not merely propositions. Complex as these issues are there is nevertheless a fairly simple moral behind the exposure of Capa's fakery. No matter how impressive the process of faking there is always the possibility that this will be at some time exposed. The subsequent exposure of the violation of trust can be a serious blow to a photographer's professional credibility. A somewhat different position on the relationship between digital technology and photography has recently been advanced by Pedro Meyer in an internet article The Renaissance of Photography (Oct 1 1995). He begins with Camille Silvy's 1858 photograph 'River Scene France'. He reveals that this painting is in fact a composite, or a fake if you wish. Silvy solved the technical problem of photographing clouds and a landscape by photographing them separately and joining them in the development process. Meyer concludes this analysis of Silvy's photograph with an endorsem*nt from the grand daughter of Ansel Adams that he would have welcomed digital photography. The next example, which Meyer considers, is that of the two photographs of the Kent University murders in 1970. The recent publication of the photo in 1995 Life Magazine had the pole behind the student's head airbrushed out. No one knows who did this and the photo was reprinted without the pole many times and the elimination of the pole attracted no notice. As Meyer notes however a debate eventually ensued on the Internet. He cites a Brian Masck as arguing that the pole should not have been airbrushed out. Masck went on to make the claim that if photography is to be believed it must not be touched up. This opinion bore directly upon the normative fiduciary level or trust aspect of truth when Masck says: The photographer therefore has a huge burden of responsibility to maintain the credibility of his images, and the employer (publisher) in turn has a burden or responsibility to the photographer as well as the reader to do the same…Once the SOURCE cannot be believed photojournalism is dead." (n.pag) Meyer responds to this by pointing out that the criterion for truth here is more exact than in writing. In writing we need confirmation from a second source. All that has happened in photography is that we now need confirmation of the photograph. It can no longer stand alone as evidence. So photography for Meyer is now freed from the burden of being evidence and can take its place along side the other arts. He does however still fudge the truth question somewhat in his analogy with writing. The use of digital techniques is compared with proofreading in writing. Thus he writes: All pictures, such as with text, are confirmed from several different sources when in doubt; otherwise it's the photographer's responsibility to deliver an image with integrity towards the events, which in turn will be constantly monitored. We understand that integrity is not a matter of how the picture was made, but what it's supposed to communicate. Just as editors don't oversee if the writers do so by hand or type on a computer, our photographers are free to use any tool they want. The veracity of an image is not dependent on how it was produced, any more than a text is credible because no corrections were done on it. (n.pag) This I think will not do. To begin with it would be quite possible to imagine a set of circ*mstances in which a written text would have more credibility if it were uncorrected. More seriously the phrase 'integrity towards the events' need clarification. If this means that the photo claims to be a record or semiotic trace of an event then the advent of digital techniques mean that it is impossible to assume such 'integrity'. The evidential nature of photography has been irrevocably challenged. To repeat an earlier point it is important to make a clear distinction between evidence and truth. We must understand here that what has been challenged is our capacity to take the evidential status of a photograph for granted. Nevertheless photographs can still prove a record or a semiotic trace of an event, but we can no longer accept the photograph as proof. Despite what the constructionists would have us believe, the referent still lives! Meyer finishes his article with another interesting comparison between a photograph and a painting by Van Gogh. They may be of the same tree. In the painting the tree is transformed into something wonderful. It glows with a kind of transcendent spirituality. By contrast in the photograph the tree is simply a tree. It does though serve the purpose of alerting us to the contrast between recording reality and transforming it through the imagination. Here Meyer quotes the Mexican poet Veronica Volkow as saying: "With the digital revolution, the photograph breaks its loyalty with what is real, that unique marriage between the arts, only to fall into the infinite temptations of the imagination. It is now more the sister of fantasy and dreams than of presence" (n.pag) If Volkow were correct then photojournalism would indeed seem to be dead. But of course there will always be a place for documentary photography. Artistic expression will improve with digital techniques; that is true. But the photograph's ability to provide a semiotic trace will always be welcomed. However, with the growth and spread of digital photography what will gradually disappear is the naive belief in the transparency of the photograph. Conclusions Interrupting the Flow: Neo Heracl*teanism and the Practice of Photography The avant-garde filmmaker, poet and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha has argued in When The Moon Waxes Red: Presentation, Gender And Cultural Politics (1991) for an extreme irrealist position in documentary by claiming: 'Reality runs away, reality denies reality. Filmmaking is after all a question of "framing" reality in its course' (43). The first part of this quotation gives us the moment of Heracl*tus, who argued : "You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are forever flowing in upon you." (Warner 26). However, there is an even more extreme element in Heracl*tean thought and that is associated with his student and follower Cratylus, who seemingly claimed that it was impossible to step into the river at all. The flux of life was so thorough that it was impossible to capture. In Plato Etc Roy Bhaskar cites the anecdote by Aristotle, which has it that Cratylus eventually despaired so much of his ability to say anything about reality that he ended up as an elective mute and would merely point (52). It is the Cratylan position that lies behind Trinh T. Minh-ha's statement 'reality denies reality' (43) for if this phrase has any meaning it must be that it is impossible to know the real. Indeed to my mind Trinh T. Minh-ha's theoretical work is much closer to Cratylus than Heracl*tus. If however Heracl*tus' fragments 41 & 42 suggest unending flux, fragment 81, which says "We step and do not step into the same rivers: we are and are not" (Warner 26). gives us the moment of the intransitive structure which is relatively enduring underneath the flux of actuality. The distinction between the intransitive (i.e. ontological) dimension and the transitive (i.e. narrowly epistemological) dimensions was first advanced by Roy Bhaskar in his Realist Theory of Science (1978). This emphasis on the difference between the intransitive and transitive dimensions helps us to understand that it is the intransitive dimension or the enduring level of ontology or reality that is the domain of the creative photographer. When the photograph gives us access to this level of reality then we are in the presence of what Cartier Bresson has called 'the decisive moment' and the photographer as creator in the sense not of faking or recording but of revealing reality is born. References: Bkaskar, Roy. The Possibilities of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. London: The Harvester Press, 1979. ____________. Scientific Realism & Human Emancipation. London: Verso, 1986. _____________. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London: Verso, 1993. _______. Plato Etc. London: Verso, 1994. Meyer, P. "The Renaissance of Photography: A keynote address at the SPE Conference Los Angeles, California", Oct 1 1995 < http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/meyer/01.htm>. Trinh T. Minh-ha. When The Moon Waxes Red: Presentation, Gender And Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1991. Vaughan, Dai. For Documentary. Berkeley: University of California Press 1999. Warburton, Nigel. "Varieties of Photographic Representation: Documentary, Pictorial and Quasi-documentary," History of Photography. 15 (3), 1991: 207. Warner, Rex.. The Greek Philosophers. New York: Mentor, 1958. Watney, Simon. "The Documentary Forum," Creative Camera 254, 1986: 12. Whelan, Richard. Robert Capa. London: Faber, 1985. Winston, Brian . Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: BFI, 1995.

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As people spend increasing time interacting with others online, computer-mediated correspondence is rapidly becoming a common form of everyday communication. Computer-mediated communication ranges from text to voice to video, through a variety of technologies (e.g., e-mail, Web pages, listservs, chat). Real-time online 'conversation' occurs in group chat rooms and one-to-one instant messages, between people who may or may not know each other outside the cyber environment. Because of its emerging popularity, Internet chat has become a distinct form of discourse with characteristics unique to the medium. As people spend increasing time interacting with others online, computer-mediated correspondence is rapidly becoming a common form of everyday communication. Computer-mediated communication ranges from text to voice to video, through a variety of technologies (e.g., e-mail, Web pages, listservs, chat). Real-time online 'conversation' occurs in group chat rooms and one-to-one instant messages, between people who may or may not know each other outside the cyber environment. Because of its emerging popularity, Internet chat has become a distinct form of discourse with characteristics unique to the medium. The purpose of this study is to apply research findings investigating Internet communication between strangers to the online chats of 'familiars', people who already know each other. Although some people may become familiars through prolonged cyberspace encounters without face-to-face contact (Parks and Floyd; Walther), this study investigates only the chats of people who had an existing face-to-face relationship prior to chatting online. The genesis of this project came from our personal experience as friends who later became Internet chatters because of geographical distance. Because our communications often detailed professional matters, we would save our discussions as text files as an efficient method of record-keeping. We noticed at times, while sending instant messages, the need to make special accommodations to reconcile misunderstandings and effectively deal with interruptions. To get ourselves 'back on track' in those instances, we had to 'talk about the talk' (i.e., metacommunicate) in order to make sense of how seemingly straightforward communication had gone astray. Continued instant message sending resulted in more observations suggesting that our online chats were qualitatively different from our face-to-face conversations. In the following paragraphs, three examples from our transcripts are analysed and discussed in relation to findings from research in computer-mediated communication: (a) meaning negotiation through metacommunication and shared history; (b) disinhibition and reconstruction of self; and (c) rule establishment. Note that, in these examples, "DRCSC" and "Wickmansa" are the respective online screen names of the co-authors. Example One: Meaning Negotiation through Metacommunication and Shared History The first example illustrates difficulty understanding the essence of a sent message without cues typically available in face-to-face contact. It is important to note that the following exchanges were preceded by dialogue concerning a stressful situation where Wickmansa had responded "I can see why [there is a problem]". Beginning in line 35 below, DRCSC jokingly attempts to parallel Wickmansa's "I can see why" with "I can see why there is panic disorder". However, given the sober nature of the conversation up to that point, line 35's intended meaning is uncertain for Wickmansa (i.e., could be serious; could be sarcastic). The three lines subsequent to 35 represent deliberate attempts at meaning negotiation. February 4, 2000 The breakdown in communication between lines 35 and 36 required management and repair. To regain mutual understanding, we attempted to make sense of this misalignment in 37 and 38 and bring it back on track. Each line's query served two purposes: (a) to clarify the 'speaker's' previous statement; and (b) to request clarification about the other's meaning. Continuing the above dialogue, lines 39 through 48 below seem to work toward realignment through metacommunication. February 4, 2000 cont. It is noteworthy that in line 42, DRCSC strengthened the realignment by introducing a metaphor that invoked a shared deli counter experience (i.e., meaning negotiation through shared history). Wickmansa let DRCSC know that the reference was understood by building on the metaphor in line 44. In this way, shared history not only provided an efficient way to anchor meaning but also expedited realignment. Referencing shared history may be a distinct way familiars, unlike strangers, display social competence by demonstrating familiarity with both topic and person when negotiating meaning during Internet chat. The act of 'going meta' in lines 37-48 above seemed to renegotiate the initial misfires of 35 and 36, moving the conversation toward collaborative understanding. Moreover, it may be that part of the necessity for familiars to repair any perceived miscommunication is tied to consequences that do not exist for strangers over the Internet. Although strangers have the opportunity to reestablish 'anonymity' by creating a new screen name and/or persona (Kiesler, Siegal, and McGuire; Myers; Turkle), familiars are bound to the 'reality' of the Internet experience in later face-to-face contact. Consequently, familiars have a greater investment in the outcomes negotiated while chatting online. Example Two: Disinhibition and Reconstruction of Self As suggested by previous research, perceived anonymity between online strangers increases disinhibition and playfulness. This can lead to the formation of multiple 'selves' within a single individual that may bear little resemblance to the corporeal self (Balsamo; Turkle; Waskul, Douglass, and Edgely). Although it is impossible for familiars to realistically 'reinvent' who they are, we, as familiars, found ourselves enacting a version of anonymity by accentuating contextually favorable aspects of our personalities. This is to say that despite the seemingly restrictive nature of text-only media, chatting online provided a new forum to lightheartedly reveal, for example, humour. Thus, a witty and clever side that might not have been otherwise readily apparent was now 'viewable'. To illustrate, the following lines are extracted from a tangential discussion about the Internet service provider America Online. February 3, 2000 In response to Wickmansa's 178 above, DRCSC playfully interjected cleverness in line 179. Wickmansa's reply "LOL" in 180 could demonstrate his understanding of DRCSC's play on "-OL" words by embedding a similar intentionality within his response. However, without contextual cues normally available in face-to-face interaction, whether Wickmansa 'really' picked up on intentionality, competency, and playfulness -- or was merely using a common chat abbreviation -- was not certain to DRCSC. Note that "LOL" stands for 'laughing out loud' and is among the most common Internet chat expressions (Grossman). To better understand (i.e, negotiate meaning), DRCSC responded in line 181 by: (a) clarifying her previous position; and (b) indirectly requesting clarification from Wickmansa. In this way, regaining equilibrium paralleled the accommodations described in example one, despite different end goals. Continued cleverness may have been evidenced again in lines 182 and 183, albeit unintentionally, with a collaborative "poet, know it" follow-up, representative of the playful context which had been co-constructed. Example Three: Rule Establishment Internet chatters create and conform to norms and rules exclusive to the medium (Hayashibara; Postmes, Spears, and Lea; Rintel and Pittam), such as abbreviating common phrases, ignoring capitalisation, spelling phonetically, and using typed symbols to transform elements from the typist's behind-the-keyboard experience into the co-constructed 'cyber' reality. The chats below illustrate the co-creation of a rule as a way to efficiently convey an abrupt interruption in the external environment. April 10, 2000 April 11, 2000 The April 10 example began with metacommunication that suggested the need for a shorthand way to signify 'interruption -- do not send instant messages now'. This led to our creating a way to do so with the "/" symbol in lines 230-250. The rule's effectiveness was evidenced immediately by its usage in lines 251-253. Rule application again was seen on April 11 when DRCSC opened the chat with "/?" In effect, she parsimoniously asked 'Are you available for online chat?' with two key strokes. The "/" became a regular chat feature after it was established, exemplifying an idiosyncratic rule created by familiars for Internet chat. As familiars chatting online, we found ourselves using metacommunication and shared history to realign after a conversational breakdown, accentuating contextually favorable aspects of our personalities, and following global Internet chat norms while creating idiosyncratic rules to accommodate for missing sensory cues. Moreover, distinct from strangers, familiars may have a greater need to display social competence due to real-world consequences. Further research is recommended to investigate the generalisablility of our experience as familiars and to explore other characteristics unique to Internet chat. Moreover, it would be interesting to see if: (a) familiars' online chats are patterned with the same idiosyncratic features as their face-to-face and telephone interactions; or (b) the chat patterns of familiars who know each other in 'real life' contain significant differences from persons who know each other only through regular online encounters. References Balsamo, Ann. "The Virtual Body in Cyberspace." Research in Philosophy and Technology 13 (1993): 119. Baym, Nancy. "The Performance of Humor in Computer-Mediated Communication." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 1.2 (1995). 14 Aug. 2000 <http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol1/issue2/baym.php>. Grossman, Steve. "Chatter's Jargon Dictionary." 14 Aug. 2000 <http://www.stevegrossman.com/jargpge.htm#Dictionary>. Danet, Brenda, Lucia Ruedenberg-Wright, and Yehudit Rosenbaum-Tamari. "Hmmm ... Where's That Smoke Coming From: Writing, Play and Performance on Internet Relay Chat." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2.4 (1997). 14 Aug. 2000 <http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol2/issue4/danet.php>. Hayashibara, Kammie Nobue. "Adolescent Communication on the Internet: Investigation of a Teenage Chat Room." Masters Abstracts International 37.01 (1998): 0009. Holland, Norman M. "The Internet Regression." 14 Aug. 2000 <http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/rmy/holland.php>. Kiesler, Sara, Jane Siegal, and Timothy W. McGuire. "Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-Mediated Communication." American Psychologist 39 (1984): 1123-34. Myers, David. "'Anonymity Is Part of the Magic': Individual Manipulation of Computer-Mediated Communication Contexts." Qualitative Sociology 10.3 (1987): 251-66. Parks, Malcolm R., and Kory Floyd. "Making Friends in Cyberspace." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2.4 (1997). 14 Aug. 2000 <http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol2/issue4/index.php>. Postmes, Tom, Russell Spears, and Martin Lea. "The Formation of Group Norms in Computer-Mediated Communication." Human Communication Research 26 (in press). Rintel, E. Sean, and Jeffrey Pittam. "Strangers in a Strange Land: Interaction Management on Internet Relay Chat." Human Communication Research 23.4 (1997): 507-34. Spears, Russell, and Martin Lea. "Panacea or Panopticon? The Hidden Power in Computer-Mediated Communication." Communication Research 21.4 (1994): 427-59. Sproull, Lee, and Sara Kiesler. Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. Thomas, Jim. "Introduction: A Debate About the Ethics of Fair Practices for Collecting Social Science Data in Cyberspace." The Information Society 12.2 (1996): 107-17. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Walther, Joseph. "Computer-Mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal and Hyperpersonal Interaction." Communication Research 23.1 (1996): 3-43. Walther, Joseph, Jeffrey Anderson, and David Park. "Interpersonal Effects in Computer-Mediated Interaction." Communication Research 21.4 (1994): 460-87. Waskul, Dennis, Mark Douglass, and Charles Edgley. "Cybersex: Outercourse and the Enselfment of the Body." Symbolic Interaction 24.4 (in press). Witmer, Diane. "Practicing Safe Computing: Why People Engage in Risky Computer-Mediated Communication." Network and Netplay: Virtual Groups on the Internet. Ed. Fay Sudweeks, Margaret L. McLaughlin, and Sheizaf Rafaeli, Menlo Park, CA: AAAI/MIT P, 1998. 127-46. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Cynthia Campbell, Scott A. Wickman. "Familiars in a Strange Land: A Case Study of Friends Chatting Online." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/friends.php>. Chicago style: Cynthia Campbell, Scott A. Wickman, "Familiars in a Strange Land: A Case Study of Friends Chatting Online," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/friends.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Cynthia Campbell, Scott A. Wickman. (2000) Familiars in a strange land: a case study of friends chatting online. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/friends.php> ([your date of access]).

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Abstract:

Online life is embedded within the complexes, organisations, power ratios, and conceptualisations of offline life. The ambiguities of the interaction between online and offline - the testing and questioning, asking and affirming of their match - make a vital part of their current phenomenology. One factor which seems to exert resistance - some form of implacability - however unexpectedly, is that of gender. Other categories, such as politics and nationality, seem to have similar, but more direct, effects. Online folklore is quite specific, and the folklore can be academic as analysts are affected by the same forces and experiences as other people. Firstly, it is claimed that gender is unimportant online - that you are free to be yourself, or whomsoever you choose. Mark Poster, who is not alone, claims: "one may experience directly the opposite gender by assuming it and enacting it in conversations" (1997: 223), which seems to confuse a temporary imagining with a long term imposed. Secondly, however, there are the repeated tales that online life is full of cross-gender impersonation and that, as a result, it is full of potential betrayal and disillusionment. Kolko writes: The stories of online cross-dressing that abound… often culminate in narratives of betrayal. In this accumulated body of scholarship, participants talk of how their notions of the world and their selves and others has been destabilized, rocked beyond recognition, until they are left feeling adrift, at sea, that they 'cannot trust anyone,' that 'everything online can be a lie,' that 'no one tells who they really are.' (1997: np). These stories seem a little contradictory. If gender is unimportant online, then how come it is such a source of anxiety? Often the anxiety seems concealed under a discourse of futurity, in which attention is given to what life online might become - with contradictions deleted - rather than giving attention to what actually happens or has happened. This move maintains the theory that the Internet is free of the effects of offline life, perhaps in compensation for increasing restrictions and insecurities in offline life. It also keeps the Internet in the realm of science fiction, where it is without history, and is cutting edge by default. People generally seem sure they can detect the gender of others (Suler 1996). A person might use a lot of emoticons and be female (Witmer & Katzman 1998: 6, 9), they might flame and be male (Baym 1995: 158, Herring 1994), they might not know American pantyhose sizes and be male (irrespective of if they come from a country which uses different sizings - most of the rest of the world - or are a woman who does not wear pantyhose). People read books by academics describing how the sexes use language differently in order to detect these differences - while, at the same time, others read them in order to fake better (Wright 2000). If people select gender neutral pronouns in a MOO, then others will not assume they do not have a gender, they will generally attempt to work it out (Kendall 1996: 217), and some research suggests that if a person refuses to reveal their offline gender then they will be dropped from interactions (O'Brien 1999: 90). Most of these ways of determining 'real gender', use offline gender clichés to make that detection, or to manufacture that production. Thus McRae, after arguing in favour of absolute gender freedom, remarks that if someone plays a woman and wants to "attract partners as 'female' [they] must craft a description within the realm of what is considered attractive" (1996: 250). They are likely to exaggerate conventions of gender (as with plastic surgery). As Kendall writes: "choosing one gender or another does nothing to change the expectations attached to particular gender identifications" (1996: 217). In fact, as people online can ignore the gender of those contradicting their expectations of gender, then those expectations may grow stronger. Categories of gender might strengthen rather than weaken. A performance which follows rules and conventions in order to convey a message, which to some extent any successful performance must, may not challenge the accepted conceptual order at all. As not all the rules and conventions of performance may be conscious or understood by performers, their performance may unintentionally harden those conventions. This is especially so as in Western online social practice, whatever the complexity of our theory, gender seems to be treated as an 'essential' and equated with an offline body. Further, gender impersonation appears to happen in specific circ*mstances, namely on IRC, or MOOs, or in games. It rarely if ever happens on Mailing Lists, where anonymity is rarer (names are often given in addresses, and email often signed with a gendered name), and people try to manifest real authentic identities, rather than play with possible identities. An experimental mailing list I was involved in, in which members, previously known to each other from another list, were anonymous and their gender not specified, was short lived. It did not become a site of play with, or 'beyond', gender. As well, people seem only disturbed when males are thought to be impersonating females - which indicates a degree of gender specificity itself. I have never seen a list of ways to detect whether a male avatar was female, while the opposite is common. This is not just anxiety from heterosexual males seeking sex partners but, in a famous case, occurred when women found that a supposedly female confidant was male (Van Gelder 1996, Stone 1995: 69-81). So why does this happen? Answers to such questions must be provisional, but it is probably connected with the role of women, in offline life, in maintaining and marking intimacy and support. We might over-quickly say that, offline (outside of male hom*osexual groups in which gender may function differently), an intimate relationship usually includes one woman. Emotional or support bonding is female. Male bonding has become almost suspect, particularly if it involves intimacy. We also live in a society with a common discourse about the decline of support through kinship, a rise in single person households, increased insecurity in work, and decline in state support for people in times of stress, at the very time that kinship no longer is able to give support (Castells 1997: 97). The Western generative atom of kinship, intimacy and support, approaches being the heterosexual pair bond. Wuthnow claimed in 1994 that, faced with these kinds of insecurities, 40% of American adults became members of small groups meeting regularly to provide support for members (1994: 45-50). There is no reason to assume the percentage has declined. Internet groups can be seen to function similarly; they are means by which people make contacts, provide help, discuss problems or interests, and sometimes get work - fibreculture being a case in point. There is often, in such groups, a fairly active 'off-group' life of correspondence and contact between particular members. Structurally, life which is off a mailing list, or in a private MOO room, approaches the structure of the dyadic, private and intimate pair bond, which should contain at least one woman. Finding out that a person you have been intimate with was not female, almost automatically changes the relationship from the realm of intimate and private into a public betrayal. Our private role and its vulnerabilities has broken into the public male domain and symbolically been exposed rather than shared. Gender functions as a way in which people interpret the actions of others. As Ten Have argues (2000), categorisation is one of the ways in which people decide what kinds of messages others are emitting, whether they have much in common and whether they can be trusted. The importance of particular categories can frequently be ascertained by how often they are requested - and gender is one of the most requested when unknown and when people are seeking support or intimacy. Because authenticity, or trying to find the truth of others, is important in Western thought about relationships, this truth becomes anchored in the 'real' body and the customs surrounding it. 'Truth' is confirmed the more private the information, and the more it is received offline. As a result, and because of models of intimacy, 'real gender' then becomes important and is central to current online life. It may also point to other ways in which the tension between the online and offline manifest, or in which an apparently abstract flow meets resistance. Works Cited Baym, Nancy (1995) "The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication", in Steven G. Jones ed. Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, Sage, Thousand Oaks. Castells, Manual (1997) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volume 2: the Power of Identity, Blackwell, 1997. Cherny, Lynn & Weise, Elizabeth R. ed. (1996) Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, Seal Press, Seattle. Herring, Susan (1994) "Gender Differences in Computer-Mediated Communication: Bringing Familiar Baggage to the New Frontier", Keynote talk at panel entitled Making the Net*Work*: Is there a Z39.50 in gender communication?, American Library Association annual convention, Miami, June 27, 1994. <http://cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/herring.txt> Kendall, Lori (1996) "MUDder? I Hardly Know 'Er! Adventures of a feminist MUDder" in Cherny & Weise, 1996. Kolko, Beth (1997) "Discursive Citizenship: The Body Politic in Cyberspace", paper presented at the Creative Collaboration in Virtual Communities Conference, Sydney, Australia, February 1997. <http://www.arch.su.edu.au/kcdc/conferences/VC97/papers/kolko.php> McRae, Shannon (1996) "Coming Apart at the Seams: Sex, Text and the Virtual Body" in Cherny & Weise. O'Brien, Jodi (1999) "Gender (Re)production in Online Interaction", in M.A. Smith, & P. Kollock, eds. Communities in Cyberspace, Routledge, London. Poster, Mark (1997) "Cyberdemocracy", in David Holmes ed. Virtual Politics: Identity & Community in Cyberspace, Sage Publications, London. Stone, A. R. (1995) The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, MIT Press. Suler, John (1996) "Do Boys Just Wanna Have Fun? Male Gender-Switching in Cyberspace (and how to detect it)". <http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/genderswap.php> ten Have, Paul (2000) " 'hi, a/s/l please?': identification/categorisation in computer mediated communication" A paper/mosaic presented at the 'Sociaal-Wetenschappelijke Studiedagen 2000', Session ICT & Huiselijk Leven. Van Gelder, Lindsay (1996) "The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover", in Rob Kling ed Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, 2nd Edition, Academic Press, San Diego. Witmar, D.F. & Katzman, S.L. “Smile When You Say That: Graphic Accents as Gender Markers” in Fay Sudweeks et al eds. Network & Netplay: Virtual Groups on the Internet, AAAI Press, MenloPark. Wright, Kathryn (2000) "Gender Bending in Games" <http://www.womengamers.com/articles/gender.php> Wuthnow, Robert (1994) Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America's New Quest for Community, Free Press, NY. Links http://cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/herring.txt http://www.arch.su.edu.au/kcdc/conferences/VC97/papers/kolko.html http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/genderswap.html http://www.womengamers.com/articles/gender.html%3e Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Marshall, Jonathan. "Resistances of Gender" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/06-resistances.php>. APA Style Marshall, J. (2003, Aug 26). Resistances of Gender. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/06-resistances.php>

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Abstract:

Literary critics have mainly read Herman Melville’s short story “I and My Chimney” (1856) as allegory. This article elaborates on the tradition of interpreting Melville’s text allegorically by relating it to Fredric Jameson’s post-structural reinterpretation of allegory. In doing so, it argues that the story is not a simple example of allegory but rather an auto-reflexive engagement with allegory that reflects the cultural and historical ambivalences of the time in which Melville was writing. The suggestion is that Melville deliberately used signifiers (or the lack thereof) of directionality and place to reframe the overt context of his allegory (Civil War divisions of North and South) through teasing reference to the contemporaneous emergence of Manifest Destiny as an East-West historical spatialization. To this extent, from a literary-historical perspective, Melville’s text presents as an enquiry into the relationship between the obvious allegorical elements of a text and the literal or material elements that may either support or, as in this case, problematize traditional allegorical modes. In some ways, Melville’s story faintly anticipates Jameson’s post-structural theory of allegory as produced over a century later. “I and My Chimney” may also be linked to later texts, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which shift the directionality of American Literary History, in a definite way, from a North-South to an East-West axis. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books may also be mentioned here. While, in recent years, some literary critics have produced readings of Melville’s story that depart from the traditional emphasis on its allegorical nature, this article claims to be the first to engage with “I and My Chimney” from within an allegorical perspective also informed by post-structural thinking. To do this, it focuses on the setting or directionality of the story, and on the orientating details of the titular chimney.Written and published shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861-1865), which pitted North against South, Melville’s story is told in the first person by a narrator with overweening affection for the chimney he sees as an image of himself: “I and my chimney, two gray-headed old smokers, reside in the country. We are, I may say, old settlers here; particularly my old chimney, which settles more and more every day” (327). Within the merged identity of narrator and chimney, however, the latter takes precedence, almost completely, over the former: “though I always say, I and my chimney, as Cardinal Wolsey used to say, I and my King, yet this egotistic way of speaking, wherein I take precedence of my chimney, is hardly borne out by the facts; in everything, except the above phrase, my chimney taking precedence of me” (327). Immediately, this sentence underscores a disjunction between words (“the above phrase”) and material circ*mstances (“the facts”) that will become crucial in my later consideration of Melville’s story as post-structural allegory.Detailed architectural and architectonic descriptions manifesting the chimney as “the one great domineering object” of the narrator’s house characterize the opening pages of the story (328). Intermingled with these descriptions, the narrator recounts the various interpersonal and business-related stratagems he has been forced to adopt in order to protect his chimney from the “Northern influences” that would threaten it. Numbered in this company are his mortgagee, the narrator’s own wife and daughters, and Mr. Hiram Scribe—“a rough sort of architect” (341). The key subplot implicated with the narrator’s fears for his chimney concerns its provenance. The narrator’s “late kinsman, Captain Julian Dacres” built the house, along with its stupendous chimney, and upon his death a rumour developed concerning supposed “concealed treasure” in the chimney (346). Once the architect Scribe insinuates, in correspondence to the chimney’s alter ego (the narrator), “that there is architectural cause to conjecture that somewhere concealed in your chimney is a reserved space, hermetically closed, in short, a secret chamber, or rather closet” the narrator’s wife and daughter use Scribe’s suggestion of a possible connection to Dacres’s alleged hidden treasure to reiterate their calls for the chimney’s destruction (345):Although they had never before dreamed of such a revelation as Mr. Scribe’s, yet upon the first suggestion they instinctively saw the extreme likelihood of it. In corroboration, they cited first my kinsman, and second, my chimney; alleging that the profound mystery involving the former, and the equally profound masonry involving the latter, though both acknowledged facts, were alike preposterous on any other supposition than the secret closet. (347)To protect his chimney, the narrator bribes Mr. Scribe, inviting him to produce a “‘little certificate—something, say, like a steam-boat certificate, certifying that you, a competent surveyor, have surveyed my chimney, and found no reason to believe any unsoundness; in short, any—any secret closet in it’” (351). Having enticed Scribe to scribe words against himself, the narrator concludes his tale triumphantly: “I am simply standing guard over my mossy old chimney; for it is resolved between me and my chimney, that I and my chimney will never surrender” (354).Despite its inherent interest, literary critics have largely overlooked “I and My Chimney”. Katja Kanzler observes that “together with much of [Melville’s] other short fiction, and his uncollected magazine pieces in particular, it has never really come out of the shadow of the more epic texts long considered his masterpieces” (583). To the extent that critics have engaged the story, they have mainly read it as traditional allegory (Chatfield; Emery; Sealts; Sowder). Further, the allegorical trend in the reception of Melville’s text clusters within the period from the early 1940s to the early 1980s. More recently, other critics have explored new ways of reading Melville’s story, but none, to my knowledge, have re-investigated its dominant allegorical mode of reception in the light of the post-structural engagements with allegory captured succinctly in Fredric Jameson’s work (Allison; Kanzler; Wilson). This article acknowledges the perspicacity of the mid-twentieth-century tradition of the allegorical interpretation of Melville’s story, while nuancing its insights through greater attention to the spatialized materiality of the text, its “geomorphic” nature, and its broader historical contexts.E. Hale Chatfield argues that “I and My Chimney” evidences one broad allegorical polarity of “Aristocratic Tradition vs. Innovation and Destruction” (164). This umbrella category is parsed by Sealts as an individualized allegory of besieged patriarchal identity and by Sowder as a national-level allegory of anxieties linked to the antebellum North-South relationship. Chatfield’s opposition works equally well for an individual or for communities of individuals. Thus, in this view, even as it structures our reception of Melville’s story, allegory remains unproblematized in itself through its internal interlocking. In turn, “I and My Chimney” provides fertile soil for critics to harvest an allegorical crop. Its very title inveigles the reader towards an allegorical attitude: the upstanding “I” of the title is associated with the architecture of the chimney, itself also upstanding. What is of the chimney is also, allegorically, of the “I”, and the vertical chimney, like the letter “I”, argues, as it were, a north-south axis, being “swung vertical to hit the meridian moon,” as Melville writes on his story’s first page (327). The narrator, or “I”, is as north-south as is his narrated allegory.Herman Melville was a Northern resident with Southern predilections, at least to the extent that he co-opted “Southern-ness” to, in Katja Kanzler’s words, “articulate the anxiety of mid-nineteenth-century cultural elites about what they perceive as a cultural decline” (583). As Chatfield notes, the South stood for “Aristocratic Tradition”; the North, for “Innovation and Destruction” (164). Reflecting the conventional mid-twentieth-century view that “I and My Chimney” is a guileless allegory of North-South relations, William J. Sowder argues that itreveals allegorically an accurate history of Southern slavery from the latter part of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth—that critical period when the South spent most of its time and energy apologizing for the existence of slavery. It discloses the split which Northern liberals so ably effected between liberal and conservative forces in the South, and it lays bare the intransigence of the traditional South on the Negro question. Above everything, the story reveals that the South had little in common with the rest of the Union: the War between the States was inevitable. (129-30)Sowder goes into painstaking detail prosecuting his North-South allegorical reading of Melville’s text, to the extent of finding multiple correspondences between what is allegorizing and what is being allegorized within a single sentence. One example, with Sowder’s allegorical interpolations in square brackets, comes from a passage where Melville is writing about his narrator’s replaced “gable roof” (Melville 331): “‘it was replaced with a modern roof [the cotton gin], more fit for a railway woodhouse [an industrial society] than an old country gentleman’s abode’” (Sowder 137).Sowder’s argument is historically erudite, and utterly convincing overall, except in one crucial detail. That is, for a text supposedly so much about the South, and written so much from its perspective—Sowder labels the narrator a “bitter Old Southerner”—it is remarkable how the story is only very ambiguously set in the South (145). Sowder distances himself from an earlier generation of commentators who “generally assumed that the old man is Melville and that the country is the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshires, where Melville lived from 1850 to 1863,” concluding, “in fact, I find it hard to picture the narrator as a Northerner at all: the country which he describes sounds too much like the Land of Cotton” (130).Quite obviously, the narrator of any literary text does not necessarily represent its author, and in the case of “I and My Chimney”, if the narrator is not inevitably coincident with the author, then it follows that the setting of the story is not necessarily coincident with “the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshires.” That said, the position of critics prior to Sowder that the setting is Massachusetts, and by extension that the narrator is Melville (a Southern sympathizer displaced to the North), hints at an oversight in the traditional allegorical reading of Melville’s text—related to its spatializations—the implications of which Sowder misses.Think about it: “too much like the Land of Cotton” is an exceedingly odd phrase; “too much like” the South, but not conclusively like the South (Sowder 130)! A key characteristic of Melville’s story is the ambiguity of its setting and, by extension, of its directionality. For the text to operate (following Chatfield, Emery, Sealts and Sowder) as a straightforward allegory of the American North-South relationship, the terms “north” and “south” cannot afford to be problematized. Even so, whereas so much in the story reads as related to either the South or the North, as cultural locations, the notions of “south-ness” and “north-ness” themselves are made friable (in this article, the lower case broadly indicates the material domain, the upper case, the cultural). At its most fundamental allegorical level, the story undoes its own allegorical expressions; as I will be arguing, the materiality of its directionality deconstructs what everything else in the text strives (allegorically) to maintain.Remarkably, for a text purporting to allegorize the North as the South’s polar opposite, nowhere does the story definitively indicate where it is set. The absence of place names or other textual features which might place “I and My Chimney” in the South, is over-compensated for by an abundance of geographically distracting signifiers of “place-ness” that negatively emphasize the circ*mstance that the story is not set definitively where it is set suggestively. The narrator muses at one point that “in fact, I’ve often thought that the proper place for my old chimney is ivied old England” (332). Elsewhere, further destabilizing the geographical coordinates of the text, reference is made to “the garden of Versailles” (329). Again, the architect Hiram Scribe’s house is named New Petra. Rich as it is with cultural resonances, at base, Petra denominates a city in Jordan; New Petra, by contrast, is place-less.It would appear that something strange is going on with allegory in this deceptively straightforward allegory, and that this strangeness is linked to equally strange goings on with the geographical and directional relations of north and south, as sites of the historical and cultural American North and South that the story allegorizes so assiduously. As tensions between North and South would shortly lead to the Civil War, Melville writes an allegorical text clearly about these tensions, while simultaneously deconstructing the allegorical index of geographical north to cultural North and of geographical south to cultural South.Fredric Jameson’s work on allegory scaffolds the historically and materially nuanced reading I am proposing of “I and My Chimney”. Jameson writes:Our traditional conception of allegory—based, for instance, on stereotypes of Bunyan—is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences: this is, so to speak, a one-dimensional view of this signifying process, which might only be set in motion and complexified were we willing to entertain the more alarming notion that such equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text. (73)As American history undergoes transformation, Melville foreshadows Jameson’s transformation of allegory through his (Melville’s) own transformations of directionality and place. In a story about North and South, are we in the south or the north? Allegorical “equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text” (Jameson 73). North-north equivalences falter; South-south equivalences falter.As noted above, the chimney of Melville’s story—“swung vertical to hit the meridian moon”—insists upon a north-south axis, much as, in an allegorical mode, the vertical “I” of the narrator structures a polarity of north and south (327). However, a closer reading shows that the chimney is no less complicit in the confusion of north and south than the environs of the house it occupies:In those houses which are strictly double houses—that is, where the hall is in the middle—the fire-places usually are on opposite sides; so that while one member of the household is warming himself at a fire built into a recess of the north wall, say another member, the former’s own brother, perhaps, may be holding his feet to the blaze before a hearth in the south wall—the two thus fairly sitting back to back. Is this well? (328)Here, Melville is directly allegorizing the “sulky” state of the American nation; the brothers are, as it were, North and South (328). However, just as the text’s signifiers of place problematize the notions of north and south (and thus the associated cultural resonances of capitalized North and South), this passage, in queering the axes of the chimneys, further upsets the primary allegory. The same chimney that structures Melville’s text along a north-south or up-down orientation, now defers to an east-west axis, for the back-to-back and (in cultural and allegorical terms) North-South brothers, sit at a 90-degree angle to their house’s chimneys, which thus logically manifest a cross-wise orientation of east-west (in cultural and allegorical terms, East-West). To this extent, there is something of an exquisite crossover and confusion of cultural North and South, as represented by the two brothers, and geographical/architectural/architectonic north and south (now vacillating between an east-west and a north-south orientation). The North-South cultural relationship of the brothers distorts the allegorical force of the narrator’s spine-like chimney (not to mention of the brother’s respective chimneys), thus enflaming Jameson’s allegorical equivalences. The promiscuous literality of the smokestack—Katja Kanzler notes the “astonishing materiality” of the chimney—subverts its main allegorical function; directionality both supports and disrupts allegory (591). Simply put, there is a disjunction between words and material circ*mstances; the “way of speaking… is hardly borne out by the facts” (Melville 327).The not unjustified critical focus on “I and My Chimney” as an allegory of North-South cultural (and shortly wartime) tensions, has not kept up with post-structural developments in allegorical theory as represented in Fredric Jameson’s work. In part, I suggest, this is because critics to date have missed the importance to Melville’s allegory of its extra-textual context. According to William J. Sowder, “Melville showed a lively interest in such contemporary social events as the gold rush, the French Revolution of 1848, and the activities of the English Chartists” (129). The pity is that readings of “I and My Chimney” have limited this “lively interest” to the Civil War. Melville’s attentiveness to “contemporary social events” should also encompass, I suggest, the East-West (east-west) dynamic of mid-nineteenth century American history, as much as the North-South (north-south) dynamic.The redialing of Melville’s allegory along another directional axis is thus accounted for. When “I and My Chimney” was published in 1856, there was, of course, at least one other major historical development in play besides the prospect of the Civil War, and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny ran, not to put it too finely, along an East-West (east-west) axis. Indeed, Manifest Destiny is at least as replete with a directional emphasis as the discourse of Civil War North-South opposition. As quoted in Frederick Merk’s Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, Senator Daniel S. Dickinson states to the Senate, in 1848, “but the tide of emigration and the course of empire have since been westward” (Merk 29). Allied to this tradition, of course, is the well-known contemporaneous saying, “go West, young man, go West” (“Go West, Young Man”).To the extent that Melville’s text appears to anticipate Jameson’s post-structural theory of allegory, it may be linked, I suggest, to Melville’s sense of being at an intersection of American history. The meta-narrative of national history when “I and My Chimney” was produced had a spatial dimension to it: north-south directionality (culturally, North-South) was giving way to east-west directionality (culturally, East-West). Civil War would soon give way to Manifest Destiny; just as Melville’s texts themselves would, much later admittedly, give way to texts of Manifest Destiny in all its forms, including Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. Equivalently, as much as the narrator’s wife represents Northern “progress” she might also be taken to signify Western “ambition”.However, it is not only that “I and My Chimney” is a switching-point text of geo-history (mediating relations, most obviously, between the tendencies of Southern Exceptionalism and of Western National Ambition) but that it operates as a potentially generalizable test case of the limits of allegory by setting up an all-too-simple allegory of North-South/north-south relations which is subsequently subtly problematized along the lines of East-West/east-west directionality. As I have argued, Melville’s “experimental allegory” continually diverts words (that is, the symbols allegory relies upon) through the turbulence of material circ*mstances.North, or north, is simultaneously a cultural and a geographical or directional coordinate of Melville’s text, and the chimney of “I and My Chimney” is both a signifier of the difference between N/north and S/south and also a portal to a 360-degrees all-encompassing engagement of (allegorical) writing with history in all its (spatialized) manifestations.ReferencesAllison, J. “Conservative Architecture: Hawthorne in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” South Central Review 13.1 (1996): 17-25.Chatfield, E.H. “Levels of Meaning in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Imago 19.2 (1962): 163-69.Emery, A.M. “The Political Significance of Melville’s Chimney.” The New England Quarterly 55.2 (1982): 201-28.“Go West, Young Man.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 29 Sep. 2017. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_young_man>.Jameson, F. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88.Kanzler, K. “Architecture, Writing, and Vulnerable Signification in Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Studies 54.4 (2009): 583-601.Kerouac, J. On the Road. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Melville, H. “I and My Chimney.” Great Short Works of Herman Melville. New York: Perennial-HarperCollins, 2004: 327-54.Merk, F. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.Sealts, M.M. “Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Literature 13 (May 1941): 142-54.Sowder, W.J. “Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney:’ A Southern Exposure.” Mississippi Quarterly 16.3 (1963): 128-45.Wilder, L.I. Little House on the Prairie Series.Wilson, S. “Melville and the Architecture of Antebellum Masculinity.” American Literature 76.1 (2004): 59-87.

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I wake up early, questions buzzing through my mind. While I sip my morning cup of tea and read The Guardian online, the writer, restless because I’m ignoring her, walks around firing questions.“Expecting the patriarchy to want to share its enormous wealth and power with women is extremely naïve.”I nod. Outside the window pieces of sky are framed by trees, fluffy white clouds alternate with bright patches of blue. The sweet, heady first wafts of lavender and citrus drift in through the open window. Spring has come to Hvar. Time to get to work.The more I understand about narcissism, the more I understand the world. I didn’t understand before. In the 1990s.“No—you knew, but you didn’t know at the same time.”I kept telling everybody The River Ophelia wasn’t about sex, (or the sex wasn’t about sex), it was about power. Not many people listened or heard, though. Only some readers.I’ve come here to get away. To disappear. To write.I can’t find the essay I want for my article about the 1990s. I consider the novel I’m reading, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and wonder whether I should write about it instead? It’s just been reprinted, twenty years after its initial release. The back cover boasts, “widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades.” It was first published in the 1990s. So far it’s about a woman named Chris who’s addictively obsessed with an unavailable man, though I’m yet to unravel Kraus’s particular brand of feminism—abjection? Maybe, maybe … while I think, I click through my storage folder. Half way through, I find a piece I wrote about Kathy Acker in 1997, a tribute of sorts that was never published. The last I’d heard from Kathy before this had been that she was heading down to Mexico to try shark cartilage for her breast cancer. That was just before she died.When I was first introduced to the work of Foucault and Deleuze, it was very political; it was about what was happening to the economy and about changing the political system. By the time it was taken up by the American academy, the politics had gone to hell. (Acker qtd. in Friedman 20)Looking back, I’d have to say my friendship with Kathy Acker was intense and short-lived.In the original I’d written “was a little off and on.” But I prefer the new version. I first met Kathy in person in Sydney, in 1995. We were at a World Art launch at Ariel bookshop and I remember feeling distinctly nervous. As it turned out, I needn’t have been. Nervous, that is.Reading this now brings it all back: how Kathy and I lost touch in the intervening two years and the sudden fact of her death. I turn to the end and read, “She died tragically, not only because she was much too young, but because American literature seems rather frumpy without her, of cancer on the 30th November 1997, aged 53.”The same age as I am now. (While some believe Kathy was 50 when she died, Kathy told me she lied about her age even to the point of changing her passport. Women who lie about their age tend to want to be younger than they are, so I’m sticking with 53.) This coincidence spooks me a little.I make a cup of tea and eat some chocolate.“This could work …” the writer says. My reasons for feeling nervous were historical. I’d spoken to Kathy once previously (before the publication of The River Ophelia on the phone from Seattle to San Francisco in 1993) and the conversation had ended abruptly. I’d wanted to interview Kathy for my PhD on American fiction but Kathy wouldn’t commit. Now I was meeting her face to face and trying to push the past to the back of my mind.The evening turned out to be a memorable one. A whole bunch of us—a mixture of writers, publishers, academics and literati—went out to dinner and then carried on drinking well into the night. I made plans to see Kathy again. She struck me as a warm, generous, sincere and intensely engaging person. It seemed we might become friends. I hesitated: should I include the rest? Or was that too much?The first thing Kathy had said when we were introduced was, “I loved your book, The River Ophelia. I found it as soon as I arrived. I bought it from the bookshop at the airport. I saw your amazing cover and then I read on the back that it was influenced by the work of Kathy Acker. I was like, wow, no one in America has ever put that on the back cover of a novel. So I read it immediately and I couldn’t put it down. I love the way you’ve deconstructed the canon but still managed to put a compelling narrative to it. I never did that.”Why didn’t I include that? It had given me more satisfaction than anything anyone else had said.I remember how quickly I abandoned my bestselling life in Sydney, sexual harassment had all but ruined my career, and exchanged it for an uncertain future in London. My notoriety as an author was damaging my books and my relationship with my publisher had become toxic. The first thing I did in London was hire a lawyer, break my contract with Picador and take both novels out of print.Reality intrudes in the form of a phone call from my mother. Terminally ill with cancer, she informs me that she’s off her food. For a retired chef, the loss of appetite is not inconsiderable. Her dying is a dull ache, a constant tiredness and sadness in me. She’s just arrived in London. I will go there next week to meet her.(1)I first came across Kathy’s work in 1991. I’d just finished my MA thesis on postmodernism and parody and was rewarding myself with some real reading (i.e. not related to my thesis) when I came across the novel Don Quixote. This novel had a tremendous impact on me. Those familiar with DQ may recall that it begins with an abortion that transforms its female narrator into a knight.When she was finally crazy because she was about to have an abortion, she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love. How can a woman love? By loving someone other than herself. (Acker Quixote 9)Kathy’s opening sentences produced a powerful emotional response in me and her bold confronting account of an abortion both put me in touch with feelings I was trying to avoid and connected these disturbing feelings with a broader political context. Kathy’s technique of linking the personal and emotional with the political changed the way I worked as a writer.I’d submitted the piece as an obituary for publication to an Australian journal; the editor had written suggestions in the margin in red. All about making the piece a more conventional academic essay. I hadn’t been sure that was what I wanted to do. Ambitious, creative, I was trying to put poststructuralist theory into practice, to write theoretical fiction. It’s true, I hadn’t been to the Sorbonne, but so what? What was the point of studying theory if one didn’t put it into practice? I was trying to write like French theorists, not to write about them. The editor’s remarks would have made a better academic essay, it’s just I’m not sure that’s where I wanted to go. I never rewrote it and it was never published.I first encountered I Love Dick (2017) during a film course at the AFTVRS when the lecturer presented a short clip of the adaptation for the class to analyse. When I later saw the novel in a bookshop I bought a copy. Given my discovery of the unpublished obituary it is also a bit spooky that I’m reading this book as both Chris Kraus and Kathy Acker had relationships with academic and Semiotext(e) publisher Sylvère Lotringer. Chris as his wife, Kathy as his lover. Kraus wrote a biography of Acker called After Kathy Acker: A Biography, which seems fairly unsympathetic according to the review I read in The Guardian. (Cooke 2017) Intrigued, I add Kraus’s biography to my growing pile of Acker related reading, the Acker/Wark letters I’m Very Into You and Olivia Laing’s novel, Crudo. While I’ve not read the letters yet, Crudo’s breathless yet rhythmic layering of images and it’s fragmented reflections upon war, women and politics reminded me less of Acker and more of Woolf; Mrs Dalloway, in fact.(2)What most inspired me, and what makes Kathy such a great writer, is her manner of writing politically. For the purposes of this piece, when I say Kathy writes politically, I’m referring to what happens when you read her books. That is, your mind—fuelled by powerful feelings—makes creative leaps that link everyday things and ideas with political discourses and debates (for Kathy, these were usually critiques of bourgeois society, of oedipal culture and of the patriarchy).In the first pages of Don Quixote, for example, an abortion becomes synonymous with the process of becoming a knight. The links Kathy makes between these two seemingly unrelated events yields a political message for the creative reader. There is more at stake than just gender-bending or metamorphoses here: a reversal of power seems to have taken place. A relatively powerless woman (a female victim except for the fact that in having an abortion she’s exerting some measure of control over her life), far from being destroyed by the experience of aborting her foetus, actually gains power—power to become a knight and go about the world fulfilling a quest. In writing about an abortion in this way, Kathy challenges our assumptions about this controversial topic: beyond the moral debate, there are other issues at stake, like identity and power. An abortion becomes a birth, rather than a banal tragedy.When I think about the 1990s, I automatically think of shoulder pads, co*cktails and expense accounts (the consumption of the former, in my case, dependent on the latter). But on reflection, I think about the corporatisation of the publishing industry, the Backlash and films like Thelma and Louise, (1991) Basic Instinct (1992) and Single White Female (1992). It occurs to me that the Hollywood movie star glamorous #MeToo has its origin in the turbulent 1990s Backlash. When I first saw each of these films I thought they were exciting, controversial. I loved the provocative stance they took about women. But looking back I can’t help wondering: whose stories were they really, why were we hearing them and what was the political point?It was a confusing time in terms of debates about gender equality.Excluding the premise for Thelma and Louise, all three films present as narrative truth scenarios that ran in stark contrast to reality. When it came to violence and women, most domestic homicide and violence was perpetrated by men. And violence towards women, in the 1990s, was statistically on the rise and there’s little improvement in these statistics today.Utter chaos, having a British passport never feels quite so wonderful as it does in the arrivals hall at Heathrow.“Perhaps these films allow women to fantasise about killing the men who are violent towards them?”Nyah, BI is chick killing chick … and think about the moral to the story. Fantasy OK, concrete action painful, even deadly.“Different story today …”How so?“Violent female protagonists are all the rage and definitely profitable. Killing Eve (2018) and A Simple Favour (2018).”I don’t have an immediate answer here. Killing Eve is a TV series, I think aloud, A Simple Favour structurally similar to Single White Female … “Why don’t you try self-publishing? It’ll be 20 years since you took The River Ophelia out of print, bit of an anniversary, maybe it’s time?”Not a bad idea. I’m now on the tube to meet mum at her bed and breakfast but the writer is impatient to get back to work. Maybe I should just write the screenplay instead?“Try both. If you don’t believe in your writing, who else will?”She has a point. I’m not getting anywhere with my new novel.A message pips through on Facebook. Want to catch up?What? Talk about out of the blue. I haven’t heard from Sade in twenty years … and how on earth did he get through my privacy settings?After meeting mum, the next thing I do is go to the doctor. My old doctor from West Kensington, she asks me how I’m going and I say I’m fine except that mum’s dying and this awful narcissistic ex-partner of mine has contacted me on Facebook. She recommends I read the following article, “The Highly Sensitive Person and the Narcissist” (Psychology Today).“Sometimes being a kind caring person makes you vulnerable to abusers.”After the appointment I can’t get her words out of my head.I dash into a Starbucks, I’m in Notting Hill just near the tube station, and read the article on my laptop on wifi. I highlight various sections. Narcissists “have a complete lack of empathy for others including their own family and friends, so that they will take advantage of people to get their own needs and desires met, even if it hurts someone.” That sounds about right, Sade could always find some way of masking his real motives in charm, or twisting reality around to make it look like things weren’t his fault, they were mine. How cleverly he’d lied! Narcissists, I read, are attracted to kind, compassionate people who they then use and lie to without remorse.But the bit that really makes me sit up is towards the end of the article. “For someone on the outside looking at a relationship between a highly sensitive person and a narcissist, it’s all too easy to blame the HSP. How and why would anyone want to stay in such a relationship?” Narcissists are incredibly good at making you doubt yourself, especially the part of you that says: this has happened before, it’ll happen again. You need to leave.The opening paragraph of the psychology textbook I read next uses Donald Trump as an example. Trump is also Patrick Bateman’s hero, the misogynistic serial killer protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious American Psycho. Despite an earlier version that broadly focused on New York fiction of the 1990s, Ellis’s novel and the feminist outcry it provoked became the central topic of my PhD.“Are you alright mum?”I’ve just picked Mum up and I’m driving her to Paris for a night and then on to Switzerland where she’s going to have voluntary euthanasia. Despite the London drizzle and the horrific traffic the whole thing has a Thelma and Louise feel about it. I tell mum and she laughs.“We should watch it again. Have you seen it since it first came out?”“Sounds like a good idea.”Mum, tiny, pointy-kneed and wearing an out-of-character fluoro green beanie given to her at the oncology clinic in Sydney, is being very stoic but I can tell from the way she constantly wrings her hands that she’s actually quite terrified.“OK Louise,” she says as I unfold her Zimmer frame later that evening.“OK Thelma,” I reply as she walks off towards the hotel.Paris is a treat. My brother is waiting inside and we’re hoping to enjoy one last meal together.Mum didn’t want to continue with chemo at 83, but she’s frightened of dying a horrific death. As we approach hotel reception Mum can’t help taking a detour to inspect the dinner menu at the hotel restaurant.“Oysters naturel. That sounds nice.”I smile, wait, and take her by the elbow.I’ve completely forgotten. The interview/review I wrote of Acker’s puss*, King of the Pirates, in 1995 for Rolling Stone. Where is it? I open my laptop and quickly click through the endless publicity and reviews of The River Ophelia, the interview/review came out around the same time the novel was published, but I can’t find it. I know I had it out just a few months ago, when I was chasing up some freelance book reviews.I make a fresh pot of tea from the mini bar, green, and return to my Acker tribute. Should I try to get it published? Here, or back in Australia? Ever the émigré’s dilemma. I decide I like the Parisian sense of style in this room, especially the cotton-linen sheets.Finally, I find it, it’s in the wrong folder. Printing it out, I remember how Kathy had called her agent and publisher in New York, and her disbelief when I’d told her the book hadn’t been picked up overseas. Kathy’s call resulted in my first New York agent. I scrutinise its pages.Kathy smiles benign childlike creativity in the larger photo, and gestures in passionate exasperation in the smaller group, her baby face framed by countless metal ear piercings. The interview takes place—at Kathy’s insistence—on her futon in her hotel room. My memories clarify. It wasn’t that we drifted apart, or rather we did, but only after men had come between us first. Neither of us had much luck in that department.(4)Kathy’s writing is also political because her characters don’t act or speak the way you’d expect them to. They don’t seem to follow the rules or behave in the way your average fictional character tends to do. From sentence to sentence, Kathy’s characters either change into different people, or live revolutionary lives, or even more radical still, live impossible lives.When the narrator of DQ transforms herself into a knight (and lives an impossible life); she turns a situation in which she is passive and relatively powerless—she is about to be operated on and drugged—into an empowering experience (and lives a creative revolutionary life). Ironically, getting power means she turns herself into a male knight. But Kathy gets around the problem that power is male by not letting things rest there. The female, aborting Kathy isn’t actually replaced by a male knight, bits of him are just grafted onto her. Sure, she sets out on a quest, but the other aspects of her empowerment are pretty superficial: she does adopt a new name (which is more like a disguise), and identity (appearance); and picks up a bad habit or two—a tendency to talk in the language used by knights.“But who’s the father?” the writer wants to know. “I mean isn’t that the real question here?”No, that is exactly not the real question here and not the point. It is not about who the father is—it’s about what happens to a woman who has an unwanted unplanned pregnancy.The phone rings. It’s my brother. Mum’s waiting for me downstairs and the oysters are beckoning.(5)The idea that writing could be political was very appealing. The transformation between my first novel, Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure and my second, The River Ophelia (Picador insisted on publishing them in reverse chronology) was partly a result of my discovery of Kathy’s work and the ideas it set off in me. Kathy wasn’t the first novelist to write politically, but she was the first female novelist to do so in a way that had an immediate impact on me at an emotional level. And it was this powerful emotional response that inspired me as a writer—I wanted to affect my readers in a similar way (because reading Kathy’s work, I felt less alone and that my darkest experiences, so long silenced by shame and skirted around in the interests of maintaining appearances, could be given a voice).We’re driving through Switzerland and I’m thinking about narcissism and the way the narcissists in my personal and professional life overshadowed everything else. But now it’s time to give the rest of the world some attention. It’s also one way of pulling back the power from the psychopaths who rule the world.As we approach Zurich, my mother asks to pull over so she can use the ladies. When she comes out I can see she’s been crying. Inside the car, she reaches for my hand and clasps it. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to say goodbye.”“It’s alright Mum,” I say and hold her while we both cry.A police car drives by and my mother’s eyes snag. Harassed by the police in Australia and unable to obtain Nembutal in the UK, Mum has run out of options.To be a woman in this society is to find oneself living outside the law. Maybe this is what Acker meant when she wrote about becoming a pirate, or a knight?Textual deconstruction can be a risky business and writers like Acker walk a fine line when it comes to the law. Empire of the Senseless ran into a plagiarism suit in the UK and her publishers forced Acker to sign an apology to Harold Robbins (Acker Hannibal Lecter 13). My third novel Dependency similarly fell foul of the law when I discovered that in deconstructing gossip and myths about celebrities, drawing on their lives and then making stuff up, the result proved prophetic. When my publisher, Harper Collins, refused to indemnify me against potential unintended defamation I pulled the book from its contract on the advice of a lawyer. I was worth seven million pounds on paper at that point, the internet travel site my then husband and I had founded with Bob Geldof had taken off, and the novel was a radical hybrid text comprised of Rupert Murdoch’s biography, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hello Magazine and I was worried that Murdoch might come after me personally. I’d fictionalised him as a King Lear type, writing his Cordelia out of his will and leaving everything to his Goneril and Reagan.Recent theoretical studies argue that Acker’s appropriation and deconstruction constitute a feminist politics as “fragmentation” (June 2) and as “agency” (Pitchford 22). As Acker puts it. “And then it’s like a kid: suddenly a toy shop opens up and the toy shop was called culture.” (Acker Hannibal Lecter 11).We don’t easily fit in a system that wasn’t ever designed to meet our needs.(6)By writing about the most private parts of women’s lives, I’ve tried to show how far there is to go before women and men are equal on a personal level. The River Ophelia is about a young woman whose public life might seem a success from the outside (she is a student doing an honours year at university in receipt of a scholarship), but whose private life is insufferable (she knows nothing about dealing with misogyny on an intimate level and she has no real relationship-survival skills, partly as a result of her family history, partly because the only survival skills she has have been inscribed by patriarchy and leave her vulnerable to more abuse). When Justine-the-character learns how to get around sexism of the personal variety (by re-inventing her life through parodies of classic texts about oedipal society) she not only changes her life, but she passes on her new-found survival skills to the reader.A disturbing tale about a young university student who loses herself in a destructive relationship, The River Ophelia is a postmodern novel about domestic violence and sexual harassment in the academy, contrary to its marketing campaign at the time. It’s protagonist, Justine, loves Sade but Sade is only interested in sex; indeed, he’s a brutish sex addict. Despite this, Justine can’t seem to leave: for all her education, she’s looking for love and commitment in all the wrong places. While the feminist lore of previous generations seems to work well in theory, Justine can’t seem to make it work in practise. Owning her power and experimenting with her own sexuality only leaves her feeling more despairing than before. Unconventional, compelling and controversial, The River Ophelia became an instant best-seller and is credited with beginning the Australian literary movement known as grunge/dirty realism.But there is always the possibility, given the rich intertextuality and self referentiality, that The River Ophelia is Justine’s honours thesis in creative writing. In this case, Sade, Juliette, Ophelia, Hamlet, Bataille, Simone, Marcelle and Leopold become hybrids made up from appropriated canonical characters, fragments of Justine’s turbulent student’s world and invented sections. But The River Ophelia is also a feminist novel that partly began as a dialogue with Ellis whose scandalous American Psycho it parodies even as it reinvents. This creative activity, which also involves the reader by inviting her to participate in the textual play, eventually empowers Justine over the canon and over her perpetrator, Sade.Another hotel room. This one, just out of Zürich, is tiny. I place my suitcase on the rack beneath the window overlooking the narrow street and start to unpack.“Hasn’t this all been said before, about The River Ophelia?” The writer says, trying out the bed. I’m in the middle of an email about self-publishing a new edition of TRO.Some of it. While the grunge label has been refuted, Acker’s influence has been underplayed.Acker often named her protagonists after herself, so losing the Acker part of my textual filiation plays into the whole grunge/dirty realism marketing campaign. I’ve talked about how I always name protagonists after famous women but not linked this to Acker. Bohemia Beach has a protagonist named after Cathy as in Wuthering Heights. Justine of The River Ophelia was doubly an Acker trait: firstly, she was named Justine after De Sade’s character and is a deconstruction of that character, and secondly she was named Justine self-reflexively after me, as a tribute to Kathy as in Kathy Goes to Haiti.The other context for The River Ophelia that has been lost is to do with the early work of Mary Gaitskill, and Catherine Texier. The narcissists were so destructive and so powerful they left no time for the relatively more subtle Gaitskill or Texier. Prototypes for Sex in the City, the 1990s was also a time when Downtown New York women writers explored the idea that gender equality meant women could do anything men did sexually, that they deserved the full gamut of libertine sexual freedoms. Twenty years on it should also be said that women who push the envelope by writing women protagonists who are every bit as sexually transgressive as men, every bit as addictively self-destructive as male protagonists deserve not to be shamed for that experimentation. They deserve to be celebrated and read.AfterwordI’d like to remember Kathy as I knew her briefly in Sydney. A bottle-blonde with a number two haircut, a leopard-skin bikini and a totally tattooed body, she swam a surprisingly genteel breast-stroke in the next lane in one of the world’s most macho lap-swimming pools.ReferencesA Simple Favour. Dir. Paul Feig. Lionsgate, 2018.Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote. London: Collins, 1986.———. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove, 1988.———. Hannibal Lecter, My Father. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.———. Kathy Goes to Haiti. New York: Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly, 1994.——— and McKenzie Wark. I’m Very into You: Correspondence 1995-1996. New York: Semiotext(e), 2015.Basic Instinct. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. TriStar Pictures, 1992.Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Norton and Co, 2003.Bushnell, Candace. Sex in the City. United States: Grand Central Publishing, 1996.Cooke, Rachel. “Review of After Kathy Acker: A Biography by Chris Kraus—Baffling Life Study.” The Guardian 4 Sep. 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/04/after-kathy-acker-a-biography-chris-kraus-review>.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage, 1991.Ettler, Justine. Bohemia Beach. Melbourne: Transit Lounge. 2018.———. “Kathy Acker: King of the puss*es.” Review of puss*, King of the Pirates, by Kathy Acker. Rolling Stone. Nov. 1995: 60-61.———. Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure. Sydney: Picador, 1996.———. “La Trobe University Essay: Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, and Catherine Texier’s Break Up.” Australian Book Review, 1995.———. The Best Ellis for Business: A Re-Examination of the Mass Media Feminist Critique of “American Psycho.” PhD. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2013.———. The River Ophelia. Sydney: Picador, 1995.Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991.Friedman, Ellen G. “A Conversation with Kathy Acker.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (Fall 1989): 20-21.Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behaviour. New York: Random House, 1988.I Love Dick. Dir. Jill Soloway. Amazon Video, 2017.June, Pamela B. The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern Feminist and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Therese Huk, Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Perez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010.Killing Eve. Dir. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. BBC America, 2018.Kraus, Chris. After Kathy Acker: A Biography. London: Penguin, 2017.———. I Love Dick. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2016.Laing, Olivia. Crudo. London: Picador, 2018.Lee, Bandy. The Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. New York: St Martin’s Press. 2017.Lombard, Nancy, and Lesley McMillan. “Introduction.” Violence against Women. Eds. Nancy Lombard and Lesley McMillan. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2013.Pitchford, Nicola. Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. London: Associated Uni Press, 2002.Schiffrin, André. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London and New York: Verso, 2000.Shakespeare, William. King Lear. London: Penguin Classics, 2015.Siegle, Robert. Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency. United States: John Hopkins Press, 1989.Single White Female. Dir. Barbet Schroeder. Columbia Pictures, 1992.Texier, Catherine. Panic Blood. London: Collins, 1991.Thelma and Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991.Ward, Deborah. “Sense and Sensitivity: The Highly Sensitive Person and the Narcissist.” Psychology Today (16 Jan. 2012). 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sense-and-sensitivity/201201/the-highly-sensitive-person-and-the-narcissist>.

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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›.

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Introduction Based on the profusion of scholarly and populist analysis of the relationship between books and films one could easily be forgiven for thinking that the exchange between the two media was a decidedly one-way affair. Countless words have been expended upon the subject of literary adaptation, in which the process of transforming stories and novels into cinematic or televisual form has been examined in ways both general and particular. A relationship far less well-documented though is that between popular novels and the films that have spawned them. With the notable exception of Randall D. Larson’s valuable Films into Books, which is centred mainly on correspondence with prolific writers of “novelisations”, academic study of this extremely widespread phenomenon has been almost non-existent. Even Linda Hutcheon’s admirable recent publication, A Theory of Adaptation, makes scant mention of novelisations, in spite of her claim that this flourishing industry “cannot be ignored” (38). Retelling film narratives in a written form is nothing new. Indeed, as Larson notes, “novelisations have existed almost as long as movies have” and can be found as far back as the 1920s, although it was not until the advent of mass-market paperbacks that they truly came into their own (3-4). The sixties and seventies were boom years for novelisations as they provided film lovers with a way to re-experience their favourite movies long after they had disappeared from cinema screens. It shouldn’t be forgotten that before the advent of home video and DVD books were, along with television broadcasts, the most widely accessible way in which people could do so. Even today they continue to appear in book shops. At the same time, the Internet age has fuelled the creation and dissemination of a vast array of “fan-fiction” that supplements the output of authorised writers. Despite the vast consumer appetite for novelisations, however, their critical reception has been noticeably cool. Jonathan Coe’s caustic appraisal of novelisations as “that bastard, misshapen offspring of the cinema and the written word” represents the prevailing attitude toward them (45). The fact that many are genre novels—sci-fi, western and crime thrillers—and that the majority are decidedly low-brow has not helped to secure them critical plaudits. Other reasons though lie beyond these prejudices. For one thing, many are simply not very well written according to any conventional measure. When one considers the time constraints under which a lot of these books were produced this is hardly surprising. Based on his extensive correspondence with authors, Larson suggests four to six weeks as around the average writing time, with some adaptations, such as Michael Avallone’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes, spewed out in a single weekend (12). The quality of the writing in many novelisations is certainly hard to defend, and yet one other widely held view of them holds considerably less water. This is the idea of novelisations as pale shadows of the movies deemed to be their source, in which only the most manifest content of characterisation and plot are reproduced. In this denuded form, it is implied, a great deal of value has been lost while only rarely has anything of significant value been added. This point of view is in strong contrast with the now customary acceptance that in the reverse process of adaptation—from book to film—while some elements may be necessarily or wilfully sacrificed, significant gains in emotional impact, characterisation or other dramatic features may often be made as a result of the different techniques available through the film medium. If we think of films as the source of novelisations we slip into a great fallacy however. In the vast majority of cases the books are not based on films at all but on their screenplays. Unlike literary adaptations, film and book do not draw one from the other but instead each produces in a different medium an adaptation of a shared source. It has generally been considered desirable to have a novelisation available for public purchase by the time the movie reaches theatres and, since time must be allowed for printing and distribution, this has generally meant that the book must be completed before the filming wraps (Larson, 12-3). No wonder, then, that novelisations rarely attempt to describe a film’s mise-en-scène. While the industrial process by which the books are produced can help to explain some features of their relationship to the films whose stories they share, the fact that they are seldom adaptations of these actual films is a point that their marketing has tended to suppress. It is normal for book covers to feature one or more images from the film. Names of stars often appear prominently, and a more detailed list of the film’s key cast and credits can generally be found in smaller print on the back of the book. Novelisations are not sold or consumed as alternative adaptations of a screenplay but through the implication of a much closer relationship to the film than many in fact possess. This discordance allows us to consider novelisations as a re-imagining of the film on two temporal levels. On the one hand, the novelisation can be thought of as preceding the film. It is not unusual for such a book to adapt an older version of the script than the one that was actually shot, thus rendering a single definitive script source elusive if not downright illusory. It is fairly common to find whole scenes missing from the book or conversely to read extensive narrative episodes that never made their way into the finished picture. Dialogue is often a mere paraphrase, no matter how diligently the author has replicated the lines of the script. Such largely unintentional differences can provide fascinating insights into the film’s production history, revealing other paths that the film might well have taken. On the other hand, despite its being published simultaneously with (or even before) the film’s release, a novelisation will often be consumed after viewing the film, in order to help its readers re-experience the movie or to develop and augment that experience. Novelisations can thus be seen to give rise to three main areas of interest. As historical documents they can be of use when considering a film’s developmental process. They also provide alternative readings of the film script and may, by extension, help to enrich a viewer’s retrospective relationship with the film itself. Thirdly, they offer an avenue for exploring the differing narrational forms and capabilities of the two media. “Talk of adaptation,” Yvonne Tasker has argued, “often seems to take place in an abstract hierarchical mode—a hierarchy in which literature seems to emerge as almost by default ‘better’, more complex than film” (18). As we shall see, such a position is not always easy to support. In considering these aspects of the novelisation we now turn to two closely related examples. The film Capricorn One, released in the United States in 1978, was directed by Peter Hyams from his own screenplay. For our purposes it is most notable as one of several works that spawned two separate English language novelisations, each by different authors. One by Bernard L. Ross (a youthful pseudonym of the now popular novelist Ken Follett) was published in England, while Ron Goulart’s version was published in the United States. The story of Capricorn One centres on a colossal fraud perpetrated by NASA in an attempt to conceal a catastrophic problem with its manned mission to Mars. Realising that a fault in the shuttle’s life support system means that the astronauts will not survive the journey, but that admission of failure will provide the government with the long-sought excuse to cut the program’s funding, a conspiracy is hatched to fake a successful mission by enacting the landing in a clandestine television studio. When the shuttle breaks up on re-entry, the three astronauts realise that their existence jeopardises this elaborate fraud and that they must go on the run for a chance at survival. Meanwhile, a journalist finds his own life in peril as he doggedly pursues a hunch that all is not as it should be with the Capricorn One mission. Novelisations as Evidence of the Film’s Production History Each book shows, in a range of ways, its fidelity to a shared source: the screenplay (or, at least, to the elements that remained unchanged through various screenplay drafts). That the screenplay comprised not only extensive dialogue but also some descriptive material becomes clear at a very early stage. Goulart opens with the following image: “The sun, an intense orange ball, began to rise over the Atlantic” (5). Several pages into his own book, Ross introduces the same narrative event with these words: “The morning sun rose like a big orange lollipop over the Atlantic Ocean” (10). The comparability of these visually evocative images with the equivalent moment in the finished film might suggest a fairly straightforward transposition of the screenplay into the three marketed texts. However, other sections belie any such assumption. The books’ origin in the screenplay and not in the film itself, and the considerable evolution that has occurred between screenplay and finished film, are expressed in two main ways. The first is the presence of corresponding scenes in both books that do not occur in the film. Where a non-filmed scene occurs in one book only we can assume a high probability that it is an invention of the book’s author which is intended to develop the narrative or characterisation. When found in both books, though, we can only infer that a scene outlined in the screenplay was dropped during either the film’s production or editing phase. For instance, in all three versions of the narrative, an attempt is made on the life of reporter Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould) by tampering with his car. A high-speed action sequence culminates when car and driver plummet into a deep river. Whereas the film moves swiftly to the next scene without ever explaining how Caulfield managed to extricate himself from this perilous situation, each book extends the sequence with a description of how he disentangles his trouser leg from the door handle in order to pull himself through the open window and out of the sinking vehicle (Goulart, 96-7; Ross, 86). Indeed, the retention of this scene in the novelisations fills what is in the film an unsatisfying narrative ellipsis. The second proof of an evolution between screenplay and film is perhaps even more interesting in understanding the production process. This is that narrative events do not all occur in the same order in each book. The differences between the two books, as well as between books and film, suggest that Goulart’s was based on a later version of the screenplay as it corresponds more closely with the film’s chronology of events. The narrational structure of each text consists of a number of alternating segments designed to maintain tension while following simultaneously occurring incidents in the adventures of each of the protagonists. This is especially the case in the last half of the story where the three astronauts—Col. Charles Brubaker (James Brolin), Lt. Col. Peter Willis (Sam Waterston) and Cmdr. John Walker (O. J. Simpson)—have escaped into the desert and split up to maximise the chance that one will survive to expose the swindle. Narrational segments follow their individual progress as well as that of Caulfield’s investigation and of NASA director James Kelloway (Hal Holbrook)’s attempts to manage the crisis of the astronauts’ escape. It is evident that during the film’s post-production some reshuffling of these sequences was undertaken in order to maximise suspense. Further evidence that Ross’s book was based on an earlier screenplay than Goulart’s source emerges through its ending which, unlike Goulart’s, differs from the finished film. In every version of the story, Caulfield is able to rescue Brubaker and deliver him to his wife Kay (Brenda Vaccaro) in front of the watching media. Instead of doing so at a memorial service for the “dead” astronauts, however, Ross has this event take place at Bru’s home, after the service occurs without incident some pages earlier. This episode, more that any other in either book, is conspicuous in its variance from the film. Other discrepancies are based on addition, non-inclusion or reordering: different tellings of the same tale. Here, however, consumers of these texts are faced with two mutually exclusive finales that enforce a choice between the “right” and “wrong” version of the story. Enriching Character and Plot through Alternative Readings of the Script Although the examples above highlight some significant variations in the three versions of Capricorn One, none show evidence of intentional narrative difference. In some other respects, though, the authors of the novelisations did employ constituents of their own invention in order to transform the source material into the format expected by the readers of any novel. One key technique is shared by both authors. This is the fleshing-out of characters, a technique used more extensively by Ross than Goulart, and one which is largely responsible for his book’s greater length (an estimated 68,000 words, compared with Goulart’s 37,000). Goulart, for his part, largely confines this technique to the latter section of the story where the astronauts make their individual journeys across the desert. While his book is comprised, for the most part, of reported speech, the protagonists’ solitude in this part of the story leads him to recourse to descriptions of their thoughts in order to stretch out and enliven what would otherwise be an exceptionally brief and potentially dull account. Ross embraces the task of elaborating characterisation with considerably greater fervour. As well as representing their thoughts, he regularly adds passages of back story. During a breakfast scene before the launch (present in both books but absent from the finished film) he describes how each astronaut came to be involved in the mission and their feelings about it. Similarly he describes childhood or youthful incidents in their lives and in those of Kelloway and Caulfield in order to explain and add believability to some of their later actions. Even the biography and thoughts of relatively minor characters, such as the whistleblowing NASA employee Elliot Whitter (Robert Walden), are routinely developed. However, Ross does not stop here in elaborating the blueprint offered by the screenplay. New characters are added in order to develop a subplot glossed over in the film. These additions relate to an elderly European man, Mr. Julius, who is affiliated with a couple of Kelloway’s corporate accomplices and whose shady employees are responsible for both the attempts to assassinate Caulfield and for piloting the helicopters used to seek and destroy the escaped astronauts. In such ways, Ross succeeds in producing a rendition of the story that (barring its anomalous ending) enhances that of the film without conspicuously competing against what all the marketing points to as the “definitive” version. The Differing Narrational Capabilities of Films and Books While this section is indebted to the methods and findings of existing studies of novel-to-film adaptations, through close attention to the reverse process (or, more accurately, to screenplay-to-novel adaptations) we can observe another less recognised dynamic at work. This is the novelisers’ efforts to assimilate what are more traditionally cinematic devices into their writing. By way of illustration, our case study shows how it has led both Ross and Goulart to employ a writing style that sometimes contrasts with the norms of original mainstream novels. My comments thus far have dwelt mainly on differences in the placement and inclusion of narrative events, although the description of how the novelisers have expanded characters’ back stories suggests one way in which the written word can lend itself more readily to the concise interspersion of such material than can the film medium. This is not to say that film is incapable of rendering such incidents; merely that the representation of back story requires either lengthy spoken exposition or the insertion of flashbacks (some of which would require younger actors doubling for the stars). Either technique is prone to be more disruptive of the narrative flow, and therefore justifiable only in rarer instances where such information proves crucial, rather than merely useful, to the main narrative thrust. There are other ways, though, in which comparison of these three texts highlights the relative strengths of the different media in stimulating the response of their viewers or readers. One of these is the handling of audiovisual spectacle. It perhaps goes without saying that the film elicits a far more visceral response during its action scenes. This is especially true of a climactic sequence in which Caulfield and cropduster pilot Albain (Telly Savalas) do aerial battle with two helicopters as each strives to be the first to reach the fugitive Brubaker. Ross is far more successful than Goulart in conveying the excitement of this scene, although even his version pales in comparison with the movie. A device on which the film regularly draws, both in order to heighten tension and so as to suggest dramatic or ironic parallels between different narrative strands, is that of cross-cutting. This technique is adapted by each of the novelisers, who use it in a diluted form. Each of the books subdivides its chapters into many segments, which are often much shorter than those found in conventional novels. Ross uses ninety such segments and Goulart sixty-seven. The shortest of these, by Ross, is a solitary sentence sitting amidst a sea of white space, in which he signals the cancellation of the plan to reunite the astronauts with their shuttle at the projected splashdown site: “High over the Pacific Ocean, the Falcon jet went into a tight banking turn and began to head back the way it had come” (116). Neither author, however, has the audacity to cut between locations with the speed that the film does. One of the movie’s most effective sequences is that in which rapid edits alternate between Kelloway solemnly announcing the fictive death of the astronauts to the press and the astronauts sitting in their hideaway imagining this very eulogy. Neither one of the novelisations succeeds in creating a sequence quite so biting in its satire. In this case study we are able to observe some of the ways in which films and novelisations can relate to one another, each providing a reading of the film script (or scripts) that, through a mutual interlocking in the mind of the reader versed in these multiple versions of the tale, can contribute to an experience of the narrative that is richer than one text alone can produce. Robert Block, who has written both novelisations and original novels, alleges that “the usual rule seems to be that while films can widely and wildly deviate from previously-published-and-purchased novels, a novelisation cannot supersede a screenplay in terms of content” (Larson, 44). Whereas this assertion describes with reasonable accuracy the approach that Ron Goulart has taken to his version of Capricorn One, the more ambitious and detailed story told by Bernard Ross provides one clear exception to this rule. It thus offers firm evidence that novelisations are not, by their very nature, merely impoverished derivations of the cinema. Instead they constitute a medium capable of original and intrinsic value and which fully deserves more detailed critical appreciation than its current reputation suggests. References Coe, Jonathan. 9th and 13th. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Goulart, Ron. Capricorn One. New York: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1978. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Larson, Randall D. Films into Books: An Analytical Bibliography of Film Novelizations, Movie, and TV Tie-Ins. London: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Ross, Bernard L. Capricorn One. London: Futura, 1978. Tasker, Yvonne, The Silence of the Lambs. London: BFI, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allison, Deborah. "Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/07-allison.php>. APA Style Allison, D. (May 2007) "Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/07-allison.php>.

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Abstract:

‘Every space has become ad space’. Steve Hayden, Wired Magazine, May 2003. Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) dictum that media technologies constitute a sensory extension of the body shares a conceptual affinity with Ernst Jünger’s notion of ‘“organic construction” [which] indicates [a] synergy between man and machine’ and Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the mimetic correspondence between the organic and the inorganic, between human and non-human forms (Bolz, 2002: 19). The logo or brand is co-extensive with various media of communication – billboards, TV advertisem*nts, fashion labels, book spines, mobile phones, etc. Often the logo is interchangeable with the product itself or a way or life. Since all social relations are mediated, whether by communications technologies or architectonic forms ranging from corporate buildings to sporting grounds to family living rooms, it follows that there can be no outside for sociality. The social is and always has been in a mutually determining relationship with mediating forms. It is in this sense that there is no outside. Such an idea has become a refrain amongst various contemporary media theorists. Here’s a sample: There is no outside position anymore, nor is this perceived as something desirable. (Lovink, 2002a: 4) Both “us” and “them” (whoever we are, whoever they are) are all always situated in this same virtual geography. There’s no outside …. There is nothing outside the vector. (Wark, 2002: 316) There is no more outside. The critique of information is in the information itself. (Lash, 2002: 220) In declaring a universality for media culture and information flows, all of the above statements acknowledge the political and conceptual failure of assuming a critical position outside socio-technically constituted relations. Similarly, they recognise the problems inherent in the “ideology critique” of the Frankfurt School who, in their distinction between “truth” and “false-consciousness”, claimed a sort of absolute knowledge for the critic that transcended the field of ideology as it is produced by the culture industry. Althusser’s more complex conception of ideology, material practices and subject formation nevertheless also fell prey to the pretence of historical materialism as an autonomous “science” that is able to determine the totality, albeit fragmented, of lived social relations. One of the key failings of ideology critique, then, is its incapacity to account for the ways in which the critic, theorist or intellectual is implicated in the operations of ideology. That is, such approaches displace the reflexivity and power relationships between epistemology, ontology and their constitution as material practices within socio-political institutions and historical constellations, which in turn are the settings for the formation of ideology. Scott Lash abandons the term ideology altogether due to its conceptual legacies within German dialectics and French post-structuralist aporetics, both of which ‘are based in a fundamental dualism, a fundamental binary, of the two types of reason. One speaks of grounding and reconciliation, the other of unbridgeability …. Both presume a sphere of transcendence’ (Lash, 2002: 8). Such assertions can be made at a general level concerning these diverse and often conflicting approaches when they are reduced to categories for the purpose of a polemic. However, the work of “post-structuralists” such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and the work of German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann is clearly amenable to the task of critique within information societies (see Rossiter, 2003). Indeed, Lash draws on such theorists in assembling his critical dispositif for the information age. More concretely, Lash (2002: 9) advances his case for a new mode of critique by noting the socio-technical and historical shift from ‘constitutive dualisms of the era of the national manufacturing society’ to global information cultures, whose constitutive form is immanent to informational networks and flows. Such a shift, according to Lash, needs to be met with a corresponding mode of critique: Ideologycritique [ideologiekritik] had to be somehow outside of ideology. With the disappearance of a constitutive outside, informationcritique must be inside of information. There is no outside any more. (2002: 10) Lash goes on to note, quite rightly, that ‘Informationcritique itself is branded, another object of intellectual property, machinically mediated’ (2002: 10). It is the political and conceptual tensions between information critique and its regulation via intellectual property regimes which condition critique as yet another brand or logo that I wish to explore in the rest of this essay. Further, I will question the supposed erasure of a “constitutive outside” to the field of socio-technical relations within network societies and informational economies. Lash is far too totalising in supposing a break between industrial modes of production and informational flows. Moreover, the assertion that there is no more outside to information too readily and simplistically assumes informational relations as universal and horizontally organised, and hence overlooks the significant structural, cultural and economic obstacles to participation within media vectors. That is, there certainly is an outside to information! Indeed, there are a plurality of outsides. These outsides are intertwined with the flows of capital and the imperial biopower of Empire, as Hardt and Negri (2000) have argued. As difficult as it may be to ascertain the boundaries of life in all its complexity, borders, however defined, nonetheless exist. Just ask the so-called “illegal immigrant”! This essay identifies three key modalities comprising a constitutive outside: material (uneven geographies of labour-power and the digital divide), symbolic (cultural capital), and strategic (figures of critique). My point of reference in developing this inquiry will pivot around an analysis of the importation in Australia of the British “Creative Industries” project and the problematic foundation such a project presents to the branding and commercialisation of intellectual labour. The creative industries movement – or Queensland Ideology, as I’ve discussed elsewhere with Danny Butt (2002) – holds further implications for the political and economic position of the university vis-à-vis the arts and humanities. Creative industries constructs itself as inside the culture of informationalism and its concomitant economies by the very fact that it is an exercise in branding. Such branding is evidenced in the discourses, rhetoric and policies of creative industries as adopted by university faculties, government departments and the cultural industries and service sectors seeking to reposition themselves in an institutional environment that is adjusting to ongoing structural reforms attributed to the demands by the “New Economy” for increased labour flexibility and specialisation, institutional and economic deregulation, product customisation and capital accumulation. Within the creative industries the content produced by labour-power is branded as copyrights and trademarks within the system of Intellectual Property Regimes (IPRs). However, as I will go on to show, a constitutive outside figures in material, symbolic and strategic ways that condition the possibility of creative industries. The creative industries project, as envisioned by the Blair government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) responsible for the Creative Industry Task Force Mapping Documents of 1998 and 2001, is interested in enhancing the “creative” potential of cultural labour in order to extract a commercial value from cultural objects and services. Just as there is no outside for informationcritique, for proponents of the creative industries there is no culture that is worth its name if it is outside a market economy. That is, the commercialisation of “creativity” – or indeed commerce as a creative undertaking – acts as a legitimising function and hence plays a delimiting role for “culture” and, by association, sociality. And let us not forget, the institutional life of career academics is also at stake in this legitimating process. The DCMS cast its net wide when defining creative sectors and deploys a lexicon that is as vague and unquantifiable as the next mission statement by government and corporate bodies enmeshed within a neo-liberal paradigm. At least one of the key proponents of the creative industries in Australia is ready to acknowledge this (see Cunningham, 2003). The list of sectors identified as holding creative capacities in the CITF Mapping Document include: film, music, television and radio, publishing, software, interactive leisure software, design, designer fashion, architecture, performing arts, crafts, arts and antique markets, architecture and advertising. The Mapping Document seeks to demonstrate how these sectors consist of ‘... activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the potential for wealth and job creation through generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ (CITF: 1998/2001). The CITF’s identification of intellectual property as central to the creation of jobs and wealth firmly places the creative industries within informational and knowledge economies. Unlike material property, intellectual property such as artistic creations (films, music, books) and innovative technical processes (software, biotechnologies) are forms of knowledge that do not diminish when they are distributed. This is especially the case when information has been encoded in a digital form and distributed through technologies such as the internet. In such instances, information is often attributed an “immaterial” and nonrivalrous quality, although this can be highly misleading for both the conceptualisation of information and the politics of knowledge production. Intellectual property, as distinct from material property, operates as a scaling device in which the unit cost of labour is offset by the potential for substantial profit margins realised by distribution techniques availed by new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their capacity to infinitely reproduce the digital commodity object as a property relation. Within the logic of intellectual property regimes, the use of content is based on the capacity of individuals and institutions to pay. The syndication of media content ensures that market saturation is optimal and competition is kept to a minimum. However, such a legal architecture and hegemonic media industry has run into conflict with other net cultures such as open source movements and peer-to-peer networks (Lovink, 2002b; Meikle, 2002), which is to say nothing of the digital piracy of software and digitally encoded cinematic forms. To this end, IPRs are an unstable architecture for extracting profit. The operation of Intellectual Property Regimes constitutes an outside within creative industries by alienating labour from its mode of information or form of expression. Lash is apposite on this point: ‘Intellectual property carries with it the right to exclude’ (Lash, 2002: 24). This principle of exclusion applies not only to those outside the informational economy and culture of networks as result of geographic, economic, infrastructural, and cultural constraints. The very practitioners within the creative industries are excluded from control over their creations. It is in this sense that a legal and material outside is established within an informational society. At the same time, this internal outside – to put it rather clumsily – operates in a constitutive manner in as much as the creative industries, by definition, depend upon the capacity to exploit the IP produced by its primary source of labour. For all the emphasis the Mapping Document places on exploiting intellectual property, it’s really quite remarkable how absent any elaboration or considered development of IP is from creative industries rhetoric. It’s even more astonishing that media and cultural studies academics have given at best passing attention to the issues of IPRs. Terry Flew (2002: 154-159) is one of the rare exceptions, though even here there is no attempt to identify the implications IPRs hold for those working in the creative industries sectors. Perhaps such oversights by academics associated with the creative industries can be accounted for by the fact that their own jobs rest within the modern, industrial institution of the university which continues to offer the security of a salary award system and continuing if not tenured employment despite the onslaught of neo-liberal reforms since the 1980s. Such an industrial system of traditional and organised labour, however, does not define the labour conditions for those working in the so-called creative industries. Within those sectors engaged more intensively in commercialising culture, labour practices closely resemble work characterised by the dotcom boom, which saw young people working excessively long hours without any of the sort of employment security and protection vis-à-vis salary, health benefits and pension schemes peculiar to traditional and organised labour (see McRobbie, 2002; Ross, 2003). During the dotcom mania of the mid to late 90s, stock options were frequently offered to people as an incentive for offsetting the often minimum or even deferred payment of wages (see Frank, 2000). It is understandable that the creative industries project holds an appeal for managerial intellectuals operating in arts and humanities disciplines in Australia, most particularly at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which claims to have established the ‘world’s first’ Creative Industries faculty (http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/). The creative industries provide a validating discourse for those suffering anxiety disorders over what Ruth Barcan (2003) has called the ‘usefulness’ of ‘idle’ intellectual pastimes. As a project that endeavours to articulate graduate skills with labour markets, the creative industries is a natural extension of the neo-liberal agenda within education as advocated by successive governments in Australia since the Dawkins reforms in the mid 1980s (see Marginson and Considine, 2000). Certainly there’s a constructive dimension to this: graduates, after all, need jobs and universities should display an awareness of market conditions; they also have a responsibility to do so. And on this count, I find it remarkable that so many university departments in my own field of communications and media studies are so bold and, let’s face it, stupid, as to make unwavering assertions about market demands and student needs on the basis of doing little more than sniffing the wind! Time for a bit of a reality check, I’d say. And this means becoming a little more serious about allocating funds and resources towards market research and analysis based on the combination of needs between students, staff, disciplinary values, university expectations, and the political economy of markets. However, the extent to which there should be a wholesale shift of the arts and humanities into a creative industries model is open to debate. The arts and humanities, after all, are a set of disciplinary practices and values that operate as a constitutive outside for creative industries. Indeed, in their creative industries manifesto, Stuart Cunningham and John Hartley (2002) loath the arts and humanities in such confused, paradoxical and hypocritical ways in order to establish the arts and humanities as a cultural and ideological outside. To this end, to subsume the arts and humanities into the creative industries, if not eradicate them altogether, is to spell the end of creative industries as it’s currently conceived at the institutional level within academe. Too much specialisation in one post-industrial sector, broad as it may be, ensures a situation of labour reserves that exceed market needs. One only needs to consider all those now unemployed web-designers that graduated from multi-media programs in the mid to late 90s. Further, it does not augur well for the inevitable shift from or collapse of a creative industries economy. Where is the standing reserve of labour shaped by university education and training in a post-creative industries economy? Diehard neo-liberals and true-believers in the capacity for perpetual institutional flexibility would say that this isn’t a problem. The university will just “organically” adapt to prevailing market conditions and shape their curriculum and staff composition accordingly. Perhaps. Arguably if the university is to maintain a modality of time that is distinct from the just-in-time mode of production characteristic of informational economies – and indeed, such a difference is a quality that defines the market value of the educational commodity – then limits have to be established between institutions of education and the corporate organisation or creative industry entity. The creative industries project is a reactionary model insofar as it reinforces the status quo of labour relations within a neo-liberal paradigm in which bids for industry contracts are based on a combination of rich technological infrastructures that have often been subsidised by the state (i.e. paid for by the public), high labour skills, a low currency exchange rate and the lowest possible labour costs. In this respect it is no wonder that literature on the creative industries omits discussion of the importance of unions within informational, networked economies. What is the place of unions in a labour force constituted as individualised units? The conditions of possibility for creative industries within Australia are at once its frailties. In many respects, the success of the creative industries sector depends upon the ongoing combination of cheap labour enabled by a low currency exchange rate and the capacity of students to access the skills and training offered by universities. Certainly in relation to matters such as these there is no outside for the creative industries. There’s a great need to explore alternative economic models to the content production one if wealth is to be successfully extracted and distributed from activities in the new media sectors. The suggestion that the creative industries project initiates a strategic response to the conditions of cultural production within network societies and informational economies is highly debateable. The now well documented history of digital piracy in the film and software industries and the difficulties associated with regulating violations to proprietors of IP in the form of copyright and trademarks is enough of a reason to look for alternative models of wealth extraction. And you can be sure this will occur irrespective of the endeavours of the creative industries. To conclude, I am suggesting that those working in the creative industries, be they content producers or educators, need to intervene in IPRs in such a way that: 1) ensures the alienation of their labour is minimised; 2) collectivising “creative” labour in the form of unions or what Wark (2001) has termed the “hacker class”, as distinct from the “vectoralist class”, may be one way of achieving this; and 3) the advocates of creative industries within the higher education sector in particular are made aware of the implications IPRs have for graduates entering the workforce and adjust their rhetoric, curriculum, and policy engagements accordingly. Works Cited Barcan, Ruth. ‘The Idleness of Academics: Reflections on the Usefulness of Cultural Studies’. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (forthcoming, 2003). Bolz, Norbert. ‘Rethinking Media Aesthetics’, in Geert Lovink, Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002, 18-27. Butt, Danny and Rossiter, Ned. ‘Blowing Bubbles: Post-Crash Creative Industries and the Withering of Political Critique in Cultural Studies’. Paper presented at Ute Culture: The Utility of Culture and the Uses of Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies Association of Australia Conference, Melbourne, 5-7 December, 2002. Posted to fibreculture mailing list, 10 December, 2002, http://www.fibreculture.org/archives/index.html Creative Industry Task Force: Mapping Document, DCMS (Department of Culture, Media and Sport), London, 1998/2001. http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/mapping.html Cunningham, Stuart. ‘The Evolving Creative Industries: From Original Assumptions to Contemporary Interpretations’. Seminar Paper, QUT, Brisbane, 9 May, 2003, http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documen... ...ts/THE_EVOLVING_CREATIVE_INDUSTRIES.pdf Cunningham, Stuart; Hearn, Gregory; Cox, Stephen; Ninan, Abraham and Keane, Michael. Brisbane’s Creative Industries 2003. Report delivered to Brisbane City Council, Community and Economic Development, Brisbane: CIRAC, 2003. http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documen... ...ts/bccreportonly.pdf Flew, Terry. New Media: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Frank, Thomas. One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Hartley, John and Cunningham, Stuart. ‘Creative Industries: from Blue Poles to fat pipes’, in Malcolm Gillies (ed.) The National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit: Position Papers. Canberra: DEST, 2002. Hayden, Steve. ‘Tastes Great, Less Filling: Ad Space – Will Advertisers Learn the Hard Lesson of Over-Development?’. Wired Magazine 11.06 (June, 2003), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/ad_spc.html Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Lash, Scott. Critique of Information. London: Sage, 2002. Lovink, Geert. Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002a. Lovink, Geert. Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002b. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. McRobbie, Angela. ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded up Creative Worlds’, Cultural Studies 16.4 (2002): 516-31. Marginson, Simon and Considine, Mark. The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Meikle, Graham. Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet. Sydney: Pluto Press, 2002. Ross, Andrew. No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Rossiter, Ned. ‘Processual Media Theory’, in Adrian Miles (ed.) Streaming Worlds: 5th International Digital Arts & Culture (DAC) Conference. 19-23 May. Melbourne: RMIT University, 2003, 173-184. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Rossiter.pdf Sassen, Saskia. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Wark, McKenzie. ‘Abstraction’ and ‘Hack’, in Hugh Brown, Geert Lovink, Helen Merrick, Ned Rossiter, David Teh, Michele Willson (eds). Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory. Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 2001, 3-7, 99-102. Wark, McKenzie. ‘The Power of Multiplicity and the Multiplicity of Power’, in Geert Lovink, Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002, 314-325. Links http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Rossiter.pdf http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/ http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documents/THE_EVOLVING_CREATIVE_INDUSTRIES.pdf http://www.creativeindustries.qut.com/research/cirac/documents/bccreportonly.pdf http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/mapping.html http://www.fibreculture.org/archives/index.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/ad_spc.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Rossiter, Ned. "Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/11-creativeindustries.php>. APA Style Rossiter, N. (2003, Jun 19). Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/11-creativeindustries.php>

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Nine Inch Nails have just released a new single; In addition to the usual formats, “The Hand That Feeds” was available for free download in Garageband format. Trent Reznor explained, “For quite some time I’ve been interested in the idea of allowing you the ability to tinker around with my tracks – to create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what’s there” (MacMinute 15 April 2005). Reznor invites creativity facilitated by copying and transformation. “Copy” carries connotations of unsavoury notions such as piracy, stealing, fake, and plagiarism. Conversely, in some circ*mstances copying is acceptable, some situations demand copying. This article examines the treatment of “copy” at the intersection of musical creativity and copyright law with regard to cover versions and sampling. Waldron reminds us that copyright was devised first and foremost with a public benefit in mind (851). This fundamental has been persistently reiterated (H. R Rep. (1909); Sen. Rep. (1909); H. R. Rep. (1988); Patterson & Lindberg 70). The law grants creators a bundle of rights in copyrighted works. Two rights implicated in recorded music are located in the composition and the recording. Many potential uses of copyrighted songs require a license. The Copyright Act 1976, s. 115 provides a compulsory licence for cover versions. In other words, any song can be covered for a statutory royalty fee. The law curtails the extent of the copyright monopoly. Compulsory licensing serves both creative and business sides of the recording industry. First, it ensures creative diversity. Musicians are free to reinterpret cultural soundtracks. Second, it safeguards the composer’s right to generate an income from his work by securing royalties for subsequent usage. Although s. 115 permits a certain degree of artistic licence, it requires “the arrangement shall not change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work”. Notwithstanding this proviso, songs can still be transformed and their meaning reshaped. Johnny Cash was able to provide an insight into the mind of a dying man through covering such songs as Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”, Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” and Parker & Charles’ “We’ll Meet Again”. Compulsory licensing was introduced in response to a Supreme Court decision that deprived composers of royalties. Congress recognised: The main object to be desired in expanding copyright protection accorded to music has been to give to the composer an adequate return for the value of his composition, and it has been a serious and difficult task to combine the protection of the composer with the protection of the public, and to so frame an act that it would accomplish the double purpose of securing to the composer and at the same time prevent the formation of oppressive monopolies, which might be founded upon the very rights granted to the composer for the purpose of protecting his interests (H. R. Rep. (1909)). Composers exercise rights over the initial exploitation of a song. Once a recording is released, the right is curtailed to serve the public dimension of copyright. A sampler is a device that allows recorded (sampled) sounds to be triggered from a MIDI keyboard or sequencer. Samplers provide potent tools for transforming sounds – filters, pitch-shifting, time-stretching and effects can warp samples beyond recognition. Sampling is a practice that formed the backbone of rap and hip-hop, features heavily in many forms of electronic music, and has proved invaluable in many studio productions (Rose 73-80; Prendergast 383-84, 415-16, 433-34). Samples implicate both of the musical copyrights mentioned earlier. To legally use a sample, the rights in the recording and the underlying composition must be licensed. Ostensibly, acquiring permission to use the composition poses few obstacles due to the compulsory licence. The sound recording, however, is a different matter entirely. There is no compulsory licence for sound recordings. Copyright owners (usually record labels) are free to demand whatever fees they see fit. For example, SST charged Fatboy Slim $1000 for sampling a Negativland record (Negativland). (Ironically, the sample was itself an unlicensed sample appropriated from a 1966 religious recording.) The price paid by The Verve for sampling an obscure orchestral version of a Rolling Stones song was more substantial. Allan Klein owns the copyright in “The Last Time” released by The Andrew Oldham Orchestra in 1965 (American Hit Network, undated). Licence negotiations for the sample left Klein with 100% of the royalties from the song and The Verve with a bitter taste. To add insult to injury, “Bittersweet Symphony” was attributed to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards when the song was nominated for a Grammy (Superswell, undated). License fees can prove prohibitive to many musicians and may outweigh the artistic merit in using the sample: “Sony wanted five thousand dollars for the Clash sample, which … is one thousand dollars a word. In retrospect, this was a bargain, given the skyrocketing costs of sampling throughout the 1990s” (McLeod 86). Adam Dorn, alias Mocean Worker, tried for nine months to licence a sample of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Eventually his persistent requests were met with a demand for $10,000 in advance with royalties of six cents per record. Dorn was working with an album budget of a mere $40 and was expecting to sell 2500 copies (Beaujon 25). Unregulated licensing fees stifle creativity and create a de facto monopoly over recorded music. Although copyright was designed to be an engine of free expression1 it still carries characteristics of its monopolistic, totalitarian heritage. The decision in Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films supported this monopoly. Judge Guy ruled, “Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this stifling creativity in any significant way” (397). The lack of compulsory licensing and the Bridgeport decision creates an untenable situation for sampling musicians and adversely impacts upon the public benefit derived from creative diversity and transformative works (Netanel 288, 331). The sobering potential for lawsuits, ruinous legal costs, injunctions, damages (to copyright owners as well as master recordings), suppresses the creativity of musicians unwilling or unable to pay licence fees (Negativland 251.). I’m a big fan of David Bowie. If I wanted to release a cover version of “Survive”, Bowie and Gabrels (composers) and BMI (publishers) could not prevent it. According the Harry Fox Agency’s online licensing system, it would cost $222.50 (US) for a licence to produce 2500 copies. The compulsory licence demands fidelity to the character of the original. Although my own individual style would be embedded in the cover version, the potential for transformation is limited. Whilst trawling through results from a search for “acapella” on the Soulseek network I found an MP3 of the vocal acapella for “Survive”. Thirty minutes later Bowie was loaded into Sonar 4 and accompanied by a drum loop and bass line whilst I jammed along on guitar and tinkered with synths. Free access to music encourages creative diversity and active cultural participation. Licensing fees, however, may prohibit such creative explorations. Sampling technology offers some truly innovative possibilities for transforming recorded sound. The Roland VariOS can pitch-eliminate; a vocal sample can be reproduced to a melody played by the sampling musician. Although the original singer’s voice is preserved the melody and characteristic nuances can be significantly altered: V-Producer’s Phrase Scope [a system software component] separates the melody from the rest of the phrase, allowing users to re-construct a new melody or add harmonies graphically, or by playing in notes from a MIDI keyboard. Using Phrase Scope, you can take an existing vocal phrase or melodic instrument phrase and change the actual notes, phrasing and vocal gender without unwanted artefacts. Bowie’s original vocal could be aligned with an original melody and set to an original composition. The original would be completely transformed into a new creative work. Unfortunately, EMI is the parent company for Virgin Records, the copyright owner of “Survive”. It is doubtful licence fees could be accommodated by many inspired bedroom producers. EMI’s reaction to DJ Dangermouse’s “Grey Album“ suggests that it would not look upon unlicensed sampling with any favour. Threatening letters from lawyers representing one of the “Big Four” are enough to subjugate most small time producers. Fair use? If a musician is unable to afford a licence, it is unlikely he can afford a fair use defence. Musicians planning only a limited run, underground release may be forgiven for assuming that the “Big Four” have better things to do than trawl through bins of White Labels for unlicensed samples. Professional bootlegger Richard X found otherwise when his history of unlicensed sampling caught up to him: “A certain major label won’t let me use any samples I ask them to. We just got a report back from them saying, ‘Due to Richard’s earlier work of which we are well aware, we will not be assisting him with any future projects’” (Petridis). For record labels “copy” equals “money”. Allan Klein did very well out of licensing his newly acquired “Bittersweet Symphony” to Nike (Superswell). Inability to afford either licences or legal costs means that some innovative and novel creations will never leave the bedroom. Sampling masterpieces such as “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” are no longer cost effective (McLeod). The absence of a compulsory licence for sampling permits a de facto monopoly over recorded music. Tricia Rose notes the recording industry knows the value of “copy” (90). “Copy” is permissible as long as musicians pay for the privilege – if the resultant market for the sampling song is not highly profitable labels may decline to negotiate a licence. Some parties have recognised the value of the desire to creatively engage with music. UK (dis)band(ed) Curve posted component samples of their song “Unreadable Communication” on their website and invited fans to create their own versions of the song. All submissions were listed on the website. Although the band reserved copyright, they permitted me to upload my version to my online distribution website for free download. It has been downloaded 113 times and streamed a further 112 times over the last couple of months. The remix project has a reciprocal dimension: Creative engagement strengthens the fan base. Guitarist/programmer, Dean Garcia, states “the main reason for posting the samples is for others to experiment with something they love . . . an opportunity as you say to mess around with something you otherwise would never have access to2”. Umixit is testing the market for remixable songs. Although the company has only five bands on its roster (the most notable being Aerosmith), it will be interesting to observe the development of a market for “neutered sampling” and how long it will be before the majors claim a stake. The would-be descendants of Grand Master Flash and Afrika Bambaataa may find themselves bound by end-user licences and contracts. The notion of “copy” at the nexus of creativity and copyright law is simultaneously a vehicle for free expression and a vulgar infringement on a valuable economic interest. The compulsory licence for cover versions encourages musicians to rework existing music, uncover hidden meaning, challenge the boundaries of genre, and actively participate in culture creation. Lack of affirmative congressional or judicial interference in the current sampling regime places the beneficial aspects of “copy” under an oppressive monopoly founded on copyright, an engine of free expression. References American Hit Network. “Bittersweet Symphony – The Verve.” Undated. 17 April 2005 http://www.americanhitnetwork.com/1990/fsongs.cfm?id=8&view=detail&rank=1>. Beaujon, A. “It’s Not The Beat, It’s the Mocean.’ CMJ New Music Monthly, April 1999. EMI. “EMI and Orange Announce New Music Deal.” Immediate Future: PR & Communications, 6 January 2005. 17 April 2005 http://www.immediatefuture.co.uk/359>. H. R. Rep. No. 2222. 60th Cong., 2nd Sess. 7. 1909. H. R. Rep. No. 609. 100th Cong., 2nd Sess. 23. 1988. MacMinute. “NIN Offers New Single in GarageBand Format.” 15 April 2005. 16 April 2005 http://www.macminute.com/2005/04/15/nin/>. McLeod, K. “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An Interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.” Stay Free 2002, 23 June 2004 http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/20/public_enemy.html>. McLeod, K. Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. United States: Doubleday Books, 2005. Negativland. “Discography.” Undated. 18 April 2005 http://www.negativland.com/negdisco.html>. Negativland (ed.). Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2. Concord: Seeland, 2005. Netanel, N. W. “Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society.” 106 Yale L. J. 283. 1996. Patterson, L.R., and S. Lindberg. The Nature of Copyright: A Law of Users’ Rights. Georgia: U of Georgia P, 1991. Petridis, A. “Pop Will Eat Itself.” The Guardian (UK) 2003. 22 June 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,1169,922797,00.html>. Prendergast, M. The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby – The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Rose, T. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2004. Sen. Rep. No. 1108, 60th Cong., 2nd Sess. 7. 1909. Superswell. “Horror Stories.” 17 April 2005 http://www.superswell.com/samplelaw/horror.html>. Waldron, J. “From Authors to Copiers: Individual Rights and Social Values in Intellectual Property.” 68 Chicago-Kent Law Review 842, 1998. Endnotes 1 Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539, 558 (1985). 2 From personal correspondence with Curve dated 16 September 2004. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Collins, Steve. "Good Copy, Bad Copy: Covers, Sampling and Copyright." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/02-collins.php>. APA Style Collins, S. (Jul. 2005) "Good Copy, Bad Copy: Covers, Sampling and Copyright," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/02-collins.php>.

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Mobile In many countries, more people have mobile phones than they do fixed-line phones. Mobile phones are one of the fastest growing technologies ever, outstripping even the internet in many respects. With the advent and widespread deployment of digital systems, mobile phones were used by an estimated 1, 158, 254, 300 people worldwide in 2002 (up from approximately 91 million in 1995), 51. 4% of total telephone subscribers (ITU). One of the reasons for this is mobility itself: the ability for people to talk on the phone wherever they are. The communicative possibilities opened up by mobile phones have produced new uses and new discourses (see Katz and Aakhus; Brown, Green, and Harper; and Plant). Contemporary soundscapes now feature not only voice calls in previously quiet public spaces such as buses or restaurants but also the aural irruptions of customised polyphonic ringtones identifying whose phone is ringing by the tune downloaded. The mobile phone plays an important role in contemporary visual and material culture as fashion item and status symbol. Most tragically one might point to the tableau of people in the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, or aboard a plane about to crash, calling their loved ones to say good-bye (Galvin). By contrast, one can look on at the bathos of Australian cricketer Shane Warne’s predilection for pressing his mobile phone into service to arrange wanted and unwanted assignations while on tour. In this article, I wish to consider another important and so far also under-theorised aspect of mobile phones: text. Of contemporary textual and semiotic systems, mobile text is only a recent addition. Yet it is already produces millions of inscriptions each day, and promises to be of far-reaching significance. Txt Txt msg ws an acidnt. no 1 expcted it. Whn the 1st txt msg ws sent, in 1993 by Nokia eng stdnt Riku Pihkonen, the telcom cpnies thought it ws nt important. SMS – Short Message Service – ws nt considrd a majr pt of GSM. Like mny teks, the *pwr* of txt — indeed, the *pwr* of the fon — wz discvrd by users. In the case of txt mssng, the usrs were the yng or poor in the W and E. (Agar 105) As Jon Agar suggests in Constant Touch, textual communication through mobile phone was an after-thought. Mobile phones use radio waves, operating on a cellular system. The first such mobile service went live in Chicago in December 1978, in Sweden in 1981, in January 1985 in the United Kingdom (Agar), and in the mid-1980s in Australia. Mobile cellular systems allowed efficient sharing of scarce spectrum, improvements in handsets and quality, drawing on advances in science and engineering. In the first instance, technology designers, manufacturers, and mobile phone companies had been preoccupied with transferring telephone capabilities and culture to the mobile phone platform. With the growth in data communications from the 1960s onwards, consideration had been given to data capabilities of mobile phone. One difficulty, however, had been the poor quality and slow transfer rates of data communications over mobile networks, especially with first-generation analogue and early second-generation digital mobile phones. As the internet was widely and wildly adopted in the early to mid-1990s, mobile phone proponents looked at mimicking internet and online data services possibilities on their hand-held devices. What could work on a computer screen, it was thought, could be reinvented in miniature for the mobile phone — and hence much money was invested into the wireless access protocol (or WAP), which spectacularly flopped. The future of mobiles as a material support for text culture was not to lie, at first at least, in aping the world-wide web for the phone. It came from an unexpected direction: cheap, simple letters, spelling out short messages with strange new ellipses. SMS was built into the European Global System for Mobile (GSM) standard as an insignificant, additional capability. A number of telecommunications manufacturers thought so little of the SMS as not to not design or even offer the equipment needed (the servers, for instance) for the distribution of the messages. The character sets were limited, the keyboards small, the typeface displays rudimentary, and there was no acknowledgement that messages were actually received by the recipient. Yet SMS was cheap, and it offered one-to-one, or one-to-many, text communications that could be read at leisure, or more often, immediately. SMS was avidly taken up by young people, forming a new culture of media use. Sending a text message offered a relatively cheap and affordable alternative to the still expensive timed calls of voice mobile. In its early beginnings, mobile text can be seen as a subcultural activity. The text culture featured compressed, cryptic messages, with users devising their own abbreviations and grammar. One of the reasons young people took to texting was a tactic of consolidating and shaping their own shared culture, in distinction from the general culture dominated by their parents and other adults. Mobile texting become involved in a wider reworking of youth culture, involving other new media forms and technologies, and cultural developments (Butcher and Thomas). Another subculture that also was in the vanguard of SMS was the Deaf ‘community’. Though the Alexander Graham Bell, celebrated as the inventor of the telephone, very much had his hearing-impaired wife in mind in devising a new form of communication, Deaf people have been systematically left off the telecommunications network since this time. Deaf people pioneered an earlier form of text communications based on the Baudot standard, used for telex communications. Known as teletypewriter (TTY), or telecommunications device for the Deaf (TDD) in the US, this technology allowed Deaf people to communicate with each other by connecting such devices to the phone network. The addition of a relay service (established in Australia in the mid-1990s after much government resistance) allows Deaf people to communicate with hearing people without TTYs (Goggin & Newell). Connecting TTYs to mobile phones have been a vexed issue, however, because the digital phone network in Australia does not allow compatibility. For this reason, and because of other features, Deaf people have become avid users of SMS (Harper). An especially favoured device in Europe has been the Nokia Communicator, with its hinged keyboard. The move from a ‘restricted’, ‘subcultural’ economy to a ‘general’ economy sees mobile texting become incorporated in the semiotic texture and prosaic practices of everyday life. Many users were already familiar with the new conventions already developed around electronic mail, with shorter, crisper messages sent and received — more conversation-like than other correspondence. Unlike phone calls, email is asynchronous. The sender can respond immediately, and the reply will be received with seconds. However, they can also choose to reply at their leisure. Similarly, for the adept user, SMS offers considerable advantages over voice communications, because it makes textual production mobile. Writing and reading can take place wherever a mobile phone can be turned on: in the street, on the train, in the club, in the lecture theatre, in bed. The body writes differently too. Writing with a pen takes a finger and thumb. Typing on a keyboard requires between two and ten fingers. The mobile phone uses the ‘fifth finger’ — the thumb. Always too early, and too late, to speculate on contemporary culture (Morris), it is worth analyzing the textuality of mobile text. Theorists of media, especially television, have insisted on understanding the specific textual modes of different cultural forms. We are familiar with this imperative, and other methods of making visible and decentring structures of text, and the institutions which animate and frame them (whether author or producer; reader or audience; the cultural expectations encoded in genre; the inscriptions in technology). In formal terms, mobile text can be described as involving elision, great compression, and open-endedness. Its channels of communication physically constrain the composition of a very long single text message. Imagine sending James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in one text message. How long would it take to key in this exemplar of the disintegration of the cultural form of the novel? How long would it take to read? How would one navigate the text? Imagine sending the Courier-Mail or Financial Review newspaper over a series of text messages? The concept of the ‘news’, with all its cultural baggage, is being reconfigured by mobile text — more along the lines of the older technology of the telegraph, perhaps: a few words suffices to signify what is important. Mobile textuality, then, involves a radical fragmentation and unpredictable seriality of text lexia (Barthes). Sometimes a mobile text looks singular: saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or sending your name and ID number to obtain your high school or university results. Yet, like a telephone conversation, or any text perhaps, its structure is always predicated upon, and haunted by, the other. Its imagined reader always has a mobile phone too, little time, no fixed address (except that hailed by the network’s radio transmitter), and a finger poised to respond. Mobile text has structure and channels. Yet, like all text, our reading and writing of it reworks those fixities and makes destabilizes our ‘clear’ communication. After all, mobile textuality has a set of new pre-conditions and fragilities. It introduces new sorts of ‘noise’ to signal problems to annoy those theorists cleaving to the Shannon and Weaver linear model of communication; signals often drop out; there is a network confirmation (and message displayed) that text messages have been sent, but no system guarantee that they have been received. Our friend or service provider might text us back, but how do we know that they got our text message? Commodity We are familiar now with the pleasures of mobile text, the smile of alerting a friend to our arrival, celebrating good news, jilting a lover, making a threat, firing a worker, flirting and picking-up. Text culture has a new vector of mobility, invented by its users, but now coveted and commodified by businesses who did not see it coming in the first place. Nimble in its keystrokes, rich in expressivity and cultural invention, but relatively rudimentary in its technical characteristics, mobile text culture has finally registered in the boardrooms of communications companies. Not only is SMS the preferred medium of mobile phone users to keep in touch with each other, SMS has insinuated itself into previously separate communication industries arenas. In 2002-2003 SMS became firmly established in television broadcasting. Finally, interactive television had arrived after many years of prototyping and being heralded. The keenly awaited back-channel for television arrives courtesy not of cable or satellite television, nor an extra fixed-phone line. It’s the mobile phone, stupid! Big Brother was not only a watershed in reality television, but also in convergent media. Less obvious perhaps than supplementary viewing, or biographies, or chat on Big Brother websites around the world was the use of SMS for voting. SMS is now routinely used by mainstream television channels for viewer feedback, contest entry, and program information. As well as its widespread deployment in broadcasting, mobile text culture has been the language of prosaic, everyday transactions. Slipping into a café at Bronte Beach in Sydney, why not pay your parking meter via SMS? You’ll even receive a warning when your time is up. The mobile is becoming the ‘electronic purse’, with SMS providing its syntax and sentences. The belated ingenuity of those fascinated by the economics of mobile text has also coincided with a technological reworking of its possibilities, with new implications for its semiotic possibilities. Multimedia messaging (MMS) has now been deployed, on capable digital phones (an instance of what has been called 2.5 generation [G] digital phones) and third-generation networks. MMS allows images, video, and audio to be communicated. At one level, this sort of capability can be user-generated, as in the popularity of mobiles that take pictures and send these to other users. Television broadcasters are also interested in the capability to send video clips of favourite programs to viewers. Not content with the revenues raised from millions of standard-priced SMS, and now MMS transactions, commercial participants along the value chain are keenly awaiting the deployment of what is called ‘premium rate’ SMS and MMS services. These services will involve the delivery of desirable content via SMS and MMS, and be priced at a premium. Products and services are likely to include: one-to-one textchat; subscription services (content delivered on handset); multi-party text chat (such as chat rooms); adult entertainment services; multi-part messages (such as text communications plus downloads); download of video or ringtones. In August 2003, one text-chat service charged $4.40 for a pair of SMS. Pwr At the end of 2003, we have scarcely registered the textual practices and systems in mobile text, a culture that sprang up in the interstices of telecommunications. It may be urgent that we do think about the stakes here, as SMS is being extended and commodified. There are obvious and serious policy issues in premium rate SMS and MMS services, and questions concerning the political economy in which these are embedded. Yet there are cultural questions too, with intricate ramifications. How do we understand the effects of mobile textuality, rewriting the telephone book for this new cultural form (Ronell). What are the new genres emerging? And what are the implications for cultural practice and policy? Does it matter, for instance, that new MMS and 3rd generation mobile platforms are not being designed or offered with any-to-any capabilities in mind: allowing any user to upload and send multimedia communications to other any. True, as the example of SMS shows, the inventiveness of users is difficult to foresee and predict, and so new forms of mobile text may have all sorts of relationships with content and communication. However, there are worrying signs of these developing mobile circuits being programmed for narrow channels of retail purchase of cultural products rather than open-source, open-architecture, publicly usable nodes of connection. Works Cited Agar, Jon. Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone. Cambridge: Icon, 2003. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974. Brown, Barry, Green, Nicola, and Harper, Richard, eds. Wireless World: Social, Cultural, and Interactional Aspects of the Mobile Age. London: Springer Verlag, 2001. Butcher, Melissa, and Thomas, Mandy, eds. Ingenious: Emerging youth cultures in urban Australia. Melbourne: Pluto, 2003. Galvin, Michael. ‘September 11 and the Logistics of Communication.’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 17.3 (2003): 303-13. Goggin, Gerard, and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Digital in New Media. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Harper, Phil. ‘Networking the Deaf Nation.’ Australian Journal of Communication 30. 3 (2003), in press. International Telecommunications Union (ITU). ‘Mobile Cellular, subscribers per 100 people.’ World Telecommunication Indicators <http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/> accessed 13 October 2003. Katz, James E., and Aakhus, Mark, eds. Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2002. Morris, Meaghan. Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: U of Indiana P, 1998. Plant, Sadie. On the Mobile: The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life. < http://www.motorola.com/mot/documents/0,1028,296,00.pdf> accessed 5 October 2003. Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology—schizophrenia—electric speech. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "‘mobile text’" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/03-goggin.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. (2004, Jan 12). ‘mobile text’. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/03-goggin.php>

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Abstract:

She's the dollars, she's my protection; she's a promise, in the year of election. Sister, I can't let you go; I'm like a preacher, stealing hearts at a traveling show. For love or money, money, money... Desire -- U2, "Desire" (1988) For the love of money. In the worship of things. Desire has traditionally been employed by advertising as a means of selling product. Regardless of culture, more powerful than context, desire is invoked as one of capitalism's iron-clad codes of quality. The Uses of Desire in Advertising Specifically, two variants have been most common. That in which desire is: (1) stimulated or (2) sated by a product. Crucial to advertisers, in both cases the product is more powerful than the thing the audience finds most powerful: the physical surge, the emotional rush, the chemical compulsion we label "desire". In the case of the former, a typical approach has been to create an equation in which product intervenes in the relationship between man and woman (and it is always man and woman), stimulating the psycho-physiological desire of one for the other. A classic pre-post design. Absent the product, desire would not arise, ad text often alleges. This tack is well captured in this ad for a perfume. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that the ad reader will desire desire. If so, he or she -- equally desirous of this turn of events -- will insert him or herself into the scenario, engaging in a symbolic, if not actual purchase of the product1. As we saw above, desire is often depicted via substitute symbols -- flashing red neon, burning matches, flame-blowers, stifling heat and raging brush fires2. The product is then used to extinguish such signs -- metaphorically quenching desire. This is the satiation variant identified at the outset. Standardised Desire? This last is an Australian ad, but in a wide variety of contexts, the same formula of product/desire appears. A recent Malaysian ad, for instance, plays out like this: a motorbike roars up to a doorstep; its leather-clad rider dismounts. Removing the helmet we find beneath a ... beautiful long-haired woman. Cut to a medium shot of the front door opening. A similarly-clad male leans against the molding. Rugged, firm, slightly aloof. Cut to product name: Dashing for Men. Followed by a picture of the cologne. "The Dashing Sensation" is then posted -- ripe with the implication that the cologne has worked its magical, magnetic attraction uniting female and male. It should be pointed out that Malaysia is a market with a significant western presence. Its top advertising firms are American, British and Italian. Thus, if one were curious as to whether desire was inherently a "cultural universal" or rather due to accession (i.e. the movement of intellectual and corporate capital), Euro-American presence would certainly be a factor to consider 3. Innovating Desire Bringing us to Japan. Desire is also a major theme there, as well. However, there, Japanese firms dominate ad production. And, interestingly, though the above-mentioned formulations do appear, desire in Japan also has its own specialised discourse. Rather than a relationship between the consumable and the consumer's emotional/physical state, discourse about desire can transpire independent of the product. Desire is often simply about desire. This is in keeping with a trend (or, more formally, a stage) of development Japanese advertising has achieved -- what I call "product-least advertising"; a condition in which discourse is about many things other than consumption. One of these things being desire. In closing I will wonder what this might say about Japanese society. Japanese Approaches to Desire As noted above, it is not the case that messages of product-induced desire do not appear in Japan. They are certainly more pervasive than in their Islamic neighbor, Malaysia. And, like America, desire is treated in an array of ways. Object-Mediated Desire One approach, admittedly less conventional, posits the product as medium. Only through the product will desire be manifested. In this ad, though verbal substitutes are invoked -- "lust", "love", "lick", "pinch", bite", "touch" -- desire is the guiding force as the figures trapped inside the product's bar code move mechanically toward physical consummation. Of particular note is the product's multi-faceted relationship to desire: it subsumes desire, stimulates it, provides a forum and means for its expression, and is the device securing its culmination ... the ad text is ambiguous as to which is controlling. This is a definitive "postmodern ad", pregnant with shifting perspective, situational action, oppositional signs and interpretive possibilities. The kind of text so-called "cultural studies" intends by the term "polysemy" (the notion that multiple meanings are contained in any sign -- see Fiske). In the case of desire, postmodern ads tell us not that desire is multiple. Rather, it is a singular (i.e. universally experienced) condition which may be differentially manifested and variously interpretable vis-à-vis singular object/products. Object-Induced Desire For instance, in this ad, again for instant noodles, two salarymen contemplate the statement "this summer's new product is stimulating". Each conjures a different image of just what "stimulating" means. For the younger man, a veritable deluge of sexual adoration; for his elder, an assault by a gang of femmes toughs. And while the latter man's fantasy would not qualify as the conventional definition of "desire", the former would. Thus, despite its polysemic trappings, the ad varies little from the standard approach outlined at the outset (plates 1 and 2). It posits that the product possesses sufficient power to stimulate desire for its consumer in external, unrelated others. Object-Directed Desire One of sociology's earliest complaints about capitalism was its reduction of people to the status of things. Social relations became instrumental acts aimed at achieving rational ends; the personalities, thoughts and qualities of those human agents engaged in the exchange become secondary to the sought good. Advertising, according to early semiotic critiques (see for instance Williamson), has only intensified this predilection, though in a different way. Ads instrumentalise by creating equality between the product presented and the person doing the presenting. When the presenter and product are conflated -- as in the case where a major star clasps the product to her bosom and addresses the camera with: "it's my Nice Once" (the product name) -- the objectification of the human subject may be unavoidable. The material and corporeal meld. She cherishes the drink. If we desire her (her status, her style, her actual physical being) but are realistic (and thus willing to settle for a substitute) ... we can settle for the simulation (her drink). This kind of vicarious taking, this symbolic sharing is common in advertising. Played out over and over the audience quickly learns to draw an equal sign between the two depicted objects (product and star). Purchasing one enables us to realise our desire (however incompletely) for the other. Sometimes the product and person are separated, but in a way that the discourse is about longing. The product is consumed because the human can't be -- perhaps a less satisfactory substitute, but a replacement, nonetheless. Or, as in the ad below, the two might be interchangeable. Interior. Bright yellow room without any discernible features. No walls, windows or furniture. Tight shot of black fishnet stockings, barely covered by a yellow dress. The legs swivel in a chair, allowing a fleeting shot of the model's crotch. Cut to a darkened interior. The product sits next to a set of wrenches. Cut back to first interior. Medium tight of the model's bare shoulders. She spins in her chair. Cut to the mechanic working on the engine of a car. Female voiceover: "Hey! Work AGAIN? ... Let's play!" Cut to tight shot of her pursed lips. "Hey! ... let's go for a drive", accompanying consecutive shots of the mechanic wiping sweat from his brow and the vamp's derriere. Next, a sequence of fast, tight images: mechanic revving the engine, the model's face, then her upper body viewed through heavily-ventilated apparel. "Oh", she says, "cars are cuter, huh?" The mechanic pauses to consider. Walks over to the product, pops the top. "When it comes to that sort of man..." her VO says as he gulps the drink, "women are suckers". Tight on woman's face: "(he's a) rake", she pouts. To better appreciate this endemic correspondence between objectification and desire, consider this ad for a car named "Rosso" ("red" in Italian, "aka" in Japanese). The model, "Anna", is tinted head to toe in red (red, of course, being the universal signifier for passion and desire)4. She and/or the car rouse enough passion in a male by-stander to literally make his blood boil. This, in turn, produces steam which, in turn, sends air current of sufficient force to propel Anna's skirt skyward. This, in turn, converts the man's face into an embarrassed and/or impassioned red. "Rosso!" he gushes enthusiastically -- reference to car, his condition, Anna and, presumably, her panties5. Thus, the desire for things -- people included -- is by no means disappearing in Japanese advertising. The name of the game is still to sell that which has been produced. Although Japanese ads have moved toward a decentring of product -- an introduction of consumption-least discourse, with a concomitant increase in popular cultural and societal content -- the great majority still speak in the language of "here it is, buy it!" The prevailing tenor is still object-oriented. And the spill-over, as we just saw, is a tendency to depict humans and their interactions in objectified terms. A recent ad, for the discount store LLAOX, is rather stark in this regard. A young man displays photos of the many items (guitars, television, appliances) he found at LLAOX. In the final shot, of an attractive woman standing in front of the items, he proudly boasts: "I found her at LLAOX, too!" Subject-Oriented Desire Like ads in other countries, then, Japanese ads tend to place the object ahead of the subject. Desire for the person depicted in the ad is either ancillary to the desire expressed for the product, or else exists as a function of the subject's objectified status. However, an accreting number of Japanese ads have begun orienting desire toward one or both of the subjects in the ad, over or independent of the object for sale. A man and woman in their early thirties sit at a table sipping whiskey. The woman leans toward the man and in a perky voice utters: "Hey, let's turn in soon." The man protests, pointing to the drink: "we haven't finished this, yet." The woman tilts her head. She insists "let's head home." Then in a conspiratorial undertone "it's that day" and winks. The man's elbow falls off the tabletop. The woman blows him a kiss. Cut to a cat hiding beneath one of his paws in embarrassment. (Source: Nikka All Malt Whiskey -- Japan, 1993) Admittedly, not all ad discourse involves desire. But of late considerable ad space has been devoted to human relations and longing6. Consider this promo for a health drink. A man stands on his verandah in his t-shirt and pyjama bottoms. He looks groggy. Cut to a young woman watering her plants on the adjacent porch. "Hey!" she coos to her bushes, "are you lively?" She tends the pots along the centre divider. Is she addressing her foliage or the young man on the other side? He cranes his neck to steal a peek. She seems unaware. He lays his head on his forearms, admiring her. Cut to a shot of her regarding the product; drinking it; savouring the taste. The text reads: "With Lactia you will bloom beautifully." The woman enthuses audibly: "happiness!" Her voyeur, still in thrall, emits a sigh, suddenly straightens and declares aloud (in English): "Nice!" The previous two examples feature desire by adults. Considerable contemporary desire-centred discourse, however, focuses on teens. In these cases the product is sometimes introduced as a symbol for desire -- as in this case of a potato chip which snaps crisply each time a boy's romantic advance is repelled. A boy and girl walk along a boardwalk. The boy tentatively reaches for his partner's hand. Just then an approaching bicyclist toots his horn and cleaves a path between the two. A superimposed chip snaps. Next, seated on the shoreline, the boy reaches out again. Suddenly, a wind-blown ball rolls past, prompting his intended to abruptly vacate her position. He is left, literally clutching air. Another chip snaps again. The boy reaches out to touch the girl's handprint in the sand. He utters "I like you". The girl turns and asks "what did you say?" He impotently shrugs "nothing at all." Cut to a box of the chips. This youthful obsession with desire plays prominently in ads. First, because it fits well with the "mini-drama" format currently favoured in Japanese advertising. Second, because it is an effective technique for capturing viewer interest. The emotional tugs keep the audience attending to the ad beyond the first viewing. In the following ad, while desire for the product is the punch line, the entire ad is structured around unrequited desire. The confusion of the former for the latter not only redounds to product value, but predisposes the audience toward empathy and engagement. A teenage girl in her plaid uniform steers her bike into its berth outside school. Her voiceover identifies the bike name, shows how one touch locks the wheel in place and the seat in the vertical position. "Oh!" a quavering male voice utters off camera. "Can I ask name?" Japanese being a language that often operates without articles and pronouns, we aren't sure which name he means. Quick zoom in on the girl's expectant expression. "Eh?" she asks breathlessly. Her narration stops, her heart soars, glowing a vibrant red over her white sweater. "The bike's name", her interlocutor clarifies. All at once, the throbbing red heart is extinguished, fading to a black circular smudge. Her expectant smile dissolves into disappointment. Not all scenarios are downers, however. In the following case the product is a prop -- at best an accoutrement -- in the teenage game of expressing desire. A spry girl pours hot water into two cups. Off camera an older female voice asks whether she isn't supposed to be resting. "Don't worry about it", the girl replies. Cut to exterior shot. She's wearing a short coat, backing through the front door with the two cups in her hands. Cut to an angled reaction shot: a handsome boy leans across his bike, placing a letter in the post. He holds the letter up. "This", he says. Cut to the girl, now leaning against the entryway of the building, sipping her drink. Haltingly, in a breathy voice, she utters: "To... tomorrow... would have been... okay. But..." Japanese being the language of implication we read this as "it's fine the way it is working out." With the girl in the foreground, we see the boy leaning against the entryway on the opposite side contemplating his drink. Cut to a long angled shot from high above. The two teens sup in the cool evening air, alone, intimate, yet separated by the building's bright entrance. The narrator closes with a message about the nutritional value of the drink -- wholly unrelated to the unequivocal web of intimacy spun by these two youths. This ad offers us a perfect take on how desire is constructed and reproduced in contemporary ads in Japan. A perfect place for us to close. Evolving Desire? Desire is not new to advertising, but the form in which it is currently being expressed is. In Japan, at least, where commercials strive for polysemy in the volatile, evanescent and ultimately quixotic struggle for audience attention, communication is increasingly about things unrelated to the product. High on the list are affection, intimacy and sexuality -- aspects of human existence which bear considerable connection to desire. Reproduced in a variety of forms, played out in an array of contexts, by a variety of demographic "types", such commercial communications have the effect of centralising desire as a major theme in contemporary Japanese society7. The increase in so-called "secondary discourse"8 about human longing is palpable. But what to make of it? Clear explanations lie in "social evolution" -- factors such as: Japan's remarkable achievement of its postwar economic goals; its subsequent economic meltdown and accreting political malaise; the dramatic decline in corporate loyalty; disintegration of the family; increased urbanisation, atomisation and anomie; the stratification of generations and economic classes; increased materialism and attention to status; the concomitant loss of a personal raison d'être and collective moral beacon. In fact, all the reasons that Emile Durkheim diagnosed in fin de siècle France in inventing the discipline of sociology and Murakami Ryu has recently discerned a century later in fin de siècle Japan. Desire is a manifestation of social breakdown, as well as a plea for its resolution. As we enter a new century -- indeed a new millenium -- it is an empirical question worth monitoring whether the Japanese obsession with desire will continue to swell. Footnotes 1. Although the claims in this paper are qualitative, rather than quantitative, without question it is true that both men and women in Japanese television advertising are depicted as desiring. In this way, one could claim that desire exists independent of gender in ads. At the same time, it is almost certain that desire is often depicted as being manifested differentially by men and women. However, as one can infer from the data below, this is not always so (viz. "True Love"). Moreover, while women (or men) might more often fit one or another of the constructs below (i.e. object-mediated, object-induced, object-directed, subject-oriented) than their opposite number, cases can generally be found in which both (male and female) are depicted desiring in each of the stated relationships. 1. Thinking of this (fire-desire) symbol-set generally (and this ad specifically), one is reminded of the Springsteen lyric: At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet and a freight train running through the middle of my head; Only you can cool my desire. I'm on fire. -- Bruce Springsteen: "I'm on Fire" (1984) Reminding one of the lyric by Shocking Blue from their decade-spanning Number 1 single (1970 by the Dutch band as well as the 1986 cover version by Bananarama): I'm your Venus, I'm your fire at your desire. If not the Earth, Wind and Fire phrasing from "That's the Way of the World" (1975): Hearts of fire, creates love desire... Of course, the fire/desire combo might also have become a universal association due to the easy opportunity (at least in English) to commit a rhyme (no matter how cloddish). 2. It has yet to be determined that desire is a cultural universal. However, the universal presence and relatively uniform logic of the "machinery of capitalism" (a major aspect of which is advertising) certainly serves as a powerful prod. That machinery overlaps culture and tends to act on it in relatively similar ways (one of which may just be the discourse about desire). This, of course, makes no claims about universal outcomes. I have addressed the interaction of capitalism and context and the themes of global/local, hom*ogeneity/heterogeneity, universal/particular in a series of articles concerning information transfer, body, color, and advertising form in comparative context. Please see my home page for references to and greater detail on this work. 3. Regarding red as signifier, see Branston & Stafford (7). Also see my work on color universals ("The Color of Meaning") and culture-specific colour conventions ("The Color of Difference"). 4. Support for this interpretation can be found in other ads, as ideas and practices in Japanese advertising tend to travel in twos or threes. During this same period, Suzuki Move placed Leonardo DiCaprio behind the wheel. As he tooled around the city, his accelleration was such as to raise the skirts of two by-standers. DiCaprio promptly braked, placed the car in reverse, rolled astride the two women, and impishly pointing at each, identified the shade of underpants ("white and strawberry") they were sporting. 5. And let me reiterate: All such depictions are exclusively about sexual/emotional longing between men and women. 6. As I am mainly working with Japanese data in this article, I feel comfortable only seeking to draw conclusions about Japanese society. Certainly, one could fathom conducting the same sort of analysis and arriving at the same general conclusions about other postmodern, capitalist, commercial-centred, consumer-oriented societies. 7. The word is O'Barr's. It bears considerable similarity to Barthes's "second order signification". Plates 1 Caliente perfume (USA, 1994) 9 Georgia canned coffee (Japan, 1999) 2 Old Spice cologne (USA, 1994) 10 Rosso (Japan, 1998) 3 co*ke (Australia, 1994) 11 LLAOX (Japan, 1999) 4 Dashing cologne (Malaysia, 1997) 12 Lactia (Japan, 1997) 5 Cup Noodles (Japan, 1998) 13 5/8 and 3/5 Chips (Japan, 1993) 6 Cup Noodles (Japan, 1998) 14 Gachyarinko (Japan, 1999) 7 Nescafe Excella (ice coffee; Japan, 1999) 15 Hotpo (health drink; Japan 1999) 8 Various ads References Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Jonathan Cape, 1972 (1957). Branston, G., and R. Stafford. The Media Student's Book. London: Routledge, 1996. Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Methuen, 1987. Holden, Todd. "The Color of Meaning: The Significance of Black and White in Television Commercials." Interdisciplinary Information Sciences 3.2 (1997): 125-146. ---. "The Color of Difference: Critiquing Cultural Convergence via Television Advertising" Interdisciplinary Information Sciences 5.1 (1999): 15-36. O'Barr. Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising. Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1994. Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisem*nts: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyers, 1979. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden. "The Evolution of Desire in Advertising: From Object-Obsession to Subject-Affection." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php>. Chicago style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden, "The Evolution of Desire in Advertising: From Object-Obsession to Subject-Affection," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden. (1999) The evolution of desire in advertising: from object-obsession to subject-affection. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php> ([your date of access]).

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Abstract:

Introduction In 2017, 250 Indigenous delegates from across the country convened at the National Constitution Convention at Uluru to discuss a strategy towards the implementation of constitutional reform and recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Referendum Council). Informed by community consultations arising out of 12 regional dialogues conducted by the government appointed Referendum Council, the resulting Uluru Statement from the Heart was unlike any constitutional reform previously proposed (Appleby & Synot). Within the Statement, the delegation outlined that to build a more equitable and reconciled nation, an enshrined Voice to Parliament was needed. Such a voice would embed Indigenous participation in parliamentary dialogues and debates while facilitating further discussion pertaining to truth telling and negotiating a Treaty between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The reforms proposed are based on the collective input of Indigenous communities that were expressed in good faith during the consultation process. Arising out of a government appointed and funded initiative that directly sought Indigenous perspectives on constitutional reform, the trust and good faith invested by Indigenous people was quickly shut down when the Prime Minster, Malcolm Turnbull, rejected the reforms without parliamentary debate or taking them to the people via a referendum (Wahlquist Indigenous Voice Proposal; Appleby and McKinnon). In this article, we argue that through its dismissal the government treated the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a passing phase or mere “thought bubble” that was envisioned to disappear as quickly as it emerged. The Uluru Statement is a gift to the nation. One that genuinely offers new ways of envisioning and enacting reconciliation through equitable relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. Indigenous voices lie at the heart of reconciliation but require constitutional enshrinement to ensure that Indigenous peoples and cultures are represented across all levels of government. Filter Bubbles of Distortion Constitutional change is often spoken of by politicians, its critics, and within the media as something unachievable. For example, in 2017, before even reading the accompanying report, MP Barnaby Joyce (in Fergus) publicly denounced the Uluru Statement as “unwinnable” and not “saleable”. He stated that “if you overreach in politics and ask for something that will not be supported by the Australian people such as another chamber in politics or something that sort of sits above or beside the Senate, that idea just won't fly”. Criticisms such as these are laced with paternalistic rhetoric that suggests its potential defeat at a referendum would be counterproductive and “self-defeating”, meaning that the proposed changes should be rejected for a more digestible version, ultimately saving the movement from itself. While efforts to communicate the necessity of the proposed reforms continues, presumptions that it does not have public support is simply unfounded. The Centre for Governance and Public Policy shows that 71 per cent of the public support constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians. Furthermore, an online survey conducted by Cox Inall Ridgeway found that the majority of those surveyed supported constitutional reform to curb racism; remove section 25 and references to race; establish an Indigenous Voice to Parliament; and formally recognise Indigenous peoples through a statement of acknowledgment (Referendum Council). In fact, public support for constitutional reform is growing, with Reconciliation Australia’s reconciliation barometer survey showing an increase from 77 per cent in 2018 to 88 per cent in 2020 (Reconciliation Australia). Media – whether news, social, databases, or search engines – undoubtedly shape the lens through which people come to encounter and understand the world. The information a person receives can be the result of what Eli Pariser has described as “filter bubbles”, in which digital algorithms determine what perspectives, outlooks, and sources of information are considered important, and those that are readily accessible. Misinformation towards constitutional reform, such as that commonly circulated within mainstream and social media and propelled by high profile voices, further creates what neuroscientist Don Vaughn calls “reinforcement bubbles” (Rose Gould). This propagates particular views and stunts informed debate. Despite public support, the reforms proposed in the Uluru Statement continue to be distorted within public and political discourses, with the media used as a means to spread misinformation that equates an Indigenous Voice to Parliament to the establishment of a new “third chamber” (Wahlquist ‘Barnaby’; Karp). In a 2018 interview, PM Scott Morrison suggested that advocates and commentators in favour of constitutional reform were engaging in spin by claiming that a Voice did not function as a third chamber (Prime Minister of Australia). Morrison claimed, “people can dress it up any way they like but I think two chambers is enough”. After a decade of consultative work, eight government reports and inquiries, and countless publications and commentaries, the Uluru Statement continues to be played down as if it were a mere thought bubble, a convoluted work in progress that is in need of refinement. In the same interview, Morrison went on to say that the proposal as it stands now is “unworkable”. Throughout the ongoing movement towards constitutional reform, extensive effort has been invested into ensuring that the reforms proposed are achievable and practical. The Uluru Statement from the Heart represents the culmination of decades of work and proposes clear, concise, and relatively minimal constitutional changes that would translate to potentially significant outcomes for Indigenous Australians (Fredericks & Bradfield). International examples demonstrate how such reforms can translate into parliamentary and governing structures. The Treaty of Waitangi (Palmer) for example seeks to inform Māori and Pākehā (non-Maori) relationships in New Zealand/Aotearoa, whilst designated “Māori Seats” ensure Indigenous representation in parliament (Webster & Cheyne). More recently, 17 of 155 seats were reserved for Indigenous delegates as Chile re-writes its own constitution (Bartlett; Reuters). Indigenous communities and its leaders are more than aware of the necessity of working within the realms of possibility and the need to exhibit caution when presenting such reforms to the public. An expert panel on constitutional reform (Dodson 73), before the conception of the Uluru Statement, acknowledged this, stating “any proposal relating to constitutional recognition of the sovereign status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be highly contested by many Australians, and likely to jeopardise broad public support for the Panel’s recommendations”. As outlined in the Joint Select Committee’s final report on Constitutional Recognition relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Referendum Council), the Voice to parliament would have no veto powers over parliamentary votes or decisions. It operates as a non-binding advisory body that remains external to parliamentary processes. Peak organisations such as the Law Council of Australia (Dolar) reiterate the fact that the proposed reforms are for a voice to Parliament rather than a voice in Parliament. Although not binding, the Voice should not be dismissed as symbolic or something that may be easily circumvented. Its effectiveness lies in its ability to place parliament in a position where they are forced to confront and address Indigenous questions, concerns, opinions, and suggestions within debates before decisions are made. Bursting the ‘Self-Referential Bubble’ Indigenous affairs continue to be one of the few areas where a rhetoric of bipartisan agreement is continuously referenced by both major parties. Disagreement, debate, and conflict is often avoided as governments seek to portray an image of unity, and in doing so, circumvent accusations of turning Indigenous peoples into the subjects of political point scoring. Within parliamentary debates, there is an understandable reservation and discomfort associated with discussions about what is often seen as an Indigenous “other” (Moreton-Robinson) and the policies that a predominantly white government enact over their lives. Yet, it is through rigorous, open, and informed debate that policies may be developed, challenged, and reformed. Although bipartisanship can portray an image of a united front in addressing a so-called “Indigenous problem”, it also stunts the conception of effective and culturally responsive policy. In other words, it often overlooks Indigenous voices. Whilst education and cultural competency plays a significant role within the reconciliation process, the most pressing obstacle is not necessarily non-Indigenous people’s inability to fully comprehend Indigenous lives and socio-cultural understandings. Even within an ideal world where non-Indigenous peoples attain a thorough understanding of Indigenous cultures, they will never truly comprehend what it means to be Indigenous (Fanon; de Sousa Santos). For non-Indigenous peoples, accepting one’s own limitations in fully comprehending Indigenous ontologies – and avoiding filling such gaps with one’s own interpretations and preconceptions – is a necessary component of decolonisation and the movement towards reconciliation (Grosfoguel; Mignolo). As parliament continues to be dominated by non-Indigenous representatives, structural changes are necessary to ensure that Indigenous voices are adequality represented. The structural reforms not only empower Indigenous voices through their inclusion within the parliamentary process but alleviates some of the pressures that arise out of non-Indigenous people having to make decisions in attempts to solve so-called Indigenous “problems”. Government response to constitutional reform, however, is ridden with symbolic piecemeal offerings that equate recognition to a form of acknowledgment without the structural changes necessary to protect and enshrine Indigenous Voices and parliamentary participation. Davis and her colleagues (Davis et al. “The Uluru Statement”) note how the Referendum Council’s recommendations were rejected by the then minister of Indigenous affairs Nigel Scullion on account that it privileged Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices. They note that, until the Referendum Council's report, the nation had no real assessment of what communities wanted. Yet by all accounts, the government had spent too much time talking to elites who have regular access to them and purport to speak on the mob's behalf. If he [Scullion] got the sense constitutional symbolism and minimalism was going to fly, then it says a lot about the self-referential bubble in which the Canberra elites live. The Uluru Statement from the Heart stands as testament to Indigenous people’s refusal to be the passive recipients of the decisions of the non-Indigenous political elite. As suggested, “symbolism and minimalism was not going to fly”. Ken Wyatt, Scullion’s replacement, reiterated the importance of co-design, the limitations of government bureaucracy, and the necessity of moving beyond the “Canberra bubble”. Wyatt stated that the Voice is saying clearly that government and the bureaucracy does not know best. It can not be a Canberra-designed approach in the bubble of Canberra. We have to co-design with Aboriginal communities in the same way that we do with state and territory governments and the corporate sector. The Voice would be the mechanism through which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander interests and perspectives may be strategically placed within parliamentary dialogues. Despite accusations of it operating as a “third chamber”, Indigenous representatives have no interest in functioning in a similar manner to a political party. The language associated with our current parliamentary system demonstrates the constrictive nature of political debate. Ministers are expected to “toe the party line”, “crossing the floor” is presented as an act of defiance, and members must be granted permission to enter a “conscience vote”. An Indigenous Voice to Parliament would be an advisory body that works alongside, but remains external to political ideologies. Their priority is to seek and implement the best outcome for their communities. Negotiations would be fluid, with no floor to cross, whilst a conscience vote would be reflected in every perspective gifted to the parliament. In the 2020 Australia and the World Annual Lecture, Pat Turner described the Voice’s co-design process as convoluted and a continuing example of the government’s neglect to hear and respond to Indigenous peoples’ interests. In the address, Turner points to the Coalition of the Peaks as an exemplar of how co-design negotiations may be facilitated by and through organisations entirely formed and run by Indigenous peoples. The Coalition of the Peaks comprises of fifty Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled peak organisations and was established to address concerns relating to closing the gap targets. As Indigenous peak organisations are accountable to their membership and reliant on government funding, some have questioned whether they are appropriate representative bodies; cautioning that they could potentially compromise the Voice as a community-centric body free from political interference. While there is some debate over which Indigenous representatives should facilitate the co-design of a treaty and Makarrata (truth-telling), there remains a unanimous call for a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament that may lead negotiations and secure its place within decision-making processes. Makarrata, Garma, and the Bubbling of New Possibilities An Indigenous Voice to Parliament can be seen as the bubbling spring that provides the source for greater growth and further reform. The Uluru Statement from the Heart calls for a three-staged approach comprising of establishing an Indigenous Voice, followed by Treaty, and then Truth-Telling. This sequence has been criticised by some who prioritise Truth and Treaty as the foundation for reform and reconciliation. Their argument is based on the notion that Indigenous Sovereignty must first be acknowledged in Parliament through an agreement-making process and signing of a Treaty. While the Uluru Statement has never lost sight of treaty, the agreement-making process must begin with the acknowledgment of Indigenous people’s inherent right to participate in the conversation. This very basic and foundational right is yet to be acknowledged within Australia’s constitution. The Uluru Statement sets the Voice as its first priority as the Voice establishes the structural foundation on which the conversation pertaining to treaty may take place. It is through the Voice that a Makarrata Commission can be formed and Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples may “come together after a struggle” – the translation of the word’s Yolngu origins (Gaykamangu; Pearson). Only then may we engage in truth telling and forge new paths towards agreement-making and treaty. This however raises the question as to how a Voice to Parliament may look and what outcomes it aims to achieve. As discussed in the previous section, it is a question that is often distorted by disinformation and conjecture within public, political, and news-media discourses. In order to unpack what a Voice to Parliament may entail, we turn to another Yolngu word, Garma. Garma refers to an epistemic and ontological positioning in which knowledge is attained from a point where differences converge and new insights arise. For Yolngu people, Garma is the place where salt and fresh water intersect within the sea. Fresh and Salt water are the embodiments of two Yolngu clans, the Dhuwa and Yirritja, with Garma referring to the point where the knowledge and laws of each clan come into contact, seeking harmonious balance. When the ebb and flow of the tides are in balance, it causes the water to foam and bubble taking on new form and representing innovative ideas and possibilities. Yolngu embrace this phenomenon as an epistemology that teaches responsibility and obligations towards the care of Country. It acknowledges the autonomy of others and finds a space where all may mutually benefit. When the properties of either water type, or the knowledge belonging a single clan dominates, ecological, social, political, and cosmological balance is overthrown. Raymattja Marika-Munungguritj (5) describes Garma as a dynamic interaction of knowledge traditions. Fresh water from the land, bubbling up in fresh water springs to make waterholes, and salt water from the sea are interacting with each other with the energy of the tide and the energy of the bubbling spring. When the tide is high the water rises to its full. When the tide goes out the water reduces its capacity. In the same way Milngurr ebbs and flows. In this way the Dhuwa and Yirritja sides of Yolngu life work together. And in this way Balanda and Yolngu traditions can work together. There must be balance, if not either one will be stronger and will harm the other. The Ganma Theory is Yirritja, the Milngurr Theory is Dhuwa. Like the current push for constitutional change and its rejection of symbolic reforms, Indigenous peoples have demanded real-action and “not just talk” (Synott “The Uluru statement”). In doing so, they implored that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples be involved in all decision-making processes, for they are most knowledgeable of their community’s needs and the most effective methods of service delivery and policy. Indigenous peoples have repeatedly expressed this mandate, which is also legislated under international law through the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Coming together after a struggle does not mean that conflict and disagreement between and amongst Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities will cease. In fact, in alignment with political theories such as agonism and pluralism, coming together within a democratic system necessitates a constructive and responsive embrace of different, competing, and in some cases incommensurable views. A Voice to Parliament will operate in a manner where Indigenous perspectives and truths, as well as disagreements, may be included within negotiations and debates (Larkin & Galloway). Governments and non-Indigenous representatives will no longer speak for or on behalf of Indigenous peoples, for an Indigenous body will enact its own autonomous voice. Indigenous input therefore will not be reduced to reactionary responses and calls for reforms after the damage of mismanagement and policy failure has been caused. Indigenous voices will be permanently documented within parliamentary records and governments forced to respond to the agendas that Indigenous peoples set. Collectively, this amounts to greater participation within the democratic process and facilitates a space where “salt water” and the “bubbling springs” of fresh water may meet, mitigating the risk of harm, and bringing forth new possibilities. Conclusion When salt and fresh water combine during Garma, it begins to take on new form, eventually materialising as foam. Appearing as a singular solid object from afar, foam is but a cluster of interlocking bubbles that gain increased stability and equilibrium through sticking together. When a bubble stands alone, or a person remains within a figurative bubble that is isolated from its surroundings and other ways of knowing, doing, and being, its vulnerabilities and insecurities are exposed. Similarly, when one bubble bursts the collective cluster becomes weaker and unstable. The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a vision conceived and presented by Indigenous peoples in good faith. It offers a path forward for not only Indigenous peoples and their future generations but the entire nation (Synott “Constitutional Reform”). It is a gift and an invitation “to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future”. Through calling for the establishment of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, a Makarrata Commission, and seeking Truth, Indigenous advocates for constitutional reform are looking to secure their own foothold and self-determination. The Uluru Statement from the Heart is more than a “thought bubble”, for it is the culmination of Indigenous people’s diverse lived experiences, outlooks, perspectives, and priorities. When the delegates met at Uluru in 2017, the thoughts, experiences, memories, and hopes of Indigenous peoples converged in a manner that created a unified front and collectively called for Voice, Treaty, and Truth. Indigenous people will never cease to pursue self-determination and the best outcomes for their peoples and all Australians. As an offering and gift, the Uluru Statement from the Heart provides the structural foundations needed to achieve this. It just requires governments and the wider public to move beyond their own bubbles and avail themselves of different outlooks and new possibilities. References Anderson, Pat, Megan Davis, and Noel Pearson. “Don’t Silence Our Voice, Minister: Uluru Leaders Condemn Backward Step.” Sydney Morning Herald 20 Oct. 2017. <https://www.smh.com.au/national/don-t-silence-our-voice-minister-uluru-leaders-condemn-backward-step-20191020-p532h0.html>. Appleby, Gabrielle, and Megan Davis. “The Uluru Statement and the Promises of Truth.” Australian Historical Studies 49.4 (2018): 501–9. Appleby, Gabrielle, and Gemma Mckinnon. “Indigenous Recognition: The Uluru Statement.” LSJ: Law Society of NSW Journal 37.36 (2017): 36-39. 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Introduction In a 1984 New York Times interview, Germaine Greer discussed the quite different views that have surrounded her supposed attitude towards sex. As she put it, “People seem to think I'm Hugh Hefner and that the reason women started having sex is because I told them to” (qtd. in De Lacy). This view had, however, shifted by the 1980s. As she told reporter Justine De Lacy, “Now they are saying that I'm against sex.” In this article, I tease out Greer’s remarks about the supposed transformation of her political persona. I do so with reference to her work on Suck Magazine, which was billed by its editors as “The First European Sex Paper,” and which was first published in 1969 (cited in Gleeson 86). The article has two key aims. The first is to demonstrate that Greer has not (as it might seem) transformed from a sexual revolutionary to an anti-sex ideologue. This view is too simplistic. The article’s second aim is to explore Greer’s significant but under-acknowledged contribution to feminist debates about p*rnography. Far from being strictly anti- or pro-p*rn, Greer’s work on Suck actually aligns with both of these positions, and it appeared before the feminist p*rn debates really gained traction. Germaine Greer as Sexual Revolutionary and/or Anti-Sex Ideologue? The apparent political transformation that Greer mentioned in 1984 has been particularly apparent since the 1990s. Since that decade, she has criticised p*rnography on several occasions. For example, in her book The Whole Woman (1999), Greer argued, “p*rnography is the flight from woman, men’s denial of sex as a medium of communication . . .” (181). In an article published in The Guardian in 2000, Greer wrote, “Can [p*rnography] go too far? No, it can't. As far as male sexual fantasy is concerned there is no too far.” In a 2012 episode of the Australian current affairs program Q&A, Greer argued, “p*rnography is the advertisem*nt of prostitution.”Greer’s stance on p*rnography, and particularly her invocation of female sexual subordination, might seem to represent a radical shift from the political persona that she cultivated during the 1960s and 1970s. During that earlier period, Greer was arguing for female sexual empowerment. She posed nude for Suck. In 1971, the US magazine Life described Greer as a “saucy feminist that even men like” (qtd. in Wallace, unpaginated photograph). There is nothing “saucy” about her more recent anti-p*rn posture; this posture is not concerned with “empowerment” in any obvious way. Yet I would suggest that Greer at least anticipated this posture in her work on Suck. In that magazine, she did not frame sex as being entirely emancipatory. Rather, Greer argued for sexual liberation (particularly for women), but (in doing so) she also invoked the hierarchical gender roles that would later be invoked in anti-p*rn feminist arguments. Examining some of Greer’s contributions to Suck will make clear the important contribution that she has made to feminist debates about p*rnography. These are debates which she has not generally been associated with, or at least not to the extent that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon (both US feminists who have very publicly remonstrated against p*rn) have (see Dworkin; MacKinnon and Dworkin). The feminist p*rn debates gained ascendance during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and seem to have been liveliest in North America (see Bronstein; Duggan and Hunter; MacKinnon and Dworkin). These debates are significant because of what they say about the truly complex and contentious relationship between sex, gender, power, and representation. The feminist p*rn debates have been broad-ranging (Sullivan and McKee 10), though they tend to have been framed as polarised conflicts between anti-p*rnography feminists and “sex-positive”/“anti-censorship” feminists. For anti-p*rnography feminists, p*rnography always symptomatises and perpetuates gender hierarchy. Andrea Dworkin famously defined “p*rnography” as the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures and/or words that also includes women presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; or women presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or women presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or women presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or women presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or women’s body parts—including but not limited to vagin*s, breasts, buttocks—exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or women presented as whor*s by nature . . . (xxxiii) Conversely, sex-positive/anti-censorship feminists tend to assess p*rnography “on a case by case basis”; p*rn can range from woman-hating to politically progressive (McKee, Albury, and Lumby 22). For these feminists, attempts to legislate against p*rnography (for example, via the anti-p*rn ordinance drawn up in the US during the 1980s by Dworkin and MacKinnon) amount to censorship, and are not in the interest of women, feminism, or sexual liberation (Duggan and Hunter 29–39; and see also MacKinnon and Dworkin). Among the most striking aspects of Greer’s work on Suck is that it actually mobilises aspects of both these (loosely-defined) feminist positions, and appeared almost a decade before p*rnography became an issue of contention amongst feminists. This work was published not in North America, but in Europe; the Australian-born Greer was living in the United Kingdom at the time of that magazine’s publication, and indeed she has been described as “Britain’s . . . most well-known feminist” (Taylor 759; and see also Gleeson). Does p*rn Suck? Greer co-founded Suck in 1969, the year before The Female Eunuch was published. Greer had already established a minor public profile through her journalistic contributions to the London-based Oz Magazine. Several of those contributions were written under the guise of “Dr G—the only groupie with a Ph.D in captivity,” and featured references to “groupiedom” and “c*nt power” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). Suck was published in Amsterdam to circumvent “British censorship laws” (Wallace 15). The magazine was very much a product of the then-current sexual revolution, as suggested by the following passage from a 1971 editorial: “Our cause is sexual liberation. Our tactic is the defiance of censorship” (University of Melbourne Archives). Suck comprised sexually-explicit imagery (for example, nudity and shots of (hetero)sexual penetration) and similarly explicit articles. These articles are furnished with the vivid, deliberately provocative prose for which Greer is renowned.In some articles, Greer argues that women’s acceptance of their bodies constitutes a rebellion against patriarchy. In a 1971 article, she writes, “Primitive man feared the vagin* . . . as the most magical of magical orifices of the body” (University of Melbourne Archives). The title of this piece is “Lady Love Your c*nt,” and indicates Greer’s view that patriarchal fears—or, as she puts it, the fears of “primitive man”—have contributed to stigma that has surrounded the vagin*. Greer concludes thus: “Why not send a photograph of your own c*nt, with your names labelled on?” (Whether any readers responded to this invitation remains unclear.) In “Bounce Titty Bounce,” she describes a “Mafia that controls the shapes of [women’s] bodies” (University of Melbourne Archives). This control is particularly evident in the brassiere, which Greer calls “a muzzle, a mask, binding joys and desires with wire and rubber and nylon and clips and cotton.” In a 1970 article entitled “Ladies get on top for better org*sms,” Greer opens with the statement: “The prevalence of the missionary position of f*cking in the Western World [sic] seems to mean a widespread unfairness in sex.” She elaborates: Even if women were not . . . slighter than men, the missionary position would have little to commend it. The hands of the man are not free to play with his lover’s breasts or cl*tor*s . . . because he must support himself, at least partially by them . . . The male ismin [sic] full control. Greer concedes that the “female on top position is perhaps the least popular of the alternatives to the missionary position.” The “female on top” position does, however, have advantages for women, one being that a woman “can arrive at a position to accept the co*ck without having to take her weight on her hands.” Greer’s best-known contribution to Suck is a selection of nude photographs that were published in a 1971 edition. In one shot, Greer is lying on her back, her legs behind her ears, her anus directly in front of the camera. In another shot, she is positioned in the same manner, although her anus and vagin* are more central within the frame. In both shots, Greer is gazing directly into the camera and smiling. On one level, the textual and photographic examples described above—and, in fact, the very publication of Suck—suggest a rebellion against sexual repression. This rebellion was characteristic of the sexual revolution (Gleeson 86). Yet, in advocating female sexual empowerment, Greer distanced herself from the masculine bias of that movement. In her 1984 New York Times interview, Greer was quoted as saying that “. . . the sexual revolution never happened. Permissiveness happened, and that’s no better than repressiveness, because women are still being manipulated by men” (qtd. in De Lacy). Here, she anticipates arguments (e.g. Jeffreys) that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s actually sanctioned (heterosexual) male desire and men’s sexual access to women. In Suck, then, Greer argued that women need to liberate themselves sexually, and not only be seen as instruments for male sexual liberation. Greer did pose nude, but, in doing so, she stared back into the camera/at the spectator—thus returning the gaze, rather than being objectified by this gaze (Mulvey). Greer has described her shots thus: “Face, pubes and anus, nothing decorative about it. Nothing sexy about it either. Confrontation was the name of the game” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). In 2013, Greer wrote of that photo shoot: “Women’s bodies were merchandised. Each week we saw a little more: nipples, then puss* . . . drip-feeding the masturbation fantasies of a [male] generation. My gesture aimed to short-circuit that process.” She has also been quoted as saying that she envisioned Suck as an “antidote to the exploitative papers like Screw and Hustler,” by “developing a new kind of erotic art, away from the tit* ‘n’ ass and the peep show syndrome” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). Thus, Greer’s Suck contributions seem to foreshadow the “sex-positive” feminism that would emerge later in the 1970s in North America (e.g. Duggan and Hunter). Her work would also anticipate feminist uses of p*rn to explore female sexuality from specifically female and feminist perspectives (see Taormino et al.). A closer examination of these contributions, however, suggests a more complex picture. Witness Greer’s reference to the popularity of “missionary sex” as a reason for “widespread unfairness in sex,” or her description of a (presumably) male-dominated “Mafia” who control women’s bodies (for example, via the bra). In a newspaper interview that was published around the time of The Female Eunuch’s 1970 publication, Greer argued that sex needs to be “rescued” from the patriarchy by feminists. This is because sex under patriarchy has been characterised by the dichotomised positions of “powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered.” In this scenario, women are the ones who are “powerless” and “mastered.” The title of that interview is “Author Attacks Dominating Male” (University of Melbourne Archives).The above statements suggest a sexual landscape characterised by “potentially violent, dominant men and subordinated, silenced women” (Duggan and Hunter 7). In this landscape, sex is a site of gender inequality; and even something as apparently innocuous as underwear is used by men to control women. The pervasive sense of patriarchy invoked here would (as scholars such as Duggan and Hunter have argued) be invoked in much anti-p*rnography feminist writing. And Greer would go on to concur with the anti-p*rn stance, as the three pronouncements cited at the beginning of this article attest. (In Suck, Greer does not attempt to define “p*rnography,” and nor does she classify her contributions as being “p*rnography” or “anti-p*rnography.”)ConclusionI have argued that it is useful to revisit some of Germaine Greer’s contributions to Suck Magazine in order to reassess her apparent transformation from sexual revolutionary to anti-sex ideologue. These contributions (which include articles and photographs) are celebrations of female sexual empowerment and critiques of what Greer sees as a pervasive gender hierarchy. I have argued that this work is also useful in that it anticipates the feminist debates about p*rnography that would gain ascendance in North America almost a decade after Suck’s publication. Greer articulates arguments that would come to be aligned with both “sex-positive” and “anti-p*rnography” feminist discourses. To this extent, she has made an important and thus far largely unacknowledged contribution to these highly polarised feminist debates. ReferencesBronstein, Carolyn. Battling p*rnography: The American Feminist Anti-p*rnography Movement, 1976–1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.De Lacy, Justine. “Germaine Greer’s New Book Stirs a Debate.” The New York Times. 5 Mar. 1984. 21 Oct. 2015 <https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/greer-debate.html>.Duggan, Lisa, and Nan D. Hunter, eds. “Introduction.” Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture. 10th Anniversary Edition. London: Routledge, 2006. 1–13.Dworkin, Andrea. p*rnography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Plume, 1989. Gleeson, Kate. “From Suck Magazine to Corporate Paedophilia: Feminism and p*rnograph—Remembering the Australian Way.” Women’s Studies International Forum 38 (2013): 83–96.Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. London: Transworld Publishers, 1999. ———. “Gluttons for p*rn.” The Guardian 24 Sep. 2000. 21 Oct. 2015 <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/24/society>.———. “As Women Bare All in Feminist Protest, Germaine Greer Asks: Is This Feminism?” News.com.au 17 Mar. 2013. 30 July 2016 <http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/as-women-bare-all-in-feminist-protest-germaine-greer-asks-is-this-feminism/story-fneszs56-1226598414628>.Jeffreys, Sheila. Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. London: The Women’s Press, 1990. MacKinnon, Catharine A., and Andrea Dworkin, eds. In Harm’s Way: The p*rnography Civil Rights Hearings. Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1997. McKee, Alan, Katherine Albury, and Catharine Lumby. The p*rn Report. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2008. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. Q&A. “Politics and p*rn in a Post-Feminist World.” First screened 19 Mar. 2012. 20 May 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3451584.htm>.Suck Magazine. Copies held by Germaine Greer Archive, University of Melbourne. Sullivan, Rebecca, and Alan McKee. p*rnography: Structures, Agency and Performance. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015.Taormino, Tristan, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young, eds. The Feminist p*rn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013.Taylor, Anthea. “Germaine Greer’s Adaptable Celebrity: Feminism, Unruliness, and Humour on the British Small Screen.” Feminist Media Studies 14.5 (2014): 759–74.University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer archive. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 216. File name “(Drawer 158) Press clippings about Germaine Greer.” “Author Attacks Dominating Male.” Interview with Germaine Greer. Interviewer and place of publication unknown. Unpaginated. ———. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name “Bounce Titty Bounce.” “Bounce Titty Bounce.” Originally published in Suck Magazine. Viewed in unpublished manuscript form. Unpaginated. ———. 1971. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name “Suck Editorial 1971?” “Editorial.” Suck Magazine. Issue number not provided. Unpaginated. ———. 1971. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name: “Lady Love Your c*nt Suck.” “Lady Love Your c*nt.” Originally published in Suck Magazine. Viewed in unpublished manuscript form. Unpaginated. ———. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name: “Suck Correspondence 73.” Untitled photographs of Germaine Greer. Originally published in Suck Magazine. Unpaginated. Wallace, Christine. Germaine Greer, Untamed Shrew. Sydney: Pan MacMillan, 1997.

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Things would never be the same again. As sales went through the roof, with some breathless estimates in the region of a 200% increase overnight, marketers practically wet their pants at the phenomenal success of the chocolate bar seen by millions in ET: the Extraterrestrial. That was back in 1982. Though not the first instance of product placement ‘at the movies’, the strategic placement of Reese’s Pieces in ET is often hailed as the triumphant marketing moment heralding the onset of the era of embedded advertising in popular media. Today, much media consumption is characterised by aggressive branding strategies. We’ve all seen ostentatious product wrangling – the unnatural handling of items (especially chocolate bars and bottled drinks) to best display their logo (regardless of considerations of verisimilitude, or even common sense), and ungainly product mentions in dialogue (who can forget the early Jude Law shocker Shopping?) that have passed into the realm of satire. In television and feature filmmaking, props bearing corporate trademarks not only supplement, but often sustain production budgets. Some programs appear to be entirely contrived around such sponsors. Australian commercial television makes no secret of the increasingly non-existent line between ‘entertainment’ and ‘advertising’, though it still purports to describe ‘lifestyle’ shows as ‘reality’ television. With the introduction of technologies like TiVO which enable consumers to skip over ads, the move is from ‘interruptive’ style advertising between programs or segments, to products insinuated in the décor – and increasingly scripts – of programs themselves, with correspondent online shopping opportunities for digital consumers. An entire industry of middle-people – sometimes euphemistically self-described as ‘prop houses’ – has sprung up to service the lucrative product placement industry, orchestrating the insertion of branded products into television and films. The industry has grown to such an extent that it holds an annual backpatting event, the Product Placement Awards, “to commemorate and celebrate product placement” in movies, television shows, music etc. But ‘advertising by stealth’ is not necessarily passively accepted by media consumers – nor media makers. The shoe-horning of brands and their logos into the products of popular culture not only defines the culture industry today, but also characterises much of the resistance to it. ‘Logo-backlash’ is seen as an inevitable response to the incursion of brands into public life, an explicit rejection of the practice of securing consumer mindshare, and subvertisem*nts and billboard liberation activities have been mainstays of culture jamming for decades now. However, criticism of product placement remains highly problematic: when the Center for the Study of Commercialism argued that movies have become “dangerously” saturated with products and suggested that full disclosure in the form of a list, in a film’s credits, of paid product appearances, many noted the counterproductivity of such an approach, arguing that it would only result in further registration – and hence promotion – of the brand. Not everyone subscribes to advertising’s ‘any news is good news’ thesis, however. Peter Conheim and Steve Seidler decided to respond to the behemoth of product placement with a ‘catalogue of sins’. Their new documentary Value Added Cinema meticulously chronicles the appearance of placed products in Hollywood cinema. Here they discuss the film, which is continuing to receive rave reviews in the US and Europe. Danni Zuvela: Can you tell me a little about yourselves? Peter: I’m a musician and filmmaker living in the San Francisco Bay Area who wears too many hats. I play in three performing and recording groups (Mono Pause, Wet Gate, Negativland) and somehow found the time to sit in front of a Mac for six weeks to edit and mix VALUE-ADDED CINEMA. Because Steve is a persuasive salesperson. Steve: I’ve been a curator for the past decade and a half, showing experimental works week after week, month after month, year after year, at the Pacific Film Archive. It was about time to make a tape of my own and Peter was crazy enough to indulge me. DZ: Why product placement? Why do you think it’s important? Where did this documentary come from? S: Steven Spielberg released Minority Report last year and it just raised my hackles. The film actually encourages the world it seems to critique by stressing the inter-relationship of his alleged art with consumerism in the present day and then extending that into a vision of the future within the film itself. In other words, he has already realized the by-product of an alarming dystopia of surveillance, monolithic policing, and capital. That by-product is his film. The rumor mill says that he was reimbursed to the tune of $25 million for the placements. So not only can he not see a constructive path out of dystopia, a path leading toward a more liberating future, he makes millions from his exhausted imagination. What could be more cynical? But Spielberg isn’t alone within the accelerating subsumption of mainstream cinema into the spectacle of pure consumption. He’s just more visible than most. But to consider product placements more directly for a moment: during the past few years, mainstream cinema has been little more than an empty exercise in consumerist viewership. The market-driven incentives that shape films, determining story-lines, exaggerating cultural norms, striving toward particular demographics, whatever, have nothing to do with art or social change and everything to do with profit, pandering, and promulgation. Movies are product placements, the product is a world view of limitless consumption. Value-Added Cinema is about the product-that-announces-itself, the one we recognize as a crystallization of the more encompassing worldview, the sole commodity, spot-lit, adored, assimilated. So why Value-Added Cinema? You’ve got to start somewhere. DZ: Can you tell me a bit about the production process – how did you go about getting the examples you use in the film? Were there any copyright hassles? P: Steve did nearly all of the legwork in that he spent weeks and weeks researching the subject, both on-line and in speaking to people about their recollections of product placement sequences in films they’d seen. He then suffered through close to a hundred films on VHS and DVD, using the fast-forward and cue controls as often as possible, to locate said sequences. We then sat down and started cutting, based at first on groupings Steve had made (a bunch of fast food references, etc.). Using these as a springboard, we quickly realized the narrative potential inherent in all these “narrative film” clips , and before long we were linking sequences and making them refer to one another, sort of allowing a “plot” to evolve. And copyright hassles? Not yet! I say... bring ‘em on! I would be more than happy to fight for the existence of this project, and one of the groups I am in, Negativland, has a rather colourful history of “fair use” battles in the music arena (the most nefarious case, where the band was sued by U2 and their big-label music lawyers over a parody we made happened before I came on board, but there’s been some skirmishes since). We have folks who would be happy to help defend this sort of work in a court of law should the occasion arise. DZ: Can you talk to me about the cultural shift that’s occurred, where the old ‘Acme’ propmaster has been replaced by ‘product peddler’? What is this symptomatic of, and what’s its significance now? S: In the past, privacy existed because there were areas of experience and information that were considered off limits to exploitation. A kind of tacit social contract assumed certain boundaries were in place to keep corporate (and State) meddling at bay and to allow an uncontaminated space for disengaging from culture. Nowadays the violation of boundaries is so egregious it’s hard to be sure that those boundaries in fact exist. Part of that violation has been the encroachment, at every conceivable level, of daily experience by all manner of corporate messages—urinal strainers with logos, coffee jackets with adverts, decals on supermarket floors, temporary tattoos on random pedestrians. Engagement with corporate predation is now foisted on us 24 hours a day. It’s the GPS generation. The corporations want to know where we “are” at all times. Again: in the past there was a certain level of decorum about the sales pitch. That decorum has vanished and in its place is the inter-penetration of all our waking moments by the foghorn of capital. If that foghorn gets loud enough, we’ll never get any sleep. DZ: How do you think product placement affects the integrity of the film? P: Well, that’s definitely a question of the moment, as far as audience reactions to our screenings have been thus far. It really depends on the work itself, doesn’t it? I think we would be highly judgmental, and perhaps quite out of line, if we dismissed out of hand the idea of using actual products in films as some sort of rule. The value of using an actual product to the narrative of a film can’t be discounted automatically because we all know that there are stories to be told in actual, marketed products. Characterizations can develop. If a flustered James Cagney had held up a bottle of Fred’s Cola instead of Pepsi in the climactic shot of One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder’s 1963 co*ke-executive comedy), it wouldn’t have resonated very well. And it’s an incredibly memorable moment (and, some might say, a little dig at both cola companies). But when you get into something like i am sam, where Sean Penn’s character not only works inside a Starbucks, and is shown on the job, in uniform and reading their various actual coffee product names aloud, over and over again, but also rides a bus with a huge Nike ad on the side (and the camera tracks along on the ad instead of the bus itself), plus the fact that he got onto that bus underneath an enormous Apple billboard (not shown in our work, actually), or that his lawyer has a can of Tab sitting on an entirely austere, empty table in front of a blank wall and the camera tracks downward for no other discernable purpose than to highlight the Tab can… you can see where I’m going with this. The battle lines are drawn in my mind. PROVE to me the value of any of those product plugs on Penn’s character, or Michelle Pfeiffer’s (his lawyer). DZ: What do you make of the arguments for product placement as necessary to, even enhancing, the verisimilitude of films? Is there a case to be made for brands appearing in a production design because they’re what a character would choose? S: It’s who makes the argument for product placements that’s troublesome. Art that I value is a sort of problem solving machine. It assumes that the culture we currently find ourselves strapped with is flawed and should be altered. Within that context, the “verisimilitude” you speak of would be erected only as a means for critique--not to endorse, venerate, or fortify the status quo. Most Hollywood features are little more than moving catalogs. P: And in the case of Jurassic Park that couldn’t be more explicit – the “fake” products shown in the amusem*nt park gift shop in the film are the actual tie-in products available in stores and in Burger King at that time! Another film I could mention for a totally different reason is The Dark Backward (1991). Apparently due to a particular obsession of the director, the film is riddled with placements, but of totally fake and hilarious products (i.e. Blump’s Squeezable Bacon). Everyone who has seen the film remembers the absurdist products… couldn’t Josie and the puss*cats have followed this format, instead of loading the film with “funny” references to literally every megacorporation imaginable, and have been memorable for it? DZ: What do you think of the retroactive insertion of products into syndicated reruns of programs and films (using digital editing techniques)? Is this a troubling precedent? P: Again, to me the line is totally crossed. There’s no longer any justification to be made because the time and space of the original television show is lost at that point, so any possibility of “commentary” on the times, or development of the character, goes right out the window. Of course I find it a troubling precedent. It’s perhaps somewhat less troubling, but still distressing, to know that billboards on the walls of sports stadiums are being digitally altered, live, during broadcast, so that the products can be subtly switched around. And perhaps most disturbingly, at least here in the states, certain networks and programs have begun cross-dissolving to advertisem*nts from program content, and vice-versa. In other words, since the advertisers are aware that the long-established “blackout” which precedes the start of advertising breaks on TV causes people to tune out, or turn the volume off, or have their newfangled sensing devices “zap” the commercial… so they’re literally integrating the start of the ad with the final frames of the program instead of going black, literally becoming part of the program. And we have heard about more reliance of products WITHIN the programs, but this just takes us right back to TV’s past, where game show contestants sat behind enormous “Pepsodent” adverts pasted right there on the set. History will eat itself… DZ: Could you imagine a way advertisers could work product placement into films where modern products just don’t fit, like set in the past or in alternate universes (Star Wars, LOTR etc)? P: Can’t you? In fact, it’s already happening. Someone told us about the use of products in a recent set-in-the-past epic… but the name of the film is escaping me. S: And if you can’t find a way to insert a product placement in a film than maybe the film won’t get made. The problem is completely solved with films like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings—most of the characters are available in the store as action figures making them de facto placements. In Small Soldiers just about every toy-sized character was, in fact, nicely packaged by Hasbro. DZ: What is the role of the logo in product placement? S: There are the stars, and there are the many supporting roles—the logo is just one of them. We’re hoping to see this category at the next Oscars. P: And categories like “Best Song” are essentially product placement categories already… DZ: I’ve heard about the future of product placement being branding in computer games, interactive shop-at-home television – what other visions of the (branded) future can you imagine? P: The future is now. If you can’t watch a documentary on so-called public television in this country without having text boxes pop up on screen to suggest “related” web sites which “might be of interest” to the viewer, you’re already well on the way to being part of a branded environment. Computer games already have ads built-in, and shop-at-home already seems plenty interactive (and isn’t internet shopping, also?). I think if the various mega-corporations can not only convince people to wear clothing emblazoned with their logo and product name, but so successfully convince us to pay for the privilege of advertising them, then we are already living in a totally branded future. Where else can it go? It may seem a trite statement but, to my mind, wearing an entire Nike outfit is the ultimate. At least the British ad company called Cunning Stunts actually PAYS their human billboards… but those folks have to agree to have the company logo temporarily tattooed onto their foreheads for three hours as they mingle in public. I’m not joking about this. DZ: Is there any response to product placement? How can audiences manage their interactions with these texts? S: Films have been boycotted for culturally heinous content, such as racist and hom*ophobic characters. Why not boycott films because of their commodity content? Or better yet boycott the product for colluding with the filmmakers to invade your peace of mind? What I hope Value-Added Cinema does is sensitize us to the insinuation of the products, so that we critically detect them, rather than passively allow them to pass before us. When that happens, when we’re just insensate recipients of those advertising ploys, we’re lost. DZ: Do you have anything to add to contemporary debates on culture jamming, especially the charge that culture jamming’s political power is limited by its use of logos and signs? Anne Moore has written that detourning ads ends up just re-iterating the logo - “because corporate lifeblood is profit, and profit comes from name recognition”, culture jammers are “trafficking in the same currency as the corporations” – what do you think of this? P: It’s an interesting assertion. But the best culture jams I’ve seen make total mincemeat of the product being parodied; just as you can’t simply discount the use of actual products in films in the context of a narrative, you can’t NOT try to reclaim the use of a brand-name. Maybe it’s a dangerous comparison because “reclaiming” use of the word co*ke is not like reclaiming the use of the word “queer”, but there’s something to it, I think. Also, I wear t-shirts with the names of bands I like sometimes (almost always my friends’ bands, but I suppose that’s beside the point). Am I buying into the advertising concept? Yes, to a certain extent, I am. I guess to me it’s about just what you choose to advertise. Or what you choose to parody. DZ: Do you have any other points you’d like to make about product placement, advertising by stealth, branding, mindshare or logos? P: I think what Steve said, that above all we hope with our video to help make people aware of how much they are advertised to, beyond accepting it as a mere annoyance, sums it up. So far, we’ve had some comments at screenings which indicate a willingness of people to want to combat this in their lives, to want to “do something” about the onslaught of product placement surrounding them, in films and elsewhere. Works Cited ET: The Extraterrestrial. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Prod. Kathleen Kennedy & Steven Spielberg, M. Universal Pictures 1982. Shopping. Dir. Paul Anderson. Prod. Jeremy Bolt , M. Concorde Pictures,1993. http://www.cspinet.org/ http://www.productplacementawards.com/ Links http://www.cspinet.org/ http://www.productplacementawards.com/ Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Zuvela, Danni. "An Interview with the Makers of Value-Added Cinema" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/03-valueadded.php>. APA Style Zuvela, D. (2003, Jun 19). An Interview with the Makers of Value-Added Cinema. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/03-valueadded.php>

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“...children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents...” — Stephen Kline, The Making of Children’s Culture We live in a world saturated by design and through design artefacts, one can glean unique insights into a culture's values and norms. In fact, some academics, such as British media and film theorist Ben Highmore, see the two areas so inextricably intertwined as to suggest a wholesale “re-branding of the cultural sciences as design studies” (14). Too often, however, everyday objects are marginalised or overlooked as objects of scholarly attention. The field of material culture studies seeks to change that by focussing on the quotidian object and its ability to reveal much about the time, place, and culture in which it was designed and used. This article takes on one such object, a mid-century children's toy tea set, whose humble journey from 1968 Sears catalogue to 2014 thrift shop—and subsequently this author’s basem*nt—reveals complex rhetorical messages communicated both visually and verbally. As material culture studies theorist Jules Prown notes, the field’s foundation is laid upon the understanding “that objects made ... by man reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased or used them, and by extension the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged” (1-2). In this case, the objects’ material and aesthetic characteristics can be shown to reflect some of the pervasive stereotypes and gender roles of the mid-century and trace some of the prevailing tastes of the American middle class of that era, or perhaps more accurately the type of design that came to represent good taste and a modern aesthetic for that audience. A wealth of research exists on the function of toys and play in learning about the world and even the role of toy selection in early sex-typing, socialisation, and personal identity of children (Teglasi). This particular research area isn’t the focus of this article; however, one aspect that is directly relevant and will be addressed is the notion of adult role-playing among children and the role of toys in communicating certain adult practices or values to the child—what sociologist David Oswell calls “the dedifferentiation of childhood and adulthood” (200). Neither is the focus of this article the practice nor indeed the ethicality of marketing to children. Relevant to this particular example I suggest, is as a product utilising messaging aimed not at children but at adults, appealing to certain parents’ interest in nurturing within their child a perceived era and class-appropriate sense of taste. This was fuelled in large part by the curatorial pursuits of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, coupled with an interest and investment in raising their children in a design-forward household and a desire for toys that reflected that priority; in essence, parents wishing to raise modern children. Following Prown’s model of material culture analysis, the tea set is examined in three stages, through description, deduction and speculation with each stage building on the previous one. Figure 1: Porcelain Toy Tea Set. Description The tea set consists of twenty-six pieces that allows service for six. Six cups, saucers, and plates; a tall carafe with spout, handle and lid; a smaller vessel with a spout and handle; a small round bowl with a lid; a larger oval bowl with a lid, and a coordinated oval platter. The cups are just under two inches tall and two inches in diameter. The largest piece, the platter is roughly six inches by four inches. The pieces are made of a ceramic material white in colour and glossy in texture and are very lightweight. The rim or edge of each piece is decorated with a motif of three straight lines in two different shades of blue and in different thicknesses, interspersed with a set of three black wiggly lines. Figure 2: Porcelain Toy Tea Set Box. The set is packaged for retail purposes and the original box appears to be fully intact. The packaging of an object carries artefactual evidence just as important as what it contains that falls into the category of a “‘para-artefact’ … paraphernalia that accompanies the product (labels, packaging, instructions etc.), all of which contribute to a product’s discourse” (Folkmann and Jensen 83). The graphics on the box are colourful, featuring similar shades of teal blue as found on the objects, with the addition of orange and a silver sticker featuring the logo of the American retailer Sears. The cover features an illustration of the objects on an orange tabletop. The most prominent text that confirms that the toy is a “Porcelain Toy Tea Set” is in an organic, almost psychedelic style that mimics both popular graphics of this era—especially album art and concert posters—as well as the organic curves of steam that emanate from the illustrated teapot’s spout. Additional messages appear on the box, in particular “Contemporary DESIGN” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. Along the edges of the box lid, a detail of the decorative motif is reproduced somewhat abstracted from what actually appears on the ceramic objects. Figure 3: Sears’s Christmas Wishbook Catalogue, page 574 (1968). Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Sears) is well-known for its over one-hundred-year history of producing printed merchandise catalogues. The catalogue is another important para-artefact to consider in analysing the objects. The tea set first appeared in the 1968 Sears Christmas Wishbook. There is no date or copyright on the box, so only its inclusion in the catalogue allows the set to be accurately dated. It also allows us to understand how the set was originally marketed. Deduction In the deduction phase, we focus on the sensory aesthetic and functional interactive qualities of the various components of the set. In terms of its function, it is critical that we situate the objects in their original use context, play. The light weight of the objects and thinness of the ceramic material lends the objects a delicate, if not fragile, feeling which indicates that this set is not for rough use. Toy historian Lorraine May Punchard differentiates between toy tea sets “meant to be used by little girls, having parties for their friends and practising the social graces of the times” and smaller sets or doll dishes “made for little girls to have parties with their dolls, or for their dolls to have parties among themselves” (7). Similar sets sold by Sears feature images of girls using the sets with both human playmates and dolls. The quantity allowing service for six invites multiple users to join the party. The packaging makes clear that these toy tea sets were intended for imaginary play only, rendering them non-functional through an all-capitals caution declaiming “IMPORTANT: Do not use near heat”. The walls and handles of the cups are so thin one can imagine that they would quickly become dangerous if filled with a hot liquid. Nevertheless, the lid of the oval bowl has a tan stain or watermark which suggests actual use. The box is broken up by pink cardboard partitions dividing it into segments sized for each item in the set. Interestingly even the small squares of unfinished corrugated cardboard used as cushioning between each stacked plate have survived. The evidence of careful re-packing indicates that great care was taken in keeping the objects safe. It may suggest that even though the set was used, the children or perhaps the parents, considered the set as something to care for and conserve for the future. Flaws in the glaze and applique of the design motif can be found on several pieces in the set and offer some insight as to the technique used in producing these items. Errors such as the design being perfectly evenly spaced but crooked in its alignment to the rim, or pieces of the design becoming detached or accidentally folded over and overlapping itself could only be the result of a print transfer technique popularised with decorative china of the Victorian era, a technique which lends itself to mass production and lower cost when compared to hand decoration. Speculation In the speculation stage, we can consider the external evidence and begin a more rigorous investigation of the messaging, iconography, and possible meanings of the material artefact. Aspects of the set allow a number of useful observations about the role of such an object in its own time and context. Sociologists observe the role of toys as embodiments of particular types of parental messages and values (Cross 292) and note how particularly in the twentieth century “children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents” (Kline 96). Throughout history children’s toys often reflected a miniaturised version of the adult world allowing children to role-play as imagined adult-selves. Kristina Ranalli explored parallels between the practice of drinking tea and the play-acting of the child’s tea party, particularly in the nineteenth century, as a gendered ritual of gentility; a method of socialisation and education, and an opportunity for exploratory and even transgressive play by “spontaneously creating mini-societies with rules of their own” (20). Such toys and objects were available through the Sears mail-order catalogue from the very beginning at the end of the nineteenth century (McGuire). Propelled by the post-war boom of suburban development and homeownership—that generation’s manifestation of the American Dream—concern with home décor and design was elevated among the American mainstream to a degree never before seen. There was a hunger for new, streamlined, efficient, modernist living. In his essay titled “Domesticating Modernity”, historian Jeffrey L. Meikle notes that many early modernist designers found that perhaps the most potent way to “‘domesticate’ modernism and make it more familiar was to miniaturise it; for example, to shrink the skyscraper and put it into the home as furniture or tableware” (143). Dr Timothy Blade, curator of the 1985 exhibition of girls’ toys at the University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Gallery—now the Goldstein Museum of Design—described in his introduction “a miniaturised world with little props which duplicate, however rudely, the larger world of adults” (5). Noting the power of such toys to reflect adult values of their time, Blade continues: “the microcosm of the child’s world, remarkably furnished by the miniaturised props of their parents’ world, holds many direct and implied messages about the society which brought it into being” (9). In large part, the mid-century Sears catalogues capture the spirit of an era when, as collector Thomas Holland observes, “little girls were still primarily being offered only the options of glamour, beauty and parenthood as the stuff of their fantasies” (175). Holland notes that “the Wishbooks of the fifties [and, I would add, the sixties] assumed most girls would follow in their mother’s footsteps to become full-time housewives and mommies” (1). Blade grouped toys into three categories: cooking, cleaning, and sewing. A tea set could arguably be considered part of the cooking category, but closer examination of the language used in marketing this object—“little hostesses”, et cetera—suggests an emphasis not on cooking but on serving or entertaining. This particular category was not prevalent in the era examined by Blade, but the cultural shifts of the mid-twentieth century, particularly the rapid popularisation of a suburban lifestyle, may have led to the use of entertaining as an additional distinct category of role play in the process of learning to become a “proper” homemaker. Sears and other retailers offered a wide variety of styles of toy tea sets during this era. Blade and numerous other sources observe that children’s toy furniture and appliances tended to reflect the style and aesthetic qualities of their contemporary parallels in the adult world, the better to associate the child’s objects to its adult equivalent. The toy tea set’s packaging trumpets messages intended to appeal to modernist values and identity including “Contemporary Design” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. The use of this coded marketing language, aimed particularly at parents, can be traced back several decades. In 1928 a group of American industrial and textile designers established the American Designers' Gallery in New York, in part to encourage American designers to innovate and adopt new styles such as those seen in the L’ Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925) in Paris, the exposition that sparked international interest in the Art Deco or Art Moderne aesthetic. One of the gallery founders, Ilonka Karasz, a Hungarian-American industrial and textile designer who had studied in Austria and was influenced by the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, publicised her new style of nursery furnishings as “designed for the very modern American child” (Brown 80). Sears itself was no stranger to the appeal of such language. The term “contemporary design” was ubiquitous in catalogue copy of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, used to describe everything from draperies (1959) and bedspreads (1961) to spice racks (1964) and the Lady Kenmore portable dishwasher (1961). An emphasis on the role of design in one’s life and surroundings can be traced back to efforts by MoMA. The museum’s interest in modern design hearkens back almost to the institution’s inception, particularly in relation to industrial design and the aestheticisation of everyday objects (Marshall). Through exhibitions and in partnership with mass-market magazines, department stores and manufacturer showrooms, MoMA curators evangelised the importance of “good design” a term that can be found in use as early as 1942. What Is Good Design? followed the pattern of prior exhibitions such as What Is Modern Painting? and situated modern design at the centre of exhibitions that toured the United States in the first half of the nineteen-fifties. To MoMA and its partners, “good design” signified the narrow identification of proper taste in furniture, home decor and accessories; effectively, the establishment of a design canon. The viewpoints enshrined in these exhibitions and partnerships were highly influential on the nation’s perception of taste for decades to come, as the trickle-down effect reached a much broader segment of consumers than those that directly experienced the museum or its exhibitions (Lawrence.) This was evident not only at high-end shops such as Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. Even mass-market retailers sought out well-known figures of modernist design to contribute to their offerings. Sears, for example, commissioned noted modernist designer and ceramicist Russel Wright to produce a variety of serving ware and decor items exclusively for the company. Notably for this study, he was also commissioned to create a toy tea set for children. The 1957 Wishbook touts the set as “especially created to delight modern little misses”. Within its Good Design series, MoMA exhibitions celebrated numerous prominent Nordic designers who were exploring simplified forms and new material technologies. In the 1968 Wishbook, the retailer describes the Porcelain Toy Tea Set as “Danish-inspired china for young moderns”. The reference to Danish design is certainly compatible with the modernist appeal; after the explosion in popularity of Danish furniture design, the term “Danish Modern” was commonly used in the nineteen-fifties and sixties as shorthand for pan-Scandinavian or Nordic design, or more broadly for any modern furniture design regardless of origin that exhibited similar characteristics. In subsequent decades the notion of a monolithic Scandinavian-Nordic design aesthetic or movement has been debunked as primarily an economically motivated marketing ploy (Olivarez et al.; Fallan). In the United States, the term “Danish Modern” became so commonly misused that the Danish Society for Arts and Crafts called upon the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to legally restrict the use of the labels “Danish” and “Danish Modern” to companies genuinely originating in Denmark. Coincidentally the FTC ruled on this in 1968, noting “that ‘Danish Modern’ carries certain meanings, and... that consumers might prefer goods that are identified with a foreign culture” (Hansen 451). In the case of the Porcelain Toy Tea Set examined here, Sears was not claiming that the design was “Danish” but rather “Danish-inspired”. One must wonder, was this another coded marketing ploy to communicate a sense of “Good Design” to potential customers? An examination of the formal qualities of the set’s components, particularly the simplified geometric forms and the handle style of the cups, confirms that it is unlike a traditional—say, Victorian-style—tea set. Punchard observes that during this era some American tea sets were actually being modelled on coffee services rather than traditional tea services (148). A visual comparison of other sets sold by Sears in the same year reveals a variety of cup and pot shapes—with some similar to the set in question—while others exhibit more traditional teapot and cup shapes. Coffee culture was historically prominent in Nordic cultures so there is at least a passing reference to that aspect of Nordic—if not specifically Danish—influence in the design. But what of the decorative motif? Simple curved lines were certainly prominent in Danish furniture and architecture of this era, and occasionally found in combination with straight lines, but no connection back to any specific Danish motif could be found even after consultation with experts in the field from the Museum of Danish America and the Vesterheim National Norwegian-American Museum (personal correspondence). However, knowing that the average American consumer of this era—even the design-savvy among them—consumed Scandinavian design without distinguishing between the various nations, a possible explanation could be contained in the promotion of Finnish textiles at the time. In the decade prior to the manufacture of the tea set a major design tendency began to emerge in the United States, triggered by the geometric design motifs of the Finnish textile and apparel company Marimekko. Marimekko products were introduced to the American market in 1959 via the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based retailer Design Research (DR) and quickly exploded in popularity particularly after would-be First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy appeared in national media wearing Marimekko dresses during the 1960 presidential campaign and on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. (Thompson and Lange). The company’s styling soon came to epitomise a new youth aesthetic of the early nineteen sixties in the United States, a softer and more casual predecessor to the London “mod” influence. During this time multiple patterns were released that brought a sense of whimsy and a more human touch to classic mechanical patterns and stripes. The patterns Piccolo (1953), Helmipitsi (1959), and Varvunraita (1959), all designed by Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi offered varying motifs of parallel straight lines. Maija Isola's Silkkikuikka (1961) pattern—said to be inspired by the plumage of the Great Crested Grebe—combined parallel serpentine lines with straight and angled lines, available in a variety of colours. These and other geometrically inspired patterns quickly inundated apparel and decor markets. DR built a vastly expanded Cambridge flagship store and opened new locations in New York in 1961 and 1964, and in San Francisco in 1965 fuelled in no small part by the fact that they remained the exclusive outlet for Marimekko in the United States. It is clear that Marimekko’s approach to pattern influenced designers and manufacturers across industries. Design historian Lesley Jackson demonstrates that Marimekko designs influenced or were emulated by numerous other companies across Scandinavia and beyond (72-78). The company’s influence grew to such an extent that some described it as a “conquest of the international market” (Hedqvist and Tarschys 150). Subsequent design-forward retailers such as IKEA and Crate and Barrel continue to look to Marimekko even today for modern design inspiration. In 2016 the mass-market retailer Target formed a design partnership with Marimekko to offer an expansive limited-edition line in their stores, numbering over two hundred items. So, despite the “Danish” misnomer, it is quite conceivable that designers working for or commissioned by Sears in 1968 may have taken their aesthetic cues from Marimekko’s booming work, demonstrating a clear understanding of the contemporary high design aesthetic of the time and coding the marketing rhetoric accordingly even if incorrectly. Conclusion The Sears catalogue plays a unique role in capturing cross-sections of American culture not only as a sales tool but also in Holland’s words as “a beautifully illustrated diary of America, it’s [sic] people and the way we thought about things” (1). Applying a rhetorical and material culture analysis to the catalogue and the objects within it provides a unique glimpse into the roles these objects played in mediating relationships, transmitting values and embodying social practices, tastes and beliefs of mid-century American consumers. Adult consumers familiar with the characteristics of the culture of “Good Design” potentially could have made a connection between the simplified geometric forms of the components of the toy tea set and say the work of modernist tableware designers such as Kaj Franck, or between the set’s graphic pattern and the modernist motifs of Marimekko and its imitators. But for a much broader segment of the population with a less direct understanding of modernist aesthetics, those connections may not have been immediately apparent. The rhetorical messaging behind the objects’ packaging and marketing used class and taste signifiers such as modern, contemporary and “Danish” to reinforce this connection to effect an emotional and aspirational appeal. These messages were coded to position the set as an effective transmitter of modernist values and to target parents with the ambition to create “appropriately modern” environments for their children. References Ancestry.com. “Historic Catalogs of Sears, Roebuck and Co., 1896–1993.” <http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1670>. Baker Furniture Inc. “Design Legacy: Our Story.” n.d. <http://www.bakerfurniture.com/design-story/ legacy-of-quality/design-legacy/>. Blade, Timothy Trent. “Introduction.” Child’s Play, Woman’s Work: An Exhibition of Miniature Toy Appliances: June 12, 1985–September 29, 1985. St. Paul: Goldstein Gallery, U Minnesota, 1985. Brown, Ashley. “Ilonka Karasz: Rediscovering a Modernist Pioneer.” Studies in the Decorative Arts 8.1 (2000-1): 69–91. Cross, Gary. “Gendered Futures/Gendered Fantasies: Toys as Representatives of Changing Childhood.” American Journal of Semiotics 12.1 (1995): 289–310. Dolansky, Fanny. “Playing with Gender: Girls, Dolls, and Adult Ideals in the Roman World.” Classical Antiquity 31.2 (2012): 256–92. Fallan, Kjetil. Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories. Berg, 2012. Folkmann, Mads Nygaard, and Hans-Christian Jensen. “Subjectivity in Self-Historicization: Design and Mediation of a ‘New Danish Modern’ Living Room Set.” Design and Culture 7.1 (2015): 65–84. Hansen, Per H. “Networks, Narratives, and New Markets: The Rise and Decline of Danish Modern Furniture Design, 1930–1970.” The Business History Review 80.3 (2006): 449–83. Hedqvist, Hedvig, and Rebecka Tarschys. “Thoughts on the International Reception of Marimekko.” Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashions, Architecture. Ed. Marianne Aav. Bard. 2003. 149–71. Highmore, Ben. The Design Culture Reader. Routledge, 2008. Holland, Thomas W. Girls’ Toys of the Fifties and Sixties: Memorable Catalog Pages from the Legendary Sears Christmas Wishbooks, 1950-1969. Windmill, 1997. Hucal, Sarah. "Scandi Crush Saga: How Scandinavian Design Took over the World." Curbed, 23 Mar. 2016. <http://www.curbed.com/2016/3/23/11286010/scandinavian-design-arne-jacobsen-alvar-aalto-muuto-artek>. Jackson, Lesley. “Textile Patterns in an International Context: Precursors, Contemporaries, and Successors.” Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashions, Architecture. Ed. Marianne Aav. Bard. 2003. 44–83. Kline, Stephen. “The Making of Children’s Culture.” The Children’s Culture Reader. Ed. Henry Jenkins. New York: NYU P, 1998. 95–109. Lawrence, Sidney. “Declaration of Function: Documents from the Museum of Modern Art’s Design Crusade, 1933-1950.” Design Issues 2.1 (1985): 65–77. Marshall, Jennifer Jane. Machine Art 1934. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. McGuire, Sheila. “Playing House: Sex-Roles and the Child’s World.” Child’s Play, Woman’s Work: An Exhibition of Miniature Toy Appliances : June 12, 1985–September 29, 1985. St. Paul: Goldstein Gallery, U Minnesota, 1985. Meikel, Jeffrey L. “Domesticating Modernity: Ambivalence and Appropriation, 1920–1940.” Designing Modernity; the Arts of Reform and Persuasion. Ed. Wendy Kaplan. Thames & Hudson, 1995. 143–68. O’Brien, Marion, and Aletha C. Huston. “Development of Sex-Typed Play Behavior in Toddlers.” Developmental Psychology, 21.5 (1985): 866–71. Olivarez, Jennifer Komar, Jukka Savolainen, and Juulia Kauste. Finland: Designed Environments. Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Nordic Heritage Museum, 2014. Oswell, David. The Agency of Children: From Family to Global Human Rights. Cambridge UP, 2013. Prown, Jules David. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio 17.1 (1982): 1–19. Punchard, Lorraine May. Child’s Play: Play Dishes, Kitchen Items, Furniture, Accessories. Punchard, 1982. Ranalli, Kristina. An Act Apart: Tea-Drinking, Play and Ritual. Master's thesis. U Delaware, 2013. Sears Corporate Archives. “What Is a Sears Modern Home?” n.d. <http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/index.htm>. "Target Announces New Design Partnership with Marimekko: It’s Finnish, Target Style." Target, 2 Mar. 2016. <http://corporate.target.com/article/2016/03/marimekko-for-target>. Teglasi, Hedwig. “Children’s Choices of and Value Judgments about Sex-Typed Toys and Occupations.” Journal of Vocational Behavior 18.2 (1981): 184–95. Thompson, Jane, and Alexandra Lange. Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes. Chronicle, 2010.

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Abstract:

Introduction Food has always been an essential component of daily life. Today, thinking about food is a much more complicated pursuit than planning the next meal, with food studies scholars devoting their efforts to researching “anything pertaining to food and eating, from how food is grown to when and how it is eaten, to who eats it and with whom, and the nutritional quality” (Duran and MacDonald 234). This is in addition to the work undertaken by an increasingly wide variety of popular culture researchers who explore all aspects of food (Risson and Brien 3): including food advertising, food packaging, food on television, and food in popular fiction. In creating stories, from those works that quickly disappear from bookstore shelves to those that become entrenched in the literary canon, writers use food to communicate the everyday and to explore a vast range of ideas from cultural background to social standing, and also use food to provide perspectives “into the cultural and historical uniqueness of a given social group” (Piatti-Farnell 80). For example in Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens, the central character challenges the class system when: “Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table, and advancing basin and spoon in hand, to the master, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity–‘Please, sir, I want some more’” (11). Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) makes a similar point, a little more dramatically, when she declares: “As God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (419). Food can also take us into the depths of another culture: places that many of us will only ever read about. Food is also used to provide insight into a character’s state of mind. In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983) an item as simple as boiled bread tells a reader so much more about Rachel Samstat than her preferred bakery items: “So we got married and I got pregnant and I gave up my New York apartment and moved to Washington. Talk about mistakes [...] there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel” (34). There are three ways in which writers can deal with food within their work. Firstly, food can be totally ignored. This approach is sometimes taken despite food being such a standard feature of storytelling that its absence, be it a lonely meal at home, elegant canapés at an impressively catered co*cktail party, or a cheap sandwich collected from a local café, is an obvious omission. Food can also add realism to a story, with many authors putting as much effort into conjuring the smell, taste, and texture of food as they do into providing a backstory and a purpose for their characters. In recent years, a third way has emerged with some writers placing such importance upon food in fiction that the line that divides the cookbook and the novel has become distorted. This article looks at cookbooks and cookery in popular fiction with a particular focus on crime novels. Recipes: Ingredients and Preparation Food in fiction has been employed, with great success, to help characters cope with grief; giving them the reassurance that only comes through the familiarity of the kitchen and the concentration required to fulfil routine tasks: to chop and dice, to mix, to sift and roll, to bake, broil, grill, steam, and fry. Such grief can come from the breakdown of a relationship as seen in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983). An autobiography under the guise of fiction, this novel is the first-person story of a cookbook author, a description that irritates the narrator as she feels her works “aren’t merely cookbooks” (95). She is, however, grateful she was not described as “a distraught, rejected, pregnant cookbook author whose husband was in love with a giantess” (95). As the collapse of the marriage is described, her favourite recipes are shared: Bacon Hash; Four Minute Eggs; Toasted Almonds; Lima Beans with Pears; Linguine Alla Cecca; Pot Roast; three types of Potatoes; Sorrel Soup; desserts including Bread Pudding, Cheesecake, Key Lime Pie and Peach Pie; and a Vinaigrette, all in an effort to reassert her personal skills and thus personal value. Grief can also result from loss of hope and the realisation that a life long dreamed of will never be realised. Like Water for Chocolate (1989), by Laura Esquivel, is the magical realist tale of Tita De La Garza who, as the youngest daughter, is forbidden to marry as she must take care of her mother, a woman who: “Unquestionably, when it came to dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying or dominating […] was a pro” (87). Tita’s life lurches from one painful, unjust episode to the next; the only emotional stability she has comes from the kitchen, and from her cooking of a series of dishes: Christmas Rolls; Chabela Wedding Cake; Quail in Rose Petal Sauce; Turkey Mole; Northern-style Chorizo; Oxtail Soup; Champandongo; Chocolate and Three Kings’s Day Bread; Cream Fritters; and Beans with Chilli Tezcucana-style. This is a series of culinary-based activities that attempts to superimpose normalcy on a life that is far from the everyday. Grief is most commonly associated with death. Undertaking the selection, preparation and presentation of meals in novels dealing with bereavement is both a functional and symbolic act: life must go on for those left behind but it must go on in a very different way. Thus, novels that use food to deal with loss are particularly important because they can “make non-cooks believe they can cook, and for frequent cooks, affirm what they already know: that cooking heals” (Baltazar online). In Angelina’s Bachelors (2011) by Brian O’Reilly, Angelina D’Angelo believes “cooking was not just about food. It was about character” (2). By the end of the first chapter the young woman’s husband is dead and she is in the kitchen looking for solace, and survival, in cookery. In The Kitchen Daughter (2011) by Jael McHenry, Ginny Selvaggio is struggling to cope with the death of her parents and the friends and relations who crowd her home after the funeral. Like Angelina, Ginny retreats to the kitchen. There are, of course, exceptions. In Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), cooking celebrates, comforts, and seduces (Calta). This story of three sisters from South Carolina is told through diary entries, narrative, letters, poetry, songs, and spells. Recipes are also found throughout the text: Turkey; Marmalade; Rice; Spinach; Crabmeat; Fish; Sweetbread; Duck; Lamb; and, Asparagus. Anthony Capella’s The Food of Love (2004), a modern retelling of the classic tale of Cyrano de Bergerac, is about the beautiful Laura, a waiter masquerading as a top chef Tommaso, and the talented Bruno who, “thick-set, heavy, and slightly awkward” (21), covers for Tommaso’s incompetency in the kitchen as he, too, falls for Laura. The novel contains recipes and contains considerable information about food: Take fusilli […] People say this pasta was designed by Leonardo da Vinci himself. The spiral fins carry the biggest amount of sauce relative to the surface area, you see? But it only works with a thick, heavy sauce that can cling to the grooves. Conchiglie, on the other hand, is like a shell, so it holds a thin, liquid sauce inside it perfectly (17). Recipes: Dishing Up Death Crime fiction is a genre with a long history of focusing on food; from the theft of food in the novels of the nineteenth century to the utilisation of many different types of food such as chocolate, marmalade, and sweet omelettes to administer poison (Berkeley, Christie, Sayers), the latter vehicle for arsenic receiving much attention in Harriet Vane’s trial in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison (1930). The Judge, in summing up the case, states to the members of the jury: “Four eggs were brought to the table in their shells, and Mr Urquhart broke them one by one into a bowl, adding sugar from a sifter [...he then] cooked the omelette in a chafing dish, filled it with hot jam” (14). Prior to what Timothy Taylor has described as the “pre-foodie era” the crime fiction genre was “littered with corpses whose last breaths smelled oddly sweet, or bitter, or of almonds” (online). Of course not all murders are committed in such a subtle fashion. In Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter (1953), Mary Maloney murders her policeman husband, clubbing him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. The meat is roasting nicely when her husband’s colleagues arrive to investigate his death, the lamb is offered and consumed: the murder weapon now beyond the recovery of investigators. Recent years have also seen more and more crime fiction writers present a central protagonist working within the food industry, drawing connections between the skills required for food preparation and those needed to catch a murderer. Working with cooks or crooks, or both, requires planning and people skills in addition to creative thinking, dedication, reliability, stamina, and a willingness to take risks. Kent Carroll insists that “food and mysteries just go together” (Carroll in Calta), with crime fiction website Stop, You’re Killing Me! listing, at the time of writing, over 85 culinary-based crime fiction series, there is certainly sufficient evidence to support his claim. Of the numerous works available that focus on food there are many series that go beyond featuring food and beverages, to present recipes as well as the solving of crimes. These include: the Candy Holliday Murder Mysteries by B. B. Haywood; the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Cleo Coyle; the Hannah Swensen Mysteries by Joanne Fluke; the Hemlock Falls Mysteries by Claudia Bishop; the Memphis BBQ Mysteries by Riley Adams; the Piece of Cake Mysteries by Jacklyn Brady; the Tea Shop Mysteries by Laura Childs; and, the White House Chef Mysteries by Julie Hyzy. The vast majority of offerings within this female dominated sub-genre that has been labelled “Crime and Dine” (Collins online) are American, both in origin and setting. A significant contribution to this increasingly popular formula is, however, from an Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Food features within her famed Phryne Fisher Series with recipes included in A Question of Death (2007). Recipes also form part of Greenwood’s food-themed collection of short crime stories Recipes for Crime (1995), written with Jenny Pausacker. These nine stories, each one imitating the style of one of crime fiction’s greatest contributors (from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler), allow readers to simultaneously access mysteries and recipes. 2004 saw the first publication of Earthly Delights and the introduction of her character, Corinna Chapman. This series follows the adventures of a woman who gave up a career as an accountant to open her own bakery in Melbourne. Corinna also investigates the occasional murder. Recipes can be found at the end of each of these books with the Corinna Chapman Recipe Book (nd), filled with instructions for baking bread, muffins and tea cakes in addition to recipes for main courses such as risotto, goulash, and “Chicken with Pineapple 1971 Style”, available from the publisher’s website. Recipes: Integration and Segregation In Heartburn (1983), Rachel acknowledges that presenting a work of fiction and a collection of recipes within a single volume can present challenges, observing: “I see that I haven’t managed to work in any recipes for a while. It’s hard to work in recipes when you’re moving the plot forward” (99). How Rachel tells her story is, however, a reflection of how she undertakes her work, with her own cookbooks being, she admits, more narration than instruction: “The cookbooks I write do well. They’re very personal and chatty–they’re cookbooks in an almost incidental way. I write chapters about friends or relatives or trips or experiences, and work in the recipes peripherally” (17). Some authors integrate detailed recipes into their narratives through description and dialogue. An excellent example of this approach can be found in the Coffeehouse Mystery Series by Cleo Coyle, in the novel On What Grounds (2003). When the central protagonist is being questioned by police, Clare Cosi’s answers are interrupted by a flashback scene and instructions on how to make Greek coffee: Three ounces of water and one very heaped teaspoon of dark roast coffee per serving. (I used half Italian roast, and half Maracaibo––a lovely Venezuelan coffee, named after the country’s major port; rich in flavour, with delicate wine overtones.) / Water and finely ground beans both go into the ibrik together. The water is then brought to a boil over medium heat (37). This provides insight into Clare’s character; that, when under pressure, she focuses her mind on what she firmly believes to be true – not the information that she is doubtful of or a situation that she is struggling to understand. Yet breaking up the action within a novel in this way–particularly within crime fiction, a genre that is predominantly dependant upon generating tension and building the pacing of the plotting to the climax–is an unusual but ultimately successful style of writing. Inquiry and instruction are comfortable bedfellows; as the central protagonists within these works discover whodunit, the readers discover who committed murder as well as a little bit more about one of the world’s most popular beverages, thus highlighting how cookbooks and novels both serve to entertain and to educate. Many authors will save their recipes, serving them up at the end of a story. This can be seen in Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef Mystery novels, the cover of each volume in the series boasts that it “includes Recipes for a Complete Presidential Menu!” These menus, with detailed ingredients lists, instructions for cooking and options for serving, are segregated from the stories and appear at the end of each work. Yet other writers will deploy a hybrid approach such as the one seen in Like Water for Chocolate (1989), where the ingredients are listed at the commencement of each chapter and the preparation for the recipes form part of the narrative. This method of integration is also deployed in The Kitchen Daughter (2011), which sees most of the chapters introduced with a recipe card, those chapters then going on to deal with action in the kitchen. Using recipes as chapter breaks is a structure that has, very recently, been adopted by Australian celebrity chef, food writer, and, now fiction author, Ed Halmagyi, in his new work, which is both cookbook and novel, The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally (2012). As people exchange recipes in reality, so too do fictional characters. The Recipe Club (2009), by Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel, is the story of two friends, Lilly Stone and Valerie Rudman, which is structured as an epistolary novel. As they exchange feelings, ideas and news in their correspondence, they also exchange recipes: over eighty of them throughout the novel in e-mails and letters. In The Food of Love (2004), written messages between two of the main characters are also used to share recipes. In addition, readers are able to post their own recipes, inspired by this book and other works by Anthony Capella, on the author’s website. From Page to Plate Some readers are contributing to the burgeoning food tourism market by seeking out the meals from the pages of their favourite novels in bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world, expanding the idea of “map as menu” (Spang 79). In Shannon McKenna Schmidt’s and Joni Rendon’s guide to literary tourism, Novel Destinations (2009), there is an entire section, “Eat Your Words: Literary Places to Sip and Sup”, dedicated to beverages and food. The listings include details for John’s Grill, in San Francisco, which still has on the menu Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops, served with baked potato and sliced tomatoes: a meal enjoyed by author Dashiell Hammett and subsequently consumed by his well-known protagonist in The Maltese Falcon (193), and the Café de la Paix, in Paris, frequented by Ian Fleming’s James Bond because “the food was good enough and it amused him to watch the people” (197). Those wanting to follow in the footsteps of writers can go to Harry’s Bar, in Venice, where the likes of Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and Truman Capote have all enjoyed a drink (195) or The Eagle and Child, in Oxford, which hosted the regular meetings of the Inklings––a group which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien––in the wood-panelled Rabbit Room (203). A number of eateries have developed their own literary themes such as the Peaco*cks Tearooms, in Cambridgeshire, which blends their own teas. Readers who are also tea drinkers can indulge in the Sherlock Holmes (Earl Grey with Lapsang Souchong) and the Doctor Watson (Keemun and Darjeeling with Lapsang Souchong). Alternatively, readers may prefer to side with the criminal mind and indulge in the Moriarty (Black Chai with Star Anise, Pepper, Cinnamon, and Fennel) (Peaco*cks). The Moat Bar and Café, in Melbourne, situated in the basem*nt of the State Library of Victoria, caters “to the whimsy and fantasy of the fiction housed above” and even runs a book exchange program (The Moat). For those readers who are unable, or unwilling, to travel the globe in search of such savoury and sweet treats there is a wide variety of locally-based literary lunches and other meals, that bring together popular authors and wonderful food, routinely organised by book sellers, literature societies, and publishing houses. There are also many cookbooks now easily obtainable that make it possible to re-create fictional food at home. One of the many examples available is The Book Lover’s Cookbook (2003) by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen, a work containing over three hundred pages of: Breakfasts; Main & Side Dishes; Soups; Salads; Appetizers, Breads & Other Finger Foods; Desserts; and Cookies & Other Sweets based on the pages of children’s books, literary classics, popular fiction, plays, poetry, and proverbs. If crime fiction is your preferred genre then you can turn to Jean Evans’s The Crime Lover’s Cookbook (2007), which features short stories in between the pages of recipes. There is also Estérelle Payany’s Recipe for Murder (2010) a beautifully illustrated volume that presents detailed instructions for Pigs in a Blanket based on the Big Bad Wolf’s appearance in The Three Little Pigs (44–7), and Roast Beef with Truffled Mashed Potatoes, which acknowledges Patrick Bateman’s fondness for fine dining in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (124–7). Conclusion Cookbooks and many popular fiction novels are reflections of each other in terms of creativity, function, and structure. In some instances the two forms are so closely entwined that a single volume will concurrently share a narrative while providing information about, and instruction, on cookery. Indeed, cooking in books is becoming so popular that the line that traditionally separated cookbooks from other types of books, such as romance or crime novels, is becoming increasingly distorted. The separation between food and fiction is further blurred by food tourism and how people strive to experience some of the foods found within fictional works at bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world or, create such experiences in their own homes using fiction-themed recipe books. Food has always been acknowledged as essential for life; books have long been acknowledged as food for thought and food for the soul. 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