Journal articles: 'New York German Union Republicans' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

The movement of new social forces into the political system is one of the central themes in the study of American political development on both the national and local levels. For example, Samuel P. Huntington has characterized the realignment of 1800 as marking “the ascendancy of the agrarian Republicans over the mercantile Federalists, 1860 the ascendancy of the industrializing North over the plantation South, and 1932 the ascendancy of the urban working class over the previously dominant business groups.” And the process of ethnic succession—the coming to power of Irish and German immigrants, followed by the Italians and Jews, and then by blacks and Hispanics—is a major focus of most analyses of the development of American urban politics.

Abstract:

Jeffrey Anderson, German Unification and the Union of Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Thomas Banchoff, The German Problem Transformed: Institutions, Politics and Foreign Policy, 1945-1995 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1999)

Abstract:

In the late 1920s, the New York Public Library received as gifts and on exchange a large collection of books, pamphlets and periodicals in the minority languages of the Soviet Union. These materials remained in storage in the Library's Annex—uncataloged, but not unclassified, albeit superficially—until the spring of 1994. These acquisitions also included materials in the languages of neighboring countries, as well as books for the well-established immigrant population in the Soviet Union speaking Estonian, Latvian, German, and Polish.

Abstract:

I first met George Mosse in late August 1967. That summer I carried my worn copy of his book on the roots of Nazi ideology, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1964), with Hubert Lanzinger's bizarre painting of Hider as a German knight on the cover, to Salzburg where I studied German before going on to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. Though I admired the book, it did not prepare me for meeting the man. In 1967 I drove out to the Midwest from New York in my VW bug. To my surprise, as soon as I arrived in Madison, someone pointed him out, sitting on the Terrace of the Wisconsin Memorial Union in his short sleeve shirt, smoking his pipe, and arguing intensely with a group of students who were planning to sit in to block the Dow Chemical Company campus recruiter in the Fall (Dow was chosen because the company was manufacturing napalm).

Abstract:

Jay Julian Rosellini, The German New Right: AfD, PEGIDA and the Re-imagining of National Identity (London: C. Hurst, 2019).Simon Bulmer and William E. Paterson, Germany and the European Union: Europe’s Reluctant Hegemon? (London: Red Globe Press, 2019).Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).Stephan Jaeger, The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Narrative, Memory, and Experience to Experientiality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020).Robert M. Jarvis, Gambling under the Swastika: Casinos, Horse Racing, Lotteries, and Other Forms of Betting in Nazi Germany (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2019).

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<p>With this study of the Sami population in the Russian part of Lapland, Lukas Allemann closes a research gap. The author focuses on the little explored period between the end of the war in 1945 and beginning of perestroika. Applying an oral history approach with biographical interviews the author opens up the inner world and structural relationships of this minority ethnic group. <br />For all the differences, contradictions and diverging assessments of the Soviet era, what emerges from this study is that - contrary to the widespread view expressed in the secondary literature - it was not collectivization and terror, but the forced relocations between the 1930s and 70s that represented the deepest rupture in the life of the Sami.&nbsp; The opinion that it was Soviet rule that initiated the destruction of Sami culture is also relativized. Russification and changes in reindeer herding patterns had set in already before the October Revolution.</p><p>Translated from German language by Michael Lomax.</p><p>Originally published (in German) by:<br />Verlag Peter Lang, 'Menschen und Strukturen' series. Historisch-sozialwissenschaftliche Studien, Ed. Heiko Haumann, Vol.&nbsp; 18, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Brussels, New York, Oxford, Vienna, 2010.</p>

Abstract:

Rafaela Dancygier, Dilemmas of Inclusion: Muslims in European Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) Reviewed by Hilary Silver, Sociology, George Washington University Thomas Großbölting, Losing Heaven: Religion in Germany since 1945; translated by Alex Skinner (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. Reviewed by Jeffrey Luppes, World Languages, Indiana University South Bend Hans Vorländer, Maik Herold, and Steven Schäller, PEGIDA and New Right-Wing Populism In Germany (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Reviewed by Joyce Mushaben, Political Science, University of Missouri St. Louis Kara L. Ritzheimer, “Trash,” Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Reviewed by Ambika Natarajan, History, Philosophy, and Religion, Oregon State University Anna Saunders, Memorializing the GDR: Monuments and Memory After 1989 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018) Reviewed by Jeffrey Luppes, World Languages, Indiana University South Bend Desmond Dinan, Neill Nugent and William E. Paterson, eds., The European Union in Crisis (London: Palgrave, 2017) Reviewed by Helge F. Jani, Hamburg, Germany Noah Benezra Strote, Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Reviewed by Darren O’Byrne, History, University of Cambridge Chunjie Zhang, Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017) Reviewed by Christopher Thomas Goodwin, History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Marcel Fratzscher, The Germany Illusion: Between Economic Euphoria and Despair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Reviewed by Stephen J. Silvia, International Relations, American University

Abstract:

Henning Tewes, Germany, Civilian Power and the New Europe. Enlarging NATO and the European Union (New York: Palgrave, 2002)Review by James SperlingAndreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003)Review by Eric LangenbacherMaria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Review by Atina GrossmannJames McAllister, No Exit: America and the German Problem, 1943-1954, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002)Review by Robert Gerald LivingstonHubert Zimmermann, Money and Security: Troops, Monetary Policy, and West Germany’s Relations to the United States and the United Kingdom, 1950-1971 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Review by Thomas Banchoff

Abstract:

AbstractThis edition makes available the correspondence between Paul Tillich and his friend, the philosopher Richard Kroner, who were colleagues at the Technische Universität Dresden from the winter semester of 1925/26. They were to meet again in New York after Tillich's emigration to the United States in 1933, and Kroner's six years later. In 1941 Tillich was able to secure Kroner a visiting lecturer position at Union Theological Seminary. The exchange of letters, which also includes contributions from their wives Hannah Tillich and Alice Kroner, covers the period from 1942 to 1964. It offers a remarkable account of the struggle for self-assertion and reorientation of two very different personalities who escaped the destructive will of the National Socialists. While Kroner and Tillich shared an enthusiasm for the philosophical legacy of German Idealism, they expressed it very differently in their respective works.

Abstract:

Jay Lockenour, Soldiers as Citizens: Former Wehrmacht Officers in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1955 (University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London, 2001)Review by Omer BartovVolker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepherd Stone Between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001)Review by Robert Gerald LivingstonGeoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2002)Review by Paul LernerTanja A. Börzel, States and Regions in the European Union: Institutional Adaptation in Germany and Spain (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Review by Richard HaeslyChristoph Kleßmann, ed., The Divided Past: Rewriting Post-War German History (Oxford: Berg, 2001)Review by Andrew H. BeattieWilfried Schubarth and Richard Stöss, eds., Rechtsextremismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Eine Bilanz (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 2001)Review by Lars RensmannErik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001)Review by Pamela Potter

Abstract:

Todd Samuel Presner, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).Reviewed by Robert TobinRuth Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)Reviewed by Hilary SilverWolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Reviewed by Clay ClemensDavid Raub Snyder, Sex Crimes under the Wehrmacht (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007)Reviewed by Regina MühlhäuserPaul Hockenos, Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic. An Alternative History of Postwar Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Reviewed by Joyce M. MushabenKatherine Pence and Paul Betts, eds. Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008)Reviewed by Eli RubinPatricia Heberer and Jürgen Matthäus, eds., Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008)Reviewed by Joachim J. SavelsbergEric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Reviewed by Michael Brenner

Abstract:

03—230 Andress, Reinhard (St. Louis U., USA), James, Charles J., Jurasek, Barbara, Lalande II, John F., Lovik, Thomas A., Lund, Deborah, Stoyak, Daniel P., Tatlock, Lynne and Wipf, Joseph A.. Maintaining the momentum from high school to college: Report and recommendations. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German (Cherry Hill, NJ, USA), 35, 1 (2002), 1—14.03—231 Andrews, David R. (Georgetown U., USA.). Teaching the Russian heritage learner. Slavonic and East European Journal (Tucson, Arizona, USA), 45, 3 (2001), 519—30.03—232 Ashby, Wendy and Ostertag, Veronica (U. of Arizona, USA). How well can a computer program teach German culture? Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German (Cherry Hill, NJ, USA), 35, 1 (2002), 79—85.03—233 Bateman, Blair E. (937 17th Avenue, SE Minneapolis, MN 55414, USA; Email: bate0048@umn.edu). Promoting openness toward culture learning: Ethnographic interviews for students of Spanish. The Modern Language Journal (Malden, MA, USA), 86, 3 (2002), 318—31.03—234 Belz, Julie A. and Müller-Hartmann, Andreas. Deutsche-amerikanische Telekollaboration im Fremdsprachenuterricht – Lernende im Kreuzfeuer der institutionellen Zwänge. [German-American tele-collaboration in foreign language teaching – learners in the crossfire of institutional constraints.] Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German (Cherry Hill, NJ, USA), 36, 1 (2002), 68—78.03—235 Bosher, Susan and Smalkoski, Kari (The Coll. of St. Catherine, St. Paul, USA; Email: sdbosher@stkate.edu). From needs analysis to curriculum development: Designing a course in health-care communication for immigrant students in the USA. English for Specific Purposes (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 21, 1 (2002), 59—79.03—236 Brandl, Klaus (U. of Washington, USA; Email: brandl@u.washington.edu). Integrating Internet-based reading materials into the foreign language curriculum: From teacher- to student-centred approaches. Language Learning and Technology (http://llt.msu.edu/), 6, 3 (2002), 87—107.03—237 Bruce, Nigel (Hong Kong U.; Email: njbruce@hku.hk). Dovetailing language and content: Teaching balanced argument in legal problem answer writing. English for Specific Purposes (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 21, 4 (2002), 321—45.03—238 Bruton, Anthony (U. of Seville, Spain; Email: abruton@siff.us.es). From tasking purposes to purposing tasks. ELT Journal (Oxford, UK), 56, 3 (2002), 280—95.03—239 Candlin, C. N. (Email: enopera@cityu.edu.hk), Bhatia, V. K. and Jensen, C. H. (City U. of Hong Kong). Developing legal writing materials for English second language learners: Problems and perspectives. English for Specific Purposes (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 21, 4 (2002), 299—320.03—240 Chen, Shumei. A contrastive study of complimentary responses in British English and Chinese, with pedagogic implications for ELT in China. Language Issues (Birmingham, UK), 13, 2 (2001), 8—11.03—241 Chudak, Sebastian (Adam-Mickiewicz-Universität, Poznán, Poland). Die Selbstevaluation im Prozess- und Lernerorientierten Fremdsprachenunterricht (Bedeutung, Ziele, Umsetzungsmöglichkeiten). [The self-evaluation of process- and learner-oriented foreign language teaching.] Glottodidactica (Poznań, Poland), 28 (2002), 49—63.03—242 Crosling, Glenda and Ward, Ian (Monash U., Clayton, Australia; Email: glenda.crosling@buseco.monash.edu.au). Oral communication: The workplace needs and uses of business graduate employees. English for Specific Purposes (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 21, 1 (2002), 41—57.03—243 Davidheiser, James (U. of the South, USA). Classroom approaches to communication: Teaching German with TPRS (Total Physical Response Storytelling). Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German (Cherry Hill, NJ, USA), 35, 1 (2002), 25—35.03—244 Duff, Patricia A. (U. of British Columbia, Canada; Email: patricia.duff@ubc.ca). The discursive co-construction of knowledge, identity, and difference: An ethnography of communication in the high school mainstream. Applied Linguistics (Oxford, UK), 23, 3 (2002), 289—322.03—245 Egbert, Joy (Washington State U., USA; Email: egbert@wsunix.wsu.edu), Paulus, Trena M. and Nakamichi, Yoko. The impact of CALL instruction on classroom computer use: A foundation for rethinking technology in teacher education. Language Learning and Technology (http://llt.msu.edu/), 6, 3 (2002), 108—26.03—246 Einbeck, Kandace (U. of Colorado at Boulder, USA). Using literature to promote cultural fluency in study abroad programs. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German (Cherry Hill, NJ, USA), 35, 1 (2002), 59—67.03—247 Fallon, Jean M. (Hollins U., Virginia, USA). On foreign ground: One attempt at attracting non-French majors to a French Studies course. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 35, 4 (2002), 405—13.03—248 Furuhata, Hamako (Mount Union Coll., Ohio, USA; Email: furuhah@muc.edu). Learning Japanese in America: A survey of preferred teaching methods. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK), 15, 2 (2002), 134—42.03—249 Goldstein, Tara (Ontario Inst. for Studies in Ed., U. of Toronto, Canada). No Pain, No Gain: Student playwriting as critical ethnographic language research. The Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue canadienne des langues vivantes (Toronto, Ont.), 59, 1 (2002), 53—76.03—250 Hu, Guangwei (Nanyang Technological U., Singapore; Email: gwhu@nie.edu.sg). Potential cultural resistance to pedagogical imports: The case of communicative language teaching in China. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK), 15, 2 (2002), 93—105.03—251 Huang, Jingzi (Monmouth U., New Jersey, USA; Email: jhuang@monmouth.edu). Activities as a vehicle for linguistic and sociocultural knowledge at the elementary level. Language Teaching Research (London, UK), 7, 1 (2003), 3—33.03—252 Hyland, Ken (City U. of Hong Kong; Email: ken.hyland@cityu.edu.hk). Specificity revisited: How far should we go now? English for Specific Purposes (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 21, 4 (2002), 385—95.03—253 Jahr, Silke. Die Vermittlung des sprachen Ausdrucks von Emotionen in DaF-Unterricht. [The conveying of the oral expression of emotion in teaching German as a foreign language.] Deutsch als Fremdsprache (Berlin, Germany), 39, 2 (2002), 88–95.03—254 Jung, Yunhee (U. of Alberta, Canada; Email: jhee6539@hanmail.net). Historical review of grammar instruction and current implications. English Teaching (Korea), 57, 3 (2002), 193—213.03—255 Kagan, Olga and Dillon, Kathleen (UCLA, USA & UC Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, USA). A new perspective on teaching Russian: Focus on the heritage learner. Slavonic and East European Journal (Tucson, Arizona, USA), 45, 3 (2001), 507—18.03—256 Kang, Hoo-Dong (Sungsim Coll. of Foreign Languages, Korea; Email: hdkang2k@hanmail.net). Tracking or detracking?: Teachers' views of tracking in Korean secondary schools. English Teaching (Korea), 57, 3 (2002), 41—57.03—257 Kramsch, Claire (U. of California at Berkeley, USA). Language, culture and voice in the teaching of English as a foreign language. Language Issues (Birmingham, UK), 13, 2 (2001), 2—7.03—258 Krishnan, Lakshmy A. and Lee, Hwee Hoon (Nanyang Tech. U., Singapore; Email: clbhaskar@ntu.edu.sg). Diaries: Listening to ‘voices’ from the multicultural classroom. ELT Journal (Oxford, UK), 56, 3 (2002), 227—39.03—259 Lasagabaster, David and Sierra, Juan Manuel (U. of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; Email: fiblahed@vc.ehu.es). University students' perceptions of native and non-native speaker teachers of English. Language Awareness (Clevedon, UK), 11, 2 (2002), 132—42.03—260 Lennon, Paul. Authentische Texte im Grammatikunterricht. [Authentic texts in grammar teaching.] Praxis des neusprachlichen Unterrichts (Berlin, Germany), 49, 3 (2002), 227–36.03—261 Lepetit, Daniel (Clemson U., USA; Email: dlepetit@mail.clemson.edu) and Cichocki, Wladyslaw. Teaching languages to future health professionals: A needs assessment study. The Modern Language Journal (Malden, MA, USA), 86, 3 (2002), 384—96.03—262 Łȩska-Drajerczak, Iwona (Adam Mickiewicz U., Poznán, Poland). Selected aspects of job motivation as seen by EFL teachers. Glottodidactica (Poznán, Poland), 28 (2002), 103—12.03—263 Liontas, John I. (U. of Notre-Dame, USA). ZOOMANIA: The See-Hear-and-Do approach to FL teaching and learning. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German (Cherry Hill, NJ, USA), 35, 1 (2002), 36—58.03—264 Littlemore, Jeannette (Birmingham U., UK). Developing metaphor interpretation strategies for students of economics: A case study. Les Cahiers de l'APLIUT (Grenoble, France), 21, 4 (2002) 40—60.03—265 Mantero, Miguel (The U. of Alabama, USA). Bridging the gap: Discourse in text-based foreign language classrooms. Foreign Language Annals (New York, USA), 35, 4 (2002), 437—56.03—266 Martin, William M. (U. of Pennsylvania, USA) and Lomperis, Anne E.. Determining the cost benefit, the return on investment, and the intangible impacts of language programmes for development. TESOL Quarterly (Alexandria, VA, USA), 36, 3 (2002), 399—429.03—267 Master, Peter (San Jose State U., CA, USA: Email: pmaster@sjsu.edu). Information structure and English article pedagogy. System (Oxford, UK), 30, 3 (2002), 331—48.03—268 Mertens, Jürgen. Schrift im Französischunterricht in der Grundschule: Lernehemnis oder Lernhilfe? [Writing in teaching French in primary school: Learning aid or hindrance?] Neusprachliche Mitteilungen aus Wissenschaft und Praxis (Berlin, Germany), 55, 3 (2002), 141–49.03—269 Meskill, Carla (U. at Albany, USA; Email: cmeskill@uamail.albany.edu), Mossop, Jonathan, DiAngelo, Stephen and Pasquale, Rosalie K.. Expert and novice teachers talking technology: Precepts, concepts, and misconcepts. Language Learning and Technology (http://llt.msu.edu/), 6, 3 (2002), 46—57.03—270 Mitchell, Rosamond and Lee, Jenny Hye-Won (U. of Southampton, UK; Email: rfm3@soton.ac.uk). Sameness and difference in classroom learning cultures: Interpretations of communicative pedagogy in the UK and Korea. Language Teaching Research (London, UK), 7, 1 (2003), 35—63.03—271 Mohan, Bernard (U. of British Columbia, Canada; Email: bernard.mohan@ubc.ca) and Huang, Jingzi. Assessing the integration of language and content in a Mandarin as a foreign language classroom. Linguistics and Education (New York, USA), 13, 3 (2002), 405—33.03—272 Mori, Junko (U. of Wisconsin-Madison, USA; Email: jmori@facstaff.wisc.edu). Task design, plan, and development of talk-in-interaction: An analysis of a small group activity in a Japanese language classroom. Applied Linguistics (Oxford, UK), 23, 3 (2002), 323—47.03—273 O'Sullivan, Emer (Johann Wolfgang Goethe-U. Frankfurt, Germany; Email: osullivan@em.uni-frankfurt.de) and Rösler, Dietmar. Fremdsprachenlernen und Kinder-und Jugendliteratur: Eine kritische Bestandaufsnahme. [Foreign language learning and children's literature: A critical appraisal.] Zeitschrift für Fremdsprachenforschung (Germany), 13, 1 (2002), 63—111.03—274 Pfeiffer, Waldemar (Europa Universität Viadrina – Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany). Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der interkulturellen Sprachvermittlung. [The possibilities and limits of intercultural language teaching.] Glottodidactica (Poznán, Poland), 28 (2002), 125—39.03—275 Rebel, Karlheinz (U. Tübingen, Germany) and Wilson, Sybil. Das Portfolio in Schule und Lehrerbildung (I). [The portfolio in school and the image of a teacher (I).] Fremdsprachenunterricht (Berlin, Germany), 4 (2002), 263–71.03—276 Sonaiya, Remi (Obafemi Awolowo U., Ile-ife, Nigeria). Autonomous language learning in Africa: A mismatch of cultural assumptions. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK), 15, 2 (2002), 106—16.03—277 Stapleton, Paul (Hokkaido U., Japan; Email: paul@ilcs.hokudai.ac.jp). Critical thinking in Japanese L2 writing: Rethinking tired constructs. ELT Journal (Oxford, UK), 56, 3 (2002), 250—57.03—278 Sullivan, Patricia (Office of English Language Progs., Dept. of State, Washington, USA, Email: psullivan@pd.state.gov) and Girginer, Handan. The use of discourse analysis to enhance ESP teacher knowledge: An example using aviation English. English for Specific Purposes (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 21, 4 (2002), 397—404.03—279 Tang, Eunice (City U. of Hong Kong) and Nesi, Hilary (U. of Warwick, UK; Email: H.J.Nesi@warwick.ac.uk). Teaching vocabulary in two Chinese classrooms: Schoolchildren's exposure to English words in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Language Teaching Research (London, UK), 7, 1 (2003), 65—97.03—280 Timmis, Ivor (Leeds Metropolitan U., UK; Email: i.timmis@lmu.ac.uk). Native-speaker norms and International English: A classroom view. ELT Journal (Oxford, UK), 56, 3 (2002), 240—49.03—281 Toole, Janine and Heift, Trude (Simon Fraser U., Bumaby, BC, Canada; Email: toole@sfu.ca). The Tutor Assistant: An authoring tool for an Intelligent Language Tutoring System. Computer Assisted Language Learning (Lisse, The Netherlands), 15, 4 (2002), 373—86.03—282 Turner, Karen and Turvey, Anne (Inst. of Ed., U. of London, UK; Email: k.turner@ioe.ac.uk). The space between shared understandings of the teaching of grammar in English and French to Year 7 learners: Student teachers working collaboratively. Language Awareness (Clevedon, UK), 11, 2 (2002), 100—13.03—283 Warschauer, Mark (U. of California, USA). A developmental perspective on technology in language education. TESOL Quarterly (Alexandria, VA, USA), 36, 3 (2002), 453—75.03—284 Weasenforth, Donald (The George Washington U., USA; Email: weasenf@gwu.edu), Biesenbach-Lucas, Sigrun and Meloni, Christine. Realising constructivist objectives through collaborative technologies: Threaded discussions. Language Learning and Technology (http://llt.msu.edu/), 6, 3 (2002), 58—86.

Abstract:

During World War II, the Soviet Union’s food supply was in a state of crisis. Hitler’s army had occupied the agricultural heartlands of Ukraine and Southern Russia in 1941 and, as a result, agricultural production for the entire nation had plummeted. Soldiers in Red Army, who easily ate the best rations in the country, subsisted on a daily allowance of just under a kilogram of bread, supplemented with meat, tea, sugar and butter when and if these items were available. The hunger of the Red Army and its effect on the morale and strength of Europe’s eastern warfront were causes for concern for the Soviet government and its European and American allies. The one country with a food surplus decided to do something to help, and in 1942 the United States agreed to send thousands of pounds of meat, cheese and butter overseas to help feed the Red Army. After receiving several shipments of the all-American spiced canned meat SPAM, the Red Army’s quartermaster put in a request for a more familiar canned pork product, Russian tushonka. Pound for pound, America sent more pigs overseas than soldiers during World War II, in part because pork was in oversupply in the America of the early 1940s. Shipping meat to hungry soldiers and civilians in war torn countries was a practical way to build business for the U.S. meat industry, which had been in decline throughout the 1930s. As per a Soviet-supplied recipe, the first cans of Lend-Lease tushonka were made in the heart of the American Midwest, at meatpacking plants in Iowa and Ohio (Stettinus 6-7). Government contracts in the meat packing industry helped fuel economic recovery, and meatpackers were in a position to take special request orders like the one for tushonka that came through the lines. Unlike SPAM, which was something of a novelty item during the war, tushonka was a food with a past. The original recipe was based on a recipe for preserved meat that had been a traditional product of the Ural Mountains, preserved in jars with salt and fat rather than by pressure and heat. Thus tushonka was requested—and was mass-produced—not simply as a convenience but also as a traditional and familiar food—a taste of home cooking that soldiers could carry with them into the field. Nikita Khrushchev later claimed that the arrival of tushonka was instrumental in helping the Red Army push back against the Nazi invasion (178). Unlike SPAM and other wartime rations, tushonka did not fade away after the war. Instead, it was distributed to the Soviet civilian population, appearing in charity donations and on the shelves of state shops. Often it was the only meat product available on a regular basis. Salty, fatty, and slightly grey-toned, tushonka was an unlikely hero of the postwar-era, but during this period tushonka rose from obscurity to become an emblem of socialist modernity. Because it was shelf stable and could be made from a variety of different cuts of meat, it proved an ideal product for the socialist production lines where supplies and the pace of production were infinitely variable. Unusual in a socialist system of supply, this product shaped production and distribution lines, and even influenced the layout of meatpacking factories and the genetic stocks of the animals that were to be eaten. Tushonka’s initial ubiquity in the postwar Soviet Union had little to do with the USSR’s own hog industry. Pig populations as well as their processing facilities had been decimated in the war, and pigs that did survive the Axis invasion had been evacuated East with human populations. Instead, the early presence of tushonka in the pig-scarce postwar Soviet Union had everything to do with Harry Truman’s unexpected September 1945 decision to end all “economically useful” Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union (Martel). By the end of September, canned meat was practically the only product still being shipped as part of Lend-Lease (NARA RG 59). Although the United Nations was supposed to distribute these supplies to needy civilians free of cost, travelers to the Soviet Union in 1946 spotted cans of American tushonka for sale in state shops (Skeoch 231). After American tushonka “donations” disappeared from store shelves, the Soviet Union’s meat syndicates decided to continue producing the product. Between its first appearance during the war in 1943, and the 1957 announcement by Nikita Khrushchev that Soviet policy would restructure all state animal farms to support the mass production of one or several processed meat products, tushonka helped to drive the evolution of the Soviet Union’s meat packing industry. Its popularity with both planners and the public gave it the power to reach into food commodity chains. It is this backward reach and the longer-term impacts of these policies that make tushonka an unusual byproduct of the Cold War era. State planners loved tushonka: it was cheap to make, the logistics of preparing it were not complicated, it was easy to transport, and most importantly, it served as tangible evidence that the state was accomplishing a long-standing goal to get more meat to its citizenry and improving the diet of the average Soviet worker. Tushonka became a highly visible product in the Soviet Union’s much vaunted push to establish a modern food regime intended to rival that of the United States. Because it was shelf-stable, wartime tushonka had served as a practical food for soldiers, but after the war tushonka became an ideal food for workers who had neither the time nor the space to prepare a home-cooked meal with fresh meat. The Soviet state started to produce its own tushonka because it was such an excellent fit for the needs and abilities of the Soviet state—consumer demand was rarely considered by planners in this era. Not only did tushonka fit the look and taste of a modern processed meat product (that is, it was standard in texture and flavor from can to can, and was an obviously industrially processed product), it was also an excellent way to make the most of the predominant kind of meat the Soviet Union had the in the 1950s: small scraps low-grade pork and beef, trimmings leftover from butchering practices that focused on harvesting as much animal fat, rather than muscle, from the carcass in question. Just like tushonka, pork sausages and frozen pelmeny, a meat-filled pasta dumpling, also became winning postwar foods thanks to a happy synergy of increased animal production, better butchering and new food processing machines. As postwar pigs recovered their populations, the Soviet processed meat industry followed suit. One official source listed twenty-six different kinds of meat products being issued in 1964, although not all of these were pork (Danilov). An instructional manual distributed by the meat and milk syndicate demonstrated how meat shops should wrap and display sausages, and listed 24 different kinds of sausages that all needed a special style of tying up. Because of packaging shortages, the string that bound the sausage was wrapped in a different way for every type of sausage, and shop assistants were expected to be able to identify sausages based on the pattern of their binding. Pelmeny were produced at every meat factory that processed pork. These were “made from start to finish in a special, automated machine, human hands do not touch them. Which makes them a higher quality and better (prevoskhodnogo) product” (Book of Healthy and Delicious Food). These were foods that became possible to produce economically because of a co-occurring increase in pigs, the new standardized practice of equipping meatpacking plants with large-capacity grinders, and freezers or coolers and the enforcement of a system of grading meat. As the state began to rebuild Soviet agriculture from its near-collapse during the war, the Soviet Union looked to the United States for inspiration. Surprisingly, Soviet planners found some of the United States’ more outdated techniques to be quite valuable for new Soviet hog operations. The most striking of these was the adoption of competing phenotypes in the Soviet hog industry. Most major swine varieties had been developed and described in the 19th century in Germany and Great Britain. Breeds had a tendency to split into two phenotypically distinct groups, and in early 20th Century American pig farms, there was strong disagreement as to which style of pig was better suited to industrial conditions of production. Some pigs were “hot-blooded” (in other words, fast maturing and prolific reproducers) while others were a slower “big type” pig (a self-explanatory descriptor). Breeds rarely excelled at both traits and it was a matter of opinion whether speed or size was the most desirable trait to augment. The over-emphasis of either set of qualities damaged survival rates. At their largest, big type pigs resembled small hippopotamuses, and sows were so corpulent they unwittingly crushed their tiny piglets. But the sleeker hot-blooded pigs had a similarly lethal relationship with their young. Sows often produced litters of upwards of a dozen piglets and the stress of tending such a large brood led overwhelmed sows to devour their own offspring (Long). American pig breeders had been forced to navigate between these two undesirable extremes, but by the 1930s, big type pigs were fading in popularity mainly because butter and newly developed plant oils were replacing lard as the cooking fat of preference in American kitchens. The remarkable propensity of the big type to pack on pounds of extra fat was more of a liability than a benefit in this period, as the price that lard and salt pork plummeted in this decade. By the time U.S. meat packers were shipping cans of tushonka to their Soviet allies across the seas, US hog operations had already developed a strong preference for hot-blooded breeds and research had shifted to building and maintaining lean muscle on these swiftly maturing animals. When Soviet industrial planners hoping to learn how to make more tushonka entered the scene however, their interpretation of american efficiency was hardly predictable: scientifically nourished big type pigs may have been advantageous to the United States at midcentury, but the Soviet Union’s farms and hungry citizens had a very different list of needs and wants. At midcentury, Soviet pigs were still handicapped by old-fashioned variables such as cold weather, long winters, poor farm organisation and impoverished feed regimens. The look of the average Soviet hog operation was hardly industrial. In 1955 the typical Soviet pig was petite, shaggy, and slow to reproduce. In the absence of robust dairy or vegetable oil industries, Soviet pigs had always been valued for their fat rather than their meat, and tushonka had been a byproduct of an industry focused mainly on supplying the country with fat and lard. Until the mid 1950s, the most valuable pig on many Soviet state and collective farms was the nondescript but very rotund “lard and bacon” pig, an inefficient eater that could take upwards of two years to reach full maturity. In searching for a way to serve up more tushonka, Soviet planners became aware that their entire industry needed to be revamped. When the Soviet Union looked to the United States, planners were inspired by the earlier competition between hot-blooded and big type pigs, which Soviet planners thought, ambitiously, they could combine into one splendid pig. The Soviet Union imported new pigs from Poland, Lithuania, East Germany and Denmark, trying valiantly to create hybrid pigs that would exhibit both hot blood and big type. Soviet planners were especially interested in inspiring the Poland-China, an especially rotund specimen, to speed up its life cycle during them mid 1950s. Hybrdizing and cross breeding a Soviet super-pig, no matter how closely laid out on paper, was probably always a socialist pipe dream. However, when the Soviets decided to try to outbreed American hog breeders, they created an infrastructure for pigs and pig breeding that had a dramatic positive impact of hog populations across the country, and the 1950s were marked by a large increase in the number of pigs in the Soviet union, as well as dramatic increases in the numbers of purebred and scientific hybrids the country developed, all in the name of tushonka. It was not just the genetic stock that received a makeover in the postwar drive to can more tushonka; a revolution in the barnyard also took place and in less than 10 years, pigs were living in new housing stock and eating new feed sources. The most obvious postwar change was in farm layout and the use of building space. In the early 1950s, many collective farms had been consolidated. In 1940 there were a quarter of a million kolkhozii, by 1951 fewer than half that many remained (NARA RG166). Farm consolidation movements most often combined two, three or four collective farms into one economic unit, thus scaling up the average size and productivity of each collective farm and simplifying their administration. While there were originally ambitious plans to re-center farms around new “agro-city” bases with new, modern farm buildings, these projects were ultimately abandoned. Instead, existing buildings were repurposed and the several clusters of farm buildings that had once been the heart of separate villages acquired different uses. For animals this meant new barns and new daily routines. Barns were redesigned and compartmentalized around ideas of gender and age segregation—weaned baby pigs in one area, farrowing sows in another—as well as maximising growth and health. Pigs spent less outside time and more time at the trough. Pigs that were wanted for different purposes (breeding, meat and lard) were kept in different areas, isolated from each other to minimize the spread of disease as well as improve the efficiency of production. Much like postwar housing for humans, the new and improved pig barn was a crowded and often chaotic place where the electricity, heat and water functioned only sporadically. New barns were supposed to be mechanised. In some places, mechanisation had helped speed things along, but as one American official viewing a new mechanised pig farm in 1955 noted, “it did not appear to be a highly efficient organisation. The mechanised or automated operations, such as the preparation of hog feed, were eclipsed by the amount of hand labor which both preceded and followed the mechanised portion” (NARA RG166 1961). The American official estimated that by mechanizing, Soviet farms had actually increased the amount of human labor needed for farming operations. The other major environmental change took place away from the barnyard, in new crops the Soviet Union began to grow for fodder. The heart and soul of this project was establishing field corn as a major new fodder crop. Originally intended as a feed for cows that would replace hay, corn quickly became the feed of choice for raising pigs. After a visit by a United States delegation to Iowa and other U.S. farms over the summer of 1955, corn became the centerpiece of Khrushchev’s efforts to raise meat and milk productivity. These efforts were what earned Khrushchev his nickname of kukuruznik, or “corn fanatic.” Since so little of the Soviet Union looks or feels much like the plains and hills of Iowa, adopting corn might seem quixotic, but raising corn was a potentially practical move for a cold country. Unlike the other major fodder crops of turnips and potatoes, corn could be harvested early, while still green but already possessing a high level of protein. Corn provided a “gap month” of green feed during July and August, when grazing animals had eaten the first spring green growth but these same plants had not recovered their biomass. What corn remained in the fields in late summer was harvested and made into silage, and corn made the best silage that had been historically available in the Soviet Union. The high protein content of even silage made from green mass and unripe corn ears prevented them from losing weight in the winter. Thus the desire to put more meat on Soviet tables—a desire first prompted by American food donations of surplus pork from Iowa farmers adapting to agro-industrial reordering in their own country—pushed back into the commodity supply network of the Soviet Union. World War II rations that were well adapted to the uncertainty and poor infrastructure not just of war but also of peacetime were a source of inspiration for Soviet planners striving to improve the diets of citizens. To do this, they purchased and bred more and better animals, inventing breeds and paying attention, for the first time, to the efficiency and speed with which these animals were ready to become meat. Reinventing Soviet pigs pushed even back farther, and inspired agricultural economists and state planners to embrace new farm organizational structures. Pigs meant for the tushonka can spent more time inside eating, and led their lives in a rigid compartmentalization that mimicked emerging trends in human urban society. Beyond the barnyard, a new concern with feed-to weight conversions led agriculturalists to seek new crops; crops like corn that were costly to grow but were a perfect food for a pig destined for a tushonka tin. Thus in Soviet industrialization, pigs evolved. No longer simply recyclers of human waste, socialist pigs were consumers in their own right, their newly crafted genetic compositions demanded ever more technical feed sources in order to maximize their own productivity. Food is transformative, and in this case study the prosaic substance of canned meat proved to be unusually transformative for the history of the Soviet Union. In its early history it kept soldiers alive long enough to win an important war, later the requirements for its manufacture re-prioritized muscle tissue over fat tissue in the disassembly of carcasses. This transformative influence reached backwards into the supply lines and farms of the Soviet Union, revolutionizing the scale and goals of farming and meat packing for the Soviet food industry, as well as the relationship between the pig and the consumer. References Bentley, Amy. Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity. Where: University of Illinois Press, 1998. The Book of Healthy and Delicious Food, Kniga O Vkusnoi I Zdorovoi Pishche. Moscow: AMN Izd., 1952. 161. Danilov, M. M. Tovaravedenie Prodovol’stvennykh Tovarov: Miaso I Miasnye Tovarye. Moscow: Iz. Ekonomika, 1964. Khrushchev, Nikita. Khrushchev Remembers. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1970. 178. Long, James. The Book of the Pig. London: Upcott Gill, 1886. 102. Lush, Jay & A.L. Anderson, “A Genetic History of Poland-China Swine: I—Early Breed History: The ‘Hot Blood’ versus the ‘Big Type’” Journal of Heredity 30.4 (1939): 149-56. Martel, Leon. Lend-Lease, Loans, and the Coming of the Cold War: A Study of the Implementation of Foreign Policy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1979. 35. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 59, General Records of the Department of State. Office of Soviet Union affairs, Box 6. “Records relating to Lend Lease with the USSR 1941-1952”. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative reports 1940-1954. USSR Cotton-USSR Foreign trade. Box 64, Folder “farm management”. Report written by David V Kelly, 6 Apr. 1951. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative Reports 1955-1961. Folder: “Agriculture” “Visits to Soviet agricultural installations,” 15 Nov. 1961. Skeoch, L.A. Food Prices and Ration Scale in the Ukraine, 1946 The Review of Economics and Statistics 35.3 (Aug. 1953), 229-35. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Fond R-7021. The Report of Extraordinary Special State Commission on Wartime Losses Resulting from the German-Fascist Occupation cites the following losses in the German takeover. 1948. Stettinus, Edward R. Jr. Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory. Penguin Books, 1944.

Abstract:

Home is the place where one knows oneself best; it is where one belongs, a space one longs to be. Indeed, the longing for home seems to be grounded in an anthropological need for anchorage. Although in English the German loanword ‘Heimat’ is often used synonymously with ‘home’, many would have claimed up till now that it has been a word particularly ill equipped for use outside the German speaking community, owing to its specific cultural baggage. However, I would like to argue that – not least due to the political dimension of home (such as in homeland security and homeland affairs) – the yearning for a home has experienced a semantic shift, which aligns it more closely with Heimat, a term imbued with the ambivalence of home and homeland intertwined (Morley 32). I will outline the German specificities below and invite an Australian analogy. A resoundingly positive understanding of the German term ‘Heimat’ likens it to “an intoxicant, a medium of transport; it makes people feel giddy and spirits them to pleasant places. To contemplate Heimat means to imagine an uncontaminated space, a realm of innocence and immediacy.“ (Rentschler 37) While this description of Heimat may raise expectations of an all-encompassing idyll, for most German speakers “…there is hardly a more ambivalent feeling, hardly a more painful mixture of happiness and bitterness than the experience vested in the word ‘Heimat’.” (Reitz 139) The emotional charge of the idiom is of quite recent origin. Traditionally, Heimat stimulates connotations of ‘origin’, ‘birth place, of oneself and one’s ancestors’ and even of ‘original area of settlement and homeland’. This corresponds most neatly with such English terms as ‘native land’, ‘land of my birth’, ‘land of my forefathers’ or ‘native shores’. Added to the German conception of Heimat are its sensitive associations relating, on the one hand, to Romanticism and its idolisation of the fatherland, and on the other, to the Nazi blood-and-soil propaganda, which brought Heimat into disrepute for many and added to the difficulties of translating the German word. A comparison with similar terms in Romance languages makes this clear. Speakers of those tongues have an understanding of home and homeland, which is strongly associated with the father-figure: the Greek “patra”, Latin and Italian “patria” and the French “patrie”, as well as patriarch, patrimony, patriot, and patricide. The French come closest to sharing the concept to which Heimat’s Germanic root of “heima” refers. For the Teutons “heima” denoted the traditional space and place of a clan, society or individual. However, centuries of migration, often following expulsion, have imbued Heimat with ambivalent notions; feelings of belonging and feelings of loss find expression in the term. Despite its semantic opaqueness, Heimat expresses a “longing for a wholeness and unity” (Strzelczyk 109) which for many seems lost, especially following experiences of alienation, exile, diaspora or ‘simply’ migration. Yet, it is in those circ*mstances, when Heimat becomes a thing of the past, that it seems to manifest itself most clearly. In the German context, the need for Heimat arose particularly after World War Two, when experiences of loss and scenes of devastation, as well as displacement and expulsion found compensation of sorts in the popular media. Going to the cinema was the top pastime in Germany in the 1950s, and escapist Heimat films, which showed idyllic country scenery, instead of rubble-strewn cityscapes, were the most well-liked of all. The industry pumped out kitsch films in quick succession to service this demand and created sugar-coated, colour-rich Heimat experiences on celluloid that captured the audience’s imagination. Most recently, the genre experienced something of a renaissance in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent accession of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, also referred to as East Germany) to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG or West Germany) in 1990. Described as one of the most seminal moments in modern history, the events led to large-scale change; in world politics, strategic alliances, but were most closely felt at the personal and societal level, reshaping community and belonging. Feelings of disbelief and euphoria occupied the hearts and minds of people all around the world in the days following the night of the 9 November 1989. However, the fall of the Wall created within weeks what the Soviet Union had been unable to manage in the previous 40 years; the sense of a distinctly Eastern identity (cf. Heneghan 148). Most of the initial positive perceptions slowly gave way to a hangover when the consequences of the drastic societal changes became apparent in their effects on populace. Feelings of disenchantment and disillusionment followed the jubilation and dominated the second phase of socio-cultural unification, when individuals were faced with economic and emotional hardship or were forced to relocate, as companies folded, politically tainted degrees and professions were abolished and entire industry sectors disappeared. This reassessment of almost every aspect of people’s lifestyles led many to feel that their familiar world had dissipated and their Heimat had been lost, resulting in a rhetoric of “us” versus “them”. This conceptual divide persisted and was cemented by the perceived difficulties in integration that had emerged, manifesting a consciousness of difference that expressed itself metaphorically in the references to the ‘Wall in the mind’. Partly as a reaction to these feelings and partly also as a concession to the new citizens from the East, Western backed and produced unification films utilised the soothing cosmos of the Heimat genre – so well rehearsed in the 1950s – as a framework for tales about unification. Peter Timm’s Go, Trabi, Go (1991) and Wolfgang Büld’s sequel Go, Trabi, Go 2. Das war der Wilde Osten [That Was the Wild East, 1992] are two such films which revive “Heimat as a central cultural construct through which aspects of life in the new Germany could be sketched and grasped.” (Naughton 125) The films’ references to Eastern and Western identity served as a powerful guarantor of feelings of belonging, re-assuring audiences on both sides of the mental divide of their idiosyncrasies, while also showing a way to overcome separation. These Heimat films thus united in spirit, emotion and consumer behaviour that which had otherwise not yet “grown together” (cf. Brandt). The renaissance of the Heimat genre in the 1990s gained further momentum in the media with new Heimat film releases as well as TV screenings of 1950s classics. Indeed Heimat films of old and new were generally well received, as they responded to a fragile psychological predisposition at a time of change and general uncertainty. Similar feelings were shared by many in the post-war society of the 1950s and the post-Wall Europe of the 1990s. After the Second World War and following the restructure after Nazism it was necessary to integrate large expellee groups into the young nation of the FRG. In the 1990s the integration of similarly displaced people was required, though this time they were having to cope less with territorial loss than with ideological implosions. Then and now, Heimat films sought to aid integration and “transcend those differences” (Naughton 125) – whilst not disputing their existence – particularly in view of the fact that Germany had 16 million new citizens, who clearly had a different cultural background, many of whom were struggling with perceptions of otherness as popularly expressed in the stereotypical ethnographies of “Easterners” and “Westerners”. The rediscovery of the concept of Heimat in the years following unification therefore not only mirrored the status quo but further to that allowed “for the delineation of a common heritage, shared priorities, and values with which Germans in the old and new states could identify.” (Naughton 125) Closely copying the optimism of the 1950s which promised audiences prosperity and pride, as well as a sense of belonging and homecoming into a larger community, the films produced in the early 1990s anticipated prosperity for a mobile and flexible people. Like their 1950s counterparts, “unification films ‘made in West Germany’ imagined a German Heimat as a place of social cohesion, opportunity, and prosperity” (Naughton 126). Following the unification comedies of the early 1990s, which were set in the period following the fall of the Wall, another wave of German film production shifted the focus onto the past, sacrificing the future dimension of the unification films. Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee (1999) is set in the 1970s and subscribes to a re-invention of one’s childhood, while Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin (2003) in which the GDR is preserved on 79 square metres in a private parallel world, advocates a revival of aspects of the socialist past. Referred to as “Ostalgia”; a nostalgia for the old East, “a ‘GDR revival’ or the ‘renaissance of a GDR Heimatgefühl’” (Berdahl 197), the films achieved popular success. Ostalgia films utilised the formula of ‘walking down memory lane’ in varying degrees; thematising pleasing aspects of an imagined collective past and tempting audiences to revel in a sense of unity and hom*ogeneous identity (cf. Walsh 6). Ostalgia was soon transformed from emotional and imaginary reflection into an entire industry, manifesting itself in the “recuperation, (re)production, marketing, and merchandising of GDR products as well as the ‘museumification’ of GDR everyday life” (Berdahl 192). This trend found further expression in a culture of exhibitions, books, films and cabaret acts, in fashion and theme parties, as well as in Trabi-rallies which celebrated or sent up the German Democratic Republic in response to the perceived public humiliation at the hands of West German media outlets, historians and economists. The dismissal of anything associated with the communist East in mainstream Germany and the realisation that their consumer products – like their national history – were disappearing in the face of the ‘Helmut Kohl-onisation’ sparked this retro-Heimat cult. Indeed, the reaction to the disappearance of GDR culture and the ensuing nostalgia bear all the hallmarks of Heimat appreciation, a sense of bereavement that only manifests itself once the Heimat has been lost. Ironically, however, the revival of the past led to the emergence of a “new” GDR (Rutschky 851), an “imaginary country put together from the remnants of a country in ruins and from the hopes and anxieties of a new world” (Hell et al. 86), a fictional construct rather than a historical reality. In contrast to the fundamental social and psychological changes affecting former GDR citizens from the end of 1989, their Western counterparts were initially able to look on without a sense of deep personal involvement. Their perspective has been likened to that of an impartial observer following the events of a historical play (cf. Gaschke 22). Many saw German unification as an enlargement of the West; as soon as they had exported their currency, democracy, capitalism and freedom to the East, “blossoming landscapes” were sure to follow (Kohl). At first political events did not seem to cause a major disruption to the lives of most people in the old FRG, except perhaps the need to pay higher tax. This understanding proved a major underestimation of the transformation process that had gripped all of Germany, not just the Eastern part. Nevertheless, few predicted the impact that far-reaching changes would have on the West; immigration and new minorities alter the status quo of any society, and with Germany’s increase in size and population, its citizens in both East and West had to adapt and adjust to a new image and to new expectations placed on them from within and without. As a result a certain unease began to be felt by many an otherwise self-assured individual. Slower and less obvious than the transition phase experienced by most East Germans, the changes in West German society and consciousness were nevertheless similar in their psychological effects; resulting in a subtle feeling of displacement. Indeed, it was soon noted that “the end of German division has given rise to a sense of crisis in the West, particularly within the sphere of West German culture, engendering a Western nostalgica for the old FRG” (Cooke 35), also referred to as Westalgia. Not too dissimilar to the historical rehabilitation of the East played out in Ostalgic fashion, films appeared which revisit moments worthy of celebration in West German history, such as the 1954 Soccer World Championship status which is at the centre of the narrative in Sönke Wortmann’s Das Wunder von Bern [Miracle of Bern, 2003]. Hommages to the 1968 generation (Hans Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei [The Educators, 2004]) and requiems for West Berlin’s subculture (Leander Haußmann’s Herr Lehmann [Mr Lehmann, 2003]) were similar manifestations of this development. Ostalgic and Westalgic practices coexisted for several years after the turn of the millennium, and are a tribute to the highly complex interrelationship that exists between personal histories and public memories. Both narratives reveal “the politics, ambiguities, and paradoxes of memory, nostalgia, and resistance” (Berdahl 207). In their nostalgic contemplation of the good old days, Ostalgic and Westalgic films alike express a longing to return to familiar and trusted values. Both post-hoc constructions of a heimatesque cosmos demonstrate a very real reinvention of Heimat. Their deliberate reconstruction and reinterpretation of history, as well as the references to and glorification of personal memory and identity fulfil the task of imbuing history – in particular personal history – with dignity. As such these Heimat films work in a similar fashion to myths in the way they explain the world. The heimatesque element of Ostalgic and Westalgic films which allows for the potential to overcome crises reveals a great deal about the workings of myths in general. Irrespective of their content, whether they are cosmogonic (about the beginning of time), eschatological (about the end of time) or etiologic myths (about the origins of peoples and societal order), all serve as a means to cope with change. According to Hans Blumenberg, myth making may be seen as an attempt to counter the absolutism of reality (cf. Blumenberg 9), by providing a response to its seemingly overriding arbitrariness. Myths become a means of endowing life with meaning through art and thus aid positive self-assurance and the constructive usage of past experiences in the present and the future. Judging from the popular success of both Ostalgic and Westalgic films in unified Germany, one hopes that communication is taking place across the perceived ethnic divide of Eastern and Western identities. At the very least, people of quite different backgrounds have access to the constructions and fictions relating to one another pasts. By allowing each other insight into the most intimate recesses of their respective psychological make-up, understanding can be fostered. Through the re-activation of one’s own memory and the acknowledgment of differences these diverging narratives may constitute the foundation of a common Heimat. It is thus possible for Westalgic and Ostalgic films to fulfil individual and societal functions which can act as a core of cohesion and an aid for mutual understanding. At the same time these films revive the past, not as a liveable but rather as a readable alternative to the present. As such, the utilisation of myths should not be rejected as ideological misuse, as suggested by Barthes (7), nor should it allow for the cementing of pseudo-ethnic differences dating back to mythological times; instead myths can form the basis for a common narrative and a self-confident affirmation of history in order to prepare for a future in harmony. Just like myths in general, Heimat tales do not attempt to revise history, or to present the real facts. By foregrounding the evidence of their wilful construction and fictitious invention, it is possible to arrive at a spiritual, psychological and symbolic truth. Nevertheless, it is a truth that is essential for a positive experience of Heimat and an optimistic existence. What can the German situation reveal in an Australian or a wider context? Explorations of Heimat aid the socio-historical investigation of any society, as repositories of memory and history, escape and confrontation inscribed in Heimat can be read as signifiers of continuity and disruption, reorientation and return, and as such, ever-changing notions of Heimat mirror values and social change. Currently, a transition in meaning is underway which alters the concept of ‘home’ as an idyllic sphere of belonging and attachment to that of a threatened space; a space under siege from a range of perils in the areas of safety and security, whether due to natural disasters, terrorism or conventional warfare. The geographical understanding of home is increasingly taking second place to an emotional imaginary that is fed by an “exclusionary and contested distinction between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’ (Blunt and Dowling 168). As such home becomes ever more closely aligned with the semantics of Heimat, i.e. with an emotional experience, which is progressively less grounded in feelings of security and comfort, yet even more so in those of ambivalence and, in particular, insecurity and hysteria. This paranoia informs as much as it is informed by government policies and interventions and emerges from concerns for national security. In this context, home and homeland have become overused entities in discussions relating to the safeguarding of Australia, such as with the establishment of a homeland security unit in 2003 and annual conferences such as “The Homeland Security Summit” deemed necessary since 9/11, even in the Antipodes. However, these global connotations of home and Heimat overshadow the necessity of a reclaimation of the home/land debate at the national and local levels. In addressing the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the removal and dislocation of Aboriginal children from their homes and families, the political nature of a home-grown Heimat debate cannot be ignored. “Bringing them Home”, an oral history project initiated by the National Library of Australia in Canberra, is one of many attempts at listening to and preserving the memories of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders who, as children, were forcibly taken away from their families and homelands. To ensure healing and rapprochement any reconciliation process necessitates coming to terms with one’s own past as much as respecting the polyphonic nature of historical discourse. By encouraging the inclusion of diverse homeland and dreamtime narratives and juxtaposing these with the perceptions and constructions of home of the subsequent immigrant generations of Australians, a rich text, full of contradictions, may help generate a shared, if ambivalent, sense of a common Heimat in Australia; one that is fed not by homeland insecurity but one resting in a heimatesque knowledge of self. References Barthes, Roland. Mythen des Alltags. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1964 Berdahl, Daphne. “‘(N)ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things.” Ethnos 64.2 (1999): 192-207. Blumenberg, Hans. Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Brandt, Willy. “Jetzt kann zusammenwachsen, was zusammengehört [Now that which belongs together, can now grow together].” From his speech on 10 Nov. 1989 in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg, transcript available from http://www.bwbs.de/Brandt/9.html>. Cooke, Paul. “Whatever Happened to Veronika Voss? Rehabilitating the ‘68ers’ and the Problem of Westalgie in Oskar Roehler’s Die Unberührbare (2000).” German Studies Review 27.1 (2004): 33-44. Gaschke, Susanne. “Neues Deutschland. Sind wir eine Wirtschaftsgesellschaft?” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B1-2 (2000): 22-27. Hell, Julia, and Johannes von Moltke. “Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic.” The Germanic Review 80.1 (Winter 2005): 74-95. Heneghan, Tom. Unchained Eagle: Germany after the Wall. London: Reuters, 2000. Kohl, Helmut. “Debatte im Bundestag um den Staatsvertrag.” 21 June 1990. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge, 2000. Naughton, Leonie. That Was the Wild East. Film Culture, Unification, and the “New” Germany. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. Rentschler, Eric. “There’s No Place Like Home: Luis Trenker’s The Prodigal Son (1934).” New German Critique 60 (Special Issue on German Film History, Autumn 1993): 33-56. Reitz, Edgar. “The Camera Is Not a Clock (1979).” In Eric Rentschler, ed. West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988. 137-141. Rutschky, Michael. “Wie erst jetzt die DDR entsteht.” Merkur 49.9-10 (Sep./Oct. 1995): 851-64. Strzelczyk, Florentine. “Far Away, So Close: Carl Froelich’s Heimat.” In Robert C. Reimer, ed., Cultural History through the National Socialist Lens. Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 109-132. Walsh, Michael. “National Cinema, National Imaginary.” Film History 8 (1996): 5-17. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ludewig, Alexandra. "Home Meets Heimat." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/12-ludewig.php>. APA Style Ludewig, A. (Aug. 2007) "Home Meets Heimat," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/12-ludewig.php>.

Abstract:

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944). It is worth revisiting the old boy’s grumpiness, because the rhetoric he so niftily skewers continues in our own time. Facebook features “Peace on Facebook” and even claims that it can “decrease world conflict” through inter-cultural communication. Twitter has announced itself as “a triumph of humanity” (“A Cyber-House” 61). Queue George. In between Orwell and latter-day hoody cybertarians, a whole host of excitable public intellectuals announced the impending end of materiality through emergent media forms. Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Daniel Bell, Ithiel de Sola Pool, George Gilder, Alvin Toffler—the list of 1960s futurists goes on and on. And this wasn’t just a matter of punditry: the OECD decreed the coming of the “information society” in 1975 and the European Union (EU) followed suit in 1979, while IBM merrily declared an “information age” in 1977. Bell theorized this technological utopia as post-ideological, because class would cease to matter (Mattelart). Polluting industries seemingly no longer represented the dynamic core of industrial capitalism; instead, market dynamism radiated from a networked, intellectual core of creative and informational activities. The new information and knowledge-based economies would rescue First World hegemony from an “insurgent world” that lurked within as well as beyond itself (Schiller). Orwell’s others and the Cold-War futurists propagated one of the most destructive myths shaping both public debate and scholarly studies of the media, culture, and communication. They convinced generations of analysts, activists, and arrivistes that the promises and problems of the media could be understood via metaphors of the environment, and that the media were weightless and virtual. The famous medium they wished us to see as the message —a substance as vital to our wellbeing as air, water, and soil—turned out to be no such thing. Today’s cybertarians inherit their anti-Marxist, anti-materialist positions, as a casual glance at any new media journal, culture-industry magazine, or bourgeois press outlet discloses. The media are undoubtedly important instruments of social cohesion and fragmentation, political power and dissent, democracy and demagoguery, and other fraught extensions of human consciousness. But talk of media systems as equivalent to physical ecosystems—fashionable among marketers and media scholars alike—is predicated on the notion that they are environmentally benign technologies. This has never been true, from the beginnings of print to today’s cloud-covered computing. Our new book Greening the Media focuses on the environmental impact of the media—the myriad ways that media technology consumes, despoils, and wastes natural resources. We introduce ideas, stories, and facts that have been marginal or absent from popular, academic, and professional histories of media technology. Throughout, ecological issues have been at the core of our work and we immodestly think the same should apply to media communications, and cultural studies more generally. We recognize that those fields have contributed valuable research and teaching that address environmental questions. For instance, there is an abundant literature on representations of the environment in cinema, how to communicate environmental messages successfully, and press coverage of climate change. That’s not enough. You may already know that media technologies contain toxic substances. You may have signed an on-line petition protesting the hazardous and oppressive conditions under which workers assemble cell phones and computers. But you may be startled, as we were, by the scale and pervasiveness of these environmental risks. They are present in and around every site where electronic and electric devices are manufactured, used, and thrown away, poisoning humans, animals, vegetation, soil, air and water. We are using the term “media” as a portmanteau word to cover a multitude of cultural and communications machines and processes—print, film, radio, television, information and communications technologies (ICT), and consumer electronics (CE). This is not only for analytical convenience, but because there is increasing overlap between the sectors. CE connect to ICT and vice versa; televisions resemble computers; books are read on telephones; newspapers are written through clouds; and so on. Cultural forms and gadgets that were once separate are now linked. The currently fashionable notion of convergence doesn’t quite capture the vastness of this integration, which includes any object with a circuit board, scores of accessories that plug into it, and a global nexus of labor and environmental inputs and effects that produce and flow from it. In 2007, a combination of ICT/CE and media production accounted for between 2 and 3 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted around the world (“Gartner Estimates,”; International Telecommunication Union; Malmodin et al.). Between twenty and fifty million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) are generated annually, much of it via discarded cell phones and computers, which affluent populations throw out regularly in order to buy replacements. (Presumably this fits the narcissism of small differences that distinguishes them from their own past.) E-waste is historically produced in the Global North—Australasia, Western Europe, Japan, and the US—and dumped in the Global South—Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southern and Southeast Asia, and China. It takes the form of a thousand different, often deadly, materials for each electrical and electronic gadget. This trend is changing as India and China generate their own media detritus (Robinson; Herat). Enclosed hard drives, backlit screens, cathode ray tubes, wiring, capacitors, and heavy metals pose few risks while these materials remain encased. But once discarded and dismantled, ICT/CE have the potential to expose workers and ecosystems to a morass of toxic components. Theoretically, “outmoded” parts could be reused or swapped for newer parts to refurbish devices. But items that are defined as waste undergo further destruction in order to collect remaining parts and valuable metals, such as gold, silver, copper, and rare-earth elements. This process causes serious health risks to bones, brains, stomachs, lungs, and other vital organs, in addition to birth defects and disrupted biological development in children. Medical catastrophes can result from lead, cadmium, mercury, other heavy metals, poisonous fumes emitted in search of precious metals, and such carcinogenic compounds as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, polyvinyl chloride, and flame retardants (Maxwell and Miller 13). The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency estimates that by 2007 US residents owned approximately three billion electronic devices, with an annual turnover rate of 400 million units, and well over half such purchases made by women. Overall CE ownership varied with age—adults under 45 typically boasted four gadgets; those over 65 made do with one. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) says US$145 billion was expended in the sector in 2006 in the US alone, up 13% on the previous year. The CEA refers joyously to a “consumer love affair with technology continuing at a healthy clip.” In the midst of a recession, 2009 saw $165 billion in sales, and households owned between fifteen and twenty-four gadgets on average. By 2010, US$233 billion was spent on electronic products, three-quarters of the population owned a computer, nearly half of all US adults owned an MP3 player, and 85% had a cell phone. By all measures, the amount of ICT/CE on the planet is staggering. As investigative science journalist, Elizabeth Grossman put it: “no industry pushes products into the global market on the scale that high-tech electronics does” (Maxwell and Miller 2). In 2007, “of the 2.25 million tons of TVs, cell phones and computer products ready for end-of-life management, 18% (414,000 tons) was collected for recycling and 82% (1.84 million tons) was disposed of, primarily in landfill” (Environmental Protection Agency 1). Twenty million computers fell obsolete across the US in 1998, and the rate was 130,000 a day by 2005. It has been estimated that the five hundred million personal computers discarded in the US between 1997 and 2007 contained 6.32 billion pounds of plastics, 1.58 billion pounds of lead, three million pounds of cadmium, 1.9 million pounds of chromium, and 632000 pounds of mercury (Environmental Protection Agency; Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 6). The European Union is expected to generate upwards of twelve million tons annually by 2020 (Commission of the European Communities 17). While refrigerators and dangerous refrigerants account for the bulk of EU e-waste, about 44% of the most toxic e-waste measured in 2005 came from medium-to-small ICT/CE: computer monitors, TVs, printers, ink cartridges, telecommunications equipment, toys, tools, and anything with a circuit board (Commission of the European Communities 31-34). Understanding the enormity of the environmental problems caused by making, using, and disposing of media technologies should arrest our enthusiasm for them. But intellectual correctives to the “love affair” with technology, or technophilia, have come and gone without establishing much of a foothold against the breathtaking flood of gadgets and the propaganda that proclaims their awe-inspiring capabilities.[i] There is a peculiar enchantment with the seeming magic of wireless communication, touch-screen phones and tablets, flat-screen high-definition televisions, 3-D IMAX cinema, mobile computing, and so on—a totemic, quasi-sacred power that the historian of technology David Nye has named the technological sublime (Nye Technological Sublime 297).[ii] We demonstrate in our book why there is no place for the technological sublime in projects to green the media. But first we should explain why such symbolic power does not accrue to more mundane technologies; after all, for the time-strapped cook, a pressure cooker does truly magical things. Three important qualities endow ICT/CE with unique symbolic potency—virtuality, volume, and novelty. The technological sublime of media technology is reinforced by the “virtual nature of much of the industry’s content,” which “tends to obscure their responsibility for a vast proliferation of hardware, all with high levels of built-in obsolescence and decreasing levels of efficiency” (Boyce and Lewis 5). Planned obsolescence entered the lexicon as a new “ethics” for electrical engineering in the 1920s and ’30s, when marketers, eager to “habituate people to buying new products,” called for designs to become quickly obsolete “in efficiency, economy, style, or taste” (Grossman 7-8).[iii] This defines the short lifespan deliberately constructed for computer systems (drives, interfaces, operating systems, batteries, etc.) by making tiny improvements incompatible with existing hardware (Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 33-50; Boyce and Lewis). With planned obsolescence leading to “dizzying new heights” of product replacement (Rogers 202), there is an overstated sense of the novelty and preeminence of “new” media—a “cult of the present” is particularly dazzled by the spread of electronic gadgets through globalization (Mattelart and Constantinou 22). References to the symbolic power of media technology can be found in hymnals across the internet and the halls of academe: technologies change us, the media will solve social problems or create new ones, ICTs transform work, monopoly ownership no longer matters, journalism is dead, social networking enables social revolution, and the media deliver a cleaner, post-industrial, capitalism. Here is a typical example from the twilight zone of the technological sublime (actually, the OECD): A major feature of the knowledge-based economy is the impact that ICTs have had on industrial structure, with a rapid growth of services and a relative decline of manufacturing. Services are typically less energy intensive and less polluting, so among those countries with a high and increasing share of services, we often see a declining energy intensity of production … with the emergence of the Knowledge Economy ending the old linear relationship between output and energy use (i.e. partially de-coupling growth and energy use) (Houghton 1) This statement mixes half-truths and nonsense. In reality, old-time, toxic manufacturing has moved to the Global South, where it is ascendant; pollution levels are rising worldwide; and energy consumption is accelerating in residential and institutional sectors, due almost entirely to ICT/CE usage, despite advances in energy conservation technology (a neat instance of the age-old Jevons Paradox). In our book we show how these are all outcomes of growth in ICT/CE, the foundation of the so-called knowledge-based economy. ICT/CE are misleadingly presented as having little or no material ecological impact. In the realm of everyday life, the sublime experience of electronic machinery conceals the physical work and material resources that go into them, while the technological sublime makes the idea that more-is-better palatable, axiomatic; even sexy. In this sense, the technological sublime relates to what Marx called “the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour” once they are in the hands of the consumer, who lusts after them as if they were “independent beings” (77). There is a direct but unseen relationship between technology’s symbolic power and the scale of its environmental impact, which the economist Juliet Schor refers to as a “materiality paradox” —the greater the frenzy to buy goods for their transcendent or nonmaterial cultural meaning, the greater the use of material resources (40-41). We wrote Greening the Media knowing that a study of the media’s effect on the environment must work especially hard to break the enchantment that inflames popular and elite passions for media technologies. We understand that the mere mention of the political-economic arrangements that make shiny gadgets possible, or the environmental consequences of their appearance and disappearance, is bad medicine. It’s an unwelcome buzz kill—not a cool way to converse about cool stuff. But we didn’t write the book expecting to win many allies among high-tech enthusiasts and ICT/CE industry leaders. We do not dispute the importance of information and communication media in our lives and modern social systems. We are media people by profession and personal choice, and deeply immersed in the study and use of emerging media technologies. But we think it’s time for a balanced assessment with less hype and more practical understanding of the relationship of media technologies to the biosphere they inhabit. Media consumers, designers, producers, activists, researchers, and policy makers must find new and effective ways to move ICT/CE production and consumption toward ecologically sound practices. In the course of this project, we found in casual conversation, lecture halls, classroom discussions, and correspondence, consistent and increasing concern with the environmental impact of media technology, especially the deleterious effects of e-waste toxins on workers, air, water, and soil. We have learned that the grip of the technological sublime is not ironclad. Its instability provides a point of departure for investigating and criticizing the relationship between the media and the environment. The media are, and have been for a long time, intimate environmental participants. Media technologies are yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s news, but rarely in the way they should be. The prevailing myth is that the printing press, telegraph, phonograph, photograph, cinema, telephone, wireless radio, television, and internet changed the world without changing the Earth. In reality, each technology has emerged by despoiling ecosystems and exposing workers to harmful environments, a truth obscured by symbolic power and the power of moguls to set the terms by which such technologies are designed and deployed. Those who benefit from ideas of growth, progress, and convergence, who profit from high-tech innovation, monopoly, and state collusion—the military-industrial-entertainment-academic complex and multinational commandants of labor—have for too long ripped off the Earth and workers. As the current celebration of media technology inevitably winds down, perhaps it will become easier to comprehend that digital wonders come at the expense of employees and ecosystems. This will return us to Max Weber’s insistence that we understand technology in a mundane way as a “mode of processing material goods” (27). Further to understanding that ordinariness, we can turn to the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, who noted three decades ago “the failures of technocratic dreams [:] that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Such fantasies derived from the very banality of these introductions—that every time they took place, one more “technical apparatus” was simply “being made at home with the rest of our world’ (548). Media studies can join in this repetitive banality. Or it can withdraw the welcome mat for media technologies that despoil the Earth and wreck the lives of those who make them. In our view, it’s time to green the media by greening media studies. References “A Cyber-House Divided.” Economist 4 Sep. 2010: 61-62. “Gartner Estimates ICT Industry Accounts for 2 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions.” Gartner press release. 6 April 2007. ‹http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867›. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia. Seattle: Basel Action Network, 25 Feb. 2002. Benjamin, Walter. “Central Park.” Trans. Lloyd Spencer with Mark Harrington. New German Critique 34 (1985): 32-58. Biagioli, Mario. “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 816-33. Boyce, Tammy and Justin Lewis, eds. Climate Change and the Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Commission of the European Communities. “Impact Assessment.” Commission Staff Working Paper accompanying the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) (recast). COM (2008) 810 Final. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 3 Dec. 2008. Environmental Protection Agency. Management of Electronic Waste in the United States. Washington, DC: EPA, 2007 Environmental Protection Agency. Statistics on the Management of Used and End-of-Life Electronics. Washington, DC: EPA, 2008 Grossman, Elizabeth. Tackling High-Tech Trash: The E-Waste Explosion & What We Can Do about It. New York: Demos, 2008. ‹http://www.demos.org/pubs/e-waste_FINAL.pdf› Herat, Sunil. “Review: Sustainable Management of Electronic Waste (e-Waste).” Clean 35.4 (2007): 305-10. Houghton, J. “ICT and the Environment in Developing Countries: Opportunities and Developments.” Paper prepared for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2009. International Telecommunication Union. ICTs for Environment: Guidelines for Developing Countries, with a Focus on Climate Change. Geneva: ICT Applications and Cybersecurity Division Policies and Strategies Department ITU Telecommunication Development Sector, 2008. Malmodin, Jens, Åsa Moberg, Dag Lundén, Göran Finnveden, and Nina Lövehagen. “Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Operational Electricity Use in the ICT and Entertainment & Media Sectors.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 14.5 (2010): 770-90. Marx, Karl. Capital: Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, 3rd ed. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1987. Mattelart, Armand and Costas M. Constantinou. “Communications/Excommunications: An Interview with Armand Mattelart.” Trans. Amandine Bled, Jacques Guot, and Costas Constantinou. Review of International Studies 34.1 (2008): 21-42. Mattelart, Armand. “Cómo nació el mito de Internet.” Trans. Yanina Guthman. El mito internet. Ed. Victor Hugo de la Fuente. Santiago: Editorial aún creemos en los sueños, 2002. 25-32. Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Nye, David E. Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2007. Orwell, George. “As I Please.” Tribune. 12 May 1944. Richtel, Matt. “Consumers Hold on to Products Longer.” New York Times: B1, 26 Feb. 2011. Robinson, Brett H. “E-Waste: An Assessment of Global Production and Environmental Impacts.” Science of the Total Environment 408.2 (2009): 183-91. Rogers, Heather. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: New Press, 2005. Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Vols. I and II. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Malden: Blackwell, 1995. Schiller, Herbert I. Information and the Crisis Economy. Norwood: Ablex Publishing, 1984. Schor, Juliet B. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin, 2010. Science and Technology Council of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials. Los Angeles: Academy Imprints, 2007. Weber, Max. “Remarks on Technology and Culture.” Trans. Beatrix Zumsteg and Thomas M. Kemple. Ed. Thomas M. Kemple. Theory, Culture [i] The global recession that began in 2007 has been the main reason for some declines in Global North energy consumption, slower turnover in gadget upgrades, and longer periods of consumer maintenance of electronic goods (Richtel). [ii] The emergence of the technological sublime has been attributed to the Western triumphs in the post-Second World War period, when technological power supposedly supplanted the power of nature to inspire fear and astonishment (Nye Technology Matters 28). Historian Mario Biagioli explains how the sublime permeates everyday life through technoscience: "If around 1950 the popular imaginary placed science close to the military and away from the home, today’s technoscience frames our everyday life at all levels, down to our notion of the self" (818). [iii] This compulsory repetition is seemingly undertaken each time as a novelty, governed by what German cultural critic Walter Benjamin called, in his awkward but occasionally illuminating prose, "the ever-always-the-same" of "mass-production" cloaked in "a hitherto unheard-of significance" (48).

Abstract:

After grossing more than $80 million at the international box office and winning the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the international success of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film The Lives of Others has popularised the word “Stasi” as a “default global synonym” for the terrors associated with surveillance (Garton Ash). Just as representations of Nazism have become inextricably entwined with a specific kind of authoritarian, murderous dictatorship, Garton Ash argues that so too the Stasi and its agents have come to stand in for a certain kind of authoritarian dictatorship in the popular imagination, whose consequences aren’t necessarily as physically harmful as those of National Socialism, but are, instead, dependent on strategies encompassing surveillance, control, and coercion to achieve their objectives.Surveillance societies, such as the former German Democratic Republic, have long been settings for both influential and popular fictions. Social theory has also been illuminated by some of these fictions, with theorists such as Haggerty and Ericson claiming that surveillance models originating in the work of Jeremy Bentham and George Orwell are central to conceptualising and understanding surveillance practices, as well as social attitudes towards them. Orwell’s terminology in particular and his ideas relating to “Thought Police,” “Big Brother,” “Room 101,” “Newspeak,” and others, have entered into popular discourse and, to a large extent, have become synonymous with the idea of surveillance itself. Even the adjective “Orwellian” has come to be associated with totalitarian regimes of absolute control, so much so that “when a totalitarian setup, whether in fact or in fantasy ... is called ‘Orwellian,’ it is as if George Orwell had helped to create it instead of helping to dispel its euphemistic thrall” (James 72).As sociologist David Lyon notes: “much surveillance theory is dystopian” (201). And while the fear, helplessness, and emotional experiences of living under the suspicion and scrutiny of security services such as Von Donnersmarck’s Stasi or Orwell’s Party are necessarily muted by theory, it is often through fictions such as The Lives of Others and Nineteen Eighty-Four that these can be fully expressed. In the case of The Lives of Others and Nineteen Eighty-Four, both use central love stories to express the affective experiences associated with constant surveillance and use these as a way of contrasting and critiquing the way in which surveillance, power, and control operate in both settings. Like many other texts which represent surveillance societies, both fictions present a bleak picture, with the surveillance undertaken by the Party or Stasi being framed as a deindividualising or depersonifying social force which eliminates privacy, compromises trust, and blurs the distinction between the self and the state, the personal and the social, the individual and the ideology. This brings me to the purpose of this paper, which is concerned with two things: firstly, it will discuss these oppositions alongside the role of social surveillance and private lives in Von Donnersmarck’s film. The existing scholarly work on The Lives of Others tends to focus on its historical setting—the former East Germany—and, consequently, emphasises its generic status as a “political thriller,” “fierce and gloomy historical drama” full of “psychological terror,” and so on. Nevertheless, this overstates the film’s social milieu at the expense of the personal drama which drives the narrative—the film is underpinned by multiple overlapping love stories—so my focus is more concerned with highlighting the latter, rather than the former. I am not going to attempt to provide any sort of a comparative case study between the film’s representation of the Stasi and the historical realities upon which it is based, for example. Secondly, much has been made of the transformation of the character Gerd Wiesler, who shifts from “a loyal Stasi officer with an unswervingly grim demeanour” into “a good man” with a conscience—to borrow from Von Donnersmarck’s commentary. I will conclude by briefly addressing this transformation with reference to surveillance and its place within the film’s narrative.The Lives of Others is a film which, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, carries the signifiers of a very specific kind of surveillance. Set in the former German Democratic Republic in the year 1984—perhaps a self-conscious reference to Orwell—the film is concerned with the playwright Georg Dreyman (played by Sebastian Koch), “the only nonsubversive writer who is still read in the West”; his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (played by Martina Gedeck); and the Stasi Captain Wiesler (played by Ulrich Mühe). In his capacity as expert interrogator and security agent, Wiesler is assigned to spy on Dreyman and Sieland because they are suspected of being disloyal, and as a playwright and actress—and thus, persons of social, intellectual, and cultural influence—this will never do. Accordingly, Dreyman and Sieland’s apartment is bugged and the pair is constantly surveilled. Their home, previously a space of relative privacy, becomes the prime site for this surveillance, forcing their “private or ‘personal life’”—which is understood as “the special preserve of intimacy, affection, trust and elective affinity”—into “the larger world of impersonal and instrumental [social] relations” governed by the East German state (Weintraub and Kumar xiii). The surveillance in the film is a “creature of its social context,” to borrow James Rule’s terminology (300). Rule argued that all systems of surveillance are “distinctive of certain social orders” and that their “continued growth is closely tied to other changes in their social structural contexts” (300). This is certainly true of the surveillance in The Lives of Others, which is characterised by effectiveness through totality, rather than technological sophistication. Broadly speaking, surveillance in the former East Germany was top-down and hierarchical and connected with the maintenance of the ruling party’s power. Metaphors abound when describing the Stasi’s surveillance network—it was an “octopus,” a “multi-headed hydra,” a beast of gargantuan size at the very heart of the East German Party-State (Childs and Popplewell xiii). Needless to say, the Stasi was big. Since Die Wende, especially, much has been made of the enormity of the Stasi’s bureaucracy and its capacity to “intrude.” Between 1950 and 1989 it employed 274,000 people in an official capacity and, after the collapse of the East German regime anywhere up to 500,000 East German Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter—Unofficial Collaborators: ordinary citizens from the East German state who had been coerced into spying on friends or family members, or had volunteered their services—had been identified (Koehler 8). This equated to approximately one Stasi officer, informer or collaborator per 6.5 East German citizens (Koehler 9). Put in perspective, there was one KGB agent per 5,800 citizens in the Soviet Union, while the Gestapo—often held up as the ultimate example of the abuses and evils inherent in many secret police forces—had one officer for every 2,000 Germans (Koehler 9).And it is this hydra, this octopus that Dreyman and Sieland encounter in The Lives of Others. Led by Wiesler and driven by suspicion, the Stasi listens in on their conversations, follows the couple clandestinely, and gathers information which may reveal “politically incorrect behaviour” (Rainer and Siedler 251). The reach of the Stasi’s surveillance network and its capacity to collect information is demonstrated through a variety of means—beginning with the interrogation scene during the film’s opening where the scent of a dissident is stored in a jar for later use, to the final coercion in which Sieland becomes an IM. The Stasi in the film consistently demonstrates an uncanny ability to know: to gather information through surveillance, and to use this surveillance to demonstrate and secure its power. As Rule points out: “the ability of any system of surveillance to control and shape the behaviour of ... [those under surveillance] depends very much on the certainty with which it manages to bring information generated in one social and temporal setting to bear elsewhere” (302). Intense “surveillance and potent mechanisms of control are useless” if those under surveillance can simply hide behind closed doors or escape over a wall—so the “system must arrange its boundaries so that both its surveillance and control activities cover a sufficiently broad area” to prevent escape through movement (Rule 303–304). In a total surveillance society such as the one seen in The Lives of Others, there is no “escape” from the Stasi other than death—suicide—which defines many of the film’s key turning points. The surveillance undertaken by the Stasi may be stored in jars in some cases; however, it can also be retrieved to confirm suspicions, to coerce and control, and, ultimately, to further the objectives of the Party State.Despite the Stasi’s best attempts, however, Dreyman is consistently loyal—he believes in the principles of socialism and, to quote Wiesler’s superior Grubitz (played by Ulrich Tukur), he “thinks East Germany is the fairest land of them all.” Eventually it is revealed that the real reason for the surveillance is not about suspected disloyalty to the state, but a personal vendetta by the Party’s Minister for Culture, Bruno Hempf (played by Thomas Thieme), who wants Sieland for himself and is using his influence within the Stasi to bring Dreyman down. The use of surveillance for personal gain, rather than for social “good” proves too much for Wiesler who undergoes a “psychological and political transformation” and begins to empathise with the subjects of his investigation (Diamond 811). Dreyman undergoes a similar transformation after the suicide of his mentor and friend Albert Jerska (played by Volkmar Kleinert)—a theatre director whose life was made meaningless after he was blacklisted by the Stasi. This brings me back to the question of the personal and the social, which forms the fundamental tension within the film and is the basis of this paper. Historically, notions of “public” and “private,” “social” and “personal”—as understood in state-socialist societies such as the former East Germany—revolved around “the victimised ‘us’ and the newly powerful ‘them’ who ruled the state” (Gal 87). Nevertheless, the distinction between the personal and the social—or public and private—has long been a social organising principle and, as a result, has acted as a springboard into “many key issues of social and political analysis, of moral and political debate, and of ordering everyday life” (Weintraub and Kumar 1). The idea of “privacy”—which is often conceptualised simplistically as a “uni-dimensional, rigidly dichotomous and absolute, fixed and universal concept” (Marx 157)—is used as a shield against any number of perceived political, social, or moral infringements, including surveillance, and can be said to be organised around the idea of visibility, where “private” encompasses that which is “able and / or entitled to be kept hidden, sheltered or withdrawn from others” (Weintraub and Kumar 6). The private is thus connected with a life free of surveillance and scrutiny, where people have a reprieve from monitored social relations and the collective self. Privacy is “fundamentally rooted” in a personal life “delineated by private space” without surveillance, and is interlinked with the idea of a “society of strangers,” where strangers are, by definition, individuals who have been denied access to our personal lives and private spaces (Lyon 21). The act of disclosure and the provision of access to our personal affairs is thus regarded as a voluntary gesture of faith and trust—an invitation into the private, which makes our lives—the lives of strangers, the lives of “others”—familiar and knowable. In The Lives of Others it is Dreyman and Sieland who, because of the personal relationship they have maintained in the relative privacy of their apartment, are the “strangers” or “others” the Stasi wants to make knowable. When Wiesler first encounters the couple at the premiere of Dreyman’s play—the tellingly named The Faces of Love—he seems disturbed by the affection they share for one another and for their fellow artists. Later, it is a brief moment of intimacy between Dreyman and Sieland that motivates Wiesler into overseeing the surveillance himself—a decision that contributes to his eventual transformation. Wiesler is disturbed by Dreyman and Sieland’s relationship because it demonstrates personal loyalties born out of private emotions which exist beyond the gaze of the Stasi and, thus, beyond the control of the state. In Wiesler’s world the only true love is social love—the impersonal love of the state—and anything resembling the romantic or the personal is not only unfamiliar, but suspicious and potentially subversive. In Von Donnersmarck’s words, Wiesler has shut out his humanity to adhere to a principle, which he values above and beyond all else. His suspicion of Dreyman and Sieland thus exemplifies how the experience and interpretation of personal emotions is dependent, in part, on social and cultural circ*mstances. For Wiesler, private emotions are dangerous, unknowable, and unfamiliar. They belong to a realm “which places extraordinary emphasis on the concept of individuality and individual self-identity” in “a society which distinguishes more or less plainly between public positions and personal roles; ... and, perhaps most importantly, [they belong to] a society that grants a high degree of mobility and flexibility in relationships in general, [and] places personal choice at the core of mating and marriage rituals ...” (Solomon xxviii). A society, in other words, quite unlike the one in The Lives of Others. By monitoring the personal lives of Dreyman and Sieland, the Stasi thus collapses the distinction between the personal and the social, the private and the public. Surveillance transforms personal emotions into public information, and it is this information which is later manipulated for the social “good” and at the expense of Dreyman and Sieland’s personal lives. In The Lives of Others there is no separation between the personal and the social, the public and the private—there is only the Party and there is only the Stasi. I want to conclude by briefly discussing the transformation of Wiesler, which is emblematic of the film’s central message about the “capacity of human beings for goodness, [love], compassion and change” (Diamond 812–13). Von Donnersmarck makes this message clear in one of the film’s early scenes, where, at the opening of his play The Faces of Love, Dreyman appeals to Minister Hempf about Jerska’s blacklisting, suggesting that Jerska is remorseful and has changed. Hempf tells Dreyman: “That’s what we all love about your plays ... the idea that people can change. People don’t change.” Hempf is suggesting, of course, that there is no “normalising gaze” in the East German state; that there is only suspicion, discrimination and exclusion. Once you have been identified as “abnormal,” “subversive” or “an enemy” by the Stasi’s surveillance, you can never remove yourself from the category of suspicion—change is impossible. But Wiesler and Dreyman do change, however unlikely Wiesler’s transformation may be. While the film’s style suggest the men are opposites—Dreyman dresses like a chic (West) German intellectual in tweed jackets and horn-rimmed glasses, while Wiesler gets around in stiff Stasi uniforms and grey nylon tracksuits; Dreyman’s home reflects his status as a man of culture and taste, with literature, art, and music dominating the bohemian aesthetic, while Wiesler’s home is cold, empty, characterless, and generic; Dreyman shares a personal life with Sieland, while Wiesler is visited by a prostitute who services all the Stasi men in his building “on a tight schedule” and so on—they share a fundamental similarity: they both believe in socialism, in the East German state, and the utopian ideals that are now obscured under layers of bureaucracy, surveillance, corruption, and suspicion (Diamond 815). Nevertheless, after discovering that Sieland is being forced into sexual encounters with party Minister Hempf, the instigator of the surveillance, Wiesler begins to identify with the couple, and, for the first time, breaches the boundary between surveillance and interference, between social observation and personal intervention. After seeing the Minister’s car pull up with Sieland inside, Wiesler uses his surveillance technologies to alert Dreyman to her return—he rings the couple’s doorbell whilst muttering, “Time for some bitter truths.” Later, after Sieland showers and collapses “in mute despair,” Dreyman cradles her in his arms, after which the film cuts to a shot of Wiesler still listening, but mirroring their body language (Diamond 817). This is the moment at which the film makes clear that Wiesler’s role has shifted from social monitoring to something more personal—he has developed an emotional investment in the surveillance he is conducting and is identifying and empathising with the subjects of his surveillance. Eventually this goes further—he steals a copy of Brecht’s poems from their apartment and reads “Memory of Marie A.” a poem which “expresses poignant longings for a love that is both enticing and elusive” (Diamond 822). By breaching the boundary between the social and the personal, Wiesler undergoes a complete transformation, and his continued interventions drive the narrative and dictate outcomes not only for himself, but also for Dreyman and Sieland. In shifting his role from surveillance to engagement, from observation to intervention, and from state suspicion to personal investment, Wiesler eventually, and in his own way, falls in love. Surveillance is the defining characteristic of The Lives of Others—it is both oppressive and redemptive, sinister and salvational, an obstacle and an opening. It defines both the film’s social setting and enables and impacts on the personal relationships between characters. The Lives of Others brings home the horrors of East Germany under the Stasi—albeit in a stylised and technically accomplished fashion—by emphasising the personal and social costs associated with the corrupt, petty, and spiteful regime through human drama. The ultimate result is a film with a surveillance network that swings between care and control, observation and engagement, with Wiesler exemplifying all of these traits. And while the end result of the Stasi’s surveillance is destructive and despairing, in the words of Von Donnersmarck, it also gives characters “the ability to do the right thing, even in social conditions that seem to eradicate the very possibility of personal goodness.”ReferencesChilds, David and Richard Popplewell. The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and Security Service. New York: New York U P, 1996.Diamond, Diana. “Empathy and Identification in Von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 56.3 (2008): 811–32.Gal, Susan. “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction.” Differences 13.1 (2002): 77–95.Garton Ash, Timothy. “The Stasi on Our Minds.” The New York Review of Books 31 May 2007. 7 November 2010. ‹http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/may/31/the-stasi-on-our-minds/›. Haggerty, Kevin D. and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” The British Journal of Sociology 51.4 (2000): 605–22.James, Clive. “The Truthteller.” The New Yorker 18 Jan 1999: 72–78.Koehler, John O. Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police. Boulder: Westview P, 1999. Lives of Others, The. Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Perf. Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Mühe, and Sebastian Koch. Arte, 2006.Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.Marx, Gary T. “Murky Conceptual Waters: The Public and the Private.” Ethics and Information Technology 3.3 (2001): 157–69.Nineteen Eighty-Four. Dir. Michael Radford. Perf. John Hurt, Richard Burton, and Suzanna Hamilton. Virgin Films, 1984.Rainer, Helmut and Thomas Siedler. “Does Democracy Foster Trust?” Journal of Comparative Economics 37 (2009): 251–69.Rule, James B. Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age. London: Allen Lane, 1973.Solomon, Robert C. Love: Emotion, Myth and Metaphor. Buffalo: Prometheus, 1990.Weintraub, Jeff Alan and Krishan Kumar, eds. Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.

Abstract:

One of Woody Allen's first jobs was as a gag/joke writer indirectly for New York gossip columnists. To coordinate with the appearance of famous people at grand openings, Allen would write appropriately witty lines that a star's press agent would work hard to get placed in a newspaper column like Walter Winchell's. The lines would be treated as authentic quotes as the star entered the premiere, club or ceremony (Lax 71). His reputation grew from this ability to see what would be humorous to say in a very public setting, or just generally what would make a particular star look more engaged, more intelligent or more alluring. The presence, at least according to the gossip columnist, was real; what the famous person said was a fiction. If we turn the crystal around somewhat you can see quite a different engagement with the fictional real life. Jackie Chan, possibly the best-known film star, plays a variety of roles from police detective (the Police Story series to his Hollywood Rush Hour) to some saviour of a particular school of kung fu (think of the Dragon Lord series). One of the features of action/kung fu are the fight scenes, elaborately staged stunts of flying bodies and various forms of body blows that have become the base aesthetic of videogames such as Tekken. They have been reformed as a slightly changed aesthetic and with a great deal more pyrotechnics by director John Woo and his series of gun operas, from A Better Tomorrow to the Hollywood-financed Face/Off. The stunts in these various films are appealing in their fetishistic stop in the narrative. For a moment everything is arrested for the movement of bodies. The outcome, although not assured in each battle, is more or less guaranteed in the ultimate survival/triumph of Jackie Chan as hero. Like watching Western professional wrestling the question is always asked: 'was that real?' The melodramatic quality of the films combined with Chan's use of physical humour makes the audience debate the reality of the action sequences. Jackie Chan turns the question around as he resolutely performs all of his "stunts" in his own movies and he reinforces his real through the final trailer in his films as the credits roll, which shows the failed attempts at doing the various stunts where the blood flows and the ambulance occasionally arrives to take Chan away (Chan). Chan is more real in his fictional constructions because there is no blue screen or stunt double hanging from the bus or falling through glass ceilings. One of Chan's laments as he ages is that to ensure his career's longevity he must eventually adopt the "fake" "blue-screen" action style of the Stallones, Willises and Schwarzeneggers of the world. A third angle to view the crystalline refractions of public life is to observe President Clinton in his various representations during his impeachment trial. There are three moving images presented. First, there is the presidential image -- he continues to make speeches (think of the bizarre State of the Union address at the end of January; he presents policy initiatives and meets with international leaders, and we see these moments on the evening news or in stills for the newspaper front pages). Second, there are the medium close-ups edited with close-ups of the president's face, Hilary Clinton's face and their hands: this is the familial Clinton. Third is the washed-out videotaped evidence that Clinton gave to the Grand Jury investigation about his affair with Monica Lewinsky that the trial managers from the House of Representatives are using in the Senate impeachment trial: here is the juridical Clinton which melds the public and the private (think of Monica Lewinsky's testimony: "I saw him more as a man than a President"). Making sense of public life is then not so much about getting to the real or the non-fiction, although that seems to be the will-to-narrative that drives our desire to watch and listen to gossip about the famous. The fictions produced are deployed realities, produced and proliferated for certain functions (Foucault). Woody Allen's unseen efforts are producing the more complete self, where the public arena becomes an elaborate Lacanian mirror stage for an audience. Max Factor's make-up techniques in Hollywood are a similar technology that transforms the self into an image. Jackie Chan's apparently real stunt work has been redeployed into the exigencies of publicity for a Hollywood film; as Redford's Sundance Festival's construction of independent film becomes part of Hollywood's industrial appropriation machine, Jackie Chan willingly becomes part of the revitalisation of Hollywood through the Hong Kong aesthetic. His "real" invigorates the decaying action genre with its extratextual narrative of personal risk. Woody Allen's and Jackie Chan's fictions have been well integrated into the system of representation; after all, as members of the entertainment industry their world is a fictional space that intersects with reality to connect to an audience. Clinton represents something quite transitional and significant in his versions of the self. There are clear deployments of the self put in place by Kenneth Starr and the Congressional Republicans (sounds like a good name for a pop band) that not only place the fictional purity of the President against the backdrop of deceit and adulterated philandering. But there is also the remarkable play of the fictional deployed selves to the audience. This is not the end of the politician's career as we witnessed with Gary Hart's decline or a myriad of other American congressmen who have fallen into the fictions and moralities of a sex scandal. What we are witnessing is the sophisticated reading of the fictional public life by the cognoscenti who just happen to be the entire American populace. Grossberg once wrote in a lament that the right had monopolised what he called the affective economy in the United States. What he meant was that the right was able to mobilise sentiment and, in that way, shape the political and cultural agenda (Grossberg). The Clinton impeachment trial with its three clear versions of the self demonstrates that the overriding fiction of all the representations and the confusion between the real and the fictional production of the self -- something that has been a given in contemporary (we could call it modern) politics -- no longer works. What an audience now looks for is slippage in the fictional plates that reveal something else. The risk is perpetual that the manufactured fiction will not hold and another fiction will supplant it. Refracted, reflected and rerefracted, the fiction of public life has been revealed by its own mechanisms of concealment. Its crystalline structure is solid zirconium which is really quite fine. References Chan, Jackie, with Jeff Yang. I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998. Foucault, Michel, in Rabinow and Dreyfus. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. Grossberg, Lawrence. It's a Sin: Politics, Postmodernism and the Popular. Sydney: Power, 1988. Lax, Eric. Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1991. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall. "The Fiction of Public Life." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/life.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, "The Fiction of Public Life," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/life.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall. (1999) The fiction of public life. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/life.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

[Editors’ note: this lyric essay was presented as the keynote address at Edith Cowan University’s CREATEC symposium on the theme Catastrophe and Creativity in November 2012, and represents excerpts from the author’s publication Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Reproduced with the author’s permission].Essay and verse and anecdote are the ways I have chosen to apprentice myself to loss, grief, faith, memory, and the stories we use to tie and untie them. Cat’s cradle, Celtic lines, bends and hitches are familiar: however, when I write about loss, I find there are knots I cannot tie or release, challenging both my imagination and my craft. Over the last decade, I have been learning that writing poetry is also the art of tying together light and dark, grief and joy, of grasping and releasing. Language is a hinge that connects us with the flesh of our experience; it is also residue, the ash of memory and imagination. (Threading Light 7) ———Greek katastrophé overturning, sudden turn, from kata down + strophe ‘turning” from strephein to turn.Loss and catastrophe catapult us into the liminal, into a threshold space. We walk between land we have known and the open sea. ———Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses, the personification of memory, makes anthropologists of us all. When Hermes picked up the lyre, it was to her—to Remembrance —that he sang the first song. Without remembrance, oral or written, we have no place to begin. Stone, amulet, photograph, charm bracelet, cufflink, fish story, house, facial expression, tape recorder, verse, or the same old traveling salesman joke—we have places and means to try to store memories. Memories ground us, even as we know they are fleeting and flawed constructions that slip through our consciousness; ghosts of ghosts. One cold winter, I stayed in a guest room in my mother’s apartment complex for three days. Because she had lost her sight, I sat at the table in her overheated and stuffy kitchen with the frozen slider window and tried to describe photographs as she tried to recall names and events. I emptied out the dusty closet she’d ignored since my father left, and we talked about knitting patterns, the cost of her mother’s milk glass bowl, the old clothes she could only know by rubbing the fabric through her fingers. I climbed on a chair to reach a serving dish she wanted me to have, and we laughed hysterically when I read aloud the handwritten note inside: save for Annette, in a script not hers. It’s okay, she said; I want all this gone. To all you kids. Take everything you can. When I pop off, I don’t want any belongings. Our family had moved frequently, and my belongings always fit in a single box; as a student, in the back of a car or inside a backpack. Now, in her ninth decade, my mother wanted to return to the simplicity she, too, recalled from her days on a small farm outside a small town. On her deathbed, she insisted on having her head shaved, and frequently the nursing staff came into the room to find she had stripped off her johnny shirt and her covers. The philosopher Simone Weil said that all we possess in the world is the power to say “I” (Gravity 119).Memory is a cracked bowl, and it fills endlessly as it empties. Memory is what we create out of what we have at hand—other people’s accounts, objects, flawed stories of our own creation, second-hand tales handed down like an old watch. Annie Dillard says as a life’s work, she’d remember everything–everything against loss, and go through life like a plankton net. I prefer the image of the bowl—its capacity to feed us, the humility it suggests, its enduring shape, its rich symbolism. Its hope. To write is to fashion a bowl, perhaps, but we know, finally, the bowl cannot hold everything. (Threading Light 78–80) ———Man is the sire of sorrow, sang Joni Mitchell. Like joy, sorrow begins at birth: we are born into both. The desert fathers believed—in fact, many of certain faiths continue to believe—that penthos is mourning for lost salvation. Penthus was the last god to be given his assignment from Zeus: he was to be responsible for grieving and loss. Eros, the son of Aphrodite, was the god of love and desire. The two can be seen in concert with one another, each mirroring the other’s extreme, each demanding of us the farthest reach of our being. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, phrased it another way: “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you have also said Yes to all Woe as well. All things are chained, entwined together, all things are in love.” (Threading Light 92) ———We are that brief crack of light, that cradle rocking. We can aspire to a heaven, or a state of forgiveness; we can ask for redemption and hope for freedom from suffering for ourselves and our loved ones; we may create children or works of art in the vague hope that we will leave something behind when we go. But regardless, we know that there is a wall or a dark curtain or a void against which we direct or redirect our lives. We hide from it, we embrace it; we taunt it; we flout it. We write macabre jokes, we play hide and seek, we walk with bated breath, scream in movies, or howl in the wilderness. We despair when we learn of premature or sudden death; we are reminded daily—an avalanche, an aneurysm, a shocking diagnosis, a child’s bicycle in the intersection—that our illusions of control, that youthful sense of invincibility we have clung to, our last-ditch religious conversions, our versions of Pascal’s bargain, nothing stops the carriage from stopping for us.We are fortunate if our awareness calls forth our humanity. We learn, as Aristotle reminded us, about our capacity for fear and pity. Seeing others as vulnerable in their pain or weakness, we see our own frailties. As I read the poetry of Donne or Rumi, or verse created by the translator of Holocaust stories, Lois Olena, or the work of poet Sharon Olds as she recounts the daily horror of her youth, I can become open to pity, or—to use the more contemporary word—compassion. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that works of art are not only a primary means for an individual to express her humanity through catharsis, as Aristotle claimed, but, because of the attunement to others and to the world that creation invites, the process can sow the seeds of social justice. Art grounds our grief in form; it connects us to one another and to the world. And the more we acquaint ourselves with works of art—in music, painting, theatre, literature—the more we open ourselves to complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief. Why else do we turn to a stirring poem when we are mourning? Why else do we sing? When my parents died, I came home from the library with stacks of poetry and memoirs about loss. How does your story dovetail with mine? I wanted to know. How large is this room—this country—of grief and how might I see it, feel the texture on its walls, the ice of its waters? I was in a foreign land, knew so little of its language, and wanted to be present and raw and vulnerable in its climate and geography. Writing and reading were my way not to squander my hours of pain. While it was difficult to live inside that country, it was more difficult not to. In learning to know graveyards as places of comfort and perspective, Mnemosyne’s territory with her markers of memory guarded by crow, leaf, and human footfall, with storehouses of vast and deep tapestries of stories whispered, sung, or silent, I am cultivating the practice of walking on common ground. Our losses are really our winter-enduring foliage, Rilke writes. They are place and settlement, foundation and soil, and home. (Threading Light 86–88) ———The loseability of our small and larger worlds allows us to see their gifts, their preciousness.Loseability allows us to pay attention. ———“A faith-based life, a Trappistine nun said to me, aims for transformation of the soul through compunction—not only a state of regret and remorse for our inadequacies before God, but also living inside a deeper sorrow, a yearning for a union with the divine. Compunction, according to a Christian encyclopaedia, is constructive only if it leads to repentance, reconciliation, and sanctification. Would you consider this work you are doing, the Trappistine wrote, to be a spiritual journey?Initially, I ducked her question; it was a good one. Like Neruda, I don’t know where the poetry comes from, a winter or a river. But like many poets, I feel the inadequacy of language to translate pain and beauty, the yearning for an embodied understanding of phenomena that is assensitive and soul-jolting as the contacts of eye-to-eye and skin-to-skin. While I do not worship a god, I do long for an impossible union with the world—a way to acknowledge the gift that is my life. Resonance: a search for the divine in the everyday. And more so. Writing is a full-bodied, sensory, immersive activity that asks me to give myself over to phenomena, that calls forth deep joy and deep sorrow sometimes so profound that I am gutted by my inadequacy. I am pierced, dumbstruck. Lyric language is the crayon I use, and poetry is my secular compunction...Poets—indeed, all writers—are often humbled by what we cannot do, pierced as we are by—what? I suggest mystery, impossibility, wonder, reverence, grief, desire, joy, our simple gratitude and despair. I speak of the soul and seven people rise from their chairs and leave the room, writes Mary Oliver (4). Eros and penthos working in concert. We have to sign on for the whole package, and that’s what both empties us out, and fills us up. The practice of poetry is our inadequate means of seeking the gift of tears. We cultivate awe, wonder, the exquisite pain of seeing and knowing deeply the abundant and the fleeting in our lives. Yes, it is a spiritual path. It has to do with the soul, and the sacred—our venerating the world given to us. Whether we are inside a belief system that has or does not have a god makes no difference. Seven others lean forward to listen. (Threading Light 98–100)———The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a rare thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. – Simone Weil (169)I can look at the lines and shades on the page clipped to the easel, deer tracks in the snow, or flecks of light on a summer sidewalk. Or at the moon as it moves from new to full. Or I can read the poetry of Paul Celan.Celan’s poem “Tenebrae” takes its title from high Christian services in which lighting, usually from candles, is gradually extinguished so that by the end of the service, the church is in total darkness. Considering Celan’s—Antschel’s—history as a Romanian Jew whose parents were killed in the Nazi death camps, and his subsequent years tortured by the agony of his grief, we are not surprised to learn he chose German, his mother’s language, to create his poetry: it might have been his act of defiance, his way of using shadow and light against the other. The poet’s deep grief, his profound awareness of loss, looks unflinchingly at the past, at the piles of bodies. The language has become a prism, reflecting penetrating shafts of shadow: in the shine of blood, the darkest of the dark. Enlinked, enlaced, and enamoured. We don’t always have names for the shades of sorrows and joys we live inside, but we know that each defines and depends upon the other. Inside the core shadow of grief we recognise our shared mortality, and only in that recognition—we are not alone—can hope be engendered. In the exquisite pure spot of light we associate with love and joy, we may be temporarily blinded, but if we look beyond, and we draw on what we know, we feel the presence of the shadows that have intensified what appears to us as light. Light and dark—even in what we may think are their purest state—are transitory pauses in the shape of being. Decades ago my well-meaning mother, a nurse, gave me pills to dull the pain of losing my fiancé who had shot himself; now, years later, knowing so many deaths, and more imminent, I would choose the bittersweet tenderness of being fully inside grief—awake, raw, open—feeling its walls, its every rough surface, its every degree of light and dark. It is love/loss, light/dark, a fusion that brings me home to the world. (Threading Light 100–101) ———Loss can trigger and inspire creativity, not only at the individual level but at the public level, whether we are marching in Idle No More demonstrations, re-building a shelter, or re-building a life. We use art to weep, to howl, to reach for something that matters, something that means. And sometimes it may mean that all we learn from it is that nothing lasts. And then, what? What do we do then? ———The wisdom of Epictetus, the Stoic, can offer solace, but I know it will take time to catch up with him. Nothing can be taken from us, he claims, because there is nothing to lose: what we lose—lover, friend, hope, father, dream, keys, faith, mother—has merely been returned to where it (or they) came from. We live in samsara, Zen masters remind us, inside a cycle of suffering that results from a belief in the permanence of self and of others. Our perception of reality is narrow; we must broaden it to include all phenomena, to recognise the interdependence of lives, the planet, and beyond, into galaxies. A lot for a mortal to get her head around. And yet, as so many poets have wondered, is that not where imagination is born—in the struggle and practice of listening, attending, and putting ourselves inside the now that all phenomena share? Can I imagine the rush of air under the loon that passes over my house toward the ocean every morning at dawn? The hot dust under the cracked feet of that child on the outskirts of Darwin? The gut-hauling terror of an Afghan woman whose family’s blood is being spilled? Thich Nhat Hanh says that we are only alive when we live the sufferings and the joys of others. He writes: Having seen the reality of interdependence and entered deeply into its reality, nothing can oppress you any longer. You are liberated. Sit in the lotus position, observe your breath, and ask one who has died for others. (66)Our breath is a delicate thread, and it contains multitudes. I hear an echo, yes. The practice of poetry—my own spiritual and philosophical practice, my own sackcloth and candle—has allowed me a glimpse not only into the lives of others, sentient or not, here, afar, or long dead, but it has deepened and broadened my capacity for breath. Attention to breath grounds me and forces me to attend, pulls me into my body as flesh. When I see my flesh as part of the earth, as part of all flesh, as Morris Berman claims, I come to see myself as part of something larger. (Threading Light 134–135) ———We think of loss as a dark time, and yet it opens us, deepens us.Close attention to loss—our own and others’—cultivates compassion.As artists we’re already predisposed to look and listen closely. We taste things, we touch things, we smell them. We lie on the ground like Mary Oliver looking at that grasshopper. We fill our ears with music that not everyone slows down to hear. We fall in love with ideas, with people, with places, with beauty, with tragedy, and I think we desire some kind of fusion, a deeper connection than everyday allows us. We want to BE that grasshopper, enter that devastation, to honour it. We long, I think, to be present.When we are present, even in catastrophe, we are fully alive. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more fully we engage with our losses—the harder we look, the more we soften into compassion—the more we cultivate resilience. ———Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. – Carl FolkeResilent people and resilient systems find meaning and purpose in loss. We set aside our own egos and we try to learn to listen and to see, to open up. Resilience is fundamentally an act of optimism. This is not the same, however, as being naïve. Optimism is the difference between “why me?” and “why not me?” Optimism is present when we are learning to think larger than ourselves. Resilience asks us to keep moving. Sometimes with loss there is a moment or two—or a month, a year, who knows?—where we, as humans, believe that we are standing still, we’re stuck, we’re in stasis. But we aren’t. Everything is always moving and everything is always in relation. What we mistake for stasis in a system is the system taking stock, transforming, doing things underneath the surface, preparing to rebuild, create, recreate. Leonard Cohen reminded us there’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. But what we often don’t realize is that it’s we—the human race, our own possibilities, our own creativity—who are that light. We are resilient when we have agency, support, community we can draw on. When we have hope. ———FortuneFeet to carry you past acres of grapevines, awnings that opento a hall of paperbarks. A dog to circle you, look behind, point ahead. A hip that bends, allows you to slidebetween wire and wooden bars of the fence. A twinge rides with that hip, and sometimes the remnant of a fall bloomsin your right foot. Hands to grip a stick for climbing, to rest your weight when you turn to look below. On your left hand,a story: others see it as a scar. On the other, a newer tale; a bone-white lump. Below, mist disappears; a nichein the world opens to its long green history. Hills furrow into their dark harbours. Horses, snatches of inhale and whiffle.Mutterings of men, a cow’s long bellow, soft thud of feet along the hill. You turn at the sound.The dog swallows a cry. Stays; shakes until the noise recedes. After a time, she walks on three legs,tests the paw of the fourth in the dust. You may never know how she was wounded. She remembers your bodyby scent, voice, perhaps the taste of contraband food at the door of the house. Story of human and dog, you begin—but the wordyour fingers make is god. What last year was her silken newborn fur is now sunbleached, basket dry. Feet, hips, hands, paws, lapwings,mockingbirds, quickening, longing: how eucalypts reach to give shade, and tiny tight grapes cling to vines that align on a slope as smoothlyas the moon follows you, as intention always leans toward good. To know bones of the earth are as true as a point of light: tendernesswhere you bend and press can whisper grace, sorrow’s last line, into all that might have been,so much that is. (Threading Light 115–116) Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Lekkie Hopkins and Dr. John Ryan for the opportunity to speak (via video) to the 2012 CREATEC Symposium Catastrophe and Creativity, to Dr. Hopkins for her eloquent and memorable paper in response to my work on creativity and research, and to Dr. Ryan for his support. The presentation was recorded and edited by Paul Poirier at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My thanks go to Edith Cowan and Mount Saint Vincent Universities. ReferencesBerman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses. New York: Bantam, 1990.Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.Folke, Carl. "On Resilience." Seed Magazine. 13 Dec. 2010. 22 Mar. 2013 ‹http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience›.Franck, Frederick. Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976.Hausherr, Irenee. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Nietzsche, Frederick. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Penguin, 1978. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oliver, Mary. “The Word.” What Do We Know. Boston: DaCapo Press, 2002.Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. (Tenth Elegy). Ed. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House/Vintage Editions, 2009.Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005 (1952).Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge, 2004.Further ReadingChodron, Pema. Practicing Peace in Times of War. Boston: Shambhala, 2006.Cleary, Thomas (trans.) The Essential Tao: An Initiation into the Heart of Taoism through Tao de Ching and the Teachings of Chuang Tzu. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1993.Dalai Lama (H H the 14th) and Venerable Chan Master Sheng-yen. Meeting of Minds: A Dialogue on Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. New York: Dharma Drum Publications, 1999. Hirshfield, Jane. "Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander toward Writing." Alaska Quarterly Review. 21.1 (2003).Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Arthur Waley. Chatham: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Neilsen, Lorri. "Lyric Inquiry." Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98. Ross, Maggie. The Fire and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. York: Paulist Press, 1987.

Abstract:

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

Abstract:

A new device, sure to inspire technological bedazzlement, has been installed in Hong Kong shopping malls. Called simply The Love Machine, it functions like a photo booth, dispensing on-the-spot portraits1. But rather than one subject, it requires a couple, in fact the couple, in order to do its work of digital reproduction. For the output of this imaging machine is none other than a picture of the combined features of the two sitters, 'morphed' together by computer software to produce a technological child. Its Japanese manufacturers, while obviously cashing in on the novelty value, nevertheless list the advantage it allows for future matrimonial selection based around the production of a suitable aesthetic. Needless to say, the good citizens of Hong Kong have not allowed any rigid criteria for genetic engineering to get in the way of the progeny such a machine allows, creating such monstrous couplings as the baby 'cat-human', achieved by a sitter coupling with their pet. Rather than being the object of love here, technology acts as the conduit of emotion, or stronger still, it is the love relation itself, bringing the two together as one. What I want to touch upon is the sense in which a desire for oneness inhabits our relations to and through the technological. There is already an abundance of literature around the erotics of cyberspace, documenting and detailing encounters of virtual sex fantasies and romance. As well, there are more theoretical attempts to come to terms with what Michael Heim describes as the "erotic ontology of cyberspace" (59). Heim depicts these encounters not as a ravaging desire gone wild, sprouting up in odd places or producing monstrous offspring, but in homely and familial terms. Finally with the computer as incarnation of the machine, our love for technology can cease its restless and previously unfulfilled wanderings and find a comfortable place. What is worth pausing over here is the sense in which the sexual is subjugated to a conjugal and familial metaphor, at the same time as desire is modelled according to a metaphysics of fullness and lack. I would argue that in advancing this kind of love relation with the computer and the digital, the possibility of a relation is actually short-circuited. For a relation assumes the existence of at least two terms, and in these representations, technology does not figure as a second term. It is either marked as the other, where desire finds a soul mate to fill its lack. Or the technological becomes invisible, subsumed in a spiritual instrumentalism that sees it merely forging the union of cybernetic souls. I would suggest that an erotic relation with the technological is occluded in most accounts of the sexual in cyberspace and in many engagements with digital technologies. Instead we are left with a non-relational meeting of the same with itself. We might describe the dominant utilisation of the technological as onanistic. Relations of difference could be a productive effect of the technological, but are instead culturally caught up within an operational logic which sees the relational erotic possibilities of the machinic eliminated as sameness touches itself. I want to point towards some different models for theorising technology by briefly drawing upon the texts of Félix Guattari and Avital Ronell. These may lead to the production of a desiring relation with technology by coupling the machine with alterity. One of several climatic scenes from the 'virtual sex' movie Strange Days, directed by Katherine Bigelow, graphically illustrates the onanistic encounter. Set on the eve of the new millennium, the temporality of the film sets up a feeling of dis-ease: it is both futuristic and yet only too close. The narrative centres on the blackmarket in ultimate VR: purchasing software which allows the user, donning special headgear, to re-experience recorded memories in other peoples' lives. An evil abuser of this technology, known until the end of the film as an anonymous male junkie, is addicted to increasingly frequent hits of another's apperception. In his quest to score above his tolerance level, the cyber-junkie rapes a prostitute, but instead of wearing the headgear used to record his own perception of the rape, he forces the woman to put it on making her annex her subjectivity to his experience of desire. He records her reaction to becoming an appendage to him. The effect of watching this scene is deeply unsettling: the camera-work sets up a point-of-view shot from the position of the male subject but plays it to the audience as one might see through a video view-finder, thus sedimenting an assumed cultural association between masculinity and the male gaze. What we see is the violence produced by the annihilation of another's desire; what we hear is the soundtrack of the woman mimicking the male's enjoyment of his own desire. Put simply, what we watch is a feedback loop of a particular formation of technological desire, one in which the desire of or for the other is audio-visually impeded. Ultimately the experience can be stored and replayed as a p*rn movie solely for future masturbation. The scene in Strange Days quite adequately summarises the obstructed and obstructive desire to go no further than masturbation caught in the defiles of feedback. Feedback is also the term used in both video and sound production when a recording device is aimed at or switched onto a device playing back the same recording. The result, in the case of video, is to create an infinite abyss of the same image playing back into itself on the monitor; in the case of sound a high-pitched signal is created which impedes further transmission. By naming the desire to fuse with the technological a feedback loop, I am suggesting that manifestations of this desire are neither productive nor connective, in that any relation to exterior or heterogeneous elements are shut out. They stamp out the flow of other desires and replay the same looping desire based around notions of fullness and lack, completion and incompletion, and of course masculinity and femininity. Mark Dery makes this association between the desire for the technological, the elision of matter and phallic modes of masculinity: This, to the masculinist technophile, is the weirdly alchemical end point of cyberculture: the distillation of pure mind from base matter. Sex, in such a context, would be purged of feminine contact -- removed, in fact, from all notions of physicality -- and reduced to mental masturbation. (121) Dery's point is a corollary to mine; in discarding the need for an embodied sexual experience, the literature and representations of cyberspace, both theoretical and fictional, endorse only a touching of the sublimated self, no other bodies or even the bodily is brought into contact. There is no shortage of evidence for the disregard embodiment holds among the doyens of cyber-architecture. Hans Moravec and Marvin Minsky, writing about Artificial Intelligence, promote a future in which pure consciousness, freed from its entanglement with the flesh, merges with the machine (Mind Children; The Society of Mind). Here the reverence shown towards digital technology enters the sublime point of a coalition where the mind is supported by some sophisticated hardware, ultimately capable of adapting and reproducing itself. There are now enough feminist critics of this kind of cyberspeak to have noticed in this fantasy of machinic fusion a replay of the old Cartesian mind/body dualism. My point, however, is that this desire is not simply put in place by a failure to rethink the body in the realm of the digital. It is augmented by the fact that this disregard for theorising an embodied experience feeds into an inability to encounter any other within the realm of the technological. We should note that this is perpetuated not just by those seeking future solace in the digital, but also by its most ardent cultural critics. Baudrillard, as one who seemingly fits this latter category, eager to disperse the notion that writers such as Moravec and Minsky propound regarding AI, is driven to making rather overarching ontological remarks about machines in general. In attempting to forestall the notion that the machine could ever become the complement to the human, Baudrillard cancels the relation of the machine to desire by cutting off its ability to produce anything in excess of itself. The machine, on his account, can be reduced to the production of itself alone; there is nothing supplementary, exterior to or differential in the machinic circuit (53). For Baudrillard, the pleasures of the interface do not even extend to the solitary vice of masturbation. Celibate machines are paralleled by celibate digital subjects each alone with themselves, forming a non-relational system. While Baudrillard offers a fair account of the solitary lack of relation produced in and by digital technologies, he nevertheless participates in reinforcing the transformation of what he calls "the process of relating into a process of communication between One and the Same" (58). He catches himself within the circulation of the very desire he finds problematic. But whether onanistic or celibate, the erotics of our present or possible relations to technology do not become any more enticing in many actual engagements with emerging technologies. Popular modes of interfacing our desires with the digital favor a particular assemblage of body and machine where a kind of furtive one-handed masturbation may be the only option left to us. I will call this the operational assemblage, borrowing from Baudrillard and his description of Virtual Man, operating and communicating across computer cables and networks while being simultaneously immobilised in front of the glare of the computer screen. An operational assemblage, whilst being efficacious, inhibits movement and ties the body to the machine. Far from the body being discarded by information technologies, the operational assemblage sees certain parts of the body privileged and territorialised. The most obvious instance of this is VR, which, in its most technologically advanced state, still only selects the eyes and the hand as its points of bodily interface. In so-called fully immersive VR experience, it is the hand, wearing a data glove, which propels the subject into movement in the virtual world, but it is a hand propelled by the subject's field of vision, computer monitors mounted in the enveloping headset. Thus the hand operates by being subjected to the gaze2. In VR, then, the real body is not somehow left behind as the subject enters a new state of electronic consciousness; rather there is a re-organisation and reterritorialisation of the hand under the operative guidance of the eye and scopic desire. This is attested to by the experience one has of the postural body schema during immersion in VR. The 'non-operational' body remaining in physical space often feels awkward and clumsy as if it is too large or cumbersome to drag around and interact in the virtual world, as if it were made virtually non-functional. The operational assemblage of a distanced eye territorialising the hand to create a loop of identity through the machine produces a desiring body which is blocked in its relational capacities. It can only touch itself as self; it cannot find itself an other or as other. Rather than encouraging the hand to break connections with the circuit of the gaze, to develop speeds, capabilities and potentials of its own, these encounters are perpetually returned to the screen and the domain of the eye. They feed back into a loop where relations to other desires, other kinds of bodies, other machines are circumvented. Looping back and returning to the aesthetic reduction performed by the Love Machine, a more lo-tech version of the two technologically contracted to one might point to the possibility of alterity that current digital machines seem keen to circumvent. At San Fransisco's Exploratorium museum one of the public points of interface with the Human Genome Project can be found3. The Exploratorium has a display set up which introduces the public to the bioinformation technology involved as well as soliciting responses to bio-ethical issues surrounding the question of genetic engineering. In the midst of this display a simple piece of glass hangs as a divider between two sides of a table. By sitting on one side of the table with a light shining from behind, one could see both a self-reflection and through the glass to whomever was sitting on the other side. The text accompanying the display encourages couples to occupy either side of the glass. What is produced for the sitter on the light side is a combination of their own reflection 'mapped' onto the features of the sitter on the other side. The text for the display encourages a judgement of the probable aesthetic outcome of combining one's genes with those of the other. I tested this display with my partner, crossing both sides of the mirror/glass. Our reactions were similar; a sensation approaching horror arose as we each faced our distorted, mirrored features as possible future progeny, a sensation akin to encountering the uncanny4. While suggesting the familiar, it also indicates what is concealed, becoming a thing not known and thus terrifying. For what was decidedly spooky in viewing a morphing of my image onto that of the other's, in the context of the surrounding bioinformatic technologies, was the sense in which a familiarity with the homely features of the self was dislocated by a haunting, marking the claim of a double utterly different. Recalling the assertion made by Heim that in the computer we find an intellectual and emotional resting point, we could question whether the familiarity of a resting place provides a satisfactory erotic encounter with the technological. We could ask whether the dream of the homely, of finding in the computer a kinship which sanctions the love machine relation, operates at the expense of dispelling that other, unfamiliar double through a controlling device which adjusts differences until they reach a point of homeostasis. What of a reading of the technological which might instaurate rather than diffuse the question of the unfamiliar double? I will gesture towards both Guattari's text Chaosmosis and Ronell's The Telephone Book, for the importance both give to the double in producing a different relation with the technological. For Guattari, the machine's ghost is exorcised by the predominant view that sees particular machines, such as the computer, as a subset of technology, a view given credence at the level of hype in the marketing of AI, virtual reality and so forth as part of the great technological future. It also gains credibility theoretically through the Heideggerian perspective. Instead Guattari insists that technology is dependent upon the machinic (33). The machinic is prior to and a condition of any actual technology, it is a movement rather than a ground; the movement through which heterogeneous elements such as bodies, sciences, information come to form the interrelated yet specific fields of a particular assemblage we might term technological. It is also the movement through which these components retain their singularity. Borrowing from modern biology, Guattari labels this movement "autopoietic" (39). Rather than the cybernetic model which sees the outside integrated into the structure of the machinic by an adjustment towards hom*ogeneity cutting off flow, Guattari underlines a continual machinic movement towards the outside, towards alterity, which transforms the interrelations of the technological ensemble. The machinic is doubled not by the reproduction of itself, but by the possibility of its own replacement, its own annihilation and transformation into something different: Its emergence is doubled with breakdown, catastrophe -- the menace of death. It possesses a supplement: a dimension of alterity which it develops in different forms. (37) Here, we can adjoin Guattari with Ronell's historical reading of the metaphorics of the telephone in attempts to think through technology. Always shadowed by the possibility Heidegger wishes to stake out for a beyond to or an overcoming of the technological, Ronell is both critical of the technologising of desire in the cybernetic loop and insistent upon the difference produced by technology's doubling desire. Using the telephone as a synecdoche for technology -- and this strategy is itself ambiguous: does the telephone represent part of the technological or is it a more comprehensive summary of a less comprehensive system? -- Ronell argues that it can only be thought of as irreducibly two, a pair (5). This differentiates itself from the couple which notoriously contracts into one. She argues that the two are not reducible to each other, that sender and receiver do not always connect, are not reducible to equal end points in the flow of information. For Ronell, what we find when we are not at home, on unfamiliar ground, is -- the machine. The telephone in fact maintains its relation to the machinic and to the doubling this implies, via the uncanny in Ronell's text. It relates to a not-being-at-home for the self, precisely when it becomes machine -- the answering machine. The answering machine disconnects the speaker from the listener and inserts itself not as controlling device in the loop, but as delay, the deferral of union. Loosely soldering this with Guattari's notion that the machine introduces a "dimension of alterity", Ronell reads the technological via the telephone line as that relation to the outside, to the machinic difference that makes the self always unfamiliar (84). I would suggest then that pursuing a love relation with technology or through the technological leads us to deploy an entire metaphorics of the familial, where the self is ultimately home alone and only has itself to play with. In this metaphorics, technology as double and technology's doubling desire become a conduit that returns only to itself through the circuitous mechanism of the feedback loop. Rather than opening onto heterogeneous relations to bodies or allowing bodies to develop different relational capacities, the body here is immobilised by an operational and scopic territorialisation. To be excited by an encounter with the technological something unfamiliar is preferable, some sense of an alternating current in the midst of all this homeliness, an external perturbation rubbing up against the tired hand of a short-circuiting onanism. Footnotes 1. The Love Machine is also the title of a digital still image and sound installation commenting upon the Hong Kong booth produced by myself and Michele Barker and last exhibited at the Viruses and Mutations exhibition for the Melbourne Festival, The Aikenhead Conference Centre, St. Vincent's Hospital, October, 1998. 2. For an articulation of the way in which this maps onto perspectival vision, see Simon Penny, "Virtual Reality as the Completion of the Enlightenment Project." Culture on the Brink. Eds. G. Bender and T. Druckery. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994. 3. Funded by the US Government, the project's goal is to develop maps for the 23 paired human chromosomes and to unravel the sequence of bases that make up the DNA of these chromosomes. 4. This is what Freud described in his paper "The Uncanny". Tracing the etymology of the German word for the uncanny, unheimlich, which in English translates literally as 'unhomely', Freud notes that heimlich, or 'homely', in fact contains the ambiguity of its opposite, in one instance. References Baudrillard, Jean. "Xerox and Infinity." The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena. Trans J. Benedict. London: Verso, 1993. 51-9. Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17. Trans. and ed. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. Heim, Michael. "The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace." Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1994.59-80. Minsky, Marvin. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Moravec, Hans. Mind Children. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988. Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Anna Munster. "Love Machines." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/love.php>. Chicago style: Anna Munster, "Love Machines," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/love.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Anna Munster. (1999) Love machines. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/love.php> ([your date of access]).

Abstract:

The concept of war is inextricably linked to violence, and military action almost always resounds with the emotion and language of rage. Since the War on Terror began in September 2001, post-9/11 expressions of terror and rage have influenced academics to evaluate rage and its meanings (Gildersleeve and Gehrmann). Of course, it has directly influenced the lives of those affected by global conflicts in war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa. The populace there has reacted violently to military invasions with a deep sense of rage, while in the affluent West, rage has also infiltrated everyday life through clothes, haircuts, and popular culture as military chic became ‘all the rage’ (Rall 177). Likewise, post-9/11 popular films directly tap into rage and violence to explain (or justify?) conflict and war. The film version of the life of United States Iraq veteran Chris Kyle in American Sniper (2014) reveals fascinating depictions of rage through the perspective of a highly trained shooter who waits patiently above the battlefield, watching for hours before taking human life with a carefully planned long-distance shot. The significance of the complexities of rage as presented in this film are discussed later. Foundations of Rage: Colonial Legacy, Arab Spring, and ISISThe War on Terror may have purportedly began with the rage of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda missions and the responding rage of George Bush’s America determined to seek vengeance for 9/11, but the rage simmering in the Middle East has deeper origins. This includes: the rejection of the Shah of Iran's secular dictatorship in 1979, the ongoing trauma of an Arab Palestinian state that was promised in 1947, and the blighted hopes of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism that offered so much in the 1950s but failed to deliver. But these events should not be considered in isolation from events of the whole 20th century, in particular the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the Allied forces, especially Britain and France after the First World War. The history of injustice that Robert Fisk has chronicled in a monumental volume reveals the complexity and nuances of an East-West conflict that continued to fracture the Middle East. In a Hollywood-based film such as American Sniper it is easy to depict the region from a Western perspective without considering the cycle of injustice and oppression that gave birth to the rage that eventually lashed out at the West. Rage can also be rage against war, or rage about the mistreatment of war victims. The large-scale protests against the war before the 2003 Iraq invasion have faded into apparent nothingness, despite nearly two decades of war. Protest rage appears to have been replaced by outrage on behalf of the victims of war; the refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and those displaced by the ever- spreading conflict that received a new impetus in 2011 with the Arab Spring democracy movements. One spark point for rage ignited when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi embarked on his act of self-immolation in protest against harassment by public officials. This moment escalated into a kaleidoscope of collective rage as regimes were challenged from Syria to Libya, but met with a tragic aftermath. Sadly, democratic governments did not emerge, but turned into regimes of extremist violence exemplified in the mediaeval misogynistic horror now known as ISIS, or IS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Hassan). This horror intensified as millions of civilised Syrians and Iraqis sought to flee their homelands. The result was the movement of peoples, which included manipulation by ruthless people smugglers and detention by governments determined to secure borders — even even as this eroded decades of consensus on the rights of refugees. One central image, that of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s corpse washed up on a beach (Smith) should invoke open rage. Here, the incongruity was that a one-time Turkish party beach for affluent 18 to 35-year-olds from Western Europe would signify the death place of a Syrian refugee child, now displaced by war. The historical significance of East/West conflicts in the Middle East, recent events post- Arab Spring, the resulting refugee crisis in the region, and global anti-war protests should be foremost when examining Clint Eastwood's film about an American military sniper in Iraq.Hot Rage and Cold Rage Recent mass shootings in the United States have delineated factions within the power of rage: it seems to blow either hot or cold. US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan was initially calm when he embarked on a public expression of rage, wounding 30 people and murdering 13 others in a mass shooting event in 2009 (MacAskill). Was this to be categorised as the rage of a nihilist, an Islamist - or as just another American mass shooting like events in Orlando or Sandy Hook? The war journalist and film maker Sebastian Junger authored a study on belonging, where he linked mass shootings (or rampage killings) to social stress and disunity, as a “tendency rising steadily in the US since the 1980s” (115-116). In contrast, the actions of a calm and isolated shooter on a rooftop can be justified as acceptable behaviour if this occurs during war. Now in the case of Chris Kyle, he normalised his tale of calm killing, as an example identified by action “built on a radically asymmetric violence” (Pomarede 53).Enemy at the Gates The point is that sniper killings can be presented in film as morally good. For example, the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates portrays a duel of two snipers in Stalingrad, Russia. This is a fictionalised contest of a fictionalised event, because there was only tangential evidence that Russian sniper hero Vasily Zaytsev actually engaged in a three-day sniper duel with his German enemy during the Second World War. Enemy at the Gates presents the sniper as an acceptable figure in mass popular culture (or even a hero?), which provides the justification for American Sniper. However, in this instance, viewers could recognise a clear struggle between good and evil.Politically, Enemy at the Gates, whether viewed from a conservative or a progressive perspective, presents a struggle between a soldier of the allies (the Soviet Union) and the forces of Nazism, undeniably the most evil variant of fascism. We can interpret this as a defence of the communist heartland, or the defence of a Russian motherland, or the halting of Nazi aggression at its furthest expansion point. Whichever way it is viewed, the Russian sniper is a good man, and although in the movie’s plot the actor Ralph Fiennes as political commissar injects a dimension of manipulation and Stalinist authoritarian control, this does not detract from the idea of the hero defeating evil with single aimed shots. There is rage, but it is overshadowed by the moral ‘good.’American Sniper The true story of Chris Kyle is quite simple. A young man grows up in Texas with ‘traditional’ American values, tries sport and University, tries ranch life, and joins the US Navy Special Forces. He becomes a SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) team member, and is trained as a specialist sniper. Kyle excels as a sniper in Iraq, where he self-identifies as America's most successful sniper. He kills a lot of enemies in Iraq, experiences multiple deployments followed by the associated trauma of reintegration to family life and redeployment, suffers from PTSD, returns to civilian life in America and is himself shot dead by a distressed veteran, in an ironic act of rage. Admired by many, the veracity of Kyle’s story is challenged by others, a point I will return to. As noted above, Kyle kills a lot of people, many of whom are often unaware of his existence. In his book On Killing, Lieutenant-Colonel David Grossman notes this a factor that actually causes the military to have a “degree of revulsion towards snipers” (109), which is perhaps why the movie version of Kyle’s life promotes a rehabilitation of the military in its “unambiguous advocacy of the humility, dedication, mastery, and altruism of the sniper” as hero (Beck 218). Most enlisted soldiers never actually kill their enemies, but Kyle kills well over 100 while on duty.The 2012 book memoir of United States Navy sniper Chris Kyle at war in Iraq became a national cultural artefact. The film followed in 2014, allowing the public dramatisation of this to offer a more palatable form for a wider audience. It is noted that military culture at the national level is malleable and nebulous (Black 42), and these constructs are reflected in the different variants of American Sniper. These cultural products are absorbed differently when consumed by the culture that has produced them (the military), as compared to the way that they are consumed by the general public, and the book American Sniper reflects this. Depending upon readers’ perspectives, it is a book of raw honesty or nationalistic jingoism, or perhaps both. The ordinary soldier’s point of view is reiterated and directed towards a specifically American audience. Despite controversy and criticism the book was immensely successful, with weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. While it naturally appealed to many in its primary American audience, from an Australian perspective, the jingoism of this book jars. In fact, it really jars a lot, to the point of being quite challenging to read. That Australian readers would have difficulty with this text is probably appropriate, because after all, the book was not created for Australians but for Americans.On the other hand, Americans have produced balanced accounts of the soldier experience in Iraq. A very different exemplar is Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury blog that became the book The Sandbox (2007). Here American men and women soldiers wrote their own very revealing stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in autobiographical accounts that ranged from nuanced explanations of the empathy for the soldier’s predicament, to simple outright patriotism. TIn their first-hand accounts of war showed a balance of ordinary pathos, humour – and the raw brutality of a soldier finding the neck stem of a human spine on the ground after a suicide bomb attack (Trudeau 161) – and even this seems more palatable to read than American Sniper. A similar book on the US military sniper experience (Cavallaro and Larsen) also shows it is possible to incorporate a variety of perspectives without patriotic jingoism, or even military propaganda being predominant.In contrast to the book, the film American Sniper narrates a more muted story. The movie is far more “saccharine”, in the words of critical Rolling Stone reviewer Matt Taibbi, but still reflects a nationalistic attitude to war and violence — appropriate to the mood of the book. American producer/director Clint Eastwood has developed his own style for skipping around the liminal space that exists between thought-provoking analysis and populism, and American Sniper is no exception. The love story of Chris Kyle and his wife Taya looks believable, and the intensity of military training and war fighting, including the dispassionate thoughts of Kyle as sniper, are far more palatable in the film version than as the raw words on the page.The Iraq War impacted on millions of Americans, and it is the compelling images shown re-living Chris Kyle’s funeral at the film’s conclusion that leaves a lasting message. The one-time footballer’s memorial service is conducted in a Texas football stadium and this in itself is poignant: but it is the thousands of people who lined the highway overpasses for over 200 miles to farewell him and show respect as his body travels towards the funeral in the stadium, that gives us an insight into the level of disenchantment and rage at America’s loss. This is a rage fuelled by losing their military ‘empire’ coupled with a traumatised search for meaning that Jerry Lembcke sees as inextricably linked to US national failure in war and the tragedy of an individual soldier’s PTSD. Such sentiments seem intimately connected to Donald Trump’s version of America, and its need to exercise global power. Kyle died before Trump’s election, but it seems evident that such rage, anger and alienation experienced by a vast segment of the American population contributed to the election result (Kluger). Calm Cold Calculation Ironically, the traditional sniper embodies the antithesis of hot-blooded rage. Firing any long- distance range weapon with accuracy requires discipline, steady breathing and intense muscle control. Olympic shooting or pentathlons demonstrate this, and Gina Cavallaro and Matt Larsen chronicle both sniper training and the sniper experience in war. So, the notion of sniper shooting and rage can only coexist if we accept that rage becomes the cold, calculating rage of a person doing a highly precise job when killing enemies. In the book, Kyle clearly has no soldierly respect for his Iraqi insurgent enemies and is content to shoot them down one by one. In the film, there is greater emphasis on Kyle having more complex emotions based around the desire to protect his fellow soldiers by shooting in a calm and detached fashion at his designated targets.Chris Kyle’s determination to kill his enemies regardless of age or gender seems at odds with the calm detached passivity of the sniper. The long-distance shooter should be dispassionate but Kyle experiences rage as he kills to protect his fellow soldiers. Can we argue he exhibits ‘cold rage’ not ‘hot rage’, but rage none the less? It would certainly seem so. War Hero and Fantasist?In life, as in death, Chris Kyle presents a figure of controversy, being praised by the political far right, yet condemned by a diverse coalition that included radicals, liberals, and even conservatives such as former soldier Michael Fumento. Fumento commented that Kyle’s literary embellishments and emphasis on his own prowess denigrated the achievements of fellow American snipers. Reviewer Lindy West described him as “a hate filled killer”, only to become a recipient of rage and hatred from Kyle supporters. Paul Rieckhoff described the film as not the most complex nor deepest nor provocative, but the best film made about the Iraq war for its accuracy in storytelling and attention to detail.Elsewhere, reviewer Mark Kermode argues that the way the film is made introduces a significant ambiguity: that we as an audience can view Kyle as either a villain, a hero, or a combination of both. Critics have also examined Kyle’s reportage on his military exploits, where it seems he received less fewer medals than he claimed, as well as his ephemeral assertion that he shot looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Lamothe). In other claims, the US courts have upheld the assertion of former wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura that Kyle fabricated a bar-room brawl between the two. But humans are complex beings, and Drew Blackburn sees it as “entirely plausible to become both a war hero and a liar” in his candid (Texas-based) assessment of one person who was, like many of us, a multifaceted figure.Conclusion This article has addressed the complicated issues of rage originating in the historical background of military actions that have taken place in the East/West conflicts in the Middle East that began in the region after the Second World War, and continue to the present day. Rage has become a popular trope within popular culture as military chic becomes ‘all the rage’. Rage is inextricably linked to the film American Sniper. Patriotism and love of his fellow soldiers motivated Chris Kyle, and his determination to kill his country’s enemies in Iraq and protect the lives of his fellow American soldiers is clear, as is his disdain for both his Iraqi allies and enemies. With an ever- increasing number of mass shootings in the United States, the military sniper will be a hero revered by some and a villain reviled by others. Rage infuses the film American Sniper, whether the rage of battle, rage at the moral dilemmas his role demands, domestic rage between husband and wife, PTSD rage, or rage inspired following his pointless murder. But rage, even when it expresses a complex vortex of emotions, remains dangerous for those who are obsessed with guns, and look to killing others either as a ‘duty’ or to soothe an individual crisis of confidence. ReferencesAmerican Sniper. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Brothers, 2014.Beck, Bernard. “If I Forget Thee: History Lessons in Selma, American Sniper, and A Most Violent Year.” Multicultural Perspectives 17.4 (2015): 215-19.Black, Jeremy. War and the Cultural Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.Blackburn, Drew. “How We Talk about Chris Kyle.” Texas Monthly 2 June 2016. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/chris-kyle-rorschach/>.Cavallaro, Gina, and Matt Larsen. Sniper: American Single-Shot Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guildford, Connecticut: Lyons, 2010. Enemy at the Gates. Dir. Jean-Jaques Annaud. Paramount/Pathe, 2001.Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.Fumento, Michael. “American Sniper’s Myths and Misrepresentations.” The American Conservative 13 Mar. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/clint-eastwoods-fabricated-sniper/>.Gildersleeve, Jessica, and Richard Gehrmann. “Memory and the Wars on Terror”. Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 1-19.Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.Hassan, Hassan. “The True Origins of ISIS.” The Atlantic 30 Nov. 2018. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/>.Kermode, Mark. “American Sniper Review – Bradley Cooper Stars in Real-Life Tale of Legendary Marksman.” The Guardian 18 Jan. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/18/american-sniper-review-bradley-cooper-real-life-tale-legendary-marksman>.Kluger, Jeffrey. “America's Anger Is Out of Control.” TIME 1 June 2016. 17 Feb. 2019 <http://time.com/4353606/anger-america-enough-already>.Kyle, Chris. American Sniper. New York: Harper, 2012. Junger, Sebastian. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. London: Fourth Estate, 2016.Lamothe, Dan. “How ‘American Sniper’ Chris Kyle’s Truthfulness Is in Question Once Again.” 25 May 2016. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/05/25/how-american-sniper-chris-kyles-truthfulness-is-in-question-once-again/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d8806f2b8d3a>.Lembcke, Jerry. PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-Empire America. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013.Pomarède, Julien. “Normalizing Violence through Front-Line Stories: The Case of American Sniper.” Critical Military Studies 4.1 (2018): 52-71. Rall, Denise N. “Afterword: The Military in Contemporary Fashion.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 177-179. Rieckhoff, Paul. “A Veteran's View of American Sniper.” Variety 16 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://variety.com/2015/film/opinion/a-veterans-view-of-american-sniper-guest-column-1201406349/>.Smith, Heather, and Richard Gehrmann. “Branding the Muscled Male Body as Military Costume.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 57-71.Smith, Helena. “Shocking Images of Drowned Syrian Boy Show Tragic Plight of Refugees.” The Guardian 2 Sep. 2015. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/shocking-image-of-drowned-syrian-boy-shows-tragic-plight-of-refugees>.Stanford, David (ed.). The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2007.Taibbi, Matt. “American Sniper Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticise.” Rolling Stone 21 Jan. 2015. <https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/american-sniper-is-almost-too-dumb-to-criticize-240955/>.Trudeau, Garry B. The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrew McMeel Publishing, 2007.West, Lindy. “The Real American Sniper Was a Hate-Filled Killer: Why Are Simplistic Patriots Treating Him as a Hero?” The Guardian 6 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/06/real-american-sniper-hate-filled-killer-why-patriots-calling-hero-chris-kyle>.

Abstract:

IntroductionThis short article examines contemporary artistic use of walkie-talkies across two projects: Saturday (2002) by Sabrina Raaf and Walk That Sound (2014) by Lukatoyboy. Drawing on Dominic Pettman’s notion of sonic intimacy, I argue that both artists incorporate walkie-talkies as part of their explorations of mediated wandering, and in ways that seek to capture sonic ambiances and intimacies. One thing that is striking about both these works is that they rethink what’s possible with walkie-talkies; both artists use them not just as low-tech, portable devices for one-to-one communication over distance, but also—and more strikingly—as (covert) recording equipment for capturing, while wandering, snippets of intimate conversation between passers-by and the “voice” of the surrounding environment. Both artworks strive to make the familiar strange. They prompt us to question our preconceived perceptions of, and affective engagements with, the people and places around us, to listen more attentively to the voices of others (and the “Other”), and to aurally inhabit in new ways the spaces and places we find ourselves in and routinely pass through.The walkie-talkie is an established, simple communication device, consisting of a two-way radio transceiver with a speaker and microphone (in some cases, the speaker is also used as the microphone) and an antenna (Wikipedia). Walkie-talkies are half-duplex communication devices, meaning that they use a single radio channel: only one radio on the channel can transmit at a time, but many can listen; when a user wishes to talk, they must turn off the receiver and turn on the transmitter by pressing a push-to-talk button (Wikipedia). In some models, static—known as squelch—is produced each time the push-to-talk button is depressed. The push-to-talk button is a feature of both projects: in Saturday, it transforms the walkie-talkie into a cheap, portable recorder-transmitter. In Walk That Sound, rapid fire exchanges of conversation using the push-to-talk button feature strongly.Interestingly, walkie-talkies were developed during World War Two. While they continue to be used within certain industrial settings, they are perhaps best known as a “quaint” household toy and “fun tool” (Smith). Early print ads for walkie-talkie toys marketed them as a form of both spyware for kids (with the Gabriel Toy Co. releasing a 007-themed walkie-talkie set) and as a teletechnology for communication over distance—“how thrilling to ‘speak through space!’”, states one ad (Statuv “New!”). What is noteworthy about these early ads is that they actively promote experimental use of walkie-talkies. For instance, a 1953 ad for Vibro-Matic “Space Commander” walkie-talkies casts them as media transmission devices, suggesting that, with them, one can send and receive “voice – songs – music” (Statuv “New!”). In addition, a 1962 ad for the Knight-Kit walkie-talkie imagines “you’ll find new uses for this exciting walkie-talkie every day” (Statuv “Details”). Resurgent interest in walkie-talkies has seen them also promoted more recently as intimate tools “for communication without asking permission to communicate” (“Nextel”); this is to say that they have been marketed as devices for synchronous or immediate communication that overcome the limits of asynchronous communication, such as texting, where there might be substantial delays between the sending of a message and receipt of a response. Within this context, it is not surprising that Snapchat and Instagram have also since added “walkie-talkie” features to their messaging services. The Nextel byline, emphasising “without asking permission”, also speaks to the possibilities of using walkie-talkies as rudimentary forms of spyware.Within art practice that explores mediated forms of wandering—that is, walking while using media and various “remote transmission technologies” (Duclos 233)—walkie-talkies hold appeal for a number of reasons, including their particular aesthetic qualities, such as the crackling or static sound (squelch) that one encounters when using them; their portability; their affordability; and, the fact that, while they can be operated on multiple channels, they tend to be regarded primarily as devices that permit two-way, one-to-one (and therefore intimate, if not secure) remote communication. As we will see below, however, contemporary artists, such as the aforementioned earlier advertisers, have also been very attentive to the device’s experimental possibilities. Perhaps the best known (if possibly apocryphal) example of artistic use of walkie-talkies is by the Situationist International as part of their explorations in urban wandering (a revolutionary strategy called dérive). In the Situationist text from 1960, Die Welt als Labyrinth (Anon.), there is a detailed account of how walkie-talkies were to form part of a planned dérive, which was organised by the Dutch section of the Situationist International, through the city of Amsterdam, but which never went ahead:Two groups, each containing three situationists, would dérive for three days, on foot or eventually by boat (sleeping in hotels along the way) without leaving the center of Amsterdam. By means of the walkie-talkies with which they would be equipped, these groups would remain in contact, with each other, if possible, and in any case with the radio-truck of the cartographic team, from where the director of the dérive—in this case Constant [Nieuwenhuys]—moving around so as to maintain contact, would define their routes and sometimes give instructions (it was also the director of the dérive’s responsibility to prepare experiments at certain locations and secretly arranged events.) (Anon.) This proposed dérive formed part of Situationist experiments in unitary urbanism, a process that consisted of “making different parts of the city communicate with one another.” Their ambition was to create new situations informed by, among other things, encounters and atmospheres that were registered through dérive in order to reconnect parts of the city that were separated spatially (Lefebvre quoted in Lefebvre and Ross 73). In an interview with Kristin Ross, Henri Lefebvre insists that the Situationists “did have their experiments; I didn’t participate. They used all kinds of means of communication—I don’t know when exactly they were using walkie-talkies. But I know they were used in Amsterdam and in Strasbourg” (Lefebvre quoted in Lefebvre and Ross 73). However, as Rebecca Duclos points out, such use “is, in fact, not well documented”, and “none of the more well-known reports on situationist activity […] specifically mentions the use of walkie-talkies within their descriptive narratives” (Duclos 233). In the early 2000s, walkie-talkies also figured prominently, alongside other media devices, in at least two location-based gaming projects by renowned British art collective Blast Theory, Can You See Me Now? (2001) and You Get Me (2008). In the first of these projects, participants in the game (“online players”) competed against members of Blast Theory (“runners”), tracking them through city streets via a GPS-enabled handheld computer that runners carried with them. The goal for online players was to move an avatar they created through a virtual map of the city as multiple runners “pursued their avatar’s geographical coordinates in real-time” (Leorke). As Dale Leorke explains, “Players could see the locations of the runners and other players and exchange text messages with other players” (Leorke 27), and runners could “read players’ messages and communicate directly with each other through a walkie-talkie” (28). An audio stream from these walkie-talkie conversations allowed players to eavesdrop on their pursuers (Blast Theory, Can You See Me Now?).You Get Me was similarly structured, with online players and “runners” (eight teenagers who worked with Blast Theory on the game). Remotely situated online players began the game by listening to the “personal geography” of the runners over a walkie-talkie stream (Blast Theory, You Get Me). They then selected one runner, and tracked them down by navigating their own avatar, without being caught, through a virtual version of Mile End Park in London, in pursuit of their chosen runner who was moving about the actual Mile End Park. Once their chosen runner was contacted, the player had to respond to a question that the runner posed to them. If the runner was satisfied with the player’s answer, conversation switched to “the privacy of a mobile phone” in order to converse further; if not, the player was thrown back into the game (Blast Theory, You Get Me). A key aim of Blast Theory’s work, as I have argued elsewhere (Wilken), is the fostering of interactions and fleeting intimacies between relative and complete strangers. The walkie-talkie is a key tool in both the aforementioned Blast Theory projects for facilitating these interactions and intimacies.Beyond these well-known examples, walkie-talkies have been employed in productive and exploratory ways by other artists. The focus in this article is on two specific projects: the first by US-based sound artist Sabrina Raaf, called Saturday (2002) and the second by Serbian sound designer Lukatoyboy (Luka Ivanović), titled Walk That Sound (2014). Sonic IntimaciesThe concept that gives shape and direction to the analysis of the art projects by Raaf and Lukatoyboy and their use of walkie-talkies is that of sonic intimacy. This is a concept of emerging critical interest across media and sound studies and geography (see, for example, James; Pettman; Gallagher and Prior). Sonic intimacy, as Dominic Pettman explains, is composed of two simultaneous yet opposing orientations. On the one hand, sonic intimacy involves a “turning inward, away from the wider world, to more private and personal experiences and relationships” (79). While, on the other hand, it also involves a turning outward, to seek and heed “the voice of the world” (79)—or what Pettman refers to as the “vox mundi” (66). Pettman conceives of the “vox mundi” as an “ecological voice”, whereby “all manner of creatures, agents, entities, objects, and phenomena” (79) have the opportunity to speak to us, if only we were prepared to listen to our surroundings in new and different ways. In a later passage, he also refers to the “vox mundi” as a “carrier or potentially enlightening alterity” (83). Voices, Pettman writes, “transgress the neat divisions we make between ‘us’ and ‘them’, at all scales and junctures” (6). Thus, Pettman’s suggestion is that “by listening to the ‘voices’ that lie dormant in the surrounding world […] we may in turn foster a more sustainable relationship with [the] local matrix of specific existences” (85), be they human or otherwise.This formulation of sonic intimacy provides a productive conceptual frame for thinking through Raaf’s and Lukatoyboy’s use of walkie-talkies. The contention in this article is that these two projects are striking for the way that they both use walkie-talkies to explore, simultaneously, this double articulation or dual orientation of sonic intimacy—a turning inwards to capture more private and personal experiences and conversations, and a turning outwards to capture the vox mundi. Employing Pettman’s notion of sonic intimacy as a conceptual frame, I trace below the different ways that these two projects incorporate walkie-talkies in order to develop mediated forms of wandering that seek to capture place-based sonic ambiances and sonic intimacies.Sabrina Raaf, Saturday (2002)US sound artist Sabrina Raaf’s Saturday (2002) is a sound-based art installation based on recordings of “stolen conversations” that Raaf gathered over many Saturdays in Humboldt Park, Chicago. Raaf’s work harks back to the early marketing of walkie-talkie toys as spyware. In Raaf’s hands, this device is used not for engaging in intimate one-to-one conversation, but for listening in on, and capturing, the intimate conversations of others. In other words, she uses this device, as the Nextel slogan goes, for “communication without permission to communicate” (“Nextel”). Raaf’s inspiration for the piece was twofold. First, she has noted that “with the overuse of radio frequency bands for wireless communications, there comes the increased occurrence of crossed lines where a private conversation becomes accidentally shared” (Raaf). Reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation (1974), in which surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) records the conversation of a couple as they walk through crowded Union Square in San Francisco, Raaf used a combination of walkie-talkies, CB radios, and “various other forms of consumer spy […] technology in order to actively harvest such communication leaks” (Raaf). The second source of inspiration was noticing the “sheer quantity of non-phone, low tech, radio transmissions that were constantly being sent around [the] neighbourhood”, transmissions that were easily intercepted. These conversations were eclectic in composition and character:The transmissions included communications between gang members on street corners nearby and group conversations between friends talking about changes in the neighbourhood and their families. There were raw, intimate conversations and often even late night sex talk between potential lovers. (Raaf)What struck Raaf about these conversations, these transmissions, was that there was “a furtive quality” to most of them, and “a particular daringness to their tone”.During her Saturday wanderings, Raaf complemented her recordings of stolen snippets of conversation with recordings of the “voice” of the surrounding neighbourhood—“the women singing out their windows to their radios, the young men in their low rider cars circling the block, the children, the ice cream carts, etc. These are the sounds that are mixed into the piece” (Raaf).Audience engagement with Saturday involves a kind of austere intimacy of its own that seems befitting of a surveillance-inspired sonic portrait of urban and private life. The piece is accessed via an interactive glove. This glove is white in colour and about the size of a large gardening glove, with a Velcro strap that fastens across the hand, like a cycling glove. The glove, which only has coverings for thumb and first two fingers (it is missing the ring and little fingers) is wired into and rests on top of a roughly A4-sized white rectangular box. This box, which is mounted onto the wall of an all-white gallery space at the short end, serves as a small shelf. The displayed glove is illuminated by a discrete, bent-arm desk lamp, that protrudes from the shelf near the gallery wall. Above the shelf are a series of wall-mounted colour images that relate to the project. In order to hear the soundtrack of Saturday, gallery visitors approach the shelf, put on the glove, and “magically just press their fingertips to their forehead [to] hear the sound without the use of their ears” (Raaf). The glove, Raaf explains, “is outfitted with leading edge audio electronic devices called ‘bone transducers’ […]. These transducers transmit sound in a very unusual fashion. They translate sound into vibration patterns which resonate through bone” (Raaf).Employing this technique, Raaf explains, “permits a new way of listening”:The user places their fingers to their forehead—in a gesture akin to Rodin’s The Thinker or of a clairvoyant—in order to tap into the lives of strangers. Pressing different combinations of fingers to the temple yield plural viewpoints and group conversations. These sounds are literally mixed in the bones of the listener. (Raaf) The result is a (literally and figuratively) touching sonic portrait of Humboldt Park, its residents, and the “voice” of its surrounding neighbourhoods. Through the unique technosomatic (Richardson) apparatus—combinations of gestures that convey the soundscape directly through the bones and body—those engaging with Saturday get to hear voices in/of/around Humboldt Park. It is a portrait that combines sonic intimacy in the two forms described earlier in this article. In its inward-focused form, the gallery visitor-listener is positioned as a voyeur of sorts, listening into stolen snippets of private and personal relationships, experiences, and interactions. And, in its outward-focused form, the gallery visitor-listener encounters a soundscape in which an array of agents, entities, and objects are also given a voice. Additional work performed by this piece, it seems to me, is to be found in the intermingling of these two form of sonic intimacy—the personal and the environmental—and the way that they prompt reflection on mediation, place, urban life, others, and intimacy. That is to say that, beyond its particular sonic portrait of Humboldt Park, Saturday works in “clearing some conceptual space” in the mind of the departing gallery visitor such that they might “listen for, if not precisely to, the collective, polyphonic ‘voice of the world’” (Pettman 6) as they go about their day-to-day lives.Lukatoyboy, Walk That Sound (2014)The second project, Walk That Sound, by Serbian sound artist Lukatoyboy was completed for the 2014 CTM festival. CTM is an annual festival event that is staged in Berlin and dedicated to “adventurous music and art” (CTM Festival, “About”). A key project within the festival is CTM Radio Lab. The Lab supports works, commissioned by CTM Festival and Deutschlandradio Kultur – Hörspiel/Klangkunst (among other partnering organisations), that seek to pair and explore the “specific artistic possibilities of radio with the potentials of live performance or installation” (CTM Festival, “Projects”). Lukatoyboy’s Walk That Sound was one of two commissioned pieces for the 2014 CTM Radio Lab. The project used the “commonplace yet often forgotten walkie-talkie” (CTM Festival, “Projects”) to create a moving urban sound portrait in the area around the Kottbusser Tor U-Bahn station in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Walk That Sound recruited participants—“mobile scouts”—to rove around the Kottbusser Tor area (CTM Festival, “Projects”). Armed with walkie-talkies, and playing with “the array of available and free frequencies, and the almost unlimited amount of users that can interact over these different channels”, the project captured the dispatches via walkie-talkie of each participant (CTM Festival, “Projects”). The resultant recording of Walk That Sound—which was aired on Deutschlandradio (see Lukatoyboy), part of a long tradition of transmitting experimental music and sound art on German radio (Cory)—forms an eclectic soundscape.The work juxtaposes snippets of dialogue shared between the mobile scouts, overheard mobile phone conversations, and moments of relative quietude, where the subdued soundtrack is formed by the ambient sounds—the “voice”—of the Kottbusser Tor area. This voice includes distant traffic, the distinctive auditory ticking of pedestrian lights, and moments of tumult and agitation, such as the sounds of construction work, car horns, emergency services vehicle sirens, a bottle bouncing on the pavement, and various other repetitive yet difficult to identify industrial sounds. This voice trails off towards the end of the recording into extended walkie-talkie produced static or squelch. The topics covered within the “crackling dialogues” (CTM Festival, “Projects”) of the mobile scouts ranged widely. There were banal observations (“I just stepped on a used tissue”; “people are crossing the street”; “there are 150 trains”)—wonderings that bear strong similarities with French writer Georges Perec’s well-known experimental descriptions of everyday Parisian life in the 1970s (Perec “An Attempt”). There were also intimate, confiding, flirtatious remarks (“Do you want to come to Turkey with me?”), as well as a number of playfully paranoid observations and quips (“I like to lie”; “I can see you”; “do you feel like you are being recorded?”; “I’m being followed”) that seem to speak to the fraught history of Berlin in particular as well as the complicated character of urban life in general—as Pettman asks, “what does ‘together’ signify in a socioeconomic system so efficient in producing alienation and isolation?” (92).In sum, Walk That Sound is a strangely moving exploration of sonic intimacy, one that shifts between many different registers and points of focus—much like urban wandering itself. As a work, it is variously funny, smart, paranoid, intimate, expansive, difficult to decipher, and, at times, even difficult to listen to. Pettman argues that, “thanks in large part to the industrialization of the human ear […], we have lost the capacity to hear the vox mundi, which is […] the sum total of cacophonous, heterogeneous, incommensurate, and unsynthesizable sounds of the postnatural world” (8). Walk That Sound functions almost like a response to this dilemma. One comes away from listening to it with a heightened awareness of, appreciation for, and aural connection to the rich messiness of the polyphonic contemporary urban vox mundi. ConclusionThe argument of this article is that Sabrina Raaf’s Saturday and Lukatoyboy’s Walk That Sound are two projects that both incorporate walkie-talkies in order to develop mediated forms of wandering that seek to capture place-based sonic ambiances and sonic intimacies. Drawing on Pettman’s notion of “sonic intimacy”, examination of these projects has opened consideration around voice, analogue technology, and what Nick Couldry refers to as “an obligation to listen” (Couldry 580). In order to be heard, Pettman remarks, and “in order to be considered a voice at all”, and therefore as “something worth heeding”, the vox mundi “must arrive intimately, or else it is experienced as noise or static” (Pettman 83). In both the projects discussed here—Saturday and Walk That Sound—the walkie-talkie provides this means of “intimate arrival”. As half-duplex communication devices, walkie-talkies have always fulfilled a double function: communicating and listening. This dual functionality is exploited in new ways by Raaf and Lukatoyboy. In their projects, both artists turn the microphone outwards, such that the walkie-talkie becomes not just a device for communicating while in the field, but also—and more strikingly—it becomes a field recording device. The result of which is that this simple, “playful” communication device is utilised in these two projects in two ways: on the one hand, as a “carrier of potentially enlightening alterity” (Pettman 83), a means of encouraging “potential encounters” (89) with strangers who have been thrown together and who cross paths, and, on the other hand, as a means of fostering “an environmental awareness” (89) of the world around us. In developing these prompts, Raaf and Lukatoyboy build potential bridges between Pettman’s work on sonic intimacy, their own work, and the work of other experimental artists. For instance, in relation to potential encounters, there are clear points of connection with Blast Theory, a group who, as noted earlier, have utilised walkie-talkies and sound-based and other media technologies to explore issues around urban encounters with strangers that promote reflection on ideas and experiences of otherness and difference (see Wilken)—issues that are also implicit in the two works examined. In relation to environmental awareness, their work—as well as Pettman’s calls for greater sonic intimacy—brings renewed urgency to Georges Perec’s encouragement to “question the habitual” and to account for, and listen carefully to, “the common, the ordinary, the infraordinary, the background noise” (Perec “Approaches” 210).Walkie-talkies, for Raaf and Lukatoyboy, when reimagined as field recording devices as much as remote transmission technologies, thus “allow new forms of listening, which in turn afford new forms of being together” (Pettman 92), new forms of being in the world, and new forms of sonic intimacy. Both these artworks engage with, and explore, what’s at stake in a politics and ethics of listening. Pettman prompts us, as urban dweller-wanderers, to think about how we might “attend to the act of listening itself, rather than to a specific sound” (Pettman 1). His questioning, as this article has explored, is answered by the works from Raaf and Lukatoyboy in effective style and technique, setting up opportunities for aural attentiveness and experiential learning. However, it is up to us whether we are prepared to listen carefully and to open ourselves to such intimate sonic contact with others and with the environments in which we live.ReferencesAnon. “Die Welt als Labyrinth.” Internationale Situationiste 4 (Jan. 1960). International Situationist Online, 19 June 2019 <https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/diewelt.html>Blast Theory. “Can You See Me Now?” Blast Theory, 19 June 2019 <https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/can-you-see-me-now/>.———. “You Get Me.” Blast Theory, 19 June 2019 <https://wwww.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/you-get-me/>.Cory, Mark E. “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art.” Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-garde. Eds. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1992. 331–371.Couldry, Nick. “Rethinking the Politics of Voice.” Continuum 23.4 (2009): 579–582.CTM Festival. “About.” CTM Festival, 2019. 19 June 2019 <https://www.ctm-festival.de/about/ctm-festival/>.———. “Projects – CTM Radio Lab.” CTM Festival, 2019. 19 June 2019 <https://www.ctm-festival.de/projects/ctm-radio-lab/>.Duclos, Rebecca. “Reconnaissance/Méconnaissance: The Work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.” Articulate Objects: Voice, Sculpture and Performance. Eds. Aura Satz and Jon Wood. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. 221–246. Gallagher, Michael, and Jonathan Prior. “Sonic Geographies: Exploring Phonographic Methods.” Progress in Human Geography 38.2 (2014): 267–284.James, Malcom. Sonic Intimacy: The Study of Sound. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming.Lefebvre, Henri, and Kristin Ross. “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview.” October 79 (Winter 1997): 69–83. Leorke, Dale. Location-Based Gaming: Play in Public Space. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.Lukatoyboy. “Walk That Sound – Deutschlandradiokultur Klangkunst Broadcast 14.02.2014.” SoundCloud. 19 June 2019 <https://soundcloud.com/lukatoyboy/walk-that-sound-deutschlandradiokultur-broadcast-14022014>.“Nextel: Couple. Walkie Talkies Are Good for Something More.” AdAge. 6 June 2012. 18 July 2019 <https://adage.com/creativity/work/couple/27993>.Perec, Georges. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Trans. Marc Lowenthal. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2010.———. “Approaches to What?” Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Rev. ed. Ed. and trans. John Sturrock. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1999. 209–211.Pettman, Dominic. Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (Or, How to Listen to the World). Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2017.Raaf, Sabrina. “Saturday.” Sabrina Raaf :: New Media Artist, 2002. 19 June 2019 <http://raaf.org/projects.php?pcat=2&proj=10>.Richardson, Ingrid. “Mobile Technosoma: Some Phenomenological Reflections on Itinerant Media Devices.” The Fibreculture Journal 6 (2005). <http://six.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-032-mobile-technosoma-some-phenomenological-reflections-on-itinerant-media-devices/>. Smith, Ernie. “Roger That: A Short History of the Walkie Talkie.” Vice, 23 Sep. 2017. 19 June 2019 <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb7vk4/roger-that-a-short-history-of-the-walkie-talkie>. Statuv. “Details about Allied Radio Knight-Kit C-100 Walkie Talkie CB Radio Vtg Print Ad.” Statuv, 4 Jan. 2016. 18 July 2019 <https://statuv.com/media/74802043788985511>.———. “New! 1953 ‘Space Commander’ Vibro-Matic Walkie-Talkies.” Statuv, 4 Jan. 2016. 18 July 2019 <https://statuv.com/media/74802043788985539>.Wikipedia. “Walkie-Talkie”. Wikipedia, 3 July 2019. 18 July 2019 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie>.Wilken, Rowan. “Proximity and Alienation: Narratives of City, Self, and Other in the Locative Games of Blast Theory.” The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies. Ed. Jason Farman. New York: Routledge, 2014. 175–191.

Abstract:

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

Abstract:

This article is about refugees’ and migrants’ dreams of home and family and stems from an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, “A Hand Up: Disrupting the Communication of Intergenerational Welfare Dependency” (LP140100935), with Partner Organisation St Vincent de Paul Society (WA) Inc. (Vinnies). A Vinnies-supported refugee and migrant support centre was chosen as one of the hubs for interviewee recruitment, given that many refugee families experience persistent and chronic economic disadvantage. The de-identified name for the drop-in language-teaching and learning social facility is the Migrant and Refugee Homebase (MARH). At the time of the research, in 2018, refugee and forced migrant families from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan constituted MARH’s primary membership base. MARH provided English language classes alongside other educational and financial support. It could also organise provision of emergency food and was a conduit for furniture donated by Australian families. Crucially, MARH operated as a space in which members could come together to build shared community.As part of her role, the researcher was introduced to Sara (de-identified), a mother-tongue Arabic speaker and the centre’s coordinator. Sara had personal experience of being a refugee, as well as being MARH’s manager, and she became both a point of contact for the researcher team, an interpreter/translator, and an empathetic listener as refugees shared their stories. Dreams of home and family emerged throughout the interviews as a vital part of participants’ everyday lives. These dreams and hopes were developed in the face of what was, for some, a nightmare of adversity. Underpinning participants’ sense of agency, subjectivity and resilience, Badiou argues (93, as noted in Jackson, 241) that hope can appear as a basic form of patience or perseverance rather than a dream for justice. Instead of imagining an improvement in personal circ*mstances, the dream is one of simply moving forward rather than backward. While dreams of being reunited with family are rooted in the past and project a vision of a family which no longer exists, these dreams help fashion a future which once again contains a range of possibilities.Although Sara volunteered her time on the research project as part of her commitment to Vinnies, she was well-known to interviewees as a MARH staff member and, in many cases, a friend and confidante. While Sara’s manager role implies an imbalance of power, with Sara powerful and participants comparatively less so, the majority of the information explored in the interviews pertained to refugees’ experiences of life outside the sphere in which MARH is engaged, so there was limited risk of the data being sanitised to reflect positively upon MARH. The specialist information and understandings that the interviewees shared positions them as experts, and as co-creators of knowledge.Recruitment and Methodological ApproachThe project researcher (Jaunzems) met potential contributors at MARH when its members gathered for a coffee morning. With Sara’s assistance, the researcher invited MARH members to take part in the research project, giving those present the opportunity to ask and have answered any questions they deemed important. Coffee morning attendees were under no obligation to take part, and about half chose not to do so, while the remainder volunteered to participate. Sara scheduled the interviews at times to suit the families participating. A parent and child from each volunteer family was interviewed, separately. In all cases it was the mother who volunteered to take part, and all interviewees chose to be interviewed in their homes. Each set of interviews was digitally recorded and lasted no longer than 90 minutes. This article includes extracts from interviews with three mothers from refugee families who escaped war-torn homelands for a new life in Australia, sometimes via interim refugee camps.The project researcher conducted the in-depth interviews with Sara’s crucial interpreting/translating assistance. The interviews followed a traditional approach, except that the researcher deferred to Sara as being more important in the interview exchange than she was. This reflects the premise that meaning is socially constructed, and that what people do and say makes visible the meanings that underpin their actions and statements within a wider social context (Burr). Conceptualising knowledge as socially constructed privileges the role of the decoder in receiving, understanding and communicating such knowledge (Crotty). Respecting the role of the interpreter/translator signified to the participants that their views, opinions and their overall cultural context were valued.Once complete, the interviews were sent for translation and transcription by a trusted bi-lingual transcriber, where both the English and Arabic exchanges were transcribed. This was deemed essential by the researchers, to ensure both the authenticity of the data collected and to demonstrate “trust, understanding, respect, and a caring connection” (Valibhoy, Kaplan, and Szwarc, 23) with the participants. Upon completion of the interviews with volunteer members of the MARH community, and at the beginning of the analysis phase, researchers recognised the need for the adoption of an interpretive framework. The interpretive approach seeks to understand an individual’s view of the world through the contexts of time, place and culture. The knowledge produced is contextualised and differs from one person to another as a result of individual subjectivities such as age, race and ethnicity, even within a shared social context (Guba and Lincoln). Accordingly, a mother-tongue Arabic speaker, who identifies as a refugee (Al-Hameed), was added to the project. All authors were involved in writing up the article while authors two, three and four took responsibility for transcript coding and analysis. In the transcripts that follow, words originally spoken in Arabic are in intalics, with non-italcised words originally spoken in English.Discrimination and BelongingAya initially fled from her home in Syria into neighbouring Jordan. She didn’t feel welcomed or supported there.[00:55:06] Aya: …in Jordan, refugees didn’t have rights, and the Jordanian schools refused to teach them [the children…] We were put aside.[00:55:49] Interpreter, Sara (to Researcher): And then she said they push us aside like you’re a zero on the left, yeah this is unfortunately the reality of our countries, I want to cry now.[00:56:10] Aya: You’re not allowed to cry because we’ll all cry.Some refugees and migrant communities suffer discrimination based on their ethnicity and perceived legitimacy as members of the host society. Although Australian refugees may have had searing experiences prior to their acceptance by Australia, migrant community members in Australia can also feel themselves “constructed in the public and political spheres as less legitimately Australian than others” (Green and Aly). Jackson argues that both refugees and migrants experiencethe impossibility of ever bridging the gap between one’s natal ties to the place one left because life was insupportable there, and the demands of the nation to which one has travelled, legally or illegally, in search of a better life. And this tension between belonging and not belonging, between a place where one has rights and a place where one does not, implies an unresolved relationship between one’s natural identity as a human being and one’s social identity as ‘undocumented migrant,’ a ‘resident alien,’ an ‘ethnic minority,’ or ‘the wretched of the earth,’ whose plight remains a stigma of radical alterity even though it inspires our compassion and moves us to political action. (223)The tension Jackson refers to, where the migrant is haunted by belonging and not belonging, is an area of much research focus. Moreover, the label of “asylum seeker” can contribute to systemic “exclusion of a marginalised and abject group of people, precisely by employing a term that emphasises the suspended recognition of a community” (Nyers). Unsurprisingly, many refugees in Australia long for the connectedness of the lives they left behind relocated in the safe spaces where they live now.Eades focuses on an emic approach to understanding refugee/migrant distress, or trauma, which seeks to incorporate the worldview of the people in distress: essentially replicating the interpretive perspective taken in the research. This emic framing is adopted in place of the etic approach that seeks to understand the distress through a Western biomedical lens that is positioned outside the social/cultural system in which the distress is taking place. Eades argues: “developing an emic approach is to engage in intercultural dialogue, raise dilemmas, test assumptions, document hopes and beliefs and explore their implications”. Furthermore, Eades sees the challenge for service providers working with refugee/migrants in distress as being able to move beyond “harm minimisation” models of care “to recognition of a facilitative, productive community of people who are in a transitional phase between homelands”. This opens the door for studies concerning the notions of attachment to place and its links to resilience and a refugee’s ability to “settle in” (for example, Myers’s ground-breaking place-making work in Plymouth).Resilient PrecariousnessChaima: We feel […] good here, we’re safe, but when we sit together, we remember what we went through how my kids screamed when the bombs came, and we went out in the car. My son was 12 and I was pregnant, every time I remember it, I go back.Alongside the dreams that migrants have possible futures are the nightmares that threaten to destabilise their daily lives. As per the work of Xavier and Rosaldo, post-migration social life is recreated in two ways: the first through participation and presence in localised events; the second by developing relationships with absent others (family and friends) across the globe through media. These relationships, both distanced and at a distance, are dispersed through time and space. In light of this, Campays and Said suggest that places of past experiences and rituals for meaning are commonly recreated or reproduced as new places of attachment abroad; similarly, other recollections and experience can trigger a sense of fragility when “we remember what we went through”. Gupta and Ferguson suggest that resilience is defined by the migrant/refugee capacity to “reimagine and re-materialise” their lost heritage in their new home. This involves a sense of connection to the good things in the past, while leaving the bad things behind.Resilience has also been linked to the migrant’s/refugee’s capacity “to manage their responses to adverse circ*mstances in an interpersonal community through the networks of relationships” (Eades). Resilience in this case is seen through an intersubjective lens. Joseph reminds us that there is danger in romanticising community. Local communities may not only be hostile toward different national and ethnic groups, they may actively display a level of hostility toward them (Boswell). However, Gill maintains that “the reciprocal relations found in communities are crucially important to their [migrant/refugee] well-being”. This is because inclusion in a given community allows migrants/refugees to shrug off the outsider label, and the feeling of being at risk, and provides the opportunity for them to become known as families and friends. One of MAHR’s central aims was to help bridge the cultural divide between MARH users and the broader Australian community.Hope[01:06: 10] Sara (to interviewee, Aya): What’s the key to your success here in Australia?[01:06:12] Aya: The people, and how they treat us.[01:06:15] Sara (to Researcher): People and how they deal with us.[01:06:21] Aya: It’s the best thing when you look around, and see people who don’t understand your language but they help you.[01:06:28] Sara (to Researcher): She said – this is nice. I want to cry also. She said the best thing when I see people, they don’t understand your language, and I don’t understand theirs but they still smile in your face.[01:06:43] Aya: It’s the best.[01:06:45] Sara (to Aya): yes, yes, people here are angels. This is the best thing about Australia.Here, Sara is possibly shown to be taking liberties with the translation offered to the researcher, talking about how Australians “smile in your face”, when (according to the translator) Aya talked about how Australians “help”. Even so, the capacity for social connection and other aspects of sociality have been linked to a person’s ability to turn a negative experience into a positive cultural resource (Wilson). Resilience is understood in these cases as a strength-based practice where families, communities and individuals are viewed in terms of their capabilities and possibilities, instead of their deficiencies or disorders (Graybeal and Saleeby in Eades). According to Fozdar and Torezani, there is an “apparent paradox between high-levels of discrimination experienced by humanitarian migrants to Australia in the labour market and everyday life” (30) on the one hand, and their reporting of positive well-being on the other. That disparity includes accounts such as the one offered by Aya.As Wilson and Arvanitakis suggest,the interaction between negative experiences of discrimination and reports of wellbeing suggested a counter-intuitive propensity among refugees to adapt to and make sense of their migration experiences in unique, resourceful and life-affirming ways. Such response patterns among refugees and trauma survivors indicate a similar resilience-related capacity to positively interpret and derive meaning from negative migration experiences and associated emotions. … However, resilience is not expressed or employed uniformly among individuals or communities. Some respond in a resilient manner, while others collapse. On this point, an argument could be made that collapse and breakdown is a built-in aspect of resilience, and necessary for renewal and ongoing growth.Using this approach, Wilson and Arvanitakis have linked resilience to hope, as a “present- and future-oriented mode of situated defence against adversity”. They argue that the term “hope” is often utilised in a tokenistic way “as a strategic instrument in increasingly empty domestic and international political vocabularies”. Nonetheless, Wilson and Arvanitakis believe hope to be of vital academic interest due to the prevalence of war and suffering throughout the world. In the research reported here, the authors found that participants’ hopes were interwoven with dreams of being reunited with their families in a place of safety. This is a common longing. As Jackson states,so it is that migrants travel abroad in pursuit of utopia, but having found that place, which is also no-place (ou-topos), they are haunted by the thought that utopia actually lies in the past. It is the family they left behind. That is where they properly belong. Though the family broke up long ago and is now scattered to the four winds, they imagine a reunion in which they are together again. (223)There is a sense here that with their hopes and dreams lying in the past, refugees/migrants are living forward while looking backwards (a Kierkegaardian concept). If hope is thought to be key to resilience (Wilson and Arvanitakis), and key to an individual’s ability to live with a sense of well-being, then perhaps a refugee’s past relations (familial) impact both their present relations (social/community), and their ability to transform negative experiences into positive experiences. And yet, there is no readily accessible way in which migrants and refugees can recreate the connections that sustained them in the past. As Jackson suggests,the irreversibility of time is intimately connected with the irreversibility of one’s place of origin, and this entwined movement through time and across space proves perplexing to many migrants, who, in imagining themselves one day returning to the place from where they started out, forget that there is no transport which will convey them back into the past. … Often it is only by going home that is becomes starkly and disconcertingly clear that one’s natal village is no longer the same and that one has also changed. (221)The dream of home and family, therefore and the hope that this might somehow be recreated in the safety of the here and now, becomes a paradoxical loss and longing even as it is a constant companion for many on their refugee journey.Esma’s DreamAccording to author three, personal dreams are not generally discussed in Arab culture, even though dreams themselves may form part of the rich tradition of Arabic folklore and storytelling. Alongside issues of mental wellbeing, dreams are constructed as something private, and it generally breaks social taboos to describe them publicly. However, in personal discussions with other refugee women and men, and echoing Jackson’s finding, a recurring dream is “to meet my family in a safe place and not be worried about my safety or theirs”. As a refugee, the third author shares this dream. This is also the perspective articulated by Esma, who had recently had a fifth child and was very much missing her extended family who had died, been scattered as refugees, or were still living in a conflict zone. The researcher asked Sara to ask Esma about the best aspect of her current life:[01:17:03] Esma: The thing that comforts me here is nature, it’s beautiful.[01:17:15] Sara (to the Researcher): The nature.[01:17:16] Esma: And feeling safe.[01:17:19] Sara (to the Researcher): The safety. ...[01:17:45] Esma: Life’s beautiful here.[01:17:47] Sara (to the Researcher): Life is beautiful here.[01:17:49] Esma: But I want to know people, speak the language, have friends, life is beautiful here even if I don’t have my family here.[01:17:56] Sara (to the Researcher): Life is so pretty you only need to improve the language and have friends, she said I love my life here even though I don’t have any family or community here. (To Esma:) I am your family.[01:18:12] Esma: Bring me my siblings here.[01:18:14] Sara (to Esma): I just want my brothers here and my sisters.[01:18:17] Esma: It’s a dream.[01:18:18] Sara (to Esma): it’s a dream, one day it will become true.Here Esma uses the term dream metaphorically, to describe an imagined utopia: a dream world. In supporting Esma, who is mourning the absence of her family, Sara finds herself reacting and emoting around their shared experience of leaving siblings behind. In doing so, she affirms the younger woman, but also offers a hope for the future. Esma had previously made a suggestion, absorbed into her larger dream, but more achievable in the short term, “to know people, speak the language, have friends”. The implication here is that Esma is keen to find a way to connect with Australians. She sees this as a means of compensating for the loss of family, a realistic hope rather than an impossible dream.ConclusionInterviews with refugee families in a Perth-based migrant support centre reveals both the nightmare pasts and the dreamed-of futures of people whose lives have experienced a radical disruption due to war, conflict and other life-threatening events. Jackson’s work with migrants provides a context for understanding the power of the dream in helping to resolve issues around the irreversibility of time and circ*mstance, while Wilson and Arvanitakis point to the importance of hope and resilience in supporting the building of a positive future. Within this mix of the longed for and the impossible, both the refugee informants and the academic literature suggest that participation in local events, and authentic engagement with the broader community, help make a difference in supporting a migrant’s transition from dreaming to reality.AcknowledgmentsThis article arises from an ARC Linkage Project, ‘A Hand Up: Disrupting the Communication of Intergenerational Welfare Dependency’ (LP140100935), supported by the Australian Research Council, Partner Organisation St Vincent de Paul Society (WA) Inc., and Edith Cowan University. The authors are grateful to the anonymous staff and member of Vinnies’ Migrant and Refugee Homebase for their trust in and support of this project, and for their contributions to it.ReferencesBadiou, Alan. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. 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