Representing Culture : Essays on Identity, Visuality and Technology [1 ed.] 9781443806411, 9781847186867

Citation preview

Representing Culture

Representing Culture: Essays on Identity, Visuality and Technology

Edited by

Claudia Alvares

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Representing Culture: Essays on Identity, Visuality and Technology, Edited by Claudia Alvares This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Claudia Alvares and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-686-6, ISBN (13): 9781847186867

CONTENTS

Editor’s Introduction ................................................................................... 1 Undisciplining Cultural Criticism Today Claudia Alvares Identity Politics and the Attack on Knowledge ........................................... 9 Daphne Patai, University of Massachusetts Feminist Communitarianism: Recuperating an Ethics of Care.................. 21 Claudia Alvares, Lusofona University Constructing the ‘Muslim Other’............................................................... 39 Chris Weedon, Cardiff University Confronting Whiteness: The Performance of Postassimilatory Jewish Heroism ..................................................................................................... 53 David Moscowitz, College of Charleston ‘Our disgust will make us stronger’: UK Press Representations of PoWs in the 2003 Iraq War ................................................................... 77 Katy Parry, University of Liverpool Public Frames: Security, Persuasion, and the Visual Construction of the International .................................................................................... 99 Frank Möller, Tampere Peace Research Institute Heritage Revisited: The Cultural Politics of Heritage in Goodness Gracious Me ............................................................................................ 119 Ana Mendes, University of Lisbon ‘It’s For You’: The Cellular Phone as Disciplinary Technology............. 131 Joseph A. Tighe, Duquesne University The End of Distance: The Emergence of Telematic Culture ................... 149 José Bragança de Miranda, New University of Lisbon

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Contents

Mnemosyne and The Arcades: Warburg and Benjamin’s Legacy ........... 179 Howard Caygill, Goldsmith’s College Contributors............................................................................................. 189 Index........................................................................................................ 193

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION UNDISCIPLINING CULTURAL CRITICISM TODAY CLAUDIA ALVARES

The essays collected in this book are polyvocal and multifarious in nature, obeying no single, cohesive narrative that defines a particular disciplinary field. If the boundaries between disciplines compartmentalise and contain knowledge within particular camps, the essays here presented serve precisely to critique the traditional confinements of disciplinary mappings. Indeed, such articles situate themselves ‘between camps’ (Gilroy, 2000) due to their interdisciplinary nature, a characteristic that is connoted with cultural studies. In effect, ‘cultural studies’ is an ‘undisciplined’ discipline due to lacking a defining methodology or pre-established corpus of theory that it can call its very own. This liberty to experiment with a wide variety of theories and methodologies is both its greatest quality and defect, for if on the one hand ‘cultural studies’ manages to escape the restrictive frameworks of preestablished discourse, engaging in new and fruitful combinations of theories and methodologies, it simultaneously can be criticised for lacking the rigour of a specific academic practice that makes it immediately recognisable. Cultural studies’ main preoccupation is with the analysis of the power and knowledge nexus that frames cultural practices. By being attentive to the multiple manifestations of this relationship in everyday life, it is heir to the Enlightenment legacy of critique, namely the capacity of the individual to transcend contextual specificities by exercising independent judgement. Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment as ‘man’s emergence from his selfincurred immaturity’ by daring ‘to think for himself’ (Kant, 1996: 51) survives in contemporary cultural criticism. Foucault’s critical ontology of the self is rooted in the Kantian conception of the enlightened subject capable of adopting a critical attitude towards the spatial-temporal context

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that moulds his subjectivity. Foucault claims that from the very moment that humanity makes free use of reason, without subjecting itself to external authority or guidance, critique becomes necessary (1984: 38). The role of criticism is therefore that of defining the conditions in which the exercise of reason is legitimate, an objective which entails probing the field of possible experience in ‘actuality’. The essays in this volume have a common denominator in that they seek precisely to explore the field of current ‘experience’ through the exercise of critique. The current post-9/11 social and political context demands that we reflect on the ubiquitous fear of terrorism on the development of ‘cultural studies’, if the latter is to survive, albeit in a different form from that which characterised the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies. Whereas the major preoccupation of traditional British cultural studies revolved around the redefinition of orthodox Marxism and the inclusion of feminist and racial issues (Hall, 1992), the prevalent socio-political climate appears to be hostile to the plurality which is at the heart of a ‘discipline’ that permanently sought to resist totalisation of any kind. The present context, then, begs prescient analysis of the impact of a ubiquitous securitising discourse on ‘modern cosmopolitanism’ and ‘multiculturalism’, both of which are gaining an increased connotation of risk and impending catastrophe in the wake of 9/11. By cosmopolitanism, I am evoking, to use Gilroy’s words, ‘the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life …’ (2004: xv) in some large metropolitan centres of the West. Gilroy points to the failure of multiculturalism as a pre-condition for the triumph of securocracy (2007: 178). The risk is that ‘natural communities of origin’, which were once regarded as potentially destructive of national collectivity, may now be considered the source of ‘meaningful identities’ and ‘meaningful ways of life’ (Bauman, 1996: 84). Zygmunt Bauman alerts us to the possibility of this danger resulting from the nation-state’s failure to perform the task of replacing individual rights with the national interest. The yearning for meaningful choice can be interpreted as a search for roots in an epoch of postmodern insecurity. Ulrich Beck’s concept of risk points towards the growing uncertainties patent in the process of modernisation and the ensuing diffusion of anxiety as a global phenomenon (2000: 49). The implosion of identity and the emergence of fragmented subjectivities entail the acceptance of risk. According to Bauman, because there is no such thing as a risk-free freedom, the current dilemma of individuals is

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their ‘resentment’ of the fact that risk and freedom go hand-in-hand (1996: 85). The resurgence of communitarian ideals thus presents a safe-haven for postmodern insecurities, appealing to traditional values and behavioural rules as a technology of control destined to curb the anxieties of risk-taking. The recontextualisation of cultural studies that this book attempts occurs along the vectors of identity politics, visual culture, and technology. These areas appear to be the ones in which the hegemony of a certain definition of cultural studies is negotiated due to the prevalent power/knowledge relationship that surfaces in media discourse. Indeed, media studies and cultural studies intertwine to the extent that it is through the media that much of the socially regulated terrain of subjectivity on which cultural studies operates becomes visible. The affirmation of identity, which risks the recuperation of essentialist categories such as sex, class, and race so as to write back against them, is the subject of the first four essays. Hostile to universal humanism, the postmodern celebration of identities can be accused of defending a decontextualised, ‘extra-worldly’ realm of difference, thus eliminating recourse to transformative projects that rely on the concrete classification of societies as ‘capitalist’, ‘patriarchal’, or ‘totalitarian’. Moreover, while acclaim for utopian differences relies on the decentring of the subject, this very decentring – or affirmation of ‘otherness’ – presupposes an aspiration to a cohesive identity freed from social constraints. As such, the postmodern subject can only reflect on the social discourses that constitute it by seeking recourse in a rooted identity that can be ‘routed’ in experience (Soper, 1990: 149-52; Lash, 1996: 271-2). In the opening article, titled ‘Identity Politics and the Attack on Knowledge’, Daphne Patai takes issue with the emphasis on the politicisation of education in North American universities, a manifestation of which is the pervasive attack on humanistic values patent in identity politics. This has allegedly led to situations in which reasoned argument has been replaced with personal attacks on opponents of those who can lay claim to an ‘oppressed’ identity. My essay ‘Feminist Communitarianism: Recuperating an Ethics of Care’ provides a positive take on identity politics by arguing that the liberal feminist values of autonomy and equality are grounded in communitarian feminist ethics. A preoccupation with relationships, with being in connection with others, provides the basis for a communitarian theory that privileges the collective – woman as subject – over the individual. Chris Weedon’s ‘Constructing the Muslim

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Editor’s Introduction

Other’ ‘revisits’ Said’s analysis of the politics of representation of Islam by the West, examining how the British press portrays Islamic alterity in the wake of the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks. She argues that the media camouflage a wide panoply of social exclusions under the signifier ‘Muslim’, which preferentially connotes ‘political ideology’ and ‘religious difference’ to the detriment of ‘much more politically significant social issues’. David Moscowitz’s ‘Confronting Whiteness’, in turn, explores the extent to which the rhetorical invention and cultural production offered by performances of ‘postassimilatory Jewish heroism’ can facilitate the process of ‘cultural recovery’ and the repudiation of ‘dominant ideology’. Performance is thus depicted as ‘resistive’ in that it helps ‘mitigate’ the effects of Althusserian interpellation on the ‘policing’ of cultural identity. In the past, performative techniques were used by Jews to assimilate into the American way of life, just as in the present such techniques often serve the purpose of negotiating a move away from that very assimilation. Visual culture and its relation to cultural politics is the theme that inspires the next three essays. Iconic codes of perception are, according to Stuart Hall, more susceptible to being ‘read as natural’ due to being ‘less arbitrary than a linguistic sign’: where the link between a linguistic signifier and its signified is purely conceptual, an iconic signifier resembles the thing represented. The ideological value of visual culture thus appears as ‘strongly fixed’. However, iconic signifiers acquire further ideological connotations by intersecting with ‘the deep semantic codes’ inherent in a particular culture (Hall, 1996: 132-3). In ‘“Our disgust will make us stronger”: UK Press Representations of PoW’s in the 2003 Iraq War’, Katy Parry analyses the dominant framing of news photography, arguing that its symbolic role transcends the objective of keeping readers informed on any particular conflict. The fact that a ‘recognisable template’ is applied to war images confirms their symbolic use for ideological purposes, namely the reinforcement of ‘moral and political justifications for war’. Frank Möller also examines the social framing of media images on international relations, in the article ‘Public Frames: Security, Persuasion, and the Visual Construction of the International’. Claiming that images are used to either legitimate or criticise politics, he defends that the discipline of International Relations should pay more attention to its own intersections with visual cultural and pictorial memory. In Ana Mendes’ ‘Heritage Revisited: The Cultural Politics of Heritage in Goodness Gracious Me’, the focus on visual culture is displaced from the stage of international conflicts to that of British show biz. By charting the disruption of heritage work through the narrative strategies patent in the British sitcom Goodness Gracious Me, the article attempts to explore how

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this series hybridises stereotypes of British Asians, appealing both to a minority British Asian audience as well as to a mainstream one. Mendes evaluates the extent to which the ‘trans-ethnical’ approach to cultural difference effectively challenges ‘nostalgic screen narratives with empowered representation’. Technology and its relation to disciplinary control is the vector that orients the next two essays. Having provoked changes in the way man relates both to himself as well as to the surrounding world, technology has not only altered man’s faculties of perception but his very capacity for control over the immediate environment. The impact of media as ‘the extensions of man’ (McLuhan, 1999) may serve as the basis for an attempt to redefine the contemporary human condition. In ‘“It’s For You”: The Cellular Phone as Disciplinary Technology’, Joseph Tighe analyses the effects of the ubiquity of the mobile phone on subject constitution. Transcending the limits of space and time, the cell phone allows for ‘perpetual contact’ and permanent ‘accountability’. As such, the disciplinary reach of technology makes it increasingly difficult to draw a strict boundary between public and private space. José Miranda’s ‘The End of Distance: The Emergence of Telematic Culture’ charts a genealogy of the redefinition of distance and proximity that has been brought about by telematic culture. He argues that while in medieval times the real was structured in relation to that which was distant yet omnipresent – God – in actuality contemporary teletechnologies organise the real on the basis of a reduction of distance and a prevalence of absolute proximity. Positioned at the end of the volume due to exemplifying the intersections of the diverse vectors that allow cultural studies to reflect on its own practice today, Howard Caygill’s article, ‘Mnemosyne and the Arcades: Warburg and Benjamin’s Legacy’, draws attention to the ‘vulnerability’ of theory in this field of research. Caygill attempts to recuperate the Germanic tradition of cultural science – Kulturwissenshaft –, which was lost with the rise of National-Socialism, by situating Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin’s work within that very legacy. In keeping with the objective that ‘cultural analysis of whatever epoch reflect on its location within modernity’, Warburg and Benjamin ultimately point, in a Weberian move, to the intersections between ‘religion, politics, and economics’ as expressing themselves through the commercial culture of everyday life. Modernity thus appears to be deprived of Enlightenment secularism and invested by the ubiquity of divine presence, haunted by ‘sacrificial’ and ‘self-destructive’ manifestations of energy that preside over the conversion of Christianity into capitalism.

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Probing the field of possible experience in ‘actuality’ implies analysing the specificity of the present in light of the legacy of modernity. Caygill’s essay shows that the vectors along which I have chosen to organise the articles here collected, namely those of identity politics, visual culture, and technology, consist not in delimited ‘camps’ but rather in axes that intersect with each other at each instance. The general aim of the book is to indicate new perspectives for the exercise of cultural criticism on the basis of the major issues that confront us today, rather than articulate any canonical viewpoint on traditional cultural studies. In this sense, this body of work is hybrid in that it is preoccupied with accommodating the centrifugal tendencies of postmodern deconstruction, whilst maintaining roots in modern criticism.

Bibliography Bauman, Zygmunt (1996) ‘On Communitarians and Human Freedom: Or, How to Square the Circle’, Theory, Culture and Society Vol. 13(2): 7990. Beck, Ulrich (2000 [1992]) ‘On the Logic of Wealth Distribution and Risk Distribution’, in Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter. London and New Delhi: Sage, pp. 19-50. Foucault, Michel (1984) ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucualt Reader, trans. Catherine Porter. London: Penguin, pp. 32-50. Gilroy, Paul (2007) ‘Cultura e Multicultura na Era de Rendição’, in Emílio Rui Vilar (ed.) O Estado do Mundo, trans. Maria João Cotter et al.. Lisbon: Edições Tinta-da-China, pp. 161-89. —. (2004) Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. —. (2000) Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London: The Penguin Press. Hall, Stuart (1996 [1980]) ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Stuart Hall et al. (eds.) Culture, Media, Language. London: Routledge, pp. 128-38. —. (1992) ‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’, in Larry Grossberg et al. (eds.) Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 27786. Kant, Immanuel (1996 [1784]) ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, in Lawrence Cahoone (ed.) From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 51-7.

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Lash, Scott (1996) ‘Tradition and the Limits of Difference’, in Paul Heelas et al. (eds.) Detraditionalisation. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 250-74. McLuhan, Marshall (1999 [1964]) ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Soper, Kate (1990) Troubled Pleasures: Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism. London: Verso.

IDENTITY POLITICS AND THE ATTACK ON KNOWLEDGE1 DAPHNE PATAI, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST

The use of group identity to push forward political claims for the benefit of all those claiming a particular identity, is, obviously, an entirely legitimate thing to do when it aims at acquiring full political and civil rights that have been denied to individuals because of their perceived or ascribed identity. When, for example, women are denied the vote because they are women, protesting this injustice as women is an appropriate response. Similarly when a white-dominated society legally discriminates against blacks because they are black, it makes sense for people to protest against this as members of a group. However, it’s important to note that something other than naming a group and its suffering is needed for identity politics to work – and that is some strategy by means of which to convince non-group members (who may hold all or most of the power) of the wrongness of the deprivation or discrimination suffered by particular groups. But in our time, identity politics has moved well beyond the arena of gaining rights that have previously been denied. It is now a game constantly played, not least in educational settings. In this essay, I want to address in particular the role of identity politics in education and describe what happens when identity politics is applied to knowledge. My argument here will be that the way in which identity politics is enacted in the academy constitutes an attack on knowledge, an attack that ought to be rejected.

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This paper is adapted from two recent essays of mine, ‘Speaking as a Human …’, in The Liberal # 6 (London, September/October 2005), and ‘Feminist Pedagogy Reconsidered’, in Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Practice, edited by Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber (Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage Publications, 2006), pp. 689-704.

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Identity Politics and the Attack on Knowledge

A currently significant form of identity politics in education can be summarised as: ‘Do you have to be one to teach it?’.2 This dilemma has beset higher education, especially in the humanities and social sciences, for some years now, most intensely in ‘identity’ programmes. Aspiring to be a human being learning about other human beings and the world we all live in is simply no longer on the agenda. Instead, we must all declare – with pride or shame – our identities, for it is assumed that there is a direct relationship between our personal identity and our intellectual work (which, moreover, has been redefined as inherently political). Between these two forces – identity on the one hand, and the conscious politicisation of education on the other – academic life has changed profoundly in North America (and I’ll confine my comments to that geographic area, though I am aware, of course, that these issues occur as well in many other parts of the world, where we can see them culminate in hatred and violence). I want to focus now primarily on the role of identity politics in academic feminism. Having just come out of yet another debate on a women’s studies e-mail list, on the subject of ‘teaching and politicisation’, I am more convinced than ever of the inherent flaws of a feminist pedagogy profoundly rooted – as it explicitly is these days – in identity politics. Why? Because matters of personal identity have a way of driving out reason while inflaming passions. Identity politics in the academic world has produced endless blame cast at the contaminated identity of formerly dominant groups, and genuflection and downright grovelling before those with a claim to being oppressed. This is matched, not surprisingly, by a tireless attempt to ferret out some oppressed identity of one’s own, perhaps to compensate for one’s own ‘complicity’ – the self-criticism is frequently heard in academic circles – with power. 2

Teaching What You’re Not: Identity Politics in Higher Education (1996), explores these issues in terms primarily of what the editor, Katherine Mayberry, calls ‘credibility’. Mayberry’s definition of identity politics is: ‘the negotiation of and for power derived from minority group affiliation’ (1996: 2). She also affirms that identity must not be endlessly ‘problematised’, since to do so makes it irrelevant (1996: 17). Race, sexual preference, and gender seem to be the identity markers this volume is most committed to respecting. Women’s Studies programmes, by contrast, increasingly use terminology relating to the ‘integrated analysis’ of various identities – though this analysis seems to exist more in the naming than in actuality, and the range of identities covered has a way of expanding. But in the present essay, I am more concerned with the effects on knowledge of identity politics, rather than the issue of classroom dynamics and expertise (or credibility).

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These days, an identity as a member of an oppressed group is used as both a bludgeon and a badge: a badge to be relentlessly displayed if you’ve got it; a bludgeon against those with identities more privileged than your own. But no one can win at the game of identity politics, for the simple reason that we are all vulnerable in our identity, to some degree or other. No one has an unassailable identity. Furthermore, as Jenny Bourne argued years ago when identity politics was on the upswing, we are neither right nor wrong because of ‘who we are’, or what our ancestors did or did not do, but rather because of ‘what we do’. Unfortunately, it is not Bourne’s vision that has won out in academe (or perhaps anywhere else). For feminists by and large continue to stake out the high ground of victimisation, utilising scare statistics – many of our students really believe that ‘one in every two women in America will be raped in her lifetime’ – as well as hyperbolic and even fraudulent characterisations of male dominance and female oppression. Despite the ever-expanding acquisition of rights and even privileges for women, feminists in the English-speaking world insist on their fragile and demeaned status. And, in fact, this is understandable as a political tactic. For what happens when one writes or speaks ‘as’ a member of this or that identity group? The immediate claim, obviously, is to the possession of an authority and credibility that others should not challenge. When I speak as a woman, men had better shut up. When I speak as a heterosexual woman, lesbian women can trump me, but if they’re white, they in turn can be trumped by non-white women, lesbian or not. No one has actually articulated the proper rankings of oppressed identities. They seem to shift, responding to the necessities of particular settings and situations. (Noretta Koertge and I, in our book Professing Feminism, referred to this as the ‘oppression sweepstakes’.) What academic has not had the experience, in the past few decades, of being denounced or lionised for identity reasons? We’re all keeping track these days of who we are. And this leads to selfidentifications such as one I recall from a feminist anthology, an autobiographical blurb that read: ‘I am a white lesbian mother of a biracial handicapped child.’ Nearly all bases covered; such a writer’s work, presumably, is not to be questioned. Though, on second thought, perhaps she could be attacked on the basis of class. The role of such statements in political and civil discourse generally I will leave to others to appraise. But it is my conviction that this is no way to conduct academic life or teaching, and that identity politics has a

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pernicious effect on education. Much has been written about the resurgent descent into tribalism, and the present historical moment is hardly one in which we can lightly ignore this issue. Why, then, does identity politics continue to have such a profound hold on academic institutions? Perhaps it’s partly a kind of cognitive economy. We sort and categorise all the time. How else could we deal with a confusing and complex reality? But the categories behind that sorting can and do change. Are we better off staffing our faculties with a one-of-each approach? I doubt it. Expertise is acquired through experience, certainly, and our personal identities have some bearing on our experience, but – and this is a crucial point – they are not in themselves qualifications. In arguments about affirmative action, the usual line one hears from academic supporters of it is that there’s nothing wrong with using it to favour minorities, because in the past ‘white men’ had the monopoly and this too was a form of affirmative action. But the fact is that those white men were in fierce competition with one another. If there’s a shortage (as there is) of qualified minority men and women to match their percentage among the population at large, there’ll be an absence of competition, and the few available people will be much sought after, regardless of their qualifications. What, then, will be the effect on colleagues and students? What happens as others note their relative lack of qualifications and feel obliged to say nothing for fear of being labelled racist or sexist or Eurocentric? Does this help decrease actual discrimination? I doubt it. And so the process of academic hiring and promotion becomes more and more degraded, and the few challengers who emerge can be readily dismissed as reactionaries defending their own ‘privilege’. Discussions uncontaminated by the extortion implicit in identity politics fall by the wayside. Consider the case that occurred in January 2005 of Harvard president Lawrence Summers. At a conference on diversifying the science and engineering workforce, Summers had the audacity to wonder if innate differences might be one reason why fewer women than men pursue careers in science and maths. This conjecture was so distressing to one science professor in the audience that – so she later recounted – she had to flee the room before vomiting or blacking out. And who was this woman? She was biology professor Nancy Hopkins, of MIT, who one hopes can keep a cooler head in the lab. In the late 1990s, Hopkins had complained about discrimination against women scientists at her own university. MIT promptly responded to this complaint by forming a committee to

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investigate the charges – with Hopkins herself chosen to chair it. When the committee’s ensuing report confirmed her accusations, the university confessed to institutionalised gender discrimination against its female scientists and made lavish amends. The Dean of the School of Science described the study as ‘data-driven’ – yet refused to release the data. The Dean moved on to the presidency of the University of Toronto, while Hopkins – well acquainted with the identity game – half a dozen years on preferred to play it again, rather than take a more cognitive approach to conjectures she didn’t like to hear. What is most telling about the Harvard episode is the power of feminists to force not only an apology from Summers but a pledge of $50 million to make the Harvard faculty more ‘diverse’. The messiness of this identity game should point to the need for it to be done away with altogether. Yet few people have dared even to imagine such an outcome. One who has is philosophy professor Louis Marinoff who, under the pseudonym Lou Tafler, published a novel, Fair New World (1994), designed to offend all possible identities. Drawing on Huxley, Orwell and Plato, Tafler crafted a series of deliciously parodic scenarios. Set in 2084, the novel details the workings of two societies: Masculinist Bruteland, and its opposite, the feminist society of Feminania, each as obviously absurd as the other, and each with its own distorted language designed to suit its politics. Against these extremes, Tafler sets the society called Melior, committed to principles of equality and a way of life governed by reason. Hiring procedures in Melior – Tafler describes the application and interview process in a university philosophy department – are subject to an Employment Quality Act, which disguises the candidate’s personal identity and makes discrimination impossible. No personal information unrelated to job qualification is allowed. Instead, the committee examines data necessary for selecting the most qualified candidate for the department’s needs. The interview, conducted at a distance via a VIDAT (a Voice Interpreter, Digitiser and Transmitter), prevents gender, race, appearance, or any other personal characteristic not relevant to the job, from having any influence on the hiring process. Finally, the search is completed and the chosen candidate accepts the job: ‘Only then did the committee learn that it had engaged an albino bulimic bisexual genetically-challenged troll of corpuscularity and whiteness, with twelve toes and apparently limitless dandruff. But the committee was

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Identity Politics and the Attack on Knowledge delighted, for it had hired the best-qualified philosopher it could find to suit its needs, which lay primarily in metaphysics and epistemology.’ (1994: 167)

When I first read this novel, I found it a little tougher on feminist idiocies than on masculinist ones. But over the years it has come to seem justified for Tafler to have erred in that direction. It is simply not the case that a denizen of Bruteland would be hired today in an academic setting, while it is obvious that aspiring inhabitants of Feminania are pushing their claims as never before. Melior’s employment proceedings are nowhere on the horizon, and further off today even than they were forty years ago, as revealed by my university’s recent hiring in the social sciences of a lesbian professor (whose supporters also acknowledged that she wasn’t the best candidate for the job), on the grounds that ‘our students need a lesbian teacher’. And in language and literature departments, there has been a steady increase of faculty members who ‘are what they teach’ in quite specific ways, a policy that will backfire one of these days. Today, as I and others have documented at great length, many feminist educators don’t shrink from making tendentious and often ill-supported arguments about science and biology, which they pass on to uninformed students. If this can occur in scientific fields, it should be obvious how vulnerable other fields are to feminist endeavours to reshape education. It should be – but isn’t – needless to say that the integrity of education is always in danger when politics or ideology supersede rational inquiry and the careful consideration of evidence. Twentieth-century history has demonstrated this peril in abundance, and it is distressing that academic feminists have not taken these cautionary instances to heart. Still, one may ask: Does it really matter that virtually all feminist teachers believe teaching to be invariably political? That they hold fairness and claims of objectivity in research to be mere illusions, if not outright frauds? I answer: Yes, definitely it matters, because teachers who hold these beliefs are left incapable of even attempting to recognise their own biases, let alone transcend them. Worse, they are programmatically committed to propagating their biases, which is exactly what they do in the ‘feminist classroom’. Thus Women’s Studies teachers openly declare their objective to make students confront their ‘privilege’ or recognise the

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‘institutional’ causes of their unprivileged status.3 And, in the name of multi- or interdisciplinarity, they pass on to their students all manner of research the merits of which they (the faculty) are not able to evaluate but which is accepted or rejected on political grounds. In such classes, students rarely encounter criticisms of feminist-inspired work, nor are they encouraged to develop the capacity of independent judgement and appraisal that might challenge the feminist presuppositions on which their courses rest.4 Women’s Studies prides itself on constantly challenging Western society – but the one thing it shrinks from challenging is its own pet ideas. So much so that one well-known feminist scholar actually suggested expanding anti-harassment politics to include what she labelled ‘anti-feminist intellectual harassment’ – which, in her description, basically meant any criticism made of women or feminist ideas. A recent report by the National Women’s Studies Association, entitled Women’s Studies Program Administrators’ Handbook,5 actually has an article on ‘Responding to Right-Wing Attacks on Women’s Studies Programmes’ in which they name an organisation (with which I’m involved) whose sole function is to defend First Amendment rights on campus. That is, it defends the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, and freedom of religion. To defend free speech, in the United States these days, is to be labelled ‘Right Wing’. 3

These examples can be found on the WMST-List’s discussion of ‘poverty activities’ in the classroom. As one professor put it: ‘The beauty of the “Life Happens” exercise is that privileged students can see how they’ve benefited from their privilege and those who have struggled with these issues can get beyond the self-blame/self-doubt instilled in them by the individualistic notion of the “American Dream”. When students are shown how institutional forces control more of their life circumstances than often their own efforts, it is very freeing for them – I’ve also seen this exercise promote a lot of social activism from students’ (J. Hatten to WMST-List, August 24 2005). 4 For an interesting example of a Women’s Studies reader that does register a bit of criticism of the field, see Sheila Ruth’s Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women’s Studies (1998). Ruth includes my essay ‘What’s Wrong with Women’s Studies?’ and positions it between one by Susan Faludi about ‘pod feminists’ and ‘pseudofeminists’ and one by Suzanne L. Cataldi dismissing charges of ‘male bashing’ in Women’s Studies. Even so, she does not trust students to draw their own conclusions: Her introductory comments to my essay alert students that my critiques ‘fit within the genre delineated in the previous selection by Susan Faludi’. By contrast, her agreement with Faludi and Cataldi is evident in the phrasing of her introductions to their essays. 5 Available at: http://www.nwsa.org/PAD/downloads/WSHandbook2006.pdf

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Identity Politics and the Attack on Knowledge

Why? Because identity politics has created a reality in which who says what to whom counts more than what is said – thus one wants to protect the speech of some while suppressing the speech of others. At my own university, a high level administrator a few years ago explained that the speech code the university was at that time embracing aimed at protecting the right to free speech of historically oppressed groups but not of the historically powerful groups: in other words, blacks could call whites names, but not the reverse (Patai and Koertge, 2003).6 As scholars who formerly devoted years to the advancement of feminism in the academy express their dissatisfaction with where politicised teaching and the identity politics that is an essential component of it have taken us, they too can expect to be vilified by the feminist academics still defending their turf. Though what such scholars really want is to see research and teaching liberated from feminism’s (and other identity groups’) political advocacy, deviation from the feminist educational agenda is enough to have one’s writing dismissed out of hand and one’s character impugned. Despite this predictable response, some well-known senior scholars closely associated with feminism in the academy have in recent years felt moved to object to the politicising of education. In the Summer 2000 issue of Signs, devoted to dozens of essays on feminism and the academy, Elaine Marks, a widely-recognised feminist critic (who until her death in late 2001 was Germaine Brée Professor of French and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison), complained that she was beginning to feel ‘isolated in Women’s Studies’, where she had come to be perceived as ‘a closet conservative’. Why? Because she deplored the prevalence of identity politics in literature courses and now agreed with Harold Bloom who wrote that ‘to read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgement, to read at all’. Marks confessed that she herself used to have politically correct responses, the kind that seek, in any work of literature, traces of the dreaded -isms (sexism, racism, etc.). But she was no longer satisfied with such approaches. Hence her decision to air in public some of what she considered to be ‘feminism’s perverse effects’ in the academy. ‘It is no simple matter,’ Marks concluded, ‘… to criticise certain tendencies in Cultural Studies or Women’s Studies or Ethnic Studies 6

See Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies (2003), for a discussion of this episode.

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without being accused of participating in a conservative political agenda’ (2001: 1163). And she is right. In the topsy-turvy world of academe, to call for an education not bound to a political agenda is tantamount to being ‘conservative’. Moreover, the fact that ‘conservative’ has become a label of instant dismissal in academe exemplifies the ideological rigidity that now disfigures the one arena that was supposed to fearlessly and openly explore ideas and knowledge claims on their own merits. The philosopher Susan Haack is one critic whose work should be indispensable reading for every feminist who aspires to scholarly integrity. Her 1998 book Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays is filled with challenges to the notion that a ‘feminist’ perspective strengthens intellectual work, the sorts of challenges routinely ignored in Women’s Studies classrooms. To Haack, ‘the politicisation of inquiry … whether in the interests of good political values or bad, is always epistemologically unsound’ (1998: 119).7 Haack considers that ‘[t]he rubric “feminist epistemology” is incongruous on its face, in somewhat the way of, say, “Republican epistemology”’ (1998: 124).8 She explains: ‘The profusion of incompatible themes proposed as “feminist epistemology” itself speaks against the ideas of a distinctively female cognitive style. But even if there were such a thing, the case for feminist epistemology would require further argument to show that women’s “ways of knowing” … represent better procedures of inquiry or subtler standards of justification than the male. And, sure enough, we are told that insights into the theory of knowledge are available to women which are not available, or not easily available, to men.’ (1998: 126)

Dismissing ‘the egregious assumption that one thinks with one’s skin or one’s sex organs’, Haack in another essay stresses that ‘this form of argument, when applied to the concepts of evidence, truth, etc., is not only fallacious; it is also pragmatically self-undermining … For if there were no genuine inquiry, no objective evidence, we couldn’t know what theories are such that their being accepted would conduce to women’s interests, nor what women’s interests are.’ (1998: 118)

7

For an example of work that incorporates critiques of science without falling prey to what she calls the ‘New Cynicism’, see Haack’s recent book Defending Science – Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (2003). 8 See also Noretta Koertge’s essay, ‘Critical Perspectives on Feminist Epistemology’, in Hesse-Biber’s Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Practice.

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In recent years, I have not seen any evidence that Women’s Studies teachers have modified their antagonism towards claims to positive knowledge and to scientific reasoning in general.9 Not surprisingly, they are now finding themselves in some company they may not choose to keep. As ‘creation science’, recast these days as ‘intelligent design’, extends its reach and threatens the teaching of basic science (reduced to a competing ideology) in the United States, its defenders make comments about the status of evolution – that it is ‘just a theory’, for example, though one that claims for itself a privileged status – which are remarkably similar to the feminist depreciation of science.10 Like creationists, many feminists have shown contempt for evidence – when it did not support their preconceptions. They may misunderstand science (perhaps intentionally), denounce its procedures, and ignore its commitment to selfcorrection – all in order to be able to characterise it as ideology, and not as honest a one as their own feminist ideology which acknowledges its political interests. But the rejection of the ideals of objective knowledge (however imperfectly attainable), and the deployment of the admitted limitations of knowledge as a weapon against past knowledge, to be dismissed as the product of patriarchal dead white men, along with the disdain for standards of evidence and logic, gain feminists only an illusory victory. It 9

In July 2005, in response to negative comments made on the WMST-List to a query of mine regarding ‘Darwinian feminism’, I received an interesting private message from a student of bioinformatics in Oregon, who had encountered hostility in Women’s Studies students to any discussion of evolution: ‘As a biologist/computer scientist-in-training I am deeply concerned by the near total absence of women in my classes. In fact, the more rigour required the fewer women are interested in the courses. To wit, in some of the more ‘woodsy’ biology courses I’ve taken there was, what seemed to me, a reasonable representation of women. In my calculus, programming, and the more mathematical of my biology courses (like population genetics) there are far fewer women. The issue concerns me because I believe that, without realising it, some feminists are actively discouraging women from studying scientific subjects and then encouraging young women (I am nearly forty, returning to school) to hold forth on subjects that they know nothing about – or in many cases would be better off if they didn’t know anything about the subject than the wild inaccuracies they hold now.’ 10 See, for example, PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, ‘Evolution Debate’, March 28, 2005. For a thorough analysis of the flaws of the controversy surrounding the teaching of ‘intelligent design’, which has implications for the feminist attack on ‘positive’ knowledge generally, see Jerry Coyne, ‘The Faith That Dare Not Speak its Name’, The New Republic, August 22 2005.

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may leave them free to defend and promote their agenda, but it also renders them vulnerable to ignorant or politically-motivated calumnies directed against them. For how will feminists respond when, with the next cultural turn, we are once again told that the blood of menstruating women causes milk to curdle? Aren’t standards of evidence and objective investigation crucial to all women (to all people) as they attempt to combat prejudice and ignorance, regardless of who displays it? I have not seen Women’s Studies teachers rush to protect academic freedom and uninhibited class discussion for those whose views contradict their own. Quite the contrary, as I have documented at length (Patai, 1998). As many commentators have observed, feminism itself could not even have got started without embracing claims resting on objective conditions and drawing on supposedly unbiased research said to accurately assess the situation of women vis-à-vis men. In light of feminism’s path, therefore, the present assertions of feminist pedagogy seem not only tendentious, but disingenuous. The feminist promotion of subjectivity, of ‘standpoint epistemology’ and of the paradigm that ‘everything is political’ is, thus, at best situational. It hardly justifies the pedagogy that has grown up around it. Of course Women’s Studies is not alone in promoting these habits. Postmodernist fashions have made a variety of vulnerable intellectual and pedagogical approaches acceptable and widely used. And this is the case even among feminist critics of postmodernism who while decrying its alienating and pretentious vocabulary as well as its distance from everyday political struggles, nonetheless adopt its practices whenever they prove convenient. Postmodernism’s indiscriminate rejection of significant distinctions, its obsession with power, and its habit of dogmatic assertion (the very thing, ironically, that postmodernism claims to ‘interrogate’) have influenced feminist academics’ own critiques, though of course this at times contravenes their activist agenda, which would be meaningless without some firm convictions about the world and our ability to communicate reliably knowledge about it. What all this means in practice is that there prevails an opportunism at the heart of feminist pedagogy today. To me, the evidence for this conclusion is utterly convincing. I also believe, however, that the many failures of this state of affairs are becoming more and more evident. Thus, feminist pedagogy, if it wants to have any credibility outside its own clique-like

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circles, will have to begin to hold itself to a higher standard. Only professors dedicated more to their teaching than to their politics – and able to tell the difference – provide us with reason for hope. To commit oneself to fostering the intellectual development of one’s students is no small or unworthy task. And, contrary to what many feminists believe, this task requires something other than political advocacy based upon identity. There are vital distinctions to be drawn between informed and conscientious teaching and attempting to persuade students to sign on to a particular political vision replete with identity politics. The important role of educators is precisely not to deny but to embrace these distinctions, to observe them, indeed to cherish them.

Bibliography Coyne, Jerry (2005) ‘The Faith That Dare Not Speak its Name’, The New Republic, August 22, pp. 21-33. Haack, Susan (2003) Defending Science – Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism. Amherst, NY.: Prometheus Books. —. (1998) ‘Science as Social? – Yes and No’, in Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 104-22. —. (1998) ‘Knowledge and Propaganda: Reflections of an Old Feminist’, in Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 123-36. Koertge, Noretta (2006) ‘Critical Perspectives on Feminist Epistemology’, in Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber (ed.) Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage Publications, pp. 55366. Marks, Elaine (2001) ‘Feminism’s Perverse Effects’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25, no. 4 (Summer), pp. 1162-6. Mayberry, Katherine J. (ed.) (1996) Teaching What You’re Not: Identity Politics in Higher Education. New York: New York University Press. Patai, Daphne et al. (2003) Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies. New York: Lexington Books. Patai, Daphne (1998) Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Ruth, Sheila (ed.) (1998) Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women’s Studies. London: Mayfield. Tafler, Lou (1994) Fair New World. Vancouver: Backlash Books.

FEMINIST COMMUNITARIANISM: RECUPERATING AN ETHICS OF CARE CLAUDIA ALVARES, LUSOFONA UNIVERSITY

I. Introduction Inspired by ethics, feminist writing grapples with issues that relate to the improvement of human relationships and respect for alterity, seeking to avoid the totalising logic that Adorno considered to distinguish the dialectic of the Enlightenment. Feminist ethics thus implies the will to combat assimilation of alterity by an identity logic that would annul ‘difference and singularity’ (Cornell, 1995: 78), pointing to ways of implementing the Aristotelian ‘good life’ in the form of a non-violent relationship with the Other. A preoccupation with relationships, with being in connection with others, provides the basis for a communitarian theory that privileges the collective – woman as subject – over the individual. However, feminist ethics is also disputed as an area inherent in liberal feminism, sponsoring the values of autonomy, equality, and individual rights as the foundation for a just society. From a liberal perspective, communitarian feminist ethics would draw close to the imposition of morality, that is, a system regulating ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ forms of behaviour. The reason for this parallelism between communitarianism and morality resides in Kantian contractarianism, which holds the social contract to obligate ‘every lawmaker to frame his laws so that they might have come from the united will of an entire people’ (Kant, in Hampton, 2005: 286). Echoing the Kantian dictum according to which one ought to act only on that maxim which could at the same time be willed as universal law, the ‘practical defence of public reason’ (Cornell, 1995: 79) thus risks, from a liberal perspective, annihilating the very right to freedom of free will. This chapter defends a communitarian approach to feminist ethics, arguing that the liberal values of autonomy and equality are grounded in ‘relationship’ within the context of feminist theory. The affirmation of self

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Feminist Communitarianism: Recuperating an Ethics of Care

through independence in the public and private spheres, namely through financial and professional autonomy, as well as the struggle against discrimination in favour of justice are rooted in a desire for recognition by alterity that characterises ‘being in relationship’. Liberal feminism argues that a ‘person’s right to the self-representation of her sexuate being’ ensues from ‘the recognition of us all as free and equal persons’ (Cornell, 2005: 417). Although this right is incompatible with any form of moral imposition by the State or social institutions regarding ‘correct’ forms of behaviour, it nevertheless requires ‘a representational device that postulates all persons as free and equal’ as the basis for a just society (Cornell, 2005: 417). Because certain modes of behaviour appear to contradict the foundations of justice, such a representational device alerts people to the need for change. ‘… these kinds of changes would take time. More important, no one would be legally, let alone violently, forced to change. Supposedly, the fear of feminism has been that it forces people into one sexual model because that is the only way to end male domination. But the imaginary domain insists, on the contrary, that as a matter of right we should not impose any model of sexual life but rather that people should be allowed to craft their own. To give people this freedom does not mean that they have to use it in any particular way.’ (Cornell, 2005: 416)

Understood as a utopian ideal of collective life which attempts to demonstrate the ‘reasonableness’ of living according to that principle, Cornell’s ‘imaginary domain’ seeks to uphold freedom as a supreme value. As such, it draws away from ‘legal definitions’ of femininity, subordinating the existence of any legal regulation of sexual conduct to the recognition of freedom and equality as values distinctive of all persons. It is difficult to accept, however, liberal feminism’s criticism of morality, which distances any utopian ideal of freedom from an imposition of ‘correct’ modes of behaviour on others. In effect, by adopting the principle of freedom as universal law, human beings cease to be free. By placing the law before the spontaneity of relationship, the liberal argument integrates the particular into the impersonal order of the totality. As such, it cannot make space for ethics, comprehended as the particularity of each instance, in opposition to the universal concept of the law (Rose, 1997: 115). The implications are that the liberal viewpoint regulates relationships through the criteria of justice.

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‘I will contend that distributive justice, understood in its deepest sense, is inherent in any relationship that we regard as morally healthy and respectable – particularly in a friendship.’ (Hampton, 2005: 281)

By postulating the necessity to establish a connection between feminism and John Rawls’ theory of justice, liberal feminism allegedly is indebted to Kantian contractarianism. As such, it advocates the concepts of ‘universalisability’ and ‘reversibility’ as an integral part of (moral) judgement.1 ‘The decider is to initially decide from a point of view that ignores his identity (veil of ignorance) under the assumption that decisions are governed by maximising values from a viewpoint of rational egoism in considering each party’s interest.’ (Kohlberg, in Benhabib, 1997b: 160)

Benhabib questions the idea that thinking from the perspective of the other can further the concepts of ‘reciprocity, equality, and fairness’, equated by Rawls with ‘reasoning behind a “veil of ignorance”’ (1992b: 160). In fact, those concepts are allegedly converted into the abstract and decontextualised perspective of the generalised other as opposed to that of a concrete other. Carol Gilligan’s attempt to distinguish between a feminine ‘ethics of care’ and a more masculine ‘ethics of justice’ on the basis of interviews with children and adults regarding issues centred on morality has sparked a great deal of debate between liberal and communitarian feminists. While an ethics of justice is centred on ‘the human being’s right to do as he pleases without interfering with somebody else’s rights’, an ethics of care privileges a sense of responsibility and obligation to oneself and to others (Gilligan, 1997: 148-9). Arguing that women tend to perceive morality in ‘interpersonal’ rather than autonomous terms – a characteristic that leads them to equate goodness with ‘helping and pleasing others’ – Gilligan defends a scale in moral development that would cease to consider individuation and the ideal of justice as corresponding to a higher stage than that of ‘care and sensitivity to the needs of others’. She criticises Lawrence Kohlberg’s description of the development of moral judgement 1

Rather than connoting the absolutism of the categorical imperative, the ‘universalisability’ and ‘reversability’ sponsored by liberal feminism would presumably be guided by the relativism of aesthetic judgement. Rooted in Kant’s ‘enlarged mentality’, aesthetic judgement implies ‘the ability to see things not only from one’s point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present’ (Arendt, 1961: 220-1).

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Feminist Communitarianism: Recuperating an Ethics of Care

for implying that women are ultimately more immature than men, due to their greater preoccupation with ‘responsibility and relationships’ than ‘rights and rules’ (1997: 147). Due to women construing their biographical narratives on the basis of alterations in their ‘understanding and activities of care’, their mode of moral judgement is considered to be more intercontextual than normative. From this viewpoint, an ethics of care allows for the definition of a moral problem by contextualising the ‘motivations’ and ‘history’ of the concrete individual as opposed to a ‘generalised other’ (Benhabib, 1997b: 160). The ethics of justice inherent in liberal feminism is premised on equality and fairness, drawing close to morality in the imposition of a ‘correct’ form of behaviour on all persons. This perspective considers that an ethics of care cannot be ethical, because it is ‘born of self-abnegation rather than self-worth’ (Hampton, 2005: 283). As such, relationships which contain an element of exploitation cannot be just and are therefore unethical. ‘However, by requiring that a policy be one that we could all agree to, the contractarian doesn’t merely ask each of us to insist on our own worth; he also asks us … to recognise and come to terms with the fact that others are just as valuable as ourselves.’ (Hampton, 2005: 291)

If liberal feminism thus appears to distance itself from Hobbesian contractarianism and utilitarianism, according to which human beings cooperate only for instrumental purposes, that is, for furthering their own desires and self-interest, it nevertheless appeals to a Kantian substitutionalist ethics of placing oneself in the place of others. In the process, the other is ‘disembedded’ and ‘disembodied’ from a life narrative that would shed light on her moral understanding (Benhabib, 1997b: 160). Further, by advocating an ethics of justice, liberal feminism reproduces Kohlberg’s highest stage in the scale of moral development that privileges the masculine values of individuation and separation as synonymous with maturity.

II. The Essentialism-Anti-Essentialism Debate Postmodern feminism’s hostility to an ethics of care ensues from its opposition to essentialism. The idea that the propensity towards care and nurturing remains a characteristic distinctive of women is considered a mode of ideologically reproducing socially conditioned gender roles. A solid, coherent definition of gendered identity can only be defined oppositionally against characteristics one lacks. As such, so the argument

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runs, a feminine ethics of care only affirms itself against a masculine ethics of justice. This opposition of complementary terms occurs within a matrix of ‘institutional heterosexuality’ that establishes ‘the limit of gendered possibilities within a … binary gender system’ (Butler, 1999: 30). From this perspective, then, an ethics of care would celebrate feminine difference present in both the ‘body and body experience’, for it is through the latter that maternity, the ‘supreme’ female function of care, occurs. If male sexuality is conflated with genitality, the female maternal function becomes essentialised through the feminine body. Masculine and feminine thus once more complement themselves within a heterosexual grid of oppositionality. Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray have attempted to capture this essentialised femininity through the specificity of an écriture feminine that mirrors the weighty bodily experience of women. Influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, this brand of writing seeks to resist the masculine Symbolic, the realm of the Law of the Father, by expressing the irrationality pervasive of the domain anterior to language. For woman, the acquisition of rational speech inspires terror because it is experienced as a ‘tearing away’ from the fusion with the maternal, which is to say with one’s own sexual identity. Woman’s discourse refuses logic, linearity, and objectivity. By speaking from within history, ‘she makes what she thinks materialise carnally, she conveys meaning with her body’ (Cixous, 1997: 232). That woman ‘involves her story in history’ is precisely the crux of the matter: her discourse cannot be dissociated from experience, both personal and collective. However, Cixous suggests that woman is not at a crossroads between agency and determinism: she cannot oppose social structures that have conditioned her sex, because her bodily experience condemns her to womanhood, to a permanent excess. This excess is visible in the ‘fecundity’, ‘richness’, or ‘plenitude’ of the feminine body, as well as in the ‘waste’, ‘superabundance’, and ‘uselessness’ that characterises feminine writing. ‘The Voice sings from a time before law, before the Symbolic took one’s breath away and reappropriated it into language under its authority of separation. The deepest, the oldest, the loveliest Visitation. Within each woman the first, nameless love is singing.’ (Cixous, 1997: 234)

Woman’s first form of expression is emotional rather than rational. Resisting the phallic power of language, with its demand for separation from the mother, woman seeks to refind the specificity of connection with her sex in the Symbolic through feminine writing. Mother, as metaphor for

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Feminist Communitarianism: Recuperating an Ethics of Care

production and nutrition, signifies creativity and ‘source of goods’: as such, women manage to re-establish their link with the mother in language through a feminine style that mirrors the ebbs and flows of liquid song, the creamy fluidity of ‘white ink’ or milk. However, to form a connection with the mother does not represent a return to the origin, for in the process of writing woman adventures into unknown land, a woman’s territory within language. To relinquish ‘the lost mother/bitter lost’ (Cixous, 1997: 234) enables woman to escape primary narcissism, a primeval stage of fusion between self and mother, and address women in general. However, in each attempt to direct oneself to other women, woman reproduces her first love, that of the mother. The agglutination of women into one single class which an écriture feminine would address is a contentious issue amongst postmodern feminists, who defend that by articulating woman as a ‘coherent and stable subject’, the plurality and diversity distinctive of gender expressions are reified and given a single ‘identity’ (Butler, 1999: 8-9, 32-3). As such, differences between women such as ‘nationality, race, class, age, occupation, sexuality, parenthood status, health, and so on’ would be camouflaged by a celebration of the universal feminine (Soper, 1990: 234).2 By essentialising the female body and the function of maternity, feminine writing is accused of reproducing the ideological matrix of gender relations that has historically reduced woman to the body, marginalising, in the process, a great deal of women who are not mothers. The implications of this reduction are that woman is relegated to silence, to a ‘self-absorption in the feminine’ rather than involving herself in an active and rational critique of patriarchal culture (Soper, 1990: 234). ‘Gratifying though it is to be told that women really are strong, integrated, peace-loving, nurturing and creative beings, this plethora of new virtues is no less essentialist than the old ones, and no less oppressive to all those women who do not want to play the role of Earth Mother’. (Moi, 1997: 247)

2

Pointing to reproduction as inherent in the feminine, the concept of a universal feminine essence is interpreted by feminist geographers as inextricably linked to Western bourgeois cultural values. As such, the idea of ‘home’ as a space reserved for the activities of reproduction, the individualism of the maternal subject isolated in the home, and disinterest in conflicting interpretations of ‘home’ amongst women directly reflect the bourgeois ideal of the private. In this perspective, feminist research emphasising reproduction as a feminine essence erases issues of class and race from its agenda (Rose, 1993a: 126-7).

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In the same vein as the négritude movement, feminine writing aspires to write back against stereotypes by inverting the meaning of those very stereotypes.3 Thus, whilst male patriarchal culture reduced women to bodily functions, placing great emphasis on maternity and an ethics of care, ‘difference’ feminists do the same. However, where such stereotypes were previously connoted with female domesticity and an unjust division of labour that prevented women from expressing themselves and from attaining self-realisation, these very stereotypes come to signify, under an écriture feminine, the emancipation and self-affirmation of women through the experience of their bodily functions. Writing therefore becomes a metaphor for bodily experience, an experience intimately tied to the emotions and to narratives of identity. Feminist politics are rooted precisely in experience: narratives of identity, fuelling powerful emotions, have led women to share common experiences and to organise themselves into collective groups struggling for a ‘common cause’. Claiming that anti-essentialist constructivism may lead to a dispersal of ‘micropolitical units or sub-categorical classifications’ and to a concomitant ‘hyperindividualism’, theorists such as Fuss and Soper warn against the perils of postmodern thought for feminist politics (1997: 257; 1990: 234). Rather than oppose essentialism as signifying an ontologically stable womanhood, Fuss argues for strategically ‘deploying’ or ‘activating’ essentialism in a move that would distance political investment from values inherent in woman towards a positioning of the sign ‘woman’ within the ‘shifting and determinative discursive relations which produced it’ (1997: 257). This perspective resembles Kristeva’s attempt to consider femininity as a ‘position’ rather than as a definable essence. Pointing to femininity as construed marginally to the patriarchal symbolic order, Kristeva defines the feminine relationally to the multifariously existing modes of patriarchy. The result is that femininity becomes less rigidly tied to any essentialist signified, surpassing, in the process, its opposition to masculinity due to the suggestion that ‘men can also be constructed as marginal to the symbolic order’, a marginality that reveals itself in male artists of the avant-garde 3

Négritude, the intellectual movement composed of black intellectuals who attempted to voice universal Negro values, often sought recourse in ‘signifying tropes’, repeating and reversing white stereotypes of blackness to write back at whiteness: ‘Signifyin(g) is a uniquely black rhetorical concept, entirely textual or linguistic, by which a second statement or figure repeats, or tropes, or reverses the first […] The very concept of Signifyin(g) can exist only in the realm of the intertextual relation’ (Gates, 1989: 49).

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such as Joyce, Céline, Artaud, Mallarmé and Lautréamont (Moi, 1997: 248). ‘Women seen as the limit of the symbolic order will in other words share in the disconcerting properties of all frontiers: they will be neither inside nor outside, neither known nor unknown. It is this position which has enabled male culture sometimes to vilify women as representing darkness and chaos, to view them as Lilith or the Whore of Babylon, and sometimes to elevate them as the representatives of a higher and purer nature, to venerate them as Virgins and Mothers of God. In the first instance the borderline is seen as part of the chaotic wilderness outside, and in the second it is seen as an inherent part of the inside: the part which protects and shields the symbolic order from the imaginary chaos.’ (Moi, 1997: 248)

Without a room of their own in the patriarchal order of the symbolic, women are relegated to the frontier that demarcates rationality from irrationality, purity from contamination, nationality from foreignness. In their maternal capacity, women represent the ‘inside’ of culture’, the perpetuators of a selective tradition that is passed down from generation to generation; however, beyond the legacy of cultural identity they bequeath, women have been historically prevented from affirming themselves autonomously. Those who risk crossing the frontier, denying the social roles that they have been destined to accomplish, are often relegated to the hinterland of gender. Territory, as ‘privileged place’, reveals itself as one’s native territory, inhabited by the Cartesian subject, the ergo sum which defines itself through the delimitation of its frontiers. This is the space where ‘the subject becomes one – both singular and whole’ (Kamuf, in Rose, 1993b: 149). Denied a ‘privileged place’, woman has consisted in a fissured signifier, excessive to any representation as a non-fragmented, unitary subject. It is no wonder, then, that feminine writing attempts to endow women with precisely that which they lack: a room of their own, a purely feminine territory that would allow woman to affirm herself in the symbolic order as a unitary subject. ‘... in the history of culture – in philosophy, theology, even linguistics – much is said about I and you and very little about he or she. With the result that we are no longer sure who I and you are in a concrete situation, since I and you are always sexed and the loss of this dimension obscures the identity of who is speaking and of the person to whom the message is addressed.’ (Irigaray, 1997: 313)

Seeking strategic recourse in essentialism would thus imply contextualising the subject experientially within the shifting discourses of gender that have

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produced a certain I and you. However shifting the discourses constitutive of femininity may be, due to their being defined relationally to the diverse forms of patriarchy that exist, they nevertheless are characterised by a commonality of experience related to the pre-eminence of an ethics of care that grounds moral development in relationships as well as in a sense of responsibility and obligation to others. By seeking to implode a coherent definition of gendered identity, postmodern feminism is excessively preoccupied with defending freedom as a precondition for the equality of different gendered possibilities. In the process, it discards concrete, historicised experience for an abstract, ‘groundless’, equality that manifests itself in an ethics of justice that, while privileging ‘rights and rules’, cannot be dissociated from morality due to the imposition of ‘correct’ behavioural norms on all persons.

III. Liberal and Postmodern Convergences Liberal and postmodern feminisms are usually depicted as differing substantially from each other, because they adhere to distinct concepts of the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate. Where liberal feminism presupposes the right of all women to autonomy and equality, postmodern feminism seeks to deconstruct the very term ‘woman’ on the grounds of its tendency to subordinate other gendered possibilities to an ‘identity logic’. ‘… What happens when women try to live according to an image that makes them deny their minds? What happens when women grow up in an image that makes them deny the reality of the changing world?’ (Friedan, 1963: 38)

The capacity of women to surpass a state of ‘self-incurred immaturity’ (Kant, 1996: 51), a condition in which one is unable to think for oneself without resorting to the guidance of authority, is emphasised by liberal feminism. Operating within the Enlightenment tradition, this current of feminist thought attempts to emancipate women through the use of their ‘own understanding’ (Kant, 1996: 51). Friedan’s questions may be contextualised within this conceptual framework, which presumes rational development to consist in humanity’s highest goal. Liberal theory ultimately attributes the State with responsibility for securing an equality of opportunities that allows all citizens to realise their potential for autonomous growth and maturity (Steeves, 1995: 392). However, despite liberal feminism’s claims to universalism, that is, to speak on the behalf of all women, it is inwardly riven by tension between class and race factors. bell hooks, for example, states that working-class women were suspicious

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of the feminist movement from its onset, due to recognising the limits inherent in the definition of ‘feminism’. For hooks, difficulty in reaching consensus on this term facilitates a comfortable, ‘upper middle-class’ liberal feminist hegemony, centred on romantic issues of freedom and equality (1997: 23-4). Postmodern feminism insurges itself against the universalist thrust of liberal feminism, arguing that any totalising concepts only succeed in ‘producing new and further exclusions’ (Butler, 1995: 40). As such, universalism becomes the locus of dispute and infinite ‘resignification’ for a postmodern politics that seeks to remain open to the ‘permanently contingent’ (Butler, 1995: 41). Avoiding closure of fissures through unceasing contestation, Butler appears to support Adorno’s negative dialectics, the attempt to prevent non-identity from being permanently assimilated by identity, contrary to Hegelian dialectics which entails a struggle for unity between identity and non-identity in a repetitive move that cancels out the ‘negative’ under the form of a ‘being-in-itself’. ‘To change this direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn toward nonidentity, is the hinge of negative dialectics. Insight into the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in the concept would end the compulsive identification which the concept brings unless halted by such reflection.’ (Adorno, in O’Connor, 2000: 63)

By rupturing a consolidated and coherent concept of woman as universal category, postmodern feminism fragments the subject so as to open it to the non-identitical, that is, to conflictual intersections such as class, race, and gender possibilities. Claiming that identity logic as a foundationalist ground for the feminist movement is condemned to failure due to its production of endless ‘factionalisation’, Butler opposes any politics inspired by a ‘procedural or substantive notion of the universal’ that necessarily leads to the imposition of a ‘culturally hegemonic notion on the social field’ (1995: 40, 50). This author proposes a feminist politics based on the risk of permanent political contestation, a risk inherent in ‘the process of democratisation’ (1995: 51). The assumption of this risk is not conducive to the demise of foundations for feminist practice; rather, it indicates the permanent putting into question of these foundations. However much Butler wishes to distance herself from foundationalism, her politics of risk is constructed upon the values of freedom and equality as the basis for a Rawlsian model of a just society. Thus, despite her best efforts to escape the ‘procedural or substantive notion of the universal’, her adherence to a radical freedom imposes a morally ‘correct’ form of

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behaviour that postulates all gendered possibilities as equal. In this sense, then, postmodern feminism may be read as approximating liberal feminist values, for both are predicated upon Enlightenment values of autonomy and equality of all persons. I want to argue that postmodern attempts to fragment substantive universalism are not as anti-essentialist as they might at first appear. Although liberal and postmodern feminisms may take two different points of departure, that of ‘woman’ in the first case and that of the ‘fragmented subject’ in the second, both are ultimately founded upon an ethics of justice centred on a normative view of individual rights. Furthermore, both are opposed to an ethics of care as a feminine specificity, due to the latter having ontological implications linked to body experience and maternity. Where liberal feminism opposes an ethics of care for relying on self-abnegation, leading to a denial of the right to autonomy and equality, postmodern feminism is hostile to the latter for presupposing ‘being in relationship’ as associated with a specifically feminine nurturing capacity, a capacity that consists in a regulatory and normative discourse on what constitutes ideal femininity. ‘Consider that most material of concepts, “sex”, which Monique Wittig calls a thoroughly political category, and which Michel Foucault calls a regulatory and “fictitious unity”. For both theorists, sex does not describe a prior materiality, but produces and regulates the intelligibility of the materiality of bodies. For both, and in different ways, the category of sex imposes a duality and a uniformity on bodies in order to maintain reproductive sexuality as a compulsory order.’ (Butler, 1995: 52)

Liberal feminism presumes that the discursive constitution of the feminine on the basis of reproductive sexuality, associated with maternity and a fertile, nurturing, material body, is charged with a ‘romantic’ conceptualisation of femininity corresponding to ‘female domestic service and (sexual) consortium, which has traditionally been exchanged for “financial support”’ (Millett, 2005: 43). In this perspective, woman’s reproductive sexuality reduces her to chattel status, that is, to private property. Buck-Morss maintains that the separation of public and private spheres, namely the ‘isolation of the political discourse of social contract from the economy of household production’, facilitated ambivalent positions, such as John Locke’s, regarding the practice of slavery in the seventeenth century. This was due to the fact that because British law defended private property as the basis of liberty, slaves, as private property, were completely excluded from the social contract. Indeed, by stipulating consent as a requirement for the establishment of a social contract, Locke excludes those allegedly deprived of reason from engaging

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in the latter. Hence, ‘uneducated or uneducable’ beings such as children, idiots and, by implication, slaves, were marginalised from the public sphere (Buck-Morss, 2000: 826-7). The logic of the argument regarding women’s status as chattel is similar to that which concerns slavery. Traditionally relegated to the domestic sphere of household production, women have been classified as ‘irrational’, alongside children, slaves, and the insane, and marginalised from the social contract that provides the foundation of freedom. An ethics of care would, from this viewpoint, be collusive with the exclusion of women from the social contract, to the extent that it focusses on characteristics that essentially constitute the private sphere, namely those of ‘being in relationship’, nurturance, and bodily experience. The privacy of the domestic sphere necessarily confers invisibility and inaudibility upon women’s activities, with the result that these were not, until recently, contemplated by jurisprudence. ‘Women, and the activities to which they have been historically confined, like child-rearing, housekeeping, satisfying the emotional and sexual needs of the male, tending to the sick and the elderly, have been placed until very recently beyond the pale of justice. The norms of freedom, equality, and reciprocity have stopped at the household door. Two centuries after the American and the French revolutions, the entry of women into the public sphere is still not the object of moral and political reflection, and women and their concerns are still invisible in contemporary theories of justice and community.’ (Benhabib, 1997a: 12-3)

The association of women with domesticity as an ideological construct has had profound material consequences, leading to the translation of the spatial division between public and private as respectively pertaining to the domains of production, bearing a masculine connotation, and reproduction, linked to femininity. The fact that liberal and postmodern feminisms condemn an ethics of care for ostracising women from the masculine sphere of justice, with its inherent norms of freedom and equality, as well as from that of production, where the norms of justice are the object of struggles, endows both with a foundational similarity that may at first not be quite apparent.

IV. Lived Experience: A New Foundationalism? In this last section I wish to argue that a feminist ethics of care provides the basis for an ethics of justice. This contention ensues from the entwining of public and private spheres and the concomitant impossibility of clearly distinguishing between domains linked to masculinity on one

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hand and to femininity on the other. Feminist geographers have been attentive to this enmeshment, drawing attention to the oppressive character that governs the relation between production and reproduction: ‘This day-to-day and generational renewal of people-as-workers, carried on in the home, is an important part of what Marxists refer to as the “reproduction of labour power”, which, in its simplest sense, means the renewal of the capacity to work. Since home life plays such an important part in this reproduction process, it clearly should not be separate in analytical terms from industrial life, from the “sphere of production”.’ (Mackenzie et al., in Rose, 1993a: 120)

Because the constitution of masculinity and femininity occurs in the job market, at home, and in the wider community, gender cannot be confined to issues of domesticity, class, or the labour market. As such, despite the fact that social relations of production and reproduction occur in distinct spaces and structure themselves through those spaces, issues of gender intersect both public and private spheres, preventing the consolidation of any dichotomy. By emphasising the interdependence of domestic work and capitalist processes, feminist geography problematises any clear-cut opposition between public and private spheres. Black feminism has presented exhaustive criticism against the public/private distinction, underscoring the cultural specificity of the private. From this perspective, the division between private and public spheres originated amongst the white bourgeoisie. For the black community, the concept of ‘private sphere’ has not always corresponded to that of domesticity; rather, it essentially refers to the spaces occupied by the black community, both masculine and feminine, which are closed off from the white community. As such, instead of consisting in a ‘burden’ for women, the private would serve as an escape from racial oppression for both black women and men (Hill Collins, in Rose, 1993a: 126). ‘Black women with no institutionalised “other” that we may discriminate against, exploit, or oppress often have a lived experience that directly challenges the prevailing classist, sexist, racist social structure and its concomitant ideology. This lived experience may shape our consciousness in such a way that our world view differs from those who have a degree of privilege (however relative within the existing system).’ (hooks, 2005: 67)

‘Lived experience’, or Erlebnis, in the technical terminology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, refers not to just any experience, but to one profoundly felt and ‘lived through’ (Macey, 2000: 164). MerleauPonty describes Erlebnisse as ‘acts of consciousness’ through which a

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subject, immersed in an always already existing world, can mould the latter according to a project. Because the subject cannot be separated from the object, from the world of which it is a part, it is unable to appropriate the latter ‘objectively’. ‘To be consciousness or rather to be an experience is to hold inner communication with the world, the body and other people, to be with them instead of being beside them.’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2000: 96)

hooks’ emphasis on ‘lived experience’ as a form of challenging white feminist hegemony points to the importance of contextualising prevalent epistemic categories so as to assess their universal validity. Being attentive to ‘lived experience’ implies heeding the emotional, motivational, and subjective investments that charge any adherence to a political project. Although feminist politics may be conducive to the implementation of an ethics of justice through struggles for rights, its foundation nevertheless relies on the sharing of narratives of identity, inspired by the lived experience of women. The ethics of care that so often characterises the lived experience of women, with its stress on ‘being in relationship’, is thus reflected in the privileging of an interpersonal network of lived experience by the feminist movement. Hill Collins claims that an ethics of caring is composed of four interrelated elements, namely the recognition of ‘individual uniqueness’, ‘the appropriateness of emotions in dialogues’, the development of ‘the capacity for empathy’, and the assumption of ‘personal accountability’ (1997: 204-5).4 Contextualised within the feminist movement, these characteristics manifest themselves in the following manner: individual uniqueness involves the recognition that individual differences consist in singular expressions of a common essence related to lived experience; the acknowledgement of the role of both personal motivation in argumentation, as well as that of personal expressiveness aims to heal the scission between irrationality and rationality, thereby deconstructing a masculinist emotion/intellect dichotomy; the establishment of an atmosphere of empathy between women is the result of the sharing of narratives of lived experience which, despite their diversity, nevertheless partake of common features; an ethics of personal accountability stems 4

Hill Collins considers that the characteristics of an ethics of care pervade African-American culture. She draws parallelisms between women’s experiences and the values of the African-American community, due to the ‘subordinate’ status of both groups having respectively forced them to seek alternative forms of knowledge production and validation (1997: 198, 204).

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from the fact that each woman is encouraged to openly voice her opinion on issues, as well as to assume responsibility for her position, an assumption which implies being aware of the role of lived experience and that of personal narratives of identity in the adherence to any particular idea. Because an ethics of personal accountability leads to the exercise of autonomy, I would claim that an ethics of care, linked to that of personal accountability, provides the foundation for the implementation of Enlightenment values associated with an ethics of justice. Indeed, within feminist thought, one witnesses a conflict between ‘the desire for connection and fear of alienation’ on one hand and ‘the desire for autonomy and fear of invasion’ on the other hand (West, in Brison, 2005: 371). The recognition that the fear of invasion is rooted in our being disconnected from the human community, thus negatively affecting our relational capacity to interact with others, implies acknowledging autonomy as based on an ethics of care. ‘It is this loss of connection that trauma survivors mourn, a loss that in turn imperils autonomous selfhood. In order to re-establish that connection in the aftermath of trauma, one must first feel able to protect oneself against invasion. The autonomous self and the relational self are thus shown to be interdependent, even constitutive of one another.’ (Brison, 2005: 372)

Ceasing to consider autonomy as separate from care implies paving the way for a feminist politics that defies the individualism prevalent in an ethics of justice, centred on the right to do as one wishes. Solely conditioned by a normative notion of the common good, this individualism depends on a juridical device that ensures the implementation of contracts and defends individuals from outside interference (Baier, 2005: 246). A feminist ethics of care thus allows for a distancing from a contractarian view of politics, linked to either utilitarian intent or moral obligation. Rather, it inspires an autonomy and accountability founded on moral maturity, a maturity that relies on the recognition of the role of lived experience – the nature of which is relational – in the assumption of political choices. Being able to surpass the personal and reach out towards that which does not coincide with a logic of identity implies first confronting personal narratives of experience, openly voicing them and recognising their influence on the way we think. On the basis of an acknowledgement of the emotional conditioning of our rational processes, we can then begin to surpass a prothesic dimension of consciousness that

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tends to see itself reflected in all objects external to itself. Feminine autonomy ultimately relies on this capacity to transcend a primary narcissism, which corresponds to a domain of fusion with the maternal, allowing woman to surpass ‘the intentionality of the I’ (Irigaray, 1997: 315) through a valorisation of both ‘he’ and ‘she’.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah (1961 [1954]) ‘The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance’, in Between Past and Future. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 197-226. Baier, Annette C. (2005 [1987]) ‘The Need for More than Justice’, in Ann E. Cudd et al. (eds.) Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 243-50. Benhabib, Seyla (1997a [1992]) ‘Introduction: Communicative Ethics and the Claims of Gender, Community and Postmodernism’, in Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 1-19. —. (1997b [1992]) ‘The Generalised and the Concrete Other’, in Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 148-77. Brison, Susan (2005 [2002]) ‘Outliving Oneself’, in Ann E. Cudd et al. (eds.) Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 365-76. Butler, Judith (1999 [1990]) ‘Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire’, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 3-44. —. (1995) ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism”’, in Linda Nicholson (ed.) Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. London: Routledge, pp. 35-57. Cixous, Hélène (1997 [1986]) ‘Sorties’, in Sandra Kemp et al. (eds.) Feminisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 231-5. Cornell, Drucilla (2005 [1998] ‘Feminism, Utopianism, and the Role of the Ideal in Political Philosophy’, in Ann E. Cudd et al. (eds.) Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 414-21. —. (1995) ‘What is Ethical Feminism?’, in Linda Nicholson (ed.) Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. London: Routledge, pp. 75106. Fuss, Diana (1997 [1989]) ‘The “Risk” of Essence’, in Sandra Kemp et al. (eds.) Feminisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 250-8.

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Gates, Henry Louis (1989) Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the ‘Racial’ Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gilligan, Carol (1997 [1982]) ‘In a Different Voice’, in Sandra Kemp et al. (eds.) Feminisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 146-52. Hampton, Jean (2005 [1992]) ‘Feminist Contractarianism’, in Ann E. Cudd et al. (eds.) Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 280-301. Hill Collins, Patricia (1997 [1991]) ‘Toward an Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology’, in Sandra Kemp et al. (eds.) Feminisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 198-206. hooks, bell (2005 [1984]) ‘Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory’, in Ann E. Cudd et al. (eds.) Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.60-8. —. (1997 [1984]) ‘Feminism: A Movement to End Sexual Oppression’, in Sandra Kemp et al. (eds.) Feminisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 22-7. Irigaray, Luce (1997 [1996]) ‘The Other: Woman’, in Sandra Kemp et al. (eds.) Feminisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 308-15. Kant, Immanuel (1996 [1784]) ‘’An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, in Lawrence Cahoone (ed.) From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 51-7. Macey, David (2000) ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, in Frantz Fanon: A Life. London: Granta Books, pp. 154-98. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2000 [1962]) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London. Routledge. Millett, Kate (2005 [1970]) ‘Theory of Sexual Politics’, in Ann E. Cudd et al. (eds.) Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 280-301. Moi, Toril (1997 [1989]) ‘Feminist, Female, Feminine’, in Sandra Kemp et al. (eds.) Feminisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 246-50. O’Connor, Brian (ed.) (2000) ‘Negative Dialectics and the Possibility of Philosophy’, in The Adorno Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 54-78. Rose, Gillian (1997) Love’s Work. London: Vintage. —. (1993a) ‘Spatial Divisions and Other Spaces’, in Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 113-36. —. (1993b) ‘A Politics of Paradoxical Space’, in Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 137-60.

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Soper, Kate (1990) ‘Feminism, Humanism, Postmodernism’, in Troubled Pleasures: Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism. London: Verso, pp. 228-45. Steeves, H. Leslie (1995 [1987]) ‘Feminist Theories and Media Studies’, in Oliver Boyd-Barrett et al. (eds.) Approaches to Media. London: Arnold, pp. 392-400.

CONSTRUCTING THE ‘MUSLIM OTHER’ CHRIS WEEDON, CARDIFF UNIVERSITY

In his groundbreaking book Covering Islam, published in 1981, Edward Said offered a disturbing critique of the representation of Muslims in Western media and culture. This article revisits Said’s critique in relation to twenty-first century representations and analyses examples of how the contemporary British press constructs Muslim ‘Otherness’ in a climate in which the politics of representation in relation to Islam have become a serious global issue. ‘FURY OVER HALAL CHRISTMAS DINNER Parents in revolt after school bans traditional turkeys’

This was the front-page headline in the conservative British tabloid, the Daily Express on Sunday November 18 2006. The article went on to explain how the headmistress of Oakwood Comprehensive school in the Yorkshire town of Rotherham ‘announced that she intended to replace the children’s traditional turkey meal with halal chicken. She claimed that eating poultry that had been slaughtered in the Muslim way would create an “integrated Christmas”’ (Jeeves, 2006: 1). The paper further described the reactions of ‘furious’ non-Muslim parents. According to the Daily Mail and in a curious elision of any distinction between non-religious cultural traditions and religious beliefs, parents accused the school of ‘undermining the Christian faith’ (Jeeves, 2006: 1). This is one small example of how questions of Muslim beliefs and culture, and their relation to non-Muslims, are being raised in the popular press in contemporary Britain and it is an example to which I shall return. In his introduction to the revised and updated 1997 Vintage paperback edition of Covering Islam, Edward Said wrote that: ‘In the fifteen years since Covering Islam appeared there has been an intense focus on Muslims and Islam in the American and Western media, most of it characterised by a more highly exaggerated stereotyping and belligerent hostility than what I had previously described in my book.

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Constructing the ‘Muslim Other’ Indeed Islam’s role in hijackings and terrorism, descriptions of the way in which overtly Muslim countries like Iran “threaten us and our way of life”, and speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies seem to play increasingly on Western consciousness.’ (Said, 1997: xi)

If this was the case in 1997, it is even more so in the post-9/11 world. Yet is this all there is to media representations of Islam? In this paper I look at this issue in more detail in the French and British contexts and suggest that recent press coverage is often much more complex than simple caricature or stereotyping, even though Islamophobia remains its over-all effect. I argue that much that appears in the British press is tempered and complexified by a partial discursive shift towards a limited acceptance of difference, motivated in part by a growing commitment to multiculturalism and cultural diversity and in part by real concerns, shared by both left and right, about terrorism and social cohesion.

Criteria for Evaluating Representations of Islam I want to begin by outlining some criteria for evaluating representations of Islam. In its 1997 report, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, the British charitable foundation, the Runnymede Trust offered the following useful categorisations that clearly draw on postcolonial critiques of Orientalist and of other colonial modes of representation.1 The report identifies two main categories into which representations of Islam fall, which it terms ‘closed’ and ‘open’ views of Islam. Closed views include representations in which: 1. Islam is seen as a single monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to new realities. 2. Islam is seen as separate and other – (a) not having any aims or values in common with other cultures; (b) not affected by them; and (c) not influencing them. 3. Islam is seen as inferior to the West – barbaric, irrational, primitive, sexist. 4. Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism, engaged in ‘a clash of civilisations’. 5. Islam is seen as a political ideology, used for political or military advantage. 6. Criticisms by Islam of ‘the West’ are rejected out of hand. 1 For more on colonial modes of representation, see Said 1978 and 1993, Mohanty 1991 and 2003, and Narayan 1997.

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7. Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society. 8. Anti-Muslim hostility is accepted as natural and ‘normal’. (Runneymede Trust, 1997: 4)

All these tendencies add up to what has come to be known in Britain as Islamophobia, which the report defines as ‘unfounded hostility’ towards Islam, the ‘practical consequences of such hostility in unfair discrimination against Muslim individuals and communities’, and ‘the exclusion of Muslims from mainstream political and social affairs’ (Runnymede Trust 1997: 4).

The Deep Roots of Islamophobia As Edward Said’s work has shown so powerfully, the hostility on which contemporary Islamophobia is founded is not new to the West, but has a long history with roots going back at least as far as the Crusades. Widespread negative media coverage of Islamic revolutions and Islamic States over the past few decades has served to reinforce many long established stereotypes. Fed by this history of negative images of Muslim societies and by recent political developments, Islamophobia has been recognised over the past few years by government in Britain as a serious social problem, related to questions of social cohesion, which is in need of serious and urgent attention. This is in part a response to Muslim voices and organisations that have become more visible and vocal, but also in response to the sort of violent unrest that occurred in Northern English cities with large Muslim populations such as Oldham and Bradford in 2001. (In the case of Oldham, for example, the state has provided £102 million of development aid since 2001). It is also a response to the London bombing in July 2005 and the growth of Jihadism among young British Muslims. Yet, ironically, as examples in this paper show, it has often been government and state institutions themselves that have provoked the plethora of negative representations, particularly since July 2005, and have helped to legitimate more populist anti-Muslim media coverage. In Britain the arrival of substantial numbers of Muslims after 1945, mainly from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, but also refugee populations from Muslim countries like Somalia, helped change the face of society in the second half of the twentieth century. Previously, port cities such as Cardiff, Liverpool, and South Shields had Muslim communities and the first purpose built British mosque dates from the 1930s. In the new millennium most British cities have several mosques. With most

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substantial Muslim populations now settled for two or three generations, multicultural Britain is being faced with demands for parity from its Muslim citizens in the form, for example, of government finance for Muslim schools and the extension of the blasphemy law to cover Islam. At the same time, hostility to Muslims and a lack of understanding of Islamic culture remain serious problems. All these issues, I would argue, have become more polarised, difficult and significant since 9/11 and the US/British response to those events. They do, however, have a much longer history. Questions of the blasphemy law and of censorship came to the fore with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1988. The ensuing debates, protests and the fatwa, calling for Rushdie’s execution, helped fuel negative perceptions of and hostility to Islam in Britain. An effect of this increased hostility has been the strengthening of the appeal of radical Islam and Jihadism among young Muslims. In looking at recent media coverage of Muslims and Islam in Britain, it is clear that much of it is organised around three tropes that have a commonsensical status within Britain as obviously true, right and justified. These are: x x x

Protecting freedom of speech Protecting human rights Protecting ‘our’ way of life

Freedom of speech has been central to media debate on Islam in Britain since the Rushdie affair. Here the battle lines were clearly constructed as an opposition between an absolute conception of freedom of speech and the often violent, censoring tendencies of Islam, all collapsed into the figure of Ayatollah Homeni issuing a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. This polarisation of positions and the lack of attention to the specificity of different Muslim positions and arguments was experienced as deeply disturbing even by Muslims who supported Rushdie’s right to publish. As liberal Muslim media commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote in 1997: ‘I felt quite comfortable within the liberal camp until the Salman Rushdie affair. I thought those who believed in religion were backward. The Rushdie affair changed all that. I was shocked by the way that liberals, who proclaimed their belief in freedom of thought and expression, were completely unwilling to listen to the voice of very powerless people who felt offended by the book … I knew the way all Muslims were being portrayed was quite unfair – these supposed dangerous people were my mum, my aunts and my uncles. My liberal associates were talking about them in terms of pure hatred. But it was not just the hatred which angered

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me. It was also the way liberals totally misunderstood people’s continuing need for religion, particularly among members of Muslim groups who are still finding it hard to find their place in British society.’ (Alibhai-Brown, 1997: 28)

More recently the trope of freedom of speech has recurred in relation to high profile media events such as coverage of the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the Danish cartoons affair, British blasphemy laws and the acquittal on appeal of Nick Griffin, the leader of the extreme right-wing British National Party in early November 2006 of charges of incitement to racial hatred. In each case the Western States in question were presented as defenders of freedom of speech and Muslim voices as attempting to destroy it. Human rights also figure prominently in media debate on Islam. They have become significant in a number of different contexts. These include, for example, debates around the British government’s assertion – in the context of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ – of the need to limit personal freedoms (most directly of Muslim suspects but potentially of all citizens) and to adapt the justice system in the interests of security. In Autumn 2006 there was also much debate on the need to protect women’s rights both against an ‘oppressive’ Islam and conversely to wear the veil – the hijab and more recently the niqab or full, face veil. My third trope, protecting ‘our’ way of life, is cited in all these contexts but also in relation to recent debates about faith schools, integration, and social cohesion. The example of the halal Christmas dinner falls into this category. The coverage was marked by some key tropes, mostly inscribed in the popular voice of local white parents. They included ‘common sense’ in the face of a ‘political correctness’ that was ‘trampelling our culture’. As one parent reportedly put it: ‘I feel my culture is being stolen away.’ Muslims, the coverage suggested, were inhumane to animals, but despite this we go to great lengths to accommodate them: ‘We bend over backwards at Eid to eat traditional Muslim food so why should we have to change our Xmas tradition? … It’s almost as stupid as serving up pork at Eid’ (Jeeves, Daily Express, November 18 2006: 5). The paper places the ordinary non-Muslim Briton as reasonable, respectful of difference, and familiar with the cultures of others, only wanting freedom of choice: ‘Why can’t we have a choice of chicken which suits everyone Muslim and nonMuslim?’ (Jeeves, Daily Express, November 18 2006: 5). The overriding message is that ‘we’ ordinary white Britons are tolerant and accommodating in a way that the Muslim Other is not. This is a trope that

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both reinforces and in some ways tempers Islamophobic modes of representation. The broader context of all current British media representation of Muslims is the ‘War on Terror’. For example, in September 2005, the British press covered a speech by Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, director general of the British secret service, MI5, given at the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Dutch security service, the AIVD, in The Hague. In this speech Dame Eliza argued that ‘civil liberties may have to be “eroded” to protect Britons from terrorism’ (BBC News, September 10 2005). She said that the July 2005 London bombings were a ‘shock’, which MI5 and the police were ‘disappointed’ that they could not prevent and that ‘some erosion of what we all value may be necessary to improve the chances of our citizens not being blown apart as they go about their daily lives’. The central dilemma, according to Dame Eliza, was how to protect citizens within the rule of law when ‘fragile’ intelligence did not amount to clear-cut evidence, where such intelligence was not enough to support criminal charges in the courts. In her words: ‘We can believe, correctly, that a terrorist atrocity is being planned but those arrested by the police have to be released as the plan is too embryonic, too vague to lead to charges and possibly convictions.’ (BBC News, September 10 2005)

During October 2006, negative media coverage of a range of issues related to British Muslims regularly appeared in the press. Charting four consecutive days, the Guardian noted the following events: ‘Four Days in October Mounting tension Tuesday British National Party distributes leaflets with cartoon picture of Muhammad in South London. Wednesday David Cameron [Leader of the Conservative opposition in parliament] wants Muslim schools to ensure a quarter of their intake comes from other faiths. Confrontations between white and Muslim youths in Windsor. Thursday Met [Metropolitan Police, i.e. London police force] commission orders inquiry into decision to excuse Muslim PC [Police Constable] Alexander Omar Basha from duty outside Israeli embassy. Jack Straw says Muslim women who wear the veil make positive intercommunity relations more difficult. Friday Mr Straw defends his position and again urges women not to cover their face with the niqab.’ (Wainwright et al., The Guardian, October 7 2006)

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On November 10 2006, two months after her speech in The Hague, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller made a further public statement, on this occasion in the UK, that received widespread media coverage. She suggested that MI5 had identified thirty terrorist plots and increasing support among radical British Muslims for violence. This news coverage was likely to have the effect of strengthening the view that Muslims are eroding ‘our freedom’ not only by terror attacks, but also by bringing about the introduction of repressive measures to prevent them. Later the same week the British National Party leader, Nick Griffin, was acquitted of charges of inciting race hatred in a covertly filmed speech that attacked Muslims and had been shown on television in the context of an investigative journalism programme. In the media debate, which included Muslim voices, it was clear that British Muslims experienced this media coverage as a stream of attacks in which they were repeatedly required to justify themselves. A leading Guardian article titled ‘God’s squads’, dating from Saturday November 11 2006, commented that: ‘A disastrous combination of events yesterday must have left many Muslims feeling battered… It may be by accident more than design, but the stakes are rising in a cultural conflict that should never have been allowed to gain traction. MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller issued her alert alongside hints that she was concerned the development of parallel communities could worsen things. She is right. But in addressing that risk it is essential to recognise that Islam is far from the only factor pushing religion centre-stage.’

It is this tendency in the media to single out Muslims, a trend that has been widely acknowledged in the press, which in part sets the stage for Islamophobia. Alongside terrorism, another topical theme of recent media coverage of Muslims is the hijab, the veil or headscarf with which many Muslim women cover their hair. It is currently much debated, even banned, in parts of the state and public sphere in mainland Europe. France instigated a ban in state schools from September 2004 and similar measures are under discussion in some of the Federal German states. Turkey, an overwhelmingly Muslim country, which had secularism written into its constitution in 1937, and which is currently applying to join the European Union, has long had such a ban. In its news programme Foreign Correspondent, broadcast on May 18 2004, ABC TV did a lead story on the headscarves issue in France. Its website synopsis summarised some of the important issues in the debate:

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Constructing the ‘Muslim Other’ ‘The headscarf has become a potent symbol and a contested site for identity – can you wear the scarf, and still be truly French? With almost ten percent of the French population now Muslim, it’s an issue with real resonance at the moment, but it isn’t restricted to France. Europe now has 15 million Muslims, the population is growing faster than the non-Muslim population and since September 11 2001, suspicion of Muslim communities has increased.’ (ABC TV, May 18 2004)

The debate over headscarves in France has been around for some fifteen years but came to worldwide public attention in 2003, when President Chirac announced his intention of proposing a law banning religious symbols and clothing in state schools and hospitals.2 In France Muslim reactions were varied. In December 2003, shortly after the French government announced its intention to ban religious attire, about 3,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Paris. A global protest followed in January 2004, with demonstrations in cities across Europe and North America. The protestors argued that it is a human right to practise one’s religion, and that the ban violated international laws on the rights to freedom of religion and expression. Religious practices, they sustained, should only be limited when there was a public safety concern or the practices affected the rights of others. Official Muslim responses in France were strong. Dalil Boubakeur, the president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, told Reuters: ‘A law on religious symbols in the school environment could stigmatize a whole community’ (CNN December 17 2003). As in other European countries, many first-generation Muslim women had stopped wearing the headscarf as they adapted to secular French culture. More recently some of their daughters had started wearing veils, in some cases as a political statement, in others in order to reclaim their ethnic identity. The French Muslim women who spoke out in the debate on the headscarf ban represented diverse competing and conflicting positions. Much of this debate focused on the degree to which wearing the hijab is a matter of choice. While secularists, including many French feminists, argued that it was imposed on girls and women by men, those in favour of allowing headscarves argued for the right to wear them as a human right. Many argued that the headscarf ban would force Muslim women into private Koranic schools. 2 Similarly, but on a more localised scale, in the UK during Winter 2006-7 there was on-going media coverage of the court case that challenged British Airways’ right to ban their frontline staff from wearing explicit religious symbols, in this instance a cross, outside their uniform. In contrast to the situation in France, BA lost the case.

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Press coverage of the hijab issue in France drew parallels with oppressive regimes elsewhere: various articles, printed on the web, compared headscarves in France with burkas in Afghanistan. The slippage here from attempts to justify the expelling of girls wearing headscarves from French schools to life under the Taliban was remarkable both for its inappropriateness and for the fact that in both cases – France and Afghanistan – the result was the denial of education to girls. At issue was the nature of the de facto multicultural French state. In the words of Dominique Moisi, a political analyst and commentator: ‘In France, the citizens of the republic do not belong to communities, they belong to the republic’ (Richburg, The Washington Post, December 20 2003). At the centre of the debate over the banning of the hijab in France is a law that seeks to erase difference, ostensibly in the interests of a secular state. Both sides of the debate appeal to the discourse of human rights. In the press in Britain, the issue is presented differently since even the rightwing press accepts multiculturalism to some degree and stresses that ‘we British’ are not like the French. The question of the veil was raised in October 2006 by the former foreign secretary Jack Straw, who as MP for Blackburn in Lancashire, in the North of England, represents a constituency with a large Muslim population of some 25,000 people. Whereas the hijab has become a common feature of British life, the full face veil or niqab was, Straw suggested, a cause for concern. He made public his feelings on local radio suggesting that the niqab was ‘a visible statement of separation and difference and that it made social cohesion difficult’ (Bunyan, Daily Telegraph, October 6 2006, p.1). Press coverage of this radio interview provoked a range of responses, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and both rightwing and liberal left press coverage included Muslim voices. The main tropes were: x x x x x x x

Political correctness versus common sense Political correctness versus ‘our’ heritage and culture The right to freedom of expression, both to criticise Islam and to follow one’s religious beliefs Multiculturalism versus integration Oversensitivity to Muslim sensibilities The British as accommodating, unlike the French: ‘We don’t ban’ Social cohesion versus Muslim separatism

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The main focus of the argument in the broadsheet press was not the question of the face veil itself, which only a tiny minority of women wear, but Straw’s raising of the issue. Both liberal and conservative papers were critical of Straw’s intervention at a time when Muslims were repeatedly coming in for negative press coverage. Thus the Guardian reported on October 7 that Straw had originally raised the issue some twelve months earlier and ‘was warned at the time that any attempt to publicise his concerns would provoke anger … It was the timing of the remarks, as much as the content, that was baffling Muslim leaders yesterday. Quietly, and unnoticed, the issue of the niqab has been raised on university campuses and in schools over the last few years, without causing ripples’ (Wainwright et al., 2006). The press debate encouraged a range of Muslim voices to give their views both about the niqab and the way in which Straw had raised it as an issue. In doing so it created a space in which Muslims could raise more general questions about their relation to government and Islamophobia in post-July 2005 Britain. Here they stressed the tokenism of consultation processes: ‘Dr Drabu said attempts at rapprochement with Muslims were a “charade”. “They had these working groups, but when it came out that they would like an inquiry, that was totally ignored. When they said this was all to do with foreign policy, that was ignored.”’ (Wainwright et al., The Guardian, October 7 2006)

Even Jack Straw was said not to have consulted members of the Muslim community in Blackburn before publicly raising his criticisms of the niqab and Hamid Qureshi, chair of the Lancashire Council of Mosques, described his intervention as ‘blatant Muslim bashing’. Several contributors to the debate pointed to the ways in which the veil debate was a sign of much deeper social divisions. For example, the Guardian gave a range of Muslim views that pointed to government double standards and the ways in which the focus of attention on the face veil in relation to social cohesion served as a way of not addressing the really divisive issues of racism and the economic bases of social inequality. The voices of women who wear face veils surfaced in a piece entitled ‘The view from Blackburn’. Here, for example, a twenty-nine year old housewife explained her motivations: ‘I have taken the full veil for 16 years now and I am much more comfortable wearing it. It is a matter of modesty as well as religion’. Another young woman told the paper ‘OK, it’s religion first but modesty comes into it a lot for me. I started using the full veil eight months ago and it’s done so much for my self-respect. It’s comfortable, I

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feel protected and I happily eat out at McDonald’s in it. I’ve devised this special way of getting the food up behind the material’ (Wainwright et al., October 7 2006). While some male ‘voices from Blackburn’ were critical of the wearing of face veils, citing the importance of seeing people’s faces in the interests of security, the right to freedom of choice emerged as the dominant discourse. As one non-Muslim twenty-year-old, business student at Manchester Metropolitan University commented: ‘It’s their choice to wear the veil and they’ve an absolute right ... I’ve no problem with it at all when I meet one – there are loads of them at uni. A more important issue is the way these things are discussed in the news, how they get simplified and people set against each other’ (Wainwright et al., The Guardian, October 7 2006). The conservative press also criticised Straw’s intervention, tying it, as might be expected, into wider critiques of Labour policies, yet it also criticised its likely effects on British Muslims. In an article, ‘Blair. The Veil. And a new low in politics’, published in the conservative tabloid the Daily Mail on October 26 2006, Peter Osbourne accused Labour of using questions related to race, religion, and immigration for political interests in ways that were extremely dangerous: ‘Practically every day for the past two weeks, another minister has insulted the customs, habits, or religious beliefs of Britain’s Muslim minority.’ At issue, the conservative press suggested, was not the truth or otherwise of the points raised by Straw and other ministers, but the politics of raising the issues at all. Reversing familiar positions within British politics, Osbourne compared Labour’s action to that of extreme right parties in mainland Europe: ‘Labour has made the extraordinary decision to place the politics of religious identity at the centre of public discourse, in the same sort of way that Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party does in Austria and Pim Fortuyn’s List Party did in the Netherlands’ (Osbourne, Daily Mail October 26 2006). Placing religious identity at the centre of public discourse, he argued, ‘liberated the media to follow suit. It seems every day now brings forth news of an outrage allegedly perpetrated somewhere by a Muslim … cumulatively this litany of condemnation has turned into an anti-Islamic crusade. I am a practising member of the Church of England and if we had come under the same wave of condemnation for our practices and traditions I would by now be affronted beyond belief’. In Osbourne’s view, ‘playing politics with Islam is reckless beyond belief … Now Tony Blair has allowed a campaign that is bound to undermine moderate Muslims and encourage extremism, whether from white supremacist parties like the BNP or within Islam itself’ (Osbourne, October 26 2006).

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Conclusion In an article entitled ‘This veil fixation is doing Muslim women no favours’, published in the Guardian on Thursday October 19 2006, Maleiha Malik, a Muslim lecturer in law at King’s College, University of London, suggested that while Britain needed an honest debate about women and Islam, the current politically driven campaign was making that debate more difficult: ‘Muslim women welcome a debate about the status of women in Islam. Intelligent, honest critique is an invaluable source of ideas for Muslims as we begin the process of reclaiming our religious and intellectual tradition. Muslim women also welcome feminist alliances with other women in the task of challenging the misuse of power by Muslim men – just as we can offer our own perspective on both women’s advances and setbacks in the West … But the significance of religious and cultural symbols such as the veil is not immutable and static – they have a mixed and changing social meaning. Muslim women who adopt the veil in Europe may simultaneously be seeking to affirm their religious identity while being determined to enter the public sphere as full and equal citizens. They are often also trying to change the cultural and political meaning of the veil in a contemporary context. For some it may be linked to patriarchal pressure, for others a symbol of identity and emancipation in a commodified and patriarchal society – and for many a response to a religious vocation.’ (Malik, 2006)

Malik criticised press comments by Guardian newspaper columnist Polly Toynbee, female politicians, and other feminists from the majority community. They would, she argued, ‘do well to reconsider the disproportionate weight they are giving to complex symbols such as the veil, which can undermine alliances around more grievous harms such as war, violence, genuine patriarchal oppression, and poverty’ (Malik, 2006).3 In press constructions of the niqab debate and coverage of other Muslim issues during Autumn 2006, a range of Muslim voices were for the most part included. Yet the wider context for press debate remains the ‘War on Terror’ in which women’s rights had been mobilised by George W. Bush to justify the bombing of Afghanistan, which, he argued, released women from imprisonment in their homes. The association of a repressive otherness, foreign to Britishness, which is allied to a fundamentalism that 3

Maleiha Malik is author of Feminism and Muslim Women, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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supports terrorism is omnipresent. Yet at the same time, the fear of causing further radicalisation of British Muslims acts as a break on Islamophobia. Press coverage in Britain is thus arguably not as negative as Said found in Covering Islam in 1981 and 1997. It is more complex and fractured as different voices, including those of Muslim women and men, lay claim to human rights, freedom of speech, and the right to practice their religion. Concerns about ‘protecting our way of life’ appear alongside apparent toleration of other values and customs. Yet arguably this very binary reinforces deep-rooted hierarchies of the white British as more civilised and stereotypes of Muslims as other, separate by choice, yet less civilised, less rational, and more oppressive to women. Thus, while majority opinion supports freedom of religion, the full face veil, can easily come to signify that hostile and threatening otherness that raises the spectrum of a fundamentalism that denies ‘our freedom’, ‘our way of life’, and that ultimately ends in terror. This leaves us with the question of the extent to which these various tropes and binaries allow for more open views of Islam. Is it possible to think of British Muslims a part of a modern Western society or are they inevitably trapped within a monolithic, static religion that is unresponsive to new realities? Clearly both positions are championed in the British press. More worryingly, in much press coverage of British Muslims, religion is reinscribed merely as a political ideology and much more politically significant social issues such as class, poverty, unemployment, racist attacks, and social exclusion – together with a real felt anger at foreign policies that oppress Muslims in other parts of the world – become reinscribed as questions of religious difference. This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of current media debates on issues relating to Muslims in Britain.

Bibliography ABC TV (2004) Foreign Correspondent, broadcast on May 18, available at http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2004 (accessed October 8 2004). Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin (1997) Runnymede Trust 1997. London: The Runnymede Trust. BBC News (2005) ‘Civil liberties may have to be “eroded”’, September 10, available at http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4232012.stm (accessed October 7 2006).

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Bunyan, Nigel (2006) ‘Take Off Your Veils, says Straw’, Daily Telegraph, October 6 2006, p.1. CNN (2003) ‘Chirac: Ban headscarves in schools’, December 17, available at http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/12/17/france. headscarves(accessed October 8 2004). The Guardian (2006) ‘God’s Squads’, November 11, available at www.theosthinktank.co.uk/God’s_Squad.aspx?ArticleID=118&PageI D=12&RefPageID=51 (accessed March 10 2007). Jeeves, Paul (2006) ‘Fury over halal Christmas Dinner’, Daily Express, November 18, pp. 1 and 5. Malik , Maleiha (2006) ‘This veil fixation is doing Muslim women no favours’, The Guardian, October 19, available at [email protected] (accessed October 20 2006). Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003) Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —. (1991) ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse’, in Chandra Talpade Mohanty et al. (eds.) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 51-80. Narayan, Uma (1997) Dislocating Cultures. Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism. New York & London: Routledge. Osbourne, Peter (2006) ‘Blair. The Veil. And a new low in politics’, Daily Mail October 26, available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/ articles/news/newscomment.html?in_article_id=411783&in_page_id=17 87 (accessed October 26 2006). Richburg, Keith (2003) ‘French Muslims offer little opposition to head scarf ban’, The Washington Post, December 20, available at www.washingtonpost.com (accessed October 22 2004). Runnymede Trust (1997) Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All. London: The Runnymede Trust. Said, Edward (1997) Covering Islam. London: Vintage Books. —. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. —. (1978) Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Wainwright, Martin et al. (2006) ‘Dangerous attack or fair point? Straw veil row deepens’, The Guardian, October 7, available at http//www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/O.1889846.00.html accessed October 26 2006).

CONFRONTING WHITENESS: THE PERFORMANCE OF POSTASSIMILATORY JEWISH HEROISM DAVID MOSCOWITZ, COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON

‘Those are my Jewish action heroes. That’s Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day. And that’s Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park.’ (Britney Baby, 2002: One More Time)1

Goldblum’s performance in Independence Day (1996), as simultaneously stereotypical ‘smart Jew’ and atypical ‘Jewish action hero’ David Levinson, typifies the joke.2 Levinson is an urbanite mensch (a good guy, a nice boy) who wears spectacles, recycles aluminum cans for the betterment of the environment, knows his way around a laptop, rides his bicycle through the crowded streets of Manhattan, and finds time in the middle of the day to play chess with his dad. Goldblum plays a similar role in Jurassic Park (1993); both characters, in fact, recite the same line while escaping alien and dinosaur enemies respectively towards the end of each film.3 In Independence Day, Jewish co-writer and producer Dean Devlin brings different types of non-white outsiders together as contrasts to – and heroic saviours for – the dominance of white patriarchy. Heroic outsiders rescue the white man, embodied most prominently by the president of the United States (Bill Pullman), who initiates the international effort to battle the malevolent, colonising intentions of literal alien outsiders.4 1

Quoted in Houpt (2002). See Sander Gilman (1996) for a more extensive reading regarding the cultural construction of the ‘smart Jew’. 3 Noted on the film’s Internet Movie Database page: . 4 Pullman’s president offers a form of whiteness that urges mitigation of difference (‘Mankind [sic]: That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences any more. We will be united in our common 2

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The Performance of Postassimilatory Jewish Heroism

Goldblum’s hero lays claim to predictable stereotypes of male Yiddishistic Jewish identity, particularly regarding the representation of his weak body.5 Irony results from Levinson’s ability to overcome his physical deficiencies. While Levinson’s own body is visually challenged and prone to motion sickness, for example, he repeatedly implores others to contribute to the health and well being of the planet. When his father warns him about catching a cold, Levinson realises he can compose a computer virus to disable the aliens’ communication system. The irony of his heroic body peaks when he violates his personal rule against tobacco to smoke a cigar with his black co-pilot Steven Hiller (Will Smith). (Consistent with the stereotype of the black male’s hyperphysical form of heteronormative masculinity, Hiller is the one who steers.) Within this context of representation, Devlin’s positioning of the white president is similarly ironic. Despite leading the other(ed) nations of the world during most of the film, the president plays, in the climax, a supporting role to the black and Jewish Others who successfully disable the alien command.6 To be clear, this essay is not about Independence Day or its heroic figures; instead, this analysis concerns what I characterise as postassimilatory responses to the familiar depiction of ironic Jewish heroism illustrated in the film. To an extent, assimilation drives the story in Independence Day.7 Compared to his often-kvetching, Bible-carrying, yarmulke-wearing father (Judd Hirsch), David’s character performs a tangible, easily recognisable figure to mid-1990’s audiences: the secular and fully assimilated Jewish American.8 Heroism functions in Independence Day as a rhetorical trope that valorises the process of assimilation, which explains not only

interests’). In an often replayed sound bite from the film’s promotional efforts, he declares that July 4 shall come to be known not only as the nation’s (United States) independence day, but also the world’s. 5 Gilman has written extensively on the essentialized Jewish body and how ‘the character of the Jew has often expressed essential, permanent Difference’ (2005: 201). 6 I should extend credit to a third outsider who contributes to this effort, Russell Casse (Randy Quaid), the neurotic, emasculated alcoholic who claims to have been violated by aliens in the past. 7 See Rogin (1998) for a more expansive reading of the film. 8 Aside from the surname Levinson and the recognition of Goldblum and Hirsch as Jewish actors, David’s Jewish identity would be difficult to discern if the film did not juxtapose him with his less assimilated father. David’s ironic body, then, represents a synecdoche for his overall identity in the film, the irony of being marked as both Jewish and assimilated.

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Levinson’s ironic ability to overcome his body’s physical weakness,9 but also the film’s prevailing supposition that July 4 will become the world’s independence day. As a result, Levinson’s ironic heroism is depicted as simultaneously embracing (e.g. the ‘smart Jew’s’ love of laptop) and overcoming (e.g. the neurotic concern over his emasculated body) stereotypical traits of Jewish identity. This alignment of assimilation, heroism, and irony in Independence Day depicts a common construction and performance of contemporary Jewish identity. Upon celebrating victory over the aliens, for example, Levinson’s father notices him smoking the cigar and teases, ‘Oh? So this is healthy?’. David’s response typifies that of many Jews who have performed their own assimilationcum-whiteness: ‘I could get used to it.’ Today, as two book titles proclaim, Jews have won the fight to become Americans (Prell, 1999) and have become white folks (Brodkin, 1998). Inevitably, though, the privilege of whiteness creates its own tensions. Jon Stratton notes how performance is being used to express dissatisfaction with this assimilatory success: ‘While African-Americans and Asian-Americans often use the rhetoric of race to ground their difference, Jewish-Americans, especially secular ones, tend to privilege the performance of cultural difference as expressing fundamental difference from the dominant culture.’ (2001: 165)

Stratton’s use of the word ‘privilege’ is ironic. Jews can ‘privilege’ performance because their predominantly Caucasian European appearance affords the privilege of passing into whiteness more easily than it does for African-Americans and Asian-Americans. Moreover, early 20th century quotas and restrictions were rolled back earlier and with greater frequency for Jews than they were for other marginalised groups (Brodkin, 1998: 2552). Today, in other words, the ‘strategic rhetoric’ (Nakayama and Krizek, 1995: 295) of accumulated whiteness endows more privilege for Jewish Americans to engage in forms of performative, postmodern play compared to what is available for other marginalised identities.

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The film’s attention towards the physical applies to other characters as well. Hiller’s physicality is celebrated when he punches a downed alien in the face and drags it across the desert. Likewise, the socially marginalized physical body of his girlfriend (Vivica A. Fox), an exotic dancer, is redeemed when she tends to the First Lady’s ailing body and then marries Hiller prior to his culminating heroic effort.

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Given this, it is useful to examine what Stratton calls the ‘production of postassimilation Jewish-American difference’ (2001: 159) and interest in ‘deassimilation’ (2001: 156, emphasis in original). Is assimilation and subsequent whiteness the cause for ‘a cultural void young Jews long to have filled’ (Snook, 2003: 68)? Can cultural play that interrogates assimilation into whiteness offer ‘the possibility of cultural recovery’ and repudiation of dominant ideology (Delgado, 2000: 399)? And if so, how does that impact on our general understanding of the relationship between performativity and identity? In addressing these questions, this essay considers the resistive and liberating possibilities that accompany the performative confrontation with whiteness by examining how performances of postassimilatory Jewish heroism compel reconsideration of the relationship between interpellation and performativity. As a construct that could mitigate the ideological thrust of interpellation, transformative performativity spurs supple, productive representations of cultural identity while encouraging new prospects for discursive resistance to dominant ideology. This essay positions transformative performativity as a basis for considering how rhetorically inventive acts of discursive resistance elaborate on the relationship between ideological whiteness and marginalised cultural identity. These postassimilatory performances of identity, I argue, present discursive possibilities for escaping, subverting, or breaking up the ‘imaginary assemblage (bricolage)’ of dominant ideology (Althusser, 2001: 108, emphasis in original). First, I review how performances of heroism contribute to the cultural imagination of identity before considering the construct of transformative performativity. This framework compels a closer reading of one fictional narrative detailing Jewish hero creation and performance, which casts attention on the relationship between assimilation, performance, and transformation and resources for discursive resistance, rhetorical invention, and evolving cultural production.

Performing Jewishness, Performing Heroism Assimilation into dominant culture reflects a transformative consequence regarding how interpellation polices cultural identity. Is contemporary American Jewishness, for example, a religious choice, an ethnic predetermination, or a socially constructed affiliation? Books such as Samuel Freedman’s Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000), Jonathan Boyarin’s Thinking in Jewish (1996), and Lisa

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Schiffman’s autobiographical Generation J (1999) debate and consider how the privilege of whiteness necessitates or deprives space for varying valences of American Jewish identity. Karen Brodkin reflects upon ‘the loss of an authentic Jewish self’ that can occur when Jews ‘easily exchange personal connection for a few of the glittering trinkets’ bestowed by whiteness (1998: 20).10 The performance of postassimilatory Jewish heroism not only attempts to reverse this outcome but also spurs new prospects for considering discursive resistance, cultural identity, and performance itself. Heroism is not only a concern for Jews, but also a pivotal social construction of dominant ideology. Susan Jeffords (1994) has observed that popular, shared appreciation of heroism roots the cultural centering of white American heteronormativity. Likewise, Alain Finkielkraut has noted the relationship between the decline of nationalism in post-World War II France and a resulting ‘society bereft of common beliefs and collective heroism’ (1994: 88). The modernist impulse that drives nationalism fuels the construction of shared heroes because of the potential to unite people and encourage collective identification, particularly among groups viewing themselves as marginalised. For example, two highly disparate magazines dedicated to Jewish identity, the irreverent, youthful Heeb, which calls itself ‘The New Jew Review’, and the more traditional, established Heritage, the official newsletter of the American Jewish Historical Society, both have participated in Jewish hero creation albeit in different ways.11 On the converse, Daniel Boyarin’s Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1997) highlights the cultural position of anti-heroism in his study detailing how Jewish gender roles evolved over time towards Christian standards of masculine heteronormativity. Like nationalism, though, the trope of the hero often presents a contested site for cultural identity. Beth Wenger notes how ‘American Jews have created a pantheon of heroes and heroines and moulded their legends to fit the unique circumstances of Jewish life in the United States’ (2001: 123). Her study of the American revolutionary Haym Salomon illustrates how ‘Jewish communal politics’ cleave to ‘competing visions of American Jewish identity’ (2001: 124). With no accurate record of Salomon’s 10

Brodkin goes on to note that whiteness implies ‘a worldview that has difficulty envisioning an organisation of social life that does not rest upon systematic and institutionalized racial subordination’ (1998: 186). 11 See articles by Abramowitz (2003) and Salkin (2004).

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likeness available, various attempts to represent him have revealed what Wenger calls the ‘contested process to create a symbolic American Jewish hero’ (2001: 148). This process reproduces itself regularly. Heeb, for example, works to reform an old ethnic slur by expressing edgy, impudent Jewishness. As a result, many of its published letters to the editor reveal the divisiveness of American Jewish opinion and interpretation, often deriving from assimilatory tensions. One letter describes the reader’s initial excitement about Heeb, but concludes that it has been a ‘huge disappointment’. ‘We receive so much Israel-bashing from the European press and from many liberal publications here that it is an outrage that it would come from a Jewish publication. Why don’t you retool and start publishing articles that show how proud many American Jews are of their Israeli brethren? Or by writing positive articles about people with a sense of pride in their Judaism, instead of by self-hating Jews like Tony Kushner, Al Goldstein, and others? I am sure you sit around and snicker to yourselves about how cool you are and how liberal you are, but you should honestly take a look in the mirror and ask yourselves if you think you are representing the “new Jew”.’ (Letters, Heeb 5: 8)

No editor response follows this letter. Another letter, though, expresses disdain about Heeb’s treatment of Jewish former presidential candidate Joe Lieberman by noting that ‘your countless insults were harsher and more embarrassing than anything the enemies of the Jews could come up with’ (Letters, Heeb 5: 10). Heeb does respond here by mocking the perennial tension between endogamy and assimilation: ‘When will this ever end – Dean’s got a Jewish wife, Clark’s got a Jewish father, Kerry’s got two Jewish grandparents, and now you’re telling us that Lieberman’s claiming to be a member of the tribe?’ (Letters, Heeb 5: 10). Tribal anxiety regarding self-hatred, (dis)loyalty towards Israel, and the need to reflect Jewish pride all reveal how post-Holocaust rhetorical exigencies translate into social pressures that compel assimilation. Jewish pride is often culled by attempts to represent the heroic – and physical – male Jewish body. In the DVD liner notes to her 1999 documentary, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, Aviva Kempner notes that she ‘made this film because I was sick of seeing nebbishy Jewish males on the screen, since they did not fit the image I had grown up with of this powerful Jewish [baseball] Hall of Famer.’ During the course of the documentary, Greenberg is referred to as a ‘hero’, a ‘messiah’, a ‘symbol’, and a ‘god’. He also is considered ‘tough’ because he refused to play ball on solemn Jewish holidays and because he ‘did

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things in a physical sense’. Greenberg, a tall, handsome, well known athlete, enjoyed performing his uncharacteristically physical, heroic Jewishness for wide audiences during a period in which the Nazi Third Reich produced a vastly different image of Jewish bodies. Greenberg’s heroic qualities – athletic, normatively masculine, big, and strong – duplicate the same values perpetuated by dominant ideology. The introductory joke concerning Jeff Goldblum’s ‘Jewish action heroes’ illustrates the complicated relationship between performing Jewish heroism and representing the Jewish body. Greenberg is no Goldblum, and likewise, Greenberg is not the subject of any joke. Performative contexts offer an opportunity to infuse Jewish identity with heroic tropes, both physical and cerebral. Escape artistry, for example, constitutes a performative context that celebrates mental acuity in tandem with physical ability. As a rhetorical and performative trope of identity, escape artistry presents a compelling site for the performance of Jewish heroism and its representation of the Jewish body.12 Before considering this in more detail, the next section elaborates on transformative performativity as a resistive and rhetorically inventive construct found in performances of postassimilatory Jewish heroism.

Transformative Performativity As a performance-based metaphor for human interaction, interpellation explicates how dominant ideologies are policed in both literal and figurative terms. Louis Althusser illustrates interpellation by a simple process in which an authority figure confirms domination over a subject by hailing it: ‘Hey, you there!’13 Judith Butler notes that interpellation ‘is compelling, in a less than logical sense, because it promises identity’ (1997b: 108). It instantiates identity, Althusser notes, because it ‘“transforms” individuals into subjects’ (2001: 118). This transformation highlights the performance of interpellation; Althusser uses terms such as ‘actors’ and ‘roles’ to describe the relationship between ideology and interpellation (2001: 120). Likewise, Butler emphasises how interpellation points towards a transitive relationship between performance and transformation by observing that ‘in the repetition of performance a belief 12

For two examples of gender-bending, body-obsessed, Jewish escape artists, see Judith Katz’s fictional novel (1997) and John Kasson’s nonfictional account (2001) of Harry Houdini. 13 The recognition of ideological authority and its dominance are key to Althusser’s conception here (2001: 118).

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is spawned, which is then incorporated into the performance in its subsequent operations’ (1997b: 119). The postassimilatory confrontation of whiteness not only considers how resistive performance might mitigate the ideological thrust of interpellation, but also explicates the rhetorical and cultural resources afforded by recognising the performativity of identity. As a mode of resistance, transformative performativity spurs supple, productive representations of cultural identity while encouraging new prospects for discursive resistance to dominant ideology. Transformative performativity depends on two principles, presence of the comic and the redefinition of power. Presence of the comic refers to the self-conscious recognition and performance of what Kenneth Burke termed the comic corrective, which stresses the negotiation of cultural identity as a salve to the fragmentation of competing ideas and ideologies (1994: 166-75). William Rueckert has noted how Kenneth Burke’s comic corrective constitutes a necessary component to agonistic discourse because the presence of the comic resists a universalising of dominant ideology. Instead, the presence of the comic uses the threat of recalcitrance to casuistically stretch normative or contentious points of view through perspectives by incongruity. As a result, the comic corrective ensures that ‘the mediating function of criticism becomes creative’ (Rueckert, 1994: 114). The creative potential of the comic applies not only to agonistic tensions, but also to the powerful pull of interpellation. Butler claims that ‘the failure of interpellation is clearly to be valued,’ but it depends on some disavowal of self-identification. She recognises the inherent challenge here because, on the one hand, the self ‘cannot criticise too far the terms by which one’s existence is secured’ and, on the other, those terms are established by dominant institutions such as the law (1997b: 129). Butler can be considered, here as well as in her earlier theorising on identity performativity,14 to call for the mitigation of personal allegiances, or put differently, of the modernist quest for categories and certainty used to define the self. Performative Jews who engaged in self-consciously comic techniques such as blackface and drag provide models for subverting those reified bases of identity rooted in dominant ideology. Nevertheless, while past Jews used these performative techniques to negotiate their way towards American assimilation, many 14

Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter centre their attention more on gender and sexuality, but as hallmarks of queer theory their theoretical contributions enrich other sites and forms of marginalised cultural identity.

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Jews today tap the performative to negotiate a shift away from it.15 The presence of the comic invites the opportunity for negotiation, which compels the kind of play necessary for confronting dominant ideology. This kind of postmodern play encourages the second theoretical principle of transformative performativity, that of the redefinition of power. Because interpellation accounts for a subject ‘who comes into being as a consequence of language,’ the act of hailing implies consent by the hailed (Butler, 1997b: 106). ‘The mark interpellation makes is not descriptive,’ notes Butler, ‘but inaugurative. It seeks to introduce a reality rather than report on an existing one’ (1997a: 33). This reality, then, is constructed by its participants, and although the hailing or naming ‘may force itself upon you, to delineate the space you occupy, to construct a social positionality’ (Butler, 1997a: 33), you may inaugurate a seditious reality. Transformative performativity offers a means for reexamining the basis of power. Andrea Most exemplifies this idea in her account of Jews who ‘transform’ themselves ‘both on and off the stage’ (1999: 313). Reflective performance, that which calls for an audience’s recognition of the performative, invites recognising an alternative basis of identity that can limit the authority of interpellation. Inventing ‘a theatrical world in which performance determines identity,’ suggests Most, can ‘redefine the power relationships’ of cultural identity (1999: 340-1). As a result, self-conscious performance creates a space for limiting what Butler calls the urge ‘to “be” in a self-identical sense’ (1997b: 131). As principles of transformative performativity, the presence of the comic and the redefinition of power offer the potential to confront – and possibly transform – conditions of dominant ideology. ‘The New Jew Review’ is rife with postassimilatory performances of Jewish identity. Heeb’s Winter 2004 issue, for example, is organised around ‘heroes – who owns them, what functions they serve, and the historical contingencies that deem their acts heroic,’ according to editorin-chief Joshua Neuman, who expresses his hope that the issue ‘inspires you to your own acts of heroism’ (2004: 6). The introduction to the issue describes a photo feature that highlights the principles of transformative performativity by confronting ‘Mel Gibson’s recent film [The Passion of 15 For other chronologies and critiques that align Jewish performance with assimilation and identity, see Alexander, Buhle, Erdman, Gabler, Hoberman and Shandler, and Stratton. Also, American Jewish History devoted a 1999 issue to the performance of Jewish ethnicity, ‘a process of self-conscious role-playing, interaction, or manipulation’ (Antler, 247).

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the Christ (2004)] and the deplorable juxtaposition of Jewish “villainy” with Christian heroism.’ The issue’s cover screams ‘BACK OFF, BRAVEHEART’ and features a buff Jesus figure with multiple lip and ear piercings holding a large, wooden cross upside down. The photo spread inside, credited to ‘Heeb Productions’, promotes the presence of the comic by presenting a modish, naughty, and belligerent construction of heroism. ‘We here at Heeb, as descendants of those hook-nosed villains of yore, now present our own interpretation of those harrowing and controversial final hours. So sit back, ye filthy idolaters, and enjoy the show’ (Heeb 5, 2004: 48). The ‘show’ includes a cast list and caption boxes featuring each performer’s real and character names, age, hometown, and occupation accompanied by a personal comment. Heeb’s performance of cultural heroism is rooted in rebellious, creative, and comical confrontation. In the first picture, Jesus is surly, sweaty, and wears nothing but a Jewish prayer shawl. Leaning into him is bare breasted ‘Temptation’, played by Lorna Litz Baez, 21, an actress and model from Brooklyn, NY, who notes, ‘Mel Gibson’s funniest movie was What Women Want. This woman wants him to stick to romantic comedies’ (Heeb 5, 2004: 49). In another photo, Kikka portrays the Virgin Mary exposing her bare breasts with piercings in each nipple as well as her belly button and mouth. Her comment recognises and negotiates the performative nature of this narrative and how cultural heroes are embedded within it: ‘Edvard Munch’s Madonna examined Mary’s procreative sexuality and her sacred dimensions simultaneously. Of course, his Mary didn’t have her nipples pierced’ (Heeb 5, 2004: 56). Pontius Pilate is played by Caraid O’Brien, who highlights the redefinition of power by expressing a desire to revise past performances that have embodied modernist declarations of interpellative self-identification: ‘I performed in passion plays at the St. Paul School in Hingham, Mass. The cutest, blondest boy would be cast as Jesus, and he would carry the cross around the school’s gym before being crucified… Christians believe the Jews killed Jesus; that is why there is so much anti-Semitism in the world. The church was created on that one simple anti-Semitic principle. Christians who say otherwise are making it up or misinterpreting their own religion.’ (Heeb 5, 2004: 54).

In the final picture, Carlos J. da Silva portrays Jesus; his comment invokes the inventive, transformative dimension of performance: ‘On the day of the performance, I found myself overwhelmed with joy, sadness, and love. I lost myself in the emotion. I truly felt alive’ (Heeb 5, 2004: 57). Heeb’s photo essay applies the principles of transformative performativity by

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juxtaposing performance with self-conscious reflection of its cultural and identificatory role. Heeb highlights how adopting and reflecting upon the cultural position of performance can open up discursive space for rhetorically inventive acts that offer creative potential for the evolving discourse of postmodern identity. In order to develop how this responds to challenges of postassimilatory identity, the next section elaborates on how transformative performativity offers cultural resources in other contexts. In particular, the performative trope of the escape artist offers a discrete site for interrogating the cultural tensions wrought by the ideological weight of assimilation into whiteness.

The Challenge of Transformation ‘[Bernard Kornblum] had never had so naturally gifted a student, but his own discipline – which was really an escape artist’s sole possession – had not been passed along. He didn’t tell them what he now privately believed: That Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains – walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.’ (Chabon, 2000: 37)

The feeling of imprisonment by ‘invisible chains’ motivates the creation of heroism in Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), a contemporary novel set within the historical context of World War II and the Nazi Third Reich. In Chabon’s novel two Jewish cousins create a popular comic book hero, the Escapist, who repeatedly performs heroic feats of autoliberation. Escape functions not only as a motive for Jewish heroism, but also as its heuristic, embodied in both literal and ‘dangerously metaphorical’ ways. By offering a therapeutic release from the trauma of Holocaust victimisation, as Lee Behlman (2004) observes, Chabon’s narrative explores how both heroic creators as well as their creation transform themselves by self-reflexively orienting attention towards their own liberatory performances.16

16 For more critique regarding Chabon’s treatment of Jewish identity and history, see Fowler, Podhoretz, and Shandler.

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The novel’s opening paragraph, for example, describes how one of the Escapist’s creators, Sam Clay, was ‘haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini’ as a child. ‘The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet … his dreams had always been Houdiniesque: They were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.’ (Chabon, 2000: 3, emphasis in original)

Chabon then invokes Houdini’s image more literally through the Escapist’s other creator, Sam’s cousin Josef, who flees Nazi-controlled Europe by hiding in an outsized casket carrying the legendary Golem of Prague. Following his escape, Josef becomes Joe as he steadily integrates himself into American culture.17 Chabon’s novel employs the trope of escape to interrogate the complicated relationship between assimilation, performance, and transformation. Josef/Joe performs several feats of escape through the course of the novel that ensure articulation between the Golem, a prominent premodern hero of Jewish faith grown from the ghettoised exclusion of unassimilated Eastern European Jews, and the assimilated American émigré Houdini, born Erik Weisz in Hungary, who continually claimed during his lifetime that he was born in Wisconsin (Kasson, 2001: 80). The link is important. The premodern Golem is a prototypical heroic figure endemic to the shtetl life of ‘eastern Jews’, those ‘religious Jews’ whose adherence to ‘oldfashioned’ customs marked a contrast with the more assimilated, western, Haskalah Jews who embraced the zeitgeist of the Western European Enlightenment (Chabon, 2000: 24, 44, 542).18 The American descendants of those ‘polished, “Europeanised” doctors and musicians from large cities who spoke French and German’ are represented by the elusive figure of Houdini, who complicated essentialist notions regarding identity by 17

Joe becomes romantically involved with Rosa Saks, who tells him when they first meet on page 251 that he doesn’t ‘make a very convincing Joe’. By page 314, her opinion has shifted: ‘It was as if, she thought, he had been engaged in a process of transferring himself from Czechoslovakia to America, from Prague to New York, a little at a time, and everyday there was more of him on this side of the ocean’ (Chabon, 2000: 314-15). 18 Although recognizing Haskalah as the ‘Jewish Enlightenment’ is appropriate, Haskalah refers principally to the contemporaneous and related effort to increase Jewish secularization and assimilation into European host cultures.

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making ‘frequent, expert use of disguise in his lifelong crusade to gull and expose false mediums’ (Chabon, 2000: 24, 40).19 Determining the tenor of a ‘false medium’ implicates the need for critical interpretation, and Chabon repeatedly encourages his reader to reevaluate the mediums sullied by façade against those deemed legitimate. Is Houdini’s assimilated identity, for example, a false medium or the reflection of a kind of transformation? Sammy explains: ‘To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing … . Houdini’s first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called “Metamorphosis”. It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.’ (Chabon, 2000: 3, emphasis in original)

Sammy identifies the common practice of heroic figures who perform dual or hidden identities. ‘Superman,’ for example, ‘an ostensibly strong, anxiety-free gentile created by two American Jews in the 1930s was really, behind that guise, an exile from a destroyed civilisation. He hid his true identity and was vulnerable only to pieces of his old culture, his home planet’s soil’ (Rubin, 1995: 234). Furthermore, Sammy’s identification of Clark Kent/Superman as Jewish – and his ensuing declaration that all superheroes are Jewish – reflects his own recognition of transformation as a component of cultural identity (Chabon, 2000: 585).20 The novel’s confrontation with whiteness is often rooted in the body. Sammy and Joe affirm a hierarchy of cultural values, for instance, when they determine the defining characteristics of their superhero. Sammy’s diminutive father, a former vaudeville star, was hailed the ‘World’s Strongest Jew’, but his son considers him a ‘bastard’ and a ‘schmuck. … He was all muscle. No heart. He was like Superman without the Clark Kent’ (Chabon, 2000: 120). Kent, read as the gentle, bespectacled contrast to the assimilation-minded Superman, is admired here in spite of his modest body. As the cousins dissect the value of strength, Sammy composes a hero, the Escapist, whose prevailing contribution is ‘the hope of liberation and the promise of freedom!’ (Chabon, 2000: 121). Likewise, Joe gradually learns 19 As a complement to Chabon’s treatment, Kasson develops Houdini’s negotiation of American assimilation in greater detail. 20 ‘Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish?’ Sammy says to Joe, ‘Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself’ (Chabon, 2000: 585).

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The Performance of Postassimilatory Jewish Heroism ‘to view the comic book hero, in his formfitting costume, not as a pulp absurdity but as a celebration of the lyricism of the naked (albeit tinted) human form in motion. It was not all violence and retribution in the early stories of Kavalier & Clay; Joe’s work also articulated the simple joy of unfettered movement, of the able body, in a way that captured the yearnings … of an entire generation of weaklings, stumblebums, and playground goats.’ (Chabon, 2000: 176-7, emphasis in original)

This celebration of the able body values the simple joy of unfettered movement. Moreover, it compromises traits of violence and retribution by inaugurating an alternative version of heroism when compared to the hyperphysical, heteronormative aspects often associated with the white American male body.21 The cousins’ construction of heroism (and its antithesis) frequently implicates gendered characteristics to defy normative portrayals of dominant ideology. Using precise descriptions of human and human-like bodies, gender roles are blurred (Chabon, 2000: 4, 61, 338), stereotypes of the weak male Jewish body are problematised (2000: 84, 303), and ironic paradoxes of physicality are nurtured. For example, Sammy’s dad, the oxymoronically named Mighty Molecule, is cast metaphorically as a tough Jew who continually feels constrained by his hyperphysicalised body. His suits, though tailored to fit him, ‘strained to encompass his physique’, and in street clothes, ‘he had an unwieldy, comical air’ (Chabon, 2000: 101-2). In his ongoing efforts to be healthy and fit, he relished raw vegetables ‘cut from the vine’ (‘“Good for your legs,” he had said’), but could not eat them when Sammy’s mother boiled them to ‘a mass of gray strings’ (Chabon, 2000: 102-3). The Molecule’s ultimate irony is embodied in his son’s weak legs, a result of polio contracted at a young age. In response to the ironically metaphorical ‘constricting nets that his wife and son had thrown across his back’, the Molecule abandons his young family during Sammy’s early childhood (Chabon, 2000: 103). Chabon’s back story makes clear that, despite the Molecule’s physical prowess, his body hinders his sense of freedom, which imprints his relationships with others.

21

Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin notes that ‘throughout history, Judaism has been quietly teaching the world a radically different view of masculinity’ (1999: 2). In contrast, ‘the American definition of masculinity has classically been: toughness, a preference for solitary action, a lack of emotion, a fondness for sports, a respect for military strength, a disdain for eggheaded intellectualism. The American dialogue on masculinity is peppered with proverbs such as “Take it like a man”, “Be a man about it”, “What are you, a man or a mouse?”’ (1999: 2).

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Chabon uses the Golem to reinforce this paradox of the body and its triangulation with the dilemmas posed by gender and whiteness. When Sammy studies his father’s naked body, for example, he realises that the Molecule’s penis cannot overcome the ‘shadow’ of his massive thighs as it resembles nothing more than ‘a short length of thick twisted rope’ (Chabon, 2000: 106). Likewise, when the mighty Golem is used to impersonate the dead body of a human giant, an old tallis is used, ‘for the sake of anatomical verisimilitude’, to bolster his ‘crotch, where there was only a smooth void of clay’ (Chabon, 2000: 61). Again, the premodern Golem contrasts with Houdini’s performative body, which disdained concealment. As Harry Houdini, Erik Weisz deliberately and frequently exposed his strong, assimilation-minded body during his escape performances. Throughout Chabon’s novel, the body’s ability to perform heroically for an audience represents both the potential and failure to ensure its own strength. Chabon uses performance and its transformative potential to complicate the tropological role of the Jewish male body, and in doing so, pursues heuristics that interrogate the efforts of Max Nordau and other early Zionists who worked to bulk up weak Jewish bodies. Both Chabon’s narrative framing as well as the diegetical altercasting enacted through his protagonists’ hero creation reflect this. Regarding the giant, premodern Golem, for example, Chabon reminds the reader that ‘every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world … was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat – was, literally, talked into life’ (2000: 119). All of it, the conversation through the chitchat, reflects the vital role of the performative. When Sammy and Joe establish their hero to readers, the themes of the inadequate body and the embodiment of performance merge. ‘The curtain itself is legendary,’ begins the chapter that introduces the Escapist. The hero is a slight Clark Kent-inspired boy who walks with a crutch due to one leg ‘that has been lame since he was an infant’ (Chabon, 2000: 124). The boy (‘really he is almost a man’), Tom Mayflower, works in the Empire Palace Theatre with his uncle, referred to backstage simply as the Master, who performs Houdini-type stunts and magic tricks for adoring audiences. By the end of the issue, it is established that, like ‘many American Jews [who] tend to think of themselves as distinctly liberal politically, as invested in social justice and in identification with the underdog’ (Brodkin, 1998: 3), the Master is passing a specific mission on

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to Tom as he becomes the Escapist. The Master’s final words are imperative: ‘“We found you in an orphanage in Central Europe. That was a cruel place. I only regret that at the time I could save so few of you. … I charge you as I was charged. Don’t waste your life. Don’t allow your body’s weakness to be a weakness of your spirit. Repay your debt of freedom. You have the key.”’ (Chabon, 2000: 134)

As Tom and the others who worked with the Master behind the curtain devote themselves to ensuring liberation and freedom, ‘the sound of their raised voices carries up through the complicated antique ductwork of the grand old theatre, rising and echoing through the pipes’ (Chabon, 2000: 134). As the voices rise and echo, the body is literally bolstered by its own performance. The Master’s imperative to repay the debt of freedom indicates that escape is more than a vehicle for heroic performance. Jewish investment in the social justice of others, particularly marginalised Others, constitutes a heroic value and commitment that affirms cultural identity. Assimilation into the dominant ideology of whiteness, however, threatens to weaken this commitment. This is reflected repeatedly in Chabon’s narrative. Despite the Master’s admonition about the importance of spirit over body, Joe worries about how the values embodied by his hero are interpreted by his fans. By design, the Escapist’s arsenal features three components: superb physical and mental training, a crack team of assistants (fellow performers from the Empire), and ancient wisdom (Chabon, 2000: 300). Preparation, social interdependence, and innate acuity seem to imply a balance of the mental and the physical, but Joe worries that his hero might assure ‘the creation of another generation of men who revered only strength and domination’ (Chabon, 2000: 204). Recognising the limits of physical strength alone, Joe and Sammy infuse their hero with characteristics that don’t rely solely on the corporeal. Unlike the Mighty Molecule, who could perform only his own body, the Escapist complements the realities of his body with the vagaries of performance itself. Whereas the unsuccessful Molecule believed that physical perfection was necessary for his effective performance, the Golem and Escapist are positioned by Chabon as heroic because they overcome physical imperfection through their ability to transform themselves within performative contexts.

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This recognition of transformation addresses constraints of contemporary Jewish identity. Chabon shapes postmodern Jewish heroism as a reaction to Jewish assimilation into whiteness. Barry Rubin, for example, notes, ‘the subject of the Jews is nearly inescapable, though much of it concerns those escaping being Jews’ (1995: xi). Early in the novel, Chabon’s Jews appear to affirm this condition as the performative body nurtures escape. Sammy uses his writing to satisfy this motive. ‘Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself … . But like most natives of Brooklyn, Sammy considered himself a realist, and in general his escape plans centered around the attainment of fabulous sums of money’ (Chabon, 2000: 6-7). Money is the means not only for Sammy’s construction of escape, but also for Joe’s ability to ensure his family’s literal escape from Prague. Although Sammy tells his cousin that their creation ‘really will be real … doing what we’re saying he can do’ because of the income it will provide, Joe comes to realise that ‘the Escapist was an impossible champion, ludicrous and above all imaginary, fighting a war that could never be won’ (Chabon, 2000: 136, 168, emphases in original). Sammy believes in his hero’s ability to ensure the escape of others, while Joe frets that this is ‘ludicrous’. The Escapist parallels the Golem; both perform ‘a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something – one poor, dumb, powerful thing – exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation’ (Chabon, 2000: 582). Over the course of Chabon’s novel, two questions become clear: can escape instantiate heroism, and if so, does it resolve Sammy’s ‘question of transformation’? It is worthwhile here to clarify who or what the Escapist is fighting. Joe and Sammy’s hero isn’t a political figure per se although he does, on the cover of one issue, sock Hitler in the face; instead, he works on behalf of the personal interests of beleaguered individuals. In this way, he offers the potential to facilitate both self-awareness and self-affirmation, a goal also advanced by the early Zionist thinkers. Sammy’s insecurities about his body, his Jewishness, his closeted homosexuality, and his occupation (the ‘low art’ of comic books failing to fulfil his dream of writing the great American novel) fuel his application of the themes of escape and transformation in order to locate his own identity. Chabon’s narration notes that this motive is ‘common’ among the authors of heroes: ‘It was, in part, a longing – common enough among the inventors of heroes – to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred

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The Performance of Postassimilatory Jewish Heroism regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only how to fake.’ (Chabon, 2000: 113)

Recognising his performance of ‘faking it’, though, eventually encourages Sammy to recognise himself as simply ‘a good boy’, a characterisation applied by both Joe and, finally, himself (Chabon, 2000: 255, 374). Performance ensures that escape, and thus transformation, are possible even for the meek, and in ironic fashion, that is what offers incentive for Sammy to cease performing, to remain a nice Jewish boy. Without this incentive, the reader and critic might wonder if Sammy would experience or express a stronger motivation to present as well as perform his identity in a way that is more heteronormative, assimilated, and typically, mythically ‘American’. Chabon’s themes regarding masquerade, assimilation, and transformation foster disparate but fecund performances of cultural identity. As a cultural value that confronts whiteness, the heroic positioning of escape is productive for postassimilation Jewish identity. Moreover, it offers a tangible site for considering Althusser’s and Butler’s development of the relationship between interpellation, performativity, and identity. Chabon’s novel is valuable for cultural critique because it responds to multiple exigencies through Sammy’s and Joe’s creation of a performative Jewish hero. Ironically, the narrative omits the outcome of heroic fruition. ‘In later years, in other hands, the Escapist was played for laughs. Tastes changed, and writers grew bored, and all the straight plots had been pretty well exhausted. … While he continued to defend the weak and champion the helpless as reliably as ever, the Escapist never seemed to take his adventures very seriously. … He was a superpowerful, muscle-bound clown.’ (Chabon, 2000: 358-360)

The superheroic Escapist gets reduced to a common stereotype of performative Jewish identity, the clown. His creators, however, do establish their own forms of self-affirmation by the end of the novel. While Sammy escapes his insecurities and ‘comes out’22 to those close to him as a nice, gay, Jewish, comic book writer, Joe fulfils his own sense of escapism by revitalising the narrative of the pre-assimilatory, premodern 22 For more on processes of ‘coming out’ that extend beyond sexual identity, see Stratton’s Coming Out Jewish.

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Golem for an increasingly assimilated, modernist age. What each cousin escapes by the novel’s end, then, is the tantalising pull of assimilation. The creators’ ability to assert and promote non-white, postassimilatory identities occurs as a result of their own growing assimilation into whiteness. Then again, Sammy and Joe are never heroes themselves. As mere mortals, both men face ambiguous fates by the end of Chabon’s novel. It is not clear whether each man is or will be happy or successful confronting those exigencies that motivated their creation of the Escapist. Some resolution of their identities, then, is left incomplete. Resolution for their hero, though, is quite clear. Tastes change, as Chabon notes, and so does the evolving composition of cultural identity. As the heroic Escapist’s role evolves, he becomes a derivation of the haunted Jewish comic (Epstein, 2001). While the Escapist facilitates his creators’ ability to transform their own identities, the Escapist himself is also transformed. Chabon’s heroic performer invokes and embodies the need to recognise transformative performativity, then recedes. As a result, Chabon’s novel initiates questions about how to evaluate the postmodern potential of transformative performativity.

The Postmodern ‘Recycling’ of Identity Assimilation and transformation initiate questions about how to evaluate the postmodern or late modern potential of performative Jewish heroism. Chabon highlights this liminal moment and its correlation to the premodern/postmodern binary through Bernard Kornblum, Joe Kavalier’s old-world mentor. ‘Never worry about what you are escaping from,’ Kornblum repeatedly counsels Joe. ‘Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to’ (Chabon, 2000: 37, emphasis in original). The presence of the comic and the redefinition of power characterised by transformative performativity defy the value and valorisation of assimilation into whiteness by illustrating what Zygmunt Bauman calls the postmodern ‘recycling’ of identity (1996: 18). By interrogating and confronting dominant ideology, postassimilatory recognition of performativity offers a mechanism for reconsidering Althusser’s conception of interpellation as one that might in turn subvert the pessimistic relationship between dominant ideology and cultural identity. Whereas Heeb depicts iconoclastic cultural heroism that confronts existing ideology, Chabon’s representations and reflections of transformative performativity initiate a robust alternative to interpellation. Like other

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postassimilatory Jewish efforts such as avant-garde musician and artist John Zorn’s ‘Radical Jewish Culture’ project, the heroes depicted by Heeb and Chabon present ‘a message of equivocation and complexity that is necessitated by non-Jewish recognition’ (Moscowitz, 2002: 166). This recognition is key to the rhetorical inventiveness of postassimilatory Jewish identity because ‘becoming-Jewish necessarily affects the non-Jew as much as the Jew’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 291). Transformative performativity explicates not only why, but also how Jews defy assimilation, confront dominant ideology, and come out Jewish (Stratton, 2000), think in Jewish (J. Boyarin, 1996), and ‘become-Jewish’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). As discursive act and text, performance incites alternative and inventive representations of cultural identity that respond to the ironic ‘Jewish action hero’ in Independence Day. It also invites new-century Jews to reflect upon what Brodkin calls the ‘psychic damage’ of transformative assimilation into whiteness (Brodkin, 1998: 186). Becoming reflective critics of transformation is key to the discursive agency afforded by that recognition. In Chabon’s novel, Bernard Kornblum repeatedly counsels Joe that ‘people notice only what you tell them to notice’ (2000: 60). With this in mind, the postassimilatory performative Jewish hero offers the potential to transform how people notice the consensual relationship between assimilation and ideology, as well as how to keep the representation of postmodern cultural identity supple and robust.

Bibliography Abramowitz, Martin (2003) ‘The Making of a Card Set: American Jews in America’s Game’, Heritage 1(2): 10-1. Alexander, Michael (2001) Jazz Age Jews. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Althusser, Louis (2001 [1971]) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (1996) ‘From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity’, in Stuart Hall et al. (eds.) Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, pp. 18-36. Behlman, Lee (2004) ‘The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction’, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22(3): 56-71.

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Boyarin, Daniel (1997) Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Boyarin, Jonathan (1996) Thinking in Jewish. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brodkin, Karen (1998) How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Buhle, Paul (2004) From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture. London: Verso. Burke, Kenneth (1984 [1937]) Attitudes Toward History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Butler, Judith (1997a) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. —. (1997b) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. —. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Chabon, Michael (2000) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Random House. ‘Crimes of Passion’, Heeb 5. Winter, 2004: 48-57. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Delgado, Fernando (2000) ‘All Along the Border: Kid Frost and the Performance of Brown Masculinity’, Text and Performance Quarterly 20: 388-401. Epstein, Lawrence J. (2001) The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America. New York: Public Affairs. Erdman, Harley (1997) Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860-1920. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Finkielkraut, Alain (1994 [1980]) The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O’Neill et al.. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Fowler, Douglas (1995) ‘The Short Fiction of Michael Chabon: Nostalgia in the Very Young’, Studies in Short Fiction 32: 75-82. Freedman, Samuel G. (2000) Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry. New York: Simon & Schuster. Gabler, Neal (1988) An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Anchor.

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Gilman, Sander (2005) ‘“We’re Not Jews”: Imagining Jewish History and Jewish Bodies in Contemporary Multicultural Literature’, in Ivan D. Kalmar et al. (eds.) Orientalism and the Jews. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, pp. 201-21. —. (1996) Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Hoberman, J. et al. (eds.) (2003) Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting. New York and Princeton, NJ: The Jewish Museum and Princeton University Press. Houpt, Simon (2002) ‘Jewsploitation: He Wears a Star of David and Orders His Manischewitz Straight Up’, October 19, The Globe and Mail. Toronto: R1. Jeffords, Susan (1994) Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kasson, John F. (2001) Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. New York: Hill and Wang. Katz, Judith (1997) The Escape Artist. New York: Firebrand. ‘Letters to the Editor’, Heeb 5. Winter, 2004: 8-11. Moscowitz, David (2002) ‘Does “Radical Jewish Culture” Produce Radical Jewish Rhetoric?’, Studies in American Jewish Literature 21: 162-71. Most, Andrea (1999) ‘“Big Chief Izzy Horowitz”: Theatricality and Jewish Identity in the Wild West’, American Jewish History 87: 31341. Nakayama, Thomas K. and Krizek, Robert L. (1995) ‘Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 81: 291-309. Neuman, Joshua (2004, Winter) ‘Setting the Record Straight’, Heeb 5: 6. Podhoretz, John (2001) ‘Escapists’, Commentary 111(6): 68-72. Prell, Riv-Ellen (1999) Fighting to Become Americans. Boston: Beacon Press. Rogin, Michael (1998) Independence Day, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Enola Gay. London: British Film Institute. Rubin, Barry (1995) Assimilation and its Discontents. New York: Times Books. Rueckert, William H. (1994) ‘Comic Criticism: Attitudes Toward History, 1937-84’, in Encounters with Kenneth Burke. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 110-31. Salkin, Allen (2004, Winter) ‘Where Have You Gone, Sandy Koufax?’, Heeb 5: 36-41.

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Salkin, Rabbi Jeffrey K. (1999) Searching for my Brothers: Jewish Men in a Gentile World. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Schiffman, Lisa (1999) Generation J. San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco. Shandler, Jeffrey (2003) ‘Imagining Yiddishland: Language, Place and Memory’, History & Memory 15: 123-49. Snook, Raven (2003, Fall) ‘Undercover Brocha’, Heeb 4: 67-8. Stratton, Jon (2001) ‘Not Really White – Again: Performing Jewish Difference in Hollywood Films Since the 1980’s’, Screen 42: 142-66. —. (2000) Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities. London and New York: Routledge. Wenger, Beth S. (2001) ‘Sculpting an American Jewish Hero: The Monuments, Myths, and Legends of Haym Salomon’, in Deborah D. Moore et al. (eds.) Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 123-51.

‘OUR DISGUST WILL MAKE US STRONGER’: UK PRESS REPRESENTATIONS OF POWS IN THE 2003 IRAQ WAR KATY PARRY, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL

‘By choosing to use and choosing how to use photographs, photographers and editors can implicitly and explicitly add and direct meaning to a photograph. For wartime photographs in particular, that’s especially true.’ (Spiker, 2003: para. 5) ‘It is the position of point-of-view, occupied in fact by the camera, which is bestowed upon the spectator. To the point-of-view, the system of representation adds the frame …; through the agency of the frame the world is organised into a coherence which it actually lacks, into a parade of tableaux, a succession of “decisive moments”.’ (Burgin, 1982: 146, original emphasis)

This essay examines the use of prisoner-of-war photographs and freezeframe images in UK press coverage of the Iraq War in early 2003. The specific period of interest is the initial combat phase of the war, when media coverage was heaviest and arguably significant in reinforcing the moral and political justifications for war. Preliminary investigations of the press photographs reveal that images of prisoners from both sides of the conflict were frequently printed in the UK press during the invasion period (March 2003), with identical or similar photographs at times appearing repeatedly across media outlets. My methodological approach develops the concept of ‘visual framing analysis’ as a technique for analysing news photographs within their original context. The selectivity of press war images and the promotion of culturally resonant definitions of events belie the supposed evidentiality of the news photograph as document. As Susan Meiselas commented in frustration, while photojournalists can choose how to ‘frame’ the image in terms of selection and shooting, they have no power over how an image is ‘framed’ in the larger context of appearance (1987: 33). The subject or theme of a

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photograph and the way it is arranged on the news page contribute more than illustration to an adjacent article. According to Stuart Hall, news photographs ‘repress their ideological dimensions by offering themselves as literal visual-transcriptions of the “real world” … But, by appearing literally to reproduce the event as it really happened, news photos suppress their selective/interpretive/ideological function. They seek to warrant in that ever-pre-given, neutral structure, which is beyond question, beyond interpretation: the “real” world.’ (Hall, 1981: 241)

The claims of unquestioned neutrality or transparency for news photos may now seem out-of-date, even within a critique of those functions, yet even the most media savvy reader can be swayed by the photographic claim of ‘having-been-there’ (Barthes, 1982). Photographs deemed to be unauthentic or inconsequential would have no currency in the practice of photojournalism and, indeed, it is argued convincingly by Julianne Newton that despite concerns raised by both recent moves towards digitalisation and the perceptions of certain postmodern literature, visual reportage is ‘thriving’ rather than flailing (2001: 9). But this ‘sleight of hand’ (Sontag, 2003: 23), whereby our attention is diverted to the accepted evidential nature of the news photograph, only works because the latent ideological message is often so well-known and so recognisable as to be barely noticeable. The trick works despite a rationalised understanding that what we are seeing is precisely what we are guided to see and cannot be wholly ‘real’. The image on the page waits to be decoded, but this is only a small part of a complex process of selection and omission, in which all other potential news images are discarded: first by the photographer who chooses his or her subject and tools for capturing the image, by the photographic agency, and finally the picture editor with a perceived audience in mind. In fact, perhaps the photographer should not be viewed as the ‘first’ in this process; after all, the decision of what makes a ‘good’ war image has already been established to some degree by past wars, by conventions dating back to esteemed photographers and picture magazines, by cultural notions of taste and decency. However, photographs of war do not simply provide the analyst with coherent signifiers, deduced with knowledge of a fixed cultural significance, but are rather one conduit in an ongoing discourse, in which the photographer is responding to the world around him or her rather than being the sole author of meaning. According to Victor Burgin, ‘it is the pre-constituted field of discourse which is the

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substantial “author” here, photograph and photographer alike are its products; and in the act of seeing, so is the viewer’ (Burgin, 1982: 207). Such an approach stresses, perhaps uncomfortably, the pre-determined limitations on agency and interpretations of meaning for producer and consumer alike, but it also reiterates Meiselas’ point on the ‘framing’ of the image occurring in its immediate and wider cultural context. Burgin’s ‘field of discourse’ should, of course, be understood as dynamic in nature. Caroline Brothers, in her study of the role of photography in British and French press coverage of the Spanish Civil War, adopts Michel Vovelle’s notion of visual images as ‘involuntary confessions’ (1990: 40) that offer the historian insights into a specific time and culture. She writes: ‘The continuous dialogue between image and culture – not the culture of the photograph’s subjects but of the society which produces and consumes the image – offers insight both into the way these photographs transmit meaning to their public, and into the collective imagination of that society at that time.’ (Brothers, 1997: 12)

Photographs, then, are not read as authored texts, but their use and the context of their use reveal cultural assumptions about the way war is seen.

Background Literature While the neglect of visuals in the area of political communication has been noted by authors discussed below, there is however a rich abundance of writing that deals with the intellectual concerns of photography theory (Benjamin, 1968; Sontag, 1979; Barthes, 1982; Burgin, 1982; Tagg, 1988; Wells, 2005); and more specifically with news photography and war (Tratchenberg, 1985; Moeller, 1989; Taylor, 1991; Brothers, 1997; Taylor, 1998; Moeller, 1999; Sontag, 2003). Furthermore, wide-ranging studies on the role of the media during wartime, whilst offering no empirical analysis of visual elements, often point to concerns relating to both practical considerations of war reporting – issues of access, censorship, safety – and the limitations on the fundamental ‘watchdog’ duty to scrutinise the representation and characterisation of a distant war as provided by government and military press officers (Morrison, 1992; Mowlana, Gerbner et al., 1992; Knightley, 2003; Allan and Zelizer, 2004; Kellner, 2005; Lewis, Brookes et al., 2006). The growing specialty of ‘visual culture’ (or visual studies) provides methods for ‘reading’ photographs, which often share with framing

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analysis a social constructionist approach to news. Semiotic or discursive analyses focus on the use of news images to reproduce dominant ideological themes through selective and constructed realities that belie the naturalistic and evidential nature of photography (Berger, 1972; Hall, 1981; Mitchell, 1994; Hall, 1997; Leeuwen and Jewitt, 2001; Rose, 2001; Sturken and Cartwright, 2001). A leading figure in visual studies, Nicholas Mirzoeff, notes in Watching Babylon, that the war image in 2003 became a ‘smart weapon’. ‘Consequently, the images of the war were not indiscriminate explosions of visuality but rather carefully and precisely targeted tools. There was no single agent of this design, although it was clear that a co-ordinated media campaign was planned and enacted by the US military and its allies.’ (Mirzoeff, 2005: 73)

Just as the military aim was to engender ‘shock and awe’, the intense visualisation of war in the media would be both ‘precisely targeted’ and an onslaught on the senses. Past research has pointed to various concerns about the role of press photography during wartime. Reiterating Mirzoeff’s observations, Barbie Zelizer asserts that ‘journalism’s images of war provide a strategically narrowed way of visualising the battlefield’ (Zelizer, 2004: 130), and she sees this as particularly problematic when images are selected due to their symbolic power. Rather than adding to the information on the page, the symbolic quality of the photograph serves to couch what is being depicted in broader, generalisable frames that help us recognise the image as consonant with broader understandings of the world (2004: 117). Their connotative power is viewed as crucial by Zelizer, with familiar imagery recycled, either literally from photo/data libraries or compositionally through recognisable themes and portrayals. Pictures are chosen based on aesthetic appeal and therefore reinforce conceptions of the ‘good’ war image through repetition and conventionalised depictions, whether of fetishised weaponry or heroic soldiers. Zelizer’s concerns are echoed by scholars both researching the visual coverage of past wars (for example Moeller, 1989; Griffin and Lee, 1995; Brothers, 1997; Perlmutter, 1998; Taylor, 1998; Griffin, 1999; Knightley, 2003), and those focusing on contemporary imagery (Petley, 2003; Entman, 2004; Fahmy, 2004; Griffin, 2004; Perlmutter and Hatley Major, 2004; Fahmy, 2005; Zelizer, 2005; Schwalbe, 2006). Michael Griffin’s ‘Picturing America’s “War on Terrorism” in Afghanistan and Iraq’ (2004) draws on his earlier work on the 1991 Gulf War (Griffin

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and Lee, 1995), and examines the US news magazines Time, Newsweek, and US News & World Report during the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars. Griffin’s conclusions echo Robert Entman’s findings on the depictions of earlier US military actions in the 1980s (Entman, 2004: 50-75). ‘The present analysis of photographic war coverage in American newsmagazines lends further support to the idea that news photographs prime and reinforce prevailing news narratives rather than contribute independent or unique visual information.’ (Griffin, 2004: 399)

Griffin is overtly critical of photographic representation not escaping sublimation to the ‘established discourse of government leaders or the concerns of commercial marketing’ and points to the danger in the pictures’ apparent reflection of events that belies their priming towards ‘certain dominant discourse paradigms and frames of interpretation’. Rather than depicting the horror and chaos of war, opening viewers’ eyes to the human suffering involved, Griffin concludes that this social role for photojournalism is a myth ‘that academic histories of photography have promulgated’ and is not apparent in the news magazines analysed. Chiming with Entman’s findings, Griffin finds little photographic evidence to add coherence or salience to counter-frames contending that the range of photographs is ‘arguably more severely restricted than the language of reporters and columnists’ (2004: 399-400). I will briefly outline my methodological approach before concentrating my discussion on a few key images. Despite our era being one in which the digitalisation of the image has supposedly increased accessibility to a plethora of images, the same or similar photographs often appeared in the majority of British newspapers during the early stages of the Iraq War. There emerged a pattern in which some aspects of the conflict were visually promoted, while others were omitted. Indeed, many newspapers included souvenir pull-out sections of the ‘war in images’ while the conflict was still underway, condensing the time between the initial ‘draft’ of history and the promotion and repetition of iconic, stipulated ‘defining’ images. As Caroline Brothers remarks in her study on the Spanish Civil War, she is following Barthes’ advice in Elements of Semiology by limiting the analysis to a body of images ‘varied but restricted in time’ (1997: 3). I also follow this advice and include the varied national press in the UK, encompassing a range of political positions on the war and a spread of both tabloid and ‘quality’ titles. The prisoner-of-war photographs discussed in this paper are only a section of my entire study, which includes all press images relating to the initial ‘combat phase’ of the

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Iraq War. The seven national newspapers in the comprehensive sample are The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, The Independent, The Guardian, The Times, and Daily Telegraph, including their Sunday equivalents. My approach proposes that visuals are not simply a background accompaniment to the news text, but provide an insight into significant, complex patterns of meaning, with the potential power to reinforce or question the understanding of the conflict offered by dominant frames. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, I integrate semiotic methods with framing analysis in order to examine ideological or mythic understandings of the war image. In developing this model of research I recognise the critical reading of symbols as central to interrogating preconceptions of heroism, identity, or fraternity.

Visual Framing The concept of visual framing provides a relatively new method for approaching the study of images in news texts. Framing analysis shares with many visual analysis methods a constructionist approach to news events and a concern with both the conscious and unconscious reinforcement of ideology. As Robert Entman defines it: ‘To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation.’ (Entman, 1993: 52)

Despite recognition in framing studies of the significance of visuals, there have been few attempts until recently to fully integrate a comprehensive study of images. Pan and Kosicki identify this as a limitation to their analysis, despite admitting that they are deterred by the lack of conceptual analysis of visual language and its relations with verbal language (1993: 71). They also point out that their concept of framing does not assume the presence of frames in news texts independent of readers of the texts. Meanings result from active interpretations by the audience in relation to their knowledge and life experiences (1993: 64). Entman also stipulates that frames must have ‘cultural resonance’ and ‘magnitude’ (2004: 6). In this way, framing analysis attempts to find markers for the dominant ideology, the accepted ‘common sense’ ideas; to pin down the rationalisations which appear well-known and unquestioned. At the same time, it does not assume that these meanings are wholly ‘in’

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the text, divorced from the cultural context of their production and dissemination. Nor should we assume that meanings are uncontested or appear in a standardised and unvarying way. Indeed, the contestation of frames within the media and struggle of competing interest groups or ideologies to define reality and offer solutions to social issues means that frames should be conceived as dynamic and subject to change over time. This flexibility means that framing analysis can be applied to both quite specific events/issues (for example, protesting), and more general ‘metaframes’ such as anti-communism in the US during the Cold War. Messaris and Abraham argue that the unobtrusive, indexical, and naturalistic qualities of photographs could mean that ‘viewers may be less aware of the process of framing when it occurs visually than when it takes place through words’ (2001: 225). They point to a central role for visual images in framing research, with images reinforcing cultural stereotypes which may not even be referred to in the lexical-verbal text. ‘The iconic ability to seemingly reproduce nature means that visual images are capable of producing documentary evidence to support the commonsensical claims of ideology, and in turn to use the very appearance of nature (seemingly factual representations) to subtly camouflage the constructed, historical, and social roots of ideology.’ (Messaris and Abraham, 2001: 220)

Shahira Fahmy’s work on the portrayal of Afghan women in AP wire photographs during and after the fall of the Taliban Regime contributes further guidance on visual framing methods (Fahmy, 2004). The liberation of Afghan women following the fall of the Taliban was an idea that ‘resonated well with the media’ (2004: 91), with the expected removal of the burqa fitting well with Western ideas of release from repressive and subordinating practices. The pressure on photojournalists to produce an image which resonated with a Western audience may have led to an oversimplified and decontextualised representation of Afghan women. Her study provides further assistance in devising a model for visual framing, incorporating visual analysis techniques developed by Goffman (1976), Leeuwen and Jewitt (2001) as well as the importance of distant framing and stereotyping from Perlmutter (1998) and Messaris and Abraham (2001). The variables employed concentrate coding on the camera angle, distance, and physical appearance of the subjects, with no recourse to textual information, though captions were referred to if visual cues could not be determined from the photograph (Fahmy, 2004: 99). In this way, Fahmy has provided a more detailed methodology for visual analysis,

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rather than relying on words to ‘exert defining power’ (Entman, 2004: 104). She has combined more traditional concerns of representation – gender and ethnicity – with Goffman’s frame analysis, ‘providing one theoretical basis for the stereotyping process’ that stresses the role of ‘mediated misconceptions’ when remote subjects are depicted (Fahmy, 2004: 94).

Prisoners-of-War Prisoner-of-war photographs from Iraq offer an emotive example, where a sense of the ‘other’ is inscribed in the re-framing of the enemy’s unfamiliar representation of ‘our’ troops, and these images are juxtaposed with the humanitarian treatment of captured Iraqis. Rather than discussing statistical data relating to the sample of prisoner-of-war photographs in the British press, this paper will highlight concerns about the portrayal of captives by concentrating in-depth analysis on the framing of the selected images and on the relationship between photograph and headline/caption. By referring both implicitly and explicitly to past wars, in particular the Gulf War, the photographs apply a recognisable template to a current yet eerily familiar conflict, its necessity and moral justification seemingly inferred through this visual characterisation. Barbie Zelizer describes the dangers of simplified or limited interpretations when past wars are evoked through imagery and text. ‘This means that wars not necessarily alike can receive a similar visual treatment in the news simply because the form of the war’s coverage is rendered similar. The past thus intrudes into the present of news photographs by acting as a carrier for symbolism and connotative force.’ (Zelizer, 2004: 125)

Zelizer outlines three ways in which journalists cue a linkage between current war coverage and the past: through ‘words’, ‘parallel pictures’, or ‘substitutional depictions’ (Zelizer, 2004: 125). I will briefly employ these categories to show how past wars were invoked in the UK press during the Iraq war. The memories and emotions from past wars can be evoked through expressions which relate back either to actual conflicts or their filmic representation: ‘It’s just like Apocalypse Now as A-10 hits enemy’ (Mirror, March 27 2003), ‘“Apocalypse Now” as bombers blitz ambush squad’ (Mail, March 27 2003). In this case Sergeant Michael Keehan is

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quoted in both reports saying that the attacks had been ‘just like Apocalypse Now’ in the sense that they had blasted a line of houses and trees in a spectacular fashion. The tone of the comment is not one that invokes the suffering of the people killed or injured in these attacks, but rather the unreal quality of the explosions and his own distancing from real distress – we wonder if the soldier has an internal sound-track of the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ as he witnesses the destruction. The reference appears again a few days later in a very gung-ho article in the Sun, titled ‘Brit choppers in “Apocalypse Now” air strike’ (Sun, April 1 2003), in which the glamorised aesthetic appeal of the film has completely subsumed connotations which could be placed closer to a critique of US bombing policy in Vietnam. In an article headlined, ‘I don’t know how the guys in Vietnam made it. I wouldn’t have’ (Independent, April 15 2003), the rescued US PoWs place their experience of capture next to those held during the Vietnam War, and in ‘Custer’s last stand’ (Mail, April 15 2003) they describe the firefight in which they were captured as being like Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn. ‘It was like something you’d see in a movie,’ said Private Patrick Miller. In attempting to understand or translate their experiences, the soldiers resort to the position of the detached spectator, perhaps to protect and distance themselves from the very real pain and suffering involved. Yet they also want to convey the enormity of the effect the capture has had on them, so they relate their experiences to ‘epic’ battles and compare a few weeks’ capture to the imprisonment of soldiers held for many years in Vietnam. The soldiers refer to events in shared memories or imaginations, not their own fights or personal experiences, but to popular films or even recognised legendary myths relating to wars from the nineteenth century. They know that readers, at least in the US, will share these points of reference and will have some instant understanding of the emotions and pictures imagined. I would argue this isn’t just an answer tailored to an audience back home, but a spontaneous reaction to being asked to describe their experiences. Indeed, it points to the ‘mirror-effect’ or reciprocal nature of the meanings associated with (mental) images; to give meaning to new experiences we refer to past templates, which in turn offer ready-made definitions and interpretations. That is not to say that these references always make sense or offer coherence – to align one’s actions with the military disaster of

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Custer’s last stand, for example, could have questionable connotations, yet the historical importance and resonance to an US audience is undeniable. Another way to cue the past is to use visual depictions that are similar in composition or theme to representations of war in a broader sense, what Zelizer defines as ‘parallel pictures’. These may be used to symbolise recurring themes such as heroism or fraternity. An oft-used example is the soldier with a rescued baby or young child, and we see examples of this during the Iraq coverage (Telegraph, March 24 2003: 1; Sun, April 4 2003: 10). Likewise the cinematic quality of sunsets and helicopters seems irresistible to picture editors, compounding the way in which the soldiers interpret their experiences as ‘movie-like’. The third way to cue a linkage is through substitutional depictions, in which earlier, iconic war photographs are reprinted. I agree with Zelizer that this method implies the most direct connection (2004: 127) and therefore could be the most problematic in terms of collapsing the distance between the two wars. In 2003, images from the 1991 Gulf War in particular were substituted for contemporary photographs. One example from the sample of prisoner photos is from the Daily Mail on March 20, just as the invasion was getting underway. The headline reads, ‘Saddam’s sorry army of deserters’. The image used, however, depicts hundreds of Iraqi soldiers surrendering in 1991. The opening paragraph claims ‘mass desertions’. One intelligence officer is quoted as saying that unfortunately they are turning away escaping Iraqis because the war hasn’t started yet. There is even a percentage supplied by ‘the authorities’ of 73% regular soldiers in southern Iraq deciding to surrender. The huge number of deserters from 1991 pictured panoramically across two pages gives credence to these claims – the only indication that this photograph is not current is given right at the end of the caption in small type. The wide angled composition of the photograph and depth of field emphasise the number of surrendering soldiers, as we scan across from those in close-up, some smiling, to others in the distance. This approach is not only misleading in its use of archive footage in ‘news’ pages, it attempts to authenticate Coalition claims which have not been corroborated independently. In fact, many of the claims of mass Iraqi surrenders were later found to be exaggerated. There are other attributes which extend the propagandist nature of the article: for example, the use of ‘Saddam’s sorry army’, personalising the battle in terms of being against one man, and the multiple use of statistics to add authority and precision

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(‘in northern Iraq, between 43 and 75 per cent of regular soldiers … have already fled’). In terms of prisoner-of-war images, the day with the greatest number of images within the study period is March 24 2003, with 45 images used across seven newspapers in a single day. (All newspapers apart from the Independent had at least 6 images within the news pages, demonstrating that the broadsheets as well as the tabloids reacted strongly to these newsvalue-laden images). This attention followed the broadcast of images from Al Jazeera and Iraqi State Television depicting US maintenance troops who had been captured by the Iraqi army in an ambush. Every single newspaper uses the familiar word ‘paraded’ to describe the forced appearance of these rather frightened young soldiers. The framing of this event in the majority of the newspapers is similar – a story which could be perceived as ‘bad news’ for the US military, at a time when the Coalition was facing unexpected resistance, is promptly framed as a despicable act of propaganda by the Iraqi authorities. The same still images, accredited to either Al Jazeera or Iraqi State TV, are used in all seven newspapers. Under headlines such as ‘Gloating bastard’ and ‘At mercy of savages’ in the tabloids, or ‘Chilling images “breach Geneva Convention”’ in the broadsheets, there is a clear disgust at the display of PoWs for propaganda purposes. Yet this ‘double-lens effect’, showing us how the enemy presents its captured troops, takes the images for an Iraqi/Arab/World audience and reframes them for the propaganda purposes of the Coalition. The reader is invited not only to view the scared, injured soldiers – and in some cases blurry images of apparently dead soldiers were also printed – but to view the cultural differences in the enemy’s representation of captured soldiers. As Susan Sontag writes, ‘To display the dead, after all, is what the enemy does’ (2003: 57). The outrage is so clearly directed at the Iraqi authorities that there is a failure to acknowledge that the reprinting of the still images engages the newspapers in a similar task – this is how the other side go about things, this is how they brutalise our soldiers, and torture them. Rather than ‘the other’ being, as Sontag claims, ‘regarded as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees’ (2003: 65), in this case ‘the other’ sees, but in a manner to be denigrated and discredited. The Iraqi authorities and their supporters are constructed here as ‘savages’ who flout the Geneva Conventions and display their prisoners as trophies of war.

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Many papers use substitutional images alongside the current ones – The Sun, Mirror, and the Telegraph use images of the captured RAF pilots in the 1991 Gulf War, while The Times shows US pilots captured during the Kosovo conflict. References to Somalia, where US soldiers were seized in 1993, were also made in the text. The linkage made is one of torture, mistreatment, and execution. In fact, other than the injuries sustained in the ambush, the soldiers, once released, do not claim to have received any further excessive abuse. Whilst obviously terrified, their worst complaints were of being beaten with sticks when they were captured, asked questions for television, and constantly moved about to avoid detection (Mail, April 15 2003: 10). The fact that such imagery is included for us to glance at, only to cause disgust for the people who would produce it, shows how our media rejects such an explicit use of the enemy’s injured body, at least openly. As John Taylor writes of the original use of the footage of captured RAF pilots in 1991, ‘Hussein’s decision to place bodies at the centre of his discourse made Iraqi warfare seem violent and random, “proving” that Hussein was an international terrorist’ (1998: 177). In 1991, the reaction of the British press was to elevate the captives to heroes and stress that no ‘real’ harm could come to them as their spirit could not be broken (1998: 178). Likewise in 2003, the headline in the Daily Mail claims ‘Our disgust will make us stronger’, accompanied by the sub-heading, ‘The tale of two PoWs: Cruelty at the hands of the Iraqis, comfort from the Allies’, with three photographs to contrast: two grainy images from Al Jazeera of injured US PoWs, unaided and taunted by Iraqi forces, and a depiction of an Iraqi prisoner receiving medical aid from an attentive Coalition solider. The verbal framing and juxtaposition of the images offers an interpretation of events in which the ‘disgust’ will unite people, hardening resolve both militarily and in the moral justification for war, rather than damaging morale; that, despite sorrow, the Coalition will be strengthened in its solemn duty to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime. This article clearly frames the treatment of prisoners as a simplified dualism; the cruelty of the Iraqis, which will only increase our fervour to fight against the brutal regime, juxtaposed with the medical help and comfort offered to Iraqi captives by Coalition soldiers. In contrast to the Iraqis’ overt flaunting of the bodily harm inflicted on the enemy during conflict, the emphasis in the third photograph used by the Mail is on the Coalition fighting a war in which harm is minimalised for

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all except the real enemy – Saddam and the few ‘fanatical’ Fedayeen. Photographs of Coalition troops offering medical help to Iraqi soldiers is a recurring theme throughout this period, whereas the large numbers of Iraqi soldiers killed in battle are kept out of sight. The crime of displaying the captives is described as ‘horrific and inhuman’ (Mirror, March 24 2003: 4), as if the visibility of their capture were the most heinous act imaginable rather than the widespread death and destruction resulting from the invasion. It should be noted that there is one major exception to this dominant visual framing in the UK national press. The Daily Mirror condemns the Iraqi television broadcast of the captured troops, but also openly challenges the position of the moral high ground occupied by the US administration. The Mirror headline on March 24, ‘America’s Nightmare’, frames the event within a bad day for Coalition battle progress, rather than concentrating all wrath on the Iraqi authorities, with a follow-up comment piece entitled ‘Hypocrites of America crying foul’. The following day, the Mirror’s headline again directly challenges the US administration with ‘Sickening: but what the hell does America expect when it treats PoWs like this?’. Instead of using substitutional pictures of UK or US captives from past conflicts, the Mirror shows pictures of ‘detainees’ at Guantanamo Bay, both on its front page and in the editorial entitled ‘What’s the difference?’. So is the Mirror’s use of these linked images more credible to their readers? Unlike the earlier examples, the compositional elements of the compared photographs are unalike. We do not see the faces of the Guantanamo prisoners, rather the bright orange suits stand out as they hold manacled, forced kneeling positions in fenced enclosures. It is not the compositional qualities of the images that mirror each other in this case, but an inferred collective reaction of outrage at their treatment. The American ‘ally’ of Britain is exposed here as hypocritical in its condemnation of the Iraqi footage after it made the, perhaps unwise, decision to invite official photographers to ‘Camp X-Ray’ a year earlier. The Mirror attacks the Iraqis’ television coverage of the captives but alerts its readers to a comparable contemporary situation in the US. The ‘problem definition’ here is shifted to include the tactics of the US administration in its global ‘war on terror’ and the self-delusion of people such as Donald Rumsfeld in declaring: ‘We know that the Geneva Conventions make it illegal for prisoners-of-war to be shown, pictured,

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and humiliated. This is something the US does not do’ (Independent, March 24 2003: 2).1 This alternative framing asserts a moral equivalency of some degree between the two administrations in their display of prisoners and challenges the more readily perceived notion of the Coalition’s morally superior position in this war and its humanitarian objectives. The Mirror editorial both rhetorically and emphatically demands an answer to ‘what’s the difference?’, placing the two images side by side as documents of mistreatment. The encoded ‘preferred reading’ does not conform to the dominant ideological and moral perspective, but challenges the reader to reposition her understanding of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the meta-narratives of humanitarian warfare and the ‘war on terror’. However, the controversial anti-war position by the Mirror’s editor Piers Morgan did not appear to satisfy either readers or management. Morgan was forced to tone down his anti-war (and in particular anti-US) stance when sales dropped below two million. Though the fall in circulation could be explained by the overall drop in newspaper sales, its main rival, the pro-war Sun, saw sales rise in the same period of time (Cozens, 2003; Morgan, 2005). Whilst one can only speculate on whether the anti-war and graphic nature of the reporting in the Mirror specifically turned readers away, past research has shown disinclination among the home audience for material considered unpatriotic, or directly questioning the legitimacy of a war fought by their own military (Morrison, 1992; Carruthers, 2000: 156; Petley, 2003). Morgan was wrong-footed more severely in May 2004 when he printed photographs which appeared to depict British troops torturing Iraqi prisoners – he was forced to resign when it was revealed that the images were faked (see also Taylor, 2005).2 The broadsheets certainly take a more restrained position than the tabloids, but nevertheless The Times, Daily Telegraph, and Guardian all print the freeze-frame images from Al Jazeera on their front pages. However, while the Independent uses one of the familiar images on page two, it should 1 The US administration does not class the Guantanamo detainees as prisoners-ofwar. 2 For the Daily Mirror editorial apologising to readers, see ‘Sorry … we were hoaxed’ at: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/tm_objectid=14242612&method=full&sitei d=50143&headline=sorry---we-were-hoaxed-name_page.html (Last retrieved on January 30 2007).

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also be regarded as an interesting exception. The Independent, a newspaper which has a reputation for innovative use of photography, prints the familiar freeze-frame of Sergeant James Reilly, but obscures his face by reducing the number of pixels in the reprinting of the image. This raises a number of intriguing points relating to the representation of prisoners. Despite the blurring of the face, the Independent still printed the image over the width of six columns and on the top half of the page – the size and prominence of the image are factors which would point to its significance and newsworthiness. So why print an image over six columns, and then obscure the main focus of its content? It could be argued that this decision was made at the last minute and so there was no option but to keep the original size. The next day, an article appeared on page nine of the newspaper written by Guy Keleny. He sets out the Independent’s position on the printing of prisoners’ faces and relays advice from the Ministry of Defence in which they ask ‘that the faces of Iraqi prisoners-of-war should either be pixellated or obscured to prevent them being identified. This is a requirement under the Geneva Convention’ (Independent, March 25 2003: 9). Guy Keleny points out that while the Geneva Conventions are binding on governments and not the media, they feel their readers ‘would not want us to profit from a breach of them’. Keleny dismisses the possible defence of using the pictures to expose wickedness, writing that displaying the pictures exposes the prisoners to ‘public curiosity’ – which they should be protected from according to the Geneva Conventions. Beneath his article is another report in which the International Committee of the Red Cross also criticise Iraqi and Western media for using close-up pictures. The explanation of the Independent’s editorial position gives us one clear reason to pixellate-out the faces of prisoners – to protect them from ‘public curiosity’ and their identity from those who may harm them or their families. Yet at the same time this striking image directs our attention to the apparent layers of representation. The large square pixels remind us that we are seeing an image which has been altered, rather than a window onto reality. In fact, we have already noted that this is not simply a photograph, but a captured still from a television broadcast – identifiable by the Al Jazeera logo and the visible grainy dots which make up the picture. The composition itself, in which a microphone is held towards the face in close-up, is recognisable in the grammar of filming a TV interview. It is already a picture within a picture. Now the pixellation adds a further layer of signification, it adds further history to the picture; a façade in

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place of a face, to forefront the processes involved in creating the finished printed image. However, at the same time, the obscuring of his face only adds to the authenticity claims of the printed image; a sense of reality is strangely reinforced through the layers of representation in which such determined obfuscation could possibly be required. In the age of digital imaging, the pixellation conversely becomes a marker for authenticity or even realism, by fragmenting and disfiguring the recognisable face for protective motives. With his face removed, the soldier becomes a blurry representation of the plight of all the captives, and indeed all those sent to war by political leaders. He is not quite invisible, but the Independent refuses to engage in this re-presentation of Iraq’s propaganda for our own perusal, which other newspapers have done without reflecting on their own duplicity. The six other newspapers show the images to deride them. The Independent’s altered image draws attention to the insincerity of the Western media’s denunciation of the Iraqi images even as they simultaneously print them. It is not squeamishness on the Independent’s part, but a rare realisation of its own role in promoting ideological interests through re-presenting/reframing the depiction of the prisoners as seen in the Arab world. The wider context to keep in mind is that every single one of the six other newspapers led with at least one of the still TV images on the front page. Most newspapers decided the images themselves were the main focus of the story – this was clearly image-driven news, and furthermore, broadcast-image driven news. Such widespread use demonstrates that these images fulfiled notions of recognisable ‘news values’ which made them so irresistible – to be tantalisingly shocking, to be easily placed within a narrative which reflects editorial positions and framings, and to show potential iconic status. In many cases the images are placed alongside other iconic images, whether of past PoW or Guantanamo prisoners, to reinforce both their historical significance and political signification. The protection of the soldier’s identity by the Independent seems of negligible benefit when most readers could ‘fill in the blanks’ themselves due to this blanket coverage. His identity is obscured but strangely present in the blank squares which have replaced the features of his face. We know that he is a US PoW, but the squares remind us that his substance as a news story may soon fade. Even a photographic icon whose image has a significant visual impact often fails to become significant as an individual

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– we do not, for example, know the fate of the man who stood before the tanks in Tiananmen Square (Perlmutter, 1998: 16). His invisibility on the day of his newsworthiness points to the very nature of news photographs – how much will we remember following the event? How much of what we do remember will be guided by the framing of the image? Whether a deliberate message or a last-minute editorial predicament, the use of the large image, its main protagonist obscured, tells us something about the nature of news images. Do we need to see his face to know his role in this narrative? Can we already imagine the fear, or is this diminished in the absence of his expression with which we could form an emotional bond? Throughout history we have added human faces to inanimate objects as a way of humanising them, as a short-hand, instant recognition for humanity. Does the removal of the face dehumanise the subject? In chipping away at the identity of captives, do the protective measures of the Independent actually remove the human suffering from images of war? Is the obscuring of the face paradoxically a way to reclaim the soldier’s (hidden) identity from the forced exposure by the Iraqi media, a protective measure that simultaneously shuns the visceral Arab representation of war to reassert a Western prudery? In this case the Independent is attempting to extract itself from the propagandist uses of prisoner images – either for the purposes of the Iraqis or the Coalition. But its use of the obscured US PoW image provides a jumping-off point for the discussion of the role images play in representing a faraway war. How the war is visualised and the way such images are framed, by the headline, layout, captions, and other text – but primarily the inclusion and treatment of the images themselves – provide us with texts which give clues about their ideological function. The conventions, in which we see repetitive and similar images used across the media outlets, reveal, for example, how we construct ideas about the enemy and the hero, to what degree a collective response or interpretation is assumed. Using templates of past wars is just one way to appeal to cultural understanding and collective memory. As Susan Sontag writes, ‘Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory – part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction’ (2003: 76). Newspaper editors and television news producers

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stipulate what is important, which events deserve our attention. Like Vovelle’s ‘involuntary confessions’, the pictures can be examined to reveal what is excluded as well as included, and offer insight into the ideological assumptions of the society that constructs and consumes the images. The visible square pixels draw our attention to the realisation that we are in the post-photographic era, where digitalisation has brought a new insecurity to the way that we look for meaning or veracity in an image. The fragmented appearance of the face reflects a growing, but not entirely new, questioning of photography when used in journalism, in which a certain amount of faith or trust is necessary for the image to have any currency. The connotative power of any news image relies on a certain level of authenticity in what is denoted. It remains to be seen whether this new turn towards digital imaging will radically alter the subject and composition of war pictures over time, as a new technology of representation struggles to retain its ‘deeper bite’ (Sontag, 2003: 19).

Bibliography Allan, Stuart et al. (eds.) (2004) Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. London, New York: Routledge. Barthes, Roland (1982) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Cape. Benjamin, Walter (1968) Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. Brothers, Caroline (1997) War and Photography: A Cultural History. London and New York: Routledge. Burgin, Victor (1982) ‘Looking at Photographs’, in Victor Burgin (ed.) Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan, pp. 142-216. —. (ed.) (1982) Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan. Carruthers, Susan L. (2000) The Media at War: Communication and Conflict in the Twentieth Century. London: MacMillan. Cozens, Claire (2003) ‘Daily Mirror Sales Fall Below 2m’, Media Guardian, April 11 [online], available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/ media/2003/apr/11/pressandpublishing.mirror (accessed March 30 2007). Deacon, David et al. (1999) Researching Communications: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural Analysis. London: Arnold. Eldridge, John (ed.) (1995) Glasgow Media Group Reader Volume One: News Content, Language and Visuals. London: Routledge.

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Entman, Robert M. (2004) Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and US Foreign Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago. —. (1993) ‘Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm’, Journal of Communication 43(4): 51-8. Fahmy, Shahira (2005) ‘Emerging Alternatives or Traditional News Gates? Which News Sources Were Used to Picture the 9/11 Attack and the Afghan War?’, Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies 67(5): 381-98. —. (2004) ‘Picturing Afghan Women: A Content Analysis of AP Wire Photographs during the Taliban Regime and after the Fall of the Taliban Regime’, Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies 66(2): 91-112. Ginneken, Jaap van (1998) Understanding Global News: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage Publications. Goffman, Erving (1976) Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper and Row. Griffin, Michael (2004) ‘Picturing America’s “War on Terrorism” in Afghanistan and Iraq’, Journalism 5(4): 381-402. —. (1999) ‘The Great War Photographs: Constructing Myths of History and Photojournalism’, in Bonnie Brennan and Hanno Hardt (eds.) Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, pp. 122-57. Griffin, Michael et al. (1995) ‘Picturing the Gulf War: Constructing Images of War in Time, Newsweek, and US News & World Report’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 72(4): 813-25. Hall, Stuart (ed.) (1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage with The Open University. —. (1981) ‘The Determination of News Photographs’, in Stanley Cohen et al. (eds.) The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media. London: Constable, pp. 236-43. Holland, Patricia (1998) ‘News Photography: The Direct Appeal to the Eye? Photography and the Press’, in Adam Briggs et al. (eds.) The Media: An Introduction. Harlow: Longman, pp. 464-76. Kellner, Douglas (2005) Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism, War and Election Battles. Boulder and London: Paradigm. King, Cynthia et al. (2005) ‘Photographic Coverage during the Persian Gulf and Iraqi Wars in Three U.S. Newspapers’, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 82(3): 623-37. Knightley, Phillip (2003) The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq. London: Andre Deutsch.

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Leeuwen, Theo van et al. (2001) Handbook of Visual Analysis. London and Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage. Lewis, Justin et al. (2006) Shoot First and Ask Questions Later: Media Coverage of the 2003 Iraq War. New York: Peter Lang. Meiselas, Susan (1987) ‘The Frailty of the Frame, Work in Progress: A Conversation with Fred Ritchin’, Aperture 108 (Fall): 31-41. Messaris, Paul et al. (2001) ‘The Role of Images in Framing News Stories’, in Stephen Reese et al. (eds.) Framing Public Life. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 215-26. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2005) Watching Babylon: the War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, William J. T. (1994) Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Communication. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Moeller, Susan D. (1999) Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. New York & London: Routledge. —. (1989) Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat. New York: Basic Books. Morgan, Piers (2005) The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade. London: Ebury. Morrison, David E. (1992) Television and the Gulf War. London: John Libbey & Company Ltd. Mowlana, Hamid et al. (eds.) (1992). Triumph of the Image: The Media’s War in the Persian Gulf: A Global Perspective. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press. Newton, Julianne H. (2001) The Burden of Visual Truth: The Role of Photojournalism in Mediating Reality. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pan, Zhongdang et al. (1993) ‘Framing Analysis: An Approach to News Discourse’, Political Communication 10: 55-75. Perlmutter, David D. et al. (2004) ‘Images of Horror from Fallujah’, Nieman Reports 58(2): 71-4. Perlmutter, David D. (1998) Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crises. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Series in Political Communication. Petley, Julian (2003) ‘War without Death: Responses to Distant Suffering’, Journal for Crime, Conflict and the Media 1(1): 72-85. Rose, Gillian (2001) Visual Methodologies. London: Sage Publications. Schwalbe, Carol B. (2006) ‘Remembering our Shared Past: Visually Framing the Iraq War on U.S. News Websites’, Journal of Computer-

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Mediated Communication 12(1), available at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/ vol12/issue1/schwalbe.html. Sontag, Susan (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin. —. (1979) On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Spiker, Ted (2003) ‘Cover Coverage: How U.S. Magazine Covers Captured the Emotions of the September 11 Attacks – and How Editors and Art Directors Decided on Those Themes’, available at http://aejmcmagazine.bsu.edu/journal/archive/Spring_2003/Spiker.htm (accessed January 31 2007). Sturken, Marita et al. (2001) Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tagg, John (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. London: Macmillan. Taylor, John (2005) ‘Iraqi Torture Photographs and Documentary Realism in the Press’, Journalism Studies 6(1): 39-49. —. (1998) Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —. (1991) War Photography: Realism in the British Press. London, Routledge. Trachtenberg, Alan (1985) ‘Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs’, Representations 9: 1-32. Vovelle, Michel (1990) Ideologies and Mentalities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wells, Liz (ed.) (2005) Photography: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. Zelizer, Barbie (2005) ‘Death in Wartime: Photographs and the “Other War” in Afghanistan’, Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 10(3): 26-55. —. (2004) ‘When a War is Reduced to a Photograph’, in Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer (eds.) Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. London: Routledge, pp. 115-35.

PUBLIC FRAMES: SECURITY, PERSUASION, AND THE VISUAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE INTERNATIONAL FRANK MÖLLER, TAMPERE PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

In her work on photographic family snapshots and portraits, Marianne Hirsch has suggested using the term ‘family frames’ to describe the photographic family album as a vehicle for the construction, justification, and maintenance of often idealised family relationships, rules of appropriate behaviour, family traditions, and memories (Hirsch, 1997). Despite often deemed unworthy of academic analysis because of its alleged triviality, the family album is precisely one of the everyday places where identities are constructed, notions of self and other are developed, feelings of belonging are articulated, and collective memories are formed. It is a place of intimacy, secluded from the outside world and to a large extent incomprehensible and impervious to outsiders to whom family photos may indeed appear to be banal, boring, or uninteresting. Failing to evoke emotions or convey a relevant message to people other than those depicted in the album and their close relatives and friends, the album is meaningful only for those who are aware of the tacit assumptions and implicit relationships, including hierarchical power relations, which can be felt though not necessarily seen in the photographs. Thus, photographs cannot be reduced to what they depict – they always carry with them more than can be seen. Their meaning is either negotiated amongst the beholders or, reflecting prevalent power relations, stipulated by the more dominant of them. Although promising to reveal much, photographs are secretive, keeping much to themselves. As Hirsch puts it, there is indeed a tension between ‘the little a photograph reveals and all that it promises to reveal but cannot’ (Hirsch, 1997: 119). The family photograph creates ‘something new’ which would not exist without the photographic representation; at the

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same time, however, this representation, being a translation rather than an invention, would not exist without the object that it represents: ‘Representation always comes after’ (Huyssen, 1995: 2). Representing the family, the photographic family snapshot – like every representation – also constructs it, resulting in a form of hybridity that cannot be reduced to either what it represents or what it constructs. In the family album, families are often represented according to fairly generic and ideal-typical notions of what a family is supposed to be. These notions reflect the hegemonic norms, values, and aesthetics in a given community which, in turn, are indicative of the latter’s power relations. It can be said, however, that even a very conventional image has the potential to ‘subvert the very structure it so solidly upholds’ because images have ‘the capacity to operate on several levels at the same time’ (Hirsch, 1997: 121). Photographs cannot be reduced to the way they operate on any one of these levels: on each level they reveal less than they promise to reveal. Furthermore, images are differently perceived by different people, relating to language and other forms of visual culture in complex and rather unpredictable fashions. The family album provides a starting point for this chapter due to pointing to photographs, even private photographs, as closely associated with the basic fabric of society, repeating and confirming the rules and hierarchies that govern any given group. In accordance with the above observations, I wish to argue here that international politics and security policies are regulated by rules of appropriate behaviour; that these rules are formed within what is here designated as public frames; that these public frames are to a large extent visual frames, namely frames consisting of visual representations; and that these visual representations have to be analytically taken into consideration if we are to come to adequately assess the possibilities and impossibilities of security policies in a culture that is dominated – and perhaps hyper-saturated – by images (Sontag, 2003: 105). While the terms ‘frames’ and ‘framing’ are used in foreign policy analysis rather generically to analyse the match or mismatch between foreign policy manifestations on the one hand and audience expectations on the other hand (Frensley and Michaud, 2006), the term ‘public frames’ in this chapter applies to those images that are employed in the construction, justification, and maintenance of security policies and rules of appropriate behaviour within the realm of security and the international. Because security policy is understood here as an intersubjective discursive practice, public frames include the negotiation between speaker and audience of value judgements as well as validity claims inherent in the articulation of

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security. Consisting in distinctly political spaces of public negotiation, in which people communicate with one another and act together, public frames allow for resistance, opposition, and counter-hegemony.

Security and Persuasion Security policy is often anti-political in the sense that the use of the word ‘security’ in a political context, domestically and internationally, frequently results in the stifling of open debate, locating a given securitised issue outside the realm of public contention. Appeals to urgency in connection with the articulation of security – that threats have to be countered now because tomorrow it will be too late – justify, furthermore, the curtailment of democratic participation as well as the tightening of control mechanisms, and support the technocratisation of securitised issues by administrative elites with questionable democratic legitimacy. Here, security speech acts appealing to urgency join hands with ‘opinion-forming commentary in the modern print media and visual media stem[ming] from an immediacy imperative driven by the technology of electronic communication that shapes the fast-moving world of political spin’ (Jones and Smith, 2006: 1079). Appeals to urgency and media practices based on immediacy render difficult thorough analysis. The emphasis on security can be seen ‘as a failure to deal with issues as normal politics’ (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, 1998: 29). To return securitised issues to the ordinary sphere – that is, to desecuritise them and to repoliticise them – appears to be an important task, especially in the post-9/11 world with its security-driven political discourse and practice that exemplify security’s problematic relationship with freedom (Waltz, 1976: 112), democracy (Czempiel, 1996), transparency, and publicity (Walt, 1991: 213). Indeed, security, ‘one of modernity’s most stubborn and enduring dreams’ (Burke, 2002: 1), can turn into a nightmare when it is aspired to at the expense of other values, thus effectively suppressing them. Concepts of security are derivative in the sense that they result from deeper assumptions regarding world politics (Booth, 2005: 13) and the basic features of the human condition. The dominance of one specific understanding of the word ‘security’ in modern political language – in a simplified version, freedom from threat to a given group of people – and the political consequences drawn from this understanding to justify all kinds of state policies (Holsti, 1995: 84) tell us much about the conditions

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of modern politics, particularly the focus on state and national security. Such conditions often obscure the fact that concepts of security vary over time and across space. Although security is often depicted as ‘one of the most fundamental human needs’ and ‘a universal good available to all’ (Burke, 2002: 1), there is no consensus amongst scholars as to what security actually is and how it can be achieved. Pseudo-definitions such as ‘freedom from threat’ do not take us much further as long as there are no objective definitions and assessments of ‘threats’. .

The lack of conceptual clarity and the multitude of means that are alleged to aid in achieving security cannot be otherwise because security is neither an objective nor an absolute state of being. Rather, understandings of security and security policy follow judgements reflecting, among other things, social contexts, experiences, identities, memories, and interests. Concepts and policies of security reflect the discursive and material power to determine, at any given moment, the understanding of security (what is security?), to define both the desired degree of security (how much security?) and the subject of security (who or what is to be secured?), to locate security at a certain position between the poles of political saliency and insignificance as well as in relation to other values (how important is security?), and to decide on the means with which to strive for security (what security policy?). Concepts of security mirror and are shaped by the public and discursive frames within which the negotiation of all of the above questions takes place. This negotiation is controversial and contested not least because the term security ‘covers a range of goals so wide that highly divergent policies can be interpreted as policies of security’ (Wolfers, 1962: 150). It is also controversial because security policy, in its military form, always includes a huge allocation of resources and its transformation into means of warfare. Although security has ‘multiple meanings, some of which are not at all necessarily logically linked to conventional understandings’ (Dalby, 1997: 6), most policy-makers seem to know exactly what security is, in what situations the word security has to be articulated, and what has to be done in order to assure and increase security. It is primarily for this reason, amongst others, that Ole Wæver’s suggestion that security be understood as ‘a speech act’ is to be welcomed: ‘the word ‘security’ is the act; the utterance is the primary reality’ (1995: 55). In this conception, the articulation of security does not reflect the existence of an objective threat but constructs this threat in the first place. This linguistic construction of security or security speech act can be analysed through discourse analysis

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by searching for ‘the rules governing what can be said and what not’ (Wæver, 2002: 29). These rules establish what is politically possible and what is not (while scholars, save for rare exceptions, have no methodological tools at their disposal with which to verify or falsify the existence of the alleged threat, and thus to support the articulation of security or to criticise it as inadequate). Wæver’s approach is ambitious because, first, security is equated with existential threats. Secondly, the word ‘security’ is said to justify the use of extraordinary means. Thirdly, in order to qualify as securitisation, the audience has to indicate some degree of acceptance of the representation of something or someone as an existential threat to the group, requiring extraordinary and immediate means to deal with the perceived threat. Security thus becomes an intersubjective discursive process (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, 1998: 23-6). Although speech acts claim validity, speakers and audience negotiate such claims and the degree to which they are accepted. For example, the audience can agree that a given development is a threat, but disagree on it being a threat to the survival of the group. Or the audience may agree that a development is indeed a threat to the survival of the group, but disagree on the possibility of it posing an immediate threat, requiring rapid countermeasures. The audience may yet argue that a given issue, downplayed in political rhetoric, does indeed pose a serious and immediate threat to the survival of the group. In democratic societies, security ideally is a process of discourse, communication, persuasion, and argumentation rather than an act of mere power. The audience can – but does not necessarily have to – accept securitising moves. In the securitisation approach, the audience is therefore given a much more important function than is usually the case in security policy and theory, which normally diminishes the audience’s role to ignorance, acclamation, or tacit acceptance. Of course, this does not automatically mean that the audience does in fact assume a more active role than can usually be observed in security policy. It is argued here, however, that it should assume a more active role than it usually does and that understanding security as a speech act may help the audience assume such a role. However, the characteristics of security policy do pose a severe obstacle to more democratic control of and participation in security policy, being characterised by, among other things, privileged access of specific interest groups to the political system’s monopoly of power, limited public access to relevant information – thus preventing the public from making informed choices – and deeply

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ingrained patterns of thought/behaviour that perpetuate the traditional elitism in security policy rather than promote democratic participation (Mouritzen, 1998). All the same, at least in theory the securitisation approach opens new avenues for citizens’ engagement in security policy (although this aspect is underdeveloped in the original writings on securitisation).1 If we assume that securitisation can be successful only when it is in accordance with the cognitive, emotional, and mnemonic frames of the targeted audience (because otherwise the audience would disagree and articulate its disagreement in, for example, parliamentary or presidential elections), then from the actors’ point of view the issue is not that of correspondence between securitising moves and the audience’s expectations, but rather the shaping of collective expectations so as to produce this correspondence in the first place and limit the degree to which securitising speech acts might be opposed. In this case, processes of securitisation would seem to be rather close to the concept of hegemony in Raymond Williams’s sense because, similar to securitisation, hegemony depends ‘… for its hold not only on its expression of the interests of a ruling class but also on its acceptance as “normal reality” or “commonsense” by those in practice subordinated by it. … The idea of hegemony, in its wide sense, is then especially important in societies in which electoral politics and public opinion are significant factors, and in which social practice is seen to depend on consent to certain dominant ideas which in fact express the needs of a dominant class.’ (Williams, 1976: 145)

Securitisation’s closeness to hegemony is strengthened by the characteristics of security described above: secrecy, lack of openly available information, privileged access of specific interest groups to decision-making, but also lack of interest in security policy on the part of the audience. However, since the audience can oppose securitising speech acts and thus interrupt the logic and dynamics resulting from the articulation of security, securitisation does also have some counterhegemonic potentialities. Hegemony, while referring to the power of a dominant class to persuade subordinate classes to accept its moral, political, and cultural values as the ‘natural’ order, ‘is never fully achieved 1

Elsewhere, Wæver agrees that ‘it could in various contexts be helpful to use the [securitisation] approach in an almost Diskursethisch sense to ask practitioners to be more explicit in explaining why their alleged “threats” and “security problems” should be lifted out of “normal politics” into the realm of “security”’ (1999: 337).

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– it is always contested’ (Jackson, 1989: 53). The same can be said with respect to securitisation: it is always contested.

Little Donkeys, Blown Up Securitisation is a process of persuasion that often – but not always – relies on words. In fact, most discourse analytical approaches to the study of security focus on language, reflecting Wæver’s linguistic framework for analysis. Wæver himself, for example, acknowledges that ‘the world is more than language’ but nevertheless suggests ‘a differential understanding of language’ as key to discourse analysis (2002: 29). Lene Hansen recognises that the lack of a discussion of visual representations presents a ‘crucial limitation’ of her own discourse analysis of the Bosnian War (2006: 217). If we think of securitisation as a social process that can be successful only if it is in accordance with the cognitive, emotional, and mnemonic frame of the audience, then discourse analysis’ almost exclusive focus on language is problematic indeed: the visual representations of the attacks on the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001 and their subsequent use, as a provider of legitimacy, in security policies make abundantly clear that processes of persuasion increasingly appeal to images and the memory of images. However, desecuritising interventions in security policy are also characterised by greatly taking recourse to images (Möller, 2007). It is in fact suggested in discourse analysis that visual representations are speech acts, too. Michael C. Williams, for example, argues that nowadays ‘political communication is increasingly bound with images’ (2003: 524). Although referring to visual representations and images in general, Williams is basically interested in televisual media and ignores other forms of visual representation. Furthermore, his statement that the experience by relevant publics of, for example, migration ‘is inevitably constructed in part by the images (and discussions based around them) of televisual media’ (2003: 526) elegantly glosses over the question of the word-image-relationship: is our perception and experience of migration or, for that matter, of anything else dominated by visual or verbal representations? What happens when verbal representations, as they are bound to do (MacDougall, 1998: 246), give a different account of migration or other issues than do visual representations? In any case, there is no need to reduce visual representations to televisual images. On the contrary, the pace of subsequent images and the MTV-inspired aesthetics of rapid cuts render it very difficult indeed to see and to understand

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anything on the TV screen. Photography’s slowness thus may be an asset rather than a liability, giving the beholder space for contemplation and engagement with the image. Furthermore, while photography helps people remember (Sontag, 2003: 89) – often, however, at the expense of their own memories (Lowenthal, 1985: 257) – television often has the opposite effect. For example, with respect to the Persian Gulf War it has been argued that on television ‘the mass destruction of an Arab nation [was] little more than a spectacular television melodrama, complete with a simple narrative of good triumphing over evil and a rapid erasure from public memory’ (Mitchell, 1994: 16). The medium-specificity of speech acts has been called into question by arguing that it is possible to ‘make a promise or to threaten with a visual sign as eloquently as with an utterance’ (Mitchell, 1994: 160). It therefore seems to be a reasonable assumption that processes of persuasion rely on images as much as they rely on words and that, therefore, securitisation may use words or images or both. And, in a world dominated by visual culture, it is also reasonable to assume that the public frames, within which the negotiation and articulation of security take place, are to some extent visual frames. In other words, security policy reflects and follows a discourse that is to some extent shaped by images (although it is notoriously difficult to quantify the extent to which discourse is shaped by images). Images used in security policy – and this brings us back to Marianne Hirsch’s insights on the family album – reflect the hegemonic norms and values in a given community. Similar to the family album, however, even very traditional images used in security policy operate on different levels, simultaneously undermining the structure they help maintain. That international politics and security policies have a visual dimension, and that security policy-makers – in contrast to most security policy analysts – are aware of it, can hardly be denied. Consider the following episode from the early stages of the US ‘war on terror,’ as reported by Steve Coll (2004: 193): ‘The rebels had to run through Soviet-laid minefields as they approached fixed positions around Jalalabad. The Afghans were trained to send mules ahead of their soldiers to clear the fields. They would tie long wooden logs on ropes behind the mules and drive them into a minefield to set off the buried charges. “I know you don’t like this,” an Afghan commander explained to Gary Schroen as the Jalalabad battle began, “but it’s better than using people.”

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“Yes, but just don’t take any pictures,” Schroen advised. Nobody back in Washington “wants to see pictures of little donkeys blown up.”’

When the United States military withdrew from Somalia in 1993, it did so in response to the media’s interpretation of photographs of stripped, dragged, and mutilated American captives. These interpretations, based on questionable assumptions regarding the public’s response to images of dead US servicemen, suggested that the withdrawal was inevitable because US public opinion would otherwise turn against the president. However, more important than the question of whether or not polling data could support these assumptions is that ‘the argument [was] not being made that we pulled out from Somalia because of what happened, but that we pulled out because of the photographs of what happened’ (Dauber, 2001: 215). Thus, not the actual killing of US servicemen, but visual representations of these killings required policy change. It was the visual frame, not the event as such that seemed to make withdrawal inevitable. Likewise, when pictures showing the massacres committed by the Israeli defense forces in the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin were published in 2002, the Israeli foreign minister reportedly commented on them by saying that ‘the problem with Jenin was that the pictures were horrible ... the pictures could not be justified’ (Bregman, 2005: 206). Thus, the pictures of the massacre, not the massacre as such, required policy change. Regarding the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, it can be said that it was not the treatment of the captives as such that was unacceptable from an official point of view. This treatment seems to have been encouraged or at least tacitly approved by high-ranking representatives of the Bush administration. However, the uncontrolled and uncontrollable dissemination of photographic evidence of this treatment, intended for private consumption – souvenirs for the friends and loved ones at home (a family album of sorts) – but disseminated world-wide almost in real time and unaffected by control mechanisms and censorship, was considered unacceptable by the Bush administration. Susan Sontag has suggested that the photographs ‘made all this “real” to Mr. Bush and his associates’ (2004) but even in this seemingly unambiguous case and despite public protest (almost) all over the world, the lessons drawn from the photographs and from the practices they document vary substantially. This reflects not only the context-dependence of interpretations of images and the surplus of meaning that images inevitably carry with them, but also the political character of most of the interpretations, aiming to support and legitimise a given political stance with reference to what the pictures allegedly show clearly, unmistakably, and unambiguously. In the case of

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the Abu Ghraib photographs, distinct master narratives were constructed on the basis of what the former presumably depict (Danner, 2004) and different demands ensued for responsibility and accountability (Sontag, 2004). The limitation of the investigation to a ‘few rotten apples’ and the explanation of the scandal in terms of ‘operator errors’2 have effectively prevented both the discussion over the involvement of high-ranking representatives of the US administration as well as the examination of more basic issues concerning the role of the military as a social institution, the function of war as a social practice, and the responsibility of the state in legitimising both the military and war (Möller, 2006: 53). Thus, the photographs have helped open the door to public debate, but ‘by virtue of their inherent grotesque power’ (Danner, 2004: 28) they have also helped close this very door before the most important questions could be asked.

Framing Security As noted above, the terms ‘frames’ and ‘framing’ are used in foreign policy analysis to analyse, among other things, the degree to which foreign policy and its manifestations on the one hand, and the audience’s expectations on the other hand coincide. Framing is seen as successful if it manages either to resonate well with the values of the targeted audience or to change the audience’s values in such a manner that they coincide with the values formulated in policy manifestations (Frensley and Michaud, 2006). Thus, ‘framing security’ is shorthand for the communicative and discursive process described above, in the course of which correspondence between securitising moves and the audience’s expectations is constructed. The social practice of framing security can be observed in both policy manifestations and media analyses. Take, for example, video images of Ayman al-Zawahiri announcing, shortly after the series of attacks on the London transport system and its users in July 2005 which killed 56 people, further attacks on the United Kingdom. The video was shown on television August 4 2005 and alZawahiri’s performance has been described as follows:

2

The term ‘operator error’ refers to organisations’ proclivity to blame individuals for errors, mistakes, and accidents rather than the organisations’ mistaken design or wrong decisions by senior staff. According to Sagan, ‘hierarchical and traditionbound military organisations may be particularly prone to blame individuals for errors rather than finding fault with the entire organisation’s structures or procedures’ (1993: 208).

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‘The iconography is relatively easy to decode. The gun to his right is a more potent looking weapon than usual, with a grenade launcher fixed to its barrel, indicating a desire to reinforce the threat of violence. The black turban like that worn by the Taliban suggests a concern to show solidarity with the rump of the movement still fighting, just about, in Afghanistan. The white robes are fairly standard but, combined with the long white beard and the military props, indicate a warrior-statesman or a fighting cleric, an archetype familiar to anyone with an interest in Islamic political history.’ (Burke, 2005)

Since, apart from the explicit focus on the United Kingdom, al-Zawahiri ‘is not saying much that is new’ (Burke, 2005), the message appears to be found in the images which are translated into words by Jason Burke in the above manner. While Burke argues that ‘anyone with an interest in Islamic political history’ will easily identify the archetype represented by alZawahiri, visible in the way he places himself on stage and in front of the camera, it might also be argued that knowledge of Islamic political history predetermines the interpreter’s view and narrows the interpretative frame. This is not to say that this frame is wrong, but rather that it is just one among many others and that other viewers use different words to fill the visual frame and assign meaning to it. The words are carefully chosen indeed. The gun is more potent looking (there is no way for the viewer to know whether this is in fact the case); the weapon attests to ‘a desire to reinforce the threat of violence’; the black turban suggests a concern to show solidarity with the Taliban; the combination of white robes, a long white beard, and military props indicates a fighting cleric or warrior-statesman. Thus, although this iconography is said to be ‘relatively easy to decode’ there is actually not much in it that the viewer knows for certain. The image’s iconography does not prove much, suggesting different things to different viewers. Thus, it indicates aspects other than those seen by Burke and other than those intended by al-Zawahiri. Furthermore, what is absent from the written description – but not from the image – is as important as that which is included in it. Here, insights from visual anthropology, disputing that images are easily translatable into words and insisting on profound differences between written and visual narratives, may help even if the following seems obvious or even trivial. As has been argued above with respect to the family album, excluding seemingly trivial elements from scholarly analysis is inappropriate because everyday experiences and banalities help

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construct identities, develop or break with notions of self and other, articulate feelings of belonging, and construct collective memories. Most basically, while visual representations co-represent the general and the particular, writing prioritises peculiarities and details such as the gun, the turban, the beard, and so on. By focusing on these details, al-Zawahiri is represented as an embodiment of difference rather than of commonality. What he obviously shares in common with the readers of the description in the Guardian and elsewhere is absent from the description but obvious in the video, namely that al-Zawahiri is a human being with head, body, and extremities (at least some of them are visible in the video and the freezeframe images disseminated in newspapers worldwide) and that he is capable of speaking in a comprehensible manner (regardless of whether or not the viewer/listener likes or agrees with what he has to say). Thus, while language takes ‘the commonalities of being human’ (MacDougall, 1998: 246) for granted, images, by ‘co-represent[ing] ... centred and peripheral details in the same frame’ and by ‘constantly reiterate[ing] the general forms in which the particular is contained’ show the commonalities ‘explicitly and redundantly’ (MacDougall, 1998: 69, 246). Images and language do not seem to give similar accounts of human existence. ‘Pictures and writing produce two quite different accounts of human existence, however much filmmakers and writers strive to describe the same thing. Writing contrives to evoke the ordinary features and substructure of an entire scene by implication, and then concentrates its attention on a few notable details ... By comparison, the account produced by films is at once more and less strange than that of writing. What is noted and what is left unnoted form a continuous co-presentation, even when details are singled out for attention. Thus, on the one hand, pictures draw our attention to the visible differences between human groups, emphasising particularities of body type, dress, personal adornment, and habitation ... On the other hand, films and photographs also convey features of human appearance and sociality of a much less diverse and more widely recognisable kind.’ (MacDougall, 1998: 246–247)

Where language tends to emphasise differences, pictures reveal both differences and commonalities. In this manner, they envisage living with, rather than reducing, difference. Pictures indicate the complexity of the world by showing similarities and differences, the central and the peripheral, the general and the particular. By foregrounding the complexity of the world, pictures oppose easy solutions based on such dichotomies as ‘we versus them’, ‘good versus bad’, ‘right versus wrong’

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– dichotomies that can be abundantly observed in the ongoing ‘war on terror’. As such, pictures resist both their straightforward use for political purposes and their simple integration in public diplomacy. For example, the 28 photographs by the distinguished photographer Joel Meyerowitz that are part of a website maintained by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the US Department of State, documenting the work of rescue, recovery, demolition, and excavation on Ground Zero in downtown Manhattan after the attacks of 11 September 2001, cannot be easily reduced to the functions assigned to them in policymakers’ comments on the website.3 The photographs do not deliver an explicit counterstory; they can be interpreted within the textual framework established on the website by, for example, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, US President George W. Bush, and the Mayor of the City of New York Rudolph W. Giuliani. Yet the photographs – a very small selection, given the overall number of more than 8,000 photographs of Ground Zero taken by Meyerowitz between September 23 2001 and June 21 2002 – nevertheless undermine parts of the official narrative by being aesthetic rather than political statements (while the comments are political rather than aesthetic interventions). Furthermore, they refuse to construct links between the destruction and recovery effort on Ground Zero on the one hand and what is usually called the fight against terrorism on the other hand. Likewise, Giuliani’s statement that the attack of September 11 was an attack, not only against the City of New York or the United States of America but, rather, against ‘the very idea of a free, inclusive, and civil society’ is a political interpretation just as is the interpretation of the attack as ‘an unprovoked act of war’ rather than a criminal act – an interpretation that is proven neither by Meyerowitz’s photographs nor by the numerous images of the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre but that nevertheless serves as a powerful provider of legitimacy for the US ‘war on terror’. I do not claim here that the 9/11 attacks were not acts of terrorism and war, but rather that the images of the attacks do not show that they were. Thus, in order for a link to the subsequent worldwide ‘war on terror’ to be constructed, commentary is needed precisely because the images,

3

After September 11: Images from Ground Zero can be visited at http://www.911exhibit.state.gov/index.cfm (accessed March 30 2006). The quotations I am referring to in the text can be found on this website.

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focussing on the rescue effort and thus appealing to the self’s strengths,4 do not unmistakably support the official message and to some extent render difficult their incorporation into the official interpretative frame of explaining the 9/11 events in terms of ‘terrorism’ and ‘war’. Thus, these photographs, too, operate simultaneously on different levels and reveal much less and, at the same time, much more than policy-makers would like them to reveal. The exhibition was sent on an international tour to convey to foreign audiences, in the words of the Assistant Secretary of State Patricia S. Harrison – as quoted on the touring exhibition’s website – ‘the physical and human dimensions of the recovery effort’ and to remind them of ‘the true face of terrorism and its threat to humankind’. According to the official narrative, also to be found on the website, the touring exhibition’s purpose is ‘to visually relate the catastrophic destruction of the 9/11 attacks and the physical and human dimensions of the recovery effort. The aim is to provide overseas U.S. diplomatic missions with a dramatic exhibit that reminds foreign audiences of the extraordinary extent of the World Trade Centre attacks, documents the recovery efforts and portrays the threat terrorism poses to any metropolitan area, a threat that must be combated at all costs.’

If we understand the framing of security as a process that aims to construct correspondence between securitising moves and the audience’s expectations, then the touring exhibition is a very good example of such a process, aiming to adapt foreign audiences to the interpretative frame within which the September attacks are interpreted in official US circles. However, regardless of substantial efforts ‘to give the exhibition particular regional resonance and lend it civic and educational connotations’ (Kennedy, 2003: 322), some overseas audiences are said to have responded to the images in a manner not intended by the US government, thus interrupting the process of securitisation and confirming that the meaning of an exhibition ‘cannot be securely tethered to either the 4 William Langewiesche, who – like Meyerowitz – had unrestricted access to Ground Zero, has noted that the breakdown of traditional hierarchies and professional routines created ‘a vital new culture’ among the people involved in the rescue effort: ‘inside the perimeter lines and beyond the public’s view [the experience] served for many of them as an unexpected liberation – a national tragedy, to be sure, but one that was contained, unambiguous, and surprisingly energising’ (2002: 10).

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mnemonic functions or the ideological connotations’ asserted by official US representatives (Kennedy, 2003: 325). While the exhibition seems to have worked reasonably well in London with the Museum of London running a parallel exhibition on the Blitz, in Nairobi, Kenya, the audience criticised the showing of images from September 11 concurrently with those from the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi and surrounding buildings in 1998, being the former perceived as dwarfing the latter.5 In Dhaka, Bangladesh, the exhibition was reportedly seen as propaganda. It was therefore understood differently by the public depending on its contextualisation, in Nairobi and Dhaka on one hand and in London on the other. For example, one commentator in Dhaka is said to have found ‘outrageous’ ‘how the US government is capitalising on the tragedy [of September 11] ... when the Israeli government is carrying out genocidal programmes against the Palestinians’ (quoted in Kennedy, 2003: 325). It may also be pondered whether a part of the audience’s discomfort with the exhibition followed from the diplomatic mission’s attempts to impose meaning: assistance in interpretation, offered by the exhibition curators and official commentators, can have been perceived as patronising, propagandistic, or simply inappropriate.

Conclusion: From Photography to Graphic Novels Compiled in the book Aftermath (2006), Meyerowitz’s photographs from Ground Zero aestheticise destruction – the ‘panoramas that fold out from Meyerowitz’s book convey what he calls the “awful beauty” of the scene’, creating an atmosphere ‘that can feel a little too sanctimoniously solemn’ (Conrad, 2006). The photos might also anaesthetise emotions: it has indeed often been observed that images have a dulling and desensitising effect. This reflects processes of habituation, analysed by Barbie Zelizer (1998) with respect to Holocaust imagery, but it can also be a mechanism geared towards viewers’ self-protection because every image of war, famine, or atrocity – indeed, every photograph depicting human suffering – reminds us of our incapacity to prevent human suffering and thus of our 5

Consider also the following episode: ‘In early 1994, the English photojournalist Paul Lowe, who had been living for more than a year in the besieged city [Sarajevo], mounted an exhibit at a partly wrecked art gallery of the photographs he had been taking, along with photographs he’d taken a few years earlier in Somalia; the Sarajevans, though eager to see new pictures of the ongoing destruction of their city, were offended by the inclusion of the Somalia pictures ... It is intolerable to have one’s own sufferings twinned with anybody else’s’ (Sontag, 2003: 112-3).

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political and moral failure. Images depict, in Sontag’s words, ‘what human beings are capable of doing – may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, selfrighteously’ (2003: 115). Photographs haunt us and help us remember (Sontag, 2003: 89), but their potential to trigger political action in order to counter new wars, new famines, new atrocities – already discernable on the horizon or, more often, on our television screens – seems to be limited. Yet, as Arthur Danto, suggests, ‘the limits of photography are not the limits of art’ (2006). Danto refers, in the context of Abu Ghraib, to the work of the Columbian painter Fernando Botero so as to argue for the superiority of paintings over photographs.6 In accordance with this chapter’s emphasis on everyday culture, it can also be argued that popular culture touches the audience in a manner that photographs often fail to do. Indeed, as Peter Conrad (2006) observes with respect to Ground Zero, ‘one way people coped with this emotional emergency was by making jokes’. Thus, in colloquial language the flayed remnants of the outer walls became ‘potato chips’. Responding to the dilemma that visual representations often fail to trigger intended political activity, Henry Jenkins has recently argued that comics, while simplifying ‘the abstract categories of political debate and cultural work’ also ‘give them an urgency that academic theory lacks’, thus helping to mobilise political action (2006: 95). As such comics can be linked to the theory of security in the sense that the articulation of security often implies that of urgency. Comics might therefore support securitising moves because both, comics and securitisation, appeal to urgency. Since comics are often counter-cultural or alternative artistic expressions in the margins of Culture (with a capital C), it is equally important to see their counter-hegemonic potential to undermine the subordinate classes’ acceptance of the interests of dominant classes as normal reality or commonsense. For example, in his very complex and deeply unnerving graphic novel, In the Shadow of No Towers, distinguished graphic novelist Art Spiegelman (2004) depicts himself as being ‘equally terrorised by Al-Qaeda and by his own government’ (plate 2), criticises ‘the Bush cabal’ for hijacking the highjackings of September 11 and ‘reduc[ing] it all to a war recruitment poster’ (preface), and shows the Vice President as a bloodthirsty 6

Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib was on show at Marlborough Gallery, New York City, from October 18 to November 21 2006.

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individual who, whilst cutting the throat of an eagle with a Stanley knife, such as that used by the highjackers, ponders ‘why do they hate us? Why???’(plate 4). Spiegelman seeks refuge in the comic characters and stories from the late 19th and early 20th century and, by so doing, locates himself within a different iconographic tradition than the Bush administration with its emphasis on ‘out West’. This is not to say that Spiegelman’s counter-claims are more appropriate and more valid than the official claims. He was attacked for reserving his ‘ire for Us, not Them’, thus allegedly failing to engage with ‘the monsters’ who caused 9/11 (Beck, 2004: 78). This criticism is not surprising given the Bush administration’s pretension to the monopoly over the interpretation of 9/11, but it misses the point that Spiegelman is thematising, not the attacks of September 11, but the political response to the latter which he sees primarily as immediate use of the attacks by US leaders to further their own agenda (preface). Spiegelman, slightly paranoid perhaps, simplifies the issues, but this surely is the right of a creative artist. Visually and narratively referring to his older work on Holocaust memories, Spiegelman’s work is problematic in that it invites the reader to equate two events that cannot be meaningfully equated (Möller, 2006: 60). These parallels trigger a feeling of uneasiness among the readers which ultimately helps divert their attention from one of the book’s main political statements, namely that official representations are always to some extent arbitrary, that they always reflect a political agenda, that it is always necessary to critically engage with them, and that there are always alternatives.

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Buzan, Barry et al. (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Coll, Steve (2004) Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. London: Penguin. Conrad, Peter (2006) ‘9/11: The Aftermath’, Observer, August 27, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/aug/27/ photography.september11 (accessed January 29 2007). Czempiel, Ernst-Otto (1996) ‘Kants Theorem. Oder: Warum sind die Demokratien (noch immer) nicht friedlich?’ Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, Vol. 3, No. 1: 79-101. Dalby, Simon (1997) ‘Contesting an Essential Concept: Reading the Dilemmas in Contemporary Security Discourse’, in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds.) Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases. London: UCL Press, pp. 3-31. Danner, Mark (2004) Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. New York: New York Review Books. Danto, Arthur C. (2006) ‘The Body in Pain’, The Nation, from the November 27 issue, available at http://www.thenation.com/ doc/20061127/danto (accessed November 13 2006). Dauber, Cory (2001) ‘Image as Argument: The Impact of Mogadishu on U.S. Military Intervention’, Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 27, No. 2: 205-29. Frensley, Nathalie et al. (2006) ‘Public Diplomacy and Motivated Reasoning: Framing Effects on Canadian Media Coverage of U.S. Foreign Policy Statements’, Foreign Policy Analysis, Vol. 2, Issue 3: 201-21 Hansen, Lene (2006) Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War. London and New York: Routledge. Hirsch, Marianne (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Holsti, Kalevi J. (1995) International Politics: A Framework for Analysis. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Huyssen, Andreas (1995) Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York and London: Routledge. Jackson, Peter (1989) Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography. London and New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry (2006) ‘Captain America Sheds His Mighty Tears: Comics and September 11’, in Daniel J. Sherman et al. (eds.) Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 69-102.

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Walt, Stephen M. (1991) ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1: 211-39. Waltz, Kenneth N. (1976) Theory of International Politics. Reading: Addison-Wesley. Williams, Raymond (1976) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana. Wolfers, Arnold (1962) Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press Zelizer, Barbie (1998) Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

HERITAGE REVISITED: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF HERITAGE IN GOODNESS GRACIOUS ME ANA CRISTINA MENDES, UNIVERSITY OF LISBON

Media representation of otherness has been crucial in articulating narratives of resistance. This essay is prompted by wondering how one would successfully ground political action towards collective change and cultural self-fashioning in a field of representation dominated by insidious and pervading media screens. It looks for answers to this opening question in selected sketches from the comedy series Goodness Gracious Me (BBC, 1998-2001), written and performed by British-born artists of South Asian descent. Studies of minority-based comedies have for their most part dealt with the negotiation and clash of cultural heritages and, in particular, with the subversion or reaffirmation of ethnic stereotyping through humorist sketches. The present article will attempt to question such a critical standpoint by looking at this sitcom from a different angle, namely as an ambivalent text that has been integrated into the British broadcasting industry through the logic of cultural hybridity and cosmopolitanism. Goodness Gracious Me is included in a body of diasporic South Asian cinematic and televisual productions which constitutes, since the early 1990s, an increasingly visible sphere in the culture industries, both British and worldwide, designated by Moya Luckett as the ‘Britasian renaissance’ (2003: 403). Appearing first on BBC Radio 4 in 1996, this cross-over comedy series later had three successful seasons running from 1998 to 2001 on BBC Two, signalling the restructuring of the broadcasting corporation to include more diverse markets. As Luckett points out, ‘the show’s form, content, and popularity point to a significant change in the organisation of terrestrial broadcast British television’, standing for ‘a move away from predominantly racially conceived programming for “minorities”, with its concomitant focus on racial specificity, to genres

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designed to concentrate more specifically on diaspora and its experiences’ (2003: 402). Moreover, according to Andra Leurdijk, ‘the popularity of Goodness Gracious Me indicates that multicultural programming in Britain has developed from “ghetto” programming to a new type of programming which is valued by majority and minority audiences alike. This is a remarkable achievement because multicultural programming in many European countries is considered as ghetto programming with little audience appeal’ (2006: 25-6). Indeed, breaking out from its initial target area and reaching out to a non-Asian audience, the sketch comedy show promptly achieved cult status in Britain and widespread commercial success, with the first series escalating up to an estimated 85 per cent white audience (Malik, 2002: 102-3).1 Meera Syal, one of the multitalented performers of the show, was not surprised by the numbers: ‘I suppose that would make sense because only five per cent of the population is Asian. But I hope people now see it as a comedy show rather than an Asian comedy show’ (Gould, 2000: 15, emphasis added). In this sense, Alison Donnell reported that ‘[w]hen the audience majority was thought to comprise Asians, Goodness Gracious Me was considered an “Asian comedy” yet when found to be 80 per cent white it became “mainstream”’ (2002: 128). The Times, heralding the programme as ‘the oil of race relations’ in 1998, credited its achievements to a postimperial ‘happy multiculturalism’:2 ‘Old Britain and its more recent immigrants are lucky. When both laugh at each other, both like each other better for doing so’ (The Times, July 1 1998, in Malik, 2002: 103). This critical and commercial success led in time to a national theatre tour and to the sitcom’s exportation to countries in and outside Europe, even though it never aired on the wider audience catcher BBC One. This essay is based on the assumption that, while the present-day expanded space for authorship and self-fashioning in the media for minorities is an encouraging trend, the growing visibility of British Asian production is dependent on the political economy of the culture industries, 1

Looking at similar audience statistics which reportedly attribute a massive white spectatorship to the show, Luckett questions: ‘How white is white?’ (2003: 407). 2 This notion is borrowed from Zadie Smith’s satirical picture of ‘Cool Britannia’ in her novel White Teeth, where the narrator denounces the deceptive rhetoric of immigrants in Britain ‘merrily weaving their way through Happy Multicultural Land’ (2000: 398).

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especially as ethnic difference became incorporated into New Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’. Undeniably, since the late 1990s, due to broader media exposure, British Asian performers and their specific cross-cultural humour have bridged boundaries in national comedy. Nonetheless, minority-based sitcoms have inescapably been subject to the commodification suffered by Asian food, fashion, and home interiors. If one reaction to the highly mediated portrayal of minorities on the British small screen has been asserting the power to represent themselves, it seems that, in the end, unmediated self-representation is a utopia. Echoing Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s reasoning of the culture industry, in which the people involved in it ‘belong to the industry long before it displays them, otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in’ (2001: 122),3 there is a sense that the culture industries inevitably control the creative output of individuals arising from the margins to guarantee that it meets the demands of generating profit. As Jigna Desai puts it when discussing the recent influx of performative representations of cultural hybridity, ‘the burden of representation has become the spectacle of representation’ (2004: 69). On a more optimistic note, Giorgio Agamben suggests that the spectacle offers the opportunity for individual or collective resistance, containing ‘something like a positive possibility – and it is our task to use this possibility against it’ (2000: 83). Conceivably, one of the most disquieting (and disorienting) feature of most postmodernist critical dissections of power is the feeling that however much emphasis is placed on struggles over power, the whole social space is shown as a strictly regulated world, almost irreversibly shaped by dominant representations constantly disrupted by strategies of resistance. In 1999, Tariq Modood stated: ‘I think people still think cool Asians are the exception to the rule. I think we 3

In Adorno on Popular Culture, Robert Witkin notes: ‘If it is argued that the talents and creative spirit of the performers and artists, who are the primary producers of the cultural artifacts, somehow guarantee the artistic integrity of what is produced, Adorno and Horkheimer point out that that such primary producers are not only dependent upon the culture industries for work but the competition for such desired jobs and creative opportunities demands that they orient themselves, in advance, to meeting the principles of production that are key to the culture industry’s operations. In short, no matter how talented the individual, s/he must repeatedly demonstrate the most valued talent of all, namely the talent to produce the cultural commodities through which consumers are made dependent. To be talented but incapable of commodifying one’s work is a recipe for being unemployed’ (2003: 42-3).

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are at a stage where people realise Asians are not all geeks, not where they think all Asians are cool’ (quoted in Luckett, 2003: 404). Although critics such as Modood have questioned the representativeness of the emergent British Asian cultural elite and objected to the marketing idea of Asian Kool, the critical and popular praise earned by the all-Asian show Goodness Gracious Me is a healthy sign of new developments in media images of otherness. We have come a long way from the media invisibility or, alternatively, the blatant ethnic stereotyping in the 1960s and 1970s depicted in a passage from the novel Anita and Me, written by the playwright, screenwriter, actress, and novelist Meera Syal: ‘According to the newspapers and television, we simply did not exist. If a brown or black face ever did appear on TV, it stopped us all in our tracks. “Daljit! Quick!” papa would call, and we would crowd round and coo over the walk-on in some detective series, some long-suffering actor in a gaudy costume with a goodness-gracious-me accent ... and welcome him into our home like a long lost relative’ (1996: 165). The purpose of selecting this extract is twofold: on the one level, Syal is the co-writer and the standout performer in Goodness Gracious Me, so her words can assist in the understanding of the creative project behind the comedy series;4 on another level, it allows me to draw attention to the shift from, as Mary Gillespie has so powerfully put it, depictions of comic Asians (or, to be accurate, whites blackened up to play Asians) to humorous performances by Asian comics themselves (2003: 95). Using strategies of intertextuality and deconstruction, the TV show engages critically, even if in a light-hearted fashion, with comic narratives belonging to an era in which white performers mimicked ethnic minority characters. From the outset, the title of the sitcom hybridises a pervasive popular image of Asians current in 1960s Britain. Indeed, not only the title of the programme, but also its theme tune were adapted and reclaimed from the hit comedy song ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ sung by Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren to promote The Millionairess (1960). In this film directed by Anthony Asquith, a blackened up Sellers acted the part of Ahmed el Kabir, a stereotypical Indian doctor, while Loren played Epifania Parerga, his patient. As a sort of counterpart to his brownface 4

It has been recently announced that Syal is to be a ‘recommended author’ in the curriculum for secondary students in England, as representative of English literary heritage alongside authors such as Anita Desai, Benjamin Zephaniah and John Agard, in place of writers such as W. B Yeats, Anthony Trollope and Lord Byron.

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make-up, Sellers adopted an absurd and caricatural Indian intonation in the song, while at the same time uttering the ‘typically British’ phrase ‘goodness gracious me’ (Gillespie, 2003: 98). British imitations of Indian speech – the ‘goodness-gracious-me accent’ Syal refers to in the passage from Anita and Me – are re-appropriated in the British Asian comedy series: the theme song is a hybridised bhangra interpretation of the playful and jingly tune. Tellingly, the programme’s provisional working title was ‘Peter Sellers is Dead’. Despite being considered excessive, the title was probably chosen given that Sellers blackened his face again in the Blake Edwards screen comedy The Party (1968). Here, he plays the character of Hrundi V. Bakshi, an ill-fated Indian film extra, cast in a Gunga Din-like film, who causes chaos by blowing up the set before the cameras start shooting. This subversion, or inversion, is vital to the critical stance of the programme; nevertheless, the engagement of Goodness Gracious Me with the history of representation of ethnic difference in television comedy is regarded by some critics as controversial given the show’s efforts to aim for (white) mainstream audiences. In effect, the comedy team did not wish to alienate mainstream viewers and deliberately capitalised on the sitcom’s cross-over audience appeal by refusing to be constrained by the shackles of political correctness, that is, by engaging with ethnic stereotyping. As Gillespie argues in her discussion of the programme, the producers ‘did not want the kind of show that would inspire guilt in the white audience with constant reminders of racism and the legacy of imperialism’ (2003: 97). In its appeal to both a minority British Asian audience and, most importantly, a mainstream one, the critic notes in the sketch show a transethnicity approach (or ‘stereovision’) that exemplifies the growing representation of cultural difference in depoliticised and commodified forms. This approach washes over the legacy of empire and colonialism as well as the reality of tense race relations in contemporary Britain for the sake of the broadest possible audience acceptance. In the critical debate concerning the show’s progressiveness, Chris Weedon had already pointed to a contentious issue: ‘When looked at from the perspective of challenging white British ethnocentrism, a key question that Goodness Gracious Me raises is the extent to which apparently progressive comedy is overdetermined by the long-standing reliance of mainstream comedy on racist stereotyping’ (2000: 264). From a similar

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standpoint, Sarita Malik added a further interrogation: ‘Because … stereotypes are negotiated by Asians and deliberately subverted through visual puns, spectacle and parody, can we safely say that racist readings are not gleaned from the text?’ (2002: 103). In this respect, Malik brings to the fore the extent to which ambivalence works in and through comedy shows in which stereotypical representations are simultaneously called upon and, according to programme-makers, confronted and interrogated (2002: 106). Drawing primarily on the second series of the show, in particular its satire of the allure of the past for the British visual media, this essay will now look at the ways through which sketches featuring intertextual parodies of Raj revival television formats strategically disrupt narrative characteristics of heritage works, such as nostalgic feelings, thematic emphasis on setting, and the splitting of stories between the moment chronicled and that of narration. The comic effect of parodic sketches based on The Jewel in the Crown (Granada Television, 1984) relies on the audience’s familiarity with heritage visual and thematic features. The intertextual critical play with the Raj revival that Goodness Gracious Me’s team takes on can be traced back to the pioneering Asian comedy show Tandoori Nights produced by Channel 4 in 1985-87, and in which Meera Syal was likewise involved. This programme played out the competition between two restaurants: The Jewel in the Crown and The Far Pavilions, named after the popular 1980s television serials adapted from Paul Scott and M. M. Kaye’s novels set in the British Raj. In the second series, episode three, of Goodness Gracious Me, a group of four sketches depict an interview conducted by a British journalist with an elderly Indian woman – a character significantly named Lady Chatterjee and performed by Syal – on her experience of growing up in colonised India. Through the comic technique of role reversal, contrary to the general practice of Raj fictions according to which Indians ‘get walk-ons, but remain, for the most part, bit-players in their own history’ (Rushdie, 1991: 90), the main part is seized by one of those who are usually extras or perform minor parts. In the first sketch, describing her near-death beating at the hands of young British fusiliers whilst chained to a gate, Lady Chatterjee cannot help but seek recourse in images reminiscent of the seductive visual style typical of heritage conventions: beautifully kept gardens, well-groomed officers, and glittering parties at the governor’s residence (to which she was denied entrance being an Indian) featuring lavish decorations and illustrious

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people wearing striking outfits. In her words, these were ‘wonderful days’ regardless of the ‘hullabaloo’ made by the founding fathers of the Indian republic, Gandhi and Jinnah, who, in her perspective, seem to be responsible for a moment of unity gone astray.5 The British interviewer feels manifestly troubled and helpless when faced with Lady Chatterjee’s bizarre longing for colonial times, in particular by the end of the third sketch when she confesses to her romantic excitement when a handsome British general came to execute her auntie.6 In the fourth and final sketch, Chatterjee overturns the rape-plot current in Raj revival narratives, according to which ‘frail English roses were in constant sexual danger from lust-crazed wogs’ (Rushdie, 1991: 101), by depicting the assault of Indian women as a spare time occupation for British army officers in perfectly creased trousers.7 ‘If rape must be used as a metaphor of the Indo-British connection,’ as Rushdie questioned, ‘then surely, in the interests of accuracy, it should be the rape of an Indian woman by one or more Englishmen of whatever class’ (1991: 89). The creative team behind Goodness Gracious Me seems to have followed up on his reasoning. One of the most popular and lucrative colonial myths is that, as Rushdie denounces, the British Empire was ‘in spite of all its flaws and meanness and bigotries, fundamentally glamorous’ (1991: 101). By subsuming physical cruelty and sexual assault into elements of setting which characteristically constitute visually pleasing heritage iconography, attention is drawn to the absurdity of a wistful longing for the glamour of the British colonial past. In the end, this group of sketches reasserts that ‘the jewel in the crown is made, these days, of paste’ (Rushdie, 1991: 92). As previously mentioned, this humorous parody of The Jewel in the Crown succeeds due to the viewers’ acquaintance with the specific style of filmmaking characteristic of Raj screen fictions. The comic sketches enact the perceived behaviour of a nostalgic individual: facing estrangement, disruption and alterity in the present, ruptures that fracture and border his/her identity, he/she begins to bracket ‘wonderful days’ together with the past, that is, with a vanished moment of equilibrium. Such a revivalism of a colonial past has been seen by Paul Gilroy as resulting, on the one hand, from the ambivalence of ‘postcolonial melancholia’ structuring British political institutions and culture, the outcome of a refusal to come 5

Goodness Gracious Me, series 2, episode 3, 0:04:20-0:05:51. Goodness Gracious Me, series 2, episode 3, 0:16:50-0:17:20. 7 Goodness Gracious Me, series 2, episode 3, 0:19:02-0:19:43. 6

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to grips with the break-up of Empire, and, on the other, from a surfacing ‘unkempt, unruly and unplanned multiculture’ (2004: x). Such a sense of lost unity and departed imperial glory can also translate into objects, such as the well-trimmed gardens, the impeccably creased trousers, and the polished boots celebrated by Syal’s Lady Chatterjee. Throughout the sketches, the interview is structured as a narrative reconstruction of a tale featuring an Edenic moment and its loss; however, a mix of comic strategies and intertextual ironic operations turn the nostalgic past into a disruptive one, opening it up to other histories told from the perspective of the colonised. In the second sketch, Chatterjee’s recollections include a train journey where a crowd of chattering elderly women and bubbly children meet, upon arriving at the station, the deadly bullets coming from dashing British fusiliers.8 As the blood trickles down the aisle during the attack, she cannot help noticing how brightly polished the officers’ boots are. Her somewhat pathetic attempts to displace the focus away from the turbulent days of the Raj only leads to the reinforcement of the real turmoil of those ‘wonderful days’. Chatterjee’s outlandish longing is always set alongside the shock and embarrassment of a white British journalist, whose discomfort is apparently the result of having to face up to colonial oppression and brutality. Chris Weedon finds representational problems in the structure of these sketches, repeated throughout several others in Goodness Gracious Me, since the viewer might identify more easily with the ‘normal’ white English character against which the Indian character is unfavourably measured (2000: 267). In other words, the critic asks us to consider if the audience laughs with or at the Indian character. On a related level, the viewer might also be asked to sympathise with the (white) British as at present ‘victims’ of their imperial past. Regardless of a predictable redeployment of colonial fictions in a more appealing and mainstream-friendly way, this alternative comic portrayal disturbs beyond repair the apparent harmony of time and place of the ‘wonderful days’. In a challenging and empowering way, imperial nostalgia within this framework is made to re-signify and is turned around for a subversive effect, talking back against the ‘refurbishment of the 8

Goodness Gracious Me, series 2, episode 3, 0:11:47-0:12:37.

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Empire’s tarnished image’ (Rushdie, 1991: 91). Even if Rushdie’s critique, written in 1984 during Thatcherism and its distrust of difference, might come across as slightly outdated, it did maintain its relevance in Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’ of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Indeed, shortly after the airing of this episode, The Jewel in the Crown peaked at number twenty-two on a list of the ‘100 Greatest British Television Programmes’ drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000. In effect, what Rushdie identifies as the ‘amputated limb’ of Empire still had ‘phantom twitchings’ (1991: 92). According to Homi Bhabha, culture consists in a transnational and translational strategy of survival (1994: 172). In Goodness Gracious Me, the character of Lady Chatterjee makes a revisionist comeback as leading figure by the hand of Meera Syal. I would like to stress that Zohra Sehgal is one of the Indian performers that actually gets a walk-on in The Jewel in the Crown, playing precisely Lili Chatterjee. Sehgal’s very own career – ranging from acting parts in the blatantly crude stereotypical misrepresentations of the 1970s sitcoms Mind Your Language and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum to the radical Bhaji on the Beach, directed by Gurinder Chadha in 1993, and the queer film Chicken Tikka Masala, directed by Harmage Singh Kalirai in 2005 – illustrates the increased opportunities for minority acting in Britain. Aided by this expanded space for British Asian cultural production in mass mediated forms, nostalgic Raj fictions are returned to the cultural location where they surfaced in the past – the television medium – replayed as oppositional practice to a hybrid audience, British Asian and white British, challenging nostalgic screen narratives with empowered representation. Furthermore, the sketches’ satirical edge lies in the recognition of heritage narratives as ambivalent and marked by fracture. In fact, Andrew Higson considers that several heritage films stage an unsettled conflict between a safe, traditional, elite Englishness and a more unstable concept of national identity which is presented to us through the experiences of marginalised social groups, perceived as simple ‘footnotes of history’ (2003: 28). In the sketches, Lady Chatterjee begins by putting forward a crack between the postimperial present and the wished-for colonial past. However, the absurdity of her nostalgia underscores that the present is in fact found in that distant past and that those who were considered ‘mere footnotes of history’ demand to be incorporated into the narrative.

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Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (2000) Means without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Desai, Jigna (2004) Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. London: Routledge. Donnell, Alison (2002) Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. London: Routledge. Gillespie, Mary (2003) ‘From Comic Asians to Asian Comics: Goodness Gracious Me, British Television Comedy and Representations of Ethnicity’, in Michael Scriven et al. (eds.) Group Identities on French and British Television. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 93-107. Gilroy, Paul (2004) After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge. Gould, Phil (2000) ‘Goodness Gracious, It’s All Go for Meera; TV’s Goodness Gracious Me Star Meera Syal Talks to Phil Gould about Her Flourishing Career’, The Birmingham Post, February 22, p. 15. Higson, Andrew (2003) English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, Max et al. (2001 [1972]) Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum. Leurdijk, Andra (2006) ‘In Search of Common Ground: Strategies of Multicultural Television Producers in Europe’, European Journal of Cultural Studies; 9:1, 25-46. Luckett, Moya (2003) ‘Postnational Television? Goodness Gracious Me and the Britasian Diaspora’, in Lisa Parks et al. (eds.) Planet TV: A Global Television Reader. New York and London: New York University Press, pp. 402-22. Malik, Sarita (2002) Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on Television. London: Sage. Rushdie, Salman (1991) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. London: Granta. Smith, Zadie (2000) White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton. Syal, Meera (1996) Anita and Me. London: HarperCollins. Weedon, Chris (2000) ‘Goodness Gracious Me: Comedy as a Tool for Contesting Racism and Ethnocentrism’, in Maria José Coperías Aguilar (ed.) Culture and Power: Challenging Discourses. Valencia: Servei de Publicaciones, pp. 261-9.

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Witkin, Robert W. (2003) Adorno on Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

Filmography Goodness Gracious Me (TV), director Nick Wood, UK, 1998-2001. The Jewel in the Crown (TV), director Christopher Morahan et al., UK, 1984. The Millionairess, director Anthony Asquith, UK, 1960. The Party, director Blake Edwards, USA, 1968.

Acknowledgement The author acknowledges the support of the doctoral Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology fellowship SFRH/BD/27385/2006.

‘IT’S FOR YOU’: THE CELLULAR PHONE AS DISCIPLINARY TECHNOLOGY JOSEPH A. TIGHE, DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY

Introduction The last ten years have witnessed a number of exciting technological advancements. From the internet, to energy-efficient automobiles to automatic banking, everyday life-practices have been impacted by what would seem to be spontaneous irruptions in the field of technology, and we are quick to laud the convenience these technologies provide. For instance, using Google, a quick internet search of a seemingly obscure topic of interest can produce almost immediately what would in the physical world correspond to volumes of information. Certainly, this is useful to people in the information business, and most of us – especially philosophers – find ourselves in one way or another in that domain. However, along with all the convenience these technologies provide come certain unanticipated consequences. To use Google again as an example, searches in that engine have all too quickly become the primary source of research information for high school students in the United States. Granted, it’s not that the searches themselves are a bad thing, but, more often than not, the information that these searches provide is in fact incomplete, wrong, or misleading. For example, at the time of writing, a Google search of the term ‘Holocaust’ produces, in the top ten results, several sites that have links to Holocaust denial organisations.1 To my mind, that’s truly frightening. Although technology itself is not frightening, the way we use it sometimes is. For instance, the ATM is of undeniable convenience to most people. I 1

Writings by David Irving, Carlo Mattogno, John Ball, and groups like CODOH or the IHR are respectively used either to provide ‘facts’ about the Holocaust, or to fund sites which claim to inform about the Holocaust.

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cannot count the times I’ve been out past bank hours and needed to withdraw or deposit money into my bank account. The ATM provides me with the ability to do this, at any time of day or night, anywhere in the world. That’s easy, convenient banking, which is, generally speaking, a good thing. In fact, I do all of my banking via ATMs. Indeed, the account I have through PNC Bank charges me a fee if I have more that one ‘face-toface’ banking transaction per month. So what this means is that if I choose to do my banking with an actual human being – a teller – more than once per month, my bank charges me a fee. I posit that this fee is recompense for the excess time I take from PNC by actually interacting with a teller, time during which I may ask the latter a question such as ‘how are you today?’. If he or she responds to this question, we have interacted in a way outside the ‘banking-construct’. In other words, we have wasted time that could have otherwise been used to perform actual ‘banking’. So to make up for this lost usability, I incur a fee. The bank could quite as easily dock the teller’s wages. To simplify things, my bank encourages me to do my banking through an ATM, and, since I cannot interact with the ATM in the same way I can with a teller – that is, in unanticipated ways – the ATM makes most efficient use of the banking-construct. The ATM is the function of the bank teller distilled to its fundamental structure. It is a social regulator, a ‘banking discipline’. It is a given social interaction calculated to a regimented form. And we love it for this. It would be a mistake to argue for a nostalgic back to basics existence, often associated with Martin Heidegger.2 Rather, what we need is a more flexible, more malleable theory of technology, calculation, and society. Indeed, flexibility and malleability are attributes of today’s technology, so it would make sense that any theory which attempts to understand technology should itself share some of technology’s own characteristics. Michel Foucault’s theory of discipline, I believe, is most suited to this task; for Foucault’s theory is itself a reflexive, creative theory of discipline. Foucault sees a dynamic relationship between social practices and power. Indeed, these two terms are part of one and the same process, as inseparable from one another as signifier is inseparable from signified. Foucault states ‘power and knowledge directly imply one another … there 2

Heidegger’s Ge-stell or ‘enframing’ is straightforwardly condemnatory.

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is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’ (1995: 27). The relation between power and knowledge is so intertwined that Foucault refers to this relation as ‘power/knowledge’, a single term comprising two elements, much like Saussure’s ‘sign’. It is my aim in this paper to show how Foucault’s theory of discipline accounts for what I see as the newest of disciplinary devices: the cellular phone. Moreover, I hope to show that, despite its seemingly despotic hold on modern society, the cellular phone offers powerful, unprecedented means of resistance, perhaps even resistance to its own despotism.

The Cellular Phone and Personal Accountability One of the most radical of the new technologies to arise in the last ten years is the cellular phone. One hears the tell-tale ring of the cell phone just about anywhere people work, play, live or inhabit, even temporarily. Most of us can tell at least one anecdote where a cell phone suddenly materialised on a social horizon in an unanticipated and usually undesired way, for instance, at the theater, in the classroom, at a restaurant, or, even worse, at a funeral. ‘There is virtually no place where [people] do not use their mobile phone … Judging by its omnipresence, it seems that there are few limits and restrictions that people abide by. In fact, it is not uncommon for people to use their mobile phone in places where it is prohibited by law … There has even been an anecdote reported of an undertaker’s phone ringing inside a grave as the deceased was being put to rest. [In Israel] this event grabbed national media attention alongside ten interruptions during a production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the National Theater and several interruptions during Don Pasquale at the New Israel Opera, as well as in other cultural events. Bezeq [Israel’s main telecommunications company] has been running a public service announcement on television requesting people to switch off their cellular phones in public places. Some restaurants now carry a “no cellular telephone” sign next to the obligatory “no smoking”.’(Schejter and Cohen, 2003: 40)

The cell phone even rings on hiking trails in the wilderness, which not only requires us to think about the cell phone and the reach of ‘technology’, but also provides great material for new jokes and philosophical musings. Indeed, in the last five years alone, the ubiquity of the cell phone has made it increasingly difficult to draw a line between

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public and private space. However, despite its undeniable impact and influence on society and social practices, very little in the way of cell phone scholarship exists. This is likely due to the relative newness of the technology. ‘The everyday epideictic discourse about the mobile telephone suggests a struggle to make sense of mobile communication and the technology that makes it possible. The contest over the meaning of the mobile telephone invokes well-formulated and nascent folk theories about the purpose and consequence of mobile communication and points to a broader contest over the material and ideological condition of communication in contemporary societies.’ (Katz and Aakhus, 2003: 7)

Indeed, it is likely that the cellular phone will create new ways of understanding society and the individuals who comprise it. Foucault’s theory is perhaps best suited at this crucial time to perform this important task. In his History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault suggests that history is not a continuous unfolding of a telos; rather, history consists in a series of ruptures brought on by new technologies of the self – namely, new ways of conceiving the individual and his relation to himself and his community. Modern use of the cell phone suggests that a similar phenomenon is at work right under our proverbial noses: ‘In terms of contemporary discourse about mobile communication, we discern a puzzle: folk views are abundant in observations and explanations, whereas expert discourse is relatively impoverished. This puzzle is not a barrier to understanding the mobile telephone but an opportunity to formulate new grounds from which to explain the mobile communication phenomenon, in particular, and the tools humans invent to communicate, in general.’ (Katz and Aakhus, 2003: 7)

The premise concerning the need to better understand the individual via the cell phone confirms the prescience of Foucault’s theory. As we begin to understand the individual via the cell phone, so shall the individual come to be understood through the cell phone. This seems tautological; however, ‘the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process’ (Foucault, 1995: 224). As we begin to theorise the individual in conjunction with the cellular phone, so shall we constitute the cellular phone as a way of understanding the individual himself.3 This is, of course, a power/knowledge relation: through knowledge of the individual, we simultaneously exert power over 3

Hence, this paper is inseparable from the concept of performativity.

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him insofar as he is deemed to be constituted in a certain way. According to Foucault, ‘knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of this domination-observation’ (1995: 305). If the individual is constituted as knowable through his use of telecommunications, in this case, the cell phone, so shall cellular phone technology exercise power over the individual. Indeed, according to Foucault’s theory, knowledge is power, and power is knowledge. In this day and age, as technology occupies an ever greater part of our existence, it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand man as separate from the technology he uses. Indeed, man seems to exist as the technology he uses. At the beginning of the twenty-first century we find ourselves at a dangerous crossroads. Technology has become so pervasive, so ubiquitous, that it threatens to usurp man’s privileged position as object of knowledge. Indeed, we have reached a time when it may be possible to think of man as no more than the sum of technology: man is as technology. Certainly, this is what most frightened Heidegger about technology. But a reactive retreat to the Black Forests of the world is not the answer to this new problem. Indeed the technology of the cell phone may rule out the forest as an escape in the first place. What we need to understand are, initially, two issues: 1) what is the process at work in cellular technology, and 2) what kind of resistance is possible? It is these two questions that will concern the rest of this paper.

It’s for You: Cellular Discipline ‘Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an “aptitude”, a “capacity”, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. If economic exploitation separates the force and the product of the labour, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination’ (Foucault, 1995: 138).

Of all of the structural elements of cell-phone use, one in particular stands out: accountability. Accountability is given through knowledge of individuals in space and time. With the cellular phone, ‘the ability to

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contact others regardless of where they might be is born’ (Ling, 2004: 38). Cellular technology is a technology that provides a perpetual accountability. In other words, cellular technology, as the name of Katz and Aakhus’ book suggests, allows for ‘perpetual contact’. The cell phone is a communication technology that transcends the limits of space and time. De Gournay claims that ‘three properties of the mobile phone are noteworthy: reachability, immediacy … and mobility’ (2003: 194). No matter what hour, no matter what distance, by simply pressing a button one can talk to anyone anywhere in the world, if they own a cell phone that is. The question, of course, is how does the ability to do just that – contact anyone anywhere at anytime – create an expectation that all people will behave as such? That is, how does knowledge (that one can reach someone else) enforce power (that one should be reachable)? In other words, how does a specific power/knowledge relation create a cellular discipline? Moreover, what is it about the cellular phone that makes it distinct from its avatar, the landline telephone? I will discuss the latter question first as a preliminary to answering the former. In order to understand the cellular phone as distinct from the landline telephone, we must deconstruct the structure of the device. Firstly, let us look at spatial relations involved in a technology thus conceived. While ‘land-line’ telephones require that the person to whom we wish to speak ‘be there’ to ‘be reached’, the cellular phone does away with this spatial requirement. Licoppe and Heurtin consider the mobile phone to be ‘radical’, for ‘it breaks apart the reference of synchronous vocal communications and the spatial contexts of the interlocutors’ (2003: 96). Conceptually speaking, the cellular phone is a non-spatial-referential communicative technology. Elaborating on this idea, I would argue that a landline telephone call is typically initiated from one specific place (a home, workplace, payphone booth) with the intention of ‘reaching’ another specific place (another home, workplace, etc.) where a certain individual should be, or is likely to be, at a particular moment in time. This kind of call is conceived linearly. However, a cellular phone call operates conceptually differently from that of the landline. The initiator of a cellular phone call need not be in any one specific place to initiate the call, and his intended recipient of the call is equally non-localisable: they are ‘mobile’. Unlike a landline phone call, a cellular-to-cellular call does not appear with an independent spatial referent other than the individuals themselves.

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This is reflected in cell-phone conversation wherein it is not uncommon to hear, immediately after ‘hello’ the question, ‘where are you?’ (Katz and Aakhus, 2003: 302). ‘The mobile phone’s use as a key resource for successful coordination over space and time lies in part in its strong impact on perceptions of space. On the one hand, it remodels the perception of the ambient space for its use. On the other hand … the person who calls or is being called by the mobile phone user can no longer assign a definite location to the other person from either the geographical or the social perspective. The cellular phone appears … to be one of the technologies that allow for the spacetime delocalisation of human interactions.’ (Licoppe and Heurtin, 2003: 96)

The everyday practices of cellular phone use give us a clue as to how the individual is reconceived via cell-phone use. But what are the consequences of non-spatial-referent communications? It would seem that the interlocutors must provide this referent in the discursive act itself. Thus, there is initially an incitement to discourse insofar as one requires information about the other: it is an incitement to account for one’s place. This contrasts with a typical landline phone call, which never requires one to ask ‘where are you?’ upon reaching the intended recipient. Indeed, such a question is a priori superfluous as the very act of telephoning in landline communications is conceived of as calling from ‘place to place’. Cellular phone calls are decidedly not calls from place to place, but from person to person. The cellular phone is a refinement of accountability, a way of rendering individuals accountable no matter where they are in space. Space is everywhere and nowhere in cellular phone use, and any one ‘cell’ can occupy a given space. Thus, space itself becomes flexible as any space could be a space occupied by an individual.4 However, the interlocutors must account for that space in order to ground their relation to each other, typically through dialogue. The cellular-phone camera also allows the interlocutors to ground their relation through the exchange of images of their respective spaces. The new GPS function of the cellular phone may eventually render this explicit grounding unnecessary. In any case, known spatial relations are necessary to discipline, for ‘discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space’ (Foucault, 1995: 141).

4

It may be fruitful to think of this in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘smooth space’.

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We must additionally examine the temporal relations involved in this dynamics. Temporal relations in landline telephone calls help to constitute accountability of individuals in space. For instance, if one calls a specific person at a desired location, say, a workplace, during certain hours, one expects to find him in that place at that time: in other words, that individual is held accountable to be there. However, this kind of accountability extends only so far. If one were to call the same place after work hours, this person needn’t pick up the phone nor be accountable. For Foucault, a certain ‘usability’ is here lost as accountability fails. Because they rely on individuals being in place at a given time, landline phone calls are not only spatially but also temporally dependent. The cellular phone eliminates this problem. With a cellular phone, an individual is reachable at all hours since the call itself locates the individual himself and not the place where he could or should be at that time. As Ling states, ‘when we send a … message to a certain telephone number, we expect that it will reach a specific person regardless of where the person is at that moment’ (2004: 151). A particular body, as selfsame body, is always where it is at each moment. The problem is, however, of knowing where that particular body is in terms of a larger network of bodies. The cellular phone makes for docile bodies, and ‘a body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved’ (Foucault, 1995: 136). Furthermore, as a technology of accountability, the cellular phone operates as a technology of power. ‘Power exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy … its effects of domination are attributed … to dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings; that one should decipher it in a network of relations … in activity.’ (Foucault, 1995: 26)

The cellular phone is an apparatus for rendering accountable the particular activities of individuals, namely those related to their bodies. Indeed, perceived this way, we begin to understand why the name ‘cellular phone’ is so apt a name for this technology. To be ‘cellular’ implies a larger body to which one belongs, much like the cells of the human body; however, in this case, we see the individual conceived as belonging to the social body. ‘Discipline allows both the characterisation of the individual as individual and the ordering of a given multiplicity. It is the first condition for the control and use of an ensemble of distinct elements: the base for a microphysics of what might be called “cellular” power.’ (Foucault, 1995: 149, my emphasis)

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It is the nature of this new kind of body that needs thinking through. As an initial hypothesis, I see this body being structured as a superorganism – for example, like a colony of ants – where all members of the organism are in contact with all other members, and the whole functions as a single body. In any case, I believe this new body requires a concomitantly unique theory of subjectivity, one which gets away from the privileged status of ‘the subject’ as individual and looks toward the subject as a necessarily intersubjective social subject. But all of this is work for another time. The above aside, what we must note is that the cellular phone makes the individual fully accountable by eliminating knowledge’s dependence on space and time in knowing the individual. This does not mean that space and time disappear from the individual; indeed, quite the opposite is the case. In cellular technology, space and time have become more infused in the individual through discipline. ‘“Discipline” may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a “physics” or an “anatomy” of power, a technology.’ (Foucault, 1995: 215)

Rather than being merely probable space and time, for instance, in the case of landline telephones, the cellular phone makes definite space and time by rendering the individual always locatable through disciplinary practice. In terms of space, the cellular phone functions as ‘enclosure’: ‘discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of space heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself’ (Foucault, 1995: 141), i.e. a cell. With respect to time, the cellular phone allows for a technology of time that renders the individual always accountable as an individual within a multiplicity: ‘time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power … In the correct use of the body, which makes possible a correct use of time. Nothing must remain idle or useless: everything must be called on to form the support of the act required.’ (Foucault, 1995: 152)

Thus, the cellular phone makes the individual always and everywhere accountable. And because the cellular phone can do this – that is, promote accountability through knowledge of the individual – it is expected that the individual be always and everywhere accountable. ‘Others expect you to be reachable; so it is your responsibility to be reachable’ (Mante, 2003: 118). ‘Turning off’, or what was once called ‘tuning out’ is not an option

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either. For insofar as one considers turning off one’s cellular phone, one is already subjected to it; to even consider ‘turning it off’ is to already be subjected to cellular power as something one attempts to ‘turn off’. Not owning a cellular phone is likewise not a valid objection, since one chooses not to own a cell phone precisely because one could/should own one. Thus, we are always already subjected to this new cellular power.5 Cellular technology is a power/knowledge relation that exercises its own, unique discipline. ‘This machinery works space in much more flexible and detailed ways. It does this first of all on the principle of elementary location or partitioning. Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual … Its aim [is] to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits. It [is] a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering, and using. Discipline organises an analytical space … disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular.’ (Foucault, 1995: 143, my emphasis)

As the individual comes to be known through cellular technology, certain power relations are inscribed on him. Already, we hear the complaints of technology ‘invading’ our private lives. Home email has blurred the line between work and home life. Wireless communications allows people to ‘work from home’ or even on the beach or in the wilderness. As these technologies expand, it seems that the necessary consequence is that more and more spaces are becoming colonised as ‘usable’. As Foucault argues, ‘particular spaces [are] defined to correspond not only to the need to supervise … but also to create a useful space’ (1995: 144). Surveillance and usability are necessarily tied. And since ‘idleness is rebellion’, we are likely to see concomitant with the proliferation of cellular technology a proliferation of usable time and the expectation that this time will be used (Foucault, 1988: 56). As cellular technology becomes more and more commonplace, so will the expectation that one own and use a cellular phone, and this in a particular, namely disciplined, way. ‘Those who treasure respite may find themselves pressured to replace otherwise excusable isolation with productive tasks. Once upon a time, being aboard an airplane excused an executive from having to interact with colleagues. No more, for the fax and phone now follow even at six miles high; nor are the seashore and the mountaintop immune to their

5

Nevertheless, for the record, I don’t own one.

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reach. An age of perpetual contact, at least in terms of potential, is dawning.’ (Katz andAakhus, 2003: 2)

We see this happening already in the workforce, where it is not uncommon for businesses to provide their employees with a cellular phone upon employment. However, with such a practice comes an expectation that the employee will use the cellular phone. Moreover, what will the rules be for such use? Will the employee be required to answer the phone at all hours of the day and in any location? To answer ‘yes’ to this question is not inconceivable. ‘Time measured and paid must also be a time without impurities or defects; a time of good quality, throughout which the body is constantly applied to its exercise. Precision and application are, with regularity, the fundamental virtues of disciplinary time.’ (Foucault, 1995: 151)

The cellular phone is a technology that allows for a homogeneous and allencompassing accounting and, consequently, use, of time and place. Because the cellular phone effectively disciplines the individual to operate as a cell within a larger network, the individual is always accountable to that network. As I have mentioned, this new network may be seen to escape the hierarchical network of, say, the corporate workplace; however, the new network may be worse, and if not worse, then at the very least radically different, where we are at once our own authority, subject, and judge. Whatever the case may be, the individual is an inherently disciplined individual. Through discipline ‘spread out in a perfectly legible way over the whole series of individual bodies, the work force may be analysed in individual units’ (Foucault, 1995: 145). It is not hard to see the consequences of this, of what I have been calling accountability. The nature of cellular technology allows for a continuous and uninterrupted survey of the ‘cells’ which comprise its network. The network, of course, is the whole of society. Conceived in this manner, we find that cellular technology functions according to the late-stage principle of Foucault’s Panopticon; namely the moment when the Panopticon has reached its disciplinary apotheosis, serving ‘to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’, which can be accomplished by arranging things so ‘that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should lead to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who

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Indeed, it would seem that cellular technology has reached this moment. As cellular technology carries the potential for the perpetual accountability of ‘cells’, so does such accountability become normalised and expected. We can see this power at work in the following: ‘[In Finland] … 93% of both men and women stressed that one of the main reasons for obtaining a mobile phone is availability … the mobile phone makes it possible to be reached wherever you are; thus one is less likely to miss opportunities. Perpetual availability, however could be seen as a tie as well. One runs the risk that others assume the mobile phone owner will accept messages regardless of place or time. Indeed, a mobile phone does not necessarily offer “more free time” or “more personal possibilities”, as people thought at the beginning of the 1990s … On the contrary, a mobile phone may be a means of control … The consequence, at its worst, may be the formation of a digital version of Foucault’s Panopticon where there is no room for choice between work and personal needs.’ (Puro, 2003: 22)6

Here we see that the unintended consequence of cellular technology has begun to rear its head. Cellular technology is affecting the individual in unexpected ways, by making him or her more accountable, more useful, more disciplined. Foucault’s thesis is correct when he writes, ‘we are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification’ (1995: 189).

Hanging up: Resistance ‘The enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchal figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed … all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism … .’ (Foucault, 1995: 197)

6

This citation is one of only two citations which make specific mention of Foucault’s work in over one thousand pages of material I read on mobile telephony. I am, however, only referring to works in English or translated into English.

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Foucault’s project points to a way out of this seemingly Orwellian conundrum. Whereas Heidegger would doom us to Ge-stell or ‘enframing’,7 Foucault’s theory of technology and power leaves agency for the individual insofar as ‘he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more profound and permanent are its effects ... .’ (Foucault, 1995: 203)

Foucault’s theory of power and subjection is one wherein the subject is responsible for his own subjection. Such a notion of subjection is inherent in Foucault’s theory since the latter is concerned with the subject as constituted. This ‘subjectivisation’ is crucial as Foucault envisions a society not of automatons, but of free individuals who choose to constitute themselves in certain ways. That most subjects constitute themselves as similar subjects is a result of discipline and punishment, which respectively function to limit the subject’s horizon of possibilities or to reinforce ‘appropriate’ behavior. ‘… it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which it is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.’ (Foucault, 1995: 26)

‘Subjection’ is fundamental to Foucault’s theory of power. The idea that the subject chooses, to a certain extent, his own subjection leaves us with a flexible, useful theory of power, presupposing resistance as part of power.8 For our purpose, we must examine how ‘the mobile phone, a quintessential instrument of two-way interpersonal communication, can also work as a tool to spur and coordinate the actions of masses for political change’ (Katz and Aakhus, 2003: 3). Cellular technology, like almost any other technology, is as it is used. Certainly, cellular technology has some fundamental attributes – mainly, 7

See ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ by Martin Heidegger. Foucault means both ‘subjection’ as in being subjected to X and ‘subjection’ as in the process of becoming a ‘subject’.

8

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‘mobility, immediacy, reachability’ as mentioned above. Cellular technology does not depend on individuals obeying a certain discipline of space and time (being in the right place at the right time to receive a call); rather, cellular technology inscribes space and time onto the individual himself, making him always and everywhere accountable. Such an individual can certainly be abused by power. However, this very same attribute, perpetual availability, invests the individual with a unique power. What Howard Rheingold calls a ‘smart mob’9 or ‘ad-hocracies’ is mobile resistance. Essentially, a smart mob is a spontaneous gathering of likeminded people coordinated via cellular telephones, either through actual conversations, calls, or ‘texting’ – a form of email from cellular phone to cellular phone. Generally, a smart mob is formed using text-messages since the sender has the ability to send the same message to every contact in his cell phone’s number registry (contacts) at once, much like a mass email. By virtue of the fact that cellular phones operate on a network principle, any one message has the potential to reach millions of people since, if that message is continually forwarded by its recipients onto their contacts, the number of recipients grows exponentially. And all of this may occur in a matter of seconds. As Rheingold mentions, the results can be astounding. ‘On January 20, 2001, President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first head of state in history to lose power to a smart mob. More than 1 million residents, mobilised and coordinated by waves of text messages, assembled…on Epifanio de los Santos … [after] four days … Estrada fell … Bringing down a government without firing a shot.’ (Rheingold, 2002: 157-8)

It would seem that just as the technology of industrialisation produced communities of workers who, in turn, produced labor unions to resist the very technology that grouped them together in the first place, so can cellular technology form a means of resistance against the highly dispersed power of the postindustrialist age. And at quick speed, too. This is exactly what happened to Estrada in the episode recounted above: millions of people, spurred on by one message which was sent and re-sent at an exponentially increasing rate, converged in one place in a matter or hours and overthrew a government they perceived as unjust. Now, that’s resistance. 9

Rheingold uses a double entendre here: ‘mob’ is of course mob, but it is also ‘mobe’ as in ‘mobile’.

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The power of the cellular phone does not come simply from its ability to organise bodies in space and time, but also, and I would suggest more importantly, from its nature as discursive technology. ‘… in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.’ (Foucault, 1972: 216)

The cellular telephone might be used as a way to evade this limitation of discourse. By nature of its own structure, the cell phone allows for a proliferation of discourse perhaps beyond our imagination. At any given moment, regardless of where one is, one may engage in discourse with another or a host of others; moreover, discourse needn’t be limited to locution. Already I’ve mentioned ‘texting’ as a way to communicate, but cellular phones possess the capacity to send not just voice and text but also music, images, video, and, perhaps someday, senses like taste and smell. If we think of the vibrating ‘ringtone’, the cellular phone might already be thought to transmit ‘touch’. The foucauldian concern with ‘new bodies, new pleasures’ may hail the cell phone as holding limitless possibilities. For instance, ‘Lovegety’ users in Japan find potential dates when their devices recognise another Lovegety user in the vicinity broadcasting the appropriate pattern of attributes. According to Rheingold, ‘location-based matchmaking is now available on some mobile phone services’ (2002: xvii). Such new practices and new discourses defy the strictures of power by allowing individuals to interact in new, unforeseen, and unpredictable ways. The question, of course, is whether cellular technology, even in providing ‘new bodies, new pleasures’, will strip us of our very humanity. Rheingold, for example, warns us that ‘people may start reacting to mechanical artifacts as if they were reacting to people’ (2002: 191). Power itself is flexible and in our society is pervaded by ‘a profound logophobia, a sort of dumb fear of these events, of this mass of spoken things, of everything that could possibly be violent, discontinuous, querulous, disordered and even perilous in it, of the incessant, disorderly buzzing of discourse.’ (Foucault, 1972: 229)

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The determination of what cellular technology will actually produce is dependent on the ways subjects themselves actually determine the use of technology. ‘As census data indicate, Americans will soon live in a country in which the majority of people live alone. But, it should be added, these people are not likely to live without television, radio, CDs, a video-cassette recorder or computer.’ (Gergen, 2003: 233) Nor, I would add, without a cellular telephone. How these individuals constitute themselves as individuals will in large part determine the face of the future. What is being decided at this very moment is whether we are on the cusp of a more discursive society or on that of ‘the perfect disciplinary society’, which ‘make[s] it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly’ (Foucault, 1995: 173).10

Conclusion A new era is at hand. It is a cellular era. Whether this cell will be the cell of a complex organism, a living, breathing, discursive organism, or the cell of the prison and the disciplinary society are the stakes. As each day goes by, it is becoming increasingly difficult to live, work and conduct business without the use of the internet and the cell phone. For Rheingold, ‘the time has come to consider … the consequences of computers disappearing into the background the way motors [and other forms of technology, i.e. writing, the home telephone, etc.] did’ (2002: 88). Just as, some time ago, we would have found it absurd if someone with whom we needed to conduct business did not have a telephone number, we are reaching an era in which it is equally absurd if a business interlocutor does not have a cellular phone, and, moreover, does not answer whenever and wherever he might be when we call. The stakes of this controversy are very real, for we are beginning to identify the individual with a number, or machine. With increased accountability comes increased surveillance. ‘The regulatory regime that will shape the future of wireless technology is not the only crucial unsettled policy issue. Who will have control over the use of the cloud of personal information … technologies transmit, as mobile and pervasive communications evolve and merge? In each of the 10

Again, this idea is linked to that of performativity, which remains a constant in this paper.

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converging technologies … issues of control remain to be resolved.’ (Rheingold, 2002: 156)

Foucault, however, does not condemn us to Big Brotherhood. Rather, he sees power and subjection as a dynamic interplay of forces. In other words, Foucault indicates a way out of our technological conundrum. We understand that power is not ‘acquired once and for all by a new control of the apparatuses nor by a new functioning or a destruction of the institutions’ (Foucault, 1995: 27); rather, power is constantly in flux, and those who are ‘subjected’ by power, however much they may be so, are subjected as subjects. To be a subject corresponds to simultaneously being an agent, and this affords the subject the ability to resist his own subjection. In Foucault, and even in cellularity, we might find inspiration for freedom.

Bibliography Foucault, Michel (1995 [1977]) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage. —. (1988 [1965]) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage. —. (1978 [1976]) The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon. —. (1972) The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon. Gergen, Kenneth J. (2003) ‘The Challenge of Absent Presence’, in James E. Katz et al. (eds.) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 227-41. Gournay, Chantal de (2003) ‘Pretense of Intimacy in France’, in James E. Katz et al. (eds.) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 193-205. Katz, James E. et. al. (2003) ‘Introduction: Framing the Issues’, in James E. Katz et al. (eds.) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-14. —. (2003) ‘Conclusion: Making Meaning of Mobiles – A Theory of Apparatgeist’, in James E. Katz et al. (eds.) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 301-20.

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Licoppe, Christian et al. (2003) ‘France: Preserving the Image’, in James E. Katz et al. (eds.) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 94-109. Ling, Rich (2004) The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society. New York: Elsevier. Mante, Enid (2003) ‘The Netherlands and the USA Compared’, in James E. Katz et al. (eds.) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 110-25. Puro, Jukka-Pekka (2003) ‘Finland: A Mobile Culture’, in James E. Katz et al. (eds.) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1929. Rheingold, Howard (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge: Basic Books. Schejter, Amit et al. (2003) ‘Israel: Chutzpah and Chatter in the Holy Land’, in James E. Katz et al. (eds.) Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 30-41.

THE END OF DISTANCE: THE EMERGENCE OF TELEMATIC CULTURE JOSÉ BRAGANÇA DE MIRANDA, NEW UNIVERSITY OF LISBON

Network media have created a new culture that is profoundly altering the millennial structure that articulated proximity with distance. This structure depended on a minimal separation between physis on the one hand and the control of bodies as well as their inevitable shock on the other hand. In medieval times, an image of that which is distant, but simultaneously omnipresent, God, organised the real, in obedience to a command or voice that presented itself as absolutely ‘external’, completely conditioning human geography and psychography. The way through which technology has affected or come to appropriate this structure is paradoxical. Distance seems to have diminished and everything now appears to fall into absolute proximity due to the exponential rise in teletechnologies. For many, what now prevails is ‘immediacy’, the ‘time of the real’ or ‘direct time’. Paul Valéry had already warned us that a process of ‘distribution of sensible reality to the home’ was under way, for good or evil. This appears to indicate the initiation of a crisis in the medial reason that has operated in history, both to direct it towards remote but necessary objectives, as well as to determine what can, or cannot, manifest itself and according to which modalities. It is necessary to minutely analyse the emergence of similar ‘telematic’ culture – spanning the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, computer networks, the wireless – that controls the appearance of seemingly chaotic but consistent traces, leaving nowhere and nobody unaffected. We should examine the modes of mutation of the transmission systems which are recreating the totality of contemporary culture and assess the possibilities of critically responding to this situation.

I In a prophetic text that has subterraneously survived to our day, Paul Valéry perceived a decisive change, that of ‘the home delivery of Sensory

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Reality’ (1964: 226). This expression is found in a short article titled ‘The Conquest of Ubiquity’. In itself, the title appears to point to an alteration in ‘theology’ and in the metaphysics that theology determined. It is well known that ubiquity was held to be one of the attributes of divinity, which, being omnipresent, saturated the real with its invisible yet ultra-potent presence. The decisive change is that of technology’s assumption of a theological attribute. The immediate consequence is an investment in the real that draws things closer, altering the millennial relations between proximity and distance. A series of symptoms clearly anticipated what was at stake. The fleeing of the gods in Hölderlin, the death of God in Nietzsche, but also the network of trains or the postage system indicated the diminishing of distance, both spatial and temporal. Valéry’s conviction is that this situation corresponds to a war of conquest, played out in space – as indeed all wars – but in this case going further than usual. The delivery of Sensory Reality engulfs both the whole of the Earth as well as domestic, or internal, space.1 Although the author has particular machines in mind, such as the telephony and the radio, or even records and the gramophone, the presuppositions of his thesis are clearly more radical. Departing from the standpoint of the transmission of art works, such as radio concerts, what is truly at issue is the capacity to ‘conquer’ ubiquity. Despite originating in the theological imagination, the desire to be omnipresent concretises itself empirically through a series of operations and machines that fill the real with the objects they produce and diffuse. Not yet acquainted with television and with all that would follow in its wake, the French poet privileged the transmission of auditory works, although he deemed it inevitable that these should have affinities with a process that would make it ‘possible to send anywhere or to re-create anywhere a system of sensations, or more precisely a system of stimuli, provoked by some object or event in any given place’ (1964: 225-6). The consequence is that the whole of perception is converted into a technical apparatus, due to being worked by machines that allow its translation into objects. Through the technical system constituted by machines, such

1

The model of theological control, according to which God’s saturation of the real leads to his occupation of the whole of space, both external (the ‘Earth’) and internal (the ‘soul’), thus looms over the current relation between proximity and distance.

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objects are continuously expelled and reabsorbed into perception.2 Moreover, this process feeds on a historically created ‘image’, that of ubiquity, whose absolute nature demands that the saturation of medieval times be now machinically accomplished. Indeed, this metaphysical desire reminiscent of traditional images propels the will to instantaneously enjoy all works, to choose them as one wishes, and to transcend the limits of time and space.3 The bourgeois act of attending the opera or a concert downtown, linked to social and spatial hierarchy, transforms itself through universal transmission. Instead of the rigidity that affected the fruition of works and delayed the desire to savour them – tying art works not only to a precise time and space, but also to a concrete programme – we can now choose the moment of enjoyment. The process of recording and, above all, transmission are, in this manner, ‘the condition essential to the most perfect aesthetic returns’ (Valéry, 1964: 228).4 Valéry seems enthralled by the possibilities laid open by this new experience. Delocalisation, detemporalisation, deprogramation, all this in favour of a greater aesthetic rendering and of the immediate concretisation of desire. A small exception, however, to this enthusiasm was revealed by a momentary presentiment that the poet registered, only to promptly distance himself from it. Valéry feared the coming of a world akin to Walt Disney where, similarly to Beauty and the Beast, all objects sing and dance: ‘This reminds me of an opera-ballet I saw as a child in a foreign theatre. Or that I may believe to have seen. In the magician’s palace, the furniture talked, sang, taking action in a poetic and malicious manner … Touching an object would cause it to burst forth into song. I truly hope that we will

2

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was aware of this fragmentation of the senses and of perception, articulating a new poetry that would permit a humanly acceptable form of recomposition (1978: 51). Friedrich Kittler broached this subject from another perspective in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999: 38). 3 This desire and the images through which it expresses itself evidently depend on concrete material conditions and on precise economic and political programmes. I will expound on this later. 4 The possibility that these new objects which have surfaced since the end of the nineteenth century may be represented in terms of monetary value relies on this aesthetic rendering.

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The End of Distance: The Emergence of Telematic Culture never reach this excess of auditory magic. One can no longer eat nor drink at a café without being disturbed by concerts.’ (Valéry, 1960: 1287)5

The ‘magic’ that leads Valéry to hesitate is the inexorable effect of the process he describes. Despite only slightly insisting on the technical aspects of this process, these will be increasingly decisive, dependent as they are on the general economy that presides over the idea of the ‘conquest’ of ubiquity. This economy, in which it is hardly possible to distinguish enchantment, controls objects, desires, and images, being impelled by a tendentially universal system of transmission. The characteristics of this system increasingly imply the shortening of difference between emission and reception. This is accomplished by the creation of an immense data base where one can freely and rapidly archive and restore files to their original location. Despite the fact that distance has not been completely eradicated, it nevertheless lies way beneath the thresholds of human perception. Valéry did not realise that a new technical system was to be installed, that of universal telematics, which would affect the totality of the ‘real’. The possibility of a ‘transmission of Sensory Reality’ is inseparable from such telematics. However, the fact that Valéry based his interpretation on sound, namely on music, either recorded or transmitted by radio, leads him to articulate more radical results than those of models created to capture and reproduce images, the latter being always dependent on stable supports. Due to its dissipatory and atmospheric characteristics, sound does not need such supports. The model of sound is not that of a multiplication of copies, but rather a permanent emission without fixed trajectories. This process occurs according to a dual principle: on the one hand, nothing is retained at a distance (and, hence, all is transparent); on the other hand, everything envelops the listener wherever he may be. Valéry reveals fascination with the model of general telematics, where trajectories cannot be controlled and all is in permanent circulation. As this process accelerates and 5

The importance of Valéry’s text on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, to which I will later return, is well known. It is interesting to note that the essay titled ‘Experience and Poverty’, originally written in 1933, refers to Walt Disney, significantly altering Valéry’s position: ‘The existence of Mickey Mouse is such a dream for contemporary man. His life is full of miracles – miracles that not only surpass the wonders of technology, but make fun of them. For the most extraordinary thing about them is that they all appear, quite without any machinery, to have been improvised out of the body of Mickey Mouse, out of his supporters and persecutors, and out of the most ordinary pieces of furniture, as well as from trees, clouds, and the sea’ (Benjamin, 2005: 734).

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develops, it can lead to a certain ‘chaos’. This point will soon be taken up again. However, I first intend to stress that Valéry’s ideas are symptomatic of one of the crucial issues of the twentieth century, namely that of the progressive elimination of ‘distance’.

II ‘Distantiation’ is the word that can be used to sum up the dozens of million of years that separate the paleolithic from man’s first historical records. Rather than carrying out research on origins, an aim doomed to failure, we can conceptually engage in an archaeology of distance. It is impossible to trace our way back to an origin, for the issue of origin is brought up always as an ‘ideal’ of history. This ideal has managed to perfect complicated empirical trajectories, following neither order nor direction. The only claim to legitimacy of such trajectories has been that of their having triumphed over alternative routes. Despite this, we tend to consider such trajectories as corresponding to narratives of necessity. Upon closer scrutiny, however, traces of their formation can always be found in series of myths, institutions, and processes that give them sufficient consistency to survive. Distance is constitutive of human experience, signalling a ‘separation’ from physis, or nature, a kind of originary self-division. A certain distance may separate a mountain from another, to the extent that both are ‘split’ in space; nevertheless, the scale of physis does not contemplate such distance. For physis, distance only occurs when animals or men, for whatever reason, have to travel it, forcing the world open. The world splits up again when this distantiation becomes the absolute distance of God or lord. The entangling of signs, physical properties, and interdictions that pervades the range of distance covered points to something essential. As Hans Blumenberg contends – and with him a whole hobbesian tradition culminating with modernity – what is at issue here is the possibility of creating a distantiation that would prevent the forces and elements habitually unleashed by distance from being destructive. Blumenberg describes this imperative as a ‘fragmentation’ of the absolutism of physis, or its ‘dispotentiation’. ‘This concept of the limit towards which the extrapolation of tangible, historical features into the archaic tends can be formally defined in a single designation: as the absolutism of reality … [that implies] … the substitution of the familiar for the unfamiliar, of explanations for the

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The End of Distance: The Emergence of Telematic Culture inexplicable, of names for the unnameable. Something is ‘put forward’, so as to make what is not present into an object of averting, conjuring up, mollifying, or power-depleting action.’ (Blumenberg, 1985: 3, 5-6)

Such fragmentation does not necessarily have to be thought of as an effect of logos, of assignation by a name, a thesis that remounts to the Genesis text of the Old Testament. Before language and its power of individuation and command, we find in nature the capacity to split images and sounds, the scissiparity of cells, the reproduction of animals and plants. The reflection of objects on the mirrored surface of water has the effect of dividing nature, multiplying the latter, and placing it at a distance. Reflection adds an apparently lightweight quality to the objects reflected, a process that will become more obvious with photography. The specular division that characterises matter converts image and reflection into something original, serving as the basis for the constitution of myth. Departing from the priority given to logos, Blumenberg extrapolates from image to myth, seeking to apprehend its universal and cosmogonic character, due to ‘the absolutism of reality’ having been ‘replaced by the absolutism of images and desires’ (1985: 8). Myth is represented as a new absolutism, in much the same manner as modern reason. In keeping with what was earlier said, both calculus and myth can trace back their origins to that initial division productive of matter that is reelaborated to constitute new objects. An example will suffice to illustrate this, namely the reelaboration of the Narcissus myth by Ovid. The original experience is that of young Narcissus’ body being divided by a reflected image; however, myth splits that experience a second time, constituting the ‘crux’ of the youth’s relation with the nymphs, the refusal of Eros and the advances of Echo, chastisement for this fact, the lesson in ‘ethics’ against solitude and isolation, and so on.6 Myth and reason are always late reinventions, founding themselves on that originary distantiation and its incessant reelaboration.7 Marie-José Mondzain suggests that

6

If some original experiences are reelaborated over and over again, the same happens with those materials produced throughout history, which are appropriated, combined, and reinvented according to other types of necessities. 7 In effect, the division between myth and reason is already post-mythical, as can be deduced from Wilhelm Nestle’s interpretation in Vom Mythos zum Logos (1971). The platonic programme of distantiation from images and the reduction of

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‘to interrogate the origin of images corresponds to interrogating ourselves on our own origin, on what founds us in imaginary and symbolic terms. It implies an indefinitely regulated distance which, albeit, is always capable of deregulation relatively to that which we call the real and of which we 8 know nothing.’ (Mondzain, 2003)

It remains to be added that, despite the pertinence of Hans Blumenberg’s hypothesis, the source of ‘terror’ cannot be reduced to impotence before nature in our search for control over its awe-inspiring, elementary forces. Rather, as Thomas Hobbes recognised on the threshold of modernity, it may also correspond to the necessity of alleviating the violence between groups of men at war amongst themselves, placing a series of obstacles that amount to distance between them, thus controlling their potential for conflict.9 The instance of separation operated by images in modernity is almost dominated by a juridical order, but even the latter, as abstract as it may be, founds itself on the ‘distance’ produced by images. The capacity to use that distance characterises the human, implying that the line of separation produced by images is enveloped by an infinity of strategies destined to both draw away from and draw closer to objects. Some prefer to erase traces or dissimulate them; others, in turn, privilege reading traces and reaching the essence of objects so as to capture that which escapes them. From the metaphysical or mythological standpoint, this very structure is required to ground command over the real, allowing for the appropriation of objects and land. These two aspects derive clearly from the important opposition proposed by Walter Benjamin between trace and aura, two general strategies of dealing with proximity and distance. Far from the interpretations that see myth through the concept, or Eidos, correspond to a turn in the history of human reason. 8 On this basis, Marie-José Mondzain’s claim that ‘images and men are born together’ appears to be correct. In the recent book, Homo Spectator (2008), Mondzain analyses the imaginary power of images. 9 Hobbes’ Leviathan (1998) implies, in this respect, a profound reelaboration of that which secretly forms history, although in it we also find present the Enlightenment assumption that humans exert control over nature. Due to the necessity of maintaining the origin of history shrouded in secrecy, we can understand the scandal provoked by both Hobbes and, later, Marx, who implicitly establishes links with the former. See Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction a la Lecture de Hegel (1947) on this subject.

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in the aura a theological motif to be abolished or whose disappearance provokes nostalgia, the relation with the ‘trace’ (spur) indicates that what is at stake is property and possession, the possibility of capturing and using land and bodies.10 However, because the trace corresponds to the effects of image, that is, vaguely ‘imaginary’ effects, the process of taking hold through the image is ‘moderate’ and gradual. The theological command that demands absolute obedience is thus slow in passing through the transparent surface of the image that allows for a series of deferrals, incomprehensions, and appropriations.11 Culture develops in the frontier that separates proximity from distance. Myth and, later, reason always already appear at the end of this process, placing themselves on this side of the divisions, walls, and obstacles that we install between ourselves and nature. Even the most innocuous myth is present in the tectonic capacity to construct a space of safety, inscribed on the earth.12 Once the boundary, or divisive line – of which walls are the best sign – is created, one immediately verifies that the crucial relation between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ consists in yet another form of relation between proximity and distance. The ‘interior’ space, that of proximity, is threatened and subjugated by natural forces: we are, in fact, still suffering the reverberations of the impact provoked by the discovery of Pompey, buried under Mount Vesuvius’ volcanic eruption, on the basis of which both psychoanalysis and great part of modern primitivism are founded. A complex system of prevision, calculus, and contention has been devised so as to control the unpredictability of nature; however, not any less important is the fact that the ubiquitous surface of Land is redefined by the use of human bodies both in processes of construction as well as in the unleashing of wars against other communities.13 In short, the structuring of an ‘internal space’ is formed by various lines of division, the most decisive of which are those that separate distance and 10

That this fact should be dissimulated under an infinity of images, myths, and theories confers almost greater importance to Benjamin’s Marxist postulation. 11 For example, medieval heresy is always the effect of a hesitancy slow to be resolved and that, even destroyed, returns through other forms. 12 I have sought to analyse the issue of ‘land-taking’ in the essay ‘Geografias: Imaginário e Controlo da Terra’ (2005). 13 The return of ‘land’ as an unresolved historical problem is essential to the nineteenth century, having been tackled by Nietzsche and later reproblematised by Heidegger as well as by a host of other philosophers such as Edmund Husserl in Die Erde bewegt sich nicht (La Terre ne se meut pas), originally published in 1917.

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proximity. It is on the latter relation that the lines that divide visibility from invisibility, presence from absence, original from copy depend. The centrality of Benjamin’s position in contemporary theory is based on the attention he gives to this structure and on the way it determines the disposition of the ‘city’, or internal space. Sacrificial practices of all kinds, more or less bloody rituals, seek to guarantee the sustainability of communities not to survive nature but rather to ensure the optimisation of human and natural forces.14 The permanent recreation of an ‘internal space’ by sacrificial rituals of all kinds evidently implies a dramatisation of the ‘exterior’. It would be possible to show that absolute distance, reelaborated by theology, is the form that dominated human history until modernity. In an influential study, Rudolf Otto sustains that the idea of the sacred, in the aception of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, is founded on an idea of absolute separation, namely of the ‘radically other’. It is this separation that makes it both fascinating and intensely desired.15 Distance rules proximity and incites the will to draw closer to that which escapes us, for ‘it is no less something that allures with a potent charm’ (Otto, 1958: 31). Through a series of techniques such as xamanism, the distant functions as ‘something that captivates and transports [us] with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication’ (1958: 31). The composition of the mystery inherent in distance and of the fascination of that which seems to draw closer constitutes an essential moment of tectonic history. The classical distance relative to nature is, therefore, inseparable from a given metaphysical structure or theological relationship between proximity and distance, ruling all human connections as well as the distribution of objects and the appropriation of land. If, in the Bible, God is still present and speaks to human beings, he rapidly retires, shrouded in distance and remaining at a distance. Be that as it may, absolute distance is always a 14

I would like to propose the term ‘energology’ to designate the system that accumulated, controlled, and applied human and animal force throughout history. This system suffered considerable evolution with the appearance of machinical energies in the nineteenth century. For a sound contextualisation of this issue, see Michel Delon’s L’Idée d’Énergie au tournant des Lumières 1770-1820 (1988). 15 It is not by chance that when Plato insurges himself against myth and the Sophists, he insists on the refusal of ‘enthusiasm’. See Marianna Massin’s Les Figures du ravissement. Enjeux philosophiques et esthétiques (2001) for a more detailed explanation of this issue.

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form of regulating relationships in the present, eliminating all mediations that might allow for counterattack. Not by chance, all command depends on this structure. The commandments that come from afar hierarchically organise a series of imperatives, preordaining those who exercise authority in the city to take decisions on how to build upon the face of the ‘Earth’. This structure has entered a crisis in modernity, having the sacred apparently regressed and reduced itself to spatial distance on Earth, or converting itself into something purely physical, technically soluble, as Valéry concludes. We are now dominated by a proximity not less absolute than that of theology, namely that of the technological. This causes new problems to arise. In effect, that our context is increasingly complex is attested to by the fact that the dominant philosophies of the twentieth century continue to elaborate on the metaphysical motive of distance. This is the case of Ernst Bloch’s or Hans Jonas’ philosophies of ‘hope’ or of ‘waiting’, the philosophies of Blanchot’s ‘viens’ or of Derrida’s ‘carte postale’, of Heidegger’s ‘sending of being’ (Geschicken), and so forth. Far from having been dissolved, we find that the traditional structure that rules over proximity and distance has gained new dynamism at the very moment of ‘capture’ by the technical.

III The weakness of modern thinkers lies less in their considering distance as belonging purely to the physical realm, than in presupposing the dissolution, almost as if by magic, of the traditional structure that commanded the transmission of the ‘real’. The difficulties in which Valéry entangles himself reveal the complexity of the situation. The theological attribute of ‘ubiquity’ does not disappear with long distance transmission, namely by radio. However, it is this very image of ubiquity that nurtures the desire of instant and immediate transmission. It is not easy to apprehend the system that rules over the important relation between distance and proximity after the collapse of the medieval iconic empire.16 Everything indicates that what has radically changed is the localisation of the treatment meted out to physical distance in a more ample system. While in the Middle Ages physical distance was determined by the absolute distance or exteriority of God,17 in modernity it appears to be 16

See Maria-José Mondzain (1996) on this formulation. Carl Einstein presents an interesting argument concerning the domain of the concept and the rigid forms that determined ‘reality’ in the Middles Ages: ‘Once the cement binding human beings to their environment – namely God – had 17

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determined by the inclination towards total proximity, operated by telematic media. But the excessive evidence of spatial and geographical dimensions reduces the experience of distance and proximity to a mere technical issue. In the first third of the past century, Walter Benjamin faced the same problem, foregrounding the decisive role of ‘mechanical reproduction’.18 It is not by chance that his most influential essay seeks to develop the Valerian notion that ‘ubiquity’ is provoked by new techniques. While Benjamin insists on mechanical reproduction, namely of the image, taking photography as a point of departure, Valéry’s model had based itself on the diffusion and transmission of music by radio. This implies that Benjamin dislocates an appreciable part of Valéry’s problem as concerns universal circulation or transmission, lacking precise orientation and direction. If images multiply, creating other objects such as photos or requiring supports such as the screen, sounds, in turn, disseminate themselves ubiquitously. Benjamin’s paradigm, founded on ‘copies’, thus comes across as antithetical to Valéry’s ‘atmospheric’ model. However, the situation can be further complexified. According to Benjamin, ‘One might generalise by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.’ (1992b: 215)

crumbled, the chasm between psychological processes and their causal explanation deepened and became the fundamental problem. God had functioned as a mean, reconciling paradoxes and antinomies. Absorbed and neutralized in God, they were thus removed from the immediate world. In earlier times, cognition, logic, and dialectics were subject to the irrational dominant that was God. The incongruous and the miraculous were considered to be the origin and the ground of being; the hallucinatory, mythic origin of cognition was clearly apparent and retained its power. In this regard, medieval thought was far more complex than modern thought, since it encompassed logic’s irrational opposite. Hence, thanks to its elementary antagonisms, the cognitive process was dialectically more complex, especially since it incorporated the alogical within itself’ (2004: 172). 18 I am referring to the 1930’s essay titled ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, translated into English as ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1992b).

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Benjamin associates the two models, both his and Valéry’s, to the concept of author: the first so as to sustain the attack on the singularity of objects and the second to explain the forms of transmission and reception of images that have been torn apart from objects.19 There is an enormous ambiguity in the manner through which essential concepts such as ‘aura’ and ‘trace’ depend on the relation between proximity and distance, while technologies of reproduction dramatise the relation between copy and original. In reality, both models communicate on a subterraneous level, to the extent that a mechanical repetition affects the historical structure of proximity and distance as well as all that this structure rules. It is common knowledge that Benjamin proposes to engage with this issue through the concept of ‘aura’.20 However, an attentive reading of Benjamin’s essay may present us with some surprises. Benjamin reveals a certain discomfort regarding the nature of aura, a concept which will gain political density as his project develops. There is an obvious difference in tone between the references to the ‘aura’ that is irradiated from a view or a face, or even expression of admiration for its retention of the theological, and its determination by the problem of ownership, clearly patent in the excerpt reproduced above.21 In a note to the essay on mechanical reproduction, Benjamin distances himself resolutely from the mysterious and the sacred: ‘The definition of the aura as a “unique phenomenon of a distance however close it may be” represents nothing but the formulation of the cult value of the work of art in categories of space and time perception. Distance is the opposite of closeness. The essentially distant object is the

19

In reality, Benjamin’s analysis does not encompass telematic technologies, the latter which have to be presupposed by the reader. This is essentially due to the fact that, contrary to Valéry who privileges spatiality and instantaneous diffusion, the German author gives preference to a temporal dimension. Objects that come from the past appear in the present as images, thus being able to draw closer to ‘subjects’ or the ‘masses’. 20 The best proof that Benjamin’s essay is a unilateral fragment of a more global project lies in the fact that little space is concomitantly dedicated to the concept of ‘trace’ (spur), explicitly associated with The Arcades Project. 21 The first explicit reference to aura appears in the 1931 essay on the history of photography: ‘What is aura, actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be’ (Benjamin, 1998: 250). The ‘strangeness’ and mystery which surround it will be vigorously attacked in the essay on mechanical reproduction.

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unapproachable one. Unapproachability is indeed a major quality of the cult image. True to its nature, it remains “distant, however close it may be”. The closeness which one may gain from its subject matter does not impair the distance which it retains in its appearance.’ (Benjamin, 1992b: 236-7n)

Benjamin draws attention to a deviance from his previous theses. Now, insistence on what is retained at a distance, on a certain invisibility, corresponds only to a negative moment, associating ‘aura’ to cultic values, whether they be mythical or religious. The object consists in an intertwining of substance and values, beyond those of ritual, aesthetics, and exchange, involving its materiality rigidly. The singularity of the object resides in these elements that compose the aspect of a work of art.22 However, from an affirmative, or political, point of view, singularity implies the transmission of the ‘real’, as it has been empirically constituted throughout history. The metaphysical values of authenticity and originality, which seek to guarantee singularity to the object, ensure its invariability throughout its spatial and temporal transmission. ‘The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.’ (Benjamin, 1992b: 215)

To my mind, the issue of tradition has been overly stressed in contemporary theory. As is common knowledge, Latin translations summarily distinguish between ‘tradition’ and ‘transmission’; however, in German the two words are almost indistinguishable from each other, for the real as it is constructed is the effect of the transmission of a particular tradition. This is the reason why Benjamin, in a later text, describes the present as an effect of a war: ‘the adherents of historicism … empathise … with the victor’ (1992a: 248). I want to argue that the concept of property is that which structures the transmission of the ‘real’, maintaining it invariable throughout time. Much to Adorno’s horror, Benjamin proceeded as if ‘property’ were the DNA of history. Aura reveals itself as a metaphysical projection of property, dissimulated under cult-like, or even aesthetical, forms. ‘The growing proletarianisation of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts 22

In a certain way, this echoes Ortega y Gasset’s (1948) ideas on the ‘dehumanisation of art’, reducing the ‘immateriality’ that invests material objects to the historical context and the spirit of the age in which they are produced.

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The End of Distance: The Emergence of Telematic Culture to organise the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.’ (Benjamin, 1992b: 234)

The advantage resulting from the crisis of the aura and the repetition of objects such as the image is related to the manner through which ‘property’ is affected. That is why, for Benjamin, this is a process with universal political implications, in a certain way the other side of historical crisis. The loss of the singularity of objects and their appropriation by the ‘masses’, that is, their reproduction and circulation ‘lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind’ (Benjamin, 1992b: 215). Great part of the difficulties patent in the Benjaminian thesis on reproduction ensue from the ambiguity of the notion of ‘property’.23 This is because Benjamin does not explicitly distinguish between objects, either durable or ephemeral, that always have a ‘single’ owner, property as global product of history, and property as ‘Possession of the Earth’ (Locke, 1988: 302). In effect, the desacralisation of the ‘cultic’ mystery that surrounded objects – and, generally speaking, all objectuality – complicates the process of possession through the image.24 As such, property is retained at a distance, remaining excessive to all objects.25

23

The entanglement of interpretations provoked by this essay is in part due to interpreters’ systematic occultation of this crucial dimension. 24 Benjamin almost prophetically anticipated the enormous complication that digital reproduction would give rise to concerning copyright and property rights. 25 Despite this, we find ourselves a step ahead of Marx’s famous thesis on the ‘theological whims of the commodity’: ‘a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its

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Benjamin attributes to techniques of reproduction, such as photography and film, the capacity to abolish distance through the crisis they introduce in the metaphysical hierarchy of objects.26 This metaphysical hierarchy expresses itself materially in the opposition between singularity, connoting durability, and copy, evoking ephemerality. This is why reading Benjamin’s essay on mechanical reproduction as focussing on ‘art’ or the ‘cinema’, or even the techniques of reproduction, is clearly insufficient. The issue is, in fact, another one. What is at stake is the emancipation of objects and subjects from aura, which dissimulates the fact that the latter obeys the logic of property. This process develops in two convergent directions. In the first place, objects lose the rigidity linked to authentic ownership and start to circulate as images; on the other hand, the real is revealed as ‘spectacle’, or ‘phantasmagoria’, whose connections or invisible relations would have to be ‘imploded’ so as to reveal their ‘optic subconscious’.27

wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was’ (Marx, 1996: 81). 26 In the essay titled ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’, Gilles Deleuze defines the specificity of platonic metaphysics as residing not in the ‘distinction between essence and appearance, the intelligible and the sensible, idea and image, original and copy, model and simulacrum’, but rather in an opposition between ‘two types of images: copies are representative of the second type of image, well-grounded claimants to the transcendent Idea, authenticated by their internal resemblance to the Idea, whereas “simulacra” are like false claimants, built on a dissimilarity and implying an essential perversion or deviation from the Idea’ (Deleuze, 1969: 180). Opposing simulacra to copies, he then sustains that ‘it is an issue of securing the triumph of copies over simulacra, of rejecting simulacra, of keeping them enchained to the very bottom, preventing them from rising to the surface and “insinuating” themselves everywhere’ (1969: 180). At first sight ‘images’ created by reproduction would have affinities with the simulacrum. But for Benjamin metaphysics is coincident with the posited hierarchy, irrespectively of the content of the opposition, as is the case with the Deleuzian distinction between ‘copy’ and ‘simulacrum’. This is the reason for his refusal of Adorno’s request, formulated in a letter dating from May 20 1935, that he escape Brecht’s influence and expose in The Arcades Project his ‘prima philosophia’. Benjamin replies that the ‘world of dialectical images is immune to all objections that can be raised by metaphysics’ due to the ‘general process of fusion which has led the entire conceptual mass of this material [that is, his research for The Arcades Project], originally motivated as it was by metaphysical concerns, towards a final shape’ (Adorno et al., 1999: 89). 27 The essay is further complexified, for photography should first allow appearance to reveal itself while the cinema would consist in an implosion of the invisible relations inherent in the real, pointing to an ‘optic subconscious’. An absence of

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Benjamin does not directly thematise the relation between the two forms of the ‘image’, although the latter communicate spontaneously through the transformation of works brought about by mechanical reproduction. The acuity of this analysis should be recognised, despite the fact that the crisis in cultic and aesthetic values does not bring visibility to the relation with property,28 a realm which is kept occult. Nevertheless, property is affected in almost imperceptible ways by the crisis in aura. If aura reveals the object through which it appears as singular, the latter exhibits aura by becoming sacred or intangible. The museological principle of ‘prohibition to touch art works’, or the fact that one should pay for the opportunity to ‘gaze’ upon art works, is truly symptomatic of this situation. Aura has an incorporeal effect on objects, having been laboriously construed throughout history. All property is imbued with such aura, but aura confuses itself with an absolute property, a difference in potential between objects and the economy which rules over them. When the image manages to unglue itself from objects and to infinitely multiply, the singularity of the object is destroyed. The object then starts to circulate as image, price, idea, fetish, substance, and so on. In a certain way, what is affected is its synthetic status. Singularity was a sort of synthesis in action. The Benjaminian presupposition that whilst appropriating oneself of an image, or by freely and contingently receiving it, the whole system is disturbed, is surprisingly accurate. The object is authentic if it is determined by property and if it has a legitimate owner. The critique of ‘envy’, or of the ‘evil eye’, the prohibition to look upon the lord, all these examples indicate the possibility of taking possession through the image. When the synthetical capacity abandons objects and images liberate themselves, they can be appropriated. Benjamin appears to posit mechanical reproduction as affecting the ‘order of property’.29 In effect, he proves that property is in crisis and not necessarily for technical motives.30 forms of articulation between photography and film is to be observed in the text, but Benjamin does not aim to clarify the issue in this context. 28 When Proudhon announces, in a famous title, that ‘property is theft’, he is defining property in general terms, irrespective of the possibility that we agree or disagree with the choice of attribute to designate it. A significantly different issue would be that of ‘stealing’ any particular commodity or object. This fact reinforces the link between property and theft, exhibiting the act of appropriation as a ‘crime’. 29 Discussing the role of film in his essay on mechanical reproduction, Benjamin claims the following en passant: ‘So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. We

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In reality, such distinctions are not clearly drawn. Despite not being visible, the general order of property continues to act secretly. As such, at the precise moment in which aura disappears,31 its effects extend to copies and originals, to objects and images. More than a manipulation of aura, or its perverse return, we are facing a final form of control at a distance, presenting itself as collective appropriation through images. It is not evident that mere reproduction should shake the complex structure that at times emerges in Benjamin’s work and that determines Western tectonics at least since Greek metaphysics. To the extent that reproduction impacts upon any particular object, even if sacralised, we have to presuppose that not only ‘copies’ but ‘originals’ should banalise themselves, becoming indistinguishable from each other. This is due to the fact that an unusual disturbance cannot manage to either loosen the hierarchical structure on which the pre-eminence of the original over copies is founded, nor offer the possibility of inversely performing this trajectory.32 This implies that do not deny that in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property. However, our present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the film production of Western Europe’ (1992b: 224-5). This almost corresponds to a denegation, for the essay on mechanical reproduction is reduced to theoretical ‘wall-paper’ when considered as exclusively centred on art work. 30 It is not perhaps due to fortuitous circumstance that in the attempt to control images and to monetarise their cost, the owners of art works should consider a connection to exist, even at a distance, between art and property despite changes in scale and in material quality. In the case of digital objects, the difficulty in maintaining this connection gives rise to important legal difficulties. Regarding the legal problems that photography originated, see Bernard Edelman’s Le droit saisi par la photographie (2001). 31 Bruno Tackels transcribes a fragment on aura, which was discovered not too long ago in the French National Library and has been insufficiently analysed. Written in Italy on the letter paper of the Hotel San Pellegrino, its most probable date is that of 1935. Because I cannot analyse it here, I will limit myself to citing a symptomatic passage: ‘As long as dreams survive, there will always be aura on earth. But, when the dream has completely extinguished itself in the awakened eye, the latter does not forget the power of the gaze. Quite to the contrary, it is only then that the gaze becomes truly strong … It begins to increasingly resemble the gaze through which … the victim responds to his oppressor. In this gaze, distance is thoroughly eradicated’ (1999: 149). Benjamin appears to presuppose that the oppressed would be prepared to wage a war over ‘aura’ in favour of the abolition of distance. 32 In reality, even this trajectory of the originals towards copies and vice-versa is already posited in the famous allegory of Plato’s divided line, in which he explains why he chooses ‘shadows’ to think images (‘appearance’) and not reflections: the

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one may monetarise, possess, and appropriate any banal object, even copies. Appropriation by the image is hence a specific case, based on a suspicious will to proximity. Insistence on techniques of reproduction can lead to attacks perpetrated against sacred or ‘singular’ objects; however, in this particular case more complex strategies are involved. The historical advantage represented by Benjamin resides in his making this structure, which is profoundly anchored in the real, explicit. In a book that gives a new take on innumerable Benjaminian studies, S. Brent Plate refers to the interesting possibility of prolonging aura analyses, singling out Marcel Duchamp and his famous ‘urinal’ as important milestones in contemporary art and thought. According to Plate, ‘with Fountain [Duchamp] goes further by inverting the whole structure and showing how powerful aura can be: the aura is so dominant in art that we no longer even need an original object’ (Plate, 2005: 88). Although its global structure remains to be examined, Duchamp’s example reveals that the structure of proximity and distance may assume other forms that do not consist in a new aesthetic sacralisation of objects, thereby gaining new ‘aura’.33 This amounts to a perverse effect of the ‘conversion’ of objects operated by Duchamp, which he would himself consider undesirable. A note in the Paris diary indicates that Duchamp and Benjamin knew each other personally.34 In a fragment from the same period as the essay on mechanical reproduction, Benjamin refers to yet another possibility of disturbing ‘telestructure’: ‘Duchamp is one of the most interesting phenomena of the French avantgarde … His theory of art, which he has exemplified (but not explained) in a series titled La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires consists in more or less the following: from the moment that we gaze upon an object as an art work, it ceases to affirm itself as such. Contemporary man hence better recognises the specific effect of an art work in the casual configurations of rubbish or debris, in objects that have been removed from their functional shadow is contiguous with the body from which it emanates (Republic VI.509D511E). 33 In reality, Benjamin had already perceived a tendency of the ‘aura’ to permanently return. 34 ‘Saw Duchamp this morning, same Café on Boulevard St. Germain … Showed me his painting: Nu descendant un escalier in a reduced format, colored by hand en pochoir, breathtakingly beautiful … » (Benjamin, in Bonk, 1998: 102).

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contexts (a salon palm tree with piano keys, a high hat full of holes) than in renowned art works.’ (Benjamin, 1991: 231)

Despite being inclined to trace an affinity between Duchampian objects and the surrealist movement, insisting on the arbitrariness of the objects trouvés, he detects interesting possibilities deriving not from singular objects, but rather from any object, even from rubbish, thus contributing to a redefinition of our surrounding organisational hierarchy. This is, in short, the effect produced by sending the urinal to an exhibition in the United States. In reality, Duchamp worked both on minimal distances, which he defines as infra-minces, and on apparent proximities. In the case of the ‘urinal’, Duchamp sought to interfere in the trajectory of objects, operating more on their dynamics of proximity and distance than on an aesthetic conversion (Breton), or a transfiguration of the banal (Danto). An industrial object suffers a mutation by being swerved away from its predestined path, namely consumption and waste. The fact that the scandal provoked by the sending of the urinal to the exhibit resided less in the urinal itself than in the very act of sending has been insufficiently analysed. It is not a question of restoring aesthetic aura nor of showing how the latter may return once and again, but rather of responding to the mutation of distance without falling into excessive proximity. For Duchamp, the crux of the matter lies in the passages, the folds, the detours between objects and images. While the immobility of objects is a result of political economy, their movement consists in an ‘effect of art’. Benjamin considered himself to be apprehending something radically new through the combination of techniques of reproduction with those of production; both are, however, determined by telematic techniques of generalised sending. Although necessary, the overly direct connection of the problematics of ‘aura’ with that of reproduction obscures the enormous complexity of the structure that partially emerges in Benjamin. Duchamp’s strategy is more forceful. An example is the ready-made titled L.H.O.O.Q., dating from 1919, in which the artist draws a moustache and goatee beard on a copy of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. It would be difficult to find a more auratic work, and symptomatic of this is the fact that Duchamp now turns to a copy and not an object, as is the case of the urinal and other ready-mades. In effect, if the great number of Mona Lisa copies risks provoking a banalisation of the capacity for being enjoyed, they nevertheless do not affect the legal constraints that remove the object from free circulation. Due to the universality of the structure of ‘property’, some

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objects survive, despite reproduction and subsequent copies, as a kind of prototype.35 From this viewpoint, it would be indifferent if the painting in the Louvre were authentic or not, as long as it remain ‘untouchable’.36 What makes it untouchable despite mechanical reproduction is its retention within a network where it functions as a ‘magnet’. Hence Duchamp’s vudu-style strategy, whereby he acts upon the object at a distance, touching it indirectly. Humour is not a less powerful form of attacking ‘aura’. In fact, some time afterwards, Duchamp creates another ready-made, Mona Lisa rasée, where the image reappears without beard or goatee, exactly as in a reproduction of Da Vinci’s painting. A combination of these two readymades is instructive: on one hand, the sacred object that remains materially unpolluted presents invisible traces of a profound profanation that superimposes itself upon it;37 on the other hand, the aesthetic conversion that Duchamp’s first ready-made inevitably suffered is deferred, downgraded, revealed as a useless addition, symmetrically inverse to value-added commercial gain. A series of other possibilities emerge from Benjamin’s treatment of the problematic of distance and proximity. The crisis in aura implies a general circulation of all elements as ‘images’. Benjamin places high expectations on the conversion of the real into image as an effect of techniques of reproduction, despite recognising the limits of this transformation.38 However important such a possibility may be, it nevertheless corresponds to a particular case. What is effectively at stake in this process is the untying of the intricate ‘web’ of transmission of the real that is formed by relations of property, objects, and images. Does the fact that individuals

35

This is the case of certain images that become prototypes, such as authored photographs or performative art documents. Despite being multifarious, the variations do not exhaust the given structure. 36 In fact, the presence of an art work would be unnecessary: ‘When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, in 1911, disappearing for two years, more people gazed fixedly at the empty space than had sought to see the art work in the previous twelve years’ (Waterhouse et al., 2002: 37). 37 It is not the image that changes, but rather the object through the image. 38 Benjamin appears to extrapolate from Marx’s thesis on the inevitable crisis of the relations of property as deriving from techniques of production to a more generalised crisis caused by mechanical reproduction. Revolution thus appears to correspond to the reinforcement of the first type of crisis by the second, the latter which, on its own, would be insufficient to provoke true transformation.

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appropriate themselves, through the image,39 of everything that escapes their reach imply the necessary end of ‘distance’? And can ‘distance’ be defined as the auratic and mysterious nature of that which maintains itself in secret, despite being present in all objects?40 One senses a certain restlessness in Benjamin concerning the disappearance of aura, as is patent in his claim that ‘without film, the loss of aura would be felt to the point of its being unbearable’ (Tackels, 1999: 150). The disappearance of aura implies absolute proximity, with the inevitable crystallisation of presence and its forms. The boundary that separates distance and proximity coincides with the ‘present’. Taking into account abundant indications that the sacred or theological modality of distance has disappeared, how can we continue to think distance? A short analysis of another Benjaminian concept, to which we have already alluded, may be useful here. This concerns the opposition between aura and trace, which Hans Robert Jauss describes ‘as a privileged place’ from which to interpret Benjamin’s work, namely in The Arcades Project (Jauss, 1989: 189). Although both trace and aura appear sparsely throughout that text, both are explicitly associated in one of its notes on Paris: ‘Trace and aura. The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.’ (Benjamin, 1999: 447)

The difficulty in analysing aura, patent in the essay on reproduction, ensues from the lack of profound analysis of the relationship between aura and trace. Despite the fact that various essays refer abundantly to aura, the trace is discussed to a much lesser degree. The above citation, in the form of aphorism, allows us a glimpse of the extreme variations of the relation between proximity and distance. While the problematic of distance may be apprehended through aura, that of proximity is emphasised by the trace. 39

Despite radicalising the phenomenon of ‘arcades’ or shop windows, the appropriation of objects by photographic images is not significantly different from their appropriation by gazing on shop windows. The difference is that in the latter case the individual has to actually go to the shopping gallery whereas, in the former case, it is the images that seek him out. 40 The general order of property remains in deep stall, being preserved from the fate of objects, whether these be sold, stolen, or exchanged. The secret encrypted on the real is that of the possession of land, disappearing in the geopolitical crystallisations of each moment.

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More important, however, is the articulation between aura and trace, particularly the boundary separating yet uniting them that gradually dislocates itself from phenomenon to phenomenon.41 The boundary that articulates aura with trace is taken, in the case of totality, for the ‘real’, that is, for ‘objects’. Such interfaces of the relationship simultaneously reveal and distort. The above-mentioned quote confirms that in Benjamin’s final project the relationship between aura and trace revolves essentially around possession, appropriation, and property. If the model of the aura is that of the ‘sacred’, transcending and overwhelming us, hiding the gaze that forces us to gaze back whilst intensely watching over us,42 the trace is described as hunting ground where signs indicate the path to that which we hope to possess or witness, in anticipation to possession. Just as the end of the aura is presupposed, Benjamin also refers to the necessity of erasing the trace. For example, in a 1933 article titled ‘Experience and Poverty’, he states: ‘A beautiful word from Brecht helps us go far, farther: “Efface the traces!” is the refrain of the first poem of the Primer for City-Dweller. In the bourgeois room, the opposite behaviour has become habitual. … Scheerbart, with his glass, and the Bauhaus, with its steel, have now created spaces in which it is difficult to leave traces.’ (Benjamin, 2005: 43 734)

Traces as signs of possession and the will to possess, or compensation for the loss of individuation, are shaken by the modern crisis, now under the effect of tectonic technologies and the constructivist avant-garde. It is evident that Benjamin sought a solution that would allow him to articulate these two concepts, which are equivalent despite being seen 41

The persistence of an ‘erotic’ in Benjamin, as in Duchamp, is related to the priority given to the relation over both objects and subjects. 42 In the fragment quoted by Tackels, we can read the following: ‘Those who belong to one of two classes, that of the oppressor or that of the oppressed, find it interesting to gaze at the opposite class. But to be the object of such a gaze is resented as something harmful and unbearable. The formation of the state that prepares to give birth to the gaze of class enemies occurs precisely along these lines. Such mobilisation is principally threatening to those who constitute the majority… ’ (Tackels, 1999: 149-50). 43 Contrary to the issue of ‘aura’, there is a considerable lack of systematic studies on the role of the ‘trace’ in the Benjaminian project. I would, nevertheless, draw attention to Ilaria Brocchini’s Trace et Disparition. À partir de l«oeuvre de Walter Benjamin (2006).

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from different perspectives. That he should have privileged the critique of the aura in published texts to the detriment of that of the trace, conformed to a strategic decision: magic, mystery, and the sacred seemed politically dangerous to him, due to the situation at the time.44 The destruction of aura is required so as to break away from magic and awe, that is, the absolute dominance of the sacred which, despite its invisibility, begins to draw close. However, does the destruction of aura not transform everything in its wake into traces or remains? Does Benjamin not describe the way through which the structure of proximity and distance is significantly diminished, making indistinct that which is close and that which is distant, so that all should become simultaneously proximal and distant? Hence, the Walt Disney-style magic that taints daily life, or the recourse of film stars and politicians to aura, freed from shackles, so as to reinforce their power. The crisis in aura liberates objects through their images, allowing them to freely circulate. They lose their position in a structure that bestowed them with singularity and authenticity, entering again into circulation. This confers a certain strangeness upon them. For in this case they would neither be originals nor copies, neither proximal nor distant.45 This apparently chaotic coexistence that appears to be the final form of ‘telerelation’ constitutes experience. Benjamin bases this thesis on the new capacities of mechanical reproduction and the ‘flattening’ of the dialectics of distance by the ‘general order of property’ which perverts it.46 Benjamin’s analysis of the issue of distance is particularly important in that it radicalises Valerian intuition; however, he appears to excessively 44

I would here take issue with Jauss’ allusion to a deficit at the level of the dialectics that articulates trace with aura (1989: 189-90). 45 An affinity can be observed between this position and that of Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols: ‘The true world – we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one’ (Nietzsche, 1977: 486). 46 As Benjamin notes towards the end of his essay on reproduction: ‘If the natural utilisation of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilisation, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society … Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way’ (1992b: 235).

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valorise technique, namely that of mechanical reproduction. Despite contributing to ‘disrupt the thread’ of property which dominated the act of transmission, thus affecting the trajectory of distance that made objects unique to a single owner, the transformation of reproduction into a freely circulating image brings to mind other types of technologies, especially those moulding distance instead of singularity. Benjamin appears to recognise this phenomenon and, in a completely Valerian phrase, affirms that ‘technical reproduction … enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.’ (Benjamin, 1992b: 214-5)

Nevertheless, he does not analyse the effects of a situation of both permanent and multiple transmission, as well as of arbitrary and contingent reception, circulating on the surface of the real and supported by other types of technology. The insistence on ‘image’ over sound is an inevitable consequence of this option.47 By affirming that a choral production can be enjoyed in absence of its performance, due to its transmission by radio, he appears to echo Valéry’s idea of an increase in liberty brought about by long-distance technology of transmission. The French poet was convinced that, despite a few dangers, one could freely choose art works as well as the moment in which to enjoy them. But if these are incessantly bombarding us, imposing themselves upon us, both anticipation and choice cease to make sense. All marvels come from the haphazard, chance, the unexpected. The pleasure gained from a work of art resides precisely in the fact that it may surprise us, transfiguring life both personally, on a psychical level, as well as collectively. But this possibility has to be potentiated against other, more dangerous ones. The crisis in aura as a synthesis of distance and proximity under the empire of distance; the crisis of trace, another synthesis of proximity and distance, under the sign of the proximal. The generalised indistinction that follows is supported and implemented by a telematic device that rearticulates, all at once, distance and proximity. To my mind, Valéry’s starting point affords greater interest than that of Benjamin’s, due to being 47

This does not prevent Benjamin from being very interested in radio, both in practical and theoretical terms. But he reveals a tendency, departing from Hitler’s example, to regard radio as having more auratic potential than images, particularly those associated with film.

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more incorporeal and dissipatory, thus anticipating many of the characteristics of current technology. Techniques of reproduction, as those of production, are entirely supported by a telematic infrastructure that allows objects and images, bodies and desires to circulate in a ‘general economy’ whose traces we are only beginning to recognise.

IV Conscience of a new lightness of objects and beings, conferring the sensation that all is possible, marks a crucial moment of the twentieth century. The end of the rigidity distinctive of modernity provoked a series of debates over the end of history, the postmodern, and so forth. Everything would, from then on, depend on a ‘subject’ who singularises himself by citing the past, or through mixture, hybridity, or miscegenation. This corresponds to an ‘ideology’ whose traces can be found in Valéry and in Benjamin. Despite either author pursuing very distinct objectives, their respective contribution to the implementation of this new culture is decisive. Both confer visibility to the fact that the prevalent culture is one in which everything ‘permanently advances’, ‘always approaches’ without our knowing or anticipating neither the ‘channels’ nor the trajectories that preside over such an apparently erratic distribution. In effect, lack of knowledge of these trajectories constitutes an integral part of the process. Everything happens as if the ‘real’ chanced to transform itself into an incessant circulation not only of ‘images’, signs, and objects, but also of bodies, desires, and money. The distinctions between production and distribution, emission and reception, previously considered essential, now appear to be reversible, as if each were a moment of the other. Ultra-rapid oscillations redefine and actualise the range of traditional oppositions, namely that of the historically crucial relation between proximity and distance. Aiming for pure invisibility, telematic technologies are backed by the tendency towards miniaturisation, computer ubiquity, distributed intelligence, in short, the wireless. The ‘real’ provides support for telematics and viceversa. Having sought to abolish physical distance, modernity now seeks to disturb the traditional structure of distance and proximity, articulating our metaphysics with physics. To apprehend telematics and the way it reinscribes all other techniques in its device, it is not sufficient to analyse the historical emergence of the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, or wireless telecommunications.

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The issue is not technical, but political. One must understand that these media are inscribed by a tendency to organise life on the basis of an investment in the relation between proximity and distance, whose model was defined by Bernhard Siegert as a ‘postal system’.48 In effect, by achieving thorough autonomy, the postal system as a matrix for transmission and reception integrates all other technologies within itself. The general model of such autonomisation is that of Shannon’s information theory or the cybernetics of Wiener. Its development led to a ‘coating’ of the real by a micrological and microphysical technical network. The nature of this network is telematic in that it annihilates distance through technical work on the proximal and the distant. The analysis of teletechnologies would, however, be of little avail, if we were to fail to detect the way they are inscribed not only on our experience, presiding over the transmission of innumerable ‘traces’ (images, objects, desires, bodies), but also on the very real. Such traces constitute a kind of ‘screen’ of the real, which receives all that has been filtered by the necessities of a general economy that develops within telematic systems. At issue here is a radical alteration of the traditional structure of distance and proximity. The mystery and fascination of distance has been transformed into a secret and cryptic structure, whose reverse is the transformation of the real into a vortex of ‘traces’. Side by side with this new ‘lightness’ of life, the ideology of hybridity or miscegenation, the desire for an absolute plasticity of substance and flesh is the harsh reality of military, biochemical, nuclear, informational research that is maintained in complete secrecy. Any critique of the telematic device which sends us its permanent injunctions and commands implies intervening in it, interrupting it through the possibility of bringing it to the realm of the visible. Benjamin contributed powerfully to that objective; in our days, we must try not to do otherwise.

Translated by Claudia Alvares

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For an archaeological analysis of the telematic system, see Siegert’s Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (1999).

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Valéry, Paul (1964[1928]) ‘The Conquest of Ubiquity’, in Aesthetics, trans. Ralph Mannheim. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 225-8. —. (1960 [1928]) ‘La conquête de l’ubiquité’, in Oeuvres, tome II, Pièces sur l’art. Paris: Nrf, Gallimard, Bibl. de la Pléiade, pp. 1283-7. Waterfield, Robin (trans.) (1993) Plato: Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waterhouse, Keith et al. (2002) The Book of Useless Information. London: Blake Publishing.

MNEMOSYNE AND THE ARCADES: WARBURG AND BENJAMIN’S LEGACY HOWARD CAYGILL, GOLDSMITH’S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

The vulnerability of theory and theoretical reflection in cultural and communication studies should never be underestimated, nor should its achievements be undervalued or taken for granted. For in cultural inquiry there are no facts without a prior theory, making theoretical reflection less an option than a predicament. It is very easy, however, for the theoretical accomplishments of the discipline to be taken for granted and even neglected or lost. An example of such a loss and the severe consequences it entailed is offered by the German language debates in cultural studies that were abruptly terminated by the advent of Nazism in the 1930s. This moment in the development of cultural studies or, more properly, cultural science (Kulturwissenschaft) took theoretical reflection on the study of culture and the sensitivity to the ways of presenting its results to levels of sophistication that were never to be re-attained. It not only required that cultural analysis of whatever epoch reflect on its location within modernity but also that scholars working in this field should shape their research and present their results in full awareness of the techniques pioneered by modernist art practice and philosophy. The work of Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin exemplifies this approach to cultural studies and is the subject of growing and sustained interest, even though it is not possible to fully appreciate their objectives and achievements without introducing the third figure of Max Weber, a cultural analyst and theorist too often exclusively located within what became the discipline of sociology. The parallels between the lives and works of Benjamin and Warburg have been the subject of fitful study over the past two decades, with a growing focus on their last, incomplete projects, Arcades and Mnemosyne. Walter Benjamin began work on The Arcades Project (Passagenarbeit) in 1928 and left it incomplete on his death in 1940, Warburg worked on Mnemosyne from 1924 until his death

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in 1929. While they were not strict contemporaries their lives and work showed many similarities: Warburg was born in 1866 and Benjamin in 1892, Warburg to a very wealthy Jewish banking family in Hamburg, Benjamin to a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin. Both suffered from the ambient anti-semitism of Imperial and later Weimar Germany, with fear for the consequences of the loss of the war to his family being one of the immediate causes of Warburg’s mental breakdown in 1918. Both were trained in the disciplines of art history and both pursued pioneering work in the field of Kulturwissenschaft. The development of Benjamin and Warburg’s thought prior to their final Arcades and Mnemosyne projects may be located within a broader theoretical questioning of modernity inaugurated by Hegel that, in spite of occasionally fierce criticism, remained in place for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the closing pages of his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel identifies the tensions informing the modern period in terms of the legacies of three events: the Reformation, the French Revolution and, less emphatically, the Industrial Revolution. The former marked not only a change in religious organisation but, with its emphasis upon ‘subjective free spirit’ (Hegel, 1956: 417) inaugurated the season of modern subjectivity. The revolution in the inward ‘principle of subjectivity’ (1956: 438) that Hegel attributes to Protestant doctrine is complemented in the political and economic realms of ‘objective spirit’ by the French and Industrial Revolutions. The change in subjectivity signalled by a shift in the understanding of the relation to the divine complements the change in the political organisation of the new, free subjectivities as well as a change in the significance and satisfaction of needs and desires. Here, as in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel shows not only that changes in subjectivity and in political and economic organisation are interrelated, but also that an optimum outcome of their combination was not predetermined: their interaction could also lead to mutual ruination. This intuition was worked through systematically by Hegel’s critics and successors, pre-eminently Marx emphasising the economic and Ranke the political, but what is of particular interest here is Hegel’s definition of the relationship between subjectivity and the divine as the realm of ‘culture’. With this he described a third realm alongside those of politics and economics, one which like political and economic science would develop its own scientific study in what became known initially with Burckhardt as ‘cultural history’ and by the end of the nineteenth century as Kulturwissenschaft or the ‘science of culture’.

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Hegel’s location of the problem of modern ‘culture’ in the Reformation offers a clue to the deep fascination shared by Benjamin and Warburg in the nature and the fate of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This fascination was intensified by one of the most remarkable and influential contributions to Kulturwissenschaft of the early twentieth century which excavated the origins of the culture of modern subjectivity and its impact upon economic and political modernity: Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism contribution to the intense theoretical and historical debates in Kulturwissenschaft concerning the methodological principles and the significance of the emerging science of culture. This extremely subtle and complex work of cultural science argued that the breakdown of a governance of subjectivity based on a sacramental relationship to the divine, mediated by the church, provoked the need for extravagant acts of cultural invention to create new relationships between subjectivity and the divine, initiating cultural processes and conflicts that for Weber were still far from resolved. Weber found the roots of modern subjectivity – its self-discipline and obsessive investment in order and punctuality – in the translation of the virtuoso ascetic disciplines of the monasteries into the everyday labours in a vocation or ‘career’.1 Both Warburg and Benjamin were struck by Weber’s thesis and his methods, and his text was fundamental for their own writings on the Reformation – Warburg’s Pagan-Antique Prophesy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther (1920) and Benjamin’s The Origins of German Tragic Drama (1928). Both texts explore what Warburg called ‘the haunted reformation’ or the Weberian irony according to which the rejection of the sacramentally mediated relationship to the divine of Catholic religiosity did not necessarily lead to religious freedom, but rather unleashed the demons of fear of perdition, melancholic solitude, and pursuit of material wealth as a sign of divine favour that deranged modern subjectivities. Both Benjamin and Warburg were acutely sensitive to the instability afflicting the relationship between modern religion, politics, and subjectivity, provoked by the uncontrolled and unpredictable intrusion of notions of the divine into the realms of politics and economics. They both agreed with Weber that modernity is characterised by the release of psychic, political, and material energies which had proved difficult to channel. They remained implacable critics of ‘theocracy’ – the intrusion of 1

‘The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.’ (Weber, 1974: 181)

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the divine into the finite – a position that for many remained incomprehensible until the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath renewed our sensitivity to the issue. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to claim that the unstable relationship between religion, politics, and economics constitutes the main object of analysis in the Mnemosyne and Arcades projects. In Mnemosyne Warburg ventures an exorcism of the religious images that persist and pervade the political and commercial visual culture of modernity. He wished to reveal that the modern visual world and the subjectivity which it expresses and incites was, in spite of first appearances, deeply invested in a relationship to the divine, and moreover, this relationship was following Weber one of asceticism, one that adopted sacrificial postures and tended towards extravagant and self-destructive expressions of energy. Benjamin’s Arcades Project is similarly haunted – a key to understanding its aims and content is a fragment of a critique of Weber from ‘Capitalism as Religion’, originally published in 1921. Here Benjamin goes a step beyond Weber by claiming that Christianity, far from being opposed to capitalism, had undergone in the Reformation a metamorphosis into capitalism. In an audacious radicalisation of Weber’s thesis, capitalism is understood as the social form adopted by Christianity, with Benjamin proposing that religious force imbues all the everyday, exchange relationships of life under capitalism. This idea became one of the foundation stones of The Arcades Project, passing there under the name of the ‘Fetish Commodity’. The project itself is a patient exploration of the ambient presence of the divine in the minutiae of everyday life. An example of the persistence of religious motifs in supposedly secular contexts that fascinated both Warburg and Benjamin was that of transubstantiation, or the sacramental conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus. The final table of Mnemosyne is a collage of twenty-two images ranging from the Renaissance to Japan, with Raphael’s crowded fresco of The Mass at Bolsena juxtaposed with several contemporary news images of religious crowd scenes and processions. The images link together around the theme of religious sacrifice and liturgical commemoration, with an image of the profanation of the host offering a complex node where the host itself is imagined as sacrificed, and the imagined Jewish perpetrators themselves are prepared for sacrifice (Warburg, 2002: 132-3; Forster et al., 2002: 233-8). The link Warburg points to between the eucharist and the crowd is also developed by Benjamin in The Arcades Project in his reflection upon the transformation of the proletariat into the crowd. Benjamin figures the fate of the French

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Revolution in the characters of Baudelaire and Hugo, claiming that while Baudelaire detached himself from the crowd, Hugo drew religious power from it through the act of transubstantiation, converting the dispersed crowd into a figure of the host of the people. Benjamin wrote of Hugo’s diversion of religious force into the alleged secular realm that: ‘He recognised the urban crowds and wanted to be flesh of their flesh. Secularism, Progress, and Democracy were inscribed on the banner which he waved over their heads. The banner transfigured mass-existence’ (Benjamin, 2003: 39). Here even laicism becomes a sacramental rite in which the individual is sacrificed to the one flesh of the crowd. Common to both Warburg and Benjamin is an insight into the abiding religious power that informs such transformations as that of a dispersed mass of individuals into a unified crowd. While both projects continue the Weberian project of excavating the ubiquitous presence of religion in modern culture, they differ from his approach in their form and method. Both Warburg and Benjamin were acutely aware of the methodological difficulties that attended both the research and the presentation of their material. If religious culture is ubiquitous and its energies grafted onto politics and economics, how is it possible to reveal it? In place of Weber’s genealogical method inspired by Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Warburg and Benjamin turn to the modernist principles of collage and assemblage, both producing ‘unfinished’ works which relied in principle on a postulated community of researchers, in both cases a future community. Some idea of the formal issues involved for both Warburg and Benjamin may be gathered from an aphorism in the latter’s One-Way Street (1928) which forms one of the origins of The Arcades Project and which declares the need for new forms of writing equal to the demands of the study of modern culture. Departing from some reflections on the typographic innovations of Mallarmé, Benjamin writes: ‘Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos. This is the hard schooling of its new form. If centuries ago it began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking itself to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advert force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular … Other demands of business life lead further. The card index marks the conquest of three dimensional writing, and so

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Mnemosyne and The Arcades: Warburg and Benjamin’s Legacy presents an astonishing counterpart to the three dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation. (And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production indicates an outdated mediation between different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index) … [writing] is approaching the moment of a qualitative leap when, advancing even more deeply into the graphic regions its new eccentric figurativeness, will suddenly take possession of an adequate material content. In this picture writing … [poets and experts in writing] will be able to participate only by mastering of the fields in which (quite unobtrusively) it is being constructed: statistical and technical diagrams.’ (1998: 62-3)

This passage is astounding not only for its insight into the changing topologies of writing and reading – the movement of script between the vertical and the horizontal and then its entry into the three dimensions of the card index. It is remarkable for its insight into the impact of economic and political organisation – the advertisement, statistical charts, technical diagrams, and the card index – on writing in general leading on the one hand in the direction of visual writing on the model of advertisements and visual charts and, on the other, to the three dimensional writing of the card index (later to develop into hypertext). Most of all perhaps, this passage is uncanny for its presentiment of the two futures of writing – picture writing organised according to the logic of the advertisement, diagram, or chart, and the three dimensional writing of the card box – that structure the Mnemosyne Atlas and The Arcades Project. The first develops a picture language in the vertical and is explicitly indebted to charts and advertisements while the latter is a card index that has now been painfully translated from three to two dimensions, a gargantuan editorial task that perhaps entirely misses the point of the form in which Benjamin chose to present his material. Let us now look at both more closely. Mnemosyne means memory, and is the word engraved over the entrance to Warburg’s library first in Hamburg and since 1933 in London. The Mnemosyne Atlas combines memory with the diagrammatic principle of the atlas – a spatial diagram for orientation. The work is physically made up of a series of large screens (150x200cm) covered with dark cloth on which are affixed collages of photographic images. In the last version of 1929 there were 82 screens, comprising three preliminary screens on the theme of the diagram which introduced the 79 screens of the Atlas itself. The origins and use of the visual technology are complex. The ‘collage principle’ as an heuristic device or tool for research has its origins in Warburg’s library, itself a collage regarded by its author as a ‘laboratory’

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and classified according to the ‘good neighbour’ principle in which books are juxtaposed in order to suggest new avenues of research to its users. The materials making up the collages of the Mnemosyne Atlas comprise photographic images sourced from postcards, newspapers, and magazines. The combination of images from art and from newspapers is pioneering, Warburg is indeed inventing the field of visual culture by showing the circulation of images and their often surreal encounters. Mnemosyne has no investment in the original – it works with images from the epoch of technical reproduction and not objects – there not being even the residual concerns with objectivity that would continue to haunt Benjamin. The explicit use of modernist collage, furthermore, marks a decisive break with the conventions of the emergent discipline of art history, especially from its intellectual and technological assumptions. In the hands of Wolfflin, Burckhardt’s student and successor as professor of art history at Basle, art history conceived of its object in terms of the problem of ‘style’. The presence of ‘style’ could be evoked technologically by the dual projection, using the juxtaposition of two images to draw out formal similarities that traced a common style. Warburg’s scepticism concerning this form of art history and his return to Burckhardt’s fusion of art and cultural history explodes both the technique and the object of art history, with multiple scattered images posing questions and opening avenues of investigation rather than illuminating an assumption. Warburg’s technique of presenting the results of his research corresponds to the openness towards the complexity of cultural history that characterised his work. He would present complex sequences of images to which he responds with speech – temporal sequences that were subsequently complemented by the spatial assemblages of the Mnemosyne Atlas. The pedagogical and curatorial practices employed by Waburg with respect to Mnemosyne were pioneered by Warburg’s assistant Saxl in the months succeeding World War I when he curated an exhibition on the theme of ‘no more war’. The technique of using screens and juxtaposed images – a form of picture writing in the vertical – was employed to present exhibitions at the Warburg library from 1925 – such as the exhibition of astronomical charts from that year. Most importantly, however, the screens and their images became central to the laboratory approach to cultural research, providing the equivalent of microscopic slides on which juxtapositions of images could be studied and discussed on a daily basis, providing the occasion and the focus for discussion. The screens were, in short, heuristic – dedicated to provoking the search for knowledge and not confirming or illustrating it.

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But knowledge of what? Some of the subtitles proposed for the Atlas are suggestive, including ‘Primeval Language of Gesture’, the ‘Critique of Pure Unreason’, and ‘Transformatio Energetica’. In a letter to Kurt Vissler of October 12 1929 shortly before his death, Warburg described Mnemosyne as proposing ‘a new theory for the foundation of the human memory of images’ that he holds to ‘represent the inner and outer movements of life’. The latter allusion to vitalism is important, for the origins of Mnemosyne also include biology alongside art and cultural history (Mann, 2002: x). The concept of the mneme, proposed in 1904 by Richard Seman and very important for Warburg, was an attempt to explain the conservation of inherited characteristics across generations, contributing to a debate prompted by Mendel’s discovery of patterns of inheritance. Rival terms included the nominalist ‘unit of account’ and ‘gene,’ the latter prevailing. The different approaches of the advocates of the mneme and the gene basically involved a difference of opinion as to whether inherited characteristics should be understood in terms of the transmissions of energy (mneme) or of information (gene). Warburg’s fascination with energy flows and the ways in which they may be blocked or dispersed inclined him to translate the approach of Seman into Kulturwissenschaft. Mnemosyne marks the attempt to make such flows visible, showing their destructive and beneficent effects. The capacity of images to damage or to heal was central to Warburg’s approach, seeing religion as a powerful source of visual energy for good or evil and placing the issue of the affect of images, rather than their meaning, at the centre of his research and its presentation. Benjamin’s Arcades Project was also touched by vitalist concerns. While the Mnemosyne Atlas pursues them by means of visual language, using the visual culture of modernity as a means to explore energy flows and blockages, Benjamin turns to the technology of archivisation and information retrieval in order to pursue his research but also to present its results. This permits to think of The Arcades Project as an exercise in three, perhaps even four-dimensional writing. The text is alphabetically organised, with copious cross-references – reading it entails participating in the research by assimilating and extending Benjamin’s archive. As a primarily heuristic technology, The Arcades Project, like Mnemosyne, is by definition incomplete, containing a labyrinth of potential historical narratives. Its three-dimensional writing provides a lateral and sequential collage (a sculpture rather than an image) that is not intended to illustrate an argument or narrative, but presents a field of research and its problematic areas. Its scholarly practice is also dedicated to releasing blocked energy flows – in Walter Benjamin’s terms, the blocked energies

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of the revolution and its transformation of subjectivity which were denied expression and remain latent and encoded in the remains of the nineteenth century. The eponymous arcades themselves are paradigmatic of this – they aspired to the stars in the intimations of the cosmic communism of Fourier but fell to become the antecedents of shopping malls. The task of the cultural historian that Benjamin pursues in The Arcades Project is to release the energies of the futures that were denied expression by detaching texts, objects, and images from the history in which they became embedded or from which they were discarded. The works of Warburg and Benjamin constitute a model for methodologically sophisticated research in cultural studies. Apart from their sensitivity to the cultural significance of religion, their work should sensitise us to the often inconspicuous routines in which research and the presentation of its results are conducted. Their work shows how the events, actions, and objects of which cultural analysis tries to make sense are already theoretically invested – meaning or the realm of information is inseparable from affect or the realm of energy. Furthermore, both dissolve the distinction between the practice of research and the presentation of results, admitting the reader and inviting him to participate in the process of research itself. Beyond this however, the legacy of their work includes the lesson of how to divert technologies developed for other – commercial, political, or religious – purposes to scholarly ends. But perhaps most radically, their work points to the danger inherent in research and its unreflexive presentation, namely that research becomes ornamental with technology put to rhetorical use in offering sound and images to confirmed pre-established narratives and undeclared theoretical postures, rather than opening and keeping open a space for thought and further research.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter (2003 [1938]) ‘The Paris of the Second Empire of Baudelaire’, in Howard Eiland et al. (eds.) Selected Writings vol. 4, 1938-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al.. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 3-92. —. (1999 [1982]) The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland et al.. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. —. (1998 [1928]) ‘One-Way Street’, in One-Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al.. London: Verso, pp. 45-104. —. (1996 [1921]) ‘Capitalism as Religion’, in Marcus Bullock et al. (eds.) Selected Writings vol. 1, 1913-1926, trans. Rodney Livingstone.

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Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 288-91. —. (1977 [1928]) The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne. London: New Left Books. Forster, Kurt W. et al. (2002) Introduzione ad Aby Warburg e all’ Atlante della Memoria. Milan: Bruno Mondatori, pp. 233-8. Hegel, George William Friedrich (1956 [1857]) The Philosophy of History, trans. J. B. Sibree. New York: Dover Publications. Mann, Nicholas (2002) ‘Mnemosyne: “Dalla parola all’immagine”, Prefazione all'edizione italiana’, in Aby Warburg, MNEMOSYNE: L’Atlante delle immagini. Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, pp. vii-xi. Warburg, Aby (2002) MNEMOSYNE: L’Atlante delle immagini, Martin Warnke (ed.). Turin: Nino Aragno Editore 2002, pp. 132-3. —. (1999 [1920]) Pagan-Antique Prophesy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther, trans. David Britt. California: Getty Publications. Weber, Max (1974 [1905]) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons. London: Unwin University Books.

CONTRIBUTORS

Daphne Patai is a Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she teaches Brazilian literature and culture, utopian studies, and literary theory. She is the author and editor of twelve books, including Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories (1988); Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies (with Noretta Koertge; new, enlarged edition, 2003); and Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (co-edited with Will H. Corral, 2005). Her latest book, published in May 2008, is ‘What Price Utopia?’: Essays on Ideological Policing, Feminism, and Academic Affairs. Claudia Alvares obtained a Ph.D from Goldsmith's College, University of London, in June 2001, under the British Council Chevening Scholarship and the Portuguese Government/European Union Praxis XXI joint Scholarship. She is Associate Professor in Culture and Communication and director of the CICANT Research Centre at Lusofona University’s School of Communication, Arts, and Information Technologies in Lisbon, Portugal, as well as chair of the ECREA Gender and Communication Section. She has published Humanism after Colonialism (2006) and various articles in Portuguese journals. She is coordinating two research projects funded by the European Union on the discursive representation of the feminine in the Portuguese media. Amongst her main interests are postcolonial criticism, cultural studies, gender, and media studies. Professor Chris Weedon is Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. She has published widely on feminist theory, cultural politics, and women's writing. Her books include Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (1987 & 1996); Cultural Politics: Class, Render, Race and the Postmodern World (with Glenn Jordan, 1994); Postwar Women’s Writing in German (ed. 1997); Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference (1999); Identity and Culture: Narratives of Difference and Belonging (2004); and Gender, Feminism and Fiction in Germany 1840-1914 (2006). She is currently working on collective memory and cultural diversity.

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Contributors

David Moscowitz (Department of Communication, College of Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.A.) researches how contemporary Jewish identity is rhetorically framed and socially constructed. He does so by interrogating problematic cultural-performative-political intersections in public discourse and popular culture including film, literature, and alternative media. His work is published in journals devoted to rhetoric and communication, cultural studies, and Jewish studies, and he serves on the editorial board for Critical Studies in Media Communication. Some of the material in this volume has been published in an earlier form (Moscowitz, David (2007) ‘“A Question of Transformation”: Michael Chabon’s Postassimilatory Jewish Heroism’, Text and Performance Quarterly 27: 302-316). Katy Parry is a Ph.D student at the University of Liverpool, examining the use of photography in the UK press depiction of war, with particular reference to the Iraq War in 2003. Her research interests include developing a model of visual framing analysis in order to examine how narratives or ideologies are promoted in visual news discourse. Frank Möller is Senior Research Fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute, University of Tampere, Finland, and the co-editor of Cooperation and Conflict. He is the author of Thinking Peaceful Change: Baltic Security Policies and Security Community Building (Syracuse University Press, 2007) and the co-editor of Encountering the North: Cultural Geography, International Relations and Northern Landscapes (Ashgate, 2003). Recent articles include ‘Photographic Interventions in Post-9/11 Security Policy’ (Security Dialogue, Vol. 38, No. 2, June 2007) and ‘Imaging and Remembering Peace and War’ (Peace Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, January-March 2008). His chapter ‘The Implicated Spectator – From Manet to Botero’ is forthcoming in Terror and the Arts: Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib, edited by Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski (Palgrave). Möller is a member of both the research team ‘Politics and the Arts’ at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change, as well as the Standing Group on Politics and the Arts of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). Ana Cristina Mendes is a researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES) in Portugal and a Ph.D. candidate at the same University. The doctoral thesis she is conducting in the area of postcolonial studies tracks the representations of the culture industries in Salman Rushdie’s work. She is currently a Portuguese Science and

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Technology Foundation fellow and her interests span postcolonial cultural production and its intersection with the culture industries. Her publications focus on Salman Rushdie’s novels as well as on Indian and British Asian film (Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan, Mira Nair's Kama Sutra, and Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach and Bride and Prejudice). Joseph A. Tighe is a graduate student in philosophy at Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. His interests include critical theory, phenomenology, twentieth-century French and German philosophy, and philosophy of literature. He has spoken at conferences throughout the United States and Europe and has published essays on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. Professor and essayist José A. Bragança de Miranda earned a doctorate in communication sciences from the New University of Lisbon, where he holds a chair in ‘Theory of Culture’. He has been involved in activities in the field of the Arts, presiding over the jury in documentary film of the Portuguese Film and Audiovisual Institute (2006) and participating in the jury selection process for the Banco Espírito Santo photography competition (2008). His focus on art and contemporary culture, namely the ‘interactive arts’ as well as the relation between ‘art and body’, has led him to write on Richard Tuttle, Jimmie Durham, Jorge Molder, and Stelarc. Amongst his main publications are the books Analítica da Actualidade (1994), Política e Modernidade (1997), Traços. Ensaios sobre a Cultura Contemporânea (1998), Teoria da Cultura (2002), Albuquerque Mendes ou o Ardor da Arte (2006), and Queda Sem Fim (2006). Howard Caygill is Professor of Cultural History at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is literary executor of the late Professor Gillian Rose and a member of the Editoral Board for the journals Tekhnema: Journal of Philosophy and Technology, the European Journal of Social Theory, and New Nietzsche Studies. His interests lie in the fields of the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and cultural history and he is currently completing a book on the philosophical and medical aspects of the body for Sage Publications, London. Amongst his books are Art of Judgement (1989), A Kant Dictionary (1995), Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998), and Levinas and the Political (2002).

INDEX

A Abraham, Linus........................... 83 Abramowitz, Martin .................... 57 academy .1, 9-12, 14, 16, 19, 81, 99, 114 accountability ...... 5, 34-5, 108, 135, 137-9, 141- 2, 144, 146 Adorno, Theodor ...21, 30, 121, 161, 163 aesthetics . 23, 80, 85, 100, 105, 111, 151, 161, 164, 167-8 After September 11 (exhibition), 111 Aftermath (Joel Meyerowitz), 113 Agamben, Giorgio..................... 121 Agard, John ............................... 122 agency .................. 25, 72, 77-8, 143 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, ................ 108 alterity3-4, 21-2, 39, 50-1, 119, 122, 125 Althusser, Louis ........... 56, 59, 70-1 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon).................................. 63 Anita and Me (Meera Syal) .... 122-3 The Arcades Project (Walter Benjamin).5, 160, 163, 169, 17980, 182-4, 186 archive..........................86, 152, 186 Aristotle....................................... 21 art 63, 69, 72, 113-5, 121, 150-1, 160-1, 163-8, 172, 179-80, 1856; art history ..................180, 185 Artaud, Antonin........................... 28 Asquith, Anthony ...................... 122 assimilation .. 4, 21, 54, 56-61, 63-5, 67, 69-72

audience. 5, 12, 61, 67, 78, 82-3, 85, 87, 90, 100, 103-5, 108, 112, 114, 120, 123-4, 126-7 aura............................. 155, 160-172 autonomy........3, 21, 29, 31, 35, 174 B Baez, Lorna Litz .......................... 62 Barthes, Roland .................. 78-9, 81 Baudelaire, Charles ................... 183 Bauman, Zygmunt ................... 2, 71 Beauty and the Beast (film) ....... 151 Beck, Ulrich .......................... 2, 115 Behlman, Lee .............................. 63 Benhabib, Seyla.................. 23-4, 32 Benjamin, Walter.....5, 79, 122, 152, 155-7, 159-74, 179-87 Bhabha, Homi............................ 127 Bhaji on the Beach (film) .......... 127 Blanchot, Maurice ..................... 158 Bloch, Ernst............................... 158 Bloom, Harold............................. 16 Blumenberg, Hans .................. 153-5 Bodies That Matter (Judith Butler) ............................................... 60 body.6, 25-7, 31, 34, 54-5, 58-9, 63, 65-9, 81, 88, 110, 119, 135, 1389, 141-3, 145, 149, 152, 154, 156, 166, 173-4, 182 Botero, Fernando, 114 Boyarin, Daniel ........................... 57 Boyarin, Jonathan........................ 56 Breton, André ............................ 167 Brocchini, Ilaria......................... 170 Brodkin, Karen ............................ 57 Brothers, Caroline ................. 79, 81 Buck-Morss, Susan...................... 31 Burckhardt, Jacob.............. 180, 185

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Index

Burgin, Victor .......................... 77-9 Burke, Jason, ............................ 119 Burke, Kenneth ........................... 60 Bush, George W. ..50, 107, 111, 114 Butler, Judith. 25-6, 30-1, 59-61, 70 Byron, Lord............................... 122

7; cultural history ..... 180, 185-6; culture industry .119-21; cultural studies ...........1-3, 5-6, 179, 187; Kulturwissenschaft ..... 5, 179-81; visual culture ...... 3-4, 6, 79, 100, 106, 109, 182, 185-6

C capitalism 3, 5, 33, 182; production, relations of ............................. 33 care.............23-4, 27, 29, 31-2, 34-5 Cataldi, Suzanne.......................... 15 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand.............. 28 cell phone .............. 5, 133-41, 144-6 Chabon, Michael .................... 63-72 Chicken Tikka Masala (film).... 127 cinema ....................................... 163 Cixous, Hélène ......................... 25-6 class..... 3, 11, 19, 26, 29-30, 33, 51, 90, 104, 125, 170 collage .................................... 182-6 collectivity 2-3, 21-2, 25, 27, 57, 79, 89, 93, 99, 104, 110, 119, 121, 165 colonialism .............. 40, 123, 125-7 comedy 60-3, 66, 69-71, 114-5, 11926 Coming Out Jewish (Jon Stratton)70 communism..........................83, 187 communitarianism............. 3, 21, 23 Conrad, Peter,........................... 114 consciousness ............ 33-5, 40, 135 contractarianism .......... 21, 23-4, 35 Cornell, Drucilla....................... 21-2 cosmopolitanism ....................2, 119 Covering Islam (Edward Said) ... 39, 51 Coyne, Jerry ................................ 18 criticism....1-2, 6, 10, 15, 22, 26, 33, 39, 50, 60, 63, 70, 78, 85, 115, 127, 164, 171, 174, 180, 182 culture ....1-6, 19, 26-8, 33-4, 39-40, 42-3, 45-7, 50, 53, 55-7, 60-5, 68, 70-2, 78-9, 82-3, 87, 93, 100, 104, 112, 114, 119-23, 125, 127, 133, 149, 173, 179-81, 183, 185-

D Da Vinci, Leonardo ................ 167-8 Danto, Arthur .................... 114, 167 deconstruction ....................... 6, 122 Defending Science – Within Reason (Susan Haack) ........................ 17 Deleuze, Gilles .................... 72, 137 Delon, Michel............................ 157 democracy, 101; participation .. 101, 103 Derrida, Jacques ........................ 158 Desai, Anita............................... 122 Desai, Jigna ............................... 121 Descartes, René ........................... 28 determinism................................. 25 Devlin, Dean................................ 53 dialectic ..........21, 30, 159, 163, 171 diaspora ..................................... 119 Die Erde bewegt sich nicht (Edmund Husserl) ................ 156 difference. 3-5, 20-1, 25, 27, 40, 43, 47, 51, 53, 55-6, 89, 90, 110, 121, 123, 127, 152, 160, 164, 169, 186 discipline, theory of132-3, 135, 13942, 146 discourse analysis .............. 102, 105 discrimination. 9, 12-13, 16, 22, 41, 48, 123 divinity ......5, 28, 45, 149, 150, 153, 157-8, 180-2; see also theology domesticity ................. 27, 31-3, 150 Donnell, Alison ......................... 120 Le Droit Saisi par la Photographie (Bernard Edelman) ............... 165 Duchamp, Marcel ...................... 166 E Edelman, Bernard...................... 165

Representing Culture education 3, 9-10, 12, 14, 16-17, 32, 46-7; pedagogy..................10, 19 Edwards, Blake ......................... 123 Einstein, Carl............................. 158 Elements of Semiology (Roland Barthes).................................. 81 emotions..........27, 34, 84-5, 99, 113 energy.... 5, 131, 135, 157, 171, 182, 186-7; energology ................ 157 Enlightenment ...1, 5, 21, 29, 31, 35, 64, 155 Entman, Robert .................. 80-2, 84 epistemology ....................14, 17, 19 equality... 3, 13, 21-4, 29-30, 32, 48, 50, 183 essentialism ...... 3, 24, 26-9, 34, 64, 155, 161, 163 ethics .... 3, 21-4, 27, 29, 31-2, 34-5, 154; see also morality ethnicity.........46, 56, 58, 119, 121-3 ethnocentrism ............................ 123 excess ...........................25, 132, 152 exclusion ..........4, 30, 32, 41, 51, 64 experience 2-3, 6, 11-12, 25, 27, 29, 31-5, 70, 85, 105, 112, 124, 151, 153-4, 159, 171, 174 F Fahmy, Shahira ........................... 83 Fair New World (Lou Tafler)...... 13 Faludi, Susan............................... 15 femininity ...............22-3, 25-9, 31-3 feminism . 2-3, 10-11, 13-14, 16-19, 21-4, 26-7, 29-35, 50 Fernando Botero Abu Ghraib (exhibition)........114 Figures du Ravissement (Marianna Massin) ................................ 157 Finkielkraut, Alain ...................... 57 foreign policy ...............48, 100, 108 Foucault, Michel . 1, 31, 132-5, 13743, 145-7 foundationalism........................... 30 Fourier, Charles......................... 187 Fowler, Douglas .......................... 63 Fox, Vivica.................................. 55

195

frames.... 1, 4, 67, 77, 79-84, 87-90, 92-3, 99-100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 112 Freedman, Samuel ....................... 56 freedom .. 2, 15, 19, 21-2, 29-30, 32, 42-3, 45-7, 49, 51, 65-6, 68, 101, 111, 142-3, 147, 150, 167, 180-1 Friedan, Betty .............................. 29 Fuss, Diana .................................. 27 G Gandhi, Mahatma ...................... 125 gender 10, 13, 24, 26, 28, 30, 33, 57, 59-60, 66-7, 84 Gender Trouble (Judith Butler) ... 60 genealogy .............................. 5, 183 Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche)............................. 183 Generation J (Lisa Schiffman) .... 57 Gibson, Mel.............................. 61-2 Gillespie, Mary....................... 122-3 Gilligan, Carol............................. 23 Gilman, Sander......................... 53-4 Gilroy, Paul ........................ 1-2, 125 Giuliani, Rudolph W. ................ 112 Goffman, Erving.......................... 83 Gogh, Theo van ........................... 43 Goldblum, Jeff.................... 53-4, 59 Goodness Gracious Me (TV Series) .........................4, 119-20, 122-7 Gournay, Chantal de.................. 136 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Friedrich Kittler) ................. 151 Greenberg, Hank ......................... 58 Griffin, Michael........................ 80-1 Griffin, Nick .......................... 43, 45 Ground Zero ........................... 111-4 Guattari, Félix...................... 72, 137 Gurinder, Chadha ...................... 127 H Haack, Susan ............................... 17 Haider, Jorg ................................. 49 Hall, Stuart .............. 2, 4, 58, 78, 80 Handbook of Feminist Research (Sharlene Hesse-Biber) ......... 18

196 Hansen, Lene............................. 105 Harrison, Patricia S. .................. 112 Hegel, Georg .................... 30, 180-1 hegemony .. 3, 30, 34, 100, 104, 106, 114; counter-hegemony........ 101 Heidegger, Martin33, 132, 135, 143, 156, 158 heroism... 4, 53-9, 61-72, 80, 82, 86, 88, 93 Hesse-Biber, Sharlene ............. 9, 17 heurism............................. 63, 184-6 Heurtin, Jean Philippe ............ 136-7 Higson, Andrew ........................ 127 Hirsch, Judd ................................ 54 Hirsch, Marianne..................99, 106 history12, 14, 24-5, 28, 41-2, 61, 63, 66-7, 81, 83, 86, 91-3, 109, 1234, 127, 134, 144, 149, 153-7, 160-2, 164, 166, 173, 180-1, 185-6 History of Sexuality (Michel Foucault) .............................. 134 Hitler, Adolf .........................69, 172 Hobbes, Thomas........................ 155 Hölderlin, Friedrich................... 150 Holocaust ...............58, 63, 113, 115 Homo Spectator (Marie-José Mondzain)............................ 155 hooks, bell .......................... 29, 33-4 Hopkins, Nancy........................... 12 Horkheimer, Max ...................... 121 Houpt, Simon .............................. 53 Hugo, Victor.............................. 183 humanism ...................................... 3 Hussein, Saddam ............... 86, 88-9 Husserl, Edmund ..................33, 156 Huxley, Aldous ........................... 13 hybridity 6, 100, 119, 121, 127, 1734 I ideology.. 4, 14, 16-18, 26, 32-3, 40, 51, 56-7, 59-61, 63, 66, 68, 71-2, 78, 80, 82-3, 90, 92-4, 113, 134, 173-4

Index image . 4, 29, 41, 58, 64, 77-94, 100, 105-13, 122, 124, 127, 137, 145, 149, 151-2, 154-6, 158-65, 1679, 171-4, 182, 184-7; see also frames In the Shadow of No Towers (Art Spiegelman) ......................... 114 Independence Day (film) .... 53-4, 72 interpellation........ 4, 56, 59-61, 70-1 interpretation . 26, 79, 82, 84-5, 107, 155, 162 Introduction a la Lecture de Hegel (Alexandre Kojève) .............. 155 Irigaray, Luce .................. 25, 28, 36 Issues in Feminism (Sheila Ruth) 15 It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (TV series) ............................................. 127 J Jauss, Hans Robert ............ 169, 171 Jeffords, Susan ............................ 57 Jenkins, Henry........................... 114 Jew vs. Jew (Samuel Freedman).. 56 The Jewel in the Crown (TV series) .................................. 124-5, 127 Jewitt, Carey.......................... 80, 83 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali ............. 125 Jonas, Hans................................ 158 journalism........45, 80, 94, 124, 126; photojournalism...... 77-8, 81, 83, 113 Joyce, James ................................ 28 judgement ..................1, 15-16, 23-4 Jurassic Park (film)..................... 53 justice . 22-5, 29, 31-2, 34-5, 43, 678; theory of justice (John Rawls) ............................................... 23 K Kalirai, Harmage Singh ............. 127 Kant, Immanuel ........ 1, 21, 23-4, 29 Katz, James.......... 134, 136-7, 141-3 Katz, Judith.................................. 59 Kasson, John................................ 59 Keehan, Michael.......................... 84 Keleny, Guy ................................ 91

Representing Culture Kempner, Aviva .......................... 58 Kikka........................................... 62 Kittler, Friedrich........................ 151 knowledge 1, 3, 9-10, 17-19, 34, 78, 82, 109, 132, 134-6, 139, 160-1, 173, 185-6 Koertge, Noretta............... 11, 16-17 Kohlberg, Lawrence ................. 23-4 Kojève, Alexandre..................... 155 Kosicki, Gerald ........................... 82 Kristeva, Julia.............................. 27 L labour .............27, 33, 135, 143, 162 laicism ............183; see also religion land... 26, 136, 155-7, 169; tectonics ............................................. 165 Langewiesche, William............. 112 Lautréamont, Comte de ............... 28 law. 21-2, 25, 31, 42-4, 46-7, 50, 60, 63, 133 Leeuwen, Theo van ................80, 83 Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes) ..... 155 Levinson, David ....................... 53-5 L.H.O.O.Q (ready-made) .......... 167 liberalism 3, 21-4, 26, 29-32, 42, 478, 58, 67 Licoppe, Christian .................. 136-7 Lieberman, Joe ............................ 58 The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (film).................... 58 Ling, Rich ..........................136, 138 Locke, John ..........................31, 162 Loren, Sophia ............................ 122 Lowe, Paul ................................ 113 Luckett, Moya .............. 119-20, 122 M Malik, Maleiha ............................ 50 Malik, Sarita.................50, 120, 124 Mallarmé, Stéphane..............28, 183 Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (Susan Haack) ........................ 17 Manningham-Buller, Eliza ....... 44-5 Marks, Elaine .............................. 16 Marx, Karl......2, 155, 162, 168, 180

197

masculinity ................................. 14, ..... 23-5, 27, 32-4, 54, 57, 59, 66 The Mass at Bolsena (fresco) .... 182 Massin, Marianna ...................... 157 maternity .......... 11, 25-8, 31, 36, 66 Mayberry, Katherine ................... 10 media . 3-5, 39-47, 49-51, 77-81, 83, 87-93, 101, 105, 107-8, 110, 114, 119-20, 122-4, 127, 133, 146, 149-50, 152, 158-9, 172-3, 183, 185; press 4, 15, 39-40, 445, 47-51, 58, 77, 79-81, 84, 88-9, 171 Meiselas, Susan ........................... 77 memory ........ 4, 93, 105-6, 184, 186 Mendel, Gregor, ........................ 186 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice........... 33-4 Messaris, Paul.............................. 83 metaphysics .. 14, 150-1, 155, 157-8, 161-3, 165, 173 methodology............................ 1, 83 Meyerowitz, Joel .................... 111-3 migration ........................... 105, 120 The Millionairess (film) ............ 122 Mind Your Language (TV series) ............................................. 127 minority ...... 5, 10, 12, 48-9, 119-20, 122-3, 127 Mirzoeff, Nicholas....................... 80 Mnemosyne Atlas (Aby Warburg) 5, 179-80, 182, 184-6 modernity 2, 5-6, 51, 57, 60, 62, 64, 67, 70-1, 101, 133, 153-9, 161, 170, 173, 179-83, 185-6 Modood, Tariq........................... 121 Mona Lisa rasée (ready-made).. 168 Mondzain, Marie-José ............ 154-5 morality . 4, 21-4, 29, 32, 35, 77, 82, 84, 88-90, 104, 114, 181 Morgan, Piers .............................. 90 Most, Andrea............................... 61 multiculturalism ...2, 40, 42, 47, 120 Munch, Edvard ............................ 62 museology ................................. 164 myth ......................... 81, 154, 156-7

198 N Narcissus myth (Ovid) .............. 154 narratives......5, 24, 27, 34-5, 81, 90, 108, 110, 119, 122, 125, 127, 153, 186-7 nationalism .................................. 57 National-Socialism 5, 59, 63-4, 179; Third Reich .......................59, 63 nation-state .................................... 2 négritude ..................................... 27 Nestle, Wilhelm......................... 154 Neuman, Joshua .......................... 61 news . 4, 45, 49, 77-82, 84, 86-7, 90, 92-4, 182; see also media Newton, Julianne......................... 78 Nietzsche, Friedrich ..150, 156, 171, 183 Nordau, Max ............................... 67 O O’Brien, Caraid ........................... 62 One-Way Street (Walter Benjamin) ............................................. 183 ontology .............................1, 27, 31 oppression . 11, 26, 33, 43, 47, 50-1, 126 Orientalism.................................. 40 The Origins of German Tragic Drama (Walter Benjamin) ... 181 Ortega y Gasset, José ................ 161 Orwell, George............................ 13 Osbourne, Peter ........................... 49 Otto, Rudolf .............................. 157 Ovid .......................................... 154 P Pagan-Antique Prophesy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther (Aby Warburg)..................... 181 Pan, Zhongdang........................... 82 Panopticon.............................. 141-2 The Party (film)......................... 123 The Passion of the Christ (film) .. 62 patriarchy .........................27, 29, 53

Index performance..4, 53, 55-7, 59-64, 6771, 72, 108, 121, 134, 146, 168, 172 Perlmutter, David ............ 80, 83, 93 persuasion....................... 103, 105-6 Philosophy of Right (Georg Hegel) ............................................. 180 photography.....4, 61-2, 77-81, 83-6, 88-92, 94, 99-100, 106-7, 10914, 154, 159-60, 163, 165, 1689, 172, 184-5; see also journalism Plate, S. Brent............................ 166 Plato .............13, 154, 157, 163, 165 platonic.............................. 154, 163 Podhoretz, John ........................... 63 political correctness ............ 43, 123; affirmative action ................... 12 politics ...3-6, 9-16, 20, 27, 30, 34-5, 39, 49, 57, 100-1, 104, 106, 1801, 183 Pontius Pilate............................... 62 postal system ............................. 174 postmodernism2-3, 6, 19, 27, 29-32, 55, 61, 63, 69, 71-2, 78, 173 Powell, Colin............................. 111 power. 1, 3, 9-10, 13, 19, 25, 33, 50, 60-2, 71, 77, 80, 82, 84, 94, 99100, 102-4, 108, 121, 132, 1346, 138-45, 147, 150, 154-5, 159, 165, 171, 183 prisoners-of-war .... 4, 77, 85, 87-93; Abu Ghraib prison, 107, 114 Professing Feminism (Noretta Koertge and Daphne Patai)................................. 16 property ... 31, 138, 142, 156, 160-5, 167-72 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Max Weber).. 181 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph............ 164 proximity ...... 5, 149-50, 155-8, 160, 166-74 Pullman, Bill................................ 53

Representing Culture Q Quaid, Randy .............................. 54 queer theory................................. 60 Qureshi, Hamid ........................... 48 R race..2-3, 9, 11-13, 16, 18, 26-7, 2930, 33-4, 43-5, 48-9, 51, 53-7, 60, 63, 65-72, 109, 119-23, 1267; whiteness.13, 27, 53, 55-7, 60, 63, 65, 67-72 Ranke, Leopold von .................. 180 Rawls, John ............................23, 30 ready-made....................... 85, 167-8 Reilly, James ............................... 91 Relays (Bernhard Siegert) ......... 174 religion ...4, 5, 15, 39, 42, 45-51, 56, 62, 64, 161, 180-83, 186-7; Anglican Church49; Catholicism .........................181; Christianity .......................5, 39, 57, 62, 182; Islam ............................ 3, 39-51; Judaism ........ 4, 53-72, 180, 182; reformation........................... 181 representation ...4, 17-18, 22, 26, 28, 39-41, 44, 46, 54, 56, 58-60, 64, 71-2, 77, 79, 81, 83-4, 86-7, 914, 99-100, 103, 105, 107, 10910, 114-5, 119-21, 123-4, 126-7, 151, 154, 166, 186 revolution ....................... 180, 182-3 Rheingold, Howard ................... 144 rights2, 9, 11, 15, 21, 23, 29, 31, 34, 42-3, 46-7, 50-1, 162 Rilke, Rainer Maria................... 151 risk .......................2, 28, 30, 45, 142 ritual ...................................161, 183 Rueckert, William ....................... 60 Rumsfeld, Donald ....................... 89 Rushdie, Salman............... 42, 124-7 Ruth, Sheila................................. 15 S sacrifice ..........................5, 157, 182 Sagan, Scott............................... 108 Said, Edward ................ 4, 39-41, 51

199

Salkin, Allen................................ 57 Salkin, Jeffrey.............................. 66 Salomon, Haym........................... 57 Sanzio, Raphael ......................... 182 Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie) 42 Saxl, Fritz .................................. 185 Schiffman, Lisa ........................... 57 screen.......5, 58, 106, 121, 123, 125, 127, 159, 174 secularism............ 5, 45-7, 54-5, 182 security 2, 43-4, 49, 100-8, 112, 114 Sehgal, Zohra ............................ 127 Sellers, Peter........................... 122-3 Seman, Richard ......................... 186 semiology .................................... 82 sexuality . 3, 10-11, 14, 17, 22, 25-6, 31, 32, 60, 62, 69-70, 125 Shandler, Jeffrey.................... 61, 63 Siegert, Bernhard....................... 174 Silva, Carlos J. da ........................ 62 slavery ......................................... 31 Smith, Will .................................. 54 Smith, Zadie .............................. 120 social contract........................ 21, 31 society ... 9, 13, 15, 21-2, 30, 41, 43, 50-1, 57, 79, 94, 100, 111, 1324, 141, 143, 145-6, 171 Sontag, Susan ................ 87, 93, 107 Soper, Kate ........................... 3, 26-7 sound 54, 68, 85, 152, 157, 172, 187 speech act .......................... 101, 106 spheres, public and private5, 22, 313, 45, 50, 134 Spiegelman, Art......................... 114 stereotype . 5, 27, 39, 40-1, 51, 53-5, 66, 70, 83, 119, 122-3, 127 Stratton, Jon............ 55-6, 61, 70, 72 Straw, Jack ......................... 44, 47-8 subjectivity 2-3, 19, 139, 180-2, 187 Summers, Lawrence ............... 12-13 surveillance........................ 141, 146 Syal, Meera.......... 120, 122-4, 126-7 T Tackels, Bruno .......................... 165 Tafler, Lou.............................. 13-14

200 Taliban ...........................47, 83, 109 Taylor, John ................................ 88 Teaching What You’re Not (Katherine Mayberry) ............ 10 technology............... 3, 5-6, 94, 101, 131-6, 138-46, 149-152, 171-4, 184, 186-7; telematics......5, 149, 152, 159-60, 167, 172-4 terrorism...2, 4, 40, 42, 44-6, 51, 88, 101, 105, 111-4; Al-Qaeda, 114 theology....28, 150, 156-8, 160, 162, 169; see also divinity theory .1, 3, 5, 17-18, 21, 23, 29, 32, 79, 103-4, 114, 132-5, 139, 143, 156-7, 161, 166, 174, 179, 186 Thinking in Jewish (Jonathan Boyarin) ................................. 56 trace, the 153-5, 160, 167, 169, 1702 Trace et Disparition (Ilaria Brocchini) ............................ 170 Trollope, Anthony ..................... 122 Twilight of the Idols (Friedrich Nietzsche) ............................ 171 U Unheroic Conduct (Daniel Boyarin) ............................................... 57 universality.... 3, 21-3, 26-7, 30, 34, 102, 151-2, 154, 159, 162, 167 utilitarianism ..........................24, 35 V Valéry, Paul............................... 149 veil, the............................ 43-8, 50-1 Vissler, Kurt .............................. 186 vitalism...................................... 186

Index Vom Mythos zum Logos (Wilhelm Nestle) .................................. 154 Vovelle, Michel ........................... 79 W Wæver, Ole..................101-2, 104-5 Walt Disney.................... 151-2, 171 war.4, 50, 69, 77-9, 80-2, 84-90, 924, 106, 108, 111, 113-4, 150, 155-6, 161, 165, 171, 180, 185; see also prisoners-of-war Warburg, Aby................... 5, 179-87 Warburg library ......................... 185 Watching Babylon (Nicholas Mirzoeff) ................................ 80 Weber, Max................ 5, 179, 181-3 Weedon, Chris................... 123, 126 Wenger, Beth............................... 57 West, the 2, 4, 15, 26, 35, 39-41, 43, 50-1, 64, 83, 91-3, 115, 165 What Women Want (film) ............ 62 White Teeth (Zadie Smith)......... 120 Williams, Michael C.................. 105 Witkin, Robert........................... 121 Wolfflin, Heinrich ..................... 185 women .... 3, 9-12, 15, 17-19, 21-34, 36, 43-46, 48, 50-1, 62, 83, 1246, 142 Y Yeats, William Butler................ 122 Z Zelizer, Barbie ............... 80, 84, 113 Zephaniah, Benjamin................. 122 Zionism ................................. 67, 69