Travels in Intermedia[lity]: Reblurring the Boundaries 9781611682595, 9781611682601, 9781611682618

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travels in intermedia[lity]

interfaces  Studies in Visual Culture Editors  Mark J. Williams and Adrian W. B. Randolph, Dartmouth College This series, sponsored by Dartmouth College Press, develops and promotes the study of visual culture from a variety of critical and methodological perspectives. Its impetus derives from the increasing importance of visual signs in everyday life, and from the rapid expansion of what are termed “new media.” The broad cultural and social dynamics attendant to these developments present new challenges and opportunities across and within the disciplines. These have resulted in a trans-disciplinary fascination with all things visual, from “high” to “low,” and from esoteric to popular. This series brings together approaches to visual culture—broadly conceived—that assess these dynamics critically and that break new ground in understanding their effects and implications. For a complete list of books that are available in the series, visit www.upne.com Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Travels in Intermedia[lity]: ReBlurring the Boundaries Monica E. McTighe, Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art Alison Trope, Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood Nancy Anderson and Michael R. Dietrich, eds., The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences Shannon Clute and Richard L. Edwards, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism Steve F. Anderson, Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus Janine Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film

Eric Gordon, The Urban Spectator: American Concept-Cities from Kodak to Google Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer, eds., The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture Jeffrey Middents, Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru Michael Golec, The Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art Rob Kroes, Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman, eds., Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Body, Image, and Interface in Information Aesthetics Luc Pauwels, ed., Visual Cultures of

between Two Worlds, updated and expanded

Science: Rethinking Representational

edition

Practices in Knowledge Building and Science

Erina Duganne, The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography

Communication Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg, eds., Trauma and Visuality in Modernity

travels in intermedia[lity]

R e Blu rr i n g t he Bo u n da r i e s

Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath

Dartmouth College Press  Hanover, New Hampshire

Dartmouth College Press An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com © 2012 Trustees of Dartmouth College All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in 9.85/14 pt. Calluna University Press of New England is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Travels in intermedia[lity] : reblurring the boundaries / edited by Bernd Herzogenrath. — 1st [ed.].     p.   cm. —  (Interfaces: studies in visual culture) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-61168-259-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61168-260-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61168-261-8 (ebook) 1. Mass media and the arts.  2. Intermediality.  I. Herzogenrath, Bernd, 1964– NX180.M3T73 2012 700.1'08—dc22 2011048541 5 4 3 2 1

contents Acknowledgments ix 1 Travels in Intermedia[lity]: An Introduction  1

Bernd Herzogenrath



2



Jens Schröter



3

Four Models of Intermediality  15

Intermediality in Media Philosophy  37

Katerina Krtilova



4



Realism and the Digital Image  46



W. J. T. Mitchell



5

Mother’s Little Nightmare: Photographic and Monstrous Genealogies in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man  63

Lars Nowak



6



Michel Serres



7



Jan Baetens



8



Bernd Herzogenrath

Laughs: The Misappropriated Jewels, or A Close Shave for the Prima Donna  81

Words and Images in the Contemporary American Graphic Novel  92

Music for the Jilted Generation: Techno and|as Intermediality  111



9



Genuine Thought Is Inter(medial)  125



Julia Meier



10

Theater and Music: Intermedial Negotiations  137

Ivana Brozić



11



The Novel as Hypertext: Mapping Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day  152 Brian W. Chanen



12



Delightful Vistas: Revisiting the Hypertext Garden  169



Mark Bernstein



13



Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis  175

Espen Aarseth 14



The Nonessentialist Essentialist Guide to Games  192

Erik Champion



15

“Turn your Radio on”: Intermediality in the Computer Game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas  211

Gunter Süss



16



Television as Network—Network as Television: Experiments in Content and Community  226 Ben Sassen



17



Social Media and the Future of Political Narrative  248



Jay David Bolter



Contributors 265 Index  271

acknowledgments I would like to thank UPNE (in particular Richard Pult) for giving me and us the opportunity to publish this book, and all those wonderful contributors to this volume—it has been a pleasure! Special thanx go out to Benjamin Betka, Sebastian Scherer, and Ann Klefstad! The illustrations are reprinted with kind permission of the rights holders. In case a formal permission is lacking, every effort was made to locate the rights holders and secure permission. I dedicate this book to Janna and Claudia, and to the memory of Frank.

travels in intermedia[lity]

travels in intermedia[lity] Bernd Herzogenrath

An Introduction

In his essay “Quotation and Originality,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant  — and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing” (543). While Emerson was trying to understand the cultural inertia that he saw in the literature of his day, his central premise was that artists’ minds were too burdened with the weight of previous creative work, so that they only took elements from the past and reconfigured them to their own taste in their present day. Yet he also admits that “in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands” (543). Much of today’s art operates under such an aesthetic: the [re]combinatorics of different media that was forming an artistic and aesthetic profile in Emerson’s times. From intertextuality to intermediality, today, the extent of that paradigm has become immense: today’s art, creativity, and originality are marked by intermediality and sampling, by a combinatory juxtaposition of genres, media, styles and surfaces, a rejection of “objective” history that explores the various connections of aesthetic forms.

In his 1977 book Image — Music — Text, Roland Barthes links intermediality to interdisciplinarity, and states, 2

Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old

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disciplines breaks down — perhaps even violently, via the jolts of fashion — in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation. (155)

Since then, the ever-expanding and heterogeneous field of intermediality and visual studies has grown to be one of the most vital and invigorating developments within the humanities today. Contesting both the sustained hegemony of logocentrism and the conventional and disciplinary boundaries between different arts and forms, intermediality seems to propose as its object of inquiry the entire culture of the media (literature, paintings, film, music, digital art, photography, installations, comic books, and more). Intermediality thus comprises both the links (and cross-breeds) between various art forms, and the various disciplines with which we talk about these media. As Dick Higgins stated in 1966, “intermedium” is the “uncharted land that lies between” (22) different media, and intermedial works are “not governed by rules; each work determines its own medium and form according to its needs” (22). For Higgins, “intermediality has always been a possibility since the most ancient times . . . it remains a possibility wherever the desire to fuse two or more existing media exists” (25). Intermedia[lity] thus can very literally be described as between the between. Although he is not a media theorist proper, I would like to digress briefly and point to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in order to make a point about intermedia[lity]. Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence (versus transcendence) is also an explicit philosophy of the surface. In its sense-producing function, media thus belong to (or are nothing but) a surface effect. Sense, as Deleuze writes in The Logic of Sense, “belongs to no height or depth, but rather to a surface effect, being inseparable from the surface which is its proper dimension. It is not that sense lacks depth or height, but rather that height and depth lack surface, that they lack sense, or have it only by virtue of an ‘effect’ which presupposes sense” (72). This surface then is not flat in the sense of missing something (depth or height), but is a fractal surface, a one-sided surface like that of the Moebius strip, where opposites meet and in that encounter create sense: “It is thus pleasing that there resounds today the news that sense is never a principle or an origin, but that it is produced. It is not something to discover, to restore, and to re-employ; it is something to produce by a new machinery” (72).

As Jens Schröter outlines in his chapter, “Four Models of Intermediality,” the field and discourse of “intermediality” is very diverse. Schröter’s essay attempts to structure the field and to formulate different models of intermediality. All these models are reconstructed from relevant theoretical texts, so that Schröter’s essay can be understood as a kind of meta-theoretical approach to the notion of intermediality. The main question is: What relations do the different discourses pose between different media? At least four models are identified (of which the last two are more different sides of the same coin than completely different models): synthetic intermediality, formal (or transmedial) intermediality, transformational intermediality, and ontological intermediality. The first model, the model of synthetic intermediality, proposes the idea of a fusion of different media to super-media (or a Gesamtkunstwerk). This model has its roots in the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk in the nineteenth century; according to this, intermediality is highly politically connoted. One problem of this model is

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From this perspective, media are nothing but these machineries of senseproduction, and the rhizomatic interconnections among the various media are what constitute the field of intermedia[lity]. Intermedia[lity] is thus the “media-version” of the plane of immanence, of that fractal surface — which is not to say that first there are different media, and then there is intermedia[lity]: this rhizomatic intermedia[lity] is the quasi-ontological plane underlying all media, out of which the specific media that we know percolate, so to speak. Then there is also an epistemological side to it: we can only refer to media by using other media (the default example being language as a primary medium). So, in a way there is one intermedia[lity] that comes first, which is the quicksand out of which specific media emerge, and a second intermedia[lity] that focuses on the various interconnections possible, from the very perspective of these specific media forms. Over the past decades, the subject of intermedia[lity] has lent itself to countless studies. Still, the ongoing and accelerating development and global convergence of technologies call for perpetual reassessment. The proposed volume contributors were invited to join in an attempt to trace new developments in a realm of fluctuating and competing discourses. How do fiction, film, music, internet, plastic, performative, and fine arts negotiate their shapes, formats, and contents? How does their interaction shape their techniques of representation, strategies of communication, and forms of reception? The proliferation of media and its technologies is rapidly and decisively transforming the humanities. Thus today, more than ever, in the light of these ongoing interactive (and intermedial) processes, Cultural Studies and American Studies are challenged to restructure and reorganize themselves as Media Studies.

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the differentiation of inter- and multimediality. The second model, the model of formal (or transmedial) intermediality, is built on the concept that there are formal structures (such as narrative structures) that are not specific to one medium but can be found (perhaps differently instantiated) in different media, as when the narrative realization of a film and a novel are compared. This model of intermediality uses the concept of transmedial devices, and has the problem that “media specificity” cannot be conceptualized within it. Number three, the model of transformational intermediality, looks at the representation of one medium through another medium (recently the term “remediation” has been suggested for this). Here we must question whether this fits “intermediality” at all, because a represented medium is not longer a medium but a representation. Insofar as media are always contested terrains, however, this form is important, because the definition of media depends on their inter-medial representations. That’s why transformational intermediality is the flip side of the final model suggested by Schröter, the model of ontological intermediality. Media always already exist in relation to other media. So at last we must ask whether the relations should be reversed. Individual media do not exist in isolation, to be suddenly taken into intermedial relations. Intermediality is rather the ontological conditio sine qua non, which is always before “pure” and specific media, which have to be extracted from the arch-intermediality. From the perspective of European media philosophy, as Katerina Krtilova argues in her essay on “Intermediality in Media Philosophy,” the key issue (and also the starting point of her essay) is not a given notion of intermedia, or “intermedia” as a term, but rather its traces in media theory: “intermediality” as a key philosophical concept and at the same time intermedia as marginal phenomena of media interaction, which can be dissolved by a critique of (mono)media concepts or technically by digitization. Krtilova argues that intermediality tangents a performative concept of media and their reflection which situates a medium “inbetween” tool and mediation, subject and object, technical and symbolic, sensual and intelligible, and which defines media as a process of “becoming a medium”: a medium emerges from a wide range of practices, technologies, symbolic and social systems, material conditions, and so on. The focus on different aspects of “the medial,” the emergence and changes of media in history, differences, breaks, the oscillation between medial forms and the creation of new relations is not only characteristic for media philosophy and the historical analysis of media or “cultural technologies” but also for the origins of “intermedia” in art and art theory. In contemporary artistic practice, the performative concept both of art and reflectivity might suggest a new form of “intermediality.”

Lars Nowak, in “Mother’s Little Nightmare: Photographic and Monstrous Genealogies in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man,” investigates how one medium, photography, is reflected upon by a text of another medium, David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man. This reflection includes representation as well as imitation, and its primary object is portrait photography of the nineteenth century. Photography is a point of reference both for the film’s main plot and for its allegorical framework, which link it to various developments. Joseph Merrick, the eponymous “elephant man,” learns how to use photographs in a socially accepted way. Step

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One of the most consistent commonplaces about the nature of digital photography (and digital imagery more generally) is that the old claim of photographic images to represent the world faithfully, naturally, accurately, has been undermined by digitization. Traditional chemical-based photography, we are told, had an indexical relation to the referent; it was physically compelled to form an image by the light rays emanating from the subject. This image or likeness was thus doubly referential, a double copy in that it was both an impression or trace, on the one hand, and a copy or analogon on the other. Both index and icon, it provided a kind of double-entry bookkeeping of the real. Like the fossil trace, the shadow, or the mirror reflection in a still lake, traditional photography was a natural sign. It carried a certificate of realism with it as part of its fundamental ontology. W. J. T. Mitchell’s essay on “Realism and the Digital Image” aims to undercut or at least complicate the prevailing myth that digital photography has a different ontology than chemical-based photography, that this ontology dictates a different relation to the referent, one based in information, coding, and signage (the symbolic realm) rather than the iconic and indexical realms of the older photography. These examples also help us to question whether this very dubious “ontology” (which isolates the “being” of photography from the social world in which it operates, and reifies a single aspect of its technical processes) has any fixed relation to issues such as authenticity and fakery or manipulated and natural images. It seems clear, Mitchell argues, that the authenticity, truth value, authority, legitimacy of photographs (as well as their aesthetic value, their sentimental character, their popularity, and many more aspects) is quite independent of their character as digital or chemical analog productions. The notion that the digital character of an image has a necessary relation to the meaning of that image, its effects on the senses, its impact on the body or the mind of the spectator, is one of the great myths of our time. It is based on a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, a kind of vulgar technical determinism that thinks the ontology of a medium is adequately given by an account of its materiality and its technical-semiotic character.

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by step, he moves from the “wild” treatment of his mother’s photo as an intimate object of oedipal fetishization to a “civilized” use of family and celebrities’ photos as objects of private collection, presentation, and exchange. His learning process is part of a more general Bildungsroman, in the course of which Merrick is (re) integrated into the substitute family of Dr Treves, the Victorian upper class, and, finally, the human race as a whole. Although show freaks were among those celebrities whose photographs were collected in the nineteenth century and Merrick, the historical person, was photographed several times as well, none of the many photographs surrounding Lynch’s Merrick show the latter himself. Photography seems to be presented here as being incapable of rendering a portrait of the monster as human, because it cannot uncover the face lying beneath the monster’s head. Only film, The Elephant Man suggests, is able to do so by showing the motions of facial expression that emerge in Merrick’s interaction with other characters. The reasons for this precedence of film over photography are given in the framework of Lynch’s film, which juxtaposes two material genealogies. The first one is photography’s gradual transformation into cinematography, which, as Nowak shows, is brought about by a splitting of the single image, the mobilization of objects within the picture and of the picture itself, a combination of shot and counter-shot, an opening up of the frame and the addition of sound. The second material development constructed by the framework is Merrick’s monstrous fathering by an elephant, an animal genealogy that Merrick’s re-humanization tries to rectify. By drawing an analogy between both genealogies, The Elephant Man presents film as photography’s monstrous descendent, which always already resembles Merrick. The analogy is justified by the fact that both the origin of Merrick and that of film appear as divided and derivative. Merrick has not one but several mothers, and creates them himself. Photography is complemented by the freak show and the pantomime, which were no less important for the emergence of cinema. The operation of splitting a single picture, which is usually the first step of photography’s transformation into film, is here applied to an image that is already cinematic in nature. Indeed, technically, even the freeze frame, which brings film closest to photography, still depends on a filmic succession of identical frames, and historically, photography was understood as the origin of film only after the latter’s invention. In addition, The Elephant Man arranges the different kinds of images that mediate between photography and film in a nonlinear and illogical order. For Nowak, The Elephant Man counterbalances film’s equation with a monstrous child with its comparison with a spiritual mother. For during the course

Michel Serres’s essay “Laughs: The Misappropriated Jewels, or A Close Shave for the Prima Donna” originally appeared as part of his monograph on his friend Hergé, the Belgian comic artist (whose real name was Georges Prosper Remi). An English translation of this text by Tony Thwaites and Sam Mele appeared in 1983 in the journal ART & TEXT, and has since then been out of print — I am very grateful to be able to reprint it here (with some minor alterations). In his reading of Hergé’s comic book, Serres shows that the medium of the comic — itself an intermedium, in which images and text combine to create more than the sum of their parts — does not (have to) follow and imitate traditional media such as literature, music, painting, or film. In fact, Hergé’s comic book is revealed by Serres as being an essay about communication channels (another version of what “media” stands for) gone wrong and wild: Serres’s reading of Hergé shows the scrambling of media in all its guises. In his chapter “Words and Images in the Contemporary American Graphic Novel,” Jan Baetens shows the relevance and the interest of word-and-image studies in studies of the American graphic novel, as itself and in relationship with tendencies and evolutions in European graphic novels. Relying on a broad definition of the genre, Baetens addresses all comic art productions in book form that address (also) an adult readership, ranging from postmodern cyberpunk superheroes comics à la Watchmen (Gibbons and Moore) to more experimental works such as Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, to the autobiographic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman. Baetens’s essay challenges the idea that the issue of intermediality can be reduced to two fundamental questions: first, the convergences and divergences of the information carried by both visual and verbal aspects of the comic strip as hybrid medium; second, the inequality of both aspects: simultaneous but not necessarily given the same value. Instead, Baetens’s ambition is to refocus this double perspective through a systematic comparison between the North American and the European graphic novel. He stresses aspects related to techniques of storytelling and reinterprets the status of the narrative voice in the graphic novel, which is less a “voice-over” than a “voice-with.” More generally, Baetens makes a plea for a cultural analysis of the word-and-image relationships, which offers

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of the film, the portrait of Merrick’s mother is not only transformed from a photographic picture into a cinematic one, but also from a material image into an immaterial one. By allowing the medium of film to paradoxically participate in this mythological immediacy, The Elephant Man completes its celebration of film as a medium that is superior to that of photography.

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an opportunity to foreground some specific features of the American graphic novel, such as its link with the comics community at large and its less literary overtones (this aspect, however, does not prevent the graphic novel from being considered a literary genre).

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Bernd Herzogenrath’s “Music for the Jilted Generation: Techno and | as Intermediality ” analyzes the intermedial phenomenon “techno” within the context of (post) structuralist theory, literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. Techno originated in the dance scene and gay scene of Detroit and its warehouse culture. The essay focuses on the dance-techno act The Prodigy’s album Music For The Jilted Generation as a “steering device” providing thematic “anchoring points” during the course of the chapter. Herzogenrath’s essay presents itself as a polylogue between the voice of The Law and “samples” of Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Bataille, and so on, samples that can be said to speak of techno as that strange, disturbing machine always already underlying the cultural machine. Techno, in its decidedly a-political self-fashioning, thus nevertheless takes part in the radical politics of subversion. Not a subversion decidedly against The Law, against its mode of communication, but forcing signification against itself, by foregrounding the signifier against the signified, the polymorphous drive against repressive, phallic desire, pre-oedipal childhood against post-oedipal adulthood. It is thus a “Rage against the machine,” not from the (however illusory) position of a nonmachinic other, but a “Rage of the (pure) machine against the (oedipal) machine,” a “rage against the Symbolic.” Techno does not speak from the position of either one or the other, not from a position of either side within difference, but from the chiastic position of difference itself, from the difference at the origin of culture and the symbolic: the law of the signifier is posed against The Law of the signified (which is the law of the signifier under determinate conditions) — “Fuck ’em and Their Law” (The Prodigy). Ultimately, Herzogenrath reads the pre-oedipal polymorphic perversity of techno as a libidinally charged equivalent to a fundamental intermedial approach. In her essay “Genuine Thought Is Inter(medial),” Julia Meier examines the stage performances of the three musicians Diamanda Galás, Peaches, and Planningtorock as examples of contemporary intermedial productions that pursue the creation of a new language. In the sense of Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of Paul Klee’s famous formula in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, they render visible the nonvisible, sonorous the nonsonorous, by exceeding the boundaries of their respective disciplines. Meier considers their personas the intermedial Gesamtkunstwerk in the sense of their ability to filter the space in between all different kinds of music styles, genres, eras, and cultures. In the clashing of all these

In “Theater and Music: Intermedial Negotiations,” Ivana Brozić explores the kinds of medial interactions framed by theories of intermediality in the medium of theater. As a multimedial form, a meeting place of old and new (media, technologies, texts) and a medium that exists in perception, theater provides a fertile ground for observing intermediality and exploring its functions. Brozić examines some of the implications of intermedial intervention in contemporary theater in the context of The Noise of Time, a theater production by Complicite and the Emerson String Quartet, based on the life and music of Dmitri Shostakovich. Brozić’s account of this production shows how reflection on all kinds of theatrical mediation makes an important part of what is seen as theater performance. It further illustrates how theater, a medium characterized by the “notorious blurring of artistic boundaries” (Carlson 140), transforms other media on stage to create a space for negotiating its forms and contents, and through them the spectator’s positions. Brian W. Chanen’s chapter, “The Novel as Hypertext: Mapping Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day,” examines Pynchon’s 2007 novel in light of the concept of intermediation. Chanen assumes that intermediation is a complex process of interaction among media forms that results in a work that shows signs of medial blendings that may only be apparent below the surface or material level, at a deeper structural level of representation. Following work by both N. Katherine Hayles on the nature of the influence of digital media on print works and by Marie-Laure Ryan on the functioning of narrative across various media, Chanen examines spatiality as a narrative element in different types of media. Different media formats privilege different ways of transmitting story, and in digital media

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different fields and media, a new, previously unknown space of sonic-sculptural quality is created. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze states that genuine thought begins with an external act of violence inflicted upon thought in order to “awaken thought from its natural stupor. . . . Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.” That fundamental encounter is like a jolt, like a disequilibrium or deregulation of the senses “that can only be sensed.” Meier takes a closer look at just what might have constituted the jolt that could have caused deregulation in various visual and musical sequences and to further approach the aesthetic passages in which oscillations occur. The virtual “space in-between” carries the potential to create genuine thought as an event within the concentrated form of intermedial artwork. Hence, the creative act in its ability to produce a new language, becomes necessary for the emergence of meaning as a signifying potential.

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there may be a privileging of spatiality at the discourse level of a narrative over temporality. This focus on spatiality in a digital text may in turn influence the presentation and reception of narrative in a print text. After first examining some work in spatial poetics in relation to both print and digital texts, Chanen’s essay aims to show that Against the Day represents a test case for the nature of the changing poetics of print as an intermediated space. Brian McHale has suggested that the novel is a step in a new direction for Pynchon and represents a text that is operating as part of what Joseph Tabbi calls “a new media ecology.” While Against the Day is set in a predigital time and uses the materiality of the page in a straightforward way, both its themes and its narrative structure point to an intermedial relationship with electronic hypertext. Against the Day represents at least a text that strains at the boundaries of genre because of the way in which narrativity is retained despite the work’s departure from usual — even in terms of typical postmodern moves — narrative structures. The attention of the audience is a writer’s most precious possession, and the value of audience attention is seldom clearer than in writing for the Web. The time, care, and expense devoted to creating and promoting a hypertext are lost if readers arrive, glance around, and click elsewhere. When hypertext writers and researchers were still worried that hypertexts would enmesh readers in a confusing tangle of links, researchers called this concern The Navigation Problem. People sought to solve it in many ways: by providing many navigational tools; by keeping links simple; by using fewer links; and by organizing the links very rigidly. The heritage of this view today is reflected in tightly constrained and bureaucratic information architecture controls, in simple, hierarchical site structures, in minimalist graphic design and impoverished features. We sacrifice everything to avoid confusing the reader, only to discover that our reader now finds us shallow and dull. As Mark Bernstein argues in “Delightful Vistas: Revisiting the Hypertext Garden,” the Navigation Problem was a phantom: readers are not more prone to be lost in a hypertext than to be lost in a book. Difficult concepts are still difficult, and confusing things cannot always be rendered simple; by providing abundant links in interesting and varied formats, we can help the baffled or the skeptical reader find their way. Once we relax our unjustified fear that the reader will be lost or confused, Bernstein states, we see that the hypertext is not, indeed, such a dangerous place after all, using “park” and “forest” as heuristic concepts: as in the park and forest, we delight in finding some things that are carefully planned and others that seem delightful because they appear to emerge organically and spontaneously from the material. In park and garden, we contrive to combine the logic of underlying con-

For quite some time now, computer games have been entering academia. Espen Aarseth discusses the problems of analyzing games from a meta-methodological position: Who analyzes? Why do they analyze? What, how, how deeply do they analyze . . . and so on. In his chapter “Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis,” Aarseth explores important issues such as playing vs. nonplaying game analysis and analyst subjectivity and competence, and presents a typology of analysis positions. Unlike game studies in mathematics or the social sciences, which are much older, games became subject to humanistic study only after computer and video games became popular. Any theoretical approach to game aesthetics implies a methodology of play, which, if not declared, becomes suspect. How do we analyze games? Since a game is a process rather than an object, there can be no game without players playing. Since these games are about controlling and exploring a spatial representation, the game must take place inside a clearly defined game-world. In some games, typically multiuser role-playing games, the social dimension dominates. In strategy and reaction-based games, such as Command&Conquer and Tetris or Quake, the rules dominate the game. And in world-exploration games, such as Half-Life or Myst, the game-world is the dominant element. Since all games are dominated by their rules, however, perhaps it is more accurate to say that in social games and world games, the rules dominate the experience less absolutely. When it comes to playing and player style, the playing analyst has a number of modes to choose from, depending on personal choice and game genre. Total completion is of course only possible in games with defined

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straints — the contour of the terrain, the course of the stream, the immovable rock in the southeast — with plantings, with landscaping, and with architectural features. Hypertext links similarly connect ideas and media, texts and intertexts, in complex and unexpected ways that can give rise to new ideas and new media. Through park and garden our paths need not be straight. Through the collage and montage of the link we can achieve new intermedial complexity that eludes us if we restrict ourselves to merely instrumental linking. The structural rigidity that makes navigation simple and ubiquitous, though it gives a hypertext the appearance of efficiency, can make a hypertext seem sterile, inert, and distant. We may find excitement in individual pages, but the hypertextual whole seems a mere shell enclosing variously interesting bits. According to Bernstein, rigid structure is often promoted for its efficiency and cost-effectiveness, particularly for large Web sites, but excessive rigidity can be costly. Flexible, organic structure can often communicate more directly and more succinctly while remaining more open to revision and extension.

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endings, and not in games such as Tetris or Space Invaders. The expert player is also, typically, a winner of multiplayer games. Should we expect game scholars to excel in the games they analyze? If we comment on games or use games in our cultural and aesthetic analysis, we should play those games, to such an extent that the weight we put on our examples at least matches the level of competence that we reach in our play. Recent theory has postulated the notion of a “magic circle” without fully considering the intermedial potential of games that embody and express shifting and contextual spatial immersivity and embodiment. Thus, as game studies has emerged from the shadows of the computer lab, as Erik Champion argues in his chapter, “The Nonessentialist Essentialist Guide to Games,” the ludologists and the narratologists, the systematizers and the emergent game-play aficionados contest the field. As aspects of game-playing, art, film discourse, aesthetics, and pedagogy all have their adherents. Philosophers have singled out games as examples of an activity without a narrow definition. Is there an essence of computer game design? This chapter wishes to argue the converse to the “liquid architecture” theory of digital worlds posted a decade ago. Instead, Champion suggests that we may wish for vague digital media boundaries that congeal or even solidify on interaction, to direct people into different cognitive realms, be they visionary, communal, or heuristic. Throughout the twentieth century, sound has grown in importance as an aspect of daily life in the West. The Walkman, the car stereo, phone-hold music: they have led to “a revolution in the culture of listening.” We have seen erosions in the distinction between private and public sound spaces, and the borders between mental soundscapes and “real” ones have blurred. At the same time, sound is not the primary subject of researches into multimodal cultural phenomena, especially computer games. Gunter Süss, in his chapter “ ‘Turn Your Radio On’: Intermediality in the Computer Game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” gives a short introduction to some of the problems scholars of popular culture are currently facing when they deal with concepts of intermediality. In consequence, Süss argues for a comprehensive approach to intermediality, which addresses not only formal, stylistic, and aesthetic aspects, but also technological, economic, and cultural questions. By “cultural” Süss means the specifically historical context of certain media texts, as well as their relationship to the larger culture with its systematic placement for different media, and their connection to power relations on other textual terrains. Süss argues that these economic and cultural aspects become increasingly important in the current climate of media convergence. Studies in intermediality have to

Recent international developments in broadcasting and media distribution autonomy, including the sanctioning of white-space devices and the Wikileaks Cablegate scandal, have raised significant questions about the role of networks in society and our relationship to the media they transport. It is therefore an apt moment in which to review the symbiotic nature of both historical and contemporary media networks and consider the significance of their forms in the twenty-first century. Through a primary focus on television broadcast networks, Ben Sassen’s chapter “Television as Network — Network as Television: Experiments in Content and Community” illustrates and examines the symbiotic relationship between media content, distribution, production, and audience as a discussion of intermedial form. Beginning with its origin as a centralized infrastructure for mass-media dissemination, Sassen explores the fundamental character of the traditional television network, exposing the paradox of its inherent need for audience feedback and simultaneous constraint of genuine dialogue. Building upon this analysis, Sassen discusses a range of artist and activist televisual interventions, and identifies their use of television’s intermedial properties as a means to critically challenge television hegemony. Finally, drawing on the work of Telestreet, Orfeo TV, TV Party, Videofreex and Radical Software, Sassen examines contemporary autonomous media network forms, applying them to the context of television broadcasting and concluding with a consideration of television’s dependence on symbiosis for survival. In the 1990s many argued that the World Wide Web promised a new age of democracy or at least individual participation in the making of media. As it developed in the later 1990s and in the 2000s, social media made a much better case for the widespread participation and spontaneous creativity (if not democracy) than the original Web. Social media are now vastly popular forms of cross-media expression. As Jay Bolter, in his chapter on “Social Media and the Future of Political Narrative” argues, these forms can have a wide range of relationships to traditional political expression. Although some sites are overtly political, many of the most popular practices seem to ignore the political dimension of social life

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reflect these developments and have to widen their scope to include economic and technological as well as cultural questions. In the second part of his chapter, Süss analyzes the massively successful computer game GTA: San Andreas as an example of the possibilities and directions that such a concept of intermediality allows. His essay particularly focuses on the marketing strategies of the publishers and producers and the use of sound in this game.

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altogether. Social media have emerged at a moment in which the status of art has diminished. Our popular culture has inherited the remnants of both the political and formal definitions of art and is ambivalent about the limits and cultural importance of artistic practice. In this historical context, the eclectic practices of social media challenge us to understand them as non-art and non-politics at the same time. Imageboards such as 4chan and social networking sites such as Facebook constitute in an ironic way the digital realization of the historical avant-garde’s dream that art and politics should dissolve into everyday life.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. Carlson, Marvin. “Theatre and Performance at a Time of Shifting Disciplines.” Theatre Research International 26.2 (2001): 137–44. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Quotation and Originality.” The North American Review 106:219 (April 1868): 543–57. Higgins, Dick. “Synesthesia and Intersenses: Intermedia.” Originally published in Something Else Newsletter 1:1 (Something Else Press, 1966). Also published as “Intermedia” in Dick Higgins, Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984, 18–28, from which I am quoting here.

four models of intermediality J ens S c h r öt er We protest against the mixing of the arts that many call synthesis.

 — Dziga Vertov, The Film Factory

The use of the term “intermediality” has become widespread (see, for example, Prümm, Eicher, Rajewsky, Paech/Schröter). It attempts to take into account the more and more apparent fact that media do not exist disconnected from one another; rather, they have existed forever in complex media configurations and have therefore always been based on other media. The German word itself (Intermedialität) seems to have been used for the first time in 1983 by Hansen-Löve, although the term “intermedia” has a much longer history. It can be traced as far back as 1812 when it was used by Coleridge, and it has experienced a revival particularly during the time of Fluxus. In the seventies, however, it was the term “intertextuality” (that in all probability was introduced by Julia Kristeva following Bakhtin) which attracted all the attention. With this in mind, let me start immediately with some necessary delimitations of my subject: intertextuality will play little role in this essay, if it does at all, the word having gone through such an explosion of secondary literature that the perti-

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nent literature has to be considered first (see Broich, Pfister, Zander, Hoesterey, among many others). Thus only the term “intermediality” will be the focal point of my considerations. A word on method: The following is not an attempt to add new definitions of intermediality to the rich plethora of definitions. It is even less an attempt to define “medium,” which, as many authors pointed out correctly, would be a prerequisite for discussing intermediality. In light of the numerous definitions, the following is a discourse analytic approach trying to structure the discussion into discursive fields and observing their regularity. I do not try to define what intermediality “really is,” but to describe what ways of talking about intermediality, in a most general sense, there are. I will distinguish among four types of discourse on intermediality that can be correlated with different texts, the last two of which could also be regarded as different sides of the same coin: synthetic intermediality, formal or transmedial intermediality, transformational intermediality, and ontological intermediality.

Synthetic Intermediality In the first discursive field to be analyzed, intermediality is discussed as the process of a (sexually connoted) fusion of several media into a new medium — the intermedium — that supposedly is more than the sum of its parts. These texts (Kultermann, Yalkut, Higgins, Frank) associate this process both with some of the artistic movements of the sixties — notably Happening and Fluxus — and with the (at that time) frequently (and repeatedly) formulated utopian idea that the gap between art and life could be closed by way of these new, synesthetic forms. These movements reside in the tradition of Wagner and his Zurich writings; that is, in the genealogical tradition of the artistic synthesis of a Gesamtkunstwerk. Three factors are characteristic for this model of intermediality: 1. The condemnation of “monomedia” as forms of social and aesthetic alienation. 2. The sharp — but hardly comprehensible — distinction between intermedia and mixed media. 3. Closely connected to this, a revolutionary and utopian attitude regarding the triumph over “monomedia” as a social liberation (or at least its preliminary stages) in terms of the return to “holistic types of existence.”

Dick Higgins, himself a Fluxus artist, demands of avant-garde art that it should convey “holistic mental experiences” (1). He sees this process as a form of cathartic borderline experience through which conventionalized patterns of perception and behavior of so-called everyday life are changed and enriched. He sees the potential of these fusions as particularly valid in the “new arts,” pointing specifically

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to Fluxus: “Another characteristic of many of them is that they are intermedial, that is, they fall conceptually between established or traditional media” (15, my emphasis). As the quote shows, a marked precondition of the new intermedial works of art is seen in their differentiation from traditional art forms. Elsewhere, Higgins points out that already in 1812 Coleridge had used the term “intermedia” “to define works which fall conceptually between media that are already known” (23, my emphasis). Since this fusion is new, it is experienced as a sensual and exciting, refreshing and invigorating, regenerating shift in one’s own horizons — until “automatization” takes its place again and the new intermedia “with familiarity” lose their “defamiliarizing” effect (see also 93). This means that the whole purpose of intermedia has to be seen in concurrence with his conception of art as a liminal experience: “but we should look to intermedial works for the new possibilities of fusion, which they afford” (17). Or, as has been similarly said by McLuhan: “The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses” (55). Summarizing, we therefore can say that for Higgins intermedial art functions to break up habitualized forms of perception. This connects him with authors such as Kultermann and Frank, but also with Richard Wagner. He continues to argue accordingly: “The concept of the separation between media arose in the Renaissance” (18). Obviously, his thoughts now are directed at historical considerations in the more narrow sense. He describes the Renaissance as a social phase during which the differentiation into different classes fostered the purification of media. Regarding this point, Frank follows him but specifies that “this development of separating the arts” is a characteristic of the establishment of the academies of fine arts in the seventeenth century in France (6). Accordingly, the twentieth-century tendency toward intermediality is rather a “re-unification” and not a completely new process. Both Frank and Higgins see the cause for this development in similar social shifts. While, according to Frank (4), “the era of specializing” is losing its influence and our century is characterized by “simultaneity,” Higgins remarks: “We are approaching the dawn of a classless society, to which separation into rigid categories is absolutely irrelevant” (18). This is where the utopian impulse comes to the fore.1 One of the central ideas of Marxism is to overcome the division of labor and its specialization into rigid categories in a classless (communist) society. Viewed in this light, intermedia seem to anticipate the overcoming of that division in the area of the arts — a concretized utopia. Kultermann also demands that “boundaries . . . be overcome” (77). One of Richard Wagner’s programmatic aesthetic writings is called Art and Revolution; in it he speaks of the “great Revolution of Mankind” that will bring forth a reconstruction of society that will continue where Greek antiquity and its “great work of total art that is tragedy” left off (Borchmeyer 67). Borchmeyer

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goes on to say: “The disunification and independence of the arts stands in the same relation to modern social ‘egoism,’ as their unity does to ‘communism’ . . . which is seen as the social ideal embodied in the Greek polis and required for the art-work of the future” (67).2 Seen in this view, this adds another component to the metaphor fusion repeatedly evoked by Higgins: it also connotes the reunification of individuals, alienated from themselves and their work, with their (so far) atrophied possibilities. The “beautiful natural functioning between man and his environment” (Yalkut 19) thus can be defined as the telos of groups of artists who work with intermedia. Consequently Higgins then can accuse the “pure” media, especially painting, of being “intended to ornament the walls of the rich” (18). After having vented his derision for the commercialization and marketing of art in galleries, he concludes: “It is absolutely natural to (and inevitable in) the concept of the pure medium, the painting or precious object of any kind. That is the way such objects are marketed since that is the world to which they . . . relate” (19). It becomes apparent that Higgins directly connects the concept of the pure medium (“natural” and “inevitable”) with that world which includes art in the circulation of goods — the world of the heyday of capitalism (“the world to which they . . . relate”). Already Wagner had attacked modern art, since he could only see it derogatively in its quality as product: Where the Greek artist was rewarded by success and public acclaim, in addition to his own delight in the work of art, the modern artist is maintained and — “paid” (Borchmeyer 63). This revocation of the difference between art and life seems rather a cliché regarding the art movements Happening and Fluxus, among which Higgins’s own artistic works can also be counted. In this context Higgins quite intensely criticizes the proscenium stage (2) that for him is symptomatic of a disappearing social order, whereas Kultermann (101) in a similar way regards the separation of artistic work and its public as one of “the rituals of bourgeois society.” Earlier, Wagner had contrasted the opposition of audience and stage with the amphitheater, because in his view the latter allowed for a fusion of artists and audience: “In the classical orchestra, almost wholly encircled by the amphitheater, the tragic chorus stood, as it were, at the very heart of the audience” (Wagner, quoted in Borchmeyer 59, my emphasis). Therefore, it is only consistent that Higgins attributes a “social vision” (66) to John Cage as one of the fathers of the happening and even calls Duchamp’s ready-mades “intermedial”: “The ready-made or found object, in a sense an intermedium since it was not intended to conform to the pure medium, usually suggests this, and therefore suggests a location in the field between the general area of art media and those of life media” (20, my emphasis).3 This passage is somewhat puzzling. It suggests that ready-mades or the sculp-

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tures by Oldenburg seem intermedial because an object from everyday life, a “life medium,” is being transferred into the general area of art, merging art and life. The term “life media” asks for an explanation. Since Higgins in this essay from 1965 regarding some of Oldenburg’s works obviously considers shoes a medium, this passage suggests a conceptual proximity to Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media from 1964 that had quickly become famous. It certainly can be no coincidence that Jud Yalkut (a Fluxus artist of the sixties) has called his manifesto from 1967 Understanding Intermedia. McLuhan (3) regards all media as extensions of man and therefore for him also clothing — “our extended skin” — can be seen as a medium (119). That is, by appropriating life-media through art-media in a defamiliarizing way, the former are elevated into aesthetic forms that generally question the borderline between art media and life media. The fundamental problem of the positions referred to above seems to be the differentiation between intermedia and mixed media. Higgins differentiates between these two forms by insinuating that in mixed media the mediated forms meeting there can at any time be regarded by the viewer as separate while in intermedia or in intermedial forms a conceptual fusion occurs, making it impossible to view only one of its origins. Rather, it forces the viewer into perceiving them as simultaneous and inseparable (16). Here, a dialectical view of intermediality is at play. While the mixed media are only a collection of different media in one place or within one frame, intermedia are syntheses within which the forms entering are sublated. The transcending of the division between life (thesis) and art (antithesis) catalyzed by way of intermedia is conceived in a similar way. The one is not simply swallowed up by the other, nor is it supposed to be turned into a form that is half life and half art. The dialectic synthesis here would be “the new identity of life and art” (Kultermann 78). It is, however, quite peculiar that a form whose name is already hinting at the assembly of different forms, like, for example, “graphic poetry,” appears as an indivisibly fusioned intermedium. If intermedia are old forms that are inextricably blended in a new form, then the analyst can hardly succeed in naming the original forms from which the intermedium is generated; if he does succeed at all, then the price would have to be paid to (textually) divide it into the original media — which then would directly negate the inviolable unity of the intermedium. In an example that one could count as “visual poetry,” namely, an image created with the typewriter but that also is a readable text, Scholz (84 and 98f.) has shown that in such representations it is not possible to perceive the pictorial and the written elements simultaneously. Either one can interpret them as images, thereby having to view the thickness, color, size, style, of the letters, or one can read the text, thereby making the mentioned parameters superfluous, unimportant, or even disturbing.4 The viewer at any one point in time can only

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consider one of the two “horizons,” as Higgins would call it; therefore no perception is possible that would reveal them as “both visual and literary art” (Higgins 16, my emphasis). With this in mind, we can say that for Higgins and others the term “multimediality” (mixed media) can only gradually — if at all — be delimited from “intermediality.” The terms “media synthesis” or “fusion” only make sense if they are regarded as spatio-temporal simultaneous presentation and reception of different media forms in an institutionalized frame. The synthesis thus lies less in the intermedium itself than in its perceptive and cognitive assimilation. These aspects, however, are completely lacking in the texts discussed here. A further critical point consists in the fact that the implied fusion of art and life (regarded by all authors as the goal of intermedial art) presupposes that the so-called life itself has to appear as a mediated form (life media) in order to be dialectically synthesized with the media of art (art media). If life is, according to Kultermann “all-encompassing; it consists of the sum total of all realities that have any bearing at all on our existence” (Kultermann 8), then here this totality of the realities of existence relating to human beings has to appear as a medium — or, in reverse: all media appear as “extensions of man” (McLuhan 3). The world as such becomes intermedial: the term threatens to be ubiquitous.5 As an aside, it can be noted that the mix of multimedial and utopian-holistic ideas symptomatic of this discourse seems to be celebrating a return in the realm of computer technology. The “multimedium computer” enables a “Gesamtdatenwerk” (total work of data, Ascott) or a “mediated gesamtkunstwerk” (see Rötzer/Weibel) leading into a “multimedia-era” in which social barriers (allegedly) are abolished with the help of “everybody’s access” and all media melt into a digital super medium (Winkler 1997, 54–80).

Formal or Trans-Medial Intermediality “The analysis of the relationship between film and painting teaches us among other things specifically that painting is not incorporated in film as a composite form of art but that it was divided into its constituents and that film is not a synthesis of anything whatsoever at all” (Aumont, 1992, 88). Aumont vehemently rejects any attempt to define film as a synthetic medium. He is sharply opposed to the “easy procedure of a simple enumeration,” observing rather remarkably that painting was partitioned and that some of the products of this partitioning at least can enter film. Müller has concisely summarized the difference between the concept of intermediality delineated above and the concept represented here when confronting Higgins with the problem that he has located “the intermediality of artworks between different media and not within specific media-contexts.”

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By contrast he reads as the quintessential result of Aumont’s analysis: “In the medium ‘film’ concepts and principles of other media are made into subjects and are aesthetically realized as well as the concepts of film are realized in other media” (1994, 133). The central term that Aumont regards as the connecting element between painting and the new types of imagery like photography and film is that of the mobile eye: Consistently, photographic and film camera now appear as the incarnations of the mobility of the gaze, almost synonymous with modernity: “L’appareil photographique comme incarnation de cette mobilité enfin trouvée” (1989, 39).6 Thus he also believes that the continuity of the perspectival organization of the image-space developed in the Renaissance with the photographic and cinematic image — which has been repeatedly underlined (see Comolli; extensively also Winkler 1991, 19–38) — is of a lesser relevance. Here Aumont’s concept coincides with studies on the prehistory of the cinema, especially those by Jonathan Crary (Modernizing Vision and Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century; see also Hick). Crary also argues that modern painting, which for example wanted to ban the volatile appearance of the world in the form of impressionism, as well as photography, which captures — as Aumont says — the “insignificant, the atmospheric, that which hardly can be grasped or felt” (1992, 83) and cinema as “experimental play with the variation of the visual focus” (81) in equal measure are results of a caesura from geometrical to physiological optics at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Aumont then seems to argue that the intermedial connection between painting and cinema lies in comparable, transmedial structures or forms that are indebted to their common participation in a historically given “order of the visible,” a “scopic regime” (Jay). These formal levels are separated from the material basis of the media; thus, they can be seen relatively autonomous regarding it — in this sense they are transmedial,7 even though they can only actualize within a media substratum. Still and all, the problem imposes itself if we are not dealing with a “mediatheoretical idealism” here insofar as a quasi-platonic independence of the form from the medium is being claimed: “In this context, intermediality would have to be misunderstood as a connection or linking of different media in order to mediate those properties that have to be differentiated from all media” (Paech, Paradoxien der Auflösung und Intermedialität, 336). Arguing with Luhmann (Das Medium der Kunst), Paech insists correctly on the inseparability of medium and form since forms — as I have already mentioned — always appear in a medium and since media themselves always exist only actualized as forms. The talk of trans-mediality in this respect seems justified, however, as indeed retroactively concrete analogies between media artifacts can be constructed that (for example) allow us to infer a “scopic regime” (Jay) dominating at a given time. As Paech remarks: “We could also say that there is no intermediality between literature

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and film; there is one only between media narrating literarily or cinematically” (Paradoxien der Auflösung und Intermedialität 335; n. 7). This formulation implies that the transmediality of narration, as a tertium comparationis, opens up the relationship between the two media without being assignable to either of the two as a specific characteristic.8 As Seymour Chatman remarks: “One of the most important observations to come out of narratology is that narrative itself is a deep structure quite independent of its medium” (117). Fictionality, rhythmicity, compositional strategies (of pictures, for example), or seriality (see Sykora) could also be regarded as possible cases of such transmedial structures (there are more). Even though these terms clearly do not range on the same level, they nevertheless share a common ground in that they have already all been used in order to compare artifacts made from different media on a more abstract level. Specifically with regard to such formal structures, Aumont’s (and also Crary’s) position can be supplemented by using the precise analytical instruments of neoformalism. Neoformalism seems to be fitting as a theoretical frame of intermediality, since Bordwell regretfully states: “We lack a term for those trans-media architectonic principles that govern the shape and dynamics of a film” (Historical Poetics of Cinema 375; my emphasis). And: “As a distinction the fabula/syuzhet [plot] pair cuts across the media. At a gross level, the same fabula could be inferred from a novel, a film, a painting, or a play” (Narration in the Fiction Film 51). He also maintains: “Logically, syuzhet patterning is independent of the medium; the same syuzhet patterns could be embodied in a novel, a play, or a film” (50). And while neoformalism — differing from strongly generalizing theories such as certain forms of psychoanalysis — seems to be explicitly dealing “with the specifics of film” (see Wulff/Hartmann), this specificity should not be mistaken for a sharp, ontological opposition of film and other media.9 And even though Branigan also insists that neoformalism consists in “a set of uniquely cinematic techniques” (Branigan 119), his own demonstration of his theory of filmic narration by analyzing a comic (76–83) shows that the narrative or even more simple formal structures of film10 indeed have a status that makes them usable as a foundation for a sort of comparative study11 of transmedial, general ways of representation. Thus, the simplifying classification of neoformalism with the “specificators,” as Branigan undertakes it in contrast to other theories of narration that see narration as a “general, transcendent sort of medium . . . which is superimposed upon specific media like film and literature” (121), is too easy and reductive — particularly since the status of the “uniquely cinematic techniques” on closer inspection is anything but crystal-clear. What, indeed, would be such a “technique,” or speaking neoformalistically, such a “device” that only and “uniquely” could be attributed to cinema? An initial thought might point to the picture’s movement and later, with the specification of differentiating film

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from theater, the movement of the field of vision as such would suggest itself. But as Bordwell and Thompson themselves remark quite clearly: “Paintings, photographs, comic strips, and other images all furnish instances of aspect ratios, in frame and out frame relations, angle, height, level, and distance of the frames vantage point. But there is one resource of framing that is specific to cinema (and video) [my emphasis]. In film it is possible for the frame to move with respect to the framed material. ‘Mobile framing’ means that within the confines of the image we see, the framing of the object changes” (Bordwell/Thompson 181). In the very chapter dealing with “Cinematographic Properties,” in fact precisely — as the citation shows — where it is a matter of differentiating film from other types of pictures by way of the criterion “mobile framing,” Bordwell and Thompson openly concede that the special “mobile framing” that is supposed to be “specific to cinema” also applies to “video” — ergo it is not “uniquely cinematic”! And since “mobile framing,” or rather the camera’s movement, can in fact be attributed not only to these two media but also to the digital pictures of the computer in the form of the “virtual camera” (see Mitchell 117–36), one could initiate a comparative, intermedially oriented study specifically using the procedural device of “mobile framing.” Bordwell (Narration in the Fiction Film) himself gives numerous hints how the neoformalist categories can be made fruitful. His “Art Cinema Mode of Narration” has emerged in the context of modernist forms of literature (207), whereas the “Parametric Mode” has a lot in common with serialist forms of art and serial music (275–78). An important term in the context of this trans-medial (Gass 69) intermediality would be the term “transtextual motivation” (see Narration in the Fiction Film 36). He describes the way in which a procedure used in the creation of an artifact is motivated by following genre-conventions, that is, relating to other, canonical texts: “Transtextual motivation [ . . . ] involves any appeal to conventions of other artworks, and hence it can be as varied as the historical circumstances allow. [ . . . ] In film, types of transtextual motivation most commonly depend on our knowledge of usage within the same genre, our knowledge of the star, or our knowledge of similar conventions in other art-forms” (Thompson 18–19, my emphasis). Therefore, how certain formal devices such as composition of the picture in relation to its frame, rhythmic structures, and so on, are being used in certain artifacts in painting or music, say, would be fruitful to study, as would whether, and how, one resorts to such functions of devices (see Bonitzer, Jost, Brüggemann)12 in certain films, photographs, paintings and so on. In this way formal, structural homologies between artifacts of different media origin can be analyzed with the terminology of neoformalism, namely as transtextually13 motivated procedures. Furthermore, it may be possible that historical phases could be comprehensively ascertained in which some devices of certain forms of art (media) might have

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dominantly affected other forms of art (media) in a specific way — the term “leading medium” thus could be made more precise both systematically and historically. Aumont’s “resumption of questions, concepts, principles” (1992, 79) between different media might find a place here as a comprehensive perspective. Two more comments: First of all one has to call to mind that the transmedial level to be studied of course is an abstraction. Foucault’s dictum of the “nonplace of language” (1977, xvi f.), in which the heterogeneous entries of Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia find their joint non-place, is to a certain extent also valid for the construction of trans-medial correspondences in the space of theoretical discourse — itself in written form (see Baxandall 28 concerning the problem of the description of images). In this respect one should be careful not to create analogies too fast, for example between cinematographic montage and cubist painting. Moreover, models operating with transmedial intermediality, that is, specifically with the realm in which different media are equally participating, have a hard time with “specifics of media.” For neoformalism, the specific cinematic aspect of film is located exclusively in “style”: “Style is thus wholly ingredient to the medium” (Bordwell 1993, 51). And even there — as I have mentioned before — the medium is not safe from constant analogies with other media. As Lars-Henrik Gass once said: “From now on one would not have to talk of two definable existences — here photography, there film — with a common ontological reference; rather, on a quasi transmedial level aesthetic conditions of proximity would emerge in which for example a film could resemble a musical composition much more closely than another film, and a photograph more closely a painting than another photograph. . . . Abstractable apriori of media, general differentiations between ‘photography,’ ‘film,’ ‘theater,’ ‘painting,’ ‘literature,’ etc., thus can be thought of as revocable in the use of aesthetic means” (Gass 69–70). And not only can the “abstractable apriori of media” be thought of as “revocable.” Rather, it seems that within the framework of the formal or transmedial paradigm the specifics of media cannot be accommodated at all any longer without problems. This becomes clear specifically in those types of analyses that on the one hand are based on transmedial common grounds of different media, while on the other, however, they presuppose a hierarchical relation between these media. This hierarchy is always implied when it is maintained that a certain procedure has been transferred from one medium to another — for example when talking of a “literarization of the cinema.” 1. On the one hand, to be precise, the thought of such a directed transfer of a procedure (which is often called “influence”; Baxandall 10–105) has to assume that the procedure is media-unspecific enough in order to be able to appear in

another media context as the same, that is, as a re-identifiable principle — this being the basis for every transmedial comparison. 2. On the other hand, the procedure has to be media-specific enough in order to still be able to point in its new media context to the medium from which it was

This paradoxical structure of the idea of a directed transfer of aesthetic procedures (influence) can be found for example quite symptomatically in Yvonne Spielmann (1993 and 1994). In her discussion of Peter Greenaway’s films we find, among others, the following train of thought: Initially, she rejects Bazin’s mediaspecific differentiation between a centripetal painted picture and a centrifugal picture of a film (166), stating with Deleuze (1983, 29f.) “the untenability of an ontological difference between a centripetal frame of painting and a centrifugal film-screen” (1993, 57). Quite in the sense of aspect 1 above, this strategy is necessary in order to call the opposition centripetal/centrifugal a non-specific option for media; that is, to state that cinematic and painted pictures can be organized both centripetally and centrifugally. Since the cinematic picture then can appear centripetally as well, she is able to find an intermedial reference of the transmedial kind in Greenaway: “The film director approaches the spatial concept of perspective painting by stressing the centripetal aspect of the cinematic picture in the composition of the field of vision over the centrifugal one” (1993, my emphasis). It is just this observation that seems amazing, however, because if centripetal and centrifugal are characterized as non-specific options for media, why then does a centripetal cinematic picture still point to painting? If after refuting a media-specific difference between film and painting centripetality is no longer an exclusive characteristic of the painted picture, why then should and can “centripetal” be representative for “painting”? This is where the aspect 2 comes to the fore. Thus, it seems that transmedial models can only take on aspect 2, that is, any kind of media specificity, at the cost of inconsistency.14 To my mind, the same paradoxical situation also shows at one point in Hansen-Löve (292): “Constructivemethodically projecting media-specific methods of artistic forms or genres into other heterogenic ones serves the avant-garde (especially in its analytical early phase) in reflecting and intensifying the appreciation of the respective specificity of the medium or genre (in its media ‘quality of difference’).” How can the transfer of a “media-specific method” into another medium take place if that method is necessarily based on the structure of its specific medium? And if it can be transferred, then it is plainly no longer specific for the first medium alone, but at least for both! With this in mind it should be obvious that if, for example, film can and does use a literary method then it is no longer of any use to say that now the film has become “literary”: after all, the method now is also a method used

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borrowed, or from which it originates.

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by film. In this spirit, Boris Eikhenbaum has already quite precisely observed: “Now, with the advent of cinema, many of these advantages are no longer the sole property of literature. . . . Like theatre, literature enriched cinema and assisted in its development. At the same time it lost its previous pre-eminent position and therefore must acknowledge the presence of a new art in its own future evolution” (Eikhenbaum 18). As I already mentioned, this problem can only be solved historically — when do which devices first emerge in the context of what media and then spread to others? This is one of the meanings of Kittler’s statement according to which new media do not replace old ones; they rather attribute different positions in the media system to them (Kittler 178). Therefore, Aumont is underlining that it is specifically not influence that for him is important (1992, 87) and that “painting” and “film . . . are much too open terms — always in danger of being defined and understood substantially instead of being specified historically.” Accordingly, a little later he replaces the term “film” with the phrase “the type of artistic practice that one generally calls ‘film’ ” (79, my emphasis).

Transformational Intermediality According to Philip Hayward one might talk of “re-representation” or, like Maureen Turim (1991) of “displacement” in this case, that is, the intermedial relationship consists in the representation of one medium by another (1).15 Beforehand it might have to be noted, however, that it is questionable whether we can talk of intermediality since, after all, the artifact of a certain medium (a film) does not contain another medium (a painting) as another but instead represents it. A painting in a film or a building in a photograph are no longer paintings or buildings but are integral parts of the medium representing them — they are simply being represented. As such, for example, a photograph of a written text would not contain any intermedial relationship; it is simply a photograph that is pointing referentially to a text. The written text becomes an object of representation and the photograph its subject. And by the way, this representational relationship already at its core undermines any thought of a “media synthesis.” In this perspective, film would not be a combined Gesamtkunstwerk (see Uhlenbruch) consisting of different media (or arts), since everything appearing in (photographic) film has to have gone through the cinematic dispositive, thereby becoming an integral part of one and the same cinematic picture (an exception might be sound in sound film since it is recorded separately).16 Nevertheless, one would obstruct an interesting perspective if, with this argument, one were to skip representation. To stay with this example: if photography can point or relate to a written text then we are already dealing with a relation

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between two media. One medium refers to another — thereby it can comment on the represented medium, which would allow one to make interesting inferences to the “self-conception” of the representing medium. And it can also represent the represented medium in such a way that its everyday, normal states of being are defamiliarized or transformed. It is a complicated question, but from that point onward one can feel justified in speaking of an intermedial representation. The term certainly would be stretched too far if one were to already judge any mentioning of the word “painting” in a film or in a book as intermedial representation. And also the cases in which paintings in films are being used for scenic or narrative ends (see Stelzner-Large) are not pertinent. It must be a representation that explicitly refers to the represented medium. A small example for such a representation would be the German program “100(0) Meisterwerke.”17 In this program, the painting was successively disassembled into individual areas that the film (or the video) then linked by way of montage. The disassembly of the painting points to an important aspect that we have already encountered. Bazin (166) distinguished the firmly framed centripetal picture in painting that polarizes “space inwards,” making reference to its center, from the centrifugal film screen that constantly transgresses the frame, establishing an exchange with the indefinite “universe” outside of the picture. We can observe in numerous cinematic representations of painting an entire work presented as a framed entity at first, and then, as the camera zooms closer and closer, it is magnified out of its frame, filling the screen. But since a screen is centrifugal, the picture or its details can now connect to other details or other pictures of the same painter or to pictures by other painters (Paech 1990a, 45). It is not by accident that this structure is often supported by a voice-over commenting on the linked, centrifugalized details thereby replacing the “internal speech” — as Eikhenbaum called it (Eikhenbaum 13) — that we are producing before the picture. It is this voice that supplements our way of viewing; it furnished the temporally developing causal connection justifying why this and no other type of link was chosen (see Doane, 572 on the power of the voice-over). Indeed, already the opening sequence of a feature like “100(0) Meisterwerke” constitutes the claim of the broadcast to be an “organ of translation for artworks” (Winter 73). We literally become accomplices of the ever-same voice from off camera because the camera position from above that lifts us far above the visitors using the stairs insinuates that we hold a (transcendental) surveying position from which an objective judgment of the artifact is possible (76). It is decisive that — despite all differences — the descriptions of such transformations always have ontological implications. In order to be able to observe a transformation, or a “displacement” as Turim calls it, a knowledge of what the

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represented medium (allegedly) is has to be there, as well as what the representing medium (allegedly) is. Fundamental differences have to be ascertained making it possible to describe what was added to the represented medium by the representing medium; that is, just how it was “displaced.” For example, I presupposed for my diminutive analysis that both forms of the picture (painting and film/video) can contain a narrated time but that only film has a fixed narrative or general representational time. Many such ontological differences can be thought of and can be formulated. One of the most current ones is the difference between the indexical character of photography in contrast to the mere iconicity of painting. Such a foundational opposition makes other forms of analyses of transformational intermediality possible; an example being those cases in which initially a painting seems to have been filmed and when later a protagonist enters the realm of the painting reconstructed for the camera then he moves around in it. This is the case in the episode “The Crows” in Dreams (Japan/USA 1990, Akira Kurosawa), in which the protagonist enters a painting by van Gogh. As we can see, the element that cannot be operationalized in the transmedial paradigm — a presupposed media-specific difference — is an indispensable prerequisite for the transformational paradigm (for a more detailed analysis of the sequence see Schröter 2005). This also means that from the transformation we make inferences both to the — if you will — “model” of the transforming and to that of the transformed medium. The crow-episode in Dreams then suggests the opposition between indexical/non-indexical as a significant difference between film and painting while the cut-ups of the painterly movement by montage in Le Mystère Picasso (1963, Georges Clouzot) seems to suggest non-moving/moving as the central, specific difference. This means that we are already on the other side of transformational intermediality that could be called . . .

Ontological Intermediality Here, it is of central interest that, for example, film can define itself by way of a transforming reference to another medium like, for example, painting. This indirect self-reflexivity of film transforming another medium could be a good example for those “intermedial figures of enunciation” that Kessler, Lenk, und Müller (9) miss in Christian Metz. Therefore, the question has to be asked: Do the clearly defined unities that we call media and that are characterized by some kind of media-specific materialities precede the intermedial relation, or does a sort of primeval intermediality exist that conversely functions as a prerequisite for the possibility of such unities? In order to get closer to a response to this question, I would like to insert a

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small thought experiment: If we want to find a definition for photography, for instance — if we want to name those elements that are specific to it — then first of all that specific point would have to be identified for which this definition supposedly applies. It would be insufficient to determine that photography creates square pictures. But which aspects should one choose? One should choose exactly those in which photography is differentiated from those media that are used as comparisons — and only those. Square pictures? Photography would have this element in common with (most) paintings, but what do photography and painting not have in common? Just this, that photographs are indexical pictures. Thus, if they are contrasted with painting then photography is a medium that creates indexical pictures. This criterion, however, does not differentiate photography from (photographic) film. In order to perform this differentiation the different status of the two types of pictures regarding, for example, hors-champ would have to be discussed. Therefore, if we define photography in the context of painting and film the result is: Photography is a medium that creates indexical and static pictures. Both differentiations, however, would not suffice in order to differentiate normal photography from Polaroid photography, and son on, ad infinitum. We can see from this that whatever seems to be specific in a given medium depends on “what the others are not” (Saussure 117); that is, it depends on the (implicit) definitions of other media that have to be used as contrasts. This is the second meaning of Kittler’s thesis according to which new media do not replace old ones but rather attribute different positions in the system to them (Kittler 178). This again means that the definition of the specific character of a medium requires the differential demarcation from other media; therefore, the (terms for) other media paradoxically are absolutely necessary for every purist and essentialist definition and as a result are contained in them as a trace. Thus every media being — as soon as it appears “on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself” (Derrida 13). This ontological intermediality then would not be one that follows the specifics of given, already defined media (as, for example, their synthesis); it rather precedes them, since the terms for the description of a new medium can only be borrowed from the already existing language or be composed from existing terms into neologisms. And so the recourse to metaphors referring to other media, such as “visual rhythm,” “writing of light,” cannot be avoided.18 One might say — with Foucault — that the essence of a medium “was fabricated in piecemeal fashion from alien forms” (1984, 78). At this point my argument seems to get entangled in a self-contradiction. On the one hand I have underlined that media are determined only relationally and differentially so that consequently they do not possess any absolutely constant being, while on the other hand I insisted on the differential character of constituting meaning within the medium language/writing, so that I therefore seem

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to subject this medium itself to an invariant specificity. However, to a certain extent this paradox cannot be avoided, since language/writing is the ineluctable prerequisite for the possibility of theory. Language/writing is the realm in which theory takes place. The media about which media theory is writing only appear as intermedial displacement in texts — namely, as language, as writing. Yet, this does not mean that theory in principle is only possible in language/writing. The so-called essay-films at least suggest the possibility that there might be theory in images as well, but the written/linguistic theory is still and all at present far and away the dominant form. It is also important to point out that I do not maintain that other media function according to the model of language/writing, as, for example, the semiotics of film have argued for film (see for this critically Deleuze 1985, 38–61). But even if one makes the most radical allowances like the irreducible difference of images, this nevertheless has to be done as text, in the medium language/writing. Language/writing is not simply one medium among others; it behaves asymmetrically to other media in that it is the only realm in which the truth, the being, the specificity of all other media can be stated. And — vice versa — no medium can appear as itself in its pure specificity and being without having passed the relationality and differentiality of language/writing. “You stand before writing like before the law, i.e., you are always involved in it, always have to succumb to its principle without being able to govern it. Writing and law therefore imply each other. Writing is the law of every language and conversely every law is binding only in writing” (Wetzel ix). It will be noticed that this ontological intermediality19 (or ontomediality) undermines the idea of clearly separated media segments. In this, the ontological and the transmedial intermediality (see part 2) can be compared. Müller notes — without using the term — about the latter: “If a ‘medium’ entails structures and possibilities of another medium or of other media, this implies that the idea of isolated media-monads or media-types can no longer be sustained” (1996, 82). Maybe all of this means that we have to recognize that it is not individual media that are primal and then move toward each other intermedially, but that it is intermediality that is primal and that the clearly separated “monomedia” are the result of purposeful and institutionally caused blockades, incisions, and mechanisms of exclusion: “Most often, perhaps in all cases, medium specificity recommendations turn out to be not defenses of a given medium per se, but briefs in favor of certain styles, genres and artistic movements” (Carroll 147). The history of art criticism is full of such attempts to justify certain movements of painting, for example, by referring to an assumed authenticity of painting. Or, to say it more clearly: Any specificity can be constructed that fits any purpose allowing the evaluation of certain objects. In conclusion, it remains to say that it can never be a matter of maintaining

Notes 1. I’ve discussed the political implications of different discourses of intermediality at more length in Schröter (Politics). 2. Even though Wagner probably knew Marx, the terminological proximity should not lead us to see Wagner as a Marxist. His “communism” rather was oriented on the model of the Greek polis. On the politics of the Gesamtkunstwerk see the detailed study by Bermbach (Der Wahn des Gesamtkunstwerkes). 3. Regarding Duchamp, Frank (Intermedia 13) observes: “Duchamp’s aesthetics of the ‘infra-mince’ underlined the gap between art and life but at the same time it demonstrated and underlined their closeness.” 4. See for this Aleida Assmann’s (Die Sprache der Dinge) considerations on the “extensive glance” that pays too much attention to the materiality of writing thus getting entangled in a “wild semiosis.” 5. Bazon Brock (Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk) and Hans Günther (Erzwungene Harmonie) both are pointing to the totalitarian implications of the discourse of Gesamtkunstwerk; and on the backdrop of Teilhard de Chardin’s philosophy Hartmut Winkler (Docuverse: Zur Medientheorie der Computer 64–72) precisely shows McLuhan’s holism. 6. See Deleuze (Cinéma 1. L’Image-Mouvement 14): “la camera apparaîtrait alors comme un échangeur, ou plutôt un equivalent généralisé des mouvements de translation” (The camera would then appear as an exchanger or, rather, as a generalized equivalent of the movements of translation, 4f.). 7. This is Lars-Henrik Gass’s term (Gass 70). 8. Somewhere else and in another context, Paech is even more explicit: “I maintain that the virtual spatial structure of the space of experience and perception in Simmel and Rilke, which I have presented as movement between projection and imagination using as an

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an integral idea of intermediality. The term is as varied as are the discourses in which it is being produced. Since we are at present threatened with an inflationary use of the term coupled with the already-known resulting adulteration of it as we previously experienced with terms like “discourse,” “medium” or “intertextuality,” it seemed necessary to take stock of the existing methods and approaches. As this essay has shown, the four described types are aiming at very different phenomena with very different methods. And in each different category also the media concept is a different one. Those different media concepts, however, cannot be developed here in the context of this subject. Therefore, the present list does not claim to be definitive or complete. It is an open list to which at any time new types of intermediality (and their correlated methods) can be added. A special case would indeed be the question if intermediality is still useful as a notion in the field of digital media, but this is a problem that can’t be discussed here (see among others, Bolter; Bolter/Grusin; Müller 1996; and Schröter 2008).

example Rodin’s sculptures, is homologous to the real cinematographic space” (Rodin, 148; my emphasis). 9. David Bordwell even quite clearly states: “On the matter of specificity, suffice it to say

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that although certain poeticians have assumed a distinction between the cinematic and

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that any film could be studied by poetics, with no film lying any closer to the essence of the

the non-cinematic, this is by no means constitutive of poetics as such. One could assume medium than others” (Historical Poetics of Cinema 374). 10. An example for the latter without doubt would be the basic structures like repetition/ alternation, unity/non-unity, and so on, as described by Bordwell and Thompson. 11. A comparative study is Petric’s (Constructivism in Film) concise analysis of Vertov’s Celovek Kinoapparatom (USSR 1929) on the backdrop of constructivism; even though it does not explicitly use neoformalist methods, it clearly points in the direction of an analysis of transmedial intermediality. 12. The transmedial paradigm, by the way, is also compatible with a psychoanalytically oriented epistemology as suggested in Crawford (Film, Looking, Painting). 13. However, I would then suggest the neologism “transmedial motivation.” 14. In Spielmann (Fading, Framing, Fake: Peter Greenaways Kunst der Regeln), we find exactly the same contradiction. Quite contradictory to the above “untenability of the ontological difference,” we read: “A fundamental, essential difference between the traditional painting on a panel and a cinematographic picture becomes specifically evident by way of the diametrical function of framing: the difference in media is found in the centripetal quality of the one and the centrifugal one of the other type of picture” (aspect 2). One page later, however, she again underlines the nonspecificity of media (aspect 1): “Greenaway approaches this spatial concept cinematographically by emphasizing the centripetal aspect of the cinematographic picture before the centrifugal one in the composition of the image field and his camera work.” (137). 15. This resembles the notion of remediation, which was discussed by Bolter/Grusin (Remediation). 16. See Pethö (Intermediality in Film) for an excellent discussion of film and intermediality. 17. “1000 Meisterwerke” (1000 Masterpieces) was the title of a television series produced by German broadcaster WDR. It was broadcast between 1980 and 1994 by ARD, ORF, and BR. In the ten-minute episodes, a famous painting was presented and analyzed by an art historian. 18. As Noel Carroll (146) for example underlines: “Ironically, often a cinema based on musicalist analogies is urged over literary cinema in the name of purism.” 19. It should be noted that transformational intermediality would also deserve to be called ontological intermediality, insofar as it implies previous definitions of the media involved. The decision to call the fourth type of intermediality “ontological” is based on the fact that here the media-ontologies themselves are an effect of the previous intermediality.

Works Cited The year of publication refers to the edition used and not to the year of the first publication. Ascott, Roy. “Gesamtdatenwerk: Connectivity, Transformation and Transcendence.” In

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Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness, ed. Edward A.

Materialität der Kommunikation, ed. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988. 237–51. Aumont, Jacques. L’Oeil interminable: Cinema et peinture. Paris: Librairie Seguir, 1989.  ——   —    . “Projektor und Pinsel. Zum Verhältnis von Malerei und Film.” Montage/av 1.1 (1992): 77–89. Baxandall, Michael. Die Ursachen der Bilder: Über das historische Erklären von Kunstwerken. Berlin: Reimer, 1990. Bazin, André. “Painting and Cinema.” In What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 164–69. Bermbach, Udo. Der Wahn des Gesamtkunstwerkes: Richard Wagners politisch-ästhetische Utopie. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1994. Bonitzer, Pascal. Decadrages: Peinture et cinema. Paris: Editions de l’Etoile, 1987. Bordwell, David. “Historical Poetics of Cinema.” In The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches, ed. R. Barton Palmer. New York: AMS Press, 1989. 369–98. —   —   —    . Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge, 1993. Borchmeyer, Dieter. Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre. Translated by Stewart Spencer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Bolter, Jay David. “Formal Analysis and Cultural Critique in Digital Media Theory.” Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 8.4 (2002): 77–88. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw Hill, 1990. Branigan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge, 1992. Brock, Bazon. “Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Pathosformeln und Energiesymbole zur Einheit von Denken, Wollen und Können.” In Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europäische Utopien seit 1800, Frankfurt/M: Ausstellungskatalog, 1983. 22–37. Broich, Ulrich. “Formen der Markierung von Intertextualität.” In Intertextualität. Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien, ed. Manfred Pfister and Ulrich Broich. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1985. 31–47. Brüggemann, Heinz. “Bewegtes Sehen und literarisches Verfahren: James Joyce ‘Ulysses’ und der Kubismus.” Neue Rundschau 102 (1991): 146–59. Carroll, Noel. “Medium Specificity Arguments and Self-Consciously Invented Arts: Film, Video and Photography.” Millennium Film Journal 14/15 (1984/85): 127–53. Chatman, Seymour. “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa).” In On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. 117–36.

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Shanken. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 222–27. Assmann, Aleida. “Die Sprache der Dinge. Der lange Blick und die wilde Semiose.” In

Comolli, Jean-Louis. “Machines of the Visible.” In The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Theresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1980. 121–42. Crary, Jonathan. “Modernizing Vision.” In Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay

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Press, 1988. 29–44.  ——   —    . Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.

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Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Crawford, Larry. “Film, Looking, Painting: The Trickster’s Site/In Sight/Insight/Incite.” Wide Angle 5, 3 (1983): 64–69. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 1. L’Image-mouvement. Paris: Les Èditions de Minuit, 1983.  ——   —    . Cinéma 2. L’Image-temps. Paris: Les Èditions de Minuit, 1985. Derrida, Jacques: “Différance.” In Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 1–28. Doane, Mary Ann. “The Voice in the Cinema. The Articulation of Body and Space.” In Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. 565–76. Eikhenbaum, Boris. “Problems of Film Stylistics.” Screen 15, 3 (1974): 7–34. Eicher, Thomas. “Was heißt (hier) Intermedialität?” In Intermedialität. Vom Bild zum Text, ed. Thomas Eicher and Ulf Bleeckman. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1994. 11–28. Eitzen, Dirk. “When Is a Text?” Iris 9 (1989): 119–30. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Ed. R. D. Laing. London: Tavistock, 1977 [1970].  ——   —    . “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 76–100. Frank, Peter. Intermedia: Die Verschmelzung der Künste. Ed. G. J. Lischka. Bern: Benteli, 1987. Galassi, Peter. Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition Catalogue), 1981. Gass, Lars Henrik. “Bewegte Stillstellung unmöglicher Körper: Über ‘Photographie’ und ‘Film.’ ” montage/av 2.2 (1993): 69–96. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Günther, Hans. “Erzwungene Harmonie: Ästhetische Aspekte des totalitären Staats.” In Gesamtkunstwerk: Zwischen Synästhesie und Mythos, ed. Hans Günther. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1995. 259–72. Hansen-Löve, Aage A. “Intermedialität und Intertextualität: Probleme der Korrelation von Wort- und Bildkunst — Am Beispiel der russischen Moderne.” In Dialog der Texte: Hamburger Kolloquium zur Intertextualität, ed. Wolf Schmid and Wolf-Dieter Stempel. Wien: Wiener Slawistischer Alamanach, Sonderband II, 1983. 291–360. Hartmann, Britta and Hans J. Wulff. “Vom Spezifischen des Films: Neoformalismus — Kognitivismus — Historische Poetik.” montage/av 4. 1 (1995): 5–13. Hayward, Philip. “Echoes and Reflections: The Representation of Representations.” In Picture This! Media Representations of Visual Art and Artists, ed. Philip Hayward. London: John Libbey, 1988. 1–25. Hick, Ulrike. “Die optische Apparatur als Wirklichkeitsgarant: Beitrag zur Geschichte der medialen Wahrnehmung.” montage/av 3.1 (1994): 83–96.

Higgins, Dick. Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Hoesterey, Ingeborg. Verschlungene Schriftzeichen. Intertextualität von Literatur und Kunst in der Moderne/Postmoderne. Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum, 1988. Jay, Martin. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” In Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster. Seattle:

Kessler, Frank, Sabine Lenk, and Jürgen E. Müller. “Christian Metz und die anthropoide Enunziation” montage/av 3. 1 (1994): 5–10. Kittler, Friedrich. “Geschichte der Kommunikationsmedien.” In Raum und Verfahren, ed. Jörg Huber und Alois Müller. Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993. 169–88. Klotz, Heinrich. “Für ein mediales Gesamtkunstwerk: Ein Gespräch.” In Digitaler Schein. Ästhetik der elektronischen Medien, ed. Florian Rötzer. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. 356–70. Kultermann, Udo. Art and Life. Translated by William Gabriel. New York: Praeger, 1971. Luhmann, Niklas. “Das Medium der Kunst.” Delfin 4.1 (1986): 6–16. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965. Mitchell, W. J. T. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Müller, Jürgen E. “Intermedialität und Medienwissenschaft: Thesenzum State of the Art.” montage/av 3.2 (1994): 119–38.  ——   —    . Intermedialität: Formen moderner kultureller Kommunikation. Münster: Nodus, 1996.  ——   —    . “Intermediality and Media Historiography in the Digital Era.” Film and Media Studies: Scientific Journal of Sapientia University 2 (2010): 15–38. Paech, Joachim. “Ein-BILD-ungen von Kunst im Spielfilm.” In Kunst und Künstler im Film. Helmut Korte and Johannes Zahlten, eds. Hameln: CW Niemeyer, 1990a. 43–50.  ——   —    . “Rodin, Rilke und der kinematographische Raum.” Kinoschriften 2 (1990 b): 145–61.  ——   —    . “Paradoxien der Auflösung und Intermedialität.” Hyper Kult: Geschichte, Theorie und Kontext digitaler Medien, ed. Martin Warnke, Wolfgang Coy und Georg Christoph Tholen. Basel & Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld/Nexus, 1997. 331–68. Paech, Joachim, and Jens Schröter. Intermedialität analog/digital: Theorien — Methoden — Analysen, München: Fink, 2008. Pethö, Ágnes. “Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of Methodologies.” Film and Media Studies. Scientific Journal of Sapientia University 2, (2010): 39–72. Petric, Vlada. Constructivism in Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pfister, Manfred. “Konzepte der Intertextualität.” Intertextualität: Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien, ed. Manfred Pfister and Ulrich Broich. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1985. 1–30. Prümm, Karl. “Intermedialität und Multimedialität.” In Ansichten einer künftigen Medienwissenschaft, ed. Volker Bohn, Eggo Müller, and Hans Ruppert. Berlin, 1988. 195–200. Rajewsky, Irina. Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke, 2002. Rötzer, Florian, and Peter Weibel, eds. Cyberspace. Zum medialen Gesamtkunstwerk. München: Boer, 1993.

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Bay Press, 1988. 3–28. Jost, Francois. L’oeil-Camera — Entre film et roman. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1987.

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Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Glasgow: Collins, 1974. Scholz, Oliver. Bild, Darstellung, Zeichen. Philosophische Theorien bildhafter Darstellung. Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1991.

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Schröter, Jens. “Der (digitale) Film öffnet die Tür in den virtuellen Raum der Malerei. Ein medientheoretischer Versuch zur Krähen-Episode aus Akira Kurosawas Yume.” In

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Akira Kurosawa und seine Zeit, ed. Nicola Glaubitz, Andreas Käuser, und Hyunseon Lee. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2005. 115–38.  ——   —    . “Das ur-intermediale Netzwerk und die (Neu-)Erfindung des Mediums im (digitalen) Modernismus.” In Intermedialität analog/digital. Theorien — Methoden–Analysen, ed. Joachim Paech and Jens Schröter. München: Fink, 2008. 579–601.  ——   —    . “The Politics of Intermediality.” Film and Media Studies. Scientific Journal of Sapientia University 2, (2010): 107–24. Spielmann, Yvonne. “Zeit, Bewegung, Raum. Bildintervall und visueller Cluster.” montage/av 2.2 (1993): 49–68.

 ——   —    . “Fading, Framing, Fake. Peter Greenaways Kunst der Regeln.” In Film, Fernsehen, Video und die Künste. Strategien der Intermedialität, ed. Joachim Paech. Stuttgart und Weimar: Metzler, 1994. 132–49. Stelzner-Large, Barbara. “Zur Bedeutung der Bilder in Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho.” In Kunst und Künstler im Film, ed. Helmut Korte and Johannes Zahlten. Hameln: CW Niemeyer, 1990. 121–34. Sykora, Katharina. Das Phänomen des Seriellen in der Kunst. Aspekte einer künstlerischen Methode von Monet bis zur amerikanischen Pop-Art. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1983. Thompson, Kristin. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Turim, Maureen. “The Displacement of Architecture in Avant-Garde Films.” Iris 12, (1991): 25–38. Uhlenbruch, Bernd. “Film als Gesamtkunstwerk?” In Gesamtkunstwerk. Zwischen Synästhesie und Mythos, ed. Hans Günther. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1995. 185–200. Vertov, Dziga. The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939, ed. and translated by Richard Taylor, introduced by Ian Christie. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988. Wetzel, Michael. Die Enden des Buches oder die Wiederkehr der Schrift. Weinheim: Acta Humaniora, 1991. Winkler, Hartmut. Der filmische Raum und die Zuschauer. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1991.  ——   —    . Docuverse. Zur Medientheorie der Computer. München: Boer, 1997. Winter, Gundolf. “Kunst im Fernsehen.” In Kunst und Künstler im Film, ed. Helmut Korte and Johannes Zahlten. Hameln: CW Niemeyer, 1990. 69–80. Yalkut, Jud. “Understanding Intermedia. Passage Beyond Definitions.” Arts Magazine 41:7, (1967): 18–19. Zander, Horst. “Intertextualität und Medienwechsel.” In Intertextualität. Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien, ed. Manfred Pfister and Ulrich Broich. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1985. 178–96.

intermediality in media philosophy Kat er i na Krti lo va A lot has been said about intermedia in the past decades: “intermediality” has been specified in all kinds of intermedial relations and all kinds of things — techniques, artworks, performances, methods — have been called “intermedia” or “intermedial.” But it is the subject matter of intermedia in media theory, rather than the more or less fashionable term, that we want to examine. Intermedial relations have always been part of our culture: images and texts, for example, have interacted from ancient times until today. Religious practice always involved different “media” — a Catholic mass, for example, can be considered an intermedial event par excellence. On the other hand, intermedia can only be analyzed as “(inter)media” from a certain theoretical perspective that is only a few decades old. It is true that media have always existed, but it is also true that there weren’t any “media” before media theory. This ambiguity about the subject matter of media theory is essential for media theories based on philosophies such as poststructuralism, deconstruction, Foucauldian archaeology, or systems theory,1 summed up in the notion of media or “the medial” as in between (the German Dazwischen):2 something in the middle, at the same time means and mediation (Mitte, Mittel, and Vermittlung). “Media” in this approach are linked to concepts or rather models such as “structure” or “dispositif,” taking on the difficulty of defining this kind of concept and its subject matter. Media

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provide tools to handle, perceive, and reflect the world and at the same time, act as mediations. They are, let us say, formations of the real which is always already “informed” (in the way Vilém Flusser uses the term in Towards a Philosophy of Photography 23), accessible only in certain forms of representation, “culture,” in language, “facts,” symbols, institutions, discourses, regimes of the sensible (Jacques Rancière) — image, text, music, dance, and so on. Media are not mere (passive) objects–they are rather reflective structures, as Lorenz Engell points out in “Tasten, Wählen, Denken. Genese und Funktioneinerphilosophischen Apparatur,” providing perspectives, techniques of signification, agencies by which they can be analyzed. There have to be media to see an “image,” a “film,” read a story — the perception, thinking, behavior has to be “pre-formatted” to understand these (cultural) forms as such — which becomes clear when people from other civilizations are confronted with these specific forms, techniques, codes, modes of signification. Just thinking about media concepts, “reflecting” media, thinking in philosophical terms, and writing we use media, which are thus “barely comprehensible within a global structure or process that they have themselves constituted or at least conditioned” (55).3 This example of a medium, or more precisely the mediality of medium — let us say writing — shows that a medium of this kind can be grasped: in self-reflective processes. A lot has been written about writing and thought about thinking, but there are many more media that can be observed as second-order systems (Lorenz Engell analyzes especially films and television in this way; Bruce Clarke and Mark Hansen as editors of Emergence and Embodiment outline the role of second-order systems theory in contemporary philosophy, media, and cultural theory). At this point the focus on media shifts to mediality and instead of intermedia we have to use intermediality, which is really a retranslation of the German equivalent of intermedia — Intermedialität — into English and a rewriting of the (continental) European concept of intermedia into Anglo-Saxon media theory. In a nutshell: first, “medial” reflection always includes multiple perspectives, it transgresses a linear subject-object perspective; and second, all we can perceive, reflect, and handle are forms, not the medium itself — in Niklas Luhmann’s distinction. The medium cannot be reduced to its actual forms, but cannot be accessed without them. Above we have described the image, film, text, writing, thinking in concepts and philosophical terms or philosophy and media philosophy as media — a rather vague concept of “media” even as a philosophical concept of a medium. It is clear that “media” in this perspective are not mass media or new media or old media (at this point the media start to be difficult to define), but they also cannot be reduced to “forms of representation like theatre and film, nor technologies like print or telecommunications, nor symbolic systems like writing, image or number” (Engell/Vogl, “Vorwort” 10).4

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A street lamp, film, a mirror, a drawing, paper, money, art, or a laboratory can be described as a medium.5 However, it is unlikely that anyone would understand what a medium is looking at this list: it is not at all clear what these “things” have in common. Nevertheless, there is something that the concept of media can bring forth. The medium and the concept of a medium are not fixed ideal entities. They emerge in processes of perception, creation, and reflection: “Media are only insofar as they are always becoming and transforming” (Engell 56).6 In one direction (focusing on medium as form) objects, codes, techniques, practices coalesce in the form of media such as film, art galleries, art, or the internet; the other direction (from media toward mediality) dissolves media into aspects of “the medial”: a drawing, diagrams, paper, art, lithography, for example, all show how a medium emerges: “traces” of the medium (which as such cannot be accessed) — its materiality; supporting technology and symbolism; its “agency”; the relation between image, writing, and number in a diagram; and so on. Marshall McLuhan can be considered a pioneer in this field of emerging media. His examples are the mirror, the wheel, or light. They are not mere examples, though, distinct from “real” media like film, photography, or television. Rather, they shift attention to a key aspect of media theory and the “in between” that Dieter Mersch has described as the “performative concept of reflection” (Meta/Dia: Zwei unterschiedliche Zugänge zum Medialen 206). In order to observe the emergence of media we have to transgress established concepts and dichotomies, such as the subject-object relation we have already mentioned, or the dichotomies of intellectual and sensual, material and symbolic. Reflection itself is in motion — the notion of performativity then connects the act of reflecting on media with media practice. Because it breaks with “one way” models of reflection and thinking, such reflectivity is not situated in an ideal sphere of pure, unmediated meaning: meaning is always constituted in specific practices, not only interacting with other terms and historical “traces” of concepts, but also with the medial premises of meaning: “In this way philosophical concepts seem to be made, designed, established with the help or under the influence of recognizable concrete tools and arrangements” (Engell/Siegert 7).7 In order to come closer to actual intermedia, we have to confront the systematic perspective of media philosophy with the historical analysis of media or cultural technologies and focus on the emergence of media (“Medien-Werden,” as in the article “Medien-Werden: Galileis Fernrohr” by Joseph Vogl). Analogous to the question of mediality in media philosophy, this approach to media history assumes a specific recursiveness:8 history is not something that is given, it is formed by media — archives, books, new data processing technologies, and more. The historical description of the emergence of media is always at the same time a reconceptualization. The “differences” and “traces” in the description of light, paper, or drawing as media are analyzed in a historical context. For

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this method, the emergence of media is crucial, not in terms of the performativity of reflection but in the historicity of medial forms — and, as a matter of fact, essentially intermedial forms. The aim is not to develop concepts and theories of media or “the medial,” but to find, show, and create unknown (inter)medial relations — as media philosophy does in artistic practice. Let us sum up this philosophical and media-theoretical background of intermedia, focusing on intermediality. The in-between character of media refers to their reflexivity — the philosophical concept of the performativity of reflection, and of media as reflexive structures. The analysis of cultural technologies or media archaeology concentrates on “becoming media”: on practices, techniques, agencies of human and nonhuman agents, and processes of signification — including factors of nonmeaning (especially material and technical factors that retain their own natures). Intermediality is a concept that brings forth relations that cannot be defined in media as fixed forms (for example, “mass media”). In this concept intermedia is posited as their connection, but in media these relations appear as certain forms that can only hint at “the medium” (Luhmann) or at their mediality — primarily by inter- and intramedial relations that differentiate what a medium is, or what constitutes its mediality, and the specificity of a medium. Before we take a closer look at a historical example of “becoming media” in intermedial relations, there is a historical and a systemic break — in some respect inevitably linked to the posthistoire and postmodern rhetorics — that has to be mentioned: a revolution in intermedia both in theory and in practice: the computer. Obviously, intermedia and media theory are connected to the development of new technologies and the growing importance of (new) media and technologies in cultural, social, and everyday life. What is revolutionary about the computer? The computer creates a virtual platform for all well-known media that can now interact in an unprecedented way — at the same time it merges these media into one medium, and thus raises the question of the difference of “monomedia”: “monomedia can be retrospectively understood as temporary, performative, discursive and therefore politically generated containments of an antecedent intermedial spectrum” (Schröter 405).9 How does the computer change the medium “text,” for example? What happens to writing, to “script,” when it takes the form of a hypertext and of programming “languages”? What does digitization mean to the image as a medium — in the context of multidimensional computer models or digital photography?10 And of course changes in contemporary digital media change media concepts underlying historical research, such as the relations between writing, calculation, and image for example.11 If the computer is understood as a “giant hypertext” (Manuel Castells), intermediality is reduced to intertextuality — to the framework of the text, to relations in the mode of representation, signifier/signified. The

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computer itself, however, cannot be described as a homogenous monomedium at all. What is a computer? The hardware, the software, the principle of logic gates, networks, interfaces, digital imagery? As Georg Christoph Tholen points out, the computer brings forth and technically realizes the character of “the medial” as such: it can be only described and used as something — a typewriter or a medium of communication and so on (Tholen, Die Zäsur der Medien 52). The modern era defined image and writing — to come back to two of the basic media of Western culture — as specific monomedia: characteristic for the image, and not only in modern art history, is its “flatness” (Clement Greenberg), the two-dimensionality of a painted canvas — applied to drawings as well as photographs — that has been reflected, subverted, and transformed in modern art and modern technologies. Writing, or more precisely text, was considered even more abstract in a way: to be able to read a text, decode the symbols as words, sentences, speech, the graphic symbols of the alphabet have to remain “invisible” — the reader has to abstract their concrete visible form.12 Jacques Derrida turned the attention of philosophy to writing as its own tool — a medium in terms of mediality: it is significant that we use writing and how we use it, but in a different way than the representational relation (signifier/signified) that writing or text suggests. Friedrich Kittler introduced the quote from Friedrich Nietzsche that has become emblematic today: “unser Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken [our writing tools participate in our thoughts]” (quote from a letter to Hans Köselitz from 1882). Kittler developed a theoretical approach focusing on “writing tools”: what is it that determines our way of thinking, texts, discourses, meaning in a nonrepresentational mode — the material conditions, technologies, practices, environments (and the other way around, in a Foucauldian tradition: what constitutes metaphysical concepts such as subject, time, space, substance, and so on)? Taking this change of perspectives into account — sometimes marked by a terminological shift from media to cultural technologies — we can ask how image and writing can be described in their intermedial relation. It is obvious that an analysis of cultural technologies does not concentrate on the meaning of the depicted scenes, figures, or forms, but on material objects in their actual historical setting and development, and of course their relation to other media in terms of material conditions, practices of production, and use. This perspective allows us to examine a wide range of intermedial relations reaching far beyond media encounters such as illustrations in books or images combined with letters. In his research on books of hours in the Middle Ages and still life painting in seventeenth-century Netherlands, Bernhard Siegert13 argues for the importance of practice, the ways texts and images are handled: in the (historical) relation of illuminated manuscripts and still life painting, the two modes of abstraction in one-dimensional writing/text and two-dimensional

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image, as described above, overlap — in both books and paintings. The illuminations oscillate between the “one-dimensionality” of writing and the emerging two-dimensional image space. Siegert points out the “in between” moments of the parallel use of a trompe-l’oeil, for example of a flower painted as if it were piercing the page on which it is painted and, on the other hand, figures and animals escaping the image space of the illuminations into the text (as if sitting on the decorative pattern representing branches of trees). The same effect can be found, for example, in Jan van Kessel’s still lifes: some of the depicted insects are trompe-l’oeil, some are situated in the image space. In still lifes under consideration, the table on which the objects are arranged can be understood as a (inter) medial reflection of the materiality of the surface of the book page and the canvas. And of course, the artist plays with the effect of these ruptures, dissonances, or moments of oscillation of meaning and perception. In the interpretation of these (inter)medial relations occurs also an oscillation in theory. This intermedial “in between” creativity seems to have played a key role in the history of intermedia–although there is not one history of intermedia, as Ken Friedman stresses (“Intermedia: Four Histories, Three Directions, Two Futures”), as an artistic practice. The concept of intermedia relates to the art theory of Fluxus in the 1960s. Dick Higgins coined the term in his 1966 essay “Synesthesia and Intersenses: Intermedia” and refers to various intermedial art forms of Fluxus (objects, cinema and performance, happenings, poems, concrete poetry, dance theatre, or conceptual art).14 The historical connection of intermedia and the avant-garde allows us to “break down the boundaries to life” (Clegg & Guttman): to take a look at intermedia not only in the context of performativity and mediality in media theory, but in real practice, performances, and exhibitions. Again, the “inter” in intermedia has to be taken seriously, at this point not so much in terms of in between, rupture, gap, or dissonance, but in terms of interaction, intertwining, encounter. To experience art in the age of (inter)media no longer means to stand in front of a picture or a sculpture, “interpret” works of art as “works of art.” In modern architecture, for example, the visitor crosses the line of the outer façade and the interior, explores the building walking through and taking up different perspectives. The medium of art becomes fluid: it is not the image space on the canvas, not even the canvas itself, but all kinds of aspects that constitute an “image,” an artwork, including the framing of the gallery space. The medium image is not only reflecting itself — its materiality or flatness (for example, Donald Judd’s Specific Objects) — but is only one possible form that can be dissolved into material conditions, sensations, practices, spaces, forms of signification. Let us imagine a romantic painting of a sunset and next to it Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project in the Tate Modern (2003). In the entrance hall, an enormous yellow luminous half circle reflects in the mirrors covering the ceiling, so

Notes 1. The key reference here is media philosophy and the theory of cultural technologies in Media Studies (“kulturwissenschaftliche Medienforschung”) in German-speaking countries, an overview and links on www.gfmedienwissenschaft.de. 2. Dieter Mersch gives a definition of the “in between” in the context of the history of philosophy and key concepts of media theory in Medientheorien zur Einführung.

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that standing on the floor it looks like a yellow shining sphere; most spectators probably would say it looks like a sun reflecting on water. Visitors to the gallery stand and lie on the floor of the entrance hall of the gallery (which is still used as an entrance hall) looking up to the “sun” and into the mirror on the ceiling, seeing themselves in the “picture,” lying or standing under the sun (or reflecting themselves in the “water”). This reflection as a metaphor (for “reflection” in philosophical terms), practice (Vollzug), and effect of the medium “image” could be reflected and experienced in Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition Innen Stadt Außen in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 2010 in a way that seems to blur the boundaries between art and theory. The exhibition consisted of different kinds of installations, among them “light-paintings”: images created on the walls of the exhibition room by the reflections and refractions of rays of light in a transparent sphere hanging on the ceiling, a video of the streets of Berlin composed of images taken by a camera in a car passing through the streets, and reflections of the streets in a big mirror fixed on a van driving “through the picture” in which the “real” video image and the mirrored (and filmed) image at times could not be distinguished. Further, in a room filled with mist that changed color (colored by lights on the ceiling) as the spectator passed through, a visitor experienced a complete dissolution of the boundary between himself and the image. The visitor himself was in the position of a medium processing the “artwork” with his senses. These artworks or art-events can hardly be described in terms of the “intentions” and “artistry” of the author and the interpretation by the spectators, nor in terms of the artwork as an “object.” It is more interesting to examine this artwork in terms of media and their relations. The suggested “medial” intertwining of art and theory is even more interesting — Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition seems to be as much a creation of images as their reflection by artistic and multi-, inter- and intramedial means. “It would today require a special kind of effort at times to distinguish art from its philosophy,” Arthur Danto proposed in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (56). Thus we have come back to the metatheoretical approach to intermedia, following a performative concept of reflection: the concepts of “intermedia,” “intermediality” and the essential “in-between” of media allow to look for ruptures, differences, connections, and new relations — in philosophy and art.

3. My translation of “kaum greifbar innerhalb eines Weltgefüges oder–ereignisses, das es dennoch selbst konstituiert oder wenigstens konditioniert hat.” 4. My translation of “sind nicht auf Repräsentationsformen wie Theater und Film, nicht

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auf Techniken wie Buchdruck oder Fernmeldewesen, nicht auf Symboliken wie Schrift, Bild oder Zahl reduzierbar.”

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5. Stefan Münker and Alexander Roessler have collected many more examples of what has been described as a “medium” in the volume Was ist ein Medium? 6. My translation of “Medien sind nur, insofern sie stets werden und sich wandeln.” 7. My translation of “Philosophische Begriffe treten derart als gemacht hervor, als herangebildet und in Umlauf gesetzt mit Hilfe oder unter Einfluss benennbarer dinglicher Werkzeuge und Anordnungen.” 8. The anthology Rekursionen: Von Faltungen des Wissens takes up this originally mathematical term and applies it to formations of knowledge; Bernhard Siegert summarizes this approach to media history in “Cacography or Communication? Cultural Techniques in German Media Studies.” Online: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/grey.2007.1.29.26. 9. My translation of “Monomedien [sind] retrospektiv als temporäre, performativ, diskursiv und damit politisch erzeugte Eingrenzungen eines vorängigen intermedialen Spektrums denkbar.” 10. Katherine Hayles or William J. T. Mitchell have thoroughly examined the medium of writing and image in the context of new media. 11. Sybille Krämer’s research on operational writing, drawing, and diagram connects both a historical and systematic perspective, lately in the article “Übertragenals Transfiguration, oder: wieist die Kreativität von Medien erklärbar?” 12. Therefore Vilém Flusser calls writing “one-dimensional” — in contrast to the image: it is irrelevant what the writing looks like, how the page is composed, what colors the text is, on which material, if it is an inscription on the wall or a text on the monitor — the text doesn’t change (Into the Universe of Technical Images). 13. His research on this subject is not yet completed; the article “Der Blickals BildStörung. Zwischen Mimesis und Mimikry” explores the still life in a broader context of film and scientific images. 14. With every historical “origin” of intermedia art the notion of intermedia changes; Marcel Duchamp or John Heartfield could be mentioned as pioneers of intermedial art, however both find and create specific intermedial relations and work in a different way with “mediality,” as Nancy Roth shows in her article “Kameraden und Kohlköpfe. John Heartfield im Universum der technischen Bilder.”

Works Cited Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Boston: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Clarke, Bruce and Mark B. N., Hansen, eds. Emergence and Embodiment. New Essays on Second Order Systems Theory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Clegg & Guttmann. Breaking Down the Boundaries to Life: Avantgarde Practice and Democratic Theory. Vienna: AKKU, 1995.

Danto, Arthur. Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Engell, Lorenz. “Tasten, Wählen, Denken. Genese und Funktion einer philosophischen Apparatur.” In Medienphilosophie: Beiträge zur Klärung eines Begriffs, eds. Stefan Münker,

2/2010, Schwerpunkt Medienphilosophie (2010). Engell, Lorenz and Joseph Vogl. “Vorwort.” In Kursbuch Medienkultur, eds. Pias, Claus et al. Stuttgart: DVA, 2000. Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Friedman, Ken. “Intermedia: Four Histories, Three Directions, Two Futures.” In Intermedia: Enacting the Liminal, eds. Hans Breder and Klaus-Peter Busse. Norderstedt: Books on Demand Gmbh, 2005. Kittler, Friedrich: Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Krämer, Sybille. “Übertragen als Transfiguration, oder: wie ist die Kreativität von Medienerklärbar?” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 2/2010, Schwerpunkt Medienphilosophie (2010). Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Mersch, Dieter. “Meta/Dia. Zwei unterschiedliche Zugänge zum Medialen.” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, Heft 2/2010, Schwerpunkt Medienphilosophie, 2010. Mersch, Dieter. Medientheorien zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Brief an Peter Gast, Feb. 1882.” In Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Bd. III.1. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. Roth, Nancy. “Kameraden und Kohlköpfe: John Heartfield im Universum der technischen Bilder.” In Medien denken. Von der Bewegung des Begriffs zu bewegten Bildern, eds. Lorenz Engell, Jiri Bystricky, and Katerina Krtilova. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010. Schröter, Jens. “Intermedialität, Medienspezifik und die universelle Maschine.” In Performativität und Medialität, ed. Sybille Krämer. München: Fink, 2004. Siegert, Bernhard. “Cacography or Communication? Cultural Techniques in German Media Studies,” In Grey Room 29 (Fall 2007). Siegert, Bernhard. “Der Blick als Bild-Störung: Zwischen Mimesis und Mimikry.” In Blickzähmung und Augentäuschung. Zu Jacques Lacans Bildtheorie, eds. Claudia Blümle and Anne von der Heiden. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2005. Tholen, Georg Christoph. Die Zäsur der Medien: kulturphilosophische Konturen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Vogl, Joseph. “Medien-Werden: Galileis Fernrohr.” In Archiv für Mediengeschichte 1, Mediale Historiographien (2001).

Inte rm e di al it y in M e dia P h ilo so phy

Alexander Roesler, and Mike Sandbothe. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003. Engell, Lorenz and Bernhard Siegert. “Editorial.” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung

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realism and the digital image W. J. T. M i tch ell The currency of the great bank of nature has left the gold standard: images are no longer guaranteed as visual truth — or even as signifiers with stable meaning and value — and we endlessly print more of them.  — William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye

All media are mixed media. But they are not all mixed in the same way, nor in the same proportions of symbolic legibility or sensory ratio. Radio is better than television, according to some humorists, because the images are better. Shakespeare is better on the page than the stage, according to Charles Lamb, because the Lady Macbeth of the mind’s eye surpasses any actress. Photography, argues Baudelaire, is inferior to painting because it sacrifices beauty, skill, and soul for a mechanical fixation on truth and realism. What does the onset of digital technology mean for the specific intermediality of photography? Does it loosen photography’s grip on the real, and open it up to a new courtship with beauty? Or does it condemn photography to disappearance in the undifferentiated flow of media images? Could it have both effects at the same time? What happens to photography when its technical basis is shifted from the realm of the material transfer of impressions to the flow of information? What does it matter

One of the most consistent commonplaces about the nature of digital photography (and digital imagery more generally) is that the old claim of photographic images to represent the world faithfully, naturally, accurately, has been undermined by digitization. Traditional chemical-based photography, we are told, had an indexical relation to the referent; it was physically compelled to form an image by the light rays emanating from the subject. This image or likeness was thus doubly referential, a double copy in that it was both an impression or trace, on the one hand, and a copy or analogon on the other. Both index and icon, it provided a kind of double-entry bookkeeping of the real. Like the fossil trace, the shadow, or the mirror reflection in a still lake, traditional photography was a natural sign. It carried a certificate of realism with it as part of its fundamental ontology. Of course one could, as Mark Hansen notes, recognize that “the specter of manipulation has always haunted the photographic image,” but still insist that this is “the exception rather than the rule” (95). As William J. Mitchell argues, “reworking of photographic images is technically difficult, time-consuming, and outside the mainstream of photographic practice” (7). With Photoshop, presumably, reworking or “doctoring” photographs becomes technically easy, quick, and quite ordinary. I remember a game that my father used to play with family photographs. It

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if the stream of information, the digital code, is invisible and unimportant to the human perception of the image? The intermediality of traditional photography was principally located in its relation to memory and writing. The photographic image had to be anchored by the language of remembrance and denomination in everything from the family album to the daily newspaper. With digital photography some (but not all) of the anchors have been incorporated in the automatisms of the apparatus. The date, time of day, serial number and type of camera, and (with GPS) even the location where the image was taken are automatically recorded along with a digital file that can be translated into an analog appearance. All the information that had to be recorded in a notebook or on the back of a print now comes along as metadata — all except the who, what, and why, the dimensions of human memory. With a sufficiently large database, of course, we can imagine a surveillance apparatus that would take these things into account, and the human component, as Friedrich Kittler would assure us, would become obsolete. In the meantime, we are in a transition where the intermediality of the digital photograph, its constitutive shuttling between an alphanumeric “reality” and an analog “appearance,” seems to threaten its traditional connection with the Real. The following pages are an investigation of this threat.

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involved lining up my sisters and me behind him on a hillside, and my mother photographing us with the illusion that we were tiny children standing on his outstretched hands. The photograph itself was not manipulated, but the profilmic event was staged for it, and staged in such a way that it took advantage of the mechanical automatism of the camera lens (its perspectival design) to produce an illusion. When Kaiser Wilhelm came to Palestine in the first decade of the twentieth century, he met with his friend Theodore Herzl, and a photo opportunity was staged to show them together. Unfortunately when the photographs were developed, it turned out that the Kaiser and Herzl never actually appeared together in a single shot. So the pictures went back to the darkroom and a famous photo of Herzl and the Kaiser together was fabricated. Was this photograph lying, given that the two men did actually meet? Was this an unusual occurrence? Was it technically difficult or time-consuming? Outside the mainstream? What would happen if a politically loaded photo fabrication like this was produced today in Photoshop? Would it be taken as authentic, or would the “spectre of manipulation” automatically hover over it, by virtue of its digital character? The Herzl-Kaiser fabrication went undiscovered for many years. Would a digital trick of this sort be immediately perceptible? Or is it the impercebtibility of the “spectre of manipulation” that casts doubt on all digital photographs? In that case, of course, we would be back to square one. If all digital photographs are equally suspect, merely by virtue of their being digital, then none of them can be trusted — or distrusted — any more than any other. I use Photoshop once a year to fabricate an illusion for my family’s annual Christmas card. Once I tried to shrink my wife and kids down to little Munchkins and put them on the parapet of one of my sandcastles, with me at full size, looming above them like a Leviathan. Needless to say this picture did not meet with the approval of the wife and kids; it exists now only in a fading print and a digital archive. Is this a rare or exceptional practice? Was it technically difficult? Outside normal professional practice? My ordinary use of Photoshop is actually just the opposite in purpose: it is what is called the “optimization” of images for whatever purpose they are going to serve — crunching them down for screening or transmitting over the internet, fattening them up in .tiff format to produce highly saturated color prints. In other words, I manipulate almost all the digital images that come into my computer, not in order to fake or fabricate anything, but to enhance their functionality in playing roles very like traditional lantern slides or photographic prints. And in fact, I am barely competent at all these practices. People often complain that my PowerPoint presentations employ low-quality, low-resolution images snatched from the Internet. And my answer is: this is a kind of realism. Why should I try

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to simulate the color saturation and focus of a lantern slide, when in fact I am not showing lantern slides but digital projections at 72 dpi? If realism means anything, surely it means candor about the nature of one’s images. The famous Life Magazine photo of Lee Harvey Oswald holding the rifle that killed Kennedy is probably a fake. What difference does it make that this was a chemically based photograph and not a digital photograph? All these examples are mobilized, clearly, to undercut or at least complicate the prevailing myth that digital photography has a different ontology than chemical photography that this ontology dictates a different relation to the referent, one based in information, coding, and signage (the symbolic realm) rather than the iconic and indexical realms of the older photography. These examples also help us to question whether this very dubious “ontology” (which isolates the “being” of photography from the social world in which it operates, and reifies a single aspect of its technical processes)1 has any fixed relation to issues such as authenticity and fakery or manipulated and natural images? It seems clear that the authenticity, truth value, authority, and legitimacy of photographs (as well as their aesthetic value, their sentimental character, their popularity, and more) is quite independent of their character as “digital” or “chemical-analog” productions. The notion that the digital character of an image has a necessary relation to the meaning of that image, its effects on the senses, its impact on the body or the mind of the spectator is one of the great myths of our time. It is based on a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, a kind of vulgar technical determinism that thinks the ontology of a medium is adequately given by an account of its materiality and its technical-semiotic character. I prefer Raymond Williams’s account of media as “material social practices” (158–64) that involve skills, traditions, genres, conventions, habits, and automatisms, as well as materials and techniques. And (though this will take time to develop) I want to argue that the myth of digital photography has things exactly upside down. Instead of making photography less credible, less legitimate, digitization has produced a general “optimization” of photographic culture, one in which better and better simulations of the best effects of realism and informational richness in traditional photography have become possible. My inkjet printer can now produce 8 × 10s with glorious color, something that was a rare and exceptional experience in the old days. If we are looking for a “tendency” in the coming of digital photography, it is toward “deep copies” that contain much more information about the original than we will ever need, and “super copies” that can be improved, enhanced, and (yes) manipulated — but not in order to fake anything. Manipulation is intended to produce the most well-focused, evenly lit image possible — in other words, to produce something like a professional quality photograph of the old style. We mustn’t forget McLuhan’s admonition, that one

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of the first effects of a new medium is simply the simulation and replacement of an older medium. What digital photography is doing to the senses, the body, the referent, the sign, the image, as well as that ever-vanishing entity known “the Real,” ought to be a question to be asked and answered by some empirical particulars, not a transcendental deduction from a thin description of the bare technical facts about the digitization of images. In saying this, however, I don’t mean to suggest that digitization has made no difference to photography, or to image-making and circulation more generally. It’s just that this difference has to be understood as a complex shift in many layers of photographic and image culture, one that involves popular as well as professional, political, and scientific uses of automated image production, and that is linked to modes of production more generally — that is, new ways of making a living (or not), and of reproducing life itself. My argument is against the reduction of digital photography to a bare material and technical essence, “grounding it,” as William Mitchell puts it, in “fundamental physical characteristics,” rather than social practices and uses. I will be using Mitchell’s discussion of digital photography throughout this essay as my principal example, simply because his book, The Reconfigured Eye, is so often cited as the principal authority and the “classic” statement of this argument. But I could have easily used many others, from Stanley Cavell to David Rodowick, who derive an ontology of the medium from its material and technical features. The main use of digital photography has been (aside from simulating the effects of chemical photography for amateur users) a deepening of the referent, not its disappearance. This point is demonstrated by Mitchell’s own frequent recourse to technoscientific examples such as the “spacecraft imaging” that makes it possible to take a “perspective view” of a volcanic landscape on Venus (see Mitchell’s Figure 2.1). Digital imaging in this case enhances one of the most venerable aims of “classic” or “realist” photography, namely, the revelation of realities that are inaccessible to the naked eye. Does anyone seriously argue that the digitization of x-ray images or magnetic resonance imaging compromise the “adherence of the referent” to these images? Of course the kinds of manipulation and artifice that were already possible in traditional photographic practice become even easier in the digital darkroom. Photoshop is packed with magical tools for distortion, enhancement, cutting and pasting, resizing, cropping, and optimizing. But despite the handwringing over the coming inability “to distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated” (New York Times photography critic, quoted by Mitchell 17), the actual professional use of digital photography in the news media has revealed remarkably few attempts to fabricate false or misleading images. The very fact that cutting and pasting is so easy has, in fact, had just the opposite effect on

there was no Matthew Brady to show us the bodies on the ground, no Robert Capa to confront us with the human reality of a bullet through the head. Instead, the folks back home were fed carefully selected, electronically captured, sometimes digitally processed images of distant and impersonal destruction. Slaughter became a video game: death imitated art. (13)

Of course at the level of fact this statement is remarkably selective. There actually were real-time images of Iraqi bodies beamed by satellite from Baghdad after a U.S. “smart bomb” destroyed what turned out to be a civilian structure. There were photographs (probably not digital) made of the trail of destruction left by the retreating Iraqi army massacred in a “turkey shoot” by American bombs and rockets (though their circulation, along with images of U.S. servicemen’s coffins, was suppressed). If there was no Robert Capa, there was Peter Arnett on hand to

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professional practices, and the National Press Photographer’s Association has gone out of its way to warn against the use of digital technology to “create lies.” As for the distinction between a “genuine” and a “manipulated” image, this is a paranoiac fantasy, since every photograph that was made in the traditional way was also a product of manipulation in the sense of technical, material standards, and decisions about what to shoot, at what settings, and how to develop and print it. The concept of the “genuine” image is an ideological phantasm. Again, none of this disputes the fact that the camera can be used to lie, or that photographs can be manipulated to deceive. It is only to insist that the invention of digital imaging does not, by itself, render this capability the key to some essentialized “ontology of the digital photograph.” If ontology is the study of being, then we must not forget that ontology of photography should focus on its being in the world, not in some reductive characterization of its essence. Mitchell makes a great deal of the de-realizing image practices that were first tried out in the first Gulf War, where “laser-guided bombs had nose-cone video cameras,” and “pilots and tank commanders became cyborgs inseparable from elaborate visual prostheses that enabled them to see ghostly-green, digitally enhanced images of darkened battlefields” (13). What he fails to note, however, is that these ghostly-green images permitted actual human beings to see what would have otherwise been invisible. There is a kind of paradox here in the relation of the image technology to the referent: what was dark is illuminated, what could not be seen becomes available to sight. The “de-realization” is only with reference to something like natural human night vision, which would have seen nothing. So is this a loss of reality or a gain? My sense is that it is both, and any attempt to confine ourselves to one side of the equation will miss the whole point of this kind of image technology as a worldly practice. In that same Gulf War, Mitchell complains that

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verify the authenticity of the images of dead Iraqi civilians. And one wonders what Mitchell would make of the role of digital photography and video in the current U.S. war in Iraq.2 The famous Abu Ghraib photos were all digital. One of the most notorious of them (the stack of naked Iraqi men) was used as a screen-saver image on a computer at Abu Ghraib prison. The digitization of the photos had, so far as I can tell, absolutely no effect on their reception as authentic, realistic depictions of what was going on inside that prison, revealing as well the peculiar attitudes of sadistic enjoyment that characterized the American presence in front of, as well as behind the camera. Like the American lynching photographs of the early twentieth century, these images were revelations of a structural, social, and political reality that would have remained, but for their existence, at the level of rumor and verbal report. Of course these images could have been manipulated and fabricated to convey false information. And many of them were quite visibly manipulated to erase the faces of the Iraqi victims. An entire internet industry of fake, staged Abu Ghraib photographs sprang up in the wake of the authentic images. But these images were faked in the pro-filmic scenario, not in the digital processing of them. Their inauthenticity had exactly nothing to do with their status as digital images. My point, however, is not that digitization is irrelevant, but that its relevance needs to be specified. In the case of the Abu Ghraib photos, the main relevance of digitization is not “adherence to the referent” (which is almost always, in any case, established by documentation and testimonial credentials outside the image itself), but circulation and dissemination. If the Abu Ghraib photos had been chemically based, it would have been very difficult for them to circulate in the way they did. They could not have been copied so readily, or transmitted worldwide by e-mail, or posted on websites (not unless they had been scanned and digitized, that is). If Abu Ghraib did not have its heroic star photojournalists to provide a human perspective, it had something perhaps even more striking and disturbing: a revelation of the inner workings of American military prisons, and of the gulag outside the law that the Bush administration has been creating, and an insight into a different use of photography as an instrument of torture. Above all, the Abu Ghraib photos demonstrated a new role for photography’s “being in the world” made possible by digitization. They showed the way in which the rapid, virulent circulation of digitized images gives them a kind of uncontrollable vitality, an ability to migrate across borders, to escape containment and quarantine, to “break out” of whatever boundaries have been established for their control. At a time when actual human bodies are being more and more fenced in by actual and virtual borders, fences, checkpoints, and security walls, when those same bodies are subjected to increasingly intensive and intrusive surveillance,

The basic technical distinction between analog (continuous) and digital (discrete) representation is crucial here. Rolling down a ramp is continuous motion, but walking down stairs is a sequence of discrete steps — so you can count the number

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the digital image can sometimes operate as a kind of “wild gas” that escapes these restrictions. It is not so much “adherence to the referent” that is endangered by digital imaging, then, as the adherence to a “controlling intention” in the production of the photographs. Certainly the intention of the Abu Ghraib photographers was not exactly “realized” by their digital circulation. Their intentions (which still remain somewhat obscure) were more along the lines of creating trophies of sadistic domination in a context where the American inability to contain the Iraqi insurgency was already becoming evident; and to humiliate the subjects of the photographs, perhaps even using them as blackmail to coerce Iraqis to work against the insurgency for U.S. intelligence (see Seymour Hersh’s speculations on this point). Both of these intentions were frustrated or turned against the producers of the photographs. Their “trophies” became exhibit A in the indictment of the “few bad apples” who were punished for the “abuses.” And far from helping get information about the Iraqi insurgency, the photographs actually fueled the resistance and served as instruments of recruitment for the insurgency, and for worldwide terrorist networks. What can we say, then, about the actual as opposed to the mythical meaning of the technical revolution in digital imaging? Are all the intelligent commentators simply mistaken in their portrayals of chemical photographs as inherently realistic, and the digital image as inherently open to manipulation and deceit, de-realization, disembodiment, and dehumanization? I think it is more complicated than a simple mistake, and that these sorts of mythic narratives of loss of authenticity and human meaning need to be stirred into whatever mixture of elements comprises the ontology of photographic images, their “being in the world” of politics, technoscience, and everyday life. The very fact that these stories are somehow compelling, that they become classic or commonplace, is a part of (but not the whole of) of the ontology of the image. I want to conclude, then, by widening the horizon of inquiry beyond photographic images to two more general domains: first, the level of the “codes” that underlie claims about referentiality and significance in images, especially the opposition between the digital and the analog image; and second, the analogy between images and lifeforms that is drastically enhanced by the quantitative increase in production, reproduction, and circulation of images in the digital world. William Mitchell’s distinction between digital and analog codes is a convenient place to start:

of steps, but not the number of levels on the ramp. A clock with a spring mechanism that smoothly rotates the hands provides an analog representation of the passage of time, but an electronic watch that displays a succession of numerals 54

provides a digital representation. (4)

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While this illustration might seem compelling at first, it quickly deconstructs itself. Rolling down a ramp may be continuous motion, but one can in fact, count the number of rolls. Or, if the metaphor is made consistent, one can walk down a ramp and count the number of steps one takes. As for walking down stairs: yes, one can count the stairs, but one may experience that descent (as my lively nieces and nephews routinely demonstrate) as a kind of flight or free fall. There is a real difference, then, between digital and analog representation, but it is a highly labile and flexible difference, a dialectical relationship, not a rigid binary opposition. Most important, it is not an ontological difference, but a difference in representation and perception. The same thing can be scanned, mapped, depicted, described, assessed — in a word, represented — in a digital or analog format. The stairs can be given analog representation; the ramp can be digitized. More important, the two forms of representation are mutually definitive and complementary. The idea of isolating one of them as somehow self-sufficient is a myth (which is why the very idea of a “digital culture” strikes me as such a slovenly and misleading shorthand, even while I recognize the inevitability of its deployment). The analog only has the meaning it does in contrast to some specifiable notion of the digital, and vice versa. And the mutual, reversible translation between the two formats is essential to their practical usages. Digital sound recording, for instance, does not produce a digital output. The analog signal returns the moment the recording is actually played on speakers driven by an amplifier. Chemical-based newspaper photographs throughout the twentieth century were routinely digitized long before the invention of computers at the moment of their printing. Examine any older newspaper photo with a magnifying glass and you will find that it is composed of a grid of Ben Day dots: pixels before the pixel. It was the human eye that “resolved” the digitized grid into an analog representation. If digitization is (as Mitchell suggests) a matter of “discrete steps,” then everything from mosaic tile to pointillist painting is already digitized. Chemical-based photography itself had to contend with a digital level known as “grain” at the heart of its own processes. Anyone who has seen Antonioni’s classic film Blow-Up is aware that, at high levels of magnification and enlargement, chemical photographic prints dissolve into an abstract mélange of black and white specks. A better guide to the relation of digital and analog is provided by Nelson Goodman, who insists that we specify the kinds of digits and marks being dif-

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ferentiated, and the codes that are governing their combination. The digital/ analog relation varies, for instance, depending on what sorts of digits or “discrete elements” are being employed. Letters of the Latin alphabet and Greek numerals are already digital in the sense of being discrete. Black and white tiles assembled to produce a geometric figure that seems alternately to recede and advance are digital elements that are received as analog in perception. A geometric curve that descends the y-axis and extends infinitely along the x-axis is an analog depiction that can be expressed digitally in the expression y=1/x. And sometimes a system of representation can be a compromise between a precise digital quantification and a rather vague, qualitative assessment. Is the specification of shoe sizes as 8, 9, 10, or 11 a “digital” representation, in contrast to T-shirt sizes defined by “Small, Medium, and Large”? Digitization need not, in other words, involve binary number systems (1 and 0). It need not even involve numbers at all, but can occur whenever a limited number of unambiguous characters (red, yellow, green, for instance) are deployed to signal unambiguous meanings (stop, caution, go). I like to illustrate the dialectical character of the digital/analog difference by referring to Chuck Close’s paintings, which simulate the look of the digital grid or screen of depiction, but then treat the individual “pixels” or discrete units as objects of individual painterly operations, as if each pixel were a miniature abstract painting. Or, if a more widely known example is desired, consider two scenes from that universal cultural referent, The Matrix. In one scene, a character named appropriately “Cipher” is watching a computer screen that is awash with a stream of alphanumeric characters. When he is asked what he’s looking at, he says it is the Miss Universe contest, and that he is so familiar with the code that it has become transparent to him. He sees right through the numbers and letters to the analog images they represent (just as we “see through” the Ben Day dots on a newspaper photo to the analog image they transmit). The other scene is the moment of revelation of the “digital reality” that underlies the analog “surface” or “illusion” constructed for human beings by the Matrix. When Neo has his moment of revelation, he suddenly sees the deadly Agents of the Matrix as what they “really are” — nothing but streams of alphanumeric characters in a virtual space. But at the very moment of this revelation, we also see that the ghost of the analog is returning, and the shapes of the Agents’ bodies are clearly outlined amidst the flow of numbers and letters that lie “behind” their corporeal illusion. When sophisticated commentators tell you (as they routinely do) that the “analog” era is behind us, that digitization has destroyed photography, digital video has destroyed film, and that the image itself has been eliminated by digitization, ask them what they make of this scene. If the Desert of the Real is, in fact, just numbers, then we can take some comfort in the fact that Plato already made this point over two thousand years ago, and he still thought the only moral to be

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drawn from it was that we had to go on living in this world of shadows, illusions, and images — in short, in the world of the analog.3 But still, the mythmakers are not completely mistaken about the digital image. Digitization makes an enormous difference to the role of images in culture, politics, and everyday life, but those differences cannot simply be “read off” their material or technical features. One would expect, for instance, that since digital images can be duplicated with a simple set of keystrokes, that the world would be flooded with more copies of these pictures than ever. But my own experience is just the reverse. Digital images (private, amateur pictures that is) tend to languish unseen on the hard drives of computers, in much the same way that 35 mm slides used to remain hidden away in storage boxes or carousels. Printing a digital photograph requires a new set of habits. Should one drop off the memory card at the drugstore the way one did with a film canister? Or should one first optimize and edit them in Photoshop, then copy them to a CD, and then take them to the drugstore? Should one buy a photo printer and do them at home, a process that looks simple until you try formatting the images for smaller sizes like 4" by 6"? Should you send them in to an on-line service and wait for the prints to arrive in the mail? Notice that the problem here is not that it is difficult to produce a set of prints in the traditional way, but that there are too many choices of how to do it. The simplest one, dropping off the memory card (or sending them into an online service) is made complicated by the fact that one knows that it would not be difficult to do this just a little better by taking a bit more time to optimize the images. But who has time? And who has time even to think about choices like these? My answer, which I suspect is typical, is to defer these decisions for another time, leaving the family photos safely (one hopes) in the digital archives. Digital photographs have a different life cycle from that of chemical-based photos. They do not necessarily circulate in printed form, but remain in a mainly subterranean realm, unseen and mostly forgotten, but (thanks to a variety of search mechanisms) available for retrieval much more quickly than printed photos or transparencies. Although it is tempting to call this a “dematerialization” of the image, since it only exists as a data file on a disk somewhere, the fact is that this is also a material existence, occupying a real place, and it is subject to material decay just as surely as are traditional photographs. William Mitchell claims that a traditional photograph “is fossilized light,” and if this metaphor makes sense, it means that digital photographs are simply the instruments of a more far-reaching paleontology of the image. Another implication of the fossil metaphor is that images are like dead, dormant, or even extinct life forms that can be brought back to life by being brought

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back into the light — printed, projected, or screened. And this, I think, is one of the key frameworks for thinking about the larger cultural context of the digital image. These images have achieved technical perfection in the same period that an entirely different class of images has been subjected to an analogous process. I’m thinking here of the reproduction of organisms, biological life forms, by the process of cloning. Clones are a living, organic version of the digital image, involving a similar relation between an underlying genetic code and a visible, bodily, analog manifestation. And much of the anxiety about digital imaging echoes the common phobias about cloning: both processes are accused of replacing a “natural” process with one involving artificial manipulation; both are accused of producing endless copies that threaten the identity of the individual specimen. As Mitchell puts it, “a digital image that is a thousand generations away from the original is indistinguishable in quality from any one of its progenitors” (6).4 The metaphor of “generations” and “progenitors” makes clear the biological figure of the perfect, artificial double or twin, in contrast to traditional copying processes, which always involve loss of detail and natural decay. There is a kind of horrific immortality about the digital image, whether photographic or organismic. And this may explain why the descriptions of them so often resort to biological metaphors, as if we were beset by a “plague” of images, self-generating, virulent entities that threaten, not just traditional photography, but traditional forms of life itself. One of the most fundamental consequences of the more virulent and volatile “life” produced by the digitization of images is an erosion of the boundaries between the private and public, amateur and professional, circulation of photographs.5 The digital image is not merely a matter of taking a picture with a digital camera and storing it on a disk or printing it out. It is also a matter of circulating it on the internet via e-mail and “photoblogs.” Family albums are now easily transformed into public exhibitions, and even secret photographs (again, Abu Ghraib is the conspicuous example) can easily circulate globally once they break out of their quarantine. What does all this say, finally, about the problem of realism in photography or in images much more generally? It all depends, obviously, on what you think counts as realism in representation. I think it means that we must untether the problem of realism from the ontology of the medium. Despite Susan Sontag’s passionate arguments, there is nothing automatic about realism in photography, nothing encoded in the ontology of the photograph that makes it “adhere to the referent.” And realism can be, in any event, many other things besides “adherence to the referent.” For one thing, the referent of a photograph has to be stipulated. Is a photograph of my Aunt Mary referring to her? Or to her dress? Her expression on this particular day, and the meaning of an occasion? Is it realistic if she put

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on her Sunday best to be photographed, so that this image shows her in a way that is somewhat exceptional? And would discussions of the value or quality of this picture be likely to focus on the question of its realism at all? Or would they focus on whether she looked pretty in this picture, looked her best, and what a special day this was? My sense is that in ordinary family photographs, realism is very low on the scale of evaluative criteria. Realism is not built in to the ontology of any medium as such. Cinematic realism reveals this perhaps most vividly, since it is a very special project within a medium that, if it has a built-in tendency, would tend toward fantasy and spectacle, not the faithful portrayal of ordinary life. Most people take photographs in order to idealize and commemorate, not to realistically portray something. As for what realism “really is,” this is a subject that would take up a lot more time than I have. One can make a photograph that “adheres to the referent” in a quite literal way, by producing a direct transfer contact print. But this guarantees nothing about its realism. Socialist realism, as we know, was anything but. It was a contrived process of ideological idealization of a projected, hoped-for reality, but (as Lukacs pointed out) it was not the same thing as what he called “critical realism,” a project of objective, historically informed representation built upon an independent point of view outside of socialism, a view that necessarily identifies the critical realist as someone who occupies a middle, perhaps even bourgeois, class position (see Lukacs). Literary realism, as Northrop Frye pointed out long ago in a similar vein, involves the representation of ordinary people in a “middling” situation, between the Aristotelian categories of “high” subject matter (tragedy and romance) and “low” (comic characters and incidents) (see Frye). “Social realism” of the sort practiced by Alan Sekula tends to fuse Lukacs’s “critical realism” with an emphasis on conditions of labor, and an interest in exposing to photographic view a world that is overlooked or generally hidden away from public view — all this, however, in tension with his photographs’ artistic status, their character as highly crafted and often beautiful objects. As an example, consider Sekula’s photograph of a displaced wrench on page 16 of his photo essay, Fish Story (Fig. 4.1). The photograph exemplifies social realism in that it does not stand alone, but is part of a whole world that is documented in loving detail, both in other photographs and the accompanying text. It satisfies Frye’s notion of low mimetic realism in its emphasis on the world of masculine labor. It is “critical realism” in Lukacs’s sense in that it is the sort of image that would only occur to an outsider to the world Sekula is documenting. It is safe to say that no sailor on board a container vessel would be likely to regard this as a picture worth taking. It would be “overlooked” and invisible, not only to the outside world, but to the insiders as well. But in addition to all this, it

Figure 4.1. Alan Sekula’s photo “Wrench” from his book Fish Story (p. 16). Reprinted by kind permission.

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is an extraordinarily beautiful and haunting image as well, one that I have never forgotten since the first time I picked up this book. Why? First, it satisfies many of the aesthetic criteria of abstract formalism, with its simple, bold, geometric composition and its defiance of perspectival depth in favor of a flat picture plane that would have pleased Clement Greenberg. This flatness is coupled with a high resolution and high color saturation, showing attention to the materiality of rusting metal, and the sheer beauty of those materials when they are isolated as a graphic specimen in a high-gloss representation (if photography has an automatism, it is as much a tendency to aestheticize and beautify as it is to “adhere to a referent”). And finally, what is the “referent” of this photograph? Is it the wrench? Or the ghostly trace of its displacement that appears just to the right of it? Whatever else this picture refers to, it clearly refers to the very issue we have been pondering, namely, the adherence of an image to its referent. The ghostly trace of the displaced wrench is a kind of natural contact print traced in the medium of rusting metal, very like those solar prints I used to make of leaves on paper in elementary school science classes. One would like to know whether the artist displaced the wrench himself, or simply found it this way. Neither answer would lower my high estimation of the picture, though I suspect that Sekula would, as a matter of realist principle, probably not have moved the wrench.6 Either way, the photograph satisfies another condition of modernist aesthetics, and that is the revelation of self-consciousness and self-reference in the work of art. It would make no difference to this meaning of the image if it turned out that it was made with a digital camera, or were projected (as it is at this moment) as a digital slide. And then, finally, there is scientific realism, which carefully defines its notion of truth, correspondence, adequation, and information, and which (given its quantitative basis) is deeply in love with the precision of digital imaging. Scientific realism, however, is generally at odds with common-sense realism, which tends to content itself with the realm of analog information, with dense, qualitative impressions filled with random, unsystematized detail. Scientific realism, in fact, usually begins by taking issue with common sense, and showing us something that we couldn’t see with the naked eye. That is why, obviously, photography (both chemical and digital) plays both sides of the fence with regard to the debate between science and common sense, verifiable truths and the idealizations of desire. And that is why I come to rest, finally, with philosophical realism (as distinct from nominalism), the view that abstract, ideational entities are “real entities” in the real world — more real, in fact, than our confused repertoire of sense impressions and opinions. Truth, Justice, Being, and “the Real” itself (along with geometric concepts such as the circle, the square, and the triangle) are, for the philosophical realist, the foundations of the real world. But the realism

Notes A slightly shorter version of this essay was first published in Jan Baetens and Hilde Van Gelder (eds.), Critical Realism in Contemporary Art: Around Allan Sekula’s Photography. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006: 13–27, and is re-published here with kind permission. 1. As William J. Mitchell puts it “the difference is grounded in the fundamental physical characteristics that have logical and cultural consequences” (Reconfigured Eye 4). 2. It is worth noting that the presence of digital photography has had a major impact on the circulation of realistic images of the war in Iraq. No longer the exclusive purview of professional journalists, photo- and text-blogs from Iraqi civilians and American soldiers are flooding the internet. And the U.S. military mission has made it clear that notions of journalistic professional neutrality will not be honored in this war. The mandatory “embedding” of journalists with military units, and the confinement of journalists to military controlled compounds was only the first stage in the attempt at total media control. Direct violence and incarceration are also favored tactics: 67 journalists have been killed in the U.S. war in Iraq, in contrast to the 63 who were killed in ten years of reporting in Vietnam (http://www.salon.com, August 30, 2005). 3. I recommend here Brian Massumi’s superb essay, “On the Superiority of the Analog.” 4. But see Lev Manovich’s discussion of “Lossy compression” in The Language of New Media for a technical puncturing of this myth of the perfect copy. A similar problem occurs with the notion of a clone as a perfect copy. Actually, a clone is less similar to its donor or parent than an identical twin because it has generally been gestated in a different womb, and matures in a completely different environment, at least one generation after its ancestor. Neither clones nor digital photographs can be identical twins in this very fundamental sense. 5. I am grateful to Alan Thomas for pointing this out. 6. During the discussion at the University of Leuven Conference in September 2005 on “Critical Realism” and the photography of Alan Sekula, it became clear that he had in fact moved the wrench, not to mention bringing in artificial light to enhance the photograph’s color saturation.

Works Cited Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.

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that would get at them is not uniquely tethered to any particular medium or its putative “ontology.” They are themselves the foundations of ontology, and the media — verbal or visual, material or immaterial — are simply poor instruments for representing them. That is why realism is a project for photography, not something that belongs to it by nature.

Goodman, Nelson. The Languages of Art. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976. Hansen, Mark. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Lukacs, Georg. Realism in Our Time. Translated by John Mander and Necke Mander. New

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York: Harper, 1971. Massumi, Brian. “On the Superiority of the Analog.” In Parables of the Virtual. Durham, NC:

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Duke University Press, 2002. 133–43. Mitchell, William J. The Reconfigured Eye. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Sekula, Alan. Fish Story. Düsseldorf: Richter, 1995. Williams, Raymond. “From Medium to Social Practice.” In Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. 158–64.

mother’s little nightmare L ar s N owa k

Photographic and Monstrous Genealogies in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man

Based on the life of Joseph Merrick, a severely disfigured man who was exhibited in English freak shows in the second half of the nineteenth century, David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980) has been described by Maitland McDonagh as a film dominated by metaphors of theater (75). Indeed, in all social contexts Merrick encounters in Lynch’s film, whether a freak show, an anatomical theater, a hospital, or the auditorium of a popular theater, he is displayed in a very theatrical manner. It was probably this omnipresence of the theatrical dispositive that prompted Bruce Kawin as well as William Holladay and Stephen Watt to compare the film The Elephant Man with Bernard Pomerance’s stage drama of the same title (Kawin; Holladay and Watt). The credit titles at the end of Lynch’s film, however, deny any relation to Pomerance’s play. I argue therefore that a different cross-media reference, which has been neglected thus far in the research literature on The Elephant Man, is far more important to this film. I have in mind here the film’s reference to photography, a medium that is related to that of film no less closely than is theater. To begin with, The Elephant Man grants photography a central place within its diegesis, which not only alludes to the production of photographs by creating metaphors for the camera, the photographic negative, and the development of photographs, but also directly and repeatedly depicts the reception of photo-

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graphs. All photographs shown in The Elephant Man date from the nineteenth century and belong to the genre of portrait photography. Particular attention is given to the facial portrait and family photography, and these two subgenres are merged in the photographic portrait of Merrick’s mother. It is significant that this portrait is a photograph since Carr Gomm, the director of London Hospital in which the real Merrick was accommodated for some time, stated that his patient possessed a painting of his mother (Graham and Oehlschlaeger 19). Furthermore, photography is not only a part of The Elephant Man’s content, but also a point of reference for its form. Georg Seeßlen’s claim that all of Lynch’s films are assimilated to photography through deceleration or other manipulations (165) also applies to The Elephant Man, which precisely imitates those genres and that epoch of photography it represents, since it also focuses on the face (Chion 60; Kember) and is characterized by that strong contrast between black and white tones that is typical of early photography.1 A closer look at The Elephant Man reveals that photography is a subject of both the film’s narrative middle section and its more allegorical framework. These two parts are concerned with two different aspects of photography, however — or, to be more precise, with two different developments relating to this medium — and also refer to these developments in two different ways. The film’s middle section narrates how Merrick gradually learns how to use photographs in a “proper” way. Merrick’s first attitude toward photographs is an intimate fetishization of the photographic portrait of his mother that is in his possession. This photo is a fetish not only because of the numerous analogies that, according to Christian Metz, connect any photograph with the fetish (though it is important to note that this kind of fetishism only comes into play here because Lynch has turned the real Merrick’s maternal painting into a photograph).2 Rather, it also serves Merrick as a fetish in the literal sense of the word. It does so because of the high appreciation Merrick shows for it through his secret use of it. Merrick looks at the photo only while he is alone and shows it to no one else. He conceals it from other people’s sight by keeping it in a doubly protected place. The attic Merrick inhabits is isolated from the rest of London Hospital and therefore represents an enclave of secrecy within the public space of the hospital. Within this enclave, the photo is once more hidden under Merrick’s pillow, a place that is only known to him and also located very close to his body. When roused from his sleep by the striking of London Hospital’s clock, Merrick produces the photo from beneath his pillow and contemplates it to gain a peace comparable to that guaranteed to the rest of the hospital’s patients, whose sleep is guarded by a portrait of Queen Victoria. However, when Merrick hears the approaching footsteps of the night watchman, he quickly puts the photo

Over the course of the film, Merrick gradually replaces his secret association with his mother’s photo with a private usage of photographic portraits. Unlike the secret association, this new usage is not individual and subjective, but rather trans-individual and inter-subjective. While the secret application was “primitive,” the private one is “civilized.” It does not only comply with the privacy which Metz considers a typical feature of photography in general, but also with that use of photographs which was conventional within the British upper class in the 1880s, the time during which the real Merrick lived and the film is set. The first step of this photo-pragmatic learning process is Merrick’s visit to the Treves’s home. As we learn in this sequence, Dr and Mrs Treves also possess genealogical photos showing their children and other relatives. Unlike Merrick, however, they do not keep them hidden, but display them prominently on the mantelpiece in their parlor. When Dr Treves takes a photograph of his children from the mantel and passes it to Merrick for closer contemplation, Merrick no longer withholds his mother’s photo from other people, but likewise shows it to his hosts. Thus, Merrick and the Treves examine each other’s photos and by doing so perform a common ritual Roland Barthes once described with the words: “Show your photographs to someone — he will immediately show you his: ‘Look, this is my brother; this is me as a child,’ etc.” (5).3 Merrick reaches the second stage of his way to a “normal” use of photographs when he himself receives the famous actress Madge Kendal in his second, more imposing abode at London Hospital. While Dr Treves had only offered his children’s photograph to Merrick for a closer look, the actress gives him a signed photo of herself as a present. Since her visit to Merrick marks the beginning of

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back in its place under the pillow to hide it from the watchman, who, a moment later, bursts into his room. Merrick does not give up the closeness between his mother’s photo and his own body when he leaves his refuge. Rather, he maintains it by carrying the photo with him, as he does when he visits the home of Dr Treves, the physician who takes care of him. Such behavior displays not only a typical fondness for photos of the beloved, but also belongs to “the order of fetishes in the ordinary sense of the word” (Metz 87). The high appreciation shown for a fetish stems from the fact that it serves as a substitute for an absent desired object. In Sigmund Freud’s theory of fetishism, this object is the mother’s missing penis (152–53). In the case of Lynch’s Merrick, it is the mother herself, the object the fetishized photo depicts. Because of his deformity, Merrick has been rejected by his mother psychologically as well as physically, but his fondest wish is to be reunited with her (Nochimson 136).

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a personal relationship, this gesture has less to do with giving an autograph, a practice still common among today’s celebrities, than with the older ritual of exchanging portraits. This exchange was limited to the aristocracy in an era when portraits were still being painted, but turned into a democratic mass phenomenon with André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri’s invention of the carte de visite photograph in 1854 (a small format that it seems characterizes the portrait of Merrick’s mother).4 Merrick is not able to complete the exchange of photos initiated by Mrs Kendal, since he has no portrait of himself to give in return. However, instead of hiding Mrs Kendal’s photo, as he did with that of his mother, Merrick puts it in a conspicuous spot. He places it on his bedside table, to which he had already moved his mother’s portrait. Merrick’s attainment of the normative application of photos has already reached its conclusion by the time he has two guests for tea, as this sequence opens with a camera track along the photographs of all his previous guests displayed in a row on his mantelpiece. By choosing the mantelpiece, Merrick has assigned these photos a place that is even more visible than his bedside table. The mantelpiece also exactly corresponds to the mantelpiece on which the Treves had placed their family photos, which makes clear that Merrick’s photographic socialization is a direct imitation of the Treves family. There remains one difference, though, for while the photographs of Dr and Mrs Treves show their own relatives, those of Merrick portray members of London’s high society. At first sight, Merrick simply seems to adopt a practice of his era here, which was primarily connected with carte de visite photography. The albums in which the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century collected their carte de visite photographs were filled not only with portraits of one’s own relatives, but also with those of celebrities, particularly those of actresses like Mrs Kendal. The analogy between Merrick’s photos and those of the Treves, however, also suggests that Merrick, who had been excluded from his actual family, has now found a substitute family, not only in the Treves, but in the entire Victorian upper class. This is not the only way in which Merrick’s association with photographs relates to the disruption of his own genealogy, which in turn is not restricted to that of his family. Merrick is also excluded from any human genealogy whatsoever, and instead is presented as being the offspring of an animal. By being labeled “the elephant man” in the freak show, he is transformed into a hybrid of man and elephant. This animalization is elaborated upon by the film itself, in which Merrick is identified with several fictitious animals. Based on the actual freak show of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in which many of the deformed bodies on display were declared a result of crossbreeding human beings with animals (Bogdan 106), Lynch’s film also explains Merrick’s resemblance to an elephant by his genesis from one. While Bytes, the showman exhibiting

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Merrick in the film’s freak show, merely ascribes his exhibit’s disfigurement to an elephant’s attack on his mother during her pregnancy with Merrick, the opening of the film dramatizes this attack as a rape resulting in Merrick’s conception (Seeßlen 48). The impression of rape is not only created by the analogy between the elephant’s trunk and a penis, but also by the wide opening of the mother’s mouth and the desperate tossing and turning of her head (Jerslev 105). Hence, not just Merrick’s deformation, but he himself seems to be produced by the elephant, which takes the place of his real, human father. Since the genealogy of an individual living in a patriarchal society is dependent on the paternal line, Merrick is thus of animal descent. Both the secret and the private application of photographs by Merrick must be understood as a reaction to these genealogical problems. A comparison between The Elephant Man and Barthes’s last book, Camera Lucida, suggests that Merrick’s fetishization of the maternal photo is caused by his genealogy’s interruption. Barthes regards his own genealogy as characterized by a twofold deviation, since it was, on the one hand, broken off by his own childlessness, and, on the other hand, inverted by the fact that he so lovingly cared for his mother during her gradual decline and eventual death (71–72). The enormous importance Barthes gives to a photo showing his mother as a child (the notion of the punctum, on which the whole book is centered, is derived from this photo) seems to be caused precisely by this double disruption of his genealogy. Obviously, Merrick’s devotion to his mother’s portrait is an analogous case. Merrick’s fetishization of the maternal portrait also serves as a restoration of his disrupted genealogy, because it corresponds to the treatment that, in the writings of Franz Kafka, is given to every portrait or photograph: that of an oedipalizing “form of expression” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 4). Merrick tries to return to his family by reterritorializing himself on his mother’s picture, just as Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis (1915), while involved in becoming a beetle clings to the portrait of a lady in furs and in this way tries to make “a plastic and still Oedipal incest with a maternal photo” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 5). By his gradual abandonment of the secret application of photographs, Merrick’s attempt to return into his own family is replaced by an effort for reintegration into humanity in general. Merrick’s efforts to collect and present photographic portraits do not only contribute to this rehumanization because these portraits represent members of the Victorian upper class who are willing to accept him as a human being. The practice also contributes to his rehumanization because it is a “civilized” way of treating photographs, because it is part of and mirrors a more general cultural and economic ascent from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie that undoes his animalization and reintegrates him into humankind.

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It is important to remark, though, that the variety of photographs represented in The Elephant Man is centered around a void. Although Merrick is surrounded by photographs, not one is of himself. There might be images of him that come close to being photographs, such as his shadow on the curtain that conceals him from the film spectator’s vision during his presentation in the anatomical theater, as well as several mirror images, despite Dr Treves’s interdiction on hanging a mirror in Merrick’s new apartment, which could confront his patient with his own monstrous appearance. However, an actual photograph of Merrick does not exist in The Elephant Man. Here, Lynch’s film disregards the historical facts in two ways. First, it ignores that not long after its invention at the beginning of the nineteenth century, photography made the production and consumption of portraits accessible to practically all sectors of the population.5 Even people with physical disabilities participated in portrait photography. At least, those among them who allowed themselves to be exhibited in freak shows were frequently photographed. These show freaks belonged to the ranks of the above-mentioned celebrities whose photographs were collected in middle-class households during the nineteenth century (Garland-Thomson 62; Bogdan 11–16). Neither in their exhibition nor in their photographic portraits were they presented exclusively as people with physical disabilities. Instead, they were cast in various fictitious roles and given corresponding imaginary genealogies. Interestingly enough, among these genealogies we also find those that Lynch’s Merrick is put into: animal as well as bourgeois genealogies. In the freak photography of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois genealogy was often created by means of a family portrait, in which the freak posed side-by-side with his marriage partner or his siblings and also with his children or parents, so that his lineage was visually documented (Bogdan 13). The bourgeois genealogy of Lynch’s Merrick might be fabricated outside the freak show proper and may even strive to contradict it, but is itself part of an exhibition that bears a strong resemblance to it. Second, the real Merrick not only surrounded himself with portrait photos of members of the British upper class (Howell and Ford 124–25; Graham and Oehlschlaeger 24–25), but was also often captured in photographs himself.6 In 1884, 1886, and 1888 medical photographs of Merrick were taken at London Hospital, which, from various perspectives, show complete views of his bare body as an example of an inexorably degenerative illness (Howell and Ford 38, 44, 89; Graham and Oehlschlaeger 15–16; Schmidt 92–97).7 Furthermore, in 1887 (Schmidt 96) or 1889 (Montague 25), Merrick was also portrayed in a half-length photograph of a completely different kind. In keeping with the style of contemporary studio portraits, this photo was an attempt at normalizing Merrick by presenting him in street clothes, which concealed large portions of his deformed

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body, and by providing him with typical bourgeois attributes such as a suit, a watch chain, and a ring (Schmidt 95–96). Though it did not originate within the context of Merrick’s exhibition in the freak show, but, like the medical images, at London Hospital, the half-length portrait corresponds to those freak show photographs that staged their freaks in a bourgeois fashion. Why does The Elephant Man exclude Merrick from the position of a photographed object, though in historical reality photographs existed of show freaks in general, and of Merrick in particular? In my view, the reason for this exclusion is that Lynch’s film subscribes to the idea that a portrait should not only depict an individual’s exterior shape, but also reveal, through this exterior surface, his inner self. This claim has also been applied to the photographic portrait. In the nineteenth century it was not only formulated by Nadar, who was praised for his artistry in photographic portraiture (Prinet and Dilasser 115–16). Although Disdéri, as inventor of the carte de visite photograph, has been little esteemed as a portraitist up to the present, he, too, strove to grasp not merely “les proportions et les formes de l’individu” (63), but also “le type, le caractère, les mœurs, l’âme ellemême” (64). In recent times, Barthes has demanded that a portrait photograph possess “the air [ . . . ] which induces from body to soul” (109). The part of the body generally regarded as expressive of the soul is the face. Merrick’s deformed body, however, does not possess a face, at least not a face that could be captured in a photograph. Admittedly, his sackcloth hood with the cutout opening meets the formal requirements of Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the face as a system consisting of a white wall and a black hole (Thousand Plateaus 167–91). However, the opening in Merrick’s hood does not represent a subject, since it combines the function of an eye with that of a mouth reduced to breathing and emitting inarticulate sounds. The hood itself does not serve as a surface for the application of signifiers, but as a veil that provokes a desire to remove it among the other characters. Merrick’s first textile veil conceals a second, carnal one, namely, a head that, due to its plasticity, heaviness, and sluggishness, is incapable of expressing Merrick’s interior. Hence, instead of a face, the elephant man possesses a head.8 By comparison, Lynch’s film itself does not refrain from depicting the monster. Though at the beginning the film withholds Merrick from the spectator’s gaze (Holladay and Watt 874–75; Chion 49; Jerslev 85) and instead represents him only by way of his formless sounds, it does so only to make his first visual appearance a quarter of the way into the film all the more effective. Later (for example, when Merrick, armed with opera glasses, lets his eye wander throughout the theater, or when he casts a last glance at his picture of a boy sleeping on his back, before following the picture’s example by lying down in bed as well), Merrick even obtains an expressive face. This expressiveness is the result of a miming that can

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only arise in motion and in interaction with another character, two conditions that can be represented only by a film, not a photograph. Thus, Lynch seems to exclude Merrick from the objects of photography in order to celebrate his inclusion in his own film all the more triumphantly. Film, not photography, The Elephant Man suggests, is the medium that is capable of representing the monster as a human subject. What gives the medium of film this privilege? To find an answer to this question it is helpful to turn at this point to The Elephant Man’s framework. This framework is not concerned with the development of an individual’s use of photographs, but with a development undergone by the medium of photography itself: its transformation into the medium of film. While Merrick’s changing usage of photographs is part of the diegesis of The Elephant Man, photography’s transformation into film is articulated by way of several specific assimilations of Lynch’s film itself to photography, which complement its above-mentioned global mimesis of this medium. The film opens with three shots that show nothing but the face of Merrick’s mother. In the first two shots, this face is completely motionless, and this motionlessness results from the fact that, strictly speaking, these shots do not represent the mother herself, but photographs of her. The photographs, initially purely visual, are combined with music in the style of a musical clock. This addition of sound begins to assimilate the mother’s photographs to the audiovisual medium of film. Sound was not only technically built into film in 1927, but was already combined with it from its beginnings. So-called silent films were actually never presented in silence, but always accompanied by music and sometimes even sound effects and speech. In the third shot of The Elephant Man, a slight movement of the mother’s head occurs. Since this movement could be caused either by a vibration of the film camera or by the slight motion that is common in a person posing for a photograph, it is difficult to decide if we are still dealing with a photograph of the mother here or actually with the mother herself posing for a photograph. This uncertainty is eliminated in the film’s fourth shot. Separated from the third shot by a fade-out and fade-in, it shows a herd of elephants passing by. Here, the object in front of the camera, which was clearly static in the first two shots, is finally set in motion. Thus, the image has obtained a second feature that distinguishes film from photography: the capability of reproducing motion. This is emphasized by the fact that the lateral movement of one elephant following another resembles the succession of film frames. The shot also points to the historical transition from photography to film in the late nineteenth century, since the procession of the elephants reminds the viewer of those chronophotographic motion studies of animals that made an essential contribution to this transition.

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Lynch’s film then proceeds to the technical prerequisites necessary for the cinematic reproduction of motion. It demonstrates the objective, material basis underlying the subjective impression of one continuously moving image: the discontinuous succession of several discrete pictures. The elephants’ parade is superimposed with another image of the mother’s face and then stopped in a freeze frame. Since in many films, for instance in Robert Siodmak’s Menschen am Sonntag (1929), a freezing of the image is used to signal the taking of a photograph (Sontag 70), the arresting of the elephants seems to take us back to photography. But here, in fact, the herd is stopped in such a way that two of the elephants divide the maternal face into its right and left halves. This splitting of the image alludes to the decomposition of a movement into a sequence of instantaneous exposures that constitutes the first step to a cinematic reproduction of this movement. This is supported by the fact that the superimposition imparts a cinematic character to the image of the maternal face for another reason. Whereas in the preceding shot the mother posed for or in a photograph and was therefore an object to be viewed, in this shot she is an actively viewing subject. Since the object she looks at is precisely the herd of elephants onto which her image is being superimposed, the superimposition simultaneously presents the subject and the object of a gaze. This technique, called “interface” by Slavoj Žižek (39–54), is a variant of that kind of shot-countershot sequence in which a viewing subject and an object being viewed are shown successively. Like this kind of shot-countershot sequence, the interface fills a picture’s hors champ, a characteristic of film as opposed to photography, which generally leaves the hors champ empty (Metz 85–88). In addition, an interface is only comprehensible for someone familiar with the shot-countershot technique in question, which is extensively used in cinema, but not in photography, where it can be applied to serial photography at best. The second step to the cinematic reproduction of a movement is demonstrated in The Elephant Man’s subsequent shot-countershot sequence, which alternates between the elephants approaching the camera and the mother hurled onto the ground and desperately throwing her head back and forth. Since the throwing of the head is slow and at the same time blurred, it seems to be produced not by ordinary slow motion, but by a dissolve of freeze frames — a type of image that is extensively used in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1963) and that Philippe Dubois, in a brilliant analysis of this film, has called “cinématogramme” (38–39). The motion of these cinématogrammes is characterized by a relative discontinuity, which points to the strictly discontinuous succession in which the instantaneous photographs of a movement are arranged to complete the cinematic reproduction of this movement. The second part of The Elephant Man’s framework returns to the mother to enable her to speak for the first time. This not only complements the mother’s

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face with her voice, which is as important to a newborn child as her face, but also brings photography’s transformation into film, as begun in the framework’s first section, to a double conclusion. The first conclusion refers to the image’s mobilization, which at the film’s beginning is halting, but by the end becomes fluid. While the tossing of the mother’s head was discontinuous, her speaking lips move continuously. The second is related to the image’s combination with sound. The first images of the mother’s face were only accompanied by music and noise — the added musical clock tune already mentioned, and the noise of a baby’s crying — which were subordinate to the pictures. Furthermore, since the visible and the audible simply connoted the same period, Merrick’s childhood, they were only loosely connected with each other. Therefore, like the sounds of silent film, those in the first part of The Elephant Man’s framework were nondiegetic. By comparison, the sound presented at the end of Lynch’s film consists of articulate and meaningful speech and is therefore as important as the image. This importance is stressed by the fact that the mother’s voice is heard even before her face appears. In addition, since we see and hear the mother speak, image and sound emanate from the same spatial source and are temporally coordinated. Thus, in its second part, the framework includes diegetic and even lip-synched sound, which was historically introduced only with the technical implementation of sound film. The Elephant Man’s framework is not only concerned with film’s genesis from photography, but also with the beginning and end of Merrick’s life. As described above, the framework’s first part, with which the film begins, depicts Merrick’s conception through his mother’s collision with an elephant. Merrick’s evolution in his mother’s womb is also symbolized in the swelling of a cloud and his birth is alluded to by means of the baby’s crying already mentioned. Correspondingly, the film’s conclusion narrates Merrick’s double end, the end of his rehumanizing formative process as well as the end of his life. After having been applauded by the exponents of the Victorian upper class at the theater and thus accepted as one of their equals for good, Merrick fulfills his long-cherished wish to sleep, like a “normal” human being, on his back, as indicated above. Since in this position his big and heavy head prevents him from breathing, Merrick’s identification with his ideal-ego brings about his death, just as, according to Jacques Lacan, every identification with one’s ideal-ego results in death (whether that of the subject or the small other). In the subsequent second section of the film’s framework, however, which presents the postmortem vision of the speaking mother described above, Merrick’s greatest wish comes true as well. In death, he is eventually reunified with his mother. The interweaving of Merrick’s life and film’s development from photography

How can one draw such an analogy between Merrick’s genesis and that of the cinema, and what is meant by the “monstrosity” of the latter? The answer offered by Lynch’s film is that both Merrick’s origin and that of film are divided and derivative. Merrick’s origin is divided insofar as the film’s final credits name two actresses as playing “Merrick’s Mother,” Phoebe Nicholls and Lydia Lisle. The first, Nicholls, is identified by Seeßlen as Merrick’s mother tout court, and the second, Lisle, plays his mother in the epilogue (186–87). Besides, each of the four times the mother appears in the opening sequence her age and physiognomy vary to such a high degree that the viewer is encouraged to assume he is not confronted with one woman but with four.9 The elephant man’s origin is derivative because while Lynch’s film presents various images of his mother in its nonrealistic framework, it never shows the mother herself, who remains persistently absent from its realistic middle part. While Merrick is a referent without a photograph, his mother is a photograph without a referent. And while his human father is replaced by an animal father, Merrick’s photographic portrait of his mother substitutes for her. The identity of Merrick’s mother is therefore no less questionable than that of his father. It is impossible to verify if the person on Merrick’s photograph is really his mother or another woman he merely passes off as being her. Thus, the mother is constructed by her own son, so that the origin is paradoxically dependent on its own offspring. Likewise, the origin of film appears as divided insofar as photography is not the only medium represented in The Elephant Man, but is joined by several others, namely, graphic art, architecture, the mime theater, and the freak show. The latter two media belonged to those institutions of popular entertainment that, on the textual as well as the contextual level, were more influential on early cinema than the legitimate arts, as the revisionist historiography of early film has demonstrated (Burch 63, 138; Gunning, “Non-Continuous Style” 220; Gunning, “ ‘Primitive’ Cinema” 5). Therefore, by including the freak show and the mime

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points to the historical coincidence of these two things. The sequence in The Elephant Man during which Merrick passes away and then his mother’s face completes its transformation from a photographic picture into a cinematic one exactly mirrors the real chronology, in which Merrick died in 1890 and cinema was invented in the years immediately following. More important, however, the intertwining of Merrick’s genesis and that of film draws an analogy between the two. It suggests that, just as Merrick is not his parents’ legitimate offspring but a monstrous deviation, film is also not photography’s legitimate descendent but a monstrous one. The Elephant Man’s assertion that only film is capable of giving an adequate representation of the monster is precisely founded in this monstrous descent of the cinematic medium.

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theater, Lynch’s film complements photography with two other predecessors of cinema.10 The photographic origin of film presents itself as derivative in The Elephant Man because a closer look at the shot of the mother’s face being divided into its two halves by its superimposition upon the elephants’ parade reveals that this shot does not only receive its cinematic character from the superimposition, but already intrinsically possesses it. A picture showing nothing but a subject looking at something beyond its boundaries is not typical of photography but of cinematography, which, due to its possibilities of reframing (moving the camera and editing), is capable of revealing the object being viewed at any time. Hence, if the operation of dividing a continuum into discontinuous units, which is the first precondition for the production of a film, is applied here to the image of the mother’s gazing, it is applied to an image that is already cinematic in itself. This calls our attention to a derivation of cinema’s origin that always comes into play when a film makes use of a freeze frame, a technique also found in The Elephant Man. Here, the medium of film comes closest to photography but fails to reach it, since a freeze frame is distinguished from a photograph by its limited duration. Moreover, as Joachim Paech has noted, this duration is filled with the constant repetition of the same frame, which might be invisible to the film’s spectator, but nevertheless constitutes an objective motion (459–60). The freeze frame therefore only seems to be a film’s foundation, but actually presupposes it. Historically, too, photography is cinema’s origin only in a derivative sense, since it was regarded as such only after the invention of film. Even toward the end of the nineteenth century when the gradual alteration of certain features of photography finally brought about the emergence of cinema, the latter medium was not considered a compelling advancement of the former. On the contrary, several of those chronophotographers of the late nineteenth century who are usually counted among the inventors of cinema actually remained quite indifferent to it, because they were not concerned with the representation and illusion of motion, but with the arresting and analysis of it. Though Constance Penley’s claim that this view was held by Eadweard Muybridge is unfounded (32), it was undoubtedly taken by Étienne-Jules Marey and Albert Londe (Braun 255–56; Gunning, “In Your Face” 17, 20). Also, Thomas Alva Edison, one of cinema’s most important supporters, imagined this medium not as an advancement of photography, but rather of the phonograph. By designing the Kinetoscope, Edison did not want to mobilize photography, but complement the phonograph’s recording of sounds with the storage of visual data (Berg 52). Finally, The Elephant Man disrupts the evolution from photography to film because, contrary to what was suggested above, the film’s framework presents a clear progression from one medium to the other only with regard to the combi-

Nevertheless, Merrick’s and the film’s monstrous genealogies are counterbalanced by the fact that the framework of Lynch’s film delineates two further developments, which constitute neither the reproduction of one body in another nor the transformation of one medium into another, but rather a transcendation of all corporeal and medial materiality, as such, in favor of a paradoxical immateriality. The mother’s pictures shown in the middle section of The Elephant Man generally appear as material objects with definite spatial extensions, limitations, and locations. There is only one exception to this rule, in which the maternal picture is partially detached from its material foundation and assimilated to an immaterial imago. In the sequence of the older couple’s visit to Merrick, the latter praises his mother’s great beauty, just as he did in the sequence of his own visit to the Treves’s home. Once again, this praise is substantiated by a picture of the mother. However, while on the occasion of Merrick’s visit to the Treves the picture was presented by himself, during the couple’s visit to him it is not. Hence, it no longer appears as a material, spatially located object. This detachment from physical space is increased by the fact that the picture fills the entire image field, such that its boundaries disappear in the hors champ. In this way, the picture’s spatial limitation is dissolved as well. On the other hand, a pan from the mother’s mouth to her right eye accentuates the image’s spatial extension.

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nation of image and sound. With respect to motion, however, its various images hybridizing photography and film are arranged in a way that negates any linear and teleological order. Between the film’s first two shots, only the second one is completely motionless, since here not only the mother’s face but also the camera remains static. In the first shot, however, the camera pans from the mother’s eyes to her mouth, a motion that subverts the idea of a linear progression in the mobilization of the image in two ways. First, The Elephant Man does not proceed from motionlessness to motion, but starts with motion, stops it, and resumes it. Second, film history’s transition from a movement of objects in the picture to a movement of the picture itself is inverted. In The Elephant Man, what moves first is neither the mother’s head nor the elephant herd, but the camera. Likewise, the technological precedence of an objective discontinuous motion over a subjective continuous one is thwarted by the fact that the latter is attained in The Elephant Man’s framework long before the mother speaks in its second part. All movements in the film’s first three shots, which appear before the discontinuous tossing of the mother’s head, are continuous. Finally, the head-tossing is not the first discontinuous motion in The Elephant Man. Instead, discontinuity is already a characteristic of the elephants’ marching, which precedes the division of the mother’s face. In this way, the technological progress from dividing a whole to arranging its parts in a sequence is subverted as well.

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Moreover, this scanning of the picture aims at penetrating into the referent lying behind it. This attempt is thwarted by the materiality of the picture, which does not betray its referent’s mystery. Finally, the image is still anchored in a subject, namely, in Merrick, who either remembers or imagines it. Though The Elephant Man’s framework at one point turns the mother’s face into a disfigured head, it also takes up the partial dematerialization of her picture and intensifies it. Like the other developments within the framework, this intensification, too, begins in its first part and concludes in the second one. The most material of all maternal pictures included in the framework is the one presented in the film’s second shot, which is spatially limited by a picture frame. However, even this picture is already partially de-materialized, since its frame is surrounded by total blackness, which negates any spatial orientation. The first and the third shot are characterized by the same ambiguity as the aforementioned shot of the mother’s picture from the film’s middle section. On the one hand, the spatial extension of the mother’s picture is once again emphasized by movements of the camera, which pans downward in the first shot and tracks forward in the third. Also, the attempt at solving the mother’s mystery is once more impeded by the materiality of her picture. On the other hand, both shots completely fill the screen with the mother’s portrait, which is thus freed from its borders. In the second part of The Elephant Man’s framework, Merrick can be reunified with his mother because his death has liberated him from his body and thus from the obstacle that had separated him from her. Likewise, the paradoxical dematerialization of the “mater,” the etymological origin of the word “matter,” is concluded in several ways. While the framework’s first section shows not only the mother’s face, but also parts of her chest, her face is completely isolated from the rest of her body when it appears in Merrick’s postmortem vision. Also, the dissolution of the maternal picture’s borders takes a more radical shape here than at the beginning of Lynch’s film. Instead of being banished to the hors champ of the film’s image field, the picture’s frame is now removed within this image field, which moreover shows a space that could not be more unbounded, namely, cosmic space (Nochimson 147). The frame is replaced by a white circle at first, but then this circle disappears as well. Besides, the circle does not separate the mother’s face from the ambient space but seems to radiate from the face itself, which thus gives the impression of spreading out in the universe. Finally, whereas its superimposition upon the image of the elephants in the framework’s first part transformed the maternal face into a head, its superimposition upon the nocturnal sky conversely lends it the semblance of transparency and weightlessness. At first sight, this dissolution of materiality unequivocally points to the past. Since it is connected with Merrick’s regression to his imaginary primordial unity with his mother, it is related to the elephant man’s ontogenetic past. And since

Notes A longer version of this essay has been published in Journal of European Popular Culture 1:1 (Autumn 2010). Copyright for this version are held by Intellect. 1. The gradation of greys between black and white was only refined after the discovery of the sensitizers in the 1870s and 1880s (Koschatzky 104), and a commercial method of color photography was not developed before 1935 (Koschatzky 189). 2. The features Metz regards as common to the photo and the fetish are privacy (81–82), silence, immobility, and timelessness (83), a suitability for being touched (88), an immediate but definitive constitution (84), an ambiguity between turning away and remembering (82, 84–86), and a peculiar capability of suggesting the presence of an absent object (88). If we relate two remarks to each other made in isolation in Metz’s essay “Photography and Fetish,” we obtain yet another analogy. Both the photograph (82–83) and the fetish (86) are connected to the objects they represent by spatiotemporal contiguity. 3. The only aspect of this ritual Merrick cannot comply with is the presentation of a

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Merrick’s mother appears as a relic from an era during which the bourgeois values of exchange and progress and the technology of photography had not yet existed, we are also dealing with a phylogenetic regression. While her own words turn the mother into the representative of an archaic matriarchy, her visual presentation corresponds to that of traditional sacred paintings. Being placed in the celestial sky, the mother is at first veiled by the curtain of Merrick’s window, then enclosed in a white circle resembling an aureole and finally covered by a cloud. She is thus endowed with typical features of eschatological pictures, whose presentation likewise made use of the celestial sky, the aureole and the veil. Above all, the immateriality that is given to the final appearance of Merrick’s mother was already imputed to sacred paintings as well. However, the semblance of immateriality attained at the conclusion of The Elephant Man is not only shared by a kind of image that historically precedes photography, but also by the cinematic image succeeding it. Aside from the fact that this image is actually immaterial when projected onto a screen, the cinematic apparatus and the codes of classical narrative cinema make every effort to disguise the cinematic picture’s own existence, which, if noticed by the spectator, would allow him to distinguish this picture from the objects depicted in it. By interweaving the transformation of photography into film not only with the monster’s genesis, but also with the transcendation of any materiality whatsoever, The Elephant Man promotes this imaginary view of film as an immaterial medium. Cinema thus appears as superior to photography in Lynch’s film not only because it alone is capable of representing the monster as human, but also because it is a medium that, paradoxically, possesses immediacy.

photograph of himself, since he does not have any such photo and since such a photo does not even exist — a peculiar absence I will return to. 4. The ritual of exchanging photographic portraits is obviously a variation on the ritual

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of exchanging looks at each other’s portraits, which was described above. Perhaps the latter ritual, which is still practised today, is a remnant of the former one, which was only

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existent in the nineteenth century. 5. This view is taken by most historians of photography, for example by Beaumont Newhall (46–57) and John Tagg (34–59). 6. These photos served as a basis for the makeup of the actor playing Merrick in Lynch’s film (Norden 282). 7. The photograph taken in 1884 was used by the real Treves as an illustration of his lecture on Merrick at the Pathological Society of London (Graham and Oehlschlaeger 15), which was given in Merrick’s absence (Howell and Ford 41). Merrick was thus replaced by his photographic representation, just as during the scene of his presentation in the medical auditorium, the viewer of The Elephant Man is only allowed a glimpse of his shadow on the curtains surrounding him. 8. Merrick’s deformed head is already anticipated by the visual disfigurement of his mother’s face during the attack of the elephant that produces Merrick, respectively Merrick’s deformation. When the parading elephants are arrested and superimposed with the maternal face, their contours bestow a peculiar convexity upon the forehead, which turns the face into a head. This head is then contorted by the mother’s opening her mouth wide to scream and smudged by her tossing and turning of it. Both kinds of disfigurement are already deployed in Francis Bacon’s paintings, which not only served Deleuze (15) in explaining the difference between the face and the head, but also influenced Lynch as a young art student (Nochimson 7–11, 16–17, 21–27). 9. This multiplication is taken up in the film’s middle part, for here, Merrick’s real mother is complemented by a symbolic one. Moreover, this symbolic mother, like the real one, is split herself, namely, in Mrs Treves and Mrs Kendal. Though at her first visit in the hospital, the popular actress assumes the role of Merrick’s mistress by exchanging verses from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595) with him, she later introduces him to the audience of Puss in Boots in the way a proud mother would present her son. 10. Even on the strictly technical level, photography is not the only origin of film, but rather one origin among others, as Charles Berg has argued (48–49). Among the other technologies absorbed into film the two most important ones are the magic lantern, which dates from the seventeenth century, and several stroboscopic apparatuses invented during the nineteenth century. From the magic lantern, film adopted the principle of projection, while the stroboscopic tools already took advantage of the human eye’s sluggishness to melt several separate pictures into one image, a technique that in some cases was even employed to produce the illusion of a continuous motion. Beyond the purely technical, the impression of a continuous movement, seriality, and narration are further elements that were already included in the magic lantern and later became important elements of film.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Berg, Charles. “Film and Photography.” In Film and the Arts in Symbiosis: A Resource Guide, ed. Gary R. Edgerton. New York: Greenwood, 1988. 47–64. University of Chicago Press, 1988. Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Burch, Noël. Life to Those Shadows. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Chion, Michel. David Lynch. London: BFI, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London: Continuum, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.  ——   —    . A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Disdéri, André Adolphe Eugène. Essai sur l’art de la photographie. Paris: Séguier, 2003. Dubois, Philippe. “La Jetée de Chris Marker ou le cinématogramme de la conscience.” In Théorème: Recherches sur Chris Marker, ed. Philippe Dubois. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002. 8–45. Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21, ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press/Institute of PsychoAnalysis, 1961. 147–57. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Graham, Peter W., and Oehlschlaeger, Fritz H. Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Gunning, Tom. “The Non-Continuous Style of Early Film 1900–1906.” In Cinema 1900/1906: An Analytical Study, Vol. 1, ed. Roger Holman. Brussels: FIAF 1982. 219–29.  ——   —    . “ ‘Primitive’ Cinema — A Frame-up? Or The Trick’s on Us.” Cinema Journal 28:2 (Winter 1989): 3–12.  ——   —    . “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film.” Modernism/Modernity 4:1 (January 1997): 1–29. Holladay, William E., and Watt, Stephen. “Viewing the Elephant Man.” PMLA 104:5 (October 1989): 868–81. Howell, Michael, and Ford, Peter. The True History of the Elephant Man. Middlesex: Penguin, 1980. Jerslev, Anne. David Lynch: Mentale Landschaften. Vienna: Passagen, 1996. Kawin, Bruce. “The Elephant Man.” Film Quarterly 34:4 (Summer 1981): 21–25. Kember, Joe. “David Lynch and the Mug Shot: Facework in The Elephant Man and The Straight Story.” In The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davison. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. 19–34.

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Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago:

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Koschatzky, Walter. Die Kunst der Photographie: Technik, Geschichte, Meisterwerke. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987. McDonagh, Maitland. “The Enigma of David Lynch.” Persistence of Vision 6 (Summer 1988):

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67–82. Metz, Christian. “Photography and Fetish.” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 81–90.

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Montague, Ashley. The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity. Lafayette: Acadian House Publishing, 2001. Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography. London: Secker & Warburg, 1972. Nochimson, Martha P. The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Norden, Martin F. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Paech, Joachim. “Intermedialität.” In Texte zur Theorie des Films, ed. Franz-Josef Albersmeier. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998. 447–75. Penley, Constance. “L’Imaginaire de la photographie dans la théorie du cinéma.” Photographies 4 (April 1984): 32–34. Prinet, Jean, and Dilasser, Antoinette. Nadar. Paris: Armand Colin, 1966. Schmidt, Gunnar. Anamorphotische Körper: Medizinische Bilder vom Menschen im 19. Jahrhundert. Cologne: Böhlau, 2001. Seeßlen, Georg. David Lynch und seine Filme. Marburg: Schüren, 1994. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983. Žižek, Slavoj. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzyzstof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-Theory. London: BFI, 2001.

laughs M i c h el S er r es

The Misappropriated Jewels, or A Close Shave for the Prima Donna

Signora Castafiore sings the great Jewel Song. In comes a magpie, who steals the jewels. The rest of the music is an awful cacophony. It’s the hold-up of the century: the voice has been embezzled, speech cheated, communication depreciated — things as precious as all the corundum and beryl of the golcondas. The fable is profound and without ostentation. What if philosophy were no longer where we’d normally look for it? While philosophy writhes in agony in the night of esoterism, the comic strip openly demonstrates the gaping wounds of our discourse; the pasty mouth, wax in the ears, broken channels, a great powerlessness in hearing or being heard, the loss of a koine beyond stereotypes and regional languages. Comics have produced their Treatise on Monadic Solitude: so know where to instruct yourself and what to ponder on. Shame on the learned, the profound, the theoretical, the unreadable, the crepuscular, the inaccessible — shame on all those who multiply and outbid our vital dramas into an intersubjective deafness. The Castafiore Emerald is the contemporary monadology.1 The treasure’s at the bottom of the chattering magpie’s nest, or the diva’s jewel box. They don’t know what to make of it. And they don’t stop making noise, so here are pictures for the blind, noise for the deaf. The adventure’s over. No more seekers for black gold, drug traffickers, counterfeiters, ethnologists in the

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land of the Incas, abominable snowman of the Himalayas, stolen scepter, or lunar voyage. Red Rackham’s treasure island, whose end Borges told in his History of lnfamy, is lost. Jules Verne and Stevenson disappear. Childhood’s over. Even in those days, the treasure was at home, hidden, awaiting the hero’s return from the trip round the world. It’s still there. The old sea-dog’s retired now, the hero’s finished his exploits, the professor tends his garden. Life at the hall. The world comes beating at its closure, just as the sea menaces the island to the rhythm of the tides. Closed: Moulinserre.2 The scene: Marlinspike. Again, the most important detail is the staircase. In Zola, the old setting between court and garden was the stage floor where the folk and the bourgeoisie blindly crossed paths. The drama took place at the dividing line. Marlinspike’s staircase has a symbolic function: it is the central route that everyone uses and has to use in order to leave, open the door, go into the village — and it has a broken step. Necessity forces accident. The channel’s blocked, communication’s interrupted. Putting it another way: every given or constructed means or technique of interaction with others is broken irreparably. Bolt the handyman never seems to arrive, but when at last he does, the accidents begin all over again. Interception. Jump to the last panel: the broken step, the captain sprawled among the debris, the space occupied by the flight of marble stairs. Surrounding the scene are three birds: the owl, the parrot, and the magpie that was watching over the country walk from high up in the first frame. The thieving, chattering magpie, the bird of the opera, opens and closes the movement. The three birds speak: hooting, chattering, imitating. Notice Bianca Castafiore’s profile (she’s never presented full-faced): an old barn owl, magpie, parrot? In his nightmare the sailor decides: the parakeet on stage, and himself naked in an audience of popinjays. Oh to be a cabin-boy again, clambering up the mainsails. Now the old owl sings La gazzaladra. Thus Signora Castafiore in three metamorphoses, three talking birds: Signora Castafiore, who alone doesn’t take a fall on the staircase, who speaks to everyone and listens to nothing, who has the treasure and hides it without insurance. Whence the principal characters of the farce: a magpie, a staircase, a parrot, personifications of language. Lost treasure, short change. Only the deaf professor, as oblivious to noise as he is to sense, will know how to change Bianca into what she should be: the white rose. The Diva sings, and loses the Jewels: a cyclone. She vocalizes: noise from the deep. She talks. She is metamorphosed into three birds, and transforms her interlocutors into different characters, makes them explode, dismembers them, kills them, annihilates them, and mismatches words and names. The Charles I furniture vanishes into the style of Henry X, that is into nothing, under the fairy Carabossa’s wand. Look where life assurance gets you. The professor, who went to the moon, becomes a balloonist: she’s not interested in him. The butler,

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otherwise Nestor the sage, is digested into Norbert or Prosper. The most affected by the tornado is the old sea-dog, the host whose house is invaded. Bitten by the gypsy girl and the parrot (note the passage: the bird’s name is Coco, and the two journalists from Paris-Flash call each other “mon coco”), bitten on the hand, the finger, on the nose, stung by a bee hidden in a rose, hit by a spotlight, his ankle sprained, an invalid, his limbs are nothing but a doll’s. Drunk, he defends himself as best he can, in the struggle for naming and recognition, calling her Castafiole, but going so far as to call her Catastrophe. She is at the summit of the chain of communication, he is wounded, battered and bruised, right at the bottom of the staircase. Here are the pieces: Bartock (she is a musician), Hammock (of death?), Holback (obey!), Carbock and Medock (bear and wine), Karnack (petrified), Kodak (no journalists!), Mastock (thick, gross, imbecile), Kornach, Balzac, Maggock and Kapstock, Gog and Magog, Captain Cap and Coke in stock: Fatstock, Drydock, Hopscotch, Stopcock, Halibut, Paddock, Maggot, Padlock . . . At the source anything (or almost) can be emitted, everything will be scrambled at reception. Language, fragmented, defeats. The broken marble in the middle of the way, the accident, the injury. Who’s speaking? Who’s answering? The space is full of the noise of Beethovian Igor (Stravinsky) Wagner’s scales, or of vocalizations. The phone rings. Bartock answers: hello, I can hear you. At the same time, Coco repeats it. The call isn’t meant for Marlinspike, but for Cutts the butcher. The parrot repeats the ringing. Haddock swears at the bird. At the other end of the line, the woman calling takes the insult as meant for her. She retaliates. A dispute. Another dispute between the captain and the bird of the islands. In the end, the parrot bites, and the background noise emits false notes and trills. The reckoning: an error in emission, a false dialogue, a misunderstanding, an injury at reception, message nil; terminal injury: catachresis, which consists in altering the proper sense of a word, a final victory to noise. I’m going mad . . . The scene here is the model for all of the text, and generalizes the image of the staircase. Why make the effort to listen or to emit sense? Every message is cancelled. It’s enough to say: What was it? What happened? What are the supports of general catachresis, of catastrophe? The text takes the form of a Treatise, because they are all there and carefully presented, at emission and at reception: animal cries, sound and music, language, as well as the ensemble of techniques of transport and diffusion, the mass media as they’re called. Wagner’s scales fill the hall. The hearers assume he’s at his piano. In fact, a tape recorder has been substituted for the pianist: the repeater instead of the repetition. No one emitting. At the reception, pure noise. In the course of the message, Bianca has a clear view of Igor speaking at some distance from his instrument, and she persuades herself that he’s playing the arpeggios she hears.

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Voice intercepts vision and confuses it. Communication is nil, cancelled: without origin or end, deprived of content and meaning, noise enough to hamper any dialogue. The message, contrary to one of its functions, covers the absence of the thing it testifies to. Who’s speaking? Nobody. At the source, the subject has escaped by the ladder — not by the staircase — to do some gambling. To place his bets, Wagner phones: Sugarplum, Oriana, Semiramis, and checks by having them repeated to him. From which the reader concludes an S.O.S., the distress signal, at least in adventure stories: a new catachresis. The play of the telephone: the important thing here isn’t the loss of the message, roughly calculated; it’s that the transformation describes the form of the chain, its lengths and its twists. Entropy grows by means of tropes. Multiply the detours, mediations and codes, and you lose the treasure on the way. Who’s made off with it? The magpie, for sure, the chatterer, that is language’s excess with respect to itself. Gongora says nothing but gongorisms. This is our normal situation: technological or learned language no longer speaks of anything but itself, in an enormous effect of narcissism, when not so long ago it was known only for its ability to see. Language speaks language and trope speaks trope, the route speaks of the route, the vehicle makes the journey and loses its load, its ballast and its reason, eating up the kilometers. Closed in on itself, the network of communication tends to communicate the form of its network at every point on the way, just as the world it replaces admired itself in every part. It’s no use transporting just anything: the space of transports is ubiquitous. But let’s get back to the play of the telephone. First of all, a call without a message: pure signal. Nobody at its source, nobody at the other end, nothing on the way. An aleatory clamor that runs from place to place. Then there is the game of errors, and after that, of errancy. If you ask for Bolt, you get Cutts; inversely, whoever wants Cutts gets the hall. Error is displaced from emission to reception. Pray to St. Nicholas to deliver the travelers from the butcher’s salting tub. Speak now, the line’s open. You can lie, ears don’t have eyes: my husband’s away, he’s there in his chair reading the paper. Emission, omission. You can announce: tomorrow, first thing, without fail. Emission, promise. I’ve had a cold, I had to go to my girlfriend’s brother’s wedding, I’ve gone on leave. The defiles at the end of the line. No, I’m not speaking to you, I’m speaking to myself, to the parrot; no, I didn’t say “I’m listening,” it was the bird . . . and those scales, those scales . . . Reception, interceptions. Why are you congratulating me? You’re hiding your moves. A misunderstanding of the message’s object, not of its interlocutors. Reception, deception. Multiply the media, put them in series: the journalists are on the phone, then the television crew. The call’s taken, even though it’s forbidden. A break, but reception nonetheless. All that’s left is to hang up in a rage. The program of misfires and errors is complete. Never is a single dialogue initiated or carried through suc-

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cessfully. So who’s responsible for: “Rrring! Hello? I can hear you”? The parrot, of course. Now here’s the barbarian invasion. Cables, spotlights, cameras, general upheaval. The television crew is late. A sign that it doesn’t so easily overcome distance. Caught in a traffic jam (there’s a bottleneck, circulation isn’t fluid in this infernal bottle) on the outskirts of the village, the crew lost its way and then had a breakdown. There are the same traps on the highways as there are on the phone lines. Whether you know the way or not, whether your car’s in good shape or not, if you’ve got the same chances as anyone else, then neither you nor anyone else is going to get there except increasingly late. From a maximum possible communication, a minimum real result. Our world is full of these inversions. For example: the radio announces that the Place de la Bastille is congested. Drive there without delay, for that very information is going to free it. Suppose my recommendation has been heard by a lot of people: the principle of inversion dictates that what’s true at the point of emission, then widely diffused, becomes false at the point of reception: the obstacle’s re-established. So, don’t go to the Bastille. But then again, if everyone’s heard the previous announcement, go. And so on. False, true, false, true . . . Everything’s reversed between the listener and the source. Who’s speaking from now on? Epimenides himself, Epimenides the liar. This is Crete. It’s less a question of communication than of circulation: it goes round and round. From which it follows that the bridges and roadways are something like a language or a model of speech. Signalized or punctuated: traversed by ideograms, emblems, signals, as it were; cut by accidents, like mistakes and lapses; with unique meanings, false meanings, counter-meanings; plotted on maps and guarded by a code: prescriptive and normative grammar; a logic of sense, as rigorous a repression; a sanctioning of the policing of usage and thieving institutionals and academics; formed by roads which all lead to Rome, Milan, or Marlinspike, saturated with turns and tropes, detours and metaphors, dangers and catachreses, shortcuts and litotes. Look at how the interchanges distribute meaning like a dictionary. Everything rolls on, speaks, goes round and round. They drive like they speak: braggarts, cocks of the walk, rivals, gross, cruel, likely to bite, timid, obedient, sheeplike, repressed, overcome by red fires and forbidden meanings. The comparison’s as fruitful as you want. The Thom(p)son Twins spoonerize, stammer, repeat and accumulate their verbal blunders: their “two-horsepower” wipes itself out on the television truck. Wagner, the humble, effacing, and silent accompanist, leaves for the village on the bike. Haddock, the most dismembered by catachresis, takes his sprain, plaster and bandages for a stroll in a wheelchair. The furniture mover is called Cracq, like the rhodomontane baron; and the cargo is destroyed en route. Nothing tries to reach a goal, there’s only showing off a beautiful vehicle, taking a long trip, taking side tours,

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creeping in and out of traffic: tourism in literature. Language, my lovely auto: auto-satisfaction, and hierarchy. To have a chauffeur, and a secretary to write your speeches: someone to speak and drive for you. The gypsies in their caravan share a strange tongue. Epimenides has the floor: television is here. Turn (it on). Calculus mistakes emission for reception. He intervenes, and by that intercepts. Perception, interception. He stumbles over the television cables; one path blocks the other. The ways congest at the crossroads. Note that he’s deaf: he doesn’t understand misunderstanding. Whence his anger: nobody ever tells me anything. But what use would it be to hear, since the sailor dreams of an America before Christopher Columbus, when the trails weren’t yet blazed, and runs for cover at the first notes. Turn it on and it speaks: Captain Balzac, the Gounod opera, my glory, I’m divine, yes, I am magisterial . . . she sings that she’s so beautiful in this mirror: perception, exception, communication, there and there alone she succeeds, going round and round in the narcissism of the moment: she succeeds in repeating another’s words: let’s admit it, nowadays there are only interpreters. But the bird intervenes, and puts a false note into the melody. Note that it’s a parrot: it doesn’t understand much, and repeats “I can hear you.” Two good televiewers, the deaf man and the parakeet. A new interception. Turn again. The Jewel song: my beauty past compare . . . power failure. Interruption, everyone is blind, the beautiful and the ugly alike. The jewels lie hidden, the treasure can’t be regained, it’s lost on the way. Someone puts in a new fuse. Things get turning again. Irma re-interrupts with the truth of the whole affair: the jewels are gone. Stops en route, breaks in emission, power failure, and now heart attacks: a general disappearance. Due to accidents everywhere the jewels are stolen. Full of insinuations, the detectives make enquiries. The jewels? I was sitting here. Owner and thief both, a bungler’s voice, a financier’s anxiety. Oh well, sing away. Or go out instead into the silent forest, listen to the nostalgic guitar of the Others, the camp-setters, the excluded, the quarantined turned out into the garbage tip, the great rural plaint of the poor, the people of the Journey. Emission is cut as many times as there are deafnesses, parrotries, and false news. Which is as much as to say that transmission is poor, let’s say paltry. Let’s see about reception. The professor has just built the Super-Calcalcolor. It’s not just by chance that Tryphon (Calculus’s name in the French text) was an Alexandrian grammarian. To the ear, the message is stuffed full of untruths, blunders, imbecilities, pure noise. To the eye, the spectacle is utterly fantastic: an atomism of colors, continually deformed waves, shattered images; staircaselike cuts in horizontal, diagonal, and vertical bands, multiple distributions of the same object, reversals, symmetries, superimpositions and doublings, mirror series in the style of Grevin, aleatory constellations, blurred homomorphisms . . .

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the program is complete, made up of the usual transformations of the thing transmitted. In a page or two, a resume, sorry, a synopsis of our techniques of expression, our virtuosity in the variety of means of covering up, of analyzing to uncover. Take your pick: add, subtract, double, multiply, divide, decompose into elements, atomize, serialize, return, alienate, symmetrize, deform, translate, superinduce, transport, abstract, mix, filter, code, overcode, calculate, juxtapose superimposed grids, formalize, transform . . . all the arithmetical, geometrical, algebraic, topological, stochastic, or atomic rules of arts and letters, of our theoretical meditations and our symbols of the spectacle. Here is the ensemble of detours and contortions that keep us from short-circuiting, and which make us afraid: monstration and demonstration, it’s the same thing. It has nothing to do with freedom or delivering a message, it’s a matter of a box of keys. The means of communicating becomes the material of the message. Mannerism, the terror of the naked thing. The curve precedes the straight line. In fact, are there still any objects? Things to say? Note that during the reception of that aurora borealis, the sound and picture were cut at least once. Finally nobody can see anyone anymore except through a trembling haze. After metamorphosis, optical anamorphosis. Our culture of special effects. Magazines, from publication to distribution. Here as always, source and issue are found at the same point: from one hall to the other. Round and round. What happens to the message at the end of the cycle, what does it become in the black box, in the black bottle? Enter the vectors: Jean-Loup de la Batellerie (Christopher Willoughby-Drupe in the English text), the juggler (le bateleur) from the Paris-Flash, known as Coco; and Rizotto (the sauce-thickener), the bespectacled photographer armed with his box (could he be called objective, then?), and called mon coco. New parrots, in honor of the Captain. Morning. The journalists’ little vade mecum. True or not, what does it matter as long as the paper sells? The diffused precedes the exact, and communication is maximal for certain types of information, but is not one of its functions. News: the oldest thing in the world, and the oldest profession. Whence the transformation of the unformed to effect a serial production, the reduction to type with a view to multiplication. Typography. The number consumes the thing that must be destroyed, prepared, normed for consumption. A little cookbook. Do you want success? Put a deaf man and two parrots together at the point of emission. You can bet that at the other end you’ll get an old wolf and a nightingale. What was it, what happened in the black box of metamorphoses? The dialogue of the deaf man with parakeets is the message’s source, and the possible model for the whole circuit. Is there a blunder or misunderstanding? Not as such, no more than usual. They’re really speaking of the same thing, of Bianca, but one is speaking of a magpie or nightingale, the other of a rose; the latter of crossbreeding, the former of marriage. It’s not such

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a bad approximation. We’ve seen Calculus do worse. Picture a pearl necklace: the jewels are threaded into a chain. The jeweler has given them a reason, an order, a sense. The sequence is well-formed. But the thread breaks and the pearls are scattered. The monads roll onto the path, into the grass and under stones. The journalists have disappeared to look for them and form a new chain of information. They gather them up here and there, in the park and between the roses, they take them out of the black box: the new series has to be aleatory. There’s the secret of the metamorphosis: stochastic mixture. What’s more, taken out of context, as elements the pearls are fakes. Say what Bior. The author stresses that this Bior is always Tristan Bior. The author stresses this explanation of the text: the necklace is open, scissored. Cut, interrupt, divide, mix, reorder at random — another inventory of tech since there’s no communication. It’s a combinatory art, an art of mixture, seen in a deforming mirror. Ha! I laugh . . . Not so long ago, a brilliant sequence arranged the gesture of the forefather fallen on Rackham’s sword with the tale of his nephew, a fine swashbuckler with a bolster (see The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure). Here again, there’s the same doubling effect, except that emission and reception are at some points very close in space, time, and circuit. The comparison calculates the metamorphosis: the magic mirror. One doesn’t look for these things in comics. What’s important here is less the thicketlike growth of mistakes, nonsense and absurdities reparable at each line — the abundance of “pearls,” usual and familiar to those who, as luck would have it, find themselves at the point of concurrence of source and issue, at the same point of the circular necklace — than it is the formidable effect of multiplication induced by the short circuit. Diffusion, explosion. The technique of decomposition into elements and transmutation of elements, and the strategy of aleatory mixtures are atomic methods. Our age is that of the genius of the atom, in whatever sense you care to take it, from criminal weaponry to arts and language. A linguistic state of gaseous diffusion, our world as bubblechamber. Whence the falling back onto the captain as precipitation: a tidal wave of letters (in the sense of the mail, or in the grammatical sense), of telegrams, phone calls, greetings and congratulations. The chain reaction: communication feeds on itself, after a slow start, and ends violently. Media engender media. An effect of multiplication: serial engagements of the prima donna to a Hindu prince, a Syldavian baron, a colonel, a marquis with the name of a strong cheese, and a sea dog who is elevated to the rank of admiral for the occasion. Star: the oldest profession in the world. Here’s the rule: at the point of omission, there is nothing, or almost nothing, a dialogue that is lacking. In the course of the message, a stochastic cloud of metamorphoses: Jean-Loup acts the wolf, the magpie becomes a nightingale, the tar is an admiral, the parrot plays a confidante, and Gand is displaced into the Ardennes: again, the message transports only its own

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transports. And at reception, a spindle of communications, parallel or radiating. The rule inverts the precedent, it goes from minimum to maximum. Either the chain is broken, or it reacts on itself. Formerly, this phenomenon would have been seen only as calumnious. The crowning piece: the trombone of the municipal brass band lets out a couple of gross notes that dance heavily and come to land on the piano. Starting from music, Verdi and Rossini, the chain ends on music, brass, woodwinds, and drums. The fanfare will lose its cohesion, rhythm, and unity under a flood of champagne. The bottle of bubbles drowns the short circuit. From communication to communion: a loss of esprit de corps. Note that a Roman magazine, concurrent with the Parisian one, has divulged or is about to divulge the truth: the lady’s a good two hundredweight, and is photographed full-page, next to her double, the parrot. She’s not amused at being less than beautiful in this mirror. And note again that if the message is faithful, it’s purely by accident. The journalist wasn’t at the authentic source. He came in by the hole in the wall at the risk of putting his foot in a wasps’ nest; another time, he entered furtively through the door, mixing in with the barbarian invasion, and escaped under cover of darkness: he wasn’t part of the chain, he slipped the bolt, he interrupted the game. He’s not an emitter but an interceptor. From which it follows that he’s two types of interception: an interception that breaks the process and blocks the message; and an interception that intervenes in order to capture the message. To make off with it. He’s the real jewel thief, and Castafiore, inflated with rage and building to explosion, knows it well. An effect of multiplication: she walks over everyone, her hosts and her I, slaves. And that’s precisely where Esmeralda is stolen. A new rule: the subject of the real message has no place in emission, a place on non-sense, a non-place; truth’s chances are statistically displaced along the chain, and its hope is nothing but a hazard of displacement. There’s only an interception: block the process, enter into the dance, stop the prying, break the necklace, gather up the pearls and see how to dance, collect the random clamor that steals along the chain, and you’ve got it. True perception is interception. In the network, submitted to the network, bearer of the chain, enchained, you’re lost, noise kills the message, the Demon closes your eyes and stops your ears. Leave the network, escape the cave where the fire glimmers, the stove which is simmering to efface the marks on the wax, get free of the oven, the oven that belongs to Heraclitus or to today’s physicists, where the black rays circulate. You have the Demon’s place; prowl the garden, wait for night, intercept. The wild goose chase: shot down in flight, caught red-handed. Who are we, real hunters, real marksmen? Interceptors. The barricade on the public way. In order to hear and be heard, understand and be understood, the solution’s obvious, but contradictory: cut communication. Backfire. Let’s suppress the media. May Society remain an empty set. Do you want to

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classify savages? First, emitters who aren’t receivers. The professor (science), deaf and absentminded, mistakes card for Yard, and whisky for spring rain; he couldn’t care less about the emerald. The prima donna emits (under cover) without receiving for another reason: she takes speech and music, and doesn’t know how to render them. The insurance salesman, in turn, doesn’t understand opera, and prefers beer. Their totem: the magpie clan. Next, receivers who aren’t emitters. The old sailor, who sings “The merry month of May” while the garbage stinks, who smiles at Miarka and is bitten, who to his horror becomes engaged, who dances at the news of Castafiore’s leaving and sings his sorrow, on foot as luck would have it, before she’s properly gone. The people of the hall and the people of the journey I accused of theft without their being able to defend themselves; the silent and oppressed, the people of the shadows. Their totem: the owl clan. Walking the rafters and howling at the night. The vectors of the third set receive anything and emit anything: journalists and television crews, their totem is the wasp clan. Like a flight or swarm, streaming out from its home nest. And finally, there are those who neither emit nor receive, but stammer, spoonerize, make noise, smash cars, and symbolize power: the Thom(p)sons, whose totem is the parrot clan. Everyone in this high society tumbles down the staircase, in a regular series. Except the Diva, goddess of art, whose totemic attributes are fourfold. Look how she incarnates the canonic rule: the nuptial flight, multiple betrothals, or the unsuccessful exchange of women; the flight of the emerald, or the phony exchange of precious goods; the theft and flight of words. Not all stones are fakes. True ones are rare. The imitation is what’s worn in public, transported, exchanged; only the fake is swapped. The bad pearl chases out the good. But then who stole the emerald? The magpie? It collects marbles, monocles, anything that glitters, and can’t tell the true from the false. A grain of wheat would be more in its line. The magpie (Castafiore)? She hides the treasure, loses it, and doesn’t have it insured. Wagner, who’s a suspect? He prefers to gamble. The gypsies, who are accused and detained? Leave them to the high roads and their rustic life. The Thom(p)sons? They mislay it as often as find it. The professor? He won’t hear a word about it, and refuses to carry it around. Everybody talks about it, but nobody wants it. Who’s the thief of this, the most precious thing in the world? All of this high society, except for those who are accused. Communication grinds to a halt. The network is booby-trapped at all points, and takes pleasure in unnerving. The chain breaks, up the line, down the line, and right in the middle. The short circuits explode. Speech, so much talked about, admires itself in its magic mirror. At the bottom of the jewel box, at the top of the trembling poplar, lost in the grass, as green as Esmeralda’s skirt, a tear of stone shines softly. It won’t be taken, it has no price. Nobody at all is worried

Notes Trans. Sam Mele and Tony Thwaites, with additional revisions by Bernd Herzogenrath. First published in Art and Text IX (Autumn 1983), republished — slightly altered — with kind permission. 1. Hergé. The Adventures of Tintin: The Castafiore Emerald. London: Methuen, 1963. 2. Captain Haddock’s residence, Marlinspike, is Moulinsart in the French editions.

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about its running off the necklace. The miracle is an event whose probability of appearance is almost zero. The sailor absentmindedly leans on the wheelchair. It runs off and he falls. It hurtles down the corridor and misses the cat by a whisker. It scoops up Calculus, and goes down the stairs, gathering speed. For the deaf man, absurdly enough, the road’s clear. What’s going to happen? Vehicle versus vehicle, professor versus doctor, the laws of impact and momentum, and a great explosion of syringes, stethoscopes, and emergency kits. What was it? What happened? Laughter is a chain. Something like a contagion. It fuses and diffuses, fuses because it diffuses. A matter of mechanics? Yes, since it’s a question of movement; no, since the chain goes crossing, integrating foreign elements, feeds on its own errancy, goes from a minimum to a maximum, plays an autonomous perpetual motion. And perpetual motion is the inverse of the mechanical, its negative, its absurdity. Mechanics overlaid on the living? A good definition of biology, properly understood: it would have to mean, then, that Descartes was comic, which is hardly likely. I suspect that Bergson, under cover of defining laughter, wanted to render his adversaries forever laughable. And the last word is Michelet’s, who never laughed at Jesuits. Laughter is a chain, a contagion, a diffusion. It makes sense that epidemics are propagated like information. There are some quite difficult theorems that say this. Publicity or infection, it runs like the ferret, from magpies to parrots. We live in the swarming of the propagated. In a world that is therefore that of the pandemic, of noise and farcical buffoonery. We’d have to be ill — the great comic, absent, would be an index of health — in order not to choke with laughter at each crossroad. Or not to weep tears of laughter, all alone.

words and images in the contemporary american graphic novel J a n Ba etens The aim of this chapter is not to reinvent the problem of the word-and-image relationship, here in the field of comics and graphic-novel production. In a modest and pragmatic way, the following pages will try to show the relevance and interest of this issue in this field, in itself as well as in relationship with analogous or comparable tendencies and evolutions in Europe. Neither will this analysis enter into long discussions on the boundaries of the corpus that will be analyzed. The concept of the contemporary American graphic novel will therefore be used in a broad sense, entailing all comic art productions in book form that address an adult readership. The group of works that will be labelled here as “graphic novels” range from the postmodern cyberpunk superheroes comics à la Watchmen (Gibbons and Moore 1987) to more experimental works such as Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan (2000), and including the autobiographic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman (1986 and 1991). Other examples will be quoted and analyzed further on. I realize that using a single label for works that may differ dramatically, on the one hand, and trying to define a certain number of global characteristics, on the other hand, is a risky and dangerous business, doomed to fail. The remarks that I will make in this contribution (and I hope not all of them will be sweeping overgeneralizations) should be taken with caution and read

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as nothing more than a first step toward a larger study of the word-and-image problem in this type of visual storytelling. The issue of intermediality is often reduced to two fundamental questions: first, the convergences and divergences of the information carried by, respectively, the visual and the verbal aspects of the comic strip as a hybrid medium; second, the question of the inequality of those aspects, which may occur simultaneously but which are not therefore considered to have the same value. Before putting a new emphasis on phenomena that are at least as important as these two questions, but that are so taken for granted that often readers fail to pay attention to them, it may be useful to take a closer look at the double issue that often monopolizes the critical debate on intermedialization: the hybridity of the narrative information, and the structural imbalance between word and image. The hybridization of comics introduces a split at the level of the dispatching of information, which is presented through the visual as well as the verbal channel (textless comics are not common, and when used they are often three panel gag-strips). What one needs to understand the story is not just provided by the images, but also by the text (balloons or captions or otherwise integrated textual material), and much scholarship has been devoted to the meticulous scrutiny of any parameter that can display either a convergence or a divergence of the verbal and the visual. Text and image can, for instance, meet or depart at temporal level (we see before we read, or vice versa). Or they can overlap or contradict each other (we do not see what we read, we see something completely different, we don’t see anything, and, in all three cases, vice versa). Or, to quote just a last example of a list that is far from being exhaustive, there can be a shift between the instance that utters the text (the narrator, or the embedded narrator if a second-level narrative is developed) and the instance that sees or filters the image (the focalizer, an extremely complex instance that can be multilayered, since just as in matters of narrative voice, the structure of focalization, that is of who is seeing what, is open to embedded structures: an image seen through the eyes of a character is of course not just an internally focalized image, it is an internally focalized image embedded in a broader framework that is always already focalized by an external focalizer). Whatever may be the relevance of discussions around focalization (which it is impossible to do without when one wants to make a precise analysis of the narrative structures of a graphic novel), the seductiveness of this type of discussion is so extreme that focalization sometimes becomes almost an aim in itself, and the same goes more or less for the discussions on the analogies or dissymetries between words and images, which tend to dissociate the notion of intermediality from its larger cultural and historical context.

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The second main issue, that of the structural imbalance between the verbal and the visual, is less isolated from that context, for it reveals in many cases the implicit iconoclasm that prevents us from looking at comics and graphic novels for what they are: hybrid and intermediate structures whose appearance can only been explained by the penetration of the image in the long-time purely textual field of the reproduction of signs. Comics and graphic novels are definitely an heir of the technological revolution of the nineteenth century, which enabled authors and artists to continue on an unprecedented scale the shift toward visuality in scientific and print culture of the Enlightenment (Stafford 1996). Yet this explosion of visual material in the age of the technical reproduction of the image (inside and outside the book form), has only gradually — and never completely! — succeeded in challenging the deeply rooted iconoclasm of Western culture. The emergence of “lower” forms of verbal and visual intertwining such as the comic strip was certainly used not only to launch a crusade against the emancipation of popular culture, but also and even more eminently to restart the never-ending fight against the claims of the visual. Once again, such a perspective on the comic strip and the graphic novel may appear extremely fruitful — it would be silly to deny the social and cultural battles around this type of objects “without value” — yet a too strong focus on this question may induce an overgeneralization of the debate, and thus a downsizing of the specific historic features of the genre’s institutional and cultural position. Instead of reading the graphic novel as a new instantiation of more hybrid forms of narratology or linking it immediately with global discussions on the society of spectacle (Debord), the videosphere (Debray), or other types of visual turn (W. J. T. Mitchell), the ambition of this chapter is to refocus this double perspective, which no serious scholarship on graphic novels can do without, in a broad (maybe too broad) historical and cultural perspective. In this regard, we will develop a systematic comparison between the North American (and not just US, for Canada is a crucial player in this market) and the European graphic novel. Although the “continental” graphic novel (and “continental” is meant explicitly to separate the British, US-dominated and -oriented market from the European market, where the main language of communication in the field, as in gastronomy or semiotics, continues to be French) is not a homogeneous field, it is well known that European graphic novels are quite different from North American ones. It is of course impossible to study here the history of the mutual shaping of these two types of visual storytelling, yet their general comparison may help to better understand what is specific about the North American production and its idiosyncratic approach to issues of intermediality.

Before the Graphic Novel 95 Words and I m ag e s in t h e A m e r ican G r a ph ic N o v e l

The importance of intermediality in the American graphic novel of today can be seen in the very first place as the result of a longtime, complex, and ambivalent interest in the role and the presence of the word in the American variants of the genre. Although the US did not really invent from scratch the type of graphic storytelling that was labelled “comics” (for a discussion of the genealogy of comics outside America, see Kunzle 1990, Dierick and Lefevre 1998, and Groensteen and Peeters 1994), there are good reasons to believe that the North American rediscovery and adaptation of the visual narrative based upon the interplay of words and drawings have defined new formulas, new formats, and new standards. With the 1895 introduction of Outcault’s Yellow Kid, the comics made a double revolution. On the one hand, the genre replaced the traditional system of the captioned cartoon by the (almost) unprecedented system of the speech balloon (for an evaluation of this revolution, see Carrier 2000 and Baetens 2007). On the other hand, the comics encountered the format or host medium that would be their most typical outlet for the decades to come: the daily newspaper (in black and white), with its weekly supplements (often in color), and also the audience that will give them their bad reputation: the semiliterate newly immigrated worker as well as children and adolescents, all accused of preferring the “bad” reading of the comics to the “good” reading of canonical literature. The association of the formal device of the speech balloon and the semiliterate audience has been a stereotype in reflections on the genre from the very beginning. Comics installments were used as a marketing tool to attract a certain type of readership and this targeting needed in a way the simplification of language structures enabled, and then enhanced, by the use of the balloon. Its spatial restrictions fostered the reduction of well-formed sentences to very short utterances and expressions, sometimes to mere words out of syntactic order, if not just crude and infantile onomatopoeias. Similar remarks have been made at the introduction of a second novelty in comics editorial history, namely, the marketing of the so-called comic book in the 1930s, which were in the first years cheap reprints of newspaper comics before they turned into an independent structure thanks to successful experiments with a new type of content matter: the superhero (Gabilliet 2005). In superheroes comics, the language reduction due to the speech-balloon formula continued even more dramatically and the encounter with quite violent (and sometimes racist) subject matter played a key role in the witch-hunt on comics associated with the name of Dr Fredric Wertham, the author of the still famous Seduction of the Innocent (Wertham, Beaty). The deep-rooted distrust of comics in legitimate culture is thus directly linked

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to the insufficiencies of the genre at linguistic level. Comics are bad because they use bad language, in the double meaning of the word: socially disqualified or unacceptable language like slang, on the one hand, and incorrectly constructed sentences (no longer sentences but words), misspelled words (in phonetic English), and, most important, a global use of language that was challenged by images (in the eyes of the genre’s enemies, one did not read comics, one looked at them). And this distrust may explain the emphasis put on the revalorization (and in certain cases even the overvaluation) of the word in certain attempts to give the comics a more acceptable status. One might have imagined indeed that the defense of comics could have emphasized the very novelty of the genre, like its capacity to foreground a (purely) visual storytelling or the exploration of new forms of written language, but this has certainly not been the dominant approach of those who wanted to remediate the typically American newspaper comics. The main exception to this tendency, besides Winsor McCay and his Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–1913; see Peeters 2005) remains George Herriman, whose Krazy Kat (1913–1944) remains the best example of the road not taken: American comics did not, as Herriman did, privilege experiments with “speechless” storytelling (Groensteen 1997 and 1998), nor did they reinforce the focus on wordplay, both aurally and graphically (moreover, but this is a different issue, Herriman’s multilingual puns could also be reinscribed in the emerging postcolonial tradition of non-English writing in the US). Instead of the Krazy Kat example, American comics authors eager to counter the bad reputation of the genre made a completely different (and in my eyes very debatable) choice. They tried to elaborate a type of comics that were either a (preparatory) digest or a (real) substitute for literature. The former solution was that of the well-known Classics Illustrated collection, which presented comic-book adaptations of the Great Literary Works, in hopes of training young readers for the real stuff. The latter was that of Will Eisner, supposedly the first to coin (and certainly to claim) the label of “graphic novel,” as a low-profile alternative for literary reading in a time were readers had no longer time to read (Eisner 1985). Eisner’s work too is a clear example of a dream of upward mobility, which not surprisingly devotes more attention to the great themes (Man, God, Society, Nature, Destiny, Life, and so on) than to formal (futile?) aspects: Eisner’s later, “serious” work is, visually speaking, less inventive than his popular crimefighter series, The Spirit. His book A Contract With God (1978) is often considered the starting point of the American graphic novel, but for several reasons this historical continuity is not entirely satisfactory. Not because of the fact that Eisner’s work hasn’t been influential (one can argue that Spiegelman’s Maus owes certain features to Eisner), but because of the fact that it overlooks other elements that have in fact exerted a greater influence on the contemporary graphic novel scene.

Graphic Novel and Storytelling: From Voice-Over to Voice-With For European readers familiar with the huge continental production of graphic novels (this term is an anachronism in this context, for it is only recently that works of this type have been labelled this way), the most obviously salient feature of its American counterpart is the importance of the notion of narrative voice, more precisely of a first-person narrator. Much more than in European graphic novels, American books foreground the presence of an explicitly “telling” instance, which the reader often also sees in the panels of the book, but there in a typically “showing” modus: the visible presence of the narrator in the pages of the book is not subjective, as is its voice, but most of the time objective, for whereas the text is clearly uttered by the narrator himself or herself, it is not always true that the drawings are made in the same subjective way. Such a split between the

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In this regard, the key element is of course the tradition of 1960s underground comics, which have dramatically redefined the role and position of the verbal aspects of the genre, both as such and in their relationship with the images. Contrary to all formerly known styles of comic storytelling, the underground authors foregrounded autobiographical material and, as a corrolary, eschewed escapism, for instance by giving a central role to historical material. One might say that Maus, a book that blurs the boundaries between autobiography and historical reconstruction, represents the logical fusion of the two major tendencies of the underground, although in a very different tone and scope. In the underground tradition too, one notices the strong link between a certain type of language and a certain type of audience-building: targeting an adult readership, underground comics often contain quite a lot of text, and this text is in many respects much more complex than what text in comics was considered able to produce (the best example of this trend is not the inclination of the underground toward sexual matters, but the efforts of some of them to tackle historical taboos and to offer comic-book version of unwritten or censored pages of local or national history). Underground authors did not only write “more,” but also “better,” and one of their great innovations consisted in transferring the care for language from the field of vocabulary and syntax to that of storytelling itself. Underground comics experimented with types and levels of narrators, introducing not just irony but also more profound devices such as unreliable narrators, multiple narrators, selfreflexivity, and so on (Hatfield 2005). The real predecessors of the contemporary American graphic novel are therefore not those who want to convert comics into a form of low-profile, all-audience literature, but those who started to question the unproblematic relationship between the verbal and the visual.

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subjective and the objective is of course typical of intermedial narratives such as comics and cinema, where a global but often implicit meganarrator can delegate the storytelling devices to two separate explicit narrators, one who is telling and one who is showing (Gaudreault 2005; for a treatment of autobiography in comics, see Baetens 2004). In the European production, the text that is contained in the balloons or directly added to the drawings is less than in the American graphic novel that of a first-person narrator, but tends to be the “embedded” voice of the characters who act as second-level narrators. Yet contrary to what happens in film, where the dominant position of the visual at the expense of the verbal is definitely stronger, the overall effect of this massive presence of the verbal narrator is not quite the same as that of the cinematographic voice-over. In the graphic novel, the appropriate preposition is less “over” than “with,” the narrator’s presence being felt as a “voice-with” that is accompanying the sequential unfolding of the images. It does not seem implausible to argue that it is precisely this less overt impact of the “voice-with” modus that explains the absence of a classic literary superego. In the history of narrative cinema, the use of voice-over techniques has been one of the instruments, besides the use of “authors” as scriptwriters and the recycling of existing literary material in all kinds of adaptations, of the literary turn of the movies (authors like Welles, for example, do link their authorship to an intense use of the narrative devices of literary storytelling). In the case of the American graphic novel, the narrators are much more modest, although no less overwhelmingly visible throughout their stories for all that. Since the voice does not “cover” the image it accompanies, there seems to be less craving for a rebalancing of the equilibrium between word and image, to benefit the former and at the expense of the latter. Words do not take the floor that is given to the image, nor vice versa, and this is a huge difference from contemporary European graphic novels, where the tendency is toward the contestation of that balance. One can see this, for instance, in the current fashion of almost textless (but of course not narratorless!) graphic novels. The acceptance of the “voice-with” position is not the only feature that hints toward the less literary position of the American graphic novel. In the same spirit, one may mention the relative lack of literary adaptations and, as a corollary, the willingness to accept and freely discuss the proper cultural heritage and environment of the comics. Rather than activating a great yet unhappy literary superego by borrowing their subject material from canonical or canonized literary works, as it has now become mainstream to do in Europe (of course not always with mainstream results, as one can see in the Kafka adaptations by Olivier Deprez, see Baetens 2006), American authors appear to be excessively modest by restricting themselves very often to either autobiography or to the almost documentary suggestion of daily life in today’s America. In the first case, the big

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question is whether they are reliable or not: in this respect Harvey Pekar is not Gilbert Hernandez. In the second case, one of the issues is the degree of irony: Daniel Clowes, the maker of Ghost World (a comic book that was already famous before it was adapted to the wide screen by Terry Zwigoff in 2002), is definitely more ironic, or at least more bitingly ironic, than Adrian Tomine, whose tone is more elegiac yet not always without sharp criticism. The interest in sharing one’s own life, one’s own community, one’s own history with the readership may explain the colloquial tone that many narrators adopt. Plain speech clearly dominates, and one observes a reluctance to overwrite the narrative text. Yet it explains even more the willingness to relate to their own comic tradition. The postmodern vogue of the American graphic novel was launched by Watchmen, a book that, although written by two British creators, remains in the first place a critical reflection on the superheroes tradition. And it is extremely significant that one of the larger short stories by Adrian Tomine in Sleepwalk (65–75), “Dylan & Donovan,” offers a synthesis of the two main sources of inspiration of the modern graphic novel in the US. First the 1960s counterculture: “Dylan and Donovan” is the story of two twin sisters who consider themselves the unwilling heirs of that period: “Before you can even ask, let me just say that, yes, those are our real names, why would I make that up? Our parents were hippies . . . They were probably high on grass or something when they named us.” Second, the comics culture and the subculture of the comics convention: Dylan and Donovan’s father offers them a trip to a big comics convention, where old comics and old counterculture seamlessly meet: “Can you believe that? That’s his idea of a ‘family experience.’ I mean, I guess it’s cooler than going on a camping trip or taking us to a baseball game or some crap like that, but it just seems so weird.” European graphic novelists share the same fascination for the history of the medium, but contrary to what happens in the US, the relationship with the past is both less direct and more dominating. Less direct, because the role of thematic and stylistic allusions is often crucial (part of the pleasure of reading European graphic novels comes not from seeing how comics culture is the very theme of the work, but from comparing them with the authors, the styles, and the works they are reusing). But also more dominant, for certain European graphic novels have serious problems in tackling contemporary society (for a critique of this incapacity to free oneself of this aesthetic and thematic nostalgia, see Peeters 1993). The eagerness to find a place in the larger comics community is also quite a difference from European graphic novels, whose inspiring model is not just literary writing but also painting, and sometimes even more painting than writing (at least in that part of the European production that is searching for an adult audience). The attitude toward color is here very symptomatic: whereas many

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American graphic novels are (still) in black and white, which is a way to oppose the commercially dominant subculture of the superheroes comics, European graphic novels are so seduced, not to say haunted, by color that their graphic experiments regularly undermine their narrative ambitions; not much is left of the story in some works that resemble more sequential paintings than graphic novels (for an analysis of this phenomenon, see the catalogue of the exhibition on the so-called direct color technique: Groensteen 1993). Of course, this preference for black and white is not simply used as a default option, but may represent the starting point of a very subtle use of minimalist treatment of color. A good example in case is Matt Broersma’s The Lock (2006). At first sight, one has the impression that the book does not use more than three colors: broken white, as a background color; black, as the color used for the contours; and a kind of yellow-green used to create variety and contrast within each panel. Yet this impression is deceiving, for what really matters is the modification of the relationships between these colors throughout the book, independent of the narrative content represented in the panels. The whole structure of the book resembles, chromatically speaking, a kind of palindrome: in the beginning, the dominant mode offers a balance between broken white and the yellow-green, then the color black becomes more and more invasive (and its contrast with the other colors is being sharpened, given the progressive fading of the yellow-green), and in the final plates of the book the initial balance is established once again. This chromatic rule cannot be discovered when one just reads the book page after page, for there are no pages that exhibit the use of color in a spectacular way. Yet this rule is immediately noticed when one flips through the book (as comic book readers often do!), and it offers the possibility of a purely chromatic reading of the story. The shifting relationships between the three colors build the story, and this purely formal event helps us to make sense of the content of the book, which is not easy to grasp, given the intertwining of various layers of time, space, and ontology (often it is not clear whether what we see is a dream of reality, whether it belongs to what is observed by the protagonist or what he remembers, and so on). Thanks to the clarity of the chromatic structure, with its clear-cut beginning, middle, and end, the reader is guided through a complex labyrinth that imitates the logic of insomnia and nightmare more than that of daily life. Finally, acceptance of the specific status of the contemporary graphic novel, which belongs to an independent field, that of visual storytelling, can be seen in the downsizing of the literary intentions of some predecessors, from the Classics Illustrated series to attempts à la Will Eisner to “save” literature through comics. Ironically, this downsizing of the specific literary scope of the contemporary American graphic novel is not the trace of a lack of ambition or self-confidence; quite the contrary. It is because the new graphic novel feels comfortable with its

Aspects of Verbovisual Storytelling Contemporary American graphic novels may contain a lot of text, certainly in comparison with the tendency towards wordlessness in more avant-garde European works. Yet this quantitative element should not be overstressed. These graphic novels are not “wordy,” and perhaps it would be more correct to state that the presence of words in text balloons or captions can be described as steady, stable, and regular. The narrative voice, be it that of the first-level narrator or that of the embedded narrators, is there from the very beginning and continues in most of the panels, its absence being generally a rhetorical device used to stress the emotional intensity of a given plate, as in Tomine’s “Lunch Break,” where the strangeness of the apparently insignificant anecdote — an old and lonely lady goes out at noon in order to eat, in an old car, the sandwich she had prepared in the opening panels of the story — is dramatically increased by the complete silence of the scene, which contrasts with the happiness and vivacity of the flashback given on the next page, where we rediscover the same car, now hosting the lovers’ noon rendezvous many years ago (Figure 7.1: Tomine 27–28). Much more important, however, is the qualitative aspect of the word-andimage relationship. At a very global level, one might say that it is the text rather than the image that drives the story in the contemporary American graphic novel. Without the accompanying text, whatever its concrete function may be, many images would not make much sense, or at least lose much of their meaning and flavor. Yet this priority of the text, which underlines once more the lack of enthusiasm of American graphic novelists for the overtly “pictorial” storytelling of many of their European colleagues, does not imply at all a structural imbalance between the two poles of the verbal and the visual. The images are never reduced to mere illustrations; their role is to complete the text in a very specific

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new position, on the shelves of a bookshop but not necessarily those of literary fiction, that it has been able to develop new forms of storytelling, which no longer have to copy the inherited models of literature. Of course, American graphic novelists sometimes make literary adaptations, and Mazzucchelli’s reworking of Paul Auster’s City of Glass is a wonderful and praiseworthy example of it. But the drive to risk the confrontation with the great literary works, in order to show that graphic novels may represent a new and even superior form of literature, seems to be less pronounced in the US than in Europe, where adaptation stances are also quite different. US adaptations seem more willing to stay close to the text, as if the value of a graphic novel depended on its capacity to be faithful to the revered original, whereas in Europe literary adaptations are often seen as a springboard toward visual experiments.

Figure 7.1. An example of wordless storytelling in which silence becomes utterly, yet tragically, eloquent. Adrian Tomine, “Lunch Break,” in Sleepwalk and Other Stories (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2002: 27–28). Reprinted by kind permission of Drawn and Quarterly.

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sense, either by giving information that the text does not offer, or by giving an often ironic counterpoint to what is said. In a certain sense, this was already the double mechanism of “anchorage/relay” coined by Roland Barthes in his seminal article on the word-and-image relations in publicity (Rhétorique, 1964). Yet whereas Barthes took as his starting point the priority of the image and the communicative problems raised by it, the American graphic novelists work the other way round. Here it is not the meaning of the image that must be “domesticated” or completed by the use of words, but the meaning of the text that must be “anchored” or “relayed.” Often, the supplementary meaning created is one of irony: the image contradicts the text, not just by showing something completely different, but by emphasizing some nuances that help us understand that the narrative voice is, willingly or unwillingly, deceptive. Such a “collaborative” relationship between images is best served by a page layout that is quite traditional, that is a gridlike structure with enough, but not too many, panels on each page so that enough visual information can be provided to complete the text on the one hand (and therefore it is important to have “enough” panels) and to leave space for the integration of the text in the panels on the other hand (and therefore it is important to avoid excessive fragmentation of the page, which reduces the available space for each word-and-image combination). Moreover, the traditional form of the grid, which remains much more frequently used in the US than in Europe, fits perfectly the needs of a steady continuation of the textual elements. The very regularity of the narrative voice, which leads the story from the beginning till the end, is something that it is very difficult to maintain if one does not draw on the safety provided by the grid. Those who, like Chris Ware, break the dominant rule of the basic grid are also those who renounce the dominating position of the word (Jimmy Corrigan is a breathtaking experiment in almost wordless narrative). Nevertheless, the use of traditional page layouts does not prevent the contemporary American graphic novel from appearing extremely innovative and original in the field of both typography and delinearization, that is, the transformation of text and plate into a visual space whose characteristics exceed the sequential arrangement of balloons and panels. What is most characteristic of this type of graphic novel is the fact that they do not redefine the space of the plate and the status of texts and images by transforming in a radical way the constitutive elements of the medium, but by the reinvention of the classic mold and patterns in sober yet very efficient ways. Contrary to some European examples, the American graphic novelists only rarely challenge explicitly the reading habits of the mainstream readership. If Spiegelman and his friends did so in the late seventies and the early eighties around the journal RAW (Spiegelman and Mouly 1987), the post-avant-garde

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Spiegelman has adopted a more traditional but no less creative use of the classic comics idiom. If there are obviously still many examples of a nonlinear use of the page, this seems more influenced by the proper characteristics of the American comics tradition, with its strong emphasis on spread pages (that is, pages covered by one complex, multilayered panel) than by the desire to push beyond the current expectations of the traditional reader. One does not find in the US today many examples of the avant-garde graphic experiments that European graphic novelists are so fond of (one may think here of the global production of avantgarde groups like L’Association and, to an even greater extent, the formerly called Fréon and Amok, two groups that have now merged in the AMOK collective). In a sense, this can be explained by the greater political commitment of many US graphic novelists, who do not want to take to risk of unsuccessful communication by an increase of formalist devices. But the relative visual quietness of the US material is also due to completely different ways of rethinking the page and the visual treatment of the text balloons. Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray (2004), a variation on the superman comics (a young antihero thinks that smoking provides him with special powers), represents a good example of the techniques at the disposal of an author who astutely tries to rework the classic mold from inside. Each double page (after the front cover page, the story starts at the left inner cover page and continues until the right inner cover page) constitutes a pastiche of the typical superheroes comics book, with their dry, uninventive layout, their pastel color scheme, judiciously printed on a slightly yellowed background that connotes the aging of the model (the small exceptions to this rule are there to help the reader to appreciate better the achievement of the global effect). But despite the continuity of the story each double page is typographically different, which creates a tremendous defamiliarization of layout schemes and typefaces that have no special features in themselves. Moreover, the unusual format of the book (23.5 x 30.5 cm, rather close to the typically European A4 standard) increases this effect of estrangement, while permitting the author to multiply the “tabular” (that is, nonlinear, to quote the terminology coined by Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle 1976) in a way that converts each double page into a kind of constellation. A specific double spread (Clowes 2004, 12–13; see Figure 7.2) offers a good illustration of this nonlinear use of the page, for the dissemination of the title words (The / Origin / Of / Death-Ray) on the grid of almost monochrome panels (each page has six equal rows, each containing four equal small panels executed in the same blue and pink nuances) shows the search for readability and the attempt to obtain maximal innovative effects with minimal and therefore readable elements. Although one has to scan the forty-eight panels of this double spread in order to reconstruct the exact word string, the title sequence remains perfectly clear, yet it is also subtly contested

Figure 7.2. An example of a sophisticated play with the elementary grid format of the comics, in which the linearity of the panels is converted into a complex mosaic. Daniel Clowes, “The Death-Ray,” Eightball 23, 2004: 12–13. Reprinted by kind permission of Daniel Clowes.

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(for instance by the “erroneous” repetition of the word “the”) and activated in a way that goes beyond any classic use of such a title panel or sequence. What matters in this shattered title are less the words than their colors and the fact that the sequence of words is spread over the double page. Both elements (the foregrounding of the colors and the dispersal of the title space) make that the reader aware of the mosaiclike composition of these pages and the potential to link the panels in several “tabular” ways. Typographical elements such as the form of a typeface, the colored blot established by the grouping and placing of the words in the balloons or the captions, the dialogue with the properties of the background color, and the diversity of reading trajectories allowed inside the classic grid structure, are not typical only of Daniel Clowes’s redefining of the comic books tradition. Most of these elements are quite characteristic of the artistic approach of many American graphic novelists, who prefer expressing their personal and original views on form and subject matter by a clever remediation of local forms. In a different register, Chris Ware’s much acclaimed Jimmy Corrigan represents a superlative version of this aesthetic, which I don’t think can be reduced to postmodern pastiche. The decision to reuse existing forms is not a symptom of an incapacity of invention (after all, no one has invented more new and imaginative typographical and layout experiments than Chris Ware, who nevertheless remains within a whole set of American design, book design, and comic book traditions). It is rather the expression of a willingness to take up this tradition (against European models, which pay less attention to readability while putting a greater emphasis on the autonomy of the visual aspects of the drawing). Once again, it is not a mere coincidence that Spiegelman’s In The Shadow of No Towers (2004) is also a survey and a rewriting of the history of American comics and pays tribute to the American masters of the ninth art (perhaps less forgotten by European aficionados than by American readers). Similar remarks can be made on the global shift of Spiegelman’s career from direct to indirect creation. Over the years Spiegelman’s artistic commitment has been more and more to the editing and publishing of other artists’ work, and this effort has not been devoted exclusively to the importation of European avant-garde to American underground circles and vice versa. A paramount aspect of this commitment has been care for neglected, forgotten, and often despised American traditions. Take for instance his wonderful defense of Winsor McCay’s biographer John Canemaker, and of McCay’s art, in an innovative review written and designed in comic book form (available in French translation in Peeters 2005), or the posthumous honor he gave to Jack Cole, the inventor of Plastic Man (Spiegelman 2001), one of the main victims of the 1950s witch-hunt against comics. What links these cases is a tremendous love of the genre, an acute and clever aware-

Works Cited Baetens, Jan. “Bandes dessinées et autobiographies.” Belphégor 4–1 (2004). http://www.dal .ca/~etc/belphegor/vol4_no1/articles/04_01_Baeten_autobd_fr.html  ——   —    . “Oliver Deprez’s storytelling.” California Society of Printmakers Journal (2006): 8–15.  ——   —    . “Historicizing achronism: Some notes on the idea of art without history in the writings of Carrier, David.” In Image (&) Narrative 12:4 (2011): 130–145. http://www .imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/205/169. Barthes, Roland. “Rhétorique de l’image.” Communications 4 (1964): 40–51. Beaty, Bart. Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2005. Broersma, Matt. The Lock: Insomnia 2. Seattle: Fantagraphics and Coconino Press, 2006. Canemaker, John. Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005 (1987). Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2000. Clowes, Daniel. Eightball 23 (“The Death-Ray”). Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004. Dierick, Charles, and Pascal Lefèvre. Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip in the Nineteenth Century. Brussels: VUB Press, 1998. Eisner, Will. A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories. Baronet Press, 1978.  ——   —    . Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac: Poorhouse Press, 1985.

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ness of its history, and, most important, a belief in the possibility of continuing it within the tradition. In this regard, great attention is paid to the use of color, and American graphic novels, which like to establish a dialogue with the typical color range of the early, badly printed comic books and newspaper cartoons in full color, are here utterly different from their European counterparts, which are much more attracted by painterly models and hence crave for less discrete colors. All these elements help in illuminating the apparently sober use of word and image, certainly in comparison with the equivalent European avant-garde tradition, but it is also the mark of a very different, less suspicious relationship toward words or, rather, to the use of language in the graphic novel. Although American authors know as well as their European colleagues how tricky, how sticky, how slippery words can be, and how difficult communication has become in the postmodern universe of today’s graphic novels, they seem less tempted to infer from that observation that words for this reason should be banned or abandoned for a more exclusively visual style. Nor do they make the choice of a strongly visual treatment of language, a treatment that would turn letters, words, and sentences in utterances of “visible language.” In their work remains a pragmatic and no-nonsense approach to the word-and-image relationship, which makes room for new forms of word-and-image interaction that are put forward to a lesser degree in the European avant-garde.

Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre. “Du linéaire au tabulaire.” Communications 24 (1976): 7–23. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Des comics et des hommes. Une histoire culturelle des comic books aux Etats-Unis. Paris: éditions du Temps, 2005. (Available in English as Of Comics and Me.

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Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.) Gaudreault, André. Du littéraire au filmique. Montréal: Nota bene, 2005 (1998).

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Gibbons, Dave, and Alan Moore. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1987. Groensteen, Thierry. “Histoire de la bande dessinée muette I.” 9e Art 2 (1997) : 60–75.  ——   —    . “Histoire de la bande dessinée muette II.” 9e Art 3 (1998): 92–105.  ——   —    . Couleur directe. Thurn: Kunst der Comics, 1993 (text in French, German and English). Groensteen, Thierry, and Benoît Peeters. Töpffer. L’invention de la bande dessinée. Paris: Hermann, 1994. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005. Kunzle, David. The History of the Comic Strip, Vol. 2: The Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Mazzuchelli, David. Paul Auster’s City of Glass. New York: Harper, 1994. Peeters, Benoît. La bande dessinée. Paris: Flammarion, 1993. Peeters, Benoît, ed. Little Nemo. 1905–2005. Un siècle de rêves. Paris and Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2005. Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York; Pantheon (2 volumes), 1986 and 1991  ——   —    . Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits. New York: Chronicle Books, 2001.  ——   —    . In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Spiegelman, Art, and Françoise Mouly, eds. Read Yourself Raw. New York: Pantheon, 1987. Stafford, Barbara. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Tomine, Adrian. Sleepwalk and Other Stories. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2002. Ware, Chris. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. New York: Pantheon, 2000. Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954.

music for the jilted generation Bernd Herzogenrath

Techno and | as Intermediality

Indeed, you may find that these things are all rather silly. But logic is always a bit silly. If one does not go to the root of the childish, one is inevitably precipitated into stupidity, as can be shown by innumerable examples . . .  — Jacques Lacan

In its complex history, the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk can be said to be a first important step on the way to intermediality. Going further, Heinrich Klotz, in an interview with Florian Rötzer, commented on a concept of a “medial Gesamtkunstwerk” (Rötzer 356) as the implementation of all the forms, disciplines, and media in which the interaction of the arts takes place. Whereas Wagner envisioned the interplay of libretto, costumes, and technology under the auspices of music as the most important factor, the “medial Gesamtkunstwerk” should not arrive at a new “wholeness,” but at a kind of Deleuzian “peripheral totality,” which creates “a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them” (Deleuze, Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 42). Klotz, in this interview, explicitly refers to this Gesamtkunstwerk in the context of digitization, which would have the power to transform the arts completely. Digitization blurs and dissolves the distances between bodies, images, texts, words, spaces, and sounds. This concept parallels the American artist Dick Higgins’s poetics of intermediality. The

“intermedial approach,” according to Higgins’s “Statement on Intermedia” is to emphasize the dialectic between the media. In his 1960s rhetoric, Higgins goes on to state that, 112

having discovered the intermedia . . . , the central problem is now not only the

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new formal one of learning to use them, but the new and more social one of what to use them for? Having discovered tools with an immediate impact, for what are we going to use them? If we assume, unlike McLuhan and others who have shed some light on the problem up until now, that there are dangerous forces at work in our world, isn’t it appropriate to ally ourselves against these, and to use what we really care about and love or hate as the new subject matter in our work? . . . We must find the ways to say what has to be said in the light of our new means of communicating. For this we will need new . . . organizations, criteria, sources of information. There is a great deal for us to do, perhaps more than ever. But we must now take the first step.

Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of a “minor literature” might be an appropriate point of reference here. It denotes the literature of a minority that employs a major language but deterritorializes it, a literature that interconnects meanings of the most disparate levels, oscillating between and mixing psychological, political, social, as well as poetic issues. Artists who work with media technologies do so through strategies of appropriation and from a position of “being minor”: “Whenever a marginality, a minority, becomes active, takes the word power . . . , transforms itself into becoming . . . it engenders a singular trajectory that is necessarily deterritorialising” (Stivale). Thus, in the context of media art, “becoming minor” is a strategy of transforming major technologies into minor machines. “Machines,” for Deleuze and Guattari, are assemblages, aggregations that transform forces, multiplicities without a regulating unity, crisscrossing lines of forces. The machine produces disruptions and discontinuities, unsettling given orders and running against routines and expectations. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari comment on Varèse’s musical experiments and describe his probings into the world of sound as “a musical machine . . . , a sound machine . . . which molecularizes and atomizes, ionizes sound matter . . . If this machine must have an assemblage, it is the syntheziser” (343). This quotation also serves as the motto for a techno label called Mille Plateaux, which sees itself as indebted to the Deleuzo-Guattarian techno-aesthetics or even techno-science. From this I will take my lead in discussing the phenomenon of techno as an intermedial phenomenon, concentrating on the digitalization of all the areas it affects as well as on its mixing of poetic, theoretical, and political issues. This paper wants to position the intermedial phenomenon techno within

So, I’ve decided to take my work back underground, to stop it falling into the wrong hands . . . (The Prodigy, “Intro”)

Apart from evoking (at least to my mind) a strangely familiar William-S.-Burroughs feeling, these words — taken from the “Intro” track of The Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation — address two important issues in my reading of techno. On the one hand, the album is introduced by what I would call the prominent soundmetaphor of modernism: the clacking keys of a typewriter. It thus relates techno to the realm of writing, the realm of the text, of differentiality. On the other hand, it opens up the question of the differentiation of underground and official culture, of the political relevance of techno — in short, of the position of techno as an art form in relation to society as a system of regulations. Rock’n’roll culture has always defined itself in terms of phallic sex and / or deviance (from the law, from common sense and its aesthetics). In contrast to rock, hip-hop or rap start from the fact of ghetto (tribe) segregation, a situation that might change for the better, but also — more probably — for the worse. Nevertheless, the discourses of hip-hop and rap still operate on the level of the outspoken signified, on the level of the message, of lyrics (hopefully “explicit” and thus labeled with the Parental Advisory). Though their music functions like a machine, it is still the soundtrack to black-and-white videos documenting the need for social change, thus still operating in an oppositional paradigm. Techno, however, is a style even less associated with “natural” instruments like guitar, bass, and drum-set, but with segments of the frequency spectrum on the monitor of the analyzer; not with real time and live performance, but with a step-by-step stratification of rhythms, samples, digital filters, and delay effects. A style that has its roots in Chicago (ware)house style and Detroit DJ culture, that takes machines (records, turntables, computers) and uses them not in the way they were supposed to be used, thus introducing techniques of ab|use (scratching, sampling, and so on). The style has an American tradition that began even earlier, maybe not so

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the context of (post)structuralist theories, literature, psychoanalysis and philosophy. As a kind of theoretical background noise, I have sampled Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze|Guattari, because they — much like techno itself — are concerned with the limits of subject, author, and representation. Thus, drawing from various discourses, without presenting (or wanting to present) a complete and final discussion of these theoretical approaches, this paper itself partakes in techno’s intermedial strategy of sampling, of putting heterogeneous elements into a new context. For this paper, I have mainly chosen tracks from the techno|dance act The Prodigy, whose album Music for the Jilted Generation shall serve as a steering device providing some thematic anchoring points in what follows.

long after the Civil War; its genealogy leads from Emerson’s essay “Quotation and Originality” —  114

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant — and this commonly on the ground of other reading or

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hearing — that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. (543)

 — via Edison’s “talking machine” or “memory machine”: the phonograph — “Mary Had a Little Lamb” — to today’s DJs and sampling artists.1 Techno’s social relevance was highlighted in Great Britain’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, Chapter 33. The English Law was the first to provide an official definition of dance and techno and to regulate the handling of this kind of music. This Act aimed at the deviant behavior not only of ravers, but of squatters, travelers, and others as well, people whose lifestyle is not one of conformity or uniformity. The respective section that criminalizes raves and techno music deserves to be quoted at full length: Powers to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave.   Section 63. — (1) This section applies to a gathering on land in the open air of 100 or more persons (whether or not trespassers) at which amplified music is played during the night (with or without intermissions) and is such as, by reason of its loudness and duration and the time at which it is played, is likely to cause serious distress to the inhabitants of the locality; and for this purpose —    (a) such a gathering continues during intermissions in the music and, where the gathering extends over several days, throughout the period during which amplified music is played at night (with or without intermissions); and   (b) “music” includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats. (Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, n. p.)

The Law speaks from the position of those who know that one sleeps at night, who know that loud music makes people aggressive, and who share the mythical belief that “music is (or has to be) natural.” In contrast, this machinic “emission of a succession of repetitive beats” truly deserves to be put in ironic quotation marks. The Law has thus branded techno as deviant, disclaiming parenthood for this disobedient, machinic child. It is indeed the very complicity of childishness and a machinic logic that will be a central perspective in my reading of techno. The duplicity of childishness and logic referred to in the Lacanian epigraph to this essay figures prominently in The Prodigy’s name. What is a prodigy? The OED gives a whole range of possible answers:

• Something extraordinary from which omens are drawn; an omen, a portent. • An amazing or marvelous thing; esp. something out of the ordinary course . . . of nature; something abnormal or monstrous. • Anything that causes wonder, astonishment or surprise; a wonder, a . . . marvel. of precocious genius.

Derived from the Latin prodigium, which denotes an omen in either a good or a bad sense, the English word prodigy thus combines two opposite meanings: the benevolent wonder and the abnormal monstrosity. Both meanings collide in the notion of the infant prodigy, a curious hybrid that combines the wisdom of a teacher with the age of a pupil. Relevant for my analysis is the possibility of reading the notion of “the prodigy” as a nodal point of four discourses: signification (“an omen”); the evil and the abject (“something abnormal or monstrous”); magic (“a wonder, a marvel”); and childhood (in connection with genius). Following these different traits, I will start with the two oft-quoted infant prodigies of psychoanalytical theory: Freud’s grandson Ernst, “inventor” of the fort|da-game, and the child prodigy in Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter,” as rendered and used by Jacques Lacan. In Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin gives the example of a young schoolboy who continuously wins the game of “even and odd” by means of a “thorough identification” (503) with his opponent. In his reading of this scene, Lacan stresses the fact that there is more at stake than mere guessing. Such intersubjectivity would remain in a purely imaginary realm, in a relation of “equivalence of one and the other, of the alter ego and the ego” (Seminar II 181). Lacan shows that by the infant prodigy’s identification with the opponent’s intellect something else is involved: a recourse to the symbolic register, thus: to an operating principle, a law, and not to something “real.” It is the signifying chain and its laws that determine the effects of subjectivity, because of some kind of inherent machinic “remembering [remémoration]” (185) of the symbolic: “From the start, and independently from any attachment to some supposedly causal bond, the symbol already plays, and produces by itself, its necessities, its structures, its organizations” (193). By contrasting the real and the symbolic, Lacan situates Poe’s story against the background of combinatorial analysis, when he claims, “The science of what is found at the same place [the real] is substituted for by the science of the combination of places as such” (299): cybernetics, “the fact that anything can be written in terms of 0 and 1” (300) — or: even and odd. Thus, the symbolic itself is binary, is related to the machinic — culture|the law as the automaton — and speaking human beings are cyborgs “from the word go.” The human being’s entrance into the machinic is playfully experienced by an-

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• A person endowed with some quality which excites wonder; esp. a child . . .

other child prodigy, Freud’s grandson Ernst. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud describes his observations of his grandson’s self-invented game. 116

What he did was to hold [a wooden reel] by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time

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uttering his expressive “o-o-o-o.” He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful “da” [“there”]. This, then, was the complete game — disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself . . . (284)

Lacan stresses the fact that in the so-called fort|da game a rudimentary use of language — a first phonematic opposition — is implicated. For the speaking subject, being constituted by this “original” digitality [fort|da, 0|I) and inscribed into a trans-subjective (rather than inter-subjective) system, an outside of digitality is impossible. It might be argued that there is something in the human subject that is not reducible to pure digitality: its indestructible drive (for a presymbolic state). Lacan highlights the “immortal . . . irrepressible life” (Four Fundamental Concepts 198) of the drive energy in his myth of the lamella. The lamella is thus the human being as pre-sexual, pre-subject substance, of a “life that has no need of no organ” (198). Lacan gives a very vivid image of it: “The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba . . . And it can run around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep . . .” (197). This illustration of the lamella reads like a perfect description of the cover of The Prodigy’s Music for the Jilted Generation. It depicts this very balanced moment when the extra-flat lamella gives way to the clearcut physiognomy of the subject, the (symbolic) “body with organs,” when the unspeakable gives way to and disappears in articulation. Lacan’s concept of “desire [as] borne by death” (Écrits 277) — and it is significant that Freud relates the fort|da-game to the repetition compulsion as a proof of the death drive, a force beyond the pleasure principle — sees desire as inevitably dependent upon the symbolic register (and thus the Oedipus complex and castration|death), even though it is on the other hand exactly that which escapes language, that which is always left over in articulation. Nevertheless, “the moment in which desire becomes human is also that in which the child is born into language” (103). Thus, the fort|da game enacts the very moment in which the pure, real jouissance (of the body of the drives) is substituted by the culturally acceptable (and thus castrated) phallic, symbolic jouissance of desire (what Lacan calls jouis-sens): a desire that is human by the very act of tying the human subject to the phallic machinic, Deleuze and Guattari’s oedipal “molar machines” (Anti-Oedipus 286). Desire is thus directed to a (however impossible) signified, its

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metonymic drift propelling forward along the culturally loaded and Law|ful chain of signifiers: “Daddy says YES!” Yet, there is another machine, a machine like the one that underlies the soundtrack of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. A strange, disturbing machine always underlying culture, in the same manner that the signifier always underlies the signified, that reminds “the signified [that it] is originarily and essentially . . . always already in the position of the signifier” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 73). These machines are described by Deleuze and Guattari as “desiring machines . . . machines in the strict sense, because they proceed by breaks and flows, associated waves and particles, associative flows and partial objects . . .” (Anti-Oedipus 286–87). Society’s molar machines are desire machines under “determinate conditions” (Anti-Oedipus 287), two states of one and the same machine. In a similar manner, Derrida shows how the deferring agency of writing as tekhne — as “a machine . . . defined in its pure functioning, and not in its final utility, its meaning, its result” (Margins 107) — is implicitly at work in the very realm that tries to suppress it — the spoken word and the living memory — by focusing, for instance on the indeterminate ambiguity of the term pharmakon (see “Plato’s Pharmacy”) as expressed in The Prodigy’s “I got the poison, I got the remedy” (The Prodigy, “Poison”). Thus, beside the obvious reading, referring to yet another disillusioned youth, the “jilted generation” of the title of the Prodigy album might be mis|read in terms of the dismissed mode of production (generation) of the “pure|desiring machine,” of the tekhne of writing as an endless signifying chain. Deleuze and Guattari’s image of the machine as an assemblage or montage can be related — via the Dadaist sound-collage–to the sampling technique of techno and acid house music. Techno, in its decidedly apolitical self-fashioning, thus nevertheless takes part in subversion. Not a subversion as decidedly against The Law, against its mode of communication, but by forcing signification against itself, by foregrounding the signifier against the signified. Achim Szepanski, founder and former owner of the label Mille Plateaux, has explained that in techno, “you can hear a multitude of noises, shrieks, chirps, creaks, and whizzes. These are all sounds traditionally associated with madness . . . Techno in this sense is schizoid music . . .” (140–41, my translation). By thus concentrating on the unreasonable sounds beyond meaning, in techno the polymorphous drive reacts against repressive, phallic desire. A pre-oedipal childhood — a realm of unrestricted freedom and bodily pleasure — opposes post-oedipal adulthood: the pure techno|tekhne-machine of “the horns of Jericho” (The Prodigy, “Jericho”). It is thus a “rage against the machine” not from that illusory position of a nonmachinic other,2 but a “rage of the (pure) machine against the (oedipal) machine,” a “rage against the Symbolic” (Kristeva, Powers 178) — “Fuck ’em and Their Law” (The Prodigy, “Their Law”).

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The promise of a return to the pre-oedipal and uncastrated realm of childhood also lies at the heart of Jaron Lanier’s manifesto for virtual reality (VR), a field closely related to techno, as can be seen both in techno video clips or in the use of computer animated images at techno raves:

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All of us suffered a terrible trauma as children that we’ve forgotten, where we had to accept the fact that we are physical beings and yet in the physical world where we have to do things, we are very limited. The thing that I think is so exciting about virtual reality is that it gives us this freedom again. It gives us this sense to be who we are without limitation . . . (Wooley 14)

This utopia of childhood revisited is expressed for example in techno DJ Marusha’s cover version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”3 I think it is important to stress the fact that this is a techno-remake, thus what is at stake is not a childhood in terms of an “analog paradise regained.” It reveals (and nevertheless enjoys and celebrates) paradise as an effect of the digital machine.4 The original song was featured in the movie The Wizard of Oz, a movie that itself relates the reality of the childish dream-world to the functioning of a machine: the big, steaming illusion-machine of the (fake) Wizard. Techno and VR now add a crucial ingredient: the pre-oedipal is always already machinic, the machine is the limit, but the limit of the machine, its basic formula 0|1, can be repeated endlessly. Thus, it seems only natural that the individual piece of techno music as a pure signifier, as a collage of various signifiers, forms a signifying chain in itself, drifts from remix to remix, creates “Loops of Infinity”:5 the artists and DJs of techno definitely and consciously belong to the post-author (and post-songwriter) era, not only due to the much-hailed democratization of the artistic process via the easily affordable instruments, but as a result of the open character of techno music itself: being more serial than serious, techno is able to proliferate endlessly, and “proliferation is always a threat to order” (Lecercle 95). The repetitiveness of the machinic is thus the distinctive characteristic of techno music, not only on the level of this signifier’s circulation (and distribution), but on the level of the individual piece (as an abstraction) as well, since this music consists of “sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats,” as stated by The Law. As in Freud’s fort|da-game, repetition of the fundamental difference (fort|da, 0|I) is the rule of the game. This, I argue, is true for techno music as well. Furthermore, it is its repeatability that makes a rule a rule, that makes a law a law. A way to contrast these two laws: the law of the signifier and The Law of the signified (which — in the end — are one and the same), is to have recourse to chaos theory, more precisely: to the notion of the fractal. As Brian Massumi has noted in his User’s Guide, a fractal, “in spite of its infinite fissuring, looks like and can function as a unified figure if we adopt an ontological posture toward it”

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(23). If this notion is related to the endless play of signifiers, the signified — as an effect of the signifier — can be related to what Massumi calls a “diagram”: “The diagram is drawable, but only if the fissuring is arbitrarily stopped at a certain level (produced meaning as evaporative end effect . . . momentary suspension of becoming)” (22). The Law of the signified is thus only an actualization of the law of the signifier: as such, it is a “dead fractal,” an effect of what it wants to — but cannot — suppress. The realm of childhood seems to pose a serious threat to the restrictions and laws of society. Georges Bataille, in an essay on Wuthering Heights, has commented on the contrast between society and the childish. He shows that what is at stake is a “revolt of Evil against Good” (19–20). Yet it is not a question of the immoral against the moral: evil is understood here as something amoral rather than immoral. A revolt from an other position always already functions within the realm of The Law, in a way acknowledges and strengthens the very opponent it wants to fight. To put it another way: a rage against the machine by something nonmachinic, by authentic rock’n’roll (or punk, for that matter), is bound to fail from the beginning. Because of the fact that it is reasonable, it is immediately incorporated by the reason-machine. A revolt thus has to be stupid, libidinal, childish, and, most important, machinic. Techno is regarded as un-natural. This perspective claims nature and the machinic as oppositions and represses the fact that once within the symbolic (culture), the machinic is our most natural condition. In Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, then, the already socialized enunciations of the Linton kids — “Oh, mamma, mamma! Oh, papa! Oh, mamma, come here! Oh, papa, oh!” (90) — are not opposed by any reasonable counter-arguments or comments like “No, not mamma! No, not papa!,” but by “frightful noises” (90) — the Romantic equivalent to the “repetitive beats” of present-day techno.6 Whereas the concepts of cyberspace and VR celebrate the sovereignty of childhood without the body — the death of the body is in fact the price to be paid to revisit paradise — techno celebrates “Judgment Night” as the re-surrection of the body, it puts the body back into its place. A place not determined by biological parameters (that is: by the real) but by symbolic parameters that go a step further than the Lacanian definition of the subject being a signifier representing a subject for another signifier. In analogy to Félix Guattari’s redefinition of the Lacanian object a as an “object machine petit ‘a’ ” (Molecular Revolution 115), the subject is constituted in “a pure signifying space where the machine would represent the subject for another machine” (117–18). Whereas the Lacanian object a is a fragment of the real (body), that “pound of flesh” exchanged for the signifier, in a techno rave the body as a whole is not replaced, but significantly affected by the machinic: techno thus transforms the whole body into the “objet-machine petit ‘a.’ ” 7 In this “final corporate colonization of the unconscious”8 — that unconscious

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that is both the “secret of the speaking body” (Lacan, Encore 18, my translation) and that “engineers, is machinic” (Deleuze, Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 53) — body and machine become one. In connection with the ravers’ use of a drug aptly called Ecstasy, all these references collide in the notion of dance as ritual. Whereas the dancing body has been traditionally seen as a means of natural (self-) expression, in techno-, Goa- and trance-dance, the body moves beyond the pose and the object of the (male) gaze: “dance” might be defined here as the relation of the body to the machinic. Lacan has called cybernetics the “science of empty places” (Seminar II 300), and techno raves, as a kind of “gay cybernetics,” to misuse a Nietzschean term, make much use of empty spaces such as industrial sites, warehouses, and factories. Jean Baudrillard has argued that the modern city (or its icon, the factory) is no longer “a site for the production and realisation of commodities” (77). It has become “a site of the sign’s execution” (119). Thus it might be no coincidence that just at the moment the factory as such disappears, techno usurps the empty places with its “signifier factory,” with a production that is good for nothing. In addition to the notion of pre-oedipal childhood and the pleasure of the body of the polymorphously perverse drives, which is experienced most directly in gabba and hardcore-techno, there is the experience of trance and ecstasy prevalent in trance and ambient-techno (which is not to say that gabba does not have its spiritual merits . . . ). Still, the terror of speed and repetitive beats is related to the evil and the abject, as a border between the human and the purely physical, whereas the Zen-like experience of trance could be related to the sublime, the border between the human and the metaphysical|spiritual. Both point toward what Lacan calls a “jouissance beyond the phallus” (Encore 81): mysticism. An obvious link between techno and mysticism can be observed in the trend of merging shamanistic ritual chants, Gregorian chants or Hildegard von Bingen’s “Canticles of Ecstasy,” with techno beats. For example, watch the video clip of Scubadevil’s “Celestial Symphony,” which features film sequences of religious rituals and fade-ins of possible combinations of 0 and I. As an expanded metaphor of the “information superhighway” and in analogy with rock’n’roll culture as an extended metaphor of the street, the two variants of techno — the abject and the sublime — can be read as the “information superhighway to Hell” and the “information super-stairway to Heaven.”9 According to Lacan, mysticism is a kind of experience that gives access to the jouissance of the body, which we have taken to be forever lost as a result of castration. This experience can ironically never be put into words as such (despite the fact that this ineffable centers the poetic discourse it creates). Here I see a main reason why The Prodigy (and other techno artists using message fragments) is not regarded as pure techno anymore: by returning — at least partly — to the realm of the signified, The (infant) Prodigy turns into a Prodigal Son.10 However, it is

Notes A slightly different version of this essay was first published as “ ‘A Sonorous People’: Techno|Music and the Joyous Body|Politic,” in Bernd Herzogenrath, An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010, 233–52, and is re-published here with kind permission. 1. For an essay dealing with these connections, see Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid), “Dark Carnival,” http://www.djspooky.com/articles/darkcarnival.html. 2. See the eponymously titled CD of the American crossover band Rage Against the Machine (1992), which explicitly states on the cover the proud announcement that “no samples, no keyboards or synthesizers were used in the making of this recording.” 3. The duplicity of techno and “modernist music” with respect to childhood is alluded to in Else Kolliner’s analysis of Igor Strawinsky’s “infantilism.” She states that Strawinsky’s music creates a “new realm of fantasy . . . which every individual once in his childhood enters with closed eyes.” Strawinsky’s techniques of “the stubborn repetition of individual motives — as well as the disassembling and totally new recomposition of their elements . . . are instrumentally accurate translations of child-like gestures of play into music.” “Remarks on Strawinsky’s ‘Renard,’ ” quoted in Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 162–63. 4. Since I have related the “pure machine”|techno to Julia Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic earlier on, I would like to add Kristeva’s warning not to confuse the semiotic with the analog: “this heterogeneity between the semiotic and the symbolic cannot be reduced to computer theory’s well-known distinction between ‘analog’ and ‘digital.’ ” Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 66.

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exactly the borderline position of Music for the Jilted Generation that makes it valuable for my reading of techno. Thus it might be that the pre-oedipal polymorphic perversity of techno functions as a libidinally charged equivalent to a fundamental intermedial approach: “By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote” (Emerson 543–44). In the child’s polymorphic sexuality, there are no fixed libidinal zones, just as in techno, there are no fixed and regulated discourses and media. “Becoming minor” refers to just that. I want to finish by again quoting Georges Bataille on mysticism. The following quote can be taken as an apt description of techno, the music of a jilted generation that uses the regalia of hippiedom (“Love Parade”) and “drifts free and peacefully above the cold volcanoes of beat-music” (Diederichsen 278): “Mysticism is as far from the spontaneity of childhood as it is from the accidental condition of passion. But it expresses its trances through the vocabulary of love. And contemplation liberated from discursive reflection has the simplicity of a child’s laugh” (Bataille 27): “hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha . . .” (Josh Winx, “Don’t laugh”).

5. This is the title of a track by the techno artist Cosmic Baby. 6. Cathy and Heathcliff are observing the Lintons through the window of Thrushcross Grange, and this windowpane serves as a translucent barrier between the realm of

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childhood and the realm of society, of etiquette, a barrier that would have to be destroyed or crushed from within in order to return to childhood again (The Prodigy, “Break and

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Enter”). 7. For Deleuze|Guattari, “Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression” (Anti-Oedipus 26). If, according to Lacan, the object a is the “stuff” (Écrits 315) of the subject, then, in that “pure signifying space,” where the subject as subject is missing, it is in fact the objet-machine petit ‘a’ that is the stuff of the “subject.” 8. Title of an ambient|trance CD by Drome (1993). 9. With respect to techno, there have been a multitude of references to shamanism, tribalism, modern primitivism, and voodoo-magic (The Prodigy, “Voodoo People”). It was Arthur C. Clarke who was quoted as saying that “any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” See Katie Hafner and John Markoff, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, p. 11. The references to the Loa and other aspects of Voodoo in William Gibson’s Neuromancer is another case in point. For the notion of tribalism and new primitivism, see Techno sub-genres such as “tribal dance” and “jungle.” Thus, hackers, cyberpunks, techno artists, and other (mis)users of computer technology are the mystics and new magicians of our age, the shamans and Voodoo-priests of technology. 10. See Kodwo Eshun’s article in i-D 135 (December 1994): 32–37, on The Prodigy, “Prodigal Sons,” where he contrasts The Prodigy’s “pre-adolescence” (34) of their debut, an “aural equivalent of [Lacan’s] mirror stage” (34), with the attempt of their latest album to “put hardcore’s adrenalin thrill into stadium rock” (33).

Works Cited Adorno,Theodor. Philosophy of Modern Music. Translated by A. G. Mitchell and W. V. Blomster. London: Sheed & Ward, 1987. Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. Translated by A. Hamilton. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1990. Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Translated by Ian H. Grant. London: SAGE Publications, 1995. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1985. Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. London: HMSO, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. —   —   —    . Margins of Philosophy. Translated by A. Bass. Brighton: Harvester, 1986.

—   —   —    . “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination. Translated by B. Johnson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981. 61–172. Diederichsen, Diedrich. Freiheit macht arm: Das Leben nach Rock’n’Roll 1990–93. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993. Emerson, R. W. “Quotation and Originality.” The North American Review 106: 219 (April

Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Vol. 2 of the Penguin Freud Library. Edited by Angela Richards and Albert Dickson. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984. 269–338. Guattari, Félix. Molecular Revolution. Translated by R. Sheed. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1984. Hafner, Katie, and John Markoff. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Higgins, Dick. “Statement on Intermedia.” In Dé-coll/age (décollage) * 6. Edited by Wolf Vostell. Frankfurt: Typos Verlag; New York: Something Else Press, July 1967. See http:// www.artpool.hu/Fluxus/Higgins/intermedia2.html, last accessed Dec. 16, 2008. Klotz, Heinrich. “Für ein mediales Gesamtkunstwerk. Heinrich Klotz im Gespräch mit Florian Rötzer.” In Digitaler Schein. Ästhetik der elektronischen Medien. Edited by Florian Rötzer. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. 356–70. Kolliner, Else. “Remarks on Strawinsky’s ‘Renard,’ ” quoted in Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music. Translated by A. G. Mitchell and W. V. Blomster. London: Sheed & Ward, 1987. 162–63. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. —   —   —    . Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan Livre XX, Encore, 1972–73. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975. —   —   —   . Écrits: A Selection. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. —   —   —    . The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978. —   —   —    . The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psycho-Analysis 1954–55. Translated by S. Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire. La Salle: Open Court, 1985. Massumi, Brian. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Purloined Letter.” In Tales of Mystery and Imagination. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1989. 493–511. Stivale, Charles J. “Pragmatic/Machinic: Discussion with Felix Guattari,” Pre/Text 14: 3–4 (1993). http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/stivale.html. Last accessed Dec. 16, 2008.

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1868): 543–57. Eshun, Kodwo. “Prodigal Sons.” i-D135 (1994): 32–7.

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Szepanski, Achim. “Den Klangstrom zum Beben bringen,” in Techno. Edited by Philipp Anz and Patrick Walder. Zürich: Ricco Bilger, 1995. 137–42. Wooley, Benjamin. Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. Cambridge:

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Blackwell, 1992.

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Sound Bites The Prodigy. Experience (1992). “Jericho.” —   —   —    . Music for the Jilted Generation (1994). “Intro,” “Their Law,” “Poison,” “Break and Enter,” “Voodoo People.” Josh Winx (1995). “Don’t laugh.”

genuine thought is inter(medial) J u li a M ei er To think is to create.  

— Antonin Artaud

This chapter deals with the question of intermediality as the space in between different media. Taking into account the “theories of difference” of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I argue that the virtual “space in-between” has the potential to create genuine thought as an event within the concentrated form of intermedial artwork. Hence the creative act, with its ability to produce a “new language” (Barthes 155), becomes necessary for the emergence of meaning as a signifying potential. My analysis revolves around the works of the three musicians Diamanda Galás, Peaches, and Janine Rostron, a.k.a. Planningtorock. I choose their work as examples of contemporary intermedial production that aims at the creation of a “new language.” What the three musicians have in common is their mixture of different music genres, their extraordinary physical presence on stage, and their ability to allow these two realms — body image and sound — to interact in a new way: Their bodies constitute a part of an intermedial sound-sculpture enabling these performers to present their compositions in an immediate or visceral manner.

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“That which hits right into the nervous system without the detour of the brain” is one of the most important statements made by British painter Francis Bacon (Sylvester 18).1 Basing his concepts on this notion, Gilles Deleuze developed his “logic of sensation” (see Francis Bacon). Not to represent but to present is a property of genuine creation, which unfolds in a realm that can only be understood via sensation — viscerally. What is implied in this concept is that all other intelligible understanding refers to something already known — to a referential system, grid, or code. In Diamanda Galás’s, Peaches’s, and Planningtorock’s performances the familiar habitat is left behind — distinct spaces of music genres and media are shattered, mixed up, and, in the process, violently brought together again. This clashing of distinct spaces is what opens up the spaces in-between. If we attempted to trace the various sources of their work and to define the different influences on that work with the aim of establishing one fixed meaning, we would “fall in with the myth of filiation” as Roland Barthes argues (“From Work to Text” in Image-Music-Text 160) — simply because we could not avoid reestablishing the well-known codes. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze attests to this idea, stating that genuine thought begins with an external act of violence inflicted upon thought in order to “awaken thought from its natural stupor . . . . Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter” (139). This fundamental encounter is like a jolt, like a disequilibrium or deregulation of the senses “that can only be sensed” (139).

Diamanda Galás In the work and persona of American vocalist, pianist, and composer Diamanda Galás2 intermediality manifests in her ability to filter the space in between all different kinds of musical styles, genres, eras, and cultures into a particularly concentrated sound: She can be considered the first artist to feature in her performances a variety that ranges from classical opera sung over blues and gospel traditionals to a visceral collage of “chants, shrieks, gurgles, hisses often at extreme volumes, frequently distorted electronically and accompanied by a torrent of words” (Harris 20) which defies description. Similar to this contracted and “folded” sound material, her visual appearance ranges from the “Dark Diva,” the “Callas of the avant-garde,” to the tortured or devastated body of a victim.3 The textual realm of her work oscillates among Edgar Allan Poe, French poetry of the nineteenth century, the Old Testament, various other texts, and her own writings (see Galás, The Shit of God). In the clashing of all these elements, a new, previously unknown space of sonic-sculptural quality is created. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari

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describe the space in-between as follows: “Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other way, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle” (25). When we see a performance of Galás we surely do not realize all the different spaces that clash simultaneously — we experience a homogeneous space, a single flow of sounds, gestures, and movements. Everything fits perfectly together and lures us deep into the composition performed on stage. We are already in the middle — inside this unique space. There is no time, no distance that would allow us to reflect, detect an order, or make intelligible sense of what is presented to us. We are affected immediately by the combination of sounds, images, and words. Why is it that a definite description of these events in front of us is not possible? It feels like a shock — there is not really a known grid or a code at hand to which we could refer. In her productions, Galás produces loops and layers of various voices. She sets different timbres, stretches and almost squashes tones, or inhales words. Galás operates here with elements that may allude to the German Expressionist Schreioper of the 1920s or Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. Both had resisted articulating phonetic units but instead gasped and screamed in unarticulated blocks of sounds in order to hinder any conventional interpretation of the piece. Despite obvious references and analogies to such an approach, Diamanda Galás differs in performance and technique. What may seem a chaotic accumulation of various sounds without any significant meaning is in fact the destruction of a clearly defined statement: “Yes, I confess!” — Galás shouts in Plague Mass and repeats the same words over and over again until they start to vibrate between themselves. She modulates these words with all kinds of different and overlapping voices. Between high-pitched volumes and deep gurgles, she stutters the sentence, and then connects it again with a clearly expressed dialogue, full speech acts: “Do you confess? Yes, I confess.” The spaces in which three distinct realms connect with one another — the spaces between high-pitched volumes which are reminders of the high sound of classical opera singing, and stuttered, cut-up sentences, as well as the space between stuttered sentences and deep gurgles — create vibratory passages that produce the integral rhythm of the piece. It is as if these distinct realms start to communicate with each other, creating a genuinely new communication, one that has not been heard before, and causing a jolt or disequilibrium to our senses in that it can only be sensed. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari state that every milieu is open to chaos. They see the space in-between two milieus as the common zone of chaos and rhythm, “chaos rhythm or chaosmos” (312). Regular or irregular meter or cadence is only possible within coded forms whereby meter can change but

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only within a milieu that is noncommunicating. Thus they understand meter as a dogmatic entity, whereas rhythm would be critical (the Unequal; the Incommensurable). That means that only rhythm can connect critical moments, connecting itself with the passage from one milieu to another. Rhythm does not operate within a homogeneous space-time; it operates as heterogeneous blocks, and it always changes directions. If we understand a well-known genre as a form of a certain habitualized code, an already established terrain or milieu in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of coded forms in A Thousand Plateaus, it can be said for Galás’s compositions, then, that the connection of pure expression, cut-up sentences, and fully articulated sentences opens up codes, and creates a passage between them. Plague Mass, for instance, features more than just one single encoding because it is both a correlation of heterogeneous sound material and the combination of two media — text and music — that mutually affect each other, become each other and thus create something new. The connection of different voices, different volumes and modes of expression of “Yes, I confess” is precisely the device by which the sentence is brought into resonance with other forces that start to vary its single meaning; forces that start to violate the common signification and shoot it into multiple directions. Thus Galás produces a new precondition that is necessary in order to push something through, to make something visible, audible, discernible that has been covered or could only have been guessed4 in the sense of Paul Klee’s famous formula: “not to render the visible, but to render visible,” and likewise not to render the sonorous, but to render sonorous (quoted in Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 48). The sentence becomes all possible meanings, acquires an “over-potential,” which sets free its mad and chaotic energy. It is thus not a simple quotation of disparate elements that are fused into an amorphous “one,” nor a simple collection where parts are set against parts, simply collecting them as aggregates, but the process of relating parts within a single field of composition, the connection or linkage of elements. The space where disparate elements touch each other delivers the possibility of a critical communication between heterogeneous blocks. The line between the different spaces does not move in a specific direction, but is a continuous oscillating movement, an endless back-and-forth between two or more spaces. It creates tension, vibration, and intensity. The composition contains a clear structure but it is unique and new, a self-forming structure, which is achieved by undoing the structure of fixed codes and static grids of conventional configurations. Thus, it is exactly the in-between, which becomes sonorous. The seemingly “empty” space of the in-between is not a “degree zero.” It is, as Guattari puts it in his book Chaosmosis, “not a neutral, passive, deficient, negative point, but an extreme degree of intensification. It is in passing through this chaotic ‘earthing,’ this perilous oscillation, that something

else becomes possible, that ontological bifurcations and the emergence of coefficients of processual creativity can occur” (111).

Planningtorock

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Planningtorock (hereafter abbreviated as PTR) presents another example of performance that illustrates the idea of a certain shock intricately tied into a new realm that is built from connecting and overlapping resonating media. She started her career as a video artist and made music only to serve as background to her video work. Later her music became more and more important, and she produced her first album Have it All in 2006. Similar to Galás’s compositions, PTR’s music infiltrates and combines diverse music styles, and cannot be categorized as one specific music genre. Her “sound-operation” is in flux, constantly developing into diverging directions and planes such as hip-hop, blues, or electronic music. Pizzicato bass styles pulsate with plucked-string productions and are mixed together with “barrelhouse boogie-woogie pianos with ridiculous xylophone trills, honkeytonk horn sleaze, bluesy growls and creepy coos” (Daniel n.p.; see also Suarez and Haist). In her one-woman performance on stage, though, PTR’s work has become one opaque realm in which music and video intersect. She projects her video installations onto her own body — her only source of stage lighting. When the video features very dark sequences or fast, bright flickering sequences, she can scarcely be seen. Or when standing against the wall she is only visible inside the oval of the projected light, which frames her body like an aureole. The images of her look as if filmed through a kaleidoscope. The processes of multiplication, mirroring, and overlapping generate a special space in-between, which exists in this case in-between the different layers of herself | her selves. In addition to music and video work, PTR’s own appearance on stage becomes an important part of the whole intermedial artwork. She wears baggy pants and diverse selfmade futuristic papier-maché masks or hats. From her nose downwards her face is covered in white make-up. While the rest of her “artistic figure” is also covered in white, her medium-long dark hair frames the upper part of her body, and long bangs fully cover her eyes. Something then starts to irritate or even shock the perceiver of such a performance. The music alone, with its creepy, hoarse coos, might trigger an eerie feeling, but in combination with the visual media, PTR’s act generates a visceral feeling that leaves her audience startled. A monstrous figure seems to descend from a nightmare — a Stephen King clownish horror figure — simultaneously conveying the clinical white of a nurse and the disturbing image of an inmate of a mental institution. With her mask covering her eyes and head she looks like

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a conflation — a meld of mime, knight in armor, and insect from outer space. When she takes off her mask and starts headbanging she changes into a vision of a heavy-metal rocker. It is as if the madness lurking inside suddenly finds an outlet.5 This outbreak of a hidden chaotic energy, tamed by the white and clean outfit and accompanied by PTR’s slow balancing movements, is achieved through a change of direction: the moment she takes off the huge covering mask and starts headbanging, she turns into something like a freaked-out nurse — a mad caretaker, and with all facets of her appearance described above, a complete monstrosity. What I want to point out here is that even though we are capable of differentiating between the three media of sound, “body|sculpture,” and video image, it is still not possible to define every single detail of the whole compound, and it is especially not possible to detect all the single parts that start to resonate. It seems as if the allusion to — but shattered fulfillment of — a previously known style or genre is what generates a kind of horror within the audience. In addition to the loss of secured recognition, the resonance of all the different in-betweens heightens the potentiality of the performance’s meaning: it acquires an intensity that can only be sensed and no longer intelligibly understood. This process might result in an unpleasant or eerie feeling, of something that has become “too much” — “too much” because this distortion of our senses has forced them to move in multiple directions; thus they can no longer be reduced to pre-established categories. The loss of recognition within such an artistic compound echoes Roland Barthes’s analysis of text, which he defines as always being plural, with no underlying originality. Barthes states, “What [the reader] perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colors, vegetations, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children’s voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes. . . . All these incidents are half-identifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique, founds the stroll in a difference repeatable only as difference” (159). Furthermore, he discovers a demonic notion intricately tied into this kind of textual realm because for “[any monistic] . . . philosophy, plural is the Evil” — a philosophical concept that traces back to the New Testament, Mark 5:9: “My name is Legion: for we are many” (160). Deleuze’s analysis of the emergence of thought in Difference and Repetition almost bears the tone of monstrosity and horror of that which is connected to “real” thought. If we were to tie the process of creating thought to the processes that happen in our perception of an intermedial artwork we could say that between different media (or more precisely, between different mental faculties) a communication is enforced; this communication does not engender a clear and distinct common sense, but is “communicated from one faculty to another, . . . is metamorphosed” (146). That which has been formed during the process of

Peaches Peaches created an image of herself in which she plays with explicit sexual male and female attributes. Among other things, she put into visual imagery music genres of different eras such as hard and glam rock, as well as punk, which she mixes with a kind of cabaret feel. She superimposes onto her persona female figures from science fiction movies — think for instance of Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner or of such idealized superhuman comic-strip figures as Catwoman or Wonder Woman, women who are sexy and tough. Altered through Peaches’s persona their attributes of glamour, cleanness, and perfection are deconstructed; the heroines become sloppy, dirty, almost freakish-looking. She combines them in this process with down-to-earth masculine attributes, taking on a hard-rock mentality and displaying truck-driver aesthetics. The specific construct of her image allows for the clashing of different visual realms in a catchy and aggressive way. Although the beard on her face or the dildo at her crotch are attached to her body, these prosthetics seem to become natural extensions of her body rather than alien elements of a costume. By mixing up various male and female sexual attributes in exaggerated stereotypes, as well as various music genres interpreted visually that imply coded forms of erotic images, a new body of sexual energy has been generated. Parallel to Peaches’s visual appearance and all the things that can be associated with her — the intermediality with reference to her artistic figure — I would like to concentrate on one particular track in which intermediality is not generated by several distinct elements but by one and the same element. The track “Rock

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communication is not a “clear and distinct” amalgam of the diverse faculties but “a forced and broken connection which traverses the fragments of a dissolved self [or in general terms: a dissolved entity] as it does the boarders of a fractured I [or entity]” (145). According to Deleuze only recognition can be the “clear and distinct,” only something that existed before and that has been represented. Thus, it becomes an act of violence when different faculties start to communicate, to interact, to clash or to resonate. This kind of communication, which is capable of generating something new, bears an immense and immediate power or energy. This then disrupts the continuous, undisrupted flow of common sense. It triggers the “explosion of the clear and distinct” (146). The new generated form is no longer the clear and distinct but the “distinct-obscure” (the Dionysian) and it generates a new harmony between the faculties that “can appear only in the form of a discordant harmony” (as Immanuel Kant describes the sublime in his Critique of Judgment).6 This is the violent act — the very point at which the audience becomes startled, the moment of the emergence of genuine thought.

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’n’ roll” from her album Fatherfucker, 2003, is in its mantralike and ecstatic manner the space in-between all iterating and somersaulting expressions of rock ’n’ roll. Peaches uses in this track one single music genre — one cliché — and forces it up to an almost insane totality of meaning. Rock ’n’ roll is the song title, the main part of the lyrics, and the full refrain. Like a maniac she screams the same words into the microphone as if the iteration was caused by a crack in a record: ROCK ’N’ ROLL  —   R OCK ’N’ ROLL, ROCKNROLLROCKNROLLROCKNROLL ROCK ’N’ ROLL  —   R OCK ’N’ ROLL, ROCKNROLLROCKNROLLROCKNROLL ROCK ’N’ ROLL  —   R OCK ’N’ ROLL, ROCKNROLLROCKNROLLROCKNROLL ROCK ’N’ ROLL  —   R OCK ’N’ ROLL, ROCKNROLLROCKNROLLROCKNROLL ROCK ’N’ ROLL  —   R OCK ’N’ ROLL, ROCKNROLLROCKNROLLROCKNROLL ROCK ’N’ ROLL  —   R OCK ’N’ ROLL, ROCKNROLLROCKNROLLROCKNROLL ROCK ’N’ ROLL  —   R OCK ’N’ ROLL, ROCKNROLLROCKNROLLROCKNROLL ROCK ’N’ ROLL  —   R OCK ’N’ ROLL, ROCKNROLLROCKNROLLROCKNROLL I bet that you are a sweet peach, to rock your body baby I bet that you are a sweet peach, to rock your body baby I bet that you are a sweet peach, to rock your body baby I bet that you are a sweet peach, to rock your body baby ROCK ’N’ ROLL  —   R OCK ’N’ ROLL, ROCKNROLLROCKNROLLROCKNROLL . . .

What seems to be an unending spectacle of ludicrousness is in fact the production of a new language — a language that enables the listener to comprehend the full power and meaning of rock ’n’ roll; not just the cliché — it is not the representation of rock ’n’ roll; not that for which it stands, and paradoxically not its iteration or its recognition, but its very presentation as the process during which all possible rock elements resonate within each other, forming one elemental compound of rock ’n’ roll. It is an overlapping and vibratory passage comparable to a sequence in the movie Being John Malkovich by Spike Jonze in which the fictional character and simultaneously real person John Malkovich “drives” into his own body and subsequently has the possibility of reflecting on everything around him through his own eyes: What he perceives is everything in himself as the person “himself”: “Malkovich; Malkovich.” At this moment he is Malkovich in the plural being of himself. Thus, in the kernel of its code, terrain, or milieu there lurks the very madness of rock ’n’ roll’s meaning. It is connected with chaos — an endless oscillation between terrain and chaos. For this track Peaches combines all possible clichés of the genre: AC/DC, Metallica, Slayer, Joan Jett, cowboy boots, leather jackets, beer, her sweating, all the gestures, all the poses of the genre, her down-to-earth

Conclusion With reference to Friedrich Nietzsche in Desert Islands (254–60) Deleuze postulates the political element immanent in the active undoing of fixed codes, political in the sense that nothing new nor a new people can emerge on the foundation of an established code system. This would be possible only if an absolute encoding, a mix-up of all codes, takes place in order to push something through which is not encodable (254). Deleuze connects the emergence of thought with a direct and inevitable relation to the outside. He states that every “quotation” that comes from the outside comes only as a “proper name,” which is neither a representation of things or of persons, nor a representation of words but a “lived experience” or “intensity” (257). In this sense then Diamanda Galás, PTR, and Peaches each become their own proper name in that they become all the different proper names whether they are collective or individual. This means in Galás’s case the witch, the saint, the whore, the murderer, the victim, Maria Callas, Aretha Franklin, Jesus Christ, the Anti-Christ, and so on. The proper names of PTR are, among others, the various overlapping, mirrored, and projected images onto and of herself. In Peaches’s track it is rock ’n’ roll that integrates all possible iterations of the genre. It is true for all three performers that every one of their proper names designates intensities inscribed either onto their body, onto the plane of their composition, onto the body of their work, or onto all of the above. Deleuze further states: “The intensity can be lived only in relation to its mobile inscription on a body, and to the moving exteriority of a proper name, and this is what it means for a proper name to be always a mask, the mask of an operator” (257). In this sense the three musicians do not represent concepts or essences of these external references that have been mediated and dissolved by an internal soul or consciousness but instead set free the lines of infinite, immediate, and mobile relations with the outside. Already the slightest gesture of pulling up the eyebrows is what forces the brutal expression of Galás saying “YES, I CONFESS!” into the diva-esque and consequently forces the change of direction. Thus an infinite oscillation is taking place between different spaces; the musicians become all the proper names at once and at the same time.

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guitar slightly over-geared, and more. All of these rock elements start to resonate in one’s own mind — the whole history of rock ’n’ roll — and in the immediacy of their presentation forces the listener into a deeper, uncomfortable degree of perception: Peaches is rock ’n’ roll. In her performance, rock ’n’ roll is stripped down to its basics; its intensity is caused by a manic monotony revealing the differences that lie in-between itself. What Peaches arrives at is just the “bone structure” as the highest potential of rock ’n’ roll.7

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Thus, what we conceive is not only this or that style. What we conceive is basically the vibration — the clash in-between things, the process of becomingother. All thought, then, begins in sense experience, in the becoming-other of the senses, and is therefore reshaping our own senses. This is where genuine thought has the potential to come into being. The more tightly the different codes are pressed against each other the faster is the perpetual movement between them. The higher the speed of the movement the higher the intensity with which all the information hits the nervous system and the less time there is to prevent it from hitting. The detour of the brain, in which intelligible thinking would take its time and place, is cut off, and information can only be sensed. In this sense intermediality shows itself here through the inscriptions on a particular “body.” It works directly on the “figure” where text, image, and music not only show themselves in their own specific media but where image becomes text, text becomes music, or music becomes body. Music, image, and text not only clash but start to interact and become other via the spaces in-between. They become a whole new, open package, all at once — the non-total Gesamtkunstwerk,8 Gesamt-noumenon/phenomenon — or whatever you want to call it.

Notes One part of this essay was first published in a slightly different version in Frank Kelleter and Daniel Stein (eds.), American Studies as Media Studies. American Studies—A Monograph Series, Vol. 167. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008, 191–99, and is reprinted here with kind permission. 1. See also Francis Bacon quoted in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 18: “It’s a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.” 2. Diamanda Galás incorporates into her work the tradition of female American performance artists of the early 1960s to the late 1980s such as Carolee Schneemann, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, or Karen Finley; however, “performance art” is not the right term for the musical virtuosity of Diamanda Galás. Even contemporary pop musicians have been inspired by her work. The concept of Marilyn Manson, for instance, would not be possible without her. Another example of her influence can be found in the styling of Madonna in the video Frozen directed by Chris Cunningham, which relies heavily on the visual appearance of Diamanda Galás. Galás became famous in the independent music scene as well as in the art world in the early 1980s.Working already in the 1970s with jazz musicians she became “the real thing” in the early 1980s with the Intravenal Sound Operation. The Intravenal Sound Operation encompasses the idea of pulling out sounds that are meant to attack the audience like an injection that goes right into the nervous system. Besides piano concerts where Galás mainly interprets blues, she gained great attention for performing fully composed pieces on stage — theatrical

masses — titled Vena Cava, Insekta, Schrei X, or Plague Mass — in which she deals with subject such as clinical depression, torture, isolation, or the death penalty. See also Andrea Juno and V. Vale, ed., Angry Women. 3. In Plague Mass, which is dedicated to people with AIDS, her naked body is covered in artificial blood during the ninety-minute performance.

is only after matter has been sufficiently deterritorialized that it itself emerges as molecular and brings pure forces attributable only to the Cosmos.” 5. One could compare this outbreak with Deleuze’s analysis of Francis Bacon’s painting of Pope Innocent X after Velásquez. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze sees in the painting of Bacon a “hystericized” Velásquez Pope. In Velásquez’s painting Deleuze detects invisible parts looming inside of it. Something that is “strangely restraint, . . . something that is going to happen, but has not yet acquired the ineluctable, irrepressible presence of Bacon’s painting.” Bacon’s painting then stripped the body of its “inertia, of the materiality of [its] presence: it disembodies [the body]” (46–47). 6. See Difference and Repetition, 146–47: “Henceforth, thought is also forced to think its central collapse, its fracture, its own natural ‘powerlessness,’ which is indistinguishable from the greatest power. . . . Terrible revelation of a thought without image . . . , and the conquest of a new principle which does not allow itself to be represented. . . . [Artaud] knows that thinking is not innate but must be engendered in thought . . . to bring into being that which does not yet exist (there is no other work, all the rest is arbitrary, mere decoration). To think is to create —  . . . ” 7. It is important to note that what is repeated over and over again is not the same thing, not the equal. One could compare this “incantation” of the seemingly same with the Nietzschean concept of the “eternal return.” According to Deleuze’s understanding of the term, there is the unequal and the selection in the eternal return: “Essentially, the unequal, the different is the true rationale for the eternal return. It is because nothing is equal, or the same, that ‘it’ comes back. In other words, the eternal return is predicated only of becoming and the multiple. It is the law of a world without being, without unity, without identity. Far from presupposing the One or the Same, the eternal return constitutes the only unity of the multiple as such, the only identity of what differs: coming back is the only ‘being’ of becoming. Consequently, the function of the eternal return as Being is never to identify, but to authenticate.” The eternal return is selective because it eliminates “halfdesires.” In doing so it “creates the superior forms, [it] raises each thing to its superior form, that is, its nth power.” See Desert Islands, 124–25. 8. There is a difference between the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk — the total work of art — and the concept of intermediality. In the former, the different realms of media cooperate in a way that is complementary. Every different realm is still discernable and only serves to support the other, aiming at totality. In contrast to the Gesamtkunstwerk idea, in intermediality, the deconstruction of the total work of art takes place. In his review “The Total Work of Art,” David Roberts states that “Wagner defines the artwork of the future as ‘living represented religion.’ . . . A union of art, religion and politics” (109). Thus

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4. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 347: “New Conditions were necessary for what was buried or covered, inferred or concluded, presently to rise to the surface. . . . It

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the Gesamtkunstwerk, especially in the Wagnerian sense, defines the “idealized union/ synthesis of music, visuals and text on stage” that serves to “embrace the full range of human experience, and to reflect [this] in his operas” (109). It is in this sense that the

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Gesamtkunstwerk aims at the full representation of human experience — the total work of art that should express all of life’s experiences, but does not create a new life experience.

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References Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977. Cunningham, Chris. The Work of Director Chris Cunningham. DVD. Palm Pictures, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.  ——   —    . Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Trans. Michael Taorima. Ed. David Lapoujade. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.  ——   —    . Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press, 1988. Daniel, Drew. “I Wanna Bite Ya: Pitchfork Track Review.” Pitchfork 3 Jan. 2006. http://www .pitchforkmedia.com/article/track_review/37502/. Accessed 16 Nov. 2006. Galás, Diamanda. Plague Mass (1984 — End of the Epidemic) Live at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, NYC. CD. Mute Records, 1991.  ——   —    . The Shit of God. London & New York: High Risk Books & Serpent’s Tail, 1996. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Haist, Lorraine. “Die Achterbahn-Priesterin,” Die Tageszeitun 28, Jan. 2006. http://www.taz .de/pt/2006/01/28/a0255.1/. Accessed 14 Sept. 2006. Harris, Williams. “Don’t Look to Diamanda Galás for Comfort.” New York Times, 4 July 1993, Arts: p. 20. Jonze, Spike. Dir. Being John Malkovich. DVD. Universal, 1999. Juno, Andrea, and V. Vale, ed. Angry Women. Re/Search 13. San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1991. Planningtorock, Have it All. CD. Chicks on Speed Records, 2006. Roberts, David. “The Total Work of Art.” Review of Die Sehnsucht nach dem Gesamtkunstwerk, by Roger Fornoff. Thesis Eleven 83 (Nov. 2005): 104–21. Sylvester, David. Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson, 1975. Suarez, Jessica. “Planningtorock — Have it All: Pitchfork Record Review.” Pitchfork 7 Aug. 2006. http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/37502/. Accessed 16 Nov. 2006.

10

theater and music I va na B r ozi ć

Intermedial Negotiations

In terms of crossing media boundaries, blurring, like the related concept of hybridization, can be given both a positive and a negative connotation. The choice of positive or negative connotation is a decisive moment in dealing with the effects of any such crossing or the ensuing sense of hybridity. In Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, a study of a much wider framework than the crossing of artistic boundaries, Rosi Braidotti notes that the “post-humanistic acceptance of hybridization . . . is neither nihilistic nor decadent. Nor is it a romantic valorization of otherness per se. . . . It aims at finding accurate cartographies of the changes that are occurring in post-industrial cultures. It is a way of mapping the metamorphoses” (170). Her text, which examines the ethics and cultural politics of the changing relationships in the contemporary world, or, as she styles it, “tracks the zigzagging transpositions of multiple differences across the global landscape of a mediated world” (8), can be readily transposed onto a number of specific and far more local territories of human thought and activity. In the context of my own pursuit — that of intermediality in theater — I find the formulation of “mapping the metamorphoses” both highly evocative and significantly empowering. It is evocative in relation to both phenomena I shall speak of — theater as a site of many kinds of transformations, and intermediality as a concept shot through differently, but no less strongly, with changes and ap-

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pearances. It is empowering in the sense in which it connotes the possibility of taking a position from which one can chart new, unexplored (hybrid) territories; the position of a cartographer as an active agent in the processes of change. The transformations I am charting here belong to the realm of theater and its audiences, the realm of perceptions, mediations, and conventions, to theater as a live performing medium whose complexities of media interactions provide a rich environment for intermedial explorations. Intermediality is a concept still troubled by the lack of a stable and inclusive definition, mostly due to different designations of the word “medium,” but also to the somewhat ambivalent prefix “inter.” In the plethora of approaches to intermediality today it is useful to examine it against its near contemporary, the concept of intertextuality. With comparatively similar histories, both as practices and as theories, they share several key aspects. They both have problems and issues related to their fluid definitions, the position they give to the reader/viewer, the need for a reconsideration of the core concepts (text, medium, and inter) and a critique of stable categories they imply. The first apparent similarity, looking at the corpus of existing approaches and case studies, can be traced in the development of the two theories. From within language theory the definition of intertextuality has followed several different directions, depending on understanding of text and of the nature of its connections with other texts. Since Bakhtin’s thoughts on the nature of language, intertextuality has been defined and redefined by a number of theorists, applied to different purposes, and even crossed literary boundaries. If on one hand this may be seen as a fruitful diversity, such dispersal may not be very helpful when intertextuality is to be used as a critical tool in a particular context. A certain positioning in relation to text, textuality, and “inter” is always required before intertextual reading. The situation is not any less complicated in case of intermediality. The range of existing case studies locates intermediality not only in the multitude of medial experiments since the 1960s, but in such distant contexts as Wilde’s poetry, Strindberg’s dramaturgy, or Byzantine liturgy.1 There are accounts that differ not only in temporal dimension, but also approach intermediality with various meanings of medium, as well as intermedium, in mind. One of the major obstacles to a common definition is that the theory of intermediality has been developed across disciplines, resulting in a number of discipline-dependent approaches. What seem to be, by all accounts, the first two treatments of intermediality appear both temporally and geographically apart, one in 1960s USA and the other in 1980s Europe. The important distinction between them, though, is not so much in time and place, as in the environments within which they appear: multimedial and monomedial, respectively. The first framework is located in 1965 USA where intermediality appears in the theorizing accounts of Dick

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Higgins in relation to avant-garde work of and around the Fluxus group of artists. Grounded in multimedial artistic practices, Higgins treats intermediality as a feature of intermedium, a hybrid new form and a site where several known media are transformed into a new one. Representative of this description is the happening, “an uncharted land that lies between collage, music and the theater” (22). The second framework is located in 1983 Europe, where intermediality resurfaces, this time explicitly in the context of intertextuality, in the work of Hansen-Löve on the relationship of Russian modernist poetry and the visual arts.2 He locates intermediality in the transformation of the function of the dominant structuring principle (of the poetic medium), created as a consequence of particular combinations of the verbal and the visual. These approaches already illustrate two distinct sets of conditions that can influence, and have influenced, any theorizing of intermediality. The first is generally well suited to multimedial environments and experimental practices involving new media forms,3 while the other is particularly resonant for intermedial explorations in conventionally monomedial forms, such as poetry, music, or painting.4 What brings together such diverse approaches to intermediality is, admittedly, not a definition of medium, but rather an exploration of a certain antinormative character of intermediality that gives it a potential for creating new ways of experience, new meanings, or new forms. In broadest terms, what all intermedial approaches are concerned with is the exploration of the effect of the “new” created by a particular deployment (that is, some kind of transformation) of medium/media used in artistic practice. Furthermore, they also explore the changes the effect of the new has on viewers’ experience and/or on the system of media categories. The effect of the new can of course be created by a number of different strategies; for instance, by combining in a number of ways two known and conventionally separate elements (two familiar media, such as music and language), or by introducing a literally new element within a familiar environment (a new medium such as video or film within an old medium such as theater). Particular strategies for creating the intermedial effect will thus depend on each medium’s characteristics and on the types of relationships it can establish with other media, and these will necessarily differ. While monomedial form may, for instance, rely on quoting or emulating other media principles, a multimedial one can employ direct medial interactions. An inclusive approach to intermediality, one that recognizes the demands (possibilities and limitations) of a particular medium, is of crucial importance for addressing intermediality in theater — a place where media of different order are likely to meet. When the question of the effect of the new turns to viewers’ experience, it becomes, at some point, unavoidably related to categories, systems, and ideologies. Intermediality thus, like intertextuality, requires an overview of existing

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concepts in the field of reception of aesthetic experiences. In various ways, different definitions of intertextuality seem to be in relative agreement that texts, and through them readers/writers, are in some kind of dialogue with other texts/ readers/writers, and that this dialogue is secured via the “inter.” “Inter” can be taken to stand for the quality — of Bakhtin’s dialogic word, of Kristeva’s genotext, of Barthes’s infinite text, of Bloom’s anxiety of influence, and so on — that is a precondition of both intertextuality and reading. It is relevant to point here to the particular kind of reading that intertextual theories bring into focus, it is the kind where the reader is actively involved in the production of meaning. “Inter” can thus be seen as a marker for that which affects the activity of the reader and makes the reader an agent in the reading process who works with the textual in-betweenness and who charts its various potential relationships with other texts. The focus on the reader (or viewer/observer as the case may be) is not always explicit in intermedial accounts. Higgins, for instance, writing from the viewpoint of an artist, only indirectly acknowledges the particular position of the observer since, as he notes, the recognition of its intermediality “makes the work easier to classify” (Higgins 26). Müller, on the other hand, draws attention to “new dimensions of experience to the recipient” effected when a “coexistence of different media-quotations and elements is transformed into a conceptual intermedia coexistence” (Müller 298). More explicitly concerned with the experiential dimension of intermediality, Oosterling foregrounds its usefulness for “enhancing an experience of the in-between and a sensibility for tensional differences” (Oosterling 30). This formulation touches upon one of the most important features of intermediality — its ability to create a tension in the viewer, a tension that is a precondition of any intervention. It is somewhat reminiscent of “blurring” as a moment in perception that carries an intermedial potential. Such moments, like intertextual “diversions” in the form of quotations or allusions, are crucial for intermedial experiences. They are instances when a spectator is made aware of transformational possibilities of a medium and invited, so to speak, to experience a work/text/event by means of an alternative other, rather than the expected or conventional medium. These moments allow for the creative use and input of knowledge and experience in dealing with medial transformations, and make possible the interpretation and understanding of media and of the purposes of their manipulation in contemporary culture. By recognizing the possibilities for rearranging the perspectives and positions, intermedial approaches that account for the particular position of the spectator acknowledge similar kinds of processes in the realm of mediation to those in textuality. The question remains, however, how exactly do we interpret the “inter” in intermedium? Looking closely into the semantics of this prefix, Bennington notes:

On the one hand, inter- separates places between two or more entities, keeps them apart, puts up a frontier, prevents them meeting, joining, mingling and maybe identifying. Inter-val is perhaps the clearest case of this sense. Intercalating, inter-posing, inter-polating, inter-mitting all obey this logic. But on the can go from inter-view to inter-action to inter-course to inter-penetration, and implies just the opposite of the first sense of inter-: here the gap or difference is not being established or reinforced, but diminished, overcome or denied (103).

The double nature of “inter,” implying separation and difference on one hand and joining and communication on the other, tells us a dialectical story, Bennington concludes, “so that ‘inter’ finds its own truth in the sublation of its two contradictory senses” (104). This point is poignantly illustrated with the case of intertext. As much as “inter” marks a text that is interconnected with another text, it also marks one that is interpolated by another, a text whose flow is interrupted in order to go in a different direction, one that can be explored by the reader. What enables such exploration is precisely the “inter,” which brings together the internal and the external, or marks an internal quality which is one of exteriority. It both splits and crosses. Intertext is thus, like intermedium, an entity whose existence is itself marked by a “tensional difference.” Texts and media are both connected to other texts and media and unsettled by them. This implies that for a medium to become an intermedium it is necessary to see media as both distinct and (to varying degrees) interspersed with traces of other media. One consequence of such a position is that intermediality overcomes issues of medium-specificity and purity, and another is the recognition that all media have the potential for dialogue.5 Of course, the analogy with intertextual kinds of dialogue can only go so far. Textuality functions on different principles, and a direct transposition of that system would not be productive, or indeed possible. What can be transposed is the principle of dialogue, which is possible in the sense in which our understanding and use of media, like that of texts, depend on a (media) system, ultimately defined by its historical situatedness, its users, and its culture. My concern, however, remains with theater, and I will view the issue of medium from that perspective, with some valuable insights from other areas. One way of addressing the nature of theater medium is to provide a template definition that allows inclusion of all of its characteristics while acknowledging its position as a medium in relation to other media of its milieu. One such template is given by Uricchio: I understand media to be more than mere technologies, institutions, and texts — a statement I would think was obvious were it not for the substantial body of literature that holds otherwise. Instead, I see media as cultural practices which envelop

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other hand, inter- joins, provides a means of communication and exchange. This

these and other elements within a broader fabric offered by particular social orders, mentalities, and the lived experiences of their producers and users. (24) 142 I vana Broz ić

Such an inclusive view of medium can be used for situating a variety of media contemporary discourses employ, and is particularly pertinent to that of theater. To see theater as a cultural practice is to acknowledge that we have historically, socially, and culturally formed an idea of what theater is. On the other hand, by going to the theater we experience what it is, which affects and is affected by those concepts. The “we” in this formulation refers to both producers and users, that is, performers and spectators as the very central constitutive elements of the theater medium, alongside its other aspects, such as technologies, institutions, and texts. The concept of technology is increasingly present in contemporary theater practice and critical writing. It is however rather difficult today to address the medium of theater through the notion of technology. Notwithstanding the influence new communication technologies have had on live performance, it is not always productive to speak of technology in the same sense in which it is used in “the media.” It may sometimes be necessary to acknowledge that at the time when theater was being formed as a medium, present-day conceptions of technology were nonexistent. Theater history shows that theater has made use of technologies as and when they appeared.6 It is not possible, however, to isolate any one of those that would define theater as a medium in the way screen or camera can be used to define film or television. Technology seems to be the aspect that needs most careful formulation in the definition of the theater medium, a formulation that has to account for the difficulties arising when theater is compared to media that have had a hugely different history and origin. In making such comparisons, we should be prepared to apply the term “technology” to cover, even if figuratively, that which is the driving force of theater, and that takes us back, unavoidably and perhaps unsurprisingly, to the performer. Indeed, there is a sense in which we can say that when we describe theater as a live medium, we are describing the nature of its “technology.” Needless to say, the ability of theater to incorporate other kinds of technologies is a feature of its medium, rather than an ontological contradiction. Furthermore, to conceive of a concept of medium inclusive of all theater’s characteristics, especially in the current environment of technological experimentation, is the only way to appropriately map the changes theater is undergoing in contemporary mediatized practices. As a way of maintaining standards of cultural practices, institutions contribute in a major way to our understanding of media. Aspects such as theater education, production and regulated forms of reception provide an important governing component through which to understand theater medium. Theater as institution, as an established form of participation in cultural production, situated

It is no technical, no mechanical, nor a digital effect — but an aisthetic8 one, which does not transform nor physically affect the actor, photo, or video-tape, as their mediation by means of a camera, scanner, or TV-screen [would]. This trace of theatrical mediation is produced in the observers’ perception alone . . . As opposed to digital transcoding into bits and bytes theater leaves the thing itself intact, yet the actor, picture and tape, at the same time, are theatrically reproduced into something beyond their mere (even less: pure) original presence. (114)

The effect of theatrical mediation is compared here to the effect other media produce as they transform (record or transmit) their texts. This kind of transformation is more difficult to account for in theater, because it is intangible, but nevertheless it is there to such an extent that “the medium and therefore mediality

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within social hierarchies and formulated by specific programs and objectives, creates an appearance of the stability (even permanence) of form. It is only an appearance, however, because even a general attempt at defining theater reveals a fluid, diverse, and uncontainable phenomenon. The stability, inasmuch as we can speak of such, may be said to exist in the form of some basic conventions, such as those that define theater as a live performing event in a specific location existing through the interaction of performer and spectator. This definition does not, on its own, explain the nature of theatrical mediation as much as it describes the conditions under which such mediation occurs. In order to gain insight into that mediation it is necessary to look into practices of production and reception. A result of particular combinations of materials and processes of staging, theater text is a decisive internal element of the constitution of the theater medium. It is multimedial, an environment created by a multiplicity of mediations (of which the performer is only one) and full of internal allegiances and conflicts.7 Particular ways, or practices, of creating theater text have undergone numerous changes through history, always using, adapting, developing new and accumulating conventions, and thus producing a body of knowledge to be used in both production and reception. Whether they have reflected specific styles, periods, demands, possibilities, or ideologies, the conventions by which we see theater as theater provide that important link between the producers and users as constitutive elements of the medium. While the performers are responsible for presenting the theater text, spectators are there to perceive it, and they do so in and through its medium. It is thus spectators’ readiness, and ability, to see a staged event as theater that marks the particular nature of that medium, a medium that exists in perception. Explaining the concept of theater as a medium in perception, Boenisch identifies a “trace” of theatrical reproduction evident in the effect theater has on all objects on stage:

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as such, is in fact theater’s core message” (113). The question remains where such a message comes from, or how this effect is produced. To ascribe this ability to theater as that which transforms everything on its stage seems insufficient as, admittedly, it is no technical nor mechanical effect. The imaginary worlds, the sensations and the significations theater is said to create, are ultimately located in the spectator. They are a result of perception. As Boenisch notes, it may be appropriate to speak of observing in this instance, rather than perceiving, because of its interesting etymology.9 Its Latin root observare implies conformity, “as in observing rules, codes, regulations, and practices” (Crary 6), although “most dictionaries make little semantic distinction between the words ‘observer’ and ‘spectator’ ” (5). This etymological resonance and the modern usage of the word produce a highly relevant double connotation in theater, first in the sense of observing as seeing, and second in the sense of observing as knowing how to see.10 The result of such observation can be described as the trace of theatrical mediality — or as theatricality. It is conditioned by theater production, with all the practical and theoretical, historical and cultural baggage that implies, and traced in spectators’ perception. Theatricality acts as that final agent that brings together and consolidates all mediations found in a theater text into one kind of mediation — the theatrical. Although the notion of theatricality has long left the boundaries of theater stage and has infiltrated all aspects of life, I am using it here in this very specific, if restricted, sense in order to capture the tensions and interactions between the theatrical and other kinds of stages. In the following account theater stage will be seen against the musical stage, and music, as constituent of theater’s multimediality, against that of language. The performance of The Noise of Time11 was a product of collaboration between the theater company Complicite and the Emerson String Quartet. It sets out to reminisce on the life and work of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) by combining theatrical and musical performance. In order to illustrate several different strategies of creating intermediality on stage, I will focus on three moments in the rich texture of this multimedia production that invite the spectator to negotiate possible mediations. First of those illustrates how intermedial staging undermines the hierarchy of theatrical representation, second juxtaposes two theatrical means of expression, and the third considers two distinct modes of performance. Given the nature of both language and music as media in sound, the performance appropriately starts by carefully preparing its audience for listening. It does so first by evoking the medium of radio and the freedom of imagination it allows. This evocation is supported throughout the performance by a mostly dark stage and effective use of torches, spotlights and projections. The opening

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image is one of an old radio receiver that plays some unconnected excerpts of transmissions from the past. The sounds and utterances are easily recognizable (such as the voice of Bill Clinton and Neil Armstrong, or the sound of a Charleston), so the audience is taken back to the time when Shostakovich, whose work owed much to the radio, wrote his music. Interspersed with the voices from the past are also some comments of a technical nature, as if reminding the audience how a radio functions. For instance, between the commentaries on the reception of Shostakovich’s symphonies, we can hear: “In 1885 a Russian, Alexander Popov, created wireless electronic communication” and “the radio transmitter changes these vibrations into waves” and the like. Amid such comments drawing attention to physical aspects of the medium — comments whose function will only be clear in retrospect — a voice from the radio poses the question, “What happens when we listen to music?” After thus framing their production and drawing attention to listening, the artists of Complicite engage more openly with the visual dimension of staging. The dark stage is interspersed with various images projected on the back wall, which consists of sheets of music, and on other objects, such as costumes or musical instruments. The voices and the music, the individually lit pieces of costume that seem to float in space, scarce illumination and an occasional image of a huge dark starlit sky, turn the scene into a place of memories, into our own mind, a place of conjecture and imagination. A multitude of carefully arranged fractions of a life can be perceived in that place — old black-and-white photographs of Dmitri as a boy and as a man, recorded reception of his music, a voice reading from his letters, TV coverage of his arrival in the US, and many more — but where is Dmitri on that stage? There are four performers and four musicians on the stage but no single performer, not one corporeal presence, stands for Shostakovich. Instead, several performers, at various moments, step in to create fragments of Dmitri or people from his life. A typical instance is one where the voice on the radio describes one of the first public performances of young Dmitri, a boy of fourteen brought to the concert hall by his mother. Several actors manipulate a white shirt and a pair of black shoes, in such a way as to suggest a ghostly presence of somebody playing a piano. A photograph of a boy is then projected onto the shirt, dissolving into that of an old man. The space shaped by the shirt and the movement of the shoes on piano pedals, the image formed by the projected photograph, and the music, are the elements that create Dmitri’s presence. As if denying the possibility of representing him with another’s body, the production leaves the audience to construct a virtual Dmitri from the indications given by the voice, the costume, the music, and the play of light. By avoiding a straightforward way of mediating his presence, that is, by removing a conventionally dominant medium of the performer/actor, this staging leaves the spectator to

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convert media of a different order in the place of that which has been removed. The staging does not give priority to either element, as any of them can be used to fulfill that purpose. For some spectators Dmitri’s presence will perhaps be most vividly experienced through the voice on the radio, for some through the photograph, and for some through the music. Complicite’s performers de- and reconstruct the performer as a unity of body-voice-expression-movement by first removing the body and then putting back together the voice on the radio, the face in a photograph, an empty costume, and an imitation of movement, all enveloped by the sound of Shostakovich’s music. The nonhierarchical approach to staging and the lack of visible preference for either medium allow for a degree of interactive reception and the construction of Dmitri’s presence by either, or in-between all, given mediations.12 This instance is also first in a number of moments in the production when, exactly because of the democratic equality in the status of all media, the spectator is made aware of the peculiar position of music on the theater stage. As with other media on stage, it is theatrically transformed “beyond its original presence” while retaining a presence of its own. This dichotomy is further brought into focus by its relationship to language. During the first part of the performance, that is, during the multimedia evocation of Shostakovich’s life, both language and music are used intermittently and on occasion refer to each other’s properties of mediation. The languages used in the production are Russian and English. When Russian is heard, a simultaneous English translation follows, with Russian still audible in the background, which makes a strange mixture of familiar and unfamiliar sounds. Various utterances — excerpts from Shostakovich’s letters, his friends’ memories, news coverage from his time, and so on — are spoken by various people and with various voice qualities. English is sometimes spoken with a Russian accent, thus acquiring a strangely soft quality. In one instance Russian is not translated; we hear Stalin’s speech, part of which is repeated, and then repeated again and again, the sound of his voice almost not requiring translation. As well as highlighting the qualities of language as a medium in sound or, we might say, highlighting its musical qualities — by counterpointing languages, accents, and speakers — the production refers to a particular habit of Shostakovich’s: he would encrypt names or initials into his music, such as the solo horn in his Tenth Symphony playing those notes that, transcribed, yield the name of Elmira, a woman with whom he was infatuated, as the voice on the radio explains.13 Juxtaposition of language and music, and the question of the possibilities of musical expression, is of course far from accidental in a story about Dmitri Shostakovich. A peculiar relationship between these two media in his own work has been discussed in a considerable amount of critical writing on his life and work. If he did not like to speak about his music, his music sometimes seemed to speak too much. The

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question of what his music is about is common in critical appraisals of it, and is an issue pervading a lot of critical and biographical writing on Shostakovich. His music has been both praised for and accused of (depending on who spoke) being able to carry messages, and to act almost as language does. Playing with transformational possibilities that a theater stage offers, this production pits them against each other as if experimenting how far such claims can be taken. Without supporting or rejecting the potential of music to create visual worlds, Complicite places it in a relation to language in which they both mediate (rather than signify). To speak of music and language in terms of mediation is to avoid imposing a referential sign-system onto a structure of sounds that, although they have meaning, do not possess the same power of denotation. To say that music mediates is to account for the sound as that which “serves to remind people of their tangible relationship to the material world.” It is to account for sound as the medium that “ ‘can vibrate perceptibly within the body” and is therefore “suited to revealing and connecting the internal and external worlds” (Shepherd and Wicke 127). This dimension is all the more relevant in theater, where reception is not based exclusively on signification and communication (and then not only by conventional means such as language or the performer’s body). After contrasting music and language as elements of theater, in the second part of the production the artists of Complicite reflect on the distinctions between music and theater as performance media. Having theatrically explored some of the crucial moments of Shostakovich’s life, The Noise of Time now turns to look at his last and most difficult period by giving the most prominent role of mediation to music. The transition is marked by the Emerson Quartet becoming the focus of attention as they start performing Shostakovich’s final string quartet: No 15 in E Flat, the darkest of quartets, in which he is said to be meditating on his own mortality. From this moment onwards, familiar modes of staging are again removed from the spectator’s perception as the actors and language are completely replaced with musicians and music. Not only is there no body-presence to refer to, once the quartet starts playing there is no more language. The audience is now fully confronted with Complicite’s experiment in “dramatization of music,” with music that speaks, that replaces language. Given that music was made a part of theater, that is, made to signify, there has been no doubt that the spectators are observing a theater performance and that the music on stage is a theatrical “language.” And yet, on another level, Complicite’s intervention into what constitutes theatrical representation begins at this point to raise questions about the nature of the event itself. As only the musicians continue performing, as other theatrical media are abandoned, and as the music is all that is left, what has been perceived as a theater performance seems to be giving way to, and turning into, a performance of music. The music seems to break from the given

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(theatrical) context and to become, or rather goes back to being, “only” music. A certain ambiguity brought about by such a shift in emphasis, and by a recognizable cultural icon such as the Emerson Quartet, makes the performance of live music oscillate between two different modes — that of a theatrical performance and that of a musical performance. The distinction though is never sharp, it wavers and blurs, as both media are present in the same space and time, and as they share many features. Considering this kind of ambiguity raises questions such as: What changes if the performers on the stage are not actors but musicians? What happens to “theater” if it is not based on a play or script but a piece of music? If we are listening to the Emerson Quartet, are we observing a theatrical performance? The events on the stage would suggest otherwise; even more so, as the stage seems to shed its theatricality. This is the instance where theatricality as the effect of the medium becomes most conspicuous, the moment when its existence is affected, changed or even absent. It is at such moments that the theater spectator engages in an activity that, even if not conclusive, suggests seeing intermediality not as a confusion, not knowing what something is, but as a process of working out of what it might be. By incorporating and not entirely transforming the medium of music, theater has left a space for the spectator to decide if the music speaks and what it says. Staging the difference between music as representation and music as performance opens questions of choice, decisions that interconnect on very different planes of the production. To elucidate this we need to remember, or construct from the details given in the earlier part of the show, the controversies over whether Shostakovich during his life in Russia rejected or supported the Soviet regime and how it affected his music. There still exists a debate over the interpretation of his life and music in respect to his attitude to Stalinism. His music has been described as both frivolous and profound, it has been burdened with charges of descriptiveness, of satirizing Russian bureaucrats or celebrating revolutionist causes on the one hand, and with formalism and abstract intellectualism on the other. These controversies remain unresolved as different visions are given by differently oriented critics.14 Revived in Paris and Moscow in 2005, a year before the Shostakovich centenary celebrations, this production tentatively, but critically and mediamatically,15 raises the question again. Particular forms of mediation used in this production can therefore also be seen to directly reflect its central theme — the problem of Shostakovich and his music, of how we understand it and how that understanding positions us. We may not be able to answer the question. There may not be one answer. Complicite presents both sides of the case and speaks for neither, providing a space for us to negotiate both forms and contents of their presentation. If the production proposes anything it is to point to a complexity at the heart of the story that cannot be resolved with a simplis-

tic either-or, a complexity reflected in the multiplicity of mediations and their relationships. To acknowledge the importance of such reflection is to realize, to return to Braidotti’s terms, that “the in-between degrees of complexity are the only ones that matter and they should be put at the centre of the agenda” (46).

1. For intermediality in Wilde’s poetry see Peter Wagner, “Oscar Wilde’s ‘Impression du matin’ — an Intermedial Reading.” For intermediality in Strindberg’s dramaturgy and Byzantine liturgy see respective discussions in Cultural Functions of Intermedial Exploration, ed. by Erik Hedling and Ulla-Britta Lagerroth (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). 2. Aage A. Hansen-Löve, “Intermedijalnost i Intertekstualnost: Problemikorelacijeverbalne i slikovneumjetnostinaprimjeruruskemoderne” in Intertekstualnost i Intermedijalnost ed. Zvonko Maković et al. (Zagreb: Zavodzaznanost o književnosti, 1988), 31–74. Originally published in Dialog der Texte, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Wien, 1983. 3. Accounts range across disciplines. A few instances are Peter Frank, “Postwar Performance and Intermedia: The Technological Impetus and the Musical Paradigm,” in Technology ed. by Leigh Landy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 9–39; Yvonne Spielmann, “Expanding Film into Digital Media,” Screen vol. 40, 1999; and Philip Auslander, “Liveness, Mediatization, and Intermedial Performance,” Degrés: Revue de synthèse à orientation sémiologique [Belgium], No. 101, Spring 2000, 1–12. 4. For instance Wagner (1996), Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), and Siglind Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting (Pendragon Press: Hillsdale, New York, 2000). 5. From a different perspective, Jürgen E. Müller voices a concern over media purity: “If media (and also ‘media-texts’) are to be located in changing relationships, if their function also depends on historical changes of these relationships, then we have to conclude that the idea of isolated media-monades or isolated sorts of media has to be abandoned” (298). 6. See, for instance, the chapters “Theatre in Modern Media Cultures” and “Theatre and Performance in the Age of Global Communications” in Theatre Histories: An Introduction, ed. by Phillip B. Zarrilli and others (New York: Routledge, 2006). 7. By describing theater as multimedial I do not refer to “multimedia theater” as a subtype of theater that uses the media in its presentation. I refer to media in a more general sense including various means of expression, communication, or perception. 8. A term Boenisch uses to refer to the original meaning of Greek aisthestai, or “to perceive” (104). 9. “Though obviously one who sees, an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations” (Boenisch 109). Citing Crary, Boenisch acknowledges the importance of the observer’s embeddedness in a system of conventions, but does not give it the priority it has in Crary’s account. Even if Crary places too much emphasis on the prescribed, it is

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Notes

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appropriate to consider the verb “to observe” in the theatrical context because of its two connotations, without giving priority to either. 10. This is what Féral, comparing performance and theater, terms “ ‘competencies’

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(which are primarily theatrical)” (179). 11. Complicite, Barbican Theatre, London 2001.

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12. A similar moment is noted by Lavender in relation to Complicite production of The Elephant Vanishes, a moment which he terms “a zone of simultaneous perspective, fracture and synthesis” (Lavender 61). 13. On one occasion, according to Wilson, Shostakovich himself comments on this practice: “When I die, it’s hardly likely that someone will write a quartet dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write it myself. . . . The main theme is the monogram D, Es, C, H, that is — my initials” (340). 14. Aranovsky notes: “It is not surprising that today we write and speak of Shostakovich in varying ways: with skepticism as well as enthusiasm, with condescension as well as deference, and with irascibility as well as indifference. Like no other major figure of twentieth century music, he remains a cause for argument” (24). 15. The term comes from Oosterling’s comment in relation to certain medium-conscious artistic practices: “On the level of production, in multimedial practices and interdisciplinary activities of avant-garde artists, critical reflection is first and foremost mediamatic, i.e. articulated by and constituted in and with the media the artists use” (42).

Works Cited Aranovsky, Mark. “The Dissident.” In Muzykalnaya Akademiya 4 (1997): 2–3. English version by Ian MacDonald in DSCH Journal 12 (January 2000): 24–26. Bennington, Geoffrey. “Inter.” Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism. Edited by Martin McQuillan et al. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. 103–19. Boenisch, Peter M. “Aesthetic Art to Aisthetic Act: Theatre, Media, Intermedial Performance.” In Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, edited by Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 103–16. Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. Carlson, Marvin. “Theatre and Performance at a Time of Shifting Disciplines.” 1 Theatre Research International 26:2 (2001): 137–44. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Féral, Josette. “Performance and Theatricality: the Subject Demystified.” Modern Drama 25:1 (March 1982): 170–81. Higgins, Dick. Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Ho, Allan B. and Dmitry Feofanov. Shostakovich Reconsidered. London: Toccata, 1998. Lavender, Andy. “Mise en scene, hypermediacy and the sensorium.” Intermediality in Theatre and Performance. Edited by Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 55–66.

Müller, Jürgen E. “Intermediality: A Plea and Some Theses for a New Approach in Media Studies.” In Interart Poetics, eds. Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. 295–304. Oosterling, Henk. “Sens(a)ble Intermediality and Interesse: Towards an Ontology of the In-Between.” Intermedialites 1 (2003): 29–46. Uricchio, William. “Historicizing Media in Transition.” In Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, eds. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 22–38. Wagner, Peter. “Oscar Wilde’s ‘Impression du matin’ — an Intermedial Reading” in Icons, Texts, Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality, ed. Peter Wagner. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996. 281–308. Wilson, Elizabeth A. M. Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

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Shepherd, John, and Peter Wicke. Music and Cultural Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997.

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11

the novel as hypertext Br i a n W. Ch a nen

Mapping Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day

One day Professor Vanderjuice vanished. Some claimed to have seen him taken into the sky. Kit went down to the Glowny Dworzec and got on a train headed west, though soon he got off and went across the tracks onto another platform and waited for a train going east, till after a while he was getting on and off trains bound for destinations he was less and less sure of.

—Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, p. 1080

The idea of intermediation can be understood in a number of different ways, but one of its first definitions, by Dick Higgins in 1965, is perhaps both its most basic and most problematic. Higgins saw intermediation as a way of describing or approaching works of art that stood between different, more conventional media, and in particular, works that weren’t simply mixing different media elements. Thus Higgins differentiates between mixed media such as an opera, “where the music, the libretto, and the mise-en-scene are quite separate,” to an intermedia work such as “abstract calligraphy” or “visual poetry,” where the “visual material is presented as a sequence with a grammar of its own” (52). Higgins was looking for a way to classify difficult works and the

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idea of intermedia, he writes, “allows for an ingress to a work which otherwise seems opaque and impenetrable, but once that ingress has been made, it is no longer useful to harp upon the intermediality of the work” (53). His definition of intermedia, though, begs a few questions: How are media blended in a way that doesn’t imply simply a piecing together? How is it that elements of a work of art such as image, sound, text, come to have a “grammar of their own” when presented in a new mode? If “grammar” is affected, what other elements are affected and how do these, in turn, affect meaning or reception? As Yvonne Spielmann has pointed out, “the process of intermedia involves an activity of transformation and not of accumulation” (60) so the question, then, is what is transformed in a somewhat seamless blending of media? I follow N. Katherine Hayles who would like to expand the definition of intermedia “to include interactions between systems of representations, particularly language and code, as well as interactions between modes of representation, particularly analog and digital” (My Mother Was a Computer 33). An important intermediation, I would argue, occurs at another level, between the levels of system and mode, as a function of discourse, or organization of presentation. For my purposes it is important that intermediation is not remediation in the sense that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin use the term. Remediation, essentially the re-presentation of a story told in one medium in a different medium, may be a complex conversation and cooperation across media that includes not only re-presentation but incorporation, imitation, and blending, while intermediation implies an influence at the structural level that, if it does not actually alter the materiality of the medium, affects the semantic level of representation that influences its reception, in the case of a print novel, as a viable narrative. Intermediation is worth study when we are faced with texts that don’t seem to have been altered but because of intermediation, change, if not physical medial boundaries, at least the boundaries of genre. While intermediation at either the surface level or the material level of a work can affect not only meaning but also the narrative structure of a text, because of the pervasive influence of digital media on culture, it is illuminating to look at less obvious media blendings that can take place, not just affect the text, at the level of narrative discourse. Intermediation for Hayles is the “complex and entangled interaction” between the three systems as “code assumes comparable importance to the worldviews of speech and writing” (31). In her analysis of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Hayles asks herself at the beginning of her own chapter two critical questions that will have bearing on this paper: “Through what pathways and by what means does the influence of an informatic writing technology, with its complex trading zones in which language and code mutually

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put pressure on one another, penetrate into a book that on the surface appears as ink marks on paper?” (118). To a large extent Hayles’s answer to these questions is that the current technologies for creating a book (computers, operating systems) influence the creation of the book in terms of a tendency toward fractured, cut-and-paste narratives. At the same time, in Cryptonomicon, she sees the battle between natural language and code played out in the thematic dialectics within the work. In the end, Hayles states that texts such as Crytonomicon need to be seen as “artifacts whose materialities emerge from negotiations between their signifying structures and the technologies that produce them” (142). For my own part, I think that the current proliferation of digital media creates an environment for intermediation that Hayles has clearly identified but that can be examined with less concern for modes of textual production and for the materiality of the text. There is an intermediality inherent not only in the media interactions that bring about the text but in those that take place above the material text (as a metaphor for the reader’s interaction with the work), and below the text (as the structuring of narrative space). In her analysis of Cryptonomicon, Hayles says, “the inability of the text to create a conventional narrative is . . . specifically linked to the intermediating dynamics of code and language, print and digital technologies” (255). It is precisely in this area that I see some fruitful possibilities for exploration of the intermedial relations between print and digital that are not addressed by Hayles’s excellent consideration of Cryptonomicon. In order to examine the issue of the changing nature of the print novel in the digital age, I will first investigate some concerns of narrative theory with the nature of space as a structural element of fiction and then investigate the different conceptions of space in digital environments. To test, or develop, some of my theories about the nature of the poetics of intermediated space I will look at the particular narrative structure of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. In many ways this novel offers a test case for changes in experimental writing, in that Pynchon’s novels have always tested the limits of narrativity and Against the Day shows a different type of engagement with narrative structure in general and the nature of narrative space in particular. In addition, Against the Day is set in a predigital time and uses the page in a straightforward way. In other words, Pynchon’s novel is not obviously about the digital, nor does it manipulate page space, typescript, or image in a way that makes it obviously spatially experimental — yet it is an example of intermediation just the same.

Spatial Poetics I write: I inhabit my sheet of paper, I invest it, I travel across it. I incite blanks, spaces (jumps in the meaning: discontinuities, transitions, —Georges Perec, Species of Spaces, p. 11

In his work Species of Spaces (1974), Georges Perec conducts a poetic and philosophical investigation of the variety and importance of space in his life and in the world, and most importantly here, in his writing. In the epigraph above, and throughout much of the work, Perec is clearly concerned with the materiality of the page and the placement of words on paper. While writing obviously occupies space and creates both marks and blank spaces, it can also more experimentally take advantage of the page, as Perec demonstrates, through diagonal printing, large gaps between paragraphs, or leaps to footnotes or marginal gloss. In describing his use of space, however, Perec naturally glides from a material description to a metaphoric description of space that involves some notion not just of the page, but of the story being presented and of related properties of movement and temporality. A movement in space, or creation of space, is a “jump in the meaning” or even the “key” to meaning. By the end of his discussion of the space of the page, Perec’s description becomes just that: a description of space that happens to exist on the page. From the placement of typeface on a blank sheet we are taken to a place: “Studious readers are reading in the libraries. Teachers are giving their lessons. Students are taking notes” (14). Perec has created, as he says, “an idealized scene” (15), and he has also approached space in its two most apparent incarnations in a novel: material space and the space of narrative itself, the setting. What Perec doesn’t consider, however, is the potential for space to act as a guiding structure to narrative (and not just a navigation device on the page itself). What Perec calls the space of the page might be better described by Michel de Certeau as place. De Certeau makes a clear distinction between the two. For de Certeau, “a place [lieu] is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence” while “space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities” (117). The distinction between place and space is interesting for our purposes primarily because of de Certeau’s often-cited remark, in the same work, that “every story is a travel story — a spatial practice” (115). Indeed, de Certeau makes the point throughout the essay that the use of space is a means for orienting the reader in narrative or facilitating transitions, movement, or change. But,

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changes of key).

to a certain extent, Certeau’s definition of space already entails other elements of narrative such as conflict and change. “Narrative structures,” writes de Certeau, 156

have the status of spatial syntaxes. By means of a whole panoply of codes, ordered ways of proceeding and constraints, they regulate changes in space (or moves

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from one place to another) made by stories in the form of places put in linear interlaced series. . . . (115)

What is important for narrative is the idea of space that includes tension or an inhabited place. The advantage that time as a structuring narrative force has always had over space is that it is inherently dynamic. Perhaps it is for this reason that space is often seen as a background for a story. Description of place seems to occur in stasis at the level of discourse where time is an active element of the story. “The room was empty and a faint light shone through the window” sets the stage for the story that is about to happen. Recent critics, though, have begun to focus more on the dynamic potential of space. Starting from Bakhtin and his idea of chronotope, Susan Stanford Friedman points to the potential for space in terms of the representation of borders, boundaries, and their crossings (197). This problematized space, however, is a semantic use of space that influences the action of characters in the novel or spurs movement that still progresses in a line dominated by temporality. David Herman, in his description of landmarks and paths within the space of narrative (278), and Kai Mikkonen, in his analysis of space in travel narrative show a way in which a path through space can order a voyage (301). What most of these narratives have in common is that the reader still follows a focalizer on a journey: the reader’s movement through story is ordered by space and time. Though space may be an essential part of the story, themes, and conflict, it still works in partnership with time in the ordering of discourse.

Cyberspatial Poetics The hypertext reader is like Robinson Crusoe, walking across the sand, picking up a navigation journal, a rotten fruit, an instrument whose purpose he does not know; leaving imprints that, like computer hyperlinks, follow from one found object to another  — Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 78

While almost all theorists look to interactivity as perhaps the key feature of digital media, most also deal in some way with the “space” of the screen or the larger, more metaphoric internet.1 For my purposes, it is important that stories in digital media are presented in blocks of text commonly called lexia, and while these

the book is spiral-bound on both lateral edges. The binding on the left side holds pages displaying images on vellum, the binding on the right side holds blue opaque pages of verbal text. Different narrative orders are created by intermixing opaque and translucent pages. (84)

Material properties of a text, though, are surely only one way of mimicking the navigation properties of electronic hypertext. While physical manipulation of a page clearly imitates the movement and narrative construction a viewer experiences when navigating hypertext, much of the movement within hypertext is actually not physical. The click of a link takes the viewer to a new page but this movement is not a journey because the movement through space is instantaneous. The movement through cyberspace is not a typical voyage because it is not ordered by time in the same way. The manipulation of a material object is not a journey, and journeys in print fiction tend to be temporally ordered explorations. Kristin Veel has made the point that the idea of navigating space has become the main metaphor for our approach to digital environments like the internet. “This truth,” she writes, “becomes evident from the way in which the labyrinth

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lexia may be actually presented as distributed on the space of the screen, they may also be more metaphorically distributed, in that one lexia is digitally linked to another.2 Digital media encourage the reader/viewer to think of the screen space, or the wider internet, as a place to navigate. The very name “cyberspace” and most discussions of the nature of the internet have solidified the use of the metaphor of space. In her article “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep” Hayles discusses the attributes of digital text, including its use of space, as part of a call for what she terms MSA, or “media-specific analysis.” She describes a digital text as an “interface that must be navigated through choices the user makes to progress through hypertext” and that “electronic hypertext is intrinsically more involved with issues of mapping and navigation than are most print texts” (83). Part of the interesting point of her investigation, though, is that she sees MSA as a way of investigating the particular constraints and possibilities of an individual medium, partly as a basis for examining how media forms imitate each other or how narrative techniques foregrounded in one medium can be exploited in another. She points to print texts such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Robert Coover’s The Babysitter as works that lean toward hypertext, either in their fragmentation or in their offering of various possibilities within a text that must be ordered by the reader. Interestingly, though, in her discussion of electronic hypertext as a space to navigate, the print texts she mentions that exploit this capability do so through an exploitation of their materiality. Hayles offers Susan E. King’s Treading the Maze (1993) as an example:

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metaphor, as a figure of orientation, crops up in scholarly work as well as everyday language whenever . . . the experience of cyberspace is put into word” (152). As she investigates the power of these metaphors, Veel also notes the word cyberspace itself “indicates a paradoxical constellation of, on the one hand, ‘spatiality,’ which traditionally implies a physical and bodily sensation and, on the other, ‘information,’ which moves the spatiality to an abstract, conceptual realm” (152). Space can be viewed as an important element in electronic hypertext for the very reason that it is important in print text: stories are used to communicate information about real, supposed, or fictional worlds, and these inhabited worlds must be spatial. The epigraph by Manovich that starts this section, however, suggests that the metaphor of spatiality may function at the discourse level. The narrative structure of an electronic hypertext, spatially dispersed on the material screen or through a syntactic level of “hotlinks,” certainly foregrounds the spatial nature of narrative over its temporal nature. Clicking on a link implies a “where to next” rather than, or at least before, a “what happens next.” Marie-Laure Ryan addresses this structural aspect of space in her discussion of what she calls the textual architecture of digital media. A mazelike diagram of nodes and paths is then used by Ryan to represent the most common structure (at the discourse level) of digital media. For Ryan, the network is an efficient model of communication because it can include back-and-forth movement in time. For this same reason, she notes that “a story is an action that takes place in time, and time is irreversible. Any diagram that allows a return to a previously visited node cannot, consequently, be interpreted as the model of a chronological succession of events” (Avatars 103). Though Ryan sees this as a shortcoming of either the model of the network, or the network itself as a story-generating machine, whether or not there is temporal coherence may be partially irrelevant, especially to a model of discourse in hypertext. When Ryan uses a very similar diagram to model the story level of digital media (as opposed to discourse) that represents the users’ wanderings through a maze, it is difficult to see the difference from the discourse mapping. The reader’s wandering through a metaphorically represented storyworld, or the main character’s wandering through a storyworld, are not happening at the discourse level. Yet discourse can follow the journey of a main character. The difficulty really becomes the separation of space and time. Time does not wander in the same way in The Odyssey as its main character wanders over the geographical world. What is important in digital network fiction is that time becomes almost irrelevant at both the discourse level and the story level. Not only can the time of events in interactive fiction be scrambled by the choices of the reader, the point of the discourse is actually the spatial movement through events. The story may or may not be reconstructed in a linear temporal structure by the reader. And in a digital environment spatial wandering must also lose its connection to tem-

Semantic Space of Against the Day And . . . what do we “think of as ordinary space” again, one does keep forgetting.  — Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, p. 783

Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) is a very long work (1,085 pages to be exact) that seems to be the latest in a long line of Pynchon’s postmodern, playful, and somewhat disorienting novels. The novel, like the previous Mason and Dixon, is set in the distant past, this time at the turn of the last century, and is populated by broadly drawn characters with significant and/or ridiculous sounding names like Webb Traverse (more on this later) or Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin. But to imply that Pynchon has been writing the same postmodern novel over and over again or that complexities and indeterminacies are always put to the same use would be unfair. In Against the Day we are confronted with another move and possibly a shift to a new kind of text with a new set of concerns. If Gravity’s Rainbow, as Brian McHale has suggested, “freely exploit[s] the artistic possibilities of the plurality of worlds, the transgression of boundaries between worlds” (25) as a movement away from epistemological modernism, then Against the Day should be seen as a novel that is still concerned with ontology, with the nature of worlds, but now with the technological deformations, fragmentations, and combinations of places into a navigable network. Against the Day can be read as a form of hypertext novel that on the thematic level displays the tensions and possibilities of network culture and at the level of discourse transforms the spatial poetics of contemporary fiction.3 Before getting to the main concerns of the novel it might help to give a brief overview, if this is possible for such a sprawling work. The novel centers around a period of time from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 to a period just after World War I. Most of the narrative, however, is focused on these intervening years. Though there are many main characters, as there are many focalizers, there are really key sets of characters. Much of the narrative concerns the “Chums of

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porality. The discourse/story question is “How is the author presenting/navigator constructing the story?” (discourse/independent navigation), as opposed to “How does the reader independently conceive of the content of what has been consumed?” (story/digital experience). Even in the case of radically distributed or aleatory narratives, even if the discourse would be plotted spatially or on a complex graph of leaps in time, the reader would tend to reorder the story in his or her mind in a linear fashion. On the internet, and in hypertext fiction, however, both presentation/construction and the re-presentation in the mind of the consumer may be primarily spatial.

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Chance,” a group of adventuring balloonists who attempt to save the world in times of peril and seem to be controlled or commanded by a mysterious, global concern. These “chums” are modeled on heroes of (and written about in the style of) young boys’ serial adventure books popular in the early twentieth century. Another story focuses on the Traverse family and their trials and tribulations working in, and against, the mines in Colorado. This story is really about the anarchist rumblings against industrialist tycoons, the murder of Webb Traverse, and the search for vengeance of the three sons, Frank, Reef, and Kit. While some of the plot lines trail off or disappear, others converge in a search for a mystical place called Shambala where a substance may or may not exist that may or may not enable either temporal or spatial transcendence of this world. In one of the first reviews of the novel, Bernard Duyfhuizen acknowledges that it focuses on “issues of time and space” and “concentrates our attention on the new ontologies of the planet that emerged at the turn of the century — a reflection that probably occupied Pynchon during his composition of the text as our own turn of the century passed” (3). Without a doubt, a historical novel such as this would have to bear somehow on the present moment. At times the book is even haunted by the memories of 9/11 as Fleetwood Vibe, in his journals, writes mysteriously of an unidentifiable city and the murmurs of people “speaking of the unfortunate events to the north, the bad dream I still try to wake from, the great city brought to sorrow and ruin” (148). Pynchon is indeed concerned with the “new ontologies” throughout the book. Duyfhuizen, however, in his brief overview of the work, places his emphasis not on the manipulation of space but of time, and of the breadth of the novel that allows the reader to “follow the main characters over many years and see the evolutions of their personalities” (4). Though the “following” is clearly important in the novel, it is the following through space and not through time that is called to the reader’s attention. By the end of the novel the reader has a memory of scattered places visited by a number of characters, rather than any ordered itinerary based on time. On almost every page of the novel space is privileged as not only the setting but the grounding of every narrative perspective and means of characterization or catalyst for character action. On the first page of the novel the reader enters in medias res, but the only reference to the time period is perhaps the language used and a reference to the “recently opened” World’s Columbian Exposition. Place, however, along with the characters’ attempts to navigate space, is immediately established. The novel opens with the cheers of the Chums of Chance as they set off on an adventure to Chicago: “Now single up all lines!” “Cheerily now . . . handsomely . . . very well! Prepare to cast her off!”

“Windy City, here we come!” “Hurrah! Up we go!” It was amid such lively exclamation that the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience . . . ascended briskly into the morning, and soon caught a southerly wind. (3)

As they came in low over the Stockyards, the smell found them, the smell and uproar of flesh learning its mortality . . . (10)   Meantime Miles and Lindsay were off to the Fair. The horse-drawn conveyance they had boarded took them through the swarming streets of southern Chicago. (21)   Lew left the little rough-milled shed of a printer’s office and headed back down the valley. (174)   Kit dreamed that he was with his father in a city that was Denver but not really Denver . . . (320)   On the train trip east, Dally kept pretty much to herself . . . (336)   Cyprian and Danilo made their way along a valley . . . (835)

References to time as a means of situating the characters tend to be vague mentions of “meantime” or “a little while later.” While there is always a notion of where the action is taking place, where the character wants to go, and how the character travels, there is seldom an indication of how long the voyage takes. Most of the voyaging, in fact, takes place between chapters while the events themselves take place upon arrival. Despite the geographical range of the novel and the characters’ journeys around (and through) the globe, this is a narrative of arrivals and departures as opposed to a travel narrative. The novel situates events in space because this is a narrative about searching through space. The sons of Webb Traverse do just that: traverse the globe in search of Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno, their father’s hired killers. The Chums of Chance float above the earth looking for new adventures and the mystical Shambala. One of the important tensions in the novel is how to find a way through space in the form of both maps that give direction and paths to follow. The characters, therefore, consistently discuss or struggle with space or even their conceptions of space. The Chums of Chance have to acclimate themselves to velocity and altitude; they don goggles so that they can see as their

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The novel opens as the possibility of movement through space as opposed to movement through time, and almost every new episode, as well as the introduction of new characters, is presented as “where” as opposed to “when.” The following references all introduce longer chapters or a variety of the short sections in the novel and show the consistent use of space:

161

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ship penetrates the center of the earth. Later in the novel, rival factions of mathematicians argue over the mapping of the space/time continuum, the Vectorists arguing “that space be simple, three dimensional, and real and if there must be a fourth term, an imaginary, that it be assigned to Time. But the Quaternions came in and turned that all end for end, defining the axes of space as imaginary and leaving Time to be the real term . . .” (534).4 As Cyprian Lakewood tries to find safe haven in the Balkans he is posed with the kind of dilemma that is essential to the dramatic tension of the novel: “Your choices from here on are few.” Senta produced a small, damaged map, apparently removed from a guidebook. “You can go on foot, up the river, here, two days, to Banjaluka, and if you feel by then that you must risk the train again, try for Zagreb. Or you can go back the way you came, back through Vakuf, to Bugojno, where you can pick up the diligence route, through the mountains, down to the coast, and find a boat out of Split. There are of course a thousand footpaths, and it’s easy to get lost, it is nearly winter, there are wolves, so the carriage road might be best for you, as long as you stay alert.” (834)

Amidst all of the travel and choices of paths that can be perilous, running throughout the novel is the fear that an undefined space, a borderless country, can be a place where “the frontier ends and disconnection begins” (53) and the characters, like Lew Basnight, fear that with the frontier gone, “did that mean Lew was about to be disconnected, too, from himself? Sent off to exile, into some silence beyond silence . . .” (54)? It does not take a very big interpretive leap to see that Pynchon is thematically concerned with movement and exploration of a globalized space of paths and choices, a world where large spaces can be navigated, if at some peril. It is also possible to see how the characters in the novel are situated in a space that is networked or somehow connected, but in a mysterious way like the coded connections of sites on the internet. As they explore, they are “seeking not a waterfall or the source of a river, not to map in a stubborn gap in the known terrain, but a railroad — a hidden railroad existing so far only as shadowy rumor . . .” (789). Approximately sixty-four separate locations across the earth are visited throughout the course of Against the Day. It would be more accurate even to say that the space of the globe is “traversed,” because the word implies movement across space in a back-and-forth motion, in a wandering way akin to the movements of Lev Manovich’s digital navigator. Almost every character moves from one place to another by chance or on a whim. Any decision that is made — Kit’s to go to Yale, Frank’s to meander into Mexico after Deuce and Sloat, Dally’s to move to Venice — may be partially based on revenge or on the search for personal destiny, but the decision is also based on circumstance and always reversible. Thematically speaking it is also important to note that this movement, despite

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the fact that it is not based on causality, or even based on a destination as goal, is circumscribed by modes of transportation or the technology of movement. Against the Day is populated by characters who journey by balloon, dynamiteloaded speedboat, coal car, horse and wagon, train, steamship, or horse. Technology enables and constrains movement through the global network represented in the novel. The Chums of Chance, the characters least constrained by geography, throughout the novel search for “Iceland spar,” an element that they discover will allow its user to read a type of map (that they are also hired to find) called the “Sfiucino itinerary.” Of course, neither item is ordinary. The element Iceland spar functions as a kind of “double-refraction” lens that will allow one to read the itinerary, which is a map that would allow desert caravans to find their way on a starless night, a map whose author “imagined the Earth not only as a three-dimensional sphere but, beyond that, as an imaginary surface” and that would reveal “worlds which are set to the side of the one we have taken, until now, to be the only world given us” (248–49). The map that the Chums are looking for sounds like a mapping of the global internet; the structure of the network, along with its map, offers power to whomever manages to find it and control it. The “paramorphoscopes of Iceland spar,” according to Professor Svegli, “reveal the architecture of dreams, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude . . .” [ellipsis in original] (250). In Against the Day, information about space is at a premium. An important concern with space throughout the novel and the space of the internet or digital media in general is the foregrounded concern of control vs. freedom within space and an alternation between what Deleuze and Guattari would call a smooth and striated space (447–500). In an essay detailing early metaphors for space on the internet, Mark Nunes describes a conflict within the network itself in regards to access and movement. “The highway metaphor,” writes Nunes, “calls to mind a system that facilitates and regulates the flow of traffic from destination to destination” (62). Nunes likens this to what Deleuze and Guattari call the “striation of space,” in that it is under the control of an overarching agency or capitalist concern that assures “regulated connections between determined points on dedicated lines” (62). Without debating whether the metaphor holds true for cyberspace, it does apply to the uses of space in Against the Day, as most characters are bound to the railroad. In addition, this network system, connection across nodes, is controlled by the industrial tycoons, such as Scarsdale Vibe. At the same time, this railroad system is new, ever-expanding, allowing further access to the world. Other characters, such as the Chums of Chance, are allowed freer rein over the global terrain. Though technically operating within the same space, they navigate as if they

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were in a more smooth space. As Nunes says, referring again to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, “smooth space sets up a nomadic system of movement,” where “lines become vectors, rather than units of measurement” (64). This tension between striated and smooth space, between movement on a grid or network and nomadic wandering in a free space, is the inherent tension of digital space and the binary opposition — presented using the very same vocabulary — that runs throughout Against the Day.

Syntactic Space of Against the Day Maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again.  — Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, p. 250

In order to consider Against the Day an example of an intermedia work, of a print text functioning as a form of hypertext, it is not enough to look at how space is approached in the novel. The concerns that the characters have with space, however — the way that space is brought to the reader’s attention through its foregrounding as the impetus for action and change — calls attention to the way the readers themselves are asked to approach the text. In fact, the wandering of the characters throughout the text is mirrored by the wandering the reader is pushed into by Pynchon. While the text is linear and seems, despite inconsistent reference to time, to unfold in a straightforward temporal way, the reader is asked to jump from place to place within the story world. Though there is very little use of prolepsis or analepsis, the narrative constantly goes back and forward from one geographic location to another. The best way to consider the importance of space to both the semantic and syntactic levels of the novel, is to draw a literary map. For the critic Franco Moretti, a literary map can “reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them from the narrative flow, and construct a new, artificial object . . . and with a little luck, these maps will be more than the sum of their parts: they will possess ‘emerging’ qualities which were not visible at the lower level” (53). Against the Day echoes Moretti’s own view in its plot and major concerns and certainly calls for a map that might reveal something about both the semantic and syntactic functions of the text. Figure 11.1 represents the path of the narrative through the storyworld. The locations on the map represent the approximate location of events at each geographic shift in the novel. The size of the circle roughly represents, in ten-page intervals, the relative number of pages dedicated to the particular location, rather than the number of visits. A circle near Serbia, for example, represents only one visit but, at forty-four pages, represents an above-average portion of the narrative.

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figure 11.1. The path of the narrative through the storyworld, with circles representing the number of pages devoted to that place.

The most striking feature of the map is that it closely resembles a typical map of the internet or Marie-Laure Ryan’s map of network structure. Connected circles distributed across the globe and connected by lines would of course resemble a network. But what also makes this map striking is that the path through the circles, though forced upon us by Pynchon, is essentially a path that does not represent a journey and there is not a causal relationship between movements from one node to another. The focus of the narrative is not a journey from one node to another, but an effortless link from node to node across vast metaphoric space. Though the reader does not have the ability to click a link as she would in a digital environment, Pynchon has clicked a link that moves the reader to a new spatially distributed node from section to section in the text. In his discussion of Against the Day at the 2007 International Conference on Narrative, Brian McHale said that what was striking to him is that the narrative of the novel is not nested or framed like some previous Pynchon works but that it is distributed along a plane, that the chapters and sections are connected by a “metonymic relay” rather than any progression along a single plot line. The connection between one section and the next in the novel, more often than not, is a mere association — a character mentioned in an earlier chapter becomes the new focalizer in a new place; an idea such as anarchism, simply mentioned in one chapter, becomes the central activity of a new focalizer in a new place in the next. The movement through the text follows the logic of the hotlink. A function of a travel narrative might be to orient the reader to a single perspective, and then

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work through an itinerary, lending, if not causality, at least a sense of contiguity. In Against the Day we are presumably taken forward in time but we jump over points on a plane and, in addition, our orientation changes from section to section as it would in a node of a network. To give an example of just one such progression, the following diagram represents the movement from one section (essentially a chapter) of the novel to the next, with the name on the left being the geographic location, the name on the right being the focalizing character, and the number giving the page length of the section — to give a sense of the rapidity of spatial movement: Venice/Dally/19 → Germany/Kit/149 → London/Lew/9 →  Germany/Kit/21 → Mexico/Frank/7

What is interesting in this model narrative progression is that time is irrelevant. First, this diagram represents forward movement through the text. Next, this movement is described as the movement from one setting to the next. Finally, this new setting is paired with a new orientation. It is one thing to work through a journey assuming that a character grows from episode to episode. We also tend to assume in a journey that the judgments made of one particular setting may hold true for the next, and as a reader we can make predictions based upon the familiar perspective or set of assumed beliefs. Against the Day, however, represents the true change in the perspective of a network from node to node through the change in focalization. The global and network concerns of Against the Day are clear, as is the structure that refuses to follow one path through the story. Interestingly, however, narrativity, at least in my own point of view, is retained in the novel. It could be argued that this is because within each node (or lexia), each short chapter, a small story with a traditional story arc is told, but this doesn’t exactly hold true: this is a novel that consistently avoids closure. We do not have a narrative that is concerned with passing time, or causality, with a journey’s destination, or with a clear goal. Any of the individual narratives in the work, such as the story of Frank’s search for Deuce and Sloat, become not main plot lines to follow, but passing sites of interest, simply because they are distributed so widely apart in the novel, the strand almost forgotten between the time it is left and picked up again. Narrativity is retained because the narrative functions as a new, familiar type of narrative, the standard network narrative of electronic hypertext. In his conference presentation Brian McHale suggested that Against the Day may be operating in what Joseph Tabbi calls a “new media ecology.” Tabbi writes that for artists operating during the current age of digital media, inundated by new types of representation along with advances in the modeling of complex human thought, “the novel will give dramatic form and renewed purpose to these

changing experiential contours . . .” (xx). The spatial poetics, at both the semantic and syntactic level, show the novel operating as a media blending so seamless as to suggest that there are new intermedial consequences or possibilities for print narrative in the digital age.

1. See, for example, attempts to delineate properties of digital media or electronic texts by Murray (1997), Manovich (2001), Ryan (2004), and Hayles (2004). 2. George Landow (1997) has provided a seminal, though now often disputed, discussion of the structure and theory of hypertext. 3. The idea for this paper came from Brian McHale at a talk given during a roundtable discussion of Against the Day at the International Conference on Narrative, Washington D.C., March 2007. 4. For a more in-depth look at this mathematical debate about space in the novel, see Dechand (2008).

Works Cited Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. De Certeau, Michael. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Dechand, Thomas. “Pynchon, Cohen, and The Crisis of Victorian Mathematics.” MLN 122 (2007): 1180–92. Guattari, Felix, and Gilles Deleuze. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2003. Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “ ‘The Exact Degree of Fictitiousness’: Thomas Pychon’s Against the Day.” Postmodern Culture 17:2 (January 2007). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ postmodern_culture/v017/17.2duyfhuizen.html. Last accessed 5 May 2008. Friedman, Susan Stanford, “Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005. 192–205. Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.  ——   —    . “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Poetics Today 25:1 (Spring 2004): 67–90. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Higgins, Dick. “Intermedia.” Leonardo 34:1 (February 2001): 49–54. Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Th e N o v e l as Hy p e rt e x t

Notes

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McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987.  ——   —    . “Against the Day.” Roundtable presentation, 2007 International Conference on Narrative, Washington, D.C., 16 March 2007.

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Mikkonen, Kai. “The ‘Narrative Is Travel’ Metaphor: Between Spatial Sequence and Open Consequence.” Narrative 15:3 (October 2007): 286–305.

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Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory. London: Verso, 2005. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Nunes, Mark. “Virtual Topographies: Smooth and Striated Cyberspace,” in Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. 61–77. Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin, 1999. Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.  ——   —    . “Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps.” Dichtung-Digital (October 2004). www .dichtund-digital.org/2004/1-Ryan.htm. Last accessed 05 May 2008.  ——   —    . “Digital Media,” in Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 329–36.  ——   —    . “Will New Media Produce New Narratives?,” in Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 337–60. Spielmann, Yvonne. “Intermedia in Electronic Images.” Leonardo 34:1 (February 2001): 55–61. Veel, Kristen. “The Irreducibility of Space: Labyrinths, Cities, Cyberspace.” Diacritics 33:3–4 (Fall–Winter 2003): 151–72.

delightful vistas M ar k B er ns t ei n

Revisiting the Hypertext Garden

The attention of the audience is a writer’s most precious possession, and the value of audience attention is particularly clear in writing for the Web. The time, care, and expense devoted to creating and promoting a hypertext are lost if readers arrive, glance around, and click elsewhere. In the early years of hypertext research, reaching back to the mid 1980s, writers were deeply anxious that a hypertext would be perceived as an impenetrable, vexatious muddle unless it was carefully structured and conservatively signposted. These anxieties proved unfounded: though early readers did find hypertext confusing, the confusion arose not from rhetoric or inherent vice but rather from the sluggishness of early hypertexts. In an era when following a link might lead to delays of many seconds or minutes — when students brought a book to the computer lab to read while the computer formatted the next page — it was easy to forget what you were reading. The same anxiety surfaced again in the Web consultancies of the 1990s. Here, the anxiety seemed at the time to be imposed by the Web’s novelty and by the visual cacophony of early Web design. In retrospect, the fear of hypertext disorientation that dominates the Web advice of the 1990s expresses a managerial assertion of control. Consultancies warned of dire consequences if the exuberance of the creatives was not carefully controlled, and librarians — rechristened

information architects — were to be placed in control to ensure that management, and not creative or technical contributors, would dominate Web rhetoric. 170

Beyond the Navigation Problem

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When hypertext writers and researchers were still worried that hypertexts would enmesh readers in a confusing tangle of links, researchers called this concern “the navigation problem.” People sought to solve it in many ways: by providing many navigational tools; by keeping links simple; by using fewer links; and by organizing the links very rigidly. In time, experience with actual hypertexts and the development of the Web suggested that the navigation problem was less forbidding than it had seemed. Hypertext writers and researchers alike discovered that readers weren’t getting lost, that occasional disorientation was common in all kinds of serious writing, and that muddled writing was more likely to be the source of confusion than hypertextual complexity. In the mid 1990s, as Web design was following the same path, I wrote the first version of Hypertext Gardens to suggest that the navigation problem was an illusion. Some early sites, growing haphazardly, were indeed confusing and frustrating to use. In response, Web designers adopted rigid tools and rigid rules: organize sites hierarchically, provide navigation bars and menus everywhere, provide identical choices on each page, avoid complex link patterns. This philosophy came to dominate the Web, where it was embodied in Web magazines, corporate sites, special-interest collections, and even in personal pages. Indeed, the structure of a large business site is often indistinguishable from that of a magazine in which a topical home page provides access to isolated, sparsely linked article pages. Personal weblogs follow the same structure with modest adaptations to facilitate frequent updating, and while bloggers wrangle constantly about linking practice and blogrolling among related sites, they have seldom used links to much effect within the scope of their own weblogs. Consistent navigational apparatus is regarded as a necessary virtue: every page needs its top banner, its side menu, its bottom menu strip, and every part of a subsite offers identical navigational choices.

The Limits of Structure The structural rigidity that makes navigation simple and ubiquitous, though it gives a hypertext the appearance of efficiency, can make it seem sterile, inert, and distant. We may find excitement in individual pages, but the hypertextual whole seems a mere shell enclosing variously interesting bits. Rigid structure is often promoted for its efficiency and cost-effectiveness, particularly for large Web sites, but excessive rigidity can be costly: the repeated appearance of naviga-

tion centers — the home page and other navigational landmarks — can send the wrong message. Each time readers finish an article, the navigational apparatus returns them to a central page. Revisiting a landmark always suggests closure, prematurely inviting the reader to leave the hypertext and do something else. mentioned on key pages receive traffic; others are rarely read. Important parts of web sites effectively vanish from existence as soon as they vanish from the home page. Navigation pushes everything else out of the key pages, making design a perpetual headache. Minuscule type sizes become pervasive, and corporate home pages like Netscape and Eastgate (http://www.eastgate.com/) begin to look just like Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/). • Overly efficient traversal may benefit neither the author nor the reader. A hypertext catalog, for example, is not merely a reference database; merchants want to give readers opportunities to discover things they need or want, including items the reader has never seen. Shoppers learn of new and useful things and find unexpected ways to meet their needs. Supermarkets and museums, similarly, serve both customers and proprietors by offering more than visitors expect. Efficient traversal provides the information readers think they want, but may hide information readers need.

Gardens and Parks Unplanned hypertext sprawl is wilderness: complex and interesting but uninviting. Interesting things await us in the thickets, but we may be reluctant to plough through the brush, subject to thorns and mosquitoes. Rigid hypertext is streetscape and corporate office: simple, orderly, unsurprising. We may find the scale impressive, we admire the richness of materials, but we soon tire of the repetitive view. We enter to get something we need, and once our task is done we are unlikely to linger. We know what to expect, and we seldom receive anything more. Gardens and parks lie between farmland and wilderness. The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity. The park is wilderness, tamed for our enjoyment. Since most hypertext aims neither for the wilderness of unplanned content, nor for the straight rows of formal organization, gardens and parks can inspire a new approach to hypertext design and can help us understand the patterns we observe in fine hypertext writing.

The Virtue of Irregularity Today’s Web designers are taught to avoid irregularity, but in a hypertext, as in a garden, it is the artful combination of regularity and irregularity that awakens

de l i g h t f u l v istas

• Navigational centers exert tremendous power over the entire structure. Articles

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interest and maintains attention. Rigid design considers irregularity a mistake to be corrected. Each place should behave exactly as expected, each path should be clearly marked, and a few familiar paths should suffice for all. In contrast, parks and gardens shape our experience through careful combination of regularity and irregularity. Here we may find beds of flowers — alike in shape, yet each unique in color or fragrance. Elsewhere, we might break the rhythm of simple geometry with shade trees or hedges, a pond or a boulder. This crafted irregularity engages our senses by offering the promise of the unexpected without the threat of the wilderness. The key to planning a hypertext garden is to communicate the promise of unexpected delight while assuring the reader that she is not entering an unplanned wilderness. A rigid design might provide identical thumb tabs on each page leading to the hypertext’s entrances; a more fluid design might always offer both some consistent choices and some choices unique to each writing space. Where a rigid design places separate, stand-alone items within a navigational shell, an organic design might interweave relevant sections, enhancing an old section by providing a new path to new material or showing how a new contribution illuminates or responds to another page. This fluidity helps break monolithic articles and white papers into smaller, more natural units, pieces of writing that can be reread and relinked in new and unexpected contexts.

Gates and Signposts The more wild a garden’s vistas, the more important it is to assure visitors that this is not a wilderness. This assurance is not merely a guarantee of safety and comfort, but also prepares visitors to enjoy the planner’s art. In hypertexts, embedded and irregular links suggest the wildness of nature, where thumb tabs, lists, and menus all suggest systematic order. Order, too, is suggested by links that explain themselves — either through explicit annotation, or through pop-ups, mouseover messages, or balloon titles. Repetition itself is a valuable cue, for repetition always signals intent and artifice. The repetition need not be complete and literal, for a writer may gain the effect of repetition by repeating some elements and varying others, or by repeating some aspects — position, typography, color — while varying others. Formal gardens are unmistakable, but parks — especially parks situated amid wilderness — may require architectural elements to announce their artifice and to frame the visitor’s first impression. The ranch-house gate, the monumental arch, the visitors’ center: all serve this purpose. Hypertexts, too, can use formal frames and gateways to good effect, demonstrating design and planning at the outset while also demonstrating a deliberate intent to avoid rigidly codified structure.

Statuary and Follies: Punctuating the Reader Experience

You aren’t going to like this.

She is not cautioning the reader so much as inviting her to consider the situation. When the reader moves on, he encounters the next page at a different pace and in a different frame of mind.

Planning Pathways Highways are judged by efficiency: distance, cost, safety, and time. Garden paths play a different role; they lead us through the best routes, not the shortest. They may bend to pace our journey, curving here to reveal a view, twisting there to lead us through a shady grove or a sunny clearing. Just as garden paths craft our experience, hypertext paths can lead readers while also enhancing their journey. A simple search can link readers directly to a destination, but thoughtful designers lead visitors not only to the answer to their question, but to better questions. For instance, readers might come to a Web catalog to check the price of a new computer. A direct approach simply delivers the data. A more carefully planned path could lead visitors to this data in the context of alternative computers (perhaps new models), different options (upgrading old equipment, for example), or other interesting products (say, ergonomic furniture designed for this computer). The path must not twist so much that visitors think they are being led astray, nor be so slow that visitors give up and strike cross-country through search engines, yet twists and detours can help designers give their readers more than they expect. Curves, interrupted views, intersections, and incidental detail make small spaces seem larger. Hypertext pathways and intersections, similarly, make small hypertexts appear richer and more varied. Too many intersecting paths, of course, can confuse the visitor; the designer’s art lies in choosing which pathways to reveal while keeping other potential connections from sight. Where an abundance of detail might overwhelm the reader, rigid and regular hypertext design

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Within the reassurance provided by guideposts and repetition, both hypertexts and gardens benefit from punctuation — from exceptional elements injected to encourage readers to pause, to reflect, to look again. Follies — unexpected pagodas and pavilions hidden in English gardens — throw the organic art of the garden into sharper relief through their constructed contrast. The same sort of sensory disjunction can revive attention and provoke reflection in a hypertext reader’s experience. Thus, when Diane Greco interrupts a discussion in Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric with the emphatic warning:

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is useful — just as broad vistas, straight avenues, and far horizons organize large spaces. Elsewhere, intersections and irregularities invite readers to explore more deeply, giving readers opportunities for unexpected discovery and giving writers a better audience.

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Seven Lessons from Gardening 1. Hypertext disorientation most often arises from muddled writing or from complex subject matter. Many hypertexts do not require elaborate navigational apparatus. 2. Rigid hypertext structures are costly. By repeatedly inviting readers to leave the hypertext, by concentrating attention and traffic on navigation centers, and by pushing content away from key pages (and traffic), rigid structure can hide a hypertext’s message and distort its voice. 3. The shortest hypertext path is not always the best. 4. Gardens are farmland that delights the senses; parks are wilderness, tamed for our enjoyment. Large hypertexts and Web sites must often contain both parks and gardens. 5. Visual effects and other irregularities enhance pathways. But use punctuation sparingly; unwanted interruptions are tiresome and intrusive. 6. The boundaries of parks should be especially clear, lest readers see them as mere wilderness. Gateways introduce structure and guideposts confirm it, assuring visitors that they are amid a crafted experience, not chaotic wilderness. 7. Rigid structure makes a large hypertext seem smaller. Complex and intricate structure makes a small hypertext seem larger, inviting deeper and more thoughtful exploration.

At times, wilderness is exactly what readers want: a rich collection of resources and links. At times, rigid formality suits readers perfectly, providing precisely the information they want, no more and no less. Indeed, individual hypertexts and Web sites may contain sections that tend toward each extreme. Often, however, designers should strive for the comfort, interest, and habitability of parks and gardens: places that invite visitors to remain, and that are designed to engage and delight them, to invite them to linger, to explore, and to reflect.

Note This essay originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in Hypertext Edge, http://www.Eastgate.com.

playing research E s p en A a r s et h

Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis

Games, and not only computer games, are the perfect object of study for intermediality. Even though games are not media themselves (they are systems that use media, which is not the same as being a medium), they usually involve more than one medium in their use; sometimes many of them, such as a football match being transmitted and commented on by the arena speaker, by newspapers, radio, TV, and on the Web, and re-mediated in football simulations. Another example of this would be chess, which can be played on a screen, with postcards, blindfolded, or with pieces on a board. Chess itself is therefore not a medium. Computer games, taking full advantage of the multimedia computer, are conglomerates of mediated expression types, and mix fictional, simulated, and real contents in highly complex ways. A piece of gold in a massively multiplayer game, for example, could have a fictional materiality as metal, a simulated weight in the avatar’s pocket, and a real value when sold on eBay to other players. When we study games and their complex uses, we need to develop analytical tools that can also be used to study other important phenomena (for instance, social software such as Facebook) that are fast replacing TV (text, image, sound) as the central intermediality of our time.

A Method That Suits the Medium 176 Es p e n Aars e t h

The study of game aesthetics is a very recent practice, spanning less than two decades. Unlike game studies in mathematics or the social sciences, which are much older, games became subject to humanistic study only after computer and video games became popular. This lack of persistent interest might seem odd, but only if we see traditional games and computer games as intrinsically similar, which they are not. We might try to explain this lack by noting that games are usually seen as trivial and lowbrow by the aesthetic and theoretical elites who cultivate the analysis of artistic media objects: literature, the visual arts, theater, music, and so on. But this does not explain the fact that aesthetic studies of games are now possible, and even, in some academic environments, encouraged and supported with grants. What happened to cause this change? A better explanation could be that these games, unlike traditional games or sports, consist of nonephemeral artistic content (stored words, sounds, and images), which places the games much closer to the ideal object of the humanities, the work of art. Thus, they become visible and textualizable for the aesthetic observer, in a way the previous phenomena were not. This sudden visibility, however, is probably also caused by the tremendous economic and cultural success of computer games. This produces certain blind spots in the aesthetic observer, especially if he or she is trained in textual/visual analysis, as is usually the case. Instead of treating the new phenomena carefully, and as objects of a study for which no methodology yet exists, they are analyzed willy-nilly, with tools that happen to be at hand, such as film theory or narratology, from Aristotle onwards. The cautious search for a methodology, which we should have reason to expect of reflective practitioners in any new field, is suspiciously absent from most current aesthetic analyses of games. This paper seeks to outline and promote a methodology for the aesthetic study of games, which, given the current nascent state of the field, will doubtless give way to more sophisticated approaches in the years to come. It is a method rather than a theory, since the approach is empirical, and not limited to any particular theoretical result or model. It should also become clear that the method is not without problems, whose severity might be relative to individual researchers and their resources. Given the expressive richness of the genre, which is unprecedented in the history of media, the empirical approach chosen by the researcher becomes a critical issue. Any theoretical approach to game aesthetics implies a methodology of play, which becomes suspect if not declared.

Leveling the Playing Field 177 Pl ayi ng R e se ar c h

Given a newish empirical field such as computer games, the obvious research question seems to be “How?” How do we investigate, and with what means? Although this question is crucial, and too often ignored by researchers, it is both too late and too early to ask it. Too late, because research using many different disciplines, from psychology to economics, is already well underway, and has been in some cases for decades; and too early, because there is another question that should be asked first, and never is. That question, of course, is “Why?” Why do we want to make games and gameplay our object of study? Given a field that is interdisciplinary and empirically varied in the extreme, there are a great number of different reasons to do research, and a great number of types of research to pursue. A more or less complete list reads like the A–Z list of subjects from a major university. When faced with the rich and varied world of digital games, it is hard to think of a subject or discipline that could not in some way be used to study the field. The primary reason for this is that computer games are simulations, and simulations can, because of the principle of computer universality that Turing (1936) outlined, contain most other phenomena, such as machines or older media. This omnipotential for simulation means that computer games can portray, in principle, any phenomenon we would care to think about, and so, also in principle, no research area is excluded. In the past, this has meant that games have been a relevant subtheme in a large number of studies and approaches, and have often been used as a metaphor. All kinds of social interactions have been termed games, rightly or wrongly, and this superficial game perspective has been applied to endless phenomena more or less pertinent to it. The concept or term “game” is always taken as a given, usually not worthy of separate investigation, or even of a cursory definition, but handy when we want to describe the je-ne-sais-quoi element of our primary, nongame object, whether it be a film, a novel, a play, a poem, a painting, a sculpture, a building, a relationship, or a piece of music. We often “play games” with the concept of game, but we don’t take it seriously, since we are really talking about some other phenomenon. So, what do we do when games become our most important cultural genre? Ideally, this situation should allow us to set up a scholarly field or discipline with the objective to study games. But in what way? It seems clear that there cannot be only one field of computer game research. Already, approaches and studies from AI/computer science to sociology and education explode the field in almost a dozen directions. Like urban studies or epidemiology, a number of independent, different disciplines can be employed

for a number of different reasons. The “Curriculum Framework” proposed by the International Game Developers’ Association (IGDA) lists nine core topics that should be offered in game programs at universities: 178

• Game Criticism, Analysis & History

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• Games & Society • Game Systems & Game Design • Technical Skills, Programming & Algorithms • Visual Design • Audio Design • Interactive Storytelling, Writing & Scripting • Business of Gaming • People & Process Management

Each of these topics lists one or two pages of subtopics, with a total of over 200 subfields and disciplines. If we move out of the game developers’ “practical” perspective, we might be able to add a hundred more. With such variety, how can we even dream of creating a single field for the study of games? It should be obvious that the clinical psychologist with an interest in game-induced brain patterns has little or nothing in common with a 3D programmer seeking better algorithms for procedural shading. They certainly have no overlap in terms of methodologies. Explicit discussions of methodology or of empirical selection (or, for that matter, reflections on the choice of theory) are very thin on the ground. A recent and notable exception to this, however, is Lars Konzack (2002) who sets out to construct a methodological framework for analyzing games. His attempt is probably the first, and the present paper is inspired by and indebted to his trail-blazing. Konzack outlines seven different layers of the computer game: hardware, program code, functionality, game play, meaning, referentiality, and socio-culture. Each of these layers may be analysed individually, but an entire analysis of any computer game must be analysed from every angle. Thereby we are analysing both technical, aesthetic and socio-cultural perspectives. (89)

Konzack then proceeds to analyze Soul Calibur (1999) according to his layers. His comprehensive approach seems very useful in at least three different respects: First, in the thorough analysis of a single, specific game, down to the last detail; second, as a general, descriptive, layered model of games; and finally, as a timely reminder of the many-sided, complex media machines that computer games are. While it is unfair to call his approach unpractical, however, its true strength lies probably in the theoretical model rather than as a practical, step-

A Typology of Game Research The elements we choose to examine are always predetermined by our motivation for the analysis. Why are we interested in this particular game? What is the point of our analysis? Given the large number of potential disciplinary perspectives discussed above, it seems that the list of motives and focal points could be equally large. For instance, it is unlikely that the same method would be fruitful in analyzing both massively multiplayer games like EverQuest and puzzle/twitch games like Tetris. Also, the concept of “computer games” is quite weak, and notoriously hard to define in an interesting way. Do we include digitized versions of traditional board games? What about chess played by email? Programmed opponents for traditional games (artificial chess or checkers players, say) dilute the concept even further. Could we identify a genre of “intrinsic computer games” that will help us exclude the games that are only trivially and “uninterestingly” digital, such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on CD-ROM? Perhaps it would be best to drop the term “computer game” altogether and instead try to find a more suitable name for the phenomenon that interests us. One such name would be “games in virtual environments.”1 This label fits games from Tetris to Drug Wars to EverQuest, while computerized toys like Furby and dice and card games like blackjack are excluded. Noncomputerized simulation games like Monopoly or Dungeons and Dragons would not be excluded, but perhaps that is a benefit rather than a problem. After all, the kinship between these and many computerized virtual-environment games is undeniable, so it makes good sense to include them. Given this focus, what general elements do we find in “games in virtual environments”? I would like to point out three dimensions that characterize every game of this type:

179 Pl ayi ng R e se ar c h

by-step formula for game analysis. The strength of Konzack’s model is also its weakness: the seven separated layers, which appear to be equally important. Depending on one’s perspective, however, it seems obvious that, say, gameplay is more important than hardware, and also, in most cases, than referentiality. Indeed, most games are not very interesting in all of these layers, and few present us with real innovations in more than one or two. An aesthetic analysis, just like a computer game, cannot afford to bore its audience, it must cut to the chase and zoom in on the elements that make the game interesting, whatever they are. Konzack’s method is probably best used as an open framework, where the analyst can choose any two to four of the seven layers to work with, and ignore the rest. Furthermore, layers should not be seen in isolation, but probably analyzed together for best effect.

• Gameplay (the players’ actions, strategies and motives) • Game structure (the rules of the game, including the simulation rules) • Game world (fictional content, topology/level design, textures etc.) 180 Es p e n Aars e t h

Almost any game, from football to chess, can be described by this tripartite model. Since a game is a process rather than an object, there can be no game without players playing. Since these games are about controlling and exploring a spatial representation (see Aarseth 2000) the game must take place inside a clearly defined gameworld. And since all games have rules for advancing or losing, the game structure of rules is perhaps the most fundamental of the three elements. Without rules to structure actions, but with a (virtual) world, we would have free play or other forms of interaction, but not gameplay. These three levels could all be subdivided further. Gameplay can be understood as actions, strategies, social relations, players’ knowledge, in-character communication, out-of-character communication, and so on. They can be analyzed separately, or combined: how does the combination of a certain game structure and a certain game world (arena) affect the gameplay? (For instance, how does changing the gravity from 1 to .3 affect the game?) These interdependent levels have different weight in different games. In some games, typically multiuser role-playing games, the first level dominates. In strategy and reaction-based games, such as Command&Conquer and Tetris or Quake, the rules dominate the game. And in world-exploration games, such as Half-Life or Myst, the game world is the dominant element. Since all games are dominated by their rules, however, perhaps it is more accurate to say that in social games and world games, the rules dominate the experience less absolutely. Perhaps more important in this context, by focusing on each of the three levels, we could identify three different types of games research perspectives: • Gameplay: sociological, ethnological, psychological, and so on. • Game rules: Game design, business, law, computer science/AI • Game world: Art, aesthetics, history, cultural/media studies, economics

In addition, combinations of the above could denominate more narrowly defined research areas, such as avatar rights (rules & world), player strategy or hacking (play & rules) or role-playing (play & world). My hypothesis is that there is a strong correlation between the dominant level of a game and the attraction it has as an object of analysis for certain disciplines and approaches. This is of course not surprising, but it should be acknowledged and perhaps guarded against when the purpose of the analysis is to produce general observations about games and playing.

But Where Is the Method? 181 Pl ayi ng R e se ar c h

There are three main ways of acquiring knowledge about any kind of game. First, we can study the design, rules, and mechanics of the game, insofar as these are available to us — for instance, by talking to the developers of the game. Second, we can observe others play, or read their reports and reviews, and hope that their knowledge is representative and their play competent. Third, we can play the game ourselves. While all methods are valid, the third way is clearly the best, especially if combined or reinforced by the other two. If we have not experienced the game personally, we are liable to entertain severe misunderstandings, even if we study the mechanics and try our best to guess at their workings. And unlike studies of films and literature, merely observing the action will not put us in the role of the audience. When others play, what takes place on the screen is only partly representative of what the player experiences. The other, perhaps more important part is the mental interpretation and exploration of the rules, which of course is invisible to the uninformed nonplayer. As nonplayers we don’t know how to distinguish between functional and decorative sign elements in the game. Once we have mastered the game ourselves, or other games in the same genre, noninvolved observation and player interviews can be quite effective, and even provide insights that our own play could not produce. But informed game scholarship must involve play, just like scholars of film and literature experience the works firsthand as well as through secondary sources. That said, how do we play? Is playing for analytical purposes different from playing for pleasure? That depends on our reason for the analysis. A journalist assigned a game to review for a mass audience will probably spend less time than a serious game scholar carefully dissecting a potential masterpiece. Another factor is of course the type of game. A multiplayer game requires the participation of others in our play, while a complex strategy game may require hundreds of hours in quiet contemplation. As a player, we must assume one of a number of positions vis-à-vis the game. What type of player am I? Am I newbie, casual, hardcore? Do I know the genre? How much research should I do prior to playing? Do I take notes while playing? Keep a game-diary, perhaps? Or do I just go ahead and immerse myself, and worry about critical analysis later? Some games are fast, some are slow; should we approach them differently? Should we record ourselves while playing? How do we analyze a game we are not very good at? As a nonplayer observer, the situation may seem easier, but is it? If I watch others play, how do I figure out their prior knowledge of the game? How do I choose my subjects? Every game involves a learning process, and this process is different for different players, depending on prior skills, motivation and context.

Styles of Play 182 Es p e n Aars e t h

Richard Bartle (1996) offers perhaps the best analysis of players and playing we have seen so far. He presents a typology of four player types, and describes how the interactions between types influence the social atmosphere in the game. The four types are socializers (the players who play to enjoy the company of other players), killers (players who enjoy preying on and harassing other players), achievers (players who like to win and triumph), and explorers (players who enjoy discovering the game’s secrets and hidden mechanics, including discovering and exploiting programming errors). It seems Bartle has created a general model of human behavior in virtual environments, and one that certainly could be used to classify game scholars as well. His typology is extracted from his active observations of the first MUDs, but his model works well with other types of games, and even beyond, with phenomena such as web portals. In almost any type of game, the drive to win, master, and discover leads the players to socialize, trouble each other, impress, or find solutions that no one thought possible. A complex game, such as Civilization, Deus Ex, or Grand Theft Auto 3 (GTA3) may be won in a matter of days or weeks, but due to the openness of the simulation and the collective ingenuity of players, the potential for new discoveries is endless. After playing the multiplayer demo of Return to Castle Wolfenstein (the level called “beach invasion”) for more than a year and a half, I am still occasionally amazed at what I see fellow players do. The game takes place on a Normandy beach, with one team defending a bunker as German soldiers, and the others playing as allies trying to invade it from the sea. At one point more than a year after the game was released, someone discovered that by exploiting the fact that players were invulnerable for the first seconds after they were revived by a medic, one could “fly” over the wall if one was revived next to a live grenade about to explode. Thus, by committing suicide, one could win the game in a novel way. This is clearly a Bartelian explorer at work, inventing a new strategy based on a weakness in the rule/simulation system. Far from an isolated case, the use of such exploits is typical in advanced gameplay. Some games, such as GTA3, even reward the player for certain innovative moves, such as spectacular car jumps (stunts). The dialectic between player inventiveness and game designers’ need to balance realism and playability in the simulation can be regarded as a major source of creativity on both sides. Players find the discovery of exploitable bugs and loopholes in the games highly rewarding, while designers see the experiments of explorers as a challenge to their ability to predict the simulation’s unwanted side effects. There is a fine line between a funny but harmless bug, and a game that is ruined by bug-exploiting players, especially in multiplayer games.

Fear and Loathing in Morrowind After having played quest games for nearly twenty years, I am struck by the repetitiveness of the situation. Receive a task, find a solution, look for the next challenge. Or, in other words, explore, kill, explore some more, kill some more, and so on. The two redeeming features of such games were improved graphics and, as a consequence, richer, better game worlds. From Crowther and Woods’ original Adventure via Myst and DukeNukem to Half-Life, Serious Sam, No One Lives Forever, Max Payne, and beyond, the gameplay stays more or less the same, the rules likewise, but the game world, as a corollary of Moore’s Law, improves yearly (along with expanded development budgets). If not, the new games would never sell at all. Where is the new adventure game with retarded graphics that was successful? It does not exist. Take away the game world, and what is left is literally the same game skeleton, give or take an algorithm. Bungie’s quite successful first-person-shooter Halo was more or less a remake of their earlier hit Marathon, but with better graphics and an improved engine, of course. Science fiction futurism, medieval fantasy, or twentieth-century noir, the formula is the same: kill, explore, kill some more. The linear structure of adventure games like these is unnoticed the first time you play one, and perhaps also the second or third game you play, but after a

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How should the game scholar approach exploitable games? Clearly, the explorers among us will enjoy this aspect, while the socializers and killers (if there are any killers in our profession?) might ignore it. The achievers, on the other hand, will have a moral dilemma on their hands: should they play nice, or exploitatively? This brings another style of play to our attention: the cheater. This lowly creature, for some reason not mentioned in Bartle’s typology, can often be spotted far into the ranks of game scholars as well as among the average players. It is with great and increasing regret that one reads papers on game analysis where the author unashamedly admits, “yes, I used a cheat code,” or “yes, I consulted a walk-through.” In other fields this behavior seems impossible, at least to admit openly. Imagine a professor of Renaissance studies admitting having used Cliffs­ Notes? While it is understandable that academics with not too much time on their hands find it difficult to spend the hundreds of hours necessary to master a game, and therefore give in to the temptation to zip through a game (typically a quest game) using the walkthrough, or (even worse) using the no-clipping or god-mode cheats, it is hard to imagine excellent research arising from such practices. Where is the respect for the game? And, more important, how is the flavor of the game kept intact? And yet, at times, most of us have done it.

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while the boredom hits, and even the most enjoyable game becomes unreplayable. Another law than Moore’s is probably at work here: the more linear, the less replayable. The corollary — the more nonlinear, the more replayable — also seems true. One such nonlinear game is Morrowind (Bethesda Softworks, 2002), the third installment in The Elder Scrolls trilogy. Morrowind is set in a mysterious fantasy empire, with elves, orcs, various political and religious organizations, monsterinfested wastelands, Imperial law enforcers, magical weapons, treasure dungeons, and more. Morrowind is a bildung-game in the tradition of Rogue/Nethack, Ultima Underworld, and Diablo, where the player-character gathers strength and personal skills in a typical rags-to-riches scenario. Unlike these dungeon games, however, Morrowind is set in an open landscape, populated with small towns and occasional large cities, and plenty of underground crypts, caves, and dungeons. The scale of the game world is impressive, as is the variety of wildlife, people, and vegetation, and even architectural styles. The game starts with the player choosing/creating a character. This character is then let loose in the Morrowind world, freed from prison by the Emperor’s order, and with some yet undefined task to perform in return. At first the world and your place in it is bewildering. The nonplaying characters you meet are willing to talk to you, especially in the towns, where imperial guards keep order, but out in the open countryside monsters and villains will attack you on sight. Luckily, there are a few alternative means of transport, such as silt-riders (elephant-sized, strange-looking bugs) whose drivers will take you to the nearby towns for a few coins. Slowly you gather information and join guilds or factions to perform tasks that will make you rise in rank. As you perform these tasks and gather experience points you increase your skills. A quicker way to do this is to pay for private lessons from various, eh . . . personal trainers you meet here and there. Little by little you learn to fight, to use magic, and to navigate the world, and slowly the map of Morrowind expands to let you see more and more of the grand picture. The exact events as they happen, however, are completely unique from player to player. The first thing I did after having bought a suitable sword with my meager initial allowance, was to wander into a dungeon and get myself slaughtered by the despicable villain who lived there. Needless to say, much later when I happened by that region again, I sought a terrible revenge and afterwards looted his filthy abode, not finding anything of real value. After my first unfortunate encounter, I learned my lesson and played much more carefully, even in cowardly ways, through numerous colorful adventures that space will not allow me to recount here. I learned that stealth and cunning get you much further than brawny behavior. Money is very hard to come by at first, so I decided to leave my real-world morals behind, and steal whatever I could get away

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with. Most items in the game have owners, but you can still sell stolen goods to others. In particular, a dour bookseller in Vivec, the largest city, became a favorite victim. I would visit his shop and stuff away a few dozen expensive volumes when he and the guard weren’t looking. Then I would sell them to a merchant across the street. Eventually nearly half his three hundred books were gone, but since I was not actually caught in the act, the poor bookseller never really noticed anything, regardless of his half-empty shelves. Later I discovered an even more profitable exploit, which wasn’t even illegal. With all the selling, my merchant skill went through the roof. This meant that I could bargain well, and make much greater profits than a beginner would. So I would seek out the merchant with the most money, which happened to be an apothecary in the provincial town of Balmora, buy her most expensive item, a mortar, at a very reasonable price, and sell it back to her for a very nice profit. This I would repeat over and over, till she was out of money. I would then go upstairs and sleep in her bed for 24 hours (the time it takes for her money to regenerate) and start the process over. With an unlimited supply of money, I could buy the training and weapons I wanted, and become a master fighter, the scourge of Morrowind. No monster too dangerous, no quest too hard. I could explore freely, and I could enter the most dangerous places I could find, such as the volcano at the center of the world. There, in a dungeon, lived a demon named Dagoth Ur, and this, finally, was an opponent worthy of my might and magic. Until that moment, I had enjoyed a game with almost no linearity whatsoever. Any quest presented to me I could take or refuse, and little consequence would come of it. Sometimes a character would ask me to help him, and follow me around until I did, and I still remember with some shame a near-naked mercenary whom I had promised to help find his gear, but had to abandon when he got stuck in a cave (the NPCs2 have limited navigation skills, and get stuck easily). Occasionally I would do the wrong thing, as when I was on a mission to eliminate two Kwama mine robbers but killed two innocent miners instead (they were in the wrong place and fit the description . . . ). But, all in all, these were happy times, exploring, fighting, and pearl-diving, in a vast landscape filled with countless wonders. I even learned to fly. However, when I met Dagoth Ur, my world changed. Dagoth Ur was simply too powerful to kill, or, as he tauntingly pointed out, I did not have the right tools for the job. Hmm. Where to get those tools? I had a rough idea, but it would involve lots of tedious exploring, so curiosity got the better of me and I finally dropped out of the game and Googled for a walkthrough. That was a mistake. The walkthrough contained a wealth of information, about quests, characters and challenges I did not even know existed, and about a central quest that I had never heard of. So instead of simply finding the information I

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wanted, I was overloaded with information I had never asked for. This should have added depth to my impression of the game world, but it had the opposite, flattening effect: Instead of making me want to explore further, the walkthrough put me off playing the game! The magic was gone, and my personal investment in the world, after a week of playing, was totally devalued. I stopped playing. I still have fond memories of a great game, where my wish for an open, undirected game experience came true beautifully. However, the knowledge that there was a central quest, and that by following a recipe made by others I would be able to enact this quest, simply put me off further playing. I was no longer in love with the game. The moral lesson here, for me at least, is that walkthroughs and other types of cheats can easily ruin the game. (They are not called “spoilers” for nothing.) But what about the methodology? My free, improvised play had not helped me to discover essential parts of the game. In failing to discover the main quest, I failed as a model player, in spite of my great enjoyment in the game. Perhaps there is a potential conflict between free enjoyment and game analysis, where cheats and walkthroughs that take away the game’s challenges must still be used to understand it. Of course, if I had had more patience and more time, then I might have discovered the main quest on my own.

The Hermeneutic Feedback Loops of Play and Non-Play How is determined by why. So what are the reasons for analyzing games? And what, and how many, kinds of reasons are there? Game analysis is not just a critical/theoretical practice; gamers do it all the time. The primary objective/ meaning of most games, how to play well and win, demands an analytical approach. In order to progress through the learning stages of a game, the player must explore various strategies and experiment with different techniques. This kind of pragmatic analysis could be said to be present in the consumption of other genres also, but nonacademic viewers or players do not regard their engagement with a new literary or cinematic work as a learning process, which every player of a new game must and does. While the interpretation of a literary or filmic work will require certain analytical skills, the game requires analysis practiced as performance, with direct feedback from the system. This is a dynamic, real-time hermeneutics that lacks a corresponding structure in film or literature. Reading a book or viewing a film does not provide direct feedback, in the sense that our performance is evaluated in real time. As Markku Eskelinen (2001) has pointed out, “in art we might have to configure in order to be able to interpret whereas in games we have to interpret in order to be able to configure.” Our understanding of books or films, in the form of an essay or paper, might be evaluated

• previous knowledge of genre • previous knowledge of game system • other players’ reports • reviews • walkthroughs • discussions • observing others play • interviewing players • game documentation • playtesting reports • interviews with game developers

While some of these are better than others, it seems clear that it is in combination with hands-on playing experience that analysis has the best potential for success. But also, as the Morrowind example shows, nonplay sources can significantly

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externally by our peers or teachers. But to show that we understand a game, all we have to do is to play it well. What will a typology of game analysis look like? There are at least two main types of analysis: playing and nonplaying. Can these be subdivided further? It would be natural to assume that nonplaying can only exist in one form, but this is not the case. Take, for instance, Eugene Provenzo’s description (2001) of “U.A.C. Labs,” the “mod” (modification) to Doom II made by one of the Columbine killers, Eric Harris. Provenzo claims that the characters in the modified game are unable to fight back, and that the mod clearly resembles the Columbine massacre. This remarkable claim is not confirmed by a walkthrough of Harris’ mod, made by Ben Turner (1999). The walkthrough shows commented screenshots from a typical Doom mod, consisting of two levels filled with the usual weapons and monsters, which Turner characterizes as “rather unimpressive.” Judging by this walkthrough, it seems clear from Provenzo’s description that he has not played, and probably not even seen, the game he is describing. But then, neither have I. I also use a secondary source, but in this case, my source seems more trustworthy than the one used by Provenzo, who does not list any reference. Here we have two different kinds of nonplaying analysis, one based on a walkthrough, and one most likely based on hearsay. While my use of a walkthrough puts me at a significant distance from the game itself, this is still better than Provenzo’s position, which seems to allow for serious descriptive errors. I may not be sure that the walkthrough is the real thing, but nothing in Turner’s report makes me suspect otherwise. Besides, I am quite familiar with the game that the mod is based on, having followed the Doom series from before the first release on the internet in December 1993. To generalize, we have several types of sources for our nonplaying analysis:

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add to our play-based understanding. Like ergodic works in general, there are variations in the realization of the games, which means that a collective pool of experience will always bring new aspects forward, as the Normandy Beach/ Wolfenstein multiplayer example shows. Thus, it might be argued that for thorough game analysis, drawing on the experience generated by others is crucial, not merely useful. The hermeneutic circle of game analysis should include the game’s player collective (the official company website discussion board, fan webrings, and other user groups), and, if possible, direct observation of others playing, not merely reading of their reports and discussions. Since most aspects of play are nonverbal, observing player styles and techniques directly is invaluable, especially if we already know the game with some degree of intimacy.

Player Strata in Game Analysis When it comes to playing and player style, the playing analyst has a number of modes to choose from, depending on personal choice and game genre. Bartle’s typology offers four distinct modes, with “cheating” as a fifth. Combined with the experience axis of newbie, casual, and hardcore, we get fifteen different player positions, although some, such as a “casual explorer,” are less likely to occur than others. We could of course play the combinatorial game further and add game genre, theoretical foundation (Lacanian, player-response, feminist, semiotic, and so on) and motivation (aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and more) and come up with a cornucopia of combined analytical modes and angles, but that will have to wait for future research. Instead, let us briefly examine the different strata of engagement that playing analysis allows. First, we have superficial play, where the analyst plays around with the game for a few minutes, merely to make a quick classification and get a “feel” for the game, but without learning interface commands or structural features. Then there is light play, where the player/analyst learns enough to make meaningful progress in the game, but stops when progress is made. Then there is partial completion, when a subgoal or a series of subgoals has been reached. Total completion is of course only possible in games with defined endings, and not in games such as Tetris or Space Invaders. Repeated play and expert play are strata that usually come after total completion, unless the game genre is so familiar to the analyst that no substantial learning is necessary. The expert player is also, typically, a winner of multiplayer games. The seventh stratum, innovative play, is seen when players invent totally new strategies and play the game not to win, but to achieve a goal by means that are not previously recognized as such by other players. The classic example of this is “rocket jumping” in Quake, where firing a rocket towards the floor while jumping will propel the player-avatar high in the air, but nearly every

genre can provide examples. A famous example is the “peon rush” in WarCraft II, where a player wins by sending his builders to wipe out the opponent’s builders, instead of progressing in the normal way of first gathering resources, building barracks, training soldiers, and so on.

How do we analyze games? It all depends on who we are, and why we do it. Scholars, gamers, critics, and developers all have different needs and need for different methods. As scholars, we may also have different needs and motives, but it might still be possible to come up with common standards. Typically, we start out with a research question, such as “What is gameplay in adventure games?” or we might have encountered a new game that interests us in a puzzling way. If the empirical basis of our inquiry is not already given, we choose one or more games to give our question a target. Here we must be careful to choose games that not only will confirm our hypotheses, but can also potentially refute them. Our choice should be well argued and thoroughly defensible. Do we need theory? This might seem obvious, but as long as there are no really outstanding computer game theories (or, as it happens, hardly any at all), it would seem more important to present a well-argued analysis that commands previous scholarship and breaks new analytical ground. Importing and applying theories from outside fields such as literature or art history can be valuable, but not always and necessarily; and often nontheoretical, critical observations can contribute more to the field than a learned but theory-centered discussion. The question to ask here is, does the theory tell us something new about games, or is it discussed merely to be self-confirmed? In gathering information about the game, we should use as many sources as possible. Playing is essential, but should be combined with other sources if at all possible. Games are performance-oriented, and our own performance might not be the best source, especially when we are analyzing it ourselves. The analysis should also contain reflection on the sources used: where they come from, what could have been included, why we selected the ones we did, and so on. When concluding our analysis, we should match the results to the empirical basis. The cultural genre of games contains a rich variety of types and subgenres, and too often generalizations are made on the basis of a few examples that are neither representative nor popular. Naturally, methodological suggestions like the above have serious limitations. The game scholar may have a number of reasons for doing analysis, and most of them do not fit the prescriptive lens offered here. But critical self-awareness, in whatever form, should always be practiced.

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Toward a Methodology

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Conclusion: Playing for Prestige? 190 Es p e n Aars e t h

For the playing analyst, the question of which position and stratum to attain is a question of skills, experience, ethics, motivation, and time. Although expert and innovative play are always hard and sometimes impossible to reach, they do imply that the (successful) analyst has understood the gameplay and the game rules better than others. A superficial cheater or a casual socializer simply cannot be expected to reach a deep understanding of the games they examine. Then the question becomes, should we expect game scholars to excel in the games they analyze? This idea, while fairly militant, has some merit, especially if we look to other performing arts, where academic training is often combined with training for practical performance skills. As game scholars, we obviously have an obligation to understand gameplay, and this is best and sometimes only achieved through play. While our achievements as academics are measured by the quality of our publications rather than by our scores in Tetris and Quake, that quality is nonetheless also, at least for most of us, an indirect result of our playing skills. More crucial here than skills, however, is research ethics. If we comment on games or use games in our cultural and aesthetic analysis, we should play those games, to such an extent that the weight we put on our examples at least matches the strata we reach in our play. Nonplaying analysis, for whatever purpose, can only be strengthened by prior playing experience. But as my analytical misadventure in Morrowind showed, there must also be a balance between free play, analytical play, and nonplay.

Notes I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of the Digital Arts and Culture 2003 conference for their very valuable comments and criticisms. 1. For a longer discussion of “games in virtual environments,” see Aarseth 2004. 2. Non-Playing Characters, computer-simulated persons in the game.

Works Cited Aarseth, Espen. “Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse,” in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative Across Media. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 361–76.  ——   —    . “Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games,” in Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa, eds. Cybertext Yearbook 2000. Finland: University of Jyväskylä. http://www.hf.uib.no/hi/espen/papers/space/. Last accessed 09 Dec. 2008. Bartle, Richard. “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit Muds.” http://www .mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm (1996). Last accessed 09 Dec. 2008.

Eskelinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies 1.1. http://www.gamestudies .org/0101/eskelinen/ (2001). Last accessed 09 Dec 2008. Konzack, Lars. “Computer Game Criticism: A Method for Computer Game Analysis,” in CGDC Conference Proceedings, Frans Mayra, ed. Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2002. 89–100. Also available at http://imv.au.dk/~konzack/tampere2002.pdf. Last

Childhood and Adolescence.” http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers /provenzo.html (2001). Last accessed 09 Dec. 2008. Turing, Alan. “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. 2.42 (1936–37): 230–65; correction ibid. 43 (1937): 544–46. Also available at http://www.abelard.org/turpap2/tp2-ie.asp (1936). Last accessed 09 Dec. 2008. Turner, Ben. Untitled “UAC Labs” walkthrough. http://www.worldlynx.net/bent/misc /uaclabs/ (1999). Last accessed 09 Dec 2008.

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accessed 09 Dec 2008. Provenzo, Eugene, Jr. “Children and Hyperreality: The Loss of the Real in Contemporary

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the nonessentialist essentialist guide to games E r i k Ch a m p i o n I take as my starting point Dick Higgins’s notion of intermedia. In his famous intermedia article (later included as a chapter in his book Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia, 18–28), Higgins argued against the relevance of High Art. He initially described intermedia as being a combination or unexpected collage of traditionally separate fine arts, but he was also inspired by Kaprow’s mirrors and environments, incorporated into his “things” to help the spectator feel more included in the creation of art. These environments turned into “happenings,” which Higgins saw as a fertile reinvention and reinvigoration of the traditionally divided and mechanistic Western theater tradition. An essentialist definition of the digital game as a “magic circle” may be useful academically to delineate game studies from, say, literature, but risks limiting the enjoyment, expressiveness and ingenuity of digital games that could reach beyond the screen and envelop participants and spectators in the game experience as a form of spatial performance. Outlining this potential danger is the primary point of my chapter. Second, I hope to show that gameplay is often at odds with film; it is not a pre-rendered screen-bound work. If technology could afford more expressiveness

The Significance of Game “Essence” When I began writing this chapter in 2008 there were eight million players in the Western world subscribed to just one online computer game. This number was around twice the population of countries like Mongolia, Singapore, New Zealand, Uruguay, The Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, or Norway; and that was before the game was even released in China (Carless 2007). This game has increased its subscriber base by more than one million every year since 2008, even though 70 percent give up before Level 10 (Burnes 2010). World of Warcraft (WoW) is more than a simple role-playing game (Bartle 2007); it owes its success at least in part to a crossing of genres and delivery media. So does this mean essentialism should have no place in popular computer games? Despite the many papers in game studies, few have deeply analyzed the role of essentialism in the creation and understanding of modern popular games.

Why Worry about Essentialism? Computer games are essentially moving images, aren’t they? As Greg Smith has pointed out in his article Computer Games Have Words, Too, describing contemporary computer games as primarily a visual medium is do them an injustice. In the early development of commercial games we saw platforms and puzzles, using text or two-dimensional graphics, controlled via the keyboard or through simple controllers such as Pong. In the last few years games have become truly multimodal, involving text, sound, graphics, and sometimes breath (such as in the Nintendo DS), movement (the Sony Eyetoy and the Nintendo Wii), haptic feedback, biofeedback (such as in Wild Divine), head tracking (via cheaper headmounted displays and tracking devices that clip onto hats), and spatial projection (such as Jacobson et al.’s Cave UT, 2005).

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and empathy, digital games may have theatrical rather than cinematic ambitions. Further, it is not my aim to say that if a game world incorporates both real and virtual space it is therefore intermedial. Rather, I suggest that interactive digital media offer particular advantages for creating spatially performative and audience-inclusive works of entertainment, and these innovative works are hindered, not helped, by traditional boundaries of art and media production. This chapter aims to examine this new and emerging digital medium with the issue of essentialism, and, further, to see what, if anything, games may and could have in common with the conceptual threads found in intermedia.

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This use and synthesis of different forms of media and sensory perception has called for new skills, an expanded imagination, and the ability to learn and cross-fertilize technology on the part of game designers. The power of game consoles has also allowed designers to begin approaching cinematic realism and techniques in the cutscenes and even in running gameplay. Some games such as The Sims, Unreal Tournament, and Halo are even used to create “gamics” (gamebased comics), or “machinima” (films made with the in-game camera). In turn, film and television are either repackaging famous games or incorporating game genres, techniques, and references. Angelina Sandova has commented on “Hollywood’s insistence in playing a role in the video game market” and Antony Breznican has noted Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis’s interest in a potential creative fusion (the article’s provocative heading is “Spielberg, Zemeckis say video games, films could become one”). This fusion has already started. In a New York Times interview with Titanic director James Cameron, Cameron announced that his latest film venture, Avatar, would fuse the computer graphics technology employed in games with movie actors. The director was quoted by reporter Sharon Waxman as saying “This film is a true hybrid — a full live-action shoot, with CG characters in CG and live environments. Ideally, at the end of the day, the audience has no idea which they’re looking at.” In another interview (with BusinessWeek Online reporter Burt Helm), Cameron announced he had also joined the board of the massively multiplayer online game network Multiverse. He said this was in order to learn about massive online multiplayer games, as he was “looking at ways for to co-generate my stuff in the film with the world with the games.” The burgeoning power of computer technology and broadband-quality Internet access has also seen the development not of virtual reality per se, or even virtual environments, but virtual social worlds populated by dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of co-present players and spectators using a variety of platforms, hardware, interfaces, and preferences. These “worlds” are persistent, dynamic, and increasingly linked to real-time data (such as weather, user-created 2D and 3D data, local user preferences, or logging statistics), as well as marketed with and paying homage to not just literature but also comics, television, and film. To satisfy the demands of these virtual social world participants, the intermedial and transmedial skills and vision required of designers will become ever more important. And the influence of computer games extends even further. In 2006 Roger Stahl went so far as to write that the “media paradigm by which we understand war is increasingly the video game.” Part of the burgeoning popularity of computer games is also evidenced by more and more academic disciplines eager to claim intellectual ownership of

Several academic misunderstandings can be caused by not clearly specifying the definitions that scholars subscribe to. Our so-called debate seems to be no exception. Apart from Marie-Laure Ryan, narrativists seem to systematically fail to provide clear, specific definitions of what they mean by narrative. It is true that defining narrative is not a simple task, but we do have access to a rich narratological tradition where we can look for support. When ludologists claim that, in spite of certain similarities, games are not narratives, it is simply because the characteristics of games are incompatible with some of the most widely accepted definitions of narrative provided by narratology.

Some fans have raised the suggestion that games could contain elements of art; others, that games have in turn gobbled up parts of film discourse, aesthetics, or fundamental new ways in which today’s generation can learn. Philosophers have even held up games as examples of a domain or activity that cannot be narrowly defined. Is there a use for essentialism in computer game design, to prevent watered-down versions of machinima and comics, or is it an exemplary form of transmedia and intermedia? Considering that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries aesthetics was often called upon to describe and prescribe works of art as belonging to distinctly unique disciplines, can aesthetic theory help explain the development of transmedia games? While aesthetics is often popularly taken to mean the study of what is beautiful, it was originally coined to describe sensory experience independently of artistic canons and cultural conventions. Of course, for aesthetics to be appropriate, it must be careful to denote whether it is describing or prescribing games. Confusing the two is a common mistake in game theory: to notice a trend or a feature does not therefore necessitate that the observed is the prime reason why a game succeeds or fails. Further, from observing that one feature is necessary to a game it does not therefore follow that this particular feature must be common to all games. Significant features of popular games need not be universally necessary “killer application” principles. For popularity is not necessarily due to intrinsic value. Humanity is often swayed in its preferences by pursuits that are timely, accessible, provocative, and or even conveniently dumb.

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game theory. As game studies has emerged from the shadows of the computer lab, a pitched battle has arisen between the ludologists and the narratologists, the systematizers and the emergent game-play aficionados, and between diehard players and keen young scouts from media studies. For example, in 2003 Gordon Frasca (96) wrote,

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In 2003 Jesper Juul (30–45) offered the following definition of games: “A game is a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.” Juul believed these criteria are necessary and sufficient, and that only games have all six criteria. The criteria may well be sufficient, for they are certainly more comprehensive than earlier definitions, but it is arguable that they are all necessary. I am most interested in what it is about game environments that make them engaging, which is not the same as attempting to uncover the uniquely identifying features of games that no other activity, product, or process shares with them. Clark Aldrich argued that part of the attraction of games arises from their engaging nature. They are, he says, “an interactive and entertaining source of play, sometimes used to learn a lesson” (240). Salen and Zimmerman also attempted to explain what makes games entertaining. They wrote the following often-quoted definition: “A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (572). While Salen and Zimmerman talked of a magic circle that separates (but not always clearly) the boundaries of a game from the real world, they focused rather quickly on conflict (rather than the more generic terms, “challenge” and “competition”). They also discounted games that may never have a final outcome (such as cricket), and did not (at least in this definition) mention the importance of strategy. Definitions of computer games by such as theorists as Juul or by Salen and Zimmerman (2003) emphasize that computer games are systems, but this does not address the issues of why users find games enjoyable. I argue that these definitions do not directly lead us to producing better games. On the other hand, the huge recent popularity of online multi-player worlds cannot be explained purely in terms of usefulness or usability. Many of these games are crying out for help from HCI specialists, and yet they are still commercial successes. For example, although Thomas Malone’s conference paper, Heuristics for Designing Enjoyable User Interfaces: Lessons from Computer Games, was written nearly a quarter of a century ago, it has recently resurfaced in the papers and theses of current game researchers. Malone explained that HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) traditionally seeks to improve software that is easy to learn and easy to master, but he quoted the founder of Atari who said that games are designed to be easy to learn but difficult to master. Unlike shopping web pages, or software designed for office use, games have goals but they do not have to have clear outcomes. They do, however, incorporate challenge and fantasy, and stimulate curiosity.

Learning Through Games One common feature of successful games is that they may offer different strategies of accomplishing a goal: interaction often involves hybrid learning practices. In other words, clues, goals, and methods are often learned, developed, or found via conversation, observation, by trial and error, or even a blend of some or all of these ways of learning. Therefore, games offer different ways of interacting in order to learn. So when one talks of game-style interaction it could be understood to mean interaction geared toward solving a task (procedural interaction), or it could be understood to mean game genre interaction (the interaction you typically find in certain types or genres of games) but there is no one form of interaction common to all games. Another option could be to define game-style interaction as meaning the types of interface technology (such as joysticks or consoles) that one finds in games. Console gamers have access to task-specific devices and interfaces not common to desktop personal computers. These interface devices are either highly dedicated to a certain type of game, or differ in degree rather than in kind from the standard PC interface. They may well have improved task efficiency or ergonomics, but for many games, one can still use a keyboard and mouse. Hence, the success of games cannot be directly related to the use of dedicated gaming interface devices.

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Malone (65) defined challenge as involving “a goal whose outcome is uncertain,” as there is often variable difficulty level or multiple goals (potentially distributed over different levels). He was perceptive enough to realize that challenge in game design is not merely about making things difficult; game designers create barriers that tantalize and cajole the player to overcome them. For example, when I evaluated over eighty people and how they learn about the original inhabitants through exploring virtual reconstructions of archaeological sites, I asked the users if the environments were challenging. The users were confused as to whether I meant “challenging” as in, “this is difficult, I am not sure I can or want to complete it” or “this is really testing me but I really don’t want to do anything else until I crack it.” This second meaning of “challenging” is an important feature of a successful computer game; it provides hard fun. This is a presumption on my part, but it is possible that gestalt theory lies behind Malone’s belief that curiosity is a motivating feature of games. He suggested players want to have “well formed knowledge structures” (65) and that games deliberately suggest such knowledge structures but that they present them as incomplete. Hence, from the point of view of a participant, a game is not a system; it is an enigma that appears to have a hidden logic and therefore hidden meaning, which tempts the player with the possibility of strategic resolution.

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The skilled design of real-world environments requires attention to the interrelation of material between rooms, and the interstitial nature of spatial function. The circulation paths of large buildings can be symbolically linked to allude to new goals without the use of signposts. Indeed, if we need to put signs up everywhere, that is a good indication the designer has admitted defeat. In designing museums and art galleries, the architectural designer is often forced to make a choice between extroverted and introverted design. She or he may design a building that is a showpiece in itself and thus risk overshadowing the collection it contains, or design a building that acts more as a backdrop. To what extent should the built surrounds be part of the experience; to what extent should they fade into the background? Arguably, this dilemma is less obvious in game design, for the creation of game space may borrow tips from real-world places on the sustainment of thematic atmosphere (see Don Carson’s writing on amusement park space); nonetheless, architecture is often incompletely integrated into the meaningful game experience. Game designers use power-ups, damaged artifacts, and off-camera cues to both indicate new places of interest and the sense of an external world “out there.” Yet there are still some techniques used by architects that may help designers to design more allusive and suggestive thematic pathways and focal areas. Digital environments are not just renditions of infinite space, à la The Matrix (for a similar view, see Janet Murray’s 1997 definition of virtual environments as “digital space”). Architecture has inbuilt physiological and psychological stimuli and phobic triggers related to a sensory notion of proximity and distance. In order to be continually meaningful, digital environments also require paths and centers, focal points, and movement areas that connect spaces and themes. Nineteenth-century art historians such as Wölfflin and Burckhardt helped form a profession that talked of façade; that created sculptural elements that suggested structure; and that aroused empathic feeling through use of proportion, color, and form. They forgot to mention that architecture, unlike other arts, involves the interrelationship of space as a proprioceptive journey. The great Egyptian temple of Karnak used allegory to suggest its papyrus columns bloomed in the direct clerestory light while the buds (capitals) of the smaller columns in the side aisle remained closed in the relative darkness. Even in the great Western churches, the use of a threshold was psychological: entry rooms were deliberately small and restrictive to enhance the feeling of spatial grandeur and release when one entered the main hall. In great environmental design, the spaces are functional and thematic, and the artistry is not just in the execution of space, but also in the linkage of spaces.

An example of moments of heightened pleasure in games is in the liminal moments as the player is briefly suspended between one realm of experience and another. Examples of this shift in perspective include when the view from the tower is finally revealed or the player steps through a doorway or portal . . . It is the representations of the space and movement through that space rather than narrative that function as the organising principle around which ludic and aesthetic experiences take place. (2)

I suggest our spatial understanding while playing computer games differs from when we view films or read books. Neural research by scientists (Gottlieb et al. 1998), on monkeys indicates that we remember locations in terms of salience (behavioral significance), and not by what is actually there. Thus, the way we access these cognitive maps is typically not just via quantitative estimates and measurements but also, as Wang et al. suggested, in relation to personal attachments and perceptions. The real-world experiencing of places can help the design of game spaces, and can help us distinguish between our experience and recall of episodic space as scene via film and literature and our experience and recall of sequential and interstitial space. Here I derive the distinction between episodic and sequential space using the definitions of cognitive mapping advanced by Katriina Soini. Our spatial recall from three-dimensional games differs from that in film and literature, because as gamers (and not as film viewers) we may need to retrace our steps, or find new paths we have not yet explored as only they lead to the next level. Science Daily has described Oregon State University research on mental activity of people while they are multitasking (driving while using a cell phone), and in the article the researcher noted that gamers perform best at this activity. I suggest that the 3D computer games they play deliberately attempt to tax their cognitive mapping to make the challenge more engaging, which in turn increases their ability to multitask, and, possibly, their spatial cognition.

Breaking Myths about Game Essentialism Myths that may tempt us toward an essentialist view of games might include the belief that computer games happen on a screen and use a mouse, or do not involve considerable physical effort (unlike real-world sports). Yet the motion-

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Second, I suggest academic literature has so far not fully seized on the special nature and potential of spatial experience available via a three-dimensional computer game. For example, the Game Design as Narrative Architecture article by Henry Jenkins does not mention thresholds. Bernadette Flynn picked up this point:

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control sensors of the Xbox Kinect and Sony’s Move indicate that physical games are going to have a big future. Many games still give the impression of placing the player inside an immutable box. Staring at a small and flat screen does not help concentration, and as players are not embodied, it takes more effort on the part of the designer to engage them in the experience. We have connected head-mounted displays to games as a response to this problem, but they cause other interface problems and can cause dizziness, and the high-resolution models are still extremely expensive. Some of my past game design students have also helped create screen-breaking games (that is, they replace the computer monitor and mouse setup). Their projects included a dome projection system, a laser gun connected to what were previously conventional 2D desktop games (which they also designed), and a calligraphy writing game that works off a writing tablet (Figure 14.1). When evaluating archaeology students and visualization experts in 2004, I had found that people typically move forward rather than walking around when navigating Web-based virtual environments on a PC, so I wanted to see how peripheral projection may engage and encourage people to better explore their environment. In 2005 I organized a student project where my digital reconstruction of a Mayan city, Palenque, was ported to a game engine (Figure 14.2). A shaman stick allowed them to control lightning, and if they found the Ball Court, the Ball Court split open and they were dispatched to Xibalba (modeled on the description in the Mayan book, The Popol Vuh). The game engine allowed quick and easy use of current models (including avatars and flying birds), was significantly quicker, and could be used to project via several cameras at once (it has been used to run in a CAVE, an automatic virtual environment). We built a special environment where the game was projected onto three walls and a ceiling, roughly 2.4 meters square (Figure 14.2). People could navigate with a 3D joystick; their task was to find the Mayan version of the underworld (Xibalba). One interesting discovery of this project was the immersive aspect of projection that catered to peripheral vision. When people are surrounded by a large game space in three dimensions that is bigger than they are, and when they interact by standing and moving (we used sensor pads so that they could move by physically raising and lowering their feet rather than using a mouse), the gameplay is enhanced. The scale of the place and the increased virtual relation to the actual physical embodiment of the visitor enhances the believability of the virtual characters, for the NPCs (nonplaying characters) develop a territorial spatial presence, as they can now physically surround the player. The mirror projection was based on the work of Paul Bourke, a visualization expert, who visited us this year with his inflatable dome and mirror projection setup (Figure 14.3). Using mirrors and complex image warping, he can avoid the

Figure 14.1. Breaking Down the Dominance of Computer Screen and Mouse. Photos by author; games by AI Studios, a student project at the University of Queensland.

Figure 14.2. Unreal Tournament and Sensor Pads: artistic version of Xibalba. Courtesy of Mark Hurst.

Figure 14.3. Paul Bourke’s portable and inflatable dome. Courtesy of Andrew Dekker.

Figure 14.4. Warping Toolkit to project onto

Figure 14.5. Racing game in a dome-

differently shaped or curved surfaces. Courtesy

tent using mirror projection. Courtesy

of Charles Henden.

of Andrew Dekker.

Additional Automatic but Indirect Player Interaction Is it possible to add to gameplay through subconscious and automatic player reaction? After all, the mouse and keyboard are very constrained and mechanical forms of human input. If a game could automatically and dynamically react to the instinctive reactions and physiological state of the player, it could increase the frequency or intensity of elements that most excite (or calm) the player. While there is extensive work using virtual reality (VR) to control phobias, there is still little research on the user-reactive aesthetics of gameplay. In order to see if low-cost biofeedback can be introduced into a virtual environment for aesthetic reasons, another student, Andrew Dekker, has developed sockets for the Half-life 2: Source game engine that allows a low-cost biofeedback device to input dynamic data from the player (Figure 14.8). He has also created shaders (and other effects such as camera shake) that are automatically triggered when the player’s heartbeat and galvanic skin response reach certain levels. The biosensor signals changes in biofeedback and triggers the shaders in the game to change both dynamically and dramatically (shaders can control the color, reflectivity, and translucency of a rendered surface). Further, the bio-input data causes the hostile zombies to respawn in response to increased agitation of the player. Future multiplayer games could extend this feature so that players could attempt to guess and trigger the physical (and perhaps emotional) reactions of other players by deliberately testing out phobic triggers on them. By also linking biofeedback to atmospheric devices such as in-game music, the drama is intensified

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use of expensive fish-eye lenses while creating a peripheral and spatially rich experience for one or more viewers. Extending his projection work of panoramas and movies to interactive realtime rendering engines is one area we are currently working on. One student, Charles Henden, is developing Open GL code that will allow users to configure correctly calibrated mirror projection for curved and differently shaped surfaces (Figure 14.4). Another masters group built a small portable half-dome for the mirror projection (Figure 14.5) so that the enhanced peripheral vision creates a more immersive experience; which is heightened by stereo amplified sound pumped through the player’s chair. They also created a more tentlike structure that allows the spectators to watch from outside (Figure 14.6). Various configurations have been built that incorporate force feedback in the steering (Figure 14.7), and force feedback into the chair, for car racing and collision-based games. The spatial size and encompassing field of view engages the player, and hides external distractions.

Figure 14.6. Lights can be linked to the “health” of the player. Courtesy of Bonnii Weeks and Jonathan Barrett.

Figure 14.7. Car racing inside the second tent using force feedback. Courtesy of Bonnii Weeks and Jonathan Barrett.

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at the right time, and in the most personally appropriate places. These devices and effects may allow us to track player engagement, but also to dynamically adjust the content to make it more engaging, and hence more memorable.

Rules and Role-Playing Rules do not explain to us the enjoyment of a computer game, they don’t define a game as an experience; they structure it. The popularity of Tetris is not fully explained by looking at the code, but by looking at the intense concentration of a Tetris player and imagining the complex and convoluted spatial paths their brain must be imagining so that they can forecast where to move their blocks. Are games defined as a system of rules? Noncomputer games typically allow us to explore what the edges and domains of rules are, but even if game designers call them rules, the rules of a computer game are typically a triggered behavior or an actual fixed constraint. The flexibility of noncomputer games is shown by how difficult it can be to trace their evolution, while with computer games each version is distinct because the “rules” are not socially agreed upon by the players but frozen “if . . . then” statements inserted into the software by the game designer. This frigidity and brittleness is evident when we look at role-playing games as a distinctive genre of computer games. At a simplistic level, say, 3D shooter

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Figure 14.8. Biosensors and Half-Life 2. Courtesy of Andrew Dekker.

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games, computer games might be considered to be either elaborate puzzles or tests of hand-eye coordination and reflexes, for example. More experienced gamers might mention role-playing games (RPGs) as a third main type of game, but again, modern computer RPGs are typically actually pattern-matching guessing or strategic calculation games, another form of puzzle. The numbers of the characters are meant to mimic dice, through apparently randomized calculation. However, the numbers directly relate to pattern matching and number crunching. Genuine role-playing involves persuasive social believability, observing distinctive social identities, and enacting appropriate social influence through appropriate interaction and behavior. Computers are still very crude at judging appropriate social behavior and the crudeness of computer-based role-playing reflects this; people do not really live inside of roles, they select and manipulate numerical arrays; which they imaginatively consider as numerical representations of character attributes. How can we extend the ability of the computer games to create believably dramatic characters and social dynamics? One answer is to put the onus of social believability on the human players and not on the characters. One of my projects was to create a game situation where the player has to convince the NPCs that they (the human player) was actually an NPC. This would avoid the problem of creating humanlike artificial intelligence because the drama and pressure of believability is reversed, like a reversed Turing test. Further, this scenario would make for an interesting multiplayer game, where players could attempt to avoid detection by NPCs, while trying to uncover and “rat on” other human players.

Why Essentialism? There are obvious and not so obvious reasons why scholars may talk about an essence to games. Scholars may wish to fence off game studies from media studies and other disciplines, but there is also the new-media influence. The field of computer games is one of the few recent media areas taken up by the young generation in defiance of the “seriousness” of their parents with serious new commercial opportunities. Game software changes so quickly that game familiarity becomes a hallmark of generational identity. Since a subscription-based service is still not developed for all games, and since many games are designed to take full advantage of all possible hardware, games are pushed as generationally superior to their predecessors. Further, to define a game is often seen as a way of affirming or refuting its perceived qualities and uniqueness. Yet the technology of the platform, processor, and interface so heavily dictates the quality of playing, that people may be subjectively looking

Conclusion: Games Are More than Rules and Rewards M. W. Rowe has defined meta-aesthetics as “philosophical inquiry about aesthetic inquiry.” Ideally, I would like to be able to propose guidelines on what would constitute a sound theory of game design without dictating the internal content, only criteria that it must address. Sadly, I agree with Rowe that such a goal, to determine principles independently of content, is difficult if not impossible. I would like to suggest there are some guidelines that may save us from some

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for objective benchmarks, notwithstanding that, simply because games allow a discursive switching of strategies, creating an objective viewpoint of their gameplay quality is a moot point. In general, it is dangerously circular to define games by saying that they feature game-style interaction, nor can we circumscribe them by saying they are rulesbased systems, because such a singular feature list does not explain why we play games. In biology a hybrid typically means an offspring has parents from different species or subspecies, and it may mean the hybrid is the end of the biological line, for example, a mule. Computer games may be a hybrid of traditional games, narrative, film techniques, CGI and virtual environments, but this hybridization appears to be a growing phenomenon, not a shrinking one. In the virtual reality–computer science field, there has been talk of seamless multi-user information environments for several decades (Yankelovich et al. 1998), and lately there has been talk of intermedia as device-free and user-centric (Magnenat-Thalmann et al. 2008). There is no seamless definition to games, and to aim for a seamless game experience is to relinquish opportunities to create not only rhetorical games, but also involving, provocative, and inspiring games. I do not wish to argue that the combination of different media is intermedia, that to merely allow location-specific device-free digital information is intermedia, or that games only need to include filmic and gamic elements to be intermedia. Rather, and in line with Braun and Gentès (2005), I believe games can reach beyond combination of different media, and beyond the seamless experience of different media. They can also be innovative in their conceptual fusion of media (Higgins and Higgins 2001). They can bring together audience, place, player, and designer in a collaborative and unique experience. I also suggest that this rough concept of intermedia has some advantages over new media. In Chapter 12 of New Heritage: Cultural Heritage and New Media (Champion 2008), I suggested that in order to avoid continually consuming itself in the reach for the ever-new, new media could be considered “the act of reshaping the user experience through the innovative use of digital media.” Perhaps intermedia is more apt, for new media still appears to have a myriad of definitions and connotations.

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endless debates on what is essential, necessary, or sufficient. As critics we should be wary of using an invalid teleological argument that the future is progress and therefore intrinsically good, or that what has been dictates what must be, a seduction by a perceived aura of inevitability. It is crucial that we explain border conditions to our theories, and if (and where) they are falsifiable. In particular, the study of games as a subset of screen studies risks ignoring particular cognitive activities of the player, but it may also prevent academics and designers from seeing the theatrical potential of games as spatial performances. As spatial performance, digital games may also more richly and dynamically incorporate the expressive and empathic abilities of audience and participants as embodied and embedded social beings. Following the historical review of Fluxus and intermedia by Braun and Gentès, I consider games to be nascently intermedial; the media in which games are designed and constructed is secondary to the game experience itself. The second stage, however, in which the player is as much artist as participant, has not yet been convincingly reached. Games can and will reach beyond a two-dimensional screen. They will take the direct and indirect input, the conscious and subconscious reactions of the player, and create something new. Rather than merely hinting at meaning and inner consistency, they will allow players as artistic participants to create and meaningfully share their game-world as it unfolds.

Note Thanks to Paul Bourke, Mark Hurst, Andrew Dekker, AI Studios, Charles Henden, Bonnii Weeks, and Jonathan Barrett.

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Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Sandoval, Angela. “Writer’s Block: Why Hollywood’s Fascination with Games Is a Double-

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Edged Sword and Why Orlando Bloom Is Just So Pixel-Icious.” GameZone, 2 March (2007), http://xbox.gamezone.com/news/03_02_07_10_21AM.htm.

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Science Daily. “Cell Phones, Driving Don’t Mix.” 9 December 2008. http://www .sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/051209113320.htm. Smith, Greg M. “Computer Games Have Words, Too: Dialogue Conventions in Final Fantasy VII.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 2.1 (2002). Soini, Katriina. “Exploring Human Dimensions of Multifunctional Landscapes through Mapping and Map-Making.” Landscape and Urban Planning 57.3–4 (2001): 225–39. Stahl, Roger. “Have You Played the War on Terror?” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23.2 (2006): 112–30. Wang, H., T. R. Johnson, and J. Zhang. “The Mind’s Views of Space.” Third International Conference of Cognitive Science Proceedings, 191–98. Beijing, China, 2001. Waxman, Sharon. “Computers Join Actors in Hybrids on Screen.” New York Times, Movies (2007). http://www.nytimes.com. Yankelovich, N., B. J. Haan, N. K. Meyrowitz, and S. M. Drucker. “Intermedia: The Concept and the Construction of a Seamless Information Environment.” Computer 21.1 (1988): 81–96.

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Intermediality in the Computer Game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

In one of the fictional and satirical newscasts in the massively successful computer game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA: San Andreas) news anchor Leanne Forgé asks whether “skateboarding [is] turning your son gay” and whether “Moses was really from Ohio.” To cultural pessimists and opponents of popular culture and especially computer games the question I want to raise in this chapter may seem equally strange: What can a computer game heavily blamed for inducing real-life violence, a product of the “culture industry” par excellence, tell us about the state of intermediality, a concept traditionally rooted in academic discourses of the high and fine arts? Quite a lot, I am convinced. I first want to give a short introduction to some of the problems scholars of popular culture are currently facing when they deal with concepts of intermediality. In consequence, I want to argue for a more inclusive definition of intermediality, which also incorporates cultural and economic dimensions. Second, I would like to address the economic relevance of GTA, especially in relation to the general tendency in the industry to expand the market for computer games targeting predominantly young adults. Third, I want to focus on sound. Historically, sound has been a neglected element of multicodal cultural phenomena. In the hierarchy of the fine arts as

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well as in the hierarchy of the senses, all things aural are usually to be found at the bottom. Simultaneously, sound has become increasingly important in lived cultures in the twentieth century. Technological innovations such as the Walkman, the car stereo, or even phone-hold music have led to “a revolution in the culture of listening,” (du Gay et al. 21) which have not only brought about a constant exposure to soundscapes, but also hint at a breakdown of the distinction between private and public sound spaces. In GTA: San Andreas sound plays an important role in targeting the game at a more mature audience. Moreover, the audio track is innovative and offers solutions to some game design problems. The music and radio commentaries construct a convincing setting, but also function as points of relevance for synergetic effects, offering possibilities of re-releasing the back catalogue of 1990s music again.

Intermediality and the Study of Popular Culture As a relatively young phenomenon, intermediality is still a much contested and even contradictory phenomenon. While research has multiplied during the last decades, the concept is far from being well-defined. This does not come as a surprise given the many approaches to questions of mediality/medium/media alone. My basic assumption is that a very broad definition of intermediality is necessary, especially when dealing with phenomena that clearly have popular and commercial dimensions and thus cannot readily be termed “art.” Werner Wolf offers such a broad definition when he writes: Intermediality . . . applies in its broadest sense to any transgression of boundaries between media and thus is concerned with “heteromedial” relations between different semiotic complexes or between different parts of a semiotic complex (“Intermediality” 252).

Intermediality so defined includes three main aspects: media combination, media change, and intermedial references (Rajewsky, “Intermedialität light?” 37–38).1 In this chapter, I will not attempt to address any typological subtleties. I do not want to distinguish between what can be subsumed under the headline “intermediality” and what cannot, nor do I want to give an overview of the state of research.2 Rather, I want to point to two problematic aspects in the current debates, especially when it comes to the study of popular culture. First, it seems that there is a huge terminological divide between scholars from Anglophone countries and those from Central Europe. The German term Intermedialität does not translate well into the English word “intermediality.” Intermedialität has developed into a specifically German construct, and the term

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“intermediality” does not have the same theoretical and practical implications and traditions. Moreover, it almost does not exist in English-speaking academic communities. A simple key search for “intermediality” in the online catalogue of the Library of Congress, which can serve as one example, returns only three entries, while the search for “Intermedialität” in the online catalogue of the Deutsche Bücherei Leipzig returns more than 100 results.3 This is especially noteworthy since important impulses and concepts in the study of intermediality — from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s first mentioning of the word “intermedium” in 1812 to the work of the Fluxus artist and the conceptional father of “intermedia,” Dick Higgins, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s — originated in Anglophone countries.4 The boom in the study of intermediality since the 1990s, however, has been a particularly Central-European phenomenon. Wolf credits the German scholar Aage A. Hansen-Löve with coining the term “intermediality” in 1983 in a study of Russian Symbolism (“Intermediality” 252). Many of the anthologies, overviews, and typologies mentioned above were published in German or by Germans and usually derive from the field of literary studies and inter-art studies. Most of the phenomena of popular culture, which make up the majority of all intermedial objects, are neither literature nor can they be called art if traditional criteria are applied. This leads to the second problematic aspect in current debates of intermediality. Inter-art studies and literary studies do not provide a comprehensive methodology and terminology for the study of popular culture. These disciplines are at best uninterested and at worst rather hostile to music videos, computer games, or other popular genres. What is needed then is a comprehensive approach to intermediality, which addresses not only formal, stylistic, and aesthetic aspects, but also technological, economic, and cultural questions. By cultural I mean the specifically historical context of certain media texts, as well as their relationship to the larger culture, with its special places in its system for different media, and their connection to power relations on other textual terrains. I want to argue that these economic and cultural aspects become increasingly important to the relationships between different media. Since the advent of the digital our media system has changed dramatically, primarily through a technological fusion or convergence of different hardware devices. Cell phones are used to play music and videos, to navigate your car through a town, and to play computer games. The TV set can provide access to the internet, and the personal computer or the notebook functions as a super-device, which integrates all other media appliances. Software — and this may be program code, a game, a movie, or a song — can be distributed using a multitude of channels, platforms, and/or different hardware

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devices. New software and new genres, such as ring tones, were invented and have proven commercially successful, even influencing the program structure of other media channels, in this case music television stations. Henry Jenkins argues convincingly that

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media convergence is more than simply a technological shift. Convergence alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences. Convergence refers to a process, but not an endpoint . . . Convergence is more than a corporate branding opportunity; it represents a reconfiguration of media power and a reshaping of media aesthetics and economics. (34–35)

Studies in intermediality have to reflect these developments and have to widen their scope to include economic, technological, as well as cultural questions. The computer game GTA: San Andreas, the marketing strategies of the publishers and producers, and especially the use of sound in this game can serve as an example of the possibilities and directions that such a concept of intermediality allows.

GTA: San Andreas and Mature Adult Audiences San Andreas, the fifth part of the GTA franchise, is an action-adventure that presents a vast territory of a whole federal state, including the three cities of Los Santos, Las Venturas, and San Fierro (loosely modeled on Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco) as well as rural regions with telling names such as Red County and Bone County. GTA: San Andreas, which was released in October 2004 for the Playstation 2 and in June 2005 for PC and Xbox, is generically hybrid. While the basic aim of the game is to get rich by all means necessary and to get respect by fulfilling the missions, there is a considerable amount of gameplay freedom to drive around, play sub-missions, or to just inspect the surroundings. GTA can therefore be called an action-adventure with elements of a racing simulation. Its perceived open-endedness and its game principle have been praised by gamers and critics alike.5 The main protagonist and avatar of the gamer is Carl “CJ” Johnson, one of the first African-American major game characters, who returns to Los Santos after his mother was murdered. In the following missions CJ has to deal with rival gangs and corrupt police officers, with hippies, mobsters, and dubious federal agents. He becomes the owner of a garage, takes part in a spectacular casino heist in Las Venturas, and becomes the rap star Madd Dogg’s manager. Like its predecessors, San Andreas has been criticized for violent content and a realistically graphic representation of violence.6 While computer games in general have been the target of much criticism regarding this issue,7 Aphra Kerr points to an economic explanation for the coming-of-age of computer games.

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In “Spilling Hot Coffee? Grand Theft Auto as Contested Cultural Product” she argues that “in order to understand the GTA story one must place it in the context of a wider shift within the digital games industry to target and develop content for more mature adult audiences” (32). Since the 1980s the industry market, especially for console games,8 has changed dramatically. While “the early console and handheld systems were designed to appeal to young people, given their design and choice of colors and input/ output devices,” Sony’s entry into the business in the mid-1990s modified the target group. Sony made “a concerted effort to broaden the games market beyond children and teenagers” (24). Rockstar games, like GTA and Max Payne, are prime examples of games targeted at a more mature audience, not only because of their violent content but also because they are loaded with numerous intermedial references, as we will see later. Rockstar produced and released these games for the Sony Playstation first — and usually half a year later for the PC and the Xbox. In this sense, the games developed by Rockstar are the software that fuel the sales of Sony’s hardware. This matches Sony’s business strategy at large, which John Mundy describes in Popular Music on Screen as “computing plus entertainment,” with movies and music being the other key software (228). This strategy clearly bears similarities with the development termed “media convergence” above. Targeting a mature and adult audience for a controversial product such as computer games, however, can be a sensitive and difficult affair, especially when the producers sell their product globally. The rating system and norms and standards of “decency” vary between cultures and nation states. A case in point is the “Hot Coffee” debate surrounding GTA: San Andreas. When San Andreas was released in 2004, it was rated M (17) by the ESRB, the self-regulating industry organization in the US and Canada. In July 2005 a mod, a small modification program for the PC version, was discovered. The mod unlocked a sex mini-game within the game. Rockstar soon declared: “So far we have learned that the ‘Hot Coffee’ modification is the work of a determined group of hackers who have gone to significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game” (Thorsen, “San Andreas rated AO”). However, this was obviously not the whole truth. The mini-game can also be unlocked on the Playstation version of the game. Since no new code can be introduced into console games, which are sold on read-only DVDs, the “hot coffee” mini-game must have been a part of the official program although it was hidden and had to be unlocked. The mini-game is far from being graphically advanced or “explicit.” Andreas Rauscher compares the quality of the episode to “silly and smutty C64 games for continuously giggling teenagers in the 1980s [my translation].” Nevertheless,

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the “hot coffee” episode sparked a new controversy, this time involving Senator Hillary Clinton, who demanded an investigation into the newly found material and a re-evaluation of the regulatory process. As a result of the public debate the ESRB reconsidered the rating, now classifying GTA: San Andreas as “Adult Only” (AO/18). An “Adult Only” rating, however, practically bans the game, as most mainstream resellers like Wal-Mart do not sell games with this rating. Other chains like Target and Best Buy took the game from their shelves, too. Consequently, Rockstar stopped manufacturing the game and released a clean version. An FTC investigation in the case ended with an out-of-court settlement in July 2006. Take Two, the publisher of Rockstar games, was not fined. While it is easy to dismiss this incident as farce, it clearly shows the fine line publishers and developers are walking when they cater for a “mature” audience. Censorship, controversies, publicity, and sales figures seem to be entangled in a complex web of causes and effects, meanings and interpretations. Furthermore, it is interesting, as Aphra Kerr argues, that the game developers hid such a scene in the game in the first place knowing that it would probably not be found by game ratings boards but suspecting perhaps that game players would unlock it, particularly in the PC version of the game where both the technology and gaming culture almost demand such modifications. This approach to third party intervention recalls creative efforts by writers to smuggle contentious ideas into literature in countries with strict censorship regimes in the early twentieth century. (30)

The Car Stereo in GTA and Functions of Sound What is it that makes the GTA series appeal to a more “mature” audience? Is it just the use of violent content and the controversy around a hidden, ludicrous sex mini-game? Clearly these are just side effects of the attractiveness of the game, which stem from the convincing gaming principle as well as the intermedial references that turn GTA into a satire of early 1990s West Coast America. GTA: San Andreas — and its predecessors Vice City and GTA3 — presents a cautious balance between missions, which advance the game’s story, and the freedom and openness that characterize the gameplay and inspire the gamer’s spirit of discovery. While the gamer tries to fulfill the missions, he or she has to cover large distances in the game world. In contrast to other computer games where traveling may be frustrating and boring, GTA: San Andreas offers a range of vehicles to drive and introduces elements of the racing simulation genre. Gonzalo Frasca writes in “Sim Sin City” about this feature of the GTA series:

One of GTA3’s particular design characteristics is that it succeeds at transforming a traditionally boring activity (moving through space) into an enjoyable game (car simulation). This is an elegant design solution which is coherent with the game’s premises and do [sic] not disturb players from their particular goals.

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In every vehicle the gamer can choose from eleven radio stations, which makes the driving experience even more pleasurable. The car stereo fulfils some functions that are especially interesting in connection with concepts of intermediality and will be under scrutiny later in this chapter. Among them are the creation of effects of realism through intermedial references as well as the construction of the car as safe space in the game environment. Furthermore, the car stereo functions as a solution to the game design problem that player intervention can destroy the carefully crafted illusion of synchronicity between moving images and sound. Last but not least, the sarcastic comments on the radio programs as well as the fictional commercials introduce irony and parody. In general, sound in computer games is a very heterogeneous phenomenon.9 Factors that influence the use of sound in games are genre, the modus (single player/multi player), and the player’s motivation, which influences his or her choice of the audio options in the game’s menu. Sound in computer games is furthermore a continuation of traditions and conventions, especially of filmic traditions and conventions as well as departures from them, usually when the “interactive” structure of games is concerned. Narrative film — with the exception of some more experimental movies — relies heavily on a rigid relationship between moving image and sound. Sound needs to be contained in conventions to achieve order. Synchronization and the use of nondiegetic or (to use Claudia Gorbman’s term) “unobtrusive” music are among the conventions that establish this order. This is possible since film is a time-based medium: the length of every scene is known in the production process and in the final movie. Therefore music and sound can be synchronized exactly. As computer games are “interactive”10 it is not clear how long a particular scene will take. The gamer’s actions decide the length of every scene. Computer games are organized in space or by actions. Game designers have found ways to deal with the “problem of interactivity.” Most frequently they use loops or scripted events to coordinate sound and images. Loops, however, can be very annoying; the use of scripted events also has its limits. Therefore, there is a constant threat in computer games that sound will escape the conventional order; that sound cuts will become audible; that sound, images, and actions will not fit. The consequences are the shattering of effects of realism: when synchronicity fails, the gamer becomes aware of the

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technological construction of the game’s realistic effects, and immersion is not possible any more. In presenting an equivalent to diegetic music, the car stereo in GTA: San Andreas offers a solution to these sound design problems that relates to the interactivity of the medium and the use of standard nondiegetic music. The principle of the car stereo is rather simple: every time the player gets into one of the vehicles the car stereo is switched on, offering a choice of eleven radio stations with a range of musical styles from Soul, Funk, Gangsta Rap, Country, or Underground House to Progressive Rock, Chart Pop, and Alternative Rock. Moreover, there is one talk radio station called WCTR. The gamer can also decide to switch the radio off and listen to no music at all. Considering the reactions and opinions of gamers in forums, trade publications, and boards this is, however, a rather hypothetical choice. The car stereo provides in-game sound with a logical motivation and source in the game world. What is interesting about the motivation of sound is that it is rooted less in medial conventions than in conventions of everyday life. The car stereo plays only a minor role in filmic conventions (usually when diegetic music turns nondiegetic, or the other way round), but it is still convincing in the game because it fits our expectations of the everyday. Even more important, the car stereo offers a starting-point and an end-point for the game’s audio, thus effectively achieving synchronization with events in the game world. The character enters the car, music starts. The character leaves the car, music stops. In this sense, the car stereo creates effects of realism in that it aids the gamer “in that willing suspension of disbelief” which according to Coleridge “constitutes poetic faith” (168–69) or, by extension, faith in every fictional text. The game researcher Rob Bridgett establishes another function of the car stereo when he compares the use of music in the vehicles to psychoanalytical theories of the “sonorous envelope” or the “sound bath” (Didier Anzieu, Guy Rosolato). Bridgett writes about the car stereo in GTA3, which works according to the same sound design principle: Certainly there is an interesting acoustic contradiction occurring, in that the radio music is presented as ‘score,’ which although an interesting play on diegetic notions in fact isolates the player in an acoustic ‘safe space’ — ‘inside’ or sealed off’ from the action of the game . . . This acoustic safe space is totally removed from our visual experience of the world from our eyes. It is a womb like inner immersion.

In my opinion it is not really a safe space that the car stereo is establishing, but rather the illusion of this safe space. The car may seem to be a refuge of safety against a hostile surrounding, but an intrusion is always possible, then painfully

Always Another Quote to Guess: Intermedial References in GTA Most of the songs are not only from the early 1990s, they are emblematically used as a portrait of this era. On Radio X, these are songs like Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” Faith No More’s “Midlife Crisis” or “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine. Radio Los Santos plays early 1990s (gangsta) rap including Kid Frost’s “La Raza,” Too Short’s “The Ghetto,” and NWA’s “Always into Somethin’ ” while classic hiphop has its home on Playback FM. Moreover, the sarcastic and ironic comments on the radio shows deal with topics and attitudes which are (stereo-)typical of their time. DJ Sage welcomes her listeners on Radio X by announcing: “Good morning, San Andreas! The baby boom is officially over. You are all irrelevant. Now die.” Radio X presents a disillusioned, hedonistic, and pretentious (white, middle-class) youth in the person of DJ Sage: “Don’t forget, each weekend we meet in the park and watch German expressionist silent films projected onto a tree. Things that are foreign are so meaningful.” K-DST (“The Dust”) is the station for “real rockers who wear leather jackets.” According to the station’s self-marketing it has a very special listenership: “When all of your friends from the seventies have gone to rehab we strongly encourage you to stay on . . . The Dust.” Moreover, the radio hosts’ voice actors are intermedial references themselves. They point to certain styles and attitudes with their public persona. The voice of Tommy “The Nightmare” Smith, DJ of The Dust, is Axl Rose, singer of the band Guns n’ Roses. Other famous voice actors are George Clinton (as DJ The Funktipus on Bounce FM) and rapper and lyricist Chuck D. of Public Enemy (as Forth Right MC on the classical rap station Playback FM). Moreover, the roles of the characters in GTA: San Andreas are voiced by actors and musicians who refer to their former roles and create an even thicker web of intermedial knots and links. The voices of the corrupt police officers Frank Tenpenny and Eddie Pulaski belong to the actors Samuel L. Jackson and Chris Penn, who starred in the Tarantino movies Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs respec-

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breaking the illusion of safety. Bridgett is right, however, when he asserts that the car stereo is an immersive device. My argumentation so far referred to the stylistic and formal features of the car stereo, to issues of media combination (audio, moving images) within the medium of the computer game. More than that, the audio track in GTA: San Andreas also creates effects of realism on the level of content. The selection of music and the sarcastic comments on the radio stations rely heavily on intertextual/intermedial references to construct a convincing setting of the early 1990s.

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tively. Former rap celebrity and advertising figure Madd Dogg (“I got clothes, I got labels comin’ out . . . I’m doin’ drinks, I got shoes, tires, rims”), whose career lapses until the riots break out at the end of the game, is voiced by rap icon Ice T. Other rappers in the cast include The Game, MC Eight, and Kid Frost. GTA: San Andreas is, however, also self-reflexive. In the course of the game it is possible to play mini-games within the game, such as basketball or pool, but also to play on arcade machines, which can be found in bars or 24–7 stores. One of these games is Duality, an Atari clone reminiscent of the arcade classic Asteroids of 1979. San Andreas refers to the history of computer games, but also to its own media history. It introduces characters from the fourth part of GTA: Vice City. In Vice City, which was set in the 1980s, Jack Howitzer is an actor who stars in Vietnam/Rambo war movie parodies like Exploder. Now he is back with his new movie Special Needs Cop, an intertextual reference to the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Kindergarten Cop. In the trailer for the movie, which is aired on WCTR, Jack (alias Tim, the cop character) speaks with a strong Austrian accent: Narrator: He was a man at war with himself, fighting a war that someone else lost. Commander: It’s over, Tim, the war is over! Jack: It’s never over! [gunshots] Narrator: You’ve seen him wipe out millions of Cambodians in Exploder. Now, Jack Howitzer is Tim, in his most challenging role yet. Commander: We’re here, Tim! Jack: A pre-school for slow children? Commander: You’re the new teacher, Tim! Narrator: Special Needs Cop! It’s the story of a psychotic ex-Marine, showing tough love to special-ed kids. Jack: One of you ’tards has been running Peruvian flake through the special-ed school, and I’m gonna find it. No juice and cookies! Boy: Your movies suck, Tim! Narrator: But soon, he becomes one of them. Boy: What is this? Jack: That’s “Teacher’s Gun”! Wanna see it? Boy: Cool! [gunshot] Jack: Aw, you’ve gone and shot yourself! Way to go! Boy: Uhh! Narrator: He was finally beginning to live a normal life. Then, all hell breaks loose.

Boy: Tim, you’re so stupid! You count with your fingers! Jack: You wanna party with me? [gunshot] Bring it on! Commander: Tim! What are you doing!? Jack: I fought for my country! Welcome to the land of freedom, bitches! Narrator: Special Needs Cop! He had a lot to learn. This film cannot be rated.

This is just one example of how GTA: San Andreas parodies media phenomena and thereby allows for multiple ways of reading. The cast of San Andreas are exaggerated icons of the history of popular culture. The game world seems to be a “gangsta theme park” (Rauscher) — or a distorted and absurd United States at large. But is it that distorted and that absurd? Would it be possible for Jean Baudrillard to argue that not Disneyland, but San Andreas “is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America?” (172).11 Joris Dormans uses a different perspective when he insists that GTA: San Andreas “is close to a play of Brechtian estrangement . . . definitely making intelligent use of the game medium to make a profound statement about the state of our society.” GTA’s treatment of the history of popular culture and the media makes it different from many contemporary computer games. It introduces irony and parody, and a complex web of intermedial references that call for expertise in popular culture on the part of the recipient. In order to understand GTA as a parody, the gamer must understand the references first. There is always another quote to guess just as there is another quest to begin. It is possible to play GTA just as another action game. However, it also allows for an intellectual way of playing and reading. By doing so, this game addresses new target groups, new customers, and intensifies the market for this popular genre. The GTA series — as Aphra Kerr argues — plays an important role in “target[ing] and develop[ing] content for more mature adult audiences” (32). The intermedial references discussed above definitely own their share in this development. GTA points to the increasing entanglement of diverse parts of the entertainment industry on a different level, too. Needless to say, the soundtrack to the game is available. It consists of the songs from the radio stations in an eight-CD box. Economic aspects of media convergence can also be exemplified by this strategy to sell software (movies, songs, computer games, and computer programs) on different platforms and in different genres. Regarding the economic aspect, it is not surprising that GTA: San Andreas, as one of the first “ ‘hood games,” makes use of “the realworld hiphop” (Klein, Fried-

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Yaaaaargh! [many gunshots from a submachine gun]

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rich). Hiphop is the most popular and commercially successful youth culture at the moment. GTA: San Andreas utilizes this culture as a reservoir of signs and symbols. Hiphop provides a whole iconography and a complete package to the game designers: clothing, music, slang, and a value system. Not only does GTA incorporate hiphop stylistically, from a narratological or ideological point of view, too, the computer game and the youth culture bear remarkable similarities. Different versions of hiphop often present a rags-toriches story in their lyrics and performances. In their appreciation of material success these accounts can be compared to an alternative or twisted American Dream story. Heroes are not the middle-class salesman or the railroad tycoon, but the rapper as a voice of the ghetto or the gangster as an alternative salesman. These characteristics and stories lend themselves to being utilized in a game’s story. Computer games often have the form of a quest, and GTA presents this quest as a rags-to-riches story of an Original Gangsta. However, GTA cannot be serious for an extended period of time. In the same moment that the game is introducing the rags-to-riches story, it is already satirizing it in one of the radio shows or through the hilarious fictional commercials.12 If not GTA: San Andreas, what else is a perfect and interesting object for studies in intermediality at the beginning of the twenty-first century? At least, this is true if we agree on an inclusive definition of intermediality, which takes economic as well as cultural contexts into account.

Notes 1. Voigts-Virchow uses slightly different terms (media combination, media transfer, and media contact), but shares the basic assumptions behind these concepts (85–86). 2. Apart from this collection of essays a number of general introductions have been published during the last ten years. See for instance the collection of essays titled Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis eines interdisziplinären Forschungsgebietes, edited by Jörg Helbig, or Werner Wolf’s entry in the The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (“Intermediality”). Mathias Mertens’s book Forschungsüberblick “Intermedialität”: Kommentierungen und Bibliographie (2000) is another overview offering the state of research. Attempts at a general typology of the concept can be found in Werner Wolf’s The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (1999) or in the monograph Intermedialität by Irina O. Rajewsky (2002). 3. Search performed on 19 February 2007. 4. Ken Friedman describes the relationship between Coleridge’s usage and the work of Higgins: “Higgins coined the term ‘intermedia’ in the mid-sixties to describe the tendency of the most interesting and best in the new art to cross the boundaries of recognized media or even to fuse the boundaries of art with media that had not previously been considered

art forms. With characteristic modesty, he often noted that Samuel Taylor Coleridge had first used the term. Higgins was too modest. Coleridge used the term ‘intermedium’ once (and apparently once only) in referring to a specific issue in the work of Edmund Spenser. Those who have read Coleridge’s Lecture Three: ‘On Spenser’ see a distant kinship to Higgins’s construction Coleridge referred to a specific point lodged between two kinds of meaning in the use of an art medium. Coleridge’s ‘intermedium’ was a singular term, used almost as an adjectival noun. Higgins’s ‘intermedia’ referred to a tendency in the arts that became both a range of art forms and a way of approaching the arts.” 5. See the articles by Frasca, Dormans, Rauscher, and Kerr for further reference on this issue. 6. See for instance Tim Surette’s article “GTA Blamed in Court Case . . . Again” in Gamespot or “San Andreas Suits Advance” by Tor Thorsen in the same online journal. 7. Critics of computer games, like the notorious Florida-based lawyer Jack Thompson, claim that playing games with violent content directly induces real-life violence. This argumentation has been fuelled especially by the school massacres of Littleton and — in German-speaking countries — Erfurt. Scholars of cultural studies must reject such monocausal, unspecific, and superficial explanations. Andreas Rauscher argues in “Tales From the Hood” that these explanations appear to be a “Greatest Hits” of resentments that in the past were aimed at older media such as movies, TV, and comics. 8. For a detailed analysis of the differences between the marketing of console and PC games as well as the economic history of the GTA series see Aphra Kerr’s excellent essay. 9. For an extensive discussion of the elements of sound, its function and influencing factors, as well as the relationship between film sound and computer game sound, see my monograph Sound Subjects: Zur Rolle des Tons in Film und Computerspiel. 10. The term “interactivity” in regard to computer games is highly disputed. Already in 1997 Espen Aarseth proposes in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature to supersede it using the term “ergodic” instead to describe the special qualities of computer games that “raise the stakes of interpretation to those of intervention” (4). Despite these interventions I join Geoff King und Tanya Krzywinska, who still adhere to the term “interactivity” for lack of a better word. However, they advise against an “overly simplistic distinction between ‘interactivity’ or ‘activity,’ on the one hand (games), and passivity on the other (cinema)” (22). 11. In his classic essay “Simulations and Simulacra,” Baudrillard continues: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation” (172). 12. Individualism, commercialism, and the mythical link between material success and personal happiness are the prime targets of satirical commercials like the one for “Dreammakers,” an acting school, where Eastern-European acting coaches show you the path to success or the “Executive Intruder Extermination Service” for the rich, whose wealth gives them freedom — “freedom to be scared of things that normal people don’t have to worry about.

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of the term, but note that Coleridge’s use was different and distinct in meaning and form.

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Works Cited Primary Sources 224

Asteroids. Arcade. Atari, 1979. Grand Theft Auto 3. PC. Rockstar North/Rockstar Games, 2001.

G u nte r S ü s s

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. PC. Rockstar North/Rockstar Games, 2005. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. PC. Rockstar North/Rockstar Games, 2003. Kindergarten Cop. Dir. Ivan Reitman. Perf. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Penelope Ann Miller, Pamela Reed. Imagine Entertainment, Universal Pictures/Universal Pictures, 1990. Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. PC. Remedy/Rockstar Entertainment, 2003. Pulp Fiction. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis. A Band Apart, Jersey Films, Miramax Films/Miramax Films. USA, 1994. Rambo: First Blood. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. Perf. Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy. Anabasis N.V., Carolco Pictures/Orion Pictures Corporation, 1982. Reservoir Dogs. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, Chris Penn. Live Entertainment, Dog Eat Dog Productions Inc./Miramax Films, 1992.

Secondary Sources Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Anzieu, Didier. “L’envelope sonore du soi.” Nouvellerevue de psychanalyse 13 (Spring 1976): 161–79. Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulations and Simulacra.” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. 166–84. Bridgett, Rob. “Diegetic Devices.” Develop Magazine (January 2005): 41–42. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. London: Dent; Rutland: Tuttle, 1991. Dormans, Joris. “The World Is Yours: Intertextual Irony and Second Level Reading Strategies in Grand Theft Auto.” Game Research Online. 24 October 2006. http:// game-research.com/?page_id=108. Last accessed 02 Sept 2008. Du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall et al., Doing Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 1997. Frasca, Gonzalo. “Sim Sin City: Some Thoughts about Grand Theft Auto 3.” Game Studies 3.2 (December 2003). http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/frasca/. Last accessed 02 Sept 2008. Friedman, Ken. “Dick Higgins, 1938–1998.” UMBRELLA: Mail Art 21.3/4 (December 1998): 106–69. http://www.ubu.com/historical/higgins/higgins.html. Last accessed 02 Sept 2008. Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Helbig, Jörg, ed. Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis eines interdisziplinären Forschungsgebietes. Berlin: Schmidt, 1998. Jenkins, Henry. “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 (2004): 33–43. Kerr, Aphra. “Spilling Hot Coffee? Grand Theft Auto as Contested Cultural Product.” In The

Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto: Critical Essays, ed. Nate Garrelts. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006. 17–34. King, Geoff, and Tanya Krzywinska. “Introduction: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces.” In Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces, eds. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska. London: Wallflower Press, 2002. 1–32. Suhrkamp, 2003. Mertens, Mathias. Forschungsüberblick “Intermedialität”: Kommentierungen und Bibliographie. Hannover: Revonnah, 2000. Mundy, John. Popular Music on Screen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen: A. Francke, 2002.  ——   —    . “Intermedialität ‘light’?: Intermediale Bezüge und die ‘bloß e Thematisierung’ des Altermedialen.” In Intermedium Literatur, eds. Roger Lüdeke and Erika Greber. Göttingen, Wallstein Verlag, 2004. 27–77. Rauscher, Andreas. “Tales from the Hood — Eine Rundfahrt durch die Genrewelten von GTA: San Andreas.” Screenshot-Online. http://www.screenshot-online.com/index. php?id=164. Last accessed 02 Sept 2008. Rosolato, Guy. “La Voix: Entre corps et langage.” Revue française de psychanalyse 38.1 (1974): 74–94. Surette, Tim. “GTA Blamed in Court Case . . . Again.” Gamespot. 25 September 2006. http:// www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/grandtheftautovicecity/news.html?sid=6158619. Last accessed 02 Sept 2008. Süß, Gunter. Sound Subjects: Zur Rolle des Tons in Film und Computerspiel. Trier: WVT, 2006. Thorsen, Tor. “San Andreas Suits Advance.” Gamespot, 26 October 2006. http://www.

gamespot.com/ps2/action/gta4/news.html?sid=6160583. Last accessed 02 Sept 2008.

 ——   —    . “San Andreas rated AO, Take-Two suspends production.” Gamespot, 20 July 2005. http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/gta4/news.html?sid=6129500. Last accessed 02 Sept 2008. Voigts-Virchow, Eckart. Introduction to Media Studies. Stuttgart: Klett, 2005. Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.  ——   —    . “Intermediality.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 252–56.

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Klein, Gabriele, and Malte Friedrich. Is This Real? Die Kultur des HipHop. Frankfurt:

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television as network — network as television B en S a s s en

Experiments in Content and Community

Th i s ch a p t e r c o n c e r n s t h e s y mb i ot i c r e l at i o n sh i p between television’s content, means of distribution, producers, and audience as an example of intermedial form. We will begin by exploring the basic methods for dialogue and engagement that exist in traditional television networks and highlighting the low-level interdependencies that form their fabric and function. Focus then shifts to analyzing the inherent limitations to full participatory engagement that exist in most television infrastructures, and the barriers this forms to further network symbiosis. With reference to this problematic, a series of case studies will next be examined in which television’s intermedial tendencies have been stimulated, ultimately creating a total convergence of all network elements and processes. Finally, these examples will be used to highlight the necessity of highly symbiotic television networks for creating meaningful user experiences in the contemporary post-broadcasting era.

Wireless Transmission In his book Relays (1999 [1993]), Bernhard Siegert suggests that the posted letter, both in its physicality, style of content (its common themes), and symbolic

Networks Dialogues Extending beyond comparisons of symbolic reception, it is clear that both postal and television networks also share certain key topological similarities. In particular, both include a range of normally discrete network identities or node types, such as message sender and receiver, each of which form a cogent part of the network. The receiver, or audience, for any one dispatch in the television network (a single TV program occurring on a single channel), however, is vastly greater than that for a single letter in a postal network. This applies similarly to the number of senders who are involved in producing the content of any single television dispatch. The television network therefore includes a type and scale of clustering not usually found within postal networks, in which a large community

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production/reception, was significantly shaped by the relay network through which it had to pass to travel from sender to receiver. The style of address of the sender to the recipient was often based on an understanding of the speed of transfer of the postal system, the knowledge that the content of the letter could easily be read by all those handling it in the process of delivery (at least until the invention of the sealed envelope offered some privacy), and that the process of epistolary writing, in creating a dialogue for an entirely removed audience, was akin to communication with a disconnected and almost spectral other. He then goes further to suggest that the styles and semiotics of writing that developed through the creation of postal systems (and the disembodied communication that is the letter), eventually went on to significantly influence writing styles within Western literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Siegert also proposes that the development of the European postal systems toward the industrial-scale logistics industries we recognize today heralded the start of what we would now describe as the modern information economy, and that the postal system itself represents a precursory template for a future of internetworked communication. Although Siegert’s analysis is of a communications infrastructure invented long before the creation of electronic signaling systems, much can be extracted and transposed from his discussion of the postal network and applied to contemporary media communications. For example, televisual form encompasses without a doubt an understanding of the time taken for messages to be delivered through the network. This is evidenced by live television phone-ins or live sports broadcasts, in which the primary value of the content is its minimal delivery time. Similarly, the disembodiment of the audience for messages delivered in the television network could be said to play a significant role in shaping the configuration of those messages and the “voice” with which they are spoken.

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of both individual producers and recipients is united through their engagement with a single message. This reduces the role or importance of any single individual within the network — each receiver node, for example, is not even deemed important enough to have its own unique address — but simultaneously places greater emphasis on the importance of the collective. In the case of the television audience, in losing the individual right to a unique network identity and a one-to-one relationship with the sender, an ability to more easily and rapidly form ad-hoc groups with other audience members is gained. With this collective identity comes the potential, at a certain tipping point in numbers, for the audience to exert a degree of will over not only the messages delivered through the network, but even the formal structure of the network itself. The multiplication of the sender in the television network results in an economic market whose primary focus is producing and sending messages. However, in both television and postal networks, the sender of a message is obsessed not only with its production but with its delivery, receipt, and finally its interpretation by the recipient. As such, the television market suffers from an industrialscale angst, with jobs, company futures, and entire economies riding solely on the response of viewers to transmitted content. So obsessed is this industry that it tracks the delivery of its messages at regular intervals in the network and attempts to both systematically monitor and predict the interpretation and appreciation of these messages by its audience. It is precisely by this mechanism that the audience are endowed with their limited but noteworthy agency over network processes — to feedback — as their acceptance or rejection en masse of any program that has been sent to them (that is, broadcast on a channel they are able to receive) will be rapidly detected and read by the broadcaster as a form of reply. Although this represents nothing more than a basic power of consumer choice, complete with all its normal trappings (that is, freedom to choose between different products is not necessarily freedom of choice), it is nonetheless notable in facilitating a certain level of network dialogue.

A Chicken and Egg Problem Given the power relationships described above, it is clear that even the most formal and conventional of television networks include a certain degree of two-way communication between consumer and producer. This results in content that is not only shaped by and contingent on the network connections through which it is delivered, but which is in fact also strongly influenced by another significant element of the network: the receiver nodes to which it is being routed. Television content is therefore arguably a function of its network. Conversely, however, the television network only exists as long as receiver

This seemingly obvious definition has only been derived through the extensive experimentation of a range of practitioners over the last forty-five years, and the general efforts of the international academic community over the last century to deepen its understanding of networked communication. To more fully understand television’s intermediality therefore, one must first search back through its history and examine both its native form and those who have sought to challenge it.

Understanding the Character of Televisual Experience In light of its engaging potential, television was singled out by Marshall McLuhan (the inspiration for much of the American experimental television movement of the 1970s) as “a cool, participant medium . . . [which] creates audience involvement in depth” (1964 [1987]). There are very few people, however, who would describe television using such terms today. On the contrary, in a network communications age that includes the mobile phone and the internet as commonplace technologies, most commercial and state-run television channels appear to mimic the apparent obsolescence of “hot” (monosensory, nonparticipant) mediums such as the printed word (1964 [1987]).1 This apparent limitation lies in the fundamental roots of television’s design and the types of audience experiences it was intended to deliver.

Hidden Architectures A generally overlooked element in many discussions of media technologies is that of standardization and market-driven ergonomics in design. Standardization exists as a method for engineers to design and maintain interoperable technolo-

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nodes are present to form a part of it, and they are drawn into populating and congregating within the network purely on the basis of what content is present. Content is therefore instrumental in forming what is finally the most consequential part of television’s topology — that for which all its network structures and technologies exist — the audience. The television network is therefore arguably a function of its content. Given these two statements, one must finally accept that in the case of television, network and content are in fact inseparably linked. The collective of the receiver, the collective of the sender, the technological formation and topology of the network and the content that is propagated through and between all of these elements, must be considered as a multifaceted set of interdependencies, identities, languages, and discourses that finally form an intermediality.

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gies and for managers to predict and manage costs. Despite the fact that we are now long past the era of Fordist production, however, the effect of technological standardization (an absolutely universal process in every field of consumer electronics) upon the media cultures that surround us is very often ignored, or at least underdiscussed. The forms and formats that shape and define our understanding of electronic audiovisual culture often do not stem from aesthetic decisions alone; at times they are completely disconnected from such trivial concerns. Instead, they are often driven by specific technological innovations and the desire to create rapid revenue from readily producible, distributable, and consumable products; they are driven by factors of engineering and market capital. Precisely such design ergonomics were certainly in effect in the creation and roll-out of the first wave of national television networks.

The Television Network at Its Inception Based essentially in most countries on the highly successful architecture of existing national radio networks (Long 1979), television broadcast networks were conceived at their inception as systems through which electronic sound and images could be efficiently transmitted from singular regional sources to large, widely dispersed audiences (Burns 1999). Although this may have sometimes involved broadcast signals being routed through regional substations or other such “relays” to reach some parts of the network, this did little to dilute the fundamental vision and tenet of the radio-based broadcast system: that of signals radiating from a central antenna out toward a broad audience of technologically standardized receivers, as exaggeratedly visualized in the classic RKO Radio Pictures ident of the 1930s. In order to create a viable environment in which it could flourish, many companies and governments began experimenting with different systems for television delivery well before television broadcasting was really possible on any scale (Burns 1999). As a result, the general development of television was not a direct reaction to the sudden presence of a new disruptive technology, but rather a highly managed negotiation among different governments, companies, and other interested parties. By the 1930s, and after a decade or so of experiments, most of the countries leading the development of television had announced or were in the process of finalizing their first broadcasting and image-quality standards (Abramson 1987). These were generally the result of intense research and speculation on how best to balance picture quality with allotted radio frequency allocation, available channel bandwidths, manufacturing complexity, and equipment cost. Included in these definitions were specific descriptions of how many frames per second would be used to create moving images, how many lines would be used to draw each frame on screen, and the aspect ratio of frames (Fink 1943).

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Although commercial markets have existed at some scale for interpersonal audio communication via analogue radio for most of its history (Long 1979), television, in its native analogue form, has never significantly enjoyed any such heights of popular consumer application.2 This almost certainly results in part from the engineering hurdles involved in trying to engineer reliable home consumer appliances for two-way television, which at the emergence of the TV market in the 1930s would probably have been enough alone to convince most organizations that one-way broadcast television was the way forward. It is also important to note, however, that specific legislative barriers to the proliferation of “home TV broadcasting” have also existed in many countries since the beginning of television. The broadcasting standardization process described in the previous section not only defined how television broadcasting technologies should operate, but in most cases also placed tacit limitations on who could operate them. As with most legislative standardization, the television standards that were introduced internationally from the 1930s onwards generally hinged on all legal broadcasters obtaining a government license to operate and agreeing to accompanying codes of conduct. In most cases, a limited number of television channels were created and assigned for legitimate use to an equally limited number of broadcasters,3 with priority given to governmental broadcasting organizations or existing radio broadcast companies. Through such tight management of radio spectrum resources, it was possible for governments to guarantee these few legitimate operators generally favorable television signal broadcasting conditions at all times and across all national territories. In the process, however, these legislative conditions effectively squeezed out any possibility of more individual broadcasting experiences. Even though they have doubtless gone through many revisions, essentially similar laws exist still in every country today, stipulating not only how television transmissions should be technically conducted (FCC 2005), but also how TV images should be formatted (EBU 2000) and what messages those images are allowed to deliver (Ofcom 2010). Although it seems in some way absurd to discuss the viability of a technology that has never really existed, it is important to highlight that the absence of two-way television communications, and the existence of a significantly more hierarchical communications medium in its place, is at least in part the result of legislative restrictions and deliberate limitations in design. It is precisely such fundamental decisions in the function and standardization of television networks that have come to influence our entire understanding and experience of televisual content. These significantly formulate the range of possible inter-connections

and encounters that can exist between television network, content, producer and audience, and therefore the nature of the medium’s intermediality.4 232

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In order to fully understand the ramifications of the media network architectures that surround us, it is useful to compare them with similar structural topologies from other fields of networking design. In the field of computer science, which has a ripe history of network engineering, the centralized television network architecture described in the previous section is known as a hierarchical tree network topology, which takes a brachiating form, like the form of the tree for which it is named. It is often used when designing broadcast-based communication networks, but can also be utilized in the design of infrastructural utility services, such as the delivery of water or electricity. One of the topology’s key qualities is that all network connections act primarily as functions of, or under direct influence from the network source: referred to as the “root” of the “tree” in computer science. In addition, hierarchical tree topologies tend to avoid network “loops” — multiple paths of communication between network nodes — which would normally be considered as “redundancies” in such networks. Television broadcast systems make a few further special modifications to the hierarchical tree topology, parallels for which can also be found in computer science terminology: 1. The network is set up to solely facilitate simplex transmission, that is, only oneway communication is possible on all channels (Weik 2000). 2. The receiver nodes use dumb terminal devices as their interface to the network. In computer science the word terminal refers to “a special unit that can perform both input and output” (Esl 2004), normally attached to a communications link. A dumb terminal then “refers to a terminal that has no processing or programming capabilities. It is designed to communicate exclusively with a host (mainframe) . . . there are only enough electronics in a dumb terminal to interpret incoming instructions from the host . . . there is no actual computer in a terminal like this, and it cannot be programmed to run programs on its own, which is why it’s called ‘dumb’ ” (ibid).

The television set is a hardware device that acts as an interface to the television network. It is designed to have no individual function or creative application without a connection to an extraneous content source. A network model in which information is disseminated only in one direction, from centralized transmission source to many transmission-incapable receivers, is hardly one that could be described as creating “audience involvement in depth”

Redefining Roles and Protocols A system is defined by the character of its information flow. Totalitarian societies, for example, are maintained from a centralized source that tolerates little feedback. Democracies, on the other hand, respect two-way information channels that have many sources.   Because we are in an information environment, no social change can take place without new designs in information architecture.  — Michael Shamberg, Guerrilla Television

With the rapid rise to popularity of McLuhan’s media theories in America in the mid 1960s, the floodgates for a whole new movement of artistic and activist media experimentation were opened. Although both in Europe and America, artists had already begun to question television’s role in society and everyday life from the early 1960s onwards,6 McLuhan’s neat delineation and character assassination of America’s conservative media culture provided a respectable and eminently hip academic foundation on which whole new concepts in critical media practice could be built. New maxims began to circulate in artistic and

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(1964 [1987]), despite McLuhan’s statements to the contrary. The relative degree of participation in a network structured in this way is low and often takes place primarily within the psyche of each individual or household: the decision to watch or not watch, to change channel or to imaginatively fill in the space around the sound and image. This is a private participation not to be shared with or observed by others. As independent video pioneer Michael Shamberg points out in (Shamberg 1971), “on one hand we’re given [television] images to respond to; on the other there are no sanctioned channels of response.” This statement appears at first a little oblique, taking no account of the market force of a significant viewership that I have described above or the official channels through which viewers could make complaints about TV content. Looking from an American perspective in 1971, however, one year before the Federal Communications Commission introduced laws creating a wealth of regional community TV channels, it was fair to say that in relative terms, television was hardly a space for open two-way dialogue. But relevant to what exactly? Shamberg’s critique of television was inspired in part by the rapidly growing international movement in independent video making and sharing of the time, a movement in which he was deeply involved and of which the journal he co-produced, Radical Software,5 was a leading voice. This new field of alternative media was to lay the foundations for substantial challenges to the established television network order, significantly questioning along the way the relationship between sites of image creation and reception.

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countercultural circles. McLuhan’s own very catchy “the medium is the message” (1964 [1987]) was rapidly joined by video artist Nam June Paik’s battle cry: “Television has attacked us for years, now we strike back” (Herzogenrath 1983). In keeping with these sentiments, a vast range of new radical television projects were embarked upon all over the globe, spurred on by the introduction of the first consumer-grade video cameras in the mid 1960s. A host of video-oriented workshops, co-operatives, guerrilla filmmakers, and artist groups appeared, some directly associated with existing TV stations, some working independently, and others swinging in between the two camps. By 1970 there existed a very small but international community of video experimenters, sharing their creations both nationally and globally via the exchange of videotapes. This constituted perhaps the first-ever example of an entirely autonomous video network, in which material was produced, distributed, and consumed without the necessity or intervention of centralized control.7

Case Study 1: Videofreex One organization closely associated with this new radical video movement was the Videofreex collective. After its inception in 1969, the group initially worked from a loft in New York’s SoHo district, where they produced short video documentaries using their own technical facilities and held semi-regular screening events to showcase their works for local audiences. In 1971, however, the group moved to a small town in New York state called Lanesville, and from there embarked upon a range of community video experiments. The group’s primary achievement in Lanesville was the construction and operation of their own local pirate television station, “Lanesville TV” (Teasdale 1999). This highly regionalized, narrowcast (as opposed to broadcast) pirate TV station ran for the next five years, featuring primarily content produced by the video collective with the sole intended audience being their town neighbors. The group’s main goal in establishing this channel was to engage the local community in producing “programming that reflected local concerns” (Teasdale 1999). As such, local residents were regularly included in the program-making process and were generally invited to participate in live broadcasts either in person at the Lanesville TV studio or via telephone. In effect the programs that were made for and broadcast on Lanesville TV recycled their audience as subjects and actors for the creation of content, or vice versa. This allowed for the formation of network connections, roles, and protocols not normally experienced in television, and created a tight loop between the production of content and network. This can be expressed as follows: • The transmission region of Lanesville TV was very limited, resulting in a geographically limited audience/viewing community.

• This in turn made it possible for content broadcast on Lanesville TV to address its audience very directly. • In effect, this turned the audience into the subject of the content, and in the process gave them some role and level of input in the content’s production. geographical community. • This negated any explicit need to extend the region of network reception beyond the geography of that community. • The transmission region of Lanesville TV was therefore very limited.

As is clear from the description above, all the elements of the Lanesville TV network were very highly contingent on each other. This clearly makes it impossible to seriously examine the video works of the Videofreex group over this period without taking into account the site of reception and methods of distribution the group had intended for them. In this respect, the Videofreex’s Lanesville TV broadcasts succeeded in both highlighting and challenging the intermedial nature of all television networks, through simply making the exchange between producer, content, and audience more explicit. The Videofreex’s precursory experiments in community narrowcasting formed an indirect but important evolutionary step in the liberalization of America’s broadcast television culture. As a result of his experience with Lanesville TV, one of the group’s founders, Parry Teasdale, was eventually invited to serve as a consultant in 1979 for an FCC commission charged with investigating the feasibility of opening America’s radio spectrum to small, highly localized independent broadcasters (Teasdale 1999). Despite their incredibly limited target audience, news of the success of the Videofreex broadcasts had reached representatives at the FCC, who were now considering whether to allow others to follow in the group’s footsteps. However, long before the FCC had even begun considering such a radical shift in their radio frequency management policies, they had already been instrumental in making another, even more influential step in the restructuring of America’s broadcasting landscape. In 1972 the FCC introduced legislation describing a bold new type of corporate responsibility, applicable specifically to cable television broadcasters, requiring many TV companies to offer special “public access” channels to the regional communities within which they operated (Olson 2000). This resulted in the speedy growth of a new wave of public service broadcasting organizations, each bound by a remit to offer a previously unseen level of open access and audience-centered content to the American people. Although the public broadcasting services established by this new legislation were not entirely unique — many other countries had been operating public service television services for some decades by the

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• The television network therefore became both produced for and by a specific

time of the FCC’s move — they were a leading example in a broader international movement interested in opening television network infrastructures for greater experimentation.8 236

Case Study 2: TV Party

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Just as the Lanesville TV experiment was ending in one part of New York, in another part the foundations of a new experiment were just beginning, this time in the form of the public access television show TV Party. Produced by a group of young hipsters using cheaply rented (and for the time quite outmoded) studio equipment, TV Party was a live broadcast, culture-magazine show, featuring regular studio-based performances, topical discussions, and interviews with a host of local and international scenesters. All of this was mixed with a sense of hedonistic abandon and “anything goes” experimentation that only the imaginations of a group of stoned twenty-something drop-outs, artists, and musicians could dream up, which was precisely what the show’s producers, guests, and audience were. The show started after journalist Glenn O’Brien appeared on a friend’s public access television program, and was shocked to discover the following day that enough viewers had been watching the show for him to be recognized by strangers on the street. As O’Brien later stated, “I couldn’t believe it because I knew about public access and I even knew somebody that had a show but I didn’t realize that anybody was watching” (Robinson 2006). O’Brien’s sudden realization of the potential opportunities offered by public access TV inspired him immediately: In exchange for their monopolies, the city’s two cable companies had to provide the public with access to programming. In other words, they had to let amateurs have television shows. Amazingly, with no money, you could have a show with a potentially huge audience of Manhattan cable subscribers. (O’Brien, n.d.)

Having decided to start his own show, O’Brien contacted friend and musician Chris Stein, who O’Brien describes as having also seen “the possibilities that existed outside the straightjacket of the [commercial television] networks” (O’Brien, n.d.). Together they then formed a production team from various friends and cultural contacts and in 1978 began regular broadcasting. The show quickly managed to establish a local following. A community, already partially connected through the New York art and music scenes, was galvanized by the show’s highly unpredictable aesthetic style and its DIY cool as zeitgeist of the New York post-punk underground. This “tribe” included the show’s creators, contributors, and audience, with at least some of the tribe’s members occupying

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each of these roles in any given week. The interchangeability and interactivity of the show’s community was further augmented by the inclusion of home viewers and other local irregular contributors directly in live broadcasts. TV Party’s producers operated their own self-interested policies on who was allowed on the show as a guest or member of the studio audience. Inclusion of the public in broadcasts operated under the maxim “if you can find it, you can come” (Janet, n.d.), but often extended to classifying which members of the tribe were worthy of the privilege of being allowed into the studio, or exploiting live on air those who had too zealously pursued inclusion.9 Irrelevant of their other studio policies, TV Party also regularly included live and unscreened phone-ins as part of their broadcasts, in which home audience members were given the opportunity to call up and contribute to the show (O’Brien, n.d.). Although this form of participation often resulted in outbursts of threats and profanity from dissatisfied viewers, and was highly subject to the whims of the presenters, it nevertheless represented an unusual, perhaps even unique, opportunity for home viewers to engage live with a television broadcast directly and without implicit censorship. Although already a relatively inclusive media experiment, TV Party’s blurring of network, content, producer, and viewer was taken a significant step further during one key broadcast titled TV Party at Home.10 For this show, the TV Party producers went to the New York apartment of presenter Glenn O’Brien with a video camera (Janet, n.d.). This was set up to capture a shot of one of the apartment’s rooms, a cramped-looking living space, with O’Brien in a bright green jacket and red trousers in center frame. O’Brien begins with a short introduction, stating that this broadcast is intended “to show you [the viewers] what you look like at home when you’re watching TV Party” (TV Party 2006). A television set is then activated out of shot, before the camera pans round to show it with some unidentified video running on screen. It is important to note that the producer’s intended method for showing TV Party viewers what they looked like was simply to recreate a simulation of their own viewing habits and record it. This is significant, as it reflects the implicit connection and assumed similarity between the show’s producers and audience. As the producers of TV Party considered themselves to be of the same, or at least similar, cultural community as their viewers, the simulation of one of their typical television viewing scenarios acquires by default the validity of also being a simulation of their audience’s typical viewing habits. This even extends to the inclusion of specific social and cultural identifiers in shot: a bohemian apartment setting, a poster that hangs on the background wall, two silent young men who sit in the back of the scene throughout, looking almost beatnik in their appearance. This video was screened in place of one of TV Party’s regular live broadcast

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slots, with the explanation from O’Brien (in the video) that the producers of the show were not present for their normal live broadcast because they were “actually at The Mudd Club,” a popular hang-out of the TV Party crowd, to which he added that anyone bored with watching TV was welcome to come join them (TV Party 2006). Although this was probably intended as an inventive and comical experiment in television broadcasting, this event effectively created a fascinating and unusual reflection, or more accurately inflection, in the network. By confronting the audience with a simulation of themselves, the TV Party at Home broadcast established an exchange between the televisual subject and observer, as the home viewer watches themselves watching TV at home. In the process, a Schrödinger’s-catstyle paradox is highlighted. If the content of what is shown on TV is a simulation of its audience, then are the audience also its authors simply by having been present to watch it? Video artist Dan Graham describes this observer-observed paradox as being “like a topological Moebius strip” (Graham 1979), alluding to the way in which the two separate surfaces of the audience’s outer medial self (an image reproduced via electronic means) and inner self-perception (produced via the cognitive understanding of that image) become linked to form a loop in which the beginning or end of either element cannot be fully defined. This in turn echoes McLuhan’s notion of media as an extension of the human nervous system (1964). The feedback loop formed in the TV Party broadcast is yet more complex and intense due to the coincidence of its creators, who implicitly identify themselves as sharing cultural identity, and therefore agency, with their audience. The result is something akin to finding the critical angle of incidence in a prism, at which light is totally internally reflected. In essence, TV Party’s experiment bends all lines of communication within the television network into an internally reflecting loop, so bringing the network into dialogue with itself and temporarily dematerializing all other content. This breaks down the norms of the television network’s communication flow and exposes something of the fabric beneath: The hyperreality of the TV Party at Home broadcast served as a reminder both of the implicitly active role of audience as impetus for television’s very existence and their explicitly passive role in the television network as disempowered producers of all they observe.11 The relativistic aestheticism and self-reflexive character of both TV Party’s and the Videofreex’s televisual experiments are perhaps best summed up by a quote from Elizabeth Ermarth. As she writes, the postmodern subject is “dispersed in systems . . . not neutral but warped . . . by the play of systems, by the negotiations between moments of identity.” She concludes: “the [postmodern] subject is dispersed in the world it observes” (1992).

Television Version 1.5

Blurring Identities A community will evolve only when a people control their own communications.  — Frantz Fanon

In his three-volume work on the rise of the new information society, author Manuel Castells observed the following concerning coming developments in network culture: The multimedia world will be populated by two essentially distinct populations: the interacting and the interacted, meaning those who are able to select their multi-directional circuits of communication, and those who are provided with a restricted number of prepackaged choices. (2010 [1996])

The experiments of the video artist/activist community and of public access channels went part of the way to emancipating viewers, empowering them with greater control over the media environments that surrounded them. Many of the experiments fell short of achieving their own utopian visions, however, by employing networks that were owned by third parties and which were therefore

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In both of these case studies, the television network was experimentally reengineered to include significantly higher levels of feedback between viewers and producers. Loops that had previously been considered redundant or unnecessary were deliberately created in the network, facilitating in the process novel forms of production, communication, and exchange, and flattening some of the previously inherent hierarchies of the tree network topology. However, despite these achievements, and having essentially reached the goals they had set out for themselves, both of the case studies described were very limited in their direct and immediate impact upon the broader world of television. Simply by virtue of the constraints of media networking technologies at the time, let alone the question of what resources any individual could actually get access to, it would have been very difficult for any independent group working in the 1970s to realize projects or effect influence on a scale much larger than that which was achieved by TV Party and the Videofreex. That noted, there was still a lot of space between the utopian dreams of video activists and artists of the 1970s, that of a totally liberating symbiosis between all network actors and content, and the reality of the television broadcasting market. The next logical step in closing this gap, therefore, was to question not only the form of television’s architectures but also their ownership.

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by their very nature disengaged from any deeply symbiotic process. In many cases, the space used for experiments in breaking the monopoly of nonparticipative media networks was offered and sanctioned by precisely those organizations that created, managed, and actively sustained such “enemy” networks. The media diversification that resulted from these experiments was not going to be enough in itself to enable a true shift away from the primitive audience interaction experiences offered by commercially and institutionally controlled television outlets. What was lacking was a serious challenge to the industrial logic of image production and distribution — the aesthetic of the third-party supply chain — which would allow both consumers and producers to engage with the full scope of communicative and discursive possibility that internetworked video is capable of. This realization prompted a new line of tactical thought. What needed to occur next was the development of “post-broadcast mediums of communication” (Holmes 2005), in which the individual sovereignty of all network actors was restored in the form of total interactive entitlement. This redemptive process would finally flatten the outmoded concentration of broadcast powers in old media networks and give rise to more democratic, autonomous systems of “datacasting,”12 which would then have the possibility to more broadly and virally repopulate the media broadcasting landscape. This next evolutionary step for alternative media practice can be summed up in one final sentence from Castells: “Television needed the computer to be free from the screen” (2010 [1996]).

Fluid Network Identities The Web 2.0 movement has popularized a style of media community that had been an undercurrent of internet culture for some years previously and which itself had originated from the alternative community and media movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In most such contemporary internet communities, all members have implicit permission to take on any of a number of community identities: resource consumer, producer, editor, or syndicator. Via these means, they are additionally authorized to explicitly partake in the building and shaping of the shared community space. This fluid set of identities describes the profile of a network “user,” as opposed to the more passive network “audience” that we know from traditional television. With this shift comes both the empowerment and responsibility of being able to effect significant change upon the networks one is present within. This adds a potential for engagement and participation rarely experienced in more hierarchical network models, allowing individual users to operate with the same degree of autonomy and agency as all other network actors, and resulting in a community of peers. Despite numerous experiments worldwide in public, pirate, and narrow-cast

TV throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the proliferation on a national scale of such a peer network for television did not occur until 2002, and even then, it did so completely outside of the economy and legislation of the normal TV market.

Case Study 3: Telestreet

Citizens,   The television ocean in which we are immersed is starting to seriously stink of monoculture.   Only one type of fish dominates the great waters of the infosphere.

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In 2002, the television station Orfeo TV was set up by a group of Italian activists, media professionals, and engineers in Bologna. Described as “micro-TV” because of its reception radius of approximately 300m, the content of its daily broadcasts was dedicated primarily to local issues and broader Italian alternative politics. The community living near the station’s headquarters on Via Orfeo (from which the station took its name) functioned as Orfeo TV’s primary audience and were also encouraged to get involved in filming and production processes. In effect, Orfeo TV operated essentially as a local, open access community broadcaster, but with one key difference: Orfeo TV was a pirate station, broadcasting in the radio frequency band normally reserved for MTV, using cheap consumer-grade equipment. The goal of this incursion was simple: to reclaim the television medium from media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s “teledictator” (Berardi, Jacquemet, and Vitali 2009). In order to comprehend Orfeo TV’s motivation one must first understand a little of Italy’s media economy at the time. In mid 2002 Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, managed effectively to take control of five of the country’s six national television broadcasters. This gave him significant personal influence over 90 percent of Italy’s television market (Willan 2002). In addition, companies belonging to the Berlusconi family held interests in Italian film, internet, and newspaper publishing industries (The Economist 2001). At the same time as Italy’s media markets were being monopolized, the internet was developing into a rich and highly dynamic space for alternative media encounters. In the few years since Indymedia’s successful webcastings from within the 1999 World Trade Organization protests (Waltz 2005), the internet had begun to flourish as a popular, open space for decentralized, autonomous, and generally uncensored communication. Inspired by and in reaction to these starkly different media cultures, Orfeo TV sought to challenge Italy’s television autocracy by proliferating their own alternative content and networks. This intention was made clear in the words of their first manifesto, which they posted up on the walls of their local district:

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Despite managing to continue broadcasting daily for a number of weeks without any interruption, the Orfeo TV group were aware that these actions alone were not enough to fulfill their larger goals. Their survival and the realization of a real challenge to the Berlusconi TV empire relied not only on their individual broadcasting interventions, but on encouraging others to follow suit and try similar local experiments in other parts of the country. To this end, they issued a second manifesto, this time distributed via the internet. Worded much more explicitly than their first manifesto, this described Italy’s domination by a “televisual dictatorship” in which “the majority of the Italian population receives most of the signals that influence its social brain from the television screen” (Walz). It then went on to outline the solution: the internet and the television screen must somehow be connected so that the shift in social communication taking place online could be shared with the TV viewing masses. The immediate task therefore was to create “a territorial grid (neighbourhood by neighbourhood) of short-range micro-broadcasters” (Walz) through which this emancipation could take place. The manifesto ended by naming this new grid “Telestreet.” To propagate this message further and encourage others to take up the tools of broadcast, a Telestreet website and mailing list were set up. This was used as a hub to publicize the work of different groups, connect Telestreet activists around Italy, and exchange tips on production and broadcasting techniques. It didn’t take long for other people to follow Orfeo TV’s example. At the end of 2002 the first national meeting of Telestreet stations was held, with 500 people from around Italy coming together to discuss tactics and strategies for the further proliferation of “street television” (Walz). Two years later, after a second national meeting, it was estimated that the network had grown to include between one hundred (Garcia 2004) and two hundred (Telestreet 2004) nodes, individual microbroadcasting TV stations, across Italy. Most of these nodes consisted of groups working in their local communities to build inclusive network infrastructures, with each group member, and the general public, able to engage in whatever role they desired: viewer, producer, or infrastructural engineer. This third role extended both to the upkeep of the broadcaster’s social infrastructure, their ties and engagement with local and internet communities, but also the technological infrastructure, the assembly and modification of household TV appliances for use as transmitters, the programming of websites and the creation of video storage servers. Although one could be mistaken for thinking that the Telestreet movement was primarily an experiment in user-generated content or in technological ingenuity,

At its heart, Orfeo TV was a conceptual work more than an effective television station. It was a simulation of postmediatic democracy . . . an experiment in what one could call postmediamatic society. (Berardi, Jacquemet, and Vitali 2009)

A Final Step in Symbiosis In the above example, the site and means of production, the shared space and means of reception, and the produced/received product are collapsed together, converging to form a single symbiotic but internally autonomous entity. This gives rise to a new style of network topology, in which there is no root node or universal network control, but where instead each node or cluster of nodes negotiates and manages their own section of the network independently and interconnects ad hoc with other nodes in a flat hierarchy of peers. In computer science, this would be described simply as an ad-hoc network topology. Ad-hoc networks have the following characteristics (Hülsmann and Windt 2007): • Decentralization: each node has the same potential rights, functionality and responsibilities • Self-organization: nodes manage their own network role and connections • Self-deployment: the nodes are the network, they do not need to rely upon any additional fixed infrastructure • Dynamic topologies: network infrastructures are liable to change rapidly and the ability to manage such changes is inbuilt into the network • Local knowledge: due to decentralization and dynamic topologies, there is little point in any individual node trying to maintain an overall map of the network. As such, nodes focus instead on maintaining a rich knowledge of their local part of the network • Interaction/cooperation: it is in the interest of all nodes to work together to establish routes for communication • Dynamic membership: nodes may choose when to join or leave a network, as there is no centralized control over network membership

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it was in fact fundamentally focused on re-imagining and re-engineering network forms. Using highly localized video-making and broadcasting facilities combined with media sharing on a national and international scale via the internet, it created an alternative, open space for content production and distribution. In the process, it totally redefined the models of ownership, identity, and centralized management encompassed within traditional television networks, creating in effect a fully functional example of communications in a post-broadcasting age. As Orfeo TV’s initiators describe their project:

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The ad-hoc network topology used by the Telestreet movement is clearly a huge departure from the hierarchical tree topology generally utilized in broadcast television. With this shift comes not only a change in the identity of network producers and consumers, reborn now under the single heading of “users,” but also in the general dynamics of network communication and fundamentally therefore in the nature of the messages exchanged. These network “upgrades” are so significant that eventually one must conclude that Telestreet is to television what email is to the postal system, a complete redefinition of when, where, and how we communicate. We are moving into a future in which networked media cultures are becoming ever more complex and where the separation between the production of image and the production of network is diminishing. In the process, many of the key characteristics that previously defined media are being rapidly explored, exploded, and dismissed. Simultaneously, audience expectations of media experience have expanded rapidly, with an ever-growing movement of individuals now seeking interactive engagement as their primary form of medial encounter. The work of the Videofreex and TV Party collectives illustrates the fact that this shift has already been in development for some time, with both groups having made significant steps away from television’s inherited paradigms as early as the 1970s. However, as the Telestreet movement also illustrates, there are certainly much more fundamental challenges to television and all other hierarchical media networks still to come. TV has seen a particularly rapid international expansion and even more rapid hybridization into new forms since the rise of the internet. The scale of this evolution is such that the term “television,” associated with a technology invented at the start of the last century, comes into question. Can “television” be used to describe current network-distributed video media? Or is this terminology still in use purely out of familiarity? Whatever the case, in an age in which the semiotics, forms, and genres of all media have been appropriated by every other form of media, one of the few remaining attributes that can still be used to describe and discern television is its intermediality: its simultaneous identity as both network and content, as medium and message. It is perhaps only through sustaining and further developing this quality that television can retain its one and only remaining value in the current post-broadcasting climate: its ability to form communities, shared synchronous experiences, and common media space.

Notes 1. This connection to the nonparticipatory is ironically pushed even further by the obsession of the television industry with reaching High Definition picture standards (the improvement in audio standards in HD is marginal compared to the gain in picture nonparticipatory nature of “hot” medias, which overcrowd the site of reception with so much monosensory information that the consumer does not have enough space to react or engage (1964 [1987]). 2. Despite many experiments, a popular and commercially viable system for analogue video telephony has never been fully achieved, although companies have been trying to create such a technology and accompanying market since at least the late 1920s (Dunlap 1932). It has only been with the creation of digital telecommunications networks that video has started to become a significant two-way real-time communications medium. 3. In America, for example, a seven-channel television system was originally proposed (Fink 1943). 4. For more in-depth discussion of the history and effects of television technology see Williams 2003 [1974]. 5. The term “radical software” was used by Shamberg et al. to describe the new age of highly participative malleable media and reformed information architectures that the activist/artist video movement in America and Europe was creating at the start of the 1970s. It is not by chance that I have continued this analogy to the computing world in my descriptions of television networks, as it is primarily in the world of information technology, sciences, and computing culture that one discovers the most cutting-edge experiments in network architectures, protocols, and interactivity. In this sense, in the proceeding sections I will attempt to discuss some of the radical network topologies that enabled and transported successive experiments in radical software. 6. Korean-born artist Nam June Paik, for example, had begun to include TV sets in his works as early as 1963. 7. For a more complete account of video art’s early years see Elwes 2006. 8. See Jankowski 1995 for further examples. 9. In TV Party 2006, one of TV Party’s producers describes his reaction to unwelcome visitors at the show’s broadcasts: “So we made them behave like animals. Why? They wanted to be famous, they wanted to be on TV, they wanted to be hip, so they would do anything.” 10. See TV Party 2006 for a clip of this broadcast. 11. For further discussion of this see Chung 2007. 12. Datacasting here refers specifically to communications networks in which the form of media content does not need to be explicitly defined as the systems handling its exchange are able to transfer and interpret multiple media; for instance, a computer network.

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quality), as it is precisely this term, “high definition,” which McLuhan uses to describe the

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Works Cited Abramson, A. (1987) The History of Television, 1880 to 1941. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987.

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“An Italian story.” In The Economist (2001). http://www.economist.com/node/587107. Accessed 15 December 2010.

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Berardi, F., M. Jacquemet, and G. Vitali. Ethereal Shadows: Communications And Power In Contemporary Italy. New York: Autonomedia, 2009. Burns, R. W. Television: An International History of the Formative Years. London: The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1999. Castells, M. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume 1: The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010 [1996]. Chung, C. Hyperreality, the Question of Agency, and the Phenomenon of Reality Television. Nebula 4.1 (2007): 31–44. Dunlap, O. The Outlook for Television. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932. EBU (European Broadcasting Union). EBU Technical Recommendation R103–2000: Tolerances on “Illegal” Colours in Television. 2000. Elwes, C. Video Art, a Guided Tour, London: I. B. Tauris, 2006. Ermarth, E. Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Esl, I. Introduction to Computer Science. Delhi: Pearson Education India, 2004. FCC (The Federal Communications Commission). Title 47 of the Code of Federal Regulations Part 15, 2005. Fink, D., ed. Television Standards and Practice. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1943. Fiske, J. Television Culture. London: Routledge, 1987. Herzogenrath, W. Nam June Paik: Fluxus Video. Munich: Verlag Silke Schreiber, 1983. Holmes, D. Communication Theory: Media Technology And Society. London: Sage, 2005. Hülsmann, M., and K. Windt, Understanding Autonomous Cooperation & Control in Logistics: The Impact on Management, Information, Communication and Material Flow. Frankfurt: Springer, 2007. Janet, S. “TV Party Is Stranger Than the Night.” http://www.terminal-boredom.com/ tvparty.html. N.d. Accessed 14 December 2010. Jankowski, N. “Reflections on the Origins and Meanings of Media Access.” Javnost — The Public 2.4 (1995): 7–20. Long, S. The Development of the Television Network Oligopoly, New York: Arno Press, 1979. McLuhan, M. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: ARK, 1964 [1987]. O’Brien, G. “The TV Party Story.” http://www.tvparty.org. N.d. Accessed 14 December 2010. Ofcom (The Independent Regulator and Competition Authority for the UK Communications Industries). The Ofcom Broadcasting Code (Incorporating the Crosspromotion Code). 2010. Olson, B. “The History of Public Access Television.” http://www.publicaccesstv.net /history01.html. 2000. Accessed 13 December 2010. Robinson, C. “Everybody Likes TV: An Interview with TV Party Host Glenn O’Brien.”

http://www.popmatters.com/music/interviews/obrien-glenn-060825.shtml. 2006. Accessed 14 December 2010. Siegert, B. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999 [1993]. Shamberg, M. Guerrilla Television. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Wilson, 1971. Turned It On. Delmar, NY: Black Dome Press, 1999. Telestreet: The Italian Media Jacking Movement. Dir. Andrew Lowenthal and Tim Parish, available online at http://www.archive.org/details/telestreet2. 2004. Accessed 14 December 2010. TV Party. Dir. Danny Vinik. Brink Films, 2006. Waltz, M. Alternative and Activist Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Weik, M. Computer Science and Communications Dictionary, Vol. 1. Norwell, MA, and Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. Willan, P. “Berlusconi Tightens Stranglehold on Italian Networks.” http://www.guardian .co.uk/media/2002/apr/18/citynews.broadcasting1. 2002. Accessed 15 December 2010. Williams, R. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge, 2003 [1974].

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Teasdale, P. Videofreex: America’s First Pirate TV Station and the Catskills Collective That

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social media and the future of political narrative J ay Dav i d Bo lter Obama Girl and the Obama Election Coverage In the 1990s there were some who argued that the World Wide Web promised a new age of democracy or at least individual participation in the making of media. (See, for example, Holmes 50–54.) According to these authors, the era of television, film, and print publication was characterized by a fundamental inequality between producers and consumers. A relatively small group of writers, directors, and actors created the content that was broadcast to millions of viewers or readers, who could only respond to what was provided. The Web could be different, because a small organization or even an individual could create a website, which in theory if not practice was as accessible as the CNN or New York Times site. The Web promised a new era of creativity and social and political action, in which the people could talk back to those in positions of cultural authority and economic power. They could create their own publications on the Internet and offer direct alternatives to the mainstream. The Web in the 1990s provided this capacity, and thousands, perhaps millions, took up the challenge and built their own pages, some even delivering their own video or other content. Nevertheless, the skill required to build a good website prevented many from participating, and participation could never be casual or immediate: it required planning, design,

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and content production. As it developed in the later 1990s and in the 2000s, Web 2.0 made a much better case for the widespread participation and spontaneous creativity (if not democracy) than the original Web. Web 2.0 comprises social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, in which hundreds of millions of participants do contribute, often on a daily or hourly basis. It comprises YouTube, where a surprising number (millions) of visitors add their own videos and even more comment on videos produced by others. “I Got a Crush . . . on Obama” was such a post on YouTube in June of 2007, a music video in which a young woman sings of her love for Obama, who was at that time still a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. The video went viral and has been viewed over 23 million times, according to the YouTube site. The creators of this music video capitalized on this success to create a website (barelypolitical.com) and went on to make a series of videos that they characterize as political satire. But traditional satire has a clear object, and it is not at all clear where the political commitments of “I Got a Crush . . .” lie. The woman sings of her love in various scenes, some of which appear natural and contain other people, some of which take place on a stage. She seems earnest as her lyrics mix praise of Obama’s sensuality with predictions that he will be a great president. But how is this to be read? As a piece of political propaganda meant to raise interest in the candidate among those young women (and perhaps their boyfriends) who watch music videos regularly? Is it instead a satire of Obama himself, as a shallow candidate whose appeal lies in his youth and attractiveness? Or is the satire aimed at the news media, which did treat Obama the candidate simultaneously as a rock star and a serious politician? There seems to be no good way to decide based purely on viewing the video; its narrative is fundamentally and happily ambiguous. The video does not give the impression that it is trying to achieve biting satire but failing; instead, it seems to be piecing together political and social elements into an entertaining whole. It is easy to imagine Obama supporters and detractors both enjoying this video, by reading a coherent ideology into it. It seems likely, however, that most of the millions of viewers came away with no political message, nor did they regret the absence of a message. We can contrast this viral video with the network news coverage of Obama on election night. The networks have always understood their task as “telling the story” of the election, and as soon as Obama’s victory was guaranteed, they chose the spontaneous celebration in Grant Park in Chicago to capture the meaning of the election. As a New York Times reporter put it, “Barack Obama’s victory was told . . . with a pan of the camera as his supporters, crammed into Grant Park in Chicago, exploded with joy” (Stanley 2008). All of the networks from CNN to Fox offered their explanations, and most emphasized the historic character of the election of an African-American. The reporters still labored to maintain the

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apparent impartiality that characterizes American broadcasting, but the need to deliver a strong storyline won out. On television and in traditional newspapers, American elections must always be about the triumph of American democracy. The contrast between traditional media and social media was one of aesthetics and style. The narrative line in the televised coverage of Obama’s election could hardly be stronger or more obvious. The narrative line in “I Got a Crush . . . on Obama” could hardly be weaker or more ambiguous, suggesting a form of representation that lacks the characteristics of traditional politics. But it would be wrong to conclude from this instance that the old media are politically engaged and that new media necessarily are not. Blogs and viral YouTube videos can carry a strong political message. The political right in the United States has created an influential genre of violently rhetorical, ideologically centered blogs — beginning with news aggregators like the Drudge Report in 1996 and growing in numbers and influence ever since. All the important political debates of the day find expression as short videos on YouTube. On the other hand, some of the most popular forms of social media seem to operate according to a logic that does not correspond to traditional ideological commitments.

The Digital Plenitude Social media applications and forms are eclectic, ad hoc, and prone to change. Blogs, for example, began as online diaries, often written by young women who cultivated audiences of like-minded readers on subjects about their personal lives and relationship, their jobs, and their crafts and hobbies. Although these social blogs remain an important part of the phenomenon, other genres have become more popular, as indicated by polls in Technorati (technorati.com), a blog about blogs. Political blogs are now among the most popular and are by far the most successful in entering into cross-media chains with the print and television news, becoming a recognized part of the political dialogue. They are also among the most conservative of social media — both in their overt political ideology and in their form. They remain largely textual, and when they do incorporate images and videos, the visual material is repurposed from the television or print news. A trio of social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) is more innovative: each one offers a different formal constellation of text, image, and video and different patterns of production and consumption. Social media have already developed a diversity of genres, but they all seem to have in common the desire to link to each other and to penetrate everywhere in the world of digital media. Facebook links to many other applications, and it seems that every new online commercial site in turn wants to link its users to Facebook. When they do not link to one of the existing social networks, online services seek

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to build their own social network. Thus, Apple’s iTunes store now offers Ping, a service to share your musical tastes with friends (and encourage them to make the same purchases). Social networking appears as an option in situations where it would have seemed unnecessary or inappropriate a few years ago. Who would have imagined that a service enabling researchers to store bibliographies and notes needs social networking? Yet Mendeley (www.mendeley.com) now encourages researchers to create a profile and share their bibliographies with collaborators or even larger public groups. Social media, like videogames, are everywhere. Social media are another manifestation of the plenitude of digital media. On the World Wide Web every site is by definition linked to all other sites, if we are only willing to traverse enough links. Social media sites like Facebook seem to exist largely to increase the density of those links and to multiply the linking mechanisms. They encourage, almost compel, their participants to ramify and increase the density of the link structures: add friends (which creates links from your page to theirs), add photos and tag them (forging implicit or explicit links), tell your friends that you like a page, a song, a tweet (leading to further ramifications as they connect to that page), and so on. Hundreds of millions of friends on Facebook make many times that number of links. Furthermore, social media are cross-media forms. As both designers and users multiply the connections among pages and sites, they show no interest in limiting themselves to a single medium. This is obviously true of Facebook and other networking sites, and it is even true of Twitter. Fundamentally a textual site, with each tweet limited to 140 characters, Twitter allows users to tweet links to multimedia pages on the Web and to share images in real time with TwitPic. YouTube defines itself on its homepage (www.youtube.com) as the “largest worldwide video-sharing community,” but it too becomes multimedia by encouraging viewers to leave textual comments, and the site has its own official blog. Social media are not medium-specific. The point may seem obvious since the World Wide Web itself has been a multimedia platform since the invention of the Mosaic browser. But in the 1990s, Web design was still a relatively specialized activity, whose aesthetics developed from graphic design for print and later (with the advent of Flash) animation. The coming of social media has vastly expanded the number of creative participants, who no longer constitute a design community in any sense. Social media producers are in general bricoleurs, throwing together found media and creating new artifacts. Remediating endlessly and without any particular aesthetic agenda, social media are not very interested in properties of individual media or in the question of medium. The millions of social media producers simply expect that they will have access to all forms of mediated expression. In short, social media are hard to classify in terms of formal aesthetics.

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Social media can also have a wide range of relationships to traditional political expression. Although some sites are overtly political, many of the most popular social media practices seem to ignore the political dimension of social life altogether. I want to suggest that these two characteristics (political and formal ambiguity) are related. Throughout the twentieth century, our culture was engaged in an effort to define the function of art. High modernists such as Clement Greenberg understood art as the exploration of the formal properties of a medium (painting, sculpture, film), while others in the avant-garde insisted that art should have a political function, contributing to the remaking of society. The perpetual question was whether and how the political and formal functions of art could be reconciled. Social media have emerged at a moment in which the status of art has diminished. Our popular culture has inherited the remnants of both the political and formal definitions of art and is ambivalent about the definition and limits of artistic practice. In this historical context, the eclectic practices of social media challenge us to understand them as non-art and nonpolitics at the same time.

Political Art in the Twentieth Century Beginning with the Futurists and Dada, various avant-gardes sought to replace the traditional (“bourgeois”) notion of the artistic sublime with a new kind of art that would dissolve into life itself. (See Bürger and, for a different view, Foster.) Art could no longer be an elite practice or belong to a sphere separate from society. This conviction was taken up at midcentury by those associated with Fluxus, including George Maciunas and Dick Higgins (Friedman 1998). Like many others, for example, Higgins believed that art needed to be transgressive both formally and politically: that formal disruption could be political. Higgins coined the term “intermedia” to describe his vision of an art that could not be limited to a single medium. For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference. The idea has arisen, as if by spontaneous combustion throughout the entire world, that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media. (1966)

Higgins rejected the modernist emphasis on exploring and advancing the medium. Intermedia performances offered by Higgins and other Fluxus artists eluded definition as a single art form. In an age of mass media and especially electric

Catharsis and Flow Like those of Fluxus and the earlier avant-gardes, the works promoted by Bourriaud and Bishop assume a key relationship between aesthetic form and social or political expression. However much relational art may seek to reject pure formalism and any sense of elitism in art, it remains easily distinguishable from popular art or entertainment, precisely because it rejects the forms of popular

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media, Higgins contended, intermedia art speaks to our new sensibilities, and it has the potential to foster social or political change. Fluxus was only a part of the complicated story of 1960s art, in which artists rejected the purity of high modernism in favor of intermedia, multimedia installations, performance art, and conceptual art. All of this work led to what Rosalind Krauss has called the “post-medium condition” (1999). What is important here is a nexus of ideas: denying that the essence of an art is to explore its own essence; denying or at least questioning the elite status of art as the special activity of special people (artists); searching for a political or social function for art to replace the idea of art as an individual aesthetic sublime. The performances of Fluxus artist Yoko Ono, such as her famous “Cut Piece,” gave expression to these ideas. It is completely appropriate that Yoko Ono eventually teamed with John Lennon, who gave mass popular expression to the goal of the revaluation of values, a kind of social change that would trump traditional politics. The search at midcentury was for practices that could constitute anti-art and anti-politics, and intermedial forms seemed to suit these twin goals. Similar themes have emerged much more recently in the writings of Nicolas Bourriaud (2002), who argues that important art work in this period obeys new aesthetic principles, which he calls “relational aesthetics . . . Art is no longer trying to represent utopia; it is trying to construct social spaces.” Bourriaud’s claims, however, are less extravagant and categorical than those of the midcentury avant-garde. The relational art that he describes often consists not of objects, but of performances, such as the preparation of a Thai meal by Rirkrit Tiravanija. Bourriaud argues that such a performance creates a “microtopia,” bringing people together for the time in which it takes to have the meal. Bourriaud has been criticized (famously by Claire Bishop in 2004) for failing to realize that political art still needs to create confrontational spaces rather than comforting ones. The distinction between Bourriaud’s and Bishop’s notions of art is really not large, however. Both still think of art as having a salvational function, and in both versions, art remains a special practice. Whether it happens inside a gallery or outside in the street, it is the work of people with special talents whom the culture labels as artists.

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expression. One of those popular forms is conventional storytelling.1 One of the consistent features of avant-garde or experimental art and literature from its beginnings in the early 1900s until today has been to challenge traditional ideas of storytelling in literature, film, and television. Not surprisingly, however, these challenges did nothing to diminish the popularity of such storytelling either in the twentieth century or today. Hollywood films like Titanic or serious television drama, such as The West Wing or Mad Men, continue to attract large audiences. Furthermore, a truly diverse number of writers from various fields including digital media studies (Murray), psychology (Bruner), evolutionary biology (Boyd, Pinker), and philosophy (Dennett, Schechtman) have reinforced the views of the book-buying and movie-going public. Such writers insist that storytelling is either inherent in our species or vital to our development as human beings. Although they may claim that storytelling belongs to all cultures in all periods, these writers are apologists for a kind of storytelling that has dominated in Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — precisely the kind that Bertolt Brecht was trying to undermine. This kind of narrative features a strong main character, a rounded story with a conclusion, and the engagement of the audience through emotional identification, or catharsis. Following Brecht, we could call this configuration the aesthetics of catharsis (Bolter). The film theorists who opposed Hollywood’s brand of storytelling were right in the sense that it is used to validate the political status quo. Mainstream American political rhetoric appeals to stories, in which America itself is the hero and triumphs over adversaries to fulfill its destiny. Looking beyond America to the history of Western societies since the eighteenth century, one could argue, as Lyotard of course has, that liberal democracy itself is presented as an overarching political narrative. Since the beginning of the modern era, various media forms have been enlisted to give shape to the ways in which political narratives are framed for contemporary society. Today these narratives are told in film, on television, on talk radio, in the surviving newspapers as well as in digital media. Blogs, YouTube videos, and other social media in particular can also be sites for cathartic storytelling. Another popular aesthetic, however, is prominent in digital and social media: the aesthetic of flow. The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi introduced the term “flow” to describe the state of total engagement that he saw in people when playing sports or practicing crafts and hobbies. Csikszentmihalyi’s flow promises the opposite kind of engagement from the experience of catharsis. Where catharsis depends on the viewer’s strong emotional identification in a story’s character and its movement toward completion, flow involves a forgetting of identity. Where catharsis depends on the narrated experience moving toward completion, the experience of flow never wants to end. Many videogames (such

Remix Videos and Alternate Reality Games Many point to participatory digital media as a new opportunity for political critique, and remix videos offer the clearest case. The web site www.politicalremixvideo.com, for example, is in a blog format and presents example after example of videos or mock advertising posters, whose ideological positions are easily read. The site (as visited in December 2010) features a video remix of George Bush’s State of the Union addresses, isolating his cynical and repeated invocations of the threat of terrorism. A number of videos criticize oil companies for their callous exploitation of the environment (the Gulf Oil spill was still a recent memory). There is an anti-war remix featuring revelations from Wikileaks. All these messages are clear and invite identification: the story is the struggle against

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as first-person shooters) are designed to induce the flow state in their players. YouTube viewers can also experience the state of flow as they click from one video to another for minutes or even hours. Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking can be flow-inducing, as users monitor the posts of others and respond to them. As design principles or aesthetic preferences, flow and catharsis constitute the ends of a spectrum, and many contemporary media forms occupy points along the spectrum, combining proportions of both flow and catharsis. Action-adventure videogames, for example, are largely exercises in flow, but they may have a narrative backstory and some dramatic elements that lead to the player’s emotional engagement. On the other hand, although Hollywood movies are exercises in catharsis, action-adventure films feature chase scenes or killing sprees that induce the flow effect in their viewers. Social media can feature cathartic storytelling, or they can be flow-inducing, and their dual nature has implications for their social and political functions. When social media are used to promote traditional political agendas, they join themselves to the long tradition of political narrative. Social media as exercises in flow are often apolitical, but at times can function as a kind of anti-politics. Many uses of social media combine elements of catharsis and flow. The diversity of social media means that some applications will be easily identified with political traditions; others will invoke the rhetoric of politics in ways that seem increasingly unstable and ambiguous. In some intriguing cases, social media forms revive — probably without any conscious effort on the part of their designers — the goal of the historical avant-garde to let art dissolve into daily life and to forge a kind of social practice that is without allegiance to any of the dominant political narratives. The following examples illustrate the diversity of social media, ranging from the overtly political to something rather like the avant-garde’s elusive art-as-life-practice.

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the insanity of war or the greed of large corporations, and the viewer is explicitly hailed to take the side of sanity and proportion. Such remix videos are by their nature not the anonymous products of crowd-sourcing, for in many cases their authors must have spent long hours assembling the carefully timed segments. They are formal remediations of found footage and are, for example, in the same spirit as (but often far more skillful than) Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. The authors of remix videos often name themselves and take explicit responsibility for them, as does Jonathan McIntosh, who hosts a website entitled Rebellious Pixels (www.rebelliouspixels.com) featuring such remixes as “Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck in Right Wing Radio Duck.” The site itself provides the narrative: Donald’s life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair, Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck. Such videos are meant to be read politically, and they are so read, for example, by Eli Horwat in his study of remix video, “A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet,” in which he compares remix video’s strategy of using found footage to the montage techniques developed by the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s. Alternative Reality Games (ARGs) constitute a different mediation of political action. ARGs began as a form of social media devoted to the most compulsive form of storytelling, conspiracy narrative. The earliest successful examples of this genre, such as “The Beast” and “I Love Bees,” were elaborate puzzle games to be played by working across media as well as in the physical world. The Wikipedia article defines an ARG as “an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.” “The Beast,” for example, was a murder mystery, whose clues were planted in the movie credits of the film AI and in various constructed websites. Some players even received phone calls. Burying the clues in various places in our mediated world helped to lend a sense of reality to the mystery. The clues were often so obscure and esoteric that it would have been impossible for an individual to find and decipher them all. Players necessarily formed groups and worked collectively through chat or email. Some of the ARGs were sponsored: “I Love Bees,” for example, was a promotion for the video game Halo II. The use of digital media to forge an interactive narrative that encouraged individuals to work together in groups in order to promote a film or a new videogame — this would surely have seemed to Brecht or the Fluxus artists as confirmation of the way in which popular narrative can be harnessed to the ideology of consumer capitalism. In recent years, however, a new form of ARG has arisen with overtly political goals. While the original ARGs were authored by teams of designers, who devised

4chan 4chan is one of the best-known imageboards (www.4chan.org). Like ARGs, this curious anonymous website was founded with no ostensible political agenda — in this case by a fan of (Japanese) manga comics for a community who wanted to share images that were not available in the West. Partly to avoid being identified as copyright infringers, the inventor of the site and his contributors adopted a policy of anonymity. 4chan developed into a series of boards, portions of the site, for the distribution of various genres of images. A typical post on one of these boards consists of an “image macro,” the image itself together with a comment, often inane and so compact as to be almost unreadable as any form of traditional communication. The most popular board, entitled /b/, is for random images, which seem to consist of a mixture of the banal and the pornographic. 4chan is also regarded as the foundation for a community of users collectively known as Anonymous (Schrank 2010). 4chan is a flow experience, in which the metaphor of flow is realized by the

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the entire plot and all the clues, the authors of this new form merely set up the premises and invite the player community to create the materials (Strickland 2007). The materials are not clues to a mystery, but contributions to collective stories of social or political relevance. “World Without Oil,” played in 2007, was one of the first such games, which, as its home page states, was “a massively collaborative imagining of the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis . . . An alternate reality chronicled online in 1,500 personal blog entries, videos, voicemails and images” (www.worldwithoutoil.org). The designers of the game established the conditions of rising oil prices and catastrophic events. Thousands of players, then, wrote their own stories in blogs and videos, explaining how they and their communities reacted to these events. In some cases, players attempted to perform their stories as well, by riding their bicycles to work to save gas or encouraging other forms of conservation in their neighborhoods. “World Without Oil” was a participatory media form whose progressive, though not revolutionary, political significance was clear. Participatory ARGs of this kind still constitute a narrative genre, although the political narrative is likely to be less coherent than that of remix videos, because of the large number of players whose views will not coincide perfectly. One of the co-authors, Jane McGonigal, who has gone on to create other ARGs and “serious games,” argues that such games can harness the imagination of large numbers of players to reconfigure our social and economic problems (Strickland 2007). In other words, by constructing the appropriate digital format for ARGs and other serious games, she can encourage social action: formal innovation can be political.

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endless stream of image macros. On the popular /b/, macros are added almost every second, so that whenever the visitor refreshes her window the ones at the top have been pushed down and replaced by new pictures of cats or nude women. Nevertheless, contributors to 4chan could be roused to political action, it seemed. When the Church of Scientology attempted to take down an embarrassing interview with Tom Cruise from YouTube, the amorphous group Anonymous began Project Chanology, a concerted campaign against the Church — in particular through denial-of-service attacks on the Church website and other pranks. Although there could be many reasons to take action against the Church of Scientology, members of Anonymous were responding to the one issue that constitutes them as a group: the Church’s attempt to block the flow of images and videos by appealing to the American legal system, with its strong protection of corporate interests in intellectual property. The Scientologists do not align themselves with any traditional ideology, but they do subscribe to a very strong political narrative. In fact, their religion, devised by a science fiction writer, is founded on narrative at least as strongly as Judaism or Christianity. Scientologists and Anonymous seem to be perfect foils for each other in the vast excesses of the American political landscape. While the Scientologists have elaborate and secretive belief structures, Anonymous represents the denial of the imposition of such structures and hidden knowledge. Anonymous has by its very nature no official spokesperson (though the founder of 4chan, “moot,” has been identified), no creed, and only the vaguest definition of the practices that define one as a member of the group. Anonymous has at best a weak political narrative and no interest in catharsis. The work of Anonymous is an example of the politics of flow, just as 4chan itself reflects the aesthetics of flow. The boards on 4chan are exercises in flow both in terms of the creation of images and memes and their distribution, and the only thing that can rouse Anonymous to collective action is a threat to impede the flow. The need to defend their flow experience explains why in 2010 members of Anonymous took action again, this time in support of Wikileaks and its leader. When Julian Assange and his site faced attempts to thwart the release of information, members of Anonymous conducted denial-of-service attacks on credit card companies that refused to process contributions to Wikileaks or official sites of governments who have denounced Wikileaks. Such denialof-service attacks are perfect instruments for a politics of flow, because their point is to deny access to those sites that have themselves sought to deny the flow of information to others. Assange himself was anything but anonymous: he promoted himself vigorously as a champion of the flow of information. His site released thousands of confidential documents (including American diplomatic cables) in the conviction that exposing government or corporate secrets would

a patently contradictory agenda; I’m not sure how we’re supposed to make sense of it. In practical terms it seems to boil down to a policy of disclosure for disclosure’s sake. This is what the technology allows, and Assange has merely followed its lead. I don’t see coherently articulated morality, or immorality, at work here at all; what I see is an amoral, technocratic void.

The incoherence of Assange’s pronouncements should not be surprising, nor is it surprising that a traditional diplomatic historian should be confused. Caryl’s task is to interpret the actions of governments and individuals as a coherent political narrative. He is justifiably baffled by a “policy of disclosure for disclosure’s sake” — baffled, that is, by the politics of flow. If flow sites such as 4chan promote a new kind of politics, do they also constitute a new kind of art? It has been suggested that: “/b/ and other surf clubs are digital examples of Relational Aesthetics, artforms that rely on social interaction and feedback to take place.”2 Yet the differences between Bourriaud’s examples of relational aesthetics and 4chan remain significant. Bourriaud’s artists are not anonymous fifteen-year-olds; they are established figures who are engaging in an explicit conversation with their professional community of artists, curators, and critics. Bourriaud still believes in the salvational character of art as a special cultural practice, even if his relational aesthetics purposely weakens the claim of high art. To suggest that 4chan represents the digital form of relational aesthetics is to deny the distinction between art as a special cultural practice and a practice that anyone with a copy of Photoshop and an internet connection can engage in. The insistence that art should dissolve into everyday life takes us back to the roots of relational aesthetics in the work of Fluxus and even further back to the historical avant-garde of Dada and the Surrealists. It is perhaps even more radical, because all of those earlier avant-gardes were still in conversation with an elite art community. 4chan is art only in the context of a digital age in which art no longer has a special status. 4chan is political art and/or non-art. If the Dadaists or Fluxus dreamed of a day in which art would be practiced by everyone, imageboards and other social media could be said to constitute the ironic realization of that dream. 4chan is more like Dada than like Bourriaud’s relational artists of the 1990s. The creation of endless variations of lolcats and the propagation of other memes are simply art as nonsense; they are not experiences carefully calibrated to bring people

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lead to a better political world. The political narrative of Assange is weak and confusing. His WikiLeaks Manifesto invokes elementary graph theory to argue that exposing secrets will sever the links of the network of official conspiracies in the world. Christian Caryl, a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, reviews some of Assange’s interviews and writings and remarks that Assange offers

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together (as Bourriaud or Bishop want relational artwork to be). They are playful, silly, meaningless, or insulting, and historically avant-garde (see Schrank). The stance they foster is political only in the vague sense that all social action constitutes a politics. If Anonymous has an ideology, it could be said to be one of opposition to any and all state ideology. Furthermore, just as the earlier avantgardes envisioned, on the pages of 4chan form constitutes political content. The aesthetics of flow, the propagation of an endless stream of images and comments on an imageboard, and the participation of as many people as possible in this process — these constitute the politics of Anonymous. The intermediality of 4chan, its refusal to commit itself to the exploration of the medium (even the digital medium), is the formal expression for the politics of flow.

Facebook and the Performance of Identity Unlike 4chan with its promotion of anonymity, Facebook is based on the promotion of identity. While it is possible to register under a false name, the massive appeal of the site lies in the opportunity it offers to project one’s identity online. There are significant political uses of Facebook, particularly because it is possible for organizations (as well as music groups, businesses, and events) to establish their own pages: the Church of Scientology has a page, as does Wikileaks, at least as of December 30, 2010. Like the personal pages, these organizational pages are expressions of identity, telling the organization’s story in a brief but coherent fashion, but also through links to web pages and other media. The vast majority of Facebook’s 500,000,000 or more pages represent individuals. By promoting itself as a place for individuals to tell their story online, Facebook falls somewhere in the middle of our spectrum of narrative and flow. Facebook and other social networking sites offer their users the opportunity to fashion and perform an identity for their friends, acquaintances, and the world at large. The performances are constrained by the structures and tools that Facebook provides: a profile, a public “wall,” photo archives, expressions of liking and disliking, and games for collective play. These structures invite each user to act out her story more than to tell it, and always in a fragmented and provisional way. Perhaps the most common activity is simply to monitor and respond to the stream of information that appears on the user’s wall. In this respect at least, an hour spent on Facebook can look very much like an hour spent on 4chan: visiting Facebook is also a flow activity. Once again, the performance of identity on Facebook has no recognizable political or artistic significance as understood in the twentieth-century traditions. Yet it is a digitally mediated aesthetic experience, in the sense that the Facebook performer is expressing herself within and through the constraints of the application’s protocols. Her engagement with Facebook

The Waning of Political Narrative? It has often been remarked that throughout the twentieth century mainstream culture has repeatedly co-opted and neutralized the radical strategies of the avantgarde. The shock of cubism or film montage wanes, until eventually posters of cubist paintings appear on dormitory walls and montage techniques appear in Hollywood films. However, the larger goal of the avant-garde — to dissolve the categories of art and politics and integrate both into everyday life — has never become a mainstream project. Certain social media forms, which often look suspiciously like the art practices of the avant-garde, seem in a parodic way to accomplish just this dissolution. In particular, the configuring of flows of text, images, and videos and the remixing of existing media materials remind us of the neo-avant-garde and Fluxus. It is an appealing coincidence that the Latin fluxus means flow. The flow experience of these forms of social media neutralizes any sense of political engagement for its users, while at the same time other forms of social media continue to provide platforms for traditionally ideological expression. On balance, the strong traditional political narratives seem to be losing coherence in our contemporary media culture. The American Tea Party movement, which could never have come to be without the cross-media chains of blogs, YouTube, talk radio, and the American television news channels, is an intriguing example of a political movement that generates the passion of traditional classbased ideologies, but whose own narrative is incoherent. Perhaps that is why the Tea Party members seem so dissatisfied: they have the passion that should lead to a cathartic experience of triumph, but their own narrative is too weak to envision any goal worth fighting for beyond “being left alone.” The Tea Party, the Obama Girl YouTube video, and Anonymous are ostensibly as different in their politics as we could imagine, and yet they are all expressions of what Walter Benjamin might have recognized as the pale aestheticization of politics in an age of social media.

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requires the moment-by-moment reading and writing of multiple media forms and could therefore be called a polyaesthetic experience (Engberg). Participation in Facebook is enormous and its uses are extremely diverse. That Facebook pages can serve serious political ends has been made clear by recent events in several Arab nations in the so-called “Arab Spring.” Nevertheless, many, perhaps most, Facebook participants do not seem to be not working toward any goal; they are not out to change anything through their Facebook experience. They are flowing, and, as Csikszentmihalyi explains, the key quality of the psychology of flow is the desire to have the experience continue. Therefore the Facebook experience could be understood as a digital realization of the avantgarde dream in which politics and art dissolve into everyday life.

Notes 1.Both the historical avant-gardes of the 1910s and1920s and the various avant-gardes of

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the midcentury called into question or completely denied the storytelling functions of art. The Futurists wrote tiny, incoherent plays that lacked any dramatic sense (Kirby and Kirby

Jay Dav i d Bo lt e r

1986). The work of Bertholt Brecht was in this sense much less radical, but in the course of becoming one of the most influential playwrights of the century, Brecht created his technique of “epic theater” precisely to undermine the audience’s cathartic identification with the main characters of the story. Avant-garde film of the 1920s by Man Ray, Buñuel, Léger, and others either critiqued the narrative style that was already dominant in Europe and North American popular film (Les Mystères du Château de Dé, Chien Andalou) or abandoned it altogether (Ballet Mécanique). In the 1950s and 1960s, with the neo-avantgarde, Happenings were participatory plays without stories or conventional climaxes. Film theorists of the 1960s and 1970s associated the storytelling techniques of Hollywood film with the ideology of consumer capitalism; avant-garde film, they thought, could challenge that ideology in part by abandoning storytelling and exploring the materiality of film (see Rodowick 1994). In other words, formal experimentation could itself be a form of political action: in this case, because Hollywood-style narrative was ultimately political in support of a capitalist status quo, the so-called structuralist films of Hollis Frampton or the abstract films of Malcom LeGrice were acts of political opposition that could educate viewers to a new kind of looking. Guy Debord’s film version of La Société du Spectacle uses the formal innovation of détournement (creating a montage of found footage from Hollywood film, newsreels, and advertising) to illustrate its political point. 2.With obvious irony, the author of this article published on a website of art criticism (www.artfagcity.com) remains anonymous.

Works Cited Anonymous. “What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn From 4chan.” Http://www.artfagcity .com/2010/09/09/img-mgmt-what-relational-aesthetics-can-learn-from-4chan/. Assange, Julian. The Wikileaks Manifesto. Http://www.thecommentfactory.com /exclusive-the-wikileaks-manifesto-by-julian-assange-3342/. Accessed 29 Dec. 2010. Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79. Bolter, Jay David. “The Aesthetics of Flow and the Aesthetics of Catharsis,” (forthcoming). Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods: Les Presses du réel, 2002. Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. boyd, danah, and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13.1 (2007), http://jcmc .indiana.edu/vo113/issuel/boyd.ellison.html. Accessed 31 Dec. 2010. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Bruner, Jerome. “Life as Narrative.” Social Research 54 (1987): 11–32. Caryl, Christian. “Why WikiLeaks Changes Everything,” New York Review of Books (13 Jan. 2011). Http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13 /why-wikileaks-changes-everything/. Accessed 2 Jan. 2011. Csíkszentmihályi, M. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York:

(1988). Engberg, Maria, “Polyaesthetic Experiences: Digital Literature in an Age of Social Media” (forthcoming). Friedman, Ken, ed. The Fluxus Reader. Chichester, West Sussex; New York: Academy Editions, 1998. Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Higgins, Dick. Statement on Intermedia. 1966. http://www.artpool.hu/Fluxus/Higgins /intermedia2.html. Accessed 30 Dec. 2010. Holmes, David. Communication Theory: Media, Technology, Society. London: Sage, 2005. Horwat, Eli. “A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet.” http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/chapter .php?id=8. Accessed 31 Dec. 2010. Kirby, Michael, and Victoria Nes Kirby. Futurist Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1986. Krauss, Rosalind. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Rodowick, D. N. The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Schechtman, Marya. The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Schrank, Brian. Avant-Garde Videogames: Play Beyond Flow. Atlanta: Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010 [Ph.D. diss.]. Stanley, Alessandra. “Anchors, Beamed in and Live, Are Skittish.” New York Times, 8 Nov. 2008. Strickland, Eliza. “Play Peak Oil before You Live It,” Salon (10 July 2007). Http://www.salon .com/technology/feature/2007/07/10/alternative_reality_games/index1.html. Accessed 30 Dec. 2010.

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HarperPerennial, 1991. Dennett, Daniel. “Why Everyone Is a Novelist.” Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 16–22

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contributors

Espen Aarseth is principal researcher at the Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen, and adjunct professor at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. From 1996 Aarseth was associate professor and from 2002 professor at the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen, which he co-founded. He holds a Cand. Philol. in comparative literature and a Dr. Art. in humanistic informatics, both from the University of Bergen. He has published research on digital power and democracy, SF and cyberpunk, digital media, digital literature, humanistic informatics, games and narrative, women and gaming, game ontology, games and crossmedia, game addiction, and mobile games. Espen is also co-founding editor-in-chief of the journal Game Studies, founder of the Digital Arts and Culture conference series, co-founder of the Philosophy of Computer Games conference series, and author of Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press 1997), a comparative media theory of games and other aesthetic forms. Jan Baetens is professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven. He has published widely, often in French, on word-and-image relationships in contemporary culture and is specializing in the poetics of the so-called minor genres (photonovella, graphic novel and comics, novelization). His publications include La novellisation: Du film au livre (2008) and Pour le roman-photo (2010). With Ari Blatt, he guest-edited a volume of Yale French Studies on “Writing and the Image Today” (No. 114, 2008) and, with Jean-Jacques Poucel, a double issue on constrained writing in Poetics Today (30.4 and 31.1, 2009 and 2010). A published poet, he has written collections on subjects such as basketball, comics, and JeanLuc Godard. In 2008 he was awarded the triennial prize for poetry of the French Community of Belgium. He serves also on the board of Word and Image. Mark Bernstein is chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, where he directed research on hypertext tools and literary hypertext. He is the designer of Tinderbox, a pioneering system for making, visualizing, analyzing, and sharing notes, and the author of numerous scientific papers as well as of The Tinderbox Way. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he received his doctorate in chemistry from Harvard University. Jay David Bolter is the Wesley Chair of New Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (1984); Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (1991;

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second edition 2001); Remediation (1999), with Richard Grusin; and Windows and Mirrors (2003), with Diane Gromala. In addition to writing about new media, Bolter collaborates in the construction of new digital media forms. With Michael Joyce, he created Storyspace, a hypertext authoring system. With Professor Blair MacIntyre and the AEL at Georgia Tech, he is helping to build Augmented Reality (AR) and mobile technology systems for games and to stage dramatic and narrative experiences for entertainment and informal education. Ivana Brozić graduated in English at the University of Zagreb and took her MA in Theatre Studies at the University of Reading. Following her core interest in theater and performance, in her recently completed PhD she looks at the forms and meanings of the concept of intermediality in the spatial, aural and visual phenomenon of theater. She has contributed to numerous symposia with her explorations of the contemporary theatre’s use, appropriation, and interaction with other artistic media involving, as in this article, fictionalized biographies of artists. She now lives and works in Croatia. Erik Champion is an Associate Professor and Director of Research and Postgraduate Studies at the Auckland School of Design, Massey University, New Zealand. He studied architecture, philosophy, and engineering (Geomatics). Erik recently published a book on virtual heritage entitled Playing with the Past (Springer HCI Series) and he is currently editing a book for ETC Press on game mod design theory and criticism. His most recent supervising and research involved Mac OS-based game design, intermedia/hybrid tactile panorama tables, biofeedback for immersive gameplay, evaluation critique of virtual heritage, thematic interfaces, history-based game environments, and warping for projection onto 3D surfaces. He is a member of ICIP ICOMOS, and on the editorial boards of Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting; Games & Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media; Gaming and Virtual Worlds; the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations (book review co-editor); the International Journal of People-Oriented Programming (IJPOP); and Loading. Brian Chanen teaches at the American School of Bombay and is an independent scholar focusing on narrative structure in a digital age, advances in digital humanities and twenty-first century literary education. He is currently developing the research group SANRA (South Asian Narratological Research Association) and prior to arriving in India was an adjunct professor at the University of Warsaw. Brian has published both on literature in the digital age and new literary curricula. Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American Literature and Culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster (Rodopi 1999), From Virgin Land to Disney World: Nature and Its Discontents in the USA of Yesterday and Today (Rodopi 2001), The Cinema of Tod Browning (Black Dog 2006), Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology (Palgrave

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2008), Edgar G. Ulmer: Essays on the King of the B’s (McFarland 2008), An [Un] likely Alliance: Deleuze|Guattari & Thinking Environment[s] (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). His fields of interest are nineteenth and twentieth century American literature and culture, critical theory, and film|media studies. He has recently published An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (Dartmouth College Press 2010), an edited collection The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams (Dartmouth College Press 2012), and a collection on Time and History in Deleuze and Serres (Continuum Press, 2011). At the moment, Bernd is planning a project — cinapses: thinking|film — that brings together scholars from film studies, philosophy, and the neurosciences (members include among others Antonio Damasio). Katerina Krtilova has been a scientific assistant at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) and postgraduate student at Bauhaus-University in Weimar since 2008. Before that, she was a research assistant at the Department of Electronic Culture and Semiotics, Charles University Prague, after doing her M.A. in Media Studies in 2006, with fellowships at the University of Regensburg and the University of Potsdam. Her publications include Medien denken: Von der Bewegung des Begriffs zu bewegten Bildern (ed. with Lorenz Engell and Jiri Bystricky, Transcript Verlag, 2010); Za filosofii nové doby (ed., Praha: 1999, 2007); “Média a medialita,” in Foret/Lapčík/Orság (ed.); Jazyk — filosofie — média (Univerzita Palackého, 2010); “Povrch, projekce, reflexe — realita mediálních obrazů,” in Magál/Mistrík/Solík, ed., Masmediálna komunikácia a realita, Trnava: FMK UCM, 2009. Julia Meier is a lecturer and freelance writer who has worked in the field of contemporary art, music, film, and philosophy in Germany and the US. She is the recipient of several academic awards including the doctoral fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in 2004. She has been a guest lecturer and visiting scholar at the Department of Comparative Studies at Stony Brook University, New York, where she conducted her doctoral research on David Lynch and Deleuze’s concept of the logic of sensation. She has published various essays about the work of Diamanda Galás, Chris Cunningham, and Matthew Barney, among others. Meier also worked as a curator for contemporary art, cocurating the exhibition Anton Corbijn: Everybody Hurts at the Kestnergesellschaft Hanover, Germany. W. J. T. Mitchell teaches literature, media, and art history at the University of Chicago, and is the editor of Critical Inquiry. His books include Picture Theory; Iconology; What Do Pictures Want?; and most recently, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9–11 to the Present. He edited, with Mark Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies, and in 2010 he gave the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard University, which will be published next year as Teachable Moments: Race, Media, and Visual

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Culture. He is currently breaking ground on a new book project entitled Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture. Lars Nowak is assistant professor of media studies at the Friedrich-AlexanderUniversity Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He received his Ph.D. from the Faculty of Media at Bauhaus-University Weimar for his dissertation Deformation und Transdifferenz: Freak Show, frühes Kino, Tod Browning (Berlin: Kadmos, 2011). Having presented papers and published essays on the connections between film and Taylorism, physical monstrosity and carnivalism in film, American popular and experimental cinema, psychoanalytic film theory, and the relationship between film and cartography, he is now working on a research project about the use of photography and cinematography in ballistics from 1860 to 1960. Ben Sassen began his career working as part of the pioneering webcasting station Interface in 1997, then went on to study telecommunications at Oxford Brookes University before becoming a freelance web media consultant in London. In 2001 he co-founded the iconscious media arts collective and with them produced a culture magazine TV series under the same title that was broadcast online from 2002 until 2006. Iconscious Film was established in 2003 to handle the short-film output of the group and in the same year Ben co-curated the first iconscious online film festival. In 2004 Ben began to experiment extensively with video as a performance tool, eventually leading to him form the live media/ performance group Mistaken Generation in the same year and a second danceoriented project under the title Unearthed Performance in 2007. Ben Sassen is currently the Jr. Prof. for Experimental Television at The Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. Jens Schröter is Professor for the Theory and Practice of Multimedial Systems at the University of Siegen. Prior to this he was a research assistant at the Centre of Cultural Research, Media Upheavals, University of Siegen, in a project group working on the digital virtualization of sculpture. His main research topics are theory and history of digital media, the history of erasure, theory and history of photography, theory and history of three-dimensional images. Recent publications include Intermedialität analog/digital: Theorien, Methoden, Analysen (München: Fink 2008), which he edited with Joachim Paech; Äther: Ein Medium der Moderne (Bielefeld: Transcript 2008), which he edited with Albert Kümmel; Virtuelle Welten als Basistechnologie von Kunst und Kultur? Eine Bestandsaufnahme (Bielefeld: Transcript 2009), which he edited with Manfred Bogen and Roland Kuck; Das Raumbild: Bilder jenseits ihrer Flächen (München: Fink 2009), which he edited with Gundolf Winter and Joanna Barck; Das holographische Wissen (Berlin: diaphanes 2009), which he edited with Stefan Rieger. His new monograph is 3D: Geschichte, Theorie und Medienästhetik des technisch-transplanen Bildes (München: Fink 2009). Visit www.multimediale-systeme.de, and www.theorie-der-medien.de.

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Michel Serres is a French philosopher of science who has taught at Clermont-Ferrand, the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, and the Sorbonne. In 1990, he was elected to the Académie Française. Serres has taught at Johns Hopkins University as a visiting professor, and is currently Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University. He is the author of Hergé mon ami, The Birth of Physics, The Natural Contract, Genesis, The Troubadour of Knowledge, and The Five Senses, among other titles. Gunter Süss is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Chemnitz University of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 2005 for a dissertation on the aural in film and computer games (Sound Subjects: Zur Rolle des Tons in Film und Computerspiel, 2006). Research interests include cultural theory, film studies, and popular culture. He is currently working on a book on American media cultures of the mid-nineteenth century. He is co-editor of the anthologies Industrialization, Industrial Heritage, De-Industrialization (2009, with Evelyne Keitel and Cecile Sandten), Intermedialities (2007, with Evelyne Keitel and Werner Huber), and HipHop Meets Academia (2007, with Stefan Meier and Karin Bock).

index Abu Ghraib, 52–53, 57 Ad–hoc networks, 243–44 Analog/digital, 47, 49, 53–57, 60, 118, 121n4, 153, 245n2, 268 Anonymous, 257–58, 260–61 Art, 1–5, 7, 9, 12, 14, 15–20, 23–27, 30, 31n3, 32n17, 37, 39–43, 44n14, 51, 58, 60, 73, 78n8, 87–88, 90, 92, 108, 111–13, 125, 129–30, 134n2, 135n8, 137, 139, 150n15, 153, 159, 171–73, 176, 180, 186, 189–90, 192–93, 195, 198, 211–13, 222–23n4, 233–34, 236, 238–39, 245n5, 245n6, 245n7, 252–56, 259–61, 262n1, 262n2, 265–68 Assange, Julian, 258–259 Aumont, Jacques, 20–22, 24, 26 Barthes, Roland, 2, 65, 67, 69, 104, 125–26, 130, 140 Bartle, Richard, 182–83, 188, 193 Bernstein, Mark, 10–11, 265 Biofeedback, 193, 203, 266 Bishop, Claire, 253, 260 Boenisch, Peter M., 143–44 Bordwell, David, 22–24, 32n9, 32n10 Bourke, Paul, 200, 202, 208n1 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 253, 259–60 Brontë, Emily, 119 Cameron, James, 194 Catharsis, 253–55, 258 Chaos, 118, 127–28, 130, 132, 174 Close, Chuck, 55 Clowes, Daniel, 99, 105–6, 108 Community, 8, 13, 99, 213, 226–27, 229, 233–37, 239–42, 244, 251, 257, 259, 265 Computer games, 11–13, 175–79, 189, 193–99, 205–7, 211, 213–17, 219–22, 223n7, 223n9, 223n10, 265, 269 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi, 254, 261 Cultural technologies, 4, 39–41, 43n1

De Certeau, Michel, 155, 156 Dekker, Andrew, 202–3, 205, 208n1 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 8–9, 25, 30, 31n6, 67, 69, 78n8, 111–13, 116–17, 120–21, 122n7, 125–28, 130–31, 133, 135n4, 135n5, 135n7, 163–64, 266–67 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 29, 41, 113, 117 Digital photography, 5, 40, 47–52, 56, 61n2, 61n4 Discourse, 3, 10, 12, 16, 20, 24, 30–31, 31n5, 38, 41, 81, 113, 115, 120–21, 142, 153, 156, 158–59, 195, 211, 229 Eisner, Will, 96, 100 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1, 114, 121 Engell, Lorenz, 38–39, 267 Essentialism, 12, 29, 51, 192–93, 195, 199, 206 Feedback, 13, 186, 193, 203–4, 228, 233, 238–39, 259, 266 Fetish, 6, 64–65, 67, 77n2 Film, 2–7, 12, 15, 20–30, 32n9, 32n11, 32n12, 32n16, 38–39, 43, 44n4, 44n13, 48, 52, 54–56, 63–77, 78n6, 78n9, 78n10, 98, 120, 129, 139, 142, 149n3, 176–77, 181, 186, 192, 194–95, 199, 207, 217–19, 221, 223n9, 234, 241, 248, 252, 254–56, 261, 262n1, 265, 267–69 Flow, 46, 55, 117, 127, 131, 141, 163–64, 233, 238, 253–55, 257–61 Frasca, Gonzalo, 216, 223n5 Freak, 6, 63, 66–69, 73, 130–31, 268 Freud, Sigmund, 65, 115–16, 118 Frye, Northrop, 58 Galás, Diamanda, 8, 125–29, 133, 134n2, 267 Game analysis, 11, 175, 179, 183, 186–88 Gameplay, 12, 177, 178–80, 182–83, 189–90, 192, 194–95, 200, 203, 207, 214, 216, 266

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Gameworld, 11, 180, 183–84, 186, 193, 208, 216, 218, 221 Garden, 10–11, 82, 89, 169–74 Guattari, Félix, 8, 67, 69, 111–13, 116–17, 119–20, 122n7, 125–28, 135n4, 163–64, 266–67 Greco, Diane, 173 Guerrilla television, 233–34 Hayles, N. Katherine, 9, 44n10, 153–54, 157, 167n1 Higgins, Dick, 2, 16–20, 42, 111–12, 139–40, 152, 192, 207, 213, 222–23n4, 252–53 Hypertext, 9–11, 40, 152, 156–59, 164, 166, 167n2, 169–74, 265–66 In–between, 4, 9, 40, 43, 125–30, 132–34, 140, 146, 149 Intermedia, 1–4, 15–19, 31n3, 37–40, 42–43, 44n14, 112, 140, 149n3, 152–53, 164, 192–93, 195, 207–8, 213, 222–23n4, 252–53, 266 Intermediality, 1–5, 7–9, 12–13, 15–17, 19–24, 26, 28–31, 31n1, 32n11, 32n16, 32n19, 37–38, 40, 43, 46–47, 93–95, 111, 125–26, 131, 134, 135n8, 137–41, 144, 148, 149n1, 149n4, 153–54, 175, 211–14, 217, 222, 222n2, 229, 232, 244, 260, 266, 268–69; formal, 3–4, 16, 20, 213; ontological, 3–4, 16, 28–30, 32n19; synthetic, 3, 16 Internet, 3, 39, 48, 52, 57, 61n2, 156–57, 159, 162–63, 165, 187, 194, 213, 227, 229, 240–44, 248, 256, 259 Jenkins, Henry, 199, 214 Kerr, Aphra, 214, 216, 221, 223 Konzack, Lars, 178–79 Krauss, Rosalind, 253 Kristeva, Julia, 15, 117, 121n4, 240 Lacan, Jacques, 8, 72, 111, 113–16, 119–20, 122n7, 122n9, 188 Link, 2, 8, 10–11, 21, 27, 40, 43n1, 97–98, 108, 120, 128, 143, 154, 156–58, 165, 169–70,

172–74, 194, 198, 203–4, 219, 223n12, 229, 232, 238, 250–51, 259–60 Lynch, David, 5–6, 63–66, 68–77, 78n6, 78n8, 117, 267 Machinima, 194–95 Malone, Thomas, 196–97 McHale, Brian, 10, 159, 165–66, 167n3 McLuhan, Marshall, 17, 19–20, 31n5, 39, 49, 112, 229, 233–34, 238, 245n1 Media, 1–4, 7, 9–26, 28–31, 32n14, 32n19, 37–43, 43n1, 43n2, 44n8, 44n10, 46, 49–50, 61, 61n2, 61n4, 63, 73, 83–84, 88–89, 111–12, 121, 125–26, 128–30, 134, 135n8, 137–44, 146–48, 149n3, 149n5, 149n6, 149n7, 150n15, 152–54, 156–58, 160, 163, 166–67, 175–78, 180, 193–95, 206–8, 212– 15, 219–21, 222n1, 222–23n4, 223n7, 227, 229–30, 232–33, 237–41, 243–44, 245n1, 245n5, 245n12, 248–57, 259–61, 265–69 Mediality, 38–42, 44n14, 143–44, 212 Media philosophy, 4, 37–40, 43n1 Medium, 2–5, 7, 9, 16, 18–22, 24–31, 32n9, 38–43, 44n5, 44n10, 49–50, 55, 57–58, 60–61, 63–64, 70, 73–75, 77, 93, 95, 99, 104, 138–48, 150n15, 153, 157, 175–76, 193, 212, 217–19, 221, 222–23n4, 229, 231–32, 234, 240–41, 244, 245n2, 251–53, 260, 268 Merrick, Joseph, 6–7, 63–70, 72–73, 75–77, 77–78n3, 78n6, 78n7, 78n8, 78n9 Mersch, Dieter, 39, 43n2 Metz, Christian, 28, 64–65, 71, 77n2 Mitchell, William J., 46–47, 50–54, 56–57, 61n1 Müller, Jürgen E., 20, 28, 30–31, 140, 149n5 Navigation, 10–11, 155–57, 159–60, 162–63, 170–72, 174, 184–85, 200, 213 Network fiction, 158 Network topology, 229, 232, 239, 243–44 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41, 120, 133, 135n7 Non-play, 11, 181, 184, 186–87, 190, 190n2, 200 Novel, 4, 7–10, 22, 92–101, 104–5, 108–9, 152–56, 159–67, 167n4, 177, 265

Oosterling, Henk, 140, 150n15 Orientation, 76, 149n3, 158, 166, 169–70, 174

Rage against the machine, 8, 117, 119, 121n2, 219 “Rags-to-riches” story, 184, 222 Rauscher, Andreas, 215, 221, 223n5, 223n7 Realism, 5, 46–49, 57–58, 60–61, 61n6, 182, 194, 217–19 Role-playing, 11, 180, 193, 205–6 Ryan, Marie–Laure, 9, 158, 165, 167n1, 195 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 220 Sekula, Alan, 58–61, 61n6 Self-reflexivity, 28, 97, 220, 238 Semantic space, 156, 159, 167 Siegert, Bernhard, 39, 41–42, 44n8, 226–27 Social media, 13–14, 248–52, 254–56, 259, 261 Sound, 6, 12–13, 26, 54, 69–70, 72, 74–75, 83,

Techno, 8, 111–14, 117–21, 121n3, 121n4, 122n5, 122n9 Telestreet, 13, 241–42, 244 Television, 13, 32n17, 38–39, 46, 84–86, 90, 142, 149n6, 150n11, 194, 214, 226–44, 245n1, 245n3, 245n4, 245n5, 248, 250, 254, 261, 268 Theater, 9, 23–24, 26, 38, 42, 44n4, 63, 68– 69, 72–74, 127, 137–39, 141–44, 146–48, 149n7, 150n10, 176, 192, 262n1, 266 Tholen, Georg Christoph, 41 Thought, 8–9, 17, 22, 24–26, 28, 38, 41, 125–26, 130–31, 133–34, 135n6, 137–38, 166, 240 Tomine, Adrian, 99, 101–2 Transformation, 3–4, 6–7, 9, 16, 26–28, 32n19, 39, 41, 57, 66, 70, 72–73, 75–77, 82, 84, 87, 104, 111–12, 119, 137–40, 143–44, 146–48, 153, 159, 217 Transmediality, 3–4, 16, 21–22, 24–25, 28, 30, 32n11, 32n12, 32n13, 194–95 Turing, Alan, 177, 206, 265 TV Party, 13, 236–39, 244, 245n9, 245n10 Uricchio, William, 141 Video activism, 239 Video art, 129, 234, 238–39, 245n7 Voice-over, 7, 27, 97–98 Voice-with, 7, 97–98 Ware, Chris, 7, 92, 104, 108 Williams, Raymond, 49, 245n4

273 Inde x

Page layout, 104–5, 108 Perception, 9, 16–17, 20, 31n8, 38–39, 42, 47–48, 54–55, 86, 89, 130, 133, 138, 140, 143–44, 147, 149n7, 194, 197, 199, 238 Perec, Georges, 155 Performance, 8–9, 37, 42, 113, 126–27, 129–30, 133, 134n2, 134n3, 142, 144–48, 149n3, 149n6, 150n10, 186, 189–90, 192, 208, 222, 236, 252–53, 260, 266, 268 Performativity, 39–40, 42 Photography, 2, 5–7, 21, 23–24, 26, 28–29, 38–41, 46–58, 60–61, 61n2, 61n4, 61n6, 63–75, 77, 77n1, 77n2, 77–78n3, 78n4, 78n5, 78n7, 78n10, 87, 89, 145–46, 268 Pirate TV, 234 Players, 11–12, 175, 179–84, 186–89, 193–97, 199–200, 203–8, 216–18, 255–57 Portrait, 5–7, 64–69, 73, 76, 78n4, 219 The Prodigy, 8, 113–14, 116–17, 120, 122n6, 122n9, 122n10 Proper name, 133 Pynchon, Thomas, Against the Day, 9–10, 152, 154, 160, 162, 164–65

87, 111–14, 117–18, 125–30, 134n2, 144–47, 153, 159, 163, 175–76, 193, 203, 207, 211–12, 214, 216–18, 223n9, 230, 233, 269 Soundtrack, 113, 117, 221 Spiegelman, Art, 7, 92, 96, 104–5, 108 Spielmann, Yvonne, 25, 32n14, 149n3, 153 Superheroes, 7, 92, 95, 99–100, 105 Syntactic space, 164, 167