talking on james street north, episode 4

talking on james street north, episode 4 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

talking on james street north, episode 3

talking on james street north, episode 3 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

talking on james street north, episode 2

talking on james street north, episode 2 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

talking on james street north, episode 1

talking on james street north, episode 1 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.


In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

Francis Bacon and Augustus Comte -- notes

One of the principles of Renaissance thought was the liberation of the human subject from the limitations of authority and tradition, of which the church was perhaps the most significant influence. Francis Bacon was one of the chief proponents of what was later understood as humanism. Fundamentally, Bacon’s thought was centred upon the idea that human ingenuity and discovery was a reflection of the will and grace of God. Indeed, the hand of God was working through human invention. Scientific progress is a reflection of a divine sense of the good; as such, it flourishes during times of peace (which Bacon incorrectly points out was extant at the time of his writing). To this end, in Thoughts and Conclusions on the Interpretation of Nature as a Science Productive of Works he outlines the benefits conferred by three technologies which he considers to be representative for the triumph of human ingenuity over the natural processes which limit the human subject: printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. Through a description of these inventions, Bacon seeks to establish the importance of the process of invention to human existence. Of cardinal significance is the notion that the acquisition of knowledge serves to improve one’s potential for acting well within world affairs, as “the improvement of man’s mind and the improvement of man’s lot are one and the same thing” (27).

Importantly, the development of the individual human subject is seen as key to the development of the body politic. Bacon suggests that scientific invention is among the most beneficial of human activities, “for the benefits inventors confer extend to the whole human race” (26). To a modern reader aware of the history and politics of European colonialism, it is difficult to avoid noting the political economy of this statement, which was written by a member of the English aristocracy who was then serving as a senior governmental bureaucrat at a time of colonial expansion. Of course, by stressing the importance of the compass, Bacon writes that England’s colonial enterprises were themselves reflections of the realisation of power through scientific processes. Through the acquisition of knowledge and the continuation of technological invention, mankind (to use Bacon’s notably gendered language) is able to expand the possibilities for action and self-realisation. In his Novum Organum, he writes that “knowledge and human power come to the same thing, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced” (29). Much like Plato’s explanation of how leaders must understand the good in order to understand the earthly manifestation of forms, Bacon suggests that mankind will understand the truth only by avoiding what he terms the false idols of intellectual activity – Idols of the Tribe, in which perception is a human affair which “distorts and corrupts the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it” (29); Idols of the Cave, wherein Bacon adapts Plato’s Cave analogy to argue that an individual person’s traits and personality may distort an understanding of reality; Idols of the Market-place, which emerge from the relational dynamics inherent to human subjectivity, manifest in language: “Words plainly do violence to the understanding and throw everything into confusion, and lead men into innumerable empty controversies and fictions” (30); and Idols of the Theatre, the dogmas associated with established philosophy, “which have become established through tradition, credulity and neglect” (30). By means of the truth, mankind will master the self. Indeed, determined effort “devoted to sane and solid purposes could triumph over every obstacle” (28). Furthermore, “inventions come without force or disturbance ... while civil changes rarely proceed without uproar and violence” (26). On the Idols and on the Scientific Study of Nature invokes Augustine’s City of God in positing a fantastic and perfectly ordered geography of thought, with all of the various sciences operating in harmony.

In order to realise the benefits of scientific progress, Bacon calls for an examination of the methods of inquiry. Throughout most of late antiquity and the medieval period, intellectual activity first involved accepting the established authority and supplementing it with opinion. The philosophical tradition then allowed for knowledge to be produced by means of dialectics, which “look only for logical consistency” (25). Lastly, experiential data allowed for some intellectual discovery, but only by means of happenstance, not methodological rigour. To counter such trends, and to account for the fact that chance is a significant contributor to intellectual discovery, a rigorous method of scientific inquiry is required. Bacon proposed in On the Reformation of Education that the education systems then extant in Europe were insufficient for such a task. He complains that education can be seen to “have rather augmented the number of learned men than raised and rectifies the sciences themselves” (34), and furthermore that “this dedication of colleges and societies to the use only of professory learning has not only been inimical to the growth of the sciences, but has also been prejudicial to states and government” (35). Bacon thus suggests that universities be equipped with the latest laboratory and observational equipment, that universities across Europe need to network with each other to allow the sciences to flourish outside of geographical happenstance, that the salaries of Lecturers (those who research “Philosophy” and “Universality”) must be sufficient to allow the best minds to seek such a life pursuit, as lecturers “are as it were the keepers and guardians of the whole store and provision of learning” (35), and finally that logic and rhetoric, the two disciplines foundational to all intellectual activity, should be reserved for mature and sufficiently-developed minds. It is quite interesting to note retroactively that such complaints have often been levelled at universities, and the desire to reform education to the benefit of the liberated human subject has been rejuvenated in a time when corporate and business interests have proliferated, and arguably poisoned, the integrity of the pursuit of knowledge.

Humanism had become entrenched in European consciousness by the time Augustus Comte was writing about scientific progress in The Nature and Importance of the Positive Philosophy. Comte believes that a historical overview is necessary, “for no idea can be properly understood apart from its history” (45). He then seeks to systematise the development of thought by stating “that each branch of our knowledge, passes in succession through three theoretical states: the theological or fictitious state, the metaphysical or abstract state, and the scientific or positive state”. As a consequence, three methods for the pursuit of knowledge come to the fore: the theological method, which situates all phenomena as originating with divine influence; the metaphysical method, in which “the supernatural agents are replaced by abstract forces, real entities or personified abstractions” which are themselves in turn the originators of all phenomena; and the positive method, which recognizes “the impossibility of of obtaining absolute truth” and therefore “endeavours ... to discover, by a well-combined use of reasoning and observation, the actual laws of phenomena – that is to say, their invariable relations of succession and likeness”. Comte demonstrates an interesting self-awareness when he describes “the need at every epoch of having some theory to connect the facts” (46). His thinking is an extension of Bacon’s idea that the knowledge of reality must in principle come from observed phenomena. Thus, “it is no less true that, in order to observe, our mind has need of some theory or other”. However, in order to objectively navigate the near-infinite number of subjective understandings, observation of phenomena must be methodologically rigorous in order to properly understand both the self and the ‘truth’ that results from intellectual activity, for “it is experience alone which has enabled us to estimate our abilities rightly” (47).

It is to this end that he outlines the necessity of the positive philosophy, whose “fundamental character ... is to consider all phenomena as subject to invariable natural laws. The exact discovery of these laws and their reduction to the least possible number constitute the goal of all our efforts; for we regard the search after what are called causes, whether first or final, as absolutely inaccessible and unmeaning” (48). In this capacity, he rejects the metaphysical and theological arguments around the interpretation and realisation of divine will. In reductionist terms, everything necessary for the understanding of a given phenomenon is present within the phenomenon itself. The remainder of the chapter sketches “what stage in the formation of that philosophy has now been reached and what remains to be done in order to constitute it fully” (49). He argues that the pursuit of knowledge was rendered contingent with positivism first among the most simple and general of disciplines, as “astronomical phenomena ... were the first to be subjected to positive theories”, followed by a succession of physical sciences increasingly proximal to the human subject. This process originated with Aristotelian thinking and has taken place “continuously and at an increasing rate”. Comte recognizes that positive theories have not been adapted to the study of all phenomena, and there remains a great deal of research to be accomplished and a “gap” which must be bridged, as positive theories must be utilized in order to understand the dynamics of “social physics” (50).

The important dynamic inherent to Comte’s thinking is the reduction of different systems of thought to the same process of knowledge production, for when “our fundamental conceptions [have] thus been rendered homogeneous, philosophy will be consituted finally in the positive state,” at which point all theological and metaphysical methodologies and systems of thought will be rendered obsolete.The individual disciplines of scientific inquiry become established when they have “developed far enough to admit of separate cultivation – that is to say, when it has arrived at a stage in which it is capable of constituting the sole pursuit of certain minds” (51). Indeed, positivism has developed rather continuously since Bacon, to the point where Comte wishes to prove that “direct contemplation of the mind by itself is a pure illusion” (53), as the functioning of the brain is only observable from an objective position. Of course, Comte was not to live to see the developments in medical imaging technologies, which have indeed allowed the discipline of neuroscience to investigate the machinations of the brain in self-aware subjects. More provocatively, however, it is possible to interpret Comte’s statement that “interior observation gives rise to almost as many divergent opinions as there are so-called observers” (53) as prognosticating the development of psychoanalysis (which is of course one of the missing positive “social sciences”).

While Comte sates that the ancients were able to participate with significant contributions in numerous areas of scientific thought, due to the relatively immature state of their development, “it is ... impossible not to be struck by the great inconveniences which [the division into disciplines] produces.” He argues for the creation of an executive body given the task of providing an overview of the processes of each scientific discipline “to determine exactly the character of each science, to discover the relations and concatenation of the sciences, and to reduce, if possible, all their chief principles to the smallest number of common principles” (52). Scientists should be trained to have a general understanding of science before specializing. Furthermore, Comte calls for the creation of “a specific class on men, whose special and permanent function would consist in connecting each new special discovery with the general system”. To explain such a function, he emphasizes that understanding is essentially a singular discipline, and that the divisions of understanding into disciplines is an artificial principle which “by separating the difficulties, resolve[s] them more easily” (55). However, these distinctions can serve problematic when “questions arise which need to be treated by combining the points of view of several sciences”.

Comte states that positivism is the only ideological system which can be seen to be in ascent; the others have been in decline for centuries. This process will be completed once positivism has included the study of social phenomena, and furthermore that it is understood as a single and coherent theory which encompasses all of the disciplines of thought. When such has been accomplished, “the revolutionary crisis which harasses civilised people will then be at an end” (57). He concludes this section by stating that the endeavour to synthesize the various disciplines of human inquiry is not to reduce their variables to “one sole law”.  Fundamentally, the human mind is not able to realize perfection, which would be required for a valid and objective “sole law” for the understanding of all phenomena: “the resources of the human mind are too feeble, and the universe is too complicated, to admit of our ever attaining such scientific perfection”. In this context, it is interesting to note that Comte hints at the ‘holy grail’ of physics after Einstein, namely the unified field theory which seeks to harmonize theories of the macro universe (astronomy) with those concerned with the subatomic universe: “it seems to me that we could hope to arrive at it only by connecting all natural phenomena with the most general positive law with which we are acquainted – the law of gravitation – which already links all astronomical phenomena to some of the phenomena of terrestrial physics” (58). While dismissed by scholars and scientists of most disciplines, the quest for such unity remains at the heart of theoretical physics.


Notes

1.  A few decades after the Bacon’s death, the French monarch Louis XIV deployed the coincidental                existence of the human subject and the state as the philosophical – and indeed procedural – basis for his        reign.

2.  It can as a consequence be deduced that this line of reasoning will result in Heisenberg’s uncertainty              principle one hundred years later.

The Hamilton Tiger-Cats are running scared

I am a regular supporter of the TiCats, and dreamed of playing on the team through my football-playing youth. I plan on attending this Saturday's game, and look forward to a Cats victory.

However, I am deeply saddened by the manner in which the TiCats organization is bullying the city over the new stadium. I have lived for most of my life in this city, and have worked diligently in the arts and education communities to help the city to succeed. The East Mountain stadium is a step in the wrong direction, for numerous reasons having to do with the quality of life in the city, the continuation of the revitalisation of businesses downtown, and the need for our social infrastructure and development plans to move away from the 'sprawl' mentality which is completely unsustainable.

I noticed that a 'rally' is being held today at Carmen's banquet centre (who would be the only beneficiaries from East Mountain outside of the TiCats). However, it seems that this is a limited seating event which required an RSVP. Such does not a rally make, but rather an instance of people agreeing with each other without having to face opponents. The East Mountain plan was pushed through at the last minute to sideswipe City Council and avoid debating the severe shortcomings of the proposal relative to the City's interests. Furthermore, the TiCats have not provided empirical figures demonstrating that West Harbour will fail. Consequently, the only conclusion a reasonable person can reach is that the TiCats are scared of allowing the benefits of East Mountain to speak for themselves. Instead, they use bully tactics to get their way in the face of concerted grassroots opposition. Their way IS the highway in this instance.

Personally, I feel that the Stadium would be best located near Confederation Park. Given the options of East Mountain or West Harbour, the residents and city of Hamilton will only benefit from West Harbour. The reason that the TiCats want East Mountain is so that they can monopolize the incidental profits from games -- parking, concessions, merchandise, etc. Public money will be spent on the stadium, and it should not be used to support private industry in this manner. Public money needs to be spent in the interests of the public. The public is interested in West Harbour.

Our City Our Future

Bound in Time: Timehunter and the Art of Playing Roles

          The title of this talk suggests that I will be examining the role-playing genre in gaming, and indeed after a slightly circuitous route I will indeed get there. First, I have to spend some time elsewhere. The idea for this paper comes from the commonly-experienced reality that there is never enough time to complete all that we want to finish in life. Now that I have begun to study gaming, I am noticing that my use of time is following the precedent of my experience with cinema studies. Namely, the more that I study the medium, the less time that I have to experience the source texts themselves. In retrospect, my mother was warning me of this trend when throughout my childhood she told me that I was wasting time playing videogames. As any game player knows all too well, the real quest at the heart of any gaming narrative is the quest for more time to play. Desire left unchecked by responsible time management is often seen as an anti-social vice, harmful to both the individual and society as a whole. (Here, I must refer anti-gaming moralists to the fact that play is inherent to learning among mammalian species.) By its very nature, gameplay encourages the binding of a human subject to an “irresponsible” use of their time. One more turn, one more quest, one more dungeon, we tell ourselves as the clock passes midnight and gameplay increasingly encroaches on sleep. We are always in a sense trying to avoid the consequences of time by means of a quest accomplished or a plot thread advanced. Already we have begun to play roles that bind us in time: the human player who must complete the game;  the academic whose occupation distracts them from their muse; the child whose desire for pleasurable experience requires conscription into proper social channels.

          Which brings me to the textual example which serves to structure this paper. To materialise the ‘bondage’ process – in other words, the binding of a body to an external object – I wish to interrogate the art of digital role-playing by means of an non-digital example of fetish gameplay. Timehunter by Japanese composer Masami Akita, released under his Merzbow persona in a limited edition in early 2003, can be seen as analogous to videogame subjectivities. In order to properly experience this musical object, one is expected to consciously assume the role of professional listener by scheduling time as the composer intends using the yearly scheduler in which the audio is packaged.

         There is an obvious fetish character to the packaging. A faux-leather bound daily planner, which contains folders for writing tools, a calculator, and important documents, allows the entry of scheduling data by the listener. Importantly, the artist has scheduled when the listener is intended to play each of the musical pieces. For example, at 9:17 on the evening of Thursday, May 1, 2003, the entire first CD is meant to be played, while at 3:25 on the morning of Tuesday, December 2, 2003 the  first track from the third CD is to be played. Merzbow‘s music is digitally processed noise intended to be experienced through loudspeakers (not headphones) at high volume levels. This aesthetic is often interpreted as unlistenable to naive, immature, or unprepared listeners. As such, a listener who dutifully follows the listening schedule as Merzbow intends will have to wake up in the middle of the night or early morning, or interrupt the nine to five work day, to play what is often misunderstood as antisocial music. I myself fully committed to the year-long listening project, although since at the time I was employed by a record label, my own performance of the role of listener did not render me into a social pariah.

         The desire for a rationally predictable future is a desire to control the body: here is where I will be at this time, and this is what I will be doing. Certainly the fact that it is a tangible physical object uncommon to musical products itself renders Timehunter into a fetish; that it was released in less than a thousand copies worldwide furthers the desire to possess the object. With acquisition comes the playing of a role. The identity which is meant to be assumed by the listener is folded into the object itself. The daily scheduler invokes the lives of professionals, who must rationalise their expenditure of time for reasons bound to their careers. Thus, a listener of Timehunter performs the role of professional listener: an educated and informed listening subject who seeks to experience existence by means of binding aesthetic excess into a quantifiable, predictable, and ultimately Cartesian framework for understanding. Merzbow intends Timehunter not as a criticism of the desire to control and rationalise time in such a manner. In fact, this release, and his body of work more generally, attempt to critically navigate the pleasures released through such control.

         Much like the computer role-player, to whom I will return in a moment, the listener binds their pleasure to the completion of the performance of a role as dictated by a communal fiction. Timehunter investigates the power relationship between the subject, who experiences the piece by participating in its authorship, and the producer of the work, who requires agreeably subservient subjects in order for the work to be realised. Furthermore, the piece was chosen as the critique which it forwards is a celebration of the pleasure of its fetish within both positive and negative terms, which mirrors the guilt many role-players feel after an extended commitment to their pleasure.

         Broadly speaking, the ontology of gameplay centres on a similar assumption of identity and performance of a fiction. A person plays a role as represented by their screen avatar. This relationship is inherent to every game, whether the avatar signifies an individual agent (a character or vehicle) or a function or process wherein the avatar is abstracted into the game interface itself (witnessed in many strategy and puzzle games). However, for the purposes of clarity and brevity I will focus presently on role-playing games (RPGs). The genre itself is a reification of the relationship between player and game, as the assumption and development of a fictional and virtual identity is the fundamental gameplay mechanic. When playing such games, one is assuming two roles – that of the character or party of characters directed by the players actions, and the role of the penitent, bound relatively motionless for hours in front of a computer or television screen. A body bound – such is the foundation of bondage.

         So while I apologise for the image invoked, let me describe to you how I bound my own body to the pleasures of gaming. I must admit that despite my youthful appearance, I come from the first generation of video and computer gaming in the home. However, my experience with console gaming is limited to the Atari VCS from 1977 and the Nintendo Entertainment System from 1985. My expertise is with home computer systems which, due to their capacity to write data onto storage media, were able to allow game progress to be saved long before consoles were able to do so. Of course, early computers were notoriously difficult to use, and many computer gamers can attest to the quest-like nature of getting some games to even run – for those of you who knew computer gaming in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the quest for memory management was often a troubling and frustrating endeavour.

         The first role-playing game that I played was Temple of Apshai, released by a now-defunct company called Epyx for multiple computer platforms in 1983. The primitive character development intrigued me, but my captivation with the genre did not really happen until I played The Bard’s Tale in 1985. This game was not the first attempt at recreating the experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons – the quintessential pen-and-paper role-playing game, which I began to play after learning RPG conventions in computer games, including computer RPG franchises such as Ultima, Wizardry, Might & Magic, and Fallout.

         From there, twenty-five years of developments in computer RPGs and computers themselves kept me engaged with the genre, although I will admit presently to being a curmudgeonly grandfather who preferred how things were in “the olden days”. More than anything, I miss the material artefacts which accompanied role-playing games in the era of limited graphical representation and storage capability. Games such as The Bard’s Tale and Wizardry lacked automap functions which were to become commonplace in the 1990s, and thus required players to physically map their progress through the geography of the game. (In this capacity, I assumed the role of thief as I continually raided the supply room in my grade school for graph paper on which I charted my various gaming journeys.) Many games used printed journals, code wheels, “fantasy” language translation charts, and printed maps to both immerse the player in the fiction of the game world, and to serve as copy protection against the many computer gamers who perform the role of pirate. What I like most about these physical gameplay devices is that they remind the player that they inhabit a body which takes a certain amount of space and performs certain actions with certain consequences – I can remember spending an entire weekend in 1989 playing the second game in The Bard’s Tale series; my hand was sore from creating maps representing dozens of square kilometres, and I had difficulty finishing my classroom schoolwork the Monday following my binge. And yet, despite the responsibilities and time constraints of adult life, there are times when I would like nothing more than to bind myself to a role-playing game for days at a time, despite the complaints from friends and loved ones that I will never see them.

          Players will often commit an exceptional amount of time to develop their avatar through repetitive behaviours scripted by game designers. One slays orcs in order to more readily be able to slay orcs in the future. Players complete quests in order to gain the experience necessary to advance character traits in order to complete future quests. As with any pleasure, the pleasures of the immediate involve the anticipation of the pleasures of the future. It is here that I wish to return to the aesthetics of Merzbow’s Timehunter, in which the pleasures of future events are relative to the immediacy of the musical piece along with the scheduling of anticipation. In abstract terms, then, pleasure is a temporal phenomenon which bridges both the absence and the presence of external stimuli.

         This process is most readily apparent with the microeconomies extant in several massively multiplayer online role playing games. Players invariably need more time for gameplay than their physical life allows, while game companies continually seek to enslave players to monetise the amount of time that people are willing to commit to their games. As a result, a labour economy has emerged wherein money is exchanged for character development; one website, for example, stipulates that any World of Warcraft character can be raised to the highest level for a few hundred dollars. Fundamentally, the subjective dynamic inherent to gameplay is akin to the performance of power and subservience inherent to a bondage fetish. The addictive consequences of role-playing games, which are often elevated by popular news media as a crisis for the digital age, suggest that the slavery inherent to digital bondage is entirely consensual.

         The pleasure experienced by players is contingent with the amount of time that they are able or willing to commit to the pursuit of ‘a good performance’, itself the optimal version of the role the player believes is expected from the game’s designers. And as some of you may already have experienced, it is typical for role-playing games to require an exceptional amount of time to complete. Most of the “classic” computer RPGs can consume anywhere from several dozen to several hundred hours to complete the narrative. In the case of Massively-Multiplayer Online RPGs, where there is no linear narrative to “complete”, the end of the game is contingent with  the termination of one’s desire to play. It is this precise function – the transmutation of desire into commitment through pleasure experienced as both immanence and anticipation within a social relation of power – that I wish to address, for it is here that we encounter the dialogue between the real and the fictive.

          A conceptual evaluation of time is fundamental to any analysis of the subjective relationship between people and the games they play. Digital gaming foregrounds time in numerous ways. Players marginalise the time experienced by their physical bodies and render it into a narrative space experienced by the avatars they control. Gameplay is then a quest for pleasure gained as time is spent. And yet pleasure is an immediacy and an immanence – the location of a subject at the limnal space between the boundary of their body and an exterior object which realises pleasure as a bodily experience. Bondage is a means by which pleasure is rationalised as the impulse for self-control of the body with the internalisation of an exterior object which conscripts unbound pleasure to a usage precisely bound. It is an agreement between the possibilities for the self-creation of identity by the bodily subject and the conscribing influence  of forces external to the subject. Of course, bodies cannot but be bound in time. With perverse pleasure then – and a nod and a wink to my mother’s remonstrations – I wish to propose that the image of a body largely immobile in front of a computer screen, immersed in the game which they are controlling, is the contemporary terminus of the quest in Western philosophical discourse for the liberation of the human subject.

Home and Decor in Michael Haneke’s "Funny Games": The Domestication of Violence

Horror, at its most elemental, is predicated on a violence both visible and hidden. The consequences of dangers to the body are fetishised in the manner of a taboo. An unseen danger remains invisible to heighten suspense and is rendered visible at moments of narrative importance. Horror cinema presents an interesting point of entry into conceptions about visual representations of the body in relation to safety and violence. The existence of horror cinema traces to the dawn of the medium, perhaps as an ironic counterpoint to an ontology of cinema commonly defined by André Bazin as the ability to “reveal the hidden meaning in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them”. And yet not without some trepidation do I wish to examine the pleasure experienced when bearing witness to the ritualisation and representation of horror. While I do not wish to suggest a causal relationship between representations and instances of violence, I do seek to interrogate elements of the dynamic by which violence is made aesthetic in order that it may be consumed. Seen within the boundaries of a consumer marketplace for entertainment media, violence, much like any other consumer product, is often domesticated when brought into the home. Mainstream cinema has embraced realistic and sensational renditions of violence, and audiences have responded by expecting that violent manipulations of the body in every film regardless of context be rendered with the same degree of (computer-generated) natural realism.

To this end, I intend for this essay to demonstrate how the visual aesthetic of the 2007 version of Funny Games serves to critique the consumption of violence as a visual spectacle. When the entertainment press reported that noted European director Michael Haneke was going to remake his controversial 1997 film Funny Games in Hollywood, most critics were perplexed at the decision. The original film had polarised art-house audiences and critics who were unsure how to address Haneke’s meditation on media violence. When combined with the filmmaker’s often noted antagonism with Hollywood films, the critical divide established by the first version of the film ensured a somewhat hostile reception for the second. Haneke has on numerous occasions mentioned that mainstream cinema, as defined and championed by Hollywood and the major transnational film companies, treats the consequences of violence in an immature and dangerous manner. Specifically in relation to Funny Games, Haneke told The Village Voice in 1998 that he intended for the film to critique “a certain American Cinema, its violence, its naivité, the way American Cinema toys with human beings”. Alternately, Haneke means to portray in his films “what mainstream movies work to take away. Namely: reality. I’m making movies that are inconsumable. And I can only do that by portraying the suffering of the victim, rather than the enjoyment of the perpetrator”. To address this last point, I will conclude this paper with a brief examination of what Haneke might mean by reality, given his conscious manipulation of the ontology of representation.

Funny Games can be seen to continue an analysis of the invasive nature of the motion camera as first explored in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, in which the killer films the murder of all of his victims, and Yoko Ono’s Rape, in which the camera silently and relentlessly stalks a random female pedestrian until she cowers in fear. In all of these films, the camera itself is the instrument by which horror is realised, at both the material and symbolic levels. In a very real sense, these films suggest the violence inherent to sight itself. The pleasure of horror-as-spectacle derives not from moral corruption, but rather from the ironic counterpoint of bodily safety assured through visibility.

Before analysing what an audience does not want to see, we must first outline the dynamic by which viewer desire is generated. Funny Games explores the desire for visibility, and why viewers often desire to witness representations of that which is rejected from daily life as horrific. In other words, if the sight of something is repulsive or causes fear, why are viewers often drawn to aesthetic events which ritualise and habitualise exposure? In this sense, it is possible to position the film as a project for peace countering the decades of media stories about violence in media begetting violence in reality and the increasing prevalence of violence in consumer entertainment products. How then might sight bring pleasure to a viewer? Most critics are in agreement that horror cinema involves social and moral transgression. Horror cinema was until recently not viewed as “proper”, by which I mean precisely the social decorum attached to the content of a film and how that film should be watched. Certainly, there is much to support the fact that for most of the twentieth century horror cinema was largely a counterculture phenomenon. However, any positioning of this argument as foundational to the ontology of horror is undermined by the fact that since the release of Psycho in 1960, horror cinema has been fully accepted into mainstream culture.

A more convincing theory elaborates the ontology of visibility as key to the self-realisation of identity. In The Practise of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau states that the ‘proper’ is “a mastery of places through sight. The division of space makes possible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and “include” them within its scope of vision. To be able to see is also to be able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading a space” (1984: 36). Fundamentally, sight ensures security through the acquisition of knowledge. Within the context of horror cinema, the spectator’s sense of bodily security is disrupted at moments when specific knowledge is lacking – the identity of the killer, the danger hidden in the darkness, an audio cue which suggests an immanence which cannot be seen. The affect produced by horror cinema can be seen therefore as a geography of play in which the sight of even the most abject grotesquerie satisfies the spectator’s need for an omniscient visibility. That the dissected or otherwise perversely manipulated body is often depicted as a repulsive object suggests that it is possible to agree with Linda Badley, who argues that “the body became the site for mythologies of self-creation” (1995: 68).

It must be noted that on a formal level, Funny Games can be seen as a postmodern genre exercise. As such, a brief overview of horror as a genre and as a cinematic device is illuminating. In an often-cited essay on horror in cinema, Noel Carroll convincingly described horror not simply as a means of categorising films into genres, but rather as a narrative trope deployed with the intention of producing a specific emotional response in a viewer (1987: 51-3). The affect produced in audiences by means of visual and aural sensations has been widely exploited by filmmakers to transfer anxieties produced by the film’s narrative to the viewer at the bodily level. More often than not, this process dictates that the audience sympathise with the victims of violence in horror cinema – namely, the audience is intended to feel scared at moments in the film in which onscreen characters are themselves scared. Here, we can witness the manifestation of genre conventions: the juxtaposition of a safe image with one suggesting danger; the use of mise-en-scène and editing to produce a targeted sense-perception response; and the use of dark lighting and confined set design to limit the information provided to the spectator, and by extension provide a degree of cohesion to the narrative, namely, the logic by which victims are diegetically “allowed” to be victimised. It is common for horror films to be set in isolated geographical locations: the cabin in the woods (The Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, I Spit on Your Grave), the house at the end of a deserted street (Psycho, The Last House on the Left), or an abandoned industrial or municipal area (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 28 Days Later). Similarly, low-light mise-en-scènes, often predicated on either malfunctioning lighting or a nighttime setting, further contribute to the sense of claustrophobia imparted by restricted vision. Certainly, in terms of its deployment of visual and auditory devices horror can be understood as operating wholly within Tom Gunning’s conception of the ‘cinema of attractions’, in which the novelty of affect and sense perception is favoured over narrative, thematic, or philosophical development.

By isolating the narrative to a lake house [Figure 1], Funny Games suggests that it is working within the common tropes of horror cinema. The film introduces a well-bred family whose wealth is visible by means of the conspicuous material possessions which surround them: the leather seats and high-end stereo system of a luxury SUV, a Tivoli radio for occasional use in the kitchen,

the meticulous hand-finished touches on a wooden boat used for recreational sailing in the afternoon, and most notably the summer lake home in the Hamptons which stands in for this film’s version of the deserted cabin. Haneke and cinematographer render these objects and the sets which contain them with stationary-camera, wide-aperture/deep-focus compositions which evoke the simple visual design common to interior decoration magazines and home decor product catalogues. In interior design magazines, these images often disturb the viewer as they are presented as virgin spaces devoid of human activity.

      Alternately, when humans are present in home decor magazines they often embody stereotypical functions such as housewife or the single young professional. The precise manner of how humans actually use these spaces is always elided in favour of an optimistic gesture to a future of possibility and self-actualisation (“This space could be yours!”). The capacity to see and interiorise these images of spaces imparts to the viewing subject a sense of bodily identity and safety, as the random clutter which constitutes the human condition is distilled to a singular controlled aesthetic. De Certeau can again be invoked in suggesting that the future has been predicted: the images of interiors are embodied precisely with the images of our future and controlled selves.

Such depictions of interiors do not allow the spectator to visualise their life occurring within these spaces as a history of material traces. Instead the body which represents the functions of life which occur within these spaces is rendered consumable precisely because of an absence in which the consumer inserts an idealised (consumable) version of themselves. Nothing is accomplished within such rooms, for traces of activity would preclude the understanding of the space as a messianic force authenticating and realising the desires of the consumer – and more specifically, interpellating the spectator of the image as a consumer of the space or the objects contained within. Thus, within a context of a consumer marketplace is the safety of the body of the consumer assured. For example, the image of a living room in Figure 3 does not represent even a trace of daily activity within its frame. Every visible surface is naked and immaculately (antiseptically) clean.

The kitchen in Figure 5, for example, which bears not a single trace of the organic materials which are processed into food on the surfaces depicted. These spaces are extracted from a temporality in which the viewing subject locates their material reality and becomes instead a space in which the spectator projects their desire for graceful living. In this capacity, it is interesting to notice that the meaning of the image is dependent on a spectator already made dependent on the image;  ontologically, the image is empty save for the spectator who fills it with an optimistic version of themselves. Instead of a randomly scattered assortment of accessories which one would expect to find in a livingroom – reading material on the table, movie cases by the DVD player, remote controls for the home theatre within easy reach of a viewing position – rather, such images represent an imagined space where the consumer of the image anticipates their future (self-)identity.

Haneke’s interiors are as equally orderly and antiseptic. The textures and orderly lines of the furniture design and layout [Figure 6], as well as that of the house itself [Figure 7], evoke a safe and inviting home. The white rustic of the interior design associates the house with a sense of nostalgia and tranquillity – another time in a better America, as it were [Figure 8].

This is not a space where violence would ever occur. And yet when it does, Funny Games presents the material consequences of violence with the same casually controlled manner. Unlike “a certain American cinema” – which often utilises rapid cross-cutting and the random, angular motions of a hand-held camera to intensify the affect produced by the action of the narrative by embodying the viewer within the “huddle” of the fight choreography – the editorial pacing and static camera are retained throughout the film, agnostic to the “momentum” of the narrative.

The material traces of violence, namely the blood and the corpse, are not rendered in a spectacular manner, but rather “normalised” by the clinical gaze of the camera which has rendered the violence without sensationalising the material traces it leaves on the domestic.

  Instead of serving as a meditation on the real consequences of horror, more often than not violence is deployed in contemporary cinema merely to engage the viewer in a ritualistic manner enslaved to the logic of sustaining a consumer market. While a metacritical examination of horror criticism in this regard is outside of the scope of this present review, numerous critics and sociologists warn against the social consequences of rendering violence into a spectacle. For example, in his updated edition of Dark Dreams, Charles Derry chastises contemporary cinema which has rendered the depiction of violence into an exciting spectacle dominated by the lack of consequences, including grief. As a consequence, mainstream cinema has produced “a generation of spectators who are empathy-deprived” and who enjoy being entertained by violence rather than being revolted that “humanity itself is being profaned” (2009: 5). And yet most critics of horror avoid moralising about spectator desires to witness representations of violence, especially in light of the numerous sociological studies which problematize any causal association between a spectator wanting to view media representations of violence and the commission of actual instances of violence. Instead of condemning as sadists those viewers who gain enjoyment through the affects produced by horror cinema, most critics understand the desire to witness the horrific within Freudian concepts of repression and the unconsciousness.

The desire for knowledge attained through visibility is not without consequences. Figure 11 depicts a scene in the film when the viewer’s blindness is transferred to the first of the killers’ victims. The killers play a game wherein the son is forced to wear a hood over his face while they pressure his mother to remove her clothes while they torture his father. Importantly, these two pleasures of sex and violence, which are so often linked to the most negatively influential among the influences of the media, are also invisible to the spectator. The fact that the mother’s nudity is hidden from the boy is a subtle condemnation of an American culture which allows children to consume bodies as violent images but bars them from seeing bodies in their actuality. Indeed, one of the killers makes explicit the importance of this game by stating that he is forcing the bag over the child’s face “to preserve moral decency”. Simultaneous to a concern for the well-being of his parents, the potential that the boy could die of asphyxiation produces the greatest anxieties for the spectator. The imagined violence toward the boy displaces the real violence experienced by the other two characters, and throughout this sequence it would be the horror of his death that would be most visible to them. The father is shot in a close-up compositional style which invokes the moment often visible in mainstream action and horror films when the potency of the male hero is restored after he bears with dignity the violence which has been caused to him by the evildoers in the film, while the female victim is saved at the moment of her weakness. Haneke’s cinema does not allow such a facile exit from violence.

As mentioned above, Haneke intended for Funny Games to be understood as an indictment of the representations of violence as consumable entertainments. It is precisely the need to see that is itself destructive for both the cinematic body and the body of the spectator. At several moments in the film, the killers break the fourth wall by directly addressing the audience, stating at different times that the spectator is on the side of the victims and demands believable narrative closure. As with other horror films, with each death their rhetoric suggests that they are presenting entertainment tableaus to the audience. And yet Haneke does not allow the violence in Funny Games to be pleasurable. Most importantly, except for one key moment none of the violence is visible onscreen. All of the bodily violence occurs out-of-frame.

For example, figure 12 is a frame taken from the moment when the first victim is killed. Nearly a minute passes as one of the victims is killed, in “real” time, in the non-diegetic space outside the frame. With playful irony, the killer not currently involved in the act of killing uses a knife to make a sandwich; this act is also not visible due to the framing of the scene. The antiseptic mise-en-scène emphasises the removal of the abject from the domestic. Indeed, the white outfit and gloves worn by the killer associate him with the peace and serenity of the house. The fact that the spectator can hear what is occurring in the room off-screen only increases a desire to understand what is happening. In fact, another five minutes pass before the identity of the victim is revealed, as the mise-en-scène shifts to portray the consequences of violence [Figure. 9]. The spectator’s desire for knowledge is left unsatisfied as, except for the killing of one of the murderers, the moments of violence done to the body are left off-screen in every instance. The exception is important, as it involves the viewer’s desire for vengeance to be exacted upon the characters who perpetrate the crimes onscreen.

Audiences consume entertainments which use the spectacle of violence in order to increase viewer sympathy with the victims of violence, who are thus rendered “good”, while allowing a formulaic narrative logic which suspends their initial moral abjection toward violence as a victim gets revenge against the initial perpetrators, who are thus rendered “evil”. Such is the standard narrative of violence offered in mainstream cinema. Arguably, this facile moral binary is allowed as logic within “a certain American cinema” precisely because the consequences of violence are excised from commercial products. Despite the ‘realistic’ depiction of acts of violence, as a phenomenon of the human condition violence is depicted as a readily contained and understandable phenomenon, rather than the incoherent and often uncontrollable outbreak of random impulses and necessities which characterise the reality of violence. Haneke subverts the narrative by once again addressing the spectator directly, as the remaining killer uses a home theatre remote control to ‘rewind’ the scene and play it back again to avoid the death of his fellow murderer.

While spectators may enjoy the convenience and marketability of formulaic narrative closure, in the interviews quoted above Haneke is explicit in condemning mainstream cinema for its depictions of the moment of violence in the manner of a spectacle while ignoring a realistic depiction of the consequences of violence. The elision of violence in Funny Games is a key aesthetic decision, and can ultimately be seen as commentary on the 21st-century viewing subject, who thanks to the proliferation of consumer video production equipment has seen and normalised almost everything. With an understated nod and a wink, Haneke is positioning the viewer to want simultaneously to inhabit the privileged lives on display and thus become the victims of the horrors experienced throughout the film.







Works Cited

Badley, Linda. Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic. London: Greenwood, 1995.

Carroll, Noel. The Nature of Horror. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 46:1, 1987. 51-59

Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, USA: Princeton UP, 1992.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkely: University of California Press, 1984.

Derry, Charles. Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film From the 1950s to the 21st Century. London: McFarland & Co, 2009.

Gunning, Tom. The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde. Film and Theory. Eds. Robert Stam & Toby Miller. NY: Blackwell, 2000. 229-235.

Hawkins, Joan. Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Nayman, Adam. Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. Eyeweekly. March 12, 2008

Pinedo, Isabel. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. NY: SUNY, 1997.

Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. NY: Berg, 2006.

Sconce, Jeffrey. Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.

Williams, Linda. Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography. Representations. 27, 1989. 37-65

Notes

1.   What Is Cinema, p. 38, as quoted in Jacques Rancière, Film Fables p. 107.

2.   As quoted in the press release for the 2007 version of the film.

3.   Interview with Adam Nayman published in the March 12, 2008 edition of Toronto’s Eyeweekly.

4.   Linda Williams explores this point in detail in “Power, Pleasure, and Perversion” (1989).

5.   For example, Joan Hawkins concludes Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde with       the suggestion that the horror genre functions primarily as a bodily experience related to                                 transgressive imagery and a concept of bodily “excess”. For Hawkins, film production and                             consumption exists as a circular continuum of cultural reinforcement and transgression. See also                     Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, edited by Jeffrey Sconce.

6.  The best and most often-quoted example is the murder of Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho. At no                 point during the murder is a knife shown penetrating the skin. Rather, the act of murder of implied in               the viewer’s mind by means of rapid cross-cutting between the danger of the knife and the safety of the         body.

7.   Here we can think of the classic examples where a moment of suspense is broken by an audio-visual             event rendered spectacle, such as an animal startling a character onscreen, or when a previously                   hidden danger is suddenly and forcefully rendered visible.

8.  The ‘cinema of attractions’ functions akin to the games and experiences found at carnivals and fairs,              where spectators first encountered early cinema. For an elaboration of this concept, see Gunning, The           Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde (1986).

9.  See, for example, Isabel Pinado Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film;            Carol Cleaver, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

10. It should be here noted that such displays are no longer limited to horror cinema, as ‘tableaux of                   death’ are increasingly prevalent in Hollywood action and dramatic films.

Disaster is the New Normal

Earth Day came and went this year with little fanfare. Token stories about turning off the lights and cycling to work made their usual rounds in the news media. The 24-hour news networks sent camera crews to schools to watch children sing and make paper signs demonstrating the need for everyone to recycle things like paper. As always, nothing really changes for most people. Just the passing of another single day devoted to all things Earth-friendly – whatever that means – during which the penitent ritually cleanse their sins from the rest of the year. And then at some point in the late morning, news broke about a massive oil spill happening in the Gulf of Mexico.

British Petroleum, the company which “owns” the oil well, reports that 5,000 barrels of oil per day are spilling into the ocean, while independent experts have calculated a rate of flow as high as five to ten times that amount. For the past three weeks, we have all watched as the circus shitshow of BP’s improvised attempts to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf have failed. Their latest effort – a tube which has successfully diverted some of the oil to ships at the surface – is clearly intended to recover oil in order to bring it to market, rather than actually stop the flow of oil into the Gulf.

Meanwhile, efforts to mitigate the environmental disaster have centred upon not allowing the oil to reach the Louisiana and Florida shorelines. The logic in play revolves around the fact that the oil which stays underwater will not threaten anyone’s opinion on BP, offshore drilling, or oil use in general. Nevermind that the real environmental damage occurs under the surface of the water, as the marine ecosystem in the Gulf collapses due to contamination. Or that the Gulf of Mexico is connected to every other oceanic body, to which the oil could spread. In the age of the televisual out of sight is, of course, out of mind.

While many among the talking heads on television enjoyed their own hyperbole about this event having the potential to be the single worst environmental disaster in the history of the United States, the reality is that the Earth has been bleeding like this for decades. The BP oil spill is merely a singularity which makes visible a much larger field of gravity.



Certainly, there are many legitimate concerns about how the spill happened. It is true that the oil industry was able to lobby American lawmakers to the point where lax regulations and an “industry knows best” mentality removed some safety protocols which may have averted or mediated the spill. However, pointing fingers at the companies who successfully sell their products to consumers who want them is misguided. We North Americans are absurdly inefficient in our use of energy. It is our desire for an abundant supply of oil which convinced BP and other oil companies of the benefits of offshore drilling. We must now understand that the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico are being discoloured by our inability to reduce oil use when alternatives to fossil fuels are increasingly presenting themselves.

In this capacity, it is we who are spilling the oil into the gulf, and we don’t stop there. As an aggregate dynamic, oil consumption is a process of continual spillage. We spill the remnants of oil into the atmosphere after it has been burned for energy, and we spill oil into the landfill after it has been transformed into plastics. The fact that such “spills” are relatively small in terms of each individual allows each of us to justify our mutual environmental disaster as the “normal way of doing things”.

As we get used to an increasing number of wide-scale environmental disasters, the rather ominous prospect arises that we have come to accept disaster as the new normal. In the wake of continual news about environmental damage around the globe, one might say that the BP spill is just another oil spill. Once the spill has been “contained” – an absurd impossibility – we will move on with our days, go for a drive, and buy another soda.

We must understand that humanity now functions as blind gods on Earth. Ours is the Anthropocene era. Our desires produce change which affects the entire planet, and we are engaging in this change without any idea of the consequences. The first conscious change we need to make is rhetorical. Whenever people talk about environmental issues, the phrase “saving the planet” comes up. The problem with this phrase is that it abdicates us from our responsibilities. Most people do not view themselves as heroes who “save” things, but as normal people living normal lives. They ask themselves How can one person make a difference? and so they don’t attempt to change their lifestyle much. Instead of “saving the planet”, we need to strive to “not wreck the planet”. Such a phrase might then allow a person who chooses to drive four blocks to the corner store to view this action in terms of wrecking the planet instead of not saving it.



There is one hope which must be retained, no matter how remote and complicated the scenario presents. Several years ago, BP adopted “Beyond Petroleum” as a new motto for the new millennium. Perhaps after a few more months of oil contaminating the waters which sustain life on this planet, human civilisation will finally understand the sublime and graceful logic of these two simple words.

deposition at city hall, re: location of new ivor wynne stadium

Good morning,

As council prepares to vote on the location of the Pan Am Stadium, I feel the necessity to add my own voice to the debate. What began as a relatively benign process has since divided many of Hamilton's residents. Community activists and grassroots organizations have united to support the West Harbour location as they believe the revitalization of the downtown to be of principal importance for Hamilton. Supporters of East Mountain state that the Hamilton Tiger-Cats cannot play in a downtown location, but require parking spaces and a concept called 'highway visibility'. Before I come to my own conclusions about the matter, namelay that downtown visibility is of paramount concern to the city of Hamilton, I wish to state where I came from and to where I plan on going.

Despite my relatively youthful appearance, I have lived and worked in Hamilton for twenty years. After having taught at Mohawk, Columbia International, and Sheridan colleges for several years, I have chosen to pursue doctoral study at York University. When i mention this last fact to people, their common reaction is to inquire as to why I do not live in Toronto. My response is always the same -- I am involved in the local arts and music communities, most of my friends live here, apartment rentals in Hamilton are very reasonable, and I can commute to Toronto using the GO bus and train service. In fact, it is cheaper for me to rent here in Hamilton and pay for a monthly GO bus pass than it is to rent an apartment in Toronto.  I do not drive in Hamilton, but prefer to ride my bicycle for leisure and business transportation, and log roughly 5,000 kilometres each year on the streets of Hamilton. As a side note, it would have been nice for the City Hall renovation to have included a bike rack somewhere, as right now riders have to lock their vehicles to the front stairs. While I commute on the bus, I am able to read, write, and do much of the work for my profession. Downtown, I attend world-class independent music and art shows, shop at the Farmer's market, and eat at the local restaurants.

I say this not to place myself on any kind of pedastal, but rather to indicate how it is possible to live in a sustainable manner in Hamilton right now, without LRT or the GO train expansion, without a decent or even functional network of bike lanes, and without a "marquee" attraction in the core. Right now, I will admit that I am an exception, but I can only imagine how many people will work and live as I do when Hamilton realizes the development plans indicated in Hamilton’s development vision as contingent with the West Harbour Stadium project. A revitalised downtown will serve as a billboard for the city, increasing the visibility of the city as a whole and not just the corporation who names the stadium.

In the media, I am continually told that my living and working habits represent a sustainable future. I do not want to live in the suburbs, but rather find solace within bustling urban centres where diversity and human interaction are encouraged. The reason that I like downtowns of cities is that they are multifunction and polyvalent spaces which support a diverse array of human cultures. In development terms, they act as cultural and economic multipliers. Hamilton is a plucky little city. Despite our poor national reputation, culturally we punch above our weight. Time and again we hear from outsiders and media pundits that this is a dirty industrial town which presents little more than blight and hoardings to the potential visitor. I, and others like me, are determined in our efforts to ameliorate life in this city, and we do so not because we see potential, but rather because we see results. We see this city as a centre for film and television production. We see this city as a musical hotbed not because of a Canadial Idol win, but because of decades of influential work by Hamilton's independent music scene. We see a city which has large residential areas containing some of the most beautiful houses in the province. We see a city immersed in the natural beauty of the escarpment and the harbour.

However, I am deeply saddened by the manner in which the TiCats organization is bullying the city over the new stadium. As a football player and fan, I know what a blitz is. I also understand that some metaphors need to remain on the field, as they do not translate to enlightened development plans. I have lived for most of my life in this city, and have worked diligently in the arts and education communities to help the city to succeed. The East Mountain stadium is a step in the wrong direction, for numerous reasons having to do with the quality of life in the city, the continuation of the revitalisation of businesses downtown, and the need for our social infrastructure and development plans to move away from the 'sprawl' mentality which is completely unsustainable.

As a city, we need to mature into a community with confidence. As such, we cannot allow the history of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats to dominate the present. As Bob Young’s recent letter to the the Mayor indicates, the TiCats are a business interest. They exist to make money for their owners, and not to add to the cultural legacy of the city of Hamilton. Perhaps if like the Green Bay Packers the TiCats were publically-owned, then we could consider their interests as more important than they are. Too long we have bent to corporate and business forces. After being abandoned by US Steel, Labatt, Siemens, Camco it is time to understand that businesses are not beholden to the community in which they operate, despite their claims to the contrary. Never was there talk to confer $100 million in public funding to such companies, but here we are debating that exact subsidy for the Tiger-Cats. It is true that the Cats have a storied history, and grew along with the city. We should not blind ourselves to the fact that it is fully possible for the TiCats to leave Hamilton at any point, including after the stadium is built and operational.

We have a bit of a history of hurrying our development decisions without allowing for the occurrence of a proper civil debate. As the most recent example, we have a Red Hill Expressway which has come to serve the dual function of being both a highway and a water theme park. On a much lesser note, we redeveloped City Hall without adding bike racks, and so people like me are forced to use the front railings. The East Mountain plan was pushed through at the last minute to sideswipe City Council and avoid a debate about the severe shortcomings of the proposal relative to the City's interests. Furthermore, the TiCats have not provided empirical figures demonstrating that West Harbour will fail, beyond simply stating that they will lose money. Consequently, the only conclusion a reasonable person can reach is that the TiCats are scared of allowing the benefits of East Mountain to speak for themselves.

Instead, they use bully tactics to get their way in the face of concerted grassroots opposition. Contrary to what some of our provincial representatives have recently stated, East Mountain is not a Place to Grow. Communities do not grow beside highways; parking lots, strip malls, and big box stores do. Such companies and corporations serve to siphon money out of communities as company and shareholder profits. The only legacy of East Mountain outside of the benefits which will be monopolised by the TiCats will be a number of minimum-wage retail and service jobs. Any other outcome is disingenuous to the citizens of Hamilton.Their way IS the highway in this instance. Personally, while I would love to see the Future Fund money spent on other more important projects, I would rather that we remediate brownfield sites in the heart of the city rather than pave over a farmer’s field and commit to a mistake for the 21^st century.

Thank you for your time.

Julia Kristeva and the Abject

I should note that due to time constraints, I will be focussing only on the first chapter from the assigned readings – Approaching Abjection. As I read the excerpts from Julia Kristeva’s 1980 book Power of Horror, I came to wonder about the manner in which the abject is constructed by daily practise. After all, many of the specific items which cause Kristeva herself to turn away in revulsion are abject in relation to her, and not to another. In this context I am thinking of the corpse, to which I shall return throughout this presentation. And from the corpse, I am led to wonder about my own interest in violence and horror as operations within cinema. Fundamentally, why am I drawn to that which I reject from my daily life to the best of my conscious efforts. If the sight of something repulses me, why am I drawn to aesthetic events which ritualise and habitualise exposure?

         But first we need to examine definition, before any degree of application can be attempted. The abject is that which is rejected as an impurity. Often, it manifests in terms of the marks of death lacking mediation – an open wound, bodily excretions, corpses without rituals of passage (funerary rites). The abject is that which is cast off and away from the subject as a corrupting influence.

          And yet Kristeva does not hesitate in positioning the abject as fundamental to subject-identity formation, stating on the first page that “the abject has only one quality of the object ... that of being opposed to ‘I’”. The fact that I is in question marks is important, as Kristeva is later to link the self-consciousness subject – the I which reflects upon itself – through the Freudian unconscious to the transcendence of Platonic rationalism. The abject is the projection of negation itself into the void of transcendence. Accordingly, it draws the subject “to a place where meaning collapses” (2). Interestingly enough, Kristeva begins her argument with food, as she describes her aversion to milk cream which she vomits up, and in so doing “abjects herself with the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself” (3). Aversion to corruption in food reflects a survival impulse: an organism turns away from food which could kill through contamination, putrefaction, or poison. The taboo of cannibalism was perhaps the first socially constructed abjection, as the flesh of humans was made sacred relative to a civilisation’s supply of food.

         For Kristeva, food exemplifies the principle of abjection as a symbol and domestification of death and a removal of violence from the fabric of the common. Unlike the prepared steak which the better entices the closer it is to being untouched, raw with a trace of cooking, flesh from the human body is repulsive when unmediated. The butcher or supermarket which handles and prepares animal flesh for human consumption, the coffin which circumscribes and contains what would otherwise be the power of the corpse for abjection, the representation and archiving of violence in cultural artefacts, dead humans televised within the context of war or accident – these symbols of death allow a logic for understanding and acceptance. However when presented naked, the abject signals a return to the space of death by reminding the subject of their corporeality. From page four, “the corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection”. The corpse grounds the subject within loss: I am a living body/subject precisely in opposition to the death with causes the flesh before me to appear inhuman.

          Identity is grounded in loss. From page five, “all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded”. Because of this sense of loss within the object, abjection is the only signified for the subject, who views itself as already under forfeiture. And yet for Kristeva, the abject is more violent than Freud’s conception of the uncanny, for it sits alone lacking memory of the words (law) of the father, which are in other words the generative aspects of the subject which also silence it. The abject demonstrates that there is an aspect of subjectivity distinct from the traditional conception of the unconscious mind, in which the subject is created and sustained by desire. From page eight, “the one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing”. Here we note a sympathy with the Kristeva of Strangers to Ourselves, as she traces the subject who as a foreigner, in exile, is immersed in the geography and time of bodily experience.

         As jettisoned and judged from the position of the Other, the subject is only able to access alterity through “a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant” (9). Abjection thus recognizes the danger which alterity poses to the subject, but it does so within the law (in terms of both obedience and transgression). As she states on the following page, Kristeva positions identity within a replacement of the self by the foreign: “I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be ‘me’”(10). Abjection is thus a limnal space and manifests as an intrinsically corporeal presence. Kristeva emphasizes that this geography circumscribes the limits of human experience. Significance in this context is not contingent with the Freudian unconsciousness, but rather by the degree to which noise is added to a system. “the abject is that pseudo-object that is made up before but appears only within the gaps of secondary repression” (12) It is here that the self-reflexive or narcissistic subject creates meaning through aversion of animal nature (the primitive or repressed self). Kristeva states on page 14 that the abject is “a kind of narcissistic crisis” which negotiates an archaic economy of libidinal desire.

         This crisis is caused either by “Too much strictness on the part of the Other (a process which involves Law and transgression), and “a lapse of the Other”, in which the objects of desire decompose. In both cases, corruption is the most common and obvious appearance of the abject: “that is the socialised appearance of the abject”, as Kristeva writes on page 16. The power for signification elicited by the abject involves its transgressive nature, for in a sense the abject uses the Law (the name of the father) to undermine and satirise its power over the subject. At this point, Kristeva concludes this first chapter of her book and her definition of the abject by enshrining the latter within “art as a secular religion”. Along with religious and legal institutions, art seeks to purify the abject (and by extension the thinking subject – he or she who engages with desire and language) and thus render it consumable. Ultimately, the abject liberates the subject into consciousness. “In a world in which the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task ... amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless primacy constituted by primal repression” (18).

         When Kristeva states on the same page that “it is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order”, I came to wonder whether we can view the abject not simply in terms of material object-hood. For the corpse to provoke feelings of revulsion in every human subject, it must contain within it some quality which “interferes with what is supposed to save [the subject] from death: childhood and science among other things” (4). And yet that which has been rendered abject can return to simple objecthood by means of a process which places the abject within a ritualised context. For a person walking down the street, a dead body is a horror. For a coroner, it is a day’s work. For the economically marginalised, a corpse might be an opportunity for financial gain; this latter context is contained within Kristeva’s formulation of the abject: both the corpse and the graverobber are repulsive figures.

         It is here that I wish to interrogate my own love of the body as a site for transgression in film: violence, horror, the ritual of the cinematic corpse. While it is easy to film actual violence and gain some degree of pleasure from it – witness the popularity of what some have termed “gore porn” on the internet – I myself am far more interested in marks of the abject which have been made aesthetic. The work of Passolini and Michael Haneke comes together at the point at which violence becomes pleasurable, and that moment is the moment at which the body as abject is made visible. In Haneke’s Funny Games, the pleasure of seeing the transgressive is elided as the moments of bodily manipulation (violence) are left offscreen in every instance (except a crucial one involving the viewer’s desire for vengeance to be exacted upon the characters who perpetrate the crimes onscreen). The glossing of violence is a key aesthetic decision, and can be seen as commentary on the 21st-century viewing subject, who thanks to the entry of consumer video has seen and normalised almost everything. Passolini’s 1975 film Salo is more explicit in rendering the abject onscreen, as human flesh is violently manipulated and objectified for the pleasure of the viewing subjects both within and exterior to the film. The fact that the libertines who torture the innocent in Salo engage with their subjects at the moment of their death by technological mediation – first through the  social hierarchy of fascism, and then by means of binoculars and spyglasses. In both films, the process by which the victims of the perpetrators become sources of pleasure for the viewer is one in which the abject is made rational.