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.

a small superficiality on visual culture

My understanding of visual culture is rooted in my undergraduate training in literature and critical theory, and as such is dependent on a definition of objects of study and fields of interpretation. Visual objects can be defined as unique gestures of communication expressed not only through material visual media, which include painting, illustration, fashion, and the plastic arts, but also reproducible and electronic media such as photography, cinema, and videogames. As material objects, the singular existence of the visual object denotes an economic as well as ontological significance. While site-specific installations of video and photography have evolved as evocative disciplines, such media tend toward the reproducible rather than the singular. The nature of electronic media reifies Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura as the visual object is divorced from the specificity and unique aura of the material object, with which it may at times be co-present.

         In any case, visual objects are given meaning through the act of interpretation. The study of visual culture involves a synthesis of a multiplicity of viewpoints and subjective locations – this is perhaps the genius of Cubism. The visual is itself a language with a developed syntax and mode of reception that are historically determined. When interpreted within different contexts, a visual work can be evaluated in entirely different ways with a consequent ascription of a greater or lesser degree of significance to the piece. In specific material contexts, certain visual images are ritually given a specific meaning intended to be commonly understood. Thus, a painting can be a religious object worthy of veneration, fashion often signals social status or function, and in the guise of urban signage a common pictorial language allows the public control of individual behaviour. The modes of reception for visual culture are informed by socio- historic forces, and in this context can be witnessed the categorisation of cultural forms into specific interpretive frameworks, such as popular or high art. Furthermore, visual objects can themselves be placed within a larger communicative
framework. Visual objects are often used in a new context or medium. This dynamic, most prevalent in advertising, serves to render the themes and modes of interpretation of the original visual object as themselves an object within a new visual frame. For example, a sequence from the film Gone With the Wind can be used in an advertisement for erectile dysfunction medication. Its existence highlights not only the visual juxtaposition between the old and the new, signalling a playful inversion of the position of the subject viewing the ad itself (they remain the old version of themselves until they purchase the product), but also signals a targeted interpellative gesture to those viewers who have an emotional attachment to the film, the majority of whom represent an older demographic.

         Visual culture encompasses not simply the visual, but rather incorporates a network of information, including non-visual media (music, words) as well as the entire operation (from Jacques Ranciere’s work) which informs the production of meaning. For this reason, visual culture necessarily represents an interdisciplinary engagement with culture.

the suffering of animals and the call to mercy

I feel obliged to address a column published by Rosie Dimanno in the January 28, 2010 edition of The Star. In the article "Skater Weir brushes off zealots in fox fur flap", Dimanno chastises animal rights protestors who are critical of figure skater Johnny Weir's use of animal fur in his costumes. It is clear that Mrs. Dimanno has a very particular opinion, and certainly she has the right to express her views. I am not condemning her ideology about the subject, but rather the painfully unprofessional journalism which she evidences throughout her piece. Principally, she condemns the views of animal rights activists without actually addressing any of their concerns.

For example, Dimanno quotes a letter from of one of the animal rights activists, and in the next sentence states "Animal rights zealots are parasites who feed off the peltry sins of celebrities in order to command media attention". There are two problems here. Firstly, she does not address the actual words expressed in the letter by the activist. Animals are indeed killed in order to provide decorative fur for clothing in a time when synthetic substitutes are available. The letter calls for a moral inquiry into the situation, and Dimanno responds by sidestepping the issue. Secondly, the use of the word "zealot" has clear negative connotations which will definitely colour the opinions of Star readers. Later in the article, she calls animal rights supporters "the righteous Cute 'n' Cuddly brigade" and "wackadoo crusaders".

While Dimanno might not care what animals go through, as a writer who publishes in a newspaper that ostensibly adheres to the traditions of journalism, she should be more engaged with her story. Instead of providing a substantive defence of the use of animal fur for clothing, she resorts to childish namecalling. In short, her language denotes a lack of critical inquiry into the issue which she purports to be writing about. Her column is no better than the numerous blogs which proliferate for free on the internet. Is The Star not supposed to adhere to a higher standard than uninformed punditry? If Dimanno's article is any indication of the journalistic principles in operation at The Star, then I cannot think of a reason for the continued existence of the paper beyond maintaining the salaries of incompetent writers.

For the record, I am an academic and a vegetarian who supports animal rights to the same degree that I am support human rights. If Dimanno wishes to engage in a more critical debate in future articles, perhaps I can suggest that she actually do some research instead of demonstrating her ignorance.

Read the original article here.

Pros and cons of a human cull

Re: 'Pros and cons of a human cull' (Editorial, Dec. 7)

I am one amongst many who are becoming increasingly concerned with the overpopulation of humans in the suburban and rural areas of the City of Hamilton.

The humans have been increasing in very large numbers over the past several years, and are now becoming bolder when it comes to approaching forests and, indeed, our creeks throughout the area.

In addition, the human population has in recent years become a bane to grazers who border the wooded areas and ravines throughout the city.

As a resident of Dundas living on a ravine, I have lost access to my shrubs and gardens to the ravenous land appetites of these intruders who only share if they are too stupid to put up a fence.

As many forest dwellers can attest, humans will turn almost anything into private property and the significant cost of the loss falls to the animals who live there.

As well, humans have devoured countless resources, leaving residents of the Earth with environments that are bare from the ground to the heights the humans can reach.

We animals of the forest try to keep our properties looking presentable year-round, but after the humans have satisfied their appetites at our expense, our homes take on a shabby appearance in spite of our continuing efforts to enhance their appearance.

I, and many others, call on the Hamilton Conservation Authority to do the right thing and help protect the land and sky and especially the forest animals from this ever-worsening situation.

The human population must be reduced -- now.

Sincerely,
A. Deer

PS: I apologize for the delay in responding to the article of December 7. As I am unable to change my word processing software to accommodate my cloven hoof, typing for me involves patience and frequent use of the delete key.

While the above letter is intended as satire, I cannot help but note the seriousness with which it was written. The author of the original words views life forms as disposable when they inconvenience him. It seems rational to him that the deer population should be controlled, as otherwise they threaten human activities such as driving and the appreciation of one particular style of landscaping. He spends countless hundreds of dollars per year on plants and he wants to appreciate their beauty. Fair enough, Mr. Moore.

However, the attitude on display by supporters of the cull is at the heart of the environmental problems which have begun to define the twenty-first century. Let me put aside for the moment the argument of the rights of the deer not to be killed. Let me also put aside the argument that in the grand scheme of things the deer have just as much right to eat Mr. Moore’s shrubs as he has in finding them beautiful. Human activity has historically been in a sense selfish. Every human activity involving the environment was made rational through property laws – if you owned something, then you could do what you like to it. However, the environmental consequences of such activity can no longer be ignored. Human habitation is increasing at the expense of non-human ecosystems.

Modern science suggests that the only way for humanity to survive and prosper is as a component of a larger, healthy biosphere. In order for such to occur, humans will need to live in symbiotic relationships with other life forms. The ideology that humans should be masters of the Earth for their benefit is currently resulting in a rate of species extinction not seen outside of unique catastrophes in the archaeological record. With this in mind, Mr. Moore, is it not logical for you to do a little research into which among the thousands of plant species not eaten by deer is attractive enough for you to plant in your garden. Surely, such diligence will avoid extending the financial and moral expense of “humanely” culling a deer population from those Hamilton taxpayers who thoroughly enjoy the co-habitation of the deer in the west end.

letter to the Hamilton Spectator

Michel de Certeau and Marcel Mauss

In The Practise of Everyday Life, de Certeau conceives of the Expert as a subject of modernity whose
rhetorical self-legitimation is a jurisdiction which comes to stand for the voice of the Other. The Expert,
whose competence is transmuted into social authority, is becoming commonplace. The common slips into
a rationalisation of exclusion and difference. Since the critic cannot find a truly objective place from which
to interpret common language, and since the interpretations which do exist are illusory, the fact remains that
there is no outside from which to exteriorise ‘alien-ness’ itself. As noted below in the survey of an article
by Marcel Mauss, the tradition of exclusion was one of a common and practical violence in the sense of it
being a practise of daily ritual. In order to legitimate itself, “every ‘strategic’ rationalisation seeks first of
all to distinguish its ‘own’ place” (36), from which it is able to define and authorise itself.

         And yet power is not static, for users and consumers of that power equally adapt to the circumstances
of engagement akin to gameplay. Perhaps the rhetorical flourishes of the 18th century, the century during
which the aristocratic institutions of Europe slowly transmuted into the bureaucratic processes and
institutions of the modern age as they hybridised with the capitalist classes, were correct to assume the
importance of fashionable discourse. Wit, de Certeau explains, is a game signalling a self-producing
adaptation to circumstance and the exchange and accumulation of social authority by means of a speech act.
Adaptations on the part of those who engage with language are crucial to the negotiation of power dynamics
within a cultural economy, and over time they come to determine ‘style’. De Certeau’s text allows the
conception of a geography of play within culture. Countercultural movements, positioned at the cracks and
fissures of dominant culture, involve a deconstructive gameplay in which users ‘bricolent’ a transformation
signalling a simultaneous critique of and inscription within a field of discourse which marginalised them.
The violence inherent to this struggle is assumed within the fabric and textures of daily life.

         Techniques of the Body by Marcel Mauss serves exemplary in this context. His methodological
strategy is to synthesise a few brief ethnographic surveys with examples from his personal life in order to
outline a system of knowledge which understands and categorises the motions of the body as enacted within
the field of culture. The body, informed as it is by the practise of everyday life, is “man’s first and most
natural technical object” (56). As the style of the movements of the body are the circumstantial adaptations
of an individual agent as articulated within the biological and cultural systems which circumscribe any
meaning elicited as a result of their expression, Mauss forwards the notion that psychology should be
introduced as an equal participant within a discursive tetrarchy that includes biology and sociology. To the
modern scholar raised on the critical discourse of poststructuralism, his study reads as the miscellaneous and
archeological remainder of colonialism, to abuse the term ‘remainder’ which Mauss himself invokes in
relation to the initial evaluation of his project to define the techniques of the body. After all, the collection,
sorting, and deployment of bodies for the mutual projects of understanding and industry served as the
intellectual foundation for colonialism.

         One could suggest that the instrumentalisation of the body, as a technology which ritualises
expression and produces and transmits knowledge and discourse, was begun, long before Marcel Mauss,
with the rationalisation of human consciousness by means of a tactical deployment of Cartesian philosophy
articulated through the culture and technologies related to empire. Indeed, for many critics of colonialism
the silently productive body of the colonised was the site of inscription from which the technique of empire
was itself articulated. The voices of the colonised are displaced, and through their silence Mauss can speak
as expert on their behalf.

          Mauss begins by suggesting that his earlier work signalled his rejection of the commonplace, but
quickly posits the body to itself be a technology of the common. In the second chapter of his essay, he
elaborates the principles of the classification of the techniques of the body. It is with this particular section
that the essay is most problematic while at the same time so very useful. When one reads of the many
examples Mauss provides which essentialise instances of a gesture into a common behavioural tendency
related to a characteristic, one can see in this methodology the articulation of power as conceived by de
Certeau: “The “proper” .... is also 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” (36). And
so we find in the sexual division of techniques of the body an explanation of how women and men hold their
thumbs differently, with the Freudian semantic composition of a man with his thumb on the outside and a
woman with her thumb inside. We also get a “biographical list of the techniques of the body” in the third
chapter, which examines the mundane techniques of the body that are common to all humans as they
progress through life; this section is a rhetorical device modelled on the riddle of the Sphinx.

          Interestingly enough, Mauss reflects the silence of his ethnographic subjects when on page sixty-five
he states under the category “Hygiene in the needs of nature” that “Here I could list innumerable facts for
you” and then proceeds to censor himself entirely. Here we get the incongruous, self-legitimating, and
transcendent category which functions akin to the ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ from Jorge Luis Borges’s
The Analytical Language of John Wilkins as interpreted by Foucault in his preface to Les Mots et les Choses. Much like the various fantastical classifications of the animals belonging to the Emperor, whose overlapping and exclusive categories signal not the power of reason but rather the power to reason, the category “Hygiene in the needs of nature” contains no content except for the authoring power by which the category itself came into existence. Mauss provides no techniques of expressing the production and containment of shit or urine, and we can understand the “hygiene” of this category to be self-censorship.

         These sections are critically useful for two reasons. First, they foster a critical discourse which examines how specific deployments and intersections of the biological, the psychic, and the social come to render meaning for the human bodies who invoke meaning through the expression of common and mundane
activities. More importantly however, the precise examples which Mauss uses serve to demonstrate the answer to a question fundamental to scholarly activity in general: has the object of a critical inquiry been altered by the enunciation which creates it and speaks in its name? De Certeau is explicit in defining this process, this power of knowledge, as the ability to “transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces” in order to “make knowledge possible and at the same time determine its characteristics” (36). It is
this violence which sits, sublimated but deterministic, at the mundane sites of the common and the everyday

Marcel Mauss: the body postcolonial

I must say that I felt as though I would be forced to perform an autopsy upon a corpse when first presented with a text as quaint and relatively antediluvial as Marcel Mauss’s 1934 essay 'Techniques of the Body'. Both Erika and myself had wanted to focus our attentions on Michel de Certeau’s work instead. Despite getting the short end of the stick, as it were, I will retain for Mauss’s text the sense of play and gamesmanship inspired by de Certeau. In this spirit, I wish to state that my initial reaction that he is unfashionably old remains with me. The various contemporary discourses invoking a politics and economics of identity can be seen to support my somewhat infantile claim that by talking about people of different national backgrounds in the manner in which he does, Mauss sounds like my grandfather. I may love him in the understanding that he is part of my extended family, but his stories bore me to tears, and thus my disapproval of the taste of his rhetoric. Due to my own psychological impulses, I tend toward playful subversion when confronted with an authority to whom I do not in all respects defer.

Mauss’s methodological strategy is to briefly interrogate disparate ethnographic surveys along with a few examples from his own personal life in order to outline a system of knowledge which understands and categorises the motions of the body as enacted within the field of culture. As the style of the movements of the body are the circumstantial adaptations of an individual agent as articulated within the biological and cultural systems which circumscribe any meaning elicited as a result of their expression, Mauss forwards the notion that psychology should be introduced as an equal participant within a discursive tetrarchy that includes biology and sociology. To the modern scholar raised on the critical discourse of poststructuralism, his study reads as the miscellaneous and archeological remainder of colonialism, to abuse the term ‘remainder’ which Mauss himself invokes in relation to the initial evaluation of his project to define the techniques of the body. After all, the collection, sorting, and deployment of bodies for the mutual projects of understanding and industry served as the intellectual foundation for colonialism. One could suggest that the project of instrumentalisation of the body, as a technology ritualising expression and producing and transmitting knowledge and discourse, was begun, long before Marcel Mauss, with the rationalisation of human consciousness by means of a tactical deployment of Cartesian philosophy articulated through the culture and technologies related to empire. Indeed, for many critics of colonialism the silently productive body of the colonised was the site of inscription from which the technique of empire was itself articulated.

Much like the habit and technique of mountain climbing, to invoke one of Mauss’s examples, and one which incidentally like the rest of the examples contextualized in his essay I would wish to see dehabiller – sans vêtements, the project of colonialism changed rapidly during the author’s lifetime. Like the colonial project, mountaineering was a technique inscribed with the silence of the voices of the indigenous whose bodies were shaped by their efforts. If, as he says on page fifty-six, that “there is no technique and no transmission in the absence of tradition”, I wish to know under whose tutelage and by whose name did Mauss come to understand the practise of sleeping while standing on a mountain. Gayatri Spivak in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason articulates the discourse of colonialism as including the silence of the colonised, and so I must remain frustrated in my desire to understand silence itself as an absence of tradition, for Mauss prefaces this example on page sixty-one with an important proximity which glosses the entire psychology and geography of empire: “The Masai can sleep on their feet. I have slept standing up in the mountains”.

This statement is a direct vindication of de Certeau’s conception in The Practise of Everyday Life, on page eight, of the Expert as person or discourse which, having “successfully submitted to [an] initiatory practise ... can, on questions foreign to his technical competence but not to the power he has acquired through it, pronounce with authority a discourse which is no longer a function of knowledge, but rather a function of the socio-economic order”. The Expert is a subject of modernity whose rhetorical self-legitimation is a quasi-poetry which comes to stand for the voice of the Other. The tradition of exclusion was one of a common and practical violence in the sense of it being a practise of daily ritual. And so we come to a slightly different evaluation of Mauss’s statement that education dominates every field of the body.

Unlike my attempt to stretch an outline of the contingencies inhabiting both mountaineering techniques and imperial discourse without breaking the original metaphor, the larger colonial project was a technique which became increasingly hidden. This is true despite de Certeau’s claim that power brings attention to itself by means of its very visibility. For power has learned to hide itself within the common. The discourse as well as the bodily articulations of colonialism became increasingly occluded after the Second World War, as the horrors of warfare allowed a critical dialogue which examined the consequences of an articulation of human reason which historicised the bodies of certain human subjects as always-already excluded, and whose gait, and here I wish to remind you of Mauss’s love of this particular turn of speech of the English, is traced in the expressions of the dominant. The techniques of the body related to consumerism have rendered silent new bodies – some made necessarily poor and others necessarily ill – within the order of things as we bear witness to the full expression of a sublimated colonial process.

Perhaps it is a bit cheeky to mention here that I am getting slightly ahead of myself and should return to the beginning.

Mauss begins his essay by suggesting that his earlier work signalled his rejection of the commonplace, but quickly posits the body to itself be a technology of the common. The body, informed as it is by the practise of everyday life, becomes the site where humanity articulates and emotes. Indeed, to further the quotation from page fifty-six, he states that the body is “man’s first and most natural technical object”. I do wish to call attention to the gendered use of language in this statement, as I will return to it momentarily.

He provides numerous examples to indicate and categorise the various techniques of the body, for example poise at the dinner table, the different modes of walking, jumping, and running, and the different styles of swimming. Of course, in relation to this latter practise, we must take note of Mauss’s reflection on page fifty-one that his “generation has witnessed a complete change in technique” by remembering, as Goethe does in his 1809 novel Elective Affinities, that swimming was a newly-discovered novelty more or less exclusive to the leisure classes only a few generations prior to Mauss’s birth. While it was known to be practised among other cultures such as the Ancient Egyptians, in early modern Europe swimming represented a new technique of articulating the body: a body moving through the water and made mobile by means of a ritualised articulation witch exploited the principles of buoyancy – I should note here as a rather purposeful and distracting aside that buoyancy was a law systematised by Archimedes, whose texts had been redeployed by scientific discourse in the early modern period. This understanding was historically contingent with the development of swimming as a technique. The change to which Mauss refers as happening within his lifetime is the development of the front crawl by John Arthur Trudgen, who named the technique after himself after copying it from Native Americans during a trip to South America. Out of this colonial history of mimicking and displacing the silenced subject comes a space for the articulation of political agency, as we can witness the social capital authored upon those men and women who undertake extreme and heroic articulations of the technique – one could gain the prestige of becoming, for example, the first woman to swim across all five Great Lakes (the CBC posted an article on August 25 of this year celebrating the second completion of this feat by a thirty-year old woman from Belleville).

In the second chapter of his essay, Mauss elaborates on the principles of the classification of the techniques of the body. It is with this particular section that I find the essay to be most problematic while at the same time so very useful. When one reads of the many examples Mauss provides which essentialise instances of a gesture into a common behavioural tendency related to a characteristic, one can see in this methodology the articulation of power as conceived by de Certeau on page thirty-six: “The “proper” .... is also 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”. And so we find in the sexual division of techniques of the body an explanation of how women and men hold their thumbs differently, with the Freudian semantic composition of a man with his thumb on the outside and a woman with her thumb inside. We also get a “biographical list of the techniques of the body” in the third chapter, which examines the mundane techniques of the body that are common to all humans as they progress through life; this section is a rhetorical device modelled on the riddle of the Sphinx. Interestingly enough, Mauss reflects the silence of his ethnographic subjects when on page sixty-five he states under the category “Hygiene in the needs of nature” that “Here I could list innumerable facts for you” and then proceeds to censor himself entirely.

Here we get the incongruous, self-legitimating, and transcendent category which functions akin to the ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ from Jorge Luis Borges’s The Analytical Language of John Wilkins as interpreted by Foucault in his preface to Les Mots et les Choses. Let me quote the first paragraph at length, as Foucault states that his book

"arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."

Please allow the joy experienced through Borges to signal your anxiety about the legitimacy of his taxonomy. I also hope to quel any worries you may have by stating that the category “Hygiene in the needs of nature” contains no content except for the authoring power by which the category itself came into existence. Mauss provides no techniques of expressing the production and containment of shit or urine, and we can understand the “hygiene” of this category to be self-censorship. While it might be a stretch a suggest that the hygiene of the colonial instinct at the heart of Mauss’s ethnographic project involved the erasure of human bodies excluded and silenced by the colonial body, I would like to Puckishly state that the individual who taught Mauss how to sleep while standing on a mountain probably had a technique of bodily excretions whose articulations were as informed by mountain life as were his patterns of sleeping. Indeed, these excretions were productive of more than culture for Mauss’s silenced Masai, for human and animal shit and urine were ingredients in the cement with which the Masai built their houses.

These sections are critically useful for two reasons. First, they do indeed foster a critical discourse which examines how specific deployments and intersections of the biological, the psychic, and the social come to render meaning for the human bodies who invoke meaning through the expression of common and mundane activities. More importantly however, the precise examples which Mauss uses serve to demonstrate the answer to a question fundamental to scholarly activity in general: has the object of a critical inquiry been altered by the enunciation which creates it and speaks in its name? On page thirty-six, De Certeau is explicit in defining this process, this power of knowledge, as the ability to “transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces” in order to “make knowledge possible and at the same time determine its characteristics”. It is this violence which sits dormant at the mundane sites of the common and the everyday.

Perhaps we can assume the Mauss essay itself to reflect the fact that scholarship is a technique of the body, and since Mauss describes education as dominating every field of the body, this articulation is quite literally specific to a body academic. If critical discourse is an activity which is as mundane as walking or swimming, and I mean by mundane the terms of their being activities which are bound to and articulated through the body, are there parallels in terms of the fashionability of their articulation? In this capacity and with the intention of provoking discussion, I propose a slight of hand wherein critical discourse is analogised to de Certeau’s conception of gameplay as fundamental to cultural expression. Scholarship is a tactical deployment which is not simply an organization of possible moves and responses but also a dialogue about itself, and thus we can define criticism and metacriticism respectively as scholarship about objects of study and objects of study which are scholars. Much as walking involves a particular habit which constitutes movement in pursuit of a destination or goal, scholarship involves a particularly self-reflexive gait in pursuit of the ordering of understanding.

I, for one, do not find tasteful Mauss’s particular fashion of rhetoric – neither the gender essentialism of the girl who can’t throw, nor the ethnographic tourism which invokes an 18th century travelogue of wondrous foreign people with faces on their chests combined with the quasi-science of a Ripley’s Believe it or Not exhibition – and thus I struggle with the fact that I can find his conclusions academically useful. Perhaps the rhetorical flourishes of the 18th century, the century during which the aristocratic institutions of Europe slowly transmuted into the bureaucratic processes and institutions of the modern age as it hybridised with the capitalist classes, were correct to assume the importance of fashionable discourse. Wit, as de Certeau explains, is a game signalling a self-producing adaptation to circumstance and the exchange and accumulation of social authority by means of a speech act. Scholarship is a self-producing institution which prides itself on a search for truth and the betterment of the human condition and justifies its existence by means of speech acts which render to academics institutional and social authority, and it is possible in this capacity to witness remuneration by means of public funding and private wealth for this properly ethical project. Critical discourses of identity politics, the ethics of science and human inquiry, and cultural relativism are flourishing in a postmodernity during which the trend of increasing corporatisation and privatisation of the academy, and this reality seems to reflect the domination of consumer activities over the critical articulations which respond to them.

Can we therefore interpret the changes in scholarship over the years to be any more politically progressive in terms of achieving the goals of academia (new SSHRC funding is increasingly tied to business-related research projects, as the institutional and intellectual fundamentals of economics are themselves increasingly under critical suspicion), than is walking (people walk much less than they did in the past, and for different reasons) or learning how to hunt for food (once the communal ritual of the hunt and the harvest, now the private ritual, enacted in a public space, of the packaged meat and processed meal made hygienic by the supermarket)?

         I desire for a politics within this space which we have designated as confession class and so I ask the following in conclusion: is the body of the animal, a body silenced as it is articulated by the technologies and techniques of contemporary agricultural practise which render it fit for the market, is this body the final and most brutal articulation of the colonial?