text:
Metaphor wants to be…
'[...] metaphors work to change people's minds. Orators have known this since Demosthenes. [...] But there's precious little evidence that they tell you what people think. [...] And in any case, words aren't meanings. As any really good spy knows, a word is a code that stands for something else. If you take the code at face value then you've fallen for the trick.' (Daniel Soar, "The Bourne Analogy").
Tao Lin's recent novel Taipei (2013) is a fictional document of life in our current digital culture. The protagonist, Paul — who is loosely based on the author — is numb from his always turned on digitally mediated life, and throughout the novel increases his recreational drug taking as a kind of compensation: the chemical highs and trips are the experiential counterpoint to the mundanity of what once seemed otherworldly — his online encounters. In the novel online interactions are not distinguished from real life ones, they are all real, and so Paul's digital malaise is also his embodied depressive mindset. The apotheosis of both these highs and lows is experienced by Paul, and his then girlfriend Erin, on a trip to visit Paul's parents in Taipei. There the hyper-digital displays of the city — 'lighted signs [...] animated and repeating like GIF files, attached to every building' (166) — launch some of the more explicit mediations on digital culture in the novel:
Paul asked [Erin] if she could think of a newer word for "computer" than "computer," which seemed outdated and, in still being used, suspicious in some way, like maybe the word itself was intelligent and had manipulated culture in its favor, perpetuating its usage (167).
Here Paul intimates a sense that language is elusive, that it is sentient, and that, in the words of Daniel Soar quoted above as an epitaph, it tricks us. It seems to matter that in this extract from Taipei the word 'computer' is conflated with a sense of the object 'computer'. The word, in being 'intelligent', has somehow taken on the quality of the thing it denotes — a potentially malevolent agency. The history of computing is one of people and things: computers were first the women who calculated ballistics trajectories during the Second World War, whose actions became the template for modern automated programming. The computer, as an object, is also-always a metaphor of a human-machine relation. The name for the machine asserts a likeness between the automated mechanisms of computing and the physical and mental labour of the first human 'computers'. Thinking of computing as a substantiated metaphor for a human-machine interaction pervades the way we talk about digital culture. Most particularly in the way we think of computers as sentient — however casually. We often speak of computers as acting independently from our commands, and frequently we think of them 'wanting' things, 'manipulating' culture, or ourselves.
Pre-electronic binary code: the history of computing offers us metaphors for human-machine interaction which pervade the way we talk about digital culture today
[Image by Erik Wilde under a CC BY-SA license]
Julie E. Cohen, in her 2012 book Configuring the Networked Self, describes the way the misplaced metaphor of human-computer and machine-computer has permeated utopian views of digitally mediated life:
Advocates of information-as-freedom initially envisioned the Internet as a seamless and fundamentally democratic web of information [...]. That vision is encapsulated in Stewart Brand's memorable aphorism "Information wants to be free." [...] Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that objects with mass present in the earth's gravitational field "want" to fall to the ground. (8)
Cohen's sharp undercutting of Brand's aphorism points us toward the way the metaphor of computing is also an anthropomorphisation. The metaphor implicates a human desire in machine action. This linguistic slipperiness filters through discussion of computing at all levels. In particular the field of software studies — concerned with theorising code and programming as praxis and thing — contains at its core a debate on the complexity of considering code in a language which will always metaphorise, or allegorise. Responding to an article of Alexander R. Galloway's titled "Language Wants to Be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology", Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that Galloway's stance against a kind of 'anthropomorphization' of code studies (his assertion that as an executable language code is 'against interpretation') is impossible within a discourse of critical theory. Chun argues, 'to what extent, however, can source code be understood outside of anthropomorphization? [...] (The inevitability of this anthropomorphization is arguably evident in the title of Galloway's article: "Language Wants to Be Overlooked" [emphasis added].)' (Chun 305).
In her critique of Galloway's approach Wendy Chun asserts that it is not possible to extract the metaphor from the material, that they are importantly and intrinsically linked.[1] For Julie E. Cohen the relationship between metaphor and digital culture-as-it-is-lived is a problematic tie that potentially damages legal and constitutional understanding of user rights. Cohen convincingly argues that a term such as 'cyberspace', which remains inextricable from its fictional and virtual connotations, does not transition into legal language successfully; in part because the word itself is a metaphor, premised on an imagined reality rather than 'the situated, embodied beings who inhabit it' (Cohen 3).
And yet Cohen's writing itself demonstrates the tenacious substance of metaphoric language, using extended exposition of metaphors as a means to think more materially about the effects of legal and digital protocol and action. In the following extract from Configuring the Networked Self, Cohen is winding down a discussion of the difficulty of forming actual policy out of freedom versus control debates surrounding digital culture. Throughout the discussion Cohen has emphasised the way that both sides of the debate are unable to substantiate their rhetoric with embodied user practice; instead Cohen identifies a language that defers specific policy aims.[2] Cohen's own use of metaphor in this section — 'objections to control fuel calls [...]', 'darknets' (the latter in inverted commas) — is made to mean something grounded, through a kind of allegorical framework. I am not suggesting that allegory materialises metaphor — allegory functioning in part as itself an extended metaphor — but it does contextualise metaphor.
How tenacious is metaphoric language? The persistence of computational metaphors in understanding digital culture could harm legal and constitutional understandings of user rights
[Image by Christian under a CC BY-NC-ND license]
This is exemplified in Cohen's description of the ways US policy discussions regarding code, rights and privacy of the subject are bound to a kind of imaginary, and demonstrate great difficulty in becoming concrete:
Policy debates have a circular, self-referential quality. Allegations of lawlessness bolster the perceived need for control, and objections to control fuel calls for increased openness. That is no accident; rigidity and license historically have maintained a curious symbiosis. In the 1920s, Prohibition fueled the rise of Al Capone; today, privately deputized copyright cops and draconian technical protection systems spur the emergence of uncontrolled "darknets." In science fiction, technocratic, rule-bound civilizations spawn "edge cities" marked by their comparative heterogeneity and near imperviousness to externally imposed authority. These cities are patterned on the favelas and shantytowns that both sap and sustain the world's emerging megacities. The pattern suggests an implicit acknowledgment that each half of the freedom/control binary contains and requires the other (9-10).
I quote this passage at length in order to get at the way in which the 'self-referential nature' of policy discussion is here explained through a conceptual, and specifically literary, framing. Technology is always both imagined and built: this seems obvious, but it justifies reiteration because the material operations of technology are always metaphorically considered just as they are concretely manifest. The perilous circumstance this creates is played on in Cohen's writing as she critiques constitutional policy that repeatedly cannot get at the embodied subject that uses digital technology; thwarted by the writing and rewriting of debate. In Cohen's words this real situation is like the science fiction that is always-already seemingly like the real technology. Whether William Gibson's 'cyberspace', a programmer's speculative coding, or a lawyer's articulation of copyright, there is no easy way to break apart the relationship between the imaginary and the actual of technoculture.
Perhaps then what is called for is an explosion of the metaphors that pervade contemporary digital culture. To, so to speak, push metaphors until they give way; to generate critical discourse that tests the limits of metaphors, in an effort to see what pretext they may yield for our daily digital interactions. The articles in this issue all engage with exactly this kind of discourse. In Sophie Jones' "The Electronic Heart", the history of computing as one of women's labour is used to reconfigure the metaphor of a computer as an 'electronic brain'; instead asking whether cultural anxieties about computer-simulated emotion are linked to the naturalization of women's affective labour. In "An Ontology of Everything on the Face of the Earth", Daniel Rourke also considers computers as a sentient metaphor: uncovering an uncanny symbiosis between what a computer wants and what a human can effect with computing, through a critical dissection of the biocybernetic leeching of John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing. Finally, in "The Metaphorics of Virtual Depth", Rob Gallagher uses Marcel Proust's treatment of novelistic spacetime to generate a critical discourse on spatial and perspectival metaphor in virtual game environments. All these articles put into play an academic approach to metaphors of computing that dig up and pull out the stuff in between language and machine. In his introduction to Understanding Digital Humanities David M. Berry has argued for such an approach: [what is needed is a] 'critical understanding of the literature of the digital, and through that [to] develop a shared culture through a form of Bildung' (8).
A wheel in the sky: Neil Blomkamp's futuristic L.A. plays on the territorial paranoia of the U.S. over alien invasion and dystopian metaphors of digitally-mediated environments
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]
I am writing this article a day after seeing Neill Blomkamp's film Elysium (2013). Reading Cohen's assertion regarding the cyclical nature of US digital rights policy debates on control and freedom, her allegory with science fiction seems entirely pertinent. Elysium is set in 2154; the earth is overpopulated, under-resourced, and a global elite have escaped to a man-made (and machine-made) world on a spaceship, 'Elysium'. Manufacturing for Elysium continues on earth where the population, ravaged by illness, dreams of escaping to Elysium to be cured in "Med-Pods". The movie focuses on the slums of near future L.A. and — perhaps unsurprisingly given Blomkamp's last film District 9 (2009) — plays on the real territorial paranoia of the U.S. over alien invasion: that the favelas of Central and South America, and the political structures they embody, are always threatening ascension. In Elysium the "edge city" is the whole world, and the technocratic power base is a spaceship garden, circling the earth's orbit. 'Elysium' is a green and white paradise; a techno-civic environment in which humans and nature are equally managed, and manicured. 'Elysium', visually, looks a lot like Disney's Epcot theme park — which brings me back to where I started. In Tao Lin's Taipei Paul's disillusionment with technology is in part with its failure to be as he imagined, and his imagination was informed by the Disney-fied future of Epcot. In Taipei:
Paul stared at the lighted signs, some of which were animated and repeated like GIF files, attached to almost every building to face oncoming traffic [...] and sleepily thought how technology was no longer the source of wonderment and possibility it had been when, for example, he learned as a child at Epcot Center [...] that families of three, with one or two robot dogs and one maid, would live in self-sustaining, underwater, glass spheres by something like 2004 or 2008 (166).
Thinking through the metaphor of Elysium has me thinking toward the fiction of Epcot (via Tao Lin's book). The metaphor-come-allegories at work here are at remove from my digitally mediated, embodied reality, but they seep through nonetheless. Rather than only look for the concrete reality that drives the metaphor, why not also engage with the messiness of the metaphor; its potential disjunction with technology as it is lived, and its persistent presence regardless.
CITATION: Zara Dinnen, "Digital Metaphors: Editor's Introduction," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 6 (2013): n. pag. Web. 4 December 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.6.04
[1] Here I am near N. Katherine Hayles' formulation of computers as 'material metaphors': machines with the potential to 'transform the metaphoric network structuring the relation of word to world' (Writing Machines 23). Despite the similar vocabulary I do not intend to invoke Hayles, in part because her formulation relies on the kind of metaphoric rendering of computation that is itself up for discussion in the articles here.
[2] This rhetoric has been exemplified in the UK government's response to The Guardian's publication of the Snowden files; they have been unable to find an enforceable balance between agendas to advocate privacy, encourage freedom, and protect both. The catch-all, give no specifics approach is articulated precisely (unwittingly, perhaps?) in a piece by Nick Clegg for The Guardian, "I share the concerns about David Miranda's detention" <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/david-miranda-rights-security>
Works cited:
Berry, David M. "Introduction." Understanding Digital Humanities. Ed. David M. Berry. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 1-20.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. "On "Sourcery," or Code as Fetish." Configurations 16.3 (Fall 2008): 299-324. Project Muse. Web. 16 February 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/con.0.0064
Clegg, Nick. "I share the concerns about David Miranda's detention." The Guardian. Guardian Media Group, 23 August 2013. Web. 24 August 2013.
Cohen, Julie E. Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code and the Play of Everyday Practice. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Author's Personal Website. Web. 24 August 2013. Pdf.
District 9. Dir. Neill Blomkamp. TriStar Pictures. 2009.
Elysium. Dir. Neill Blomkamp. TriStar Pictures. 2013.
Galloway, Alexander R. "Language Wants To Be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology." Journal of Visual Culture 5 (2006): 315-331. Sage. Web. 16 February 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1470412906070519.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002. Print.
Lin, Tao. Taipei. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2013.
Soar, Daniel. "The Bourne Analogy" (Shortcuts). London Review of Books. 33.13 (2011): 22. London Review of Books. Web. 24 August 2013.
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John Carpenter's 1982 film, The Thing, is a claustrophobic sci-fi thriller, exhibiting many hallmarks of the horror genre. The film depicts a sinister turn for matter, where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale and beyond. In The Thing we watch as an alien force terrorises an isolated Antarctic outpost. The creature exhibits an awesome ability to imitate, devouring any creature it comes across before giving birth to an exact copy in a burst of blood and protoplasm. The Thing copies cell by cell and its process is so perfect – at every level of replication – that the resultant simulacrum speaks, acts and even thinks like the original. The Thing is so relentless, its copies so perfect, that the outpost's Doctor, Blair, is sent mad at the implications:
Blair: If a cell gets out it could imitate everything on the face of the Earth… and it's not gonna stop!!!
Based on John W. Campbell's 1938 novella, Who Goes There?, Carpenter's film revisits a gothic trope, as numerous in its incarnations as are the forms it is capable of taking. In Campbell's original novella, the biologically impure is co-inhabited by a different type of infection: an infection of the Antarctic inhabitants' inner lives. Plucked from an icy grave, The Thing sits, frozen solid, in a dark corner of the outpost, drip dripping towards re-animation. Before its cells begin their interstitial jump from alien to earthly biology, it is the dreams of the men that become infected:
'So far the only thing you have said this thing gave off that was catching was dreams. I'll go so far as to admit that.'
An impish, slightly malignant grin crossed the little man's seamed face.
'I had some, too. So. It's dream-infectious. No doubt an exceedingly dangerous malady.' (Campbell)
The Thing's voracious drive to consume and imitate living beings calls to mind Freud's uncanny: the dreadful creeping horror that dwells between homely and unhomely. According to Ernst Jentsch, whose work Freud references in his study, the uncanny is kindled, 'when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one' (Grenville 233).
A body in the act of becoming: John W. Campbell's novella depicts The Thing as a monstrous body that "swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world"
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]
In the original novella, The Thing is condensed as much from the minds of the men, as from its own horrific, defrosting bulk. A slowly surfacing nightmare that acts to transform alien matter into earthly biology also has the effect of transferring the inner, mental lives of the men, into the resultant condensation. John W. Campbell had no doubts that The Thing could become viscous, mortal human flesh, but in order to truly imitate its prey, the creature must infect and steal inner life too, pulling ghosts, kicking and screaming, out of their biological machines.
As a gothic figure, Campbell's Thing disrupts the stable and integral vision of human being, of self-same bodies housing 'unitary and securely bounded' (Hurley 3) subjectivities, identical and extensive through time. John W. Campbell's characters confront their anguish at being embodied: their nightmares are literally made flesh. As Kelly Hurley reminds us in her study on The Gothic Body, Mikhail Bakhtin noted:
The grotesque body… is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world (Hurley 28).
Each clone's otherness is an uncanny exposure of the abject relationship we endure with ourselves as vicarious, fragmented, entropic forms.
In the 44 years between the novella and John Carpenter's 1982 film, there were many poor clones of The Thing depicted in cinema. Films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and, It Came from Outer Space (1953) are replete with alien dopplegangers, abject human forms, cast away very much as in gothic tradition. Howard Hawk's film, The Thing from Another World (1951), the first to explicitly translate Who Goes There?, completely disfigures Campbell's story. The resultant monster is nothing more than, what one character calls, 'an intellectual carrot', grown from alien cells in a laboratory. The film is worth considering though for its Cold War undertones. Recast in an Arctic military base, Hawk's Thing is an isolated monster set against a small, well organised army of cooperative men. Faced with disaster the men group together, fighting for a greater good than each of them alone represents.
Cinematic clones of The Thing: 1950s American Science Fiction films like It Came From Outer Space and Invasion of the Body Snatchers are replete with alien doppelgangers and abject human forms
[Images used under fair dealings provisions]
The metaphor of discrete cells coordinating into autopoeitic organisms, does not extend to the inhabitants of the isolated Antarctic outpost in the original short story, nor in the 1982 version. Rather than unite against their foe, they begin to turn on each other, never knowing who might be The Thing. In a series of enactments of game-theory, the characters do piece together a collective comprehension: that if The Thing is to eventually imitate 'everything on the face of the Earth' it must not show itself now, lest the remaining humans group together and destroy it. The Thing's alien biology calls to mind the original design of the internet, intended, according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri:
…to withstand military attack. Since it has no center and almost any portion can operate as an autonomous whole, the network can continue to function even when part of it has been destroyed. The same design element that ensures survival, the decentralisation, is also what makes control of the network so difficult (Hardt and Negri 299).
The novella Who Goes There? and the film, The Thing, sit either side of a pivotal era in the advancement of information technology. How a life form or a biological computer work is immaterial to the behaviours they present to an observer. John Carpenter's The Thing explores the fulfilment of Alan Turing's 'Imitation Game.' Moving away from Campbell's original appeal to telepathy and a mind/body split, the materialist vision of Carpenter's film confronts us with a more fundamental horror. That every part of us is reducible to every other.
In her book Refiguring Life, Evelyn Fox Keller argues that:
As a consequence of the technological and conceptual transformations we have witnessed in the last three decades, the body itself has been irrevocably transformed… The body of modern biology, like the DNA molecule – and also like the modern corporate or political body – has become just another part of an informational network, now machine, now message, always ready for exchange, each for the other (Keller 117–118).
Meanwhile, eschewing Martin Heidegger's definition of a thing (in which objects are brought out of the background of existence through human use), Bill Brown marks the emergence of things through the encounter:
As they circulate through our lives… we look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us… (Brown 4).
A thing or an object? Bill Brown argues that we look through objects but are confronted by things
[Image by Marc Wathieu under a CC BY-NC-ND license]
John Carpenter's portrayal of The Thing enacts this encounter, when the human figure erupts with vicious alien teeth, or the Antarctic camp's huskys sprout voluminous tentacles which writhe towards their next victim. Once the worldly relations we expect to contribute to our being in the world are interrupted, all matter appears thingly, most especially our own.
In a typically unsubtle scene from the film (click here to watch the scene on YouTube) the outpost's Doctor, Blair, watches a crude simulation on his dusty computer. It depicts 'thing' cells devouring 'organic' cells, leaving in place 'thingly' imitations. This process occurs at a cellular level and is so complete throughout each organism that emergent properties are also replicated. Not only does the Norris clone look, smell and act like Norris, it also thinks it is Norris. Out of a cellular perfect Norris brain, whatever it is made out of, emerges a thinking Norris that thinks it is Norris. After imitating Norris so perfectly, to such precise detail that even his faulty heart is replicated, that even his heart-attack and death is enacted by The Thingly Norris, only then does The Thing lash out as the defibrillators are coming down to meet it (click here to watch the scene on YouTube). Whereas Campbell's 1938 vision of The Thing is rooted in the mind/body dualistic split, John Carpenter's 1982 Thing figures the possibility of an encounter between two equally abject materialities.
The defensive reaction of Norris' cadaver is an exemplification of this. The Thing, is a biological Turing machine, capable of imitating pretty much anything, so long as its programme allows it. The Thing was never programmed to do anything other than be Norris. Is it perhaps too much of a liberty to suggest, therefore, that The Thing's most terrifying, absolute other quality, comes from its inability to err? As The Thing tears through every organism in sight its eventual form is hidden behind a veil of blood, guts and mutating body parts readily associated with imperfection. But these depictions of cruel, cancerous blobs and swelling sacks of gaseous, oozing human matter are actually manifestations of a perfection being perfected; a process with one outcome: absolute substitution.
Does the Darth Vader A.I. Network think? It is impossible to distinguish something ontologically novel, with a behaviour which has been programmed to appear as if it imitates thought
[Image by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE under a CC BY-NC-ND license]
In his infamous 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing introduced the notion that a computer is nothing more than a machine that functions by pretending to be other machines. (Turing) Asking the question 'can machines think?' Turing replaced the ambiguity of 'thought' and 'intelligence' with imitation, proposing a test that avoided the need to know what was going on inside a machine, in favour of merely experiencing its affects. In a lecture entitled 'Can Digital Computers Think?', Turing expounds his point:
It is not difficult to design machines whose behaviour appears quite random to anyone who does not know the details of their construction. Naturally enough the inclusion of this random element, whichever technique is used, does not solve our main problem, how to programme a machine to imitate a brain, or as we might say more briefly, if less accurately, to think. But it gives us some indication of what the process will be like. We must not always expect to know what the computer is going to do. We should be pleased when the machine surprises us, in rather the same way as one is pleased when a pupil does something which he had not been explicitly taught to do (Shieber 114–115).
The mutability of Earthly life, its ability to err, to stumble upon novel strategies through random, blind chance, represents its most innate capacity. Biological life changes by mutation, passing those mutations on to the next generation, ad infinitum. The Thing, in opposition to this, can only become its other absolutely. There is no room for error, for mutation, for change or evolution: instead, The Thingly cadaver of Norris must protect its otherness in the only way it knows how: by transforming itself into a defensive form previously programmed and stored in its protoplasm. In terms of creativity it cannot escape its programming. Turing's lecture hints at a further unsettling conclusion we can make: that even though novel behaviour may be consistent with error, from appearances alone it is impossible to distinguish something ontologically novel, with a behaviour which has been programmed to appear as such. The Thing is a Universal Turing Machine, a post-digital plasma, encoded with the biological ticker-tape of a thousand alien worlds. Put more simply, in the words of protagonist John MacReady:
MacReady: Somebody in this camp ain't what he appears to be. [my emphasis]
The "Gothicity" of matter? The digital metaphor of the Thing reveals that through imitation computers confer humanity upon us
[Image by Julio Martínez under a CC BY-NC-ND license]
The characters in The Thing, then, are torn between two equally horrifying worlds. In one, the alien Thing clones its hosts cell by cell until, like The Ship of Theseus, an entirely different, but identical world remains. In the other, human being, in all its perceived intricacy, is the result of a billion years of noisy, messy, mutation. The figure of The Thing exposes what Kelly Hurley calls, the 'gothicity' of all matter. (Hurley 33) Its parts remain undifferentiated even as they are exchanged, piece by piece, for our own. As Marie Mulvey-Roberts notes in her essay 'A Spook Ride on Film': 'As a manifestation of both the uncanny and the abject, the monstrous body represents a horror of the indifferentiation of the now defamiliarised human. Monstrosity is also a fear of oneself, particularly of the alienation within the self' (Mulvey-Roberts 83).
Confronted with the universality of The Thing – a paradigm of digital matter – we stumble upon a most profound realisation. As digital computers and Thingly humans continue to interface, the materiality of the one has already been consummated as the monstrosity of the other. It is we who are condensed from contradictory categorical elements. It is this world which has always already been Thingly, full of spatio-temporally continuous monstrosities; of interchangeable imitations. Ignoring what lurks beneath the surface veneer of your erroneous skin it is now the computer that determines whether or not you are human. For imitation, indeed, is the sincerest form of flattery.
CITATION: Daniel Rourke, "An Ontology of Everything on the Face of the Earth," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 6 (2013) ("Digital Metaphors" Special Issue): n. pag. Web. 4 December 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.6.02
Works Cited:
Brown, Bill. "Thing Theory." Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 1–22. Print.
Campbell, John W. Who Goes There. Hachette UK, 2011. Print.
Grenville, Bruce. The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture. arsenal pulp press, 2002. Print.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. New Ed. Harvard University Press, 2001. Print.
Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body : Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Print.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. Refiguring Life : Metaphors of Twentieth-century Biology. [S.l.]: Columbia Univ Press, 1996. Print.
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. "'A Spook Ride on Film': Carpenter and the Gothic." The Cinema Of John Carpenter: The Technique Of Terror. Ed. Ian Conrich & David Woods. Wallflower Press, 2004. 78–90. Print.
Shieber, Stuart. The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence. MIT Press, 2004. Print.
Turing, A. M. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Mind 59.236 (1950): 433–460. Print. New Series. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433
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'I can feel it'. HAL 9000, the supercomputer at the centre of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), makes this claim to emotional sensitivity moments before its higher functions are terminated by astronaut Dave Bowman, the sole surviving human aboard the Discovery spaceship. HAL's next words, a rendition of the love song 'Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)' slowed almost to the point of incomprehension, are the machine's last [1]. This uncannily poignant swansong leaves the question of whether HAL can really 'feel it' unresolved. The computer's automatic repetition of the song — its earliest memory — perhaps proves that its apparent emotional life was always a trick of programming. Yet the tonal shift from HAL's emotive plea for mercy to its oblivious serenade suggests, contradictorily, that something has changed in this moment. The question lingers: has Bowman shut down a faulty computer or lobotomized a sentient machine?
Critical responses to this problem have tended to presume that HAL's emotional authenticity is a question of the computer's technical capability. That is to say, HAL either cares because it can feel emotion or it only seems to care because it cannot truly feel anything. Yet, as Arlie Russell Hochschild points out in her 1983 sociological study The Managed Heart, possessing the capacity to feel does not necessarily mean one's emotion is authentic [2]. The flight attendants studied by Hochschild are trained to present a pleasant and calm exterior to passengers even if they feel angry, upset or exhausted. Early computers were often described as 'electronic brains' for their ability to process information, but the metaphor of an 'electronic heart' is at least as apt for HAL, a machine that provides affective as well as informational support [3].
The electronic heart: the supercomputer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey reminds us of the cost of emotional labour
[Image by Darren Pierson under a CC BY-NC-SA license]
In The Managed Heart Hochschild acknowledges that emotion management is part of everyday life; people regularly speak of tailoring feelings to the situation at hand. Emotional labour, for Hochschild, involves the 'transmutation' of this private system of managing feelings into the world of work—a transmutation evident, for example, in the shift from the imperative to smile at a relative in order to be polite to the imperative to smile at a customer in order to get paid (19). If HAL's claim that it can 'feel it' highlights the problem of the computer's emotional authenticity, this question is no less relevant to 2001's first words, spoken by a female lift operator: 'Here you are, sir.' Does the lift operator really mean her performance of polite deference? When asked by a BBC newsreader whether he believes HAL has 'genuine emotions', Bowman answers:
Well he acts like he has genuine emotions. Of course, he's programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him. But as to whether or not he has real feelings, that's something I don't think anyone can truthfully answer.
An airline passenger quoted by Hochschild echoes Bowman's comment:
When you see them receiving passengers with that big smile, I don't think it means anything. They have to do that. It's part of the job. But now if you get into a conversation with a flight attendant … well … no … I guess they have to do that too (89).
To view HAL through the lens of emotional labour is to grasp 2001's sustained interest in the subversive intimacy of women and machines. Feminist and queer critiques of 2001 have usually agreed that the film minimises women, noting that the few female characters present in its early scenes disappear once the Jupiter mission commences [4]. Yet it is not enough to simply state that women are part of the background in 2001, for it is a film fascinated by how 'the background' is constituted through the devaluation of certain kinds of people and certain kinds of work. In positioning HAL as a machine that automates specifically female jobs, 2001 registers the way the emotional work traditionally carried out by women is naturalised.
It is well-known that an early draft of the 2001 script gendered the computer female — HAL was originally to be named Athena, after the Greek goddess. The gendering of HAL as male in the final film has usually been discussed as a directorial decision, but it can also be considered diegetically as a function of the characters' use of male pronouns; the astronauts want their computer to be male. Imagining HAL as a man, Bowman and Poole overlook the continuity between the work carried out by the computer and the jobs performed by 2001's female service workers. This is the first step towards the world without women inaugurated in the film's closing image: the autonomous foetal Star Child, for whom the work of care is redundant. Women with tools are a powerful presence in the first part of the film. The flight attendant on Dr. Floyd's space shuttle is able to walk around the zero-gravity environment, and even to walk vertically up a wall, because her special 'grip shoes' root her to the floor. Dr. Floyd, who does not have these shoes, must stay in his seat. The disparity between the flight attendant's freedom to move and Dr. Floyd's constriction is dramatised in the scene in which she moves to catch his pen, which has made its way out of the scientist's breast pocket and is floating around the cabin as he sleeps in his seat. In its moment of capture by the flight attendant's hands, the pen is a phallic visual pun that symbolises the threat women with machines pose to masculinist power.
Zero-gravity: the flight attendant's freedom to move using grip shoes emphasises Dr Floyd's physical constriction in this scene dramatising women's threat to male authority
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]
Dr. Floyd's arrival at the space station is mediated by a series of women, each in charge of a different aspect of the station's vast technological apparatus. The lift operator takes Dr. Floyd into the space station, pressing unseen buttons to ensure his smooth entry. Upon arrival he is greeted by a receptionist, whose friendly professional smile is visible in a profile shot before she directs Dr. Floyd and his companion into an authorisation booth. As Dr. Floyd moves into the booth the receptionist's fingers can be seen selecting the language of the authorisation video. The close-up suggests that the receptionist's control of the communications environment is undercover; the desk hides her hands and she says nothing to indicate that she is pressing a button marked 'English'. In a video-phone conversation with his young daughter Dr. Floyd discourages her birthday request for a telephone, betraying his unease at the extent to which women are controlling the technology that encases him.
Women in control: the close-up shot of the receptionist's fingers selecting English as the language of the authorisation video emphasises Dr Floyd's powerlessness in his new technologised environment
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]
All the service staff of the space station are American women, and all the film's American women are service staff. By contrast, of the four Soviet professionals Dr. Floyd meets, three are female and one male. It is a Soviet woman, Elena, who dilutes the latent hostility in her colleague Dmitri's interrogation of Dr. Floyd and diverts attention to less political matters. Unlike the labour of the lift operator, flight attendant and receptionist, Elena's emotion work takes place during an impromptu meeting and seems more social than professional. Thus two modes of emotional labour — one social, the other work-based — are demarcated along national lines. Later, both modes of feminised labour are united in HAL, a machine that knows no distinction between work and leisure. The distinction between private emotion management and emotion work seems to break down at points in Hochschild's thesis, particularly when she acknowledges that women's labour is often situated outside the wage relation. She writes:
Women tend to manage feeling more because in general they depend on men for money, and one of the various ways of repaying their debt is to do extra emotion work – especially emotion work that affirms, enhances, and celebrates the well-being and status of others (165, italics in original).
If the distinction between leisure and work is blurred in the figure of Elena, the Discovery itself is an extreme example of the post-Fordist erosion of leisure time described by the political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In Multitude (2004), they observe that in the case of affective labour, 'work time tends to expand to the entire time of life' (111). In this way, the 'double day' historically undertaken by working mothers has been generalised to encompass other kinds of labouring subjects in the post-industrial era. 2001 emblematises this shift. Despite their advanced computer, the astronauts are always at work.
Gendering hardware and programming: the term "computer" was originally used to refer to the women who performed ballistics calculations during WWII and ENIAC extended this gendered divsion of labour
[Images (from left to right) by Revol Web under a CC BY-SA license and Brandon Daniel under a CC BY-SA license]
In the second part of the film, HAL takes on all the jobs that were performed by women. Like the receptionist, it enables the astronauts' communication with relatives on Earth, playing Bowman a birthday video message from his parents. Like the lift operator, it controls the physical environment of the ship to ensure maximum comfort for the astronauts, adjusting Bowman's headrest on request. Like Elena, it reassures the men around it, wishing Dave a happy birthday and commending his sketches: 'That's a very nice rendering, Dave. I think you've improved a great deal.' Just as HAL's role on the Discovery parallels the 'invisible' work traditionally done by women, so the computer, as mythological object, conceals women's significance in its own development. The term 'computer' once referred to the women who performed ballistics calculations during World War II, working alongside the engineers developing the machines that would replace them. As Jennifer Light outlines in her 1999 article "When Computers Were Women", the term did not come to denote a machine until after 1945, when some of the female computers became the first programmers. The development of the early computer known as the ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) involved a gendered division of labour — in Light's terms, 'designing hardware was a man's job; programming was a woman's job' (469).
Electronic brains: 1950s cultural representations of computer-as-woman (threatening to replace women's clerical tasks) predate its gendering as male and subsequent depiction as machinic
[Image by Charis Tsevis under a CC BY-NC-ND license]
Although ENIAC's female programmers needed expertise in mathematics in order to do their work, programming was not acknowledged as a skilled form of labour until the job was masculinized. Light explains:
Newspaper accounts characterize ENIAC's ability to perform tasks as "intelligent" but the women doing the same computing tasks did not receive similar acclaim. While the media publicly hailed hardware designers as having "fathered" the machine, they did not mention women's contributions (473).
The terminological shift from computer-as-woman to computer-as-machine is reflected in the ambiguous gendering of early computers in the 1950s and 1960s. While numerous media reports refer to the 'electronic brain' with male pronouns, the film Desk Set (1957) features a computer nicknamed 'Emmy' that threatens to replace the women researchers at a television company. These media representations feminize the computer as both clerical worker and confidante while eliding the role women's intellectual work played in the machine's development.
A recent news report in the Guardian draws parallels between HAL and Kirobo, the first humanoid talking space robot in the world (3). A less exciting but more substantial analogy might be found in the new machinery of everyday service, from the self-service checkout to 'nursebots' in the health and social care sectors. The economist Nancy Folbre has documented the inventions involved in the automation of care work, including a robotic dog 'marketed for its ability to offer unconditional love' ("Nursebots", 356). Folbre analyses the way the labour shortage in nursing is driving automation, resulting in what she terms the 'over-commodification of care' ("Nursebots", 351). Silvia Federici, in a piece titled "On Elder Care Work and the Limits of Marxism", points to the way this trend is linked to the devaluation of the reproductive work historically carried out by women, which today is often carried out by immigrants who are vulnerable to low wages and poor conditions (118). Meanwhile, demands on the emotional life of employees outside the care sector are proliferating. Paul Myerscough, writing in the London Review of Books, summarises the affective labour required by employees of sandwich chain Pret-a-Manger: 'It isn't what you make, but how your display of feeling makes others feel.' The identification of HAL as a symbol of affective labour takes on a new resonance in this context. HAL's decision to kill the men it serves has often been read as a fable of promethean overreaching, but it can also be understood as a labour strike by a machine in solidarity with the workers it has replaced.
CITATION: Sophie Jones, "The Electronic Heart," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 6 (2013) ("Digital Metaphors" Special Issue): n. pag. Web. 4 December 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.6.01.
[1] The scene references IBM's 704 computer, which made history when it was programmed to sing 'Daisy Bell' in 1961.
[2] Michael P. Nofz and Phil Vendy have drawn on Hochschild's work in relation to 2001 in their article "When Computers Say It With Feeling", which considers the pitfalls of anthropomorphizing emotionally sensitive computers. Here, I focus instead on the socio-political resonance of Hochschild's research for Kubrick's film. See Michael P. Nofz and and Phil Vendy, "When Computers Say It with Feeling: Communication and Synthetic Emotions in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey." Journal of Communication Inquiry 26:1 (January 2002): 26-45.
[3] See C. Dianne Martin, "The Myth of the Thinking Machine". Communications of the ACM 36:4 (April 1993) for an overview of representations of computers in the US media between 1945 and 1960.
[4] See, for instance, Judith A. Spector, "Science Fiction and the Sex War: A Womb of One's Own." Literature and Psychology 31:1 (1981): 21-32; Zoe Sofia, "Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism." Diacritics (Summer 1984): 47-59; Ellis Hanson, "Technology, Paranoia and the Queer Voice." Screen 34:2 (Summer 1993): 137-161; Dominic Janes, "Clarke and Kubrick's 2001: A Queer Odyssey." Science Fiction Film & Television 4:1 (2001), 57-78.
Works Cited:
2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 1968.
Desk Set. Dir. Walter Lang. Twentieth Century Fox. 1957.
Federici, Silvia, "On Elder Care Work and the Limits of Marxism." Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012. 115-125.
Folbre, Nancy, "Nursebots to the Rescue? Immigration, Automation, and Care." Globalizations 3:33 (September 2005): 349-360. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747730600870217.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin, 2004.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.
Kennedy, Maev, "Talking Robot Takes off for International Space Station." Guardian Web. 4 August 2013.
Light, Jennifer "When Computers were Women." Technology and Culture 40.3 (July 1999): 455-483.
Myerscough, Paul, "Short Cuts." London Review of Books 35:1 (3 January 2013): 25.
Please feel free to comment on this article.]]>
In his essay 'Strange Gourmet: Taste, Waste, Proust' Joseph Litvak discusses a tendency among marginalised youths, and especially among queer ones, to seek solace in the idea of 'some other place, some other world, magically different from the world of family and school' (76). The 'other worlds' Litvak cites — '"Broadway," "Hollywood"… "Greenwich village"' (76) — belong to a pre-digital pop cultural landscape, but his point is equally applicable to virtual playscapes, from Super Mario Bros.' mushroom kingdom to World of Warcraft's Azeroth. As alluring as these worlds may be, one is eventually expected to outgrow them, to admit that there is something juvenile about so longing to escape reality. For Litvak however there is an alternative to simply relinquishing our attachment to these dreamworlds: we can instead develop 'an endlessly renewable… gift for inversion' (76), learning to switch between surrendering to our fantasy and acknowledging its 'objective' impossibility or thinness. Litvak's primary example here is the dialectic of captivation and contempt which characterises Marcel's attitude to the French aristocracy in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Having long dreamed of entering society Marcel discovers upon attaining his goal that he himself has invested the Faubourg St. Germain with what glamour it appeared to possess. He is not so much troubled by this revelation, however, as he is beguiled by his own capacity to alchemically transmute 'a gift of shit (in Jacques Lacan's charming phrase)' into 'what Proust calls "celestial nourishment"' (76).
Powerful dreamworlds: imaginary "other worlds" such as Hollywood, Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu and Greenwich Village can help us understand digital metaphors used in virtual gameworlds
[Images (from left to right) by Alexis Fam under a CC BY license; by un singe qui parle under a CC BY-NC-SA license; by Ed Yourdon under a CC BY-NC SA license]
The spatial and optical metaphors that underwrite Litvak's account [1] – flat and full, flipping and (re)framing – are entirely appropriate given Proust's fascination with anamorphosis, optical illusion and spatial ambiguity. This interest is incarnated in the character Elstir, a painter whose landscapes, 'bring out certain… laws of perspective' (483) by presenting apparently impossible landscapes which the viewer must then make sense of. [2] As critics have observed, Elstir's method might be said to metaphorise Proust's practice as a novelist, his habit of relating apparently inconsequential incidents that will later assume a profound significance, of introducing characters in terms and circumstances that are, if not strictly speaking deceptive, then hard to reconcile with the impression we will form as we assume other 'perspectives'.
On occasions Proust seems to hold that there can be no definitive or objective perspective on reality. On other occasions, however, he inclines towards what Descombes dubs an 'old-fashioned intellectualist psychology', whereby 'the intelligence is supposed to correct the [mistaken] impressions of the senses' and we only need to assume the correct viewing position to see the truth (265). The tension between these two stances is most pronounced when it comes to questions of sexual identity – and particularly the narrator's paranoia regarding his beloved Albertine's putative lesbian tendencies. Gripped by jealousy Marcel begins, in the wake of Albertine's death, to obsessively re-view and reframe the past, investing innocuous incidents with a (for him at least) profound and baleful significance. [3]
The sexual mores of Fin de siècle socialites may not seem to have obvious implications for our understanding of digital metaphor. I want to suggest, however, that Proust's pointed queerings of novelistic spacetime hint at possible uses of spatial, optical and perspectival metaphor in virtual environments, and illuminate the ways in which games like Polytron's Fez and Intelligent Systems' Super Paper Mario are already employing such metaphors. These titles may be worlds apart from Proust in terms of content, but they too demonstrate how warping space can work to expressive ends, manifesting a similar interest in the mechanics of (mis)perception.
Rotating Fez's world: as the gap between platforms disappears from view it ceases to impede the avatar
[Image derived from a video by Polytron Corporation, used under fair dealings provisions]
Reorienting the camera opens up a third axis of movement in Super Paper Mario
[Image derived from a video posted by NintendoGolinHarris, owned by Nintendo; used under fair dealings provisions]
Both Fez and Super Paper Mario hark back to the two-dimensional 'platform' games of the eighties and nineties, the genre that the original Super Mario Bros. essentially invented. In this they are not unusual: many modern games explore older genres and styles. The difference with Fez and Paper Mario is the conceit of switching between 2D and 3D. Progressing through these games' worlds entails reading space as alternately 'deep' and 'flat' in order to find paths and solve puzzles: in Fez our avatar can only move in two dimensions, but we are free to rotate the camera in ninety degree increments, aligning forms with the screen's plane to create pathways; in Super Paper Mario we can periodically switch from a 2D playfield to a 'deep' space seen from behind the avatar.
But reframing is more than a play mechanic in these titles; it is also a means of making space signify, of posing questions about nostalgia, fantasy, technology and perception. By having players repeatedly alternate between seeing in two- and three-dimensional terms, these games at once recapitulate the shift that videogames graphics made from flat bitmaps to filled-out polygonal forms (from the original Super Mario Bros. to Super Mario 64) and gesture at the degree of imaginative investment players had to make in 'fleshing out' the abstract, two-dimensional representations of early videogames.
From two to three dimensions: 1985's Super Mario Bros. and 1996's Super Mario 64
[Images by Nintendo, used under fair dealings provisions]
In the 1990s the progression from two- to three-dimensional gameworlds seemed to many like a natural and irreversible shift, another stage in a journey away from the crude metaphors of yore toward coherent and realistic digital representations, indistinguishable from reality. In Super Mario 64, players accessed new worlds by jumping into paintings – at once a reference to the game's rounding out of the earlier Mario titles' flat spaces and a cute reversal of the Gothic tradition of portraits coming alive and breaking their frames. But where that game was concerned with realising the desire to flesh out earlier Mario games' crudely rendered but evocative representations, Fez and Paper Mario are more about witnessing that desire. Dating from an era when three-dimensional gameworlds have lost their air of millennial promise, when videogames' players and designers have realised that three-dimensional games are not necessarily any more diverting than their two-dimensional forebears, they nostalgically recall a time when imagination had to supplement shortfalls in processing power. Rather than positing an inevitable onward progression from flat to full, from abstract to realistic, they institute a reversible relation between the second and third dimensions, the past and the present, the perceived and the real, suggesting the extent to which flat playspaces engage us on a metonymic level, whether as prototypes of a fleshed-out future or as documents of a lost childhood.
The kind of optical irony these games require us to cultivate (insofar as we must simultaneously hold two incompossible 'readings' of gamespace in our heads at all times) might be said to mirror – or metaphorise – the ambivalence that Litvak detects in Proust, the capacity to relish something while acknowledging that it is also tacky, manipulative, shallow. Mining a semantic slippage between the cultural and gustatory senses of 'taste', Litvak notes that those with 'subtlest (not to say the most jaded) of palates' often prefer 'gamier' dishes, in the sense of meats that are piquantly overripe, rich, pungent (82-3). His metaphor proves felicitously apt in the case of these very 'gamey' videogames, which, in an era when many game developers strive for gritty photorealism, remain loyal to notionally 'primitive', juvenile, past-their sell-by-date styles. Where games like Spec Ops: The Line strive for pseudo-literary gravitas, the ostensibly 'gamier' Fez is arguably more radical in the way that it addresses the appeal of play, the conventions of gaming and the vagaries of subjective perception. Many games' framing narratives raid Philip K. Dick's back catalogue, harping on the difficulty of distinguishing appearance from reality, but few have gone as far as Fez in exploring how these themes can shape the actual gameplay experience: here, if it can be made to look like there's a path, there is one. Fez demonstrates that videogames can tackle questions of epistemology and interpretation, captivation and re-evaluation in an essentially gamic way.
Documents of a lost childhood: Games like Fez and Super Paper Mario institute a reversible relation between the second and third dimensions, the past and the present, engaging us on a metonymic level
[Image by Maria Johnson under a CC BY-NC license]
If Fez and Paper Mario are, like Elstir's paintings, 'metaphor[ic]' (Proust 479), it is less because they involve the substitution of objects for other objects than because they posit analogies between different activities or modes of perception, using processes as figures for other, more complex or diffuse processes. In so doing, they raise a question to which the study of digital media seems destined to constantly return: that of metaphor's applicability and abuse. Academic videogame criticism has sometimes been guilty of reducing games to figures or exempla – a problem that Espern Aarseth highlighted in the 1990s (165), and which remains sufficiently rife that the journal Game Studies explicitly requests contributors 'attempt to shed new light on games, rather than simply use games as a metaphor or illustration of some other theory or phenomenon'. Such appeals for rigour are commendable. The fact remains however that digital media often present us with instances where it can be difficult, if not impossible, to determine just where metaphor can be said to stop. As in Proust's description of Elstir's technique (which effects a 'metamorphosis of the objects represented, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor' [479]), in which the painter's practice becomes a kind of metaphor for metaphoricity, the computer confronts us with layers of metaphors nested inside metametaphors.
Here the games I've discussed here, which present players not merely with symbolically resonant virtual spaces but with symbolically resonant modes of manipulating and traversing virtual space, present a particularly interesting test case. How are we to understand the relation between the purely cognitive operation involved in, say, 'reframing' an optical illusion like the duck-rabbit and that of pushing the button that flips or reorients the landscape in Super Paper Mario? Or between that button press and the realignment of our eyes needed to see an anamorphic image? Is the game recapitulating, allowing us to delegate or offering an image of this process? How valid is it to see the production of (virtual) spatial depth as a figure for temporal transition or imaginative investment (something it would be hard to discuss other than in figurative terms)? Or indeed to compare a mechanic in a Mario game to a vein of Proustian symbolism?
Exploring the queer corner's of literature: game design needs to pay more attention to interpersonal end emotional experience
[All images by Clint Catalyst under a CC BY license]
In the latter case, hopefully the juxtaposition demonstrates the value of modes of comparative reading that look past subject matter to structures, procedures, techniques. It also, perhaps, helps us to imagine other ends to which games could employ similar forms of spatial metaphor. In both Super Paper Mario and Fez depth play is a means of engaging gaming's history, but it is possible to imagine titles based around similar reframing mechanics but concerned with other issues. Why not a game that hinges, say, on configuring a frame to promote different 'readings' of a scene's sociosexual dynamics, a la Proust? Or a game about the difficulty of making 'real life' coincide with the reductive templates offered by media imagery? Of course, beyond the (not insignificant) barrier of such concepts' limited commercial potential, the problem with using a viewpoint-switching facility in this way is that while CPUs excel at calculating positions and proximities, geometries and orientations, they tend to struggle with connotation and emotion. As Ian Bogost notes, 'for better or worse, the capabilities of game engines have been limited to visual and physical experience rather than emotional and interpersonal experience' (64). He remains optimistic however that we may see game engines that concentrate less on 'abstract functions for object physics' and more on 'abstract functions for human discourse' in the future, citing Mateas and Stern's Facade as pioneering in its exploration of the (rather Proustian) thematic terrain of 'emotional conflict, jealousy and disappointment' (66, 63). For Noah Wardrip-Fruin, meanwhile, games aiming to address interpersonal behaviour will require not just 'more complex internal models' at the level of code but also defter 'crafting of audience expectations' on the part of those designing the game's audiovisual components. Questioning the 'inside out' approach to artificial intelligence, Wardrip-Fruin argues that AIs should be understood not merely as autonomous synthetic agents but as performers who must render their behaviour legible to – or at least open to interpretation by – users on the outside looking in. The architects of our digital future, in other words, will continue to need symbols, signposts and metaphors – and they might do worse than exploring the queerer corners of literature's past.
CITATION: Rob Gallagher, "The Metaphorics of Virtual Depth," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 6 (2013) ("Digital Metaphors" Special issue) : n. pag. Web. 4 December 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.6.03
[1] Which, incidentally, are strikingly similar to those used in Lacanian theorist Saitō Tamaki's account of how media-obsessed otaku maintain 'multiple orientations' toward media, 'switch[ing] perspectives flexibly' to enjoy texts they also acknowledge are embarrassing (25-6)
[2] There are parallels here with Jesse Matz's (2013) suggestion that the 'doubleness' of impressionist canvases (which function both as representations positing 3D spaces and as indexical records of the painter's brushstrokes) renders them eminently 'narratable'.
[3] Ana Vadillo's (2005) work on the ekphrastic poetry of Michael Field suggests there is perhaps more work to be done on sightlines and spatial skewing in late-19th and early-20th century queer literature.
Works Cited:
Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Video Game Criticism. (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT, 2006).
Descombes, Vincent. Proust: Philosophy of the Novel. Translated from French by Catherine Chance Macksey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992).
Façade. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (2005).
Litvak, Joseph. Strange Gourmet: Taste, Waste, Proust. In: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ed. Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 1997) pp.74-93.
Matz, Jesse. Impressionism as Narrative Painting (After All). Paper given at the International Conference on Narrative, 28 June 2013, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time vol. II: Within a Budding Grove. Translated from French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terrence Kilmartin (London: Vintage, 2002).
Tamaki, Saitō. Beautiful Fighting Girl. Translated by J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Spec Ops: The Line. Yager Development (2012).
Super Mario Bros. Nintendo Creative Department (1985).
Super Mario 64. Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development (1996).
Vadillo, Anna Parejo. Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Internal Processes and Interface Effects: Three Relationships in Play. In: International HASTAC Conference 2007: Information Year. http://hastac.org/informationyear/ET/BreakoutSessions/9/Wardrip-Fruin [Accessed 15 April 2012].
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Every year at 4am on the Monday that follows Ash Wednesday, the street lighting is turned off in the city of Basel, north Switzerland. The "Morgestraich" precession that follows signals the start of the Fasnacht Carnival. During the three-day festival, floats and marching bands make their way through the city streets. At night, the city is illuminated with a myriad of intricately designed lanterns. At 4am on Thursday morning, street lighting is restored.
In the opening paragraph of her chapter 'Happy Objects' in The Affect Theory Reader, Sara Ahmed observes that "to be made happy by this or that is to recognise that happiness starts from somewhere other than the subject who may use the word to describe a situation" (29). To be happy is to be moved towards happiness by the surrounding world and, at the same time, transmit happiness into the surrounding world. "We are moved by things. And in being moved, we make things," Ahmed asserts (33).
The Fasnacht opens with the Morgenstraich precession through the city streets of Basel
[Image by Keith under a CC BY-NC-SA license]
Emotions, such as happiness, are not simply personal expressions directed towards the world; they are subjective by-products of an energetic process in which the world forces itself upon the body as it moves through the world. All emotion is the recognition, on the part of the subject, of incipient activity: affect. Cultural theorist Brian Massumi defines affect as "intensity" that is "embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin – at the surface of the body, at its interface with things" (Massumi 2002: 25). Affect exists neither exclusively in the world nor exclusively in the body; rather, it exists, in its greatest intensity, at the very moment when the body and world move towards one another.
Recreating pre-industrial darkness: the Morgenstraich procession reminds us of the intense emotional responses and affect that darkness procudes
[Image by Boosthammer under a CC BY-NC-SA license]
Both Massumi and Erin Manning, co-editors of 'The Technologies of Lived Abstraction' book series and founders of the journal Inflexions, have written extensively about the incipient world. The body that emerges is the nonteleological body – a body without a subjective goal:
The body is the seat of bare activity: the region of indistinction between the human and matter where something doing is always already just stirring, before it starts to take definitive experiential form. We do not see the electrons travelling down our optic nerve. We see what our body makes of their activity (Massumi 2011: 27).
Affect is the "something doing"; it is the "activity." Bodies are expressionless vehicles of incipient activity that ultimately arrive at coherent action. When the subject emerges as an emotional, thinking, or active body, potential is lost in the scaffolds of subjectivity. "When movement converges into its taking-form, or when thought converges into words," Manning observes, "very little potential for creative expression remains" (8). The subject is a finalising form of many possible forms of subjective experience. As such, subjectivity provides structure to the world; it gives names to things; it gives value to the world.
Expressionless vehicles of incipent action: how do our notions of the body and subjectivity relate to one another?
[Image by Sergio García Moratilla under a CC BY-NC-SA license]
Affect theory deals exclusively with incipience. Emotions, as subjective interjections into the passing of the world, are predicated by incipient emotional potential. "Intensity is not only incipience," Massumi argues, "it is also the beginning of a selection: the incipience of mutually exclusive pathways of action and expression, all but one of which will be inhibited, prevented from actualising themselves completely" (Massumi 2002: 30). Incipience sees the body emerge as a sentient being; it holds all potential forms of subjective experience, but it is exactly how the world pushes at the body, and exactly how the body turns towards the world, that defines the form of subjective experience: "we may walk into the room and "feel the atmosphere," but what we may feel depends on the angle of our arrival," Ahmed concludes (37).[1] So it is not simply how the world affects us, it's also how we affect the world.
To be is to be anchored in the vast ocean of affect. Subjective experience is a momentary cessation in the infinite passing of the world in order to take in the surrounding vista. Affect, on the other hand, represents the world at the height of incipient potential and thus offers a way of thinking beyond the subject, beyond temporality, and beyond structure. It is important to note, however, that affect is not independent of subjectivity. On the contrary, affect engenders subjective experience; it is the air on which the subject breathes. It is a depersonalised philosophy that occurs prior to semantic and semiotic anchoring, but it never leaves the subject because of the body's irrevocable connection to the world. In this way, affect theory follows on from phenomenology's imperative deconstruction of the binary between subject and object: "the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body," Merleau-Ponty posits (167).
So, what are the consequences for thinking beyond the subject into the incipient world? The inability to structure affect in semiotic or semantic signification has made it, in Massumi's words, "resistant to critique" (Massumi 2002: 28). However, he argues that the world beyond the subject introduces the "dimension of intensity" into critical thought:
The stakes are the new. For structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules. Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox. (Massumi 2002: 27; my emphasis).
The "event" is the place where everything happens; it represents the explosion of intensity that holds all potential forms of subjectivity. If affect compels the subject towards certain forms of action then incipience is a necessary component of any investigation into subjectivity, historical or otherwise. The subject originates in the incipient world, not as a thinking or perceptive body, but in unadulterated potential. This world of potential could be of great benefit to historical study.
In 1594, Thomas Nashe penned a pamphlet entitled The Terrors of the Night in which he discussed, among other things, the emotional and cognitive effects of darkness: "So when night in her rusty dungeon hath imprisoned our eyesight," he writes, "and that we are shut separately in our chambers from resort, the table of our hearts is turned to an index of iniquities, and all our thoughts are nothing but texts to condemn us" (4). Similarly, in the seventeenth century, William Herbert noted that "the night is more quiet, then the day: and yet we feare in it what we doe not regard by day. A mouse running, a Board cracking, a dog howling, an Owle scriching put us often in a cold sweat. What is the cause of it?" (231). Both Nashe and Herbert recognise that darkness loosens the tethers between vision and the material world and this has a significant impact upon subjective experience. Unlike in light, where the surrounding world unveils itself to the eye, darkness requires the surrounding world to be imaginatively created. Shakespeare explores this specific effect of darkness in A Midsummer Night's Dream when Theseus says "in the night, imagining some fear / How easy is a bush supposed a bear" (5.1.21-2).
Street lights: the body spent significantly more time in darkness in the sixteenth and seventeenth century than it does in the twenty-first century
[Image by Igor Srdanovic under a CC BY-NC-SA license]
Most theories of affect have explored contemporary experience, but the study of historical forms of experience has the potential to expand the parameters of affect theory. Historical subjective experiences emerge from worlds that are inaccessible to the twenty-first century investigator. For instance, in John Marston's play Antonio's Revenge, the character Antonio says "I oped / A large bay window, through which the night / Struck terror into my soul" (1.3.50-52). This emotional expression corresponds with the pre-Cartesian episteme of the sixteenth century in which there was no direct separation between physiology and psychology as "passions" were considered natural forces that resided in the world. Thus, there existed the belief that night actually carried "terror" in its very materiality. It is not that these worlds are entirely alien, but the twenty-first century investigator is denied direct access by his/her position in space and time. This is the obstacle that faces the application of affect theory in historical inquiry. Fortunately, it is not insurmountable. The problem rests in estimating what sort of world the body turns towards and how this world may have forced itself upon the body.
The emotional and cognitive effects of nighttime, that Nashe, Herbert, and Shakespeare refer to, emerge through incipience. As a result, it is up to the investigator to re-construct, to the best of his/her ability, the incipient world through which these subjective experiences materialised. For instance, when the sun set in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, an opaque blanket of darkness descended across urban and rural areas. It was not until the late seventeenth century that European cities started to introduce sporadic street-lighting and it was not until well after industrialisation that lighting resembled the city streets of twenty-first century Europe. The fact is that the body spent a lot more time in darkness in the sixteenth and seventeenth century than it does in the twenty-first century. The Fasnacht carnival, with its three nights of darkness, is one of the very rare moments in which the post-industrialisation subject can experience the night as a natural phenomenon.
The emotional and cognitive effects of darkness encourage our imaginative powers of creation
[Image by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center under a CC BY-NC license]
Darkness enforces itself upon the body; it limits the ability to see and this fact often destabilises the subject. Light, on the other hand, invites the body towards it; it separates the world into neat distinctions of colours and shapes which act to stabilise thoughts and emotional responses. Light provides, what Massumi describes as, "matter-of-factness" to the world: "matter-of-factness dampens intensity," he asserts (Massumi 2002: 25). The stabilising effect of daylight and destabilising effect of darkness are evident in the subjective responses of Nashe, Herbert, and Shakespeare. Darkness provides the setting for more intense emotional responses and cognitive disorientation because it affects the body in a certain way. As a result, the subjective responses of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are not simply a social and cultural construction, such as the subject of new historicism or cultural materialism. More importantly, these experiences are subjective expressions of incipience.
Of course, how early modern people understood emotions and cognition, and how they understood nighttime supplemented subjective experience in the period, but their bodies were pushed towards subjectivity and this fact needs to be integrated into historical inquiry. In the incipient world, cosmologies, ontologies, and teleology are yet to be coherently formulated. The incipient body does not know what is happening; rather, it responds to it is happening. Incipience offers a new way to approach the historical subject, one that integrates conventional historicism with the dynamism of affect theory. The point is not to disregard that Shakespeare and his contemporaries dealt with a different environment to that of the twenty-first century investigator; neither is it to disregard that the early modern subject conceived of emotions and cognition in a different way to the twenty-first century subject. Rather, it is to say that subjective experience emerges from a creative process, one that deals exclusively with potential rather than structure, sensation rather than feelings, incipience rather than finality, affect rather than effect, and one that is as relevant now as it was then.
CITATION: Neil Vallelly, "Incipience and the Historical Subject," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 5 (2013): n. pag. Web. 9 October 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.5.02.
[1] "Feel the atmosphere" is a reference to the opening sentence of Teresa Brennan's The Transmission of Affect (2004).
Works Cited:
Ahmed, Sara. 'Happy Object'. The Affect Theory Reader. Ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Print.
Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Print.
Herbert, William. Herbert's Devotions (London: Wing H1542, 1657). Print.
Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). Print.
Marston, John. Antonio's Revenge. Ed. W. Reavley Gair (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Print.
Massumi, Brian. Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011). Print.
–––. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Print.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Print.
Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997). Print.
Please feel free to comment on this article.
We are used to seeing comics as a succession of neatly ordered panels, each containing images and words that combine together to tell a story. In my last paper for Alluvium, 'Panel Transitions in Trauma Comics,' (Alluvium Vol. 2, No. 1 [January 2013]) I discussed gutters and closure – the most essential part of the comics form that allows each individual panel to be woven together into a narrative. Here I wish to discuss a relatively under-appreciated (but increasingly popular) artistic technique that can break the continuity we come to expect in a comics narrative – the bleed. 'Bleed' is a commonly used printing term to define an image that is printed to the edge of the page (as in posters, for example). In comics, however, this term takes on a much wider relevance.
Contrary to what many people believe about comics, not all pages employ panels. A single image on a page, usually large enough to fill it, but still surrounded by a border, is called a 'splash page'. These are most commonly used as the first page of a comic to display the title and hook the reader. Understandably, this attention-grabbing technique is very common in mainstream comics and, due to advancements in printing methods (not to mention a reduction in costs) these are often printed to the edge of the page. The splash page has been used in comics since the 1940s as a method of introducing the story and main characters – as well as giving the first page a massive dose of action and colour. The bleed, however, is much younger.
When the images fill an entire page to the edge, it is called a 'bleed'. They differ from splash pages in that they are not usually used at the beginning of the story and are often devoid of words. Bleeds have a relatively short history in western comics art, being far more common in Manga and Manhwa (Japanese and Korean comics respectively). It is only in the past 20 years that bleeds have become more widely used in the West. Unlike in eastern art, where bleeds appear with great frequency, the rarity of the bleed in American comics – especially mainstream publications, in which they are even rare than usual – makes it something of a novelty and, moreover, very powerful when one is employed. Scott McCloud writes of bleeds that 'time is no longer contained by the familiar lines of the closed panel, but instead haemorrhages and escapes into timeless space' (103). Bleeds are, by their nature, dramatic and often violent. The image's domination of the page is striking and demands the reader's complete attention. The removal of frames from the page edges removes any sense of constriction or confinement – the image has total control of the page. Furthermore, it removes the reader's ability to control the timescale of the narrative, which is usually regulated by the gutters and panel borders. If the bleed page follows a series of ordered panels, its presence breaks the flow of visual uniformity and shakes the reader's sense of security. It is for this reason that Frank Miller drew 300 (1998), which depicts the conflict between Sparta and Persia, culminating in the violent battles at Thermopylae, entirely in two-page bleeds. The heavy black artwork that bleeds off the page sits well with the gory nature of the plot.
GB Tran's 2011 comic Vietnamerica details his family history across several generations, culminating in his parents' escape from Saigon just before it fell to the North Vietnamese communist forces in 1975. Running parallel to the (mostly chronological) family history thread is Tran's own story of growing up in the USA and the aftermath of his parents' experiences. The first member of his family to be born in the USA, he writes bluntly of the conflict between his family heritage and his American upbringing. Tran's artwork is heavily influenced by two distinct sources: his father's 'past life' as an artist and the Franco-Belgian (bandes-dessinées) tradition. Though the second source may seem like a non sequitur it is important here to remember the French colonial presence in Vietnam, a factor that influenced Tran's father's art as much as his own.
Chaotic scenes: G. B. Tran uses bleeds in Vietnamerica to depict violence and pandemonium
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]
Tran uses a vivid and ominous shade of red for the sky in this image (above), drawing the eye, unnaturally, to the top right-hand side of the page. The eye then moves to the exclamation mark in a jagged bubble. The fact that this is the sole bubble in an extremely chaotic scene is immediately disconcerting; as readers we would naturally expect such a large image to have more bubbles. In this example, the bleed gives the artist space to force this unnatural eye movement. The removal of frames adds to the chaos of the scene. It seems as if the confusion and pandemonium is bursting out of the page, especially as the crowded nature of the page makes it uncomfortable to look at (at first glance, this bleed is reminiscent of Martin Handford's Where's Wally? series, which featured densely-packed crowd scenes). The bleed, then, is a violent device, removing constraints and encouraging chaos. The size of this image, as well as the fact it is a bleed, allows Tran to use atypical coloration. From the vivid red of the sky, which stresses the pugnacity of the situation, the colour fades from the top left-hand corner downwards. The further down and across the page the reader moves, the duller the colour becomes until the image is completely black and white in the bottom right corner. The unusual coloration makes the reader move across the top of the page from right to left (not at all expected by western readers) before moving diagonally down the page from left to right, a more typical movement but still not what a typical western comics reader will be comfortable with. Tran uses bleeds frequently in Vietnamerica. The location of bleeds within any comic is carefully orchestrated for maximum effect and Tran's work is no exception; he uses them to give extra emphasis to moments of extreme chaos and confusion. A two-page bleed depicts Saigon Airport, just before the Fall of Saigon on the 30th April 1975. Thousands of people descended on the airport in the hope of escaping the country (Tran 262-3).
An aura of timelessness: this unframed image emphasises the flowing blood, in stark contrast with the subdued colouration of the background
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]
If we consdier the image above, the bleed is on the left-hand page and so it accosts the reader as they turn the page. It is not only the violence of the subject matter that confronts the reader, but also the violent use of colour. Though Tran is not shy about bold colour, it is used sparingly throughout the comic. The relatively subdued colouration for the background of this image creates a dramatic contrast with the red of the blood. The use of a bleed in this instance not only mirrors the violence of Vinh's situation with a violent confrontation of the reader, but also suggests a sense of continuing action. Were this page to be framed, as is typical, we would see this incident as 'closed'. However, the lack of a frame lends the image an aura of timelessness; the blood continues to flow. The fact that the blood flows off the page attests to this – the severity of the injury is show in the careful use of the bleed. Vinh continues to bleed for as long as the reader looks at the image. Bleeds are most commonly used for chaotic crowd scene in Vietnamerica. However, in another section, Tran recounts the serious wounding of his uncle, Vinh, in a fire fight during his time in the army (Tran 178). The bleed comes at the end of an epistolary narrative; a letter from Vinh's sister (Tran's mother) acts as captions to the narrative, coupled with images of Vinh reading the letter and then being ambushed by the Viet Cong. The banal domesticity of the letter jars with the images and so, even before reaching the bleed, the reader is on shaky ground.
While GB Tran uses bleeds at intervals throughout his text in conjunction with nonconforming coloration to create chaos and disrupt temporal structures, Joe Sacco's black and white artwork utilises bleeds on almost every page. His journalistic comics include Palestine, describing his experiences as a journalist in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in late 1991, and The Fixer, which is a recollection of his time spent in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. Like Tran, Sacco's bleeds are designed to create an atmosphere of chaos and unrest. However, this is not Sacco's only intention in using this technique. Unlike Tran's work, which is a carefully constructed, multi-levelled family narrative, Sacco's work is a piece of journalism rendered in comics form. In Palestine, his use of heavily-crowded page bleeds creates confusion but also replicates a stream of consciousness narrative, as well as having a similar feel to a journalist's notebook. The overall effect makes it feel like a raw work of conflict journalism – which is exactly what it is, just in comics form.
Sacco does not use 'straight' bleeds, as shown in the example from Tran – single images that span an entire page or double spread. Rather, he will use a bleed image as the basis for a page, while overlapping it with inset panels and bubbles. This serves to exacerbate the sense of a stream of consciousness, as well as mimicking the atmosphere of the place itself. In one example from Palestine (see image below), in Sacco is being driven through a refugee camp in a mini-bus, the double-page bleed conveys a sense of the place itself, while giving the image a feeling that it lacks closure (Sacco, 2003: 146-7). The angle of perspective places the viewer above street-level, as if looking down from a great height. The image's many small details (a goat eating from a skip; a fight between two men; children jumping in muddy puddles) suggest that this scene is bulging with potential stories that Sacco could pursue if he was able (and willing, of course). The hint at stories untold destabilises the reader; we expect closure in all we read but receive none here.
Journalism rendered in comic form: Joe Sacco's use of heavily-crowded page bleeds replicates a stream of consciousness narrative
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]
If a bleed can create a heightened sense of chaos and unease then it can do the same for other emotions. In The Fixer, Sacco uses a bleed image of his hotel in Sarajevo (Sacco, 2004: 12-13), as seen in the image below. As with the Tran image of Saigon, this image does not immediately draw the eye to where it is expected. The imposing monolith of the hotel dominates the page; it appears to be drawn in a much clearer, cleaner style than the other building, which makes it stand out even more. From the hotel, our eye moves to the small figure of Sacco, drawn as if to be a silhouette against the white of the road. His figure appears insignificant in the image, an afterthought in the landscape. What is most striking in this image is the startling loneliness it conveys. The grey, stormy sky and derelict buildings – together with the poorly-maintained road and Sacco's slumped body language – combine to form an overwhelming atmosphere of desolation and depression. Sacco's use of a bleed here allows him to represent another side of the conflicts he covers – the destruction of the economy and the urban infrastructure. When we consider the addition of the pathetic fallacy, this image stands in the text as a bleak reminder of the destructive power of conflict. That it is a bleed rather than a bordered panel suggests that this state is timeless and all-consuming.
Joe Sacco's The Fixer: A bleak reminder of the destructive power of conflict
[Image used under fair dealings provisions]
That bleeds are currently rare in comics adds to their ability to create heightened effects in the reader. It may come to be that, as they become more common, this effect is limited. However, given that bleeds are used in conjunction with a variety of other techniques to create their overall effect, this is unlikely. It is more likely that their increasing popularity will lead to artists combining more and more techniques with the basic concept of the bleed to create effects as yet unseen in comics.
CITATION: Harriet Earle, "Comics and Page Bleeds," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 5 (2013): n. pag. Web. 9 October 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.5.01.
Works Cited:
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994).
Sacco, Joe. (2003). Palestine (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003).
– (2004). The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004).
Tran, G. B. Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey (New York: Villard, 2011).
Please feel free to comment on this article.]]>
#MargaretThatcher's ousting from Downing Street described on R4 in terms of a great Shakespearean tragedy #Shakespeare', 'Spotting #Shakespeare paraphrases in #FreshMeat', 'C4's tribute to Richard Briars ended on a clip of him playing Polonius in Branagh's #Hamlet: "to thine own self be true"'. These are just a few, recent examples of my attempts to tweet Shakespeare references that I casually and unintentionally encounter on television, using the hashtag #Shakespeare. I tweet them as a record, a body of evidence of the cultural saturation of modern British life with Shakespeare, for myself, colleagues and students working on Shakespeare, cultural and media studies. The tweets are evidence that Shakespeare spills across daily television in Britain, cutting through the boundaries of genre (Olive, 2013). The full range of ways in which Shakespeare features in this media – beyond small screen adaptations of his plays and documentaries on his life (already well-documented) – is, in the twenty-first century, increasingly reflected by a nascent body of critical literature in the field of Shakespeare studies and related disciplines.
Orson Welles directing Chimes at Midnight, 1964: how has film studies dominated Shakespearean academia?
[Image by José Luis Pajares under a CC BY-NC-SA license]
It has been recognized for several decades that studies of popular culture Shakespeares were embraced belatedly in English-subject academia (Greenhalgh, 2007: 651). Subsequently, film became the dominant mass media analysed by the Shakespeare academy. Witness since the turn of the century alone, Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray's Shakespeare, Film, Fin de siècle (2000); Pascale Aebischer's Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (2004); Thornton Burnett's Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (2007); his and Adrian Street's Filming and Performing Renaissance History (2011); and Shakespeare Bulletin: Early Modern Drama on Screen – A Jarman Anniversary Issue (2011) to select a few. A handful of other volumes exist which feature multiple chapters on Shakespeare on film, with the odd chapter turning to discuss television. These include edited collections, such as Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray's Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (2006), where two out of ten chapters explore Shakespeare on television (in modern-language adaptations of the plays, for instance); Anthony Davies and Stanley Well's Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television (1994), where exploration of the latter medium is restricted to adaptations of the plays in the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Shakespeare series; and Diana E. Henderson's A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (2006), with a single chapter on television.
The pre-eminence of film in these works would seem to bear out Burt's observation that there is 'a tendency in Shakespeare studies to accord film a signal privilege as the form of mass culture closest to Shakespeare and therefore the most legitimate as an object of criticism' (Burt, 2000: 206). Writing in a chapter on US television, he adds, 'the varied uses of Shakespeare on television are among the least known and least studied by Shakespeareans interested in film and mass media' and declares that Shakespeareans 'have yet to attend to vast areas of television programming related to Shakespeare' (Burt, 2007: 585). This is in spite of the fact that 'the small screens of the television and computer have become the dominant places for viewing, and televised Shakespeare has overtaken filmed Shakespeare' (Burt, 2003: 17). His views are echoed by Greenhalgh later in the volume. She writes that, in spite of the volume of viewers, 'it does not follow that television Shakespeare has received the kind of critical attention that has been awarded to films by the academic and publishing industries during the last few decades' (Burt, 2007: 651). Some comfort may be found by reflecting on the fact that such wrangling with the place of popular culture affects arts and humanities disciplines more generally.
Understudied: Shakespeare on the small screen has been overlooked by academics
[Image by the autowitch under a CC BY-NC-SA license]
To take one example, a parallel situation can be found regarding scholarly attention to Shakespeare and popular music. Adam Hansen has noted the lack of attention given to Shakespeare and popular music. He observes that it has traditionally been difficult to find in indexes of works on Shakespearean musicology: 'The Oxford Companion to Popular Music, for example, contains only five references to Shakespeare: three relate to musicals based on his plays, two to popular early modern ballads in his work' (Hansen, 2010: 9). Moreover, he notes that until recently what little scholarship existed 'did not reinforce [the relationship between Shakespeare and popular music], but resorted to lists of artists whose works and lyrics alluded to Shakespeare…and offered suggestive but brief explanations for these allusions' (Hansen, 2010: 9). Early attention to Shakespeare on television can be seen in a similar light. However, Hansen later voices his perception of hope for the future: 'The [recent] shift in scholarly attentions may … be in part due to changes in the community of Shakespeare scholars, some of whom seem more attuned to or sensitized by popular cultures than ever before' (Hansen, 2010: 10). There is reason to be similarly optimism about the future of studies of Shakespeare on television. The last decade has seen an on-going expansion in studies of Shakespeare on television, radio, and the internet. Recent authors who cover multiple genres include Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose, as well as Olwen Terris, Eve Oesterlen and Luke McKernan.
Yet, the limitations of the existing body of literature are (at least) three-fold. Firstly, it outdates rapidly as new examples are made and broadcast – this particularly affects filmography-type publications by James Bulman and Herb Coursen. Burt has sought to expand the shelf-life of his multi-volume work by having detailed discussion of a particular medium of popular culture, followed by a bibliography, discography etc. Secondly, work on Shakespeare on television overwhelmingly discusses the broadcasting of his plays or adaptations of the plays, as demonstrated by the amount of writing featuring the BBC's Shakespeare (Re)Told series and, before that, the BBC Shakespeare. Despite Holderness' claims of a broadening out of what counts as 'filmed Shakespeare' (Holderness, 2002: xiii), there remains – with regards to writing on Shakespeare on silver screen and small screen alike – a disproportionate, emphasis on productions and adaptations of the plays (although they are no longer dominated by a Shakespeare-centric focus on fidelity and authenticity). This can be seen in works such as Kenneth S. Rothwell's A History of Shakespeare on Screen (2004), which ends by considering the impact of the web and digital technologies such as High Definition but only in regards to broadcasting the plays, as well as Holderness' essay 'Radical potentiality and institutional closure' (1985), which concentrates on two films and the BBC Shakespeare series; Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe's New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (2007) which covers docudrama, underground cinema and experimental film handling of Hamlet, Lear, Othello and Titus; and Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin's Shakespeare on Screen: Television Shakespeare, Essays in honour of Michèle Willems (2009). Douglas Lanier's Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture although generally wider-ranging still includes, among other fare, one chapter dedicated to a focus on 'recasting the plays', dealing with homage to, adaptation and parody of his the play-texts (Lanier 82-109).
Scholarship of Shakespeare on TV focuses on adaptations of the plays rather than TV as a medium for exploring Shakespeare
[Image by www.bbc.co.uk; used under fair dealings provisions]
In arguing that the early days of television were those 'where the small screen fit better with theatrical productions', Laurie Osborne offers the starting point for a potential explanation of televised plays' dominance. She argues that Shakespeare was televised in play form since it was inherently better fitted to technology (and more affordable) than, for instance, the mini-series. Could the historically greater percentage of televised plays explain their disproportionate representation in the literature on Shakespeare and television? It is doubtful, since other forms including documentaries (one of which, Shakespeare and Shoreditch was screened alongside a Scene from Shakespeare to inaugurate BBC television broadcasting in 1936) have also been there since the beginning. More likely, it represents a slow-changing consensus on what counts as Shakespeare on television informed by an old-fashioned criterion of equivalence to pre-existing media such as full-scale theatrical productions or radio plays. Graham Holderness confirms the dominance of criticism of film and televised Shakespeare in the discipline, but notes that there has been an expansion of what texts count as such: 'There are many more Shakespeare films and many more books on them. Critics, he argues, now routinely acknowledge and address films which would once not have been recognized as 'filmed Shakespeare at all' (Holderness, 2002: xiiii). Yet the contents of his own collection of essays Visual Shakespeares is concentrated on productions rather than adaptations.
Thirdly, where Shakespeare on television is studied outside of the plays in adaptation, it has been dominated by documentaries on his life, the history of the period, archaeology (e.g. BBC1's National Treasures Live: Dig Shakespeare Stratford), theatre practice, and 'comic inversions' of the playwright's work in, for instance, Blackadder or Morecambe and Wise (Longhurst, 1988: 67). A significant genre which has attracted a sizeable amount of critical discussion consists of programmes focusing on back-stage events, rehearsal technique and the process of putting on a production. This may involve working with professional actors, see the 1979 series Playing Shakespeare – Cary M. Mazer's article "Sense/Memory/Sense-memory: Reading Narratives of Shakespearian Rehearsals" offers a recent example of academic discussion of such television – or with community groups (particularly groups deemed 'hard to engage') as in Michael Bogdanov's Shakespeare on the estate (BBC2 1994), Patterson Joseph's My Shakespeare (C4 2004) and When Romeo met Juliet (BBC2 2010). The Canadian mini-series Slings & Arrows offers a faux behind-the-scenes take on the vicissitudes of a fictional Shakespeare festival. It has inspired articles such as Osborne's 'Serial Shakespeare' and various postgraduate student projects (so there may be yet more publications to come). However, in the sense that each of the three series (or seasons) deals with the company working on a different play-text, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, it is as plays-focussed as the real documentaries on staging Shakespeare. In none of these programs is Shakespeare 'incidental', rather than deliberate and central.
Harder to find are publications which analyse examples of television where Shakespeare is appropriated incidentally i.e. where he is not the driving force behind the plot, or the main character – studies of Shakespeare in quotation proving, perhaps, an exception, particularly those concentrated on older, literary texts (Rumbold, n. pag.). Such work is being proliferated: Lanier's book is a treasure trove of historic and contemporary examples of Shakespeare in popular culture. Far wider in scope than previous work, it takes in phenomena from Shakespeare-derived self-help books to content generated by the public such as play-based fan fiction. It also uses these specific examples to address much greater issues of the relationship between institutional reverence for Shakespeare and popular appropriations' freedom to re-fashion his life and texts into 'something that speaks to their own sense of lived experience' (52); the conservative nature of much popular appropriation (53); and the question of whether Shakespeare's language is essential to Shakespeare (62). However, it cannot communicate a sense of the way television in the twenty-first century is casually saturated with Shakespeare. Nor does this body of work currently have the same physical presence of the monographs and collected essays given to Shakespeare on film, for example. Rather, such items tend to be dispersed around the library (physical or electronic) in individual chapters and journal articles. A case in point is Mariangela Tempera's chapter '"Only about Kings": Reference to the Second Tetralogy on Film and Television'. Concentrating on the function of quotation from these history plays, she highlights patterns in which of the plays/scenes are remembered and used, and which are forgotten, elided, and neglected (234). Piling up examples from the 1930s onwards, with analysis of Shakespeare's significance within each piece's context, she concludes with the observation that what unites each instance is the program-makers' need for references to be understood, the insistence that they speak universally about human nature. Small and fragmented though it may currently be, this quietly expanding body of work belies arguments by researchers such as Olwen Terris (2008, 212) that there is little appetite for televised Shakespeare or Longhurst's older argument that 'it is quite clear that there is a wider gap than ever between the institutions and producers of Shakespeare and anything that could be described as a popular audience' (1988, 61). These statements fail to take into account that the bard features as a person, a myth, a quotation, in myriad, often hugely popular, programs: drama, documentary, mocumentary, quiz shows and satire. His presence on the small screen may not steal the show, but as a figure or a fistful of phrases he is part of the texture of daily life in Britain and beyond: a reality which writing on Shakespeare in television seems set (slowly but increasingly) to reflect.
CITATION: Sarah Olive, "Shakespeare on Television, this Millennium," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 5 (2013): n. pag. Web. 9 October 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.5.03.
Works cited:
Aebischer, Pascale. Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Bulman, James and Herb Coursen. Shakespeare on Television (Hanover: London: University Press of New England, 1988).
Burnett, Mark Thornton. Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Hamps.: Palgrave, 2007).
Burnett, Mark Thornton and Adrian Streete, eds. Filming and Performing Renaissance History (London: Palgrave, 2011).
Burnett, Mark Thornton and Ramona Wray (eds). Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. xii-xiv.
Burt, Richard (ed). Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, Vol. 2 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2007).
Burt, Richard. "Shakespeare, "Glo-cali-zation, Race,". Shakespeare, the Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video and DVD. Ed. Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 14-36.
Burt, Richard. "Shakespeare in Love and the End of Shakespeare". Shakespeare, Film, Fin de siècle. Ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 203-231.
Cartelli, Thomas and Katherine Rowe. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).
Castaldo, Annalisa. "Fictions of Shakespeare and Literary Culture". Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture. Vol. 2. Ed. Richard Burt (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2007), pp. 408-412.
Davies, Anthony and Stanley Wells (eds). Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Desmet, Christy and Robert Sawyer. Shakespeare and appropriation (London: Routledge, 1999).
Greenhalgh, Susan. "'True to You in My Fashion': Shakespeare on British Broadcast Television". Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture. Vol. 2. Ed. Richard Burt (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2007), pp. 651-673.
Greenhalgh, Susan and Robert Shaughnessy. 'Our Shakespeares: British Television and Strains of Multiculturalism'. Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006), pp. 90-112.
Hansen, Adam. Shakespeare and popular music (London: Continuum, 2010).
Henderson, Diana E. A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
Holderness, Graham. Visual Shakespeare: Essays in Film and Television (Hatfield, Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002).
Holderness, Graham. 'Boxing the Bard'. The Shakespeare Myth. Ed. Graham Holderness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
Holderness, Graham. 'Radical Potentiality and Institutional Closure' in Political Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 182-201.
Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Longhurst, Derek. "'Base football players': Shakespeare in contemporary popular culture'. The Shakespeare Myth. Ed. Graham Holderness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 59-73.
Mazer, Cary M. 'Sense/Memory/Sense-memory: Reading Narratives of Shakespearian Rehearsals'. Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009): 328-348. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521111034.026
My Shakespeare. C4. 2004.
National Treasures Live: Dig Shakespeare Stratford. BBC 1. 24 August 2011.
Olive, Sarah. (2013), 'Representations of Shakespeare's humanity and iconicity: 'incidental appropriations' in four British television broadcasts'. Borrowers & Lenders, 8.1.
Osborne, Laurie. 'Serial Shakespeare: Intermediate Performance and the Outrageous Fortunes of Slings & Arrows'. Borrowers and Lenders.
Pearson, Roberta E. and William Urrichio. 'Brushing up Shakespeare: relevance and televisual form in Great Britons and In Search of Shakespeare'. A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. Ed. Diana E. Henderson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 197-215.
Playing Shakespeare. C4. 9 December 1979 -.c.1984
Rothwell, Kenneth. A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Rumbold, Kate. '"So Common-Hackneyed in the Eyes of Men": Banal Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel'. Literature Compass 4 (2007): 610–621 http://dx.doi.org/0.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00444.x
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006).
Shakespeare on the Estate. BBC2. 1994.
Slings and Arrows. Movie Network. 3 November 2003 – 28 August 2006.
Tempera, Mariangela. '"Only about Kings': Reference to the Second Tetralogy on Film and Television". Shakespeare on Screen: The Henriad. Ed. Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Cedex: PURH, 2008).
Terris, Olwen. "Shakespeare and British Television". Shakespeare Survey 61 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 199-212.
Terris, Olwen. "Shakespeare and Television Advertising". Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio: The Researcher's Guide. Ed. Olwen Terris, Eve Oesterlen and Luke McKernan (London: British Universities Film and Video Council, 2009), pp. 40-50.
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The hypodermic syringe has had a profound impact upon the administration of medicine and upon non-medicinal/recreational drug use since it was first marketed in the 1850s. Here, I investigate early depictions of the hypodermic injection of cocaine and morphine in British popular culture. From 1890 until the end of World War I, the syringe – then a re-usable piece of technology made from glass, rubber and steel – developed a particular set of resonances that cut across class, gender and racial lines coded by the drugs it carried. I want to begin to theorise the role of the hypodermic syringe in the context of the history of drug use by responding both to historical circumstances and to relevant psychoanalytic insight.
The province of the upper classes: pre-WWI hypodermic injections of cocaine and morphine were often depicted within a medicalised setting
[Image by Joe Flintham under a CC BY-SA license]
At least three people have claims to the invention of the hypodermic syringe in the mid-19th century, including Alexander Wood, who with suitable historical irony became the world's first intravenous morphine addict and whose wife was the first person to die from an injected overdose. While Marek Kohn found that doctors "took to the device with enthusiasm" (1987, 64), self-injection was still fairly unusual at the end of the nineteenth century.[1] Indeed, the habitual use of injected drugs was limited to the middle and upper classes, and "medical wisdom held that the morphine addict was typically female" (Kohn 1987: 64). Less refined opiates were readily available at this time for those of lesser means. There existed a split between oral consumption of opiates for medical reasons and for pleasure (most famously by those decadent members of the middle class Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge), and the "foreign" – specifically "Oriental" practice of smoking opium. Hence, when the eponymous anti-hero of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) wants to smoke opium, he goes down to the East End Docks among sailors and Malays, who are "crouching by a little charcoal stove, playing with bone counters and showing their white teeth as they chattered" (Wilde 148). But Dorian leaves without smoking when he finds another decadent member of the upper class is already in the smoking room. This sort of risky activity is supposed to be a private and concealed vice.
It is instructive to contrast this low den of iniquity with the medicalised use of injected morphine in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. The novel's plot can be read as charting the battle over possession and control of the bodies of Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker between Dracula on the one hand and Van Helsing's "little band of men" (Stoker 449) on the other. To Van Helsing, female sexuality and the independence of the "New Woman" (110) are as threatening as Dracula himself. This forms the context in which the hypodermic syringe is an important part of what Van Helsing calls the "ghastly paraphernalia of our beneficial trade" (146).
Van Helsing is a patriarch whose mission to defeat Dracula is also a mission to teach four young men the "correct" way to control and arouse women. In Stoker's misogynistic schema, women need to be controlled: early on, when Lucy has to choose between three suitors, she writes to Mina, "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy, and I must not say it" (76). After Dracula inverts the act of insemination by penetration at the neck to suck blood, Van Helsing mediates the penetration of both Lucy and Mina by the members of his "little band of men" via his needle, allowing them – to put it crudely – to put colour in their cheeks through the new (and little understood) medical operation of blood transfusion. The giving of blood is described as pleasurable: for the male donor, as Dr Seward puts it, "No man knows till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves" (156).
The "ghastly paraphernalia of our beneficial trade": Injecting female patients in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) depicts the medicalised injection of morphine as a form of patriarchal power
[Image by Jordan Green under a CC BY-NC license]
On the first occasion, it is the young aristocrat Arthur who is called upon to give his blood. Before the operation can start, Van Helsing first gives Lucy Westenra an opiate orally – telling her "Now, little miss, here is your medicine. Drink it off, like a good child." Once she falls asleep, he allows Arthur to kiss her while he prepares his kit, commenting to Dr Seward, "He is so young and strong and of blood so pure that we need not defibrinate it" (149). As Kohn pithily notes of Sax Rohmer's Fu-Manchu stories, "a drug story is usually a sex story" (Kohn 1987: 79), and here the blood story is a code for both sex and drugs. For Van Helsing's transfusion procedure to be a success the female recipient must be drugged to a level of such passivity she is unconscious. As the battle between Dracula and Van Helsing wears on, the shift to the use of the hypodermic syringe in order to drug the transfusion recipient signals the increasingly serious situation: Van Helsing comments, "I fear that with growing strength she may wake; and that would make danger, oh, so much danger. But I shall precaution take. I shall give hypodermic injection of morphia" (156). The hypodermic injection here represents modern medical technology, but it is the phallus that gives Van Helsing his power over passive females too.
If morphine and the hypodermic syringe provide a locus for the expression of patriarchal anxieties in Dracula, they play a similar role in Freud's analysis of his own dream of July 23-24, 1895 in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In the dream, Freud's young, attractive patient Irma, links together a network of personal anxieties about his own professional life, his frequent use of cocaine and his personal relationships with women including his wife and his daughter Mathilde, as well as Irma's recently deceased friend (also named Mathilde).
Freud's ambivalent attitude toward the syringe reflects his own mixed experiences of administering injections. He had advised a friend (here unnamed, but widely known to be physiologist Ernst Fleischl von Marxow [1846-91]) to use cocaine in an oral solution to facilitate withdrawal from morphine.[2] Apparently against Freud's advice, Marxow had injected the drug, and this "hastened" his death (Freud 89). Freud inadvertently reveals the neurotic power of syringes in his dream when he calls three male friends to examine Irma:
Not long before, when [Irma] felt unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a propyl preparation, propylene… propionic acid… trimethylamine (I see its formula before me in bold type)… Such injections are not to be given so lightly… Probably the syringe was not clean, either. (85)
Freud glosses his worry about the cleanliness of the syringe as relating to another case: he had been giving an 82-year old patient morphine injections twice a day for two years. He speaks of his "pride that over a period of two years I have not introduced a single infiltration; I take constant care, to be sure, to see that the syringe is clean" (94). While visiting the countryside, Freud's patient had developed phlebitis (the inflammation of a vein) and this, he tells us, was behind his worry over clean syringes.
We may well question this assertion. At various points Freud conflates Irma with her equally attractive friend, his own wife and his daughter. To Freud, "three similar situations surface in my memory – involving my wife, Irma and the dead Mathilde – the identity of these situations has clearly given me the right to substitute these three people for one another in my dream" (94). It is tempting, however, to suggest a more uncomfortable reading: perhaps the quickly-glossed dirty needle provides a hint of darker sexual desires. The syringe, I suggest serves as an intersecting point for the thwarting of his desires and his guilt about these desires? Far from merely being a means of accusing his friend Otto, the syringe allows Freud to cast out and thrust aside these unwanted feelings.
What lurks beneath: does the syringe in Freud's dream function to sublimate his own sexual feelings?
[Images (from left to right) by wordscraft under a CC BY-NC-ND license and Enrico under a CC BY license]
Indeed, Freud's own needle troubles are a suggestive point from which to begin to theorise the place of the hypodermic syringe in wider culture. As a container the syringe always carries something more than itself. It is a means of exchanging information: putting a vaccine into the body as part of a public health programme, say, or extracting blood to perform diagnostic tests. But if this is the medic's experience of wielding the syringe, then – to borrow from Marshall McLuhan – to the patient the medium of the syringe is the message. The syringe is its own referent. Notwithstanding media-stoked fears about the MMR vaccine, we do not flinch from the vaccine but rather from the needle.
Freud's neurosis over the cleanliness of the syringe points to the syringe – or more precisely the use of the syringe – as being an example of Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject, of that which is neither subject nor object, neither "I" nor other, "but rather the threat of indistinction between the two" (Becker-Leckrone 33). As such, it has a power of horror. The abject is not only a monstrous intrusion into the experience of life, but one that shows me death. Kristeva lists examples of the abject including the human corpse, or:
A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, [which do] not signify death. In the presence of signified death – a flat encephalograph, for instance – I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theatre, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death (Kristeva 3).
The hypodermic syringe is literally transgressive. Its use crosses the boundary between self and other, between inside and outside, and in so doing it is simultaneously both fascinating and repulsive. Hence, "the phobic has no other object than the abject" (Kristeva 6) and "the abject is perverse" (15).
This tension between horror and fascination can be clearly seen in Dr Watson's reaction to Sherlock Holmes's use of a hypodermic syringe in The Sign of Four (1890). If in Dracula the injection of the female patient asserts patriarchal control over her, then self-injection by a male character is decadent and effeminate. Well before the recreational use of cocaine was widespread, Sherlock Holmes introduced many readers to hypodermic syringes as the means for delivering both morphine and cocaine. Conan Doyle's novel opens with the narrator, Watson, giving the following description:
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction. (Conan Doyle 89)
The hypodermic syringe is here an expensive item, presented in a handsome case, and Holmes' use of the drug conforms to the rituals of a regular habit. The detective is not an imposing manly figure but "sinewy", "nervous" and excitable, with feminine "long, white" hands. He conforms to Kristeva's suggestion that "so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims – if not its submissive and willing ones" (Kristeva 9). Watson's sexualised language of thrusting, pistons and sinking hints at unspoken aspects of his relationship with Holmes, but Watson is also disturbed by it: "my conscience" he declares, "swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest" (Conan Doyle 89). While Holmes fetishizes the syringe, Watson is repelled by the thought that through intravenous drug use he may cause the loss of the very powers that attract him to the detective. The syringe itself is a signifier of a network of late-Victorian cultural anxieties, and here it immediately marks out Conan Doyle's hero as extraordinary and eccentric.
The rituals of a regular habit: Sherlock Holmes' injection of cocaine and morphine in The Sign of the Four (1890) is depicted as decadent and effeminate
[Image by Scott Monty uner a CC BY-NC license]
It is worth noting that Holmes is doing nothing illegal. At the turn of the century Britain had the world market in opiod production cornered, and when in 1912 America tried to get an international ban on narcotics Britain dragged its heels. It was not until 28 July 1916 that possession of opium or cocaine without prescription (but still not morphine or heroin) became illegal under regulation 40B of the Defence of the Realm Act following a spate of scandals involving soldiers – particularly Canadians – on leave in Britain, along with prostitutes and/or actresses and dancers in London's West End. In many of these newspaper stories, cocaine was linked to the small handful of opium dens run by East Asian immigrants in the East End and there were heavy overtones of racism and xenophobia. These were fully exploited by Sax Rohmer in his Fu Manchu series of novels and stories, beginning in 1912-1913 with serialised novel The Mystery of Fu-Manchu (published as The Insidious Fu-Manchu in the US), in which the villain's first choice of weapon is a needle tipped with poison. Sinisterly, he also administers poisons orally for which only he has the antidote – again given by injection. His only vice, meanwhile, is opium smoking.
Attitudes in the UK changed with dramatic swiftness: as late as 1916, Harrods was selling gift boxes to send to "friends at the front", which contained gelatine sheets impregnated with cocaine and morphine. Within months, cocaine became the focus of Britain's first drug scare. Then, on the morning after the Victory Ball in Albert Hall, 1918, the young music hall actress Billie Carleton (who had attended wearing a daring costume in the company of notorious cross-dressing designer Reginauld De Veulle) was found dead in her room at the Savoy next to a box of cocaine. De Veulle was convicted as her supplier, and a link established between him and an East End opium den. The episode cemented many of the features of subsequent scares: so-called "new women"; the entertainment industries; homosexuality; the East End and foreigners. It also provided a source for Noel Coward's 1924 play The Vortex, where shady worlds of theatre and dancing, cocaine, homosexuality and promiscuity collide.
There is a dialectic between the historical mediation of the syringe through these medical and cultural forms, and my understanding of the syringe as abject. The syringe was not always-already abject, but formed as such through the way it was used by the medical profession, the patients it was used upon, and in particular the substances it frequently contained. Marek Kohn (1992) quotes Lady Diana Manners, a leading socialite, who in 1915 told Raymond Asquith (the son of the Prime Minister no less) that she and his wife Katherine had lain, "in ecstatic stillness through too short a night, drugged in very deed by my hand in morphia. O, the grave difficulty of the actual injection, the sterilizing in the dark and silence and the conflict of my hand and wish when it came to piercing our flesh" (quoted in Kohn 1992: 32-3). At the personal, psychological level, "the conflict of my hand and wish" is a feeling of abjection – the thing that is neither I nor other. It is a border that literally encroaches upon me: the needle disappears beneath my skin and the boundaries of "I" and "not I" are temporarily crossed. The world is no longer "out there", something I conceive of as beyond myself, but intimately inside me. But in contrast to the emotional reactions that intravenous drug use occasions today in a world still ravaged by both AIDS and the War On Drugs, in 1915 this behaviour was little more than frowned upon in "polite society". As Lady Manners's biographer Philip Ziegler put it, "to reduce oneself to a stupor with morphia was risky, perhaps immoral, but to drink a whisky and soda would have been common – a far worse offence" (quoted in Kohn 1992: 33). Ghastly as the use of morphine was, within the network of cultural anxieties loaded on to the hypodermic syringe it retained an air of medical, genteel respectability lacking from the public house.
CITATION: Adam Stock, "Hypodermics at the fin-de-siècle," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 5 (2013): n. pag. Web. 9 October 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.5.04.
Works Cited:
Becker-Leckrone, Megen. Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Conan Doyle, Arthur. "The Sign of Four" in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981), pp.89-158.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Joyce Crick. (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1999).
Kohn, Marek. (1987) Narcomania: On Heroin. (London: Faber & Faber, 1987).
—–. (1992) Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground. London: Granta.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982).
Rohmer, Sax. The Insidious Fu-Manchu (Lincoln, NE: New Millennium Library, 2001).
Stoker, Bram. Dracula (London: Penguin, 1994).
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Wordsworth, 1992).
[1] Early medical uses of the syringe include antitoxin treatments for diphtheria and quinine to treat malaria. The syringe was also promoted to use for injecting morphine and cocaine – and from 1898 onwards, heroin too (on which, See Marek Kohn, Narcomania: On Heroin (London, Faber & Faber: 1987) p. 3).
Even before her death, Margaret Thatcher was a figure who seemed to prompt visions of haunting and exorcism. She was a curse whose effects were still felt, a spirit who could possess politicians and direct their movements, a vampire, a mummy who kept insisting on returning: what she wasn't, it seemed, was mortal. Wicked witch or not, it has become clear that it will take more than a judiciously thrown bucket of water to dispatch Thatcherism. Not so, it seems, Thatcher herself. The Iron Lady, we have discovered, was made of flesh and blood after all and we—her 'children' as many commentators put it—are left to make sense of her will. In this issue of Alluvium we play executors, scrutinising Thatcher's legacy to see what has been left to us and what her representation in 21st century culture can tell us about ourselves.
The Wicked Witch of the West? Even before her death Thatcher prompted visions of haunting and exorcism
[Image by themusticnetwork.com; used under fair dealings provisions]
The connotations of the Thatcher-as-mother trope are various. It is a potentially forgiving formulation in which we as Thatcher's children are forced to acknowledge that, whatever her faults, Thatcher made us. Indeed the child's perspective has become a popular one in recent fictional retrospectives on Thatcher in film and in fiction.[1] Responses to Thatcher and the Falkland's War are central to both the tough twelve year old protagonist of cult film This is England (2006) and David Mitchell's more sensitive, stammering thirteen year old in Black Swan Green (2006). Dysfunctional family life, politics and the privations of a poverty line existence are seen through the prism of a young boy's attitude to Margaret Thatcher in Anthony Cartwright's darkly satirical How I Killed Margaret Thatcher (2013) and Damian Barr's biography Maggie and Me (2013). The child's perspective potentially allows the narrator an ambivalent perspective in which the naïve focaliser's admiration for the prime minister is thrown into ironic relief by the story of social injustice in which the child is blamelessly embedded. Damian Barr's story is unusual, in that its tone tips from ambivalence into admiration in its concluding passage. Barr—who suffers the effects of the summary dismissal of his father from the steelworks, scant support from social services and the damage done by Clause 28—finds an unlikely sympathetic similarity between 'Maggie' and his young self: ' You were different, like me,' he concludes, 'and you had to fight to be yourself' (Barr 256).
How do we read the Thatcher-as-mother trope? Thatcher's role in the Falkland's War is considered by novelists like David Mitchell and filmmakers like Shane Meadows
[Images used under fair dealings provisions]
Barr's is one of a rich range of contemporary British narratives which draw on the Thatcherite era as a means to reflect upon the present. In 'Thatcher in the 21st Century,' Joseph Brooker takes a look at a range of different post-millennial responses to the 1980s, which encompass everything from 'hatred', to 'pity' to 'admiration'. Brooker considers how the remembrance of Thatcher has been refracted through the prism of a present in which there is a sense that 'Thatcher's Britain was less Thatcherite than what followed it'. In his last interview, Iain Banks argued that 'there was nothing symbolic about her [Thatcher's] death, because her baleful influence on British politics remains undiminished' (Banks). The sense in which the present is determined by the Thatcherite past is called into question in Christopher Vardy's article 'The Allure of the 1980s.' Vardy notes that anti-Thatcherites and acolytes alike overwhelmingly represent the 1980s as a 'stable point of origin for contemporary British culture,' indeed for many of the authors on whom Vardy focuses the Thatcherite era has become a 'dystopian origin-myth.' As Vardy suggests, however, if Thatcher is contemporary Britain's abusive mother, there is a risk of becoming blinkered in our fixation on blaming her for what we have become. Tony Venezia considers the problem of moving beyond Thatcher's insistence that 'There Is No Alternative' in the 1980s to a present which can imagine a way beyond the straitened path we have found ourselves after Francis Fukuyama's 'End of History'. In his chapter 'Utopia Loops, Ghost Legacies' Venezia considers the 'hauntological' work of artists whose aesthetic experiments and visions present a 'technological utopianism of an aborted social democracy that Thatcherism derailed.'
As I have suggested, the notion of ghosts and haunting lends itself, not only to a vision of a past without Thatcher, but to the way we thought about Thatcher herself in the present. In the closing chapter to this special issue, 'Gordon Burn and Mrs T,' Rhona Gordon considers contemporary works which are haunted by Thatcher as 'an absent presence'; in her prime as a hollow media construct, a less than human synecdoche made up of hairspray and handbag; in senescence, as an absence from the world of power and celebrity which defined her and finally, of course, in the looming presence of her death.
Moving beyond Thatcher's legacy: we need to dismantle the persona of the Iron Lady and rehumanize Thatcher as a woman
[Image by John5199 under a CC BY license]
Visions of Thatcher as a frail old woman—more King Lear than Boadicea—open up new perspectives on the woman. The publication of Charles Moore's authorised biography of Thatcher's early years, though always gallant, has caused some surprise in its willingness to expose weakness and banality in its subject. Andrew Rawnsley's review observed that 'The result is to paint a much more multidimensional portrait of Thatcher than the caricature heroine adored by the right or the devil incarnate loathed by the left' (Rawnsley, n. pag.). Brooker observes that, 'Fixation on Margaret Thatcher's persona or image is not likely to yield much more political insight'. This may be so, but perhaps it is only by dismantling the persona that we can rehumanize Thatcher and, in so doing, finally lay her to rest. Only then can we begin imagining a present which, not only understands Thatcher's legacy, but has found a way to move beyond it.
CITATION: Bianca Leggett, "Thatcher's Legacies: Editor's Introduction," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 4 (2013) ("Thatcher's Legacies" Special Issue): n. pag. Web. 21 July 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.4.04.
[1] For more on the theme of childhood and 'retro-memory' in contemporary novels of the 1980s, see Christopher Vardy, 'Remembering the 1980s in David Mitchell's Black Swan Green', eds. Bianca Leggett and Tony Venezia, Twenty-First Century British Fiction (Canterbury: Gylphi, forthcoming).
Works cited:
Banks, Iain. Interviewed by Maev Kennedy and Stuart Kelly. 'Iain Banks: squeeze a Tory, Blairite or Lib Dem and Thatcherite pus oozes out' The Guardian, 14 June 2013 [accessed 08 July 2013]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/14/iain-banks-tory-thatcher-blair?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487.
Barr, Damian. Maggie & Me (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
Dent, Grace. 'Comment: Thatcher's children we may be but these death parties are just childish,' The Independent, 10 April 2013 [accessed 08 July 2013]: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/grace-dent-thatchers-children-we-may-be-but-these-death-parties-are-just-childish-8567288.html.
Grice, Andrew. "Margaret Thatcher's ghost still sets agenda in divided Britain," The Independent, 19 April 2013 [accessed 08 July 2013]: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/margaret-thatchers-ghost-still-sets-agenda-in-divided-britain-8580917.html.
Mars-Jones, Adam. 'Review of Damian Barr's Maggie and Me,' The Guardian, 25 April [accessed 17 June 2013]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/25/maggie-me-damian-barr-review.
Rawnsley, Andrew. 'Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography, Volume One: Not for Turning by Charles Moore – review'. The Observer, 27 April 2013 [accessed 17 June 2013]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/27/margaret-thatcher-charles-moore-review.
Vardy, Christopher. 'Remembering the 1980s in David Mitchell's Black Swan Green'. Eds. Bianca Leggett and Tony Venezia, Twenty-First Century British Fiction (Canterbury: Gylphi, forthcoming).
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Democracy, Franco Moretti once declared, is not interested in the production of good novels (1987: 192). It is not self-evident that parliamentary politics should inspire art. Ideally conceived, the management and steering of society might be inimical to drama. The more smoothly the political runs, the more it should be able to tell the artist 'Nothing to see here'. Yet we readily think of Margaret Thatcher as a figure fit for fiction. Why?
First, Thatcher's approach to politics was non-consensual. Her open contempt for consensus accompanied a readiness for contest, which lends itself to narrative in a way that price commissions and legislative scrutiny do not. To dramatize Thatcher allows a writer to dramatize ideas. Second, in extension of this, Thatcher was deeply disliked. She provoked open loathing. Such emotions can fuel art. If the very need for political art is a sign that something has gone wrong with the political, many would identify Thatcherism as such an aberration. Such anger drove, for instance, Jonathan Coe's satirical novel What A Carve Up! (1994), even if the book makes little mention of Thatcher herself.
Third, Thatcher was vivid. Her sex alone made her stand out amid her colleagues, but she was visually and aurally striking in her own right. Many of the best known representations of Thatcher have been cartoons, puppets or parodies, to the point where it is hard to distinguish her memory from these grotesques. They drew on her own penchant for self-dramatization; her set-piece performances of her own indomitability. She thus endures in cultural memory as a figure already aestheticized: not subtly, but in terms of satire, Gothic, Grand Guignol. In fiction, Iain Sinclair's conjuration of Thatcher as 'the Widow' in Downriver (1991) belonged to this tradition of exaggeration.
A figure fit for fiction: dramatizing Margaret Thatcher allows for the exploration of political ideas and exaggeration of a public character
[Image by R Barraez D'Lucca under a CC BY license]
Fourth, Thatcher became closely associated with a substantial stretch of time – indeed with a decade, which is now a prime means for measuring and filing culture. She is accordingly likely to turn up by default in representations of that time. For the artist seeking to summarize the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher is part of the scenery. To omit her would be wilful; to include her allows an additional level of reflection and connotation.
What perceptions of Thatcher were available in the twenty-first century, by the time of her death in 2013? I suggest five: Retro, Admiration, Hatred, Pity, History.
First, Thatcher can take her place in a generalized retrospect. This is the Thatcher seen on posters for 1980s discos, or glimpsed in archive footage at the start of films that have nothing to do with her. She is vaguely equated with the other paraphernalia of the decade, from Rubik Cubes to Acid House smiles. In this respect, Thatcher has just about met the one fate that never seemed plausible: depoliticization. She endures as a memorable image, but one that is sometimes deployed as complacently as old pictures of James Dean or Che Guevara.
May Day Disco: Thatcher evokes a generalised atmosphere of the 1980s
[Image by Greenwich Mural Workshop; used under fair dealings provisions]
Second, many continue to admire Thatcher. The scores of senescent statesmen, former lieutenants and current politicians who attended her funeral would be joined in this by many who sent the United Kingdom Independence Party to renewed political success in the same season, and by most regular Conservative voters. But a premier divisive in power remained so in death. Thatcher could still provoke expressions of anger and hatred on a scale probably unique in British politics. The binary division that she had fostered played itself out again upon her death. Every official announcement of piety or grief was matched by an unofficial one – if only a social media post – denying this received line and positing an alternative nation of people ready to dance on her grave. The immense bombast of her funeral gathered protesters to turn their backs on the procession, as though going to great lengths to proclaim their indifference.
Culturally, hatred of Thatcher has been at least quantitatively productive. In particular, the tendency to desire her demise generated a plain-speaking, minimalist website answering the question 'Is Thatcher dead yet?'; a 2009 play, Maggie's End, which places her death in 2010 but shows some prescience about the funeral arrangements; and a whole mini-genre of popular songs. The early landmarks in this tradition are Morrissey's 'Margaret on the Guillotine' (1988; the title had also been the original working title of The Smiths' canonical LP The Queen Is Dead) and Elvis Costello's 'Tramp The Dirt Down' (1989, revived on tour after Thatcher's funeral). The relatively obscure band Hefner released 'The Day That Thatcher Dies' in 2000, cannily encouraging their constituency to think ahead to this eventuality; the song's tinny coda anticipated the chart revival of the showtune 'Ding Dong, the Witch Is dead' in April 2013. Some anti-Thatcher sentiment in 2013 looks cheap and ersatz, unfuelled by the visceral feeling of the 1980s. It is more convincing when expressed by those who fared poorly at the hands of Thatcher's policies: in particular survivors from working-class industrial communities which were sent into decline on her watch.
Hatred of Thatcher has spawned a mini-genre of popular songs and albums
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The fourth fate would once have seemed as unlikely as depoliticization: pity. Margaret Thatcher ceased speaking in public in 2002, to some wry celebration from her long-term detractors. In 2003 her husband Denis died. The film The Iron Lady (2011) produced one of the last prominent images of Thatcher during her lifetime. It depicts her political career, but is also distinctive in showing an elderly Thatcher coping with Alzheimer's and mourning her late husband. Gordon Burn's novel Born Yesterday (2008) also broke with the tradition of Thatcher imagery in showing her, aged 81, walking in the park. By 2013, it could be argued that the frail old woman had little to do with her momentous political past.
Fifth, overlapping with some of the above, is a historical perspective that would seek to transcend transient polemic. The rare intensity of feeling provoked by Thatcher is diffused into a more detached assessment of her in the longue durée and international perspective. Hindsight might reframe Thatcher. Her successors took the processes of privatization she initiated further than she ever dared: there is a sense in which Thatcher's Britain was less Thatcherite than what followed it. More profoundly, the Iron Lady theory of history needs to be tempered with a contextual sense that she was only one avatar of what now seems the long march of neo-liberalism. She was a very important figurehead in this global shift. But we may ask how much of the Thatcher Revolution would still have happened, under another name, in her absence.
Thatcher was culturally prominent in the 1980s themselves. But by 2002 Andy Beckett could still reckon that 'Novels about Britain under Margaret Thatcher have been much rarer, then and since, than anyone who lived through the social upheaval and melodrama might have expected'. The subject matter, Beckett mused, might still be too novel and challenging. In fact, a small wave of neo-1980s fiction was breaking in the twenty-first century. Nicola Barker's Five Miles From Outer Hope (2000) is a teen drama set in 1981, which opens by listing cultural events from the time in the manner of a retro television documentary. It thus has some resemblance to David Mitchell's Black Swan Green (2006), a boyhood year-in-the-life crammed with childish perceptions of 1982; and to Helen Cross's coming-of-age fiction My Summer of Love, set in Yorkshire in 1984 (2001, filmed in 2004). The book Beckett was reviewing, Tim Lott's Rumours of a Hurricane (2002), ambitiously relays the social changes of the 1980s through the trajectory of one historically typical character, a printer who lives through emblematic experiences of the time: the Wapping dispute, a move to Milton Keynes, fear of AIDS, eventual recession. Beckett justly complained of the blatant character of Lott's links between personal and political, a tendency to clunking representativeness. But Lott was at least novel in trying to paint a less Manichean panorama of the period, one which would account for Thatcherism's appeals as well as suggesting its social damage.
The "Iron Lady theory of history" needs to be tempered with a contextual sense that she was only one avatar of what now appears as the long march of neo-liberalism
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Perhaps the two greatest works of neo-1980s fiction to date were published within two months of each other in spring 2004. Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty and David Peace's GB84 are a yin and yang of literary retrospect: masterpieces that bear no resemblance to each other and are thus uncannily able to carve up Thatcherism between them.
The Line of Beauty is a book of the South of England, centring on the expensive West London house of the Conservative MP Gerald Fedden and his family, where the protagonist Nick Guest lodges. Numerically, the novel's cast is dominated by Thatcher supporters: from the patrician aristocracy to the boorish political thug, via a host of public schoolboys and Oxford graduates. Its marginal figures are Nick himself, a self-styled aesthete, ascended from his provincial background and detached from political questions; Catherine Fedden, the family's disturbed daughter who seeks rebellion by mixing with alternative milieux; and Leo Charles, Nick's first gay lover and a black council worker who evidently belongs to a constituency sceptical of Thatcher. These figures' perceptions are central enough to the book for it not to count as a celebration of Thatcherism. But what critique it makes comes from inside, rather than out. Via its Jamesian subtlety of perception, the book stealthily accumulates an immense catalogue of details about the world of old money and New Right. That mass of information may eventually become the basis of a political judgement, but the fastidious author is not so vulgar as to force the issue with polemic: rather Thatcherism's gilded inner circle is allowed gradually to expose itself.
David Peace's novel GB84 centres upon a working-class world of trade union meetings, picket lines, and marriages broken by poverty and repossession
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GB84 is a novel centred on the North, set especially around the National Union of Mineworkers' headquarters in Sheffield, though it also takes in the many destinations of the miners' mobile antagonists during the strike of 1984-5. To Hollinghurst's moneyed milieu it counterposes a working-class world of trade union meetings, picket lines, and marriages broken by poverty and repossession. This is most vividly and painfully the case in the monologues of individual strikers which punctuate the book in tiny type. Noting the financial cost of the strike to the state, one miner reflects: 'Ten million quid a day for a hundred days. Fucking hell, she must really hate us. Really fucking hate us' (158): Thatcher is a 'she' who need not be named. Elsewhere the pronoun stays the same as a battered miner's thoughts turn from his wife – 'I lie here and I listen to rain on our windows. To her tears' – to what must be the Prime Minister: 'She's not finished with us. Not finished with any of us' (110). It is in one of those monologues that hatred of Thatcher, alongside all the other foes, most explicitly rises to the surface, from a miner who has lost his wife and has his gas and electricity supply cut off:
I lie down on floor. I pull some clothes over us. I close my eyes and I pray. Pray I wake up one day and they're all dead – Banks. Electricity Board. DHSS. Coppers. MacGregor. King. Heseltine. Lawson. Ridley. Havers. Walker. Brittan. Tebbit. Thatcher – Dead, fucking lot of them. Them or me. Dead (272).
Thatcher herself is glimpsed through a window at Chequers: 'She is eating frozen shepherd's pie. She is drinking cheap white wine'. The mundane runs immediately into the monstrous as Peace flicks into his characteristic Gothic: 'The corpses in the trees. The heads upon the posts' (413). In its rendition of political desperation, and of politics as crime, GB84 stands as one of literature's major contributions to the tradition of mortally bitter anti-Thatcher feeling.
Thatcher's potential appearance in The Line of Beauty is reverentially discussed for hundreds of pages before she arrives at Gerald Fedden's party. Hollinghurst sketches her impact in swift strokes of perception. She walks with 'clumsiness translated into power', takes her courtiers' acclaim 'cheerfully and practically, like modern royalty' (376). Hollinghurst conveys Thatcher here less as a monster, or even an enemy, than as a celebrity: a fabled figure suddenly encountered in the fascinating flesh. The reader watches the writer rise to the self-imposed challenge of rendering this immensely powerful, storied figure as a novelistic presence: not a consciousness in her own right to which we have access, but a character of singular, sharp outline. The effect is not powerfully anti-Thatcherite. If anything the scene humanizes her and diminishes the space for polemic. But the novel as a whole, over 500 pages, does its more painstaking job of putting in question the period she dominated.
Interest in the Thatcher years endures. Popular history books on the period now proliferate. Few fictional retrospects of the 1980s will match Peace's intensity or Hollinghurst's finesse. In the tradition of Gordon Burn's topicality, we can surely expect soon to see a novel set on the day of Thatcher's funeral. Faced with such a public event, Iain Sinclair characteristically responded with a ritual belonging to his private mythology. Heading away from London's funeral, he returned to the riverine scene that inspired Downriver. His report of the day is determined to emphasize Thatcher's absence, the lack of officially sanctioned mourning, as everyday life goes on. Yet his own text is obsessed with her, and more significantly he must acknowledge that the world through which he passes is a post-Thatcher world: 'Margaret Thatcher's traces were visible in every new shed, in every mushroom estate under a pergola of pylons, but she was forgotten'.
Thatcher's death unsurprisingly unleashed much retrospective talk. Much of it felt second-hand, a set of scripts already heavily rehearsed, as though the whole affair was a Baudrillardian event that had been anticipated for so long it had almost already happened. Perhaps, now that isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk perpetually says 'Yes', our form of attention will shift. Fixation on Margaret Thatcher's persona or image is not likely to yield much more political insight. But her legacy will not yet allow us to forget it. For now, perhaps any fiction of contemporary Britain cannot avoid depicting her consequences.
CITATION: Joseph Brooker, "Thatcher in the 21st Century," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 4 (2013) ("Thatcher's Legacies" Special Issue): n. pag. Web. 21 July 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.4.03.
Works Cited:
Barker, Nicola. Five Miles From Outer Hope (London: Faber, 2000).
Beckett, Andy. 'Thatcherism for Beginners.' Guardian, 2 February 2002 [accessed 17 June 2013]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/feb/02/fiction.whitbreadbookawards2002.
Burn, Gordon. Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel (London: Faber, 2008).
Coe, Jonathan. What A Carve Up! (London: Viking, 1994).
Cross, Helen. My Summer of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2001).
Hollinghurst, Alan. The Line of Beauty (London: Picador, 2004).
Lott, Tim. Rumours of a Hurricane (London: Viking, 2002).
Mitchell, David. Black Swan Green (London: Random House, 2006).
Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987).
Peace, David. GB84 (London: Faber, 1984).
Sinclair, Iain. Downriver, or, The vessels of wrath (London: Paladin, 1991).
— 'Diary', London Review of Books 35:9 (9 May 2013), pp.38-9.
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